If they still offer it, try and get your hands on one of the sampler discs (100 MP3 tunes from different bands, broken down by genre) and see if you don't find a dozen albums you want.
Very interesting idea - however, I can't find sample MP3 CDs on the website. Are you talking about this, or something else? If it's an actual CD, can you please post the name? I'd be willing to pay for a CD like this, to figure out which artists have some potential...
Any man or woman, not being married to each other, who lewdly and lasciviously associates and cohabits together, and any man or woman, married or unmarried, who is guilty of open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than 1 year, or a fine of not more than $1,000.00. No prosecution shall be commenced under this section after 1 year from the time of committing the offense.
Any man or woman, not being married to each other, who shall lewdly and lasciviously associate and cohabit together, and any man or woman, married or unmarried, who shall be guilty of open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not more than 1 year, or by fine of not more than $500.00. No prosecution shall be commenced under this section after 1 year from the time of committing the offense.
I guess the original "shalls" sounded too biblical...
Most Michigan businesses (and probably most government offices) use NAT or proxy servers for their internet connections. I believe a zealous prosecutor could interpret proxy servers as hiding the specifics of the computer that is making the requests for connections.
Thus, just about every person with internet access at work is breaking Michigan law, under one interpretation. Including the AG that you are emailing.
As long as you are sending long and technical emails to the AG, why not ask if a spammer who fakes his headers is breaking the law...
Tariffs act like a tax that we all pay but can't see, for the benefit of a single group.
Let's say the U.S can produce a widget for $2 and Third-World country X can produce it for $1. Any reasonable business person (and many consumers) would save 50% and buy the $1 widget. Of course, the American Widget Workers will scream bloody murder, and ask for some government protection.
So the U.S. puts a 100% tariff on widgets, so that the U.S. companies can compete. Great for the widget makers, but everyone that uses widgets is paying a dollar more than they would have to. Any product that uses widgets is that much more expensive. Companies that use widget-based products need more money for inventory and can spend less on salaries, so there are less total jobs in the economy. The only people that benefit are the American Widget Workers. And even they don't benefit as much as they think they do - the tariff works it's way invisibly through the economy, making the goods they buy more expensive than they would normally be. Plus, the third-world manufacturer can still sell widgets to other countries, whose products will have an advantage over the U.S., since they'll be using half-price widgets! There goes the exchange rate on a dollar...
Now replace widgets with software, and it gets a whole lot worse. What business doesn't use software? What sector of the economy wouldn't be helped by having to pay much less for software?
If job security really bothers you, there are some software jobs that can't be outsourced. Most U.S. military projects go to American companies, for reasons of security. It's even better if you can get security clearance.
It's not easy to be a worker in a fast-paced economy, where the skill sets are changing and job security is non-existant. But it's a lot better than the alternative, a broken economy where the government protects the jobs of a few privilidged workers at the expense of everyone else.
They (Yahoo!) have the games on demand service. There are many other semi-repackaged versions of this. Generally older games. But good for the non-hardcore gamer, I think. I'm playing Age of Wonders which I never got to play, with The Outforce. They've got some Star Trek games, too. For me, it is worth the money, because I almost never buy software. Especially after the MOO3 disaster, I don't think I'll buy again for a very long time.
Do you really use this? $5 for only 3 days seems like a lot for a PC game, especially considering you can pick some of these games up for $15 in a bargin bin. Some of those I recently bought for $7.50 each.
Now, the site in the story allows unlimited downloads for $10, which sounds like a great deal, worth the premium for not having to dig through bargin bins. I wish I knew enough of the language to determine if the games were in English or if they were localized versions.
and a room full of adults would have a problem w/ nudity because..? not everyone in the world is a reactionary, fundemental puritan. You know most of the world isnt as alarmed by people without clothes on as america eh? again, this American-ism is the minority.
Sure, you could argue that this should be no problem for a bunch of adults. But after a few weeks of up-skirt photos and goatse uploads, the place will start looking like Hooters - no women except for the employeees.
