That rotten fish smell is coming from michael's ass from whence this story was pulled to be put on the front page of Slashdot. This means that the driver was most likely inept and couldn't figure out what to do as other posters have already suggested. I agree that it's nearly impossible that a catastrophic "failure" to slow down was anything but the driver's fault in this case.
Remember people, michael likes to post stories which are sensationalist, and he typically never verifies anything, preferring instead to add some fuel to the fire of speculation and sensationalism with his additional quips that are usually tagged on to the story headline. I can't ignore his stories because then I'm out of the loop when trolls make fun of them later in the week, but that's about all they're good for anymore.
Heh. I whole-heartedly agree, but I think a word definition and clarification is necessary. The only real thing that classifies someone as a "professional" is that they get paid for 'it', whatever 'it' is that they do. However, just because you are a professional, you're not necessarily the expert. There are many experts who don't get paid for their expertise. There are many professionals who could never claim to be an expert at any one thing - and never will be, they just have a diploma that somehow "qualifies" them to practice law, medicine, etc.
So perhaps it'd be better to classify oneself as an expert, instead of just a professional when referring to your skills and abilities in any one particular area. I see way too many elitists post to Slashdot that think they're somehow better than others because of their "professional" vocation. Bull-crap! If you're really knowledgeable about a subject, if you do it on a day-to-day basis at your job, whatever, say so. But don't think that that somehow makes you better and more knowledgeable than the OSS developer working in his grandmother's basement on some small software application. For that application, he or she is the expert and professional, not the egotistical PhD with far too much time wasted hob-nobbing with other egotistical elitists.
Sadly, you're mistaken. Representing an audio signal in a digital medium through the "airwaves" will ALWAYS be better than analog, as long as the frequency is high enough. Why?
1) A digital signal can basically eliminate ANY noise in the signal as it reconstructs the bit pattern being received into the analog equivalent of the original message sent. This is all done through those wonderful little things called transistors, digital filters, and a host of other modern marvels of the electronic age.
2) An analog signal will basically ALWAYS have noise present in the system since their is no way to distinguish what is noise and what's not when your signal is a continuous, changing value instead of a string of 1's and 0's.
3) Our human senses can only distinguish things at a certain rate of speed. Our hearing and sight and smell are not as finely tuned as a cat or dog's are. While the cat or dog can outdo us in sensing ability, they can't outdo us in thinking skills (obviously). Ever wonder why most cats don't watch TV, or when they do appear to react slowly to the images on the TV? It's because their visual perception is about 60 frames per second (if I remember correctly), so watching TV which displays images at about 30 frames/sec is like watching a picture change images quickly, but too slowly for a cat to really focus on it as a "real-time" moving image. So while you may think that analog represents such a richer sound or vision, the truth of the matter is that the digital reproduction of the analog signal is probably just not fast enough yet for us humans to be able to not detect a difference. This is why my VOIP telephone connection usually (barring high network activity) sounds BETTER than the old-school analog telephone connections I used to have. No noise, and the digital reproduction of the frequency ranges of a human voice is easily fast enough these days to pick up all the details of someone's voice, WITHOUT all the noise of the old landlines added into the conversation.
The problem is not that analog is better. The problem is that digital isn't quite as advanced as it could be. We hear 128kbit/s sampled mp3's and think: "Gee, my LP sounds SOOOOOOO much better!" Well no shit, sherlock! 128kbit/s sampling is fine for keeping the mp3 to a manageable size, but is noticeably not as good as the original 320kbit/s (or better) CD version of the sound.
I recommend you try ripping a song in 128kbit/s mp3 format, and then ripping the exact same song in 160kbit/s ogg format. The size of the files will be relatively the same, but ogg sounds much richer to my ears, and those were the ONLY changes I made to my computer system this weekend to hear any difference. Ogg formatted digital audio files are a more recently developed codec than the mp3 standard, which is why I offer it as an example of better tech providing more indistinguishability (is that even a word?? LOL!) than what was 'advanced technology' just a few years ago. The better the tech gets, the more you'll be less able to tell the difference between digital and analog.
