Yeah, the way the article reads, her information was handed over to the RIAA during a court case in another jurisdiction, and she was sent to collections without prior notice or trial. In fact, the collection agency used the threat of a law suit as leverage to extort money, so clearly there was never a court case.
I find it alarming that the RIAA can obtain information about a person in one jurisdiction when the person resides in an entirely different jurisdiction. I furthermore am alarmed that they can use this as grounds for extortion.
It seems to me that they (the RIAA) are required to actually tender a bill or invoice for the funds first, rather than sending the matter directly to a collection agency. The fact that a collection agency is involved can irreparably harm this woman's credit. But then, that's probably part of the plan.
Funny how you can change the meaning...
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It's really funny how you can change the meaning of something just by making subtle choices of language or juxtaposition. Consider the following from the Slashdot article:
The timing is not coincidental with Apple's Tiger release, as Allchin pointed out some advantages that Microsoft had over Apple's OS: 'High on the list of features are security enhancements, improved desktop searching and organizing, and better methods for laptops to roam from one network to another.'
The way this is written implies that this is a list of features that Longhorn has which Tiger does not have.
If you read the actual C|Net article, it's not written quite so slanted. First off, nowhere in the article is security said to be an improvement over OS X (any version), but rather, over previous versions of Windows. Allchin does state his belief that Longhorn's searching is better than Tiger's Spotlight feature -- mainly in ways you can do useful things with search results. (Then again, Tiger is due out this month, a full year before Longhorn, and no doubt Apple will offer incremental updates to the feature set via Software Update.)
Laptops doing network roaming is something that's been well-supported in OS X for quite some time now, so again, this isn't something Microsoft can claim as an advantage. Certainly anything is an improvement over WiFi support in XP (though I'm told SP2 fixes some of the worst problems).
The icons representing actual file contents (or folder contents, for folder icons) sounds great at first -- but this is the kind of feature that, if poorly implemented, could really kill performance. There's a reason that icons traditionally are an abstracted representation of the type of file data or the application to which the file belongs.
If Microsoft implemented this feature right, it wouldn't be too much of a performance hit -- basically, they'd only have to cache a thumbnail image of the file's contents (or the first page of the file's contents), and only update the cache when the timestamp on the file is newer than the timestamp on the thumbnail. But judging from past Microsoft coding efforts, I sincerely doubt that they coded this feature anywhere near that efficiently.
My real objection to the new icon rendering paradigm in Longhorn is the same objection I have to Microsoft UI gaffes like dynamically hiding lesser-used menu items, and it has to do with interface consistency. Bruce Tognazzini has expounded on this at length, so I won't repeat the things that he's said. But he's written some excellent articles on how Microsoft has repeatedly broken the menu bar paradigm with this and other misfeatures. (He explains why putting a menu bar at the top of the screen is far better than attaching a menu bar to the application window, as well.)
Then again, Microsoft can't be bothered to do real usability testing and hire real human factors experts. If they did, their UI wouldn't have so much brain damage. But it seems that Microsoft is doing what it always does -- they look at the competition, and they duplicate the eye candy without putting thought into duplicating the features that actually make something work right. (It's as though Steve Jobs ran amuck without any usability or human factors considerations to keep him in check.) And Tog isn't a Windows-basher. He wrote an article citing 10 reasons why the OS X dock sucks, though at least one of those reasons can be negated if you pin the dock to the right hand side of the bottom of the screen. (Hint, doing this keeps the trash can in a consistent location so you can rely on muscle memory.)
At least Longhorn will give you the option of using an interface minus all the eye candy; if only Microsoft gave you the power to permanently disable the hiding of menu items that are seldom used. (Having menu items that appear and disappear sabotages your ability to rely on the order that items appear in a menu. Furthermore, hidden items are more likely to be entirely forgotten by users, even experienced users.)
Look at the farscape fans.. We got a 'finale' and let it die a dignified death.
Um, your analogy is a bit strained. The Sci-Fi channel was content to let Farscape die at the end of season 4, even with a major cliffhanger ending that would be unresolved; it was only through a massive fan campaign to save the show that the Farscape mini-series (the Peacekeeper War) was realized. This allowed much of the story arc planned for season 5 to be told, and many of the loose ends were tied up.
With Enterprise, we again have a fan campaign to save the series, and though some would argue the case, I would say that season 4 of Enterprise is by far the best one yet, and what the show should have been in seasons 1-3. (Thank you, Manny Coto.) Farscape was cut down in its prime, and I'd argue that the same holds true for Enterprise.
I would argue that if the fans of Farscape "let it go," as you're advising Enterprise's fans to do, the show wouldn't have had the dignified death you speak of. Rather, it would have fizzled out and left too many questions unanswered. The season-ending cliffhanger at the end of season 4 was certainly not the "finale" we all hoped for. That's why the mini-series was such a godsend. (Yeah, I would have been happier with a fifth season, but better to get something than nothing.)
Even if Tridge had accepted the terms of the license, illegal and/or unenforceable clauses of the license agreement carry no weight.
The legal right to reverse engineer is enshrined in countries such as the United States. In the U.S., reverse engineering for the purpose of compatibility is explicitly legal. Since Tridge claims that his reverse engineering of BitKeeper is entirely done for compatibility reasons (i.e., to export data from BitKeeper to non-proprietary SCM systems), I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt on this one.
The only caveat to the above line of reasoning is that I don't know for certain that Tridge was doing this work in the U.S. or some other country where reverse engineering is legal.
Anyway, my real point here is that just because the license says you can't do something doesn't remove your legal right to do that thing. Of course, Tridge is on even firmer footing because he doesn't use BitMover/BitKeeper, and therefore his efforts are about as "clean room" as you can get with a one man show.
Standard disclaimers apply: I am not a lawyer, blah blah blah.
To burn a CD with the finder, you put a blank disk in. It appears on the desktop, and you can drag files to it + rename it. Then, you drag it to the trash in order to commit your changes to the disk.
That's one way to burn the CD. There's also a "Burn" button in the finder window representing the volume you're creating (accessible by double-clicking the icon for the CD-R to open said finder window). Or you can even Control-Click (or right-click if you have a 2 button mouse) to bring up the contextual menu and do it that way.
I think there's also a menu item for burning.
If I want to erase a disk, I can't use the trash can, I have to use the disk image utility (or the terminal).
That's one OS deficit I find unfortunate. CD-RW disks should be eraseable from the Finder. You shouldn't have to use a separate utility (OS provided or 3rd party) just to erase a CD-RW!
I'm assuming that this thing does port forwarding and so forth. But does it do arbitrary port forwarding while allowing things like redirection to different numbered ports? For instance, can I have incoming WAN traffic on port 10010 forwarded to port 80 on one of the servers on my LAN?
This feature is important to me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is bypassing my ISP's idiotic port blocking. (Yes, I know I can reconfigure the daemons on my box to listen on non-standard ports, but I would rather have all my internal LAN traffic talking on the standard ports and only have inbound WAN traffic listened for on non-standard ports.)
