We handed out CDs with Windows versions of FOSS apps. If people find that they can do their jobs just fine with those apps instead of Windows-only apps, then the OS doesn't matter to them anymore.
Then Ubuntu came along with a combo live CD and Windows installer for several FOSS apps as an added bonus, so we've settled on that as our new sampler. I do get a kick out of the fact that Kubuntu has Firefox for Windows on the CD, but not for Linux. (Not that synaptic can't add it in a hurry.)
You can't seriously mean that the crap that Enron pulled should be legal, can you? You think it's perfectly cool to mislead the public into thinking that your company is doing great, then sell of all your stake in it just in time for the truth to come out?
Fraud and force are the two things that justify the retaliatory use of force by government. And Enron executives were convicted for their illegal acts. Just like every other high-profile crime that is used as an excuse to give the government more power to somehow prevent the next one. But there's always a next one, isn't there?
There are plenty of slashdotters who have had to implement SOX requirements. They impose more costs on new entrants. Who is in the better position to fill out all the forms and satisfy the regulators, AT&T or the ClassMyAss Telephone company?
And once you've empowered your new agency to regulate Big Bad Business, who do you think goes to work there? High-minded reformers, or people who have actual experience in those very businesses? Look at your state agencies that regulate utilities, and find out how many of their staff members used to work for the utilities. The federal agency that was created to regulate the Evil Railroads was heavily dominated by railroad people, until it morphed into the Surface Transportation Board that also regulates trucking. Now it has a lot of people from trucking companies too.
these are exactly the types of questions that capitalism can't solve by itself
Hogwash.
If a manufacturer places rules on retailers that they don't like, they're likely to find those retailers stocking competitors' products instead. All it takes is one player who sees the value of not actively alienating his distribution channels. With a free capital market, such a player can be assembled with little difficulty. But of course, we don't have a free capital market. Everything is regulated by SEC, and every time a large company goes out of business, someone decides There Ought To Be A Law to be sure it doesn't happen again. So they pile on more regulations that act as a barrier to new entrants, stifling competition.
The apologists for the Nanny State routinely trot out antitrust as an example of where the free market doesn't work, but in reality it's the industries with the most regulation by government that are the most monopolized. Take telecommunications. For most of the history of telephones, it was illegal to compete for customers. That monopoly was enforced by local governments. But I guess as long as you control the government schools that teach the history of 'Robber Barons', people will believe the propaganda.
He also complains that he was forced to lie:
"When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie."
I thought that was a strange answer. I wonder if saying "I can't answer that question" would be a violation of the order. How about "I'm not going to lie to you", and then just shut up, or change the subject entirely: "Who do you like for American Idol?" Does the order specifically require that a person tell a lie? What if that person is under oath, which would constitute perjury?
Dude, nobody uses Astroturf anymore. The handful of stadia that do use artificial turf use much better products (including the AstroTurf GameDay brand that the Bills use); the Cardinals took the extraordinary step of having their new stadium with a rollout tray to hold a natural grass field, so that it could sit in the sunshine other than on game day. Otherwise they'd probably have to use artificial turf too.
I'm rather fond of my 8-5 world including more daylight after I get off of work.
Before we had these time pieces, people got up at sunrise. Over the course of the six months between solstices, the change would be a minute a day at most in the temperate zone. This gradual adjustment went away when we started using sundials, which based the time of day on noon instead of sunrise.
Then we got clocks, which came in handy for things like train schedules. The railroads had a problem. When an Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe train left the former at noon, it was still 11:57:46 in the second city, and 11:16:41 in the latter. The difference caused all sorts of problems. So the AT&SF might decide to standardize on Topeka Time, while the Union Pacific would choose Omaha, which would be a minute and 36 seconds behind Topeka, complicating matters where passengers or cargo had to change trains from one line to another.
So one of the railroad men came up with the bright idea of a standard time system for the whole country, where just the hour would differ between 'zones' approximiately 15 degrees of longitude in width. Since astronomers used the meridian of the Greenwich Observatory as '0', that would put Atchison, Topeka, and Omaha all well within 7.5 degrees of 90W (just east of St. Louis), while Santa Fe was just west of the 105W meridian, and would have its clocks set to an hour earlier.
In practice, the actual boundaries have tended to skew westward, so that even in the Winter, astronomical noon is after 12:00 Standard Time, leaving more daylight after people get off work in the afternoon. The boundary between the Central (90W) and Mountain (105W) time zones actually touches the 105W meridian in TX, and Saskatchewan effectively pushes it further west by declaring that it's on permanent DST (which is a contradiction in terms, and is therefore rendered on maps as being inside the CTZ rather than permanent MDT)!
