The weird thing about electronic voting is that after 2000, the Democrats were decrying paper ballots and were all about "modernizing" the system and adopting electronic voting.
Everybody, right and left, was for reform, because hand-counting "leads to hanging chads."
This year, they're decrying electronic voting and all for paper voting because it "leaves a trail."
They're for verifiable voting. If diebold's machines were not black boxes beyond a local election official's ability to verify, no one would raise a stink. Even if it's not copyleft, this is a case where the code should be delivered, and compiled by the government onto commodity hardware of their choice
Why the sudden 180? Is it just to cover their backs if they fail to gain a majority in the mid-term elections ("We would've won if it wasn't for those darn electronic voting machines") or is it just a pattern of blaming the system whenever they lose an election ("We would've won if it wasn't for those darn paper ballots")? What's the deal?
You must be a republican. A talk-radio republican, by the quality of your argument. Allow me to draw the consistent line which most Americans believe should be followed:
We should use the voting technology that allows the greatest level of confidence that all of the votes were counted correctly. All-paper is bad. All-electronic can be worse; Diebold is certainly no better than paper ballots, just faster and harder to audit.
And while I'm pointing fingers -- George W. Bush won by a narrow enough margin that vote fraud would have been enough to push the election either way. That usually doesn't happen, and if he had done what he said he was going to in 2000 (be "a uniter, not a divider" and kept to his origial lead on the War on Terrorism) it wouldn't have happened in 2004.
It's not rocket science when it comes to winning an election by a large enough margin that you're beyond the margin of error. I hope most of tomorrow's elections succeed where 2004's presidential election failed in that respect. It'll make the outcome, either way, less of an obstacle for Congress doing the people's work.
I presume you are not a scientist. A scientist would only have faith in observations, not consensus, not conventional wisdom.
I presume you are a student. Real scientists base most of their understanding of the world on consensus, and every good scientific paper starts from consensus and argues for or against a change in consensus.
If I were to pick you up and put you in a new universe with new rules, you would spend your entire life just trying to get to where Galileo STARTED his research. And that's if you're a scientist with a proper set of basic tools.
$500? Sorry bud, if you want to keep your job, you will vote the way that the company tells you to.
Can you say "unlawful termination?" I knew you could.
All it takes is one employee willing to fork over the $250 to file a court case, and they get to own the small business they work for. Governments and publicly traded businesses already have pretty strong employment rules against that, leaving only the "small business" as a bastion of that kind of stupidity.
Once you have decided that truth is not decided by evidence, you cannot turn around and require that your critics somehow show evidence when they accuse you of something.
Truth is not now, and never has been, decided by evidence. It has been decided by whomever has made the most cognizant argument regarding the proper interpretation of evidence provided. In wikipedia's case, it's done via reference. In the case of a field of science, it's done via experimentation and journals. In the case of a trial, it's done by three experts in the law presenting a case to a group of 6 or 12 laymen.
When you get right down to it, Wikipedia's got exactly what they should have for a web-based encyclopedia. They're far better than random web searches, and significantly broader than the "authoritive" dead-tree encyclopedias.
Yes. I'm in favor of the idea, but want something based on science instead of something that comes across as something designed to hamper some economies and boost others. Re-write it so it includes reductions for all. No increase. Reductions for all.
Screw that. Write it so it has one level of acceptable pollution for all. It's a theoretically simple formula: [Total Allowable Global Pollution] / [total world population] * [Country population]. Let less-developed countries sell their "share" to rich foreign countries, and we're all set.
News flash: teh US is the world's biggest polluter, both per-capita and in-total. Pollution control of any kind is going to hurt us. We should have seen this coming twenty years ago and done something about it.
There are plenty of scenes where "civilized" Americans go along and tacitly or explicitly agree with some very racist and anti-semitic remarks.
So? A significant portion of that is "hospitality." Let Cohen go about dressed as an American and try the same stuff, and you'll get a better measure of the level of American racism.
For example when Borat goes into the gun dealer's shop and asks for a good gun to kill Jews with, the owner proudly gives him a nice handgun that looked like its bullets could pierce thick armor!
