Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment... laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind... as that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, institutions must advance also, to keep pace with the times.... We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain forever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Thomas Jefferson (on reform of the Virginia Constitution)
Also, another poster said that any computer attached to a public network is fair game. Ok, here's a stupid analogy: "If you park your car on a public street, you should expect it to be stolen". Do you keep your car always locked up in a garage? How about "if you drive your car down a public street, you should expect to get carjacked. If you don't want to get carjacked, don't drive it on a public street! Build your own private street to drive on!".
You're right, it is a stupid analogy.
If I put a server on the 'net, I don't expect it to be broken into. Nor do I expect my car in a public parking lot to be. However, I do expect that if I park my car in a public parking lot, someone may *look* at it. Oh no! You looked at my car! You *must* be trying to break in. What other reason could you possibly have for looking at my car?
Heck, you could even write down my license plate number. Suspicious? Yes. Illegal? Certainly not.
"Denying the Antecedent", is any argument of the form:
If A, then B.
Not A, therefore not B.
Your argument:
Premise 1: Corporations pay taxes.
Premise 2: Those who pay taxes have rights.
Conclusion: Corportation have rights.
Or: Corporations pay taxes (A), therefor they have rights (B).
Now, denying the antecedent, would be if I tried to argue:
Coporations do not pay taxes (not A), therefore they do not have rights. (not B)
This would be wrong. *However*, this it not what the other poster is arguing. The other poster is arguing that your premise 2 is false. Since you have not tried even once to support premise 2, you can hardly accuse someone of a fallacy for questioning it's veracity.
In fact, I would say that your characteristics of what is needed to have rights (paying taxes) is a fallacy of narrow definition. I would also say that paying taxes is not a requirement of having rights at all. If one of your premises is false, then your argument is automatically unsound.
Methinks you should take that classical logic course again, and this time try paying attention, mmkay?
What if everyone out there who thinks large corporations stealing others' domain names is crap, and who runs a nameserver, decides to tell AOL to piss off, and put in DNS pointers to aimster's site for www.aimster.com anyway? There's no law that says I *have* to listen to the root nameservers.
Then, anyone who wanted to see the uncorporatized Internet could just stick on of these namservers in their/etc/resolv.conf.
Couldn't we use OpenNIC to do something like this?
Yeah, I know, it's far to idealistic to think enough people would do this for it to actually work, but I find it a neat idea in theory anyway.:-)
I am officially starting a network consulting company. Anyone here who has a network, and does not pay my company to help you maintain it will be hearing from my lawyers next week.
I used to work tech support. ( I left to get a Solaris admin job, thank God) That post is something that needs to be required reading for every tech support caller.
You pretty much describe the exact argument a good friend of mine has used when explaining the problem with the 55 mph speed limit. (A friend with a degree in Transporation Engineering, BTW)
Speed differential is what is the true cause of traffic accidents. If we have 5 cars on a stretch of interstate, 3 going 70 mph, one going 80 mph, and the last going 50 mph, the driver going 50 is the one most statistically likely to cause an accident.
I remember my friend writing a paper on this for a class, and he researched the "statistically correct" way to set speed limits. It's based on the fact that a certain percentage of driver will always go much faster than the speed limit, another certain percentage will never drive faster than a certain speed, no matter what the speed limit is, etc. By looking at these numbers, you can minimize the differential between the high and low ends of the scale, and create the statistically safest speed limit.
Is explained pretty well here, and shows why this is not really a problem.
Don't get me wrong, I think Sorites Paradox is interesting, but since philosophy has pretty much given up on the concept of the ideal language doctrine, it doesn't make for a valid argument.
-Wintermute, of course, I still agree the DMCA is absurd.
1) I wonder how many people who are calling the use of GPL'ed code in a proprietary application "stealing" also get riled up when RIAA uses the same word to refer to Napster. (For the record, neither are "stealing", they would both be copyright infringement.)
2) Those who are bitter at the GPL, calling the license a virus. I wonder how many of them support proprietary software developers being able to create any restrictive license they want. (If MS can put all their inane restrictions in their EULA, then the FSF types can put whatever they want in theirs. It works both ways)
Stop the hypocracy. Either you agree with the concepts of intellectual property, copyrights, and licenses, or you don't. (In case anyone is curious, I find the concepts fundamentally flawed, but that is an argument for another day)
Let's say Earthlink would let you send through another ISP's mailserver. If the people running that ISP have a lick of sense, they aren't going to let Earthlink IPs send mail through their servers.