Of course, a lot of Slashdotters rarely the light of day, so to them it's all a pointless exercise.
Ben Franklin used pseudonyms in the traditional sense, to hide his identity. He did not present himself as someone with qualifications he did not have or earn.
But the irony of it is that as a person with 'expert qualifications' in a particular subject area (Catholic Theology), by Wikipedia standards he is no more qualified to speak on that subject than anyone else. To do so would be to introduce Original Research, which is a violation of one of the three main content rules. Instead, what SJ should have done was to cite respected authorities as experts, and keep the sheepskin out of it.
That anyone ever gave him deference because of this alleged authority is an indication of how well Wikipedia follows its own rules.
...text, spreadsheets, and presentations, produced by any state agency shall be created, exchanged, and preserved in an open extensible markup language-based, XML-based file format.
Why would text need to be in an XML-based format, when it can be in a... text format? If you have a text document that doesn't require any formatting, just make it text!
It looks like a replay of the times when Hollywood was flaunting the Edison patents.
You're either missing some words or you've used the wrong one here. Either Hollywood was flaunting its disregard for the patents, or it was flouting them.
Yes, I'm a Big Dic...ionary Guy. How is it that geeks who understand that spelling, grammar, and usage errors in their code will at best keep it from compiling (so that they know there's a problem and can fix it) but consider the same things in human communication irrelevant, and resent having them pointed out?
And while I'm ranting, when two things agree with each other, they jibe, not 'jive'. The whole comprises the parts, or the parts compose the whole. In passive voice, the whole is composed of the parts (it is not 'comprised of' them, although it's possible that they could be 'comprised of' the whole).
The word it's, by the way, is a contraction for it is or it has; possessive pronouns do not have apostrophes in them. The only case where an apostrophe indicates a plural is that of text characters (Dot all your i's and cross all your t's).
The frozen dessert is 'sherbet', not 'sherbert'. A 'slash' leans forward (/), a 'backslash' leans back (\), a colon is two dots (:) and a semicolon is a dot on top of a comma (;). There is no such word as 'paticular', 'strenth', 'lenth'.
A default gnome desktop install package that just works, and an additional power-users tweak package. Like Windows has with TweakUI (only more powerful)
No, because these aren't things that are just for 'power users'. You're setting up an artificial barrier to a user gaining experience by requiring them to install a package to gain features.
We're talking about things like duplexing printers being able to print even-numbered pages on the back of the odd-numbered pages, or toner/ink-saving draft modes.
The way to handle the tension between the "KISS for Aunt Tillie" and "Let me tweak my ass off" crowds is to put the most basic options on one tab of the dialog, and have more advanced options on the other tabs, or accessible via an [Advanced] button of some sort.
Changing daylight savings time or y2k will be childsplay compared to the Year 2038 32-bit time_t overflow.
Oh, please. The y2k12 overflow of the Mayan Long Count will be 26 years before then. You act like there will be 32-bit computers left after TEOTWAWKI.
In principle, Linux and friends can fix this by redefining time_t to 64-bit - but lots of communication protocols and even file formats like tar use 32-bit dates.
The tar format has already been extended once with the USTAR spec; it can be extended again. It's got a 12-character field for mtime, which is inexplicably populated with an ASCII-encoded octal value that apparently must only use 11 characters. But 11 octal digits are 33 bits, so the tar format itself doesn't seem to be the problem so much as the software that reads and writes it. I've no doubt that the spec says only 31 bits can be used, but rewriting it to allow the lower bits of a new time_t64 to populate all 33 bits pushes the problem out to 2242 without a major change to the format.
At least we have 30 years to fix that, a lot more than the year and a half we had to get ready for this one.
The whitewash came from the term 'Internett-leverandører'. The 'lever' sounded enough like 'laver' from French that I figured it got caught in one of those Vowel Shifts that are so popular. I took 'ulovlig' to be the antonym of 'lovely'. But I should have known better than that.
And don't tell me to RTFA, because it's in Norwegian.
Like that makes any difference.
I dag legger Datakrimutvalget fram et forslag som vil pålegge Internett-leverandører å blokkere nettsider med ulovlig innhold.
I don't know a word of Norwegian, but it sounds like the Datacrime bureau wants to whitewash the Internet and block websites with bad content. Hey, at least I tried...
Threatening to beat the crap out of someone who disagrees with you is the moral equivalent of using political power to take away licenses of weather forecasters who don't toe the party line. Science doesn't need to coerce compliance. Reality is what it is.
Giving notice is purely a courtesy. It legally can not affect recommendations or references
You sure about that? If someone calls one of my prior employers that I quit voluntarily, asked if I gave notice, and they truthfully answered how much notice I gave, you're saying that I have a legal claim against them?
