Of course, our Constitution gives certain limited powers to the central government, not "whatever we think the States can't do good enough for themselves".
Of course, that horse has long gone through the barn door. I support the states fighting this on principle, even if a national ID card would be more secure.
I would say that interfering with someone's right to practice their religion is clearly illegal, but being California, this falls under the Orwellian concept of hate crimes. In other words, the severity of a crime increases depending upon what the perpetrator thinks. Improper thoughts are punishable by law. And of course, being California, improper thoughts would include just about anything that a normal American might think.
I've been saying for years, give California back to Mexico and call it even. The U.S. will, on balance, average out a lot closer to sane.
I don't listen to any radio except talk and occasionally classical. I don't know any of these songs either, although I recognize some of the names, and I'd give a 99% chance that I would hate them if I did hear them. If I am insulated, it is only from corporate mass-media garbage.
I do like plenty of "classic rock" that is mainstream enough that people will know about it, but why listen to a "classic rock" radio station 75% of whose entire playlist is about 3% of what I carry on my MP3 player?
In the real world, I would bet that maybe 10% of the population would know of the Top 5 songs.
Microsoft suffers from the John Kerry syndrome WRT the Zune.
John Kerry is so arrogantly sure of his superiority he feels he shouldn't have to explain himself. He expects it to be obvious to everyone. Whether or not this is true, it's a lousy way to convince anyone of anything.
Microsoft seems to think the Zune is self-evidently cool because of Microsoft's (self-delusional) reputation for innovation, or the fact that they often do make good hardware. Anyhow, I guess they figure their name should generate the buzz rather than anything about the product.
Of course, there are millions of people that don't realize most of Microsoft's products are barely acceptable at best.
Your calculator can easily be checked for accuracy at any time and any place. Voting machines only have to fake it long enough to get into the election.
Here in Virginia we've used paper optical-scan ballots for years, and I've never figured out how those grotesquely overpriced, overcomplicated touch screen machines could possibly be seen as better. Sure, no system is perfect, but marks on paper can always be recounted in different machines and even hand-counted.
It was always a no-brainer in my opinion. Florida's problem in 2000 wasn't primarily the voting technology they used but the poorly thought-out election laws, and people trying to change the rules in mid-game, but when Congress realizes they can create a new multi-billion dollar industry for their corporate friends, common sense, as usual, goes out the window.
It's like college, specifically a BS degree sucks all spine and drive out of a person rendering them into a pile of useless word spewing morons.
It is my glaring proof that outside of science (computers are NOT science) higher education is worthless.
I would say that while current higher education may be worthless a traditional liberal arts education would still be really useful. Unfortunately, college education is more often than not actually training, rather than education. A real education would go a long way to helping people think (and that's not something you are going to get in practically any undergraduate degree, especially technical ones). I have a BS in computer science and while my CS classes were worthwhile, some of the most useful classes I took were unrelated or only tangentially related to CS.
And computers absolutely can be part of science, ever hear of things like information theory? OK, well, maybe math then, but I bet very little of a modern CS education touches on this. I expect most of it is just classes teaching you Java. Almost all of my CS classes used Pascal, but I learned principles well enough to hit the ground running as a C programmer in my first job, and a couple years later doing C++.
An educated software developer might (and almost certainly will) have preferences, but if he or she complains about not being able to use any mainstream language, then I would suspect that person's real knowledge. I recently had a job doing Tcl work, and again was able to pick it up very quickly despite never having actually used the language, because I know how to program. The best programmers I know are all the same too, and this is the kind of thing a CS degree should ensure, but from what I've seen often doesn't.
Microsoft probably retains an entire legal firm just to figure these things out. The fact that they act like they don't know about it only means they don't think it's important.
I'm betting they spend more time and energy on legal matters than technical matters, after all, they aren't the biggest and most powerful software company in the world because their products are superior. They never were.
Given Gates' track record on technology trends, I'm surprised he predicted something this obvious. Now I'm starting to think maybe IPTV _won't_ be revolutionary within 5 years.
