You shouldn't talk about the death of the "lone asteroid" theory until the people on the West Coast have had a chance to hear about it, you insensitive clod!
Why do we need a breathalyzer in every car? That's a lot of points of failure in the system, what happens if the car's breathalyzer breaks? Or worse yet, fails in such a way that every one tests positive? Your car may need to be towed to the shop because it won't let anyone drive it.
If people are so concerned about drunk driving, they should put breathalyzer machines in the bathrooms of places that sell alcohol. At least that way someone can figure out if they're over the limit without guessing. And while the devices can still fail, at least the operation of your car isn't depending on it.
I usually ask "Why are we having this meeting? No. Really". It never gets answered satisfactorily. Am I asking anything wrong??
There's nothing wrong with that, unless you want to get promoted into management. Then I think your performance will be evaluated on the number of useless meetings you go to (and run).
I get invited to a ton of meetings every week, but always ask the person calling it if I really need to go. More than half the time, I was only invited because I was on the project distribution list!
I've lost count of the number of times I've been emailed about it, from anonymous do gooders making sure that I know they know I'm serving copyrighted goods online, and that it's illegal, and that I could get in some great trouble. Even had one guy argue with me until he broke down into swearing and abuse insisting the RIAA would have my balls on a platter.
I'm suprised people care enough to get into arguments with you over it. Unless they're all RIAA shills...
I'm graduating with a Computer Engineering degree in May. While I agree that the job market is awful - I *did* obtain 16 interviews and 2 job offers. So I can claim that jobs do exist. I know more than 5 grads from my school alone who've found jobs. The job market isn't *that* bad.
A lot of that depends on how mobile you are. Someone fresh out of college is not tied down to a particular area yet, and can conduct a nationwide search to find a job.
But someone older with more experience will also have more personal ties to the community, and the relative cost (financial, family, and social) of relocating across the country will be much greater. As a result, when you get laid off, you'll have fewer choices, because you'll be focusing on jobs in your immediate area first. And you may have to decide between taking a job that uses your degree somewhere else, and taking a less well-paying job but not having to move.
Here's some unsolicited advice to all you grads out there: try and get a feel for the relative job markets in the areas you are considering taking jobs in. Even if it's just querying internet job sites for jobs in those areas, and seeing what they come up with. It's almost inevitable that you'll get laid off or leave your job at some point; it would be nice if you didn't have to move to find a new job if you didn't want to.
If this problem is as pervasive as it seems, exactly WHAT components are effected? I mean, think about this, how many of these plastics have found their way into things like Ventilators, internal defibrillators, external defibrillators like the LifePak series that is so prevalant on ambulances and in hospitals world wide?
Any equipment, from a single transistor to a microprocessor, that is used in life-support systems have a whole different qualification process, and the parameters are much stricter. I know that space-qualified chips often have their own fabrication process that is different than normal chips to make them radiation-hardened; I wouldn't be suprised if chips that are meant to be put into someone's body are fabricated using an older, more stable process, which wouldn't have had this change in the first place.
And anything that doesn't make money when it's not available (like an ATM machine) will have scads of redundancy built in. If chips are dying in the field, odds are it's only resulting in more service calls, and perhaps marginally more downtime.
I would think that some of the newer chips for game systems and PCs would be the first to show any ill effects from this problem, since they're likely to be in the newest processes to get the best transistor density. But it all depends on who fabbed the chip (which in all likelihood is different than who's logo appears on it), and whether they were using this process change at the time.
It is the equivalent of putting out a press release that all the dorms have now installed the new "Trusted door" technology, which will only let students out of their dorms when they have a valid reason to do it (I mean, you can't trust students - we know that - so why not have trusted doors instead???)
The parents who actually pay the tuition bills might think that Trusted Door Technology is a great idea: it guarantees that their child isn't getting into trouble, with no interacton on their part. (doesn't it? that's what the nice man at the school told me!)
Yeah, I'm being sarcastic (a little) but there is a point buried in there. The Open Web is dead not because of DRM, but because the more powerful interests want it dead. They could care less about what we think, and anything that increases their profits and their control over us with less actual interaction with us is OK.
So I was thinking - I like games, she likes to talk, why not combine the two?
Unless she likes games too, this doesn't stand a chance in hell of working out well for you. You are trying to use logic -- guy logic -- to deal with women. The sooner you learn how futile this is, the better it is for you.
A student was in the news a few years ago for setting up his own part-time bookstore. Custom ordering cheaper foreign editions if I remember. The college was not amused.
