Re:Why is more dimensions "better"
on
3D User Interfaces
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Let's talk real 3D, glasses and all. This would completely change everything and for the better.
Yes, let's talk about this "better" world.
Putting things in a real background,
Okay in a real 3D, there is no "background", just like how there's no "background" in real life. There's just things that are farther away. The way you put things in the "background" is either by schlepping the window 5km away from where you're working, and then then return the 5km to your primary worksite. This method is incredibly annoying and inefficent.
Or you can perfom some action that moves automatically moves the window 5km, then perform some action that automatically retrieves the window from 5km away. How this is different from a 2d interface iconifying a window to a thumbnail, I don't know.
3D video,
Well all that requires is a 3d video player, not really a 3d interface, unless of course you're talking about fully immersive virtual reality, but I'm assuming your not.
parking windows,
I'm not familiar with parking windows.
3D representations of CD cases instead of ID3 tags,
Another example is all those media player skins that resemble radios, tubas, organ grinders, and what not. These are widely considered to be very poorly designed interfaces. Whatever intuitiveness is gained by modeling the interface to superficially resemble a real world device is lost the moment the user tries to use it. You can't twist dials easily with a mouse. It's much slower to click a series of button widgets, than press physical buttons. Compare onscreen keyboards to your physical keyboards.
Let's change your idea from id3 tags to cddb files, since id3tags are per track, and cd cases are per album. Right now I click "view info" and get a window that displays the tracklisting and possibly the album cover. With your idea I would click "view info" and magically the cd case would fly into view. I would then need to rotate the case to view the track listing, and then rotate it again to view the cover art. Presumably the case would be textured in high resolution scans of the physical cd's artwork. As anyone who has viewed the back cover art can attest, it's not always easily read (i.e. screwy fonts, text that spirals around the outside edge, tracks not always listed in order, etc.).
3D website deisgn
Of course websites are mostly text, an intrinsicly 2d object. So it's unclear on how you would actually add a third dimension to this. Sure you display one page, and then display outgoing pages farther away, but if you can't read them, then what's the point. You could achieve this same thing by displaying a thumbnail of the link's destination in a traditional 2d interface.
I think the thumbnail idea is alot more plausible than that Johnny Mnemonic crap.
remote control of real world objects
I'll give you this one if the device interacts in the world in 3d. So, a robot arm? Yes. A furnace? No.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that all 3d are pure crap. I'm saying use them where appropriate (CAD, geospatial, some simulation, spreadsheets), and not where it's not (text, photographs, cd players,...) >This is just another fantastic way to waste the CPU
So is anti-aliasing, so is even having a windowing system that isn't completely and utterly bare bones, etc.
Anti-aliasing isn't simply eyecandy. It enhances the user experience by making text easier to read. The easier it is read, the easier the user can perform his task.
For better or worse, according to the W3C, opening windows via JavaScript is the only proper way to create new windows. In fact, the target attribute has been removed from standard HTML since at least HTML 4.01 strict.
*BZZZRT* Sorry. You're wrong. Removal of the "target" attribute would break frames, which is still HTML 4. Even on the page you linked to "target" is still listed as a valid attributed. Blockquoth the page:
Attributes defined elsewhere
* id, class (document-wide identifiers)
* lang (language information), dir (text direction)
* title (element title)
* style (inline style information )
* shape and coords (image maps)
* onfocus, onblur, onclick, ondblclick, onmousedown, onmouseup, onmouseover, onmousemove, onmouseout, onkeypress, onkeydown, onkeyup (intrinsic events ) * target (target frame information)
* tabindex (tabbing navigation)
* accesskey (access keys)
Even the current draft of XHTML 2.0 doesn't remove the "target" attributed. It doesn't place any restrictions on the attribute, but rather passes that duty to the environment the link was in. For instance, XFRAMES. XFRAMES does not specify "_blank", or any frame id for the matter. It does state that, "If no matching id is found, then the targetted resource is processed in an entirely new environment (for instance, a visual browser might open a new window)." So just as long as you don't specify a frame id as "_blank", "_blank" will work exactly as expected.
Obviously, the ads were not very widespread or well-targeted. So much for the highly educated hard work involved.
Wide enough apparently. You found out about it. Anyway class action lawsuits aren't about getting every single victim. They're about getting a representitive number (sometimes as small as 5) of defendents. The main purpose of such lawsuits isn't reparations, but rather punative action.
The lawyers were not a party to the original transactions but feed off the reparation.
Which, you agreed to. No one forced you hire the lawyer. You made that decision. No one forced you to agree to the terms of payment. You made that decision as well.
People being payed to perform a service to enable another transaction is nothing new. Real estate agents for one typical earn a commission for successfully pairing sellers and buyers. Would say real estate agents weren't providing a useful service?
If your car is stolen and then recovered by the police, does the officer get half your car? Does he get a percentage of it? You will say that the officer is already being paid - so don't -
Well that's the crux of it. How payment for services rendered is achieved.
if legal services were freely available as a tax-paid public service for all, that would be fine.
There has never been a right to representation in civil cases. The reason is society is not a party to the acts. Unlike crime, which is seen as an act against the state. That's why all criminal cases begin "The people of ________ vs ___________".
Given that, how would you pay the lawyer you hired? Many lawyers work for a flat fee, or on hourly rates based on the work involved. For large cases that take many months and years to complete and enlist the services of large teams of lawyers, a commission system is used. The commission system has a long historical precedent and is used in many advocacy occupations, mainly those involving commercial transactions and asset recovery. The very things lawyers do.