Since everyone's favorite "editor" michael is now posting stories, be assured that they'll be highly inflammatory, usually contain many falsities, and will be hardly worth the time wasted RTFA. We all hated flamed Katz out of Slashdot existence - I propose we do the same with michael. These last three articles have all been extremely UN-newsworthy bits.
If outsourcing is a symptom of anything its corporate greed. They can save millions by paying unintelligable people to stumble along with english over the phone and have their customers take it up the arse. It has nothing to do with education. Its economics...
Yes, and no. Sure, corporations want to be as profitable as possible... it's what their shareholders expect, otherwise they wouldn't be shareholders. Also, if a company continually has abysmal service records that people TRULY cannot put up with, they'll go find someone else to purchase their goods or services from. But individual consumers are cheap and want things at rock bottom prices usually. So they settle for Wal-Mart and the like. It sounds like you're not like that, but understand that you're not the typical American consumer then.
Ah, but I also read somewhere not long ago that a good deal of the success of first-generation immigrants is that they automatically have many niches or ideas that they are able to fill because they're novel to the new culture that they're in. Quite often fulfilling a niche market or innovating in one culture with something that's completely obvious from your own culture can make one very wealthy indeed. That's why the "little guy's" can still compete with the Wal-Mart's, Best Buy's, and McDonald's of America - they're not as big and lumbering as those behemoth companies and therefore can make quick inroads to serve unmet needs.
I agree, michael is an ass. He's pissing and moaning that Microsoft added yet another feature??? Make such a press release about Linux and there'd be dancing in the streets over how much more secure Linux can be than Microsoft. The problem isn't Microsoft adding features - it's not allowing anyone else (software developers) to use their features that's the problem.
I have a close friend stationed at the Air Force missile base near Great Falls, and from his tales, Great Falls, MT is a totally backwards, depressed area of the US due to little in the way of high-paying jobs. Thus, it makes complete sense that the brightest and most well-read kids were the "cool" ones out there. I would assume becoming edumacated to get yourself OUT of Great Falls would be a wonderful reward indeed!;)
My cisco systems networking, British English 12 and Precalculus classes are going to be HARD.
Read the guy's book online and you'll quickly find that he specifically points out that corporate America is behind a good deal of the "school system" designed to mold children into a psuedo slave labor workforce, able to manipulate the tools, but unable to think for themselves. I just found it kinda funny that they're offering a Cisco systems networking class for high school kids! We NEVER had classes like that when I was a high school junior, and that was only 10 years ago!
Fortunately, you sound like an intelligent young person who is capable of rising above the typical BS in most public schools of today's American culture. And for what it's worth, my advice would be to continue your drive to not fall into the trap of trying to be "cool" all the time. Most of the badasses and "really cool kids" in my high school I haven't even seen more than once or twice since high school because I wouldn't probably want to associate now with them at all, while some of the less cool kids like myself (although I was generally well-liked) have become even closer friends to me, have prospered and become well-balanced adults.
Dude, just get the All-in-One gestures plugin and drag your mouse up while holding down the right mouse button and it'll load a random page in a new tab. I just tried it and it works fine.
Sadly, you obviously know little of the legal profession as a whole. The ambulance chasers may sue to get rich, and most lawyers abhor any lawyer who advertises on TV. Many lawsuits do not have to be settled in a court of law. In fact, sueing someone for monetary damages is usually justified in one way or another, but there's ALWAYS two or more sides to the story, which is why both a plaintiff and a defendant need a lawyer to work FOR their position.
Having seen my wife go through law school has opened my eyes even wider to the absolute need for a lawyer in so many situations where it'd be extremely easy to get screwed over by a company, individual, or a government. If you honestly think everyone else has a little angel inside of them that only wants to do what's right, then you are WOEFULLY mistaken about every single human's depraved nature.
