From now on I'm buying all my books from local bookstores. I'll just use amazon.com to help filter through titles, then go to a local shop, sit down and go over the books enjoying the coffee and wifi until I decide on my purchases.
Why would you ever do otherwise? Amazon's prices aren't so much better than brick and mortar stores (and being in WA state, I have to pay sales tax at Amazon like I would in a local store), and you don't have to pay shipping and handling if you buy locally. Maybe you don't live in an area with a convenient Barnes and Noble or Borders, but you'd have to be way out in the middle of nowhere if there's not one within half an hour's drive. I'd much rather go out to a store, buy a book, and have it in my hands now than buy a book and wait a week for it to ship. I guess there are some special order books that you may not find locally, but why not just ask your local store clerk to see if they can order for you?
That's one thing I hate, corps rewarding their employees and making it seem like they're doing it for the consumer. Why don't they post pictures of the company picnic too.
I agree. I don't care if they reward their employees (in fact, they should else they wouldn't have any employees). Don't pawn it off as a "reward" for customers. We're not as stupid as they think we are.
And besides, Bob Dylan and Norah Jones? If I were an Amazon employee, I'd be scalping my tickets (which is now legal in Seattle!) rather than wasting 2 hours of my life on that crap.
It's a codename, like Longhorn or Whistler (Windows XP) or Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005). When it ships, you can bet it won't be called Monad. Instead, it'll have a "generic" name like "Microsoft Shell (msh)".
The biggest time consumer (for me, anyway) is actually reading everything and deciding what I need to fill in or not - and then how to actually do that...
But you have to do it every year. How many years are you going to re-read the same crap, finding out that you have to fill in the same boxes as last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and...
Yes, tax code changes year after year. No, it rarely changes enough that the forms and instructions are drastically different (your allowed deductions may change, but the fact that you can take deductions won't). This really will only benefit the people filing the state equivalent of the 1040EZ form (US-centric alert!), which has had a phone-in system for at least a decade (the 1040EZ, that is -- state tax submission methods obviously vary state by state). You do a bit of very basic math, call a phone number, punch in a few numbers on your touch-tone phone, and you're done. Pretty much anybody else will benefit from taking deductions (especially if you have a mortgage, or student loans, or any other loan with tax-deductible interest).
I'm happy I live in a no-incoming-tax state (still pay property and sales taxes), and I wish the federal government would get their act together and simplify the tax code. How many millions of tax dollars are wasted just on processing and auditing tax filings? Seems rather silly to me. I just buy TaxCut every year for $20-30, punch in my numbers, and file online. Even "complicated" stuff like deducting mortgage interest and tracking long-term vs. short-term stock sales is trivially simple and doesn't take me more than an hour or two a year. I'd rather the government save some money and not implement a program to do your taxes for you.
Finally, don't forget to update your W-4 withholdings every year. There's no reason the government should be allowed to collect interest on money they're going to give back to you anyway. If you got a refund, it's time to adjust your withholdings to give you back more money per paycheck rather than waiting for it each April.
If you want knowlegable employees who actually give a damn try shopping at a smaller, local game shop... though honestly I'll admit that they're very, very rare.
I just want to point out that "smaller, local game shop" doesn't necessarily mean "independent". I say that because there used to be a smaller, local, independent game shop a few blocks from my house. It was dirty, smelly, and had a piss poor game selection, and I was happy to see it close shop a few months ago. If you go a few miles further out, there's a very good Game Crazy (small and local here, but not independent) with a number of very knowledge guys (and girls!) on the staff who're more than willing to shoot the breeze about games. They're not pro-Xbox anti-Sony, or pro-PS2 anti-Microsoft, or anti-Nintendo. They like good games, and they seem to be pretty knowledgeable. Granted, Game Crazy is pretty much console-only, but I haven't played a game on my PC in over 6 months anyway. Pretty good used game prices, too.
I'm not trying to say that all Game Crazies are this way, or that all independent shops are dirty urine-soaked hellholes. I just wanted to point out that "independent" does not always mean "good" and "corporate" does not always mean "bad".
That said, there are so many things that are so easy to do in open office or have no counter part in Word that MSWORD just plain sucks.
Like? You complain that the author doesn't compare really useful information, yet you don't either. You say that there are things OO.o does that Word simply can't without saying what those things even are. If you provide a list, I would bet that most (if not all) of the things you think are "impossible" in Word are easily doable. Without a list, I have to assume that it's your lack of experience with Word that's hindering you rather than the application itself.
I don't think Volkswagen would confuse its marketing like that...
Volkswagen doesn't own Porsche, nor does Porsche own Volkswagen. They collaborate on parts (the Cayenne platform is used for the Touareg), but that doesn't mean Porsche isn't independent. Yes, Volkswagen was founded by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche (Porsche also designed the the King Tiger tank for Germany during WWII, and other members of the family created the Porsche industrial design firm that makes everything from sunglasses to cigarette lighters; Porsche has also collaborated with many other companies such as Harley Davidson for the V-Rod engine and Subaru for their current line of flat-4 turbo boxer engines)). Yes, Porsche cars have used Volkswagen engines in the past (the 356 used a Volkswagen engine, as did the 924). No, they are not the same company. Porsche is not like Audi or Lamborghini, which are owned by VW.
In the sense that the availability of a Skoda with four seats and a hatchback for $10K means you aren't constrained to buy a Boxster with only two seats and no luggage capacity for $50K just because it's the only car in town. ..yes.
No luggage capacity? The Boxster has two trunks! I would wager that, using only trunks, I could fit more luggage in my Boxster than you could in a Skoda (assuming you're not going to use the rear seats for luggage in the Skoda).
Competing with Photoshop because it does vector and raster imaging? Isn't that like saying a Skoda is competing with a Porsche because they both have wheels and an engine?
