It's not unreasonable for the US to tax citizens living overseas? Come on - it's crazy! Very few countries do it, primarily places like the USA and Uganda. By that same logic, non-citizen residents of the USA should not pay taxes, as they have no obligation to do so as citizens.
The US is one of the only countries in the world that will tax you on income you make in a foreign country while living overseas, and it will continue to tax you even after you renounce your citizenship if it feels like it. If you're worth over $500k, you're guilty until proven innocent of tax evasion, and actually, you can't prove yourself innocent, either.
Sorry, but you don't live in a world full of sane people. You live in a world full of united states politicians.
You'd pay the termination fee? I wouldn't. I'd have my lawyer write them a nice letter explaining that they are in breach of contract for failure to provide service, and just cut them off.
That would be intelligent, and thus against gnome's UI design policies.
GNOME used to be a relatively usable desktop environment, back when ordinary developers were actually the ones who made UI decisions. It had functional tab-complete, most of the applications could be configured in sane ways (though they were very immature), etc.
Then hoity toity "usability experts" were brought in. As a professional software engineer, I've never seen a usability expert design something in a way that couldn't have been done better by junkie in detox. The few times they offered a logical suggestion, it basically amounted to a simple bug report, like "Hey, this takes 34 button clicks and still doesn't work."
GNOME has now been taken over by people who actually listen to these nimrods, and it shows in the shockingly worthless user interface decisions and generally retarded interface, as well as the patronizing attitude of its promoters - "What? It sucks and doesn't work? Well you're stupid then for trying to use it!"
[Regarding ctrl-L] The Open dialog NEVER will, because it is ridiculous exposing this to most users who have no clue what it does and get scared by exposure to the UNIX file system.
You know, I decided to stop using GNOME when I first saw this, since it was proof positive that gnome is a piece of shit and the developers are arrogant morons.
Usability means the program performs the tasks the users need it to in an efficient and easy to learn manner, with minimal interference. Ideally, it should perform the tasks in the manner a wide range of users want it to.
Gnome's new UI is a classic example of a bad UI: It is inefficient, does not perform the necessary tasks (look at the horrendous file dialogue - it's quite literally the worst I've ever seen), is difficult to learn since many basic options are hidden and require undocumented keyboard shortcuts, and the users are forced to do tasks in a particular, usually inefficient way.
Almost as bad, it's buggy as hell and slow. Why does opening a menu from the panel take 2 seconds on my 1.4Ghz Athlon? It should open in less than 1/4 of a second for seamless operation. It should open in milliseconds to not be an embarrassment.
All of this is made the more aggravating by the fact that in many cases, the very last point release actually worked better. Case in point: the file dialogue. All of a sudden I need to type control-L to type in a filename? And tab complete, which used to be supported, is removed? What sort of low-grade crack were the "usability experts" smoking?
So in other words, you're going to set up one account for investing, and another account for silly stock market games.
Notice that you instinctively know that there will be no day trading in the account where you intend to actually make money through investments. *grin*
Just make sure the day trading account is a small one! And try to find a broker that makes their day trading engine look like GTA3. In fact, I think I'll patent that idea now and make a fortune! Yeah! 3D first person day trading shooter engine!
Ask them to identify themselves. If they refuse, inform them that they are in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and are liable for a $1500 fine. Ask them again.
Once they have identified themselves, inform them that they have called a cell phone, in violation of the TCPA, and are liable for a $1500 fine.
If you have not placed yourself on the Do-Not-Call list, do so. If you have, inform them that furthermore they have called a number on the Do Not Call list, and are liable for an $11,000 fine.
If the time is not between 8am and 9pm, furthermore inform them that they have once again violated the TCPA, and are liable for yet more fines.
Hang up.
File a complaint with the attorney general, the FCC, and the FTC. The TCPA fines are payable to you. Hey! Easy money!
Drives will NOT always flush. Consumer ATA drives are notorious for ignoring flush commands to get another half a point on some benchmark. In addition, many drives will *lie* about whether you can turn write cache on and off, too.
