Hmm... I suspect that Wi-Fi has no such effect, but am curious as to whether my suspicion is correct, so I propose the following experiment. Prepare a questionaire for the pupils to give to their parents, asking whether their child experience appear to be suffering from this condition, when in the week the symptoms appear, when in the weekend they disappear, and how constantly they appear (i.e. does the child experience the symptoms every day at school, or only some), whether the child experiences symptoms the previous week, whether they disappeared during the weekend, and whether they reappeared during Monday. On Monday disable the wireless without letting the children or the parents know. At the end of the day hand out these questionaires and require that they be filled in and returned the next morning.
This experiment won't tell you if the alleged illness it real or not, but it will give you a good idea of whether the speculative link between the symptoms and Wi-Fi is valid, and goes a long way towards due diligence should anyone take the school to court.
How often do windows/mac users change their audio backend?
What does "change their audio backed" even mean in the context of your question? I'm starting to thing that by "backends" you were actually referring to "drivers". In this case, Windows users generally change it 1 time: after installing their system (and the user must figure out for himself which of several is the "correct" one for his system). By comparison, I have never witnessed a Mac or Linux user needing to change audio drivers at all.
Jumping back to the topic of Phonon and why it is desirable for the user to be able to change the audio backend, here is a real-life example: many programs use DirectSound, but on Windows Vista and later DirectSound runs through a software emulation layer that kills 3D effects and hardware emulation. If you could, wouldn't you like to be able to switch the backend to one of the many Windows audio backends that does not have this problem? On Linux many people seem to complain about PulseAudio. Why shouldn't they be able to switch to something else without having to recompile every single program on their computer?
The biggest problem of the article lies in the following statement:
If the government regulates net neutrality, policies for internet access are set by one entity: the FCC.
The fact is that net neutrality (at least the net neutrality that we are asking for) doesn't grant the FCC any new ability to set policies at all. It IS the policy. The only thing the FCC gets is the responsibility to enforce it - they aren't being given any more authority to decide new policies at all.
The rest of the article relies very heavily on analogies drawn from naive speculation, such as this one:
Many airlines offers passengers who pay for a “first class” ticket improved service for extra money.
Indeed. And if they sell you a first class ticket then they must give you a first class seat or make else amends somehow for failing to do so, because regulation demands that they honour the terms of the sale of the ticket. They may not wait until after takeoff and then downgrade your seat because the airport on the other end decided not to pay a "prioritisation fee", and suggest that next time you choose a destination with a "Tier-1 Airport" so that you don't run the risk of loosing the seat that you pay for.
Ultimately the real risk inherent in a net neutrality law is that lawmakers are persuaded to give us a "Net Neutrality" law that is something other than what we asked for. We must be watchful of that. The points given in this article, on the other hand, are nothing more than misinformation.
Or your distributor can plug in the best backend on your OS (yeah, they really might be different on Solaris, BSD, Linux, Windows and Mac) so that you can get sound from your speakers.
It should be a compile time option or something - at least there should be no GUI to change the backend. Exposing the backend selection in gui makes it a "reasonable" thing for a user to do, which should not be the case at all.
Compile-time? Why? Phonon is designed so that *all* backends that work with your OS can be provided and users can change backends in run-time without any applications having to handle anything, or even needing to be aware that anything has changed. Why should it be "unreasonable" for a user to select backends?
From Wikipedia:
Phonon can switch multimedia frameworks on the fly. The user can switch between frameworks even while listening to music, with only a slight pause during the switch. This change will also be system wide, affecting all applications that use Phonon, so changing frameworks will be much easier.
You do know World of Goo had a "pay what you want" day right? where most people paid less than one dollar for it.
According to 2DBoy's sales figures, the opposite is true: only 40% paid less than 1 dollar for it. Granted, almost 69% paid less than $2 though.
