And don't you think that if there were some kind of system to do so that somebody would have come up with it already, or it would have already been implemented,
No, I don't think that. That was the point of the paragraph from which you quoted a sentence. The point is that there are so many influential people so heavily invested in the current system that I don't really expect there to be a serious effort to find another. But I guess it's easier for you to pick out the bits you want to criticize in order to support your own biases about the situation than it is to actually look at where those bits came from.
Keep looking. I don't claim to have the answers, but there is one other obvious suggestion I made in there. I understand that it may have been a bit advanced for you to see in reading, but it's in there.
Nice way to shrug off the core of the problem. Your rant is pretty much all fluff if you don't even address the issue. Yes, we all know that people not getting drugs to cure disease is bad. That's obvious. Any suggestions?
I suppose you could have read the rest of my post, but naaaah, that would required time, effort, and thought.
We spend a lot of time bitching about software patents around here. Drug patents are worse, though. There's a difference, in that (to my knowledge) most drug patents involve more actual research and investment than the chikenshit software and business method patents we see. However, this doesn't change the fact that drug patents are not only killing our economy, but they're also unethical and immoral.
Killing our economy you say? Hello? Pharmaceutical industries are one of the most profitable sectors of the economy, and doubtless most of us have mutual funds highly bolstered by investments in pharmaceutical companies. Well, fine, but look at the bigger picture. Health care costs are spiraling. The reason? Part of it is due to spiraling drug prices. And drug prices are expensive because they're proprietary; once you can get a generic substitute, drugs come much cheaper. They would be much cheaper to start with if generics were available sooner. And that would take a huge burden off of employer sponsored health plans (which are getting more expensive and covering less), not to mention state and federal health plans which are in serious trouble even as we're talking about adding a perscription drug plan to medicate. Every "cost saving" plan I see just shifts the costs around, it doesn't address any of the reasons why the costs are too high. Eliminating pharmaceutical patents would address that reason.
Unethical and immoral? That one's more obvious. Never mind the poor folk in our country (I'm in the USA) who can't afford the drugs. Never mind our law enforcement agencies leaning on Canada to clamp down on the people from the USA who cross the border to get the drugs they need at a price they can afford. Just look at the millions in Africa dying of AIDS. At international AIDS conferences, our country, our democratic leaders who represent us, have to stand up and say that it's important that American intellectual property be protected. We can't give the drugs away, we can't just allow anybody who can put together a production line to make them. (Which itself can be expensive, but much less than what you pay when you're also paying the patent.) So as to protect our precious intellectual property, we have to argue to the world that it's better to let the poor people of poor countries die. Is this really what we as a nation want to be standing up to the world and saying?
Fine, you will object, I've got my head in the clouds. Developing drugs is expensive. Without the patent protection that allows companies to get a return on their investment, there never would have been the investment in the first place. If I eliminate drug patents, I will also eliminate all the new drugs I was trying to make afforadable, the argument will go. Well, maybe, but it's not so obvious to me. What is obvious is that the current system is both untenable and immoral, and so therefore we have to ask what else we can do. Consider the goverment investing much more heavily in health research than it does now. More government spending? Maybe-- we should find out if that spending would really be that much more once we factor in the savings that will come from the much cheaper drugs our federal health care programs will be purchasing. Additionally, I believe that already right now the government funds a fair amount of drug research, including some for drugs that end up patented. Given the ills of the current system, we have ask if something else can be done.
Unfortunately, we won't. Pharmaceutical companies are rich, and thus highly influential. Plus, I'm talking about killing them; not the researchers, not the people doing the valuable work, but I am talking about removing the ability for those who aren't actually doing the work to profit from us. (Obviously, the drug research is important, so any replacement system would have to have a way to employ and pay those who are actually developing the new drugs.) And it goes deeper than that; it's all of us with our mutual funds heavily invested in pharmaceutical companies. Killing drug patents would probably send our country into a crushing recession for several years as all of those fund tanked. But I sincerely believe that if done right, the country that emerged out of the other end would both be more economically sound and more moral.
In the mean time, drug costs will continue to spiral upward, more and more people are going to have a harder and harder time affording health care, and our leaders are going to have to argue to the world that the crucial interests American economy require us to allow people in other unimportant countries to die of various diseases.
Anyway, I don't see anyone complaining about the fact that you have to pay for all of the GURPS character creators, as SJ Games certainly won't let you give thier data away for free.
It can't be "free" in the "libre" sense, no. But from the way you state it ("have to pay") it's very clear that you are talking about "free as in beer", and the very links on SJGames' own site
prove that you're incorrect about what they'll let you do.
