If Ford Motor Co. decided to implement considerably radical changes to their automobile line, they'd list the reasons why it was necessary, which in turn would have to come under public and government scrutiny.
Wha-? Now hang on. FMC certainly does make radical changes to the auto line without explaining them. Ask FMC about the ignition module mounted too close to the engine so they could save $4 per vehicle. The result: the ignition module overheated and cut out, usually on the highway, leaving the driver with not steering and no power to the brakes. After numerous fatilities and the inevitable class action suit, Ford was forced to pay damages and punitive fees. That is just ONE EXAMPLE of how Ford does NOT answer to the public for the design decisions they make unless FORCED TO DO SO by the court system.
Want to read more? Try The Anti-Ford Page. Lot's of stories from real consumers about how Ford makes any design decision they want and to hell with the customer if things go wrong.
To bring this message back full circle to the topic at hand, Microsoft can make any design decision they want without first checking with their customers. On the other hand, if they make blatantly bad design decisions that result in fiscal (or even real) damages, they should rightfully be held accountable for such. It's my suspicion that Microsoft is feeling the heat from:
the multitude of very public security deficiencies that have come to light lately, and
Linux server and desktop
I also suspect that there is some kind of DMCA crap being incorporated into SP2. It should be a real fun release.....
This article may be complete crap, but it claims red mercury is mercury antimony oxide, compressed using a primary explosion to induce fusion.
And I agree with another poster about use in rocket engines. While the gamma rays my provide little boost -- and I do believe they would provide some, otherwise why would solar sails work? -- they could be used to heat some other material either to produce thrust or electricity.
Any thoughts on which governor will get recalled for this? Or will they decided that it was somehow caused by the Blaster worm infecting the computer systems of the power companies and go after M$ for producing laughable "security" into all versions of Windows.
And yeah, you can bet Davis is jumping up and down, pointing towards the east and yelling, "SEE? SEE? I TOLD YOU IT COULD HAPPEN TO ANYONE!!"
The article mentions that creatine causes unpleasant body odor. I don't buy it. I used creatine for months at a time during a period in my life when I was weight training 5 days a week for about 1.5 hours a day. I always found that bathing after workouts resolved any possible malodorous problems.
On the other hand, I've been taking flax seed oil pills since having Lasik surgery about 4 months ago to improve my tear composition and relieve dry eyes, and *that* stuff will cause you to get a bit aromatic. Again, bathing regularly is key.
For example, just looking at the AfterStep screen-shots on the site (before it gets Slashdotted, heh), i'm liking the way the system is designed, in general, but it looks hideous. The graphics used in the interface are jagged, the window frames and buttons are almost industrial in their simplicity and lack of creativity, and the icons still look like really bad GIFs.
Until you click on them with the little "magnify" cursor. Then they expand and all the jagged edges smooth out and the icons look like really good GIFs. I too thought it looked awful, as though it was captured on a laptop with resolution problems, but then I figured out the zoom-in/zoom-out feature on the pictures this web site shows.
Fine them 0.01$/email and improve third world infrastructures with the money.
Look ya tree-huggin' hippy, if spammers get fined, that money better dang well go to the people receiving the emails. It's my time those (expletive deleted) are wasting, not some goat-milking dipstick who can't quite figure out why his crops won't grow in the desert. To quote the late Sam Kinison, "We've got deserts too, but we don't LIVE IN THEM!!"
No, spammers should have to pay into a fund that is applied to the communications bills of those that have been subjected to the spams. I got 976 emails in a 36 hour period over the weekend, and there 4 -- count'em, FOUR! -- emails that weren't spam. It's my time and my bandwidth these a******* are using.
"terrabyte" -- ok, I had too much coffee. So sue me.
"tebibyte" -- Not unless I acquire an adult-onset hairlip. Terabyte is just fine, thanks, and already in general use. You'd be fighting an uphill battle on that one.
If I recall correctly, GM has already had designs in the works for an electric car that would be built on top of a "skateboard", basically a car base with batteries and electronics all built in. You could pop any shell/interior top onto that base. The idea was that you spent the big bucks on the base, and then spend your fashion dollars on a new top from year to year. In fact, an aftermarket was envisioned for custom, made to order, modularized, pop-together tops for the base.
