Wait, what? What's wrong with "top-posting?" (By which I assume you mean writing one's reply to an email at the top, and including the quote of the email being replied to below it.) What kind of nutcase wants to scroll past the old email (that they likely wrote themselves) to read a reply? The quoted email is there for reference in case it is needed. It's not the most important thing, which is what should be at the top.
In the time it takes to find one single top-posted response in context, one can just press the "end" key once, or the "page down" key a few times, and there's the reply at the bottom. And if you have trouble with bottom posting, the "end" or "page down" keys on your keyboard (depending on your email client) can reach the reply quickly. If you don't believe me, try reading this message as if it was top posted - from the bottom - and you tell me if this top-posted response is easier to read than it would be if it was written in the usual order. This waste of time is why many people, including me, loathe top-posting. It takes a lot longer to read a message full of top-posting in proper sequence than it does to read a message where the sequence of reading is the same as the sequence of posting. Instead of reading from top to bottom in one smooth sequential flow, one must constantly search the text for the beginning of the next response. Top-posting is a gross violation of that convention. Almost all written text in English is read in sequential order from top to bottom. The trouble with top-posting is that the email that is referenced becomes difficult to read because it flouts an established convention that is seen in most other written English prose.
Imagine you are in an aircraft travelling over a target on the ground, and you have to drop some small projectile to hit that target just as you pass over it. If you just drop the projectile, the speed of the plane will cause the projectile to have a horizontal velocity equal to the speed of the aircraft, and you will miss your target by a wide margin. To make the projectile fall vertically, you have to throw it backwards from the aircraft with a backwards velocity equal to the forward velocity of the plane.
Dropping something into the sun is roughly the same. The Earth is moving in its orbit at more than 107,000 kilometres per hour, or nearly 30 kilometres per second. To make something fall straight towards the sun it has to be hurled backwards at this speed. The escape speed of Earth is only 11 kilometres per second.
The difficulty I have with this propsal is the huge numbers of light fittings that are designed to hold incandescent light globes. In many of these fittings, flourescent lights do not fit.
In my home right now, I have six or seven light fittings that cannot take a flourescent light due to the size of the lights and the available space in the fitting. To replace these light fittings would cost a substantial amount of money. Although the ROI of replacing some of these fittings is likely to be in the order of several years, it is still uneconomic to replace them. Some of these fittings are seldom used so the ROI could be 20 years or more. (Fortunately this should not be a problem. By the time it is necessary to replace those globes adequate replacement flourescents should be available.)
Furthermore, the light fittings in my refrigerator and my range hood cannot be replaced (although it is likely that the smaller flourescents will fit in these so this is not a particularly serious issue).
Luckily I own my own home so I can pay for these renovations if I wish. Tenants aren't so lucky.
I'm hoping that flourescents of a reasonable brightness and size come on to the market so as to make this point moot. Some are on the market already, but are not bright enough to light a room adequately on their own. To do that, people would need compact flourescents in the 12 to 15 watt range that are no larger than an incandescent light globe. When such lights do become available, only then is it feasible to phase out incandescent light globes.
The material has been removed from our Web server.
The MPAA are doing their best to destroy the evidence before they get served with court papers.
* No Web links were ever provided to the blog.
The blog was publically accessible.
* The blog was never assigned a domain name.
This is irrelevant to the MPAA's crime of copyright infringement. None of the allegedly pirated movies have domain names, either.
* The blog was never advertised to the public in any way.
Criminals don't advertise their activities because law enforcement may notice.
* The material on the server was a proof of concept awaiting approval to move into production.
It was also someone else's work that the MPAA was going to rip off.
* The blog was only ever used for testing purposes.
The MPAA still breached the licence terms which do not have exceptions for testing purposes.
* Should we have decided to make the move to production, then we would have paid the 25 Pounds that would have authorized us to run a version of the blog without the logos and links.
Many of the copyright ingfringers the MPAA have sued have used the same defence. "We were going to pay but you caught us first".
In short, the MPAA's alleged "defence" is pretty piss-weak, and had they offered it up in court, the counsel for the prosecution would have ripped them apart.
The owner of the software did the wrong thing, however. By approaching the MPAA as soon as the breach was discovered, he made it easy for the MPAA to destroy the evidence and act as if nothing had happened. He should have gathered as much evidence as possible (preferably via third-parties, like the RIAA and MPAA do, which leave no suspicious entries in the server logs) and only when there was a lot more evidence should he have acted. The ideal time to act would be after the blog goes live, preferably after it's been running for a while. Then is the time to get a lawyer to serve notice of infringement, have the police seize the servers and so forth.
