You can't disclaim all responsibility anyways (even with valid contracts). write a virus, pop up a misleading click-through that hides in there "format the hard drive" and it's still a crime. Malicious damages are always going to fall under criminal law.
For everything else, there's the fairly obvious defense that there's no warranty when there's no sale. Now, if you buy Redhat's distro, especially the expensive ones that cost more than copying costs and that come with service packages, I think there's a reasonable expectation that it is fit for the advertised task.
But that's for Redhat to cover. Perhaps they'll start selling all packages at the same price with an offer in each box to sign up for the service package, which they explain has certain terms...
And everyone who doesn't get paid for their software keeps releasing it without any warranty, express or implied.
Sure, your CD-ROM drive won't last the 100 years they claim the disks will, but it's a documented format and people could easily build a reader if they felt the need. Hell, with a really high-resolution scan you could read the data directly. And that's with CDs, something hard to preserve.
Xerox (and others) have been working on a printed storage medium, where data is represented by little left or right leaning slashes and encoded with enough error-checking and redundancy that you can recover the data from any piece of paper large enough to hold it. (Put 1/8th of a page of data together and any 1/8th of a page contains all of it.)
The Xerox method was actually intended for digital watermarks, so that links to the original document would allow people to find it from an old printed copy, and so embed author info, etc, in every page of the document and have it look, to the naked eye, like a uniform light-gray background.
You could do something like this fairly easily with the intent being to save the data. The storage was fairly impressive, 15k per page or something, and you could use a simple self-documenting compression to cram a lot onto each page. Print these out as your "fall of technology" backup and store properly. Any self-respecting geek could write a reader in very little time. For extra insurance, print a few pages of human-readable text describing the procedure and offering psuedo-code for decompressing the data.
On the computer, store everything in text-based formats and store it with the appropriate RFCs for the formats for the non-text based data. Even if people forget what XML or HTML are they can still see the original text in there and figure out how to strip that out easily if need be.
This is assuming that people don't copy the data to a new storage medium when updating their computers, and that the whole world forgets how to access common formats.
And yes, I do know of which I speak. I've reverse engineered disk-storage formats from old PCs to allow disk-images to be used as file systems on modern PCs, to extract old files, or for high-level emulators to use.
That's pretty well how it is. You either need to be a lawyer, or invest so much time that you could be, to have read everything relevant.
Should it be that way? Hell no. I've often proposed that the entire legal code an individual be subjected to be readable and roughly memorizable by "the average non-college educated person". So IMHO the legal code should be no longer than a reasonable read for a grade-12 student, use no words they aren't likely to have seen, and not be so complex as to confuse them. This does mean a very simple legal code, but it also means lawmakers would have to pick and choose.
(The "exception" would be that the description of the spirit of the law wouldn't have to be included, just the actual rules you have to follow.)
There is some legal precedent for this. Many judges are finding that ignorance *is* an excuse, at least in contract law with one uninformed party and one informed party where the uninformed party is shown a 20-page contract that they have to sign if they want a job/healthcare/a house/etc.
In a system where the legal code was required to be understood by the majority of the people they'd either have to simplify it, or increase the level of education of the people and include legal classes as standard curiculum (this really should be, even now).
Then make it illegal, in the commission of a crime, or where it is reasonable to assume that it might be in the commission of a crime.
Driving a friend to and from the bank is legal, unless you have a reason to believe he's robbing it.
And even then, it's the aiding and abetting that's the crime, the driving is just how it was done.
Require the shops to call a special "Am I stolen" number before modding a phone, if they don't take a simple precaution to check for this, they can't be said to have been taking reasonable precautions. It's much like pawn shops.
Some providers don't let you switch phone without a fee, especially if you do it in a pattern that indicates you're using multiple phones (something they want to be able to sell you the right to do). I don't believe they have this right, I think once you own a phone you should be able to do anything you want with it. If changing hardware IDs is what's required to get around it, I think that's a good reason to keep the practice legal.
I know that's a joke, but... Yes, I do want investors to lose money. Too many people see their investments as something the government should protect. Sorry, invest in a company that's shady, lose money. Wah.
