I'm really tired of that Clarke quote. All he was saying was that something you don't understand looks like magic. Which is true, but so what? It's hardly a profound insight.
You're correct on all points. Plus there's the nasty little fact that they do have a case.
And you know, if we didn't thoroughly hate the media monopolies for all their misdeads of the last few years, we'd be cheering them on. AllOfMp3 is basically arguing that they should be allowed to sell anybody's music anywhere in the world, and the only cost to them is a nominal payment into a recording fund. Hardly fair.
OK, granted that a freeware MS-DOS clone has value. (I use it together with Dosbox to run old games under XP.) But why is it good news that people are still working on it? It's been around for 12 years now. And it's a clone of a truely simple-minded OS. Indeed, you could argue that MS-DOS is just a program loader — it lacks almost all the features of a real OS.
In other words, you think the gadget is useless because it doesn't have a feature most people won't use and nobody really needs. I mean, you have heard of book lights?
1. Why is this price particularly high? It's only half as much as a really good laptop, and has most of the same functionality (or at least the functionality that people buy laptops for).
2. Taking 4 seconds to turn the page is certainly a pain. But under some circumstances, that's a good tradeoff for not having to recharge the thing for a week.
3. Excuse me? You want to take an expensive device and add an expensive, power-draining feature just because it's expensive? Laptops don't have backlights because they're expensive. They have backlights because a color LCD display is useless without them. This device works fine without a backlight.
It's because of consumers like you that electronic devices suck. You insist on a lot of unnecessary features, and the idiot marketeers listen to you. So every cell phone has a zillion lame features nobody uses. And every device has to have a color display, so it's useless without a backlight. I particularly hate the fact that cell phones are no longer made with mono LCDs. So the display is only visible when you push a button, and then only for a few seconds at a time. All for fancy graphics that nobody really cares about.
If the thieves were that well-prepared, it presupposes some complex conspiracy of the sort you only see in movies. Like, "ELINT from the VA indicates that Subject X will take his laptop home this weekend. Field operatives are directed to acquire the laptop. IT Intelligence will download the database, being careful to not leave any signs that the database was actually accessed. We will then return the laptop for the reward, so the entire operation will have the appearance of a casual theft."
The FBI has to be thorough, of course, since this case affects so many people. But it should be obvious by now that the thieves were just looking for stuff they could fence for a few dollars. That's what almost all laptop thefts are about, not stealing data. Indeed, the more professional thieves always wipe the drives right away, since that's evidence that they're holding stolen property.
Of course, this might change now that laptops with sensitive data have been in the news so much lately.
One of the dropped features was the Read Mail toolbar button, but it turns out that many very vocal people actually use this feature. (Indeed, I'd gotten several queries about it myself.) So based on user feedback, the Read Mail toolbar button is back (well, it's a Command Bar button now), though it's not on by default: To enable it, you need to summon the Customize Toolbar dialog (which, again, is misnamed)...
In this one passage, I count three different ways that MS does things that are totally stupid. It overreacts to surveys and focus groups, making major changes in response to trivial complaints. It disables features that "nobody uses", instead of just making them optional. (Remember the way MDI went away with one version of Word, then came back as an optional feature in the next one?) And it has complex, inconsistent, and worst of all multiple competing models of GUI design!
....how she drove was her business and noone elses.
When it comes to guns, cars, and spouses with black eyes, MYOB covers a multitude of sins.
Still, embarassing or not, you were far from being an asshole. In fact, you did exactly the right thing. People throw tantrums when they've been embarassed. So the lady's tirade mean that your observation that she was driving like a drunk hit home. There is some possibility that you saved one or more lives
Indeed, all Buran operations were remotable. All the first-time tests (including the only orbital flight) were unmanned missions. At the time, I thought that was pretty weird, but in hindsight it seems pretty smart.
The Soviet/Russian space program has always been better at anticipating Murphy's Law. NASA's approach has been to try to design it away. That is both expensive and (sadly) ineffective.
Had the citizens of Germany had the ability to defend themselves against the Nazis they may have been spared that horror.
