It's a waste that people use their cars to go see a movie when they could be delivering food to the homeless shelter. It's a waste that people are storing ice cream in the fridge when they could be storing donated blood plasma.
How did this get modded Insightful? Its a waste of my time and money to donate food or resources to a homeless shelter when I could be watching a movie. Its a waste of my time and blood plasma to donate for use to others when I could be storing ice cream in my freezer.
Am I a selfish SOB? No, I'd just rather only "donate" resources to family and maybe some friends. It's vastly wasteful of my resources to "help" nameless others when I could be "helping" those I know and have relationships with. I'd give a whole paycheck's worth for "family needs." I wouldn't give a whole paycheck to nameless others. I'd get the paycheck's worth back from family. Would I get the money back from nameless others? Here is a concept every organization that recieves donations having to give the money or resources back after about a year. When I was in scool, I had to sell all sorts of things to fund school activities. My kids do the same. Why can't these "homeless" work at selling something to fund their own "homeless" shelters?
There is a big cost diffrence if putting in a subdivision and burying the 7200 volt line into the subdivision transformers and burying a 500,000 transmission line. Safety is also a concern. Which line would you rather hit with a backhoe?
I'd rather those that dig up power lines be hit with the 500,000 transmission line and removed from the gene pool. It would be nice if fiber lines were laid in with these heavy duty transmission lines so idiots with backhoes don't just dig them up. My small city has been seperated from the rest of the internet because our main line out has been repeatedly dug up by backhoes. It takes about a day for them to fix. I would love for those internet backbones to be guarded with high voltage transmission lines. Any one with a few brain cells would call and have everything properly marked before digging.
It's all about cost versus risk. In this case, the risk of WinZip stormtroopers crashing through the skylight and throwing flash-bangs is so low as to be laughable. Microsoft, not so much...
I would have thought the same thing about fonts.
Um, the BSA are "generic" software troopers. They don't go in with a mind of checking one type of software; the BSA checks all installed software. It wouldn't matter what kinda of software that you had improper licenses for if they find out you'll be paying.
In some respects it would make since to bundle all the copyright orgs together so that they could check for all licensed software and content at once and send your fines on the same bill.
Just as long as Google doesn't replace Slashdot with GDot... I'm thinking they're ok. Nah, they'll start GSpot news for the ladies, and every/.er will end up there because we have dirty minds.
Do MMORPG's Cause People to Buy Fewer Games at Retail?
Yes? How hard is it to realize that paying $15/mo for (similar) entertainment is a better option than shelling out $50 every few weeks?
That comes out to $180 a year for MMORPGs. I may get 2 or 3 none current games a year for around $15-$20 each. I couldn't afford $180 a year for a MMORPG. Now, the nice thing about buying "older" games is that they are cheaper. I'd say that those that play MMORPGs for the long term social experience and enjoyment find the $180 a year money well spent and can't justify additional purchases of $40-$120 worth of games a year. Most kids or casual gamers do not buy/recieve a game a week, or a game a month. Think 1-2 at a birthday and 1-2 at Christmas.
Hey, there's an idea for a stupid lawsuit - sue to make pants manufacturers include a warning label on metal-zippered pants: "In case of thunderstorms, drop pants and hurl them away from you"
Hey, you wouldn't say that if lighting struck you in the crotch!
Educating all the bad programmers in the world has always been a stupid idea.... At some point, when an entire population of users spends years using a tool wrong, you have to stop blaming the users and start fixing the tools.
I'm going to agree that "educating" those "bad" programmers that don't follow the basic rules/standards that "every programmer should follow" isn't useful. Because you aren't just dealing with "bad" but also with "lazy" or "rushed" folks. The problem with "fixing the tools" is that any useful functions are suddenly only accessible through wizards. I think that some untyped languages are used a bit than they should be. A strictly typed language isn't better; it just forces the "bad" and "lazy" to a certain min. standard. Of course if you had a langauge that forced the "bad" and "lazy" to met a very high standard, the general output "should" be higher. O.k. Maybe I'm wrong and we just need a better tools, which would mean in this case better langauages rather than a better IDEs.
