Wow. You managed to blame the origin of French-bashing on President Bush, and it sounds believable.
Now, if you can do that for global warming on Mars, the heartbreak of psoriasis the Black Plague and rap it will be official that everything bad that has ever happened is Bush's fault.
Reasonable people don't have a problem with the French criticizing us. We do have a problem with the French being obstructionist against the U.S. at every turn (they wouldn't allow flights through their airspace during the first Gulf War), or the fact that anything they had to say regarding Iraq, correct or not, was compromised by the fact that they were on the take from Saddam. There are many more reasons I could list, but it has always appeared to me that the French government behaves as if it resents the fact that France is no longer a major world power, and they will do everything they can to appear influential, even if most of it is merely throwing a wrench into things.
Perhaps the French people, who as a whole seem to be decent folks, have finally gotten tired of their country's "Short Man's Disease" or being sold out to lazy people and hostile immigrants that they have chosen a leader that might actually have their interests in mind.
Or maybe the fact that you don't need a different and incompatible wall wart for every device you own? The benefits from wide adoption of this device would be very significant. Or do you think millions of wall warts in landfills is a good thing?
Must everything be an opportunity for someone to show how superior he is?
You'd think employees of an ISP, who routinely warns its customers about it, would be wise to rudimentary "attacks" like phishing scams.
I can tell you from personal experience that you'd be wrong. And not just because we are talking about AOL, but this will be true in any large company.
I can guarantee that I'll still be listening to Spock's Beard and The Flower Kings, to name two, as long as I'm listening to music. There is a tremendous amount of real music, made by real musicians, for for people who appreciate music, but you won't find it on the radio (well, maybe on satellite), and you probably won't find it in the bog box stores (especially now that Tower Records is gone).
You appear to be writing a buffer overflow. Would you like to:
1. Switch to a certified safe string copy function? 2. Cause Vista to pop up a security dialog every time your function is run? 3. See more information on currently unpatched Windows exploits? 4. See tips on how to acquire fame and fortune as a virus writer?
It's a shame because if we have cheap, plentiful energy (infinite for all practical purposes) a whole buncha looming problems can be easily and efficiently addressed in 20 years or so:
1. Global warming? We need to cut down on greenhouse gases? Sure. All the coal and oil plants go away and given another 20 years of battery technology, electric vehicles will be able to be mainstream. Poof. Most of the man-made greenhouse gasses go bye-bye. Even if it doesn't change anything, we get that almost for free! Of course, but if Al Gore all those other nitwits really cared about global warming they'd've been pushing nuclear for the last 20 years.
2. Clean water? We have quadrillions of gallons of ocean water and distillation is no problem if energy is no object.
3. Hunger? Medicine? Education? These are all big issues that will be easier to solve with next-to-free energy.
4. The RIAA and MPAA? Nope, sorry, unless we want to vaporize them using a fusion-powered space laser, we'll still be stuck with them, but since since many huyndreds of millions will have more to eat and clean water and better health care, maybe it won't be so bad.
To me, fusion is so much bigger than just cutting the umbilicus to Middle East oil. Besides, there will be a whole society of Saudi ex-millionaires with little or no marketable skills that will suddenly find themselves broke, bored and really, really, really angry and we'll need all that energy for when the War on Terror goes into high gear.
So, tell us, why should we adulterate our definition of chocolate to improve your profit margins?
Because they paid the FDA to let them. If you had that kind of money, you could buy your own regulations too. You don't think the FDA or Congress or any other part of the U.S. government exists for your benefit do you?
Congress doesn't even pretend they are doing this for consumers' benefit. I figured it wasn't going to be long before they finally just said, "Yeah, we're gonna screw you over. Whatcha gonna do? Vote for the other party?! HAW HAW HAW!"
I think that MS missed their opportunity to make Vista really secure.
You're assuming they're in business to make a secure, usable operating system. They were once, around 1989. Now they are in business to maintain their monopoly. They're far too busy to write good software. How else can you explain the fact that they claim all these annoying kludges were to provide backwards compatibility, and the end result isn't very compatible, or secure, and, oh, by the way, they forgot to add anything new that anyone cares about?