It's perfectly legal to use Microsoft Shared Source to reverse engineer their protocols, under copyright law.
The only thing stopping you is their license and mountain of rabid attack lawyers.
You're prohibited from making copies of their code, that is all. If you want to look at their code and write your own code from scratch that does something equivalent, that's perfectly legal. When they sue you, merely show your code next to theirs and demonstrate it's not the same.
If you're afraid their smooth-talking rabid attack lawyers will weave some sort of psychotic web of lies and use words like "tainted" and such which will confuse a jury, simply use the clean-room technique and just write a document instead by reading their code. "How Microsoft protocols work." Then give it to your friend and let her write the program. This is extra-super legal, since your friend never even saw their code at all, and there's obviously none of their code in the document. If she never even saw it, there's obviously no way she could copy it.
Again, the only thing stopping you here is some psycho contract they make you agree to to see the code, where you have to promise your first born child to them first. Copyright law makes no such restriction.
"But I still don't know what makes these EULAs valid."
This is actually fairly simple to understand... It's an age-old legal principle called "The party with the most money wins."
Seriously, the EULAs are NOT valid under a legitimate legal theory. What makes them valid is that Microsoft has more money than you. That means, the government will tend to rule in their favor. In addition, having so much money, they can easily purchase laws to make EULAs valid, which is exactly what they've been trying to do the last decade or so.
When you purchase a piece of software, you own that copy, and can use it as you please except as specified in law. A EULA is an additional restriction on your use of the software - it's an attempt to take away rights you already had when you bought it, after the fact. Of course it's not really legal. Your right to use was defined by the government in copyright law, not by the company.
But since they've been used for a number of years, people now see them as the normal way of things, and it becomes ever simpler for Microsoft and the rest of the corporate world to purchase laws making them legal. Such is the way of things. The sale price on congressmen is quite cheap, you know.
I'll never find any restrictive DRM system acceptable, under any circumstances.
I don't use crap designed to break my computer, I don't accept industry's right to buy laws like the DMCA which make the citizen into a criminal, and I don't approve of companies treating customers like thieves.
The only DRM I would find acceptable is "DRM" which is actually that: Management software. I'd be perfectly happy if files came with a copyright description field in some standard form, explaining who owns the copyright and any extra rights above those given in fair use that are granted in the license. I'd even be happy if the big media companies hired some programmers and funded various software programs to process these tags, and say things like:
That would be an acceptable form of Digital Rights Management, as it would be purely advisory and would provide polite assistance to citizens in navigating the complex legal subject of copyright. Citizens who do not need this assistance could merely turn it off.
A superior method for this is already available. It's called black paint.
Re:Think about the Soyuz... the AK47...
on
Hondas in Space
·
· Score: 1
Let me get this straight.
The Insight, a two seat coupe, has insufficient power if you add a wife and two kids, and some groceries?
Where are the kids going to sit? The roof?
*rolls eyes*
It works fine for its appropriate load: Standard transportation for two, with cargo.
Re:Think about the Soyuz... the AK47...
on
Hondas in Space
·
· Score: 1
The Insight has as much acceleration as a standard Civic. The faster Civics accelerate slightly better, but not enough to matter. I mean, come on, they're all a joke compared to an actual fast car or a bike.
Have you ever even driven a hybrid car? The Civic hybrid, for example, has better pickup and is more fun to drive than regular Civics.
You've obviously never dealt with some of the older executives who control vast amounts of money, and who could largely give a damned about the day to day ramblings of linux users and its community. They want a professional solution that just works, not cutesy horseshit.
In other words, they're incompetent, and have no idea what the technology they're buying does or is capable of. Which is exactly my point: they're fools. Fools with money, but fools nonetheless.
