I've used systems that had both Shift Lock and Caps Lock.
Shift Lock would lock Shift on, giving you capitals by default (and punctuation instead of numbers); but if you Shifted manually, it would effective cancel the Shift Lock, as shift worked as a toggle bit.
Caps Lock would lock in capitals, regardless of what you did with Shift, and wouldn't cause numbers to be shifted to symbols.
I view that as the logical and consistent behavior. Not necessarily the most useful, but logical and consistent.
Yeah, sure, if you happened to have bought the OS within a certain time limit before the next version, there was an upgrade. But there was no general upgrade program, and there's no guarantee of future time-limited upgrade programs.
You're welcome to do raw OpenGL if you want. The problem is, developers want a nice easy way to (for example) draw a line of specified thickness from point (x1,y1) to point (x2,y2).
OpenGL theoretically offers that, but in practice the drivers provided by the video card vendors are riddled with bugs. On some machines you get an antialiased line; on some you don't. On some machines you get a line of the correct width, on some the lines are always 1 pixel wide.
So Apple does what they have to do. They build their own Core Graphics API which provides a call to draw an anti-aliased line of set thickness. Core Graphics then does whatever dicking around with quads and textures is necessary to implement that on top of the crappy driver code delivered by ATI and nVidia.
The DoD testing germ warfare agents on civilian populations in Florida. (A quick Google for "florida germ warfare tests" will bring up a ton of articles.)
Quaker Oats and MIT feeding kids radioactive oatmeal to see what happened. (Without parental knowledge.)
ECHELON. The EU reports are quite comprehensive and available online.
The secret torture camps run by the Allies at the end of WW II, where Germans were tortured for information.
The thing about most conspiracy theories is they're no worse than things our governments have either done in the past, or considered doing.
Some of the real plans are downright weird, too. The US military actively considered trying to develop a Gay Sex Bomb that would demoralize the enemy by making the troops all hot for each other. And that was during the Clinton administration, not back in the 50s.
I think that the UK or USA needs to have a true trigger-happy fascist government, complete with large scale death camps. Only then will people learn to take freedom seriously. The UK is full of compacent people who say "Well, it's never happened here, good old England, go ahead and give us ID cards and put cameras everywhere"; and the USA is full of people who say "Well, I'd just get my rifle out and see them off". Both groups need a dose of reality.
At the same time, since these devices are now on networks, there is a real possibility of them getting hacked.
Well, first off my DirecTiVo has no network option, and it's still crippled.
Secondly, there's a simple solution which would enable them to comply with the letter and spirit of the GPL: Put a DIP switch inside the unit that turned off the signature verification.
And thirdly, yesterday I had a successful Denial of Service attack perpetrated against my TiVo by TiVo/DirecTV themselves, who somehow screwed up a bunch of people's boxes by sending an erroneous "You are no longer authorized" message.
The city knew they were going to stop paying for the software and be unable to operate the garage. It was the city's decision to fail to warn people and to trap those cars.
The fact that the city gambled on being able to use the software illegally to continue operating the garage does not absolve them of the blame, or shift the blame onto the software company.
Similarly, if I rent out property and decide to stop paying for the electricity, it's my fault when the tenants find themselves with no lights--not the electric company's fault. Even if I thought I'd be able to run a long extension cord from the apartment next door.
Not really. HTML was designed to be in the same style as SGML (and many other markup languages), but it wasn't really SGML, none of the implementations used SGML technology and the DTDs came after the implementations.
Wrong. Tim Berners-Lee's first code used SGML software; check out the section headed "FORMAT CONVERSION FROM SGML".
Blizzard could easily offer free downloads or dirt cheap demo CDs for people requesting them online, and still let Best Buy charge whatever they want for a fancy box on a shelf.
Shakespeare is consider high brow, even cultural, but if you believe some english language students many of the names in his plays are nothing but plays on the then slang names for toilets. Oh yeah, very classy.
That's only the half of it. Read Romeo and Juliet and you can't help but be struck by the fact that it's full of dick jokes from start to finish.
Who would buy something under those terms? I can't imagine making a major investment where someone else is in complete control of it and gets to re-bill me whatever they want whenever they want or else the whole thing becomes useless.
I can. I own a DirecTV TiVo. As well as the box I had dual coax run down from the roof and routed through the walls, a pair of sockets plastered in and painted, a satellite dish mounted on the roof, and I paid for it all. I pay $50 a month for the service. If I stop paying, the hardware and the cabling work are useless.
Remember that $66,000 a year is small change to a city government. They probably waste that much on gasoline for unnecessarily large and inefficient fleet vehicles.