Exactly! timothy is doing a very pathetic "editor" job today. Is he even reading the submissions today???
This company is just like the hundreds of other "data visualization solutions" out there today. Trust me, I use Access, SQL, Minitab, and Excel every day, and NONE of them can fill the need for me to ANALYZE the data I'm looking at. I can slice and dice data a hundred different ways, but unless I know exactly what I'm doing and am applying proper statistical methods to my slicing and dicing of data, it's totally worthless to have some fancy graphing application making pretty charts for me.
Besides, submitting your own story to Slashdot is like voting for yourself in a fifth-grade election. It doesn't matter if you think you're the shit, it's only what the majority thinks that matters, and already the threads on this story seem to indicate that this lame-ass story should never have been posted to Slashdot.
After all the tons of nerds on Slashdot talking about BladeRunner over the years and the ensuing flame wars of directors cut vs. theatrical trailer, I decided to go out and buy the Director's cut DVD and watch the movie myself. I've never read the book it's based on, and I've never seen the Theatrical version.
I think the Director's cut is sweet! The cheesy 80's-ish hair and ideas about futuristic "cars" is of course silly, but the story at the heart of it all is really enthralling I think. I don't like voiceovers anyways, so watching it without those is just fine by me.
I always finish watching the Director's cut with that hanging question in my head - Is Deckard replicant or not? and can androids be as human as a human? Having my perspective on the movie (a complete "newb" to the book and theatrical version of the movie) I think shows that the director effectively got the point of Dick's original writings across to someone like me perfectly through the Director's cut.
Well in referring to the hook and loop instance, and the door knobs thing, that was through experience on an actual Amish farm. (we got a puppy there - BIG mistake!)
And yet, although they used no gas-powered vehicles to tend to their fields (just horse-drawn tools and wagons), they had a chemical spreader attached to one of their horse-drawn wagons, presumably for maintaining higher crop yields. It's just all so strange to me.
If you go to amish country, you can see teens driving the buggy with a boom box blaring next to them
I live in Ohio, where there plenty of Amish, and I am not kidding that I indeed saw this one time. A horse drawn, straight out of the early 1800's black buggy was 'thumpin' with rap music coming out of it. I couldn't help laughing at it. It's just so ridiculous. Why is it that the loop and hook was apparently the right place to stop technologically for an Amish person, but buttons and door knobs are RIGHT OUT!?? Doesn't make a bit of sense to me, not to mention they're supposedly religiously super-pious by adhering to the whole buttons=bad stuff, and yet rap music of the 90's and 00's is ok?
ROFL! Wow, my little off-the-cuff semi-funny comment really generated plenty of animosity. I am really impressed with the amount of real-world, well thought out responses and examples of reasons why we would all be better off without lawyers, period.
And no, lawyers don't go around suing people for the fun of it, or to make people rich ALL OF THE TIME. They represent you in a court of law, where the wording and minute "legalese" of every little thing escapes people like me. You think your precious mp3 p2p downloading is safe from big corporations without lawyers? You think you can adequately represent yourself in court against someone who has studied the law for many years and knows how to rip apart every one of your arguments or statements, no matter how "solid" you think they are? Good luck! You're gonna need it!
Yes, it's true, lawyers like all the rest of us are big fat failures and make mistakes, sometimes even intentionally being malicious, but they're not all bad and out to do everyone harm. If they were, then being a "lawyer" would be considered illegal and absolutely no one would want them around. You super-anarchist types make me cringe with your lack of logical thought.
If you killed all the lawyers, who'd be there to protect your interests from all the freakin' jerks suing you and the power-grubbing politicians trying to take away your rights?
Just downloaded and tried out Sunbird 0.2 as the Thunderbird plugin and it thankfully retains all the ease of use and good ideas that Calendar 0.1 had, but now seems to not be quite as buggy. At least so far.