Why would you feel embarrassed because you're pitching a product to someone who's completely clueless? If they have no ability to employ critical thinking skills to evaluate a technology, and instead just stare at four color glossies and GUI about boxes, you have nothing to be ashamed about. Theirs is the sort of moronic thinking that drives corporate IT departments into endless money pit hells. "Waaa! I don't understand this email client! Rebuild the entire corporate email system around Microsoft Outlook because it's the only email program I ever seen! Oh, and tell my secretary to print out all my email from now on, I don't know how to use this rattail thing!"
If you seriously want to deal with idiots (because they have money), tailor your pitch with stupidity in mind. Stop talking about serious ROI numbers and real world features, and instead give them lollipops, bullshit powerpoint charts, and completely made up numbers with lots of buzzwords. That's what the Microsoft providers are going to be doing.
Should you be embarrassed doing this? You bet. But you're dealing with idiots, what can you expect?
You were embarrassed because you were pitching to a client who was such an idiot, he's never even heard of GNU/Linux? What were you embarrassed about? The fact that you actually tried to pitch a product to a fool like that?
Please. Your mistake was in pitching to a client who's such a pathetic ignoramus, he doesn't even know what GNU/Linux is. At this point, if you're in a position to buy computer technology and you're not familiar with Linux, you're a baboon in a suit.
Not to mention Gentoo being a lesson in patience! I got tired of waiting for stuff to complile every time I wanted some misc. utility or application or game (not to mention openoffice!) I'm pretty sure the 10% more total CPU I gained from -march=pentium4 optimizations was eaten up by gcc long before I even got up and running.
Of course, besides the massive time wasted on building, it's highly unlikely you got 10% speedup from -march=pentium4, either. Generally those arch-specific optimizations are nearly in the noise, and sometimes even make things slower.
What's more, pretty much every distro ships an optimized kernel, and the performance-critical bits of code like video encoders etc. are generally multi-core and auto-detect, so they just load the right binary for your CPU at runtime.
The compiler switches Gentoo people go on about are really just placebos. They put on more options, so it must be faster, it must!
PGP/GPG is very easy. Just send out your key, and people can mail you. Encrypting mail just requires a single keypress, and all the decryption is done automatically and transparently.
Oh, wait you say, it isn't that easy? You have all sorts of troubles using PGP? It requires some bizarre gizmo that you copy/paste with?
That's because you're using the most worthless pile of shit excuse for an email program in the history of the world: Microsoft Outbreak.
99.9% of all real problems with GPG are Outbreak. I am not kidding. More or less every useful Unix email program has functional GPG support. Mozilla has functional (though annoying) GPG support. Even that piece of junk Eudora has some kind of semi-functional broken GPG support.
The one standout is Outbreak. It works like ass at PGP-type mail. Absolute, utter ass, broken in every way.
I was on a project once where we had to use PGP to talk to another company (at their request). That company used Outbreak. Every time I sent them an email encoded using 100% RFC compliant PGP-mime encoding, they whined, because their worthless junk emailer couldn't read it. Their emails to me were encoded using some retarded inline-placement that hasn't been seen since the early '90s. It violated every known RFC, forcing me to resort to procmail scripts to turn Outbreak Garbage PGP into barely parseable real PGP. Half the time even that didn't work, because they ended up sending me PGP ascii armor pasted into an HTML mail message, the result being too unbelievably trashed for any known mail reader to process.
And of course, let's not forget the instability. I once got a call, the basic gist of which being: "What did you do to my Outbreak?! I tried to send you an email and Outbreak crashed when I hit encrypt!"
There aren't really any problems with PGP. The protocol and security is excellent. The problem is with these worthless Windows email pieces of crap, that can't implement simple mime encoding or key management properly, and apparently give their sadly misguided users the impression that somehow it's PGP's fault that their Microsoft email client is a load of dog crap.
And let's not even get into the incredible brokenness of webmail systems such as hotmail and gmail.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not unreasonable for the US to tax citizens living overseas? Come on - it's crazy! Very few countries do it, primarily places like the USA and Uganda. By that same logic, non-citizen residents of the USA should not pay taxes, as they have no obligation to do so as citizens.
