Um, Galileo got in at least as much trouble for writing a book that labeled the Pope as an idiot (not a really brilliant move) as he did for supporting the Copernican model. And he didn't get in all that much trouble in real terms even at that. Lots of Italians would have been happy to have had as good a life as he had being "punished."
I'm running Xandros OCE, and have been for about a year now. It was a nice install, and I like some stuff about the file manager. The packages they had to offer weren't what I wanted, so I added some regular debian repositories and, after breaking the Xandros desktop manager and switching to KDE, it's run fine. Updates via the Xandros system have been a little odd, but I'm running FF 1.5 and found the upgrade from 1.0x to be as pain-reduced as any FF upgrade I've done in terms of extension compatibility (but, then, I use MR Tech Local Install to insist that extension compatibility isn't an issue).
I like it because, for most of what I want to do, it just works -- I have easier support of thumb drives and my mp3 player than I do under windows (ME, the last windows license I will buy), upgrades are easier (if slower) and the File Manager automates creating symlinks, which I love about it.
I'm considering moving over to Kubuntu just to get some fresher software (had been planning to go Debian/Etch, and might yet, but Kubuntu is getting the buzz).
Actually, on Whedonesque, there were offers to help provide for legal costs, and some indication that the attorney helping 11th Hour was to some degree the product of donation from the community. So let's not be too quick to judge whether the community is contributing to this effort substantially. This is a community where individuals were known to buy out the tickets for entire showings of Serenity in the theater so they could give them away, or to buy boxed sets of the series and give them away to friends to get them hooked on it. For folks like that to donate $5 a head would not be a stretch, and that can add up when you're looking at the size of the Firefly community. Browncoats don't always know when to fight and when to run, but they tend to be very loyal toward their own, and Universal isn't in the crew unless the conjure they are.
Selling T-shirts for profit with your own designs, using none of the trademarked images or likenesses thereof is definitely a commercial endeavor. I suppose, if it were competing with similar products from those paying license fees for those images, it could be seen as unfair, if it used the same images or designs, or in any substantial way cashed in on the work of Universal. But evidence of that kind of thing hasn't been shown in my seeing. If somebody can show a bunch of Universal licensed t-shirts that are similar to products 11th Hour is selling (even if 11th Hour was selling them first), I'd be a bit more sympathetic to their claim of injury. I can't imagine that products with those trademarked images having any problem competing in the marketplace -- who's not going to want shirts with the faces of the BDHs with memorable lines and the Serenity logo? I'd love one with River standing in the doorway to the infirmary saying "Besides, I can kill you with my brain." But I'm having a hard time taking seriously a company of their size complaining about being injured by a small operation like this, and the other fan-based businesses they've been sending c&ds to. Especially with the idea that they're unfairly competing with the products they could license that would be way cooler than they can be without that material. Why aren't they discussing a licensing agreement with 11th Hour to bring that licensed material to play with the 11th Hour creativity that's capable of unfairly competing with the apparent wusses they've sold licenses to?
I appreciate to the end of the day Universal making this movie, and I don't want my displeasure with the choices of their legal division to get in the way of my gratitude on that count. I disagree with the folks who are calling for boycotts -- we're not going to make friends, nor movies, with that kind of approach. I think the site the FA is talking about is good at making a point that Universal is showing a lack of gratitude to those who have helped sell it's product, and that the suits in the other part of the Universal building should go to the folks at legal and suggest they back off with the jackboot approach and treat these folks like friends in a misunderstanding rather than thieves. That would be the smartest possible outcome for all involved, and I won't even bill them for the idea on the site the FA is about -- that one's gratis.
That would make sense if you'd never heard of Douglas MacArthur, I suppose, and want to pretend that the only things that had anything to do with those outcomes were the two nukes dropped on Japan and the firebombing of Dresden. Were it not for MacArthur's flatly brilliant handling of Japan after those bombs were dropped, Japan could have been a much worse nightmare than Iraq has turned out to be.
And Hitler was never convinced that the war wasn't worth fighting. He finally became convinced that the German people had failed him and didn't deserve to live. He gave the orders that all of the infrastructure that the Allies hadn't destroyed be destroyed, which would have darn near annihilated the German people.
Dropping two nukes on Japan was a very different act than nuking Medina would be. At the time, not only did nobody have nukes to respond with, nobody (much) had ever seen one go off. The Japanese culture at the time was far more monolithic than anything the Arab world has seen, with the Emperor worshipped as a God on Earth (Muslims would consider that blasphemy).
So did you really have something to say, or did you just want to show that you'd heard of the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden, and the nukes at Hiroshima or Nagasaki?
The Assad you're talking about was Hafez al Assad, who is dead. His son, Bashar, now rules in Syria. And he's approximately as much of a jerk as his father was, but he is nicer looking.