Don't think someone could get your DNA? Do this: turn your keyboard upside down, keys facing downward, and smack the side of it a couple of times. That crud that fell out? Mixed in with the crumbs and dead bugs is your hair and dandruff. Now how easy was that?
Of course, nothing fell out of mine when I did that. I'm meticulously clean!!;)
Jim hates Marty. Marty is dating the woman Jim has loved from afar. Nevermind that Jim has serious impaired hygiene and social skills and can't hold down a job, Marty, in Jim's mind, is evil. And Sue, the woman Jim's solo love life revolves around, must be saved from Marty.
Even if it means she must die.
And so Jim plans it carefully. He sits outside Marty's house, recording his schedule. Then one day, while Marty is at work, Jim breaks in. He's careful to wear uber-clean clothes, bought but never worn before, broken out of the package and put on in Jim's backyard just prior to breaking in so there's little DNA on the outside.
His sole target: Marty's hair brush.
Marty comes home, finds his door has been forced. Nothing appears to be missing. Perhaps Marty reports the crime, perhaps not. Since there are no fingerprints and nothing stolen or destroyed, the case is immediately dropped into the "Yeah, Whatever" file at the police station. No one ever notices that the hair brush has less hair in it than before.
A month later, enough time to make the two events seem disconnected, the police are again talking to Marty, but this time it's in connection with the death of Sue.
The gory details are not necessary. Suffice to say that Jim was cold, vicious, and meticulous. Sue never had a chance. And the only hard evidence left at the scene is the hair clutched in Sue's cold fist: Marty's hair.
DNA is trusted explicitly. The jury can easily picture Sue fighting for her life. And Marty, gentle and loving man with the ring he would propose to Sue with sitting in his pocket on the day of his arrest, is now on death row in Texas for a crime he didn't commit.
Marty's guilt twists his mind and pushes him further towards the edges of society. He eventually dies in a roach-infested hotel surrounded by goatse porn and empty beer bottles, having never confessed his horrible crime.
Man, you guys sure got fired up. Ok, so each of you has brought up a rebuttal, and most of your rebuttals have the same quality: they're all in the *real world*. So let's review:
1. Those items are data; data can be backed up, data can be restored.
2. In the real world, if you steal my ball, you can be arrested because the ball costs money to replace.
3. I never said the hackers shouldn't be arrested. They committed a crime, sure, but should you get money for virtual tangibles? I don't think so. Their crimes consist of illegal computer access.
4. The sysops can not only give you back your virtual stuff, they can give you a virtual bonus with no additional cost to themselves. And if those items are worth money, as one rebutter (rebuttalist?) pointed out, some of these points/items are worth money on EBay. You not only get your stuff back, you come out a winner. Of course, this depends on how much the game operators want people to use their games. The same can be said about the level of security they provide.
Again, I feel it falls to the game operators to provide a secure setup. Failing to do that, it falls on them to replace your virtual stuff. You can nitpick about the time used to do that, but really it costs them nothing to replace these items.
I think it's silly to pay someone for gaming virtual tangibles that can be replaced in any quantity with little or no cost.
If the game operators want to go after the hackers for breaking, entering, and destroying data, that's a different story, and really the only proper (IMHO) solution.
And I'll say it again: if you still feel that monetary damages should be awarded for destruction of gaming points and objects, you need to get out in the sun and mingle with the populace a little more.
Now it makes sense. Bush did so well with Afghanistan, he got a free game. Then he chose Iraq. He naturally assumed he'd get a free game again, and planned on using it either on Syria or Korea, but he didn't count on this level being harder, what with the guerilla warfare tactics and all that.
Perhaps he should have picked up the nitro boost when he broke into Baghdad? I recommend that the troops start banging on all the walls until we find the "secret areas" with caches of armor, med kits, and rail guns.
Tickets to the Superbowl: $0 Credit card to charge up $9000 in stereo equipment: $0 Same credit card, Quad-CPU, 16 gigs RAM, 1 terrabyte machine with all the latest blings: $0
A lawyer that can use the "it was a bug in the printer" defense to successfully get you off: Priceless.
Ok, so let me get this straight. You played a game in which someone cheated. And now someone has to pay you for it? No, you go play a different game. This is covered in kindergarten here in the U.S.; I'm not sure how this particular life lesson is passed on in other countries.