A USB key is a neat trick to keep the wife away from your pr0n collection, but it won't do you much good if the FBI can force you to hand it over.
Many pets are microchipped these days, right?
(evil grin)
Make the unlock code the microchip code for your evil, bad-tempered cat that scratches everyone but you. To unlock your computer, use a USB microchip reader to read your cat's details.
If you have to hand over your USB code to the authorities, just give them the cat.
It may not stop the authorities from accessing your data, but it will sure make it more interesting for them to do so. Especially if the unlock code is a hissing, spitting, scratching ball of feline fury.
Say you're buying a $5.23 lunch, five days a week. You're actually paying $5.25 a day.
In practice, this does not occur for many businesses in Australia. Small businesses like cafes, bakeries and the like set their prices to the nearest 5 cents or 10 cents, so no rounding occurs. Most supermarkets still price to the nearest cent, but rounding is not an issue because people generally buy many items at a time from supermarkets and over time the rounding balances out.
The increase in costs of manufacturing coins has to be addressed eventually. Britain reduced the size of their coins several years ago. New Zealand did the same this year, and also changed their coins to plated steel and removed the 5 cent coin from circulation. Eventually the US will have to address this issue too. Removing the pennies from circulation and making the nickel smaller would be worth considering.
This passenger scoring thing denies rights based on a secret law.
This bit scares me the most. It is a common principle in law that ignorance of the law is not a defense against breaking that law. However, such a principle is founded on the assumption that the people can find out what the law is. When a state has secret laws, this is no longer possible. So we have a situation where citizens may break a secret law and have no plausible way to determine for themselves what they need to do to stay on the right side of the law, yet citizens who are charged with breaking such laws may not be able to use ignorance of the law as a defense in a court of law.
We don't need a word for entering and leaving different kinds of vehicles. "Disembark" should cover all forms of mass transit - ships, planes, trains, buses. We don't have words like "deship", "detrain" or "debus", so why must we have such nonsense as "deplane"?
Deplane sounds like what I do to a piece of paper when I make it into a ball and throw it in the rubbish, or deform any other planar surface so it is no longer a plane.
Or, as the parent poster suggested, it sounds like we are being cleansed of an infestation of tiny parasitic planes. Deice - remove ice, degauss - remove gauss, delouse - remove lice, deplane - remove planes. Makes more sense to me.
I agree. These user-contributed images are intellectual property, and as such the users should be compensated for it. After all, who paid for the camera, the internet access to upload the images and so on?
It can get worse if such sites attempted to claim copyright for such images. If such sites claimed copyright on user-submitted images, and the users distributed the images to other places, can the users get sued for copyright infringement of their own images even though they have not signed anything and received no consideration for allegedly assigning the copyright?
What study after study has shown is that it is the speed differential between vehicles that causes an increases in traffic accidents, and not 'high' speed.
If only someone will tell this to those citizens that insist on driving really slowly in traffic. It's not always the fast cars that cause accidents.
Why do products break? Because one pays one's money up-front when buying them. If all such products were sold on hire-purchase agreements with 120 equal monthly payments with payments ceasing automatically when the product breaks because of poor workmanship (wilful destruction excepted), then the quality of products sold would be far better.
Many such products have warranties that only last 12 months. And these are warranties, not guarantees. Such warranties often have restrictions on claims which make it harder to get one's money back, and in most cases one cannot choose to get one's money back because such a choice is made by the manufacturer. Often, all one can do is get a replacement of the same shoddy product.
Products these days are supposed to break. Manufacturers get more money that way because the products must be replaced more often. It's why iPods don't have replaceable batteries. It's why modern cars don't have bumper bars any more. It's why so many products break in the first 12 months after the warranty runs out.
So what can we do about it?
Stop buying this crap.
Sadly, that is easy to say but difficult to do. The difficulty is the consumers cannot make informed choices about which products are good and which are shonky pieces of crap that are likely to break within two years.
I suppose the best approach is to spread the word whenever a product doesn't last as long as you hoped. Tell your friends. Complain in your blog. Find product comparison websites and post there. Make sure people know that the piece of crap you bought with your hard-earned money is worthless and that other products from the same manufacturer may also have a short life expectancy.