And what Assad was able to do within his own country is not something that would work for the US to do to another country. Like the ripples leaving a pebble thrown into a pond, unintended consequences go beyond our capacity to predict, and a nuke ain't no pebble. Simplistic solutions only solve simple problems, and this isn't a remotely simple situation. Strong military response is an important part of the solution, but it simply won't be enough. These are folks who are used to being treated badly by people they consider brothers -- we don't have the stomach to treat them badly enough to really make them fear us, and the world wouldn't tolerate it if we tried. Identifying and killing the worst is a good step, but we can't find them and kill them quickly enough.
Yeah, except for the part where they're already getting paid for their perceived losses due to the copying of CDs. Remember the Home Recording Act? The one that says that record companies get paid a "tax" on all recordable media that's sold as compensation for those perceived loses due to copying on that media? The one that, strangely enough, doesn't list computers as a recording device?
If it did, then a kid copying his CD for his friend would be legal, so long as the one doing the copying wasn't getting paid for it. If the copying is done with a cd copier, then it's legal already, paid for by you and me and everybody else who backs up their data using cdr/dvdr.
I'll grant, it might break the flow of your stream of stereotypes.
Since this is the pedantic thread, "soldiers are" is also proper British English for the group "soldiers," since collective nouns in British English take plural verbs. So, if you're talking to a Brit (or derivative) he can get pedantic right back.
And won't you just feel silly?
And, since we're still being pedantic, the proper term for attributing human emotions to nonhuman things is "anthropopathize," rather than "anthropomorphize," (the latter meaning, more literally, to give human shape).
You should never anthropopatize robots. They hate that.
Because they people who have no children aren't likely to have much of an impact on the world after they die. The people who do have children are more likely to have their values carried on to the next generation. And the people who are having as many children as they can aren't going to bow to your cultural superiority and reject their values.
If you want the vasectomy, by all means go for it.
Why look for help in irc? When you're looking to get a problem debugged and working in less than a month because it's going to take a series of steps that someone on irc can walk you through in a much shorter period of time.
That's why I've gone there -- when I'm pretty sure my answer is going to be relatively common knowledge to the knowledgable and I haven't been able to find anything approaching what I want in 20-30 google results.
When it works, I can give "okay, that works, it says X, now what?" or "Nope that didn't work, it says Y, now what?" replies to the channel and work through things rather quickly.
Sounds like they did you a favor to delete your more ranty stuff before the thread got slashdotted. You'd look like even more of a jerk.
I don't use Ubuntu -- I used debian-via-knoppix for about 18 months, and have recently switched to Xandros OCE and I'm reasonably happy with it.
From reading over the thread, it looks as though you had the expectation that the people who gave you the software for free were obliged to provide you with the answers to all of your demands for support sight unseen. This is the place where the problems in the thread came from.
Mind you, I know what it's like to ask a simple-sounding question and get a brief and obscure answer -- or a very ugly answer (like "back up your homedirs, format your hd, and do a fresh install with stable or testing" that I got on irc last month). It's frustrating. Part of where it comes from is not yet knowing enough to be able to ask the question which, when answered, will give you the information you need to fix the problem you've got. That's you, and that's me. I'm learning pieces as we go, and the learning curve isn't a lot of fun, but the nice thing about *nix stuff is that the things that you learn stay true (if not, always, relevant), as opposed to proprietary stuff, where the paradigms can change much more drastically and things you once knew have to be unlearned with annoying frequency.
However, when you're asking for free help, you need to remember that there isn't anybody there that has a stake in you fixing your problem. Not everybody who could answer your question chooses to hang around in those forums, and not everybody who does is going to give you the answer you want in the form you want to hear it. If you're not paying for their time, it is unreasonable to expect them to show a good customer service attitude. You're not a customer.
Now, some things you might have learned from this situation:
1) It's a smart idea to know where your Windows install CD is, especially when you're going to try something major with your system.
2) It's a smart idea to have a Knoppix CD on hand when you try something major with your system.
3) Having more than one physical HD in a system makes it a little non-standard, and standard answers might need a little tweaking to work right. The person who wrote the manual may not have taken the details of your situation into account, so this is something to research prior to trying to set things up on it.
4) The Thumper Principle works really, really well when asking for free help from strangers who have no reason to like you or do anything nice for you: If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. That's hard to do when you're really frustrated. In the words of Eric to Corey, "Life's hard, little brother. Get a helmet." Or, if you prefer "Life is pain, princess. Anybody who says otherwise is selling something." That which doesn't kill you will make you stronger, and you're not dead yet. Being nice to people is just generally a better idea when you have nothing to offer them that they need in return.
Not sure which, if any, of those lessons you have or will learned, but those jump out to me. I hope you've worked through the problem somehow by now.
I was wondering about this very thing when I read this post -- this has been the fact in America going back to audio-cassettes iirc. The labels get paid for blank media to offset the projected loss of revenue due to copying using that media.