You really don't have any idea about professional ethics. Professional ethics do not allow you to put your client/customer's interests above the good of society
Society is harmed when one is not allowed to put up a vigourous legal defense. Society is harmed when the standard of guilt is lessened. Society is harmed when someone not on the jury is allowed tip the legal scales. That is how society is harmed when a lawyer does perfom to the best his abilities.
As far as the ACM and IEEE, neither of them are professional societies advocacy professionals, and are therefore irrelevant. I would suggest the ABA or whatever the accountants group is, or even the AMA. As an advocate, your job is to work in your client's interest while not breaking the law. If you don't, you've violated that trust.
If the use of "congresscritters" is avoided by "Intellgent" people, then there are some mainstream columnists as well as few hundred-thousand Slashbots who are thereby rendered un-"intellgent".
And this negates my statement how?
Drop out of the Ann Coulter School of Writing, and and get yourself a real education, like David Brooks, William Safire, Andrew Sullivan, or Bill Kristol to name but a few.
Obviously. Making law is the flip side of practicing law, and if you luck out, you get a black robe and get to interpret the law! Although I have to admit I have more respect for judges than lawyers or lawmakers.
Yet you fail to reconcile how congress is pro-lawyer when tort reform is high on the current agenda.
Consistently nothing. First it was that lawyers enforce the law;
When did I say they didn't. The only confusion I can see is that you got criminal law and civil law confused. I'm talking about civil law, but that should have been obvious given the introduction of the topic (class action lawsuits).
Of course, 600 years ago a "peer review" would call you a crank for saying the world was round.
Your view of scientific knowledge of 600 years ago is somewhat lacking. It was well established in the year 500BCE that that the earth was indeed round, and was belived to have a size roughly to the actual size of the Earth. (The error came from assuming a perfect sphere.) Even in the year 1400 round earthers were the norm. Columbus wasn't some visionary. He just was a politcally connected sailor.
If there was anyone allowed to watch I'd say China would be the biggest polluter
You mean like with environmental satelites right? Oh wait, we do have those.
You don't know what your talking about. Its farily easy to determine where emissions are coming from. All study show that the largest sourcee of greenhouse gasses come from united states, namely from the high penetration of automobiles. More specificaslly, automobiles carrying one person stuck in traffic during long commutes.
But I'm sure those damn muckity muck liberal scientists are just trying to make us feel bad.
I found out about the suit from a story on Slashdot and followed the link.
So from a story based on a press release, which are in effect an advertisement.
You still have not explained how you would have gone about getting your six dollars without enlisting the help of those "parasitic" lawyers.
>You're a hypocrite.
I'm not, you are! Geez, grow up, guy.
Well, at least the irony of that statement isn't lost one of us.
You complain about people using lawyers to sue for money you think they don't deserve, (e.g "victims of car accidents who didn't receive TLC") yet you take part in a lawsuit for damages accrued from purchasing a CD you wanted for a price you agreed to. You complain that lawyers advertise their services to these deadbeats, yet you didn't even realize harm was done to you, until a lawyer told you there was. Then you turn around and call those that perfomed all the work to bring you a check, "parasites". Interesting. You perfomed no service. You performed no action other than saying "gimme!". Yet, you receive a benefit. Sounds like parasitic behavior to me.
Perhaps I do have a basic misunderstanding of how lawyers operate. I thought that they had to take a professional oath and that they were supposed to decline frivoluous claims and advise their clients not to do dishonest things. Sanitation workers aren't violating ethics by handling your trash, while many lawyers are.
If I found out my lawyer wasn't doing everything in his power to win, then I'd fire him, and so would you.
You seem to have no concern for ethics.
I never said break the law. What I said was that it is unethical for you not to work to the best of your abilities when someone placed his trust in you. There's a whole field of ethics about that. It's called "professional ethics.
Again, Geragos. O.J. Simpson.
In order to use the word "again", there had to be a "before".
Geragos didn't have anything to do with OJ.
Yes, OJ is murderer, but the lawyers at fault aren't the defense. It's the prosecution. They managed to botch a slamdunk case. The jurors didn't understand that DNA matches was on the order of 1 in a billion, rather than 1 in 6. The prosecution setup the defense beautifully by having OJ try on the glove, which obviously wouldn't "fit", because 1) the leather shrank from being in a pool of blood, 2) no one wheres tight leather gloves while wearing latex gloves, and, most importantly, 3) OJ wouldn't put them on correctly. The prosecution allowed the defense to put Mark Furhman on trial. These were obvious mistakes and lapses of judgement. Yes, lawyers got OJ off. It was just the State's lawyers.
I believe that lawyers are not supposed to lie or knowingly help the guilty to circumvent justice. When a lawyer says, "Don't tell me anything except you're innocent," that a breach of ethics IMHO.
They don't lie. They make an argument by selectively illustrating facts. The differnce is, everything they say is true. If people come to the wrong conclusion, then they should have been more discerning.
It doesn't doesnt matter whether or not the lawyer's client is guilty or innocent. Everyone deserves a strong defense. It's not for the defendent's lawyer to decide whether or not he is guilty. That's the jury's job.
As I pointed out previously, my congresscritters are lawyers who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and they don't really agree with my views,
Perhaps your congressman would take them more seriously if you didn't use terms "congresscritters". Terms like that aren't witty. They're juvenile. Intellgent people don't use them. Neither
This should be easy, even for you. The parasites are the ones who made all the money while not being involved in the original monetary transactions: the lawyers.