I'm still waiting for him to eliminate spam. It's a good thing he's retiring soon, maybe his charity work won't be as affected by his complete lack of touch with reality. Now if they could only get rid of that psychopath chair-thrower, Microsoft could possibly get back on the track of relevancy.
Even the AOR stations in the late 70's through about the mid 80's played an order of magnitude wider selections than you can hear now. That's when I was listening to a lot of radio, and it was fun to tune to an AOR station and leave it on all night.
Nowadays, I hear the average radio station has 400 songs in its entire playlist, which means it must repeat its entire catalog approximately every 2 days. I have an 80GB Neuros filled with almost 13000 songs (all legally purchased, about 85% on CD and the rest from eMusic.com). That means I have the equivalent of more than 32 entire radio stations... not counting the fact that the average song in my collection (lots of progressive, jazz, instrumental rock, etc) is probably more than twice that of what you hear on the radio. When's the last time you heard a good 20-minute epic on one of ClearChannel's mass-market-excretoria (i.e., radio stations)? Top that off with the fact that about 80% of my collection would never get played on the radio in the first place because we all know niche markets for radio are long gone. Ironically, I can put on the local "classic rock" station and 75% of what they play is in my music collection, but how many times can one hear the same 20 songs, no matter how good they are? From what I hear, even satellite radio is already undergoing this blandification process.
Aside from stuff like C-Span... tell me again why I would ever listen to radio?
A $40K house? Consider yourself lucky. Here in the DC Metropolitan area, you're hard pressed to find a single-family detached house for $400K, and that's no exaggeration. I'm just glad I was able to get a house back in '98 before the market went through the roof otherwise we'd've had to move out of the area completely.
eMusic is legal. Granted the big labels won't play ball with them, but there is so much cool stuff on eMusic who needs the big labels? I usually use up my monthly download with 2 days of them being refreshed and I'm always finding more interesting stuff every month.
But you can go back to your world and sit there watching cartoons and pretending everybody loves everyone else and that we don't have the capability to destroy all life on earth.
No thanks, Nancy Pelosi is already taking care of that.
The only MS software that could be worse than IE has got to be Word, which is the most horrible piece of software ever written by man (given that Lotus Notes was written by some kind of invertebrate). This is lovely, the new Outlook will take 2 minutes to start, and crash while you're writing a message, and autorecover won't work, and you'll spend 30 minutes trying to get autonumber to work.
Good thing I've been using Thunderbird for 3 years.
Essentially, procrastinators have less confidence in themselves, less expectancy that they can actually complete a task...
I call bullshit. As an expert procrastinator, the real reason is this: Procrastinators are lazy. Since they took 10 years and it took me about a minute to write this, I'm apparently ~5000000 times more efficient at figuring these things out, but I bet I won't get a grant or anything.
Has a class-action lawsuit ever accomplished anything but be a minor annoyance to the defendants and enrich the lawyers? They certainly never do anything useful for the class.
Even more so since they weren't a monopoly at the time
By what standard? Did any of the competitors you mention ever have more than a single-digit marketshare? By the time Windows 3 was out was their any chance it would ever happen? And to top it off, it was impossible to compete with Microsoft on their platform, which was running on around 90% of desktops at the time. That's a monopoly in my book.
What I always thought was ironic was that _this_ was how Microsoft cemented their monopoly, and the whole "bundling the browser" was just a bunch of sour grapes by Netscape who's software became even more bloated than Microsoft's (if that's even imaginable). That monopoly suit was 10 years too late and a lame case to begin with. Also, the reason MS could strongarm OEM's was _because_ they were a monopoly, not how they became one.
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Probably a Towers of Hanoi type problem. i.e. economically shifting other parked cars to liberate the one right at the back.
Oh, great. And when you park the 64th car the Universe ends.
Just send them a shipment of smallpox blankets.
Uh oh, I think that joke may have gotten me on a terrorist watch list.
Of course, our Constitution gives certain limited powers to the central government, not "whatever we think the States can't do good enough for themselves".
Of course, that horse has long gone through the barn door. I support the states fighting this on principle, even if a national ID card would be more secure.