If your college has a Follett's bookstore on campus, odds are that when they signed the contract to bring Follett's on board, the school agreed to not have a school or student-affiliated competing bookstore on college property. Yes, that means if a student sets up a store, the school has the legal obligation to squash it.
Yeah, the school is essentially signing away students rights, but if they didn't, they'd have to find a local businessman to run the bookstore instead of a large, monopolizing corporation, and that would be tragic! Think of the kids of the middle managers at Follett's who won't be getting their BMW's on their sixteenth birthday if you open up that competing bookstore!
Unless students vote with their feet by boycotting classes that require overpriced textbooks, and threatening to switch schools or majors if a required course requires the overpriced textbook, there's never going to be any change. So long as new books are required every year, and the publishers can keep it that way, the market for used textbooks will dry up.
As another poster has pointed out, all that boycotting a class (especially required classes) would do is hurt yourself. You're talking about dramatically changing your future (and your employment path) over an issue that, while it's important now, you won't care about once you get your diploma. Since books are a required part of university life, the University and the Publisher will still get their share of money out of you, one way or another.
Now, what I think you should do is take the class, but not buy the book, or at least not pay full price for the book. There are many clever ways to accomplish not having to shell out top dollar for the book, and that don't involve wholesale copyright infringement. Figuring these out is left as an exercise to the reader.;)
The library? That's the place that has a bunch of books and stuff, and then "shares" them with anyone with a library card, right?
I'm suprised the government allows this, it sounds like obvious copyright infringement. Imagine what life would have been like if we had these "libraries" for the past two hundred years --- everyone would be able to read books and stuff for free, and no one would ever be able to exercise their constitutional rights to make a profit from selling them!
Damn Communist Linux Hippies. First Napster, then Libraries. What will they think of next?
Since actual DVD's are so cheap nowadays, wouldn't a better business model for airport rentals be to rent an actual DVD to people in airports, and include a postage-paid return envelope for you to give back your disc at your destination?
I seen to remember a similar service (that also included a portable DVD player rental if you wanted it), but I think that service was limited to flights between airports that had their kiosks, so you could return the equipment right to them in the airport.
I was about to join in on the chorus of M$ bashing here, because it's fun. Let's face it: the fact that they chose to release an advisory rather than use one of the many techniques listed in these comments to fix the problem reveals one of two things: they don't really have a committment to security, or their IE code is so crufty that no one can fix it.
But then I thought of a third possibility: even though this class of exploits may be fixable in future versions of IE, there are plenty of people who are running older versions of Windows with older versions of IE. Even if Microsoft's commitment to secure computing is genuine, there may simply not be enough manpower to go back and fix every version of IE for any new security fix that comes along.
I see two classes of people benefitting from this KB article: those who are still running ancient versions of Windows on their old PC's, and those in a corporate environment where the IT department locks down their PC's to use only older, tested versions of Windows (and IE). In either case, even if Microsoft were to provide patches for every version of IE, the chance that the patch would actually be applied is slim.
Of course, the probability of these users actually encountering this KB article in the course of their daily websurfing is also slim, but we'll let that slide for the moment...
Mike Rowe's original post on his website about the letter from Microsoft mentioned the words "copyright infringement". Other sites (including the major news sites, once they got a hold of the story) used those exact same words, since that's what he wrote on his site.
(Our second big loss has been the "IP" fudge, which is blurring the distinctions between patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, competative advantages, wishful thinking, bullshit, and marketing babble into one vague pile of lawyer poo).
Excellent. I think I need to come up with a shorter version of that to turn into my new sig!
Please explain to me (and I'm sure many others here) how the electoral college system is "democratic." Because I don't think it is.
The electoral college as it currently stands is "democratic" if you consider that the US President is not elected by a single election, but 50 separate elections held by each state. Each voter has an equal vote to determine the outcome in that state. It traces its origins to when the president was not directly elected by voters, but elected by people appointed by their individual states. Each state could use its own method for appointing these electors, which was seen as a good thing back then, to a people who were generally distrustful of central government.
(There's a good paper on this here (PDF). I didn't have the time to read all of it before posting here, but I probably will before the next big Electoral College discussion heats up this November.)
So, the real issue is how the results of each election are combined to determine the winner. Whether or not the state results are a result of a popular vote, they still have to be combined. Weighting them equally is obviously not an option -- it gives too much power to the smalelr states. Weighting them proportionally to the number if voters in that election (which is essentially what you advocate) also has its drawbacks too: the votes of people in less populated regions would simply get lost in the noise. I think the current system works rather well, although I think the "winner-take-all" format of most states' electoral college votes needs some work.
