I use/yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd - Description/Description - ImageNumber.jpg
The image number is important if you post the photos anywhere. You can quickly find the one someone mentions even if you've retitled it over the years.
It also means you can dump photos from a few dates, usually of a similar subject, into one directory (/FlowerPics, for instance) without two Flower 02.jpg pictures colliding.
As for the photos themselves, I was thinking of storing keywords in the exif info and writing a perl script to throw all the index info into a database so I can start pulling out all similar photos even if their name isn't all-inclusive.
Unless of course, they were talking with a Microsoft rep at the time about how to implement currency detection... Microsoft has stated that their intention is to destroy open software by any means necessary - doesn't take a great imagination to picture them putting this bug in the right ear. Not saying they did, but you can't rule it out, especially if you know about everything that Microsoft has done.
It's like DVD players, but worse. If you use/distribute DeCSS the movie industry has to get the cops to bust you. If you use non-"protected" graphics software the treasury department would be after you on their own. Actually, it'd probably make it illegal to produce the software, not to own it, which would have the same effect but at a higher level.
I think it's time to start embedding the eurion in everything. Supposedly it only needs to be in one color channel - I should play with this in Gimp, checking the results in Photoshop, and then add it as a watermark as the last step in processing all of my images.
This is exactly what I mean. Someone mentions a trivial fact (yes, fact) and you jump up and down and demand studies of sitting postures correlated with typing speeds.
Is there much of a speed difference between keyboard? Dunno. Is it significant enough to change RSI numbers? Dunno. Would *everyone* think so? You can't get everyone to agree on anything, so no.
Is it nicer to use? Yes. Is it more comfortable to not have to bounce your hands around as much and not have to stretch of daintily bend a finger (depending on hand size) as much? Yes. Anyone who has sat and used one for a minute or two can tell you that. Is there less finger movement? Simply think about letter frequency and placement and you'll see that there is.
Accept the facts, then argue the conclusions. Yammering on about wanting a study for the trivially observed is just childish.
Endlessly droning on about needing proof for something trivially obvious makes you look like the kook. Try typing two phrases out of a typing tutor program, one that uses only the home row and another "advanced" phrase that uses all the letters. It's trivial to type the first example and anywhere from less-handy to uncomfortable to type the phrase that uses all the keys.
Anyone with half a brain can look at some basic charts and see that Dvorak has more of the most common letters on the home row than Qwerty. That alone means that more phrases can be typed without having to move your fingers from their resting position.
Understand?
It's not an extrordinary claim, it does not require extrordinary proof.
35mm digital (from the 1Ds and 14n) isn't quite as high resolution as MF but is lower grain which probably will end up producing a much better final image.
Should we be looking to punish and restrict speech (communication)?
I believe that, as distasteful as these things are, we are probably in the wrong to restrict them.
But, what about the children, won't someone think...
Taking child porn pictures is child abuse and is easily punished in court. Conspiracy to commit a crime is a punishable crime. You punish these things as you always have. Under-cover work, tracking shipments of porn, tracking terrorist funding, etc. Eventually you find and punish the people and you've built a trail of evidence that points to guilty action, not simply hot-headed speech in an internet forum.
Trying to regulate everything to the point where it can't be abused means that there's nothing left for the legitimate users.
Some action movies can be pretty deep. You don't need to present the intrigue as a Sherlock Holmes mystery or anything, present it as a standard action film where part-way along the characters realize that something isn't quite right, but where they aren't sure what. Just before credits roll pull a suprise like in Usual Suspects or something.
Oh yeah, as if anyone ever changes a law these days without huge campaign contributions. That's the beauty of these idea, make someone rich pay to change the law.
If I was going to waste my time fighting a losing battle I'd fight campaign contributions, they're a dishonest as "donating" to a cop who stopped you for speeding.
To fight this, simply name Brad Pitt (or better yet, Britney Spears) as the father of your next baby. Don't bother informing them or asking them for child support, until two years have passed.
See how quickly the law gets changed. Laws like that are only laws as long as they don't hurt anyone rich.
There have been documented cases (DR DOS not a supported platform for Windows) where someone at Microsoft has intentionally modified their software to break a third-party application.
It's a stretch to invent a conspiracy that's much different that someone's observed behaviour, I would agree.
