That was an unexpectedly insightful response. Most Americans tend to have the opinion that "while I don't like the American system, at least I know it's the best in the world", and actually believe that blindly without caring to know anything about what the world looks like outside the American borders, not to mention off the North American continent. I thought I saw this in your text, which triggered my knee-jerk reaction.
I personally believe that the U.S. sue-them culture is very destructive, as it tends to promote blame thinking. Hell, there's even a hefty monetary incentive for blaming other people for your own problems. Hence, protection against this consumes a disproportionate (again, compared to elsewhere) amount of resources; most American power tool manuals, for example, are three times the volume of elsewhere, simply because of all the should-be-obvious warnings ("Do not try to stop the chainsaw with your genitals. You may be injured."). Lawyers are everywhere; a full-time lawyer is an early employment in small firms. They are the true winners of this system.
In the country where I live, there is no judicial distinction between "did indeed understand" and "should have understood". For example, suing because you tried to stop the chainsaw with your hand and subsequently got hurt is going to get you slightly shorter than nowhere. I am not saying this is the all-out solution, but it helps to stifle, forgive my wording, pure idiocy, which I sometimes see elsewhere.
So accept my apologies for an aggressive reaction. Your follow-up argument was more interesting.
You'd be surprised to see how many MS people read Slashdot. I wasn't very surprised, more amused, to see it was one of the primary test sites during the development of the.Net Framework, for example.
(As you may know, Slashdot is available as XML...)
Besides, you hint that MS people are kept well in line and restrained by management. Nothing could be further from the truth -- as long as you do what you're supposed to do, nobody will even react if you're browsing around for news or working from home for a day or whatever. The key thing is that you do and drive what you've committed to do and drive, and as long as you succeed in that, you can do more or less anything you want. HR may have an issue with if you are surfing pr0n from work, but that's all I can think of right now.
Believe it or not, Microsoft is actually a great place to work. It is amazingly devoid of clueless managers.
But if you think Microsoft people read here because of market research, you're barking up the wrong tree. I read here because I'm a geek. Honestly, I could care less about what ad campaigns Microsoft is currently running, but I'd have to try damn hard.:-)
Sure, I may not use Linux much. That doesn't prevent me from writing code mostly all day.
Oh I guess some MS marketroids do read here in the same sense a biologist looks under large rocks to see what's moving, too. Watch me not care.:-)
Today's top requirement for mobile phones is still not featurism, it's BATTERY LIFE. Well, after basic telephony, anyway. You need minimum one full day of battery life or you're toast in the market. Usually you need more, at least upwards of a week.
Now, switch to one of the most processor-intensive task known to man: image recognition for biometrics in a real environment.
Then, switch back to the low-power, low-capacity processors of mobile phones (reference; they're usually loaded to capacity when codecing radio AND infrared at the same time).
Are you trying to tell me that THIS guy (pointing at the mobile phone) will run THIS application (pointing at face recognition software) IN THE BACKGROUND, ALL THE TIME?
I don't know what you're smoking, but you damn well oughta share some.
Re:Its funny our attitude about success...
on
Soviet Moon Rocket
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· Score: 1
Just nitpicking facts - Apollo 11 was not the first Apollo mission to leave Earth orbit. As part of the Apollo program, they had manned missions orbit the moon first, without landing.
Don't remember the flight sequence number though.
(Also, I'm not sure that there is a meaningful distinction between "permanent station" and "permanent manned station" once we reach the level of technology needed to achieve this.)
Child porn is unique in that it is fairly straightforward both to define [...]
The definition of a good definition is that it creates a sharp boundary of inside vs. outside of the definition. If you claim that child porn has such a definition, you're smoking crack.
The term "child porn" here is supposed to cause a knee-jerk reaction, with imagery of 5-year-olds being raped. I'm as much against that as anyone (I don't know of any culture where this is acceptable, although such cultures may exist).
However, there are other cases. Consider the pictures from the family vacation trip to a nude beach. (To you who balk with horror: this is fairly common practice in Europe.) These are naked people. Is it pornography? No? Then, when does it become pornography? When the same people on the nude beach are closer to the camera? When they are resting in a chair? The line is far from obvious.
Ok, so let's assume for a moment that it is easy to determine the age, with exact precision, of somebody photographed (which it's not) and that there is a binary and ubiquituous answer to whether an image is pornographic or not (which there isn't).
The age of consent in the U.S. is one of the highest in the world. Is one really a child, sexually, when one is 17? Consider Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", which takes place just before Juliet's 14th birthday. One striking line is "Younger than she are happy mothers made." Is an image of a sexually active 17-year-old child porn? With focus on child? What if she made the image herself?
