It should be legal to appear naked in public places if one has been ordered to do so over the Internet. That way, naked customers can exit hacked stores without fear of prosecution.
<w:r rogue:empidRPr='MS00404922' xmlns:rogue="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/o oxml/sp2/employee/curtain"> <w:ignoreElements w:val="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/ooxml/s p2/employee/curtain"/> <w:rPr> <w:rStyle w:val='rogue'/> </w:rPr> <w:t>Hey, guys! Vote yes on our standard and we'll send you some free T-shirts and mugs!</w:t> </w:r>
This made me think of the Far Side strip where a demon is greeting newcomers to hell and the sign behind him says "This is the first day of the rest of your life."
In fact hell has been working on a "Web 2.0 style" social network for ages. I can't wait to meet up with all my friends there.
I've seen this show before. A horrible standard (XML or otherwise) can have repurcussions that transcend the evil acts of one company- but it can also backfire on them simultaneously. That company may have an edge if the format takes off, but usually, the way it ends up is with that company supporting its proprietary format under two names: the old proprietary name, and a "public" name. Same crap, new umbrella.
I've been burned by a poorly written XML specification before, which was tightly coupled to one vendor's internal implementation and was heavily promoted by them. Lots of people in the sector were thirsty for a common standard to process experimental data, and an expert group was formed to come up with a common XML format for interoperability- and they jumped on this one. People across the industry wasted a lot of time trying to get it to work. I myself almost developed an ulcer. It was completely unusable- it could simply not be parsed or encoded to/from anything useful, without the involvement of continuous human intervention requiring real-world expert knowledge at every tag. (An XML DOM tree effectively isolated from any meaningful context is not "useful".) Unless you could write code that had a PhD and several years of experience in experiment design and lab work, you couldn't create a valid document. You had to know what to do with a tag reference that would mean "control signal", and another that referred to a standardized enumeration of the types of bedding used in rodent cages. It was ridiculous.
Everyone gave up on it after wasting a lot of time and the "experts" were reduced to sending out emails to software manufacturers, research groups at universities, and device manufacturers, pleading with them to use this standard. It was embarrassing to watch.
This turkey still presents a political roadblock because a lot of MBA types fall for the continued marketing from the guilty company (which benefits by having competitors waste time and resources), the continued reluctance of the experts group to admit to their mistake, and the popular perception of XML as being inherently readable. Anyone who actually has to get work done is still stuck with tab delimited text annotated with English. At least you can create a valid document.
We pick a few of those groups of 1,000 and we count the English records on those ballots and make sure they match the count the Germans gave us.
Are you implying that Germans can read barcodes? That's quite impressive- they must make good mailmen and supermarket clerks!
This scheme's weakness is its requirement for randomness. The groups of 1,000 have to be selected randomly across the voting population, using a good honest source of random numbers like non-loaded dice or lottery ping pong ball machines. They'd probably use a pseudorandom number generator carefully seeded by political operatives to land all the audits in Orange County.
Spoken like someone who doesn't own a a hi-def television.
I have a 30" LCD, much prettier than the CRT it replaced. It has an HDMI port, unused. Unless I get a console (doubtful) I have no plans to plug anything into it. Component video works fine. It doesn't show off the full HD capabilities, but I'd rather keep the extra money.
If current trends continue I may get cut off from Hollywood someday, but by then movies will have gotten so bad that it will matter even less than it does now. They're already getting pretty hard to sit through. Hollywood spends too much money on lawyering and lobbying, and not enough on talent.
Isn't it ironic that the consumer vigorously defends his right to "choice" but won't make a move until the choice is made for him?
I already made my choice: regular DVD is fine. Someone decided for me that I should delay buying another player for at least another 18 months. I just don't know who the next long term deal is going to be with, and it's pretty clear they're quite interested in selling the same shit over and over again on multiple formats.
The last video format conversion was from tape to disc. That was a huge change in the overall experience. Remember those tape rewinders? Tape was a disaster. So are discs actually. The difference in the experience between DVD and HD-whatever-DVD-Ray is too slight. Counting pixels misses the point. Why do you even care how sharp this garbage looks? With these hi-def discs, you still have to actually get up, walk over to a player, and fiddle with physical plastic objects and their stupid covers with those annoying stickers plastered across the opening. Does anyone think it's going to be cool to keep doing that 18 months from now? It's going to feel as intolerable as CD audio feels today.
