The guy browsing does not own the content, neither do Microsoft.
Irrelevant. Fair use dictates that I can do anything I want with your content, for my personal use. If I want to rewrite your rant into a pro-Microsoft treatise, I have the perfect right, as long as I don't republish it.
Microsoft does not have the right to change the content of my page, neither do you!
This is wrong on so many levels.
First of all, Microsoft is not changing the content of the page, only "reading" the page and making recommendations on other pages that I might find interesting.
Second of all, I have the legal right to change the page any way I want. That's called "fair use". As long as I don't redistribute it, I can do anything I want.
Third of all, the nature of HTML and browsers is such that it's reformatted in a browser-dependent way. Reformatting text is perfectly natural and expected on the web.
What business is it of yours whether Microsoft gets to deploy text-based advertising across all of creation without paying for it?
Exactly. It's NONE of my business, and it's NONE of yours. It's the business of the user of the web browser.
If they expect to have links IN the content area of anyone's page,
There's where you go wrong. It stops being your page the minute it leaves your computer and enters my browser. At that point, I can view it any damn way I want to. Stay the hell out of my browser!
Why are you trying to give Microsoft an advertising handout?
First of all, I didn't say whether I would use the feature or not. My point is that it's none of your damn business how I view web pages on MY computer. If I choose to use Microsoft's feature, then I'll use it.
You're sounding alarmingly Socialist.
You have it exactly backwards. I'm on the side of freedom. The Socialist position would be to "protect" the consumers "for their own good" because they might be "fooled" by the evil Microsoft. I do NOT want a bunch of arrogant, elitist, big brothers deciding what I can and can't have in my browser.
in the server side you have to put extra stuff to disable this piece of crap.
And I think Microsoft shouldn't even allow it to be disabled. Read my lips: It's none of your business if I decide to use this feature on your web site. Stay out of my browser! Hopefully, Microsoft will have an option to override the page's preference.
It is an stealth M$ tax taken in time of people deploying *any* web server solution.
So don't put in the tag. It's that simple. Nobody is forcing you to do it, and in fact, you are violating other's freedom by putting it in.
I for one don't want Microsoft choosing where links on a Slashdot story go.
It's amazing to me how anti-Freedom many Slashdotters are, including apparently the Chief Editor of this site.
If you don't like it, TURN OFF THE FEATURE. But it's damn arrogant of you to decide for everyone else whether they can use the feature or not. It's up to me how I want to view a page. If I want to read your page with an encyclopedia next to me in order to look up things that I read in the article, it's my choice. This is no different. The only difference is that Microsoft is supplying the database, rather than the publisher of the encyclopedia.
In short, Taco, stay the hell off my computer and stop trying to decide how I use my browser.
Gah! I can't understand why you don't understand that being monitored isn't freedom!
No, what is freedom is choosing whether I want to be monitored or not. If you (or people like you) deny me the right to make that choice for myself, then you are denying me freedom.
What you fail to understand is that not everyone is as paranoid about being tracked as you are. I realize that you think "they should be", but you just might want to make room in your philsophy for cases where it's worth it for certain people.
I tell you in exchange for this, I will give you double your salary. You are saying you would take this deal, freely - yet I control the leash. Are you now more free?
Damn right I would take it -- in a microsecond. What do I care if my employer tracks me or not? Not to mention that he has the perfect right to track whatever I do if he's paying me for my time...
In any case, unless this employer is forcing me into slavery, yes, my freedom is perfectly intact -- because I choose whether to participate or not. And that's where you go wrong -- you are arguing that no one should be allowed to make the choice, and that makes you just as bad as the oppressors that you dislike.
If the consumer doesn't know about it, then they are unable to make a choice not to buy it.
Funny how we all know about it.
We both know this is a lie. Such schemes won't drive the cost of PCs down, but rather keep them the same, and increase profits - it is all about money, and "Damn the citizen!"...
If this doesn't argue for mandatory economics education, then nothing does.
Tell me this: the cost of producing 17" monitors has steadily declined over the years. So why aren't 17" monitors still > $1000? Why don't they just "keep them the same" and keep the extra profit?