Uncheck the 'clicking' checkbox and/or the 'dragging' one.
Job done! That was easy, eh?
If it were my laptop, sure. But I don't like touchpads anyway, and so wouldn't buy a laptop that's got one. When I'm borrowing somebody else's (or otherwise using somebody else's, e.g. to show a third party how to download his OpenOffice.org presentation and show it), it would be highly impolite to go in and play with system settings.
Kind of ironic that you're not permitted to 'test' the machine you're about to fork out several thousand dollars for.
When I was last searching for a laptop I encountered this brick-wall mentality, consequently I ended up telling them "Oh, in that case, no sale, goodbye" ( Commissions obviously doesn't exist in sales any more ).
I failed to do that once, and regretted it. It was 1993 or some such, and I was trying to get a monitor for my Amiga 1200. Being a cheapsakte and wanting to save money, I figurd I'd get a standard massmarket SVGA monitor instead of paying more for a Commodore monitor, since I thought that ought to work. I go to CompUSA to ask what they have there. I ask the guy if I could bring my computer in and try it out. Ha. No go. He had a nice, friendly excuse about how he'd love to help me out, but it was Sunday morning and it was going to get real busy in there before long.... (Meanwhile, it's real quiet in there and several sales people are just standing around.)
Sucker, stupid-ass me goes and buys a monitor anyway from a place that has just demonstrated as clearly as can be deomnstrated that they are customer-hostile.. And, no, it doesn't work. I did return it, and got a check for the refund a month later. (That also irritated me; I was a grad student, and a couple hundred dollars of cash flow was significant at the time.) (I don't remember if there was a "restocking" fee.) I kicked myself from buying from such a customer-hostile place, and eschewed all CompUSA's for some 7 or 8 years thereafter. (Nowadays, I do go into them, but don't buy anything there I wouldn't also just buy mail order from another mass-market place. I've moved a few times, it's no longer the same store, and the small places I trusted (including that Amiga shop) have all gone out of business.)
For the Amiga, I ended up buying a more expensive commodore monitor from the same shop where I bought the computer in the first place-- you know, a small friendly shop where I knew the people. I should have just done that in the first place, but the siren song of lower prices for bulk hardware is hard to ignore.
I wasn't making the point that it isn't a tax. I was making the point that it's not in Sony/Dell/HP/Compaq/Toshiba/Fujitsu's interests to bother stocking non-Windows laptops. Look at it this way. If i walk into 7-11 looking for Bovril, it would be ridiculous to complain that they don't have it. Hardly any of their customers want it, so it's not worth them stocking it.
Terrible, useless analogy.
Point 1: you can walk into a 7-11 and buy Dr. Pepper instead of Coke. If you could only get coke at a 7-11, then your analogoy might apply.
Point 2: it's real easy to find another store with a wider selection of drinks. With laptops, unless you wan to buy the specialty Apple machines, you have almost no choice but to buy a Windows-laden machine.
It's a monopoly. It's very sad that those of us who don't want to use Windows end up with little choice but to support Microsoft every time we purchase a laptop. We probably wouldn't mind so much if Microsoft weren't out there pushing proprietary standards and generally trying to do everything it can to make life difficult for the OS we do want to use. But they do; it's not just a matter of paying some money that goes to something we won't use, it's a matter of paying some money that goes to a company trying to ensure that we can't use our computers the way we want to.
It's not just a gratuitous anal political statement, it's practicality; unless enough of us make this sort of political statement, we are in real danger of not being able to do what we want to do with computers.
Myself, I've not been so good. I bought a use dlaptop, trying to justify to myself that well, I wasn't paying any more to Microsoft.... But that does nothing to support those few, hard-to-find types out there selling "naked" laptops.
They can also operate as a mouse button. Tap. Tap and drag, etc. Another Apple first
This, to my mind, is the absolute worst feature about them. I hate this. Reason: I'm typing away, and want to move the mouse. So I go and move my thumbs to the pad to move the pointer. Result: I've just clicked somewhere I don't want to click. If I'm lucky, I can back out of what I just unintentionally clicked on and didn't close something.
Any input device where you have to be very, very careful to touch it gingerly so as not to accidentally give input you didn't mean to give is a poorly designed input device, in my opinion.
Each to his own. I hate touch pads with a passion, and will never buy a laptop that will saddle me with one. I find eraserheads infinitely more usable.
I don't know, I guess this strikes me as petty somehow.
It would have been petty if they had put this into their main release, so that everybody using Opera had to put up with it. You know, sort of like how MS put it into the main release of their web page, so that every Opera user has to put up with it.
