I find it odd that/.ers push opensource and freedom of information but don't want to regester an account at NYT to read news.
.... Says the AC who can't be bothered to register for an account.
BTW, where did I say I demanded free information? I said I'd pay to read random articles on various sites, but I don't want to deal with keeping track of dozens of accounts. In fact, there is no free information in my proposed transaction. I'd be paying them cold hard cash; they in turn would have no reason to expect free information from me.
That could be an issue. However, ideally you would have the option of buying a card with cash, and the card issuer would conduct itself more like a genuine financial institution than a sleazy spyware company. (I do realize that this is probably more than can be hoped for in the real world, though.)
The worst thing about all of this is all of the accounts and passwords to keep track of and the information you need to disclose to "register" on various sites. What somebody should do is come up with an standardized anonymous way to pay for things, just like a prepaid phone card.
If such a system were in place, you could buy a prepaid micropayment card at any store or online, and enter it's number in your browser. Then you could anonymously pay for content on any site without revealing anything about your identity, or worrying about what info some scheme like Passport is passing along to them.
The sites really need to drop this whole idea about needing information about their customers. I would be happy to pay a fair price for information if they were happy to take my money and leave it at that. If they are in business to make money all they need is to get paid, they don't need to know who I am. Newspapers and magazines sold at news stands have worked with this business model for centuries; I don't know why it can't be applied to online content.
No, he's making the lenses for the benefit of humanity. For his own benefit, he'll be offering special UV, anti-glare and scratch-resistant coatings, custom tinting, a line of exclusive designer frames, a mantenence and checkup program, and a two-year comprehensive protection plan.
For example, too much exposure to the sun causes skin cancer, right? So you should cover up and only use 10000 spf suntan lotion to prevent skin cancer. Never mind the fact that you NEED some ionizing radiation in order to get vitamin D.
You need some sunlight to produce vitamin D; therefore, therefore, sunlight cannot cause cancer.
If a driver is seated properly in the vehicle with their seatbelt properly fastened, there is no way that their head could come into contact with the steering wheel.
Have you ever seen a high-speed film of a crash test? In a severe crash, the passenger compartment partially collapses, and the seats and seatbelts flex like rubber bands. Even a belted driver can most definitely hit the steering wheel, hard.
I agree that a racing-style roll cage and harnesses would be much safer. However, since those can't be stamped out like cookies the way today's car bodies are, that would cost far more than even an airbag system.
Finally, with compulsory insurance laws, how can another drivers' side airbag lessen your insurance premium? They're required to have insurance.
You're forgetting the whole point of insurance: to spread risk. The whole idea is that if you get injured, other people pay for it.
Further, how does this affect your tax bill?
Let me simplify the situation. If more people get hurt in auto accidents, then more money is being spent on hospital bills. There are only 4 possible sources of money for this: someone involved in the accident, insurance, taxes (e.g., broke injury victims go on Medicaid), or costs absorbed by hospitals (and then passed on to their paying customers). Since the vast majority of the population doesn't have the financial resources to personally cover the costs of a severe injury, most of the money is coming from one of the other three sources. All of the other three sources are paid for by people who didn't buy your car. No matter how you slice it, unless you're a multimillionaire with no insurance, somebody else is paying the costs of your accident risk.
The consumer should have had the choice with airbags all along, but some legislator thought that because some people can't wear seatbelts -- we should all pay for mandatory airbags.
Car safety systems are optimized for the use of both seatbelts and airbags at the same time. Airbags don't just benefit the idiots who can't be bothered to put their seatbelts on; they make it safer for seatbelt wearers as well.
Moreover, the cost isn't just about your "consumer choice". If you or one of your passengers gets injured or killed in an accident, I pay more for insurance premiums or whatever other funding source is used to keep uninsured accident victims out of the gutter. You're propising to shift the cost of accident risk from your new car purchase to my taxes and insurance bills.
So its OK for the GPL to impose restrictions, but not for other licenses to?