Um, I don't know about you, but I'd want several of these all over the global. They may need to re-think their idea though. If major planet disease/bioterror strike wiped out all our food sources and we really needed this to reseed the global food sources, what are the odds of no one being able to get there to unlock it? Or better yet we've nuked our selves back and we know that their is the vault and close to where it is, but unforunately it's being guarded by polar bears that are hungry... O.k. long term I'd put my money on the nuclearly mutanted savages rather than the polar bear, but why not several of these on each major land mass near major crop lands? Heck, why stop at stock piling seeds? Why not stockpile tractors and fertilizer and enough resources that you could feed a major city within a year from a single stock pile?
Exactly, which is why MS needs to offer both Vista and the alternative. The Vista dev protocols would ensure compatibility with the new OS, so new and upgraded apps would be fine. I'm not talking about a immediate release of the new OS, I'm talking 3-4 years down the road when Vista has a larger marketshare and there are fewer legacy apps that don't work with the new OS. Alternatively, a WinXP and WinME emulator could be included as an optional install, which would allow use of legacy apps without breaking the 'streamlined' philosophy of the new OS.
Are you kidding? Most developers can't even handle writing programs that run properly under a WinXP restricted user profile properly without error messages or dialogs. I get a warm fuzzy every time that I run an application that is actually designed properly around WinXP. WinXP restricted user profile isn't the best thing in the world, but every WinXP app should be tested to run properly only under the restricted user profile except for admin utilities. Few pieces of software seem to even bother with it though.
Maybe it's the storage farm the NSA makes them build to store all the queries from every google user in the world...
Nah, that one would be completely sub-contracted by a secure no-name company that is below everyone's radar and could there for be built anywhere. I'm waiting for Google Census where they try to get real-time answers for the long form questions for everyone on Earth.
Like Americans students reciting the pledge of allegance every morning. Seriously what's up with that? and people don't even realise why people from other countries find that a little strange/scary.
If you really want the low down on that pledge of allegance crap, I'll let you in on it. It's a hold over when Eastern Europe was sending alot of people over here to be our brand new citizens. Ever wonder why the US is so hung up on English? Its sort of a related issue. Back then there wasn't any equal opp. laws or anything. Basically we made those new to the country feel like crap until they were good little US Citizens. Well what the hell is a US Citizen? First off you need to speak a US brand of English and get indoctrinated with our holidays and the pledge of allegance. Half the people that I've had an intellegent conversation on the topic admit that it is very Nazish, but it is the primary way we get those 2nd and 3rd generation new citizens to become "just like" everyone else. Who do you think pushes for that crap the most now a days? The families that remember coming here and think that the US is the best country on the planet. Remember there are reasons why alot of people don't like "public" education and the pledge of allegance is one of them.
Shh, the not very big secret is that he US DOD spends major research funding on alots of things "war related." Just because its being billed as a chemical warfare agent removal system doesn't mean that the profressor or university working on it doesn't also see the usage for just environmental clean up. There just isn't a big US agency finacing research into environmental clean up. There is one paying for tech related to clean up the messes of war. The US professors are just using the grants and money that they can get.;)
Um, so include both, that way the Chinese and US governments would have to agree before using both sets of backdoors to get into that info. For minor privacy issues, that should be "good enough". The few things that I could envision the US and Chinese governments agreeing on something, I'd really, really hope that they actually have a backdoor to use though. What's it really matter to slashdot anyway? Don't we use our own set of encryption on top of the built-in encryption? That just makes sense.
Um, but I don't have a social networking account or a personal webpage! One of these days I'm going to have to make a list of things that I'd put up on a personal webpage or blog.
* buy Nintendo?
* buy a fertilizer factory in Peru?
* go into the soft drinks business?
* open an on-line strip-joint and call it iBoobs?
* start shipping marvellously good-looking military hardware?