I suspect that scene was either staged or edited; you still need at least a cursory background check to buy a handgun, especially if you're not an American citizen. The gun dealer can be as good-salesman-happy as he wants; he's not a bartender, and it's the customer who's liabile for the use of that gun.
At every turn a good republican should ask if what they are doing helps the people and minimizes the control the government has over the people. They are clearly not doing the latter, and the former [is] arguable.
No, not really.
Your party has historically been for many things, but "small government" was never really one of them. It was just a way to say they were "anti-socialist" or "anti-welfare" without being negative. The party you describe would be against drug laws or outlawing abortion as much as it's against gun control.
The left/right divide comes down to the division of Right and Proper -- the Right-wing desires the government to do that which is morally correct, while the left desires the government do that which is legally proper. there are, of course, other metrics you might use to divide the two, but "big government / small government" isn't one of them.
John Kerry insults our military. The media response? "It was just a botched joke. Bush is evil. Let's get back to that."
John Kerry is an idiot. (How do you go from "how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" to "I voted for the $80 billion before I voted against it"?) And even that botch isn't necessarily foul play, coming from someone who was all but drafted to fight in Vietnam. And the minority of soldiers (et al) who made a career out of it can feel insulted; everyone else should just quiet down.
Rush criticizes Michael J Fox's political ads, and is surpised by what he sees, so he tries to demonstrate it... but focuses on the content of Fox's ads, as opposed to Fox himself. The media response? "This is an outrage. Rush should apologize for being born!" (while ignoring the *real* debate over what Rush said about cloning, and what Fox said about stem cells).
Rush accused Fox of faking his illness. If you want to compare it to Kerry being an idiot, you'd have to find a JK quote where he said something equally out of bounds -- such as "the United States Military faked 9/11." The fact that the debate is ignored is Rush's own fault.
(Oh, and for the record -- stem cell research and cloning are two entirely different things. Hell, "cloning" is about as much what we see in labs as "teleportation" is getting two atoms to line up from fifteen feet away.)
Even if Microsoft could persuade the court to interpret their EULA as a contract, is there anywhere on the planet where a "no sue" clause in a contract would be valid?
Yes*. There are several perfectly valid contracts in the United States today wherein, as part of them, the parties agree to waive litigation or limit the awardable damages thereof. A great example is the contract you enter when you attend an amusement park or go to a ski range. So long as the parties both acted in good faith and within the bounds of the law, such provisions will usually stand.
As for that asterisk (*): there's no such thing as a contract that will deny you your access to the Courts ("redress of grievances" and all that), but there are contracts that will let you get a lawsuit dismissed with a simple motion you can almost make without a lawyer.
(Btw, there's one famous contract that, on/., you probably use at least once in your daily life -- the GPL. The exact same legal principle applies.)
((Oh, and if you file a suit knowing you don't have grounds, you might get hit to pay the other party's legal fees. Which is one reason to get a lawyer -- so their malpractice insurance will cover you for such stupidity.))
That says that you're agreeing you cannot (not will not) sue Microsoft for damages. That you do not have a right to bring your greivances before a court of law.
Wrong.
What it means is that, if you somehow get in a situation where Microsoft causes you real harm--like, say, Windows causes your PC to explode and kill your brother--you have to prove that it's so terrible the court needs to modify the contract. And if it's really that bad, there isn't a judge in the country that'll let the EULA stand.
That line says the same thing that the GPL says when it comes to warranties -- that there is no warranty attached to the software, and the limit of what you can get from it simply not working is what you paid for it.
They have changed the behavior of common icons (e.g. the network system tray icon does not have a "right-click properties" method of accessing the connection settings).
Single-click the icon, and then click "connection properties" on the window that pops up. (Or something else -- my non-windows, non-vista cable modem gateway is being a pain, so I'm typing this from my XP desktop instead of the laptop running vista.)
And note how Vista remembers network connections, and remembers different security settings per network connection. Don't know if Apple has that, but it's a significant improvement over XP.
Also, there is no more Start -> Run option. They have replaced it with Start -> "Search". This appears to offer the same functionality as "Run", but does not seem intuitive.