Seriously, that was the first thing I thought of too. In fact, I bet that was the first thing everyone thought of. Given the tens of thousands of man-years that certainly must have gone into Vista, they should have been able to do just that. Heck, for all we know Microsoft Research has that very OS running quietly on a box under someone's desk somewhere in a lab, but the marketing folks will never let it see the light of day (or never realize they should).
Bill Gates and Chair-Throwing Monkey Boy are too busy making vaporous claims about technology they never plan on delivering, and scheming to kidnap Linus Torvalds, kneel on his chest and dangle spit on his face until he admits he stole Microsoft technology in the Linux kernel.
It's not the first time. If I recall the details correctly, Windows 98 came with DX5, but poor NT 4.0 was still stuck at DX3. Sometime shortly later however, someone figured out how to get DX5 installed on NT so more games could be run on it without having to wait for Windows 2000. I don't know if this was done by Microsoft or with their blessing, but it was certainly not what they originally intended.
People say, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Microsoft says if you can't beat 'em, don't let them play. It seems that Microsoft, understandably (from the point of view of an evil monopoly) wants to minimize compatibility and interoperability with other platforms, and usually it seems to work against them rather than for them. Maybe the market can start doing what the flaccid Department of Justice couldn't do, force MS to recognize it doesn't rule the world.
Windows is pretty decent to use, but there are more and more ways that it limits you for reasons that have nothing to do with technology or competence. As Microsoft continues to sabotage their own products in a misguided attempt to remain the undisputed ruler of the computer world, the more they will do our work for us.
To paraphrase Princess Leia: "The more you tighten your grip, the more users slip through your fingers."
You have a point. On the other hand, most engineering projects are not used while orbiting a planet 100 million miles away. NASA has had some embarrassingly spectacular failures (including some truly tragic ones), but their success engineering accomplishments have been truly amazing and inspiring.
That reminds me that the "Chunnel" was completed by starting on both ends and meeting in the middle, and IIRC, when they met, after several miles of digging in both directions, they were off by about a foot in one direction and 2 inches in the other (i.e., horizontal vs. vertical). While mankind can't manage more abstract enterprises like software development or governments with more than about a 5% efficiency, we've proved that as a species, we can build some incredible things that work.
Of course, that doesn't rule out that some clown will forget about the International Date Line and the tunnel will accidently get dug to the South Pole. "What?! But you said Drill till Thursday!"
Sorry, but the umpteen countries that do have gun controls prove you wrong. There is no logic going on there my dear.
I'm talking specifically about the U.S., where there is not much correlation between gun control and gun violence. I specifically stated that I was talking about the U.S.
I find it funny that the liberals who think gun control will work are often the same ones who are insisting we admit that illegal drugs don't make sense because you can never stop drugs coming into the country. I'd be all for gun control if I thought there was any chance it would do any good. I don't own a gun myself, and have no intention of owning one.
Whatever you think of the logic of the situation, owning arms is explicitly enumerated in our Constitution, and gun opponents know there is no possibility of altering that amendment, so they simply (like everyone else in the U.S. government) just kind of ignore those pesky rights and hope people won't notice too much. Short of the government quartering soldiers in our houses, there is nothing in the Bill of Rights that is universally respected (within reason) by the U.S. government so the Second Amendment is unlikely to be different.
Windows does in fact send a signal via a window message. I don't recall the name of it off the top of my head, I haven't done any Windows stuff in a few years. Anyhow, the message is something like WM_WINDOWSWANTSTOSHUTDOWN. Apps are supposed to respond to this, which most do. Of course, the app might throw up a modal dialog in response, and if you don't answer it, the program hangs until Windows guns it. Other apps (like Office) often simply take longer than 20 seconds to shut down.
I try to be patient unless I know it won't matter. Of course, something you just need to nuke apps with extreme prejudice... especially Explorer, which after 12 years is still very flaky at times, and locks up if you look at it crosseyed.
Anyhow, this shutdown behavior actually makes sense, and when your apps are efficient and well-behaved it's not a problem.
I'm glad to hear a little reason amidst all the frantic calls of "they should've done...".
I had the exact same reason. Someone posted they should have "shut down the state all the way to Roanoke", apparently not thinking how absurd that is, or the fact that if they did that for every shooting, the "state" would rarely be _not_ shut down.
