I expect a good lawyer won't so much have memorised all of the case law as much as generated a hash table, something like: "Party under physcial or emotional distress", "Where cases must be filed", "Party is a minor", "Legal rep has no case history", "who's who of American Bar Association", etc. They'd have a series of "keywords" for case law like I have for my photo collection ("lizards", "mountains", "water", "forest", "single tree", "cloudscape", "sunset", "sunrise", "beach").
Thus in one fell swoop, the lawyer would have been able to bring up dozens of cases of interest where certain key misfeatures of the plaintiff's claims could be blow apart.
It's my impression that "insulting" the antagonist law firm and calling into question the competency of the lawyer, their supervisor and indeed their firm is the legal equivalent of sabre-rattling and leering. It is an attempt to encourage capitualation by indicating that you are bigger, tougher and are capable of polysyllabillic utterances. Fear the polysyllabilic utterances.
Just like everywhere else in the realm of human interaction, disagreements are settled first by pissing contests, then (if noone concedes) coming to blows.
I'm amused that the defendant's lawyer gave the RIAA so many reason to call off the litigation. First, there is no evidence, second they're suing somone in severe emotional distress (the "thin skull plaintiff"), third they're filing in the wrong court, fourth they have not properly followed up their attempts to contact the defendant, and fifth there's the offer for the defendant to withdraw from a pending class-action suit against the plaintiff. How sweet and caring.
This was some very entertaining reading. Thankyou.
It's not about fine-tuning the hardware specifications on a $100k tender. It's about breaking up your windfall purchases into smaller units, none of which are large enough to go to tender. One small purchase for scanners. One small purchase for 16ppm B&W laser printers. One small purchase for 12ppm color printers. One small purchase for extra consumables. One small purchase for the accessories for those scanners... and so the story continues.
It's easier to spend $10k 10 times than to spend $100k once.
And then when the discount "Office Ultimate" software decides to lock you out of your Office documents, you have to pay the full price plus the unlocking fee.
Read the EULA. Understand about DRM, and Microsoft's plans for the future. ORCON is fine and dandy until you realise that the provider of the control mechanisms is the real owner of the document.
This FUD brought to you by the number 51 and a Tin Foil Hat.
Shitty resolution for its size, even though it's using the highest resolution LCD available on the market at the moment? Prone to accidental button presses despite the proximity sensor technology and other measures taken in the UI design? Lacks any sort of keyboard even though it turns the whole screen into a keyboard when you need it?
Yes, it's just another idiot tax, but you've apparently already paid your idiot tax - you have a mobile phone, don't you?
The idea of rote learning is to make you do the multiplication/division so many times that eventually you don't have to think "gee, 15% of X is 10% of X plus 5% of X, which equals Y", but you end up "wired" to recall that "15% of X is Y". The constant rehearsal is aimed at getting the numbers stuck in your head so you don't have to waste time thinking about problem solving strategies and instead just recall the correct answer.
Anyone who delves into breaking down simple problems instead of recalling from rote learning is just being lazy.
What is the sample population for the study? How many people were surveyed? Was it a self-selecting phone survey ("Hi, we'd like to ask you some questions about your religion...")? What questions were asked?
Is a survey of 1000 Christians (especially from fanatical sects) in the USA really going to be representative of the genetic makeup of humanity as a whole?
Is it possible that being exposed to religion during the first 5 years of your life -- and constantly being told, "God made it that way" or "God loves you even if you don't believe in him" -- would influence your belief system to the extent that you'd believe in a "magic box" that would destroy the property of non-believers?
Speculate that deity dependence is ingrained into our genetic makeup all you like, but until you can present a survey from a meaningful sample population it's nothing more than an interesting topic for discussion around the water cooler (or in the modern office, the automatic espresso machine).
TFA tells you that there is no "bathtub curve" and no "failure spike". The drives just fail more frequently as they get older - it's an exponentially rising curve.
The executives who control the decisions are addicted to their Exchange-powered Blackberries (even if it does mean that all their corporate messaging goes through a company in Canada). At two companies that I've worked for, we used to be Linux/Mac based, but then one exec got a Blackberry. Within weeks we'd switched over to Windows XP/Exchange.
