Unbelievable. As if knowing what's on TV is an important part of a healthy social life.
The idea here is that his children were actually socializing and focused on meaningful, fulfilling life activities, rather than spending time staring at the blinking lights. So what if some of their social time was a bit awkward? All kids run into awkward social situations. The TV-free kids were probably better prepared to deal with it because they spent more time being social than their peers in the first place.
According the Wikipedia entry, PowerPoint was originally released as a Macintosh application in 1987 and MS bought it later that year, releasing a Windows version in 1990. I personally used HyperCard on Macintosh in 1987-88 to do a lot of what PowerPoint does for presentations: slides, animations, sounds, etc.
I'm also skeptical that the "Start" menu was all that exciting. Apple had the Apple menu on the first Mac OS in 1984. Sure, it isn't quite the same, but I'd guess that any number of windowing systems with any menu capability had something similar to the "Start" menu before Windows did. Really, don't you think having a "main" menu of some sort is rather obvious anyway?
Microsoft's brilliance is not to be found in obvious stuff, but in the details-- believe it or not. Most importantly in the details of sound business management.
Not only is it possible to use GnuCash on Windows using Cygwin's X Server. That's how I've been doing it for some time now with very good results. The only problem I've ever had is with default window sizes for non-maximized windows--probably from having a much larger screen resolution on the Windows system than the Linux system that gets X forwarded.
As far as I'm concerned GnuCash is one of the big reasons I've managed to avoid bankruptcy in the past. It's standard approach to accounting and reports was very helpful for me when I got into financial trouble in the past. Seeing this announcement for 2.0 is heartening, and a good reminder that it's time to donate to the developers' beer fund (or whatever they spend donations on).
Seriously, paying one or two people several millions dollars when there is no shortage of fresh talent banging on the doors is just stupid.
Right. Because the movie-going public really wants to gamble with their ticket money on unknowns when they could, for the same amount of money, see a big star whose other movies they have enjoyed.
Exactly what I was thinking. I know my DVD purchasing habits have gone from buying several every now and again to buying absolutely none now that I am a Netflix subscriber. Ditto my desire to waste time trying to download movies from anywhere. Much easier to find the movie on Netflix, put it at the top of the queue, wait a few days, watch movie, realize that even that may have been too much effort, given the low quality of most Hollywood productions, and... well, you get the idea.:)
Uh. No. The people who are driving too fast are just as capable of matching the legal speed. Accidents are their fault. Not the guy who is "blocking" the lane by driving the legal limit. I would also argue that faster speeds, even in straight lines and in conforming groups, not only cause greater damage in accidents, but increase accident rates due to decreased handling ability and reaction timing.
You all can continue to make all the excuses for your lawless anti-social (and deadly) behavior you want, but until your first argument is "let's start by following the rules" this discussion is going to go nowhere. There can be no excuse for 75-99% of motorists simply breaking the law like they do. Blaming the one guy who is following the law for accidents is ridiculous and simply demonstrates the level of denial you all are engaged in as to your own culpability in the situation.
I get what you're saying and I'm sure we agree on the general approach. But I don't know that we're actually safer if everyone goes 10 MPH over the limitin such situations. My understanding is that there is a direct correlation between increases in speed and increases in fatality levels when accidents do happen. In our larger conversation about who should be following which laws, the obvious answer to being behind someone who is actually driving the speed limit is to slow down and also drive the speed limit. After all, that's the law. I'm not sure what human nature has to do with it. I don't think recklessly negligent impatience is natural, especially when it leads to more dangerous roadways. My question is: why do motorists continuously insist that cyclists have to obey the law, when it's clear to any observer that 99% of motorists fall far short of obeying those same laws?
So basically, not only is it okay for motorists to break the law, but law-abiding motorists should take special care to help them do it easily? Here, I have an equally ridiculous idea: how about if every car on the road is required to yield the right of way to any cyclist at any intersection, regardless of what signage is present or what lights are lit at the time?
drivers passing on the right shouldn't be in the wrong. The fault actually lies with the slowpoke in the fast lane failing to obey the "slower traffic keep right" sign.