If someone makes a recording that can continue to sell for 50+ years, that person deserves some sort of financial reward for it.
You are assuming that the artist actually owns the copyright to their works. That is not usually the case. More often, it's a corporation in the recording industry that owns the copyright, and the artist receives royalties from the corporation - after the corporation takes their cut. I believe that any extension of copyright should include clauses that stipulate that the copyright reverts to the artists, their heirs and successors after a period of time, say 30 years. This would reduce the greed of recording corporations and encourage the creation of new works.
What we should also discuss are intellectual property laws that provide proper protection to the artists. Artists should not be assigning the copyrights to a record corporation unless the terms of such a transaction are just and reasonable - and all too often that is not the case. Maybe copyright should always belong to the creators of the work, not the corporations that distribute it, and all that corporations can buy are exclusive rights to reproduction and distribution. This would be functionally the same as the current situation of the corporations owning the copyright, except the artist has a far better bargaining position in case of disputes.
Howard can indeed be taken down a notch at the next election. His seat of Bennelong has gone from a safe seat to a marginal seat (4.5% margin) due to demographic change in the last 30 years, and it will become even more marginal at the next election even without a swing. There is a real possibility that Howard could lose his seat at the next election - which means he will no longer be Prime Minister even if his Liberals win the election.
So if the Opposition do the right thing they would stand a high-profile candidate in Bennelong.
Interestingly, a uniform 4.5% swing is what the Opposition need to win government. These figures aren't a coincidence because Bennelong is the seat that is right in the middle of the pendulum.
By the way, don't call Howard a cunt, because that is an insult to real cunts.
Prime Minister John Howard, who has recently made global warming part of the mainstream debate in Australia after years of playing down the issue, said he would be willing to consider the trading system to limit greenhouse gas emissions -- if it does not harm key resource-dependent industries.
He did nothing of the sort. He wasn't leading the country on the discussion of climate change. This is the leader of a political party that refuses to ratify the Kyoto agreement, who was apparently in denial about climate change until recently, and who had to be dragged into the climate change debate after the opposition parties gained a lot of attention on the issue. He had no choice after opinion polls suggested that climate change was an issue that concerned many Australians (I don't remember the exact figures but it was something like four out of five).
The only real leadership he has shown on climate change is his view that Australia should use nuclear power. While I don't agree with nuclear power - its associated risks are large and uranium is not renewable - I do know that the debate is important. Howard is very coy about exactly where the plants may be built. This is not surprising because nuclear power plants have a very large NIMBY effect.
The nature of language is that you must maintain it in order to prevent it from devolving.
Nobody maintains the English language. The English language is one of the few major languages that lacks a central regulatory body. If the English Language actually had a body maintaining it, we would not still be spelling words as they were pronounced in the 14th century: "eight", "laughter", "knight"; we would not have a language burdened with unnecessary silent letters: "give", "debt", "island", "answer", "ptarmigan", "friend"; and we would not have an orthography that does not respell assimilated foreign words: "café", "shiitake", "spaghetti", "llama".
Many people have trouble reading and writing in English, but to some extent that is the fault of the language, not the people. Such people would have fewer problems with the written English language if the above words were spelt more regularly as "eit", "lafter", "nite", "giv", "det", "iland", "anser", "tarmigan", "frend", "cafay", "shitaki", "spagetti", "lama".
3) You know Al Gore's movie, where they show the glacier photos, before and after? Are the before and after both from the same season? Because the glaciers change size seasonally. Did Al Gore show winter 1980 vs. summer 2005?
The distance that many glaciers have retreated is much greater than the difference between the summer and winter extents of those glaciers. Many of these glaciers have retreated one kilometre or more. If the distance such a glacier retreats was solely due to seasonal effects, then the glacier would have to advance at a rate of more than five metres a day to cover that distance (rough calculation: 180 days advancing x 5 metres/day = 900 metres). Most glaciers don't move that fast.
Slashdot Mirror
In the time it takes to find one single top-posted response in context, one can just press the "end" key once, or the "page down" key a few times, and there's the reply at the bottom.
And if you have trouble with bottom posting, the "end" or "page down" keys on your keyboard (depending on your email client) can reach the reply quickly.
If you don't believe me, try reading this message as if it was top posted - from the bottom - and you tell me if this top-posted response is easier to read than it would be if it was written in the usual order.