Any responsibly admin'ed ISP will only let people coming from their network send mail through their server. If more people were this responsible, we'd have a lot less spam.
Besides, why does it matter to you? Send the mail through Earthlink's SMTP server. It's still going to get to the same place, and you can still make the reply-to address whatever you want.
And the only way to do the latter is to cause them financial harm. Corporations must ultimately be responsible to their shareholders, and their shareholders demand profits.
So you need to get serious about boycotting, serious about spreading the boycott, and serious about letting the Corporations know that you're boycotting them, and what they need to do differently to win back your financial support.
If you don't like the restrictions placed on you by the content creators then DON'T UTILIZE THEIR SERVICES! Don't listen to the music, don't watch the movies, don't use the software. That is the only lawful, moral and ethical way to cause them financial harm.
Umm, what do you think a boycott is? He/she is advocating exactly what you told him/her to do. Sometimes I think a mandatory reading comprehension test should be required to post on/..
You are a parasite. We don't need parasites in our society, as they provide no value.
And you are an obediant little slave of the corporations and what they say is right. Refusing to question, or to even concider the idea that there might be a better way. We don't need people like you in our society, as they actually provide *negative* value.
Something I've had a lot of experience with. I've worked for two ISPs, and have dealt with 5 different billing packages. Interestingly enough, 4 of them were developed in-house.
The first ISP I worked for was a large, national ISP, who got their entire customer base from buying out various local ISPs across the country, then began buying time on UUNet dialups to provide "national" service. The lovely thing about this, is when I worked there, all these smaller ISPs each had their own billing package. (I beleive that since I left, they have integrated into one system)
I dealt with 3 packages while working there. Two were rather awful. One of these was simply a command typed at a shell prompt which dumped you into a very feature-poor program with a pretty poor interface for moving aroung. The second was accessed by telnetting (Yes, as insecure as that was. Not to mention the box we were telnetting to was across the country from us, and god knows how many people could have packet-sniffed it) to a particular server, which dropped you into a menu based system. (Select 1 for this, 2 for that, etc)
The good package I used while working there was entirely web based. Security was handled by SSL and htaccess, and you had to have an interal IP to hit the site as well. The system allowed you to run SQL queries on pretty much any field you could think of. Needed to look up the number of customers in city X with a phone number having prefix 555? No problem. (This was completely written in Perl, database was MySQL. All running on FreeBSD.) Best package I have ever used, but the company isn't going to be releasing it to the public any time soon.
Now, at my current company, I have used two. The first was in-house, accessed again by typing a command at the shell prompt. Decent interface, but still feature poor. A web interface was also part of it, for tracking customer history. No database, just flat files. Sloooow...
We have now moved to a commerical package called Emerald. This gives you the pretty Windows GUI, but requires you to run MS SQL 7 (Not 6, not 8, not Oracle. I'm not sure why it is so picky) as well as an NT radius server. (This company was 100% Solaris when I started there, with Windows on the desktops)
Now, the operations staff wasn't exactly happy about this decision, and we are still pretty paranoid about the NT boxes' security. (Which is why they are buried behind firewalls) The decision was made so the accounting department could have a pretty windows interface, and so we could ditch the in-house package the company had completely outgrew.
The software is very feature-rich, letting you do all kinds of neat tricks and reporting. Let's say someone forgets to pay their bill. You can have the system let them log on, but allow nothing to work but web traffic, and redirect them to a page telling them to call in and cough up the cash. The interface, however, is kludgy, slow, and quite the memory hog. In-house, a web-based (perl again) interface is being developed so we can ditch the crappy interface it comes with. Another note, the software is *very* expensive. (Some tricky things also had to be done with perl scripts to get around the fact that the software wants you to run a Windows mailserver. No way we were going to take on that security risk, as well as give up on the excellent mailserver that is Qmail.)