Most of the time these people passing this way are way exceeding the posted speed limits (and often driving much faster than prevailing traffic speeds).
Yeah, like I said, let me know when the motorists, who are often in *my* way when I'm biking (my favorites are the ones who don't yield right of way when turning or who block intersectins), decide they're going to start obeying the traffic laws themselves.
Motorists consistently violate all the rules of the road and manage to kill 43,000 Americans a year. This whole "cyclists need to follow the rules" spiel is a crock. Half the time when cyclists do follow the rules they get verbal abuse and/or actual physical threats (made with very large deadly weapons).
I realize it's just a few motorists making the rest look bad-- oh wait, it's standard practice to drive 1-10 MPH over the speed limit in most places, and in some 10-20 MPH over is not uncommon. I've watched many, many, many motorists not only blow red lights, but speed up while doing so. Then we have passing on the right (often a shoulder), no turn signal usage, tailgating, driving with intoxicated or distracted... yeah, those dang cyclists. Don't they know they should sit out red lights even when it's pouring down rain and that a full stop means a foot must rest on the ground?
Definitely. I guess my concern is letting it sound like a fringe group is the dominant paradigm within the environmental movement. And you hit on the key problem which is a lot harder to address and brings competing interests within the environmental movement into conflict: conservation. But what I think is that most environmentalists would try first for conservation efforts, and failing that, seek to minimize the problem.
In this case, wind power is certainly less destructive than burning fossil fuels. So I would be surprised if the majority of environmentalists opposed wind power, even while acknowledging its harms. In your example, the desalinization plant is probably less harmful than lake draining, but only because the lake draining is proven and the salt levels issue is more theoretical. Of course, NIMBYism is often a key factor in contributing factor in much of what passes for environmentalism, making it even more difficult to define environmentalism easily.
"Office Space" was an awful movie. "Head Office" (from the 80s) was much better and had an all-star cast (Moranis, Devito, Reinhold, etc) rather than the annoying girl from Friends. It's even available on DVD. Or maybe on P2P (he says in a vain attempt to be on-topic).
But really, do we expect any of these EMI + UMG guys to do time over this? I don't. Seems like the most likely outcome is that the civil suits in question will end up dropped. The people who made the actual statements will probably pass the buck to people who will pass the buck and unless there's a secret memo coordinating all this stuff and that memo can actually be found before it's shredded, no one will be held accountable.
I think you missed my point, which was that the typical environmentalist thinks wind power is a very good idea, in that it is not coal or gas burning, nor is it nuclear. Or at least this is my experience with environmentalists, having been around a fair number for the last 15 years or so.
It's the classic divide-and-conquer approach that America has been using since Day One. In this case the divide being created is between the artists and their audience. Guess which side wins... Bzzt! Neither. The media corporate execs are the only ones winning in this game (OK, so they do create a few multi-millionaire "artists" that serve the same function as lottery winners: keeping the suckers playing).
The execs are the only ones in a no-lose position. Or at least that was the case before computers and the internet. It's time for a whole new paradigm. But to get there, consumers and artists are going to have to work together... hence the sick beauty of the divide-and-conquer approach. The longer artists and audiences are kept from reaching mutually satisfactory solutions, the longer the media corp execs can line their pockets.
My first thought with this whole post was: Huh? Environmentalists opposed to wind power? Not bloody likely. Last wind-power related thing I read was from a group of granola-eaters looking to make it possible to set up small scale turbines in urban settings... something to complement their solar panels, the way I understood it.
Yes. It is greed. But so what? Obviously there are people willing to pay the prices she asks for, and as long as they can afford these tickets without committing bank robberies, our problem with this is what exactly?