All of the above! Here would be Apple's long term fun plan: 1. Make a "next-generation" game console called i-Game that'll be the name of the system after Wii. The soft drink will be iJuice. The Fertilizer Factory in Peru will be used building explosives for their military hardware. Apple's Military toys will be iGrunt, iExplode, and iKill. The Online Strip Joint will be cover for their covert ops plan to steal industrial design ideas from Unlikely Sources, Inc, and it'll be code named iSpy.
Part of the proposed program would make it illegal to do so without a court order. And therefore, any evidence gained from a surreptitiously decrypted number would be inadmissible in court (and very embarrassing for the NSA).
See, technically the only thing that stops the police from tapping every phone (other than respect for the community) is that it's illegal to do so and any evidence gathered is wholly worthless.
Oh, please these aren't the police. Your local police could only have dreams of having a.005% of that sort of wiretapping ability. Be honest. These are Federal Spies and they aren't just tracking terrorists. That's just the current "hot button" issue that's the public excuse. I would like to know how long the NSA has really been doing this and what the "real" reason is. Terrorism or communism isn't even on my radar. Heck, total thought control isn't either for that control of media companies like Disney and Time Warner should be all that's required to keep the group think of the US all along the same lines.
I actually don't mind US Spies doing real Spy Stuff with all that data. Who knows there might be something actually useful in all that data. But I wouldn't want a single political interest to have oversight or use or knowledge of any of the details of the program. Call me wierd, but I can actually "trust" nameless US spies, but I couldn't "trust" any elected US politican with that kind of power.
This is frightening. It's like we're becoming the very thing we fought in the cold war. A totalitarian government.
But at least we have 37 types of cereal.
Hey, you don't realize how important those 37 types of cereal are to their plan, or all the damn fast food burger choices either. They want you to spend time trying to think up what's the best option on near meaningless things or things that could only affect you so you don't have any spare brain power left at the end of the day to think of how the government may not be serving your interests.
You missed it though. The demand was for $15 unlimited with a laptop or anyother freaking device that I damn well can connect to through the internet not $60 for their ultra platium edition plan that let's me do what I should be doing at $15 per month.
Face it, Nintendo may make games for them (and the system may be great for them) but Nintendo is no longer actively marketing towards Hard-Core gamers; with Animal Crossing, Brain Training and Nintendogs Nintendo has realized that they can be very successful with non-traditional gamers on a level no one ever has been (non-traditional as in women).
Will they be successful? I don't know, but the Nintendo DS has (so far) sold faster than the PS2 did simply because their potential market was much larger.
Um, you missed something about Nintendo when you were growing up. Nintendo has never courted the "hard core" gamer market. They have always tried to hit either the kid game or family game market, both of which is far larger than the hard core market ever will be.
In the end, it isn't about Media Player, per se, but Microsoft's domination of the software market. However, all the EU is doing is poking Gulliver with their Lilliputian sticks. Unless the EU plans on banning Microsoft entriely (and how could they!), they will never be able to put enough of a chokehold on Ballmer and Company to seriously dent their market share.
Um, actually, you'd be surprised at how "easy" it would be for them to officially ban MS software from the EU. Oh, the difficult part would be keeping people from using or buying it though, but why bother? The EU could pass a few laws that new OEM computer in the EU can have a non-EU designed/approved OS and software suite installed, or that certain software must submit their full source code to their government before the government is allowed to use it.
The EU could pass any laws that they want, but the hard part will be enforcing them. I bet you IBM, Sun, Red Hat, or QNX could build/sell an OS to the EU. I'm kinda of mixed in that I think that it is both a good and bad idea. It's good because it would force some companies to work against each other, but it doesn't, because MS wouldn't/couldn't sell there, and I'd bet you that MS could get the US to ban whoever emerges from that market from selling in the US. Well, maybe unless it happened to be another US company that was watching for that. IBM is the only company large enough to compete like that though.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a waste that people use their cars to go see a movie when they could be delivering food to the homeless shelter.
It's a waste that people are storing ice cream in the fridge when they could be storing donated blood plasma.
How did this get modded Insightful?
Its a waste of my time and money to donate food or resources to a homeless shelter when I could be watching a movie.
Its a waste of my time and blood plasma to donate for use to others when I could be storing ice cream in my freezer.
