Not everyone who thinks gas taxes should be higher is asked to be taxed more. I think that gas taxes should be substantially higher, so that highway funding comes from the people who use the highways the most. Currently the vast majority of highway funding in this country comes from property taxes. How much I pay for the highways in my city is almost purely a function of how much my house is worth, and has very little to do with how much I actually drive. Of course, this is completely backwards, because in many urban areas the most expensive property is located in places where people are least likely to drive (due to better transportation options, higher price of parking, higher price of gase, etc.) When my wife and I puchased a house, we chose to live in a substantially more expensive neighborhood so that we could live somewhere that neither of us had to drive to work. We could have chosen to buy a house 20 miles further away (where we both would have been driving to work) and for about 80% of what we paid. If that had been the case, we would be putting substantially more wear and tear on the roads every day, and paying 20% less for their maintenance. How much sense does that make?
In public schools, yes, the student usually wins, because the schools are funded by the government.
However, in private schools (as all of the schools mentioned in the article are) the school has much more latitude on what they can do. They can refuse to admit anyone they want for just about any reason they want (except for a few cases specifically addressed by discrimination laws, e.g. race, gender) and likewise can expel a student for all of the same reasons. If the student does something that violates the school's policy (even when they aren't at school) the public schools are well within their rights to take disciplinary action regarding it.
Likewise, you as a student are well within your rights to choose not to attend a private institution that has a policy regarding student behavior that you find unnacceptable. If you pay to go there, you are agreeing to live by their rules. If you don't like those rules, then why would you attend in the first place?
That was my first thought too when I saw this a month or so ago. As AJAX interfaces go, Gmail is actually incredibly simple (which is probably what makes it so attractive). I could probably recreate it by myself in under a month, given enough free time (or the ability to work on it while at my real job, as I'm assuming these two did). An exact replica of the gmail interface in four man months? BFD.
Not to mention the "bonus" that they were able to write the entire thing in pascal while never touching a line of html, css or javascript. I'm sure there are people out there that might consider that to be a bonus, but not anyone that I know or have ever worked with..
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. The USS Cole was bombed by suicide bombers who piloted a boat straight at the ship and then blew themselves up.
A 150 decibel noise seems like a pretty minor convenience compared to blowing yourself up.
Furthermore- let's say the powerboat Good Times is headed towards the USS Paranoid is just a bunch of folks havin' a good time and not noticing the fact that they're bearing down on a warship (sounds strange given how dumb you'd have to be to do it, but people do leave the 'bridge' or controls of their boat quite often. They also tend to get drunk on their boats quite often too.)
If the people piloting a boat toward you are incapacitated from the noise, then it should be a trivial matter to move out of their line of travel assuming the boat you are on is not at anchor.
well, what other copmuter maker can you think of that has been around for more than 20 years? apple has outlived pretty much every one else in the game, even if they haven't always been as successful as they are now.
Dell is a lean machine of a company, offering the same as everybody else just easier, cheaper and with more options. Its margins are always going to be small, but it'll probably always make money. Apple is a boutique company that will always have fatter margins because it'll offer exclusive products. But it depends too much on fickle consumers that can change brands as easily in electronics as in shirts.
Unless I am badly misreading your statement, I think you have it exactly backwards. Dell is the company with the most fickle customers. If the only distinguishing feature about your product is that you can make it cheaper than anyone else, then you have to be prepared to lose your entire customer base the minute somebody else manages to undersell you. But if you can create a product that is unique and offers obvious value compared to any of its competitors, then as long as you keep your quality high, you can expect to keep a lot of your customers even if there are cheaper or better competing products.
Via gmail they know who are my friends, where I work, what I do,... everything.
Then don't use GMail. You can use Hotmail, Yahoo, , your ISP's mail service, your school or work email, or even set up your own. It's not like you are limited in options of how to get an email account...
Via google search history they can even gather more informations, they can even guess when I was in front of my computer.
Then don't use google when you search.
More and more all my private life is scanned by google. Bull. They aren't scanning anything. Google doesn't have any private information about you that you don't give them, either directly (via gmail, search history etc.) or indirectly (via information you put online that they spider). If you don't trust them, stop giving them your information...
Coca Cola doesn't have a patent on their recipe because if they did, everyone would have been able to start making cola using the exact same recipe 17 years after the patent was issued.
It has nothing to do with whether the formula could or could not be patented, but rather they felt that they would be better served by keeping the formula secret, as then their protections would not expire in a fixed amount of time.
Sorry, but this is a case there the patent system is being used as intended. Rather than keep their recipe secret forever, they have released it to the public now in exchange for the government protected right to profit off of it for the next 17 years. Meanwhile, anyone can build off of their work which would not be possible if they chose to keep it a trade secret instead.