The Opera folks very clearly set aside the "joke" browser, and they've stated very clearly why they are doing it. People who don't want to mess with it won't accidentally stumble acrsos it. They're pointing out, in a manner that makes it very obvious, just what it is that MS is doing. And if the article is right, and MS is still screwing up older versions of Opera, then contacting the MS team clearly hasn't done much good.
As an unfortunate side-effect, this would reinforce webmasters' belief that everybody in the world uses MSIE.
Yep. What we really need is too late to accomplish. What we really need is a protocol that forbids you from identifying which browser you are, but only allows you to specify to which standards you conform.
Then maybe webmasters would write their HTML and such the way they're supposed to, and what's more the browsers would have to really support the standards they claim to support.
But, unfortunately, that's an ideal world, not the one we live in.
Anyone, including Microsoft, who writes a site that serves seperate pages to different browsers is doing a disservice to the public.
While I agree with the philosophy, unfortunately it's unrealistic. Reason: so many browsers, worst among them Netscape 4, try to support CSS and fail so miserably that a standards-complaint CSS page is likely to be unreadable. And, unfortunately, some people still use NS4 and old versions of IE.
What I've done some places is write some SSI that detects the browser. If it detects Netscape 4 or lower, or IE... probably 4 or lower, I forget at the moment... it sends a "dumbed down" style sheet that will present only a faint echo of the layout of the page, but which will leave the text readable. Any other browser, you get the normal "standards compliant" style sheet. Note that here I am sending specific style sheets for specific browsers-- but I assume that any version of Opera, and any version of Netscape or Mozilla 5 or greater and any recent IE and any other browser that may come is standards complaint.
Coca-cola's formula still hasn't been figured out last I checked.
...or, instead of reverse engineering Coke, you could just drink a soda that tastes better.
Coke's real secret formula has nothing to do with any chemistry or anything that goes into the can. It has everything to do with what goes on the can, on the billboards, on the TV commercials, in the product placement, and in the minds of consumers. Coke's success is all about marketing, not about the product.
That villan is the US Patent Office, and indeed the entire US Patent System.
That something like this would be granted a patent is just crazy. That we have a system that would grant a monopoly on this-- a very obvious extention once you've got hyperlinks in the first place-- is a system that is broken and wrong.
The only people-- THE ONLY PEOPLE-- who win out of this mess are the frikkin' patent lawyers. Maybe, sometimes, the company that takes advantage of the bad system wins. (And, yes, I consider SBC a villan for taking advantage of evil laws.) But no matter what happens, the patent lawyers win, because they get billable hours out of it.
I shouldn't say this, because I know students who plan to become patent lawyers, and because after all one of my personal heros (Lawrence Lessing) is an IP lawyer, but sheesh we've got an entire parasitic class feeding quite nicely off of some of the truly stupid and evil things written into our laws.
Reading the summaries I can find of the act, it seems that even *reproduction* is considered a felony, in the absence of distribution.
Uh?
I've ripped a bunch of my CDs and encoded them into Ogg Vorbis files for convenience. I've not distributed them, nor have I downloaded any illegal music files. All I've done was format shift. I had thought that sort of thing was legal under fair use. Is it not? Am I a federal felon under the net act because I've reproduced copyrighted works, even though they're from CDs I own and just for my own personal use?
If so, then our country is even way more out of joint that I had previous thought. (And I had already thought it was pretty bad.)
As appealing as 14-year copyrights sound, I wouldn't accept outlawing free software in exchange for that. Which is, after all, what caving to the demands for DRM would really involve. Look at all the analysis of the CBDTPA or the Broadcast Flag for reasons why this is what they're talking about, and not just my paranoid raving.
The copyright cartels have gone way too far. We shouldn't have to give up our freedom to bring them back within sight of reason.
-Rob
Re:The only convincing bit was...
on
Why VHS Was Better
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And maybe this should be a warning to those companies that want to accommodate DRM into their products: you will marginalize your widget. I'm sure Jack Valenti preferred beta to VHS.
Jack Valenti hated them both. (cf: "Boston Strangler" comment.) If he had his way, the only place we could see movies now would be in the theaters, and it would be illegal to descrbe what we'd seen to other people. The only ones allowed to openly describe scenes from movies would be licenced reviewers (who paid an annual licencing fee, a fraction of which went to the MPAA becasue of the excessive use of their intellectual property).
Unfortunately, some of the more "religious" antispammers block the entire dynamic dsl range, so there are a few places that refuse mail from me (very rare, fortunately).