Pardon the sudden rant, but why can't there be an actuall MMOG that people can spend, oh, 1-3 hours on a week instead of 10-30 hours a week and still have fun.
Didn't the old Trade Wars BBS game have a daily limit? Maybe it was just the one I played, but I remember only having a certain number of moves per day, so that I'd have to come back 24 hours later to play again. This was probably because if someone on a dial-up decided to play 16 hours straight, that's 16 hours that no one else could use that connection.
Of course, if a game put in a limit like this, the hardcore guys would bitterly complain that they were only able to play 1 hour, 4 hours, or even 8 hours a day. And, of course, the company that sold the game would sell advanced accounts without the restrictions...
What about something like this: important events that last 1-2 hours, that everyone knows when they occur. For instance, a massive-multiplayer sci-fi game, where you play as troops attacking some alien stronghold, and you know your troop ship arrives at 10 PM Eastern Standard. If you want, you can log in early, grab a few other guys and go into the holodeck to try out moves, tactics, and qualify for advanded weapons, or just stay "in statis" (offline) and log in just before the real action occurs. You could reward the diehards with the occasional unplanned "real" action, like an encounter with an undetected alien ship, with the opportunity for aquiring cool weapons.
I don't see any reason why you couldn't somehow limit the time commitment, but I imagine its the people who like to play 10-30 hours a week that support the monthly subscription model.
I didn't really want to get into a Isreal / Palestinian arguement. I just wanted to make the point that UN resolutions toward the Middle East have more to do with foriegn policy than setting up global laws that all countries agree on. As for International Treaties, they get a lot of press, but their also easy to break (the ABM treaty and the Kyoto Protocol, for instance). It seems silly to me to base arguements for war on some pact that was signed for political reasons and that the U.S. would break in a second if it was in its interest.
I'm not sure about your use of the word "Philistine". Did you mean "A person who is uninterested in intellectual pursuits"? Or did you mean Palestinians instead?
Jews make up about 6 million of the U.S.'s 290 million, or 2%. That doesn't seem to be a huge voting block to me, although it may be proportionally bigger if they have a higher voter turnout or vote as a block. It seems to me that the U.S.'s pro-Isreal stance comes from the benefits of having a solidly pro-U.S. country in the Middle East, and voter support comes from leftover guilt from the Holocaust, as well as some support from the Christian Right (there are a few who think Isreal is helping the world get closer to Armageddon, the Rapture, and Jesus's return).
Basically Bush is saying that if the UN won't back up its resolutions with force when the crunch comes, it's just a joke, a debating and posturing society with no teeth, a sideshow.
If they won't enforce their own edicts by going after a dictator who makes, and has a record of using, banned weapons of mass destruction, why should any country or multinational corporation pay any attention to their documents and edicts?
But this has already been proven... Just look at all the unenforced resolutions toward Isreal here (or the Google cache
here if that page gets Slashdotted).
The company is investigating whether open source tools are adequate for the task of real-time simulation, in a military training setting.
The question is: is it reasonable to run the simulation on top of open source components (i.e. RT Linux), using open-source tools (GNU C++, f2c, etc).? The answer is yes - simulation can be run on almost any system that meets the requirements for hard or near-hard real time.
However, this DOESN'T mean you can run an F-16 simulator on your desktop. While the tools may be open-source, the actually simulation code will be owned by the government, and won't be freely distributed. Plus, it is not an easy problem to divorce the code from the hardware. You have to build that into the code, and most of this code was written in Fortran or Ada, back when they felt lucky not to be writing in assembler.
The comparison to Apache is good: can the military run it's webservers off Apache? Sure. Does that mean Joe Linux can have a.mil site? Not really.
Right now 4 GB of memory might be enough. But switching to 64 bit when we are already hitting the wall is not an option. The point with going to 64 bits now is that we can add memory past 4 GB without the headaches of moving to a new platform, since the transition is already done.