Finally, if you thought that the 2000 election was a debacle, remember that Florida was not the only close statewide election, it was simply the election that was closest. If the President was elected by a true national vote, every ballot nationwide would have been opened up for scrutiny during thode few months, and there would have been much more of an opportunity for after-the-fact manipulation of votes in recounts. The Electoral College system neatly confines election problems to one state. I think this is a Good Thing.
I Belive that now copying something is considered theft by law.
I recently got a GameCube, and Madden 2004. I do read all my software licenses, mostly for a good laugh. The Madden 2004 licence included a phrase that went something like this (paraphrasing, but the stuff in scare quotes was in scare quotes in the license):
Any duplication of this software is against the law, for any purpose. "Back-Up" or "Archival" copies are not necessary to protect your software, and are not allowed.
That's nice of them, isn't it? Getting rid of all that messy Fair-Use stuff by saying it's not allowed. I wonder how else my software is protected, if it gets lost, stolen, or my dog eats it?
What's keeping students from putting a copyright notice on the front page of all their papers, with some boilerplate text like "Reproduction of any type without the express written permission of me is prohibited"? If it works for Major League Baseball, why can't it work for a student?
I had an Engineering teacher once who was too lazy to make up different tests for his courses every year. He got upset that the IEEE student chapter was archiving student's copies of his tests for use in future years (which, since he rarely changed the questions on the tests, was like an answer key), so he required all classwork and tests to bear a copyright notice with his name and the students' name on it. He specifically told the IEEE chapter that they could not copy his class materials. Faced with this, they stopped archiving the tests, even though they probably could have still archived original copies and just not permitted anyone to make any reproductions.
Of course, a student is in a much weaker position to assert his or her rights, since he needs a grade from the teacher more then the teacher needs to grade his paper. But I'm sure there's more than one law student who was anal enough to try this...
I'd say the standards war would be a big reason for Apple to sell cheaper iPods, but that's not the only reason.
I know many PC users who get openly hostile when they find out that I prefer to use Macs. They obsess about the one-button thing, deride the fruity colors, and constantly remind me that MegaSuperUltraFrag isn't out on the Mac yet.
Yet, a lot of these same people have downloaded iTMS, have realized how easy it is to use compared to other legal or illegal services, and grudgingly admit that Apple's on to something. They like how the iPod looks, but don't want to spend so much on it. And since the iPod is the only player that iTunes for Windows works with, this means that they're still using some other software to load their MP3's onto their Rio's.
Now, if they can buy a player that has many times the capacity of the flash players out on the market right now, but priced between $120 and $150, you'll see a lot more 128MB Flash-based players on eBay after all these people snap them up, and more people will be using iTunes (and quicktime!) on a regular basis. (They'll still make fun of the mouse, though.)
In short, a mini-iPod is targeted squarely at Windows users who usually dismiss Apple hardware as overpriced. If all these people rush out and buy mini-iPods, Apple will simply own the portable player market, and get a back-door to installing Quicktime on every windows machine that has iTunes. Apple can afford to reduce their margins to get this type of market share.
In all fairness, opinion polls help move political parties towards general consensus. Without this kind of feedback, you might have to choose between extreme-left and extreme-right parties at election time. Rather than two extreme-not-what-you-actually-want parties.
I would argue the opposite: that opinion polls help move political parties towards the opinions held by people who are inclined to answer opinion polls. And my scientific polling of the people still at my workplace on New Years Eve says that 50.00% of these people (with a 49% margin of error, of course) are extremists who are just happy that they can talk about their wacko politics to someone who isn't a radio talk show host without getting shusshed by their spouses.
Slashdot Mirror
You shouldn't talk about the death of the "lone asteroid" theory until the people on the West Coast have had a chance to hear about it, you insensitive clod!
If people are so concerned about drunk driving, they should put breathalyzer machines in the bathrooms of places that sell alcohol. At least that way someone can figure out if they're over the limit without guessing. And while the devices can still fail, at least the operation of your car isn't depending on it.
You could say the same thing for Linux, after all.
The best way for Mac or Linux users to play good games is to go out and spend $99 on a GameCube. That's what I did.
If Neil's lawyer scours Slashdot to find people who copy a few of his paragraphs for fun, then perhaps Neil isn't giving him enough to do...
Well, if there are dounuts, then I don't need to ask: of course I need to go!
There's nothing wrong with that, unless you want to get promoted into management. Then I think your performance will be evaluated on the number of useless meetings you go to (and run).