Before reading it, I believed that "light" drugs, like marijuana should be decriminalized, while "hard" drugs should remain illegal. The book makes an excellent argument as to why they should just *all* be legalized, and truly shows the absurdity of the anti-drug propaganda.
Oh, and a special note for our RIAA/MPAA friends. I read the book online, but liked it so much I *bought* a copy of it... Hmm, kinda like all those CDs I bought cause I first heard the groups on Napster...
Gates: "I don't like this new encrypted hard scheme. It's going to cost the OEMs too much money. I'll tell you what, all new Microsoft software will be specificaly designed *not* to work with these copy protected drives."
I have no sympathy for the author. His firm is hosting a site that is selling spamming tools.
The author is *not* hosting a site that sells spamming tools. The author (Jamie) happens to work with a site (Peacefire) hosted by a company (Media 3)that has another customer (Marketing Masters) which is selling spamming tools. So he gets his site blocked because of the actions of his provider's customer.
Or, if you're spending 5 digits each month, you won't notice another $20, so you buy a dial-in or shell account with any fricking ISP of your choice on Earth and access its servers via TCP/IP over your five-figure account.
Yeah, ok, here's a hypothetical situation for you. Let's say I am paying 5 figures for my DS-3, and in my building are several mailservers, for myself, my colo customers, my webhosting customers, etc. I find out my provider uses the RBL. (There are providers that will *not* tell you they use it. I personally know of one, the only reason why I know they use it is because a new employee at my company used to work there. I have friends who have had similar experiences.)
Now, I don't want to deal with the RBL. It causes potential customers not to be able to email me, or *my* customers. So you are seriously suggesting that this is no problem, I can just go get a $20 account and use some other ISP's POP3 server? Yeah, that one POP3 account will handle all the mail for the several mailservers in my building with no problems... Right...
Yeah, I've seen the Palm Beach ballot, and I could figure it out. But that's not the point. If anyone actually read the PDF file in the story they would have seen that the probability of there being this many Buchanan voters in Palm Beach is less than 1 in 3 quadrillion.
When this many people make a mistake, it is quite clearly the fault of the interface. One of the primary rules of UI design is that the interface should accommodate the user, rather than the user being forced to accommodate the interface. In this case, statistics quite clearly prove that for whatever reason, the "interface" for this ballot is flawed. Well, unless you beleive that there are a bunch of closet Buchananites in Palm Beach.
The first type does it for a year or two and moves on. The second type stays there forever (this is espcially true at helpdesks). If the first type doesn't leave after a year or two, then they get lots of crap dumped on them and eventually have a breakdown and get fired - then recover and move on.
I'm one of your "type 1's" who is still doing it. And I'm at the point right now where I am "getting lots of crap dumped" on me, and *this* close to having that breakdown...:-)
I have a preemptive strike though. I'm job hunting right now...
I've been a huge fan of this concept since I saw it brought up in a debate on C-SPAN. Not only would this allow people who disagree with the Republicrats to actually have representaion, it would encourage those who feel disenfrachised by the current system to participate.
A Republic should not be a winner-take-all, tyranny of the majority. If 5% of US citizens voted Libertarian, 5% Green, etc, (I personally think these numbers would be higher in a proportional system, since every vote now matters) they would actually have some people in congress that represent their beliefs! What a novel concept in this country...
Hell, when I first learned about the electoral college system as a child, I knew then it was a stupid system. The state I live in is a Republican stronghold, it's going to Bush whether or not I vote for Gore, Nader, Browne, or no one.
-Wintermute, who'd love to see a system where his vote meant something.
...with a CD-RW. After I upgraded from Win98 to Win2K, I went to hp's site for new drivers. Only to find the only way to get the CD-RW to work was to first run a firmware upgrade (that didn't even work in Win2K, I had to temporarily transfer the CD-RW to my roomate's Win98 box to run it) and then order a new software CD from HP for $9.95. Umm, I don't even *want* the software, just the damn driver! Bunch 'o thieves I say....
...makes calls to the win 3.1 GUI libraries. It won't run unless the box has win 3.1 on it. (Well, it may work with another older version of windows, I've never had one to try)
I've done this *alot*. Always annoyed me to have to install DOS, then Win 3.1, then Win95. Now the win98 upgrade will let you install if you just insert the win95 CD briefly as a license check.