And yet Skoda participates in racing as a manufacturer (rallying), while Porsche does not (they used to, and they're gearing up to get back into LMPs, but for the moment and for the past few years they haven't been in any racing series as a manufacturer). So yeah, if Porsche would get back into rally (they do have a long history of rally support, from the original 356 to 911 rally cars to the 959s that won Paris-Dakar back in the day, and the Cayenne-based VW Touareg has raced in at least one recent Paris-Dakar), they could conceivably compete with Skoda:)
Re:What's the problem with dual boot on same disk?
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Test Driving Linux
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Other than the caveat that Windows MUST be installed first (otherwise it will clobber the Linux boot sector), I don't see why this should cause a problem. Perhaps your problem is with dynamicly resizing an existing parition?
I haven't installed a dual-boot machine in years, but I don't recall that ever being the case if you were smart about how you were installing. Instead of telling LILO to install on the MBR, tell it to install to the boot sector of your boot partition (ie, instead of boot=/dev/hda, use boot=/dev/hda1 or boot=/dev/hda2 or wherever you installed/, or preferably/boot). Then fire up fdisk, mark the partition with lilo as the active parition, and you're done. Windows only clobbers the MBR. It can't clobber the boot sector of other partitions. It also doesn't reset the active partition. By installing LILO in this way, I was able to reinstall Windows as many times as I liked without affecting my Linux install. In fact, just for grins I once had two copies of linux, two copies of NT 4, one copy of Win2k, and one copy of Be OS all installed on the same machine and all managed by LILO. After getting linux installed, installation order was unimportant other than making sure I knew what partition I was going to use and set up lilo to be able to boot the new OS.
Of course, since then I've decided to separate my Linux and Windows installations onto diferent boxes, and since doing that I haven't needed to reinstall in a very long while (last time I reinstalled XP was due to a motherboard upgrade ~2 years ago; last Linux reinstall was even longer ago than that and was only required thanks to a failing hard drive).
OK then, if, as you say, cops have eyes & noses which can reliably determine drunken state, why have the breathalyzer test in the first place?
What if I'm not that obviously drunk, yet still am over the limit, and refuse to take any tests? Should I be let go to continue my driving, in the name of my "constitutionally protected rights" (not that any constitional rights are being violated here)?
Are you really so dense that you can't devise a solution to this problem? Let's see, how about this: The drunk person refuses to submit any evidence (blood/breath/urine). The cop can tell he's obviously drunk, but doesn't have enough evidence to make a case. So, he puts the guy in lock-up for the night (called the "drunk tank" for a reason), and lets him out in the morning when he's sober. Nothing wrong with that scenario. There's nothing saying you can't be held, only that you can't be held indefinitely without being arrested and arraigned.
Not harsh enough for you? Okay, how about this: The drunk refuses to give any evidence, and so the cop slaps him with a charge of obstructing justice. Maybe it's not as harsh as a DUI, but it does carry fines and a possible jail sentence. The cop then puts him in the drunk tank for the night, releases him on personal recognizance in the morning with a court date, and they prosecute the obstruction of justice charge.
What about the right of other people to NOT GET RUN OVER BY SOME DRUNKEN BASTARD?
Don't walk in the street and you won't get run over. Seriously, though, re-read what I said. I made no claims that anyone has a constitutional right to drive drunk (or to drive at all). What I said (and what you'd have gathered if you understood the 5th Amendment) is that you can't be forced to testify against yourself. Giving evidence from your own body (blood/breath/urine) could be considered as testifying against yourself. That's why you're read your Miranda rights (no, Miranda isn't some girl -- it's a guy who was not informed that he had the right not to talk, and thus was coerced into testifying against himself; right or wrong, whether he did it or not, a constitutional right was violated and it made its way to the supreme court of the land). You know, "You have the right to remain silent", et al?
Your right to personal safety (which, btw, is not guaranteed anywhere in the constitution -- the constitution protects against unlawful search and seizure, but that's it) does not trump my personal property rights (illegal search and seizure, 4th amendment; one could argue that coercing a suspect to give breath/blood/urine is an illegal seizure of his personal property) or my legal rights (5th amendment, my right not to bear witness against myself; 8th amendment, no excessive fines shall be imposed nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted).
You shouldn't whine about "implied consent" and "refusal means admission of guilt" unless you can think of a better way of handling the above situation.
Bullshit. That you can't solve the problem of an obviously-drunk person refusing to submit to chemical testing (hint: Cops have eyes, noses. If you're that obviously drunk, they'll have enough to make probable cause on an arrest) doesn't mean that you can remove a person's Constitutionally protected rights (read that little thing called the 5th Amendment some time).
Sure, fair use and all is well and good, but I don't think you can argue that it's wrong for advertisers to get you to see their ads.
Not my assertion (that was the original poster calling them unscrupulous), but that might be part of a compromise. Then again, the attitude of many content providers is that the end users somehow owe them. I'll return to my original point: If you want to get paid for your content, make it premium (subscription or one-time fee, your choice). You can serve me ads and popups all you want, but you can't force me to look at them.
Considering there's no explicit agreement for browsing the web (which in this day and age I'm quite amazed that we haven't seen these yet) you can agree that the content provider has every right to distribute whatever content they wish to your machine, where you can then choose to disregard it or regard it as you want.
I'd rather there not be a EULA for browsing a web page. Consider how well those work today, with spyware even being mentioned in the EULA fine print and people still installing it anyway (because they don't read the EULA). If a site had a EULA that said, "You will not block popups or ads on this site," nobody will read the EULA and nobody will turn off their popup blockers or ad blockers while visiting the site. Oops, just violated the EULA. What are you going to do, mister site owner?
Push whatever data you wish when I view your site. My browser will render it or disregard it as I choose, not as you choose.
That being said, finding out how to get around a popup blocker isn't trampling your right to fair use (you just need to upgrade in the popup cold war).