I agree wholeheartedly that patents are being misused in a huge range of areas these days, but there are still areas where they can be valid and (dare i say) helpful.
And what this has to do with our rights online, I'll never know...
IE7 is also not yet available to the public in any form and probably won't be available as a finished product until Firefox 2 is out (or at least well on it's way). So I wouldn't worry about Firefox losing out to IE7 just yet.
And even if it does, it has still been successful in giving Microsoft the impetus to a) release an up to date browser, and b) follow web standards. As a web developer, I don't really care if Firefox never gets above 10% market share as long as its existence is enough to keep the 80+% market share holder on its toes.
Prior Art has to have occurred before the patent was filed(*) not before it was issued. It could have easily taken two years or more between the date of filing and the date of issue. Of course, I still think the patent is bogus, as the basic idea has been around for along time. I think it is ridiculous that people can take an existing idea and apply it to a new media and suddenly get a patent for it.
On the other hand, I'm a little torn on this particular patent. The patent basically covers java and flash applets that run automatically when a web page is loaded. Microsoft's proposed workaround for the patent worked almost exactly the same as the Firefox click-to-play flash plugin. If this were to be the required behavior for all web browsers that don't want to pay to license the Eolas patent, I think it could be the greatest thing to happen to the web in years...
(*) I believe that technically (in the U.S.) prior art actually has to precede when the invention was invented not when the patent was filed. The company could have 'invented' the idea a year before they filed, and so long as they had some sort of proof about when the invention took place, prior art would have to precede the invention date ratherthan the filing date.
If by "OK", you mean "better than any native win32 competing application" I suppose I would agree with you... In my experiance, only Trillian can compete with gaim, and that feels even less like a win32 app than gaim does.
Which stuff are you asking them to fix? You talk about the game as though it's packed full of bugs and poor implementation, but the only thing you ever mentioned specifically is the poor targetting. What other issues did you have?
I agree that the targetting isn't very good if you are playing on the playstation, but then, FPS style targetting/shooting never work well on consoles (in my experience, at least). I think Rockstar did well by using the 'autotarget' system they went with on the playstation, with all of it's limitations, as I think the alternative would have been awful.
If you want to play Grand Theft Auto primarily as an FPS game, you should play in on the PC, where it behaves like a typical FPS. I own GTA3 for PC and I also borrowed the PS2 version from my fried for some time. There is a vast difference in how I played the game on PC compared to the PlayStation. On the PC, I treated it very much like a typical FPS, using the cars mainly as a quick way to get from place to place (And when required to by various missions). On the PS2, it became much more of a driving game, where the focus was mainly on the cars, and the extravehicular activity was much more limited in scope. The two are almost completely different games that use the same storyline. Some people may complain about this, but I think they made a great move by focusing on each platforms strengths rather than try to produce the same sub-optimal experience across each platform.
Instead I would like to see developers take the massive non-linear 3D world concept and create more games like Shenmue, or given the emphasis on driving in the games, something like Fast and the Furious where the player starts down at the bottom, maybe jacking cars or working as a delivery boy, and rises on the street racing circut (OK, I would hate that game too, but it's just an idea).
Already been done. "Midnight Club" and sequels, also by Rockstar, are whole games based on the driving engine in the GTA3 games (with some improvements). (I've only played Midnight Club 2, but I believe the others are similar, with different cities and various engine improvements over time.) You start out with one really crappy car, and as you win races over the course of the game, you get more and better vehicles to choose from.
If I steal the cd from the store, how does enforcing the cd to be in the drive enforce purchase?
If you steal the CD from the store, Firaxis already has been paid just as much money for the CD as they would have recieved had you purchased it legally. It's only the store that loses money.
One of the female programmers I used to work with once said: "Sometimes I think I work with all of the people who spent their grade school years getting beat up by everyone else."
Hmm... GM and Ford. Yah, I can just see the two biggest truck makers in the world offering incentives to their employees to drive more fuel efficient vehicles.
"Hey boss, I have a great idea. Why don't we raise the price of our cars so that we can help our employees buy our competitors products." I'm sure that will go over real well...