The sales figures have some interesting results:
about 30% paid 1c, and almost as many paid $1-$1.99 (I presume that most of these were $1)
roughly half that paid %5-%5.99
roughly half that paid %2-%2.99
roughly half that paid %10-%10.99
We can draw some very useful conclusions from their data:
Lots of people (although far fewer than I had expected) will pay a token minimum price. For this purpose, it appears that a cent is as good as a dollar, so you may as well set the minimum to $1 so you at least make a profit.
How many of those 1c/$1 buys were from people who wanted to try it out before buying (why try the demo when you can test the real thing?) and would have paid more later if given the chance? We don't know - so next time you do a pay-what-you-want, why not allow customers to increase their contribution at a later date? That way, you get more money and your statistics become far more informative at the ever-so-important low-end.
Nobody likes the original asking price of $20. People seem willing to pay $10. But even if they have the option of paying less, the vast majority of customers who are willing to pay anything significant at all will happily choose to pay $5-$5.99 entirely of their own volition. If you're selling games at a fixed price, this looks like the sweet-spot for maximising your revenue.
If only 2DBoy had more-detailed histograms on the most interesting price-ranges ($1 exactly and $5-$5.99), but their experiment is invaluable to the industry.
One thing the author doesn't take into account, the way the monitor pirated copies is how many IP addresses access their stats server (at least for WoG), this is kind of fubar as whenever I power cycle my router I get a different IP, not to mention when I take my laptop on the go and play it (with touch screen, WoG is amazingly better with this) every time I change access points its a different IP.
Agreed. Piracy figures are generally hugely inflated due to their nature, and IP addresses are especially useless for measuring them. If you're using high-score systems to measure piracy, then I suppose one could get an accurate measurement if every game gives itself a unique ID upon installation and this is sent to the server. Then IP addresses don't matter.
This is a false dichotomy. Studying at a university does not preclude you from using the Internet as well - university students benefit from the Internet just as much (if not more) than non-students, in addition to the formal education that they are already receiving.
I think it's more of a theoretical vs practical kind of thing: copyleft gives users more theoretical rights (that they mostly can't use anyway, not being programmers...) should anyone actually write software, while BSD makes it easier to actually write that software in the first place.
If you want to make changes to your software and you are not a programmer, then GPL ensures that you can hire somebody who is. BSD allows developers to distribute their software without having to give their users that assurance.
Invert the axes and you have a form of head-tracking, which is somewhat less-awkward. Look at the character all the time and turn your head a bit to the right to move right, etc. You will still need to filter the input to account for the player glancing all over the screen.
Holy guacamole! You can get 20Mbps for $17 USD? Shit, I pay $50 USD for 15Mbps. The US of A really sucks when it comes to telecommunications.
Holy chakalaka! You can get 15Mbps for $50 USD? Here in South Africa you would pay $60 for 4Mbps plus another $4 for each gig you download. When it comes to telecommunications, US of A is a dream compared to the R of SA.
The DSi Flash Carts contain an actual poriton of a copyrighted rom that contains an exploit.
How legit is that?
Pretty legit, at least in the US, according to Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc., 977 F.2d 1510 (9th Cir. 1992)
From Wikipedia:
The court's discussion of the second factor highlighted the unique challenges of applying copyright law to software. Ideas embedded in, or functional elements of software are not protected by copyright, but expression of those ideas – the code – is protectable; but how can someone access the functional idea without copying the protected code? Essentially, the court concluded that the only way to get to the unprotected functional elements in the software was for Accolade to copy the entire protected expression of those functional elements, and therefore, this factor, the nature of the copyrighted work, also weighed in Accolade's favor.
Regarding the third factor, the amount copied, the court reiterated that Accolade had copied entire Sega programs. However, Accolade extracted the functional aspects and then wrote their own expressive code, thus ultimately using only minimal amounts of protected material in the final Accolade game. The court afforded this factor little weight.