It's OK for any license to impose any restrictions that they want. Certain combinations of restrictions can't be mixed, but that's OK, too. These two licenses can't be mixed because of the interaction of both their restrictions.
The deal in this case is that this new XFree86 license covers one point release of one work of software, whereas the GPL covers thousands of works produced over the past couple of decades.
If, in a reverse of the situation, all of today's GPLed software had been actually released under the new XFree license, and the XFree86 project had just invented the GPL for their new 4.4 version, the outcome would be exactly the same: People would be dumping XFree86 4.4 because it was incompatible with the more commonly used license.
Didn't the Soviet built lunar rovers go much further in a single day back in the early 70's?
With a three-second ping time, those lunar rovers could be directly controlled by people on earth, like a glorified radio-controlled model car. With a 20-minute ping time, the mars rovers have to autonomously execute a list of high-level goals transmitted from earth. Not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison.
I would hate for some wack-job with money to get a hold of one of these, get some armament via the black market, and use it to do something regrettable.
I would imagine that most wack-jobs would choose to save about $8,990,000 by mounting their black market arms on the back of a pickup truck instead of on this jet.
Does anybody seriously claim that the Beatles wouldn't have made the White Album if they thought that it wouldn't be profitable almost 40 years later?
Given the notoriously bad business decisions that they made back in the 60s, I would guess that they didn't really care that much if it was going to be profitiable the week after it was released.
A lot of people are saying this- but it seems to imply that farming equipment, etc. must always run on fossil fuels.
It doesn't matter if the farm equipment uses fossil fuels. If it takes 1.1 gallons of ethanol to grow enough corn to produce 1 gallon of ethanol, you're never going to break even.
IMHO, this kind of scheme will never work with traditional crops. They are too resource intensive to make sense as an energy source. Maybe it could work if they created genetically modified algea that was highly optimized for efficient photosynthesis and needed no other nutrients other than dead yeast. Then you could have a closed-cycle energy production system (other than H2O and sunlight).
that C# and IL are an international standard (at least in ECMA's eyes) and MS has absolutely no control over the language right?
They have no control over C# standards in exactly the same way they have no control over HTML standards: Developers code to the Microsoft implementation, regardless of what the "standard" may say.
Actually, IIRC, the Interbase back door existed for all the years that it was a proprietary product, and it was only discovered after the source code was released.
McDonald's seems to have always been lacking in the cash register department. Back when I worked at McDonald's circa 1980, our store's cash registers didn't even do addition. For every single order they had the person at the counter manually add up all of the items on a slip of paper. After they finished this time-consuming process, they entered the error-filled total tally into the cash register to finish the transaction.
Why they used this system was totally beyond me, since mechanical adding cash registers had been available for a century or more prior to that time. They shelled out money for some kind of machine with a keyboard, but then they also paid wages for people to manually add the numbers anyway.
And if such a great idea as sub-pixel resolution does exist, it doesn't seem like anybody is using it cause LCD graphics just don't seem as...well crisp.
In Windows, it's called ClearType, IIRC. You can turn it on in a wizard somewhere. In the KDE control panel, go to Appearance->Fonts and click "Use sub-pixel hinting". The basic idea is that knowing the positions of the R, G and B components of each pixel, you can control them individually to antialias fonts at 1/3 the dot pitch. It can't work on a CRT because the dot pitch and pixels aren't correlated.
I'm using it right now. I will never use another monitor technology that doesn't support it. Text looks almost as good as printout.
Most companies expect to receive these creations. In fact, the practice is so common that you usually see elaborate fixtures for collecting them in every office. Every employer I've had has accepted these submissions, but I honestly don't know what they do with them after they've been dropped off in the fixtures. I suspect that they really don't want to deal with this stuff and it just gets shipped offsite somewhere.
I can narrow it down to a few choices pretty quick. I'll pull out the local phone book here...
Here we go, there's either: The law firm whose ad takes up the entire back cover of the phone book; The law firm whose ad takes up 1/3 of the front cover of the phone book; or, The law firm whose ad takes up 80% of the spine of the phone book.
That's a good start, and I didn't even need to open the book!