Jeez, where do you get your history from? Some NRA web page? Hitler didn't come to power because he had guns and his opponents didn't. Nor did he keep power that way. He had millions of Germans supporting him. He was an extremely popular politician. Even if you could build a time machine and give every anti-Nazi in 1932 Germany an M16, he might still have won.
I've heard people here argue that the right to bear arms doesn't mean anything unless they have the right to bear equivalent arms to the government. Which would include nuclear bombs, I guess.
They live in a fantasy world, where nobody gets mad for no good reason. Or suicidal...
Hot flash, dude: life is not a James Bond movie. Evil people are not souless power mongers bent on world domination. They don't even think of themselves as evil. Lenin and Stalin were trying to found a "workers paradise". Hitler was protecting the Aryan Race from subjugation by the Jews and Bolsheviks. And now Bin Laden is trying to defend Islamic culture against what he sees as a "Crusader" culture that's bent on wiping it out.
I'm not defending any of the above: I'd have an unpleasant and brief life if I had to live under any of their rule. But the fact is that they're all driven by complicated ideas and social forces that have nothing to do with the typical concept of the Evil Powermonger.
And here's the big irony: Islamists justify their terrorism by resorting to exactly the same ideas that your lazy mind finds so attractive. They believe that they're the victims of greedy westerners who want to make the whole world their slaves.
Well, constructing a bomb does sort of tend to remove the moral ambiguity from the situation. Unless you construe the "right to bear arms" to include bombs!
When Joe Sixpack says, "I opt out of the state" (which is how we started this discussion) he's stating his willingness to use violence against anybody he perceives to be interfering with him. Such people almost always end up hurting a lot of innocent people.
Bin Laden claims to be protecting his people against the "Zionist-Crusader alliance". Maybe in his heart of hearts he wants to forcibly convert everybody to his own religion — but you can say the same for Pat Robertson!
Please, let's not get into that. I don't give a shit about where morality comes from. The fact remains that there are widely accepted moral norms. Most people would agree that blowing up a skyscraper with thousands of people in it is morally wrong. That's the only basis for fighting Osama. Without that moral consensus, how do we justify fighting back? Maybe you want to live in a world were "being in the right" means having the biggest gun. Not a world I want to live in. Maybe you do, but if you ever get that wish, you'll probably live just long enough to regret it.
So the founding fathers were immoral by your logic and should have left England alone?
Do you imagine that the Founders just woke up one day and said, "Fuck this British Empire shit, let's start our own country!" If they had, then yeah, they'd be pretty immoral. Worse, they'd be stupid.
But that's not the way it happened at all. Read the Declaration of Independence some time. It's mostly about a long list of grievances that the Americans had been trying to get addressed for decades. And it talks about how it's wrong to overthrow established authority for "light and transient cause". Far from considering revolution their fundamental right, the founders considered it to be a nasty last resort, justified only by the extreme abuses of the British crown.
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Moderation -1000: Blasphemy!
I'm really tired of that Clarke quote. All he was saying was that something you don't understand looks like magic. Which is true, but so what? It's hardly a profound insight.
You're correct on all points. Plus there's the nasty little fact that they do have a case.
And you know, if we didn't thoroughly hate the media monopolies for all their misdeads of the last few years, we'd be cheering them on. AllOfMp3 is basically arguing that they should be allowed to sell anybody's music anywhere in the world, and the only cost to them is a nominal payment into a recording fund. Hardly fair.
OK, granted that a freeware MS-DOS clone has value. (I use it together with Dosbox to run old games under XP.) But why is it good news that people are still working on it? It's been around for 12 years now. And it's a clone of a truely simple-minded OS. Indeed, you could argue that MS-DOS is just a program loader — it lacks almost all the features of a real OS.
Thanks for telling us about it!
Yes, but will 235 books fit in your briefcase?
If your mom is that understanding, why do you need to hide under the covers?
Then you need a device that includes a shaver for the hair on your palms.
In other words, you think the gadget is useless because it doesn't have a feature most people won't use and nobody really needs. I mean, you have heard of book lights?
Why do you need a light source? Why is that an essential feature?
2. Taking 4 seconds to turn the page is certainly a pain. But under some circumstances, that's a good tradeoff for not having to recharge the thing for a week.