The answer is because competition drives prices down, with a floor at the cost of production. If you have more revenues coming in, then that reduces the overall cost of production, and thus there is more room to reduce prices to undercut your competitors.
Do you honestly think people want their computers reporting details contained on their hard drives back to some "anonymous authority"?
First of all, it's not for you to decide for anyone but yourself whether it's wanted or not. Second, yes, there are people who would be willing to have details of their lives reported in exchange for money.
Example: Supermarket clubs. The supermarkets pay you for the ability to track your purchases. Don't want to participate? Fine, then don't. But I have absolutely no problem with being paid for this.
Now, if you were in the original meeting that talked about purchase tracking for marketing purposes, you would get on your soapbox and say "this is evil, this unethical, blah blah blah".
And what's so ironic is that you people like you who talk on and on about freedom are the first people who say that I should NOT have the freedom to decide whether I want to be tracked or not.
Well, if it's all the same to you, stay the hell out of my life and make decisions for your own life, not mine. That's true freedom.
The friends I do have are those who oppose corporate and government tyranny and control such as this. The friends I have know about freedom and rights.
Right -- as long as you are the one controlling what freedoms people have.
Your "friend" has created an idea that essentially allows remote monitoring and control of other citizens' property and habits. This is morally repugnant, and unethical, to say the least.
That's simply absurd. While I don't think it was a particularly good idea, there is nothing "unethical" about this at all. If the consumer doesn't want it, then the consumer won't buy it. This is not about some secret society spying on people.
The fact of the matter is that alternate revenue streams would serve to drive down the costs of PCs. If someone wanted the lower end PC that was subsidized by this, then it would be their choice.
In fact, who are you to decide what people should or shouldn't have? Again, this is not something I would want, but for you to arrogantly say "I don't want this, and in fact you are no longer my friend because you are daring to produce something that I don't want" is the height of arrogance.
Something tells me you don't have too many friends.
I wasn't sure I wanted to post this, because it could possibly give away my "secret identity", but...
A friend of mine is reasonably high up at Phoenix. He had been working on a "secret project" that he wouldn't tell me anything about, but he told me that it was going to be big. Of course, I badgered him for information, but he wouldn't tell.
Well, I had lunch with him one day not long after PhoenixNet was announced. I asked him, "so what's up with this PhoenixNet thing?" He replied, "what do you think of it?"
I then went on to totally trash the idea, saying why it wouldn't work, that people wouldn't stand for their BIOS downloading advertising, on and on. I railed on for quite a while. I might've even called it a "stupid idea".
Then I said, "hey wait a minute... is this the secret project you've been working on??"
He said, "Yes. It was my idea."
Oops. I kind of grinned sheepishly. Huge case of "open mouth, insert foot."
The actors all have names that were thought out way too much: "Trance Gemini", "Seamus Zelazy Harper", "Beka Valentine", "Tyr Anasazi". The names remind me of bad fan fiction.
At least the names don't have random apostrophes insert into the name. Memo to frustrated writers out there: If you have a name with an apostrophe, that's a good indicator that your novel sucks. I don't think it's a coincidence that Star Trek Voyager had a major character with an apostrophe'd name. You could've predicted the series was going to be lacking just based on that.
comedy is not technology, it does not become obsolete
I don't think that is true. Ever watched any Keystone Cops? Or Laurel and Hardy? Or -- dare I say it -- I love lucy? These were considered hysterical in their time, but by today's standards, they seem quaint and unsophisticated. A lot of humor is timeless (Shakespeare), but a lot of it really requires living in the times and seeing it when it was innovative.
I'm normally not given to eeeevil conspiracy theories, but the ABA is not a pro-consumer group. It's a pro-lawyer group. If a law is too one sided, either on the consumer side OR the corporate side, then that's a recipe for fewer lawsuits. What the ABA wants is for laws to be maximized to have the most ambiguity possible, so that lawyers have to go into court to get rulings.
Some of the time, this actually works to keep things balanced, but it often also is a bad thing. Like, the current Patient Bill of Rights going through Congress where the Trial Lawyers via the Democrats are trying to push up the "medical lottery" limits (aka HMO lawsuit limits). [Not that I don't think patients shouldn't be able to sue medical practitioners, by the way, but...]