What if she's living in Holland, where the age of consent is 12 (twelve)? What if a Japanese 15-year-old (who is past the age of consent) poses for camera in Japan? If it is not child porn there (which it isn't), does it become child porn elsewhere? When?
Saying that it is easy to rate something as child porn vs. not child porn, even when we know that one component of the word ("porn") lacks a good definition, is utterly ridiculous.
The three most dangerous people on the world are a) a hardware guy with a compiler, b) a software guy with power tools, and c) a user with a feature idea.
That's sort of my point -- I could imagine myself being on the ground (in a special forces op) painting the target for a precision conventional payload that's gonna take out the badguy and the guy standing next to him, but for a NUKE?
Even aircraft should be susceptible to the EMP burst...
Hey, at the company where I work, we have thousands and thousands of Windows XP and Win2k installations, and I don't think we've paid license for a single one of them. There are huge download servers where you can auto-install pretty much any MS operating system flavor, upgrade from Win2k to XP keylessly, etc etc. A reasonable guesstimate would be that the number of installed systems is around the 100k mark.
I've been toying with the idea of calling the BSA about this, just to see the look on their faces when - after a long time - I finally tell them the company I work at is Microsoft:-)
Are you suggesting even for a minute that the U.S. are consistent in how they treat other countries, and how they expect to be treated themselves by the very same countries?
The #1 rule of United States Foreign Relations: The American Way Is Correct.
I wasn't saying others didn't do better, I was saying Microsoft got it right. By saying so, I implicitly thought it was clear that I mean that Microsoft used the right facit as blueprints?
Well, that's what I meant, anyway. There are even more restrictive settings in other products (and in IE6 too for that matter), but let's face it, most people (and this really is a most-people business) DO use Windows. And whatever ships with it.
Actually one thing Microsoft does right (finally)
on
DoubleClick Gets Into Spam
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Internet Explorer 6 will block cookies from referenced sites, such as DoubleClick. These guys had better act fast if they're after the profiles on that Windows user base, because what they've got is all they'll ever have...
This isn't new - check your motorbike gear catalog
on
Self-Warming Jackets
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· Score: 1
For us who ride motorbikes, this concept isn't new by any means. Especially for us who ride all year round, like me.
A good jacket will cost you $500 and up anyway. A good jacket which keeps you warm, dry, and safe at highway speeds and considerably more will often set you back somewhere between $700 and $900.
Gloves, jackets and even underwear with built-in heating have existed for some time. Most of them plug into the bike's generator.
I can see it now, Tom Cruise reading an e-mail which ends in "This message will self-destruct in five seconds." Or rather, the computer reading it FOR him in a synthesized voice à la the speaking clock in Spy Hard.
After that, we are treated to a typical Hollywood-esque deletion of an email (typically a rendering of a screen melting or so, accompanied by the sound of jam pouring out of its jar).
*idea* Hey, I thought of it first! I should have royalties for the linking "Self-destructing email messages" to the phrase "This message will self-destruct in n seconds"! (I wonder if ye olde Aussie Patent Works will grant me that, now that they're done with the wheel?)
This game (for the Amiga, though I believe there is a PC version as well) fulfills the basic criteria: harvest, build, destroy -- and in real time versus a computer opponent.
What can I say except it took me many years to learn that... (and yes, I'm also many years out of high school). Btw, I do have a normal social life now (for some value for normal). When I was in school, however, I was in the "legit to make fun of" category...
Strange how things change. Just yesterday I realized I don't really have any close male friends; my close friends are all women. (yes, I am male.)
As long as you have a CLR on your target machine, this is the way it works.
This is the way Java works already. Any compiled class written in Java can run in any environment with a JVM. So what's so surprising about taking a CIL-compiled class from C# (or VB.Net, or managed C++, or..., or...) and running it in a virtual machine somewhere else?
(The first thing that struck me when I heard of this was that "Oh, man, this must be slow." The first thing that struck me when I first ran it was that "Oh, wow, it's not.")
Many speak WAP, and several gateways translate. In fact I was one of the designers of the WAP Push standard, and preventing spam was a major concern for us...
I think that particular feature was stupid stupid stupid. Or at least, badly implemented. A menu option of "try to decode" or something like that might have done the trick better.
What I reacted against was the deliberate exclusion of many users based on the author's preference of e-mail client. He's giving people trouble on purpose. That's what I don't like. I'm not defending the bug.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, I even have this tune for my mobile phone. I've been waiting for the first guy to recognize it -- the count so far is zero.