I would say that interfering with someone's right to practice their religion is clearly illegal, but being California, this falls under the Orwellian concept of hate crimes. In other words, the severity of a crime increases depending upon what the perpetrator thinks. Improper thoughts are punishable by law. And of course, being California, improper thoughts would include just about anything that a normal American might think.
I've been saying for years, give California back to Mexico and call it even. The U.S. will, on balance, average out a lot closer to sane.
I'm with you, the GP is way off.
I don't listen to any radio except talk and occasionally classical. I don't know any of these songs either, although I recognize some of the names, and I'd give a 99% chance that I would hate them if I did hear them. If I am insulated, it is only from corporate mass-media garbage.
I do like plenty of "classic rock" that is mainstream enough that people will know about it, but why listen to a "classic rock" radio station 75% of whose entire playlist is about 3% of what I carry on my MP3 player?
In the real world, I would bet that maybe 10% of the population would know of the Top 5 songs.
Microsoft suffers from the John Kerry syndrome WRT the Zune.
John Kerry is so arrogantly sure of his superiority he feels he shouldn't have to explain himself. He expects it to be obvious to everyone. Whether or not this is true, it's a lousy way to convince anyone of anything.
Microsoft seems to think the Zune is self-evidently cool because of Microsoft's (self-delusional) reputation for innovation, or the fact that they often do make good hardware. Anyhow, I guess they figure their name should generate the buzz rather than anything about the product.
Of course, there are millions of people that don't realize most of Microsoft's products are barely acceptable at best.
Your calculator can easily be checked for accuracy at any time and any place. Voting machines only have to fake it long enough to get into the election.
Here in Virginia we've used paper optical-scan ballots for years, and I've never figured out how those grotesquely overpriced, overcomplicated touch screen machines could possibly be seen as better. Sure, no system is perfect, but marks on paper can always be recounted in different machines and even hand-counted.
It was always a no-brainer in my opinion. Florida's problem in 2000 wasn't primarily the voting technology they used but the poorly thought-out election laws, and people trying to change the rules in mid-game, but when Congress realizes they can create a new multi-billion dollar industry for their corporate friends, common sense, as usual, goes out the window.
It's like college, specifically a BS degree sucks all spine and drive out of a person rendering them into a pile of useless word spewing morons.
It is my glaring proof that outside of science (computers are NOT science) higher education is worthless.
I would say that while current higher education may be worthless a traditional liberal arts education would still be really useful. Unfortunately, college education is more often than not actually training, rather than education. A real education would go a long way to helping people think (and that's not something you are going to get in practically any undergraduate degree, especially technical ones). I have a BS in computer science and while my CS classes were worthwhile, some of the most useful classes I took were unrelated or only tangentially related to CS.
And computers absolutely can be part of science, ever hear of things like information theory? OK, well, maybe math then, but I bet very little of a modern CS education touches on this. I expect most of it is just classes teaching you Java. Almost all of my CS classes used Pascal, but I learned principles well enough to hit the ground running as a C programmer in my first job, and a couple years later doing C++.
An educated software developer might (and almost certainly will) have preferences, but if he or she complains about not being able to use any mainstream language, then I would suspect that person's real knowledge. I recently had a job doing Tcl work, and again was able to pick it up very quickly despite never having actually used the language, because I know how to program. The best programmers I know are all the same too, and this is the kind of thing a CS degree should ensure, but from what I've seen often doesn't.
Everything else is just a cost so you're best getting rid of that pointless, expensive R&D.
Except HP is doing massive R&D... those printer cartridges don't become unrefillable and prematurely unusable on their own.
Microsoft probably retains an entire legal firm just to figure these things out. The fact that they act like they don't know about it only means they don't think it's important.
I'm betting they spend more time and energy on legal matters than technical matters, after all, they aren't the biggest and most powerful software company in the world because their products are superior. They never were.
In Soviet Russia, trite Orwell quotes unfairly mod YOU down.
Given Gates' track record on technology trends, I'm surprised he predicted something this obvious. Now I'm starting to think maybe IPTV _won't_ be revolutionary within 5 years.
I'm still waiting for him to eliminate spam. It's a good thing he's retiring soon, maybe his charity work won't be as affected by his complete lack of touch with reality. Now if they could only get rid of that psychopath chair-thrower, Microsoft could possibly get back on the track of relevancy.