I had that problem with my cable modem. Unfortunately, one domain that (so far as I can tell) started refusing mail from dynamic home IP blocks a few days ago is pobox.com. I've been using that as a forwarding service for years, so that I would have a stable E-mail address even if my ISP changed. Suddnely on Friday, my wife couldn't send me E-mail. I sent a very irate message to pobox.com, but suspect I'll be cnacelling that service, which will be quite annoying and inconvenient. But even though I can work around it, I don't want to support a service that's going to be promoting what I see as primarily a source of collatoral damage in the spam wars.
idea 1) force all smtp servers (recieving) to query back to the original sender of the e-mail to confirm that the user exsists on their system
note: this isn't perfect it might work, there is a good chance it doesn't though
idea 2) reject e-mail who's sender 1) doesn't match the domain it's coming from or 2) doesn't have a fully qualified domain
Of all of these, the latter part of idea 2 is the only one I like. Right now, my wife and I both use the same SMTP server (mostly because they get forwarded through the exim on my computer-- that way, she can send mail even if the cable modem is down, and it will get forwarded on next time the modem is up), but we have different addresses. Thus, requiring us to have an account or a domain which matches the SMTP server's domain would be bad for us.
To me, the solution is far simpler: require all SMTP servers to use SMTP AUTH. That won't cut down all spam, but that will help an awful lot. It's also unrealistic, since there will always be open relays that don't use SMTP AUTH, and there will probably be legitimate reasons to allow open relays. But just as systems nowadays come configured by default without open relays, they should come configured by default to use and require SMTP AUTH.
Please don't promote blocking port 25, whatever happens. That would be very annoying.
I'm already annoyed at being collatoral damage in the war against SPAM. I use mutt as my e-mail MUA, which is not an MTA and doesn't support use of an SMTP server. No problem; use sendmail or exim on my macine to actually *send* the mail. Except that I find out that some of my mail is bouncing, because my cable modem is in a blacklisted range (the range that includes "all cable modems"), and therefore being rejected by some SPAM filters. I don't run an open relay, I'm just using a program to send mail from my computer in the way that it is designed.
Very annoying.
So I have to configure my MTA to forward to a gateway SMTP server which won't be on the various RBL lists. A pain, but fine, I can do that. I've managed to get that set up... but I'm not using Comcast's SMTP server. Maybe I should, but after briefly using @Home's mail services, I've leanred simply not to trust the cable modem ISP services for anything. I've got web hosting outfits I pay for, so I can use those SMTP servers, configuring my exim to forward to them and use SMTP AUTH. But if Comcast starts blocking port 25, then *that* won't work, and I'll be stuck again. (And, of course, "getting another ISP" isn't an option, because where I live, the cable company's got a monopoly as far as broadband access goes. I *do* have another ISP I pay for for things like news and mail, on top of the cable modem. But, unlike where I used to live, I don't have the option of going with DSL and choosing the ISP to use with it.)
Let's please not put forward this idea. There's enough collatoral damage as it is. And it won't really cut back on the spam, either. It's very very fuzzy logic to assert that since 50% of the spam now comes from AOL customers, that shutting that down would cut spam by 50%. The spammers out there will just find other places to spam. Going after the spammers themselves, and not just some of the tools they use, is the only way to stop spamming. Anything else only temporarily inconveniences them, and meanwhile greatly inconveniences innocents.
'Was checking their press announcement [apcc.com] and found this quote: "APC recommends that the user immediately remove the UPS unit from service by turning off all connected equipment, turning the UPS unit off, and then unplugging the unit from the electrical outlet." Umm... really, if you own a UPS and you need that information, you shouldn't own a computer, let alone an UPS.
Yes, but of course, that won't stop the stupid people from suing if their UPS catches on fire. Lowest common denominator, minus a bit, instructionsn are legal de rigeur nowadays.
If we didn't have that nightmare, then it would never be plausible when somebody comes out with one of these "gonna make Linux vendors pay" stories. It's only a matter of time before somebody *does* come out with a patent that Linux violates (since there are so many chickenshit patents). Either a precent needs to be set that people who come out with chickenshit patent claims get slammed, or Linux hackers are going to spend the rest of their lives writing ever more convoluted code to avoid violating every patent the head-in-butt patent office grants.
I'd much rather see software patents killed once and for all. No more granted, none in the past valid. This *will* become a nightmare for Linux, and soon, even if this SCO story is bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
And don't you think that if there were some kind of system to do so that somebody would have come up with it already, or it would have already been implemented,
No, I don't think that. That was the point of the paragraph from which you quoted a sentence. The point is that there are so many influential people so heavily invested in the current system that I don't really expect there to be a serious effort to find another. But I guess it's easier for you to pick out the bits you want to criticize in order to support your own biases about the situation than it is to actually look at where those bits came from.
