Strictly speaking it's corporate branding at the top of the message that's been inserted at the top of the page. It's no more an advert than putting it at the top of a letter.
However, that's not to say that I agree with the insertion of the message at all. If they really want to get the message to the user in that fashion, redirect HTTP requests to a different page until the user has clicked one of the "yes, all right, I've read it now stop bothering me" links. For preference, check the user-agent header to try to make sure you're not displaying it to a script; not fool-proof, but better than nothing...
That relies not only on the client supporting JavaScript and having it switched on, but also on the ISP not stripping it out. Doing so may be non-trivial, but on a targeted, per-site basis (eg for heavily-visited sites) it's certainly feasible.
So what, I shouldn't have the right to voluntarily enter in to this sort of an agreement with a company? They shouldn't have the right to invite people to do so?
Help me out here guys, I'm trying to see what right is involved.
While I agree that this is insane, I wouldn't get too hung up on the idea of it being a new agency until you see figures for the budget assigned to it. One guy and an office is an agency, after all; it's not the size that counts, it what they do.
What does "correctly" mean? No-one knows, except Microsoft and they're not telling.
"Correctly" in this context means "so that it looks and behaves like it does when viewed in IE". That may well be a lot of effort, of course, and may be incompatible with correctly implementing various parts of various specs.
If you develop against FF, your sites will display correctly in most major browsers.
You really have to stretch your definition of "major" to include anything other than FF and IE, and even the most "FF-friendly" usage stats still have IE far in the lead. I'm not disagreeing with you, but for most people/businesses the majority of their users/customers will be using IE. It doesn't make good business sense to exclude FF users, but it makes no sense at all to exclude IE users if you want to reaach as wide an audience as possible. I appreciate that that's not what you're suggesting, but when the deadline looms and the budget is running out, you *know* what's going to be the first thing to be dropped.
Of course it isn't impossible - for example, you could program in a rule that says "if the discovered infringing content represents less than X% of the whole work, ignore it".
Doesn't mean that it'll be implemented, of course, or that it's easy to make it fool proof, especially in edge cases, but it's certainly not impossible.
Forget about ticket prices, what about the ~2000% markup on popcorn and soda?
You'll be wanting to take that up with the venue (although I have heard that it's so expensive precisely because too much of the ticket price goes to cover the cost of showing the film, and that concessions are where the cinemas make their money)
They can force you to sign a contract, and that contract is still binding? *And* it was back-dated? That right there is your first problem. The fact that they did it is just icing on the cake.
Plus I expect they have permissions in place to prevent the overwrite.
If they're not installing stuff as administrator, they should be. If they've modified their machine significantly from what the average gamer would have, they shouldn't have (by which I mean going in and denying even administrator access to system files, for example).
Besides which, another poster claims that the EVE boot.ini file contains specific information about which version of the game you have, and that it's only installed by the Premium version. That sounds like a test case right there - patch the normal version, confirm boot.ini file not present. Patch the Premium version, confirm that it is.
QA *should* have caught this.
Anyone will tell you the odds of a mistake are bigger the longer you go without making one.
That's because most people simply don't understand probability theory. Unless you get complacent and sloppy, the odds should be independent of past successes.
And what's stopping me from logging in to a Linux machine as root and removing/boot? Why aren't those files "locked unless the system is trying to edit" them?
as a web developer with a typical (read: mac) set up
Maybe things are different where you are, but I've been working in the web for 8.5 years now and I can't think of a single person I've worked with who has used a Mac in their day to day work. Quite a few have owned them, yes, but I can't think of any who actually used them at work. YMMV, but in my experience a Mac is hardly a typical set-up for a web developer.
And by "wrong" I mean "in such a way as to make compatibility with other browsers difficult".
What other browsers? At the time MS came up with that stuff the only serious competition they had was Netscape 4, which was utterly shit. Now don't get me wrong, I used it - I have never and most likely will never use IE as my browser, but even when I was using Netscape 4 rather than IE I acknowledged just how bad it was. Resizing the window forced a page reload, for crying out loud! It choked on even semi-complicated pages, crashed regularly, etc.