So the ones who were sought out by parties, and successfully provided the service do not deserve to be compensated for their time and effort?
Pray tell, how would you have gone about receiving your six dollars? And while you're at it, tell me how you found out that there was even a class action suit for you to join?
I mean like those lawyers who put late night commercials on TV asking if you have pain from your car accident and feel you weren't given the TLC you deserve, and how you really deserve some money for your supposed pain.
You mean like those lawyers who ran advertisements saying, "Did you buy a CD? You may be owed money! Call us today!"? You're a hypocrite.
Or are objecting that someone would dare advertise their services to the public?
You seem to have a lack of the basic understanding of how lawyers operate. Someone off the street comes to them and says, "I want to sue this person." The lawyer then sues that person, and is paid. The transaction is no different from your afore mentioned sanitation workers. ("Do you need trash picked up? Call us!")
So perverting the law to help a client is okay? Gee, weren't you just saying lawers enforce the law? They pervert the law in order to make a reputation and more money.
There's always two sides to the conflict, and both sides are using every tactic at their disposal to win. If the parties' lawyers aren't doing that, then the lawyers are either negligent or incompetent. If I found out my lawyer wasn't doing everything in his power to win, then I'd fire him, and so would you.
What you call the "perversion" of the law is really just making an argument based on the letter of the law, and pitting two conflicting laws against each other, and revealing how the law has previously been enforced. The law is complecated, and at times contradictory. Lawsuits allow the courts to clarify the law. If you don't like how the law the law is being applied, write your congressman and have the law changed.
Does the name Geragos and his purchase of property near a courthouse mean anything to you?
And your point is?
Twice now you've tried to use non sequiturs anecdotes as evidence to buttress your argument. Contrary to helping your argument, it reveals your lack of skills in forming a coherent argument. Take a rhetoric class. You need it.
BS. The system is rigged to force you to hire one. My brother was set up for termination (and he was backed up by other employees) and could not get documents from his (previous) employer because they would only release them to legal counsel. It took a retainer to get the documents.
Your brother could have filed a document indicating that he was serving as his own legal counsel. The fact that he didn't realize that he could have done that shows that he was unqualified to act in legal proceedings and was in desperate need of trained legal counsel. Hiring a lawyer was the prudent choice.
So you're saying all settlement money really belongs to the lawyers even though it is in compensation for a wrong done to someone else.
No. I'm saying the lawyers deserve to financially compensated for services rendered.
The injured party should just be grateful for some scraps from the lawyer's table. How's your law degree coming along? You can try to as hard as you want to make a silk purse from a sow's ear, but it still won't happen.
You agreed to pay them the fee. If it was too much, take your buisness elsewhere. Anyway, by law, the majority of any settlement must go to the injured party.
The settlement was a pittance for the victims. Obviously, the RIAA had better lawyers, or the amount would have been greater. The lawyers on both sides made the real money.
You're complaining that someone got paid for bringing you check that all you did to receive was file up behind the sign that read "free money". Now, who's the parasite?
Do you realize how incredibly valuable ambulance chasers are to society?
You mean like those "ambulance chasers" that do product liability cases because a corporation instead of spending the extra nickel per unit for a safety valve, decided to knowingly put their customers health and safety at risk? You mean those "ambulance chasers" that tilt the economic incentives towards safety instead of risk? Those lawyers? How dare they!
When you can buy the right to issue subpoenas and bypass due process, that's a problem.
I never said it wasn't.
The majority of US senators are lawyers.
And your point is?
So do sanitation engineers, and IMHO, they're far more valuable to society than a bunch of parasites who make a living from fomenting confrontations and bleeding both sides while trying to pervert the law in their favor.
How do lawyers pervert the law into their favor? Now they may pervert the law in their client's favor, but I've never heard of lawyers perverting the law for lawyers. There's a big difference.
Lawyers don't exist in a vaccuum. As I said, they're hired guns. The confrontations lawyers resolve already exist. The same civil lawyer that was facing off against you yesterday, can be yours today if you pay his fee. In fact, that happens all the time.
Lawyers don't bleed both sides. They are hired by both sides. If you don't want to pay one, don't hire one! Second in cases of tort, if you win you don't pay the lawyer. The losing side does, either directly or indirectly through a a commission based on the award. Since the awarde money wasn't yours to begin with, it's not like the lawyers took any money from you. Of course you agreed to the terms when you hired the lawyer, but I'm sure that's just a technicality.
And who has all the best lawyers? Any class action suit (like the one against the RIAA) results in a check for six dollars (I got one) for the injured party and millions for the lawyers.
Well in this case, the members of the class action suit had the better lawyers. They won a settlement that resulted in a cash pay out.
Did you really expect to you'd get more than a token amount? Look how many people were part of the suit, and how much money you could reasonably expect was going to be paid out. You should be glad you got a check. Most of price fixing suits end with coupons, or promises to lower prices in the future.
Do you realize how many highly educated and highly skilled people were involved in bringing the suit and negotiating the settlement? Do you realize how much each one of those individuals is worth in the market?
You got a check for six dollars, and what did you do for it? Oh that's right you filled out a webpage, then sat on your ass for a check to come. When it came, you complained that people that actually worked for months and years to bring you that check got more money. Guess what? They earned more money.
Sure they do. Despite all the civil and criminal prosecutions of the RIAA and its members, it's the RIAA that is making (and enforcing) the laws by buying legislation.
I fail to see what tort has to do with undue influence over politicians. This problem is about cost of campaigns and how they are financed.