This whole naked PC annoys me. I have *never* purchased a PC with a preinstalled OS. back when I only had on PC, I always ran it as a dual-boot Windows/Linux system anyway, why would I want Windows only preinstalled?
If some computer manufacturer tried to get me get preinstalled Windows because they're more qualifed to install it, I'd feel insulted.
-Wintermute, and before I get tarred with the piracy brush, I have *legal* copies of Windows 95, 98, NT Workstation, and 2K Professional right now. And *none* of them are on more than one computer.
That said, I've *never* lived in a place where I had a choice of more than one cable company.
Then move. Simply because there is a free market on housing that means there is a free market in cable. It's as simple as moving.
Umm, yeah. That's realistic. Move because one cable company has a government enforced monopoly. Umm, how about removing this government interference in the free market instead of making us move. You'd think someone so quick to jump on the liberal trashing bandwagon would be for removing government interference in the marketplace.
Ah, Liberal Self-Importance Syndrome. Do you really believe yourself to be so important that companies want to "screw you"?
Nope. I don't think companies want to screw me specifically. I think they want to screw everyone equally to get their stock price to go up a quarter point. Making money is their raison d'etre after all.
In any case, corporations do not "want" anything. They are not persons, and only persons can want stuff.
And who runs the corps? Oh yeah.. People.
Communists like Ralph Nader...
Umm, Ralph Nader brought accountability to the auto industry. He has indirectly saved thousands of lives. That's a man I can respect, whether you throw around ad hominems like "Communist" or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment... laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind... as that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, institutions must advance also, to keep pace with the times.... We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain forever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
Thomas Jefferson (on reform of the Virginia Constitution)
Also, another poster said that any computer attached to a public network is fair game. Ok, here's a stupid analogy: "If you park your car on a public street, you should expect it to be stolen". Do you keep your car always locked up in a garage? How about "if you drive your car down a public street, you should expect to get carjacked. If you don't want to get carjacked, don't drive it on a public street! Build your own private street to drive on!".
You're right, it is a stupid analogy.
If I put a server on the 'net, I don't expect it to be broken into. Nor do I expect my car in a public parking lot to be. However, I do expect that if I park my car in a public parking lot, someone may *look* at it. Oh no! You looked at my car! You *must* be trying to break in. What other reason could you possibly have for looking at my car?
Heck, you could even write down my license plate number. Suspicious? Yes. Illegal? Certainly not.
-Wintermute
"Denying the Antecedent", is any argument of the form:
If A, then B.
Not A, therefore not B.
Your argument:
Premise 1: Corporations pay taxes.
Premise 2: Those who pay taxes have rights.
Conclusion: Corportation have rights.
Or: Corporations pay taxes (A), therefor they have rights (B).
Now, denying the antecedent, would be if I tried to argue:
Coporations do not pay taxes (not A), therefore they do not have rights. (not B)
This would be wrong. *However*, this it not what the other poster is arguing. The other poster is arguing that your premise 2 is false. Since you have not tried even once to support premise 2, you can hardly accuse someone of a fallacy for questioning it's veracity.
In fact, I would say that your characteristics of what is needed to have rights (paying taxes) is a fallacy of narrow definition. I would also say that paying taxes is not a requirement of having rights at all. If one of your premises is false, then your argument is automatically unsound.
Methinks you should take that classical logic course again, and this time try paying attention, mmkay?
-Wintermute
Here's a "what if?" :
/etc/resolv.conf.
:-)
What if everyone out there who thinks large corporations stealing others' domain names is crap, and who runs a nameserver, decides to tell AOL to piss off, and put in DNS pointers to aimster's site for www.aimster.com anyway? There's no law that says I *have* to listen to the root nameservers.
Then, anyone who wanted to see the uncorporatized Internet could just stick on of these namservers in their
Couldn't we use OpenNIC to do something like this?
Yeah, I know, it's far to idealistic to think enough people would do this for it to actually work, but I find it a neat idea in theory anyway.
-Wintermute
Umm, ok.
I am officially starting a network consulting company. Anyone here who has a network, and does not pay my company to help you maintain it will be hearing from my lawyers next week.
Lunacy...