No, you can't.
The US is one of the only countries in the world that will tax you on income you make in a foreign country while living overseas, and it will continue to tax you even after you renounce your citizenship if it feels like it. If you're worth over $500k, you're guilty until proven innocent of tax evasion, and actually, you can't prove yourself innocent, either.
Sorry, but you don't live in a world full of sane people. You live in a world full of united states politicians.
You'd pay the termination fee? I wouldn't. I'd have my lawyer write them a nice letter explaining that they are in breach of contract for failure to provide service, and just cut them off.
That would be intelligent, and thus against gnome's UI design policies.
GNOME used to be a relatively usable desktop environment, back when ordinary developers were actually the ones who made UI decisions. It had functional tab-complete, most of the applications could be configured in sane ways (though they were very immature), etc.
Then hoity toity "usability experts" were brought in. As a professional software engineer, I've never seen a usability expert design something in a way that couldn't have been done better by junkie in detox. The few times they offered a logical suggestion, it basically amounted to a simple bug report, like "Hey, this takes 34 button clicks and still doesn't work."
GNOME has now been taken over by people who actually listen to these nimrods, and it shows in the shockingly worthless user interface decisions and generally retarded interface, as well as the patronizing attitude of its promoters - "What? It sucks and doesn't work? Well you're stupid then for trying to use it!"
You know, I decided to stop using GNOME when I first saw this, since it was proof positive that gnome is a piece of shit and the developers are arrogant morons.
It's nice to know I made the right decision.
You sir, do not understand usability.
Usability means the program performs the tasks the users need it to in an efficient and easy to learn manner, with minimal interference. Ideally, it should perform the tasks in the manner a wide range of users want it to.
Gnome's new UI is a classic example of a bad UI: It is inefficient, does not perform the necessary tasks (look at the horrendous file dialogue - it's quite literally the worst I've ever seen), is difficult to learn since many basic options are hidden and require undocumented keyboard shortcuts, and the users are forced to do tasks in a particular, usually inefficient way.
Almost as bad, it's buggy as hell and slow. Why does opening a menu from the panel take 2 seconds on my 1.4Ghz Athlon? It should open in less than 1/4 of a second for seamless operation. It should open in milliseconds to not be an embarrassment.
All of this is made the more aggravating by the fact that in many cases, the very last point release actually worked better. Case in point: the file dialogue. All of a sudden I need to type control-L to type in a filename? And tab complete, which used to be supported, is removed? What sort of low-grade crack were the "usability experts" smoking?
So in other words, you're going to set up one account for investing, and another account for silly stock market games.
Notice that you instinctively know that there will be no day trading in the account where you intend to actually make money through investments. *grin*
Just make sure the day trading account is a small one! And try to find a broker that makes their day trading engine look like GTA3. In fact, I think I'll patent that idea now and make a fortune! Yeah! 3D first person day trading shooter engine!
Level 2 is for day traders, that is, people who want to play video games with the stock market, and aren't interested in investing.
It involves having some ultimately useless technical information such as the price of a stock right now this very second OMG! Buy buy SELL!
Level 3 is reserved for the Martian overlords who really control the stock market.
I went to that site in Konqueror, and using the default identification it rendered horribly broken.
I then went to the browser identification dropdown and changed it to Safari on Mac OSX, and it worked fine.
My impression would be that Eric Meyer's web page is simply garbage. It's not just Opera that gets hit - he just has no idea how to code.
I don't know how the poster did it, but it's trivially easy to just get new credit cards with those "introductory" rates and transfer the balances.
I don't have any credit card debt, but I get calls / junk mail / blah blah. daily with offers near or at 0% (for 6 months).
Ask them to identify themselves. If they refuse, inform them that they are in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and are liable for a $1500 fine. Ask them again.
Once they have identified themselves, inform them that they have called a cell phone, in violation of the TCPA, and are liable for a $1500 fine.