At any rate, I think there are enough incentives out there already for fuel efficient vehicles (in Colorado for instance, hybrid car buyers get a state tax credit for the difference in price between their hybrid and and the equivalent non-hybrid.) What I'd like to see is more incentives for not driving at all. My company (about 160 people) started offering incentives a few months ago for employees to ride their bikes in to work, ride the bus, or car pool. Likewise, employees at my wife's office get free bus passes. Of course this requires companies to locate their offices in places where such methods of getting to work are an option for most employees, i.e. not in giant suburban office parks. But encouraging people to take their cars off the road entirely would be much better for the environment than encouraging them to spend extra money on a car that gets 15-20% better gas mileage.
fellow programmer: My girlfriend got really pissed at me the other day when she walked into my room and i didn't say anything to her for almost a minute. random guy: (rolls eys) well, duh! fellow programmer: I had the FLAG!! me: Ah.. me: Well, did you at least tell her that?
While you have a point, the fact of the matter is that the U.S has 'controlled' the Internet up until now, and the worst complaints that anyone can levy against them so far is that they refuse to tax it and they refuse to block access to sites that some people deem unnacceptable.
Along the same lines as "If it's not broke, don't fix it," the argument isn't whether the U.S. has demonstrated that it has impeccable integrity, but rather whether there is any other country or organization out there that has demonstrated that they would do better.
Of course it's popular to bash the U.S., even among many Americans, but doing so doesn't answer the real question that people against the current status quo need to address.
On top of that I find it quite interesting that out of all possible motivations you could have seen behind the request of other countries to have more control, you decided that the most plausible one was jelousy and envy. That kind of reasoning can lead to no good.
No kidding. Anyone with half a brain can see that this is really about money and control. Jealousy! Pfff!
True, but most people who went through the process of changing their default browser with win2K would have gone through the process of doing it again with XP. Internet Explorer has barely advanced at all since before Windows XP was released, while the alternatives have progressed quite substantially since then.
Mind telling us which version of Windows 2000 all of these companies were using that didn't have Internet Explorer 5 or 6 installed? Upgrading from 2000 to XP wouldn't change the number of Internet Explorer users, unless a very large number of people were using Firefox and Opera in Win2k that haven't gotten around to reinstalling them yet under XP.
Google lets me find information anywhere without needing to remember domain names
Ah, so what happens when google's DNS servers resolve differently than the one you are using? What if Google gives you a link to 'www.searchresult.com', which for them resolves to 123.123.123.123, but for you resolves to 101.101.101.101?
Slashdot Mirror
Not everyone who thinks gas taxes should be higher is asked to be taxed more. I think that gas taxes should be substantially higher, so that highway funding comes from the people who use the highways the most. Currently the vast majority of highway funding in this country comes from property taxes. How much I pay for the highways in my city is almost purely a function of how much my house is worth, and has very little to do with how much I actually drive. Of course, this is completely backwards, because in many urban areas the most expensive property is located in places where people are least likely to drive (due to better transportation options, higher price of parking, higher price of gase, etc.) When my wife and I puchased a house, we chose to live in a substantially more expensive neighborhood so that we could live somewhere that neither of us had to drive to work. We could have chosen to buy a house 20 miles further away (where we both would have been driving to work) and for about 80% of what we paid. If that had been the case, we would be putting substantially more wear and tear on the roads every day, and paying 20% less for their maintenance. How much sense does that make?
if the associations the schools had with their students were voluntary, like those a college has with its students, it would be different.
These are all private schools being discussed. In what way were the "associations the schools had with their students" not voluntary?
In public schools, yes, the student usually wins, because the schools are funded by the government.
However, in private schools (as all of the schools mentioned in the article are) the school has much more latitude on what they can do. They can refuse to admit anyone they want for just about any reason they want (except for a few cases specifically addressed by discrimination laws, e.g. race, gender) and likewise can expel a student for all of the same reasons. If the student does something that violates the school's policy (even when they aren't at school) the public schools are well within their rights to take disciplinary action regarding it.
Likewise, you as a student are well within your rights to choose not to attend a private institution that has a policy regarding student behavior that you find unnacceptable. If you pay to go there, you are agreeing to live by their rules. If you don't like those rules, then why would you attend in the first place?
That was my first thought too when I saw this a month or so ago. As AJAX interfaces go, Gmail is actually incredibly simple (which is probably what makes it so attractive). I could probably recreate it by myself in under a month, given enough free time (or the ability to work on it while at my real job, as I'm assuming these two did). An exact replica of the gmail interface in four man months? BFD.
Not to mention the "bonus" that they were able to write the entire thing in pascal while never touching a line of html, css or javascript. I'm sure there are people out there that might consider that to be a bonus, but not anyone that I know or have ever worked with..
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. The USS Cole was bombed by suicide bombers who piloted a boat straight at the ship and then blew themselves up.
A 150 decibel noise seems like a pretty minor convenience compared to blowing yourself up.