Look, everyone wants to get pissy when someone "wastes time". I spent X hours playing this, and you cheated me out of points/wins/lives/etc. Well, then you just go to the next game. Or you complain to the folks running the game and they sympathize and set you up with the stuff you say you lost. Or they don't because you'd be "wasting their time." And then you go play someone else's game and let them rot with their insecure gaming software. Vote with your participation and watch gaming software quality improve.
But to try to track down and sue someone because they cost you time playing games is severely unrealistic.
It occurs to me that people who see real damages in that situation need to tear themselves away from the computer and join the real world now and then.
As for me.... I'm going to go sue the crap out of that guy that tripped me during the weekend warrior basketball game. Who knew there was money in getting cheated?
Folks, just because Microsoft Office uses a binary format to represent text documents, spreadsheets, databases and presentations, doesn't mean Open Source projects have to. Should they be able to read and write these formats? If they want to fit into the current business environment, yes, they absolutely must support the de facto standard for business applications. But they should also be capable of writing their data in XML. What could be easier to decipher?
It just felt to me that with every Office upgrade, MS tried to do something dramatically different (as opposed to just fixing bugs or giving speed increases).
There's no money in speed increases and bug fixes. No one, not even M$, charges for service packs. People don't pay for fast software; they pay for fast hardware and feature-rich software.
For ethical reasons I despise Microsoft. For business reasons I try to learn from them. For religious reasons I stick pins in a voodoo doll of Bill Gates while casting spells to leech his mana...
The first Highlander rocked, no doubt. I mean, considering the special effects amounted to showing dummies getting their heads cut off and then lightening effects, and then the final cheesy animation overlay of the swirling spirits/power thing, it was a really cool sleeper. The ensuing flailing attempts to rake in more money on stupid sequels was like watching a train wreck. That kept backing up and wrecking again. And again. And then again and again in the TV series. Dumb.
But if you're going to get into timelines and such, it's easy -- the previous timeline was erased, or, more accurately, back-looped. In the previous loops, there was no T-X developed, or at least none developed at the point in time when the terminators were sent back. There was also no "assassination model" of the Terminator as he describes himself in "T3". Different timelines, different success rates of the resistance to the machines resulting in different pressures driving development of killing machines. In the last time loop, there may have been some knowledge that previous attempts failed and, at the point in time when the new model was sent back, some effort was made to refine the machine sent back. What we see is an evolutionary process until either the machines or mankind fail completely and one or the other is wiped out. Otherwise the timelines simply represent loops along a single continuum.
And what makes this all possible is the concept that always bugs me that time would try to "heal" itself, as though fate really is preordained and any attempt to change it is doomed to fail because the series of events will repeat themselves in some other form until the final result is achieved, even if from a different and seemingly unrelated direction.
For me it is. My old dual 266 dual boots NT4 and Suse Linux. The NT4 serves as on occasional temporary web server now and then, but not long ago it was the full time web server and *never crashed*. It was solid as a frikkin' rock. When I got a hold of it, I used to laugh -- not always just on the inside -- at the poor slobs running 3.1 and 95/98.
What folks should keep in mind is that there is no money in stable software. Major versions inherently have bugs, and by the time you get the bugs worked out, the user expects a new bundle of functionality. Two things are working against you:
1. If it's truly stable and robust, there are no service calls. No service calls, not tech support dollars.
2. If enough time has passed to get the software truly stable and robust, someone else has eaten your lunch delivering greater, if less stable, functionality.
I will miss NT4 just for the lack of headaches involved. It was actually pretty dang good, as PC OS's from 1996 go.
Slashdot Mirror
Wha-? Now hang on. FMC certainly does make radical changes to the auto line without explaining them. Ask FMC about the ignition module mounted too close to the engine so they could save $4 per vehicle. The result: the ignition module overheated and cut out, usually on the highway, leaving the driver with not steering and no power to the brakes. After numerous fatilities and the inevitable class action suit, Ford was forced to pay damages and punitive fees. That is just ONE EXAMPLE of how Ford does NOT answer to the public for the design decisions they make unless FORCED TO DO SO by the court system.