-Wintermute
I used to work tech support. ( I left to get a Solaris admin job, thank God) That post is something that needs to be required reading for every tech support caller.
-Wintermute
You pretty much describe the exact argument a good friend of mine has used when explaining the problem with the 55 mph speed limit. (A friend with a degree in Transporation Engineering, BTW)
Speed differential is what is the true cause of traffic accidents. If we have 5 cars on a stretch of interstate, 3 going 70 mph, one going 80 mph, and the last going 50 mph, the driver going 50 is the one most statistically likely to cause an accident.
I remember my friend writing a paper on this for a class, and he researched the "statistically correct" way to set speed limits. It's based on the fact that a certain percentage of driver will always go much faster than the speed limit, another certain percentage will never drive faster than a certain speed, no matter what the speed limit is, etc. By looking at these numbers, you can minimize the differential between the high and low ends of the scale, and create the statistically safest speed limit.
-Wintermute
Is explained pretty well here, and shows why this is not really a problem.
Don't get me wrong, I think Sorites Paradox is interesting, but since philosophy has pretty much given up on the concept of the ideal language doctrine, it doesn't make for a valid argument.
-Wintermute, of course, I still agree the DMCA is absurd.Microsoft is appealing the decision. The prosecution can choose not to contest the appeal, which I assume is what Bush will have them do.
This is of course completely against the interests of justice, but when has that ever stopped anyone?
-Wintermute
Well, it certainly sounds to me like you aren't being hypocritical at all. But, you have to admit, that there are many people around here that are.
-Wintermute
I love contradictions...
1) I wonder how many people who are calling the use of GPL'ed code in a proprietary application "stealing" also get riled up when RIAA uses the same word to refer to Napster. (For the record, neither are "stealing", they would both be copyright infringement.)
2) Those who are bitter at the GPL, calling the license a virus. I wonder how many of them support proprietary software developers being able to create any restrictive license they want. (If MS can put all their inane restrictions in their EULA, then the FSF types can put whatever they want in theirs. It works both ways)
Stop the hypocracy. Either you agree with the concepts of intellectual property, copyrights, and licenses, or you don't. (In case anyone is curious, I find the concepts fundamentally flawed, but that is an argument for another day)
-Wintermute
This doesn't even matter.
Let's say Earthlink would let you send through another ISP's mailserver. If the people running that ISP have a lick of sense, they aren't going to let Earthlink IPs send mail through their servers.
Any responsibly admin'ed ISP will only let people coming from their network send mail through their server. If more people were this responsible, we'd have a lot less spam.
Besides, why does it matter to you? Send the mail through Earthlink's SMTP server. It's still going to get to the same place, and you can still make the reply-to address whatever you want.
-Wintermute
And the only way to do the latter is to cause them financial harm. Corporations must ultimately be responsible to their shareholders, and their shareholders demand profits.
So you need to get serious about boycotting, serious about spreading the boycott, and serious about letting the Corporations know that you're boycotting them, and what they need to do differently to win back your financial support.
If you don't like the restrictions placed on you by the content creators then DON'T UTILIZE THEIR SERVICES! Don't listen to the music, don't watch the movies, don't use the software. That is the only lawful, moral and ethical way to cause them financial harm.
Umm, what do you think a boycott is? He/she is advocating exactly what you told him/her to do. Sometimes I think a mandatory reading comprehension test should be required to post on /..
You are a parasite. We don't need parasites in our society, as they provide no value.
And you are an obediant little slave of the corporations and what they say is right. Refusing to question, or to even concider the idea that there might be a better way. We don't need people like you in our society, as they actually provide *negative* value.
-WintermuteSomething I've had a lot of experience with. I've worked for two ISPs, and have dealt with 5 different billing packages. Interestingly enough, 4 of them were developed in-house.