I'm still using an antiquated firewall/router appliance from Moreton Bay (which I believe got bought out by Snapgear) precisely because it does this sort of thing, and none of the other affordable consumer-grade firewall/router appliances seem to have this ability. (They only allow forwarding to same-numbered ports.)
Why in the hell does Sony use the "X" - you know, the universal symbol for closing/exiting/canceling in everything else electronic - as the friggin' *select* button?
Actually, I've read that on Japanese PSPs, the O button is used instead of the X button for selection by default. (Basically, the roles of O and X are the reverse of the roles these buttons play on the U.S. PSP, at least for the built-in UI. With games, all bets are off, though I imagine Japanese localized games probably try to stick with the Japanese convention, and U.S. localized games probably try to stick with the U.S. convention.)
This is similar to how the Macintosh localized the behavior of check boxes (well before the advent of OS X). In some older versions of what we now call the "classic" Mac OS, the Japanese-localized version used a real check-mark inside checkboxes, whereas the U.S. version of the OS used an X mark inside check boxes. The reason these changes were made had to do with cultural differences -- in Japan, X denoted that you were de-selecting something, or that you were negating something, whereas in the U.S., putting an X mark in a checkbox was a synonym for putting a check mark in a box. (And drawing an X is easy to do procedurally, whereas a check mark would require blitting a small bitmap. Not that this is necessarily why it was done this way, but it's a possible reason.)
Eventually, Apple decided to use the check mark universally, as its meaning seems to be unambiguous regardless of the locale.
Familiar my ass - maybe familiar to the people who have another playstation...
Which is a lot of people. Most folks who buy a PSP are going to own a PlayStation or a PS2. And this also hearkens to another UI lesson we can take from the Macintosh! If you've ever used a Mac, you are probably aware that the trash can's meaning has been overloaded. Dragging a file onto the trash means scheduling that file for deletion (i.e., moving the file into a trash folder which will later be "emptied"). Dragging a disk icon, such as the icon for a floppy or (later) for a CD, onto the trash causes that media to be unmounted and ejected. Well, OK, disk images and external hard disks just get unmounted, but you get the idea.
Now, this is a pretty brain damaged UI metaphor, because intuitively, you'd think that dragging your floppy icon to the trash would erase the contents of the floppy! But once this shortcut for ejecting floppies (and later, CDs) became widespread, Apple didn't dare remove this UI metaphor. Why? Because people were familiar with it.
This stupid metaphor even persists in OS X, although Apple now causes the trash icon to change to an "eject" icon (similar to the eject button on most CD and tape players) whenever a disk icon is being dragged on the desktop. But that's a kludge to clarify the meaning of dropping the disk icon onto the trash.
I'm honestly not sure how the "X = select, O = go back" convention got established for the PlayStation in the U.S. The first few games that came out for the original PlayStation didn't have a lot of UI consistency for how to navigate menus and so forth. Somehow, one convention stuck, and that's what developers have been using ever since.
Surprising that you got into MIT (or maybe you didn't.. you know, you might just be lying to make point here!! *gasp*!!).
Actually, yes, I'm an MIT alumnus. I don't think MIT makes its alumni records public on the web, but you can check for my photo in Technique (the MIT yearbook); I'm in the book for the class of 1992. If that still doesn't satisfy you, I'm sure you can call the Institute and verify that a Robert Poole did in fact study there from 1988 to 1992. I believe the registrar's office should have that information. I'd place a scan of my diploma online, but I don't feel like being a target of identity theft.
From the wikipedia article[...]
Since when has Wikipedia been an authoritative source of any information? Since just about anyone can contribute, the peer review and fact checking that would go into any garden variety encyclopedia would seem to be missing. But let's ignore that for the moment:
The term "X Windows" (in the manner of "Microsoft Windows") is officially deprecated and generally considered incorrect, though it has been in common use since the inception of X and has been used deliberately for literary effect, for example in the UNIX-HATERS Handbook.
So, basically, the Wikipedia article backs me up on this. The term has been in common use since the inception of X. How is this quote in any way, shape, or form a negation of what I wrote? Oh, yes... they "deprecated" the term "X Windows." Which doesn't stop people from continuing to use the term, regardless of whether some people want the term to die for political reasons. The X Consortium is free to request that people use one of the officially "blessed" names for X11. That doesn't mean I have to do what they ask.
And that thing about RMS and other MIT people calling it X WindowS (not by mistake) -- yeah, right. I believe you.
And BTW, common usage doesn't make 'then' and 'than' interchangeable. It's still an error when you do that. Same thing with X.
Actually, no, you're comparing apples and oranges here.
First off, "common usage" is not to be confused with "common errors." People make common grammatical and spelling mistakes for a variety of reasons; for instance, two words might sound the same or similar but be spelled differently. (Thus, the confusion of "then" and "than.") The two words are not used interchangeably except by the ignorant.
Examples of common usage trumping antiquated grammar or spelling rules:
So-called "split infinitives." Once upon a time, a grammarian who thought that Latin-derived rules of grammar should apply to English decided that infinitives should never be split. Most modern English authorities agree that there's nothing wrong with split infinitives, and in fact, the split infinitive form of a sentence is often less cumbersome to speak. (Spoken language is primary; written language derives from spoken language.) So, "To boldly go where no man has gone before
Apple isn't in the computer business, apple is in consumer computing business.
This is actually not strictly true, and if it were true, there would be no G5 tower computers, nor would there be any XServes.
Apple has made great inroads in academic computing (for instance, the Virginia Tech supercomputer project) and commercial enterprises that are numeric-intensive (e.g., gene sequencing done on XServe farms). Down the road, this can be viewed as an investment, because capturing mind-share in academia and in niche corporate computing markets is the tip of the wedge that can allow Apple to enter other markets. Apple is not just about consumer computing.
...was that Sony's marketing has traditionally targeted older gamers, whereas Nintendo's marketing has traditionally targeted younger gamers, especially children. As you correctly point out, Sega's marketing was geared for a slightly older and "hipper" crowd than Nintendo's -- we all remember the Sega ads around the time of the Genesis, right? "Sega does what Nintendon't!" -- but in my opinion, Sony pushed the envelope and attracted people in their mid-20's, something even Sega never really managed to do in great numbers. Yes, such games geared toward an adult audience appeared on the PC long ago, but we're talking about console gaming. Console gaming is a much bigger market than PC gaming is, even today. Dedicated game consoles have traditionally been viewed as the purview of kids and teenagers, not 20-somethings fresh out of college. When Sony entered the picture, the gamer demographics definitely changed.
It might be giving Sony too much credit to say they invented the market for adult games, but they do deserve some credit for exploiting this demographic better than almost anyone else. Look at the title line-up for the PlayStation and PS2, and tell me what percentage of titles are geared at young kids? It's a small number. Yeah, the Saturn had some titles for mature gamers, but the system didn't predate the PlayStation by that much, and Sega definitely wanted their system to have broad appeal to gamers of all ages.
Wait, no, that isn't it at all. The only reason Sony got anywhere with the original Playstation was everything else at the time fucking sucked.