The "Run" command -- which is still WindowsKey + R, btw -- is removed from the default start menu, but you can add it back in about ten seconds.
The "Search" command is actually better, as it uses real names instead of the obscure file names. To run Word on XP, you either have to find the icon, or remember "winword". To do the same in XP, it's just "hit WindowsKey, type 'Word', and select the program".
Another item I was hoping for: multiple concurrent Remote Desktop sessions.
Hmm... do you mean one client to multiple servers (already works) or one server to multiple clients (business decision to limit to server OS.)?
If not, then why is it considered "stealing" when magnetic bits are manipulated to the same state on hard drives?
Because "unlawful copyright infringement in the Nth degree" is hard for a layman to say?
It's illegal. You can go to jail for it, and will almost certainly be forced to pay actual damages. You might as well complain about why a priest calls aggrivated manslaughter "murder."
I've seen this prediction-of-doom vary from 10 years to 50 years.... projected at various points over the last 30 years. Chances are, you'll be able to see some headline in 2070: "Oil Running Out in 20 Years!!!"
Amazing how you don't graps what "Peak Oil" really is.
At a certain point, production stops increasing, and in fact starts to decline, because not enough new fields can be found to replace the spent ones. (When's the last time you saw a field of Oil pumps in PA?) The price of oil goes up, as the supply goes down -- making currently non-profitable oil reserves and energy sources, theoretically, more profitable.
We will likely never run out of oil, although it will eventually (50 years? 500?) reach the point where it's simply too expensive to get the stuff out of the ground, and we only use biomass-made oil or some other alternative fuel source.
If you don't see the west's double standards in treating Jews and Arabs let me refresh you memory;
I see a double standard, but let me rebutt yours before I argue mine.
People get sent to jail for challenging the accuracy of the Holocaust figures, yet freedom of speech in invoked everytime someone gratuitousely insults the prophet Mohammed and his teachings.
No one ever gets sent to jail in the west for insulting the Jews or their teachings. Insulting the prophet Mohammed (isn't there supposed to be an addition there?) is the equivalent of saying that Kabbalah is devil-worship; it's freedom of religion.
Those counties (of which the United States is NOT a part) that made denying the Holocaust a crime did so because they were complicit in the holocaust. It'd be as if the United States made questioning the reality of southern slavery a crime. You're comparing apples and, well, pears.
Israel gets away with a stockpile of nukes but no Arab country could dream of being allowed to develop them.
No arab country has millions of Jews planning on burning it from existance. And while Israel implies that they have nuclear weapons, they do not openly admit to having them, and they have never performed a nuclear test. It's entirely possible that they don't have a single nuke of their own, and are just mis-stating the presense of nukes installed by their allies.
As for how the Jews get special treatment -- you're right. They, as a part of their religion, believe that they're special, and as part of their politics, hold that they have a modern-day right to do so. Because they've done such a good job adapting to the west, the jewish idea of what is offensive and abhorrent is treated as an agnostic view, and so carries a fair bit of weight. This is, in essense, subversive, but it's not the sort of thing that my country is going to get riled up over. After all, Christians and Muslims have exactly the same access to influencing our country; they just need to play their cards right.
While apparently the courts for some reason tend to think that clicking a license implies consent
Yep. Just like they thing that for some reason you signing the line on an end of a contract implies consent. I mean, it's not like anyone READS all of those.
Vista's EULA would be better served with an "introduction" denoting the limitations that can be done. It'd get the point across pretty well, and let the CAPITAL LETTER DISCLAIMERS continue.
This guy tries to explain to the average reader/non-geek that Microsoft.NET is a "computer language".
So long as your precompiled code is a combination of English and C, and yet you still prefer to call it a "language", you shouldn't be surprised to hear others mis-use the word just as bad as you.
C, C++, VB, Java, Perl, Pascal, Javascript, and all the rest are syntaxes, not languages.
I laughed last night when I discovered that accidentally hitting the Windows key STILL boots you out of a fullscreen game. That thing has to be the most worthless key ever invented.
Odd.
1: Doom3, at least, is fully capable of telling the windows key to frack off.