Despite the TV shows you watch, lawyers are not out save the world or adopt all the orphans they run across while doing community service for their coke problems; they're out to make money.
When did I say that? Of course they're capitalists. The vast majority society is capitalists. Lawyers are hired guns. Lawyers are skilled professionals. Yes, they get paid very well, and by and large they deserve it. Anyone does who:
invests large amounds of time, effort, and money in an education
perfoms complex tasks that most of society can not
actually does their job well
I never said lawyers act out of the goodness of their heart. What I said was they perform a needed function of society, and without tort society would fall apart.
So without huge payments to lawyers, some people would be better off and some people would be worse off.
No. A lot of people would be much worse off, and a few would be much better off. The reason corporations hate lawyers and class action lawsuites is because it enables the plebs to band togother and actually enforce the law. That's it. Courts find against you, if you broke the law. It may be civil law, but it's still the law.
The reason why money is involved, is because that's the only thing courts can deal with. If you go blind, the court can give back your sight, the can only give you money.
Since lawyers consume so much and produce nothing at all, it's not hard to argue that the people who do produce things would be better off, on average, without lawyers.
Produce nothing? They change someones behavior, and through extension society as a whole. Without lawyers, we'd be anarchy. Like it or not lawyers enforce the laws. (Yes, Kohath, the government is primaryly lawyers.)
You may think "yeah kill all the lawyers", but its a very sophmoric attitude.
Shortly after the warranty expired (Isn't that how it always works?) my i8k began to lock up at random intervals. When power cycle the machine the bios wouldn't even finish booting. A few power cycles later, then it work. Eventually I determined that it was a hardware problem. Something is loose inside the machine, because lifting up on the back left corner seems to help, but of course disassembling the system doesn't find anything obviously wrong.
Probably the saddest part of this experience is that a friend of mine said he had the same laptop at work, and the same thing happened to his. I wouldn't get another Dell.
In fact I'm kind of wary of laptops in general anymore.
If all you're looking for is a player that is filename agnostic and supports autoqueuing, check out Grind. It's web based, easy to install, supports any codec you've got a player for, and most importantly supports intellegent autoqueuing based on observing your preferences.
I use it all the time. In fact I'm using it right now.
This doesn't keep a consistent menu, which is totally annoying.
It's not just that the items in the menu change, but the order of the items change in the menu. It completely destroys muscle memory and spatial awareness. When a user utilizes the menus he knows about where the item he wants is or will be located. Typically the user moves the pointer rapidly to the items general neighborhood and then much more slowly selects the item in question. With the menu order changing the user suddenly finds the pointer in the wrong part of the menu, and becomes disoriented. This is incredibly frustrating.
Yes, having menus only display the items the user actually requires does improve usability. Frequently adding and removing items automagically does not.
I've found at work and at home that Windows (since late NT4) can be quite stable ~if~ you don't install tons of junk software. [...] My machine doesn't lock up and it doesn't crash and neither does hers.
Huh. When I had an NT4 box sitting on my desk at work, it crashed so often, I kept a record of its crashes. It had a median uptime of 96 hours. That's 4 days. It was horrible.
None of us could ever prove it, but we suspected the problem was Exceed.
This was my long term experience with NT4. My machine at home dual boots between Debian unstable and Win98. I don't really use winXP machines for any long term. I can't comment on the state of the world now, but my experience with NT4 was a suckfest.
Fortunately, many medical texts are available online which contain the information needed to self-diagnose.
When I read this I was reminded of what my abnormal psych professor said at the start of class. "Don't start reading ahead. Don't just open the DSM-IV and start reading about wierd psychological problems. You're all perfectly normal and sane. When we study obsessive compulsive disorders, all of you are going to start thinking, 'I have these symptoms. I have OCD!'. You don't. When we start start reading about schizophrenia and people talking to themselves, and hearing voices, you're going to think, 'Wow! I talk to myself all the time. I'm schizo!'. You're not. None of you have the training or experience to diagnose anything. Don't act like you do."
Everytime you change doctors, you're starting the diagnosis over at step one. When you come in and say "I have disease X. Give me xyzzy, that new perscription drug I've seen on tv." The doctor thinks, "hypochondriac".
The reason he initially thinks it's "the thing going around", is because 90% of the time it is. Only when that treatment fails, will the doctor move off that. Instead of actually going back to the doctor in two weeks like he suggested, you go to another doctor who says, "Hypochondriac. Take the antibiotic and come back in two weeks if it's not working." Instead of moving to step 2, you've decided to shop around until you find someone who is willing to start at step 6. No wonder it's hard for you to find a doctor.
Best bet is to talk to a local teamster rep. If you can't find one, head to a local UPS. They are there.
I believe the Communications Workers of America were the ones looking to organize software engineerings. The teamsters drive trucks. Both unions are AFL-CIO, so the teamsters would be able to put you in touch with the right people though.
In two separate locations, employees attempted to form a union. Employees were fired and that put an end to that idea.
The union organizers should hire a labor attorney and sue the company for unlawful termination. There's laws about retaliation. Convergys acted illegally, and should be prosecuted.
Yes, it's good that Gtk is using the standard file chooser. The bad thing is the Gtk file chooser is massively broken. Who ever designed that doesn't have clue about user interfaces. They removed the text entry box! Apparently they thought knew better than 30 years of GUI development.
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Why not breed a dog with a cat, and produce man's best friend who ignores him?
That's not what you get. You get a miracle hybrid, with the loyalty of a cat and the cleanliness of a dog.
Let's talk real 3D, glasses and all. This would completely change everything and for the better.
