Nah, Ms. Ansari could probably get a date, so she doesn't count.
Re:With all due respect to the man ...
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
We're identified with a jingoist leader that 50% of us opposed.
Argh. Look, can we please keep the politics out of non-political topics? You don't like Bush, fine. You're perfectly entitled to your opinion. If this was an article about the Patriot Act or somesuch, that opinion would be relevant, and I might even agree with you. But why does it have to pop up in a discussion about the death of an Australian naturalist/celebrity?
I know I'm ranting out of proportion to your specific post, and I apologize. It's just that this seems to be happening all the freaking time lately, no matter how tenous the connection to the topic is, and it's driving me batty. It's like playing one of those word assocation games at a party, but somehow it always steers itself to "Bush." I'm waiting for it to happen in "LDAP Authentication in Linux" or "Rethinking the Thinkpad" or maybe the "Favorite Sweetener" poll.
"The binocular guy nods, reaches up with one hand and presses a lapel switch. The next time he turns around, a word is written across his back in neon green electropigment: MAFIA. The older guy turns away; his windbreaker says the same thing. Hiro turns around in the middle of the gangplank. There are twenty crew members in plain sight all around him. Suddenly, their black windbreakers all say, MAFIA. Suddenly, they are all armed."
the waste products remain dangerous for thousands of years.
Store it temporarily while our space capabilities develop, then launch it into the Sun.
Expected reply: "But what if there's a failure on launch? That'll spread radioactive waste everywhere!"
Note that I said launch it once our space capabilities develop. If our level of space technology progresses so slowly that it's more than a couple hundred years before we can get stuff off this rock safely and reliably, then we're probably going to be made extinct by a comet or whatnot eventually, anyway.
Developers are pissed because they can't use code developed by someone else in their own software and yet not give the freedoms to others which were given to them by the original developers. They're pissed because they can't have a free ride.
Except that a free ride isn't what I'm looking for. My company buy licenses for all of the 3rd-party (or n'th party) libraries we use. $200 for InfoPower, $900 or so for Report Builder, $500 for Dream Collection, etc. etc. We don't except free rides, we pay for our rides. The frustration for us when dealing with people who GPL their libraries isn't because we've been prevented from stealing something. It's because we're dealing with someone who is acting totally contrary to how we'd act in their shoes, and contrary to how most other property transactions happen. Note (before someone strawmans me) that I'm definitely not saying that the person who GPL'ed the library didn't have the right to do so.
Let me give an example. Last year, we decided our app needs be able to output to PDF. We found a guy (Pragnaan Software) who wrote add-ons for the report engine we use (Report Builder) who had something that would let us write to PDF and a metric buttload of other formats. Now, as payment for our using the library, supposing he had the choice of:
1. $200 or so (his list price), or...
2. The warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that we'd be legally obligated to give our entire app's source code to all of our users, whom he doesn't know from Adam and who wouldn't know what to do with it if their lives depended on it, anyway.
Obviously he preferred option 1. And if we were in his shoes, so would we. Everything made sense to both parties, and we conducted our transaction and both went away satisfied. Now, I realize that, in the view of GPL advocates, that's not the way things should be done. So be it. But don't misrepresent the intentions of those who don't want to deal with the GPL. It's like going to a store, picking out a TV, taking it to the register, getting out your wallet... and being told they only accept payment in coconuts.
The problem with most 2nd Amendment folks is that they forget that it starts "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state..." and think that the Amendment implies that gov't cannot regulate anything about gun ownership.
The problem with anti-2nd Amendment folks who point to the "well-regulated" portion of the amendment, is that they don't know what "well-regulated" meant when used back then. It has nothing to do with government regulation. It means properly functioning.
From Federalist No. 29, Alexander Hamilton (talking about the problems of maintaining a standing army):
"To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss."
That is, having a certain "degree of perfection" in "going through military exercises and evolutions" entitle them to the character of a "well-regulated militia." A "well-regulated" militia is one that can shoot straight.
Your "guns were rare in Colonial America" sounds like you're getting your info (directly or indirectly) from Michael Bellesiles's Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, which has been pretty thoroughly debunked, so I'm not going to go into the details here. Best place to start is this article in Reason magazine.
Yeah!! Any why should companies have to hire blacks and women if they don't want to?
Yeah!! And why should employees have to work for blacks and women if they don't want to?