2: Look up "windows shortcut keys" in the Windows help files. It's a fairly useful key. (And if you don't like it, you can always just remove it and cap the button. might take you all of ten minutes.)
We did. And then Joss pulled the dirtiest storytelling trick he's ever pulled, and half of us shouted out how badly it was. That had a significantly depressing effect on ticket sales -- just like Superman Reurns, and just like Star Trek: Nemesis.
Combined with the demoralizing turnout for Star Trek: Nemesis, this makes me wonder whether the ratio of influence to noise by the Slashdot crowd is not overrated by some scary multiplier.
The article should read 'upgrading all your computers to brand new ones, trashing all your old hardware and putting Vista and (for some reason) MS office on them will cost $3000'.
don't forget "paying somebody to train them in 90 minutes what they could have figured out in 10" and "having someone walk over and cut open the box for them". That's about the only thing that justifies a 3k increase.
No shit. Give me original content any day of the week.
You make a common mistake -- an "original" game is no more novel nor innovative than a "sequel". In fact, since time has to be spent on developing a new premise, we actually wind up with less original content than if a sequal had been made.
The 'life force' is a concept that was invented for Star Trek and other TV shows. Please don't confuse it with reality.
Sorry, you're wrong on both parts.
1: It's an older concept than TV. (Going back at least to Frakenstein, btw -- depending on how you parse your definitions)
2: There really is something distinct about "life" that "not-life" doesn't have. It may be inherent to the particular balance of matter and energy that resides in a living thing, but there's "something." the right answer to teh question is "we don't know, but since the actual bits of you change all the time anyway, we don't think it'd be a problem."
Please don't confuse science with reality. It's arrogant.
Slashdot Mirror
The weird thing about electronic voting is that after 2000, the Democrats were decrying paper ballots and were all about "modernizing" the system and adopting electronic voting.
Everybody, right and left, was for reform, because hand-counting "leads to hanging chads."
This year, they're decrying electronic voting and all for paper voting because it "leaves a trail."
They're for verifiable voting. If diebold's machines were not black boxes beyond a local election official's ability to verify, no one would raise a stink. Even if it's not copyleft, this is a case where the code should be delivered, and compiled by the government onto commodity hardware of their choice
Why the sudden 180? Is it just to cover their backs if they fail to gain a majority in the mid-term elections ("We would've won if it wasn't for those darn electronic voting machines") or is it just a pattern of blaming the system whenever they lose an election ("We would've won if it wasn't for those darn paper ballots")? What's the deal?
You must be a republican. A talk-radio republican, by the quality of your argument. Allow me to draw the consistent line which most Americans believe should be followed:
We should use the voting technology that allows the greatest level of confidence that all of the votes were counted correctly. All-paper is bad. All-electronic can be worse; Diebold is certainly no better than paper ballots, just faster and harder to audit.
And while I'm pointing fingers -- George W. Bush won by a narrow enough margin that vote fraud would have been enough to push the election either way. That usually doesn't happen, and if he had done what he said he was going to in 2000 (be "a uniter, not a divider" and kept to his origial lead on the War on Terrorism) it wouldn't have happened in 2004.
It's not rocket science when it comes to winning an election by a large enough margin that you're beyond the margin of error. I hope most of tomorrow's elections succeed where 2004's presidential election failed in that respect. It'll make the outcome, either way, less of an obstacle for Congress doing the people's work.
I presume you are not a scientist. A scientist would only have faith in observations, not consensus, not conventional wisdom.
I presume you are a student. Real scientists base most of their understanding of the world on consensus, and every good scientific paper starts from consensus and argues for or against a change in consensus.
If I were to pick you up and put you in a new universe with new rules, you would spend your entire life just trying to get to where Galileo STARTED his research. And that's if you're a scientist with a proper set of basic tools.
And how often has the most powerful console been a total market failure?
Almost always. (see: NeoGeo, 3D0, N64, Game Gear, etc., etc.)
$500? Sorry bud, if you want to keep your job, you will vote the way that the company tells you to.
Can you say "unlawful termination?" I knew you could.