Keep looking. I don't claim to have the answers, but there is one other obvious suggestion I made in there. I understand that it may have been a bit advanced for you to see in reading, but it's in there.
-Rob
Nice way to shrug off the core of the problem. Your rant is pretty much all fluff if you don't even address the issue. Yes, we all know that people not getting drugs to cure disease is bad. That's obvious. Any suggestions?
I suppose you could have read the rest of my post, but naaaah, that would required time, effort, and thought.
-Rob
We spend a lot of time bitching about software patents around here. Drug patents are worse, though. There's a difference, in that (to my knowledge) most drug patents involve more actual research and investment than the chikenshit software and business method patents we see. However, this doesn't change the fact that drug patents are not only killing our economy, but they're also unethical and immoral.
Killing our economy you say? Hello? Pharmaceutical industries are one of the most profitable sectors of the economy, and doubtless most of us have mutual funds highly bolstered by investments in pharmaceutical companies. Well, fine, but look at the bigger picture. Health care costs are spiraling. The reason? Part of it is due to spiraling drug prices. And drug prices are expensive because they're proprietary; once you can get a generic substitute, drugs come much cheaper. They would be much cheaper to start with if generics were available sooner. And that would take a huge burden off of employer sponsored health plans (which are getting more expensive and covering less), not to mention state and federal health plans which are in serious trouble even as we're talking about adding a perscription drug plan to medicate. Every "cost saving" plan I see just shifts the costs around, it doesn't address any of the reasons why the costs are too high. Eliminating pharmaceutical patents would address that reason.
Unethical and immoral? That one's more obvious. Never mind the poor folk in our country (I'm in the USA) who can't afford the drugs. Never mind our law enforcement agencies leaning on Canada to clamp down on the people from the USA who cross the border to get the drugs they need at a price they can afford. Just look at the millions in Africa dying of AIDS. At international AIDS conferences, our country, our democratic leaders who represent us, have to stand up and say that it's important that American intellectual property be protected. We can't give the drugs away, we can't just allow anybody who can put together a production line to make them. (Which itself can be expensive, but much less than what you pay when you're also paying the patent.) So as to protect our precious intellectual property, we have to argue to the world that it's better to let the poor people of poor countries die. Is this really what we as a nation want to be standing up to the world and saying?
Fine, you will object, I've got my head in the clouds. Developing drugs is expensive. Without the patent protection that allows companies to get a return on their investment, there never would have been the investment in the first place. If I eliminate drug patents, I will also eliminate all the new drugs I was trying to make afforadable, the argument will go. Well, maybe, but it's not so obvious to me. What is obvious is that the current system is both untenable and immoral, and so therefore we have to ask what else we can do. Consider the goverment investing much more heavily in health research than it does now. More government spending? Maybe-- we should find out if that spending would really be that much more once we factor in the savings that will come from the much cheaper drugs our federal health care programs will be purchasing. Additionally, I believe that already right now the government funds a fair amount of drug research, including some for drugs that end up patented. Given the ills of the current system, we have ask if something else can be done.
Unfortunately, we won't. Pharmaceutical companies are rich, and thus highly influential. Plus, I'm talking about killing them; not the researchers, not the people doing the valuable work, but I am talking about removing the ability for those who aren't actually doing the work to profit from us. (Obviously, the drug research is important, so any replacement system would have to have a way to employ and pay those who are actually developing the new drugs.) And it goes deeper than that; it's all of us with our mutual funds heavily invested in pharmaceutical companies. Killing drug patents would probably send our country into a crushing recession for several years as all of those fund tanked. But I sincerely believe that if done right, the country that emerged out of the other end would both be more economically sound and more moral.
In the mean time, drug costs will continue to spiral upward, more and more people are going to have a harder and harder time affording health care, and our leaders are going to have to argue to the world that the crucial interests American economy require us to allow people in other unimportant countries to die of various diseases.
-Rob
Anyway, I don't see anyone complaining about the fact that you have to pay for all of the GURPS character creators, as SJ Games certainly won't let you give thier data away for free.
This is demonstrably false:
http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/utilities/
It can't be "free" in the "libre" sense, no. But from the way you state it ("have to pay") it's very clear that you are talking about "free as in beer", and the very links on SJGames' own site prove that you're incorrect about what they'll let you do.
-Rob
System Preferences->Mouse->Trackpad
Uncheck the 'clicking' checkbox and/or the 'dragging' one.
Job done! That was easy, eh?