I have to take a little umbrage at that statement. The 3DO (not 3D0 as you wrote -- a common mistake which I'm surprised people are still making) may have been way overpriced when it was initially released, but by the time the PlayStation debuted, the 3DO had a reasonable price, and a decent library of games. Yeah, there were quite a few bad titles in the 3DO library, but Road Rash and Way of the Warrior were pretty outstanding titles, not to mention Gex. For a while, it looked like 3DO was gaining traction and that it would become what Trip Hawkins had been hoping for: the VHS of the game world.
Unfortunately, most of the 3DO hardware licensees dropped plans to release their own versions of the console, and when some formerly 3DO exclusive titles appeared on other platforms, I think the handwriting was on the wall. Naughty Dog went on to major success developing titles for the PlayStation, as did many other developers. By the time Panasonic/Matsushita decided to buy the exclusive rights to the next gen 3DO chipset, and then sat on it for years before quietly shelving it, the 3DO had faded from the public consciousness.
Similarly, you mention the Sega Saturn, and while I will freely admit that the hardware was badly designed (especially with respect to the brain-damaged master-slave dual CPU arrangement), the games that came out for the system were pretty darned good. In fact, the Saturn did very well in Japan, much better than in North America. So making the blanket statement that "the PlayStation did well because everything else at the time sucked" is perhaps not correct.
Point in fact, I preordered the PlayStation and shelled out $300 for it, but sold mine about a year later because there were no good games for it. (Well, precious few.) None of the halfway-decent PS games could hold a candle to the few titles that I loved and played regularly on the 3DO. I didn't wind up buying a new PlayStation until Bloody Roar came out, and only then because the system had finally picked up some critical mass with enough decent titles to sustain it. (That, and some brilliant person came up with the idea of re-marketing older game titles as "Classics" that only cost $20. That way, people like me who didn't want to pay for used games that might be scratched or otherwise defective could buy older popular titles for cheap.)
I own a Nintendo DS, but I have to say that the backward compatibility wasn't a big selling point for me. Up til now, I haven't felt a need to own a portable gaming system. (Well, I flirted with owning an Atari Lynx back in grad school, because I got one used for a great price... but that was given away a long time ago.) The DS seemed cool and innovative to me, and the few titles that are out there for the system seem to utilize the touchscreen to varying degrees. It's a fun little system. However, my girlfriend has a lot of old GameBoy and GameBoy Color games, so when I gave her the choice between a DS and a GBA SP, she chose the GBA SP. The DS won't play those older games.
The backward compatibility of the DS is only a compelling feature if you have a library of GameBoy Advance games. I can't imagine someone going out to buy a Nintendo DS and then buying a bunch of GBA games for it -- if you're going to do that, why not just save yourself a chunk of change and buy the GBA SP instead? Considering also that multiplayer GBA games won't work in multiplayer mode on the DS (since Nintendo unwisely decided not to support the link cable or emulating one using the DS's WiFi), I'd say that feature is of limited utility.
"The X Window System" may be correct English (at least American), but "The X Windowing System" is no less correct... and some purists might say it is technically more correct. Both are just cumbersome to use in speech or print.
Then shouldn't it rather be called "The X Window
ing System"?
Funny enough, a fair number of MIT folks (including yours truly) referred to it as that for a long time... you know, before formal documentation solidified and people started pointing to the docs as "proof" that their way of referring to this software was the One True Way.
Since "The X Windowing System" is rather cumbersome (both in print and in speech), people like me call it "X Windows" as a vernacular abbreviation, or "X11" to be super-brief. I don't consider these wrong. I know I'm in good company in my usage, and I am constantly bewildered by the astoundingly stupid pedantry that surrounds this subject. Try talking to some of the folks who worked on X or used X from the get-go, and you'll see a very much more relaxed usage than what some of these young whippersnappers are spouting off about.:-)
There is no such thing as X Windows. It has always been called:
"The X Window System" not X Windows.
It is called that in all 7 out of 7 of the books I purchased on it a few years ago.
Which does not negate years of common usage that predate the books you bought. I pointed out in another posting that even Richard Stallman has referred to X11 as "X Windows" in articles he's written. Not that everything RMS writes is sacrosanct, but I should point out that his ties to the MIT community (where the X Window System originated) go back a long way, and most of us ex-MIT people like to call it X Windows because it's convenient and descriptive, regardless of what some jackass pedant thinks.
There is no PLURAL "S" on Window in "The X Window System"
Yes, but truncating "The X Window System" to "X Window" is decidedly wrong from a linguistic standpoint, at least for American English speakers. The OP was trying to tell people it was called "X Window," which comes up every few months, and touches off a firestorm of crap posts.
He was saying that it is not X WindowS. It is always mentioned that the S should be left out - it's not Microsoft Windows and X Windows.
That's pretty funny, because I've referred to X11 as X Windows since I was an MIT undergrad, and that's typically how most old hands from that place refer to it. You know, MIT, the place where X was first developed. (Yes, I even used X10 briefly before the campus fully transitioned to X11.)
Even the much-loved RMS (that's Richard Stallman, for those who aren't aware) has referred to it as "X Windows" in articles he's written. So whoever the idiot is that keeps correcting people to call it "X Window," can you please shut the fsck up? Seriously. Not to mention the fact that the person who keeps doing this is obviously not a native English speaker, because "X Window" sounds retarded and just plain wrong, at least to American ears. It might sound great in Germany or Russia or possibly even in the UK (though I highly doubt a UK speaker of English would say that).
Besides, X11 can display more than one window at a time, so calling it "X Window" just sounds... retarded. And I'm not someone who uses the term "retarded" or "brain damaged" lightly, but both definitely apply in this case.
Last point: Common usage in language is usually what counts, folks. Just because some jackass claims that "the standard says foo, so call it foo" doesn't mean that negates years of common use. Some of us have been using X11 (and its predecessors) longer than these pipsqueaks who chime in with these idiotic "it's called X Window, not X Windows!" threads.
I beg to differ. As another poster pointed out, only quartz and certain other crystals (e.g., calcium fluoride, which is being investigated as a lens material for next generation chip fabs using EUV for photolithography) transmit UV.
This technology actually isn't that new. The Japanese were experimenting with piping sunlight into buildings using fiber optics about a decade ago, possibly more. I remember seeing a program about the topic on PBS or Discovery about that long ago. One of the benefits touted by this technique is that it actually filters out harmful UV; they did experiments that showed plants grew healthier under piped-in sunlight than they did out in the open.
Someone spank the moderator for modding this Insightful. Apple, in fact, only ever officially supported DVD-R. Apple has traditionally backed DVD-R because the format has marginally wider support among DVD players. The only DVD recordable media sold in Apple's retail stores, and the only Apple-branded DVD recordable media available anywhere, is DVD-R format.