The answer, in both cases, is that they shouldn't have to. If party A and party B are considering entering into some sort of arrangement (business or otherwise), both parties must have the same legal rules apply to them, or the idea of "equality before the law" has gone out the window. An employer should be able to enter/terminate their relationship on exactly the same basis that the employee can. The same goes between customers and proprietors. If (assuming no prior contract) the law forced you to work for someone that you didn't want to work for, that would rightly be condemned as slavery, no matter how irrational or racist or whatever your reasons for not wanting to work for them were. To force someone to hire you against their will is no less morally repugnant -- again, no matter what their reasons for not wanting to are.
So, what Mozilla needs now is to report as "existing" any window it was told to pop up.
More generally: create whatever internal data structure it uses for said popup windows, and handle JavaScript calls exactly as they'd be handled otherwise -- just don't do whatever low-level calls result in actually showing the popup. This handles the next obvious route the popup writer will take -- create a popup window, set some property of the window, and then query that property and compare it against what you set it to. "Create me a popup. Is it there? It is? Yeah. Uhuh. Sure it is, you ad-evading bastard. Alright, set the width to 321. Now, what's the width? It's not 321? No page for you!"
Many of the sites I visit use some sort of scripting that I would like to remain working. Specific things that scripting is used for is all that should need to be disabled. That's a little too "all or nothing" for my taste (and I suspect for others as well).
More than that, many sites use the script/noscript tags with just "This site requires JavaScript" in the noscript section, or often nothing at all. Or if you get to it, all the links cease to work, because they use OnClick (or somesuch) rather than HRef tags.
What's worse, I've seen at least one site that prevents you from accessing some pages if you have popups disabled in Opera (and presumably Mozilla). I'm not well versed in JavaScript, but as far as I could tell what it does is try to open a temporary popup window, then check whether the popup exists. If it finds the popup it closes it and proceeds to what you were trying to get to. If it can't find it, it stops.
Will this new technology automatically exclude these items, like all the bestsellers list today do? Cuz I don't want to have to hear the preacher down at church bragging about "The lords been topping the charts for 36 weeks now!"
Dunno about other religions, but its definitely something that the Church of Scientology likes to crow about.
"You use a WMD (weapon of mass destruction) on us, we use one on you - and all we have are nukes"
All you have is nukes? The USA has some of the worlds largest stockpiles of both chemical and biological weapons.
More accurately, nukes are all we have that are deliverable right away -- 30 minutes for an ICBM, less for an SLBM depending on where the sub and target are. A bio or chem retaliatory strike would require weapons to be brought out of storage, probably transported, prepped, and loaded onto a bomber, and I don't know offhand whether most of the USAF's long range bombers can carry bio/chem weapons.
So, it's Bush's fault that after the Cold War was over, the then-President squandered the opportunities presented and now Clinton's chickens are coming home to roost?
We had budget surpluses, now budget deficits.
Yes, I definitely think that Bush should take a harder line with the Democrat's desire to spend more money. Glad to see you agree.
We had a 'peace dividend,' now we have the largest military budget.
That peace was handed to Clinton by his predecessors, and because he let things fall apart during his term, now money has to be spent fixing what he let rot.
Have you spoken to anyone in the military lately, by any chance? I have a couple of friends who were in, and for the last 6 years or so was able to hear about how badly things were deteriorating -- inadequate maintainance for aircraft, personnel leaving because being sent around the world to serve as Clinton's ad agency left them too little time to spend with their families, that sort of thing. Don't blame the janitor for the expense of cleaning up the mess.
We had a strong economy, now a recession.
I hate to break it to you, but the stock market took a nose dive in response to a certain court ruling in 1999, in a case prosecuted by the Clinton administration, and it hasn't recovered since. The Microsoft ruling turned what would have been a gradual die-off amongst the dotcoms into a mass meteor-and-dinosaurs extinction event. So now instead of going from "You're on the Internet? We don't need to see your business plan, here's some money!" to "Ahem. Let's look at that business plan," we've gone to "You're on the Internet? We don't need to see your business plan, go away!" But I suppose sticking a pin in a balloon is more fun than letting it deflate.
We had a fair tax system, now a tax system favoring the rich.
What universe do you live in? The tax cuts (what little there are of them) have barely gone into effect.
We had an 'Alaska,' now we have a 'Drilled Alaska.'