Word processing on the go? If you're going to have a flat surface (table, desk) to work from, it's hard to beat an older Palm (like the M125 or M130) with the folding portable keyboard. I can fit them both into my fanny pack (aka, my sporran) with plenty of room for wallet, keys, cell phone, etc. You can get the Palms used for ~$30-50 and the keyboards for about the same. With a good word processor (another $20-30) you will have a good, very light weight system that works on over-the-counter batteries with longer life each than you're going to find for comparable price with a lap top.
Handling broken code well has unintended consequences. A web-developing friend of mine was having a ton of problems getting the css on a site she was building to work properly. She dug around and found out that it's a documented bug in how ie/win renders (ie/mac doesn't have the problem). From my reading of how the bug works, it sounds particularly to me like the problem is being created by the steps ie/win takes to make sure it works in broken code.
For those who might care, the bug is documented here and you're free to tell me that I'm wrong in my under-educated analysis and why.
But, basically, the law of unintended consequences can still bite you in the butt.
There are, periodically, plans circulated to do things like remove pennies from circulation or to replace the $1 bill with a coin (as Canada has). Those don't take into account a key thing about American money.
The penny has the face of Abraham Lincoln, and the $1 bill has the face of George Washington. These are two of the most (if not just the two most) universally popular presidents in American history. Removing them isn't going to be a politically popular thing to do.
Also, cash handlers are highly resistant to denomination changes -- this is why the $2 bill and $1 coin don't circulate well. Usually once a year the Federal Reserve Banks will send a bunch of them out to the banks and post offices, and they will give them out in change or with withdrawals until they are gone. Then some folks will hoard them, thinking they are collectible, and the rest will take them to stores and buy stuff with them. Cash drawers don't really have a space for them, so they get set aside where they don't get circulated again much (I used to circulate them to Canadian folks when I knew I had them and I was paid in Canadian currency, because Canadian folks seem to rather like them). The stores deposit them back in the banks, and the banks seem to send them back to the Reserve Banks where they sit until next year.
Currency reform in the US is a political no-win situation. There's no sense ticking people off about it. Just give us funny looking quarters every so often and we stay happy.
A few years back, when Comcast Cable was AT&T, I checked on the pricing for one of these business accounts that would let me put a server on. IIRC, it was about $300/month for the cheapest such service they provided (I've blocked on the setup fee -- not something I want to remember).
Just looking now on the Comcast site, the closest down/up parity I can find is 5Mbit/512kbit for $160/month and $250 setup -- and that brings one dynamic IP, with the ToS specifying that you can't run a server unless you get a package with a static IP (which they don't offer where I am -- I couldn't run a legal server with them at any price).
It's for Hatrackers. These folks have been doing role-play type posting in this "world" for more than a decade (they were going pretty heavy when I got to AOL, back when they used the GeoWorks interface). When Scott moved off of AOL to hatrack.com, they just moved over there, and have been going strong the whole time.
I don't think you're going to see this trying to be the next Everquest. The folks who want it will know about it (most already do) and we'll find out how many are willing to pay to use it. I'm not sure how it'll work out (I was never into the role-play part), but I know there are folks who will want to try it.
I was at EnderCon a few years back, and sat in on a panel with Prof. Michael Collings about the connection between the epic tradition and Enders Game (and, iirc, comic books). During the panel, Orson Scott Card slipped in and listened as Collings gave examples of literary devices in the text that were taken from the epic tradition, and were used at key pieces in the story.
After these were listed, Scott pointed out that every one of the things Collings mentioned was there, they were all intentional, and, if anybody noticed them on their first time through the story, he was failing in his job as a writer.
Scott has also said that Collings knows more about the meaning in his work than he does himself. I don't think this is unusual.
Please, every mail admin out there read this again. I own my own domain (guess which one), and I get as much spam from these bounces from addresses at my domain (none of which originated here) as I do in actual spam directed at me.
Among the more annoying are the lengthy "We think this is spam" messages. If you think it's spam, then delete it, but don't talk to me about it. I don't care what "From:" tells you -- it wasn't me.
I just got a call this morning from a friend that I set up with Firefox a week or two ago. She hadn't done any web-browsing in that time until yesterday, so she hadn't really commented on Firefox until this morning. She was really impressed with how smooth everything was -- how many pop-ups she wasn't getting, etc. Then I told her about "Flash-click-to-view" and she was pretty excited.
My "default" action when I see IE or OE icons on a desktop is to drag them to Recycle Bin. I do it reflexively, right after I cringe.
You want no anomalies in your elections? Yeah, that'll happen right after someone can code an operating system that has no bugs or security issues. Which is right after pigs fly, and right before monkeys fly out of my butt.
Thank God that'll never happen. I don't like monkeys.