Furthermore- let's say the powerboat Good Times is headed towards the USS Paranoid is just a bunch of folks havin' a good time and not noticing the fact that they're bearing down on a warship (sounds strange given how dumb you'd have to be to do it, but people do leave the 'bridge' or controls of their boat quite often. They also tend to get drunk on their boats quite often too.)
If the people piloting a boat toward you are incapacitated from the noise, then it should be a trivial matter to move out of their line of travel assuming the boat you are on is not at anchor.
well, what other copmuter maker can you think of that has been around for more than 20 years? apple has outlived pretty much every one else in the game, even if they haven't always been as successful as they are now.
Dell is a lean machine of a company, offering the same as everybody else just easier, cheaper and with more options. Its margins are always going to be small, but it'll probably always make money. Apple is a boutique company that will always have fatter margins because it'll offer exclusive products. But it depends too much on fickle consumers that can change brands as easily in electronics as in shirts.
Unless I am badly misreading your statement, I think you have it exactly backwards. Dell is the company with the most fickle customers. If the only distinguishing feature about your product is that you can make it cheaper than anyone else, then you have to be prepared to lose your entire customer base the minute somebody else manages to undersell you. But if you can create a product that is unique and offers obvious value compared to any of its competitors, then as long as you keep your quality high, you can expect to keep a lot of your customers even if there are cheaper or better competing products.
Via gmail they know who are my friends, where I work, what I do, ... everything.
Then don't use GMail. You can use Hotmail, Yahoo, , your ISP's mail service, your school or work email, or even set up your own. It's not like you are limited in options of how to get an email account...
Via google search history they can even gather more informations, they can even guess when I was in front of my computer.
Then don't use google when you search.
More and more all my private life is scanned by google.
Bull. They aren't scanning anything. Google doesn't have any private information about you that you don't give them, either directly (via gmail, search history etc.) or indirectly (via information you put online that they spider). If you don't trust them, stop giving them your information...
Coca Cola doesn't have a patent on their recipe because if they did, everyone would have been able to start making cola using the exact same recipe 17 years after the patent was issued.
It has nothing to do with whether the formula could or could not be patented, but rather they felt that they would be better served by keeping the formula secret, as then their protections would not expire in a fixed amount of time.
Sorry, but this is a case there the patent system is being used as intended. Rather than keep their recipe secret forever, they have released it to the public now in exchange for the government protected right to profit off of it for the next 17 years. Meanwhile, anyone can build off of their work which would not be possible if they chose to keep it a trade secret instead.
I agree wholeheartedly that patents are being misused in a huge range of areas these days, but there are still areas where they can be valid and (dare i say) helpful.
And what this has to do with our rights online, I'll never know...
IE7 is also not yet available to the public in any form and probably won't be available as a finished product until Firefox 2 is out (or at least well on it's way). So I wouldn't worry about Firefox losing out to IE7 just yet.
And even if it does, it has still been successful in giving Microsoft the impetus to a) release an up to date browser, and b) follow web standards. As a web developer, I don't really care if Firefox never gets above 10% market share as long as its existence is enough to keep the 80+% market share holder on its toes.
Prior Art has to have occurred before the patent was filed(*) not before it was issued. It could have easily taken two years or more between the date of filing and the date of issue. Of course, I still think the patent is bogus, as the basic idea has been around for along time. I think it is ridiculous that people can take an existing idea and apply it to a new media and suddenly get a patent for it.
On the other hand, I'm a little torn on this particular patent. The patent basically covers java and flash applets that run automatically when a web page is loaded. Microsoft's proposed workaround for the patent worked almost exactly the same as the Firefox click-to-play flash plugin. If this were to be the required behavior for all web browsers that don't want to pay to license the Eolas patent, I think it could be the greatest thing to happen to the web in years...
(*) I believe that technically (in the U.S.) prior art actually has to precede when the invention was invented not when the patent was filed. The company could have 'invented' the idea a year before they filed, and so long as they had some sort of proof about when the invention took place, prior art would have to precede the invention date ratherthan the filing date.
gAIM works "OK". It's useable.
If by "OK", you mean "better than any native win32 competing application" I suppose I would agree with you... In my experiance, only Trillian can compete with gaim, and that feels even less like a win32 app than gaim does.
Who knew K posts to Slashdot?
Which stuff are you asking them to fix? You talk about the game as though it's packed full of bugs and poor implementation, but the only thing you ever mentioned specifically is the poor targetting. What other issues did you have?
I agree that the targetting isn't very good if you are playing on the playstation, but then, FPS style targetting/shooting never work well on consoles (in my experience, at least). I think Rockstar did well by using the 'autotarget' system they went with on the playstation, with all of it's limitations, as I think the alternative would have been awful.