You've got too many subtle actions and controls for a complete idiot to undertand. Click-and-hold, press return, control-click, click the name, click the icon. How can all of these things be "obvious"?
As you point out, you can still satisfy people like my because a Mac has context menus too. Great. That's what I'd use for most things (although I'd use F2 for renaming on any OS that supports power users). The grandparent post said that context menus were stupid, redundant and useless; you've just disproved this.
How is right-clicking and selecting "Rename" any better than just clicking the frickin' icon name and typing away?
I've probably accidently activated the name edit text input box (on various OSes) several times more often than I've actually intended to rename a file. Hit the escape key X times vs. right click Y times; they both suck. Whatever.
On my Mac, though, you just click the filename to rename it. Pretty obvious: goes along with the whole "point at the thing you want to manipulate" paradigm.
With "point at the thing", you only get to do one action by pointing. I highly doubt renaming would be the one thing that you usually want to do a file. What? Does double clicking or command-key-clicking do the other things that you're more likely to want? Well, that's not "obvious". At least with a context menu, you get to see a list of choices.
Second: a "right-click" menu is not remotely obvious. It's clearly not obvious, by virtue of the fact that there's no indication that you can "right-click" to get a menu. For that matter, what's a "right-click" anyway?
It's no more non-obvious than a left-click. It's not even obvious that that white blob on a wire sitting near the computer is supposed to be rolled around on the desk. It looks more like a microphone to me. I've been trying to give it verbal commands all morning, but nothing's happening. It's not doing the obvious thing! Computers suck!
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it's because nationalism is the primary motivation for manned space missions?
BTW, where did I say I demanded free information? I said I'd pay to read random articles on various sites, but I don't want to deal with keeping track of dozens of accounts. In fact, there is no free information in my proposed transaction. I'd be paying them cold hard cash; they in turn would have no reason to expect free information from me.
That could be an issue. However, ideally you would have the option of buying a card with cash, and the card issuer would conduct itself more like a genuine financial institution than a sleazy spyware company. (I do realize that this is probably more than can be hoped for in the real world, though.)
If such a system were in place, you could buy a prepaid micropayment card at any store or online, and enter it's number in your browser. Then you could anonymously pay for content on any site without revealing anything about your identity, or worrying about what info some scheme like Passport is passing along to them.
The sites really need to drop this whole idea about needing information about their customers. I would be happy to pay a fair price for information if they were happy to take my money and leave it at that. If they are in business to make money all they need is to get paid, they don't need to know who I am. Newspapers and magazines sold at news stands have worked with this business model for centuries; I don't know why it can't be applied to online content.
One person losing a pile of cash on a trip to Vegas == bad luck.
Millions of people losing piles of cash in Vegas each year == expected statistical outcome.
No, he's making the lenses for the benefit of humanity. For his own benefit, he'll be offering special UV, anti-glare and scratch-resistant coatings, custom tinting, a line of exclusive designer frames, a mantenence and checkup program, and a two-year comprehensive protection plan.
And the OP wasn't? That was the point.
You need some sunlight to produce vitamin D; therefore, therefore, sunlight cannot cause cancer.
Sure, whatever you say.
Have you ever seen a high-speed film of a crash test? In a severe crash, the passenger compartment partially collapses, and the seats and seatbelts flex like rubber bands. Even a belted driver can most definitely hit the steering wheel, hard.
I agree that a racing-style roll cage and harnesses would be much safer. However, since those can't be stamped out like cookies the way today's car bodies are, that would cost far more than even an airbag system.
Finally, with compulsory insurance laws, how can another drivers' side airbag lessen your insurance premium? They're required to have insurance.
You're forgetting the whole point of insurance: to spread risk. The whole idea is that if you get injured, other people pay for it.
Further, how does this affect your tax bill?