If it were my laptop, sure. But I don't like touchpads anyway, and so wouldn't buy a laptop that's got one. When I'm borrowing somebody else's (or otherwise using somebody else's, e.g. to show a third party how to download his OpenOffice.org presentation and show it), it would be highly impolite to go in and play with system settings.
-Rob
Kind of ironic that you're not permitted to 'test' the machine you're about to fork out several thousand dollars for.
When I was last searching for a laptop I encountered this brick-wall mentality, consequently I ended up telling them "Oh, in that case, no sale, goodbye" ( Commissions obviously doesn't exist in sales any more ).
I failed to do that once, and regretted it. It was 1993 or some such, and I was trying to get a monitor for my Amiga 1200. Being a cheapsakte and wanting to save money, I figurd I'd get a standard massmarket SVGA monitor instead of paying more for a Commodore monitor, since I thought that ought to work. I go to CompUSA to ask what they have there. I ask the guy if I could bring my computer in and try it out. Ha. No go. He had a nice, friendly excuse about how he'd love to help me out, but it was Sunday morning and it was going to get real busy in there before long.... (Meanwhile, it's real quiet in there and several sales people are just standing around.)
Sucker, stupid-ass me goes and buys a monitor anyway from a place that has just demonstrated as clearly as can be deomnstrated that they are customer-hostile.. And, no, it doesn't work. I did return it, and got a check for the refund a month later. (That also irritated me; I was a grad student, and a couple hundred dollars of cash flow was significant at the time.) (I don't remember if there was a "restocking" fee.) I kicked myself from buying from such a customer-hostile place, and eschewed all CompUSA's for some 7 or 8 years thereafter. (Nowadays, I do go into them, but don't buy anything there I wouldn't also just buy mail order from another mass-market place. I've moved a few times, it's no longer the same store, and the small places I trusted (including that Amiga shop) have all gone out of business.)
For the Amiga, I ended up buying a more expensive commodore monitor from the same shop where I bought the computer in the first place-- you know, a small friendly shop where I knew the people. I should have just done that in the first place, but the siren song of lower prices for bulk hardware is hard to ignore.
-Rob
I wasn't making the point that it isn't a tax. I was making the point that it's not in Sony/Dell/HP/Compaq/Toshiba/Fujitsu's interests to bother stocking non-Windows laptops. Look at it this way. If i walk into 7-11 looking for Bovril, it would be ridiculous to complain that they don't have it. Hardly any of their customers want it, so it's not worth them stocking it.
Terrible, useless analogy.
Point 1: you can walk into a 7-11 and buy Dr. Pepper instead of Coke. If you could only get coke at a 7-11, then your analogoy might apply.
Point 2: it's real easy to find another store with a wider selection of drinks. With laptops, unless you wan to buy the specialty Apple machines, you have almost no choice but to buy a Windows-laden machine.
It's a monopoly. It's very sad that those of us who don't want to use Windows end up with little choice but to support Microsoft every time we purchase a laptop. We probably wouldn't mind so much if Microsoft weren't out there pushing proprietary standards and generally trying to do everything it can to make life difficult for the OS we do want to use. But they do; it's not just a matter of paying some money that goes to something we won't use, it's a matter of paying some money that goes to a company trying to ensure that we can't use our computers the way we want to.
It's not just a gratuitous anal political statement, it's practicality; unless enough of us make this sort of political statement, we are in real danger of not being able to do what we want to do with computers.
Myself, I've not been so good. I bought a use dlaptop, trying to justify to myself that well, I wasn't paying any more to Microsoft.... But that does nothing to support those few, hard-to-find types out there selling "naked" laptops.
-Rob
They can also operate as a mouse button. Tap. Tap and drag, etc. Another Apple first
This, to my mind, is the absolute worst feature about them. I hate this. Reason: I'm typing away, and want to move the mouse. So I go and move my thumbs to the pad to move the pointer. Result: I've just clicked somewhere I don't want to click. If I'm lucky, I can back out of what I just unintentionally clicked on and didn't close something.
Any input device where you have to be very, very careful to touch it gingerly so as not to accidentally give input you didn't mean to give is a poorly designed input device, in my opinion.
-Rob
I prefer the touch pads, personally,
Each to his own. I hate touch pads with a passion, and will never buy a laptop that will saddle me with one. I find eraserheads infinitely more usable.
-Rob
Call me a RMS-like fanatic, but if you're gonna use proprietary software, don't act all surprised when you get screwed.
-Rob
I don't know, I guess this strikes me as petty somehow.
It would have been petty if they had put this into their main release, so that everybody using Opera had to put up with it. You know, sort of like how MS put it into the main release of their web page, so that every Opera user has to put up with it.