Now if only I could use Thunderbird and Sunbird as my primary apps for email and calendar/task scheduling at work, I'd be set. Alas, I am a wage slave and forced to work using minimal tools: Lotus Notes nad IE. Boo! Hissss!
Exactly what I was thinking! They're upset over Apple's proprietary DRM'd codec, and yet no one can play a.rm file without RealPlayer software installed on your *Windows* computer. (and the last time I checked, which was a couple of years ago I'll admit, was FULL of ads and "load on Windows startup" default options that couldn't be changed) So what is this I hear about freedom of music choice??? Who cares about music choice when it's only going to play on one "radio station" (the.rm file format and it's completed dependance on only one software package that can play it) FULL of ads and other crap I don't want to put up with!
It is truly amazing how entire companies can take what appear to be great ideas in one arena of business, or politics, or the internet, or whatever; and manage to completely screw it up when they try to just slap it on their own business processes and products. Blogs are great for consumers, not usually for companies (unless it fits your companies goals and internet focus, of course). In effect, Real just gave investors a direct method to measure customer feedback about their new product. That's totally cool when your product rocks and your customers all agree that it rocks. But if it doesn't, and this apparently hasn't for Real, then you're in big trouble.
I can forsee this report landing on a free IT purchaser's desks mixed in with all the "real" (or MS-funded) TCO reports, because it is so well designed.
Then you must not see many business documents. While I agree that it is semi-humorous and written to look professional, it most certainly F41LS 1T!
OK, now that the caffeine buzz has worn off, I can say that I apologize, and thanks for your clarification on what you think. I can agree with you now.
Wow! What great business sense you have! Gee, I never realized how completely trivial it must be to just "screw the customer" and migrate to Mozilla, Linux, and everything good and open source!
Look, I'm all for Mozilla, Linux, and open source software, but sometimes preaching and serving are two entirely different things. The homeless, starving person on the street corner could care less what kind of philosophical bullshit about healthfoods and a "low-carb lifestyle" you want to talk about, but give them a week's worth of free burger coupons to McDonald's and they'll most certainly be grateful for your help.
Sometimes your "customer" doesn't want The Best Thing, they just want something that works NOW. IE and MS Windows for companies works NOW. Sell them on the benefits of open source software, Mozilla, and Linux LATER. I guarantee they'll listen to you more intently if you've already helped them out in the past, despite their past computing shortcomings.
And by the way, you are one of those Gnu/Linux hippie types who gives Linux users a bad name because of your rhetoric about everything Microsoft. It's true, Microsoft is insecure and dangerous to use in these days of the Internet and widespread computer virii, but the average computer user doesn't know that and sometimes doesn't even care. There are still plenty of reasons NOT to switch to Linux or Mozilla for many people, which while unfortunate, is their lot in life. I for one, am stuck using IE once in a while. Why? Because I HAVE TO! Mozilla won't work with certain things. Yes, it upsets me that some developers can't code for interoperability, but not everyone is at the same stage of uber-enlightment that you are.
Thank you, it felt good to flame you. You may now return to your regularly scheduled postings.
And while $13 isn't much money, it's certainly more fun to know how much money the attorney's got for prosecuting the case against the RIAA. That $13 didn't line my pockets, but it certainly took away from the diamond-lined pockets of the RIAA. Wuhahahahahaha!!!
Thanks for the insights about Knoppix and HDD installs. After seeing how "clean" it looked coming straight off of the CD I thought it might be useful enough in it's current form for my Windows-using wife to actually use in her upcoming opening of her own business. However, based on your mileage with it, if she does decide to switch over to Linux as her workstation, then I'll make sure to go with a more mainstream Linux distro like Mandrake, Red Hat, or SUSE. (I've never been that impressed with Debian, Gentoo, or Slackware's general arcane-ness for the newbie Linux user, and I don't have a problem with companies making profits)
Slashdot Mirror
That rotten fish smell is coming from michael's ass from whence this story was pulled to be put on the front page of Slashdot. This means that the driver was most likely inept and couldn't figure out what to do as other posters have already suggested. I agree that it's nearly impossible that a catastrophic "failure" to slow down was anything but the driver's fault in this case.