Maybe we need a weapons dismantlement agreement. You agree as a content provider not to circumvent our tools (you can refuse to show us content if we use an ad or popup blocker, but you can't slip a popup through that intentionally bypasses our popup blockers), and we'll agree to stop using more egregious greasemonkey scripts, like rewriting links to yahoo searches to use google instead (just an example, no clue if such a script exists). Because you've already shown that you can't be trusted, we won't get rid of our own defensive weapons, but we'll stop creating offensive weapons.
As long as advertising is easy to ignore/disable, there will always be the back and forth (until some crappy future US law makes those things illegal).
As long as the end user has control over the browser, advertising will always be ignorable/disableable. You need a delivery mechanism like television, where the end user's part only consists of displaying electrons (DVRs are changing that, but until every TV is sold with a DVR it's not a huge issue). A browser is not this, because it has to interpret and render html. So long as the browser is interpreting and rendering, it can ignore or disable content.
Unscrupulous? And you think actively blocking the content that pays the bills of the people whose websites you frequent isn't?
You're not entitled to make a living. If you want to be guaranteed money for your content, go subscription-only (of course, your content better be worth it, or you're not going to get any money that way either). Otherwise, once the data has reached my local machine, fair use gives me the right to do anything I want to it so long as I don't redistribute your data (I can certainly redistribute the tools I use, since they're not circumventing a copy protection). Thus, I can apply an ad blocker, or a popup blocker, or a Greasemonkey script that adds links to other sites or rearranges or removes your page content, or anything else that I want. Even if your content is only available by subscription, I can still apply ad blocking, popup blocking (if you're premium content, why do you still have popups and ads? greedy bastard), or GM scripts to it with impunity. Paying your subscription fee allows me access to your content, which is then mine to do with as I please under fair use. You can't stop me legally or morally.
You have to figure that there's something wrong when the relationship between online advertisers and end users is escalating like a cold war weapons build-up. There's got to be a better way than pissing off your end user with bigger and more annoying advertisements (google text ads were a step in the right direction but way too little, way too late). The end-users will always beat the ad providers in the end. All the advertisers can do is make our lives miserable for short periods of time.
Why not? It would make A LOT of sense to release a game on a livecd/dvd. For one thing, it would let you optimize the kernel for your game. You could customize the kernel with the hooks it needs so that the game could run in kernel space.
Why? If I'm playing a game on my PC, I don't want to wait for a reboot to be able to play the game. Unless you can reboot in a matter of seconds (just shutting down Windows and the BIOS POST takes longer than that), it's too long. Besides, you've just removed one of the few benefits left to PC gaming -- you can use the machine to do other things. I may not leave Word open while playing Far Cry, but I'll certainly leave IE running. Unless your PC is specially engineered, it's never going to reboot as quickly as a console (and if it does, why would you buy a $1000 PC when you could buy a $300 console)?
Having the game in a totally standardized run-time enviornment would also greatly simplify tech support -- you don't have to worry about incompatible library versions, dependencies, non-standard drivers, or any of a littany of other issues. Having a standard run-time environment is one of the main advantages a console gives developers; a live cd brings this advantage to the PC.
You're not quite right on the console advantage. Sure, console games generally get to provide their own run-time environment, but that's not the win. The biggest benefit a console provides is a standard hardware environment. Even if you have a standard run-time, you'll still have to deal with ambiguous hardware on a PC. What kind of video card, CPU, RAM do you have? I can almost guarantee mine will be different than yours. PC game developers have to test against that, regardless of the run-time environment (really, when was the last time you saw a game fail due to incompatible library versions? Maybe drivers, but I don't think I've ever seen library versioning problems). A live CD/DVD environment can't fix hardware ambiguity.
Maybe you should ask your self if your an alcoholic?
That's "if you're an alcoholic", and why? Because I enjoy having a drink now and then? Here's a clue: "Person who likes to drink alcohol" != "alcoholic". An alcoholic is someone who cannot function without booze in their system. That's certainly not me, nor is it most people I know. Just because someone gets into trouble with the law due to alcohol doesn't mean they're an alcoholic. That's why courts require an alcohol evaluation, because a diagnosis of alcoholism can lessen the penalties of an alcohol-related infraction. The assumption is that it's not a foregone conclusion, even though the state of the alcohol "treatment" industry (and it is an industry) means that you have about a 90% chance of being diagnosed as an alcoholic even if you're not. Even if that were a valid measurement, it would require frequent and consistent problems to even begin to be considered. Is someone who robs convenience stores a kleptomaniac? Sure, he broke the law, but not because of some uncontrollable urge to steal. Alcoholism is the uncontrollable urge to drink, to be drunk. The alcoholic can't help himself.
It's the end of memorial day weekend, a weekend of much drinking. I've consumed maybe a six-pack of beer over three days. Oh my god, I must be alcoholic? Shit, I'm going to go check myself into the nearest clinic and get myself sobered up.
Do you smoke pot? Can you function without pot? Do you smoke cigarettes, dip snuff, or chew? Can you function without nicotine? Do you drink coffee or other caffeine-laden beverages? Can you function without caffeine? If you truthfully answered "yes" to any of the "can you function" questions, you're not dependent on that substance. The same applies to alcohol. The answer to the first question in each series ("do you...") is irrelevant in determining your dependent state.
If lots of people like User Friendly, how does my liking it make me unique?
First, you're assuming lots of people like UF:). Second, I was being facetious, as in, "You're a unique person, just like everybody else." You know, like the people that shop at Hot Topic because they want to be "different, like everybody else".