If you want to play Grand Theft Auto primarily as an FPS game, you should play in on the PC, where it behaves like a typical FPS. I own GTA3 for PC and I also borrowed the PS2 version from my fried for some time. There is a vast difference in how I played the game on PC compared to the PlayStation. On the PC, I treated it very much like a typical FPS, using the cars mainly as a quick way to get from place to place (And when required to by various missions). On the PS2, it became much more of a driving game, where the focus was mainly on the cars, and the extravehicular activity was much more limited in scope. The two are almost completely different games that use the same storyline. Some people may complain about this, but I think they made a great move by focusing on each platforms strengths rather than try to produce the same sub-optimal experience across each platform.
Instead I would like to see developers take the massive non-linear 3D world concept and create more games like Shenmue, or given the emphasis on driving in the games, something like Fast and the Furious where the player starts down at the bottom, maybe jacking cars or working as a delivery boy, and rises on the street racing circut (OK, I would hate that game too, but it's just an idea).
Already been done. "Midnight Club" and sequels, also by Rockstar, are whole games based on the driving engine in the GTA3 games (with some improvements). (I've only played Midnight Club 2, but I believe the others are similar, with different cities and various engine improvements over time.) You start out with one really crappy car, and as you win races over the course of the game, you get more and better vehicles to choose from.
If I steal the cd from the store, how does enforcing the cd to be in the drive enforce purchase?
If you steal the CD from the store, Firaxis already has been paid just as much money for the CD as they would have recieved had you purchased it legally. It's only the store that loses money.
And yes, I know that wasn't your point.
One of the female programmers I used to work with once said:
"Sometimes I think I work with all of the people who spent their grade school years getting beat up by everyone else."
Hmm... GM and Ford. Yah, I can just see the two biggest truck makers in the world offering incentives to their employees to drive more fuel efficient vehicles.
"Hey boss, I have a great idea. Why don't we raise the price of our cars so that we can help our employees buy our competitors products." I'm sure that will go over real well...
At any rate, I think there are enough incentives out there already for fuel efficient vehicles (in Colorado for instance, hybrid car buyers get a state tax credit for the difference in price between their hybrid and and the equivalent non-hybrid.) What I'd like to see is more incentives for not driving at all. My company (about 160 people) started offering incentives a few months ago for employees to ride their bikes in to work, ride the bus, or car pool. Likewise, employees at my wife's office get free bus passes. Of course this requires companies to locate their offices in places where such methods of getting to work are an option for most employees, i.e. not in giant suburban office parks. But encouraging people to take their cars off the road entirely would be much better for the environment than encouraging them to spend extra money on a car that gets 15-20% better gas mileage.
reminds me of one of my college buddies...
fellow programmer: My girlfriend got really pissed at me the other day when she walked into my room and i didn't say anything to her for almost a minute.
random guy: (rolls eys) well, duh!
fellow programmer: I had the FLAG!!
me: Ah..
me: Well, did you at least tell her that?
While you have a point, the fact of the matter is that the U.S has 'controlled' the Internet up until now, and the worst complaints that anyone can levy against them so far is that they refuse to tax it and they refuse to block access to sites that some people deem unnacceptable.
Along the same lines as "If it's not broke, don't fix it," the argument isn't whether the U.S. has demonstrated that it has impeccable integrity, but rather whether there is any other country or organization out there that has demonstrated that they would do better.
Of course it's popular to bash the U.S., even among many Americans, but doing so doesn't answer the real question that people against the current status quo need to address.
On top of that I find it quite interesting that out of all possible motivations you could have seen behind the request of other countries to have more control, you decided that the most plausible one was jelousy and envy. That kind of reasoning can lead to no good.
No kidding. Anyone with half a brain can see that this is really about money and control. Jealousy! Pfff!
There is a reason that eBay handles 1 billion transactions a day on Java.
Because they run it on a million servers?
True, but most people who went through the process of changing their default browser with win2K would have gone through the process of doing it again with XP. Internet Explorer has barely advanced at all since before Windows XP was released, while the alternatives have progressed quite substantially since then.
Mind telling us which version of Windows 2000 all of these companies were using that didn't have Internet Explorer 5 or 6 installed? Upgrading from 2000 to XP wouldn't change the number of Internet Explorer users, unless a very large number of people were using Firefox and Opera in Win2k that haven't gotten around to reinstalling them yet under XP.
Google lets me find information anywhere without needing to remember domain names
Ah, so what happens when google's DNS servers resolve differently than the one you are using? What if Google gives you a link to 'www.searchresult.com', which for them resolves to 123.123.123.123, but for you resolves to 101.101.101.101?
Google would be useless without DNS.