I get invited to a ton of meetings every week, but always ask the person calling it if I really need to go. More than half the time, I was only invited because I was on the project distribution list!
I'm suprised people care enough to get into arguments with you over it. Unless they're all RIAA shills...
A lot of that depends on how mobile you are. Someone fresh out of college is not tied down to a particular area yet, and can conduct a nationwide search to find a job.
But someone older with more experience will also have more personal ties to the community, and the relative cost (financial, family, and social) of relocating across the country will be much greater. As a result, when you get laid off, you'll have fewer choices, because you'll be focusing on jobs in your immediate area first. And you may have to decide between taking a job that uses your degree somewhere else, and taking a less well-paying job but not having to move.
Here's some unsolicited advice to all you grads out there: try and get a feel for the relative job markets in the areas you are considering taking jobs in. Even if it's just querying internet job sites for jobs in those areas, and seeing what they come up with. It's almost inevitable that you'll get laid off or leave your job at some point; it would be nice if you didn't have to move to find a new job if you didn't want to.
Any equipment, from a single transistor to a microprocessor, that is used in life-support systems have a whole different qualification process, and the parameters are much stricter. I know that space-qualified chips often have their own fabrication process that is different than normal chips to make them radiation-hardened; I wouldn't be suprised if chips that are meant to be put into someone's body are fabricated using an older, more stable process, which wouldn't have had this change in the first place.
And anything that doesn't make money when it's not available (like an ATM machine) will have scads of redundancy built in. If chips are dying in the field, odds are it's only resulting in more service calls, and perhaps marginally more downtime.
I would think that some of the newer chips for game systems and PCs would be the first to show any ill effects from this problem, since they're likely to be in the newest processes to get the best transistor density. But it all depends on who fabbed the chip (which in all likelihood is different than who's logo appears on it), and whether they were using this process change at the time.
The parents who actually pay the tuition bills might think that Trusted Door Technology is a great idea: it guarantees that their child isn't getting into trouble, with no interacton on their part. (doesn't it? that's what the nice man at the school told me!)
Yeah, I'm being sarcastic (a little) but there is a point buried in there. The Open Web is dead not because of DRM, but because the more powerful interests want it dead. They could care less about what we think, and anything that increases their profits and their control over us with less actual interaction with us is OK.
Unless she likes games too, this doesn't stand a chance in hell of working out well for you. You are trying to use logic -- guy logic -- to deal with women. The sooner you learn how futile this is, the better it is for you.
If your college has a Follett's bookstore on campus, odds are that when they signed the contract to bring Follett's on board, the school agreed to not have a school or student-affiliated competing bookstore on college property. Yes, that means if a student sets up a store, the school has the legal obligation to squash it.
Yeah, the school is essentially signing away students rights, but if they didn't, they'd have to find a local businessman to run the bookstore instead of a large, monopolizing corporation, and that would be tragic! Think of the kids of the middle managers at Follett's who won't be getting their BMW's on their sixteenth birthday if you open up that competing bookstore!
As another poster has pointed out, all that boycotting a class (especially required classes) would do is hurt yourself. You're talking about dramatically changing your future (and your employment path) over an issue that, while it's important now, you won't care about once you get your diploma. Since books are a required part of university life, the University and the Publisher will still get their share of money out of you, one way or another.
Now, what I think you should do is take the class, but not buy the book, or at least not pay full price for the book. There are many clever ways to accomplish not having to shell out top dollar for the book, and that don't involve wholesale copyright infringement. Figuring these out is left as an exercise to the reader. ;)
I'm suprised the government allows this, it sounds like obvious copyright infringement. Imagine what life would have been like if we had these "libraries" for the past two hundred years --- everyone would be able to read books and stuff for free, and no one would ever be able to exercise their constitutional rights to make a profit from selling them!
Damn Communist Linux Hippies. First Napster, then Libraries. What will they think of next?
I seen to remember a similar service (that also included a portable DVD player rental if you wanted it), but I think that service was limited to flights between airports that had their kiosks, so you could return the equipment right to them in the airport.
But then I thought of a third possibility: even though this class of exploits may be fixable in future versions of IE, there are plenty of people who are running older versions of Windows with older versions of IE. Even if Microsoft's commitment to secure computing is genuine, there may simply not be enough manpower to go back and fix every version of IE for any new security fix that comes along.
I see two classes of people benefitting from this KB article: those who are still running ancient versions of Windows on their old PC's, and those in a corporate environment where the IT department locks down their PC's to use only older, tested versions of Windows (and IE). In either case, even if Microsoft were to provide patches for every version of IE, the chance that the patch would actually be applied is slim.