Oh, come on! Don't you want the fun of playing with the 64-bit equivalent of extended and expanded memory? Endless tinkering of autoexec.bat and config.sys! Endless reboots! Doom 3 runs in it's own operating system (the way God intended)!
Bring on the half-ass memory solutions! We should be deep in flavor-country by 2005.
Re:Business Plan Math for the Startup
on
Salon Asks for Help
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
You might be forgetting something - David Talbot probably bought a house in bubbleville. If they can find cheap office space in San Francisco, great, but anywhere else in the world and Talbot will probably have to move, and sell his house at a huge loss (if he can sell it at all). I imagine he fiananced most of it, so moving the office may save Salon, but not Talbot, from bancruptcy.
Personally, I think Salon is marching down the road to bancruptcy and reorganization, and they don't have much choice, for business and personal financial reasons.
Some have suggested that the formula for Valentine's Day gifts is:
R = P / M
where R is the romantic level, P is price, and M is mass. This seems to work in some cases: when flowers are the same mass, the ones that cost more are more romantic. Ditto for wine. Diamonds are light and pricey, and thus even more romantic than flowers. However, RAM, no matter what the bus speed, has not been found to be romantic. This has led some to propose the formula:
R = P / (M * U)
where U is utility - thus, the more useful it is, the less romantic it is. Mathemeticians are still applying this formula in the field, looking for counter-examples and debating the consequences.
WHY wouldn't they spell-check their home page? CONCIEVE idiots!
In context:
Our goal is to help clients concieve, plan for and implement powerful XML based websites and systems. - Doug Wallace, President, Agile
Now that's what I call XTreme Editing! I'd probably add a hyphen ("XML-based"). But, it's a quote - maybe he really spelled it that way when he said it.
I hope they ran the book through a spell-checker...
It sounds like your job can't be oursourced
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
...because I see it first hand. We are doing a Java GUI project with 1 person in US and 3 in India. I'm the 1 still in the US. And it works, and it saves money (50% to 60% reduction in sw development costs). The engineers in India are pretty good, and with a good internet connection there is very little holding us back from sending more work over there.
Wait, let me get this straight. I'm assuming that your four-man operation replaces a three-or-four man operation in the U.S. Let's say salary costs are $50,000 per U.S. programmer, $15,000 per Indian programmer. A four-man U.S. team is $200,000 a year, while a one US, three Indian team is $95,000, for a savings of 48%.
Great! Your company now has an extra $105K to spend! Either you get a raise (not likely), or another team can be created, employing 8 programmers where four were employed before (and allowing your company to do more work). Of course, the real ratio is a little higher - you need slightly more support staff (management, office workers, etc) to support twice as many workers, on both sides of the ocean, so it's possible your company could jump from 4 workers to 10, for the same amount of money. Seems like a net good to me.
Further, the U.S. is the top market for high technology products, because we have the extra cash to spend on them. Increased employment in other countries raises their GDP, which means they can better afford high-end toys, which means they get cheaper and better for us, etc. etc.
Take a look at the numbers - globalization has been in full swing for a few decades now, and the U.S. has the lowest unemployment rate in years - lower than they thought possible a decade ago! Almost everyone wins when the people that can make a product the cheapest are allowed to do it. The only ones who lose, in the short run, are those who are displaced by the production move. The remedy for that is short-term government support, and the best way to get out is to acquire new skills.
Tell your children to become engineers. The problem-solving skills you learn will help them easily jump from career to career, as needed. Encourage them to take some liberal arts classes, too, to make them think more flexibly and excercise that right brain a little. May I suggest an economics class?
Per-pixel reflection vector calculations for specular, instead of an
interpolated half-angle. The only remaining effect that has any visual
dependency on the underlying geometry is the shape of the specular highlight.
