Not arguing with your conclusions, but just on a point of information: corn syrup replaced cane sugar in 1980-1. New Coke wasn't conceived until late 1984. (Source: Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country and Coca Cola, London: Orion 1993, pp. 331; 349.)
The dictionary.com page you've linked to actually gives four different meanings of "arbitrary," of which you've cited only the first. The second - "based on or subject to individual judgment or preference" - is presumably the sense originally intended.
All EU member states are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights), which prohibits the death penalty, and forbids acts which might expose individuals to it (such as extraditing them to countries that still practise it). As I understand it, the convention is enforced in the European Court of Human Rights, but many nations have also passed local laws formalising this commitment. I'm afraid I can't find a reference for France, but the situation in the UK is:
The United Kingdom is a signatory to the Sixth Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights which outlaws the application of the death penalty. Consistent with the convention, the Extradition Act 1989 provides that extradition may be refused if the fugitive stands accused or convicted of an offence for which he could be or has been sentenced to death. The United Kingdom/United States Extradition Treaty also provides that extradition may be refused unless the requesting party gives satisfactory assurances that the death penalty will not be carried out. In practice, US extradition requests involving capital crimes are very rare. Not all US states continue to apply the death penalty. Those which do stand ready in extradition cases to provide assurances that the death penalty will not be carried out.
Source: Written reply to Parliamentary Question asked of Lord Marlesford by Lord Rooker, 8th November 2001
Commodore's legendary bog-awful marketing. You can find the adverts on the web, they were bad. The failed to push the Amiga platform towards anything much other than gamers.
They made the opposite mistake with the A500 in the UK. They pushed it as a business machine for about two years, allowing the 520ST to consolidate its early foothold. If they'd properly set out to compete directly for the home gaming/productivity market, they could have killed the ST in two years and owned UK home computing for half a decade. But hey, they didn't, so who knows how that might have worked out.
This is also the case in the British Library. I assumed it was to do with copyright, but I asked, and apparently their major concern is people dragging scanners across the surfaces of their books. They're quite happy for you to photocopy as much as you like on their photocopiers, or indeed for you to sit there and transcribe them into a laptop - it's just they have a lot of irreplaceable books, and they're very worried about wear and tear. Which is a hell of a drag when all you want is to quickly grab a few pages, but fair enough really.
Three or four days to count paper ballots? Here in the UK, we count them all in a few hours.
That's a slight exaggeration. It doesn't take four days, but it takes more than a few hours. In 2001, the polls closed at 10pm, William Hague conceded at 3.40am, and some constituencies were still counting at 10am the next morning.
I agree though that the idea of computerised voting is just another ill-conceived "eye-catching initiative" from our beloved PM. I suppose we should just be grateful it probably won't do any great harm either, unlike his "initiatives" on education, transport, agriculture and health.
With reference to our letter dated [whatever], we must restate that, under United States trademark law, if a trademark is used by too many different sources, it becomes a "generic" term, and Wiley may lose its exclusive right to use it. Wiley has no wish to limit the usefulness or accessibility of your Internet site, but the company, having been granted use of FOR DUMMIES as a trademark, must now police its use or jeopardise the investment made in good faith in that trademark.
We should be pleased to see your Internet site succeed under a different title: but we hope you will understand that this is a matter on which we have no scope for compromise, as, again as stated in our previous letter, United States trademark law requires that Wiley take all reasonable steps to prevent others from using its marks.
IANAL, but that's my guess.
You can look at the situation two ways, and neither makes Wiley the bad guys here. Either:
1. The website uses "for Dummies" because the phrase was popularised by Wiley. If this is the case, Wiley is pretty much forced to act like this, for the reasons above. Don't blame them, blame the law that leaves them no discretion to permit certain uses.
Or:
2. The website would have been called "for Dummies" regardless of Wiley's existence. If this is the case, Wiley should never have been given the trademark in the first place, as it was obviously a generic phrase. Again, don't blame Wiley - blame the trademark office that made that bad call, on the basis of which Wiley has now made a considerable bona fide investment.
Either way, I don't think Wiley's acting at all unreasonably, given the constraints they're under.
"The over all technology of other mini-book PCs around is still far from our achievement today. Take advantage of the new breed PC of tomorrow and experience the next generation way of computing."
Dude. This is totally a press release. Couldn't somebody at least have stuck a snide comment at the end?? I come to Slashdot for... er... well, I forget, but anyway, adverts masquerading as news reports bomb.
Maybe they're willing to take a greater risk than many of us thought? Maybe their ITs have more insight into the future of the desktop than many of us thought? I can't find any other reason than those -- if anyone has any ideas, please say so.
Afraid I think the answer is simply that they can sell them cheaper without Windows. They know that 99% of the people who buy these computers will immediately take them home and install Windows on them; but Wal-Mart can hardly be held reponsible for that. After all, they're selling complete, working systems, and can hardly be blamed if people decide to run pirate software on them.
So I'm afraid I think Wal-Mart's support for Lindows is mostly just a way to cut costs by evading the MS tax. Even so, it still helps Linux gain mindshare and credibility.