This waste of time is why many people, including me, loathe top-posting.
It takes a lot longer to read a message full of top-posting in proper sequence than it does to read a message where the sequence of reading is the same as the sequence of posting.
Instead of reading from top to bottom in one smooth sequential flow, one must constantly search the text for the beginning of the next response.
Top-posting is a gross violation of that convention.
Almost all written text in English is read in sequential order from top to bottom.
The trouble with top-posting is that the email that is referenced becomes difficult to read because it flouts an established convention that is seen in most other written English prose.
The Earth is moving very quickly in its orbit.
Imagine you are in an aircraft travelling over a target on the ground, and you have to drop some small projectile to hit that target just as you pass over it. If you just drop the projectile, the speed of the plane will cause the projectile to have a horizontal velocity equal to the speed of the aircraft, and you will miss your target by a wide margin. To make the projectile fall vertically, you have to throw it backwards from the aircraft with a backwards velocity equal to the forward velocity of the plane.
Dropping something into the sun is roughly the same. The Earth is moving in its orbit at more than 107,000 kilometres per hour, or nearly 30 kilometres per second. To make something fall straight towards the sun it has to be hurled backwards at this speed. The escape speed of Earth is only 11 kilometres per second.
Yes, it does. All planets in the solar system have one. It's called "night".
Damn, it's spring now; we've only got three months! Will we be ready in time?
People with ids 20,000 registered in the first six months or so that Slashdot was up and running. I have no idea how I know this.
Or we could be really sneaky. Add this to the bottom of the contract:
JURISDICTION
This contract is governed by the laws of the state of California.
The difficulty I have with this propsal is the huge numbers of light fittings that are designed to hold incandescent light globes. In many of these fittings, flourescent lights do not fit.
In my home right now, I have six or seven light fittings that cannot take a flourescent light due to the size of the lights and the available space in the fitting. To replace these light fittings would cost a substantial amount of money. Although the ROI of replacing some of these fittings is likely to be in the order of several years, it is still uneconomic to replace them. Some of these fittings are seldom used so the ROI could be 20 years or more. (Fortunately this should not be a problem. By the time it is necessary to replace those globes adequate replacement flourescents should be available.)
Furthermore, the light fittings in my refrigerator and my range hood cannot be replaced (although it is likely that the smaller flourescents will fit in these so this is not a particularly serious issue).
Luckily I own my own home so I can pay for these renovations if I wish. Tenants aren't so lucky.
I'm hoping that flourescents of a reasonable brightness and size come on to the market so as to make this point moot. Some are on the market already, but are not bright enough to light a room adequately on their own. To do that, people would need compact flourescents in the 12 to 15 watt range that are no larger than an incandescent light globe. When such lights do become available, only then is it feasible to phase out incandescent light globes.
In short, the MPAA's alleged "defence" is pretty piss-weak, and had they offered it up in court, the counsel for the prosecution would have ripped them apart.
The owner of the software did the wrong thing, however. By approaching the MPAA as soon as the breach was discovered, he made it easy for the MPAA to destroy the evidence and act as if nothing had happened. He should have gathered as much evidence as possible (preferably via third-parties, like the RIAA and MPAA do, which leave no suspicious entries in the server logs) and only when there was a lot more evidence should he have acted. The ideal time to act would be after the blog goes live, preferably after it's been running for a while. Then is the time to get a lawyer to serve notice of infringement, have the police seize the servers and so forth.
(evil grin)
Make the unlock code the microchip code for your evil, bad-tempered cat that scratches everyone but you. To unlock your computer, use a USB microchip reader to read your cat's details.
If you have to hand over your USB code to the authorities, just give them the cat.
It may not stop the authorities from accessing your data, but it will sure make it more interesting for them to do so. Especially if the unlock code is a hissing, spitting, scratching ball of feline fury.
Now we know what ELIZA programmers do for a living these days.
In practice, this does not occur for many businesses in Australia. Small businesses like cafes, bakeries and the like set their prices to the nearest 5 cents or 10 cents, so no rounding occurs. Most supermarkets still price to the nearest cent, but rounding is not an issue because people generally buy many items at a time from supermarkets and over time the rounding balances out.
The increase in costs of manufacturing coins has to be addressed eventually. Britain reduced the size of their coins several years ago. New Zealand did the same this year, and also changed their coins to plated steel and removed the 5 cent coin from circulation. Eventually the US will have to address this issue too. Removing the pennies from circulation and making the nickel smaller would be worth considering.