Let's stop blaming the University, the gun lobby, the Virginia General Assembly, Charlton Heston, George Bush and the CIA Orbital Mind-Control Lasers.
We may all be revolted by the child pornography, but we have to remember, that the defense of pornography in general (Larry Flint et al.) was based on the Free Speech argument -- not on the usefulness of the art or anything like it.
Just because it was used to defend pornography, even successfully, doesn't make it a valid argument.
By that same argument, snuff movies should be legal to own too. How is any of this different from shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater or inciting people to violence? Free Speech can't trump other more basic rights, like the right to life, or the right not to be sexually exploited. And yes, the Supreme Court can be wrong. In fact, it is often wrong, just like the President and Congress are often wrong.
I don't know about you, I'd rather the tasks end themselves rather than windows kill9'ing them and losing all their unsaved data. But maybe that's just me.
No. It makes them less accepted in society and all the easier to identify who has firearms illegally.
Yeah, because murder, being illegal, isn't accepted by society, and we know how seldom that happens.
The logic is simple and irrefutable. Making guns illegal only affects people unwilling to break the law. And you can't "ban" guns any more effectively than you can ban alcohol. All you can do is pass laws on top of laws. It's already illegal to murder someone, yet people are still murdered. In particular, places that have complete (or effectively complete) bans on guns (like Washington, D.C.) often have the highest murder rates in the country (like Washington, or New York up till a decade or so ago)... and those folks aren't being garroted with piano wire or having poison poured in their ears while they sleep.
Banning guns won't work, at best you are preventing a few accidents. In America, it has never worked, it will never work, and ultimately it's unconstitutional. Aside from that, I'd be all for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. You managed to blame the origin of French-bashing on President Bush, and it sounds believable.
Now, if you can do that for global warming on Mars, the heartbreak of psoriasis the Black Plague and rap it will be official that everything bad that has ever happened is Bush's fault.
Reasonable people don't have a problem with the French criticizing us. We do have a problem with the French being obstructionist against the U.S. at every turn (they wouldn't allow flights through their airspace during the first Gulf War), or the fact that anything they had to say regarding Iraq, correct or not, was compromised by the fact that they were on the take from Saddam. There are many more reasons I could list, but it has always appeared to me that the French government behaves as if it resents the fact that France is no longer a major world power, and they will do everything they can to appear influential, even if most of it is merely throwing a wrench into things.
Perhaps the French people, who as a whole seem to be decent folks, have finally gotten tired of their country's "Short Man's Disease" or being sold out to lazy people and hostile immigrants that they have chosen a leader that might actually have their interests in mind.
I don't get it, what's the deal with those bytes? Why are people repeating them everywhere, almost as if... it makes someone mad to do so.
Shouldn't your sig be "Make Wii, not WWIII"?
I've gotten mod points pretty regularly for 9 years now. I guess I'm not obnoxious enough to piss off the right people.
I need to work on that.
I don't know why that's so intuitive to most Slashdotters, but not intuitive to movie execs...
Because, as clueless as we are, most Slashdotters can at least count past 10 without taking off our shoes. Movie execs aren't that smart.
That's OK, when I added it to my sig last night, the stars started going out.
... as to put that number in a /. comment. After all, we don't want to get /. in trouble do we?
Or maybe the fact that you don't need a different and incompatible wall wart for every device you own? The benefits from wide adoption of this device would be very significant. Or do you think millions of wall warts in landfills is a good thing?
Must everything be an opportunity for someone to show how superior he is?
You'd think employees of an ISP, who routinely warns its customers about it, would be wise to rudimentary "attacks" like phishing scams.
I can tell you from personal experience that you'd be wrong. And not just because we are talking about AOL, but this will be true in any large company.
I can guarantee that I'll still be listening to Spock's Beard and The Flower Kings, to name two, as long as I'm listening to music. There is a tremendous amount of real music, made by real musicians, for for people who appreciate music, but you won't find it on the radio (well, maybe on satellite), and you probably won't find it in the bog box stores (especially now that Tower Records is gone).