Not yet, unfortunately.
We had a blow job scandal, now we have a 'jobs' and billions of $ scandal.
Enron expected their campaign contributions to get them help. They got none. Which is as it should be. As for the employee's 401Ks, anyone who sticks all their money in a single basket like that (and they WERE able to take whatever they put in out, just not Enron's matching stock) deserve what happens to them.
We had liberties, now we have virtually none.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
I'm not happy with some of Bush's response to the terrorist attacks either, but do the words "Communications Decency Act" ring a bell? Digital Millenium Copyright Act? Phil Zimmerman? Carnivore?
And since I presume my words won't carry much weight with you, go here at the Cato Institute and see what ACLU president Nadine Strossen had to say about Clinton and the rule of law.
This isn't quite as elegant as the Mac approach, but it works -- until you want to switch the program you use for a particular file type.
Then, you're basically at Microsoft's mercy. Because Windows makes you go on a mad hunt through menus and folders and options to find the dialogue box that lets you make any such change.
Errr... maybe this is different under Win9x, but under Win2K this isn't hard at all. Right-click on the file in question, pick "Open With." It has a menu with the programs that have previously been used to open that file type (Notepad, IE, and WordPerfect for the text file I just opened to try this). At the bottom of the list is "Choose program..." That brings up a list of apps installed on the machine. Pick the app to open it with. If you want to make that app the default for that file extension, click "Always use this program to open these files."
That's so freakin' hard about this? It fits just fine with the "right-click on it to see what you can do with it" paradigm that Windows uses throughout.
This is right wing hogwash. Monopolies run forever because they eliminate competition. If may get lazy, but that just makes them more likely to resort to illegal tactics, not more likely to go under despite massive market advantages.
That's why he can't site a single example to make his case. Monopolies ran forever, hence the anti-trust laws were required to ensure a vibrant economy.
And this is left-wing hogwash.
Henry Ford initially had massive market share, and decided to treat his customers arrogantly (his famous "you can have it in any color you want, as long as it's black" statement). Competitors sprang up to take advantage of this, not killing Ford Motors but pushing it back to being merely one of the "big three" auto companies, instead of undisputed top dog. When the eventually-complacent big three got hit with the gas crisis of the 70's, the Japanese automakers moved in, to the point where Chrysler had to go begging from the government.
Word Perfect used to rule the word processor market. Then they dug in their heels, trying to stay in DOS when the consumers wanted to move to Windows 3.1, and they got toppled.
Hayes once dominated modem sales. Do they even exist anymore?
Atari was the leader in video games, when the industry first started. Then for a while, Nintendo was pretty much the only system anyone wanted. Then, the Playstation came in and established itself on at least equal footing.
But therein lies the fundamental flaw of steganography, and the reason it will never really compete with cryptography for security applications.
The fundamental idea of steganography breaks the cardinal rule of cryptography: no security by obscurity. Steganography by its very definition achieves security by obscurity.
When a method of steganography is discovered, it is useless. Not only that, but every single message ever sent using that method becomes instantly compromised. This is not acceptable for any applications that require scalability.
That's why you use both: you first encrypt the data using a known good encryption algorithm. Then you hide the encrypted data using steganography. That way, even if you find it, all you can do is say "Hah! There's a message hidden here!" But you still don't know the content of the message, unless you have a key. And the fact that the message being hidden has been encrypted, would make statistical analysis more difficult. In a certain sense, the better an encryption algorithm is, the more random-seeming it's output is -- i.e. the more it resembles noise. So if you combine crypto and stego, you're essentially hiding noise inside noise.
The downside is that the Chinese and Japanese action/monster flick producers that use this technology for film dubbing will also use Babelfish to translate the scripts.
So that's how we got "All Your Base Are Belong To Us."
Re:2001 Excursion, 1997 Accord, which pollutes mor
on
Eco-Terrorism
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· Score: 1
but your argument the "the greenies" WANT to use up fossil fuel is bullshit too. You are a flamebait boy, and should be modded DOWN as such....
Just because you think something is "bullshit" doesn't mean it qualifies as flamebait. If that's your understanding of the moderation guidelines, I sure hope your chances to moderate are few and far between.
He apparently holds the delusion that gold somehow has an "intrinsic" value that is fixed (yeah, like the gold price never changes),
The difference is that, while the price of gold does change, you can generally trust that it isn't going to suddenly be devalued. Only political restrictions prevent the supply of dollars or marks or euros from suddenly skyrocketing.