However in Microsoft's case, I think it's reasonable to assume that a company that continually breaks the law (Stacker, Perjury about IE being part of Windows, etc) and where management specifically intends to attack the competition (Halloween documents) instead of competing on features and quality, is up to their old tricks again.
I don't think it's a stretch at all to assume that Microsoft is abusing their monopoly position. They've expresses a willingness to fight competition in any way necessary and they've rigged their software to sabotage competitors products before. What's a stretch about thinking that they might repeat past behaviour that they've gotten good results from and not been punished for?
No matter what the USA did people would be offended.
Give money for schools and provide teachers and they're pushing their agenda.
Give money for disaster recovery and they should have helped sooner.
Give money for infrastructure and they're just trying to get American industry into other countries.
Stop industry from moving into third-world countries and they're keeping everyone down.
Ignore a dictator and they're complicit in the deaths of ordinary citizens.
Go remove a dictator and they're refusing to let people govern themselves.
What could the USA possibly do that would make 98% of people happy? They're the super-power, the biggest and richest country. Every inaction of theirs is going to be scrutinized more than anything any other country can do.
Personally, if I were an Iraqi (and Iraqis I know agree with this) I'd rather the USA went in and removed Saddam. I'd also rather they (or even better, a real UN with the determination to do something) stayed and left the country better off with a real civilian government instead of handing it over to the next dictators.
Does this mean I like Bush? Nope. Does this mean I'm blind to the crimes to the government? Nope. But I realize that you can't please everyone and I like the fact the the USA is trying, in a suboptimal way maybe, but at least they're trying unlike all the other countries who'd rather a trade-pact with a dictator than helping people become free.
It's funny how everyone was saying "we" (first-world nations) should go into Afghanistan in mid 2000 when they were destroying the statues and the news was full of stories about women being stoned to death for being raped. Then the terrorist attacks happen and the USA wants to go in and suddenly the Afghani people deserve to be left alone in the system they picked... What happened to the idea of rescuing the victims of a brutal theocracy, just because the USA showed up and was willing to help.
The lesson, if you're not blinded to it, is that you don't need 100% control of something to be an effective monopoly.
Microsoft controlled the OS. If they didn't like you your application would accidently break every time they upgraded the OS. If they decided to compete with you, same thing.
It's like buying every bridge in town (matters more in some towns than others) and claiming that you don't represent a monopoly because you've only got 1/7000th of the road surface in town. Bridges are a bottleneck of driving. Like an OS. Nobody buys a computer for the OS, they buy it to do things, the OS is just like the mechanics of the car - something that makes the car do what you bought it to do.
With Microsoft's control over a large segment of the industry (90%?) they could bully other companies into not writing software for other OSes, or selling computers with other OSes.
In other words, they started to be able to extert non-market pressures. An ideal market has perfect knowledge and perfect availability. Microsoft is trying to remove these as much as possible. They don't want people to know about alternatives, nor be able to use them if they hear about them. If you do buy a competing office suite, which you can't get pre-installed, it'll break when MS "upgrades" something.
A capitalist would embrace the market. They would strive to offer a better service, or a better price, and draw customers voluntarily. Microsoft instead is paying people to mislead you and restrict your choice of competitors. Like bribing the city to rezone your property, or accidently shutting off your electricity, if you dare to compete with them. Or sabotaging their own product (car for instance) when you install a third-party product (stereo) in order to scare everyone away from non-Microsoft add-ons.
30cm is 3/10ths of a meter. You want 1/3rd of that? 1/10th.
Fractions can be used by anyone, in any system. The problem is that Imperial doesn't easily turn into a decimal measure in the end to compare to other measurements.
How many 1'+3 7/8" distances are there in a mile? It's easy to see the relation between 4cm floor tiles, 1m doorways, 15m walls, and 6km roads. Imperial would have been mostly okay had there been just one measure. If we did everything in feet and said "I'm 5 & 7/24ths feet tall", or "I drove 16kilo-feet to the mall" it wouldn't really bother anyone. After all, as other people pointed out, there's no accurate relation between meters and the size of the Earth - just as there's no useful relation between "feet" and anyone's feet.
Gosh, I wonder why that is. Do battle with an under-equipped enemy whose weapons barely scratch your tanks and they're less likely to kill you.
You of course fire just as many shots as before, so your friendly-fire numbers aren't going to change much.
Less kills by enemies, the same by friendlies, and you have an increasing percentage of friendly fire kills.