Anyone who can write a spoken language can contribute to Wikipedia.
...As well as an awful lot of people who can't. In certain genres, the grammar is horrendous, the spelling abysmal, and the less said about the punctuation, the better.
As someone who tries to do something about it, I often don't bother, because some articles are that badly written.
A link may not be a guarantee but stubborn refusal to provide a reference of any kind is suspicious and rightfully so, because the number one cause of that is if you're pulling it out of your ass.
In fact, this is true 72.45% of the time according to a recent survey [citation needed].
Cingular, Priceline, and Travelocity have been fined for using adware by the New York Attorney General.
what they really meant was
Cingular, Priceline, and Travelocity have been fined by the New York Attorney General for using adware.
No, that doesn't make sense either. A state AG can't fine anyone. He's a prosecutor, not a judge or jury. What could the true meaning of this be? Could it be that this is a settlement, agreed to by the AG and the three companies in question? Yes. Yes it could.
Nope, read your EULA. Microsoft has the right to audit at your expense at any time.
When I buy a computer with software already installed, and I am not informed before agreeing to the sale of such terms, they're on pretty shaky ground legally. One party to a transaction can't come along later and declare that there are additional terms that weren't disclosed when the agreement was, well, agreed to by the other party. That's basic contract law, with a lot of legislation on the side of the consumer to strengthen it.
Well, the original makes more sense. I always word it that way, myself.
I have trouble when people use phrases like "head over heels in love", when having one's head over his heels is the normal, logical, way for someone to be. I wish my elder daughter had been 'head over heels'....
Or "I could care less", which logically means that you must care SOME. Now, if someone says "I couldn't care less", then they're saying what most people mean. Is it that hard to say what you mean instead of the opposite?
How about parents who want to teach their childred from birth that religion X is th eonly true way and that everyone else is a sinner and needs to be converted? What about parents who teach their children to be sexist? racist?
When they pick up weapons and try to translate that philosophy into reality, we'll just have to kill them. Meanwhile, we'll muddle through under this wacky idea that parents are presumed to have the best interests of their children at heart, and understand that hate mongers from Westboro to Wahhabi are the price of religious freedom.
Somebody tell this guy about the correlation between DMHO ingestion and sex crimes! It's 100%
What a yutz. Let's say this guy gets his law. What practical method is there for a state legislature to require a website based on servers in some other state to verify the identity of people who want to edit pages there?
Some online services marketed to adults take a credit card as a way of proving you're an adult. They place an authorization on your card, perhaps even charging some nominal fee, which if accepted by the card issuer is sufficient proof of age. How hard is it for a teen to slip Mom's credit card out of her purse, write down the card number, expiration date, and the verification number on the reverse, knowing that if it's just an authorization, she'll have no way to know, and if it's a one-off charge of a buck or three, she still probably won't notice. Or maybe Precious Child has his own Visa Buxx, and uses that to prove he's an adult.
So that's clearly out. Is he going to create some state agency to give online credentials to adults? Uh-oh. I just realized that in posting this comment, I'm within the definition of 'create or maintain a Web page', and I don't believe I've shown anyone my drivers licence here.
The internet provides fertile new ground for evildoers, whether they're pedophiles or politicians.
Slashdot Mirror
We handed out CDs with Windows versions of FOSS apps. If people find that they can do their jobs just fine with those apps instead of Windows-only apps, then the OS doesn't matter to them anymore. Then Ubuntu came along with a combo live CD and Windows installer for several FOSS apps as an added bonus, so we've settled on that as our new sampler. I do get a kick out of the fact that Kubuntu has Firefox for Windows on the CD, but not for Linux. (Not that synaptic can't add it in a hurry.)
There are plenty of slashdotters who have had to implement SOX requirements. They impose more costs on new entrants. Who is in the better position to fill out all the forms and satisfy the regulators, AT&T or the ClassMyAss Telephone company?
And once you've empowered your new agency to regulate Big Bad Business, who do you think goes to work there? High-minded reformers, or people who have actual experience in those very businesses? Look at your state agencies that regulate utilities, and find out how many of their staff members used to work for the utilities. The federal agency that was created to regulate the Evil Railroads was heavily dominated by railroad people, until it morphed into the Surface Transportation Board that also regulates trucking. Now it has a lot of people from trucking companies too.
The apologists for the Nanny State routinely trot out antitrust as an example of where the free market doesn't work, but in reality it's the industries with the most regulation by government that are the most monopolized. Take telecommunications. For most of the history of telephones, it was illegal to compete for customers. That monopoly was enforced by local governments. But I guess as long as you control the government schools that teach the history of 'Robber Barons', people will believe the propaganda.