DVD+R support only came in the most recent updates to Mac OS X and the latest firmware updates for Apple's SuperDrives. (Apple typically sources their DVD burners from Pioneer, but they had a habit of putting Apple-custom firmware on the drives, which disabled +R support for the longest time.) So now you can burn DVD+R discs in your G5 Mac, though for best results you probably want to use Roxio Toast and not Apple's built-in disc burning software. Apple also recently added playback support for DVD+R discs to their DVD Player application, so that discs burned on set-top DVD recorders can be played back on a Mac.
Just in case parent isn't trolling (Which I really think he is), parent poster should realize two things:
Paying back money that you borrow is distinctly different from selling human beings as slaves. They're not even remotely the same.
that banks are employed by *people*, who do die when they don't eat, and the bank must be profitable in order to employ those people.
Just to be clear, the parent post to which you are referring is actually alluding to a real practice that existed, once upon a time. Specifically, people did at one time sell their children into indentured servitude or slavery (or were themselves placed into indentured servitude) in order to pay off debts. There were also debtor prisons, which you can read about in most history books. Bankruptcy law has done away with most of these archaic and inhumane practices, but making it harder for individuals to declare bankruptcy is going to undo a lot of the progress we've made in the last two centuries.
Let's address your points, shall we? First, the post to which you're replying most certainly does not attempt to imply that paying back borrowed money is somehow the same as selling human beings into slavery. If you read the portion that you yourself quoted, you'd realize that. The original poster was using sarcasm to drive the point home that these bankruptcy "reforms" are a step backwards. Selling human beings into slavery is, however, a way to generate revenue, and that is revenue that can be used to pay a debt. When someone doesn't have any (or many) resources, slavery or indentured servitude is a desperation move, usually to avoid the aforementioned debtor's prison. In the modern world, people run the very real risk of losing their homes, their jobs, and a variety of other things that are fundamental to living.
Thankfully, slavery has been abolished in the civilized world.
To address your second point, banks and other money lending institutions incorporate risk calculations into every aspect of the money lending process. They use these probabilities (the risk that a borrower will default on a loan) to determine whether to extend someone credit, and to determine what interest rate to give someone. They also use these risk calculations to project profits, losses, etc. No modern banking institution or other money lender is going to go out of business because some of its customers default on loans and declare bankruptcy. No modern banking institution or other money lender is going to put its employees out on the street because Joe Schmo declared Chapter 7 after racking up a bunch of credit card bills. Banks, like insurance companies and casinos, play to win, and they make sure the odds are always in their favor.
For the purpose of full disclosure, I should mention that I myself have declared bankruptcy -- initially under Chapter 13, which the Washington Post article indicates is what many debtors would be forced to declare under the new law; eventually, I converted to Chapter 7 because I simultaneously lost my job and had car repairs in excess of $3000, and thus could no longer meet my Chapter 13 payment plan. Chapter 7 is primarily there to protect people who have incredibly bad luck. Yes, it gets abused -- but not as much as the banks would like you to think. And the new laws don't take into account factors such as medical debt, which according to the Washington Post article cited earlier is responsible for 50% of bankruptcy cases. (Another sobering statistic: Of those who declare bankruptcy due to illness or medical bills, 75% have medical insurance -- meaning that medical insurance may not be enough to prevent financial ruin.)
But he's wrong about one thing. 'None' is a noun, not an adjective, and it can be used both singularly and plurally, as he says, depending on the quantity it's expressing.
Actually, a cursory examination of the Dictionary.com reference for 'none' indicates that 'none' can act as a pronoun, an adverb, or even an adjective (in the sense of "not any," see the entry sourced from WordNet/Princeton), but not as a noun. So you're wrong on two counts -- 'none' isn't a noun, but it can serve as an adjective.
Note that I wouldn't have bothered, except that you were correcting someone with patently false information. It pays to check facts before being a pedant.
Nice content in your post, but could you tone down the stridency with the all-caps? Also, the subject line is inflammatory and misleading, since you really haven't negated my arguments; rather, you have merely provided an alternative viewpoint (which does not in fact negate anything I said in my parent post).
With any legal dispute, you are going to see two or more opposing legal theories, each of which has merits. It's up to a judge or a jury to decide which argument is more compelling. This is not a clear-cut case where one viewpoint is "WRONG!" and another viewpoint is right.
Furthermore, your initial statement is in fact false. You state that the ISP is selling Internet service to the customer, and that the customer has a reasonable expectation that the service will be usable for all non-harmful Internet uses. However, most ISPs in the United States now block port 80 inbound to the customer's computer (for example) so that the customer is prohibited from running a web site hosted on their own computer hardware. I could argue that I have a reasonable expectation to be allowed to run any damned IP service I want on my own hardware, and the ISP as the common carrier shouldn't regulate that; however, the ISP has to balance my bandwidth utilization against that of other customers, and they have a desire to prevent people from using a non-commercial account for commercial purposes (i.e., running a for-profit web site when you've only paid for regular home broadband service).
Of course, the ISP is normally required to divulge what their customers are and are not allowed to do -- those are the terms of service the customer must agree to. The only reason the FCC and the courts stepped in this time is because VoIP is being backed by a lot of large companies with a lot of money, and many of these companies feel they are being unfairly locked out of competition in these areas by port blocking. (In most cases, the ISP is doing port blocking on VoIP because they want to offer such services themselves, or because they want their customers to use traditional phone service, which many carriers also provide.)
It's the ISPs network. They can do whatever they want with it.
Yes, but the more restrictive the ISP is, the less they look like a common carrier. You can't have your cake and eat it too -- and common carrier status confers all kinds of protections (legal and otherwise) that the ISP runs the risk of losing if it starts censoring specific kinds of traffic.
I suppose in your world hiding behind an alias or username is somehow considered more honorable.
Who's attacking whose character now?
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to register; now we can differentiate your posts from everyone else who posts as Anonymous Coward. (It has nothing to do with hiding behind an alias, and everything to do with making it easier to track who is making what assertions in a discussion thread.)
I'm sorry you felt that I attacked your character, but only a little bit. After all, since you've stooped to the same tactics that you accuse me of, you've basically proven yourself to be a hypocrite. If you want to say that I have no clue, then fine. Designing RAM chips isn't a job I want to do; I have more interesting things to spend my time on, and to me, storage (long or short term) is just storage. So there you go -- you win. Feel better now?
By the way... AFAICT, I never accused you of laziness. Petulance, yes. I will, however, accuse you of being a pedantic ass. I will also say that I am underwhelmed by the current state of the art in RAM technology, so you'll just have to forgive me for not caring about some of the fine points that you apparently care so much about. As I see it, everything is still just a grid of cells, with abysmal performance characteristics. All the fancy support logic and power management circuitry won't change that fundamental fact. When I see an order of magnitude boost in performance (speed) and/or storage densities, then I'll be impressed. I don't necessarily even care how we get there. But I strongly suspect that relying on the same tired DRAM technology (transistors and capacitors, for crying out loud) won't be the right path.
once you have "figured out the tricks", building a rocket isn't rocket science either. Just what the hell is your point?
Funny how you seem to lack the courage or conviction to attack someone without hiding behind AC.