Yes, MS were wrong for implementing XHR in a guaranteed IE-only fashion, but at the time they really didn't have anything to be compatible with.
We have communities within 20 miles of a somewhat major city (if you can call Pittsburgh a major city) that still don't have DSL or Cable internet. This doesn't even bring the frail backbone of the internet into question.
Feh. I live on the outskirts of London - technically in Essex as I have an Essex postcode and phone code, but there's a Tube station 3 minutes walk from my house and I'm in a London Borough. So, I'm kind of sort of living in one of the world's major capitals.
My ADSL connection caps out at 2.5Mbps on a good day, and I rarely actually achieve much above 250KBps when downloading stuff. I won't be downloading normal DVDs any time soon, let alone HD ones.
Online distribution of feature-length HD content, complete with extras? Yeah sure, one day - but not any time soon.
Obviously the reasoning there is "electronics = electron + ics, therefore spintronics = spin + tronics". Which of course means that it really ought to be simply "spinics", but that sounds even worse. It's the same sort of reasoning that brings us the non-word "blogosphere", modelled on the word "atmosphere" that is actually "atmo" + "sphere" - giving the non-word you're looking for as "blogsphere", not "blogosphere"...
Well, more like "you have a gun and you've made it known to anyone and everyone that you're willing to use it, and now a bunch of people are dead, shot by a gun very much like yours, so unless you can provide a very good alibi you're going down".
My old iRiver iHP-120 plays mp3, wma and ogg just fine. Mind you, it's been a few years since I bought it, I have no idea what the current state of support of ogg files is. I've no reason to find out either, at least until my iRiver breaks.
Yes, but the basic concepts - don't take stuff that doesn't belong to you, don't hurt people unnecessarily, don't burn down buildings, don't copy CDs or movies, etc - are pretty easy to understand. You do not need to understand all the minute details of what goes on in a court case, you just need to know enough not to do anything illegal enough to get caught and prosecuted.
For example, you don't need to know the difference between say fraud and embezzlement to know that stealing money from work is wrong, or between manslaughter and murder (and the various degrees of murder) to know that stabbing someone because they looked at you funny is wrong. (If there are complicated legal requirements specific to your job, then it's part of your job to know them, but that doesn't apply to most people.)
And how many of those amateur astronomers are contributing (very usefully, of course) by reporting observations, and how many are actually doing theoretical work?
There's a world of difference between making and reporting on observations and working out the theory behind those observations. I'm not saying that the former isn't essential, but the latter is what requires the qualifications.
Other than that I agree with your main point - you don't necessarily need qualifications to be doing useful work in a field. It really depends on the field though, and by no means do all fields lend themselves to useful contributions by amateurs.
Take it from someone who's worked in several open plan offices over the last 8 years - they're almost always too damn noisy. Of course it depends on who else is in the office, how it's laid out, where you sit in relation to the noisier ones, etc, but the number of times I've either worked from home or gone in at the weekend or on a public holiday and been two or three times more productive is quite frankly depressing.
There have been times when I have *longed* to work in a cube farm. I'm sure they have their disadvantages too, but I'm betting that done well they're a damn sight quieter.
I agree with the others who have said that this is a cost-saving exercise, and add another reason - open plan means more people can see you and what you're doing, means less chance of an employee spending too much time on personal email, online games, etc. In other words, it's to save money and because the managers don't trust their staff to work.
With MS you have to pay for EVERY new version which is released. In my world that is kind of a huge difference. And if you are just talking about IE, well, you really shouldn't be using old versions anyway...:)
Of course he's just talking about IE - unless the Mozilla Foundation released an OS recently that I hadn't heard about...
Besides, it's not as easy as "you shouldn't be using old versions". Some third parties develop software targeted specifically at a given version of IE. If they won't fix their software when a new version comes out (I'm looking at you Tridion, amongst many, many others) then you have the choice to either replace that software or stay with the old version of IE. Replacing may be prohibitive in terms of cost, even if you upgrade to the vendor's latest version.
So no, you shouldn't be using old software, but sometimes you have to. And yes yes, if you were using open source you could fix it yourself - except that *that* may be too costly too, even if a suitable OSS application existed (they usually do, but by no means always).