Ideally, you want the same final image for a surface regardless of if it is
two giant triangles, or a mesh of 1024 triangles. This will not be true if
any calculation done at a vertex involves anything other than linear math
operations. The specular half-angle calculation involves normalizations, so
the interpolation across triangles on a surface will be dependent on exactly
where the vertexes are located. The most visible end result of this is that
on large, flat, shiny surfaces where you expect a clean highlight circle
moving across it, you wind up with a highlight that distorts into an L shape
around the triangulation line.
OK, I did some 3D imaging math about 10 years ago (when you had to code your own drivers to get SuperVGA mode under DOS), so I think I get what he's talking about: the problem of how to show the reflection of one object (or light source) off another object. I've never heard of "interpolated half-angle" or "specular highlights", or the "triangulation line". Anyone know what he is talking about?
About 12 percent of the queries received by the root server on Oct. 4, were for nonexistent top-level domains, such as ".elvis", ".corp", and ".localhost"
Whenever a website demands an email address to continue, I give them a horribly wrong address like "heywood@jabuzzoff.com". I imagine a few of these are from people who have submitted emails like "me@elvis.lives". The email addresses get sold to spammers, causing hundreds of bad DNS lookups with each bulk mailing.
As a side note, why are trolls posting on Slashdot's main page? Did someone hack into editor's accounts?
Nope, just dumb webmasters. As far as I can tell, they're using a server-side browser-sniff to send different code to different web browsers. Thing is, they're mis-identifying mozilla (and presumably other mozilla-based browsers) as Netscape. Then, it looks like they still subscribe to the theory that there'e only one Netscape, and are using one tailored for NN4.x, hence it looks crappy. Opera gets given the IE style sheet, and renders everything just fine. I suspect Moz-based browsers would similarly work fine if they got given that CSS.
Isn't there a way in Moz to fix this? I did a search at Mozilla.org on browser sniff, which led me to general.useragent.override and user agent strings. The documentation says the user can redefine the user-agent string and make a Mozilla browser tell websites that it is IE, but it doesn't tell how to do this.
This could be a cool Mozilla hack - a sidebar panel where you can choose what web browser you want Mozilla to pretend to be, and see how the pages are rendered differently. It could also get around the stupidity of some webmasters.
That site has been up for months. But wait, if everyone trieds to collect, and the payment is less that $5/ person, then it goes to a charity (I'm guessing the the EFF), not the people. We can't let that happen!
The music industry giving a payment to an organization that lobbies for consumer rights? Sure....
Instead, this will probably take the form of education grants, so that schools and libraries get "discounts" on the retail prices for certain media. Maybe they'll even use it as R&D money, to distribute DRM hardware and media to schools.
But I'm sure the prosecuters of this case will take some of their portion of the settlement and give it to the EFF...
A TiVo is as much a VCR as a spreadsheet is a calculator. Sure they both do calculations, but they are WORLDS apart in how they work.
How about the difference between TiVo and a VCR is the difference between a computer and a typewriter? I can imagine the same complaints from office workers when the computer was introduced:
"It takes up too much space"
"It is too expensive"
"My typewriter does everything this computer does - why would I pay for a machine to apply the whiteout?"
The analogy falls apart a little. My TiVo is much more reliable than my computer. The only problems I've had were simple user errors (told it to only save 3 episodes of a program, went on a two week trip with an unwatched episode), or with the IR blaster (channels not changed correctly). Practice has taken care of the human errors, and an IR cage and TiVo updates took care of the second.
Further, a computer is much more capable than a typewriter. More than the TiVo has over the VCR. But I'll stick by the analogy - once you have a digital interface to TV rather than the old analog one, interesting things become possible. I'm not talking digital vs. analog signal, but digital vs. analog access. In that way, its a lot like the difference between CDs and audio tapes, although TiVo acts more like an MP3 player than some CD player.
So, you get two analogies for the price of one post:
"TiVo is to a VCR like an MP3 player is to an audio tape recorder".