Look, how about you go talk to some poll workers and get a clue about the weird crap that happens in a polling place, no matter how careful you are. For those who weren't paying attention, this was the largest turn-out election since WWII. Poll workers -- the ones that give out the ballots and handle them -- do this job perhaps as much as five days a year. And none of them has worked an election like this before -- none of them.
This is my third presidential election I've worked a poll -- the first time I was the one responsible for it. We had 100 (about 20%) more voters than this poll has ever seen before, and a substantial number of those voters have never voted before. I had one more worker (four instead of three) than we usually have, and I had twice the voting machines I usually have. I had the other three taking care of the folks voting a regular ballot, and I did the 92 provisional ballots in the day (for those who don't know, provisional ballots take substantially more time to process than regular ballots, including the new HAVA requirements that we give each provisional voter a method of determining the disposition of their ballot). I also took every voter who indicated that they'd never voted before, and every voter who had a question of how to vote, and walked them through the voting process (we're still using punch cards). I only had two voters stuff their ballots down inside the machine as a result (four years ago at this poll, there were four that did that), and I only had to spoil one ballot (which is unheard of).
Of those 92 provisional ballots I processed, three voters failed to follow the proper procedures, bringing me back their provisional ballots so they could sign the roster and the envelopes necessary for their ballots to be processed. Two of the three sealed their ballots in the plain white envelopes that preserve the secrecy of their ballots, but one did not. The two that did, I was able to put their ballots into the proper outer envelopes based on where they were in the ballot box when we opened it, but the third went into the mix, and there is no way of figuring out which ballot it was. The voter was an old lady who was confused about the process, so her daughter helped her vote. But her daughter didn't know about the rules for the provisional ballot, so she just dropped it in the ballot box and left.
So my poll, with two precincts, has an error of one ballot that can't be fixed. No computers involved (I dread the day we get them). Not a hanging chad issue. Just a simple, honest mistake by a careless voter who didn't stop to ask a question when she should have.
And it's possible that this ballot would have been counted anyhow -- she was issued an absentee ballot, and most likely didn't vote it, in which case it would have been opened and counted. But it doesn't matter anyhow -- that one vote error doesn't matter -- it's less than half of one percent of the votes from that poll. Nonetheless, I was very upset -- I don't want any anomolies either. I do my best to run a tight poll, and the observer who was there all day long -- an attorney familiar with election law -- had no complaint with how we did our jobs.
But I've still only spent two days in the past year working elections. The biggest year I've had we had four elections (two phony "emergency special" elections that year that were "emergencies" only so they could be one-issue elections where those who were supportive were most likely to show up and vote -- shockingly, both passed). If you know a way to stay absolutely on top of your game with a job that you'll do ten times in four years, with legal changes every year or two, and turn-out numbers that range from 15 (about what we're likely to
This is important for small retailers to remember -- along with the fact that most of them fail in the first six months. In small retail, you have to provide something that the big guys can't provide and that sufficient people want to pay you for to keep it alive. Yes, that's all kinda obvious, but people don't go into small business necessarily intending to give people what the people want -- they want to give the people what they want to give and get paid for it. Doesn't work all that often.
In big retail, though, the rules are different. If you've got a big name, a good location, products that are in demand and prices that are average-or-better, you will get substantial sales, and people will put up with mistreatment to get them.
Now, there are customers that aren't worth having. Where I used to work the policy was that we would do returns without receipts for people under certain conditions, and we took their drivers license number when we did because there was a limit to how many of them we would do. I remember working with a lady for her last such return that worked, and the first one that we wouldn't take. She had already done all the returns without receipts that she could do with her own drivers license, and had used her father's license as well, and now she had no further options. Keep in mind that, every time one of those returns was done, we emphasized that she needed to hang on to her receipts, and every receipt she got said right on it that it was required for returns. Nothing seemed to get through until I had to tell her I couldn't accept the return.
Anybody in retail can tell stories like this and worse. When you have thousands of customers a day, and a tenth of one percent of people are difficult, you will get several every day and most when you're too busy to deal with them effectively. The improvement of the experience of bringing an item to return which would come from just reading the information that's posted on the walls in big letters around the return area (preferably when buying the item, but even just at the time of the return) is hard to calculate. And the number of unfriendly policies that result from people ripping off the stores is huge -- dishonest people screw things up for everybody.
However, these do not explain the entirety of customer unfriendly policies that have come down -- they don't even come close. And, as I said, they will continue until/unless it can be proven that someone is being friendlier and is making more money because of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, Galileo got in at least as much trouble for writing a book that labeled the Pope as an idiot (not a really brilliant move) as he did for supporting the Copernican model. And he didn't get in all that much trouble in real terms even at that. Lots of Italians would have been happy to have had as good a life as he had being "punished."
It wasn't like he faced the Spanish Inquisition.