>and that it's "accepted everywhere" (yeah, sure)
No, it's not, and that's pretty much a Catch-22 situation. People accept currency in exchange for goods and services, primarily because they know that they can turn around and have it accepted in exchange for other goods and services. So people won't accept gold, because... people won't accept gold. A problem, but not an insurmountable one. What's needed to jumpstart it is transparency -- say, being able to hold a balance in gold but pay with a credit card using whatever currency is required, the way I can pay for goods in yen using my Visa card against my account in dollars. (Yes, I know there's a fee involved. The point is that I don't have to deal with it. It's a convenience issue, not a cost issue in this case).
and thus is different than any other currency (which it, of course, isn't).
Like I said, the difference is stability, specifically against currency devaluation. To get Weimarr-style inflation under a pure hard currency standard, you'd need a meteor of gold to strike somewhere.
This is like giving a car to someone who can't drive a stick; they try to start the car in third gear, release the clutch too soon, and the whole car explodes. Then the car manufacturer blames the incompetent driver.
No, it's more along the lines: you buy a car, and then put non-OEM tires on it, and the tires blow out causing you to crash. Then the car manufacturer blames the tire manufacturer.
But as far as the perception of Win2K being more stable than Win95: that depends. Win2K is rock solid for me -- except when I play Everquest or Starfleet Command, when it locks up or spontaneously reboots every hour or so, probably because I can't get non-beta drivers for my video card. Win95 on the same machine plays EQ and SFC all night without a hitch.
I agree with the 2nd half of your statement. Drizzt could be a great piece of film. ..as long as it doesn't come out as a miserable piece of shit ala D&D.
(cue the Rolling Stones' "Beast of Burden"...)
o/~ I'll never be your Drizzt Do'Urden.
The Underdark has got me hurtin'.
All I want is Llolth to lay off of me... o/~
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, Ms. Ansari could probably get a date, so she doesn't count.
We're identified with a jingoist leader that 50% of us opposed.
Argh. Look, can we please keep the politics out of non-political topics? You don't like Bush, fine. You're perfectly entitled to your opinion. If this was an article about the Patriot Act or somesuch, that opinion would be relevant, and I might even agree with you. But why does it have to pop up in a discussion about the death of an Australian naturalist/celebrity?
I know I'm ranting out of proportion to your specific post, and I apologize. It's just that this seems to be happening all the freaking time lately, no matter how tenous the connection to the topic is, and it's driving me batty. It's like playing one of those word assocation games at a party, but somehow it always steers itself to "Bush." I'm waiting for it to happen in "LDAP Authentication in Linux" or "Rethinking the Thinkpad" or maybe the "Favorite Sweetener" poll.
"The binocular guy nods, reaches up with one hand and presses a lapel switch. The next time he turns around, a word is written across his back in neon green electropigment: MAFIA. The older guy turns away; his windbreaker says the same thing. Hiro turns around in the middle of the gangplank. There are twenty crew members in plain sight all around him. Suddenly, their black windbreakers all say, MAFIA. Suddenly, they are all armed."
the waste products remain dangerous for thousands of years.
Store it temporarily while our space capabilities develop, then launch it into the Sun.
Expected reply: "But what if there's a failure on launch? That'll spread radioactive waste everywhere!"
Note that I said launch it once our space capabilities develop. If our level of space technology progresses so slowly that it's more than a couple hundred years before we can get stuff off this rock safely and reliably, then we're probably going to be made extinct by a comet or whatnot eventually, anyway.
"If you do not master your anger..."
"'...then your anger will master you.' That's what you were going to say, isn't it? Isn't it?"
"Not necessarily."
Any chance this could be applicable for use in artificial hearts?
Developers are pissed because they can't use code developed by someone else in their own software and yet not give the freedoms to others which were given to them by the original developers. They're pissed because they can't have a free ride.
Except that a free ride isn't what I'm looking for. My company buy licenses for all of the 3rd-party (or n'th party) libraries we use. $200 for InfoPower, $900 or so for Report Builder, $500 for Dream Collection, etc. etc. We don't except free rides, we pay for our rides. The frustration for us when dealing with people who GPL their libraries isn't because we've been prevented from stealing something. It's because we're dealing with someone who is acting totally contrary to how we'd act in their shoes, and contrary to how most other property transactions happen. Note (before someone strawmans me) that I'm definitely not saying that the person who GPL'ed the library didn't have the right to do so.