Do you have any indication that there are more FF kills, per soldier, than in previous wars? (Leaving out static battles like trench-to-trench sniping.)
The point is that the grand-parent poster *lied*. He may be a nice guy, his cause may be the just cause, but he still lied.
Is it too much to ask that people not make shit up in an argument?
All of your reasons why the USA shouldn't have invaded Iraq are irrelevant. Not wrong necessarily, but not at all relevant to the topic that was first brought up, Saddam's past ownership of "WMD"s.
I'm not in the USA so none of this is personal for me, but it does bother me. There are many valid issues to discuss about invading Iraq to remove someone who charitably can be called a brutal dictator. Many Iraqis, both current and expatriates, wanted Saddam removed. Now people are rewriting history, pretending that Saddam never had chemical weapons. Sure, the USA gave them to him, but he was perfectly willing to use them, both in the war as intended and then later in some quiet ethnic cleansing. The world does need to consider the suggestion of removing genocidal dictators. (And yes, when that is up for discussion, so is the question of GW Bush qualifying for UN removal.) These very important discussions are being hampered by morons on both sides who can't see the consequences of their lies. They're so busy making stuff up to justify their views that they don't consider the corner they're backing themselves and everyone else into. (This goes for both sides in this "debate".)
Just admit to the truth. Full stop. You don't get to disqualify facts just because they support someone else's position, they're still facts. Feel free to call the other side on their facts - I haven't seen any proof of current (pre-war) WMDs in Iraq, yet the public was told there was proof. Same rules apply to everyone, they can't invent convenient facts, you can't deny inconvenient ones.
Isn't it like Vietnam? A war against a vauge undefined "menace" that can shift to include anyone if it's convenient. A "war" where our troops are in a foreign country where even our allies don't like us much, trying to tell the good foreigners from the bad foreigners. Where our troops are playing cops more than soldiers. A war that most of the allies don't want to be in, or think we should be in.
I'm not saying the USA shouldn't be in Iraq. I just think they should have arranged a better exit strategy, after handing control to the UN. If the UN can't handle setting up a democracy, what the fuck is it good for? Then when the US stays there to help, they'll be peacekeepers like the Canadians and the Swiss, instead of invaders.
I think Saddam could have gotten huge payoffs for a comparatively small donation to the terrorists, why wouldn't he have done it? Al Queda proved that they weren't above 'sinning' to accomplish their goals. Their suicide pilots in the USA were drinking, not observing religious rituals, etc.
Fanatics are usually willing to overlook many things in order to accomplish their goals.
There's no way we could prove that Saddam didn't help the terrorists and, I think, it's reasonable that he might have common goals, despite their long-term views. Because of that, it's wrong to say that we *know* that Saddam didn't help the terrorists.
There's enough FUD from Bush and friends, the other sides don't need to play that same game.
Perhaps. I don't know either way, but I just wanted to point out that making groundless claims one way is no better than the other side with their groundless claims.
The fact that there's no proof is damning enough, I don't need to manufacture the idea that we *know* he didn't do it.
Yeah, I knew you were using metaphors and simplistic arguments. My only complaint was that you presented it as the final word. I feel that the "average joe" gets enough of this from the media so I took exception to it.
I feel that the fears are obvious enough without playing them up. Sure atomic bombs are terrible, but atomic power is pretty cool and radioactive elements have many other uses. Focussing just on the negatives ignores the fact that whole cities could be easier wiped out by biological menaces.
Ditto with genetic engineering. Sure, there are some dystopias possible, but why would anyone bother? Do you see a significant number of people standing up and rejecting the level of bread (cheap, fatty snack food) and circuses (tractor pulls, "pro" wrestling, etc) that we have now that keeps so many people happy in what would otherwise be a mind-numbing job with no future.
If we keep scaring people with every new advance they're going to panic and when the masses panic and politicians realize they can get votes for pandering, you get a real mess of litigation.
Like with guns. Like them or not, we don't need six overlapping laws banning the same guns. One well considered piece of legislation would make everything much clearer and take a larger step towards a proper balance than a top of ill-conceived panic band-aid fixes in response to media circuses.
Sorry it took so long to write, I've been doing really long days at work.
The ProCD case, if I remember correctly, was one where the purchaser could, through personal notification in previous years, be expected to know the presale conditions. The fact that they were included in the box didn't really seem relevant. Had the seller merely vocally communicated their conditions the decision would have been the same.