Teach them to dance.
I'm running Xandros OCE, and have been for about a year now. It was a nice install, and I like some stuff about the file manager. The packages they had to offer weren't what I wanted, so I added some regular debian repositories and, after breaking the Xandros desktop manager and switching to KDE, it's run fine. Updates via the Xandros system have been a little odd, but I'm running FF 1.5 and found the upgrade from 1.0x to be as pain-reduced as any FF upgrade I've done in terms of extension compatibility (but, then, I use MR Tech Local Install to insist that extension compatibility isn't an issue).
I like it because, for most of what I want to do, it just works -- I have easier support of thumb drives and my mp3 player than I do under windows (ME, the last windows license I will buy), upgrades are easier (if slower) and the File Manager automates creating symlinks, which I love about it.
I'm considering moving over to Kubuntu just to get some fresher software (had been planning to go Debian/Etch, and might yet, but Kubuntu is getting the buzz).
Actually, on Whedonesque, there were offers to help provide for legal costs, and some indication that the attorney helping 11th Hour was to some degree the product of donation from the community. So let's not be too quick to judge whether the community is contributing to this effort substantially. This is a community where individuals were known to buy out the tickets for entire showings of Serenity in the theater so they could give them away, or to buy boxed sets of the series and give them away to friends to get them hooked on it. For folks like that to donate $5 a head would not be a stretch, and that can add up when you're looking at the size of the Firefly community. Browncoats don't always know when to fight and when to run, but they tend to be very loyal toward their own, and Universal isn't in the crew unless the conjure they are.
Selling T-shirts for profit with your own designs, using none of the trademarked images or likenesses thereof is definitely a commercial endeavor. I suppose, if it were competing with similar products from those paying license fees for those images, it could be seen as unfair, if it used the same images or designs, or in any substantial way cashed in on the work of Universal. But evidence of that kind of thing hasn't been shown in my seeing. If somebody can show a bunch of Universal licensed t-shirts that are similar to products 11th Hour is selling (even if 11th Hour was selling them first), I'd be a bit more sympathetic to their claim of injury. I can't imagine that products with those trademarked images having any problem competing in the marketplace -- who's not going to want shirts with the faces of the BDHs with memorable lines and the Serenity logo? I'd love one with River standing in the doorway to the infirmary saying "Besides, I can kill you with my brain." But I'm having a hard time taking seriously a company of their size complaining about being injured by a small operation like this, and the other fan-based businesses they've been sending c&ds to. Especially with the idea that they're unfairly competing with the products they could license that would be way cooler than they can be without that material. Why aren't they discussing a licensing agreement with 11th Hour to bring that licensed material to play with the 11th Hour creativity that's capable of unfairly competing with the apparent wusses they've sold licenses to?
I appreciate to the end of the day Universal making this movie, and I don't want my displeasure with the choices of their legal division to get in the way of my gratitude on that count. I disagree with the folks who are calling for boycotts -- we're not going to make friends, nor movies, with that kind of approach. I think the site the FA is talking about is good at making a point that Universal is showing a lack of gratitude to those who have helped sell it's product, and that the suits in the other part of the Universal building should go to the folks at legal and suggest they back off with the jackboot approach and treat these folks like friends in a misunderstanding rather than thieves. That would be the smartest possible outcome for all involved, and I won't even bill them for the idea on the site the FA is about -- that one's gratis.
That would make sense if you'd never heard of Douglas MacArthur, I suppose, and want to pretend that the only things that had anything to do with those outcomes were the two nukes dropped on Japan and the firebombing of Dresden. Were it not for MacArthur's flatly brilliant handling of Japan after those bombs were dropped, Japan could have been a much worse nightmare than Iraq has turned out to be.
And Hitler was never convinced that the war wasn't worth fighting. He finally became convinced that the German people had failed him and didn't deserve to live. He gave the orders that all of the infrastructure that the Allies hadn't destroyed be destroyed, which would have darn near annihilated the German people.
Dropping two nukes on Japan was a very different act than nuking Medina would be. At the time, not only did nobody have nukes to respond with, nobody (much) had ever seen one go off. The Japanese culture at the time was far more monolithic than anything the Arab world has seen, with the Emperor worshipped as a God on Earth (Muslims would consider that blasphemy).
So did you really have something to say, or did you just want to show that you'd heard of the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden, and the nukes at Hiroshima or Nagasaki?
Or was this just a slashdottism of:
1. Nuke a city.
2. ???
3. ???
4. Profit!!
The Assad you're talking about was Hafez al Assad, who is dead. His son, Bashar, now rules in Syria. And he's approximately as much of a jerk as his father was, but he is nicer looking.