Am I a selfish SOB? No, I'd just rather only "donate" resources to family and maybe some friends. It's vastly wasteful of my resources to "help" nameless others when I could be "helping" those I know and have relationships with. I'd give a whole paycheck's worth for "family needs." I wouldn't give a whole paycheck to nameless others. I'd get the paycheck's worth back from family. Would I get the money back from nameless others? Here is a concept every organization that recieves donations having to give the money or resources back after about a year. When I was in scool, I had to sell all sorts of things to fund school activities. My kids do the same. Why can't these "homeless" work at selling something to fund their own "homeless" shelters?
There is a big cost diffrence if putting in a subdivision and burying the 7200 volt line into the subdivision transformers and burying a 500,000 transmission line. Safety is also a concern. Which line would you rather hit with a backhoe?
I'd rather those that dig up power lines be hit with the 500,000 transmission line and removed from the gene pool. It would be nice if fiber lines were laid in with these heavy duty transmission lines so idiots with backhoes don't just dig them up. My small city has been seperated from the rest of the internet because our main line out has been repeatedly dug up by backhoes. It takes about a day for them to fix. I would love for those internet backbones to be guarded with high voltage transmission lines. Any one with a few brain cells would call and have everything properly marked before digging.
It's all about cost versus risk. In this case, the risk of WinZip stormtroopers crashing through the skylight and throwing flash-bangs is so low as to be laughable. Microsoft, not so much...
I would have thought the same thing about fonts.
Um, the BSA are "generic" software troopers. They don't go in with a mind of checking one type of software; the BSA checks all installed software. It wouldn't matter what kinda of software that you had improper licenses for if they find out you'll be paying.
In some respects it would make since to bundle all the copyright orgs together so that they could check for all licensed software and content at once and send your fines on the same bill.
Just as long as Google doesn't replace Slashdot with GDot ... I'm thinking they're ok. /.er will end up there because we have dirty minds.
Nah, they'll start GSpot news for the ladies, and every
Do MMORPG's Cause People to Buy Fewer Games at Retail?
Yes? How hard is it to realize that paying $15/mo for (similar) entertainment is a better option than shelling out $50 every few weeks?
That comes out to $180 a year for MMORPGs. I may get 2 or 3 none current games a year for around $15-$20 each. I couldn't afford $180 a year for a MMORPG. Now, the nice thing about buying "older" games is that they are cheaper. I'd say that those that play MMORPGs for the long term social experience and enjoyment find the $180 a year money well spent and can't justify additional purchases of $40-$120 worth of games a year. Most kids or casual gamers do not buy/recieve a game a week, or a game a month. Think 1-2 at a birthday and 1-2 at Christmas.
Hey, there's an idea for a stupid lawsuit - sue to make pants manufacturers include a warning label on metal-zippered pants: "In case of thunderstorms, drop pants and hurl them away from you"
Hey, you wouldn't say that if lighting struck you in the crotch!
Educating all the bad programmers in the world has always been a stupid idea. ... At some point, when an entire population of users spends years using a tool wrong, you have to stop blaming the users and start fixing the tools.
I'm going to agree that "educating" those "bad" programmers that don't follow the basic rules/standards that "every programmer should follow" isn't useful. Because you aren't just dealing with "bad" but also with "lazy" or "rushed" folks. The problem with "fixing the tools" is that any useful functions are suddenly only accessible through wizards. I think that some untyped languages are used a bit than they should be. A strictly typed language isn't better; it just forces the "bad" and "lazy" to a certain min. standard. Of course if you had a langauge that forced the "bad" and "lazy" to met a very high standard, the general output "should" be higher. O.k. Maybe I'm wrong and we just need a better tools, which would mean in this case better langauages rather than a better IDEs.
Um, I don't know about you, but I'd want several of these all over the global. They may need to re-think their idea though. If major planet disease/bioterror strike wiped out all our food sources and we really needed this to reseed the global food sources, what are the odds of no one being able to get there to unlock it? Or better yet we've nuked our selves back and we know that their is the vault and close to where it is, but unforunately it's being guarded by polar bears that are hungry... O.k. long term I'd put my money on the nuclearly mutanted savages rather than the polar bear, but why not several of these on each major land mass near major crop lands? Heck, why stop at stock piling seeds? Why not stockpile tractors and fertilizer and enough resources that you could feed a major city within a year from a single stock pile?