Want to read more? Try The Anti-Ford Page. Lot's of stories from real consumers about how Ford makes any design decision they want and to hell with the customer if things go wrong.
To bring this message back full circle to the topic at hand, Microsoft can make any design decision they want without first checking with their customers. On the other hand, if they make blatantly bad design decisions that result in fiscal (or even real) damages, they should rightfully be held accountable for such. It's my suspicion that Microsoft is feeling the heat from:
I also suspect that there is some kind of DMCA crap being incorporated into SP2. It should be a real fun release.....
This article may be complete crap, but it claims red mercury is mercury antimony oxide, compressed using a primary explosion to induce fusion.
And I agree with another poster about use in rocket engines. While the gamma rays my provide little boost -- and I do believe they would provide some, otherwise why would solar sails work? -- they could be used to heat some other material either to produce thrust or electricity.
This article may be complete crap, but it claims red mercury is mercury antimony oxide, compressed using a primary explosion to induce fusion.
Any thoughts on which governor will get recalled for this? Or will they decided that it was somehow caused by the Blaster worm infecting the computer systems of the power companies and go after M$ for producing laughable "security" into all versions of Windows.
And yeah, you can bet Davis is jumping up and down, pointing towards the east and yelling, "SEE? SEE? I TOLD YOU IT COULD HAPPEN TO ANYONE!!"
The article mentions that creatine causes unpleasant body odor. I don't buy it. I used creatine for months at a time during a period in my life when I was weight training 5 days a week for about 1.5 hours a day. I always found that bathing after workouts resolved any possible malodorous problems.
On the other hand, I've been taking flax seed oil pills since having Lasik surgery about 4 months ago to improve my tear composition and relieve dry eyes, and *that* stuff will cause you to get a bit aromatic. Again, bathing regularly is key.
For example, just looking at the AfterStep screen-shots on the site (before it gets Slashdotted, heh), i'm liking the way the system is designed, in general, but it looks hideous. The graphics used in the interface are jagged, the window frames and buttons are almost industrial in their simplicity and lack of creativity, and the icons still look like really bad GIFs.
Until you click on them with the little "magnify" cursor. Then they expand and all the jagged edges smooth out and the icons look like really good GIFs. I too thought it looked awful, as though it was captured on a laptop with resolution problems, but then I figured out the zoom-in/zoom-out feature on the pictures this web site shows.
Fine them 0.01$/email and improve third world infrastructures with the money.
Look ya tree-huggin' hippy, if spammers get fined, that money better dang well go to the people receiving the emails. It's my time those (expletive deleted) are wasting, not some goat-milking dipstick who can't quite figure out why his crops won't grow in the desert. To quote the late Sam Kinison, "We've got deserts too, but we don't LIVE IN THEM!!"
No, spammers should have to pay into a fund that is applied to the communications bills of those that have been subjected to the spams. I got 976 emails in a 36 hour period over the weekend, and there 4 -- count'em, FOUR! -- emails that weren't spam. It's my time and my bandwidth these a******* are using.
No, but there's a guy somewhere trying to take the Windows 95 footprint down small enough to fit...
It wasn't me -- it was my Dad!!
You are absolutely correct, except for one part.
;)
1000 is a grand.
And just out of curiousity, who exactly popped up and decided that a kilobyte was no longer 1024 bytes? I never heard of this.
"terrabyte" -- ok, I had too much coffee. So sue me.
"tebibyte" -- Not unless I acquire an adult-onset hairlip. Terabyte is just fine, thanks, and already in general use. You'd be fighting an uphill battle on that one.
In fact, here's a URL:
/
http://money.cnn.com/2002/01/08/autos/auto_tech
If I recall correctly, GM has already had designs in the works for an electric car that would be built on top of a "skateboard", basically a car base with batteries and electronics all built in. You could pop any shell/interior top onto that base. The idea was that you spent the big bucks on the base, and then spend your fashion dollars on a new top from year to year. In fact, an aftermarket was envisioned for custom, made to order, modularized, pop-together tops for the base.
Don't think someone could get your DNA? Do this: turn your keyboard upside down, keys facing downward, and smack the side of it a couple of times. That crud that fell out? Mixed in with the crumbs and dead bugs is your hair and dandruff. Now how easy was that?