Sometimes I wonder whether what fanbase there is around UF exists only because back in the day it was pro-Linux when little else was, and thus they formed a community. It didn't matter that the art was shit, the stories were shit, and the humor was non-existent. It was Pro-Linux, and that's all they needed. Now, it's just momentum carrying them on. What's the new reader rate of UF? What's their reader growth numbers? I assume Illiad is able to do UF as a full-time job, but how much of that is related to existing momentum, and how much is due to genuine appeal to new people? How many people have been intrigued enough by UF to go read the entire backlog of comics? (when I pick up a new web comic, that's the first thing I do -- I work my way through the archives, usually over weeks or months depending on the extent of the archives. I only do that with comics that really grab my attention, the latest being ctrl+alt+del)
Well, I looked at those other comics, and I disagree. I suppose you have to have lived the life of a sysadmin (down, not across) to get the most out of UF, but it is funny. A lot of those comics are heavily targetted at gamers, and while I enjoy games, I'm not that heavily into it.
Two points:
While you're correct that most of those I linked to are gaming-related, not all of them are. And for those that aren't, the humor is often zany enough that it doesn't matter if you can relate to it as a gamer. There certainly are strips that require you to have some deep gaming knowledge, but those are few and far between. Besides, who can't relate to stuff like blister packaging, used on much more than just video gaming peripherals? See? Funny, without going the "Windoze is sux" route. Maybe the guy getting both of his hands cut off by the packaging was too graphic, which is a valid complaint. Here's PA's take on the blister packaging issue, without the gratuitous violence.
Even if you can't appreciate them for their story or humor, all of the comics I linked to are artistically pleasing, if not amazing (PA, Megatokyo, and Mac Hall routinely astound). Of the art/story/funny trifecta, they at least have one leg to stand on. UF has none.
Oh, yeah, I was gong to also pimp Something Postivie as a strip that's not about gaming (though they do throw in some pen and paper role-playing every now and then), has decent art (below average when compared against PA or Mac Hall, but light years ahead of UF), is funny, and has an interesting story.
Come on, why don't people realize that not everyones taste is the same. Frankly, I don't _want_ everyone liking just the things I like. It'd be boring...
In other words, you want to be so unique that you'll willingly choose to like pure crap just to be different? Well, whatever it takes, I guess.
First, you should link to PA's comic directly, or your commentary on the strip won't make sense in a couple days. Second, black and white is not necessarily bad (Megatokyo is mostly in black and white). The problem with Userfriendly's art is not so much that it's not in color as that it's drawn with all of the skill of a three year old child. If the story was good or the humor funny, it could make up for the bad artwork. Sadly, neither of those are the case.
For the record, I just pulled a couple comics at random. As has already been mentioned, Diesel Sweeties is also good, as well as many others (ctrl+alt+del, Mac Hall when they update, Angst Technology, etc). All of these are better than UF, in story, art, and humor. If UF could pull even one of those out of its rear, it might be worth browsing once a month or so. Until then it's nothing more than a reason to laugh at people that think it's good.
Where does User Friendly fit in the scheme of things?
Ideally in the "dead and buried" category. Comics should either look good or be funny. Megatokyo looks good. Dilbert is funny (or, well, it has its moments, but is funny most of the time). Penny Arcade is both. User Friendly has neither art nor humor going for it, and thus is a waste of time.
0.05% legal limit, which equates to roughly 3 beers an hour for the first hour, then 1 beer an hour after that.
How much do you weigh? 4 beers in two hours would put most people over 0.05%, if not 0.08%. If you're planning a long night out, you'll metabolize most of those first three beers in a few hours and your subsequent "maintenance" beer/hour won't cause a problem. However, if you're going out for a 2 hour dinner you're not going to have time to metabolize those first three beers before it's time to get in the car and drive.
Studies have shown that most people at 0.08% are still fully capable of driving, and that the legal limit should be 0.10% (as it was in most places of the US many years ago). The slow but inexorable lowering of the legal limit is tantamount to a reinstatement of prohibition in small steps. If you live in an area where no public transportation is available (sadly, a very large percentage of the US -- I can't speak to Australia, having never been there), 0.08% means you can maybe have one beer an hour, and then you're risking it due to inaccuracies in breathalyzers and road-side sobriety tests (the "walk a straight line" tests are designed to make you fail, regardless of your actual BAC). At.08 you can get away with having a drink or two and not run into any problems. At.05 I'd have maybe one drink the entire night. Any lower, and you just can't drink at all.
Once you can't even have one or two drinks for fear of getting a DUI on the way home, what's to stop them from starting in on other ways of reinstating prohibition? Make it illegal to be drunk on public transportation? Make it illegal to walk home drunk (already the case in many places where public drunkenness is a crime)? Just because the bars are still allowed to stay open doesn't make it any less like Prohibition. Maybe the teetotallers should get a life and stop trying to make everyone else stop drinking. Reinstate the.10% legal limit, and add tougher penalties if you feel it's necessary, but as things are right now even one drink when you're going to have to drive is just asking for years of pain from a bullshit DUI.
Thanks for enlightening me. I was unaware Clancy was such a loser. I've now burned all of my Clancy books and will be preaching the anti-Clancy gospel to everyone I meet. Thank you for showing me the light.
Known by whom? You get a DUI, you're automatically branded an alcoholic, because the alcoholic "treatment" industry is driven by the courts. They have financial incentives to brand you as an alcoholic, regardless of your actual behaviors, family history, or any other factors that go into truly diagnosing alcoholism. Given this, most alcholic "treament" centers would diagnose 90% of the populace as alcoholics, even though the true number is probably closer to 10-15% (if even that high).
So, how are you diagnosing people as alcoholics? (I say this as I'm drinking a beer. Does this make me an alcoholic? OMG! A beer!)
Make it part of the fine when you get a DUI - you can get your license back after you spend 600 bucks to put this in your car.