:-)
I thought I was too geeky at first until I noticed this post. Thanks
That was an unexpectedly insightful response. Most Americans tend to have the opinion that "while I don't like the American system, at least I know it's the best in the world", and actually believe that blindly without caring to know anything about what the world looks like outside the American borders, not to mention off the North American continent. I thought I saw this in your text, which triggered my knee-jerk reaction.
I personally believe that the U.S. sue-them culture is very destructive, as it tends to promote blame thinking. Hell, there's even a hefty monetary incentive for blaming other people for your own problems. Hence, protection against this consumes a disproportionate (again, compared to elsewhere) amount of resources; most American power tool manuals, for example, are three times the volume of elsewhere, simply because of all the should-be-obvious warnings ("Do not try to stop the chainsaw with your genitals. You may be injured."). Lawyers are everywhere; a full-time lawyer is an early employment in small firms. They are the true winners of this system.
In the country where I live, there is no judicial distinction between "did indeed understand" and "should have understood". For example, suing because you tried to stop the chainsaw with your hand and subsequently got hurt is going to get you slightly shorter than nowhere. I am not saying this is the all-out solution, but it helps to stifle, forgive my wording, pure idiocy, which I sometimes see elsewhere.
So accept my apologies for an aggressive reaction. Your follow-up argument was more interesting.
Great legal system, compared to what? Have you actually bothered to compare to other legal system?
I'm willing to bet money you haven't.
Vad fan gör du här, Richie? :-)
You'd be surprised to see how many MS people read Slashdot. I wasn't very surprised, more amused, to see it was one of the primary test sites during the development of the .Net Framework, for example.
(As you may know, Slashdot is available as XML...)
Besides, you hint that MS people are kept well in line and restrained by management. Nothing could be further from the truth -- as long as you do what you're supposed to do, nobody will even react if you're browsing around for news or working from home for a day or whatever. The key thing is that you do and drive what you've committed to do and drive, and as long as you succeed in that, you can do more or less anything you want. HR may have an issue with if you are surfing pr0n from work, but that's all I can think of right now.
Believe it or not, Microsoft is actually a great place to work. It is amazingly devoid of clueless managers.
But if you think Microsoft people read here because of market research, you're barking up the wrong tree. I read here because I'm a geek. Honestly, I could care less about what ad campaigns Microsoft is currently running, but I'd have to try damn hard. :-)
:-)
Sure, I may not use Linux much. That doesn't prevent me from writing code mostly all day.
Oh I guess some MS marketroids do read here in the same sense a biologist looks under large rocks to see what's moving, too. Watch me not care.
Today's top requirement for mobile phones is still not featurism, it's BATTERY LIFE. Well, after basic telephony, anyway. You need minimum one full day of battery life or you're toast in the market. Usually you need more, at least upwards of a week.
Now, switch to one of the most processor-intensive task known to man: image recognition for biometrics in a real environment.
Then, switch back to the low-power, low-capacity processors of mobile phones (reference; they're usually loaded to capacity when codecing radio AND infrared at the same time).
Are you trying to tell me that THIS guy (pointing at the mobile phone) will run THIS application (pointing at face recognition software) IN THE BACKGROUND, ALL THE TIME?
I don't know what you're smoking, but you damn well oughta share some.
Just nitpicking facts - Apollo 11 was not the first Apollo mission to leave Earth orbit. As part of the Apollo program, they had manned missions orbit the moon first, without landing.
Don't remember the flight sequence number though.
(Also, I'm not sure that there is a meaningful distinction between "permanent station" and "permanent manned station" once we reach the level of technology needed to achieve this.)
Child porn is unique in that it is fairly straightforward both to define [...]
The definition of a good definition is that it creates a sharp boundary of inside vs. outside of the definition. If you claim that child porn has such a definition, you're smoking crack.
The term "child porn" here is supposed to cause a knee-jerk reaction, with imagery of 5-year-olds being raped. I'm as much against that as anyone (I don't know of any culture where this is acceptable, although such cultures may exist).
However, there are other cases. Consider the pictures from the family vacation trip to a nude beach. (To you who balk with horror: this is fairly common practice in Europe.) These are naked people. Is it pornography? No? Then, when does it become pornography? When the same people on the nude beach are closer to the camera? When they are resting in a chair? The line is far from obvious.
Ok, so let's assume for a moment that it is easy to determine the age, with exact precision, of somebody photographed (which it's not) and that there is a binary and ubiquituous answer to whether an image is pornographic or not (which there isn't).
The age of consent in the U.S. is one of the highest in the world. Is one really a child, sexually, when one is 17? Consider Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", which takes place just before Juliet's 14th birthday. One striking line is "Younger than she are happy mothers made." Is an image of a sexually active 17-year-old child porn? With focus on child ? What if she made the image herself?