Of course, nothing fell out of mine when I did that. I'm meticulously clean!!
Jim hates Marty. Marty is dating the woman Jim has loved from afar. Nevermind that Jim has serious impaired hygiene and social skills and can't hold down a job, Marty, in Jim's mind, is evil. And Sue, the woman Jim's solo love life revolves around, must be saved from Marty.
Even if it means she must die.
And so Jim plans it carefully. He sits outside Marty's house, recording his schedule. Then one day, while Marty is at work, Jim breaks in. He's careful to wear uber-clean clothes, bought but never worn before, broken out of the package and put on in Jim's backyard just prior to breaking in so there's little DNA on the outside.
His sole target: Marty's hair brush.
Marty comes home, finds his door has been forced. Nothing appears to be missing. Perhaps Marty reports the crime, perhaps not. Since there are no fingerprints and nothing stolen or destroyed, the case is immediately dropped into the "Yeah, Whatever" file at the police station. No one ever notices that the hair brush has less hair in it than before.
A month later, enough time to make the two events seem disconnected, the police are again talking to Marty, but this time it's in connection with the death of Sue.
The gory details are not necessary. Suffice to say that Jim was cold, vicious, and meticulous. Sue never had a chance. And the only hard evidence left at the scene is the hair clutched in Sue's cold fist: Marty's hair.
DNA is trusted explicitly. The jury can easily picture Sue fighting for her life. And Marty, gentle and loving man with the ring he would propose to Sue with sitting in his pocket on the day of his arrest, is now on death row in Texas for a crime he didn't commit.
Marty's guilt twists his mind and pushes him further towards the edges of society. He eventually dies in a roach-infested hotel surrounded by goatse porn and empty beer bottles, having never confessed his horrible crime.
Man, you guys sure got fired up. Ok, so each of you has brought up a rebuttal, and most of your rebuttals have the same quality: they're all in the *real world*. So let's review:
1. Those items are data; data can be backed up, data can be restored.
2. In the real world, if you steal my ball, you can be arrested because the ball costs money to replace.
3. I never said the hackers shouldn't be arrested. They committed a crime, sure, but should you get money for virtual tangibles? I don't think so. Their crimes consist of illegal computer access.
4. The sysops can not only give you back your virtual stuff, they can give you a virtual bonus with no additional cost to themselves. And if those items are worth money, as one rebutter (rebuttalist?) pointed out, some of these points/items are worth money on EBay. You not only get your stuff back, you come out a winner. Of course, this depends on how much the game operators want people to use their games. The same can be said about the level of security they provide.
Again, I feel it falls to the game operators to provide a secure setup. Failing to do that, it falls on them to replace your virtual stuff. You can nitpick about the time used to do that, but really it costs them nothing to replace these items.
I think it's silly to pay someone for gaming virtual tangibles that can be replaced in any quantity with little or no cost.
If the game operators want to go after the hackers for breaking, entering, and destroying data, that's a different story, and really the only proper (IMHO) solution.
And I'll say it again: if you still feel that monetary damages should be awarded for destruction of gaming points and objects, you need to get out in the sun and mingle with the populace a little more.
Now it makes sense. Bush did so well with Afghanistan, he got a free game. Then he chose Iraq. He naturally assumed he'd get a free game again, and planned on using it either on Syria or Korea, but he didn't count on this level being harder, what with the guerilla warfare tactics and all that.
Perhaps he should have picked up the nitro boost when he broke into Baghdad? I recommend that the troops start banging on all the walls until we find the "secret areas" with caches of armor, med kits, and rail guns.
So you think Larry Ellison, in his refurbished MiG, would give Bill Gates, in his F-22, a sporting chance when the BSOD comes up? Yeah, ok.
Larry would probably die from laughing so hard anyway. They'd both go down without a shot fired. It would be less bloody than the old Comdex's.
Tickets to the Superbowl: $0
Credit card to charge up $9000 in stereo equipment: $0
Same credit card, Quad-CPU, 16 gigs RAM, 1 terrabyte machine with all the latest blings: $0
A lawyer that can use the "it was a bug in the printer" defense to successfully get you off: Priceless.