Most states already do that with an ignition interlock (requires you to blow in a breathalyzer to start the car, and periodically after that to keep the car running), depending on the state laws and the severity of the DUI (for example, many states don't require such a device for infractions below 0.15 BAC, where 0.08 BAC is the legal limit). However, the devices are notoriously faulty, and it's questionable whether it's a good idea to require the driver to blow while driving to continue operation of the car. And finally, breathalyzers are notoriously inaccurate (many can be off upwards of.02-.03 BAC plus or minus, which means that you could be well under the legal limit and still blow high, or well above the limit and blow safely). I question whether a skin test would be any more accurate.
The only 100% accurate way to check your BAC is to check your blood. Anything else is too easy to impeach in court by any halfway decent lawyer.
I can't understand why law enforcement would rely on such faulty equipment, but then they already have precedent. Radar guns are notoriously inaccurate, and most police organizations have a bad track record of keeping them properly calibrated with all of the necessary paperwork. LIDAR guns (laser) are even worse than radar guns, simply due to the physics behind them. Unlike radar, which measures actual velocity, LIDAR measures distance over time. They work on the grade school math concept of "d=rt", but unless the cop using the gun is a sharpshooter (with the requisite paperwork, impeachable in court), it's too easy to get an inaccurate reading. Ever see a stop sign do 12mph? Pretty easy to do -- point the gun at the sign, and as you pull the trigger jerk your hand off to the side. Depending on the severity of your movement, you may have just measured distance between you and the stop sign and then distance between you and a building down the street. That looks like a change in distance over the time of measurement, which is then translated to velocity. Nevermind that the sign didn't actually go anywhere. Now do the same excercise on a car 1500 meters away, with a laser no larger than a 1 meter wide or less at that distance, and take into account what effect the cop's daily dosage of coffee may do to his hand (hint: shaking, even a little bit, could move the laser off of the car and onto one behind it, or in front of it, or off to the side -- thus the sharpshooter requirement, not only to properly hit their target at such a long distance but also to keep the laser on target; even then, shooting lidar is much more difficult than shooting a sniper rifle, because you have to keep lidar targeted after pulling the trigger). Scared yet?
(sorry for going off-topic, but I was making a point -- much of the technology that law enforcement uses is extremely faulty. You should use that to your advantage if you ever find yourself in such a situation. Don't just roll over and take it. That's what they want you to do, so they can fill their coffers from your hard-earned dollars. Stick it to them any chance you get.)
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Why would you ever do otherwise? Amazon's prices aren't so much better than brick and mortar stores (and being in WA state, I have to pay sales tax at Amazon like I would in a local store), and you don't have to pay shipping and handling if you buy locally. Maybe you don't live in an area with a convenient Barnes and Noble or Borders, but you'd have to be way out in the middle of nowhere if there's not one within half an hour's drive. I'd much rather go out to a store, buy a book, and have it in my hands now than buy a book and wait a week for it to ship. I guess there are some special order books that you may not find locally, but why not just ask your local store clerk to see if they can order for you?
I agree. I don't care if they reward their employees (in fact, they should else they wouldn't have any employees). Don't pawn it off as a "reward" for customers. We're not as stupid as they think we are.
And besides, Bob Dylan and Norah Jones? If I were an Amazon employee, I'd be scalping my tickets (which is now legal in Seattle!) rather than wasting 2 hours of my life on that crap.
It's a codename, like Longhorn or Whistler (Windows XP) or Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005). When it ships, you can bet it won't be called Monad. Instead, it'll have a "generic" name like "Microsoft Shell (msh)".
Uhh ... what?
Monad:
I have no idea what your Monad code is supposed to be.But you have to do it every year. How many years are you going to re-read the same crap, finding out that you have to fill in the same boxes as last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and ...
Yes, tax code changes year after year. No, it rarely changes enough that the forms and instructions are drastically different (your allowed deductions may change, but the fact that you can take deductions won't). This really will only benefit the people filing the state equivalent of the 1040EZ form (US-centric alert!), which has had a phone-in system for at least a decade (the 1040EZ, that is -- state tax submission methods obviously vary state by state). You do a bit of very basic math, call a phone number, punch in a few numbers on your touch-tone phone, and you're done. Pretty much anybody else will benefit from taking deductions (especially if you have a mortgage, or student loans, or any other loan with tax-deductible interest).
I'm happy I live in a no-incoming-tax state (still pay property and sales taxes), and I wish the federal government would get their act together and simplify the tax code. How many millions of tax dollars are wasted just on processing and auditing tax filings? Seems rather silly to me. I just buy TaxCut every year for $20-30, punch in my numbers, and file online. Even "complicated" stuff like deducting mortgage interest and tracking long-term vs. short-term stock sales is trivially simple and doesn't take me more than an hour or two a year. I'd rather the government save some money and not implement a program to do your taxes for you.
Finally, don't forget to update your W-4 withholdings every year. There's no reason the government should be allowed to collect interest on money they're going to give back to you anyway. If you got a refund, it's time to adjust your withholdings to give you back more money per paycheck rather than waiting for it each April.
I just want to point out that "smaller, local game shop" doesn't necessarily mean "independent". I say that because there used to be a smaller, local, independent game shop a few blocks from my house. It was dirty, smelly, and had a piss poor game selection, and I was happy to see it close shop a few months ago. If you go a few miles further out, there's a very good Game Crazy (small and local here, but not independent) with a number of very knowledge guys (and girls!) on the staff who're more than willing to shoot the breeze about games. They're not pro-Xbox anti-Sony, or pro-PS2 anti-Microsoft, or anti-Nintendo. They like good games, and they seem to be pretty knowledgeable. Granted, Game Crazy is pretty much console-only, but I haven't played a game on my PC in over 6 months anyway. Pretty good used game prices, too.
I'm not trying to say that all Game Crazies are this way, or that all independent shops are dirty urine-soaked hellholes. I just wanted to point out that "independent" does not always mean "good" and "corporate" does not always mean "bad".