Until Apple offers a Mail/Calendaring system that's as functional as Exchange, I don't see Apple being adopted by corporations any time soon. Though perhaps the iPhone offers just enough functionality in a sexy enough package that the executives will be tripping over themselves to get the latest expensive status symbol.
We just have to realise that some nasty stuff will slip through, and those penalties will have to be exercised.
In the meantime though we have the politicians who realise that every opportunity to puff their chests and make meaningless noise boosts their chances of reelection. If only it wasn't for the politicians...
maybe someday Apple will get back to actually creating something 'new'
Maybe Red Hat could do something 'new' too, instead of continually releasing a warmed-over corpse of an operating system that is almost 40 years old?
Maybe Slashdot could do something 'new' instead of just doing the same thing day in day out. This reporting of stories gag is getting a little old after a couple of hundred years. Everyone's done it to death already.
I guess there's no room in your world for refining an existing idea. or even combining a few good ideas and implementations into one package. As for the article you reference:
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, he said that Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and ZTE and others will be coming out with devices that have similar functionality to the iPhone. Winn said that although the iPhone had a touchscreen, he did not believe it made the device revolutionary.
That's like saying, "I think that Mac OS X is doomed, because Microsoft will be coming out with an operating system that has a windowed interface which users interact with using a mouse. Just because Mac OS X has a clean, elegant interface doesn't make it revolutionary."
I'll have one serve of totally missing the point, to go!
Ken's product: yet another games console that hosts a range of titles such as driving games, golf games, shoot'em-up games... you know, same thing just more pixels.
Steve's product: a well-presented mobile phone/wireless communicator that actually makes it easy to place phone calls and use the features that the phone network provides (eg: conference calls, no more accidentally hanging up on your customer when you want to talk to the product manager).
Yes, the iPhone is (going to be) that good.
Mind you, I'm in the "I'll wait for $400, and no reaming thanks" crowd. I will be holding out on buying a new phone or PDA until the iPhone (or similar device) is available in Australia.
Forgive me for trotting out Apple's own tired line on this subject: Licencing DRM means there will be more chances for the details of the DRM to be leaked, and thus the system will be compromised. The best way of handling DRM is to not use it at all. This will ensure 100% interoperability and allow for true competition in the marketplace.
Microsoft "licenced" their DRM system to their friends and colleagues in a system called "Plays For Sure". You might have heard of that mess when reading up about the abominable Zune media player.
DRM isn't just bad for consumers, it's bad for hardware manufacturers, content providers and anyone attempting to run a media store.
Apple does give you choice: you can choose to (a) buy the song from the iTunes Music Store and only play it on iTunes or an iPod, or (b) buy the song from a bricks-and-mortar store (ie: as a CD) and play it where you want. If the device that Apple sells you doesn't do what you'd like, complain to Apple or buy another device (or hack your iPod to give you the features you want).
Modern scientific research motivated as much by pure science as it is by profit. If you spend millions of dollars researching the cure for cancer, you can bet your sponsors want to see some return on investment. If someone else has already patented the particular receptors that you wish to use, you're going to spend so much in licencing that patent, there'll be nothing left to pay dividends.
Which of course leads to the issue of patenting proteins and genes, but this is not the forum for that discussion.
Neither of the options that you describe would have addressed the "Hot Coffee" mini-game in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It's content that a play-reviewer wouldn't have seen without knowledge of how to get to the content.
The rating of computer games for content maturity must rely on the honesty of the publishers (which can be encouraged by imposing heavy fines for breaches, but you're still relying on honesty).
The only way to be sure that your children don't see computer generated porn is to ensure your children don't see a computer.
I'm certainly not experiencing Microsoft Windows Vista myself. This is why I'm confused by the broad spectrum of statements.
I'm dead certain that the range of opinions is due to some people being aggravated by every single UAC popup they see, while others have long since dismissed UAC as a trivial nuisance which no longer even registers on their consciousness (even while they are just blindly clicking the "Allow" button when it asks about running Visual Studio, changing the desktop picture, installing a virus, recompiling a project and running it under the debugger for testing).
That is, some people are the types who complain when even one of the beans ground to make their coffee was slightly scorched, while other people are the ones who don't really care whether they use a flat or heaped teaspoon of International Roast to make their cuppa. In the meantime, I'm sitting here sipping my cup of Indian Chai wondering what all the fuss is about.