It certainly isn't Madonna's fault that the world is full of people whose lives are so meaningless, yet flush with cash, that they're willing to fork over these amounts to see her perform. The real problem here is this allegation that ticket prices are somehow related to file sharing. What a crock. We cannot say this enough. This is a crock. If anything is raising the price of tickets it is the fact that scalping is getting easier. Or greed. Or both. But this has absolutely nothing to do with record sales slumping due to P2P. If record sales are slumping it probably has more to do with the declining quality of major label releases and fans being upset with the high prices of tickets and CDs and because commercial radio is a complete wasteland.
What I really don't understand is why they haven't done more with ticket pricing to eliminate the scalpers and such by going to a per seat or per block auction type of pricing. Then the folks who would gladly pay way more than $250 for front row seats can do so directly and the nosebleed seats might still actually be affordable.
Of course, what do I know. I refuse to pay more than $30 for any performance and most of the last year I've been going to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, for world class classical music-- at $10 a seat. Forget Madonna.
I think the various forums I've been on are loaded with people like that. My favorite one is Perl Monks. That place was great (and probably still is) in that it really fostered a sense of community for the longer term members while making it easy to ask questions. Plus, the ability to form a reputation in the community for providing assistance encouraged doing so in a positive way.
I suspect the flip side of the Linux Snob is the person who thinks that just because they have a question that they deserve to have it answered, no matter how rudely it is asked, how obvious the answer is, or how obstinate they seem to be in their level of unwillingness to put in some effort of their own. There are also users who complain a lot about how something doesn't work, but then when you open up the documentation the answer to their problem is the first sentence, in bold type, capitalized, underlined, centered on the page, and perhaps even illustrated with an images with circles and arrows and a paragraph explaining what each image means.
I saw this with my friend who bought an iMac and a printer and then complained about the printer not working. Had he bothered to even OPEN the little booklet that came with his printer he could have resolved his own problem in about five minutes. Instead I got to feel like a kindergarten teacher reading the Fine Manual to him.
Microsoft has the ability to leverage its monopoly to force the "special hardware" on the public
No. They don't. They have the ability to offer it for sale and the public has the ability to refuse to accept it. Good luck convincing the public to do this, though.
Way late, sorry, but I agree with your sentiment. My point wasn't that I felt it was an employment matter but that there are rarely laws to protect employees from political discrimination.
Encode the video in Flash and do a php call so the file name is never revealed - not even the url to the directory where the file *is* is revealed.
How does this stop someone from using a proxy to capture the URL of the request? Even if the source of the stream is capable of being obscured... wouldn't a user simply be able to capture the video stream data at the client and modify it to his heart's content?
Yes. In only a very few places is political activity a protected category of speech when it comes to employment matters, even when that employer is the government itself (http://www.workplacefairness.org/index.php?page=r etaliationpolitical). On the other hand, you are free to join a cult and your employer
can't say boo about it because that would be discriminating on the basis of religion.
Slashdot Mirror
Unbelievable. As if knowing what's on TV is an important part of a healthy social life.
The idea here is that his children were actually socializing and focused on meaningful, fulfilling life activities, rather than spending time staring at the blinking lights. So what if some of their social time was a bit awkward? All kids run into awkward social situations. The TV-free kids were probably better prepared to deal with it because they spent more time being social than their peers in the first place.
You'd trust management to be able to tell which programmer is the wrongdoer?
According the Wikipedia entry, PowerPoint was originally released as a Macintosh application in 1987 and MS bought it later that year, releasing a Windows version in 1990. I personally used HyperCard on Macintosh in 1987-88 to do a lot of what PowerPoint does for presentations: slides, animations, sounds, etc.
I'm also skeptical that the "Start" menu was all that exciting. Apple had the Apple menu on the first Mac OS in 1984. Sure, it isn't quite the same, but I'd guess that any number of windowing systems with any menu capability had something similar to the "Start" menu before Windows did. Really, don't you think having a "main" menu of some sort is rather obvious anyway?
Microsoft's brilliance is not to be found in obvious stuff, but in the details-- believe it or not. Most importantly in the details of sound business management.
Not only is it possible to use GnuCash on Windows using Cygwin's X Server. That's how I've been doing it for some time now with very good results. The only problem I've ever had is with default window sizes for non-maximized windows--probably from having a much larger screen resolution on the Windows system than the Linux system that gets X forwarded.