Slashdot Mirror
Very interesting idea - however, I can't find sample MP3 CDs on the website. Are you talking about this, or something else? If it's an actual CD, can you please post the name? I'd be willing to pay for a CD like this, to figure out which artists have some potential...
When timothy posts it again tommorow, then it will be a dupe.
Oops - the link should be this instead. Damn spastic posting finger...
Most Michigan businesses (and probably most government offices) use NAT or proxy servers for their internet connections. I believe a zealous prosecutor could interpret proxy servers as hiding the specifics of the computer that is making the requests for connections.
Thus, just about every person with internet access at work is breaking Michigan law, under one interpretation. Including the AG that you are emailing.
As long as you are sending long and technical emails to the AG, why not ask if a spammer who fakes his headers is breaking the law...
Let's say the U.S can produce a widget for $2 and Third-World country X can produce it for $1. Any reasonable business person (and many consumers) would save 50% and buy the $1 widget. Of course, the American Widget Workers will scream bloody murder, and ask for some government protection.
So the U.S. puts a 100% tariff on widgets, so that the U.S. companies can compete. Great for the widget makers, but everyone that uses widgets is paying a dollar more than they would have to. Any product that uses widgets is that much more expensive. Companies that use widget-based products need more money for inventory and can spend less on salaries, so there are less total jobs in the economy. The only people that benefit are the American Widget Workers. And even they don't benefit as much as they think they do - the tariff works it's way invisibly through the economy, making the goods they buy more expensive than they would normally be. Plus, the third-world manufacturer can still sell widgets to other countries, whose products will have an advantage over the U.S., since they'll be using half-price widgets! There goes the exchange rate on a dollar...
Now replace widgets with software, and it gets a whole lot worse. What business doesn't use software? What sector of the economy wouldn't be helped by having to pay much less for software?
If job security really bothers you, there are some software jobs that can't be outsourced. Most U.S. military projects go to American companies, for reasons of security. It's even better if you can get security clearance.
It's not easy to be a worker in a fast-paced economy, where the skill sets are changing and job security is non-existant. But it's a lot better than the alternative, a broken economy where the government protects the jobs of a few privilidged workers at the expense of everyone else.
Well, take a look at the page source:
Seriously, the HTML doesn't look too bad. In some ways, it's more readable than the rendered copy - such as his list of data items rendered in XML.Do you really use this? $5 for only 3 days seems like a lot for a PC game, especially considering you can pick some of these games up for $15 in a bargin bin. Some of those I recently bought for $7.50 each.
Now, the site in the story allows unlimited downloads for $10, which sounds like a great deal, worth the premium for not having to dig through bargin bins. I wish I knew enough of the language to determine if the games were in English or if they were localized versions.
Sure, you could argue that this should be no problem for a bunch of adults. But after a few weeks of up-skirt photos and goatse uploads, the place will start looking like Hooters - no women except for the employeees.
Didn't the old Trade Wars BBS game have a daily limit? Maybe it was just the one I played, but I remember only having a certain number of moves per day, so that I'd have to come back 24 hours later to play again. This was probably because if someone on a dial-up decided to play 16 hours straight, that's 16 hours that no one else could use that connection.
Of course, if a game put in a limit like this, the hardcore guys would bitterly complain that they were only able to play 1 hour, 4 hours, or even 8 hours a day. And, of course, the company that sold the game would sell advanced accounts without the restrictions...
What about something like this: important events that last 1-2 hours, that everyone knows when they occur. For instance, a massive-multiplayer sci-fi game, where you play as troops attacking some alien stronghold, and you know your troop ship arrives at 10 PM Eastern Standard. If you want, you can log in early, grab a few other guys and go into the holodeck to try out moves, tactics, and qualify for advanded weapons, or just stay "in statis" (offline) and log in just before the real action occurs. You could reward the diehards with the occasional unplanned "real" action, like an encounter with an undetected alien ship, with the opportunity for aquiring cool weapons.
I don't see any reason why you couldn't somehow limit the time commitment, but I imagine its the people who like to play 10-30 hours a week that support the monthly subscription model.