Just keeping plastic discs organized actually requires special racks, stands, or actual furniture. I have two "media stands" holding DVDs in the corner. They're probably headed for the garage where my CD audio rack is. I recently got one of those ipod stands with a CD audio player on top. I have yet to put a CD into it because all the discs are in the garage. If we ever get a new disc, it gets ripped, and then it goes to the garage. The slight degradation in quality doesn't enter into the decision at all. I just don't care. I'm happy I can listen to music without having to look at all these stupid things or match them with their covers.
Americans are getting fatter. They don't want to waddle over to a player every time they play a different movie. That's totally lame. They want whatever lets them watch this shit without leaving their sofas by pushing buttons on a remote and only ONE remote- not a bunch of remotes with an additional one arriving every 18 months during a long bitter format war. So nobody is going to bother with HD-DVD or Blue-Ray. If you're going to pull a scam like this, you have to offer something worthwhile to the mark.
I wonder why we even need to see the UIDs. Just show a hash. Guys with large UIDs get so self-conscious about it and loudly defend Microsoft as if they're trying to compensate. And then the three- or four-digit people show up and are treated like celebrities.
How on earth does the sound and network subsystem overlap?
The smoke from the cigars mixes in the air of the smoke-filled back rooms where these things are decided between the content cartel and the company that makes Windows Media Central or whatever that thing used to be called.
This was a cool thing until the the piece was altered because of the new owner being consumed with his own vanity.
I know; it's unbecoming. You shouldn't be consumed with your own vanity- you have to leverage the vanity of others, like that guy on the Colbert Report last night who made a lifesized Steven Colbert replica out of Legos. If this guy had only replaced Han Solo's head with that of Steven Colbert instead of his own, he could have been on TV.
Making a carbonate-entombed Steven Colbert out of Legos would take all of five minutes (at least to get the base block done, leaving the face and hands aside) and might score you a late-night appearance. There is probably an untapped market for narcissists entombed in Lego carbonate.
Still untrue. We may be losing, but it isn't because some abstract concept is winning. It just isn't that simple.
That's a matter of semantics. There is no denying that 9/11 was a wildly successful attack, more successful than anyone dreamed even in 2002. The losses from the attacks themselves were largely confined to 3000 innocent lives, two skyscrapers, and four downed airliners. People even across the Middle East were lighting candles for us.
Our overreaction got us a new ineffective federal agency, an endless quagmire of a long bitter war that has killed more Americans than died on 9/11 and many times as many Iraqi civilians, new torture policies allowing "extraordinary rendition" and "enhanced interrogation" that have made the U.S. into a pariah across the world, a suspension of habeas corpus, and an undermining of the protections behind Amendments I, IV, V, VI, and VIII as well as numerous statutory protections in the federal realm relating to privacy, wiretapping, and individual rights to a fair trial- but we did get a nice rainbow color chart out of the whole thing. Maybe some "abstract concept" isn't "winning" but by any standard the 19 hijackers couldn't have asked for a reaction from the United States that would be more damaging to the United States.
Since the US military has in the past flat out REFUSED to be deployed on US soil, I have a hard time believing they'd use those sorts of weapons, restricting the discussion to personal weapons anyway.
We are not the EU. We're still a sovereign nation and we'll handle our internal shit ourselves.
You know, that explains a lot. I never realized the GOP considered itself a sovereign nation that lives inside this one, but it makes perfect sense now.
After they lose the election and get driven from power, they're going to open a chain of casinos.
Yes I agree that a regulated monopolistic setup often works- unfortunately they strike some people as dull. Soon the Ayn Rand fan club comes in to town and argues that the regulation is keeping the lid on innovation (in ripping people off, basically). Forces will be applied to reduce government expenditures (regulation, taxes, badness). More and more DMV functions can be pawned off until you have a system designed to keep you there reregistering your car every week for some bizarre reason or another. They'll have you read fuzzy letters (light gray on yellow) for expensive tests (they nominally compete on price with the other providers they collude with) and send you to the eyeglass stores who run booths in the corner (cross-marketing) assuming you don't trip over a Shrek cardboard cutout on the way there. The place down the street will be just as bad. (One would think that competition prevents these things, but the basis of that competition is always cost cutting and profit making. When pissing off consumers no longer interferes with profit making, then all this competition becomes a bad thing.)