Energy consumption is not inextricably associated with increased life expectancy: people were living to 100 long before they were using electric toothbrushes. A 100-inch plasma screen TV does nothing to enhance your life expectancy.
The trick is to find a source of energy which doesn't produce heat or chemical pollution when generated or used. Otherwise the energy consumption of the world will come to a horrid, screeching halt as all the industrialised nations turn into deserts and we enter a new ice age.
One poster has already stated that he got requests for authorisation for simply dragging icons to the Start menu. This guy's saying that in day to day operations, he only gets the UAC prompt when he launches Visual Studio. Who is right? Perhaps the first guy is complaining about the startup cost of getting his environment set up just the way he wants it, while the second guy is conveniently forgetting that headache and stating that he only has to interact with UAC on a daily basis to launch his IDE?
On a Mac, you don't have to type in a password to drag stuff to the Dock. On a Mac, you don't have to do anything to launch XTools besides double-click the icon. Under Linux, you don't have to provide any special authorisation for gcc to compile some code that you have just edited using Vim (which also didn't require special authorisation to edit the source file). Could you imagine how much of a pain it would be if you had to type in a password for sudo every time you compiled a program? This isn't about installing the program and running it as root, this is UAC asking for permission to run the development tools. Even worse, if the OP is right, installing a program using MSI is the one time UAC doesn't bother you for permission -- this can't be right?
You are about to run 'strace my_buggy_program', allow [yN]?
I think that would be annoying.
You are about to submit an article to Slashdot, allow [yN]?
The TFA uses the classic technique of misdirection - changing the topic of the argument and using the differences between the redefined topic and the original topic to attack the original argument.
DRM means Digital Rights Management, and the term applies specifically to software intended to restrict the use of a particular document (be it a sound file, movie, or PDF). What TFA is talking about is copyright notification, which is already supported through ID3 tags. The author of TFA needs to read up on definitions. Digital Rights Management (a proper noun, with capital letters) refers to specific types of technology.
If iTunes is deleting songs off your iPod, it's because you moved the song out of the iTunes Music Library folder, isn't it? Which means that iTunes is doing exactly what you told it to do?
Slashdot Mirror
I expect a good lawyer won't so much have memorised all of the case law as much as generated a hash table, something like: "Party under physcial or emotional distress", "Where cases must be filed", "Party is a minor", "Legal rep has no case history", "who's who of American Bar Association", etc. They'd have a series of "keywords" for case law like I have for my photo collection ("lizards", "mountains", "water", "forest", "single tree", "cloudscape", "sunset", "sunrise", "beach").
Thus in one fell swoop, the lawyer would have been able to bring up dozens of cases of interest where certain key misfeatures of the plaintiff's claims could be blow apart.
It's my impression that "insulting" the antagonist law firm and calling into question the competency of the lawyer, their supervisor and indeed their firm is the legal equivalent of sabre-rattling and leering. It is an attempt to encourage capitualation by indicating that you are bigger, tougher and are capable of polysyllabillic utterances. Fear the polysyllabilic utterances.
Just like everywhere else in the realm of human interaction, disagreements are settled first by pissing contests, then (if noone concedes) coming to blows.
I'm amused that the defendant's lawyer gave the RIAA so many reason to call off the litigation. First, there is no evidence, second they're suing somone in severe emotional distress (the "thin skull plaintiff"), third they're filing in the wrong court, fourth they have not properly followed up their attempts to contact the defendant, and fifth there's the offer for the defendant to withdraw from a pending class-action suit against the plaintiff. How sweet and caring.
This was some very entertaining reading. Thankyou.
You missed the essential lesson.
It's not about fine-tuning the hardware specifications on a $100k tender. It's about breaking up your windfall purchases into smaller units, none of which are large enough to go to tender. One small purchase for scanners. One small purchase for 16ppm B&W laser printers. One small purchase for 12ppm color printers. One small purchase for extra consumables. One small purchase for the accessories for those scanners... and so the story continues.
It's easier to spend $10k 10 times than to spend $100k once.
No doubt Daffy Duck and friends will be able to show us how it's done.