Too much of the Microsoft anti-trust trial seemed to be based on what finding them guilty (and applying a real punishment) would do to their stock price. Not only did I not see any consideration for the stock prices of the companies MS destroyed through their illegal actions, but I also didn't see any concern for the law. It's like when an athlete breaks the law (rape, drugs, etc) and gets a slap on the wrist because they're famous and the team really needs them.
Oh, and I wouldn't mind seeing some execs go to jail. I think Rambus's leaders need a little, for the fraud they committed. Real jail too, not play jail.
Canon. They aren't part of this crap in the industry of preventing refills by using a chip that monitors ink levels. They also do seperate ink tanks for all the colors, something that saves a ton of money even if you buy all your ink from them. (I do, I wouldn't ever buy a printer whose ink tanks I couldn't refill, but I'm too lazy to actually do it for the $10 difference.)
And for servers, Sun and SGI. Or, if you don't need hot-swap CPUs, try clusters of commodity boxes. (And do proper rollover, which essentially (by letting you unplug a cluster member without any problems) gives you hotswap CPU capability.)
Try Canon. They not only make good printers but they aren't dicks about ink. Their printers have seperate ink cartridges (well, their $60 model may not, but everything I've seen does) and they make it easy to refill them yourself.
This says a lot in the age of companies chipping their cartridges to prevent refilling, "for your own good." (And threatening to sue people who bypass, or describe how to bypass, the protection.)
Really, I'm too lazy to refill my own cartridges, but I won't *ever* go with someone who makes it impossible. It's a freedom thing. And this way there's a second source, if I ever need it.
I wrote Canon an email explain why all of my future purchases (and recommendations) would be for their products, based on their current policies.
The internet is all about the content and the people at the other ends. Your ISP is *just* a wire.
I use email, but I get it through the same company I have hosting my domain because my home provider (rogers cable -> rogers@home -> shaw@home -> shaw cable) has made me change my email account five or six times. If someone else came along and offered the same service they did at a buck less a month, I'd switch. They're just a commodity.
Even google, as much as I like their service, doesn't actually offer any content themselves (except perhaps the usenet archives) and if they went away the net as a whole would carry on. People would just go back to bookmarking.
Yahoo and sites that offer content and/or host private content, are a big part of the net for me. If my ISP blocked them I'd cancel my service the same day. But, if an ISP started playing games with Yahoo, I'd stick with Yahoo (if, theoretically I had a Yahoo email address) even if they blackholed that provider.
So, if Yahoo and India fight, India loses. Nobody has patience for companies that try to blackmail others.
And really, the peopel of India need the net more than the net needs them. As such, their ISPs will give this up fairly quickly when their customers start bitching about wanting access to everyone that blocks them.
I agree. Perhaps let developers perform compiles on a very fast remote box, but make them use and test the system on a computer that is the "minimum recommended". If they can't do it, the stated minimums are wrong.
And can you say the RIAA hasn't wronged them? I know the MPAA did me terrible harm when they bribed the US government to pass the DMCA (And I'm not even from the US).
I honestly feel that I'd be justified in causing the MPAA members a billion or so dollars harm. They support unfair laws (and the destruction of a system of government) and reduce the freedom of everyone. (the US citizens for now, but everyone eventually when the US gets around to demanding everyone else adopt a DMCA-like policy.)
There's no way I could ever get a law passed which would hurt them in the same way, or reasonably expect to have any chance of changing the law to one that wasn't unfair. So why would it be so wrong for me to strike out at them, trying to hurt them in an unrelated yet farily equivalent way?
And in this case, the attack is hilarious. It's a perfect example of the shit that they'd pull and when they run to law enforcement about this hopefully some people will see the irony of them complaining about this and then trying to get permission to do it to others. It also seems balanced here, the RIAAs website is essentially valueless, they don't lose money by it being down, so this is a zero-cost (ignoring backbone charges) way of demonstrating something - perfect because the RIAA is only suggesting (and likely bribing for, but that's another issue) the law at this point.