Like? You complain that the author doesn't compare really useful information, yet you don't either. You say that there are things OO.o does that Word simply can't without saying what those things even are. If you provide a list, I would bet that most (if not all) of the things you think are "impossible" in Word are easily doable. Without a list, I have to assume that it's your lack of experience with Word that's hindering you rather than the application itself.
Volkswagen doesn't own Porsche, nor does Porsche own Volkswagen. They collaborate on parts (the Cayenne platform is used for the Touareg), but that doesn't mean Porsche isn't independent. Yes, Volkswagen was founded by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche (Porsche also designed the the King Tiger tank for Germany during WWII, and other members of the family created the Porsche industrial design firm that makes everything from sunglasses to cigarette lighters; Porsche has also collaborated with many other companies such as Harley Davidson for the V-Rod engine and Subaru for their current line of flat-4 turbo boxer engines)). Yes, Porsche cars have used Volkswagen engines in the past (the 356 used a Volkswagen engine, as did the 924). No, they are not the same company. Porsche is not like Audi or Lamborghini, which are owned by VW.
No luggage capacity? The Boxster has two trunks! I would wager that, using only trunks, I could fit more luggage in my Boxster than you could in a Skoda (assuming you're not going to use the rear seats for luggage in the Skoda).
And yet Skoda participates in racing as a manufacturer (rallying), while Porsche does not (they used to, and they're gearing up to get back into LMPs, but for the moment and for the past few years they haven't been in any racing series as a manufacturer). So yeah, if Porsche would get back into rally (they do have a long history of rally support, from the original 356 to 911 rally cars to the 959s that won Paris-Dakar back in the day, and the Cayenne-based VW Touareg has raced in at least one recent Paris-Dakar), they could conceivably compete with Skoda :)
I haven't installed a dual-boot machine in years, but I don't recall that ever being the case if you were smart about how you were installing. Instead of telling LILO to install on the MBR, tell it to install to the boot sector of your boot partition (ie, instead of boot=/dev/hda, use boot=/dev/hda1 or boot=/dev/hda2 or wherever you installed /, or preferably /boot). Then fire up fdisk, mark the partition with lilo as the active parition, and you're done. Windows only clobbers the MBR. It can't clobber the boot sector of other partitions. It also doesn't reset the active partition. By installing LILO in this way, I was able to reinstall Windows as many times as I liked without affecting my Linux install. In fact, just for grins I once had two copies of linux, two copies of NT 4, one copy of Win2k, and one copy of Be OS all installed on the same machine and all managed by LILO. After getting linux installed, installation order was unimportant other than making sure I knew what partition I was going to use and set up lilo to be able to boot the new OS.
Of course, since then I've decided to separate my Linux and Windows installations onto diferent boxes, and since doing that I haven't needed to reinstall in a very long while (last time I reinstalled XP was due to a motherboard upgrade ~2 years ago; last Linux reinstall was even longer ago than that and was only required thanks to a failing hard drive).
Are you really so dense that you can't devise a solution to this problem? Let's see, how about this: The drunk person refuses to submit any evidence (blood/breath/urine). The cop can tell he's obviously drunk, but doesn't have enough evidence to make a case. So, he puts the guy in lock-up for the night (called the "drunk tank" for a reason), and lets him out in the morning when he's sober. Nothing wrong with that scenario. There's nothing saying you can't be held, only that you can't be held indefinitely without being arrested and arraigned.
Not harsh enough for you? Okay, how about this: The drunk refuses to give any evidence, and so the cop slaps him with a charge of obstructing justice. Maybe it's not as harsh as a DUI, but it does carry fines and a possible jail sentence. The cop then puts him in the drunk tank for the night, releases him on personal recognizance in the morning with a court date, and they prosecute the obstruction of justice charge.
Don't walk in the street and you won't get run over. Seriously, though, re-read what I said. I made no claims that anyone has a constitutional right to drive drunk (or to drive at all). What I said (and what you'd have gathered if you understood the 5th Amendment) is that you can't be forced to testify against yourself. Giving evidence from your own body (blood/breath/urine) could be considered as testifying against yourself. That's why you're read your Miranda rights (no, Miranda isn't some girl -- it's a guy who was not informed that he had the right not to talk, and thus was coerced into testifying against himself; right or wrong, whether he did it or not, a constitutional right was violated and it made its way to the supreme court of the land). You know, "You have the right to remain silent", et al?
Your right to personal safety (which, btw, is not guaranteed anywhere in the constitution -- the constitution protects against unlawful search and seizure, but that's it) does not trump my personal property rights (illegal search and seizure, 4th amendment; one could argue that coercing a suspect to give breath/blood/urine is an illegal seizure of his personal property) or my legal rights (5th amendment, my right not to bear witness against myself; 8th amendment, no excessive fines shall be imposed nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted).
Bullshit. That you can't solve the problem of an obviously-drunk person refusing to submit to chemical testing (hint: Cops have eyes, noses. If you're that obviously drunk, they'll have enough to make probable cause on an arrest) doesn't mean that you can remove a person's Constitutionally protected rights (read that little thing called the 5th Amendment some time).
Not my assertion (that was the original poster calling them unscrupulous), but that might be part of a compromise. Then again, the attitude of many content providers is that the end users somehow owe them. I'll return to my original point: If you want to get paid for your content, make it premium (subscription or one-time fee, your choice). You can serve me ads and popups all you want, but you can't force me to look at them.
I'd rather there not be a EULA for browsing a web page. Consider how well those work today, with spyware even being mentioned in the EULA fine print and people still installing it anyway (because they don't read the EULA). If a site had a EULA that said, "You will not block popups or ads on this site," nobody will read the EULA and nobody will turn off their popup blockers or ad blockers while visiting the site. Oops, just violated the EULA. What are you going to do, mister site owner?
Push whatever data you wish when I view your site. My browser will render it or disregard it as I choose, not as you choose.