I believe that there's *NOTHING* that would make a court find in favor of an shrinkwrap license in the usual cases, one where the consumer picks up a box in the store and pays for it without seeing an EULA or being told what the conditions are.
This is based on general precedent - court opinion towards overly broad, entrapping contracts, on specific requirements of a contract, and on hundreds of years of specific precedent finding against post-sale imposition of contractual obligations.
If you put a license agreement in a car and sold it, then tried to hold the buyer to the conditions of the contract you not only wouldn't be able to, but you'd probably find yourself behind bars for the crime of fraud (if nothing else). The specific fact that this hasn't been decided in the specific case of software seems irrelevant. It's been decided for books (first-sale doctrine) and perhaps somewhat in various warranty-requirement findings. You can't sell a product and require *ANY* specific behaviour from the end user. As soon as you sell anything it's out of your hands completely.
Letting the user bring the software back might be indicative of your intent not to cheat the buyer, but shouldn't have any bearing on the contract requirements.
Did you sign that EULA before you bought the product, or as part of the sale? If not, it's worthless.
EULAs are valid, IF you agree to them before the sale is finalized. As in, ask MS for a copy, they say you can have $10 off if you sign this agreement and you say "Sure!". If it comes in the box after the sale it's just a piece of paper.
And I doubt pirates legally agreed to any EULA.
Soon MS will be bitten by product worthiness issues, as almost all other for-sale products are.
Another benefit is that optimized code is often simply reworked code - having seen where the bottlenecks are and working in a better algorithm (buying a faster MD5 library, replacing bubble-sort, etc). That code should now be much easier to fix and debug, potentially a millions-of-dollars-per-day savings that far outweighs any hardware savings.
Re your sig: You only *think* Saddam didn't support Al Queda, there's no proof either way and it's the kind of thing he'd do. Like SCUDing Israel during GW1.
Slashdot Mirror
I use /yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd - Description/Description - ImageNumber.jpg
The image number is important if you post the photos anywhere. You can quickly find the one someone mentions even if you've retitled it over the years.
It also means you can dump photos from a few dates, usually of a similar subject, into one directory (/FlowerPics, for instance) without two Flower 02.jpg pictures colliding.
As for the photos themselves, I was thinking of storing keywords in the exif info and writing a perl script to throw all the index info into a database so I can start pulling out all similar photos even if their name isn't all-inclusive.
Unless of course, they were talking with a Microsoft rep at the time about how to implement currency detection... Microsoft has stated that their intention is to destroy open software by any means necessary - doesn't take a great imagination to picture them putting this bug in the right ear. Not saying they did, but you can't rule it out, especially if you know about everything that Microsoft has done.
It's like DVD players, but worse. If you use/distribute DeCSS the movie industry has to get the cops to bust you. If you use non-"protected" graphics software the treasury department would be after you on their own. Actually, it'd probably make it illegal to produce the software, not to own it, which would have the same effect but at a higher level.
I think it's time to start embedding the eurion in everything. Supposedly it only needs to be in one color channel - I should play with this in Gimp, checking the results in Photoshop, and then add it as a watermark as the last step in processing all of my images.
That doesn't justify anything. By that line of thinking they should back criminals too, betting on them getting off on a technicality.
Simply the fact that you're doing something for business reasons does not excuse you from ethical considerations.
This is exactly what I mean. Someone mentions a trivial fact (yes, fact) and you jump up and down and demand studies of sitting postures correlated with typing speeds.
Is there much of a speed difference between keyboard? Dunno. Is it significant enough to change RSI numbers? Dunno. Would *everyone* think so? You can't get everyone to agree on anything, so no.
Is it nicer to use? Yes. Is it more comfortable to not have to bounce your hands around as much and not have to stretch of daintily bend a finger (depending on hand size) as much? Yes. Anyone who has sat and used one for a minute or two can tell you that. Is there less finger movement? Simply think about letter frequency and placement and you'll see that there is.
Accept the facts, then argue the conclusions. Yammering on about wanting a study for the trivially observed is just childish.
Endlessly droning on about needing proof for something trivially obvious makes you look like the kook. Try typing two phrases out of a typing tutor program, one that uses only the home row and another "advanced" phrase that uses all the letters. It's trivial to type the first example and anywhere from less-handy to uncomfortable to type the phrase that uses all the keys.