You can't say that civil disobedience is only valid in cases like Ghandis. Hell, he should have just shut up, after all it was just an issue of him obeying laws, few/no people got killed before they started disobeying their lawful masters' orders...
Or, do people have a right to fight unjust laws even if their skin color isn't an issue? Personally, I think the DMCA and potential requirements for a Palladium-type system are worse in the long run, they mandate systems that will take all freedom away from people in a way that will likely be beyond people's ability to circumvent for any reason in a generation or two when the education required has been declared terrorist training. (After all, planes have electronics systems, training potential terrorists about those could kill people!)
Then they'd look at it from the angle of no contract being entered into with the user.
There are implied contracts of sale. You don't need to sign anything when buying a book, but they're bound by a few implied warranties (even if they say otherwise) such as that the product must be what they claimed.
If you get a gift, there are no implied warranties. You can't sue someone if they give you a TV and it breaks, even if you think they probably bought the cheapest one they could.
In the case of a hacker defacing a website, claimed damages might be fairly high, but in product liability, if a product merely fails to do the expected job the judgements are usually related to purchase price. (If it blows up, or injures someone in an unexpected way, that's different.)
For the reason of $0 price (low damages) and the fact that it's a gift, I can't see free software suffering from this at all.
$50k for 10k users? Even if we assume $100 / user for Win2k or XP (with a great site license) that's $1M.
Then there's the benefit of stability and easy control by the IT department...
If a few million dollars isn't worth retraining employees whose computer use consists of clicking an 'Outlook' icon to read email, or a 'Word' icon to use a word processor to use 'Open Office', etc, then you've got really stupid employees. How many people do anything with a word processor beside bold/underline, pick fonts, and auto-generate a TOC? All fairly trivial stuff. (Many companies already retrain all their users, giving them a custom tool bar and locking their access to anything else, except in the odd case of someone who need DTP functionality.)
Now, if you've got a staff who uses VisualC++ all the time coding for Windows users, they might not benefit from the change. But generic office types who type up a document every now and then and email each other? Most of a company's IT people are taken up helping people recover email, fixing dead windows installs, or listening to someone complain about how a crash wiped out everything. Most of that would go away with a better platform.
Win2k isn't unstable, you just need to know how to run it... Exchange doesn't suck, you need to set it up right...
When stuff is that flaky, it sucks. The fact that you can hold it together if you're very experienced isn't really the point.
I get about 2 weeks out of 2k, when actually using it. It's lasted over a month, but I was on vacation most of that time, and it dies in a day or two if I really use it (LAN party, Constant dev work, etc). I've been told that 2k never crashes except from bad hardware which is obvious bunk because I've run Linux on this computer for three months without a reboot. This makes me less likely to believe you when you say that Exchange rocks, despite all other evidence saying otherwise.
Yes. Every now and then it seems like there was an attempt to take the 1/2 page lecture about AI and match it to the question, but only every now and then.
Not only can you stitch multiple shots into one panoramic, but you can get higher (effective) resolution in areas with more overlap.
If you then take this high resolution image and composite it back into the video, you'd have a higher-quality video, provided you did the compositing properly.
It'd actually be easier to do this way because the motions of one camera (and thus the perspective corrections needed) are easily modelled, compared to the angles of multiple cameras when you have subjects at multiple distances. (Easy for a landscape, not as easy for a shot of people walking in front of this landscape, in the foreground.)
Moreover, this could be used to remove the grain from film without blurring. And grain in movies is one of the most annoying distractions.
The 'Donor' thing will work when it becomes treason to accept this money. Seriously, you're selling out your country and destroying its political system.
Failing that, it needs to be as illegal to "donate" to a politician as to "donate" to a cop who pulled you over. (All the idiotic "first amendment" rights arguments are flat-out wrong in both cases.)
Try suing someone for a bug in GCC. Seriously, try.
How much is the award going to be? Three times what you paid? A hundred times? Still nothing.
If I give you a gift you can't sue me if it's defective. (You could perhaps have me arrested for a crime if it was harmful and I misrepresented it.) Gifts are free and as such don't have any implied contract (like there is for a sale) so nothing gets agreed to and nothing is binding, except the assigning of ownership (in most cases).