Have you paused to consider that maybe it was done under anonymity to preserve whatever karma they may have here on/.
Sorry, but anyone who gives two shits about slashdot karma is taking the whole thing far too seriously and desperately needs to get out more - and I say that as someone who's had it maxed out since before they replaced the numeric score with the silly textual descriptions.
Even The Register is starting to show cracks of laziness (and occasionally outright fanboyism) in their articles nowadays.
I guess it's a matter of personal perspective, but I stopped reading El Reg several years ago when the rampant pro-Linux, anti-MS bias just got too much for me. I'm not great fan of MS or their products, but damn the Register were blaming MS for absolutely everything they could, no matter how tenuous the link, and defended Linux and open source no matter how damning the evidence. Objective? Not in my experience.
What if we the software ever got to the point of true AI? Would it still have moral implications?
If it's truly sentient, then irrevocably erasing it would certainly have moral implications; you'd have killed it in any meaningful sense of the word. Just shooting the character in a game would hardly be the same though - never playing the game again, on the other hand...
In my gut I feel that humans deserve these rights (not to be enslaved/killed for gaming purposes) and AI software don't
Why do you believe that humans deserve these rights? If it's because we're intelligent, thinking, feeling creatures, then if your definition of "true AI" encompasses those qualities (and you deny the existence of a soul to make humans special) then logically you must support those rights for such AIs as well. If not, then what do you mean by "true AI"?
There's also at think called "paragraphs". Look into it!
There's also a thing called "spelling". Look into it!
(Seriously, it's an unwritten rule - if you criticise someone else's spelling or grammar, you're bound to make a mistake yourself. For those of you thinking "criticise" was mine, I'm from the UK, that's how we spell it over here.)
Slashdot Mirror
Strictly speaking it's corporate branding at the top of the message that's been inserted at the top of the page. It's no more an advert than putting it at the top of a letter.
However, that's not to say that I agree with the insertion of the message at all. If they really want to get the message to the user in that fashion, redirect HTTP requests to a different page until the user has clicked one of the "yes, all right, I've read it now stop bothering me" links. For preference, check the user-agent header to try to make sure you're not displaying it to a script; not fool-proof, but better than nothing...
That relies not only on the client supporting JavaScript and having it switched on, but also on the ISP not stripping it out. Doing so may be non-trivial, but on a targeted, per-site basis (eg for heavily-visited sites) it's certainly feasible.
So what, I shouldn't have the right to voluntarily enter in to this sort of an agreement with a company? They shouldn't have the right to invite people to do so?
Help me out here guys, I'm trying to see what right is involved.
While I agree that this is insane, I wouldn't get too hung up on the idea of it being a new agency until you see figures for the budget assigned to it. One guy and an office is an agency, after all; it's not the size that counts, it what they do.
What does "correctly" mean? No-one knows, except Microsoft and they're not telling.
"Correctly" in this context means "so that it looks and behaves like it does when viewed in IE". That may well be a lot of effort, of course, and may be incompatible with correctly implementing various parts of various specs.
If you develop against FF, your sites will display correctly in most major browsers.
You really have to stretch your definition of "major" to include anything other than FF and IE, and even the most "FF-friendly" usage stats still have IE far in the lead. I'm not disagreeing with you, but for most people/businesses the majority of their users/customers will be using IE. It doesn't make good business sense to exclude FF users, but it makes no sense at all to exclude IE users if you want to reaach as wide an audience as possible. I appreciate that that's not what you're suggesting, but when the deadline looms and the budget is running out, you *know* what's going to be the first thing to be dropped.
Of course it isn't impossible - for example, you could program in a rule that says "if the discovered infringing content represents less than X% of the whole work, ignore it".
Doesn't mean that it'll be implemented, of course, or that it's easy to make it fool proof, especially in edge cases, but it's certainly not impossible.
They can force you to sign a contract, and that contract is still binding? *And* it was back-dated? That right there is your first problem. The fact that they did it is just icing on the cake.
Besides which, another poster claims that the EVE boot.ini file contains specific information about which version of the game you have, and that it's only installed by the Premium version. That sounds like a test case right there - patch the normal version, confirm boot.ini file not present. Patch the Premium version, confirm that it is.