This is really very simple. By "tricks," I was referring to the process tweaks which, apparently (if earlier posts in this thread are to be believed), violate semiconductor design rules. These tweaks allow for increases in cell density; however, once you've established what tricks seem to work, how hard is it to create a grid of these cells? Not very. It should have been obvious to anyone who followed this discussion thread what I meant.
I shouldn't have to quote every single parent in a thread to establish the context in which I'm saying something; if you're too lazy to follow the thread, kindly don't comment. Of course, I suspect your goal wasn't to further the discussion but to get in a personal attack, hence your post as Anonymous Coward. It's easy to make smarmy comments when you take someone's written word entirely out of context, choosing to focus instead on a single sentence for the sole purpose of trying to make someone else look bad.
OK, so you want my point? You petulantly demand that I give you my point and make it plain, since you apparently don't have the capacity to figure it out on your own. Here it is: My contention is, and has been, that RAM isn't that frigging complicated, and despite the complexities inherent in the (design/refinement/whatever)process, RAM itself is conceptually and topologically simple. That's it. People have understood grids for thousands of years. So there's some fancy solid-state physics involved in squeezing higher bit densities onto memory chips? Great. That doesn't change the fact that it's a frigging matrix of cells, if we're talking about DRAM, each cell has one transistor and one capacitor. That's it, end of story. The complexities are all driven by economics.
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Yeah, the way the article reads, her information was handed over to the RIAA during a court case in another jurisdiction, and she was sent to collections without prior notice or trial. In fact, the collection agency used the threat of a law suit as leverage to extort money, so clearly there was never a court case.
I find it alarming that the RIAA can obtain information about a person in one jurisdiction when the person resides in an entirely different jurisdiction. I furthermore am alarmed that they can use this as grounds for extortion.
It seems to me that they (the RIAA) are required to actually tender a bill or invoice for the funds first, rather than sending the matter directly to a collection agency. The fact that a collection agency is involved can irreparably harm this woman's credit. But then, that's probably part of the plan.
The way this is written implies that this is a list of features that Longhorn has which Tiger does not have.
If you read the actual C|Net article, it's not written quite so slanted. First off, nowhere in the article is security said to be an improvement over OS X (any version), but rather, over previous versions of Windows. Allchin does state his belief that Longhorn's searching is better than Tiger's Spotlight feature -- mainly in ways you can do useful things with search results. (Then again, Tiger is due out this month, a full year before Longhorn, and no doubt Apple will offer incremental updates to the feature set via Software Update.)
Laptops doing network roaming is something that's been well-supported in OS X for quite some time now, so again, this isn't something Microsoft can claim as an advantage. Certainly anything is an improvement over WiFi support in XP (though I'm told SP2 fixes some of the worst problems).
The icons representing actual file contents (or folder contents, for folder icons) sounds great at first -- but this is the kind of feature that, if poorly implemented, could really kill performance. There's a reason that icons traditionally are an abstracted representation of the type of file data or the application to which the file belongs.
If Microsoft implemented this feature right, it wouldn't be too much of a performance hit -- basically, they'd only have to cache a thumbnail image of the file's contents (or the first page of the file's contents), and only update the cache when the timestamp on the file is newer than the timestamp on the thumbnail. But judging from past Microsoft coding efforts, I sincerely doubt that they coded this feature anywhere near that efficiently.
My real objection to the new icon rendering paradigm in Longhorn is the same objection I have to Microsoft UI gaffes like dynamically hiding lesser-used menu items, and it has to do with interface consistency. Bruce Tognazzini has expounded on this at length, so I won't repeat the things that he's said. But he's written some excellent articles on how Microsoft has repeatedly broken the menu bar paradigm with this and other misfeatures. (He explains why putting a menu bar at the top of the screen is far better than attaching a menu bar to the application window, as well.)
Then again, Microsoft can't be bothered to do real usability testing and hire real human factors experts. If they did, their UI wouldn't have so much brain damage. But it seems that Microsoft is doing what it always does -- they look at the competition, and they duplicate the eye candy without putting thought into duplicating the features that actually make something work right. (It's as though Steve Jobs ran amuck without any usability or human factors considerations to keep him in check.) And Tog isn't a Windows-basher. He wrote an article citing 10 reasons why the OS X dock sucks, though at least one of those reasons can be negated if you pin the dock to the right hand side of the bottom of the screen. (Hint, doing this keeps the trash can in a consistent location so you can rely on muscle memory.)
At least Longhorn will give you the option of using an interface minus all the eye candy; if only Microsoft gave you the power to permanently disable the hiding of menu items that are seldom used. (Having menu items that appear and disappear sabotages your ability to rely on the order that items appear in a menu. Furthermore, hidden items are more likely to be entirely forgotten by users, even experienced users.)
Um, your analogy is a bit strained. The Sci-Fi channel was content to let Farscape die at the end of season 4, even with a major cliffhanger ending that would be unresolved; it was only through a massive fan campaign to save the show that the Farscape mini-series (the Peacekeeper War) was realized. This allowed much of the story arc planned for season 5 to be told, and many of the loose ends were tied up.
With Enterprise, we again have a fan campaign to save the series, and though some would argue the case, I would say that season 4 of Enterprise is by far the best one yet, and what the show should have been in seasons 1-3. (Thank you, Manny Coto.) Farscape was cut down in its prime, and I'd argue that the same holds true for Enterprise.
I would argue that if the fans of Farscape "let it go," as you're advising Enterprise's fans to do, the show wouldn't have had the dignified death you speak of. Rather, it would have fizzled out and left too many questions unanswered. The season-ending cliffhanger at the end of season 4 was certainly not the "finale" we all hoped for. That's why the mini-series was such a godsend. (Yeah, I would have been happier with a fifth season, but better to get something than nothing.)
Incidentally, Jolene Blalock has opined that the show's finale is "appalling." Not the blaze of glory you want a show to go out on...
Even if Tridge had accepted the terms of the license, illegal and/or unenforceable clauses of the license agreement carry no weight.
The legal right to reverse engineer is enshrined in countries such as the United States. In the U.S., reverse engineering for the purpose of compatibility is explicitly legal. Since Tridge claims that his reverse engineering of BitKeeper is entirely done for compatibility reasons (i.e., to export data from BitKeeper to non-proprietary SCM systems), I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt on this one.
The only caveat to the above line of reasoning is that I don't know for certain that Tridge was doing this work in the U.S. or some other country where reverse engineering is legal.
Anyway, my real point here is that just because the license says you can't do something doesn't remove your legal right to do that thing. Of course, Tridge is on even firmer footing because he doesn't use BitMover/BitKeeper, and therefore his efforts are about as "clean room" as you can get with a one man show.
Standard disclaimers apply: I am not a lawyer, blah blah blah.
That's one way to burn the CD. There's also a "Burn" button in the finder window representing the volume you're creating (accessible by double-clicking the icon for the CD-R to open said finder window). Or you can even Control-Click (or right-click if you have a 2 button mouse) to bring up the contextual menu and do it that way.
I think there's also a menu item for burning.
That's one OS deficit I find unfortunate. CD-RW disks should be eraseable from the Finder. You shouldn't have to use a separate utility (OS provided or 3rd party) just to erase a CD-RW!