And what Assad was able to do within his own country is not something that would work for the US to do to another country. Like the ripples leaving a pebble thrown into a pond, unintended consequences go beyond our capacity to predict, and a nuke ain't no pebble. Simplistic solutions only solve simple problems, and this isn't a remotely simple situation. Strong military response is an important part of the solution, but it simply won't be enough. These are folks who are used to being treated badly by people they consider brothers -- we don't have the stomach to treat them badly enough to really make them fear us, and the world wouldn't tolerate it if we tried. Identifying and killing the worst is a good step, but we can't find them and kill them quickly enough.
Yeah, except for the part where they're already getting paid for their perceived losses due to the copying of CDs. Remember the Home Recording Act? The one that says that record companies get paid a "tax" on all recordable media that's sold as compensation for those perceived loses due to copying on that media? The one that, strangely enough, doesn't list computers as a recording device?
If it did, then a kid copying his CD for his friend would be legal, so long as the one doing the copying wasn't getting paid for it. If the copying is done with a cd copier, then it's legal already, paid for by you and me and everybody else who backs up their data using cdr/dvdr.
I'll grant, it might break the flow of your stream of stereotypes.
On the contrary "class" is a collective noun and, therefor, it takes plural verb forms in British English. Just like "herd," "flock," "gaggle" etc.
Since this is the pedantic thread, "soldiers are" is also proper British English for the group "soldiers," since collective nouns in British English take plural verbs. So, if you're talking to a Brit (or derivative) he can get pedantic right back.
And won't you just feel silly?
And, since we're still being pedantic, the proper term for attributing human emotions to nonhuman things is "anthropopathize," rather than "anthropomorphize," (the latter meaning, more literally, to give human shape).
You should never anthropopatize robots. They hate that.
Because they people who have no children aren't likely to have much of an impact on the world after they die. The people who do have children are more likely to have their values carried on to the next generation. And the people who are having as many children as they can aren't going to bow to your cultural superiority and reject their values.
If you want the vasectomy, by all means go for it.
Why look for help in irc? When you're looking to get a problem debugged and working in less than a month because it's going to take a series of steps that someone on irc can walk you through in a much shorter period of time.
That's why I've gone there -- when I'm pretty sure my answer is going to be relatively common knowledge to the knowledgable and I haven't been able to find anything approaching what I want in 20-30 google results.
When it works, I can give "okay, that works, it says X, now what?" or "Nope that didn't work, it says Y, now what?" replies to the channel and work through things rather quickly.
Sounds like they did you a favor to delete your more ranty stuff before the thread got slashdotted. You'd look like even more of a jerk.
I don't use Ubuntu -- I used debian-via-knoppix for about 18 months, and have recently switched to Xandros OCE and I'm reasonably happy with it.
From reading over the thread, it looks as though you had the expectation that the people who gave you the software for free were obliged to provide you with the answers to all of your demands for support sight unseen. This is the place where the problems in the thread came from.
Mind you, I know what it's like to ask a simple-sounding question and get a brief and obscure answer -- or a very ugly answer (like "back up your homedirs, format your hd, and do a fresh install with stable or testing" that I got on irc last month). It's frustrating. Part of where it comes from is not yet knowing enough to be able to ask the question which, when answered, will give you the information you need to fix the problem you've got. That's you, and that's me. I'm learning pieces as we go, and the learning curve isn't a lot of fun, but the nice thing about *nix stuff is that the things that you learn stay true (if not, always, relevant), as opposed to proprietary stuff, where the paradigms can change much more drastically and things you once knew have to be unlearned with annoying frequency.
However, when you're asking for free help, you need to remember that there isn't anybody there that has a stake in you fixing your problem. Not everybody who could answer your question chooses to hang around in those forums, and not everybody who does is going to give you the answer you want in the form you want to hear it. If you're not paying for their time, it is unreasonable to expect them to show a good customer service attitude. You're not a customer.
Now, some things you might have learned from this situation:
1) It's a smart idea to know where your Windows install CD is, especially when you're going to try something major with your system.
2) It's a smart idea to have a Knoppix CD on hand when you try something major with your system.
3) Having more than one physical HD in a system makes it a little non-standard, and standard answers might need a little tweaking to work right. The person who wrote the manual may not have taken the details of your situation into account, so this is something to research prior to trying to set things up on it.
4) The Thumper Principle works really, really well when asking for free help from strangers who have no reason to like you or do anything nice for you: If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. That's hard to do when you're really frustrated. In the words of Eric to Corey, "Life's hard, little brother. Get a helmet." Or, if you prefer "Life is pain, princess. Anybody who says otherwise is selling something." That which doesn't kill you will make you stronger, and you're not dead yet. Being nice to people is just generally a better idea when you have nothing to offer them that they need in return.
Not sure which, if any, of those lessons you have or will learned, but those jump out to me. I hope you've worked through the problem somehow by now.
I was wondering about this very thing when I read this post -- this has been the fact in America going back to audio-cassettes iirc. The labels get paid for blank media to offset the projected loss of revenue due to copying using that media.