3. Excuse me? You want to take an expensive device and add an expensive, power-draining feature just because it's expensive? Laptops don't have backlights because they're expensive. They have backlights because a color LCD display is useless without them. This device works fine without a backlight.
It's because of consumers like you that electronic devices suck. You insist on a lot of unnecessary features, and the idiot marketeers listen to you. So every cell phone has a zillion lame features nobody uses. And every device has to have a color display, so it's useless without a backlight. I particularly hate the fact that cell phones are no longer made with mono LCDs. So the display is only visible when you push a button, and then only for a few seconds at a time. All for fancy graphics that nobody really cares about.
I often wonder why Apple's lawyers haven't reacted to to all the bozos puttting "i" in front of the names of pseuodo-Apple products.
If the thieves were that well-prepared, it presupposes some complex conspiracy of the sort you only see in movies. Like, "ELINT from the VA indicates that Subject X will take his laptop home this weekend. Field operatives are directed to acquire the laptop. IT Intelligence will download the database, being careful to not leave any signs that the database was actually accessed. We will then return the laptop for the reward, so the entire operation will have the appearance of a casual theft."
The FBI has to be thorough, of course, since this case affects so many people. But it should be obvious by now that the thieves were just looking for stuff they could fence for a few dollars. That's what almost all laptop thefts are about, not stealing data. Indeed, the more professional thieves always wipe the drives right away, since that's evidence that they're holding stolen property.
Of course, this might change now that laptops with sensitive data have been in the news so much lately.
When it comes to guns, cars, and spouses with black eyes, MYOB covers a multitude of sins.
Still, embarassing or not, you were far from being an asshole. In fact, you did exactly the right thing. People throw tantrums when they've been embarassed. So the lady's tirade mean that your observation that she was driving like a drunk hit home. There is some possibility that you saved one or more lives
Indeed, all Buran operations were remotable. All the first-time tests (including the only orbital flight) were unmanned missions. At the time, I thought that was pretty weird, but in hindsight it seems pretty smart.
The Soviet/Russian space program has always been better at anticipating Murphy's Law. NASA's approach has been to try to design it away. That is both expensive and (sadly) ineffective.
Yeah right. If I want to go shoot somebody, nobody has a right to tell me I can't!
Hot flash, dude: life is not a James Bond movie. Evil people are not souless power mongers bent on world domination. They don't even think of themselves as evil. Lenin and Stalin were trying to found a "workers paradise". Hitler was protecting the Aryan Race from subjugation by the Jews and Bolsheviks. And now Bin Laden is trying to defend Islamic culture against what he sees as a "Crusader" culture that's bent on wiping it out.
I'm not defending any of the above: I'd have an unpleasant and brief life if I had to live under any of their rule. But the fact is that they're all driven by complicated ideas and social forces that have nothing to do with the typical concept of the Evil Powermonger.
And here's the big irony: Islamists justify their terrorism by resorting to exactly the same ideas that your lazy mind finds so attractive. They believe that they're the victims of greedy westerners who want to make the whole world their slaves.
Well, constructing a bomb does sort of tend to remove the moral ambiguity from the situation. Unless you construe the "right to bear arms" to include bombs!
When Joe Sixpack says, "I opt out of the state" (which is how we started this discussion) he's stating his willingness to use violence against anybody he perceives to be interfering with him. Such people almost always end up hurting a lot of innocent people.
Bin Laden claims to be protecting his people against the "Zionist-Crusader alliance". Maybe in his heart of hearts he wants to forcibly convert everybody to his own religion — but you can say the same for Pat Robertson!
Do you imagine that the Founders just woke up one day and said, "Fuck this British Empire shit, let's start our own country!" If they had, then yeah, they'd be pretty immoral. Worse, they'd be stupid.
But that's not the way it happened at all. Read the Declaration of Independence some time. It's mostly about a long list of grievances that the Americans had been trying to get addressed for decades. And it talks about how it's wrong to overthrow established authority for "light and transient cause". Far from considering revolution their fundamental right, the founders considered it to be a nasty last resort, justified only by the extreme abuses of the British crown.