...)
Yes, let's talk about this "better" world.
Putting things in a real background,
Okay in a real 3D, there is no "background", just like how there's no "background" in real life. There's just things that are farther away. The way you put things in the "background" is either by schlepping the window 5km away from where you're working, and then then return the 5km to your primary worksite. This method is incredibly annoying and inefficent.
Or you can perfom some action that moves automatically moves the window 5km, then perform some action that automatically retrieves the window from 5km away. How this is different from a 2d interface iconifying a window to a thumbnail, I don't know.
3D video,
Well all that requires is a 3d video player, not really a 3d interface, unless of course you're talking about fully immersive virtual reality, but I'm assuming your not.
parking windows,
I'm not familiar with parking windows.
3D representations of CD cases instead of ID3 tags,
Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt.
Another example is all those media player skins that resemble radios, tubas, organ grinders, and what not. These are widely considered to be very poorly designed interfaces. Whatever intuitiveness is gained by modeling the interface to superficially resemble a real world device is lost the moment the user tries to use it. You can't twist dials easily with a mouse. It's much slower to click a series of button widgets, than press physical buttons. Compare onscreen keyboards to your physical keyboards.
Let's change your idea from id3 tags to cddb files, since id3tags are per track, and cd cases are per album. Right now I click "view info" and get a window that displays the tracklisting and possibly the album cover. With your idea I would click "view info" and magically the cd case would fly into view. I would then need to rotate the case to view the track listing, and then rotate it again to view the cover art. Presumably the case would be textured in high resolution scans of the physical cd's artwork. As anyone who has viewed the back cover art can attest, it's not always easily read (i.e. screwy fonts, text that spirals around the outside edge, tracks not always listed in order, etc.).
3D website deisgn
Of course websites are mostly text, an intrinsicly 2d object. So it's unclear on how you would actually add a third dimension to this. Sure you display one page, and then display outgoing pages farther away, but if you can't read them, then what's the point. You could achieve this same thing by displaying a thumbnail of the link's destination in a traditional 2d interface.
I think the thumbnail idea is alot more plausible than that Johnny Mnemonic crap.
remote control of real world objects
I'll give you this one if the device interacts in the world in 3d. So, a robot arm? Yes. A furnace? No.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that all 3d are pure crap. I'm saying use them where appropriate (CAD, geospatial, some simulation, spreadsheets), and not where it's not (text, photographs, cd players,
>This is just another fantastic way to waste the CPU
So is anti-aliasing, so is even having a windowing system that isn't completely and utterly bare bones, etc.
Anti-aliasing isn't simply eyecandy. It enhances the user experience by making text easier to read. The easier it is read, the easier the user can perform his task.
Some of us buy our CPUs to use them, not coddle t
*BZZZRT* Sorry. You're wrong. Removal of the "target" attribute would break frames, which is still HTML 4. Even on the page you linked to "target" is still listed as a valid attributed. Blockquoth the page:
Following the "target" link to the "frames" section, you'll find a link to recognized HTML link targets in HTML 4
Even the current draft of XHTML 2.0 doesn't remove the "target" attributed. It doesn't place any restrictions on the attribute, but rather passes that duty to the environment the link was in. For instance, XFRAMES. XFRAMES does not specify "_blank", or any frame id for the matter. It does state that, "If no matching id is found, then the targetted resource is processed in an entirely new environment (for instance, a visual browser might open a new window)." So just as long as you don't specify a frame id as "_blank", "_blank" will work exactly as expected.
Obviously, the ads were not very widespread or well-targeted. So much for the highly educated hard work involved.
Wide enough apparently. You found out about it. Anyway class action lawsuits aren't about getting every single victim. They're about getting a representitive number (sometimes as small as 5) of defendents. The main purpose of such lawsuits isn't reparations, but rather punative action.
The lawyers were not a party to the original transactions but feed off the reparation.
Which, you agreed to. No one forced you hire the lawyer. You made that decision. No one forced you to agree to the terms of payment. You made that decision as well.
People being payed to perform a service to enable another transaction is nothing new. Real estate agents for one typical earn a commission for successfully pairing sellers and buyers. Would say real estate agents weren't providing a useful service?
If your car is stolen and then recovered by the police, does the officer get half your car? Does he get a percentage of it? You will say that the officer is already being paid - so don't -
Well that's the crux of it. How payment for services rendered is achieved.
if legal services were freely available as a tax-paid public service for all, that would be fine.
There has never been a right to representation in civil cases. The reason is society is not a party to the acts. Unlike crime, which is seen as an act against the state. That's why all criminal cases begin "The people of ________ vs ___________".
Given that, how would you pay the lawyer you hired? Many lawyers work for a flat fee, or on hourly rates based on the work involved. For large cases that take many months and years to complete and enlist the services of large teams of lawyers, a commission system is used. The commission system has a long historical precedent and is used in many advocacy occupations, mainly those involving commercial transactions and asset recovery. The very things lawyers do.
You really don't have any idea about professional ethics. Professional ethics do not allow you to put your client/customer's interests above the good of society
Society is harmed when one is not allowed to put up a vigourous legal defense. Society is harmed when the standard of guilt is lessened. Society is harmed when someone not on the jury is allowed tip the legal scales. That is how society is harmed when a lawyer does perfom to the best his abilities.
As far as the ACM and IEEE, neither of them are professional societies advocacy professionals, and are therefore irrelevant. I would suggest the ABA or whatever the accountants group is, or even the AMA. As an advocate, your job is to work in your client's interest while not breaking the law. If you don't, you've violated that trust.