I'm assuming that this thing does port forwarding and so forth. But does it do arbitrary port forwarding while allowing things like redirection to different numbered ports? For instance, can I have incoming WAN traffic on port 10010 forwarded to port 80 on one of the servers on my LAN?
This feature is important to me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is bypassing my ISP's idiotic port blocking. (Yes, I know I can reconfigure the daemons on my box to listen on non-standard ports, but I would rather have all my internal LAN traffic talking on the standard ports and only have inbound WAN traffic listened for on non-standard ports.)
I'm still using an antiquated firewall/router appliance from Moreton Bay (which I believe got bought out by Snapgear) precisely because it does this sort of thing, and none of the other affordable consumer-grade firewall/router appliances seem to have this ability. (They only allow forwarding to same-numbered ports.)
Actually, I've read that on Japanese PSPs, the O button is used instead of the X button for selection by default. (Basically, the roles of O and X are the reverse of the roles these buttons play on the U.S. PSP, at least for the built-in UI. With games, all bets are off, though I imagine Japanese localized games probably try to stick with the Japanese convention, and U.S. localized games probably try to stick with the U.S. convention.)
This is similar to how the Macintosh localized the behavior of check boxes (well before the advent of OS X). In some older versions of what we now call the "classic" Mac OS, the Japanese-localized version used a real check-mark inside checkboxes, whereas the U.S. version of the OS used an X mark inside check boxes. The reason these changes were made had to do with cultural differences -- in Japan, X denoted that you were de-selecting something, or that you were negating something, whereas in the U.S., putting an X mark in a checkbox was a synonym for putting a check mark in a box. (And drawing an X is easy to do procedurally, whereas a check mark would require blitting a small bitmap. Not that this is necessarily why it was done this way, but it's a possible reason.)
Eventually, Apple decided to use the check mark universally, as its meaning seems to be unambiguous regardless of the locale.
Which is a lot of people. Most folks who buy a PSP are going to own a PlayStation or a PS2. And this also hearkens to another UI lesson we can take from the Macintosh! If you've ever used a Mac, you are probably aware that the trash can's meaning has been overloaded. Dragging a file onto the trash means scheduling that file for deletion (i.e., moving the file into a trash folder which will later be "emptied"). Dragging a disk icon, such as the icon for a floppy or (later) for a CD, onto the trash causes that media to be unmounted and ejected. Well, OK, disk images and external hard disks just get unmounted, but you get the idea.
Now, this is a pretty brain damaged UI metaphor, because intuitively, you'd think that dragging your floppy icon to the trash would erase the contents of the floppy! But once this shortcut for ejecting floppies (and later, CDs) became widespread, Apple didn't dare remove this UI metaphor. Why? Because people were familiar with it.
This stupid metaphor even persists in OS X, although Apple now causes the trash icon to change to an "eject" icon (similar to the eject button on most CD and tape players) whenever a disk icon is being dragged on the desktop. But that's a kludge to clarify the meaning of dropping the disk icon onto the trash.
I'm honestly not sure how the "X = select, O = go back" convention got established for the PlayStation in the U.S. The first few games that came out for the original PlayStation didn't have a lot of UI consistency for how to navigate menus and so forth. Somehow, one convention stuck, and that's what developers have been using ever since.
Actually, yes, I'm an MIT alumnus. I don't think MIT makes its alumni records public on the web, but you can check for my photo in Technique (the MIT yearbook); I'm in the book for the class of 1992. If that still doesn't satisfy you, I'm sure you can call the Institute and verify that a Robert Poole did in fact study there from 1988 to 1992. I believe the registrar's office should have that information. I'd place a scan of my diploma online, but I don't feel like being a target of identity theft.
Since when has Wikipedia been an authoritative source of any information? Since just about anyone can contribute, the peer review and fact checking that would go into any garden variety encyclopedia would seem to be missing. But let's ignore that for the moment:
So, basically, the Wikipedia article backs me up on this. The term has been in common use since the inception of X. How is this quote in any way, shape, or form a negation of what I wrote? Oh, yes... they "deprecated" the term "X Windows." Which doesn't stop people from continuing to use the term, regardless of whether some people want the term to die for political reasons. The X Consortium is free to request that people use one of the officially "blessed" names for X11. That doesn't mean I have to do what they ask.
Well, besides the fact that the very Wikipedia article you quoted admits that the term "X Windows" has been in common use since the inception of X (i.e., since X was created, which was at MIT), I actually have some articles I can point you at:
A transcript of Richard Stallman's speech at NYU on May 29th, 2001
Section 29.21 of the GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual
A site containing choice quotes from RMS
A transcript of an interview with RMS
In addition, there's at least one other article I couldn't track down, but it was cited recently on Slashdot.
Actually, no, you're comparing apples and oranges here.
First off, "common usage" is not to be confused with "common errors." People make common grammatical and spelling mistakes for a variety of reasons; for instance, two words might sound the same or similar but be spelled differently. (Thus, the confusion of "then" and "than.") The two words are not used interchangeably except by the ignorant.
Examples of common usage trumping antiquated grammar or spelling rules:
This is actually not strictly true, and if it were true, there would be no G5 tower computers, nor would there be any XServes.
Apple has made great inroads in academic computing (for instance, the Virginia Tech supercomputer project) and commercial enterprises that are numeric-intensive (e.g., gene sequencing done on XServe farms). Down the road, this can be viewed as an investment, because capturing mind-share in academia and in niche corporate computing markets is the tip of the wedge that can allow Apple to enter other markets. Apple is not just about consumer computing.
...was that Sony's marketing has traditionally targeted older gamers, whereas Nintendo's marketing has traditionally targeted younger gamers, especially children. As you correctly point out, Sega's marketing was geared for a slightly older and "hipper" crowd than Nintendo's -- we all remember the Sega ads around the time of the Genesis, right? "Sega does what Nintendon't!" -- but in my opinion, Sony pushed the envelope and attracted people in their mid-20's, something even Sega never really managed to do in great numbers. Yes, such games geared toward an adult audience appeared on the PC long ago, but we're talking about console gaming. Console gaming is a much bigger market than PC gaming is, even today. Dedicated game consoles have traditionally been viewed as the purview of kids and teenagers, not 20-somethings fresh out of college. When Sony entered the picture, the gamer demographics definitely changed.
It might be giving Sony too much credit to say they invented the market for adult games, but they do deserve some credit for exploiting this demographic better than almost anyone else. Look at the title line-up for the PlayStation and PS2, and tell me what percentage of titles are geared at young kids? It's a small number. Yeah, the Saturn had some titles for mature gamers, but the system didn't predate the PlayStation by that much, and Sega definitely wanted their system to have broad appeal to gamers of all ages.
Like it or not, Sony was a pioneer in this area.