After this, they're just going to have to find some *bigger* predator to take out the Army. It's a neverending cycle.
Congress? Of course what do use to get rid of politicans?
Exactly, which is why MS needs to offer both Vista and the alternative. The Vista dev protocols would ensure compatibility with the new OS, so new and upgraded apps would be fine. I'm not talking about a immediate release of the new OS, I'm talking 3-4 years down the road when Vista has a larger marketshare and there are fewer legacy apps that don't work with the new OS. Alternatively, a WinXP and WinME emulator could be included as an optional install, which would allow use of legacy apps without breaking the 'streamlined' philosophy of the new OS.
Are you kidding? Most developers can't even handle writing programs that run properly under a WinXP restricted user profile properly without error messages or dialogs. I get a warm fuzzy every time that I run an application that is actually designed properly around WinXP. WinXP restricted user profile isn't the best thing in the world, but every WinXP app should be tested to run properly only under the restricted user profile except for admin utilities. Few pieces of software seem to even bother with it though.
Microsoft run by a WalMart Exec. The mind boggles ....
heck, the parodies practically write themselves
The only way it could be even better if Hillary Clinton some how managed to become the CEO of MS.
Maybe it's the storage farm the NSA makes them build to store all the queries from every google user in the world...
Nah, that one would be completely sub-contracted by a secure no-name company that is below everyone's radar and could there for be built anywhere. I'm waiting for Google Census where they try to get real-time answers for the long form questions for everyone on Earth.
Now the question is: will the Yahoo and Microsoft data centers show up on Google Earth?
I think that it would be funnier if they both built datacenters in the same small town.
Like Americans students reciting the pledge of allegance every morning. Seriously what's up with that? and people don't even realise why people from other countries find that a little strange/scary.
If you really want the low down on that pledge of allegance crap, I'll let you in on it. It's a hold over when Eastern Europe was sending alot of people over here to be our brand new citizens. Ever wonder why the US is so hung up on English? Its sort of a related issue. Back then there wasn't any equal opp. laws or anything. Basically we made those new to the country feel like crap until they were good little US Citizens. Well what the hell is a US Citizen? First off you need to speak a US brand of English and get indoctrinated with our holidays and the pledge of allegance. Half the people that I've had an intellegent conversation on the topic admit that it is very Nazish, but it is the primary way we get those 2nd and 3rd generation new citizens to become "just like" everyone else. Who do you think pushes for that crap the most now a days? The families that remember coming here and think that the US is the best country on the planet. Remember there are reasons why alot of people don't like "public" education and the pledge of allegance is one of them.
What's up with the war fixation people?
;)
Shh, the not very big secret is that he US DOD spends major research funding on alots of things "war related." Just because its being billed as a chemical warfare agent removal system doesn't mean that the profressor or university working on it doesn't also see the usage for just environmental clean up. There just isn't a big US agency finacing research into environmental clean up. There is one paying for tech related to clean up the messes of war. The US professors are just using the grants and money that they can get.
Um, so include both, that way the Chinese and US governments would have to agree before using both sets of backdoors to get into that info. For minor privacy issues, that should be "good enough". The few things that I could envision the US and Chinese governments agreeing on something, I'd really, really hope that they actually have a backdoor to use though. What's it really matter to slashdot anyway? Don't we use our own set of encryption on top of the built-in encryption? That just makes sense.
Um, but I don't have a social networking account or a personal webpage! One of these days I'm going to have to make a list of things that I'd put up on a personal webpage or blog.
Is Apple going to...
* buy Nintendo?
* buy a fertilizer factory in Peru?
* go into the soft drinks business?
* open an on-line strip-joint and call it iBoobs?
* start shipping marvellously good-looking military hardware?