Anyone with half a brain can look at some basic charts and see that Dvorak has more of the most common letters on the home row than Qwerty. That alone means that more phrases can be typed without having to move your fingers from their resting position.
Understand?
It's not an extrordinary claim, it does not require extrordinary proof.
35mm digital (from the 1Ds and 14n) isn't quite as high resolution as MF but is lower grain which probably will end up producing a much better final image.
Raw files are compressed, usually about 8:1 or so. It's lossless, and straight (raw) off the sensor.
Some cameras only do compressed TIFF for raw which isn't as good at the 12-bit internal format that most pro cameras use.
Should we be looking to punish and restrict speech (communication)?
...
I believe that, as distasteful as these things are, we are probably in the wrong to restrict them.
But, what about the children, won't someone think
Taking child porn pictures is child abuse and is easily punished in court. Conspiracy to commit a crime is a punishable crime. You punish these things as you always have. Under-cover work, tracking shipments of porn, tracking terrorist funding, etc. Eventually you find and punish the people and you've built a trail of evidence that points to guilty action, not simply hot-headed speech in an internet forum.
Trying to regulate everything to the point where it can't be abused means that there's nothing left for the legitimate users.
Some action movies can be pretty deep. You don't need to present the intrigue as a Sherlock Holmes mystery or anything, present it as a standard action film where part-way along the characters realize that something isn't quite right, but where they aren't sure what. Just before credits roll pull a suprise like in Usual Suspects or something.
Oh yeah, as if anyone ever changes a law these days without huge campaign contributions. That's the beauty of these idea, make someone rich pay to change the law.
If I was going to waste my time fighting a losing battle I'd fight campaign contributions, they're a dishonest as "donating" to a cop who stopped you for speeding.
To fight this, simply name Brad Pitt (or better yet, Britney Spears) as the father of your next baby. Don't bother informing them or asking them for child support, until two years have passed.
See how quickly the law gets changed. Laws like that are only laws as long as they don't hurt anyone rich.
There have been documented cases (DR DOS not a supported platform for Windows) where someone at Microsoft has intentionally modified their software to break a third-party application.
It's a stretch to invent a conspiracy that's much different that someone's observed behaviour, I would agree.
However in Microsoft's case, I think it's reasonable to assume that a company that continually breaks the law (Stacker, Perjury about IE being part of Windows, etc) and where management specifically intends to attack the competition (Halloween documents) instead of competing on features and quality, is up to their old tricks again.
I don't think it's a stretch at all to assume that Microsoft is abusing their monopoly position. They've expresses a willingness to fight competition in any way necessary and they've rigged their software to sabotage competitors products before. What's a stretch about thinking that they might repeat past behaviour that they've gotten good results from and not been punished for?
No matter what the USA did people would be offended.
Give money for schools and provide teachers and they're pushing their agenda.
Give money for disaster recovery and they should have helped sooner.
Give money for infrastructure and they're just trying to get American industry into other countries.
Stop industry from moving into third-world countries and they're keeping everyone down.
Ignore a dictator and they're complicit in the deaths of ordinary citizens.
Go remove a dictator and they're refusing to let people govern themselves.
What could the USA possibly do that would make 98% of people happy? They're the super-power, the biggest and richest country. Every inaction of theirs is going to be scrutinized more than anything any other country can do.
Personally, if I were an Iraqi (and Iraqis I know agree with this) I'd rather the USA went in and removed Saddam. I'd also rather they (or even better, a real UN with the determination to do something) stayed and left the country better off with a real civilian government instead of handing it over to the next dictators.
Does this mean I like Bush? Nope. Does this mean I'm blind to the crimes to the government? Nope. But I realize that you can't please everyone and I like the fact the the USA is trying, in a suboptimal way maybe, but at least they're trying unlike all the other countries who'd rather a trade-pact with a dictator than helping people become free.
It's funny how everyone was saying "we" (first-world nations) should go into Afghanistan in mid 2000 when they were destroying the statues and the news was full of stories about women being stoned to death for being raped. Then the terrorist attacks happen and the USA wants to go in and suddenly the Afghani people deserve to be left alone in the system they picked... What happened to the idea of rescuing the victims of a brutal theocracy, just because the USA showed up and was willing to help.
The lesson, if you're not blinded to it, is that you don't need 100% control of something to be an effective monopoly.