Maybe we need a weapons dismantlement agreement. You agree as a content provider not to circumvent our tools (you can refuse to show us content if we use an ad or popup blocker, but you can't slip a popup through that intentionally bypasses our popup blockers), and we'll agree to stop using more egregious greasemonkey scripts, like rewriting links to yahoo searches to use google instead (just an example, no clue if such a script exists). Because you've already shown that you can't be trusted, we won't get rid of our own defensive weapons, but we'll stop creating offensive weapons.
As long as the end user has control over the browser, advertising will always be ignorable/disableable. You need a delivery mechanism like television, where the end user's part only consists of displaying electrons (DVRs are changing that, but until every TV is sold with a DVR it's not a huge issue). A browser is not this, because it has to interpret and render html. So long as the browser is interpreting and rendering, it can ignore or disable content.
You're not entitled to make a living. If you want to be guaranteed money for your content, go subscription-only (of course, your content better be worth it, or you're not going to get any money that way either). Otherwise, once the data has reached my local machine, fair use gives me the right to do anything I want to it so long as I don't redistribute your data (I can certainly redistribute the tools I use, since they're not circumventing a copy protection). Thus, I can apply an ad blocker, or a popup blocker, or a Greasemonkey script that adds links to other sites or rearranges or removes your page content, or anything else that I want. Even if your content is only available by subscription, I can still apply ad blocking, popup blocking (if you're premium content, why do you still have popups and ads? greedy bastard), or GM scripts to it with impunity. Paying your subscription fee allows me access to your content, which is then mine to do with as I please under fair use. You can't stop me legally or morally.
You have to figure that there's something wrong when the relationship between online advertisers and end users is escalating like a cold war weapons build-up. There's got to be a better way than pissing off your end user with bigger and more annoying advertisements (google text ads were a step in the right direction but way too little, way too late). The end-users will always beat the ad providers in the end. All the advertisers can do is make our lives miserable for short periods of time.
Why? If I'm playing a game on my PC, I don't want to wait for a reboot to be able to play the game. Unless you can reboot in a matter of seconds (just shutting down Windows and the BIOS POST takes longer than that), it's too long. Besides, you've just removed one of the few benefits left to PC gaming -- you can use the machine to do other things. I may not leave Word open while playing Far Cry, but I'll certainly leave IE running. Unless your PC is specially engineered, it's never going to reboot as quickly as a console (and if it does, why would you buy a $1000 PC when you could buy a $300 console)?
You're not quite right on the console advantage. Sure, console games generally get to provide their own run-time environment, but that's not the win. The biggest benefit a console provides is a standard hardware environment. Even if you have a standard run-time, you'll still have to deal with ambiguous hardware on a PC. What kind of video card, CPU, RAM do you have? I can almost guarantee mine will be different than yours. PC game developers have to test against that, regardless of the run-time environment (really, when was the last time you saw a game fail due to incompatible library versions? Maybe drivers, but I don't think I've ever seen library versioning problems). A live CD/DVD environment can't fix hardware ambiguity.
That's "if you're an alcoholic", and why? Because I enjoy having a drink now and then? Here's a clue: "Person who likes to drink alcohol" != "alcoholic". An alcoholic is someone who cannot function without booze in their system. That's certainly not me, nor is it most people I know. Just because someone gets into trouble with the law due to alcohol doesn't mean they're an alcoholic. That's why courts require an alcohol evaluation, because a diagnosis of alcoholism can lessen the penalties of an alcohol-related infraction. The assumption is that it's not a foregone conclusion, even though the state of the alcohol "treatment" industry (and it is an industry) means that you have about a 90% chance of being diagnosed as an alcoholic even if you're not. Even if that were a valid measurement, it would require frequent and consistent problems to even begin to be considered. Is someone who robs convenience stores a kleptomaniac? Sure, he broke the law, but not because of some uncontrollable urge to steal. Alcoholism is the uncontrollable urge to drink, to be drunk. The alcoholic can't help himself.
It's the end of memorial day weekend, a weekend of much drinking. I've consumed maybe a six-pack of beer over three days. Oh my god, I must be alcoholic? Shit, I'm going to go check myself into the nearest clinic and get myself sobered up.
Do you smoke pot? Can you function without pot? Do you smoke cigarettes, dip snuff, or chew? Can you function without nicotine? Do you drink coffee or other caffeine-laden beverages? Can you function without caffeine? If you truthfully answered "yes" to any of the "can you function" questions, you're not dependent on that substance. The same applies to alcohol. The answer to the first question in each series ("do you ...") is irrelevant in determining your dependent state.
First, you're assuming lots of people like UF :). Second, I was being facetious, as in, "You're a unique person, just like everybody else." You know, like the people that shop at Hot Topic because they want to be "different, like everybody else".
Sometimes I wonder whether what fanbase there is around UF exists only because back in the day it was pro-Linux when little else was, and thus they formed a community. It didn't matter that the art was shit, the stories were shit, and the humor was non-existent. It was Pro-Linux, and that's all they needed. Now, it's just momentum carrying them on. What's the new reader rate of UF? What's their reader growth numbers? I assume Illiad is able to do UF as a full-time job, but how much of that is related to existing momentum, and how much is due to genuine appeal to new people? How many people have been intrigued enough by UF to go read the entire backlog of comics? (when I pick up a new web comic, that's the first thing I do -- I work my way through the archives, usually over weeks or months depending on the extent of the archives. I only do that with comics that really grab my attention, the latest being ctrl+alt+del)
Two points:
Oh, yeah, I was gong to also pimp Something Postivie as a strip that's not about gaming (though they do throw in some pen and paper role-playing every now and then), has decent art (below average when compared against PA or Mac Hall, but light years ahead of UF), is funny, and has an interesting story.
In other words, you want to be so unique that you'll willingly choose to like pure crap just to be different? Well, whatever it takes, I guess.