You may also want to read about Dracunculiasis. This is a parasitic worm that can be removed by wrapping the worm around a stick.
That's all we need. Silly String that costs $500 a can.
Somehow I find that rather scary.
We don't need a word for entering and leaving different kinds of vehicles. "Disembark" should cover all forms of mass transit - ships, planes, trains, buses. We don't have words like "deship", "detrain" or "debus", so why must we have such nonsense as "deplane"?
Deplane sounds like what I do to a piece of paper when I make it into a ball and throw it in the rubbish, or deform any other planar surface so it is no longer a plane.
Or, as the parent poster suggested, it sounds like we are being cleansed of an infestation of tiny parasitic planes. Deice - remove ice, degauss - remove gauss, delouse - remove lice, deplane - remove planes. Makes more sense to me.
I agree. These user-contributed images are intellectual property, and as such the users should be compensated for it. After all, who paid for the camera, the internet access to upload the images and so on?
It can get worse if such sites attempted to claim copyright for such images. If such sites claimed copyright on user-submitted images, and the users distributed the images to other places, can the users get sued for copyright infringement of their own images even though they have not signed anything and received no consideration for allegedly assigning the copyright?
Why do products break? Because one pays one's money up-front when buying them. If all such products were sold on hire-purchase agreements with 120 equal monthly payments with payments ceasing automatically when the product breaks because of poor workmanship (wilful destruction excepted), then the quality of products sold would be far better.
Many such products have warranties that only last 12 months. And these are warranties, not guarantees. Such warranties often have restrictions on claims which make it harder to get one's money back, and in most cases one cannot choose to get one's money back because such a choice is made by the manufacturer. Often, all one can do is get a replacement of the same shoddy product.
Products these days are supposed to break. Manufacturers get more money that way because the products must be replaced more often. It's why iPods don't have replaceable batteries. It's why modern cars don't have bumper bars any more. It's why so many products break in the first 12 months after the warranty runs out.
So what can we do about it?
Stop buying this crap.
Sadly, that is easy to say but difficult to do. The difficulty is the consumers cannot make informed choices about which products are good and which are shonky pieces of crap that are likely to break within two years.
I suppose the best approach is to spread the word whenever a product doesn't last as long as you hoped. Tell your friends. Complain in your blog. Find product comparison websites and post there. Make sure people know that the piece of crap you bought with your hard-earned money is worthless and that other products from the same manufacturer may also have a short life expectancy.
What we should also discuss are intellectual property laws that provide proper protection to the artists. Artists should not be assigning the copyrights to a record corporation unless the terms of such a transaction are just and reasonable - and all too often that is not the case. Maybe copyright should always belong to the creators of the work, not the corporations that distribute it, and all that corporations can buy are exclusive rights to reproduction and distribution. This would be functionally the same as the current situation of the corporations owning the copyright, except the artist has a far better bargaining position in case of disputes.
So if the Opposition do the right thing they would stand a high-profile candidate in Bennelong.
Interestingly, a uniform 4.5% swing is what the Opposition need to win government. These figures aren't a coincidence because Bennelong is the seat that is right in the middle of the pendulum.
By the way, don't call Howard a cunt, because that is an insult to real cunts.
The MSNBC article also has a factual error:
He did nothing of the sort. He wasn't leading the country on the discussion of climate change. This is the leader of a political party that refuses to ratify the Kyoto agreement, who was apparently in denial about climate change until recently, and who had to be dragged into the climate change debate after the opposition parties gained a lot of attention on the issue. He had no choice after opinion polls suggested that climate change was an issue that concerned many Australians (I don't remember the exact figures but it was something like four out of five).
The only real leadership he has shown on climate change is his view that Australia should use nuclear power. While I don't agree with nuclear power - its associated risks are large and uranium is not renewable - I do know that the debate is important. Howard is very coy about exactly where the plants may be built. This is not surprising because nuclear power plants have a very large NIMBY effect.
Many people have trouble reading and writing in English, but to some extent that is the fault of the language, not the people. Such people would have fewer problems with the written English language if the above words were spelt more regularly as "eit", "lafter", "nite", "giv", "det", "iland", "anser", "tarmigan", "frend", "cafay", "shitaki", "spagetti", "lama".