And I've been in England where the money is in different colors. Except I still can't tell a purple-and-orange 5 from an orange-and-purple 10. Or was it the other way around? Or was it the 20?
In fact the £5 note is bluey-green, the £10 is orangey-bown, the £20 is dark indigo and the £50 is red. I take your point - you still have to get used to knowing which colour is which. But even if you don't know which colour means which value, you can still see easily at a glance how many different sorts of note you're holding, so if you have a wad of twenty bluey-green notes and two reddy-brown ones, you only have to look at two notes, rather than twenty-two, to know what you're carrying.
I'm surprised by the vehemence with which people - exclusively Americans, it seems - are lining up against this idea. Yes, numbers do the job fine, but there are obvious benefits to using colours as well, and I really can't see any harm in doing so.
A few people have said coloured notes wouldn't help colour-blind people; but they'd certainly be no harder for the colour-blind than the present ones. At any rate, colour-blind people don't just see in black and white; they can normally distinguish between various colours. It shouldn't be too hard to design coloured banknote designs that are easily distinguishable by the majority of colour-blind people too.
"He doesn't have to capitalize because he was quoting the first word."
Don't believe I've ever heard that rule before!? Anyway, that's by the way. My point is that using "Grafitti" as a verb seems to me entirely logical, clear and harmless. I certainly can't think of any argument against adopting it, nor indeed a better way to refer to writing using the Grafitti system. It should perhaps have a capital letter, mind, to distinguish it from simply writing things on walls.
Strait (str't), a., sb, and adv. [ME. streit, a. OF. estreit tight, close, narrow, also as sb.:--L. strictusSTRICT, pa. pple. of stringere; see STRAINv., STRINGENTa.] A. adj.I. Tight-fitting, narrow. 1. Of a garment, etc. : Tight-fitting Obs. exc. dial.2. Affording little room ; narrow. Of bounds, limits : narrow...
Oh sod it, I can't be bothered. What I'm trying to say is, it's in my dictionary.
If you don't want your car with a Blaupunkt preinstalled, don't buy a Mercedes or install your stereo yourself. The same if you want your PC preinstalled with netscape.
I don't think it is quite the same. I can easily buy a car with a Sony stereo and I can still drive on all the same roads I use right now. Where can I buy a PC that's preinstalled with Netscape and still runs all the software I use at the moment? That's the Monopoly Difference! (TM)
Once the Wine hackers have developed drop-in replacements for all of the Windows components, we will essentially have a Windows clone. Then we can start focussing on added functionality.
He he. Let's embrace and extend the Windows APIs...
Slashdot Mirror
I say "bequiet."
Not arguing with your conclusions, but just on a point of information: corn syrup replaced cane sugar in 1980-1. New Coke wasn't conceived until late 1984. (Source: Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country and Coca Cola, London: Orion 1993, pp. 331; 349.)
The dictionary.com page you've linked to actually gives four different meanings of "arbitrary," of which you've cited only the first. The second - "based on or subject to individual judgment or preference" - is presumably the sense originally intended.
Commodore's legendary bog-awful marketing. You can find the adverts on the web, they were bad. The failed to push the Amiga platform towards anything much other than gamers.
They made the opposite mistake with the A500 in the UK. They pushed it as a business machine for about two years, allowing the 520ST to consolidate its early foothold. If they'd properly set out to compete directly for the home gaming/productivity market, they could have killed the ST in two years and owned UK home computing for half a decade. But hey, they didn't, so who knows how that might have worked out.
Don't be silly. Of course the site's running on AmigaOS. BSD is dead!
VHS is analogue, though, so the loss of resolution merely softens the image a bit. I imagine pixelisation is rather more annoying.
This is also the case in the British Library. I assumed it was to do with copyright, but I asked, and apparently their major concern is people dragging scanners across the surfaces of their books. They're quite happy for you to photocopy as much as you like on their photocopiers, or indeed for you to sit there and transcribe them into a laptop - it's just they have a lot of irreplaceable books, and they're very worried about wear and tear. Which is a hell of a drag when all you want is to quickly grab a few pages, but fair enough really.
This he asks of people who read the comments on Slashdot.
Three or four days to count paper ballots? Here in the UK, we count them all in a few hours.
That's a slight exaggeration. It doesn't take four days, but it takes more than a few hours. In 2001, the polls closed at 10pm, William Hague conceded at 3.40am, and some constituencies were still counting at 10am the next morning.
I agree though that the idea of computerised voting is just another ill-conceived "eye-catching initiative" from our beloved PM. I suppose we should just be grateful it probably won't do any great harm either, unlike his "initiatives" on education, transport, agriculture and health.
Probably something along the lines of:
With reference to our letter dated [whatever], we must restate that, under United States trademark law, if a trademark is used by too many different sources, it becomes a "generic" term, and Wiley may lose its exclusive right to use it. Wiley has no wish to limit the usefulness or accessibility of your Internet site, but the company, having been granted use of FOR DUMMIES as a trademark, must now police its use or jeopardise the investment made in good faith in that trademark.