I don't know if this is a troll or not, but I mostly agree with this, except for one thing: I never found it funny.
Now, I can appreciate most forms of humor. I love the humor of Blazing Saddles. I love the Simpsons. I liked A Fish Called Wanda. I love black humor. I even love the stupid humor of Airplane.
But Monty Python has always caused me to shake my head and say "what is funny about this"? The formula seems to be "substitute random element in scene with a random object, and call it funny". For me, there has to be some modicum of cleverness, and I've just never seen any sort of cleverness in Monty Python.
They found that the mass extinction occurred around 46,400 years ago, give or take 3,000 years.
Indeed. Not to mention that, if CNN quoted him accurately, the idiot quotes a figure with more significant figures than his margin for error ("Hey Roberts, are you sure it's not 46,500?")
I returned the digital cable box the next day. (This was a year or so ago.)
You know what scares me more than customer support being able to see what channel you're on? That there are people who will actually return a cable box because they're worried about customer support being able to see the channel.
"Our claim is that we can run 1:1 or [even] better than native speeds"
Bullshit.
Wake me when these guys go out of business. Been here, seen this. The x86 emulator guys made the same claims for their Mac-based emulators, almost word for word. (I won't even get into Transmeta's claims that have turned out to be similar bullshit).
This is just a special case of an optimizing compiler, which Java run-time optimizers also fall into.
These claims, as well as the claims for the "magic compiler" that can produce code better than humans, will never happen until we have real human-level AI that can "understand" the purpose of code. You can only get so far with narrow-vision algorithmic optimization, as proven by the failure of 40 years of research. (Failure, only as defined as producing code as good as a human can).
An intermediately strong field will partially separate them. Clear?
Well, that's the obvious answer, but it's not obvious that it will work. Remember that particles are moving around. Their position is not proportional to the field strength. The field strength probably only determines how fast they move. Also, all the particles will probably move in unison, not just some of them in proportion to the field strength.
Even if you tried to move them "half way" to try and get gray scales (and that actually showed gray scales), it's not clear that you could accurately position them. You would have to know the viscosity of the suspending fluid and run the electrical field for a certain amount of time. I'm not sure the process would be accurate enough to give you smooth color.
According to their technology page, there are both white and black particles, oppositely charged. Given that just an electric field is applied, how do you only move some of the particles?
Given that they have white particles, I wonder why they can't have particles of different colors, rather than using filters.
As to your other post, it's a good point that the particles will attract each other, so that's not an issue.
It looks like one color particles are negatively charged, and the other type is positively charged. Two problems that I see: 1) since both types are oppositely charged, they might not want to be mixed, and 2) they use an electrical field to move them around. How do get only part of the particles to move?
It sounds like a dot is either on or off. That means you can only have eight colors, unless they can somehow do shading of the pixels. It doesn't seem to imply that, based on how the article was written.
That would suck. They shouldn't even bother with color, unless they can either increase the dot density to simulate decent color, or fix this problem.
Funny story related to this... my father-in-law used MSN dial-up for $4.95/month. When cable came to town, he was like, "ehhh, I don't need extra speed. It's another $15/month! What do I need it for?" I talked him into it, and of course there's no going back. I thought it was funny that he didn't know how good he had it here.
I used to be totally pro-DSL for those reasons, but unfortunately my new house can only get 128kb DSL. So I went cable modem.
I really have to give credit where credit is due... Cox cable here in the Palos Verdes Peninsula in California rocks. Not only do I seem to be getting great consistent bandwidth, but they also assign you a static IP (!). No problems setting up my mail server with my domains. Apparently they are part of the new breed of cable design that can easily subdivide local loops if they start to get too saturated.
Oh yeah... $19.95/month. Can't beat this deal with a stick, considering I used to pay $100/month for static IP 384kb DSL at my old house.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy browsing does not own the content, neither do Microsoft.
Irrelevant. Fair use dictates that I can do anything I want with your content, for my personal use. If I want to rewrite your rant into a pro-Microsoft treatise, I have the perfect right, as long as I don't republish it.
--
Microsoft does not have the right to change the content of my page, neither do you!
This is wrong on so many levels.