First, you should link to PA's comic directly, or your commentary on the strip won't make sense in a couple days. Second, black and white is not necessarily bad (Megatokyo is mostly in black and white). The problem with Userfriendly's art is not so much that it's not in color as that it's drawn with all of the skill of a three year old child. If the story was good or the humor funny, it could make up for the bad artwork. Sadly, neither of those are the case.
For the record, I just pulled a couple comics at random. As has already been mentioned, Diesel Sweeties is also good, as well as many others (ctrl+alt+del, Mac Hall when they update, Angst Technology, etc). All of these are better than UF, in story, art, and humor. If UF could pull even one of those out of its rear, it might be worth browsing once a month or so. Until then it's nothing more than a reason to laugh at people that think it's good.
Ideally in the "dead and buried" category. Comics should either look good or be funny. Megatokyo looks good. Dilbert is funny (or, well, it has its moments, but is funny most of the time). Penny Arcade is both. User Friendly has neither art nor humor going for it, and thus is a waste of time.
How much do you weigh? 4 beers in two hours would put most people over 0.05%, if not 0.08%. If you're planning a long night out, you'll metabolize most of those first three beers in a few hours and your subsequent "maintenance" beer/hour won't cause a problem. However, if you're going out for a 2 hour dinner you're not going to have time to metabolize those first three beers before it's time to get in the car and drive.
Studies have shown that most people at 0.08% are still fully capable of driving, and that the legal limit should be 0.10% (as it was in most places of the US many years ago). The slow but inexorable lowering of the legal limit is tantamount to a reinstatement of prohibition in small steps. If you live in an area where no public transportation is available (sadly, a very large percentage of the US -- I can't speak to Australia, having never been there), 0.08% means you can maybe have one beer an hour, and then you're risking it due to inaccuracies in breathalyzers and road-side sobriety tests (the "walk a straight line" tests are designed to make you fail, regardless of your actual BAC). At .08 you can get away with having a drink or two and not run into any problems. At .05 I'd have maybe one drink the entire night. Any lower, and you just can't drink at all.
Once you can't even have one or two drinks for fear of getting a DUI on the way home, what's to stop them from starting in on other ways of reinstating prohibition? Make it illegal to be drunk on public transportation? Make it illegal to walk home drunk (already the case in many places where public drunkenness is a crime)? Just because the bars are still allowed to stay open doesn't make it any less like Prohibition. Maybe the teetotallers should get a life and stop trying to make everyone else stop drinking. Reinstate the .10% legal limit, and add tougher penalties if you feel it's necessary, but as things are right now even one drink when you're going to have to drive is just asking for years of pain from a bullshit DUI.
Thanks for enlightening me. I was unaware Clancy was such a loser. I've now burned all of my Clancy books and will be preaching the anti-Clancy gospel to everyone I meet. Thank you for showing me the light.
Known by whom? You get a DUI, you're automatically branded an alcoholic, because the alcoholic "treatment" industry is driven by the courts. They have financial incentives to brand you as an alcoholic, regardless of your actual behaviors, family history, or any other factors that go into truly diagnosing alcoholism. Given this, most alcholic "treament" centers would diagnose 90% of the populace as alcoholics, even though the true number is probably closer to 10-15% (if even that high).
So, how are you diagnosing people as alcoholics? (I say this as I'm drinking a beer. Does this make me an alcoholic? OMG! A beer!)
Most states already do that with an ignition interlock (requires you to blow in a breathalyzer to start the car, and periodically after that to keep the car running), depending on the state laws and the severity of the DUI (for example, many states don't require such a device for infractions below 0.15 BAC, where 0.08 BAC is the legal limit). However, the devices are notoriously faulty, and it's questionable whether it's a good idea to require the driver to blow while driving to continue operation of the car. And finally, breathalyzers are notoriously inaccurate (many can be off upwards of .02-.03 BAC plus or minus, which means that you could be well under the legal limit and still blow high, or well above the limit and blow safely). I question whether a skin test would be any more accurate.
The only 100% accurate way to check your BAC is to check your blood. Anything else is too easy to impeach in court by any halfway decent lawyer.
I can't understand why law enforcement would rely on such faulty equipment, but then they already have precedent. Radar guns are notoriously inaccurate, and most police organizations have a bad track record of keeping them properly calibrated with all of the necessary paperwork. LIDAR guns (laser) are even worse than radar guns, simply due to the physics behind them. Unlike radar, which measures actual velocity, LIDAR measures distance over time. They work on the grade school math concept of "d=rt", but unless the cop using the gun is a sharpshooter (with the requisite paperwork, impeachable in court), it's too easy to get an inaccurate reading. Ever see a stop sign do 12mph? Pretty easy to do -- point the gun at the sign, and as you pull the trigger jerk your hand off to the side. Depending on the severity of your movement, you may have just measured distance between you and the stop sign and then distance between you and a building down the street. That looks like a change in distance over the time of measurement, which is then translated to velocity. Nevermind that the sign didn't actually go anywhere. Now do the same excercise on a car 1500 meters away, with a laser no larger than a 1 meter wide or less at that distance, and take into account what effect the cop's daily dosage of coffee may do to his hand (hint: shaking, even a little bit, could move the laser off of the car and onto one behind it, or in front of it, or off to the side -- thus the sharpshooter requirement, not only to properly hit their target at such a long distance but also to keep the laser on target; even then, shooting lidar is much more difficult than shooting a sniper rifle, because you have to keep lidar targeted after pulling the trigger). Scared yet?
(sorry for going off-topic, but I was making a point -- much of the technology that law enforcement uses is extremely faulty. You should use that to your advantage if you ever find yourself in such a situation. Don't just roll over and take it. That's what they want you to do, so they can fill their coffers from your hard-earned dollars. Stick it to them any chance you get.)