I worked for a company that made business software.
We offered customers a choice of terms. They could buy the software outright, or they could rent it by the month.
If they chose to rent it by the month, you're damn right we made it expire if the software key expired. Call it a "logic bomb" if you like, but I don't have an ethical problem with that, any more than I have an ethical problem with the phone company disconnecting me if I stop paying my phone bill.
That's like saying, "don't whine about the cost of gas -- nobody made you buy that car".
And as a Prius driver, I say that about SUV drivers all the time.
Say there's a movie you really like. So you want to buy a copy on DVD so you can watch it whenever you want. Suprise! No more DVDs! All the good movies are now DRM files that you download.
Then I pirate it.
I choose not to consent to DRM. You are free to do likewise.
Your example isn't really analogous to the situation. In this case, the person who owns the car parking space and the person who owns the key to the lock are two different people, and both need to cooperate for you to get your car. In your car parking analogy, the parking space and lock are controlled by the same person.
So, let's make your analogy truly analogous.
Your friend has a garage. He gets a fancy electronic alarm system installed, with an integrated electrical garage door opener, like the system I have.
Your friend says you can park your car in his garage. Then he decides he doesn't want to pay the agreed upon monthly fee for the alarm system monitoring any more.
In response, the security company turns off the alarm system, which has the side effect of disabling the automatic garage door opener they installed and own. As a result, you can't get your car out of your friend's garage.
Now, do you really think the security company would be found guilty of car theft in that situation? I don't. I think the dispute would be between you and your friend.
It would be up to your friend to get his garage door open somehow and release your car, and if that meant ripping the garage door off or partially demolishing a wall that would be his problem, he'd have to hire builders to do that. And if you didn't like having to wait around to get your car, it'd be your friend you'd be suing.
Similarly, it's up to Hoboken to work out a way to get the cars out of their car park. If that involves a crane, it's their own stupid fault, they should have thought of that before they decided to stop paying for the ability to get cars in and out by robot.
I keep hearing this "it's ok to pirate something if I never intended to buy it anyway," line of reasoning. It's NOT ok for a person to pirate something they don't intend to buy it...if they don't intend to buy it, they have no right to have it, use it, or reap any benefits it may offer.
You may be right legally, but I believe you were responding to an ethical argument, not a legal one.
I think that if a piece of software is only available for Windows, the ethical thing to do is to pirate it and run it on a pirate copy of Windows.
No, I'm not trolling. Just as I refuse to shop at Wal-Mart and avoid buying Chinese goods, so I refuse to give financial support to the Redmond empire, directly or indirectly. I do my best to simply use alternatives, but if I have to get at some data that's only readable by some Windows-only software, I'll use a pirate copy. If the game is available on console, Mac or Linux, I'll buy that version. (Unless the game is from Microsoft, like "Age of Empires", in which case I'll pirate it.)
So, it's a given that there's no way I'd buy a piece of Windows software under any circumstances. That being the case, why does it matter if I pirate Windows-only games?
You say the companies will be deprived of revenue? Good, I want them to be deprived of revenue. They support Microsoft, I'd like to see them deprived of so much revenue that they go out of business.
The point is, there's still hardware available today that will play all PlayStation games. I still have some great PlayStation games that I play. I expect I'll still be playing them on occasion in another 3-4 years when I have a PS3.
Similarly, there's hardware out today that will still run the handheld games I bought 5 years ago.
I don't have any Mac or PC games that old that still run properly, unless it's via open source engine replacements (e.g. ScummVM, Infocom games).
Hence, when looking at what games to buy, console games are a much more attractive proposition. As well as the longevity there's no dicking around with drivers, and there's no need for expensive hardware upgrades every 6-12 months. It's no surprise that I haven't bought a non-console game in ages.
HTML did not come about by having a committee sit for months in a room and then hand down graven tablets to be implemented.
No, it came about from taking an existing standard which a committee had sat for months in a room and defined, and handed down graven tablets describing—and then specializing it for online hypertext use and removing a lot of unnecessary functionality.
Specifically, the committee was ISO JTC1 SC34, and the standard was ISO 8879 or SGML. That's where DTDs came from, and that's why the HTML specifications still refer to ISO 8879 today.
Netscape had a good try at screwing up the ability to treat HTML as SGML, but we're on the way to fixing that as XML is a subset of SGML and XHTML is XML.
So HTML is a spectacularly poor example of rapid de-facto standard setting, being built on 20 years of committee-based standards making.
I took a look at 'Chandler' a while back, and I didn't really see what it had in common with Agenda. It seems more like an attempt at an Outlook and iCal clone with a bit more generality.