First of all, Microsoft is not changing the content of the page, only "reading" the page and making recommendations on other pages that I might find interesting.
Second of all, I have the legal right to change the page any way I want. That's called "fair use". As long as I don't redistribute it, I can do anything I want.
Third of all, the nature of HTML and browsers is such that it's reformatted in a browser-dependent way. Reformatting text is perfectly natural and expected on the web.
--
What business is it of yours whether Microsoft gets to deploy text-based advertising across all of creation without paying for it?
Exactly. It's NONE of my business, and it's NONE of yours. It's the business of the user of the web browser.
If they expect to have links IN the content area of anyone's page,
There's where you go wrong. It stops being your page the minute it leaves your computer and enters my browser. At that point, I can view it any damn way I want to. Stay the hell out of my browser!
Why are you trying to give Microsoft an advertising handout?
First of all, I didn't say whether I would use the feature or not. My point is that it's none of your damn business how I view web pages on MY computer. If I choose to use Microsoft's feature, then I'll use it.
You're sounding alarmingly Socialist.
You have it exactly backwards. I'm on the side of freedom. The Socialist position would be to "protect" the consumers "for their own good" because they might be "fooled" by the evil Microsoft. I do NOT want a bunch of arrogant, elitist, big brothers deciding what I can and can't have in my browser.
Stay the hell out of my browser!
--
in the server side you have to put extra stuff to disable this piece of crap.
And I think Microsoft shouldn't even allow it to be disabled. Read my lips: It's none of your business if I decide to use this feature on your web site. Stay out of my browser! Hopefully, Microsoft will have an option to override the page's preference.
It is an stealth M$ tax taken in time of people deploying *any* web server solution.
So don't put in the tag. It's that simple. Nobody is forcing you to do it, and in fact, you are violating other's freedom by putting it in.
--
"Stupidest" is the most stupid thing I've heard in a while.
Note that fact that stupidest is a perfectly valid adjective, modifying the noun "thing".
Do not call out RM/101 on grammar issues. You'll just embarrass yourself.
--
correction: it was my filter. I was filtering .asp sites (not always a bad thing...).
I just have to say that that's the stupidest thing I've heard in a while. Congratulations.
--
I for one don't want Microsoft choosing where links on a Slashdot story go.
It's amazing to me how anti-Freedom many Slashdotters are, including apparently the Chief Editor of this site.
If you don't like it, TURN OFF THE FEATURE. But it's damn arrogant of you to decide for everyone else whether they can use the feature or not. It's up to me how I want to view a page. If I want to read your page with an encyclopedia next to me in order to look up things that I read in the article, it's my choice. This is no different. The only difference is that Microsoft is supplying the database, rather than the publisher of the encyclopedia.
In short, Taco, stay the hell off my computer and stop trying to decide how I use my browser.
--
Gah! I can't understand why you don't understand that being monitored isn't freedom!
No, what is freedom is choosing whether I want to be monitored or not. If you (or people like you) deny me the right to make that choice for myself, then you are denying me freedom.
What you fail to understand is that not everyone is as paranoid about being tracked as you are. I realize that you think "they should be", but you just might want to make room in your philsophy for cases where it's worth it for certain people.
I tell you in exchange for this, I will give you double your salary. You are saying you would take this deal, freely - yet I control the leash. Are you now more free?
Damn right I would take it -- in a microsecond. What do I care if my employer tracks me or not? Not to mention that he has the perfect right to track whatever I do if he's paying me for my time...
In any case, unless this employer is forcing me into slavery, yes, my freedom is perfectly intact -- because I choose whether to participate or not. And that's where you go wrong -- you are arguing that no one should be allowed to make the choice, and that makes you just as bad as the oppressors that you dislike.
--
If the consumer doesn't know about it, then they are unable to make a choice not to buy it.
Funny how we all know about it.
We both know this is a lie. Such schemes won't drive the cost of PCs down, but rather keep them the same, and increase profits - it is all about money, and "Damn the citizen!"...
If this doesn't argue for mandatory economics education, then nothing does.
Tell me this: the cost of producing 17" monitors has steadily declined over the years. So why aren't 17" monitors still > $1000? Why don't they just "keep them the same" and keep the extra profit?