Microsoft controlled the OS. If they didn't like you your application would accidently break every time they upgraded the OS. If they decided to compete with you, same thing.
It's like buying every bridge in town (matters more in some towns than others) and claiming that you don't represent a monopoly because you've only got 1/7000th of the road surface in town. Bridges are a bottleneck of driving. Like an OS. Nobody buys a computer for the OS, they buy it to do things, the OS is just like the mechanics of the car - something that makes the car do what you bought it to do.
With Microsoft's control over a large segment of the industry (90%?) they could bully other companies into not writing software for other OSes, or selling computers with other OSes.
In other words, they started to be able to extert non-market pressures. An ideal market has perfect knowledge and perfect availability. Microsoft is trying to remove these as much as possible. They don't want people to know about alternatives, nor be able to use them if they hear about them. If you do buy a competing office suite, which you can't get pre-installed, it'll break when MS "upgrades" something.
A capitalist would embrace the market. They would strive to offer a better service, or a better price, and draw customers voluntarily. Microsoft instead is paying people to mislead you and restrict your choice of competitors. Like bribing the city to rezone your property, or accidently shutting off your electricity, if you dare to compete with them. Or sabotaging their own product (car for instance) when you install a third-party product (stereo) in order to scare everyone away from non-Microsoft add-ons.
30cm is 3/10ths of a meter. You want 1/3rd of that? 1/10th.
Fractions can be used by anyone, in any system. The problem is that Imperial doesn't easily turn into a decimal measure in the end to compare to other measurements.
How many 1'+3 7/8" distances are there in a mile? It's easy to see the relation between 4cm floor tiles, 1m doorways, 15m walls, and 6km roads. Imperial would have been mostly okay had there been just one measure. If we did everything in feet and said "I'm 5 & 7/24ths feet tall", or "I drove 16kilo-feet to the mall" it wouldn't really bother anyone. After all, as other people pointed out, there's no accurate relation between meters and the size of the Earth - just as there's no useful relation between "feet" and anyone's feet.
Gosh, I wonder why that is. Do battle with an under-equipped enemy whose weapons barely scratch your tanks and they're less likely to kill you.
You of course fire just as many shots as before, so your friendly-fire numbers aren't going to change much.
Less kills by enemies, the same by friendlies, and you have an increasing percentage of friendly fire kills.
Do you have any indication that there are more FF kills, per soldier, than in previous wars? (Leaving out static battles like trench-to-trench sniping.)
The point is that the grand-parent poster *lied*. He may be a nice guy, his cause may be the just cause, but he still lied.
Is it too much to ask that people not make shit up in an argument?
All of your reasons why the USA shouldn't have invaded Iraq are irrelevant. Not wrong necessarily, but not at all relevant to the topic that was first brought up, Saddam's past ownership of "WMD"s.
I'm not in the USA so none of this is personal for me, but it does bother me. There are many valid issues to discuss about invading Iraq to remove someone who charitably can be called a brutal dictator. Many Iraqis, both current and expatriates, wanted Saddam removed. Now people are rewriting history, pretending that Saddam never had chemical weapons. Sure, the USA gave them to him, but he was perfectly willing to use them, both in the war as intended and then later in some quiet ethnic cleansing. The world does need to consider the suggestion of removing genocidal dictators. (And yes, when that is up for discussion, so is the question of GW Bush qualifying for UN removal.) These very important discussions are being hampered by morons on both sides who can't see the consequences of their lies. They're so busy making stuff up to justify their views that they don't consider the corner they're backing themselves and everyone else into. (This goes for both sides in this "debate".)
Just admit to the truth. Full stop. You don't get to disqualify facts just because they support someone else's position, they're still facts. Feel free to call the other side on their facts - I haven't seen any proof of current (pre-war) WMDs in Iraq, yet the public was told there was proof. Same rules apply to everyone, they can't invent convenient facts, you can't deny inconvenient ones.
Isn't it like Vietnam? A war against a vauge undefined "menace" that can shift to include anyone if it's convenient. A "war" where our troops are in a foreign country where even our allies don't like us much, trying to tell the good foreigners from the bad foreigners. Where our troops are playing cops more than soldiers. A war that most of the allies don't want to be in, or think we should be in.