Of course, the probability of these users actually encountering this KB article in the course of their daily websurfing is also slim, but we'll let that slide for the moment...
Mike Rowe's original post on his website about the letter from Microsoft mentioned the words "copyright infringement". Other sites (including the major news sites, once they got a hold of the story) used those exact same words, since that's what he wrote on his site.
Excellent. I think I need to come up with a shorter version of that to turn into my new sig!
The electoral college as it currently stands is "democratic" if you consider that the US President is not elected by a single election, but 50 separate elections held by each state. Each voter has an equal vote to determine the outcome in that state. It traces its origins to when the president was not directly elected by voters, but elected by people appointed by their individual states. Each state could use its own method for appointing these electors, which was seen as a good thing back then, to a people who were generally distrustful of central government. (There's a good paper on this here (PDF). I didn't have the time to read all of it before posting here, but I probably will before the next big Electoral College discussion heats up this November.)
So, the real issue is how the results of each election are combined to determine the winner. Whether or not the state results are a result of a popular vote, they still have to be combined. Weighting them equally is obviously not an option -- it gives too much power to the smalelr states. Weighting them proportionally to the number if voters in that election (which is essentially what you advocate) also has its drawbacks too: the votes of people in less populated regions would simply get lost in the noise. I think the current system works rather well, although I think the "winner-take-all" format of most states' electoral college votes needs some work.
Finally, if you thought that the 2000 election was a debacle, remember that Florida was not the only close statewide election, it was simply the election that was closest. If the President was elected by a true national vote, every ballot nationwide would have been opened up for scrutiny during thode few months, and there would have been much more of an opportunity for after-the-fact manipulation of votes in recounts. The Electoral College system neatly confines election problems to one state. I think this is a Good Thing.
And how did you know where to find them?
I recently got a GameCube, and Madden 2004. I do read all my software licenses, mostly for a good laugh. The Madden 2004 licence included a phrase that went something like this (paraphrasing, but the stuff in scare quotes was in scare quotes in the license):
Any duplication of this software is against the law, for any purpose. "Back-Up" or "Archival" copies are not necessary to protect your software, and are not allowed.
That's nice of them, isn't it? Getting rid of all that messy Fair-Use stuff by saying it's not allowed. I wonder how else my software is protected, if it gets lost, stolen, or my dog eats it?
I had an Engineering teacher once who was too lazy to make up different tests for his courses every year. He got upset that the IEEE student chapter was archiving student's copies of his tests for use in future years (which, since he rarely changed the questions on the tests, was like an answer key), so he required all classwork and tests to bear a copyright notice with his name and the students' name on it. He specifically told the IEEE chapter that they could not copy his class materials. Faced with this, they stopped archiving the tests, even though they probably could have still archived original copies and just not permitted anyone to make any reproductions.
Of course, a student is in a much weaker position to assert his or her rights, since he needs a grade from the teacher more then the teacher needs to grade his paper. But I'm sure there's more than one law student who was anal enough to try this...
All of us Dorks on the internet need to unite -- form a union or something -- lest we suffer the same cruel fate!
I know many PC users who get openly hostile when they find out that I prefer to use Macs. They obsess about the one-button thing, deride the fruity colors, and constantly remind me that MegaSuperUltraFrag isn't out on the Mac yet.
Yet, a lot of these same people have downloaded iTMS, have realized how easy it is to use compared to other legal or illegal services, and grudgingly admit that Apple's on to something. They like how the iPod looks, but don't want to spend so much on it. And since the iPod is the only player that iTunes for Windows works with, this means that they're still using some other software to load their MP3's onto their Rio's.
Now, if they can buy a player that has many times the capacity of the flash players out on the market right now, but priced between $120 and $150, you'll see a lot more 128MB Flash-based players on eBay after all these people snap them up, and more people will be using iTunes (and quicktime!) on a regular basis. (They'll still make fun of the mouse, though.)
In short, a mini-iPod is targeted squarely at Windows users who usually dismiss Apple hardware as overpriced. If all these people rush out and buy mini-iPods, Apple will simply own the portable player market, and get a back-door to installing Quicktime on every windows machine that has iTunes. Apple can afford to reduce their margins to get this type of market share.
I would argue the opposite: that opinion polls help move political parties towards the opinions held by people who are inclined to answer opinion polls. And my scientific polling of the people still at my workplace on New Years Eve says that 50.00% of these people (with a 49% margin of error, of course) are extremists who are just happy that they can talk about their wacko politics to someone who isn't a radio talk show host without getting shusshed by their spouses.