Even the AOR stations in the late 70's through about the mid 80's played an order of magnitude wider selections than you can hear now. That's when I was listening to a lot of radio, and it was fun to tune to an AOR station and leave it on all night.
Nowadays, I hear the average radio station has 400 songs in its entire playlist, which means it must repeat its entire catalog approximately every 2 days. I have an 80GB Neuros filled with almost 13000 songs (all legally purchased, about 85% on CD and the rest from eMusic.com). That means I have the equivalent of more than 32 entire radio stations... not counting the fact that the average song in my collection (lots of progressive, jazz, instrumental rock, etc) is probably more than twice that of what you hear on the radio. When's the last time you heard a good 20-minute epic on one of ClearChannel's mass-market-excretoria (i.e., radio stations)? Top that off with the fact that about 80% of my collection would never get played on the radio in the first place because we all know niche markets for radio are long gone. Ironically, I can put on the local "classic rock" station and 75% of what they play is in my music collection, but how many times can one hear the same 20 songs, no matter how good they are? From what I hear, even satellite radio is already undergoing this blandification process.
Aside from stuff like C-Span... tell me again why I would ever listen to radio?
A $40K house? Consider yourself lucky. Here in the DC Metropolitan area, you're hard pressed to find a single-family detached house for $400K, and that's no exaggeration. I'm just glad I was able to get a house back in '98 before the market went through the roof otherwise we'd've had to move out of the area completely.
Here in the lab...
Sorry, your imagination is not a lab.
Microsoft has quite big pipe on their end
Just so you don't embarrass yourself in the future, they're called "tubes".
On topic: I've found the MS download manager to work very well. I'm glad that after almost 30 years in the business they've got that right.
I would agree with you, but your description holds for most software, not just DRM.
[cue Microsoft jokes]
eMusic is legal. Granted the big labels won't play ball with them, but there is so much cool stuff on eMusic who needs the big labels? I usually use up my monthly download with 2 days of them being refreshed and I'm always finding more interesting stuff every month.
I love eMusic, but this is a very stupid feature of theirs. It _is_ possible to browse without signing up, but they make it really hard to find.
Try this: http://www.emusic.com/browse/all.html I think this will work for you.
But you can go back to your world and sit there watching cartoons and pretending everybody loves everyone else and that we don't have the capability to destroy all life on earth.
No thanks, Nancy Pelosi is already taking care of that.
The only MS software that could be worse than IE has got to be Word, which is the most horrible piece of software ever written by man (given that Lotus Notes was written by some kind of invertebrate). This is lovely, the new Outlook will take 2 minutes to start, and crash while you're writing a message, and autorecover won't work, and you'll spend 30 minutes trying to get autonumber to work.
Good thing I've been using Thunderbird for 3 years.
Essentially, procrastinators have less confidence in themselves, less expectancy that they can actually complete a task...
I call bullshit. As an expert procrastinator, the real reason is this: Procrastinators are lazy. Since they took 10 years and it took me about a minute to write this, I'm apparently ~5000000 times more efficient at figuring these things out, but I bet I won't get a grant or anything.
Serious question:
Has a class-action lawsuit ever accomplished anything but be a minor annoyance to the defendants and enrich the lawyers? They certainly never do anything useful for the class.
Even more so since they weren't a monopoly at the time
By what standard? Did any of the competitors you mention ever have more than a single-digit marketshare? By the time Windows 3 was out was their any chance it would ever happen? And to top it off, it was impossible to compete with Microsoft on their platform, which was running on around 90% of desktops at the time. That's a monopoly in my book.
What I always thought was ironic was that _this_ was how Microsoft cemented their monopoly, and the whole "bundling the browser" was just a bunch of sour grapes by Netscape who's software became even more bloated than Microsoft's (if that's even imaginable). That monopoly suit was 10 years too late and a lame case to begin with. Also, the reason MS could strongarm OEM's was _because_ they were a monopoly, not how they became one.
Wow. You could get a well-paying job with Microsoft Marketing, although I suspect you may be a little too bald-faced for even them.