Medicare Part D was almost run as you describe, except they got rid of a part needed to make it work, where we had a say in what prices we would be willing to be bound by law to pay monopolist drug patent holders. Not only is it legal extortion of the public, it's mandated extortion. The California electricity infrastructure ran as a regulated utility until the free marketeers came in and argued for a Wild West where we found ourselves at the mercy of kilowatt-hour extortionists who offered take-it-or-leave-it prices and forced the state to sign expensive contracts under duress. MBAs straight out of college were caught on tape ordering plant shutdowns at peak hours. One mistake made by both the regulators, the courts, and the players was of thinking as electricity as a fungible commodity. No thought was given to physical location and electrical resistance; they had power routes crisscrossed and diverted all over the country. Not a plan thought up by geniuses.
If a government service as central and fundamental as counting votes can be pawned off to a private company, then anything is for sale. We already have an exploding prison building industry giving rise to an exploding inmate population. Basically we are on the path to an organized corporate anarchy, carefully operating within the structure of a representative democracy (like any racket does).
How exactly do you deregulate a government function?
Oh you have no imagination. First assign mechanisms for licensure and registration to private companies, so they can offer products that include your new license, registration, and car insurance in one big package. The license places them on the hook if they incorrectly grant one. So they're taking on risk and will have to follow investigative procedures similar to the DMV to check out your history and give you the eye test so this will be expensive. It can become inordinately expensive and so profitable for the companies involved that they will steal DMV employees and lobby the government to cut the DMV budgets. Once the lines at the DMV become ten times as long as they are now, someone says it's "common sense" to shut them down, cut waste, etc. Then the fees explode, the companies earn healthy profits- good for stockholders and former DMV workers, with the invisible hand taking credit.
Then when your kid turns 17 it will cost him a thousand dollars- not to buy a crappy first car, but to get a license to drive your car. Unless each of 5 companies (3 after the mergers) tells him to take a hike- then he's on his own. Think that's crazy? Crazier things have been done.
Slashdot Mirror
It should be legal to appear naked in public places if one has been ordered to do so over the Internet. That way, naked customers can exit hacked stores without fear of prosecution.
link?
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...
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<w:rPr>
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<w:t>Hey,</w:t>
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</w:rPr>
<w:t> </w:t>
<w:ignoreElements w:val="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/ooxml/
<w:rPr>
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<w:t>guys!</w:t>
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<w:rPr>
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</w:rPr>
<w:t> </w:t>
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<w:rPr>
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<w:t>Vote</w:t>
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<w:t>yes</w:t>
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<w:rPr>
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<w:t>Hey, guys! Vote yes on our standard and we'll send you some free T-shirts and mugs!</w:t>
</w:r>
Or maybe they could write their own code instead of taking someone else's
I love people who think like this.
"This code was just here yesterday! Damn you, Tivo!"
Penn and Teller have spent too much time underwater for me to trust their opinion of Wal-Mart.
This made me think of the Far Side strip where a demon is greeting newcomers to hell and the sign behind him says "This is the first day of the rest of your life."
In fact hell has been working on a "Web 2.0 style" social network for ages. I can't wait to meet up with all my friends there.
I've seen this show before. A horrible standard (XML or otherwise) can have repurcussions that transcend the evil acts of one company- but it can also backfire on them simultaneously. That company may have an edge if the format takes off, but usually, the way it ends up is with that company supporting its proprietary format under two names: the old proprietary name, and a "public" name. Same crap, new umbrella.
I've been burned by a poorly written XML specification before, which was tightly coupled to one vendor's internal implementation and was heavily promoted by them. Lots of people in the sector were thirsty for a common standard to process experimental data, and an expert group was formed to come up with a common XML format for interoperability- and they jumped on this one. People across the industry wasted a lot of time trying to get it to work. I myself almost developed an ulcer. It was completely unusable- it could simply not be parsed or encoded to/from anything useful, without the involvement of continuous human intervention requiring real-world expert knowledge at every tag. (An XML DOM tree effectively isolated from any meaningful context is not "useful".) Unless you could write code that had a PhD and several years of experience in experiment design and lab work, you couldn't create a valid document. You had to know what to do with a tag reference that would mean "control signal", and another that referred to a standardized enumeration of the types of bedding used in rodent cages. It was ridiculous.
Everyone gave up on it after wasting a lot of time and the "experts" were reduced to sending out emails to software manufacturers, research groups at universities, and device manufacturers, pleading with them to use this standard. It was embarrassing to watch.
This turkey still presents a political roadblock because a lot of MBA types fall for the continued marketing from the guilty company (which benefits by having competitors waste time and resources), the continued reluctance of the experts group to admit to their mistake, and the popular perception of XML as being inherently readable. Anyone who actually has to get work done is still stuck with tab delimited text annotated with English. At least you can create a valid document.