As far as I'm concerned GnuCash is one of the big reasons I've managed to avoid bankruptcy in the past. It's standard approach to accounting and reports was very helpful for me when I got into financial trouble in the past. Seeing this announcement for 2.0 is heartening, and a good reminder that it's time to donate to the developers' beer fund (or whatever they spend donations on).
Seriously, paying one or two people several millions dollars when there is no shortage of fresh talent banging on the doors is just stupid.
Right. Because the movie-going public really wants to gamble with their ticket money on unknowns when they could, for the same amount of money, see a big star whose other movies they have enjoyed.
Exactly what I was thinking. I know my DVD purchasing habits have gone from buying several every now and again to buying absolutely none now that I am a Netflix subscriber. Ditto my desire to waste time trying to download movies from anywhere. Much easier to find the movie on Netflix, put it at the top of the queue, wait a few days, watch movie, realize that even that may have been too much effort, given the low quality of most Hollywood productions, and... well, you get the idea. :)
You all can continue to make all the excuses for your lawless anti-social (and deadly) behavior you want, but until your first argument is "let's start by following the rules" this discussion is going to go nowhere. There can be no excuse for 75-99% of motorists simply breaking the law like they do. Blaming the one guy who is following the law for accidents is ridiculous and simply demonstrates the level of denial you all are engaged in as to your own culpability in the situation.
I get what you're saying and I'm sure we agree on the general approach. But I don't know that we're actually safer if everyone goes 10 MPH over the limitin such situations. My understanding is that there is a direct correlation between increases in speed and increases in fatality levels when accidents do happen. In our larger conversation about who should be following which laws, the obvious answer to being behind someone who is actually driving the speed limit is to slow down and also drive the speed limit. After all, that's the law. I'm not sure what human nature has to do with it. I don't think recklessly negligent impatience is natural, especially when it leads to more dangerous roadways. My question is: why do motorists continuously insist that cyclists have to obey the law, when it's clear to any observer that 99% of motorists fall far short of obeying those same laws?
So basically, not only is it okay for motorists to break the law, but law-abiding motorists should take special care to help them do it easily? Here, I have an equally ridiculous idea: how about if every car on the road is required to yield the right of way to any cyclist at any intersection, regardless of what signage is present or what lights are lit at the time?
Most of the time these people passing this way are way exceeding the posted speed limits (and often driving much faster than prevailing traffic speeds).
Yeah, like I said, let me know when the motorists, who are often in *my* way when I'm biking (my favorites are the ones who don't yield right of way when turning or who block intersectins), decide they're going to start obeying the traffic laws themselves.
Motorists consistently violate all the rules of the road and manage to kill 43,000 Americans a year. This whole "cyclists need to follow the rules" spiel is a crock. Half the time when cyclists do follow the rules they get verbal abuse and/or actual physical threats (made with very large deadly weapons).
I realize it's just a few motorists making the rest look bad-- oh wait, it's standard practice to drive 1-10 MPH over the speed limit in most places, and in some 10-20 MPH over is not uncommon. I've watched many, many, many motorists not only blow red lights, but speed up while doing so. Then we have passing on the right (often a shoulder), no turn signal usage, tailgating, driving with intoxicated or distracted... yeah, those dang cyclists. Don't they know they should sit out red lights even when it's pouring down rain and that a full stop means a foot must rest on the ground?
In this case, wind power is certainly less destructive than burning fossil fuels. So I would be surprised if the majority of environmentalists opposed wind power, even while acknowledging its harms. In your example, the desalinization plant is probably less harmful than lake draining, but only because the lake draining is proven and the salt levels issue is more theoretical. Of course, NIMBYism is often a key factor in contributing factor in much of what passes for environmentalism, making it even more difficult to define environmentalism easily.