Remember people, michael likes to post stories which are sensationalist, and he typically never verifies anything, preferring instead to add some fuel to the fire of speculation and sensationalism with his additional quips that are usually tagged on to the story headline. I can't ignore his stories because then I'm out of the loop when trolls make fun of them later in the week, but that's about all they're good for anymore.
Heh. I whole-heartedly agree, but I think a word definition and clarification is necessary. The only real thing that classifies someone as a "professional" is that they get paid for 'it', whatever 'it' is that they do. However, just because you are a professional, you're not necessarily the expert. There are many experts who don't get paid for their expertise. There are many professionals who could never claim to be an expert at any one thing - and never will be, they just have a diploma that somehow "qualifies" them to practice law, medicine, etc.
So perhaps it'd be better to classify oneself as an expert, instead of just a professional when referring to your skills and abilities in any one particular area. I see way too many elitists post to Slashdot that think they're somehow better than others because of their "professional" vocation. Bull-crap! If you're really knowledgeable about a subject, if you do it on a day-to-day basis at your job, whatever, say so. But don't think that that somehow makes you better and more knowledgeable than the OSS developer working in his grandmother's basement on some small software application. For that application, he or she is the expert and professional, not the egotistical PhD with far too much time wasted hob-nobbing with other egotistical elitists.
Sadly, you're mistaken. Representing an audio signal in a digital medium through the "airwaves" will ALWAYS be better than analog, as long as the frequency is high enough. Why?
1) A digital signal can basically eliminate ANY noise in the signal as it reconstructs the bit pattern being received into the analog equivalent of the original message sent. This is all done through those wonderful little things called transistors, digital filters, and a host of other modern marvels of the electronic age.
2) An analog signal will basically ALWAYS have noise present in the system since their is no way to distinguish what is noise and what's not when your signal is a continuous, changing value instead of a string of 1's and 0's.
3) Our human senses can only distinguish things at a certain rate of speed. Our hearing and sight and smell are not as finely tuned as a cat or dog's are. While the cat or dog can outdo us in sensing ability, they can't outdo us in thinking skills (obviously). Ever wonder why most cats don't watch TV, or when they do appear to react slowly to the images on the TV? It's because their visual perception is about 60 frames per second (if I remember correctly), so watching TV which displays images at about 30 frames/sec is like watching a picture change images quickly, but too slowly for a cat to really focus on it as a "real-time" moving image. So while you may think that analog represents such a richer sound or vision, the truth of the matter is that the digital reproduction of the analog signal is probably just not fast enough yet for us humans to be able to not detect a difference. This is why my VOIP telephone connection usually (barring high network activity) sounds BETTER than the old-school analog telephone connections I used to have. No noise, and the digital reproduction of the frequency ranges of a human voice is easily fast enough these days to pick up all the details of someone's voice, WITHOUT all the noise of the old landlines added into the conversation.
The problem is not that analog is better. The problem is that digital isn't quite as advanced as it could be. We hear 128kbit/s sampled mp3's and think: "Gee, my LP sounds SOOOOOOO much better!" Well no shit, sherlock! 128kbit/s sampling is fine for keeping the mp3 to a manageable size, but is noticeably not as good as the original 320kbit/s (or better) CD version of the sound.
I recommend you try ripping a song in 128kbit/s mp3 format, and then ripping the exact same song in 160kbit/s ogg format. The size of the files will be relatively the same, but ogg sounds much richer to my ears, and those were the ONLY changes I made to my computer system this weekend to hear any difference. Ogg formatted digital audio files are a more recently developed codec than the mp3 standard, which is why I offer it as an example of better tech providing more indistinguishability (is that even a word?? LOL!) than what was 'advanced technology' just a few years ago. The better the tech gets, the more you'll be less able to tell the difference between digital and analog.