We pick a few of those groups of 1,000 and we count the English records on those ballots and make sure they match the count the Germans gave us.
Are you implying that Germans can read barcodes? That's quite impressive- they must make good mailmen and supermarket clerks!
This scheme's weakness is its requirement for randomness. The groups of 1,000 have to be selected randomly across the voting population, using a good honest source of random numbers like non-loaded dice or lottery ping pong ball machines. They'd probably use a pseudorandom number generator carefully seeded by political operatives to land all the audits in Orange County.
Spoken like someone who doesn't own a a hi-def television.
I have a 30" LCD, much prettier than the CRT it replaced. It has an HDMI port, unused. Unless I get a console (doubtful) I have no plans to plug anything into it. Component video works fine. It doesn't show off the full HD capabilities, but I'd rather keep the extra money.
If current trends continue I may get cut off from Hollywood someday, but by then movies will have gotten so bad that it will matter even less than it does now. They're already getting pretty hard to sit through. Hollywood spends too much money on lawyering and lobbying, and not enough on talent.
Isn't it ironic that the consumer vigorously defends his right to "choice" but won't make a move until the choice is made for him?
I already made my choice: regular DVD is fine. Someone decided for me that I should delay buying another player for at least another 18 months. I just don't know who the next long term deal is going to be with, and it's pretty clear they're quite interested in selling the same shit over and over again on multiple formats.
The last video format conversion was from tape to disc. That was a huge change in the overall experience. Remember those tape rewinders? Tape was a disaster. So are discs actually. The difference in the experience between DVD and HD-whatever-DVD-Ray is too slight. Counting pixels misses the point. Why do you even care how sharp this garbage looks? With these hi-def discs, you still have to actually get up, walk over to a player, and fiddle with physical plastic objects and their stupid covers with those annoying stickers plastered across the opening. Does anyone think it's going to be cool to keep doing that 18 months from now? It's going to feel as intolerable as CD audio feels today.
Just keeping plastic discs organized actually requires special racks, stands, or actual furniture. I have two "media stands" holding DVDs in the corner. They're probably headed for the garage where my CD audio rack is. I recently got one of those ipod stands with a CD audio player on top. I have yet to put a CD into it because all the discs are in the garage. If we ever get a new disc, it gets ripped, and then it goes to the garage. The slight degradation in quality doesn't enter into the decision at all. I just don't care. I'm happy I can listen to music without having to look at all these stupid things or match them with their covers.
Americans are getting fatter. They don't want to waddle over to a player every time they play a different movie. That's totally lame. They want whatever lets them watch this shit without leaving their sofas by pushing buttons on a remote and only ONE remote- not a bunch of remotes with an additional one arriving every 18 months during a long bitter format war. So nobody is going to bother with HD-DVD or Blue-Ray. If you're going to pull a scam like this, you have to offer something worthwhile to the mark.
I have already predicted with 100% precision that this patent will be granted.
I wonder why we even need to see the UIDs. Just show a hash. Guys with large UIDs get so self-conscious about it and loudly defend Microsoft as if they're trying to compensate. And then the three- or four-digit people show up and are treated like celebrities.
Typical "high-UID" catchphrase. Not our fault you were off playing with Windows 98 when there were still low UIDs to be had.
How on earth does the sound and network subsystem overlap?
The smoke from the cigars mixes in the air of the smoke-filled back rooms where these things are decided between the content cartel and the company that makes Windows Media Central or whatever that thing used to be called.
This was a cool thing until the the piece was altered because of the new owner being consumed with his own vanity.
I know; it's unbecoming. You shouldn't be consumed with your own vanity- you have to leverage the vanity of others, like that guy on the Colbert Report last night who made a lifesized Steven Colbert replica out of Legos. If this guy had only replaced Han Solo's head with that of Steven Colbert instead of his own, he could have been on TV.
Making a carbonate-entombed Steven Colbert out of Legos would take all of five minutes (at least to get the base block done, leaving the face and hands aside) and might score you a late-night appearance. There is probably an untapped market for narcissists entombed in Lego carbonate.
That doesn't account for the true costs of the antitrust charges- Microsoft has to hire lobbyists.
We would be inclined to view antitrust charges as a "nice to have" type of problem.
You need a new wife.
Ex-wife. The fresh flowers were explicitly mentioned in the first prenup. That's one mistake I didn't make with my second one.
Oh well; I have a room full of slot machines going full blast to take care of both those bitches.
The terrorists have won, in part.