If someone made a real clone of Agenda, that would be news.
60%+ of day traders lose money, and once you factor in fees none of them can match the performance of (say) an S&P500 index fund, on a long term basis. It really is a game for suckers.
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And this is different from regular Windows XP how, exactly?
I've used systems that had both Shift Lock and Caps Lock.
Shift Lock would lock Shift on, giving you capitals by default (and punctuation instead of numbers); but if you Shifted manually, it would effective cancel the Shift Lock, as shift worked as a toggle bit.
Caps Lock would lock in capitals, regardless of what you did with Shift, and wouldn't cause numbers to be shifted to symbols.
I view that as the logical and consistent behavior. Not necessarily the most useful, but logical and consistent.
Yeah, sure, if you happened to have bought the OS within a certain time limit before the next version, there was an upgrade. But there was no general upgrade program, and there's no guarantee of future time-limited upgrade programs.
You're welcome to do raw OpenGL if you want. The problem is, developers want a nice easy way to (for example) draw a line of specified thickness from point (x1,y1) to point (x2,y2).
OpenGL theoretically offers that, but in practice the drivers provided by the video card vendors are riddled with bugs. On some machines you get an antialiased line; on some you don't. On some machines you get a line of the correct width, on some the lines are always 1 pixel wide.
So Apple does what they have to do. They build their own Core Graphics API which provides a call to draw an anti-aliased line of set thickness. Core Graphics then does whatever dicking around with quads and textures is necessary to implement that on top of the crappy driver code delivered by ATI and nVidia.
Apple hasn't done any discount upgrades for OS X since the upgrade from 10.0 to 10.1. They'll expect you to pay full price.
Which is why I'm waiting until 10.5 to buy a new machine.
If you want real security, get the NAT box to null-route anything from those machines unless it's going to one of the approved IP addresses.
You may need to get a better router to get adequate functionality, or get a WRT54GS and install OpenWRT.
You might also like to read about:
The thing about most conspiracy theories is they're no worse than things our governments have either done in the past, or considered doing.
Some of the real plans are downright weird, too. The US military actively considered trying to develop a Gay Sex Bomb that would demoralize the enemy by making the troops all hot for each other. And that was during the Clinton administration, not back in the 50s.
I have a similar theory:
I think that the UK or USA needs to have a true trigger-happy fascist government, complete with large scale death camps. Only then will people learn to take freedom seriously. The UK is full of compacent people who say "Well, it's never happened here, good old England, go ahead and give us ID cards and put cameras everywhere"; and the USA is full of people who say "Well, I'd just get my rifle out and see them off". Both groups need a dose of reality.
However, I don't want to be here when it happens.
Well, first off my DirecTiVo has no network option, and it's still crippled.
Secondly, there's a simple solution which would enable them to comply with the letter and spirit of the GPL: Put a DIP switch inside the unit that turned off the signature verification.
And thirdly, yesterday I had a successful Denial of Service attack perpetrated against my TiVo by TiVo/DirecTV themselves, who somehow screwed up a bunch of people's boxes by sending an erroneous "You are no longer authorized" message.
The city knew they were going to stop paying for the software and be unable to operate the garage. It was the city's decision to fail to warn people and to trap those cars.
The fact that the city gambled on being able to use the software illegally to continue operating the garage does not absolve them of the blame, or shift the blame onto the software company.
Similarly, if I rent out property and decide to stop paying for the electricity, it's my fault when the tenants find themselves with no lights--not the electric company's fault. Even if I thought I'd be able to run a long extension cord from the apartment next door.
Wrong. Tim Berners-Lee's first code used SGML software; check out the section headed "FORMAT CONVERSION FROM SGML".
Blizzard could easily offer free downloads or dirt cheap demo CDs for people requesting them online, and still let Best Buy charge whatever they want for a fancy box on a shelf.
It's just price gouging.
That's only the half of it. Read Romeo and Juliet and you can't help but be struck by the fact that it's full of dick jokes from start to finish.
I can. I own a DirecTV TiVo. As well as the box I had dual coax run down from the roof and routed through the walls, a pair of sockets plastered in and painted, a satellite dish mounted on the roof, and I paid for it all. I pay $50 a month for the service. If I stop paying, the hardware and the cabling work are useless.
Remember that $66,000 a year is small change to a city government. They probably waste that much on gasoline for unnecessarily large and inefficient fleet vehicles.
I worked for a company that made business software.
We offered customers a choice of terms. They could buy the software outright, or they could rent it by the month.