The court determined that the fourth factor, effect on the market, also weighed in Accolade’s favor. A court may not find fair use if an infringing work would take the place of the original work in the market. But the court notes that the Copyright Act was not intended to create monopolies, it was intended to foster creativity. Thus, the court finds that Accolade’s largely original work is merely an acceptable market competitor of Sega's work. While natural market competition might have a negative financial effect on Sega, the court found that the benefit to consumers compelled a finding that the fourth factor weighed in Accolade’s favor. Therefore, the court found that Accolade had engaged in fair use.
Last night i was told by my ISP that they would charge extra to get fast access to hulu.com
Oh wait no.... no they didn't
The point isn't that they are doing it, it's that they could be.
That's right. More to the point, they have already been trying to do so for almost 5 years (although in a more inconspicuous manner - they won't charge you extra for accessing hulu, but in addition to hulu paying its ISP and you paying yours they would want hulu to give your ISP extra money or else degrade your internet access, along with everyone else on your network, whenever you try to access hulu. Yes, it's that convoluted.). The only reason this isn't actually happenning is because of net--neutrality activists fighting tooth-and-nail to prevent this scenario from coming to pass.
I'm a registered Independent, and have been since I turned 18. I've also never voted in the two presidential elections I've been old enough for because all of the choices are just as corrupt. Yes, that includes third, fourth, and fifth parties.
Good on you. I must admit though that I find the term "registered Independant" somewhat amusing.
Buried in the penultimate paragraph is the somewhat alarming note that "77% of iPhone owners say they'll buy another iPhone, compared to 20% of Android customers who say they'll buy another Android phone." So... 80% of Android customers are satisfied with their phones, whereas 77% of iPhone owners feel that they need to replace theirs.
There is no need to reconcile anything; Hulu, YouTube et al established themselves on a already-neutral Internet. The push for explicit net neutrality laws emerged in 2005 in response to Edward Whitacre (then CEO of what is now AT&T) campaigning for consumer-protection laws to be relaxed to allow them to create a "tiered Internet" where they cripple the connection between you and their customers IF you happen to be the customer of one of their competing networks UNLESS you pay them not to. I hate to be so polar, but it is basically extortion.
Neutrality isn't a new thing - it is the way that the Internet has always worked. Pro-neutrality argues that things should work as they have until now, and anti-neutrality argues that things should change radically. Perhaps net neutrality laws are unnecessary and nothing will change without them, but then one would wonder why there is such an anti-neutrality effort arising from the networks if they are not planning on upsetting the status quo.
I've tried Adobe Reader, Sumatra and Foxit Reader, but wasn't really satisfied with any PDF readers until I found PDF-Xchange Viewer. It's much faster than Adobe, has a good UI, and has all the functionality I need.
[citation needed], and not one commissioned by liars and thieves (RIAA/MPAA).
Whenever a person decides to be legal and goes out to buy a DVD and from a convincingly legit-looking bootlegger selling copies
That's not piracy, that's counterfeiting. Yes, sales are lost due to counterfeiting, sales are also lost from shoplifting, but neither one is piracy.
You know, I think we're making the same argument, but our terminology is in conflict. The point I was trying to make is that criminal copyright infringement (which I refer to as "piracy" but you do not) harms sales but filesharing (which you refer to as "piracy" but I prefer not to because it is a conflation with the criminal activity) does not, despite what we are told by the media. We disagree on the choice of words, but are ultimately saying the exact thing.
For HTML5 they chose to go the middle route. The closed (
paragraph
paragraph
), unbalanced (
paragraph
paragraph) and xml-empty ( />) elements are all valid. So if you write your document in XHTML style it will be valid, but if you do the old HTML4 style it will also work.
What this amounts to is that you can use valid XML if you like, but you aren't forced to. However, if do want to force XML syntax you can declare your document to be XHTML5.
Nobody ever lost sales from piracy, but obscurity guarantees lack of sales.
Plenty of sales have been lost to piracy. Whenever a person decides to be legal and goes out to buy a DVD and from a convincingly legit-looking bootlegger selling copies, the publisher loses a sale no matter how you spin it. But I do realise that's not the type of piracy you were talking about.