Still untrue. We may be losing, but it isn't because some abstract concept is winning. It just isn't that simple.
That's a matter of semantics. There is no denying that 9/11 was a wildly successful attack, more successful than anyone dreamed even in 2002. The losses from the attacks themselves were largely confined to 3000 innocent lives, two skyscrapers, and four downed airliners. People even across the Middle East were lighting candles for us.
Our overreaction got us a new ineffective federal agency, an endless quagmire of a long bitter war that has killed more Americans than died on 9/11 and many times as many Iraqi civilians, new torture policies allowing "extraordinary rendition" and "enhanced interrogation" that have made the U.S. into a pariah across the world, a suspension of habeas corpus, and an undermining of the protections behind Amendments I, IV, V, VI, and VIII as well as numerous statutory protections in the federal realm relating to privacy, wiretapping, and individual rights to a fair trial- but we did get a nice rainbow color chart out of the whole thing. Maybe some "abstract concept" isn't "winning" but by any standard the 19 hijackers couldn't have asked for a reaction from the United States that would be more damaging to the United States.
You're welcome for the 75K of federal taxes I paid last year.
Ha ha ha, you just admitted you make $200k. Loser.
You couldn't cover my wife's fresh flower expenses!
Since the US military has in the past flat out REFUSED to be deployed on US soil, I have a hard time believing they'd use those sorts of weapons, restricting the discussion to personal weapons anyway.
Military decisions set no binding precedents.
We are not the EU. We're still a sovereign nation and we'll handle our internal shit ourselves.
You know, that explains a lot. I never realized the GOP considered itself a sovereign nation that lives inside this one, but it makes perfect sense now.
After they lose the election and get driven from power, they're going to open a chain of casinos.
Yes I agree that a regulated monopolistic setup often works- unfortunately they strike some people as dull. Soon the Ayn Rand fan club comes in to town and argues that the regulation is keeping the lid on innovation (in ripping people off, basically). Forces will be applied to reduce government expenditures (regulation, taxes, badness). More and more DMV functions can be pawned off until you have a system designed to keep you there reregistering your car every week for some bizarre reason or another. They'll have you read fuzzy letters (light gray on yellow) for expensive tests (they nominally compete on price with the other providers they collude with) and send you to the eyeglass stores who run booths in the corner (cross-marketing) assuming you don't trip over a Shrek cardboard cutout on the way there. The place down the street will be just as bad. (One would think that competition prevents these things, but the basis of that competition is always cost cutting and profit making. When pissing off consumers no longer interferes with profit making, then all this competition becomes a bad thing.)
Medicare Part D was almost run as you describe, except they got rid of a part needed to make it work, where we had a say in what prices we would be willing to be bound by law to pay monopolist drug patent holders. Not only is it legal extortion of the public, it's mandated extortion. The California electricity infrastructure ran as a regulated utility until the free marketeers came in and argued for a Wild West where we found ourselves at the mercy of kilowatt-hour extortionists who offered take-it-or-leave-it prices and forced the state to sign expensive contracts under duress. MBAs straight out of college were caught on tape ordering plant shutdowns at peak hours. One mistake made by both the regulators, the courts, and the players was of thinking as electricity as a fungible commodity. No thought was given to physical location and electrical resistance; they had power routes crisscrossed and diverted all over the country. Not a plan thought up by geniuses.
If a government service as central and fundamental as counting votes can be pawned off to a private company, then anything is for sale. We already have an exploding prison building industry giving rise to an exploding inmate population. Basically we are on the path to an organized corporate anarchy, carefully operating within the structure of a representative democracy (like any racket does).
How exactly do you deregulate a government function?
Oh you have no imagination. First assign mechanisms for licensure and registration to private companies, so they can offer products that include your new license, registration, and car insurance in one big package. The license places them on the hook if they incorrectly grant one. So they're taking on risk and will have to follow investigative procedures similar to the DMV to check out your history and give you the eye test so this will be expensive. It can become inordinately expensive and so profitable for the companies involved that they will steal DMV employees and lobby the government to cut the DMV budgets. Once the lines at the DMV become ten times as long as they are now, someone says it's "common sense" to shut them down, cut waste, etc. Then the fees explode, the companies earn healthy profits- good for stockholders and former DMV workers, with the invisible hand taking credit.
Then when your kid turns 17 it will cost him a thousand dollars- not to buy a crappy first car, but to get a license to drive your car. Unless each of 5 companies (3 after the mergers) tells him to take a hike- then he's on his own. Think that's crazy? Crazier things have been done.