I'm not sure about your use of the word "Philistine". Did you mean "A person who is uninterested in intellectual pursuits"? Or did you mean Palestinians instead?
Jews make up about 6 million of the U.S.'s 290 million, or 2%. That doesn't seem to be a huge voting block to me, although it may be proportionally bigger if they have a higher voter turnout or vote as a block. It seems to me that the U.S.'s pro-Isreal stance comes from the benefits of having a solidly pro-U.S. country in the Middle East, and voter support comes from leftover guilt from the Holocaust, as well as some support from the Christian Right (there are a few who think Isreal is helping the world get closer to Armageddon, the Rapture, and Jesus's return).
If they won't enforce their own edicts by going after a dictator who makes, and has a record of using, banned weapons of mass destruction, why should any country or multinational corporation pay any attention to their documents and edicts?
But this has already been proven... Just look at all the unenforced resolutions toward Isreal here (or the Google cache here if that page gets Slashdotted).
The question is: is it reasonable to run the simulation on top of open source components (i.e. RT Linux), using open-source tools (GNU C++, f2c, etc).? The answer is yes - simulation can be run on almost any system that meets the requirements for hard or near-hard real time.
However, this DOESN'T mean you can run an F-16 simulator on your desktop. While the tools may be open-source, the actually simulation code will be owned by the government, and won't be freely distributed. Plus, it is not an easy problem to divorce the code from the hardware. You have to build that into the code, and most of this code was written in Fortran or Ada, back when they felt lucky not to be writing in assembler.
The comparison to Apache is good: can the military run it's webservers off Apache? Sure. Does that mean Joe Linux can have a .mil site? Not really.
Oh, come on! Don't you want the fun of playing with the 64-bit equivalent of extended and expanded memory? Endless tinkering of autoexec.bat and config.sys! Endless reboots! Doom 3 runs in it's own operating system (the way God intended)!
Bring on the half-ass memory solutions! We should be deep in flavor-country by 2005.
Personally, I think Salon is marching down the road to bancruptcy and reorganization, and they don't have much choice, for business and personal financial reasons.
R = P / M
where R is the romantic level, P is price, and M is mass. This seems to work in some cases: when flowers are the same mass, the ones that cost more are more romantic. Ditto for wine. Diamonds are light and pricey, and thus even more romantic than flowers. However, RAM, no matter what the bus speed, has not been found to be romantic. This has led some to propose the formula:
R = P / (M * U)
where U is utility - thus, the more useful it is, the less romantic it is. Mathemeticians are still applying this formula in the field, looking for counter-examples and debating the consequences.
In context:
Our goal is to help clients concieve, plan for and implement powerful XML based websites and systems. - Doug Wallace, President, Agile
Now that's what I call XTreme Editing! I'd probably add a hyphen ("XML-based"). But, it's a quote - maybe he really spelled it that way when he said it.
I hope they ran the book through a spell-checker...
Wait, let me get this straight. I'm assuming that your four-man operation replaces a three-or-four man operation in the U.S. Let's say salary costs are $50,000 per U.S. programmer, $15,000 per Indian programmer. A four-man U.S. team is $200,000 a year, while a one US, three Indian team is $95,000, for a savings of 48%.
Great! Your company now has an extra $105K to spend! Either you get a raise (not likely), or another team can be created, employing 8 programmers where four were employed before (and allowing your company to do more work). Of course, the real ratio is a little higher - you need slightly more support staff (management, office workers, etc) to support twice as many workers, on both sides of the ocean, so it's possible your company could jump from 4 workers to 10, for the same amount of money. Seems like a net good to me.
Further, the U.S. is the top market for high technology products, because we have the extra cash to spend on them. Increased employment in other countries raises their GDP, which means they can better afford high-end toys, which means they get cheaper and better for us, etc. etc.