Let me give an example. Last year, we decided our app needs be able to output to PDF. We found a guy (Pragnaan Software) who wrote add-ons for the report engine we use (Report Builder) who had something that would let us write to PDF and a metric buttload of other formats. Now, as payment for our using the library, supposing he had the choice of:
1. $200 or so (his list price), or...
2. The warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that we'd be legally obligated to give our entire app's source code to all of our users, whom he doesn't know from Adam and who wouldn't know what to do with it if their lives depended on it, anyway.
Obviously he preferred option 1. And if we were in his shoes, so would we. Everything made sense to both parties, and we conducted our transaction and both went away satisfied. Now, I realize that, in the view of GPL advocates, that's not the way things should be done. So be it. But don't misrepresent the intentions of those who don't want to deal with the GPL. It's like going to a store, picking out a TV, taking it to the register, getting out your wallet... and being told they only accept payment in coconuts.
The problem with most 2nd Amendment folks is that they forget that it starts "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state..." and think that the Amendment implies that gov't cannot regulate anything about gun ownership.
The problem with anti-2nd Amendment folks who point to the "well-regulated" portion of the amendment, is that they don't know what "well-regulated" meant when used back then. It has nothing to do with government regulation. It means properly functioning.
From Federalist No. 29, Alexander Hamilton (talking about the problems of maintaining a standing army):
"To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss."
That is, having a certain "degree of perfection" in "going through military exercises and evolutions" entitle them to the character of a "well-regulated militia." A "well-regulated" militia is one that can shoot straight.
Your "guns were rare in Colonial America" sounds like you're getting your info (directly or indirectly) from Michael Bellesiles's Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, which has been pretty thoroughly debunked, so I'm not going to go into the details here. Best place to start is this article in Reason magazine.
Ah. So that's what was in all those barrels in Doom.
Yeah!! Any why should companies have to hire blacks and women if they don't want to?
Yeah!! And why should employees have to work for blacks and women if they don't want to?
The answer, in both cases, is that they shouldn't have to. If party A and party B are considering entering into some sort of arrangement (business or otherwise), both parties must have the same legal rules apply to them, or the idea of "equality before the law" has gone out the window. An employer should be able to enter/terminate their relationship on exactly the same basis that the employee can. The same goes between customers and proprietors. If (assuming no prior contract) the law forced you to work for someone that you didn't want to work for, that would rightly be condemned as slavery, no matter how irrational or racist or whatever your reasons for not wanting to work for them were. To force someone to hire you against their will is no less morally repugnant -- again, no matter what their reasons for not wanting to are.
So, what Mozilla needs now is to report as "existing" any window it was told to pop up.
More generally: create whatever internal data structure it uses for said popup windows, and handle JavaScript calls exactly as they'd be handled otherwise -- just don't do whatever low-level calls result in actually showing the popup. This handles the next obvious route the popup writer will take -- create a popup window, set some property of the window, and then query that property and compare it against what you set it to. "Create me a popup. Is it there? It is? Yeah. Uhuh. Sure it is, you ad-evading bastard. Alright, set the width to 321. Now, what's the width? It's not 321? No page for you!"
Many of the sites I visit use some sort of scripting that I would like to remain working. Specific things that scripting is used for is all that should need to be disabled. That's a little too "all or nothing" for my taste (and I suspect for others as well).
More than that, many sites use the script/noscript tags with just "This site requires JavaScript" in the noscript section, or often nothing at all. Or if you get to it, all the links cease to work, because they use OnClick (or somesuch) rather than HRef tags.
What's worse, I've seen at least one site that prevents you from accessing some pages if you have popups disabled in Opera (and presumably Mozilla). I'm not well versed in JavaScript, but as far as I could tell what it does is try to open a temporary popup window, then check whether the popup exists. If it finds the popup it closes it and proceeds to what you were trying to get to. If it can't find it, it stops.
Will this new technology automatically exclude these items, like all the bestsellers list today do? Cuz I don't want to have to hear the preacher down at church bragging about "The lords been topping the charts for 36 weeks now!"
Dunno about other religions, but its definitely something that the Church of Scientology likes to crow about.