Perhaps it's that the NYT (and others) realize that they're losing some sales, but that if they demanded their removal from Google, people wouldn't come to them for the article (in most cases.) People would probably still just use Google and accept the second-best result. If the NYT wants to be in the public consciousness they may tolerate free views of their OOP stuff to at least keep people away from viewing the Washington Post's version, for instance...
To be fair, I think the answer they gave (web site administrators [of the particular site]) is more helpful.
Sure, you could talk to Google, but if they have it, five or six others have it, including that engine that supposedly has much more content indexed than Google.
So if you really want it changed you should talk to the author/publisher, not the distributors. It's like going to a news-stand with a marker and "correcting" all the copies of a newspaper instead of contacting them and demanding that they issue a retraction. Not only is it not the right way to do it, but it's not very effective.
Besides, saying anything else in the article would have made Google explain this a million times to misguided people.
There's a general movement by many authors (and musicians I suppose) to have copyright revoked from the publishers (when signed over) because a work has remained out of print. I (and others) propose taking this one step further. When the author hasn't made reasonable attempts to publish it in a few years, revoke their copyright too.
The idea behind copyright law is to increase the ammount of public-domain knowledge. That's society's motive for giving someone an otherwise unreasonable monopoly on a creative work. (Yes, unreasonable. On because of copyright do we have the concept of a song you aren't allowed to sing.)
The idea of the new change is that as long as something is being reasonably published (as in, for a price in line with similar works, and so forth) it is being made available to the public and all is well. But when copyright is being used to remove a work from public access, it's not serving the public good anymore and monopoly rights should be revoked.
There are a few other changes that should be made to bring information laws in line with a networked world, but they aren't necessarily part of the first change.
The first is to require non-encrypted high-quality copies of anything submitted to the government for copyright protection. This way the end of a work's sale life isn't met with the legal removal of copyright, but the practical death of the work by access-prevention devices.
The second is some sort of 'accuracy in reporting' requirement. You need to balance the right of someone to have accurate information about them (not flattering perhaps) in public circulation, with the convenience of entities like Google who store posts by millions of people and don't claim to be responsible for the accuracy of it.
Maybe coming up with a way to look for annotations to any given URL, so that if I see something misleading when searching for myself on google I can supply a correction, which other people can view (if they choose) easily by asking any search engine or a browser pluggin for user-annotations to the page. (There was a company that provided an IE pluggin that did this and if my memory serves me right, they got sued for copyright violation - very unfair.)
Slander/Libel laws (do 'spoken' laws count in chat rooms, and 'writen' laws count in forums?) should cover any intentional misrepresentation.
There was a program that would do this, it let users annotate web pages and let multiple users with the same software see each other's annotations and have mini-forums at any given site.
So of course they got sued, for copyright violation I think, as if writing in the margins of a books you own is a violation, or writing on post-it notes and returning those to the library with a book to get other people's comments.
So laughs the man who doesn't realize that an average computer has 5+ flashable BIOSes, most of which are required to boot properly and require a factory replacement to fix.
Also, voltages for nearly everything are controllable by software. Wonder how that new CPU would like double the rated voltage.
Just buy a new box, fix the holes, and continue? Well, as long as you aren't depending on that HD which had its BIOS flashed just before the system wiped all the directory info, the first 1k of every file, and then started a low-level format. (This happening while flashing the BIOSes of the rest of the devices, prior to upping the voltage dangerously.)
Not to mention viruses (worms really) not being stopped by firewalls. EMail and web access are almost always allowed and those are the two biggest holes. And because everyone has a firewall blocking windows networking, once you're inside the firewall it's usually easy to access the rest of the machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you very much! I never imagined that such an organization already existed. That makes it a lot easier to explain to people what I mean.
.... etc, etc." -> "If you have any questions, please call."
I love their example "If there are any point on which you require
I agree.
...
You can't disclaim all responsibility anyways (even with valid contracts). write a virus, pop up a misleading click-through that hides in there "format the hard drive" and it's still a crime. Malicious damages are always going to fall under criminal law.