Take a look at the numbers - globalization has been in full swing for a few decades now, and the U.S. has the lowest unemployment rate in years - lower than they thought possible a decade ago! Almost everyone wins when the people that can make a product the cheapest are allowed to do it. The only ones who lose, in the short run, are those who are displaced by the production move. The remedy for that is short-term government support, and the best way to get out is to acquire new skills.
Tell your children to become engineers. The problem-solving skills you learn will help them easily jump from career to career, as needed. Encourage them to take some liberal arts classes, too, to make them think more flexibly and excercise that right brain a little. May I suggest an economics class?
Yes, yes it does. Thanks.
Per-pixel reflection vector calculations for specular, instead of an interpolated half-angle. The only remaining effect that has any visual dependency on the underlying geometry is the shape of the specular highlight. Ideally, you want the same final image for a surface regardless of if it is two giant triangles, or a mesh of 1024 triangles. This will not be true if any calculation done at a vertex involves anything other than linear math operations. The specular half-angle calculation involves normalizations, so the interpolation across triangles on a surface will be dependent on exactly where the vertexes are located. The most visible end result of this is that on large, flat, shiny surfaces where you expect a clean highlight circle moving across it, you wind up with a highlight that distorts into an L shape around the triangulation line.
OK, I did some 3D imaging math about 10 years ago (when you had to code your own drivers to get SuperVGA mode under DOS), so I think I get what he's talking about: the problem of how to show the reflection of one object (or light source) off another object. I've never heard of "interpolated half-angle" or "specular highlights", or the "triangulation line". Anyone know what he is talking about?
Followup question - if it isn't an editor's job to explain technical terms and abbeviations, and to correct mis-spellings, what is an editor's job?
Whenever a website demands an email address to continue, I give them a horribly wrong address like "heywood@jabuzzoff.com". I imagine a few of these are from people who have submitted emails like "me@elvis.lives". The email addresses get sold to spammers, causing hundreds of bad DNS lookups with each bulk mailing.
As a side note, why are trolls posting on Slashdot's main page? Did someone hack into editor's accounts?
Isn't there a way in Moz to fix this? I did a search at Mozilla.org on browser sniff, which led me to general.useragent.override and user agent strings. The documentation says the user can redefine the user-agent string and make a Mozilla browser tell websites that it is IE, but it doesn't tell how to do this.
This could be a cool Mozilla hack - a sidebar panel where you can choose what web browser you want Mozilla to pretend to be, and see how the pages are rendered differently. It could also get around the stupidity of some webmasters.
It looks like they are working on something like this, but it's hard to get right.
The music industry giving a payment to an organization that lobbies for consumer rights? Sure....
Instead, this will probably take the form of education grants, so that schools and libraries get "discounts" on the retail prices for certain media. Maybe they'll even use it as R&D money, to distribute DRM hardware and media to schools.
But I'm sure the prosecuters of this case will take some of their portion of the settlement and give it to the EFF...
How about the difference between TiVo and a VCR is the difference between a computer and a typewriter? I can imagine the same complaints from office workers when the computer was introduced:
"It takes up too much space"
"It is too expensive"
"My typewriter does everything this computer does - why would I pay for a machine to apply the whiteout?"
The analogy falls apart a little. My TiVo is much more reliable than my computer. The only problems I've had were simple user errors (told it to only save 3 episodes of a program, went on a two week trip with an unwatched episode), or with the IR blaster (channels not changed correctly). Practice has taken care of the human errors, and an IR cage and TiVo updates took care of the second.
Further, a computer is much more capable than a typewriter. More than the TiVo has over the VCR. But I'll stick by the analogy - once you have a digital interface to TV rather than the old analog one, interesting things become possible. I'm not talking digital vs. analog signal, but digital vs. analog access. In that way, its a lot like the difference between CDs and audio tapes, although TiVo acts more like an MP3 player than some CD player.
So, you get two analogies for the price of one post:
"TiVo is to a VCR like an MP3 player is to an audio tape recorder".