All of the above! Here would be Apple's long term fun plan: 1. Make a "next-generation" game console called i-Game that'll be the name of the system after Wii. The soft drink will be iJuice. The Fertilizer Factory in Peru will be used building explosives for their military hardware. Apple's Military toys will be iGrunt, iExplode, and iKill. The Online Strip Joint will be cover for their covert ops plan to steal industrial design ideas from Unlikely Sources, Inc, and it'll be code named iSpy.
Part of the proposed program would make it illegal to do so without a court order. And therefore, any evidence gained from a surreptitiously decrypted number would be inadmissible in court (and very embarrassing for the NSA).
.005% of that sort of wiretapping ability. Be honest. These are Federal Spies and they aren't just tracking terrorists. That's just the current "hot button" issue that's the public excuse. I would like to know how long the NSA has really been doing this and what the "real" reason is. Terrorism or communism isn't even on my radar. Heck, total thought control isn't either for that control of media companies like Disney and Time Warner should be all that's required to keep the group think of the US all along the same lines.
See, technically the only thing that stops the police from tapping every phone (other than respect for the community) is that it's illegal to do so and any evidence gathered is wholly worthless.
Oh, please these aren't the police. Your local police could only have dreams of having a
I actually don't mind US Spies doing real Spy Stuff with all that data. Who knows there might be something actually useful in all that data. But I wouldn't want a single political interest to have oversight or use or knowledge of any of the details of the program. Call me wierd, but I can actually "trust" nameless US spies, but I couldn't "trust" any elected US politican with that kind of power.
This is frightening. It's like we're becoming the very thing we fought in the cold war. A totalitarian government.
But at least we have 37 types of cereal.
Hey, you don't realize how important those 37 types of cereal are to their plan, or all the damn fast food burger choices either. They want you to spend time trying to think up what's the best option on near meaningless things or things that could only affect you so you don't have any spare brain power left at the end of the day to think of how the government may not be serving your interests.
My encryption key is:
1.....2.....3.....4.....5
Hey, how did you get my key!
Don't you asshats have a city to rebuild? Why the fuck are you wasting your constituent's money on this?
Why do you think that they have a city to rebuild? It wasn't because of a weather event.
You missed it though. The demand was for $15 unlimited with a laptop or anyother freaking device that I damn well can connect to through the internet not $60 for their ultra platium edition plan that let's me do what I should be doing at $15 per month.
Face it, Nintendo may make games for them (and the system may be great for them) but Nintendo is no longer actively marketing towards Hard-Core gamers; with Animal Crossing, Brain Training and Nintendogs Nintendo has realized that they can be very successful with non-traditional gamers on a level no one ever has been (non-traditional as in women).
Will they be successful? I don't know, but the Nintendo DS has (so far) sold faster than the PS2 did simply because their potential market was much larger.
Um, you missed something about Nintendo when you were growing up. Nintendo has never courted the "hard core" gamer market. They have always tried to hit either the kid game or family game market, both of which is far larger than the hard core market ever will be.
In the end, it isn't about Media Player, per se, but Microsoft's domination of the software market. However, all the EU is doing is poking Gulliver with their Lilliputian sticks. Unless the EU plans on banning Microsoft entriely (and how could they!), they will never be able to put enough of a chokehold on Ballmer and Company to seriously dent their market share.
Um, actually, you'd be surprised at how "easy" it would be for them to officially ban MS software from the EU. Oh, the difficult part would be keeping people from using or buying it though, but why bother? The EU could pass a few laws that new OEM computer in the EU can have a non-EU designed/approved OS and software suite installed, or that certain software must submit their full source code to their government before the government is allowed to use it.
The EU could pass any laws that they want, but the hard part will be enforcing them. I bet you IBM, Sun, Red Hat, or QNX could build/sell an OS to the EU. I'm kinda of mixed in that I think that it is both a good and bad idea. It's good because it would force some companies to work against each other, but it doesn't, because MS wouldn't/couldn't sell there, and I'd bet you that MS could get the US to ban whoever emerges from that market from selling in the US. Well, maybe unless it happened to be another US company that was watching for that. IBM is the only company large enough to compete like that though.