The answer is because competition drives prices down, with a floor at the cost of production. If you have more revenues coming in, then that reduces the overall cost of production, and thus there is more room to reduce prices to undercut your competitors.
Do you honestly think people want their computers reporting details contained on their hard drives back to some "anonymous authority"?
First of all, it's not for you to decide for anyone but yourself whether it's wanted or not. Second, yes, there are people who would be willing to have details of their lives reported in exchange for money.
Example: Supermarket clubs. The supermarkets pay you for the ability to track your purchases. Don't want to participate? Fine, then don't. But I have absolutely no problem with being paid for this.
Now, if you were in the original meeting that talked about purchase tracking for marketing purposes, you would get on your soapbox and say "this is evil, this unethical, blah blah blah".
And what's so ironic is that you people like you who talk on and on about freedom are the first people who say that I should NOT have the freedom to decide whether I want to be tracked or not.
Well, if it's all the same to you, stay the hell out of my life and make decisions for your own life, not mine. That's true freedom.
The friends I do have are those who oppose corporate and government tyranny and control such as this. The friends I have know about freedom and rights.
Right -- as long as you are the one controlling what freedoms people have.
--
Your "friend" has created an idea that essentially allows remote monitoring and control of other citizens' property and habits. This is morally repugnant, and unethical, to say the least.
That's simply absurd. While I don't think it was a particularly good idea, there is nothing "unethical" about this at all. If the consumer doesn't want it, then the consumer won't buy it. This is not about some secret society spying on people.
The fact of the matter is that alternate revenue streams would serve to drive down the costs of PCs. If someone wanted the lower end PC that was subsidized by this, then it would be their choice.
In fact, who are you to decide what people should or shouldn't have? Again, this is not something I would want, but for you to arrogantly say "I don't want this, and in fact you are no longer my friend because you are daring to produce something that I don't want" is the height of arrogance.
Something tells me you don't have too many friends.
--
I wasn't sure I wanted to post this, because it could possibly give away my "secret identity", but...
A friend of mine is reasonably high up at Phoenix. He had been working on a "secret project" that he wouldn't tell me anything about, but he told me that it was going to be big. Of course, I badgered him for information, but he wouldn't tell.
Well, I had lunch with him one day not long after PhoenixNet was announced. I asked him, "so what's up with this PhoenixNet thing?" He replied, "what do you think of it?"
I then went on to totally trash the idea, saying why it wouldn't work, that people wouldn't stand for their BIOS downloading advertising, on and on. I railed on for quite a while. I might've even called it a "stupid idea".
Then I said, "hey wait a minute... is this the secret project you've been working on??"
He said, "Yes. It was my idea."
Oops. I kind of grinned sheepishly. Huge case of "open mouth, insert foot."
--
The actors all have names that were thought out way too much: "Trance Gemini", "Seamus Zelazy Harper", "Beka Valentine", "Tyr Anasazi". The names remind me of bad fan fiction.
At least the names don't have random apostrophes insert into the name. Memo to frustrated writers out there: If you have a name with an apostrophe, that's a good indicator that your novel sucks. I don't think it's a coincidence that Star Trek Voyager had a major character with an apostrophe'd name. You could've predicted the series was going to be lacking just based on that.
--
comedy is not technology, it does not become obsolete
I don't think that is true. Ever watched any Keystone Cops? Or Laurel and Hardy? Or -- dare I say it -- I love lucy? These were considered hysterical in their time, but by today's standards, they seem quaint and unsophisticated. A lot of humor is timeless (Shakespeare), but a lot of it really requires living in the times and seeing it when it was innovative.
--
I'm normally not given to eeeevil conspiracy theories, but the ABA is not a pro-consumer group. It's a pro-lawyer group. If a law is too one sided, either on the consumer side OR the corporate side, then that's a recipe for fewer lawsuits. What the ABA wants is for laws to be maximized to have the most ambiguity possible, so that lawyers have to go into court to get rulings.
Some of the time, this actually works to keep things balanced, but it often also is a bad thing. Like, the current Patient Bill of Rights going through Congress where the Trial Lawyers via the Democrats are trying to push up the "medical lottery" limits (aka HMO lawsuit limits). [Not that I don't think patients shouldn't be able to sue medical practitioners, by the way, but...]