The Opera folks very clearly set aside the "joke" browser, and they've stated very clearly why they are doing it. People who don't want to mess with it won't accidentally stumble acrsos it. They're pointing out, in a manner that makes it very obvious, just what it is that MS is doing. And if the article is right, and MS is still screwing up older versions of Opera, then contacting the MS team clearly hasn't done much good.
-Rob
As an unfortunate side-effect, this would reinforce webmasters' belief that everybody in the world uses MSIE.
Yep. What we really need is too late to accomplish. What we really need is a protocol that forbids you from identifying which browser you are, but only allows you to specify to which standards you conform.
Then maybe webmasters would write their HTML and such the way they're supposed to, and what's more the browsers would have to really support the standards they claim to support.
But, unfortunately, that's an ideal world, not the one we live in.
-Rob
Anyone, including Microsoft, who writes a site that serves seperate pages to different browsers is doing a disservice to the public.
While I agree with the philosophy, unfortunately it's unrealistic. Reason: so many browsers, worst among them Netscape 4, try to support CSS and fail so miserably that a standards-complaint CSS page is likely to be unreadable. And, unfortunately, some people still use NS4 and old versions of IE.
What I've done some places is write some SSI that detects the browser. If it detects Netscape 4 or lower, or IE ... probably 4 or lower, I forget at the moment ... it sends a "dumbed down" style sheet that will present only a faint echo of the layout of the page, but which will leave the text readable. Any other browser, you get the normal "standards compliant" style sheet. Note that here I am sending specific style sheets for specific browsers-- but I assume that any version of Opera, and any version of Netscape or Mozilla 5 or greater and any recent IE and any other browser that may come is standards complaint.
-Rob
Coca-cola's formula still hasn't been figured out last I checked.
...or, instead of reverse engineering Coke, you could just drink a soda that tastes better.
Coke's real secret formula has nothing to do with any chemistry or anything that goes into the can. It has everything to do with what goes on the can, on the billboards, on the TV commercials, in the product placement, and in the minds of consumers. Coke's success is all about marketing, not about the product.
-Rob
Remove "Grace Period" from the question.
Then the answer is a resounding "yes".
-Rob
But lately, said many patent attorneys, the patent office will likely reject any filing claiming more than a single sequence of genetic code.
This still goes too damn far.
-Rob
That villan is the US Patent Office, and indeed the entire US Patent System.
That something like this would be granted a patent is just crazy. That we have a system that would grant a monopoly on this-- a very obvious extention once you've got hyperlinks in the first place-- is a system that is broken and wrong.
The only people-- THE ONLY PEOPLE-- who win out of this mess are the frikkin' patent lawyers. Maybe, sometimes, the company that takes advantage of the bad system wins. (And, yes, I consider SBC a villan for taking advantage of evil laws.) But no matter what happens, the patent lawyers win, because they get billable hours out of it.
I shouldn't say this, because I know students who plan to become patent lawyers, and because after all one of my personal heros (Lawrence Lessing) is an IP lawyer, but sheesh we've got an entire parasitic class feeding quite nicely off of some of the truly stupid and evil things written into our laws.
-Rob
Reading the summaries I can find of the act, it seems that even *reproduction* is considered a felony, in the absence of distribution.
Uh?
I've ripped a bunch of my CDs and encoded them into Ogg Vorbis files for convenience. I've not distributed them, nor have I downloaded any illegal music files. All I've done was format shift. I had thought that sort of thing was legal under fair use. Is it not? Am I a federal felon under the net act because I've reproduced copyrighted works, even though they're from CDs I own and just for my own personal use?
If so, then our country is even way more out of joint that I had previous thought. (And I had already thought it was pretty bad.)
-Rob
As appealing as 14-year copyrights sound, I wouldn't accept outlawing free software in exchange for that. Which is, after all, what caving to the demands for DRM would really involve. Look at all the analysis of the CBDTPA or the Broadcast Flag for reasons why this is what they're talking about, and not just my paranoid raving.
The copyright cartels have gone way too far. We shouldn't have to give up our freedom to bring them back within sight of reason.
-Rob
And maybe this should be a warning to those companies that want to accommodate DRM into their products: you will marginalize your widget. I'm sure Jack Valenti preferred beta to VHS.
Jack Valenti hated them both. (cf: "Boston Strangler" comment.) If he had his way, the only place we could see movies now would be in the theaters, and it would be illegal to descrbe what we'd seen to other people. The only ones allowed to openly describe scenes from movies would be licenced reviewers (who paid an annual licencing fee, a fraction of which went to the MPAA becasue of the excessive use of their intellectual property).