The consequences between different forms of piracy is so distinct that there really should be completely different words to distinguish them. (I personally like to refer to personal non-commercial copying as "privateering")
Some e-commerce sites make the users enter their credit card numbers every time they transact. Others remember the credit card number as a convenience so that the user doesn't need to keep entering it.
The latter approach is far more convenient, but carries the risk of exposing credit card numbers of anyone who's account gets hacked. I haven't used Apple's store, but since the victims are being charged it seems that Apple chooses to remember their credit card numbers for them.
Given that account hacks are becoming an issue, Apple could mitigate the problem of fraudulent charges by using a hybrid approach: remember the credit card number as per usual, but if a user logs on from a device other than the one he usually uses to log on, then keep the card number secret. Once the user has entered the card number on a device, the card number can be visible next time the user uses it to log on.
This way, if someone hacks into your account the worst he can do without requiring further exploits is download things that you have already purchased, mess with your account settings or perhaps make purchases on your behalf using his own card, but you (the real owner of the account) should remain relatively safe from thieves draining your credit card..
And this is why third-party voting in the US fails so miserably. "I don't wanna waste my vote by voting for a guy who actually represents what I want in government. I wanna vote for someone who might win."
Independents and minor parties win seats all the time in other countries.
I hear about that comment quite often, but no matter how hard I try I can't understand what it is supposed to mean. Could somebody explain it to me? How is your vote wasted by using it to vote for a party that is less-likely to win? Is there some kind of benefit to having voted for the winning party that you miss out on if you voted for someone else?
"Kinect". You know, I quite like that name.
When I read about Project Natal I kept wondering if it could be used effectively as a low-cost motion-capture system. It would be wonderful if amateur/indie CG animators could (for example) model a character walking using nothing more than an XBox, Kinect, a treadmill and a tether.
Actually Firefox does not ever allow extensions to be installed without the user's permission. The problem is that Windows Update runs as Administrator, and as such has more control over the programs on your computer than those programs have over themselves. In this case, Windows Update quietly modifies your Firefox installation to insert the extension and make it believe that the user has already accepted the extension. There is nothing much that Mozilla or anyone else can do to prevent Microsoft from being able to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... I suspect that Wi-Fi has no such effect, but am curious as to whether my suspicion is correct, so I propose the following experiment. Prepare a questionaire for the pupils to give to their parents, asking whether their child experience appear to be suffering from this condition, when in the week the symptoms appear, when in the weekend they disappear, and how constantly they appear (i.e. does the child experience the symptoms every day at school, or only some), whether the child experiences symptoms the previous week, whether they disappeared during the weekend, and whether they reappeared during Monday. On Monday disable the wireless without letting the children or the parents know. At the end of the day hand out these questionaires and require that they be filled in and returned the next morning.
This experiment won't tell you if the alleged illness it real or not, but it will give you a good idea of whether the speculative link between the symptoms and Wi-Fi is valid, and goes a long way towards due diligence should anyone take the school to court.
How often do windows/mac users change their audio backend?
What does "change their audio backed" even mean in the context of your question? I'm starting to thing that by "backends" you were actually referring to "drivers". In this case, Windows users generally change it 1 time: after installing their system (and the user must figure out for himself which of several is the "correct" one for his system). By comparison, I have never witnessed a Mac or Linux user needing to change audio drivers at all.
Jumping back to the topic of Phonon and why it is desirable for the user to be able to change the audio backend, here is a real-life example: many programs use DirectSound, but on Windows Vista and later DirectSound runs through a software emulation layer that kills 3D effects and hardware emulation. If you could, wouldn't you like to be able to switch the backend to one of the many Windows audio backends that does not have this problem? On Linux many people seem to complain about PulseAudio. Why shouldn't they be able to switch to something else without having to recompile every single program on their computer?
The biggest problem of the article lies in the following statement:
If the government regulates net neutrality, policies for internet access are set by one entity: the FCC.