If they chose to rent it by the month, you're damn right we made it expire if the software key expired. Call it a "logic bomb" if you like, but I don't have an ethical problem with that, any more than I have an ethical problem with the phone company disconnecting me if I stop paying my phone bill.
And as a Prius driver, I say that about SUV drivers all the time.
Then I pirate it.
I choose not to consent to DRM. You are free to do likewise.
Your example isn't really analogous to the situation. In this case, the person who owns the car parking space and the person who owns the key to the lock are two different people, and both need to cooperate for you to get your car. In your car parking analogy, the parking space and lock are controlled by the same person.
So, let's make your analogy truly analogous.
Your friend has a garage. He gets a fancy electronic alarm system installed, with an integrated electrical garage door opener, like the system I have.
Your friend says you can park your car in his garage. Then he decides he doesn't want to pay the agreed upon monthly fee for the alarm system monitoring any more.
In response, the security company turns off the alarm system, which has the side effect of disabling the automatic garage door opener they installed and own. As a result, you can't get your car out of your friend's garage.
Now, do you really think the security company would be found guilty of car theft in that situation? I don't. I think the dispute would be between you and your friend.
It would be up to your friend to get his garage door open somehow and release your car, and if that meant ripping the garage door off or partially demolishing a wall that would be his problem, he'd have to hire builders to do that. And if you didn't like having to wait around to get your car, it'd be your friend you'd be suing.
Similarly, it's up to Hoboken to work out a way to get the cars out of their car park. If that involves a crane, it's their own stupid fault, they should have thought of that before they decided to stop paying for the ability to get cars in and out by robot.
You may be right legally, but I believe you were responding to an ethical argument, not a legal one.
I think that if a piece of software is only available for Windows, the ethical thing to do is to pirate it and run it on a pirate copy of Windows.
No, I'm not trolling. Just as I refuse to shop at Wal-Mart and avoid buying Chinese goods, so I refuse to give financial support to the Redmond empire, directly or indirectly. I do my best to simply use alternatives, but if I have to get at some data that's only readable by some Windows-only software, I'll use a pirate copy. If the game is available on console, Mac or Linux, I'll buy that version. (Unless the game is from Microsoft, like "Age of Empires", in which case I'll pirate it.)
So, it's a given that there's no way I'd buy a piece of Windows software under any circumstances. That being the case, why does it matter if I pirate Windows-only games?
You say the companies will be deprived of revenue? Good, I want them to be deprived of revenue. They support Microsoft, I'd like to see them deprived of so much revenue that they go out of business.
The point is, there's still hardware available today that will play all PlayStation games. I still have some great PlayStation games that I play. I expect I'll still be playing them on occasion in another 3-4 years when I have a PS3.
Similarly, there's hardware out today that will still run the handheld games I bought 5 years ago.
I don't have any Mac or PC games that old that still run properly, unless it's via open source engine replacements (e.g. ScummVM, Infocom games).
Hence, when looking at what games to buy, console games are a much more attractive proposition. As well as the longevity there's no dicking around with drivers, and there's no need for expensive hardware upgrades every 6-12 months. It's no surprise that I haven't bought a non-console game in ages.
Efficiency. When I used to use a Newton to take notes, I could just upload the notes to my searchable index of project files when I was done.
Now, every time I take notes I have to spend the same amount of time again typing them up and redrawing the diagrams. That's wasted time.
That's never stopped Microsoft from entering any other market.
No, it came about from taking an existing standard which a committee had sat for months in a room and defined, and handed down graven tablets describing—and then specializing it for online hypertext use and removing a lot of unnecessary functionality.
Specifically, the committee was ISO JTC1 SC34, and the standard was ISO 8879 or SGML. That's where DTDs came from, and that's why the HTML specifications still refer to ISO 8879 today.
Netscape had a good try at screwing up the ability to treat HTML as SGML, but we're on the way to fixing that as XML is a subset of SGML and XHTML is XML.
So HTML is a spectacularly poor example of rapid de-facto standard setting, being built on 20 years of committee-based standards making.
If I go to the Dojo site and click the "see it in action" tab, Firefox immediately crashes. Not exactly a great demo.
I took a look at 'Chandler' a while back, and I didn't really see what it had in common with Agenda. It seems more like an attempt at an Outlook and iCal clone with a bit more generality.
If someone made a real clone of Agenda, that would be news.
Pretty much the same information is in the excellent Personal Finance For Dummies .
60%+ of day traders lose money, and once you factor in fees none of them can match the performance of (say) an S&P500 index fund, on a long term basis. It really is a game for suckers.