This needs to be a bigger part of the discussion.
Word processing on the go? If you're going to have a flat surface (table, desk) to work from, it's hard to beat an older Palm (like the M125 or M130) with the folding portable keyboard. I can fit them both into my fanny pack (aka, my sporran) with plenty of room for wallet, keys, cell phone, etc. You can get the Palms used for ~$30-50 and the keyboards for about the same. With a good word processor (another $20-30) you will have a good, very light weight system that works on over-the-counter batteries with longer life each than you're going to find for comparable price with a lap top.
Handling broken code well has unintended consequences. A web-developing friend of mine was having a ton of problems getting the css on a site she was building to work properly. She dug around and found out that it's a documented bug in how ie/win renders (ie/mac doesn't have the problem). From my reading of how the bug works, it sounds particularly to me like the problem is being created by the steps ie/win takes to make sure it works in broken code.
For those who might care, the bug is documented here and you're free to tell me that I'm wrong in my under-educated analysis and why.
But, basically, the law of unintended consequences can still bite you in the butt.
There are, periodically, plans circulated to do things like remove pennies from circulation or to replace the $1 bill with a coin (as Canada has). Those don't take into account a key thing about American money.
The penny has the face of Abraham Lincoln, and the $1 bill has the face of George Washington. These are two of the most (if not just the two most) universally popular presidents in American history. Removing them isn't going to be a politically popular thing to do.
Also, cash handlers are highly resistant to denomination changes -- this is why the $2 bill and $1 coin don't circulate well. Usually once a year the Federal Reserve Banks will send a bunch of them out to the banks and post offices, and they will give them out in change or with withdrawals until they are gone. Then some folks will hoard them, thinking they are collectible, and the rest will take them to stores and buy stuff with them. Cash drawers don't really have a space for them, so they get set aside where they don't get circulated again much (I used to circulate them to Canadian folks when I knew I had them and I was paid in Canadian currency, because Canadian folks seem to rather like them). The stores deposit them back in the banks, and the banks seem to send them back to the Reserve Banks where they sit until next year.
Currency reform in the US is a political no-win situation. There's no sense ticking people off about it. Just give us funny looking quarters every so often and we stay happy.
A few years back, when Comcast Cable was AT&T, I checked on the pricing for one of these business accounts that would let me put a server on. IIRC, it was about $300/month for the cheapest such service they provided (I've blocked on the setup fee -- not something I want to remember).
Just looking now on the Comcast site, the closest down/up parity I can find is 5Mbit/512kbit for $160/month and $250 setup -- and that brings one dynamic IP, with the ToS specifying that you can't run a server unless you get a package with a static IP (which they don't offer where I am -- I couldn't run a legal server with them at any price).
Then you're disregarding the terms of the unamended Constitution itself -- those other amendments satisfy its requirements.
Look, I'm not thrilled with everything there either, including #16, but don't be silly.
It's for Hatrackers. These folks have been doing role-play type posting in this "world" for more than a decade (they were going pretty heavy when I got to AOL, back when they used the GeoWorks interface). When Scott moved off of AOL to hatrack.com, they just moved over there, and have been going strong the whole time.
I don't think you're going to see this trying to be the next Everquest. The folks who want it will know about it (most already do) and we'll find out how many are willing to pay to use it. I'm not sure how it'll work out (I was never into the role-play part), but I know there are folks who will want to try it.
I was at EnderCon a few years back, and sat in on a panel with Prof. Michael Collings about the connection between the epic tradition and Enders Game (and, iirc, comic books). During the panel, Orson Scott Card slipped in and listened as Collings gave examples of literary devices in the text that were taken from the epic tradition, and were used at key pieces in the story.
After these were listed, Scott pointed out that every one of the things Collings mentioned was there, they were all intentional, and, if anybody noticed them on their first time through the story, he was failing in his job as a writer.
Scott has also said that Collings knows more about the meaning in his work than he does himself. I don't think this is unusual.
Please, every mail admin out there read this again. I own my own domain (guess which one), and I get as much spam from these bounces from addresses at my domain (none of which originated here) as I do in actual spam directed at me.
Among the more annoying are the lengthy "We think this is spam" messages. If you think it's spam, then delete it, but don't talk to me about it. I don't care what "From:" tells you -- it wasn't me.
Yes, he is. Is Tim Kyger still working for him? Tim is also quite cool.
I just got a call this morning from a friend that I set up with Firefox a week or two ago. She hadn't done any web-browsing in that time until yesterday, so she hadn't really commented on Firefox until this morning. She was really impressed with how smooth everything was -- how many pop-ups she wasn't getting, etc. Then I told her about "Flash-click-to-view" and she was pretty excited.
My "default" action when I see IE or OE icons on a desktop is to drag them to Recycle Bin. I do it reflexively, right after I cringe.