The first ISP I worked for was a large, national ISP, who got their entire customer base from buying out various local ISPs across the country, then began buying time on UUNet dialups to provide "national" service. The lovely thing about this, is when I worked there, all these smaller ISPs each had their own billing package. (I beleive that since I left, they have integrated into one system)
I dealt with 3 packages while working there. Two were rather awful. One of these was simply a command typed at a shell prompt which dumped you into a very feature-poor program with a pretty poor interface for moving aroung. The second was accessed by telnetting (Yes, as insecure as that was. Not to mention the box we were telnetting to was across the country from us, and god knows how many people could have packet-sniffed it) to a particular server, which dropped you into a menu based system. (Select 1 for this, 2 for that, etc)
The good package I used while working there was entirely web based. Security was handled by SSL and htaccess, and you had to have an interal IP to hit the site as well. The system allowed you to run SQL queries on pretty much any field you could think of. Needed to look up the number of customers in city X with a phone number having prefix 555? No problem. (This was completely written in Perl, database was MySQL. All running on FreeBSD.) Best package I have ever used, but the company isn't going to be releasing it to the public any time soon.
Now, at my current company, I have used two. The first was in-house, accessed again by typing a command at the shell prompt. Decent interface, but still feature poor. A web interface was also part of it, for tracking customer history. No database, just flat files. Sloooow...
We have now moved to a commerical package called Emerald. This gives you the pretty Windows GUI, but requires you to run MS SQL 7 (Not 6, not 8, not Oracle. I'm not sure why it is so picky) as well as an NT radius server. (This company was 100% Solaris when I started there, with Windows on the desktops)
Now, the operations staff wasn't exactly happy about this decision, and we are still pretty paranoid about the NT boxes' security. (Which is why they are buried behind firewalls) The decision was made so the accounting department could have a pretty windows interface, and so we could ditch the in-house package the company had completely outgrew.
The software is very feature-rich, letting you do all kinds of neat tricks and reporting. Let's say someone forgets to pay their bill. You can have the system let them log on, but allow nothing to work but web traffic, and redirect them to a page telling them to call in and cough up the cash. The interface, however, is kludgy, slow, and quite the memory hog. In-house, a web-based (perl again) interface is being developed so we can ditch the crappy interface it comes with. Another note, the software is *very* expensive. (Some tricky things also had to be done with perl scripts to get around the fact that the software wants you to run a Windows mailserver. No way we were going to take on that security risk, as well as give up on the excellent mailserver that is Qmail.)
-Wintermute
Before reading it, I believed that "light" drugs, like marijuana should be decriminalized, while "hard" drugs should remain illegal. The book makes an excellent argument as to why they should just *all* be legalized, and truly shows the absurdity of the anti-drug propaganda.
Oh, and a special note for our RIAA/MPAA friends. I read the book online, but liked it so much I *bought* a copy of it... Hmm, kinda like all those CDs I bought cause I first heard the groups on Napster...
-Wintermute
Gates: "I don't like this new encrypted hard scheme. It's going to cost the OEMs too much money. I'll tell you what, all new Microsoft software will be specificaly designed *not* to work with these copy protected drives."
And that would be then end of that idea.....
-Wintermute
Ahh yes, another /. poster that doesn't read
I have no sympathy for the author. His firm is hosting a site that is selling spamming tools.
The author is *not* hosting a site that sells spamming tools. The author (Jamie) happens to work with a site (Peacefire) hosted by a company (Media 3)that has another customer (Marketing Masters) which is selling spamming tools. So he gets his site blocked because of the actions of his provider's customer.
Reading comprehension. A valuable skill.
-WintermuteOr, if you're spending 5 digits each month, you won't notice another $20, so you buy a dial-in or shell account with any fricking ISP of your choice on Earth and access its servers via TCP/IP over your five-figure account.
Yeah, ok, here's a hypothetical situation for you. Let's say I am paying 5 figures for my DS-3, and in my building are several mailservers, for myself, my colo customers, my webhosting customers, etc. I find out my provider uses the RBL. (There are providers that will *not* tell you they use it. I personally know of one, the only reason why I know they use it is because a new employee at my company used to work there. I have friends who have had similar experiences.)
Now, I don't want to deal with the RBL. It causes potential customers not to be able to email me, or *my* customers. So you are seriously suggesting that this is no problem, I can just go get a $20 account and use some other ISP's POP3 server? Yeah, that one POP3 account will handle all the mail for the several mailservers in my building with no problems... Right...
-Wintermute...Not the other way around.
Yeah, I've seen the Palm Beach ballot, and I could figure it out. But that's not the point. If anyone actually read the PDF file in the story they would have seen that the probability of there being this many Buchanan voters in Palm Beach is less than 1 in 3 quadrillion.