The fact is that net neutrality (at least the net neutrality that we are asking for) doesn't grant the FCC any new ability to set policies at all. It IS the policy. The only thing the FCC gets is the responsibility to enforce it - they aren't being given any more authority to decide new policies at all.
The rest of the article relies very heavily on analogies drawn from naive speculation, such as this one:
Many airlines offers passengers who pay for a “first class” ticket improved service for extra money.
Indeed. And if they sell you a first class ticket then they must give you a first class seat or make else amends somehow for failing to do so, because regulation demands that they honour the terms of the sale of the ticket. They may not wait until after takeoff and then downgrade your seat because the airport on the other end decided not to pay a "prioritisation fee", and suggest that next time you choose a destination with a "Tier-1 Airport" so that you don't run the risk of loosing the seat that you pay for.
Ultimately the real risk inherent in a net neutrality law is that lawmakers are persuaded to give us a "Net Neutrality" law that is something other than what we asked for. We must be watchful of that. The points given in this article, on the other hand, are nothing more than misinformation.
Or your distributor can plug in the best backend on your OS (yeah, they really might be different on Solaris, BSD, Linux, Windows and Mac) so that you can get sound from your speakers.
It should be a compile time option or something - at least there should be no GUI to change the backend. Exposing the backend selection in gui makes it a "reasonable" thing for a user to do, which should not be the case at all.
Compile-time? Why? Phonon is designed so that *all* backends that work with your OS can be provided and users can change backends in run-time without any applications having to handle anything, or even needing to be aware that anything has changed. Why should it be "unreasonable" for a user to select backends?
From Wikipedia:
Phonon can switch multimedia frameworks on the fly. The user can switch between frameworks even while listening to music, with only a slight pause during the switch. This change will also be system wide, affecting all applications that use Phonon, so changing frameworks will be much easier.
You do know World of Goo had a "pay what you want" day right? where most people paid less than one dollar for it.
According to 2DBoy's sales figures, the opposite is true: only 40% paid less than 1 dollar for it. Granted, almost 69% paid less than $2 though.
The sales figures have some interesting results:
We can draw some very useful conclusions from their data:
If only 2DBoy had more-detailed histograms on the most interesting price-ranges ($1 exactly and $5-$5.99), but their experiment is invaluable to the industry.
One thing the author doesn't take into account, the way the monitor pirated copies is how many IP addresses access their stats server (at least for WoG), this is kind of fubar as whenever I power cycle my router I get a different IP, not to mention when I take my laptop on the go and play it (with touch screen, WoG is amazingly better with this) every time I change access points its a different IP.
Agreed. Piracy figures are generally hugely inflated due to their nature, and IP addresses are especially useless for measuring them. If you're using high-score systems to measure piracy, then I suppose one could get an accurate measurement if every game gives itself a unique ID upon installation and this is sent to the server. Then IP addresses don't matter.
This is a false dichotomy. Studying at a university does not preclude you from using the Internet as well - university students benefit from the Internet just as much (if not more) than non-students, in addition to the formal education that they are already receiving.
I think it's more of a theoretical vs practical kind of thing: copyleft gives users more theoretical rights (that they mostly can't use anyway, not being programmers...) should anyone actually write software, while BSD makes it easier to actually write that software in the first place.
If you want to make changes to your software and you are not a programmer, then GPL ensures that you can hire somebody who is. BSD allows developers to distribute their software without having to give their users that assurance.
Invert the axes and you have a form of head-tracking, which is somewhat less-awkward. Look at the character all the time and turn your head a bit to the right to move right, etc. You will still need to filter the input to account for the player glancing all over the screen.
Holy guacamole! You can get 20Mbps for $17 USD? Shit, I pay $50 USD for 15Mbps. The US of A really sucks when it comes to telecommunications.
Holy chakalaka! You can get 15Mbps for $50 USD? Here in South Africa you would pay $60 for 4Mbps plus another $4 for each gig you download. When it comes to telecommunications, US of A is a dream compared to the R of SA.