If the use of "congresscritters" is avoided by "Intellgent" people, then there are some mainstream columnists as well as few hundred-thousand Slashbots who are thereby rendered un-"intellgent".
And this negates my statement how?
Drop out of the Ann Coulter School of Writing, and and get yourself a real education, like David Brooks, William Safire, Andrew Sullivan, or Bill Kristol to name but a few.
Obviously. Making law is the flip side of practicing law, and if you luck out, you get a black robe and get to interpret the law! Although I have to admit I have more respect for judges than lawyers or lawmakers.
Yet you fail to reconcile how congress is pro-lawyer when tort reform is high on the current agenda.
Consistently nothing. First it was that lawyers enforce the law;
When did I say they didn't. The only confusion I can see is that you got criminal law and civil law confused. I'm talking about civil law, but that should have been obvious given the introduction of the topic (class action lawsuits).
lawyer deserve more than other professions be
If I remember correctly, it was the ancient Greek scientist Erastothenes who managed to correctly estimate the circumpherence to within a few miles.
Using the well in Alexandria that on one day of the year the sun shone directly into.
Of course, 600 years ago a "peer review" would call you a crank for saying the world was round.
Your view of scientific knowledge of 600 years ago is somewhat lacking. It was well established in the year 500BCE that that the earth was indeed round, and was belived to have a size roughly to the actual size of the Earth. (The error came from assuming a perfect sphere.) Even in the year 1400 round earthers were the norm. Columbus wasn't some visionary. He just was a politcally connected sailor.
If there was anyone allowed to watch I'd say China would be the biggest polluter
You mean like with environmental satelites right? Oh wait, we do have those.
You don't know what your talking about. Its farily easy to determine where emissions are coming from. All study show that the largest sourcee of greenhouse gasses come from united states, namely from the high penetration of automobiles. More specificaslly, automobiles carrying one person stuck in traffic during long commutes.
But I'm sure those damn muckity muck liberal scientists are just trying to make us feel bad.
I found out about the suit from a story on Slashdot and followed the link.
So from a story based on a press release, which are in effect an advertisement.
You still have not explained how you would have gone about getting your six dollars without enlisting the help of those "parasitic" lawyers.
>You're a hypocrite.
I'm not, you are! Geez, grow up, guy.
Well, at least the irony of that statement isn't lost one of us.
You complain about people using lawyers to sue for money you think they don't deserve, (e.g "victims of car accidents who didn't receive TLC") yet you take part in a lawsuit for damages accrued from purchasing a CD you wanted for a price you agreed to. You complain that lawyers advertise their services to these deadbeats, yet you didn't even realize harm was done to you, until a lawyer told you there was. Then you turn around and call those that perfomed all the work to bring you a check, "parasites". Interesting. You perfomed no service. You performed no action other than saying "gimme!". Yet, you receive a benefit. Sounds like parasitic behavior to me.
Perhaps I do have a basic misunderstanding of how lawyers operate. I thought that they had to take a professional oath and that they were supposed to decline frivoluous claims and advise their clients not to do dishonest things. Sanitation workers aren't violating ethics by handling your trash, while many lawyers are.
If I found out my lawyer wasn't doing everything in his power to win, then I'd fire him, and so would you.
You seem to have no concern for ethics.
I never said break the law. What I said was that it is unethical for you not to work to the best of your abilities when someone placed his trust in you. There's a whole field of ethics about that. It's called "professional ethics.
Again, Geragos. O.J. Simpson.
In order to use the word "again", there had to be a "before".
Geragos didn't have anything to do with OJ.
Yes, OJ is murderer, but the lawyers at fault aren't the defense. It's the prosecution. They managed to botch a slamdunk case. The jurors didn't understand that DNA matches was on the order of 1 in a billion, rather than 1 in 6. The prosecution setup the defense beautifully by having OJ try on the glove, which obviously wouldn't "fit", because 1) the leather shrank from being in a pool of blood, 2) no one wheres tight leather gloves while wearing latex gloves, and, most importantly, 3) OJ wouldn't put them on correctly. The prosecution allowed the defense to put Mark Furhman on trial. These were obvious mistakes and lapses of judgement. Yes, lawyers got OJ off. It was just the State's lawyers.
As for Geragos, you've yet to say what your talking about. All I can gather is that your outraged that he would purchase choice real estate downtown. Hardly an ethical lapse.
I believe that lawyers are not supposed to lie or knowingly help the guilty to circumvent justice. When a lawyer says, "Don't tell me anything except you're innocent," that a breach of ethics IMHO.
They don't lie. They make an argument by selectively illustrating facts. The differnce is, everything they say is true. If people come to the wrong conclusion, then they should have been more discerning.
It doesn't doesnt matter whether or not the lawyer's client is guilty or innocent. Everyone deserves a strong defense. It's not for the defendent's lawyer to decide whether or not he is guilty. That's the jury's job.
As I pointed out previously, my congresscritters are lawyers who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and they don't really agree with my views,
Perhaps your congressman would take them more seriously if you didn't use terms "congresscritters". Terms like that aren't witty. They're juvenile. Intellgent people don't use them. Neither
This should be easy, even for you. The parasites are the ones who made all the money while not being involved in the original monetary transactions: the lawyers.
So the ones who were sought out by parties, and successfully provided the service do not deserve to be compensated for their time and effort?
Pray tell, how would you have gone about receiving your six dollars? And while you're at it, tell me how you found out that there was even a class action suit for you to join?