All it takes is one employee willing to fork over the $250 to file a court case, and they get to own the small business they work for. Governments and publicly traded businesses already have pretty strong employment rules against that, leaving only the "small business" as a bastion of that kind of stupidity.
Once you have decided that truth is not decided by evidence, you cannot turn around and require that your critics somehow show evidence when they accuse you of something.
Truth is not now, and never has been, decided by evidence. It has been decided by whomever has made the most cognizant argument regarding the proper interpretation of evidence provided. In wikipedia's case, it's done via reference. In the case of a field of science, it's done via experimentation and journals. In the case of a trial, it's done by three experts in the law presenting a case to a group of 6 or 12 laymen.
When you get right down to it, Wikipedia's got exactly what they should have for a web-based encyclopedia. They're far better than random web searches, and significantly broader than the "authoritive" dead-tree encyclopedias.
Yes. I'm in favor of the idea, but want something based on science instead of something that comes across as something designed to hamper some economies and boost others. Re-write it so it includes reductions for all. No increase. Reductions for all.
Screw that. Write it so it has one level of acceptable pollution for all. It's a theoretically simple formula: [Total Allowable Global Pollution] / [total world population] * [Country population]. Let less-developed countries sell their "share" to rich foreign countries, and we're all set.
News flash: teh US is the world's biggest polluter, both per-capita and in-total. Pollution control of any kind is going to hurt us. We should have seen this coming twenty years ago and done something about it.
There are plenty of scenes where "civilized" Americans go along and tacitly or explicitly agree with some very racist and anti-semitic remarks.
So? A significant portion of that is "hospitality." Let Cohen go about dressed as an American and try the same stuff, and you'll get a better measure of the level of American racism.
For example when Borat goes into the gun dealer's shop and asks for a good gun to kill Jews with, the owner proudly gives him a nice handgun that looked like its bullets could pierce thick armor!
I suspect that scene was either staged or edited; you still need at least a cursory background check to buy a handgun, especially if you're not an American citizen. The gun dealer can be as good-salesman-happy as he wants; he's not a bartender, and it's the customer who's liabile for the use of that gun.
At every turn a good republican should ask if what they are doing helps the people and minimizes the control the government has over the people. They are clearly not doing the latter, and the former [is] arguable.
No, not really.
Your party has historically been for many things, but "small government" was never really one of them. It was just a way to say they were "anti-socialist" or "anti-welfare" without being negative. The party you describe would be against drug laws or outlawing abortion as much as it's against gun control.
The left/right divide comes down to the division of Right and Proper -- the Right-wing desires the government to do that which is morally correct, while the left desires the government do that which is legally proper. there are, of course, other metrics you might use to divide the two, but "big government / small government" isn't one of them.
John Kerry insults our military. The media response? "It was just a botched joke. Bush is evil. Let's get back to that."
... but focuses on the content of Fox's ads, as opposed to Fox himself. The media response? "This is an outrage. Rush should apologize for being born!" (while ignoring the *real* debate over what Rush said about cloning, and what Fox said about stem cells).
John Kerry is an idiot. (How do you go from "how do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" to "I voted for the $80 billion before I voted against it"?) And even that botch isn't necessarily foul play, coming from someone who was all but drafted to fight in Vietnam. And the minority of soldiers (et al) who made a career out of it can feel insulted; everyone else should just quiet down.
Rush criticizes Michael J Fox's political ads, and is surpised by what he sees, so he tries to demonstrate it
Rush accused Fox of faking his illness. If you want to compare it to Kerry being an idiot, you'd have to find a JK quote where he said something equally out of bounds -- such as "the United States Military faked 9/11." The fact that the debate is ignored is Rush's own fault.
(Oh, and for the record -- stem cell research and cloning are two entirely different things. Hell, "cloning" is about as much what we see in labs as "teleportation" is getting two atoms to line up from fifteen feet away.)
Even if Microsoft could persuade the court to interpret their EULA as a contract, is there anywhere on the planet where a "no sue" clause in a contract would be valid?
/., you probably use at least once in your daily life -- the GPL. The exact same legal principle applies.)