QA *should* have caught this.
Anyone will tell you the odds of a mistake are bigger the longer you go without making one.
That's because most people simply don't understand probability theory. Unless you get complacent and sloppy, the odds should be independent of past successes.
And what's stopping me from logging in to a Linux machine as root and removing /boot? Why aren't those files "locked unless the system is trying to edit" them?
Yes, MS were wrong for implementing XHR in a guaranteed IE-only fashion, but at the time they really didn't have anything to be compatible with.
We have communities within 20 miles of a somewhat major city (if you can call Pittsburgh a major city) that still don't have DSL or Cable internet. This doesn't even bring the frail backbone of the internet into question.
Feh. I live on the outskirts of London - technically in Essex as I have an Essex postcode and phone code, but there's a Tube station 3 minutes walk from my house and I'm in a London Borough. So, I'm kind of sort of living in one of the world's major capitals.
My ADSL connection caps out at 2.5Mbps on a good day, and I rarely actually achieve much above 250KBps when downloading stuff. I won't be downloading normal DVDs any time soon, let alone HD ones.
Online distribution of feature-length HD content, complete with extras? Yeah sure, one day - but not any time soon.
Well, more like "you have a gun and you've made it known to anyone and everyone that you're willing to use it, and now a bunch of people are dead, shot by a gun very much like yours, so unless you can provide a very good alibi you're going down".
My old iRiver iHP-120 plays mp3, wma and ogg just fine. Mind you, it's been a few years since I bought it, I have no idea what the current state of support of ogg files is. I've no reason to find out either, at least until my iRiver breaks.
Yes, but the basic concepts - don't take stuff that doesn't belong to you, don't hurt people unnecessarily, don't burn down buildings, don't copy CDs or movies, etc - are pretty easy to understand. You do not need to understand all the minute details of what goes on in a court case, you just need to know enough not to do anything illegal enough to get caught and prosecuted.
For example, you don't need to know the difference between say fraud and embezzlement to know that stealing money from work is wrong, or between manslaughter and murder (and the various degrees of murder) to know that stabbing someone because they looked at you funny is wrong. (If there are complicated legal requirements specific to your job, then it's part of your job to know them, but that doesn't apply to most people.)
And how many of those amateur astronomers are contributing (very usefully, of course) by reporting observations, and how many are actually doing theoretical work?
There's a world of difference between making and reporting on observations and working out the theory behind those observations. I'm not saying that the former isn't essential, but the latter is what requires the qualifications.
Other than that I agree with your main point - you don't necessarily need qualifications to be doing useful work in a field. It really depends on the field though, and by no means do all fields lend themselves to useful contributions by amateurs.
Take it from someone who's worked in several open plan offices over the last 8 years - they're almost always too damn noisy. Of course it depends on who else is in the office, how it's laid out, where you sit in relation to the noisier ones, etc, but the number of times I've either worked from home or gone in at the weekend or on a public holiday and been two or three times more productive is quite frankly depressing.
There have been times when I have *longed* to work in a cube farm. I'm sure they have their disadvantages too, but I'm betting that done well they're a damn sight quieter.
I agree with the others who have said that this is a cost-saving exercise, and add another reason - open plan means more people can see you and what you're doing, means less chance of an employee spending too much time on personal email, online games, etc. In other words, it's to save money and because the managers don't trust their staff to work.
Besides, it's not as easy as "you shouldn't be using old versions". Some third parties develop software targeted specifically at a given version of IE. If they won't fix their software when a new version comes out (I'm looking at you Tridion, amongst many, many others) then you have the choice to either replace that software or stay with the old version of IE. Replacing may be prohibitive in terms of cost, even if you upgrade to the vendor's latest version.
So no, you shouldn't be using old software, but sometimes you have to. And yes yes, if you were using open source you could fix it yourself - except that *that* may be too costly too, even if a suitable OSS application existed (they usually do, but by no means always).
(Seriously, it's an unwritten rule - if you criticise someone else's spelling or grammar, you're bound to make a mistake yourself. For those of you thinking "criticise" was mine, I'm from the UK, that's how we spell it over here.)