Since everyone's favorite "editor" michael is now posting stories, be assured that they'll be highly inflammatory, usually contain many falsities, and will be hardly worth the time wasted RTFA. We all hated flamed Katz out of Slashdot existence - I propose we do the same with michael. These last three articles have all been extremely UN-newsworthy bits.
michael: Please stop posting to Slashdot.
Yes, and no. Sure, corporations want to be as profitable as possible... it's what their shareholders expect, otherwise they wouldn't be shareholders. Also, if a company continually has abysmal service records that people TRULY cannot put up with, they'll go find someone else to purchase their goods or services from. But individual consumers are cheap and want things at rock bottom prices usually. So they settle for Wal-Mart and the like. It sounds like you're not like that, but understand that you're not the typical American consumer then.
Ah, but I also read somewhere not long ago that a good deal of the success of first-generation immigrants is that they automatically have many niches or ideas that they are able to fill because they're novel to the new culture that they're in. Quite often fulfilling a niche market or innovating in one culture with something that's completely obvious from your own culture can make one very wealthy indeed. That's why the "little guy's" can still compete with the Wal-Mart's, Best Buy's, and McDonald's of America - they're not as big and lumbering as those behemoth companies and therefore can make quick inroads to serve unmet needs.
I agree, michael is an ass. He's pissing and moaning that Microsoft added yet another feature??? Make such a press release about Linux and there'd be dancing in the streets over how much more secure Linux can be than Microsoft. The problem isn't Microsoft adding features - it's not allowing anyone else (software developers) to use their features that's the problem.
I have a close friend stationed at the Air Force missile base near Great Falls, and from his tales, Great Falls, MT is a totally backwards, depressed area of the US due to little in the way of high-paying jobs. Thus, it makes complete sense that the brightest and most well-read kids were the "cool" ones out there. I would assume becoming edumacated to get yourself OUT of Great Falls would be a wonderful reward indeed! ;)
Read the guy's book online and you'll quickly find that he specifically points out that corporate America is behind a good deal of the "school system" designed to mold children into a psuedo slave labor workforce, able to manipulate the tools, but unable to think for themselves. I just found it kinda funny that they're offering a Cisco systems networking class for high school kids! We NEVER had classes like that when I was a high school junior, and that was only 10 years ago!
Fortunately, you sound like an intelligent young person who is capable of rising above the typical BS in most public schools of today's American culture. And for what it's worth, my advice would be to continue your drive to not fall into the trap of trying to be "cool" all the time. Most of the badasses and "really cool kids" in my high school I haven't even seen more than once or twice since high school because I wouldn't probably want to associate now with them at all, while some of the less cool kids like myself (although I was generally well-liked) have become even closer friends to me, have prospered and become well-balanced adults.
Dude, just get the All-in-One gestures plugin and drag your mouse up while holding down the right mouse button and it'll load a random page in a new tab. I just tried it and it works fine.
Sadly, you obviously know little of the legal profession as a whole. The ambulance chasers may sue to get rich, and most lawyers abhor any lawyer who advertises on TV. Many lawsuits do not have to be settled in a court of law. In fact, sueing someone for monetary damages is usually justified in one way or another, but there's ALWAYS two or more sides to the story, which is why both a plaintiff and a defendant need a lawyer to work FOR their position.
Having seen my wife go through law school has opened my eyes even wider to the absolute need for a lawyer in so many situations where it'd be extremely easy to get screwed over by a company, individual, or a government. If you honestly think everyone else has a little angel inside of them that only wants to do what's right, then you are WOEFULLY mistaken about every single human's depraved nature.