Yes*. There are several perfectly valid contracts in the United States today wherein, as part of them, the parties agree to waive litigation or limit the awardable damages thereof. A great example is the contract you enter when you attend an amusement park or go to a ski range. So long as the parties both acted in good faith and within the bounds of the law, such provisions will usually stand.
As for that asterisk (*): there's no such thing as a contract that will deny you your access to the Courts ("redress of grievances" and all that), but there are contracts that will let you get a lawsuit dismissed with a simple motion you can almost make without a lawyer.
(Btw, there's one famous contract that, on
((Oh, and if you file a suit knowing you don't have grounds, you might get hit to pay the other party's legal fees. Which is one reason to get a lawyer -- so their malpractice insurance will cover you for such stupidity.))
That says that you're agreeing you cannot (not will not) sue Microsoft for damages. That you do not have a right to bring your greivances before a court of law.
Wrong.
What it means is that, if you somehow get in a situation where Microsoft causes you real harm--like, say, Windows causes your PC to explode and kill your brother--you have to prove that it's so terrible the court needs to modify the contract. And if it's really that bad, there isn't a judge in the country that'll let the EULA stand.
That line says the same thing that the GPL says when it comes to warranties -- that there is no warranty attached to the software, and the limit of what you can get from it simply not working is what you paid for it.
They have changed the behavior of common icons (e.g. the network system tray icon does not have a "right-click properties" method of accessing the connection settings).
Single-click the icon, and then click "connection properties" on the window that pops up. (Or something else -- my non-windows, non-vista cable modem gateway is being a pain, so I'm typing this from my XP desktop instead of the laptop running vista.)
And note how Vista remembers network connections, and remembers different security settings per network connection. Don't know if Apple has that, but it's a significant improvement over XP.
Also, there is no more Start -> Run option. They have replaced it with Start -> "Search". This appears to offer the same functionality as "Run", but does not seem intuitive.
The "Run" command -- which is still WindowsKey + R, btw -- is removed from the default start menu, but you can add it back in about ten seconds.
The "Search" command is actually better, as it uses real names instead of the obscure file names. To run Word on XP, you either have to find the icon, or remember "winword". To do the same in XP, it's just "hit WindowsKey, type 'Word', and select the program".
Another item I was hoping for: multiple concurrent Remote Desktop sessions.
Hmm... do you mean one client to multiple servers (already works) or one server to multiple clients (business decision to limit to server OS.)?
If not, then why is it considered "stealing" when magnetic bits are manipulated to the same state on hard drives?
Because "unlawful copyright infringement in the Nth degree" is hard for a layman to say?
It's illegal. You can go to jail for it, and will almost certainly be forced to pay actual damages. You might as well complain about why a priest calls aggrivated manslaughter "murder."
I've seen this prediction-of-doom vary from 10 years to 50 years.... projected at various points over the last 30 years. Chances are, you'll be able to see some headline in 2070: "Oil Running Out in 20 Years!!!"
Amazing how you don't graps what "Peak Oil" really is.
At a certain point, production stops increasing, and in fact starts to decline, because not enough new fields can be found to replace the spent ones. (When's the last time you saw a field of Oil pumps in PA?) The price of oil goes up, as the supply goes down -- making currently non-profitable oil reserves and energy sources, theoretically, more profitable.
We will likely never run out of oil, although it will eventually (50 years? 500?) reach the point where it's simply too expensive to get the stuff out of the ground, and we only use biomass-made oil or some other alternative fuel source.
If you don't see the west's double standards in treating Jews and Arabs let me refresh you memory;
I see a double standard, but let me rebutt yours before I argue mine.
People get sent to jail for challenging the accuracy of the Holocaust figures, yet freedom of speech in invoked everytime someone gratuitousely insults the prophet Mohammed and his teachings.
No one ever gets sent to jail in the west for insulting the Jews or their teachings. Insulting the prophet Mohammed (isn't there supposed to be an addition there?) is the equivalent of saying that Kabbalah is devil-worship; it's freedom of religion.