Clippy sez:
You appear to be writing a buffer overflow. Would you like to:
1. Switch to a certified safe string copy function?
2. Cause Vista to pop up a security dialog every time your function is run?
3. See more information on currently unpatched Windows exploits?
4. See tips on how to acquire fame and fortune as a virus writer?
It's a shame because if we have cheap, plentiful energy (infinite for all practical purposes) a whole buncha looming problems can be easily and efficiently addressed in 20 years or so:
1. Global warming? We need to cut down on greenhouse gases? Sure. All the coal and oil plants go away and given another 20 years of battery technology, electric vehicles will be able to be mainstream. Poof. Most of the man-made greenhouse gasses go bye-bye. Even if it doesn't change anything, we get that almost for free! Of course, but if Al Gore all those other nitwits really cared about global warming they'd've been pushing nuclear for the last 20 years.
2. Clean water? We have quadrillions of gallons of ocean water and distillation is no problem if energy is no object.
3. Hunger? Medicine? Education? These are all big issues that will be easier to solve with next-to-free energy.
4. The RIAA and MPAA? Nope, sorry, unless we want to vaporize them using a fusion-powered space laser, we'll still be stuck with them, but since since many huyndreds of millions will have more to eat and clean water and better health care, maybe it won't be so bad.
To me, fusion is so much bigger than just cutting the umbilicus to Middle East oil. Besides, there will be a whole society of Saudi ex-millionaires with little or no marketable skills that will suddenly find themselves broke, bored and really, really, really angry and we'll need all that energy for when the War on Terror goes into high gear.
So, tell us, why should we adulterate our definition of chocolate to improve your profit margins?
Because they paid the FDA to let them. If you had that kind of money, you could buy your own regulations too. You don't think the FDA or Congress or any other part of the U.S. government exists for your benefit do you?
Congress doesn't even pretend they are doing this for consumers' benefit. I figured it wasn't going to be long before they finally just said, "Yeah, we're gonna screw you over. Whatcha gonna do? Vote for the other party?! HAW HAW HAW!"
So what happens when you have more possible branches than you have execution units?
Silly, you run over to MicroCenter buy more hardware.
I think that MS missed their opportunity to make Vista really secure.
You're assuming they're in business to make a secure, usable operating system. They were once, around 1989. Now they are in business to maintain their monopoly. They're far too busy to write good software. How else can you explain the fact that they claim all these annoying kludges were to provide backwards compatibility, and the end result isn't very compatible, or secure, and, oh, by the way, they forgot to add anything new that anyone cares about?
Seriously, that was the first thing I thought of too. In fact, I bet that was the first thing everyone thought of. Given the tens of thousands of man-years that certainly must have gone into Vista, they should have been able to do just that. Heck, for all we know Microsoft Research has that very OS running quietly on a box under someone's desk somewhere in a lab, but the marketing folks will never let it see the light of day (or never realize they should).
Bill Gates and Chair-Throwing Monkey Boy are too busy making vaporous claims about technology they never plan on delivering, and scheming to kidnap Linus Torvalds, kneel on his chest and dangle spit on his face until he admits he stole Microsoft technology in the Linux kernel.
It's not the first time. If I recall the details correctly, Windows 98 came with DX5, but poor NT 4.0 was still stuck at DX3. Sometime shortly later however, someone figured out how to get DX5 installed on NT so more games could be run on it without having to wait for Windows 2000. I don't know if this was done by Microsoft or with their blessing, but it was certainly not what they originally intended.
People say, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Microsoft says if you can't beat 'em, don't let them play. It seems that Microsoft, understandably (from the point of view of an evil monopoly) wants to minimize compatibility and interoperability with other platforms, and usually it seems to work against them rather than for them. Maybe the market can start doing what the flaccid Department of Justice couldn't do, force MS to recognize it doesn't rule the world.
Windows is pretty decent to use, but there are more and more ways that it limits you for reasons that have nothing to do with technology or competence. As Microsoft continues to sabotage their own products in a misguided attempt to remain the undisputed ruler of the computer world, the more they will do our work for us.
To paraphrase Princess Leia: "The more you tighten your grip, the more users slip through your fingers."
I wouldn't say they are "vastly" different. If you extended the yellow area up to the top of the 'l' they probably would be equal in area.
You have a point. On the other hand, most engineering projects are not used while orbiting a planet 100 million miles away. NASA has had some embarrassingly spectacular failures (including some truly tragic ones), but their success engineering accomplishments have been truly amazing and inspiring.