Then we got clocks, which came in handy for things like train schedules. The railroads had a problem. When an Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe train left the former at noon, it was still 11:57:46 in the second city, and 11:16:41 in the latter. The difference caused all sorts of problems. So the AT&SF might decide to standardize on Topeka Time, while the Union Pacific would choose Omaha, which would be a minute and 36 seconds behind Topeka, complicating matters where passengers or cargo had to change trains from one line to another.
So one of the railroad men came up with the bright idea of a standard time system for the whole country, where just the hour would differ between 'zones' approximiately 15 degrees of longitude in width. Since astronomers used the meridian of the Greenwich Observatory as '0', that would put Atchison, Topeka, and Omaha all well within 7.5 degrees of 90W (just east of St. Louis), while Santa Fe was just west of the 105W meridian, and would have its clocks set to an hour earlier.
In practice, the actual boundaries have tended to skew westward, so that even in the Winter, astronomical noon is after 12:00 Standard Time, leaving more daylight after people get off work in the afternoon. The boundary between the Central (90W) and Mountain (105W) time zones actually touches the 105W meridian in TX, and Saskatchewan effectively pushes it further west by declaring that it's on permanent DST (which is a contradiction in terms, and is therefore rendered on maps as being inside the CTZ rather than permanent MDT)!
Of course, a lot of Slashdotters rarely the light of day, so to them it's all a pointless exercise.
That anyone ever gave him deference because of this alleged authority is an indication of how well Wikipedia follows its own rules.
I had to look him up on
Wikipedia:
Now I can tell that
Jean-Louis Gassée is an
Important Person
Yes, I'm a Big Dic...ionary Guy. How is it that geeks who understand that spelling, grammar, and usage errors in their code will at best keep it from compiling (so that they know there's a problem and can fix it) but consider the same things in human communication irrelevant, and resent having them pointed out?
And while I'm ranting, when two things agree with each other, they jibe, not 'jive'. The whole comprises the parts, or the parts compose the whole. In passive voice, the whole is composed of the parts (it is not 'comprised of' them, although it's possible that they could be 'comprised of' the whole).
The word it's, by the way, is a contraction for it is or it has; possessive pronouns do not have apostrophes in them. The only case where an apostrophe indicates a plural is that of text characters (Dot all your i's and cross all your t's).
The frozen dessert is 'sherbet', not 'sherbert'. A 'slash' leans forward (/), a 'backslash' leans back (\), a colon is two dots (:) and a semicolon is a dot on top of a comma (;). There is no such word as 'paticular', 'strenth', 'lenth'.
And we get fringe benefits, not 'French'...
We're talking about things like duplexing printers being able to print even-numbered pages on the back of the odd-numbered pages, or toner/ink-saving draft modes.
The way to handle the tension between the "KISS for Aunt Tillie" and "Let me tweak my ass off" crowds is to put the most basic options on one tab of the dialog, and have more advanced options on the other tabs, or accessible via an [Advanced] button of some sort.
At least we have 30 years to fix that, a lot more than the year and a half we had to get ready for this one.
Threatening to beat the crap out of someone who disagrees with you is the moral equivalent of using political power to take away licenses of weather forecasters who don't toe the party line. Science doesn't need to coerce compliance. Reality is what it is.
On what grounds?
As someone who tries to do something about it, I often don't bother, because some articles are that badly written.
I have trouble when people use phrases like "head over heels in love", when having one's head over his heels is the normal, logical, way for someone to be. I wish my elder daughter had been 'head over heels'....
Or "I could care less", which logically means that you must care SOME. Now, if someone says "I couldn't care less", then they're saying what most people mean. Is it that hard to say what you mean instead of the opposite?
What a yutz. Let's say this guy gets his law. What practical method is there for a state legislature to require a website based on servers in some other state to verify the identity of people who want to edit pages there?
Some online services marketed to adults take a credit card as a way of proving you're an adult. They place an authorization on your card, perhaps even charging some nominal fee, which if accepted by the card issuer is sufficient proof of age. How hard is it for a teen to slip Mom's credit card out of her purse, write down the card number, expiration date, and the verification number on the reverse, knowing that if it's just an authorization, she'll have no way to know, and if it's a one-off charge of a buck or three, she still probably won't notice. Or maybe Precious Child has his own Visa Buxx, and uses that to prove he's an adult.
So that's clearly out. Is he going to create some state agency to give online credentials to adults? Uh-oh. I just realized that in posting this comment, I'm within the definition of 'create or maintain a Web page', and I don't believe I've shown anyone my drivers licence here.
The internet provides fertile new ground for evildoers, whether they're pedophiles or politicians.