Those counties (of which the United States is NOT a part) that made denying the Holocaust a crime did so because they were complicit in the holocaust. It'd be as if the United States made questioning the reality of southern slavery a crime. You're comparing apples and, well, pears.
Israel gets away with a stockpile of nukes but no Arab country could dream of being allowed to develop them.
No arab country has millions of Jews planning on burning it from existance. And while Israel implies that they have nuclear weapons, they do not openly admit to having them, and they have never performed a nuclear test. It's entirely possible that they don't have a single nuke of their own, and are just mis-stating the presense of nukes installed by their allies.
As for how the Jews get special treatment -- you're right. They, as a part of their religion, believe that they're special, and as part of their politics, hold that they have a modern-day right to do so. Because they've done such a good job adapting to the west, the jewish idea of what is offensive and abhorrent is treated as an agnostic view, and so carries a fair bit of weight. This is, in essense, subversive, but it's not the sort of thing that my country is going to get riled up over. After all, Christians and Muslims have exactly the same access to influencing our country; they just need to play their cards right.
While apparently the courts for some reason tend to think that clicking a license implies consent
Yep. Just like they thing that for some reason you signing the line on an end of a contract implies consent. I mean, it's not like anyone READS all of those.
Vista's EULA would be better served with an "introduction" denoting the limitations that can be done. It'd get the point across pretty well, and let the CAPITAL LETTER DISCLAIMERS continue.
Are SSNs of dead people later re-assigned?
Not yet, but they will eventually. That or add another digit.
Less than a century until we run out of our billion or so possible SSNs. Expect the next method to just have a new digit thrown in.
0 - The unwashed masses that do not realise that you can have a yes/no value represented by one bit
Yes, you can. But when you're talking about real types, you assign them a value. The existance of null-persons is always implied.
This guy tries to explain to the average reader/non-geek that Microsoft .NET is a "computer language".
So long as your precompiled code is a combination of English and C, and yet you still prefer to call it a "language", you shouldn't be surprised to hear others mis-use the word just as bad as you.
C, C++, VB, Java, Perl, Pascal, Javascript, and all the rest are syntaxes, not languages.
Israel just wants to be left alone.
Israel wants to be racially and religiously pure.
I laughed last night when I discovered that accidentally hitting the Windows key STILL boots you out of a fullscreen game. That thing has to be the most worthless key ever invented.
Odd.
1: Doom3, at least, is fully capable of telling the windows key to frack off.
2: Look up "windows shortcut keys" in the Windows help files. It's a fairly useful key. (And if you don't like it, you can always just remove it and cap the button. might take you all of ten minutes.)
I was stunned when nobody went to see it.
We did. And then Joss pulled the dirtiest storytelling trick he's ever pulled, and half of us shouted out how badly it was. That had a significantly depressing effect on ticket sales -- just like Superman Reurns, and just like Star Trek: Nemesis.
Combined with the demoralizing turnout for Star Trek: Nemesis, this makes me wonder whether the ratio of influence to noise by the Slashdot crowd is not overrated by some scary multiplier.
No, it's just that some times movies suck.
The article should read 'upgrading all your computers to brand new ones, trashing all your old hardware and putting Vista and (for some reason) MS office on them will cost $3000'.
don't forget "paying somebody to train them in 90 minutes what they could have figured out in 10" and "having someone walk over and cut open the box for them". That's about the only thing that justifies a 3k increase.
No shit. Give me original content any day of the week.
You make a common mistake -- an "original" game is no more novel nor innovative than a "sequel". In fact, since time has to be spent on developing a new premise, we actually wind up with less original content than if a sequal had been made.
The 'life force' is a concept that was invented for Star Trek and other TV shows. Please don't confuse it with reality.
Sorry, you're wrong on both parts.
1: It's an older concept than TV. (Going back at least to Frakenstein, btw -- depending on how you parse your definitions)
2: There really is something distinct about "life" that "not-life" doesn't have. It may be inherent to the particular balance of matter and energy that resides in a living thing, but there's "something." the right answer to teh question is "we don't know, but since the actual bits of you change all the time anyway, we don't think it'd be a problem."
Please don't confuse science with reality. It's arrogant.