Sometimes people get upset about that.
You want no anomalies in your elections? Yeah, that'll happen right after someone can code an operating system that has no bugs or security issues. Which is right after pigs fly, and right before monkeys fly out of my butt.
Thank God that'll never happen. I don't like monkeys.
Look, how about you go talk to some poll workers and get a clue about the weird crap that happens in a polling place, no matter how careful you are. For those who weren't paying attention, this was the largest turn-out election since WWII. Poll workers -- the ones that give out the ballots and handle them -- do this job perhaps as much as five days a year. And none of them has worked an election like this before -- none of them.
This is my third presidential election I've worked a poll -- the first time I was the one responsible for it. We had 100 (about 20%) more voters than this poll has ever seen before, and a substantial number of those voters have never voted before. I had one more worker (four instead of three) than we usually have, and I had twice the voting machines I usually have. I had the other three taking care of the folks voting a regular ballot, and I did the 92 provisional ballots in the day (for those who don't know, provisional ballots take substantially more time to process than regular ballots, including the new HAVA requirements that we give each provisional voter a method of determining the disposition of their ballot). I also took every voter who indicated that they'd never voted before, and every voter who had a question of how to vote, and walked them through the voting process (we're still using punch cards). I only had two voters stuff their ballots down inside the machine as a result (four years ago at this poll, there were four that did that), and I only had to spoil one ballot (which is unheard of).
Of those 92 provisional ballots I processed, three voters failed to follow the proper procedures, bringing me back their provisional ballots so they could sign the roster and the envelopes necessary for their ballots to be processed. Two of the three sealed their ballots in the plain white envelopes that preserve the secrecy of their ballots, but one did not. The two that did, I was able to put their ballots into the proper outer envelopes based on where they were in the ballot box when we opened it, but the third went into the mix, and there is no way of figuring out which ballot it was. The voter was an old lady who was confused about the process, so her daughter helped her vote. But her daughter didn't know about the rules for the provisional ballot, so she just dropped it in the ballot box and left.
So my poll, with two precincts, has an error of one ballot that can't be fixed. No computers involved (I dread the day we get them). Not a hanging chad issue. Just a simple, honest mistake by a careless voter who didn't stop to ask a question when she should have.
And it's possible that this ballot would have been counted anyhow -- she was issued an absentee ballot, and most likely didn't vote it, in which case it would have been opened and counted. But it doesn't matter anyhow -- that one vote error doesn't matter -- it's less than half of one percent of the votes from that poll. Nonetheless, I was very upset -- I don't want any anomolies either. I do my best to run a tight poll, and the observer who was there all day long -- an attorney familiar with election law -- had no complaint with how we did our jobs.
But I've still only spent two days in the past year working elections. The biggest year I've had we had four elections (two phony "emergency special" elections that year that were "emergencies" only so they could be one-issue elections where those who were supportive were most likely to show up and vote -- shockingly, both passed). If you know a way to stay absolutely on top of your game with a job that you'll do ten times in four years, with legal changes every year or two, and turn-out numbers that range from 15 (about what we're likely to
This is important for small retailers to remember -- along with the fact that most of them fail in the first six months. In small retail, you have to provide something that the big guys can't provide and that sufficient people want to pay you for to keep it alive. Yes, that's all kinda obvious, but people don't go into small business necessarily intending to give people what the people want -- they want to give the people what they want to give and get paid for it. Doesn't work all that often.
In big retail, though, the rules are different. If you've got a big name, a good location, products that are in demand and prices that are average-or-better, you will get substantial sales, and people will put up with mistreatment to get them.
Now, there are customers that aren't worth having. Where I used to work the policy was that we would do returns without receipts for people under certain conditions, and we took their drivers license number when we did because there was a limit to how many of them we would do. I remember working with a lady for her last such return that worked, and the first one that we wouldn't take. She had already done all the returns without receipts that she could do with her own drivers license, and had used her father's license as well, and now she had no further options. Keep in mind that, every time one of those returns was done, we emphasized that she needed to hang on to her receipts, and every receipt she got said right on it that it was required for returns. Nothing seemed to get through until I had to tell her I couldn't accept the return.
Anybody in retail can tell stories like this and worse. When you have thousands of customers a day, and a tenth of one percent of people are difficult, you will get several every day and most when you're too busy to deal with them effectively. The improvement of the experience of bringing an item to return which would come from just reading the information that's posted on the walls in big letters around the return area (preferably when buying the item, but even just at the time of the return) is hard to calculate. And the number of unfriendly policies that result from people ripping off the stores is huge -- dishonest people screw things up for everybody.
However, these do not explain the entirety of customer unfriendly policies that have come down -- they don't even come close. And, as I said, they will continue until/unless it can be proven that someone is being friendlier and is making more money because of it.