If you have not placed yourself on the Do-Not-Call list, do so. If you have, inform them that furthermore they have called a number on the Do Not Call list, and are liable for an $11,000 fine.
If the time is not between 8am and 9pm, furthermore inform them that they have once again violated the TCPA, and are liable for yet more fines.
Hang up.
File a complaint with the attorney general, the FCC, and the FTC. The TCPA fines are payable to you. Hey! Easy money!
Drives will NOT always flush. Consumer ATA drives are notorious for ignoring flush commands to get another half a point on some benchmark. In addition, many drives will *lie* about whether you can turn write cache on and off, too.
It's perfectly legal to use Microsoft Shared Source to reverse engineer their protocols, under copyright law.
The only thing stopping you is their license and mountain of rabid attack lawyers.
You're prohibited from making copies of their code, that is all. If you want to look at their code and write your own code from scratch that does something equivalent, that's perfectly legal. When they sue you, merely show your code next to theirs and demonstrate it's not the same.
If you're afraid their smooth-talking rabid attack lawyers will weave some sort of psychotic web of lies and use words like "tainted" and such which will confuse a jury, simply use the clean-room technique and just write a document instead by reading their code. "How Microsoft protocols work." Then give it to your friend and let her write the program. This is extra-super legal, since your friend never even saw their code at all, and there's obviously none of their code in the document. If she never even saw it, there's obviously no way she could copy it.
Again, the only thing stopping you here is some psycho contract they make you agree to to see the code, where you have to promise your first born child to them first. Copyright law makes no such restriction.
"But I still don't know what makes these EULAs valid."
This is actually fairly simple to understand... It's an age-old legal principle called "The party with the most money wins."
Seriously, the EULAs are NOT valid under a legitimate legal theory. What makes them valid is that Microsoft has more money than you. That means, the government will tend to rule in their favor. In addition, having so much money, they can easily purchase laws to make EULAs valid, which is exactly what they've been trying to do the last decade or so.
When you purchase a piece of software, you own that copy, and can use it as you please except as specified in law. A EULA is an additional restriction on your use of the software - it's an attempt to take away rights you already had when you bought it, after the fact. Of course it's not really legal. Your right to use was defined by the government in copyright law, not by the company.
But since they've been used for a number of years, people now see them as the normal way of things, and it becomes ever simpler for Microsoft and the rest of the corporate world to purchase laws making them legal. Such is the way of things. The sale price on congressmen is quite cheap, you know.
I don't use crap designed to break my computer, I don't accept industry's right to buy laws like the DMCA which make the citizen into a criminal, and I don't approve of companies treating customers like thieves.
The only DRM I would find acceptable is "DRM" which is actually that: Management software. I'd be perfectly happy if files came with a copyright description field in some standard form, explaining who owns the copyright and any extra rights above those given in fair use that are granted in the license. I'd even be happy if the big media companies hired some programmers and funded various software programs to process these tags, and say things like:
That would be an acceptable form of Digital Rights Management, as it would be purely advisory and would provide polite assistance to citizens in navigating the complex legal subject of copyright. Citizens who do not need this assistance could merely turn it off.
A superior method for this is already available. It's called black paint.
Let me get this straight.
The Insight, a two seat coupe, has insufficient power if you add a wife and two kids, and some groceries?
Where are the kids going to sit? The roof?
*rolls eyes*
It works fine for its appropriate load: Standard transportation for two, with cargo.
The Insight has as much acceleration as a standard Civic. The faster Civics accelerate slightly better, but not enough to matter. I mean, come on, they're all a joke compared to an actual fast car or a bike.
Have you ever even driven a hybrid car? The Civic hybrid, for example, has better pickup and is more fun to drive than regular Civics.
In other words, they're incompetent, and have no idea what the technology they're buying does or is capable of. Which is exactly my point: they're fools. Fools with money, but fools nonetheless.