Exactly! timothy is doing a very pathetic "editor" job today. Is he even reading the submissions today???
This company is just like the hundreds of other "data visualization solutions" out there today. Trust me, I use Access, SQL, Minitab, and Excel every day, and NONE of them can fill the need for me to ANALYZE the data I'm looking at. I can slice and dice data a hundred different ways, but unless I know exactly what I'm doing and am applying proper statistical methods to my slicing and dicing of data, it's totally worthless to have some fancy graphing application making pretty charts for me.
Besides, submitting your own story to Slashdot is like voting for yourself in a fifth-grade election. It doesn't matter if you think you're the shit, it's only what the majority thinks that matters, and already the threads on this story seem to indicate that this lame-ass story should never have been posted to Slashdot.
After all the tons of nerds on Slashdot talking about BladeRunner over the years and the ensuing flame wars of directors cut vs. theatrical trailer, I decided to go out and buy the Director's cut DVD and watch the movie myself. I've never read the book it's based on, and I've never seen the Theatrical version.
I think the Director's cut is sweet! The cheesy 80's-ish hair and ideas about futuristic "cars" is of course silly, but the story at the heart of it all is really enthralling I think. I don't like voiceovers anyways, so watching it without those is just fine by me.
I always finish watching the Director's cut with that hanging question in my head - Is Deckard replicant or not? and can androids be as human as a human? Having my perspective on the movie (a complete "newb" to the book and theatrical version of the movie) I think shows that the director effectively got the point of Dick's original writings across to someone like me perfectly through the Director's cut.
Well in referring to the hook and loop instance, and the door knobs thing, that was through experience on an actual Amish farm. (we got a puppy there - BIG mistake!)
And yet, although they used no gas-powered vehicles to tend to their fields (just horse-drawn tools and wagons), they had a chemical spreader attached to one of their horse-drawn wagons, presumably for maintaining higher crop yields. It's just all so strange to me.
I live in Ohio, where there plenty of Amish, and I am not kidding that I indeed saw this one time. A horse drawn, straight out of the early 1800's black buggy was 'thumpin' with rap music coming out of it. I couldn't help laughing at it. It's just so ridiculous. Why is it that the loop and hook was apparently the right place to stop technologically for an Amish person, but buttons and door knobs are RIGHT OUT!?? Doesn't make a bit of sense to me, not to mention they're supposedly religiously super-pious by adhering to the whole buttons=bad stuff, and yet rap music of the 90's and 00's is ok?
Strange
ROFL! Wow, my little off-the-cuff semi-funny comment really generated plenty of animosity. I am really impressed with the amount of real-world, well thought out responses and examples of reasons why we would all be better off without lawyers, period.
And no, lawyers don't go around suing people for the fun of it, or to make people rich ALL OF THE TIME. They represent you in a court of law, where the wording and minute "legalese" of every little thing escapes people like me. You think your precious mp3 p2p downloading is safe from big corporations without lawyers? You think you can adequately represent yourself in court against someone who has studied the law for many years and knows how to rip apart every one of your arguments or statements, no matter how "solid" you think they are? Good luck! You're gonna need it!
Yes, it's true, lawyers like all the rest of us are big fat failures and make mistakes, sometimes even intentionally being malicious, but they're not all bad and out to do everyone harm. If they were, then being a "lawyer" would be considered illegal and absolutely no one would want them around. You super-anarchist types make me cringe with your lack of logical thought.
Consider the flip side of that coin...
If you killed all the lawyers, who'd be there to protect your interests from all the freakin' jerks suing you and the power-grubbing politicians trying to take away your rights?
Just downloaded and tried out Sunbird 0.2 as the Thunderbird plugin and it thankfully retains all the ease of use and good ideas that Calendar 0.1 had, but now seems to not be quite as buggy. At least so far. Now if only I could use Thunderbird and Sunbird as my primary apps for email and calendar/task scheduling at work, I'd be set. Alas, I am a wage slave and forced to work using minimal tools: Lotus Notes nad IE. Boo! Hissss!