For everything else, there's the fairly obvious defense that there's no warranty when there's no sale. Now, if you buy Redhat's distro, especially the expensive ones that cost more than copying costs and that come with service packages, I think there's a reasonable expectation that it is fit for the advertised task.
But that's for Redhat to cover. Perhaps they'll start selling all packages at the same price with an offer in each box to sign up for the service package, which they explain has certain terms
And everyone who doesn't get paid for their software keeps releasing it without any warranty, express or implied.
This is often brought up and is quite misleading.
Sure, your CD-ROM drive won't last the 100 years they claim the disks will, but it's a documented format and people could easily build a reader if they felt the need. Hell, with a really high-resolution scan you could read the data directly. And that's with CDs, something hard to preserve.
Xerox (and others) have been working on a printed storage medium, where data is represented by little left or right leaning slashes and encoded with enough error-checking and redundancy that you can recover the data from any piece of paper large enough to hold it. (Put 1/8th of a page of data together and any 1/8th of a page contains all of it.)
The Xerox method was actually intended for digital watermarks, so that links to the original document would allow people to find it from an old printed copy, and so embed author info, etc, in every page of the document and have it look, to the naked eye, like a uniform light-gray background.
You could do something like this fairly easily with the intent being to save the data. The storage was fairly impressive, 15k per page or something, and you could use a simple self-documenting compression to cram a lot onto each page. Print these out as your "fall of technology" backup and store properly. Any self-respecting geek could write a reader in very little time. For extra insurance, print a few pages of human-readable text describing the procedure and offering psuedo-code for decompressing the data.
On the computer, store everything in text-based formats and store it with the appropriate RFCs for the formats for the non-text based data. Even if people forget what XML or HTML are they can still see the original text in there and figure out how to strip that out easily if need be.
This is assuming that people don't copy the data to a new storage medium when updating their computers, and that the whole world forgets how to access common formats.
And yes, I do know of which I speak. I've reverse engineered disk-storage formats from old PCs to allow disk-images to be used as file systems on modern PCs, to extract old files, or for high-level emulators to use.
That's pretty well how it is. You either need to be a lawyer, or invest so much time that you could be, to have read everything relevant.
Should it be that way? Hell no. I've often proposed that the entire legal code an individual be subjected to be readable and roughly memorizable by "the average non-college educated person". So IMHO the legal code should be no longer than a reasonable read for a grade-12 student, use no words they aren't likely to have seen, and not be so complex as to confuse them. This does mean a very simple legal code, but it also means lawmakers would have to pick and choose.
(The "exception" would be that the description of the spirit of the law wouldn't have to be included, just the actual rules you have to follow.)
There is some legal precedent for this. Many judges are finding that ignorance *is* an excuse, at least in contract law with one uninformed party and one informed party where the uninformed party is shown a 20-page contract that they have to sign if they want a job/healthcare/a house/etc.
In a system where the legal code was required to be understood by the majority of the people they'd either have to simplify it, or increase the level of education of the people and include legal classes as standard curiculum (this really should be, even now).
Then make it illegal, in the commission of a crime, or where it is reasonable to assume that it might be in the commission of a crime.
Driving a friend to and from the bank is legal, unless you have a reason to believe he's robbing it.
And even then, it's the aiding and abetting that's the crime, the driving is just how it was done.
Require the shops to call a special "Am I stolen" number before modding a phone, if they don't take a simple precaution to check for this, they can't be said to have been taking reasonable precautions. It's much like pawn shops.
Some providers don't let you switch phone without a fee, especially if you do it in a pattern that indicates you're using multiple phones (something they want to be able to sell you the right to do). I don't believe they have this right, I think once you own a phone you should be able to do anything you want with it. If changing hardware IDs is what's required to get around it, I think that's a good reason to keep the practice legal.
I know that's a joke, but... Yes, I do want investors to lose money. Too many people see their investments as something the government should protect. Sorry, invest in a company that's shady, lose money. Wah.