Unfortunately, some of the more "religious" antispammers block the entire dynamic dsl range, so there are a few places that refuse mail from me (very rare, fortunately).
I had that problem with my cable modem. Unfortunately, one domain that (so far as I can tell) started refusing mail from dynamic home IP blocks a few days ago is pobox.com. I've been using that as a forwarding service for years, so that I would have a stable E-mail address even if my ISP changed. Suddnely on Friday, my wife couldn't send me E-mail. I sent a very irate message to pobox.com, but suspect I'll be cnacelling that service, which will be quite annoying and inconvenient. But even though I can work around it, I don't want to support a service that's going to be promoting what I see as primarily a source of collatoral damage in the spam wars.
-Rob
idea 1) force all smtp servers (recieving) to query back to the original sender of the e-mail to confirm that the user exsists on their system
note: this isn't perfect it might work, there is a good chance it doesn't though
idea 2) reject e-mail who's sender 1) doesn't match the domain it's coming from or 2) doesn't have a fully qualified domain
Of all of these, the latter part of idea 2 is the only one I like. Right now, my wife and I both use the same SMTP server (mostly because they get forwarded through the exim on my computer-- that way, she can send mail even if the cable modem is down, and it will get forwarded on next time the modem is up), but we have different addresses. Thus, requiring us to have an account or a domain which matches the SMTP server's domain would be bad for us.
To me, the solution is far simpler: require all SMTP servers to use SMTP AUTH. That won't cut down all spam, but that will help an awful lot. It's also unrealistic, since there will always be open relays that don't use SMTP AUTH, and there will probably be legitimate reasons to allow open relays. But just as systems nowadays come configured by default without open relays, they should come configured by default to use and require SMTP AUTH.
-Rob
Please don't promote blocking port 25, whatever happens. That would be very annoying.
I'm already annoyed at being collatoral damage in the war against SPAM. I use mutt as my e-mail MUA, which is not an MTA and doesn't support use of an SMTP server. No problem; use sendmail or exim on my macine to actually *send* the mail. Except that I find out that some of my mail is bouncing, because my cable modem is in a blacklisted range (the range that includes "all cable modems"), and therefore being rejected by some SPAM filters. I don't run an open relay, I'm just using a program to send mail from my computer in the way that it is designed.
Very annoying.
So I have to configure my MTA to forward to a gateway SMTP server which won't be on the various RBL lists. A pain, but fine, I can do that. I've managed to get that set up... but I'm not using Comcast's SMTP server. Maybe I should, but after briefly using @Home's mail services, I've leanred simply not to trust the cable modem ISP services for anything. I've got web hosting outfits I pay for, so I can use those SMTP servers, configuring my exim to forward to them and use SMTP AUTH. But if Comcast starts blocking port 25, then *that* won't work, and I'll be stuck again. (And, of course, "getting another ISP" isn't an option, because where I live, the cable company's got a monopoly as far as broadband access goes. I *do* have another ISP I pay for for things like news and mail, on top of the cable modem. But, unlike where I used to live, I don't have the option of going with DSL and choosing the ISP to use with it.)
Let's please not put forward this idea. There's enough collatoral damage as it is. And it won't really cut back on the spam, either. It's very very fuzzy logic to assert that since 50% of the spam now comes from AOL customers, that shutting that down would cut spam by 50%. The spammers out there will just find other places to spam. Going after the spammers themselves, and not just some of the tools they use, is the only way to stop spamming. Anything else only temporarily inconveniences them, and meanwhile greatly inconveniences innocents.
-Rob
'Was checking their press announcement [apcc.com] and found this quote: "APC recommends that the user immediately remove the UPS unit from service by turning off all connected equipment, turning the UPS unit off, and then unplugging the unit from the electrical outlet." Umm... really, if you own a UPS and you need that information, you shouldn't own a computer, let alone an UPS.
Yes, but of course, that won't stop the stupid people from suing if their UPS catches on fire. Lowest common denominator, minus a bit, instructionsn are legal de rigeur nowadays.
-Rob
...software patents in the first place.
If we didn't have that nightmare, then it would never be plausible when somebody comes out with one of these "gonna make Linux vendors pay" stories. It's only a matter of time before somebody *does* come out with a patent that Linux violates (since there are so many chickenshit patents). Either a precent needs to be set that people who come out with chickenshit patent claims get slammed, or Linux hackers are going to spend the rest of their lives writing ever more convoluted code to avoid violating every patent the head-in-butt patent office grants.
I'd much rather see software patents killed once and for all. No more granted, none in the past valid. This *will* become a nightmare for Linux, and soon, even if this SCO story is bullshit.
-Rob