And then when the discount "Office Ultimate" software decides to lock you out of your Office documents, you have to pay the full price plus the unlocking fee.
Read the EULA. Understand about DRM, and Microsoft's plans for the future. ORCON is fine and dandy until you realise that the provider of the control mechanisms is the real owner of the document.
This FUD brought to you by the number 51 and a Tin Foil Hat.
For two-finger scrolling on older Apple laptops, you might want to check out iScroll2: http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/
Shitty resolution for its size, even though it's using the highest resolution LCD available on the market at the moment? Prone to accidental button presses despite the proximity sensor technology and other measures taken in the UI design? Lacks any sort of keyboard even though it turns the whole screen into a keyboard when you need it?
Yes, it's just another idiot tax, but you've apparently already paid your idiot tax - you have a mobile phone, don't you?
The idea of rote learning is to make you do the multiplication/division so many times that eventually you don't have to think "gee, 15% of X is 10% of X plus 5% of X, which equals Y", but you end up "wired" to recall that "15% of X is Y". The constant rehearsal is aimed at getting the numbers stuck in your head so you don't have to waste time thinking about problem solving strategies and instead just recall the correct answer.
Anyone who delves into breaking down simple problems instead of recalling from rote learning is just being lazy.
What is the sample population for the study? How many people were surveyed? Was it a self-selecting phone survey ("Hi, we'd like to ask you some questions about your religion...")? What questions were asked?
Is a survey of 1000 Christians (especially from fanatical sects) in the USA really going to be representative of the genetic makeup of humanity as a whole?
Is it possible that being exposed to religion during the first 5 years of your life -- and constantly being told, "God made it that way" or "God loves you even if you don't believe in him" -- would influence your belief system to the extent that you'd believe in a "magic box" that would destroy the property of non-believers?
Speculate that deity dependence is ingrained into our genetic makeup all you like, but until you can present a survey from a meaningful sample population it's nothing more than an interesting topic for discussion around the water cooler (or in the modern office, the automatic espresso machine).
TFA tells you that there is no "bathtub curve" and no "failure spike". The drives just fail more frequently as they get older - it's an exponentially rising curve.
The executives who control the decisions are addicted to their Exchange-powered Blackberries (even if it does mean that all their corporate messaging goes through a company in Canada). At two companies that I've worked for, we used to be Linux/Mac based, but then one exec got a Blackberry. Within weeks we'd switched over to Windows XP/Exchange.
Until Apple offers a Mail/Calendaring system that's as functional as Exchange, I don't see Apple being adopted by corporations any time soon. Though perhaps the iPhone offers just enough functionality in a sexy enough package that the executives will be tripping over themselves to get the latest expensive status symbol.
So... I see two ways to combat an F-22 in the modern theater.
The first: run away and hope you cross a magic geographical boundary which crashes the software.
The second: use a directed energy weapon such as a HERF gun to fry the computer running the software.
[NEIGHBOUR] "You'll be hearing from my lawyer." *slam*
[time passes]
[COP] "You are under arrest for unlawfully accessing a computer network" *click*
I agree.
...
We just have to realise that some nasty stuff will slip through, and those penalties will have to be exercised.
In the meantime though we have the politicians who realise that every opportunity to puff their chests and make meaningless noise boosts their chances of reelection. If only it wasn't for the politicians
Me too!
Ken's product: yet another games console that hosts a range of titles such as driving games, golf games, shoot'em-up games... you know, same thing just more pixels.
Steve's product: a well-presented mobile phone/wireless communicator that actually makes it easy to place phone calls and use the features that the phone network provides (eg: conference calls, no more accidentally hanging up on your customer when you want to talk to the product manager).
Yes, the iPhone is (going to be) that good.
Mind you, I'm in the "I'll wait for $400, and no reaming thanks" crowd. I will be holding out on buying a new phone or PDA until the iPhone (or similar device) is available in Australia.
Forgive me for trotting out Apple's own tired line on this subject: Licencing DRM means there will be more chances for the details of the DRM to be leaked, and thus the system will be compromised. The best way of handling DRM is to not use it at all. This will ensure 100% interoperability and allow for true competition in the marketplace.
Microsoft "licenced" their DRM system to their friends and colleagues in a system called "Plays For Sure". You might have heard of that mess when reading up about the abominable Zune media player.