Too much of the Microsoft anti-trust trial seemed to be based on what finding them guilty (and applying a real punishment) would do to their stock price. Not only did I not see any consideration for the stock prices of the companies MS destroyed through their illegal actions, but I also didn't see any concern for the law. It's like when an athlete breaks the law (rape, drugs, etc) and gets a slap on the wrist because they're famous and the team really needs them.
Oh, and I wouldn't mind seeing some execs go to jail. I think Rambus's leaders need a little, for the fraud they committed. Real jail too, not play jail.
Canon. They aren't part of this crap in the industry of preventing refills by using a chip that monitors ink levels. They also do seperate ink tanks for all the colors, something that saves a ton of money even if you buy all your ink from them. (I do, I wouldn't ever buy a printer whose ink tanks I couldn't refill, but I'm too lazy to actually do it for the $10 difference.)
And for servers, Sun and SGI. Or, if you don't need hot-swap CPUs, try clusters of commodity boxes. (And do proper rollover, which essentially (by letting you unplug a cluster member without any problems) gives you hotswap CPU capability.)
Try Canon. They not only make good printers but they aren't dicks about ink. Their printers have seperate ink cartridges (well, their $60 model may not, but everything I've seen does) and they make it easy to refill them yourself.
This says a lot in the age of companies chipping their cartridges to prevent refilling, "for your own good." (And threatening to sue people who bypass, or describe how to bypass, the protection.)
Really, I'm too lazy to refill my own cartridges, but I won't *ever* go with someone who makes it impossible. It's a freedom thing. And this way there's a second source, if I ever need it.
I wrote Canon an email explain why all of my future purchases (and recommendations) would be for their products, based on their current policies.
The internet is all about the content and the people at the other ends. Your ISP is *just* a wire.
I use email, but I get it through the same company I have hosting my domain because my home provider (rogers cable -> rogers@home -> shaw@home -> shaw cable) has made me change my email account five or six times. If someone else came along and offered the same service they did at a buck less a month, I'd switch. They're just a commodity.
Even google, as much as I like their service, doesn't actually offer any content themselves (except perhaps the usenet archives) and if they went away the net as a whole would carry on. People would just go back to bookmarking.
Yahoo and sites that offer content and/or host private content, are a big part of the net for me. If my ISP blocked them I'd cancel my service the same day. But, if an ISP started playing games with Yahoo, I'd stick with Yahoo (if, theoretically I had a Yahoo email address) even if they blackholed that provider.
So, if Yahoo and India fight, India loses. Nobody has patience for companies that try to blackmail others.
And really, the peopel of India need the net more than the net needs them. As such, their ISPs will give this up fairly quickly when their customers start bitching about wanting access to everyone that blocks them.
I agree. Perhaps let developers perform compiles on a very fast remote box, but make them use and test the system on a computer that is the "minimum recommended". If they can't do it, the stated minimums are wrong.
And can you say the RIAA hasn't wronged them? I know the MPAA did me terrible harm when they bribed the US government to pass the DMCA (And I'm not even from the US).
I honestly feel that I'd be justified in causing the MPAA members a billion or so dollars harm. They support unfair laws (and the destruction of a system of government) and reduce the freedom of everyone. (the US citizens for now, but everyone eventually when the US gets around to demanding everyone else adopt a DMCA-like policy.)
There's no way I could ever get a law passed which would hurt them in the same way, or reasonably expect to have any chance of changing the law to one that wasn't unfair. So why would it be so wrong for me to strike out at them, trying to hurt them in an unrelated yet farily equivalent way?
And in this case, the attack is hilarious. It's a perfect example of the shit that they'd pull and when they run to law enforcement about this hopefully some people will see the irony of them complaining about this and then trying to get permission to do it to others. It also seems balanced here, the RIAAs website is essentially valueless, they don't lose money by it being down, so this is a zero-cost (ignoring backbone charges) way of demonstrating something - perfect because the RIAA is only suggesting (and likely bribing for, but that's another issue) the law at this point.
You can't say that civil disobedience is only valid in cases like Ghandis. Hell, he should have just shut up, after all it was just an issue of him obeying laws, few/no people got killed before they started disobeying their lawful masters' orders...