I mean like those lawyers who put late night commercials on TV asking if you have pain from your car accident and feel you weren't given the TLC you deserve, and how you really deserve some money for your supposed pain.
You mean like those lawyers who ran advertisements saying, "Did you buy a CD? You may be owed money! Call us today!"? You're a hypocrite.
Or are objecting that someone would dare advertise their services to the public?
You seem to have a lack of the basic understanding of how lawyers operate. Someone off the street comes to them and says, "I want to sue this person." The lawyer then sues that person, and is paid. The transaction is no different from your afore mentioned sanitation workers. ("Do you need trash picked up? Call us!")
So perverting the law to help a client is okay? Gee, weren't you just saying lawers enforce the law? They pervert the law in order to make a reputation and more money.
There's always two sides to the conflict, and both sides are using every tactic at their disposal to win. If the parties' lawyers aren't doing that, then the lawyers are either negligent or incompetent. If I found out my lawyer wasn't doing everything in his power to win, then I'd fire him, and so would you.
What you call the "perversion" of the law is really just making an argument based on the letter of the law, and pitting two conflicting laws against each other, and revealing how the law has previously been enforced. The law is complecated, and at times contradictory. Lawsuits allow the courts to clarify the law. If you don't like how the law the law is being applied, write your congressman and have the law changed.
Does the name Geragos and his purchase of property near a courthouse mean anything to you?
And your point is?
Twice now you've tried to use non sequiturs anecdotes as evidence to buttress your argument. Contrary to helping your argument, it reveals your lack of skills in forming a coherent argument. Take a rhetoric class. You need it.
BS. The system is rigged to force you to hire one. My brother was set up for termination (and he was backed up by other employees) and could not get documents from his (previous) employer because they would only release them to legal counsel. It took a retainer to get the documents.
Your brother could have filed a document indicating that he was serving as his own legal counsel. The fact that he didn't realize that he could have done that shows that he was unqualified to act in legal proceedings and was in desperate need of trained legal counsel. Hiring a lawyer was the prudent choice.
So you're saying all settlement money really belongs to the lawyers even though it is in compensation for a wrong done to someone else.
No. I'm saying the lawyers deserve to financially compensated for services rendered.
The injured party should just be grateful for some scraps from the lawyer's table. How's your law degree coming along? You can try to as hard as you want to make a silk purse from a sow's ear, but it still won't happen.
You agreed to pay them the fee. If it was too much, take your buisness elsewhere. Anyway, by law, the majority of any settlement must go to the injured party.
The settlement was a pittance for the victims. Obviously, the RIAA had better lawyers, or the amount would have been greater. The lawyers on both sides made the real money.
You're complaining that someone got paid for bringing you check that all you did to receive was file up behind the sign that read "free money". Now, who's the parasite?
Do you realize how incredibly valuable ambulance chasers are to society?
You mean like those "ambulance chasers" that do product liability cases because a corporation instead of spending the extra nickel per unit for a safety valve, decided to knowingly put their customers health and safety at risk? You mean those "ambulance chasers" that tilt the economic incentives towards safety instead of risk? Those lawyers? How dare they!
When you can buy the right to issue subpoenas and bypass due process, that's a problem.
I never said it wasn't.
The majority of US senators are lawyers.
And your point is?
So do sanitation engineers, and IMHO, they're far more valuable to society than a bunch of parasites who make a living from fomenting confrontations and bleeding both sides while trying to pervert the law in their favor.
How do lawyers pervert the law into their favor? Now they may pervert the law in their client's favor, but I've never heard of lawyers perverting the law for lawyers. There's a big difference.
Lawyers don't exist in a vaccuum. As I said, they're hired guns. The confrontations lawyers resolve already exist. The same civil lawyer that was facing off against you yesterday, can be yours today if you pay his fee. In fact, that happens all the time.
Lawyers don't bleed both sides. They are hired by both sides. If you don't want to pay one, don't hire one! Second in cases of tort, if you win you don't pay the lawyer. The losing side does, either directly or indirectly through a a commission based on the award. Since the awarde money wasn't yours to begin with, it's not like the lawyers took any money from you. Of course you agreed to the terms when you hired the lawyer, but I'm sure that's just a technicality.
Well in this case, the members of the class action suit had the better lawyers. They won a settlement that resulted in a cash pay out.
Did you really expect to you'd get more than a token amount? Look how many people were part of the suit, and how much money you could reasonably expect was going to be paid out. You should be glad you got a check. Most of price fixing suits end with coupons, or promises to lower prices in the future.
Do you realize how many highly educated and highly skilled people were involved in bringing the suit and negotiating the settlement? Do you realize how much each one of those individuals is worth in the market?
You got a check for six dollars, and what did you do for it? Oh that's right you filled out a webpage, then sat on your ass for a check to come. When it came, you complained that people that actually worked for months and years to bring you that check got more money. Guess what? They earned more money.
Sure they do. Despite all the civil and criminal prosecutions of the RIAA and its members, it's the RIAA that is making (and enforcing) the laws by buying legislation.
I fail to see what tort has to do with undue influence over politicians. This problem is about cost of campaigns and how they are financed.
Despite the TV shows you watch, lawyers are not out save the world or adopt all the orphans they run across while doing community service for their coke problems; they're out to make money.
When did I say that? Of course they're capitalists. The vast majority society is capitalists. Lawyers are hired guns. Lawyers are skilled professionals. Yes, they get paid very well, and by and large they deserve it. Anyone does who:
I never said lawyers act out of the goodness of their heart. What I said was they perform a needed function of society, and without tort society would fall apart.