Ok, so let me get this straight. You played a game in which someone cheated. And now someone has to pay you for it? No, you go play a different game. This is covered in kindergarten here in the U.S.; I'm not sure how this particular life lesson is passed on in other countries.
Look, everyone wants to get pissy when someone "wastes time". I spent X hours playing this, and you cheated me out of points/wins/lives/etc. Well, then you just go to the next game. Or you complain to the folks running the game and they sympathize and set you up with the stuff you say you lost. Or they don't because you'd be "wasting their time." And then you go play someone else's game and let them rot with their insecure gaming software. Vote with your participation and watch gaming software quality improve.
But to try to track down and sue someone because they cost you time playing games is severely unrealistic.
It occurs to me that people who see real damages in that situation need to tear themselves away from the computer and join the real world now and then.
As for me.... I'm going to go sue the crap out of that guy that tripped me during the weekend warrior basketball game. Who knew there was money in getting cheated?
Three letters: XML.
Folks, just because Microsoft Office uses a binary format to represent text documents, spreadsheets, databases and presentations, doesn't mean Open Source projects have to. Should they be able to read and write these formats? If they want to fit into the current business environment, yes, they absolutely must support the de facto standard for business applications. But they should also be capable of writing their data in XML. What could be easier to decipher?
It just felt to me that with every Office upgrade, MS tried to do something dramatically different (as opposed to just fixing bugs or giving speed increases).
There's no money in speed increases and bug fixes. No one, not even M$, charges for service packs. People don't pay for fast software; they pay for fast hardware and feature-rich software.
For ethical reasons I despise Microsoft. For business reasons I try to learn from them. For religious reasons I stick pins in a voodoo doll of Bill Gates while casting spells to leech his mana...
The first Highlander rocked, no doubt. I mean, considering the special effects amounted to showing dummies getting their heads cut off and then lightening effects, and then the final cheesy animation overlay of the swirling spirits/power thing, it was a really cool sleeper. The ensuing flailing attempts to rake in more money on stupid sequels was like watching a train wreck. That kept backing up and wrecking again. And again. And then again and again in the TV series. Dumb.
But if you're going to get into timelines and such, it's easy -- the previous timeline was erased, or, more accurately, back-looped. In the previous loops, there was no T-X developed, or at least none developed at the point in time when the terminators were sent back. There was also no "assassination model" of the Terminator as he describes himself in "T3". Different timelines, different success rates of the resistance to the machines resulting in different pressures driving development of killing machines. In the last time loop, there may have been some knowledge that previous attempts failed and, at the point in time when the new model was sent back, some effort was made to refine the machine sent back. What we see is an evolutionary process until either the machines or mankind fail completely and one or the other is wiped out. Otherwise the timelines simply represent loops along a single continuum.
And what makes this all possible is the concept that always bugs me that time would try to "heal" itself, as though fate really is preordained and any attempt to change it is doomed to fail because the series of events will repeat themselves in some other form until the final result is achieved, even if from a different and seemingly unrelated direction.
Ok, back to reality. That was fun....
Or why not just dispense with parens entirely?
:= random( INFINITE ) // actual := emails * 1000; := incidents * 1000000; := emaildamages := incidentdamages;
function award( emails, incidents : integer ) : double;
var
emaildamages,
incidentdamages : double;
begin
if ( boolean( random( 1 ) ) then
result
else
begin
emaildamages
incidentdamages
if ( emaildamages incidentdamages ) then
result
else
result
end;
end;
For me it is. My old dual 266 dual boots NT4 and Suse Linux. The NT4 serves as on occasional temporary web server now and then, but not long ago it was the full time web server and *never crashed*. It was solid as a frikkin' rock. When I got a hold of it, I used to laugh -- not always just on the inside -- at the poor slobs running 3.1 and 95/98.
What folks should keep in mind is that there is no money in stable software. Major versions inherently have bugs, and by the time you get the bugs worked out, the user expects a new bundle of functionality. Two things are working against you:
1. If it's truly stable and robust, there are no service calls. No service calls, not tech support dollars.
2. If enough time has passed to get the software truly stable and robust, someone else has eaten your lunch delivering greater, if less stable, functionality.
I will miss NT4 just for the lack of headaches involved. It was actually pretty dang good, as PC OS's from 1996 go.