The DSi Flash Carts contain an actual poriton of a copyrighted rom that contains an exploit.
How legit is that?
Pretty legit, at least in the US, according to Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc., 977 F.2d 1510 (9th Cir. 1992) From Wikipedia:
The court's discussion of the second factor highlighted the unique challenges of applying copyright law to software. Ideas embedded in, or functional elements of software are not protected by copyright, but expression of those ideas – the code – is protectable; but how can someone access the functional idea without copying the protected code? Essentially, the court concluded that the only way to get to the unprotected functional elements in the software was for Accolade to copy the entire protected expression of those functional elements, and therefore, this factor, the nature of the copyrighted work, also weighed in Accolade's favor.
Regarding the third factor, the amount copied, the court reiterated that Accolade had copied entire Sega programs. However, Accolade extracted the functional aspects and then wrote their own expressive code, thus ultimately using only minimal amounts of protected material in the final Accolade game. The court afforded this factor little weight.
The court determined that the fourth factor, effect on the market, also weighed in Accolade’s favor. A court may not find fair use if an infringing work would take the place of the original work in the market. But the court notes that the Copyright Act was not intended to create monopolies, it was intended to foster creativity. Thus, the court finds that Accolade’s largely original work is merely an acceptable market competitor of Sega's work. While natural market competition might have a negative financial effect on Sega, the court found that the benefit to consumers compelled a finding that the fourth factor weighed in Accolade’s favor. Therefore, the court found that Accolade had engaged in fair use.
Last night i was told by my ISP that they would charge extra to get fast access to hulu.com
Oh wait no .... no they didn't
The point isn't that they are doing it, it's that they could be.
That's right. More to the point, they have already been trying to do so for almost 5 years (although in a more inconspicuous manner - they won't charge you extra for accessing hulu, but in addition to hulu paying its ISP and you paying yours they would want hulu to give your ISP extra money or else degrade your internet access, along with everyone else on your network, whenever you try to access hulu. Yes, it's that convoluted.). The only reason this isn't actually happenning is because of net--neutrality activists fighting tooth-and-nail to prevent this scenario from coming to pass.
I'm a registered Independent, and have been since I turned 18. I've also never voted in the two presidential elections I've been old enough for because all of the choices are just as corrupt. Yes, that includes third, fourth, and fifth parties.
Good on you. I must admit though that I find the term "registered Independant" somewhat amusing.
Buried in the penultimate paragraph is the somewhat alarming note that "77% of iPhone owners say they'll buy another iPhone, compared to 20% of Android customers who say they'll buy another Android phone."
So... 80% of Android customers are satisfied with their phones, whereas 77% of iPhone owners feel that they need to replace theirs.
Statistics are so open to interpretation
There is no need to reconcile anything; Hulu, YouTube et al established themselves on a already-neutral Internet. The push for explicit net neutrality laws emerged in 2005 in response to Edward Whitacre (then CEO of what is now AT&T) campaigning for consumer-protection laws to be relaxed to allow them to create a "tiered Internet" where they cripple the connection between you and their customers IF you happen to be the customer of one of their competing networks UNLESS you pay them not to. I hate to be so polar, but it is basically extortion.
Neutrality isn't a new thing - it is the way that the Internet has always worked. Pro-neutrality argues that things should work as they have until now, and anti-neutrality argues that things should change radically. Perhaps net neutrality laws are unnecessary and nothing will change without them, but then one would wonder why there is such an anti-neutrality effort arising from the networks if they are not planning on upsetting the status quo.
I've tried Adobe Reader, Sumatra and Foxit Reader, but wasn't really satisfied with any PDF readers until I found PDF-Xchange Viewer. It's much faster than Adobe, has a good UI, and has all the functionality I need.
Plenty of sales have been lost to piracy
[citation needed], and not one commissioned by liars and thieves (RIAA/MPAA).