I'm not saying the USA shouldn't be in Iraq. I just think they should have arranged a better exit strategy, after handing control to the UN. If the UN can't handle setting up a democracy, what the fuck is it good for? Then when the US stays there to help, they'll be peacekeepers like the Canadians and the Swiss, instead of invaders.
The enemey of my enemy...
I think Saddam could have gotten huge payoffs for a comparatively small donation to the terrorists, why wouldn't he have done it? Al Queda proved that they weren't above 'sinning' to accomplish their goals. Their suicide pilots in the USA were drinking, not observing religious rituals, etc.
Fanatics are usually willing to overlook many things in order to accomplish their goals.
There's no way we could prove that Saddam didn't help the terrorists and, I think, it's reasonable that he might have common goals, despite their long-term views. Because of that, it's wrong to say that we *know* that Saddam didn't help the terrorists.
There's enough FUD from Bush and friends, the other sides don't need to play that same game.
Perhaps. I don't know either way, but I just wanted to point out that making groundless claims one way is no better than the other side with their groundless claims.
The fact that there's no proof is damning enough, I don't need to manufacture the idea that we *know* he didn't do it.
Yeah, I knew you were using metaphors and simplistic arguments. My only complaint was that you presented it as the final word. I feel that the "average joe" gets enough of this from the media so I took exception to it.
I feel that the fears are obvious enough without playing them up. Sure atomic bombs are terrible, but atomic power is pretty cool and radioactive elements have many other uses. Focussing just on the negatives ignores the fact that whole cities could be easier wiped out by biological menaces.
Ditto with genetic engineering. Sure, there are some dystopias possible, but why would anyone bother? Do you see a significant number of people standing up and rejecting the level of bread (cheap, fatty snack food) and circuses (tractor pulls, "pro" wrestling, etc) that we have now that keeps so many people happy in what would otherwise be a mind-numbing job with no future.
If we keep scaring people with every new advance they're going to panic and when the masses panic and politicians realize they can get votes for pandering, you get a real mess of litigation.
Like with guns. Like them or not, we don't need six overlapping laws banning the same guns. One well considered piece of legislation would make everything much clearer and take a larger step towards a proper balance than a top of ill-conceived panic band-aid fixes in response to media circuses.
Sorry it took so long to write, I've been doing really long days at work.
The ProCD case, if I remember correctly, was one where the purchaser could, through personal notification in previous years, be expected to know the presale conditions. The fact that they were included in the box didn't really seem relevant. Had the seller merely vocally communicated their conditions the decision would have been the same.
I believe that there's *NOTHING* that would make a court find in favor of an shrinkwrap license in the usual cases, one where the consumer picks up a box in the store and pays for it without seeing an EULA or being told what the conditions are.
This is based on general precedent - court opinion towards overly broad, entrapping contracts, on specific requirements of a contract, and on hundreds of years of specific precedent finding against post-sale imposition of contractual obligations.
If you put a license agreement in a car and sold it, then tried to hold the buyer to the conditions of the contract you not only wouldn't be able to, but you'd probably find yourself behind bars for the crime of fraud (if nothing else). The specific fact that this hasn't been decided in the specific case of software seems irrelevant. It's been decided for books (first-sale doctrine) and perhaps somewhat in various warranty-requirement findings. You can't sell a product and require *ANY* specific behaviour from the end user. As soon as you sell anything it's out of your hands completely.
Letting the user bring the software back might be indicative of your intent not to cheat the buyer, but shouldn't have any bearing on the contract requirements.
Did you sign that EULA before you bought the product, or as part of the sale? If not, it's worthless.
EULAs are valid, IF you agree to them before the sale is finalized. As in, ask MS for a copy, they say you can have $10 off if you sign this agreement and you say "Sure!". If it comes in the box after the sale it's just a piece of paper.
And I doubt pirates legally agreed to any EULA.
Soon MS will be bitten by product worthiness issues, as almost all other for-sale products are.
Pirates should have to go and download a keygen, like everyone else. Sheesh, kids these days wanting everything to be so easy.
Another benefit is that optimized code is often simply reworked code - having seen where the bottlenecks are and working in a better algorithm (buying a faster MD5 library, replacing bubble-sort, etc). That code should now be much easier to fix and debug, potentially a millions-of-dollars-per-day savings that far outweighs any hardware savings.
Re your sig: You only *think* Saddam didn't support Al Queda, there's no proof either way and it's the kind of thing he'd do. Like SCUDing Israel during GW1.