I have to take a little umbrage at that statement. The 3DO (not 3D0 as you wrote -- a common mistake which I'm surprised people are still making) may have been way overpriced when it was initially released, but by the time the PlayStation debuted, the 3DO had a reasonable price, and a decent library of games. Yeah, there were quite a few bad titles in the 3DO library, but Road Rash and Way of the Warrior were pretty outstanding titles, not to mention Gex. For a while, it looked like 3DO was gaining traction and that it would become what Trip Hawkins had been hoping for: the VHS of the game world.
Unfortunately, most of the 3DO hardware licensees dropped plans to release their own versions of the console, and when some formerly 3DO exclusive titles appeared on other platforms, I think the handwriting was on the wall. Naughty Dog went on to major success developing titles for the PlayStation, as did many other developers. By the time Panasonic/Matsushita decided to buy the exclusive rights to the next gen 3DO chipset, and then sat on it for years before quietly shelving it, the 3DO had faded from the public consciousness.
Similarly, you mention the Sega Saturn, and while I will freely admit that the hardware was badly designed (especially with respect to the brain-damaged master-slave dual CPU arrangement), the games that came out for the system were pretty darned good. In fact, the Saturn did very well in Japan, much better than in North America. So making the blanket statement that "the PlayStation did well because everything else at the time sucked" is perhaps not correct.
Point in fact, I preordered the PlayStation and shelled out $300 for it, but sold mine about a year later because there were no good games for it. (Well, precious few.) None of the halfway-decent PS games could hold a candle to the few titles that I loved and played regularly on the 3DO. I didn't wind up buying a new PlayStation until Bloody Roar came out, and only then because the system had finally picked up some critical mass with enough decent titles to sustain it. (That, and some brilliant person came up with the idea of re-marketing older game titles as "Classics" that only cost $20. That way, people like me who didn't want to pay for used games that might be scratched or otherwise defective could buy older popular titles for cheap.)
I own a Nintendo DS, but I have to say that the backward compatibility wasn't a big selling point for me. Up til now, I haven't felt a need to own a portable gaming system. (Well, I flirted with owning an Atari Lynx back in grad school, because I got one used for a great price... but that was given away a long time ago.) The DS seemed cool and innovative to me, and the few titles that are out there for the system seem to utilize the touchscreen to varying degrees. It's a fun little system. However, my girlfriend has a lot of old GameBoy and GameBoy Color games, so when I gave her the choice between a DS and a GBA SP, she chose the GBA SP. The DS won't play those older games.
The backward compatibility of the DS is only a compelling feature if you have a library of GameBoy Advance games. I can't imagine someone going out to buy a Nintendo DS and then buying a bunch of GBA games for it -- if you're going to do that, why not just save yourself a chunk of change and buy the GBA SP instead? Considering also that multiplayer GBA games won't work in multiplayer mode on the DS (since Nintendo unwisely decided not to support the link cable or emulating one using the DS's WiFi), I'd say that feature is of limited utility.
"The X Window System" may be correct English (at least American), but "The X Windowing System" is no less correct... and some purists might say it is technically more correct. Both are just cumbersome to use in speech or print.
Funny enough, a fair number of MIT folks (including yours truly) referred to it as that for a long time... you know, before formal documentation solidified and people started pointing to the docs as "proof" that their way of referring to this software was the One True Way.
Since "The X Windowing System" is rather cumbersome (both in print and in speech), people like me call it "X Windows" as a vernacular abbreviation, or "X11" to be super-brief. I don't consider these wrong. I know I'm in good company in my usage, and I am constantly bewildered by the astoundingly stupid pedantry that surrounds this subject. Try talking to some of the folks who worked on X or used X from the get-go, and you'll see a very much more relaxed usage than what some of these young whippersnappers are spouting off about.
Which does not negate years of common usage that predate the books you bought. I pointed out in another posting that even Richard Stallman has referred to X11 as "X Windows" in articles he's written. Not that everything RMS writes is sacrosanct, but I should point out that his ties to the MIT community (where the X Window System originated) go back a long way, and most of us ex-MIT people like to call it X Windows because it's convenient and descriptive, regardless of what some jackass pedant thinks.
Yes, but truncating "The X Window System" to "X Window" is decidedly wrong from a linguistic standpoint, at least for American English speakers. The OP was trying to tell people it was called "X Window," which comes up every few months, and touches off a firestorm of crap posts.
That's pretty funny, because I've referred to X11 as X Windows since I was an MIT undergrad, and that's typically how most old hands from that place refer to it. You know, MIT, the place where X was first developed. (Yes, I even used X10 briefly before the campus fully transitioned to X11.)
Even the much-loved RMS (that's Richard Stallman, for those who aren't aware) has referred to it as "X Windows" in articles he's written. So whoever the idiot is that keeps correcting people to call it "X Window," can you please shut the fsck up? Seriously. Not to mention the fact that the person who keeps doing this is obviously not a native English speaker, because "X Window" sounds retarded and just plain wrong, at least to American ears. It might sound great in Germany or Russia or possibly even in the UK (though I highly doubt a UK speaker of English would say that).
Besides, X11 can display more than one window at a time, so calling it "X Window" just sounds... retarded. And I'm not someone who uses the term "retarded" or "brain damaged" lightly, but both definitely apply in this case.
Last point: Common usage in language is usually what counts, folks. Just because some jackass claims that "the standard says foo, so call it foo" doesn't mean that negates years of common use. Some of us have been using X11 (and its predecessors) longer than these pipsqueaks who chime in with these idiotic "it's called X Window, not X Windows!" threads.
I beg to differ. As another poster pointed out, only quartz and certain other crystals (e.g., calcium fluoride, which is being investigated as a lens material for next generation chip fabs using EUV for photolithography) transmit UV.
This technology actually isn't that new. The Japanese were experimenting with piping sunlight into buildings using fiber optics about a decade ago, possibly more. I remember seeing a program about the topic on PBS or Discovery about that long ago. One of the benefits touted by this technique is that it actually filters out harmful UV; they did experiments that showed plants grew healthier under piped-in sunlight than they did out in the open.
Someone spank the moderator for modding this Insightful. Apple, in fact, only ever officially supported DVD-R. Apple has traditionally backed DVD-R because the format has marginally wider support among DVD players. The only DVD recordable media sold in Apple's retail stores, and the only Apple-branded DVD recordable media available anywhere, is DVD-R format.
DVD+R support only came in the most recent updates to Mac OS X and the latest firmware updates for Apple's SuperDrives. (Apple typically sources their DVD burners from Pioneer, but they had a habit of putting Apple-custom firmware on the drives, which disabled +R support for the longest time.) So now you can burn DVD+R discs in your G5 Mac, though for best results you probably want to use Roxio Toast and not Apple's built-in disc burning software. Apple also recently added playback support for DVD+R discs to their DVD Player application, so that discs burned on set-top DVD recorders can be played back on a Mac.
Just to be clear, the parent post to which you are referring is actually alluding to a real practice that existed, once upon a time. Specifically, people did at one time sell their children into indentured servitude or slavery (or were themselves placed into indentured servitude) in order to pay off debts. There were also debtor prisons, which you can read about in most history books. Bankruptcy law has done away with most of these archaic and inhumane practices, but making it harder for individuals to declare bankruptcy is going to undo a lot of the progress we've made in the last two centuries.