What if she's living in Holland, where the age of consent is 12 (twelve)? What if a Japanese 15-year-old (who is past the age of consent) poses for camera in Japan? If it is not child porn there (which it isn't), does it become child porn elsewhere? When?
Saying that it is easy to rate something as child porn vs. not child porn, even when we know that one component of the word ("porn") lacks a good definition, is utterly ridiculous.
The old adage holds true:
The three most dangerous people on the world are a) a hardware guy with a compiler, b) a software guy with power tools, and c) a user with a feature idea.
There are serial ports you can attach to USB if you like. That's how I plan to use this thingy...
(and with some sort of external power supply)
That's sort of my point -- I could imagine myself being on the ground (in a special forces op) painting the target for a precision conventional payload that's gonna take out the badguy and the guy standing next to him, but for a NUKE?
Even aircraft should be susceptible to the EMP burst...
Who's gonna be on the ground painting the target with the laser?
You must have a pretty bad-ass phone :-)
:-)
:-)
Ok, so I forgot for a moment I was at the university of nitpicking here
Something I'd love to record and play back later at a company party, anyway. And something the managers would downright damn me for *laughs*
Hey, at the company where I work, we have thousands and thousands of Windows XP and Win2k installations, and I don't think we've paid license for a single one of them. There are huge download servers where you can auto-install pretty much any MS operating system flavor, upgrade from Win2k to XP keylessly, etc etc. A reasonable guesstimate would be that the number of installed systems is around the 100k mark.
:-)
I've been toying with the idea of calling the BSA about this, just to see the look on their faces when - after a long time - I finally tell them the company I work at is Microsoft
Are you suggesting even for a minute that the U.S. are consistent in how they treat other countries, and how they expect to be treated themselves by the very same countries?
The #1 rule of United States Foreign Relations: The American Way Is Correct.
*bah*
I wasn't saying others didn't do better, I was saying Microsoft got it right. By saying so, I implicitly thought it was clear that I mean that Microsoft used the right facit as blueprints?
Well, that's what I meant, anyway. There are even more restrictive settings in other products (and in IE6 too for that matter), but let's face it, most people (and this really is a most-people business) DO use Windows. And whatever ships with it.
Internet Explorer 6 will block cookies from referenced sites, such as DoubleClick. These guys had better act fast if they're after the profiles on that Windows user base, because what they've got is all they'll ever have...
For us who ride motorbikes, this concept isn't new by any means. Especially for us who ride all year round, like me.
A good jacket will cost you $500 and up anyway. A good jacket which keeps you warm, dry, and safe at highway speeds and considerably more will often set you back somewhere between $700 and $900.
Gloves, jackets and even underwear with built-in heating have existed for some time. Most of them plug into the bike's generator.
I can see it now, Tom Cruise reading an e-mail which ends in "This message will self-destruct in five seconds." Or rather, the computer reading it FOR him in a synthesized voice à la the speaking clock in Spy Hard.
After that, we are treated to a typical Hollywood-esque deletion of an email (typically a rendering of a screen melting or so, accompanied by the sound of jam pouring out of its jar).
*idea* Hey, I thought of it first! I should have royalties for the linking "Self-destructing email messages" to the phrase "This message will self-destruct in n seconds"! (I wonder if ye olde Aussie Patent Works will grant me that, now that they're done with the wheel?)
This game (for the Amiga, though I believe there is a PC version as well) fulfills the basic criteria: harvest, build, destroy -- and in real time versus a computer opponent.
Ouch. That hurt to read. :-/
What can I say except it took me many years to learn that... (and yes, I'm also many years out of high school). Btw, I do have a normal social life now (for some value for normal). When I was in school, however, I was in the "legit to make fun of" category...
Strange how things change. Just yesterday I realized I don't really have any close male friends; my close friends are all women. (yes, I am male.)
As long as you have a CLR on your target machine, this is the way it works.
..., or...) and running it in a virtual machine somewhere else?
This is the way Java works already. Any compiled class written in Java can run in any environment with a JVM. So what's so surprising about taking a CIL-compiled class from C# (or VB.Net, or managed C++, or
(The first thing that struck me when I heard of this was that "Oh, man, this must be slow." The first thing that struck me when I first ran it was that "Oh, wow, it's not.")
Many speak WAP, and several gateways translate. In fact I was one of the designers of the WAP Push standard, and preventing spam was a major concern for us...
I think that particular feature was stupid stupid stupid. Or at least, badly implemented. A menu option of "try to decode" or something like that might have done the trick better.
What I reacted against was the deliberate exclusion of many users based on the author's preference of e-mail client. He's giving people trouble on purpose. That's what I don't like. I'm not defending the bug.