Or, do people have a right to fight unjust laws even if their skin color isn't an issue? Personally, I think the DMCA and potential requirements for a Palladium-type system are worse in the long run, they mandate systems that will take all freedom away from people in a way that will likely be beyond people's ability to circumvent for any reason in a generation or two when the education required has been declared terrorist training. (After all, planes have electronics systems, training potential terrorists about those could kill people!)
Then they'd look at it from the angle of no contract being entered into with the user.
There are implied contracts of sale. You don't need to sign anything when buying a book, but they're bound by a few implied warranties (even if they say otherwise) such as that the product must be what they claimed.
If you get a gift, there are no implied warranties. You can't sue someone if they give you a TV and it breaks, even if you think they probably bought the cheapest one they could.
In the case of a hacker defacing a website, claimed damages might be fairly high, but in product liability, if a product merely fails to do the expected job the judgements are usually related to purchase price. (If it blows up, or injures someone in an unexpected way, that's different.)
For the reason of $0 price (low damages) and the fact that it's a gift, I can't see free software suffering from this at all.
$50k for 10k users? Even if we assume $100 / user for Win2k or XP (with a great site license) that's $1M.
Then there's the benefit of stability and easy control by the IT department...
If a few million dollars isn't worth retraining employees whose computer use consists of clicking an 'Outlook' icon to read email, or a 'Word' icon to use a word processor to use 'Open Office', etc, then you've got really stupid employees. How many people do anything with a word processor beside bold/underline, pick fonts, and auto-generate a TOC? All fairly trivial stuff. (Many companies already retrain all their users, giving them a custom tool bar and locking their access to anything else, except in the odd case of someone who need DTP functionality.)
Now, if you've got a staff who uses VisualC++ all the time coding for Windows users, they might not benefit from the change. But generic office types who type up a document every now and then and email each other? Most of a company's IT people are taken up helping people recover email, fixing dead windows installs, or listening to someone complain about how a crash wiped out everything. Most of that would go away with a better platform.
This is the apologists' answer to everything.
Win2k isn't unstable, you just need to know how to run it... Exchange doesn't suck, you need to set it up right...
When stuff is that flaky, it sucks. The fact that you can hold it together if you're very experienced isn't really the point.
I get about 2 weeks out of 2k, when actually using it. It's lasted over a month, but I was on vacation most of that time, and it dies in a day or two if I really use it (LAN party, Constant dev work, etc). I've been told that 2k never crashes except from bad hardware which is obvious bunk because I've run Linux on this computer for three months without a reboot. This makes me less likely to believe you when you say that Exchange rocks, despite all other evidence saying otherwise.
Oops. Yeah, I did.
Ok, so basically you're saying a rough estimate and some guesswork, but also that it's not important to get it perfect.
That's what I would have done, but I thought there might be a trick.
Yes. Every now and then it seems like there was an attempt to take the 1/2 page lecture about AI and match it to the question, but only every now and then.
Actually, this would be possible.
Not only can you stitch multiple shots into one panoramic, but you can get higher (effective) resolution in areas with more overlap.
If you then take this high resolution image and composite it back into the video, you'd have a higher-quality video, provided you did the compositing properly.
It'd actually be easier to do this way because the motions of one camera (and thus the perspective corrections needed) are easily modelled, compared to the angles of multiple cameras when you have subjects at multiple distances. (Easy for a landscape, not as easy for a shot of people walking in front of this landscape, in the foreground.)
Moreover, this could be used to remove the grain from film without blurring. And grain in movies is one of the most annoying distractions.
How do you calculate the exposure for that, such that double-flashing the same area doesn't cause it to wash compared to the rest of the image?
Also, this sounds like a great shot, can I see it online anywhere?
The 'Donor' thing will work when it becomes treason to accept this money. Seriously, you're selling out your country and destroying its political system.
Failing that, it needs to be as illegal to "donate" to a politician as to "donate" to a cop who pulled you over. (All the idiotic "first amendment" rights arguments are flat-out wrong in both cases.)