"You use a WMD (weapon of mass destruction) on us, we use one on you - and all we have are nukes"
All you have is nukes? The USA has some of the worlds largest stockpiles of both chemical and biological weapons.
More accurately, nukes are all we have that are deliverable right away -- 30 minutes for an ICBM, less for an SLBM depending on where the sub and target are. A bio or chem retaliatory strike would require weapons to be brought out of storage, probably transported, prepped, and loaded onto a bomber, and I don't know offhand whether most of the USAF's long range bombers can carry bio/chem weapons.
So the CORPORATION of M$ which is actually Gates, gives its money and holds positions counter to the vast majority of its own employees.
Which has absolutely zero to do with anything. Microsoft (or any corporation) is supposed to act on behalf of its stockholders, not its employees.
We had peace, now war.
So, it's Bush's fault that after the Cold War was over, the then-President squandered the opportunities presented and now Clinton's chickens are coming home to roost?
We had budget surpluses, now budget deficits.
Yes, I definitely think that Bush should take a harder line with the Democrat's desire to spend more money. Glad to see you agree.
We had a 'peace dividend,' now we have the largest military budget.
That peace was handed to Clinton by his predecessors, and because he let things fall apart during his term, now money has to be spent fixing what he let rot.
Have you spoken to anyone in the military lately, by any chance? I have a couple of friends who were in, and for the last 6 years or so was able to hear about how badly things were deteriorating -- inadequate maintainance for aircraft, personnel leaving because being sent around the world to serve as Clinton's ad agency left them too little time to spend with their families, that sort of thing. Don't blame the janitor for the expense of cleaning up the mess.
We had a strong economy, now a recession.
I hate to break it to you, but the stock market took a nose dive in response to a certain court ruling in 1999, in a case prosecuted by the Clinton administration, and it hasn't recovered since. The Microsoft ruling turned what would have been a gradual die-off amongst the dotcoms into a mass meteor-and-dinosaurs extinction event. So now instead of going from "You're on the Internet? We don't need to see your business plan, here's some money!" to "Ahem. Let's look at that business plan," we've gone to "You're on the Internet? We don't need to see your business plan, go away!" But I suppose sticking a pin in a balloon is more fun than letting it deflate.
We had a fair tax system, now a tax system favoring the rich.
What universe do you live in? The tax cuts (what little there are of them) have barely gone into effect.
We had an 'Alaska,' now we have a 'Drilled Alaska.'
Not yet, unfortunately.
We had a blow job scandal, now we have a 'jobs' and billions of $ scandal.
Enron expected their campaign contributions to get them help. They got none. Which is as it should be. As for the employee's 401Ks, anyone who sticks all their money in a single basket like that (and they WERE able to take whatever they put in out, just not Enron's matching stock) deserve what happens to them.
We had liberties, now we have virtually none.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
I'm not happy with some of Bush's response to the terrorist attacks either, but do the words "Communications Decency Act" ring a bell? Digital Millenium Copyright Act? Phil Zimmerman? Carnivore?
And since I presume my words won't carry much weight with you, go here at the Cato Institute and see what ACLU president Nadine Strossen had to say about Clinton and the rule of law.
This isn't quite as elegant as the Mac approach, but it works -- until you want to switch the program you use for a particular file type.
Then, you're basically at Microsoft's mercy. Because Windows makes you go on a mad hunt through menus and folders and options to find the dialogue box that lets you make any such change.
Errr... maybe this is different under Win9x, but under Win2K this isn't hard at all. Right-click on the file in question, pick "Open With." It has a menu with the programs that have previously been used to open that file type (Notepad, IE, and WordPerfect for the text file I just opened to try this). At the bottom of the list is "Choose program..." That brings up a list of apps installed on the machine. Pick the app to open it with. If you want to make that app the default for that file extension, click "Always use this program to open these files."
That's so freakin' hard about this? It fits just fine with the "right-click on it to see what you can do with it" paradigm that Windows uses throughout.
This is right wing hogwash. Monopolies run forever because they eliminate competition. If may get lazy, but that just makes them more likely to resort to illegal tactics, not more likely to go under despite massive market advantages.
That's why he can't site a single example to make his case. Monopolies ran forever, hence the anti-trust laws were required to ensure a vibrant economy.
And this is left-wing hogwash.