Whenever a person decides to be legal and goes out to buy a DVD and from a convincingly legit-looking bootlegger selling copies
That's not piracy, that's counterfeiting. Yes, sales are lost due to counterfeiting, sales are also lost from shoplifting, but neither one is piracy.
You know, I think we're making the same argument, but our terminology is in conflict. The point I was trying to make is that criminal copyright infringement (which I refer to as "piracy" but you do not) harms sales but filesharing (which you refer to as "piracy" but I prefer not to because it is a conflation with the criminal activity) does not, despite what we are told by the media. We disagree on the choice of words, but are ultimately saying the exact thing.
paragraph
paragraph
), unbalanced (paragraph
paragraph) and xml-empty (/>) elements are all valid. So if you write your document in XHTML style it will be valid, but if you do the old HTML4 style it will also work.
What this amounts to is that you can use valid XML if you like, but you aren't forced to. However, if do want to force XML syntax you can declare your document to be XHTML5.
Nobody ever lost sales from piracy, but obscurity guarantees lack of sales.
Plenty of sales have been lost to piracy. Whenever a person decides to be legal and goes out to buy a DVD and from a convincingly legit-looking bootlegger selling copies, the publisher loses a sale no matter how you spin it. But I do realise that's not the type of piracy you were talking about.
The consequences between different forms of piracy is so distinct that there really should be completely different words to distinguish them. (I personally like to refer to personal non-commercial copying as "privateering")
Some e-commerce sites make the users enter their credit card numbers every time they transact. Others remember the credit card number as a convenience so that the user doesn't need to keep entering it.
The latter approach is far more convenient, but carries the risk of exposing credit card numbers of anyone who's account gets hacked. I haven't used Apple's store, but since the victims are being charged it seems that Apple chooses to remember their credit card numbers for them.
Given that account hacks are becoming an issue, Apple could mitigate the problem of fraudulent charges by using a hybrid approach: remember the credit card number as per usual, but if a user logs on from a device other than the one he usually uses to log on, then keep the card number secret. Once the user has entered the card number on a device, the card number can be visible next time the user uses it to log on.
This way, if someone hacks into your account the worst he can do without requiring further exploits is download things that you have already purchased, mess with your account settings or perhaps make purchases on your behalf using his own card, but you (the real owner of the account) should remain relatively safe from thieves draining your credit card..
And this is why third-party voting in the US fails so miserably. "I don't wanna waste my vote by voting for a guy who actually represents what I want in government. I wanna vote for someone who might win."
Independents and minor parties win seats all the time in other countries.
I hear about that comment quite often, but no matter how hard I try I can't understand what it is supposed to mean. Could somebody explain it to me? How is your vote wasted by using it to vote for a party that is less-likely to win? Is there some kind of benefit to having voted for the winning party that you miss out on if you voted for someone else?
If you mean a solid rectangle, then use the rectangle select tool and then choose "Fill with FG Color" from the edit menu.
If you mean a hollow stroked rectangle, then use the rectangle select tool and choose "Stroke Selection" from the edit menu.
And where do you live? Unless you also live in Seattle, the price of a Happy Meal where you live says nothing about the price in Seattle.
"Kinect". You know, I quite like that name. When I read about Project Natal I kept wondering if it could be used effectively as a low-cost motion-capture system. It would be wonderful if amateur/indie CG animators could (for example) model a character walking using nothing more than an XBox, Kinect, a treadmill and a tether.
Actually Firefox does not ever allow extensions to be installed without the user's permission. The problem is that Windows Update runs as Administrator, and as such has more control over the programs on your computer than those programs have over themselves. In this case, Windows Update quietly modifies your Firefox installation to insert the extension and make it believe that the user has already accepted the extension. There is nothing much that Mozilla or anyone else can do to prevent Microsoft from being able to do this.
Computers wouldn't touch beer (which can't even reach 50% yet) when they already have Alcohol 120%.
I propose introducing the word "Iracy" into the English language to describe this sort of situation.