We should be pleased to see your Internet site succeed under a different title: but we hope you will understand that this is a matter on which we have no scope for compromise, as, again as stated in our previous letter, United States trademark law requires that Wiley take all reasonable steps to prevent others from using its marks.
IANAL, but that's my guess.
You can look at the situation two ways, and neither makes Wiley the bad guys here. Either:
1. The website uses "for Dummies" because the phrase was popularised by Wiley. If this is the case, Wiley is pretty much forced to act like this, for the reasons above. Don't blame them, blame the law that leaves them no discretion to permit certain uses.
Or:
2. The website would have been called "for Dummies" regardless of Wiley's existence. If this is the case, Wiley should never have been given the trademark in the first place, as it was obviously a generic phrase. Again, don't blame Wiley - blame the trademark office that made that bad call, on the basis of which Wiley has now made a considerable bona fide investment.
Either way, I don't think Wiley's acting at all unreasonably, given the constraints they're under.
I love the idea of setting aside 10% of the money for "expenses e.g. telephone costs." That's $3,000,000! They must be planning some very long calls!
Oops - misread that as "at least four senoritas." Which is, let's face it, not a bad alternative.
If you think you can do better, create your own superpower.
We're on the case.
"The over all technology of other mini-book PCs around is still far from our achievement today. Take advantage of the new breed PC of tomorrow and experience the next generation way of computing."
Dude. This is totally a press release. Couldn't somebody at least have stuck a snide comment at the end?? I come to Slashdot for... er... well, I forget, but anyway, adverts masquerading as news reports bomb.
I think secretly Perens wants to be the hero of the anti-DMCA movement.
If this is how he goes about his secret plans, God help us if he ever decides to do anything overt!
Maybe they're willing to take a greater risk than many of us thought? Maybe their ITs have more insight into the future of the desktop than many of us thought? I can't find any other reason than those -- if anyone has any ideas, please say so.
Afraid I think the answer is simply that they can sell them cheaper without Windows. They know that 99% of the people who buy these computers will immediately take them home and install Windows on them; but Wal-Mart can hardly be held reponsible for that. After all, they're selling complete, working systems, and can hardly be blamed if people decide to run pirate software on them.
So I'm afraid I think Wal-Mart's support for Lindows is mostly just a way to cut costs by evading the MS tax. Even so, it still helps Linux gain mindshare and credibility.
And I've been in England where the money is in different colors. Except I still can't tell a purple-and-orange 5 from an orange-and-purple 10. Or was it the other way around? Or was it the 20?
In fact the £5 note is bluey-green, the £10 is orangey-bown, the £20 is dark indigo and the £50 is red. I take your point - you still have to get used to knowing which colour is which. But even if you don't know which colour means which value, you can still see easily at a glance how many different sorts of note you're holding, so if you have a wad of twenty bluey-green notes and two reddy-brown ones, you only have to look at two notes, rather than twenty-two, to know what you're carrying.
I'm surprised by the vehemence with which people - exclusively Americans, it seems - are lining up against this idea. Yes, numbers do the job fine, but there are obvious benefits to using colours as well, and I really can't see any harm in
doing so.
A few people have said coloured notes wouldn't help colour-blind people; but they'd certainly be no harder for the colour-blind than the present ones. At any rate, colour-blind people don't just see in black and white; they can normally distinguish between various colours. It shouldn't be too hard to design coloured banknote designs that are easily distinguishable by the majority of colour-blind people too.
What I'd really like is Bluetooth banknotes, so I could see how much money I had without even having to put my hands in my pockets.
And, yes, I'm a 'merkin.
You're one of these!?
"He doesn't have to capitalize because he was quoting the first word."
Don't believe I've ever heard that rule before!? Anyway, that's by the way. My point is that using "Grafitti" as a verb seems to me entirely logical, clear and harmless. I certainly can't think of any argument against adopting it, nor indeed a better way to refer to writing using the Grafitti system. It should perhaps have a capital letter, mind, to distinguish it from simply writing things on walls.
Strait (str't), a., sb, and adv. [ME. streit, a. OF. estreit tight, close, narrow, also as sb.:--L. strictus STRICT, pa. pple. of stringere; see STRAIN v., STRINGENT a.] A. adj. I. Tight-fitting, narrow. 1. Of a garment, etc. : Tight-fitting Obs. exc. dial. 2. Affording little room ; narrow. Of bounds, limits : narrow ...
Oh sod it, I can't be bothered. What I'm trying to say is, it's in my dictionary.
If you don't want your car with a Blaupunkt preinstalled, don't buy a Mercedes or install your stereo yourself. The same if you want your PC preinstalled with netscape.
I don't think it is quite the same. I can easily buy a car with a Sony stereo and I can still drive on all the same roads I use right now. Where can I buy a PC that's preinstalled with Netscape and still runs all the software I use at the moment? That's the Monopoly Difference! (TM)
I don't think OS X is free as in beer. I think it costs $129, though it's bundled with every new Mac.
Once the Wine hackers have developed drop-in replacements for all of the Windows components, we will essentially have a Windows clone. Then we can start focussing on added functionality.
He he. Let's embrace and extend the Windows APIs...