DRM isn't just bad for consumers, it's bad for hardware manufacturers, content providers and anyone attempting to run a media store.
Apple does give you choice: you can choose to (a) buy the song from the iTunes Music Store and only play it on iTunes or an iPod, or (b) buy the song from a bricks-and-mortar store (ie: as a CD) and play it where you want. If the device that Apple sells you doesn't do what you'd like, complain to Apple or buy another device (or hack your iPod to give you the features you want).
Modern scientific research motivated as much by pure science as it is by profit. If you spend millions of dollars researching the cure for cancer, you can bet your sponsors want to see some return on investment. If someone else has already patented the particular receptors that you wish to use, you're going to spend so much in licencing that patent, there'll be nothing left to pay dividends.
Which of course leads to the issue of patenting proteins and genes, but this is not the forum for that discussion.
Neither of the options that you describe would have addressed the "Hot Coffee" mini-game in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It's content that a play-reviewer wouldn't have seen without knowledge of how to get to the content.
The rating of computer games for content maturity must rely on the honesty of the publishers (which can be encouraged by imposing heavy fines for breaches, but you're still relying on honesty).
The only way to be sure that your children don't see computer generated porn is to ensure your children don't see a computer.
I'm certainly not experiencing Microsoft Windows Vista myself. This is why I'm confused by the broad spectrum of statements.
I'm dead certain that the range of opinions is due to some people being aggravated by every single UAC popup they see, while others have long since dismissed UAC as a trivial nuisance which no longer even registers on their consciousness (even while they are just blindly clicking the "Allow" button when it asks about running Visual Studio, changing the desktop picture, installing a virus, recompiling a project and running it under the debugger for testing).
That is, some people are the types who complain when even one of the beans ground to make their coffee was slightly scorched, while other people are the ones who don't really care whether they use a flat or heaped teaspoon of International Roast to make their cuppa. In the meantime, I'm sitting here sipping my cup of Indian Chai wondering what all the fuss is about.
Energy consumption is not inextricably associated with increased life expectancy: people were living to 100 long before they were using electric toothbrushes. A 100-inch plasma screen TV does nothing to enhance your life expectancy.
The trick is to find a source of energy which doesn't produce heat or chemical pollution when generated or used. Otherwise the energy consumption of the world will come to a horrid, screeching halt as all the industrialised nations turn into deserts and we enter a new ice age.
One poster has already stated that he got requests for authorisation for simply dragging icons to the Start menu. This guy's saying that in day to day operations, he only gets the UAC prompt when he launches Visual Studio. Who is right? Perhaps the first guy is complaining about the startup cost of getting his environment set up just the way he wants it, while the second guy is conveniently forgetting that headache and stating that he only has to interact with UAC on a daily basis to launch his IDE?
On a Mac, you don't have to type in a password to drag stuff to the Dock. On a Mac, you don't have to do anything to launch XTools besides double-click the icon. Under Linux, you don't have to provide any special authorisation for gcc to compile some code that you have just edited using Vim (which also didn't require special authorisation to edit the source file). Could you imagine how much of a pain it would be if you had to type in a password for sudo every time you compiled a program? This isn't about installing the program and running it as root, this is UAC asking for permission to run the development tools. Even worse, if the OP is right, installing a program using MSI is the one time UAC doesn't bother you for permission -- this can't be right?
You are about to run 'strace my_buggy_program', allow [yN]?
I think that would be annoying.
You are about to submit an article to Slashdot, allow [yN]?
Bah!
The TFA uses the classic technique of misdirection - changing the topic of the argument and using the differences between the redefined topic and the original topic to attack the original argument.
DRM means Digital Rights Management, and the term applies specifically to software intended to restrict the use of a particular document (be it a sound file, movie, or PDF). What TFA is talking about is copyright notification, which is already supported through ID3 tags. The author of TFA needs to read up on definitions. Digital Rights Management (a proper noun, with capital letters) refers to specific types of technology.
That, or we need to wean ourselves off the high-energy-consumption habit.
If iTunes is deleting songs off your iPod, it's because you moved the song out of the iTunes Music Library folder, isn't it? Which means that iTunes is doing exactly what you told it to do?