That reminds me that the "Chunnel" was completed by starting on both ends and meeting in the middle, and IIRC, when they met, after several miles of digging in both directions, they were off by about a foot in one direction and 2 inches in the other (i.e., horizontal vs. vertical). While mankind can't manage more abstract enterprises like software development or governments with more than about a 5% efficiency, we've proved that as a species, we can build some incredible things that work.
Of course, that doesn't rule out that some clown will forget about the International Date Line and the tunnel will accidently get dug to the South Pole. "What?! But you said Drill till Thursday!"
Sorry, but the umpteen countries that do have gun controls prove you wrong. There is no logic going on there my dear.
I'm talking specifically about the U.S., where there is not much correlation between gun control and gun violence. I specifically stated that I was talking about the U.S.
I find it funny that the liberals who think gun control will work are often the same ones who are insisting we admit that illegal drugs don't make sense because you can never stop drugs coming into the country. I'd be all for gun control if I thought there was any chance it would do any good. I don't own a gun myself, and have no intention of owning one.
Whatever you think of the logic of the situation, owning arms is explicitly enumerated in our Constitution, and gun opponents know there is no possibility of altering that amendment, so they simply (like everyone else in the U.S. government) just kind of ignore those pesky rights and hope people won't notice too much. Short of the government quartering soldiers in our houses, there is nothing in the Bill of Rights that is universally respected (within reason) by the U.S. government so the Second Amendment is unlikely to be different.
Windows does in fact send a signal via a window message. I don't recall the name of it off the top of my head, I haven't done any Windows stuff in a few years. Anyhow, the message is something like WM_WINDOWSWANTSTOSHUTDOWN. Apps are supposed to respond to this, which most do. Of course, the app might throw up a modal dialog in response, and if you don't answer it, the program hangs until Windows guns it. Other apps (like Office) often simply take longer than 20 seconds to shut down.
I try to be patient unless I know it won't matter. Of course, something you just need to nuke apps with extreme prejudice... especially Explorer, which after 12 years is still very flaky at times, and locks up if you look at it crosseyed.
Anyhow, this shutdown behavior actually makes sense, and when your apps are efficient and well-behaved it's not a problem.
Then by definition, it's not a snuff movie, now is it?
I'm glad to hear a little reason amidst all the frantic calls of "they should've done...".
I had the exact same reason. Someone posted they should have "shut down the state all the way to Roanoke", apparently not thinking how absurd that is, or the fact that if they did that for every shooting, the "state" would rarely be _not_ shut down.
Let's stop blaming the University, the gun lobby, the Virginia General Assembly, Charlton Heston, George Bush and the CIA Orbital Mind-Control Lasers.
We may all be revolted by the child pornography, but we have to remember, that the defense of pornography in general (Larry Flint et al.) was based on the Free Speech argument -- not on the usefulness of the art or anything like it.
Just because it was used to defend pornography, even successfully, doesn't make it a valid argument.
By that same argument, snuff movies should be legal to own too. How is any of this different from shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater or inciting people to violence? Free Speech can't trump other more basic rights, like the right to life, or the right not to be sexually exploited. And yes, the Supreme Court can be wrong. In fact, it is often wrong, just like the President and Congress are often wrong.
I don't know about you, I'd rather the tasks end themselves rather than windows kill9'ing them and losing all their unsaved data. But maybe that's just me.
No. It makes them less accepted in society and all the easier to identify who has firearms illegally.
Yeah, because murder, being illegal, isn't accepted by society, and we know how seldom that happens.
The logic is simple and irrefutable. Making guns illegal only affects people unwilling to break the law. And you can't "ban" guns any more effectively than you can ban alcohol. All you can do is pass laws on top of laws. It's already illegal to murder someone, yet people are still murdered. In particular, places that have complete (or effectively complete) bans on guns (like Washington, D.C.) often have the highest murder rates in the country (like Washington, or New York up till a decade or so ago)... and those folks aren't being garroted with piano wire or having poison poured in their ears while they sleep.
Banning guns won't work, at best you are preventing a few accidents. In America, it has never worked, it will never work, and ultimately it's unconstitutional. Aside from that, I'd be all for it.