Why would you feel embarrassed because you're pitching a product to someone who's completely clueless? If they have no ability to employ critical thinking skills to evaluate a technology, and instead just stare at four color glossies and GUI about boxes, you have nothing to be ashamed about. Theirs is the sort of moronic thinking that drives corporate IT departments into endless money pit hells. "Waaa! I don't understand this email client! Rebuild the entire corporate email system around Microsoft Outlook because it's the only email program I ever seen! Oh, and tell my secretary to print out all my email from now on, I don't know how to use this rattail thing!"
If you seriously want to deal with idiots (because they have money), tailor your pitch with stupidity in mind. Stop talking about serious ROI numbers and real world features, and instead give them lollipops, bullshit powerpoint charts, and completely made up numbers with lots of buzzwords. That's what the Microsoft providers are going to be doing.
Should you be embarrassed doing this? You bet. But you're dealing with idiots, what can you expect?
You were embarrassed because you were pitching to a client who was such an idiot, he's never even heard of GNU/Linux? What were you embarrassed about? The fact that you actually tried to pitch a product to a fool like that?
Please. Your mistake was in pitching to a client who's such a pathetic ignoramus, he doesn't even know what GNU/Linux is. At this point, if you're in a position to buy computer technology and you're not familiar with Linux, you're a baboon in a suit.
You should have given him a lollipop.
Not to mention Gentoo being a lesson in patience! I got tired of waiting for stuff to complile every time I wanted some misc. utility or application or game (not to mention openoffice!) I'm pretty sure the 10% more total CPU I gained from -march=pentium4 optimizations was eaten up by gcc long before I even got up and running.
Of course, besides the massive time wasted on building, it's highly unlikely you got 10% speedup from -march=pentium4, either. Generally those arch-specific optimizations are nearly in the noise, and sometimes even make things slower.
What's more, pretty much every distro ships an optimized kernel, and the performance-critical bits of code like video encoders etc. are generally multi-core and auto-detect, so they just load the right binary for your CPU at runtime.
The compiler switches Gentoo people go on about are really just placebos. They put on more options, so it must be faster, it must!
PGP/GPG is very easy. Just send out your key, and people can mail you. Encrypting mail just requires a single keypress, and all the decryption is done automatically and transparently.
Oh, wait you say, it isn't that easy? You have all sorts of troubles using PGP? It requires some bizarre gizmo that you copy/paste with?
That's because you're using the most worthless pile of shit excuse for an email program in the history of the world: Microsoft Outbreak.
99.9% of all real problems with GPG are Outbreak. I am not kidding. More or less every useful Unix email program has functional GPG support. Mozilla has functional (though annoying) GPG support. Even that piece of junk Eudora has some kind of semi-functional broken GPG support.
The one standout is Outbreak. It works like ass at PGP-type mail. Absolute, utter ass, broken in every way.
I was on a project once where we had to use PGP to talk to another company (at their request). That company used Outbreak. Every time I sent them an email encoded using 100% RFC compliant PGP-mime encoding, they whined, because their worthless junk emailer couldn't read it. Their emails to me were encoded using some retarded inline-placement that hasn't been seen since the early '90s. It violated every known RFC, forcing me to resort to procmail scripts to turn Outbreak Garbage PGP into barely parseable real PGP. Half the time even that didn't work, because they ended up sending me PGP ascii armor pasted into an HTML mail message, the result being too unbelievably trashed for any known mail reader to process.
And of course, let's not forget the instability. I once got a call, the basic gist of which being: "What did you do to my Outbreak?! I tried to send you an email and Outbreak crashed when I hit encrypt!"
There aren't really any problems with PGP. The protocol and security is excellent. The problem is with these worthless Windows email pieces of crap, that can't implement simple mime encoding or key management properly, and apparently give their sadly misguided users the impression that somehow it's PGP's fault that their Microsoft email client is a load of dog crap.
And let's not even get into the incredible brokenness of webmail systems such as hotmail and gmail.
You... had... confidence... in... Microsoft... DRM?!
The mind boggles.
$ exiftran -ai *.jpg
*thwap*
That's bound to do amazing things with no working NIC driver.