Let's address your points, shall we? First, the post to which you're replying most certainly does not attempt to imply that paying back borrowed money is somehow the same as selling human beings into slavery. If you read the portion that you yourself quoted, you'd realize that. The original poster was using sarcasm to drive the point home that these bankruptcy "reforms" are a step backwards. Selling human beings into slavery is, however, a way to generate revenue, and that is revenue that can be used to pay a debt. When someone doesn't have any (or many) resources, slavery or indentured servitude is a desperation move, usually to avoid the aforementioned debtor's prison. In the modern world, people run the very real risk of losing their homes, their jobs, and a variety of other things that are fundamental to living.
Thankfully, slavery has been abolished in the civilized world.
To address your second point, banks and other money lending institutions incorporate risk calculations into every aspect of the money lending process. They use these probabilities (the risk that a borrower will default on a loan) to determine whether to extend someone credit, and to determine what interest rate to give someone. They also use these risk calculations to project profits, losses, etc. No modern banking institution or other money lender is going to go out of business because some of its customers default on loans and declare bankruptcy. No modern banking institution or other money lender is going to put its employees out on the street because Joe Schmo declared Chapter 7 after racking up a bunch of credit card bills. Banks, like insurance companies and casinos, play to win, and they make sure the odds are always in their favor.
For the purpose of full disclosure, I should mention that I myself have declared bankruptcy -- initially under Chapter 13, which the Washington Post article indicates is what many debtors would be forced to declare under the new law; eventually, I converted to Chapter 7 because I simultaneously lost my job and had car repairs in excess of $3000, and thus could no longer meet my Chapter 13 payment plan. Chapter 7 is primarily there to protect people who have incredibly bad luck. Yes, it gets abused -- but not as much as the banks would like you to think. And the new laws don't take into account factors such as medical debt, which according to the Washington Post article cited earlier is responsible for 50% of bankruptcy cases. (Another sobering statistic: Of those who declare bankruptcy due to illness or medical bills, 75% have medical insurance -- meaning that medical insurance may not be enough to prevent financial ruin.)
Actually, a cursory examination of the Dictionary.com reference for 'none' indicates that 'none' can act as a pronoun, an adverb, or even an adjective (in the sense of "not any," see the entry sourced from WordNet/Princeton), but not as a noun. So you're wrong on two counts -- 'none' isn't a noun, but it can serve as an adjective.
Note that I wouldn't have bothered, except that you were correcting someone with patently false information. It pays to check facts before being a pedant.
Nice content in your post, but could you tone down the stridency with the all-caps? Also, the subject line is inflammatory and misleading, since you really haven't negated my arguments; rather, you have merely provided an alternative viewpoint (which does not in fact negate anything I said in my parent post).
With any legal dispute, you are going to see two or more opposing legal theories, each of which has merits. It's up to a judge or a jury to decide which argument is more compelling. This is not a clear-cut case where one viewpoint is "WRONG!" and another viewpoint is right.
Furthermore, your initial statement is in fact false. You state that the ISP is selling Internet service to the customer, and that the customer has a reasonable expectation that the service will be usable for all non-harmful Internet uses. However, most ISPs in the United States now block port 80 inbound to the customer's computer (for example) so that the customer is prohibited from running a web site hosted on their own computer hardware. I could argue that I have a reasonable expectation to be allowed to run any damned IP service I want on my own hardware, and the ISP as the common carrier shouldn't regulate that; however, the ISP has to balance my bandwidth utilization against that of other customers, and they have a desire to prevent people from using a non-commercial account for commercial purposes (i.e., running a for-profit web site when you've only paid for regular home broadband service).
Of course, the ISP is normally required to divulge what their customers are and are not allowed to do -- those are the terms of service the customer must agree to. The only reason the FCC and the courts stepped in this time is because VoIP is being backed by a lot of large companies with a lot of money, and many of these companies feel they are being unfairly locked out of competition in these areas by port blocking. (In most cases, the ISP is doing port blocking on VoIP because they want to offer such services themselves, or because they want their customers to use traditional phone service, which many carriers also provide.)
Yes, but the more restrictive the ISP is, the less they look like a common carrier. You can't have your cake and eat it too -- and common carrier status confers all kinds of protections (legal and otherwise) that the ISP runs the risk of losing if it starts censoring specific kinds of traffic.
You tell 'em, sparky!
For the humor impaired: It's spelled "moron." And that should be "you're," not "your."
Who's attacking whose character now?
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to register; now we can differentiate your posts from everyone else who posts as Anonymous Coward. (It has nothing to do with hiding behind an alias, and everything to do with making it easier to track who is making what assertions in a discussion thread.)
I'm sorry you felt that I attacked your character, but only a little bit. After all, since you've stooped to the same tactics that you accuse me of, you've basically proven yourself to be a hypocrite. If you want to say that I have no clue, then fine. Designing RAM chips isn't a job I want to do; I have more interesting things to spend my time on, and to me, storage (long or short term) is just storage. So there you go -- you win. Feel better now?
By the way... AFAICT, I never accused you of laziness. Petulance, yes. I will, however, accuse you of being a pedantic ass. I will also say that I am underwhelmed by the current state of the art in RAM technology, so you'll just have to forgive me for not caring about some of the fine points that you apparently care so much about. As I see it, everything is still just a grid of cells, with abysmal performance characteristics. All the fancy support logic and power management circuitry won't change that fundamental fact. When I see an order of magnitude boost in performance (speed) and/or storage densities, then I'll be impressed. I don't necessarily even care how we get there. But I strongly suspect that relying on the same tired DRAM technology (transistors and capacitors, for crying out loud) won't be the right path.
This is really very simple. By "tricks," I was referring to the process tweaks which, apparently (if earlier posts in this thread are to be believed), violate semiconductor design rules. These tweaks allow for increases in cell density; however, once you've established what tricks seem to work, how hard is it to create a grid of these cells? Not very. It should have been obvious to anyone who followed this discussion thread what I meant.
I shouldn't have to quote every single parent in a thread to establish the context in which I'm saying something; if you're too lazy to follow the thread, kindly don't comment. Of course, I suspect your goal wasn't to further the discussion but to get in a personal attack, hence your post as Anonymous Coward. It's easy to make smarmy comments when you take someone's written word entirely out of context, choosing to focus instead on a single sentence for the sole purpose of trying to make someone else look bad.
OK, so you want my point? You petulantly demand that I give you my point and make it plain, since you apparently don't have the capacity to figure it out on your own. Here it is: My contention is, and has been, that RAM isn't that frigging complicated, and despite the complexities inherent in the (design/refinement/whatever)process, RAM itself is conceptually and topologically simple. That's it. People have understood grids for thousands of years. So there's some fancy solid-state physics involved in squeezing higher bit densities onto memory chips? Great. That doesn't change the fact that it's a frigging matrix of cells, if we're talking about DRAM, each cell has one transistor and one capacitor. That's it, end of story. The complexities are all driven by economics.