Police don't enforce civil law.
You want both a high paying job and no extra hours, don't you? What make you feel you've earned it?
Well it's not the extra hours per se. It's the fact that the workers aren't being paid for those hours.
Yes, the EA workers should quit. Their not working 40 hours for $60k, their working two 40 hour jobs for $30k.
So without huge payments to lawyers, some people would be better off and some people would be worse off.
No. A lot of people would be much worse off, and a few would be much better off. The reason corporations hate lawyers and class action lawsuites is because it enables the plebs to band togother and actually enforce the law. That's it. Courts find against you, if you broke the law. It may be civil law, but it's still the law.
The reason why money is involved, is because that's the only thing courts can deal with. If you go blind, the court can give back your sight, the can only give you money.
Since lawyers consume so much and produce nothing at all, it's not hard to argue that the people who do produce things would be better off, on average, without lawyers.
Produce nothing? They change someones behavior, and through extension society as a whole. Without lawyers, we'd be anarchy. Like it or not lawyers enforce the laws. (Yes, Kohath, the government is primaryly lawyers.)
You may think "yeah kill all the lawyers", but its a very sophmoric attitude.
Can someone tell me why there are so many articles about EA? What is this, the message board for one tech company?
You know there's this thing called the archive. It's even on the left called "Old Stories". Perhaps you'd like to use it.
Just take your laptop apart and try pressing down on any board that seems to plug into another one.
Yeah, I've tried that. It seems to work immediately, but then quickly flakes out again.
Shortly after the warranty expired (Isn't that how it always works?) my i8k began to lock up at random intervals. When power cycle the machine the bios wouldn't even finish booting. A few power cycles later, then it work. Eventually I determined that it was a hardware problem. Something is loose inside the machine, because lifting up on the back left corner seems to help, but of course disassembling the system doesn't find anything obviously wrong.
Probably the saddest part of this experience is that a friend of mine said he had the same laptop at work, and the same thing happened to his. I wouldn't get another Dell.
In fact I'm kind of wary of laptops in general anymore.
I just hope they can get Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo to reprise their roles for Super Mario Brothers 2.
If all you're looking for is a player that is filename agnostic and supports autoqueuing, check out Grind. It's web based, easy to install, supports any codec you've got a player for, and most importantly supports intellegent autoqueuing based on observing your preferences.
I use it all the time. In fact I'm using it right now.
This doesn't keep a consistent menu, which is totally annoying.
It's not just that the items in the menu change, but the order of the items change in the menu. It completely destroys muscle memory and spatial awareness. When a user utilizes the menus he knows about where the item he wants is or will be located. Typically the user moves the pointer rapidly to the items general neighborhood and then much more slowly selects the item in question. With the menu order changing the user suddenly finds the pointer in the wrong part of the menu, and becomes disoriented. This is incredibly frustrating.
Yes, having menus only display the items the user actually requires does improve usability. Frequently adding and removing items automagically does not.
I've found at work and at home that Windows (since late NT4) can be quite stable ~if~ you don't install tons of junk software.
[...]
My machine doesn't lock up and it doesn't crash and neither does hers.
Huh. When I had an NT4 box sitting on my desk at work, it crashed so often, I kept a record of its crashes. It had a median uptime of 96 hours. That's 4 days. It was horrible.
None of us could ever prove it, but we suspected the problem was Exceed.
This was my long term experience with NT4. My machine at home dual boots between Debian unstable and Win98. I don't really use winXP machines for any long term. I can't comment on the state of the world now, but my experience with NT4 was a suckfest.
Fortunately, many medical texts are available online which contain the information needed to self-diagnose.
When I read this I was reminded of what my abnormal psych professor said at the start of class. "Don't start reading ahead. Don't just open the DSM-IV and start reading about wierd psychological problems. You're all perfectly normal and sane. When we study obsessive compulsive disorders, all of you are going to start thinking, 'I have these symptoms. I have OCD!'. You don't. When we start start reading about schizophrenia and people talking to themselves, and hearing voices, you're going to think, 'Wow! I talk to myself all the time. I'm schizo!'. You're not. None of you have the training or experience to diagnose anything. Don't act like you do."
Everytime you change doctors, you're starting the diagnosis over at step one. When you come in and say "I have disease X. Give me xyzzy, that new perscription drug I've seen on tv." The doctor thinks, "hypochondriac".
The reason he initially thinks it's "the thing going around", is because 90% of the time it is. Only when that treatment fails, will the doctor move off that. Instead of actually going back to the doctor in two weeks like he suggested, you go to another doctor who says, "Hypochondriac. Take the antibiotic and come back in two weeks if it's not working." Instead of moving to step 2, you've decided to shop around until you find someone who is willing to start at step 6. No wonder it's hard for you to find a doctor.
Best bet is to talk to a local teamster rep. If you can't find one, head to a local UPS. They are there.
I believe the Communications Workers of America were the ones looking to organize software engineerings. The teamsters drive trucks. Both unions are AFL-CIO, so the teamsters would be able to put you in touch with the right people though.
In two separate locations, employees attempted to form a union. Employees were fired and that put an end to that idea.
The union organizers should hire a labor attorney and sue the company for unlawful termination. There's laws about retaliation. Convergys acted illegally, and should be prosecuted.
Yes, it's good that Gtk is using the standard file chooser. The bad thing is the Gtk file chooser is massively broken. Who ever designed that doesn't have clue about user interfaces. They removed the text entry box! Apparently they thought knew better than 30 years of GUI development.
Damn them all.