"Office Space" was an awful movie. "Head Office" (from the 80s) was much better and had an all-star cast (Moranis, Devito, Reinhold, etc) rather than the annoying girl from Friends. It's even available on DVD. Or maybe on P2P (he says in a vain attempt to be on-topic).
But really, do we expect any of these EMI + UMG guys to do time over this? I don't. Seems like the most likely outcome is that the civil suits in question will end up dropped. The people who made the actual statements will probably pass the buck to people who will pass the buck and unless there's a secret memo coordinating all this stuff and that memo can actually be found before it's shredded, no one will be held accountable.
I think you missed my point, which was that the typical environmentalist thinks wind power is a very good idea, in that it is not coal or gas burning, nor is it nuclear. Or at least this is my experience with environmentalists, having been around a fair number for the last 15 years or so.
The execs are the only ones in a no-lose position. Or at least that was the case before computers and the internet. It's time for a whole new paradigm. But to get there, consumers and artists are going to have to work together... hence the sick beauty of the divide-and-conquer approach. The longer artists and audiences are kept from reaching mutually satisfactory solutions, the longer the media corp execs can line their pockets.
Ouch. Talk about global warming!
My first thought with this whole post was: Huh? Environmentalists opposed to wind power? Not bloody likely. Last wind-power related thing I read was from a group of granola-eaters looking to make it possible to set up small scale turbines in urban settings... something to complement their solar panels, the way I understood it.
It certainly isn't Madonna's fault that the world is full of people whose lives are so meaningless, yet flush with cash, that they're willing to fork over these amounts to see her perform. The real problem here is this allegation that ticket prices are somehow related to file sharing. What a crock. We cannot say this enough. This is a crock. If anything is raising the price of tickets it is the fact that scalping is getting easier. Or greed. Or both. But this has absolutely nothing to do with record sales slumping due to P2P. If record sales are slumping it probably has more to do with the declining quality of major label releases and fans being upset with the high prices of tickets and CDs and because commercial radio is a complete wasteland.
What I really don't understand is why they haven't done more with ticket pricing to eliminate the scalpers and such by going to a per seat or per block auction type of pricing. Then the folks who would gladly pay way more than $250 for front row seats can do so directly and the nosebleed seats might still actually be affordable.
Of course, what do I know. I refuse to pay more than $30 for any performance and most of the last year I've been going to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, for world class classical music-- at $10 a seat. Forget Madonna.
Sure. It's free if your time is worth nothing. :)
I suspect the flip side of the Linux Snob is the person who thinks that just because they have a question that they deserve to have it answered, no matter how rudely it is asked, how obvious the answer is, or how obstinate they seem to be in their level of unwillingness to put in some effort of their own. There are also users who complain a lot about how something doesn't work, but then when you open up the documentation the answer to their problem is the first sentence, in bold type, capitalized, underlined, centered on the page, and perhaps even illustrated with an images with circles and arrows and a paragraph explaining what each image means.
I saw this with my friend who bought an iMac and a printer and then complained about the printer not working. Had he bothered to even OPEN the little booklet that came with his printer he could have resolved his own problem in about five minutes. Instead I got to feel like a kindergarten teacher reading the Fine Manual to him.
Microsoft has the ability to leverage its monopoly to force the "special hardware" on the public
No. They don't. They have the ability to offer it for sale and the public has the ability to refuse to accept it. Good luck convincing the public to do this, though.
Way late, sorry, but I agree with your sentiment. My point wasn't that I felt it was an employment matter but that there are rarely laws to protect employees from political discrimination.
How does this stop someone from using a proxy to capture the URL of the request? Even if the source of the stream is capable of being obscured... wouldn't a user simply be able to capture the video stream data at the client and modify it to his heart's content?
The gender does not matter.
And yet two of the five words/phrases you used to describe their behavior were gender-specific.
Yes. In only a very few places is political activity a protected category of speech when it comes to employment matters, even when that employer is the government itself (http://www.workplacefairness.org/index.php?page=r etaliationpolitical). On the other hand, you are free to join a cult and your employer
can't say boo about it because that would be discriminating on the basis of religion.