When this many people make a mistake, it is quite clearly the fault of the interface. One of the primary rules of UI design is that the interface should accommodate the user, rather than the user being forced to accommodate the interface. In this case, statistics quite clearly prove that for whatever reason, the "interface" for this ballot is flawed. Well, unless you beleive that there are a bunch of closet Buchananites in Palm Beach.
-WintermuteThe first type does it for a year or two and moves on. The second type stays there forever (this is espcially true at helpdesks). If the first type doesn't leave after a year or two, then they get lots of crap dumped on them and eventually have a breakdown and get fired - then recover and move on.
I'm one of your "type 1's" who is still doing it. And I'm at the point right now where I am "getting lots of crap dumped" on me, and *this* close to having that breakdown... :-)
I have a preemptive strike though. I'm job hunting right now...
-WintermuteI've been a huge fan of this concept since I saw it brought up in a debate on C-SPAN. Not only would this allow people who disagree with the Republicrats to actually have representaion, it would encourage those who feel disenfrachised by the current system to participate.
A Republic should not be a winner-take-all, tyranny of the majority. If 5% of US citizens voted Libertarian, 5% Green, etc, (I personally think these numbers would be higher in a proportional system, since every vote now matters) they would actually have some people in congress that represent their beliefs! What a novel concept in this country...
Hell, when I first learned about the electoral college system as a child, I knew then it was a stupid system. The state I live in is a Republican stronghold, it's going to Bush whether or not I vote for Gore, Nader, Browne, or no one.
-Wintermute, who'd love to see a system where his vote meant something.
Well, at least in Win2K. Not sure about ME/Whistler.
:-)
The beta Win2K driver for my SBLive was unsigned. Win2K gave me a dialog box suggesting that I don't install it but I did anyway. Worked fine.
Besides, I doubt Linux and/or BSD will be made "SDMI-Compliant" anytime soon...
-Wintermute
...with a CD-RW. After I upgraded from Win98 to Win2K, I went to hp's site for new drivers. Only to find the only way to get the CD-RW to work was to first run a firmware upgrade (that didn't even work in Win2K, I had to temporarily transfer the CD-RW to my roomate's Win98 box to run it) and then order a new software CD from HP for $9.95. Umm, I don't even *want* the software, just the damn driver! Bunch 'o thieves I say....
-Wintermute
...makes calls to the win 3.1 GUI libraries. It won't run unless the box has win 3.1 on it. (Well, it may work with another older version of windows, I've never had one to try)
I've done this *alot*. Always annoyed me to have to install DOS, then Win 3.1, then Win95. Now the win98 upgrade will let you install if you just insert the win95 CD briefly as a license check.
This whole naked PC annoys me. I have *never* purchased a PC with a preinstalled OS. back when I only had on PC, I always ran it as a dual-boot Windows/Linux system anyway, why would I want Windows only preinstalled?
If some computer manufacturer tried to get me get preinstalled Windows because they're more qualifed to install it, I'd feel insulted.
-Wintermute, and before I get tarred with the piracy brush, I have *legal* copies of Windows 95, 98, NT Workstation, and 2K Professional right now. And *none* of them are on more than one computer.
That said, I've *never* lived in a place where I had a choice of more than one cable company.
Then move. Simply because there is a free market on housing that means there is a free market in cable. It's as simple as moving.
Umm, yeah. That's realistic. Move because one cable company has a government enforced monopoly. Umm, how about removing this government interference in the free market instead of making us move. You'd think someone so quick to jump on the liberal trashing bandwagon would be for removing government interference in the marketplace.
Ah, Liberal Self-Importance Syndrome. Do you really believe yourself to be so important that companies want to "screw you"?
Nope. I don't think companies want to screw me specifically. I think they want to screw everyone equally to get their stock price to go up a quarter point. Making money is their raison d'etre after all.
In any case, corporations do not "want" anything. They are not persons, and only persons can want stuff.
And who runs the corps? Oh yeah.. People.
Communists like Ralph Nader...
Umm, Ralph Nader brought accountability to the auto industry. He has indirectly saved thousands of lives. That's a man I can respect, whether you throw around ad hominems like "Communist" or not.
-Wintermute