--
I don't know if this is a troll or not, but I mostly agree with this, except for one thing: I never found it funny.
Now, I can appreciate most forms of humor. I love the humor of Blazing Saddles. I love the Simpsons. I liked A Fish Called Wanda. I love black humor. I even love the stupid humor of Airplane.
But Monty Python has always caused me to shake my head and say "what is funny about this"? The formula seems to be "substitute random element in scene with a random object, and call it funny". For me, there has to be some modicum of cleverness, and I've just never seen any sort of cleverness in Monty Python.
--
They found that the mass extinction occurred around 46,400 years ago, give or take 3,000 years.
Indeed. Not to mention that, if CNN quoted him accurately, the idiot quotes a figure with more significant figures than his margin for error ("Hey Roberts, are you sure it's not 46,500?")
--
I returned the digital cable box the next day. (This was a year or so ago.)
You know what scares me more than customer support being able to see what channel you're on? That there are people who will actually return a cable box because they're worried about customer support being able to see the channel.
You're not from Montana, are you?
--
"Our claim is that we can run 1:1 or [even] better than native speeds"
Bullshit.
Wake me when these guys go out of business. Been here, seen this. The x86 emulator guys made the same claims for their Mac-based emulators, almost word for word. (I won't even get into Transmeta's claims that have turned out to be similar bullshit).
This is just a special case of an optimizing compiler, which Java run-time optimizers also fall into.
These claims, as well as the claims for the "magic compiler" that can produce code better than humans, will never happen until we have real human-level AI that can "understand" the purpose of code. You can only get so far with narrow-vision algorithmic optimization, as proven by the failure of 40 years of research. (Failure, only as defined as producing code as good as a human can).
--
An intermediately strong field will partially separate them. Clear?
Well, that's the obvious answer, but it's not obvious that it will work. Remember that particles are moving around. Their position is not proportional to the field strength. The field strength probably only determines how fast they move. Also, all the particles will probably move in unison, not just some of them in proportion to the field strength.
Even if you tried to move them "half way" to try and get gray scales (and that actually showed gray scales), it's not clear that you could accurately position them. You would have to know the viscosity of the suspending fluid and run the electrical field for a certain amount of time. I'm not sure the process would be accurate enough to give you smooth color.
--
According to their technology page, there are both white and black particles, oppositely charged. Given that just an electric field is applied, how do you only move some of the particles?
Given that they have white particles, I wonder why they can't have particles of different colors, rather than using filters.
As to your other post, it's a good point that the particles will attract each other, so that's not an issue.
--
It looks like one color particles are negatively charged, and the other type is positively charged. Two problems that I see: 1) since both types are oppositely charged, they might not want to be mixed, and 2) they use an electrical field to move them around. How do get only part of the particles to move?
--
It sounds like a dot is either on or off. That means you can only have eight colors, unless they can somehow do shading of the pixels. It doesn't seem to imply that, based on how the article was written.
That would suck. They shouldn't even bother with color, unless they can either increase the dot density to simulate decent color, or fix this problem.
--
Funny story related to this... my father-in-law used MSN dial-up for $4.95/month. When cable came to town, he was like, "ehhh, I don't need extra speed. It's another $15/month! What do I need it for?" I talked him into it, and of course there's no going back. I thought it was funny that he didn't know how good he had it here.
--
I used to be totally pro-DSL for those reasons, but unfortunately my new house can only get 128kb DSL. So I went cable modem.
I really have to give credit where credit is due... Cox cable here in the Palos Verdes Peninsula in California rocks. Not only do I seem to be getting great consistent bandwidth, but they also assign you a static IP (!). No problems setting up my mail server with my domains. Apparently they are part of the new breed of cable design that can easily subdivide local loops if they start to get too saturated.
Oh yeah... $19.95/month. Can't beat this deal with a stick, considering I used to pay $100/month for static IP 384kb DSL at my old house.
--
Uh, it's the reporter, not the Pentagon that claimed that the Pentagon has "found a way" to erase the hard drives.
Is it just me, or does it seem to anyone else like Slashdot's editors 1) can't read, and/or 2) are easily amused?
--