Henry Ford initially had massive market share, and decided to treat his customers arrogantly (his famous "you can have it in any color you want, as long as it's black" statement). Competitors sprang up to take advantage of this, not killing Ford Motors but pushing it back to being merely one of the "big three" auto companies, instead of undisputed top dog. When the eventually-complacent big three got hit with the gas crisis of the 70's, the Japanese automakers moved in, to the point where Chrysler had to go begging from the government.
Word Perfect used to rule the word processor market. Then they dug in their heels, trying to stay in DOS when the consumers wanted to move to Windows 3.1, and they got toppled.
Hayes once dominated modem sales. Do they even exist anymore?
Atari was the leader in video games, when the industry first started. Then for a while, Nintendo was pretty much the only system anyone wanted. Then, the Playstation came in and established itself on at least equal footing.
But therein lies the fundamental flaw of steganography, and the reason it will never really compete with cryptography for security applications.
The fundamental idea of steganography breaks the cardinal rule of cryptography: no security by obscurity. Steganography by its very definition achieves security by obscurity.
When a method of steganography is discovered, it is useless. Not only that, but every single message ever sent using that method becomes instantly compromised. This is not acceptable for any applications that require scalability.
That's why you use both: you first encrypt the data using a known good encryption algorithm. Then you hide the encrypted data using steganography. That way, even if you find it, all you can do is say "Hah! There's a message hidden here!" But you still don't know the content of the message, unless you have a key. And the fact that the message being hidden has been encrypted, would make statistical analysis more difficult. In a certain sense, the better an encryption algorithm is, the more random-seeming it's output is -- i.e. the more it resembles noise. So if you combine crypto and stego, you're essentially hiding noise inside noise.
The downside is that the Chinese and Japanese action/monster flick producers that use this technology for film dubbing will also use Babelfish to translate the scripts.
So that's how we got "All Your Base Are Belong To Us."
but your argument the "the greenies" WANT to use up fossil fuel is bullshit too. You are a flamebait boy, and should be modded DOWN as such....
Just because you think something is "bullshit" doesn't mean it qualifies as flamebait. If that's your understanding of the moderation guidelines, I sure hope your chances to moderate are few and far between.
He apparently holds the delusion that gold somehow has an "intrinsic" value that is fixed (yeah, like the gold price never changes),
The difference is that, while the price of gold does change, you can generally trust that it isn't going to suddenly be devalued. Only political restrictions prevent the supply of dollars or marks or euros from suddenly skyrocketing.
>and that it's "accepted everywhere" (yeah, sure)
No, it's not, and that's pretty much a Catch-22 situation. People accept currency in exchange for goods and services, primarily because they know that they can turn around and have it accepted in exchange for other goods and services. So people won't accept gold, because... people won't accept gold. A problem, but not an insurmountable one. What's needed to jumpstart it is transparency -- say, being able to hold a balance in gold but pay with a credit card using whatever currency is required, the way I can pay for goods in yen using my Visa card against my account in dollars. (Yes, I know there's a fee involved. The point is that I don't have to deal with it. It's a convenience issue, not a cost issue in this case).
and thus is different than any other currency (which it, of course, isn't).
Like I said, the difference is stability, specifically against currency devaluation. To get Weimarr-style inflation under a pure hard currency standard, you'd need a meteor of gold to strike somewhere.
This is like giving a car to someone who can't drive a stick; they try to start the car in third gear, release the clutch too soon, and the whole car explodes. Then the car manufacturer blames the incompetent driver.
No, it's more along the lines: you buy a car, and then put non-OEM tires on it, and the tires blow out causing you to crash. Then the car manufacturer blames the tire manufacturer.
But as far as the perception of Win2K being more stable than Win95: that depends. Win2K is rock solid for me -- except when I play Everquest or Starfleet Command, when it locks up or spontaneously reboots every hour or so, probably because I can't get non-beta drivers for my video card. Win95 on the same machine plays EQ and SFC all night without a hitch.
I agree with the 2nd half of your statement. Drizzt could be a great piece of film. . .as long as it doesn't come out as a miserable piece of shit ala D&D.
(cue the Rolling Stones' "Beast of Burden"...)
o/~ I'll never be your Drizzt Do'Urden.
The Underdark has got me hurtin'.
All I want is Llolth to lay off of me... o/~
... how long is it going to be before someone posts the obligatory "all your clicks are belong to us" message?