Try suing someone for a bug in GCC. Seriously, try.
How much is the award going to be? Three times what you paid? A hundred times? Still nothing.
If I give you a gift you can't sue me if it's defective. (You could perhaps have me arrested for a crime if it was harmful and I misrepresented it.) Gifts are free and as such don't have any implied contract (like there is for a sale) so nothing gets agreed to and nothing is binding, except the assigning of ownership (in most cases).
Perhaps it's that the NYT (and others) realize that they're losing some sales, but that if they demanded their removal from Google, people wouldn't come to them for the article (in most cases.) People would probably still just use Google and accept the second-best result. If the NYT wants to be in the public consciousness they may tolerate free views of their OOP stuff to at least keep people away from viewing the Washington Post's version, for instance...
To be fair, I think the answer they gave (web site administrators [of the particular site]) is more helpful.
Sure, you could talk to Google, but if they have it, five or six others have it, including that engine that supposedly has much more content indexed than Google.
So if you really want it changed you should talk to the author/publisher, not the distributors. It's like going to a news-stand with a marker and "correcting" all the copies of a newspaper instead of contacting them and demanding that they issue a retraction. Not only is it not the right way to do it, but it's not very effective.
Besides, saying anything else in the article would have made Google explain this a million times to misguided people.
There's a general movement by many authors (and musicians I suppose) to have copyright revoked from the publishers (when signed over) because a work has remained out of print. I (and others) propose taking this one step further. When the author hasn't made reasonable attempts to publish it in a few years, revoke their copyright too.
The idea behind copyright law is to increase the ammount of public-domain knowledge. That's society's motive for giving someone an otherwise unreasonable monopoly on a creative work. (Yes, unreasonable. On because of copyright do we have the concept of a song you aren't allowed to sing.)
The idea of the new change is that as long as something is being reasonably published (as in, for a price in line with similar works, and so forth) it is being made available to the public and all is well. But when copyright is being used to remove a work from public access, it's not serving the public good anymore and monopoly rights should be revoked.
There are a few other changes that should be made to bring information laws in line with a networked world, but they aren't necessarily part of the first change.
The first is to require non-encrypted high-quality copies of anything submitted to the government for copyright protection. This way the end of a work's sale life isn't met with the legal removal of copyright, but the practical death of the work by access-prevention devices.
The second is some sort of 'accuracy in reporting' requirement. You need to balance the right of someone to have accurate information about them (not flattering perhaps) in public circulation, with the convenience of entities like Google who store posts by millions of people and don't claim to be responsible for the accuracy of it.
Maybe coming up with a way to look for annotations to any given URL, so that if I see something misleading when searching for myself on google I can supply a correction, which other people can view (if they choose) easily by asking any search engine or a browser pluggin for user-annotations to the page. (There was a company that provided an IE pluggin that did this and if my memory serves me right, they got sued for copyright violation - very unfair.)
Slander/Libel laws (do 'spoken' laws count in chat rooms, and 'writen' laws count in forums?) should cover any intentional misrepresentation.
There was a program that would do this, it let users annotate web pages and let multiple users with the same software see each other's annotations and have mini-forums at any given site.
So of course they got sued, for copyright violation I think, as if writing in the margins of a books you own is a violation, or writing on post-it notes and returning those to the library with a book to get other people's comments.
So laughs the man who doesn't realize that an average computer has 5+ flashable BIOSes, most of which are required to boot properly and require a factory replacement to fix.
Also, voltages for nearly everything are controllable by software. Wonder how that new CPU would like double the rated voltage.
Just buy a new box, fix the holes, and continue? Well, as long as you aren't depending on that HD which had its BIOS flashed just before the system wiped all the directory info, the first 1k of every file, and then started a low-level format. (This happening while flashing the BIOSes of the rest of the devices, prior to upping the voltage dangerously.)
Not to mention viruses (worms really) not being stopped by firewalls. EMail and web access are almost always allowed and those are the two biggest holes. And because everyone has a firewall blocking windows networking, once you're inside the firewall it's usually easy to access the rest of the machines.