Exactly what I was thinking! They're upset over Apple's proprietary DRM'd codec, and yet no one can play a .rm file without RealPlayer software installed on your *Windows* computer. (and the last time I checked, which was a couple of years ago I'll admit, was FULL of ads and "load on Windows startup" default options that couldn't be changed) So what is this I hear about freedom of music choice??? Who cares about music choice when it's only going to play on one "radio station" (the .rm file format and it's completed dependance on only one software package that can play it) FULL of ads and other crap I don't want to put up with!
It is truly amazing how entire companies can take what appear to be great ideas in one arena of business, or politics, or the internet, or whatever; and manage to completely screw it up when they try to just slap it on their own business processes and products. Blogs are great for consumers, not usually for companies (unless it fits your companies goals and internet focus, of course). In effect, Real just gave investors a direct method to measure customer feedback about their new product. That's totally cool when your product rocks and your customers all agree that it rocks. But if it doesn't, and this apparently hasn't for Real, then you're in big trouble.
I can forsee this report landing on a free IT purchaser's desks mixed in with all the "real" (or MS-funded) TCO reports, because it is so well designed.
Then you must not see many business documents. While I agree that it is semi-humorous and written to look professional, it most certainly F41LS 1T!
OK, now that the caffeine buzz has worn off, I can say that I apologize, and thanks for your clarification on what you think. I can agree with you now.
Wow! What great business sense you have! Gee, I never realized how completely trivial it must be to just "screw the customer" and migrate to Mozilla, Linux, and everything good and open source!
Look, I'm all for Mozilla, Linux, and open source software, but sometimes preaching and serving are two entirely different things. The homeless, starving person on the street corner could care less what kind of philosophical bullshit about healthfoods and a "low-carb lifestyle" you want to talk about, but give them a week's worth of free burger coupons to McDonald's and they'll most certainly be grateful for your help.
Sometimes your "customer" doesn't want The Best Thing, they just want something that works NOW. IE and MS Windows for companies works NOW. Sell them on the benefits of open source software, Mozilla, and Linux LATER. I guarantee they'll listen to you more intently if you've already helped them out in the past, despite their past computing shortcomings.
And by the way, you are one of those Gnu/Linux hippie types who gives Linux users a bad name because of your rhetoric about everything Microsoft. It's true, Microsoft is insecure and dangerous to use in these days of the Internet and widespread computer virii, but the average computer user doesn't know that and sometimes doesn't even care. There are still plenty of reasons NOT to switch to Linux or Mozilla for many people, which while unfortunate, is their lot in life. I for one, am stuck using IE once in a while. Why? Because I HAVE TO! Mozilla won't work with certain things. Yes, it upsets me that some developers can't code for interoperability, but not everyone is at the same stage of uber-enlightment that you are.
Thank you, it felt good to flame you. You may now return to your regularly scheduled postings.
Seth Finkelstein? Is that you??
:)
LOL, just kidding, Seth. I do think michael sims is a jerk. Cheers!
And while $13 isn't much money, it's certainly more fun to know how much money the attorney's got for prosecuting the case against the RIAA. That $13 didn't line my pockets, but it certainly took away from the diamond-lined pockets of the RIAA. Wuhahahahahaha!!!
Thanks for the insights about Knoppix and HDD installs. After seeing how "clean" it looked coming straight off of the CD I thought it might be useful enough in it's current form for my Windows-using wife to actually use in her upcoming opening of her own business. However, based on your mileage with it, if she does decide to switch over to Linux as her workstation, then I'll make sure to go with a more mainstream Linux distro like Mandrake, Red Hat, or SUSE. (I've never been that impressed with Debian, Gentoo, or Slackware's general arcane-ness for the newbie Linux user, and I don't have a problem with companies making profits)