Let me simplify the situation. If more people get hurt in auto accidents, then more money is being spent on hospital bills. There are only 4 possible sources of money for this: someone involved in the accident, insurance, taxes (e.g., broke injury victims go on Medicaid), or costs absorbed by hospitals (and then passed on to their paying customers). Since the vast majority of the population doesn't have the financial resources to personally cover the costs of a severe injury, most of the money is coming from one of the other three sources. All of the other three sources are paid for by people who didn't buy your car. No matter how you slice it, unless you're a multimillionaire with no insurance, somebody else is paying the costs of your accident risk.
Car safety systems are optimized for the use of both seatbelts and airbags at the same time. Airbags don't just benefit the idiots who can't be bothered to put their seatbelts on; they make it safer for seatbelt wearers as well.
Moreover, the cost isn't just about your "consumer choice". If you or one of your passengers gets injured or killed in an accident, I pay more for insurance premiums or whatever other funding source is used to keep uninsured accident victims out of the gutter. You're propising to shift the cost of accident risk from your new car purchase to my taxes and insurance bills.
It's OK for any license to impose any restrictions that they want. Certain combinations of restrictions can't be mixed, but that's OK, too. These two licenses can't be mixed because of the interaction of both their restrictions.
The deal in this case is that this new XFree86 license covers one point release of one work of software, whereas the GPL covers thousands of works produced over the past couple of decades.
If, in a reverse of the situation, all of today's GPLed software had been actually released under the new XFree license, and the XFree86 project had just invented the GPL for their new 4.4 version, the outcome would be exactly the same: People would be dumping XFree86 4.4 because it was incompatible with the more commonly used license.
With a three-second ping time, those lunar rovers could be directly controlled by people on earth, like a glorified radio-controlled model car. With a 20-minute ping time, the mars rovers have to autonomously execute a list of high-level goals transmitted from earth. Not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison.
My impression is that they are more involved with the design of a certain OS than with languages.
I would imagine that most wack-jobs would choose to save about $8,990,000 by mounting their black market arms on the back of a pickup truck instead of on this jet.
8 years ago? I was running Microsoft OSes off live bootable disks more than 20 years ago.
Given the notoriously bad business decisions that they made back in the 60s, I would guess that they didn't really care that much if it was going to be profitiable the week after it was released.
It doesn't matter if the farm equipment uses fossil fuels. If it takes 1.1 gallons of ethanol to grow enough corn to produce 1 gallon of ethanol, you're never going to break even.
IMHO, this kind of scheme will never work with traditional crops. They are too resource intensive to make sense as an energy source. Maybe it could work if they created genetically modified algea that was highly optimized for efficient photosynthesis and needed no other nutrients other than dead yeast. Then you could have a closed-cycle energy production system (other than H2O and sunlight).
They have no control over C# standards in exactly the same way they have no control over HTML standards: Developers code to the Microsoft implementation, regardless of what the "standard" may say.
Actually, IIRC, the Interbase back door existed for all the years that it was a proprietary product, and it was only discovered after the source code was released.
Why they used this system was totally beyond me, since mechanical adding cash registers had been available for a century or more prior to that time. They shelled out money for some kind of machine with a keyboard, but then they also paid wages for people to manually add the numbers anyway.
In Windows, it's called ClearType, IIRC. You can turn it on in a wizard somewhere. In the KDE control panel, go to Appearance->Fonts and click "Use sub-pixel hinting". The basic idea is that knowing the positions of the R, G and B components of each pixel, you can control them individually to antialias fonts at 1/3 the dot pitch. It can't work on a CRT because the dot pitch and pixels aren't correlated.
I'm using it right now. I will never use another monitor technology that doesn't support it. Text looks almost as good as printout.
Most companies expect to receive these creations. In fact, the practice is so common that you usually see elaborate fixtures for collecting them in every office. Every employer I've had has accepted these submissions, but I honestly don't know what they do with them after they've been dropped off in the fixtures. I suspect that they really don't want to deal with this stuff and it just gets shipped offsite somewhere.
I can narrow it down to a few choices pretty quick. I'll pull out the local phone book here...
Here we go, there's either: The law firm whose ad takes up the entire back cover of the phone book; The law firm whose ad takes up 1/3 of the front cover of the phone book; or, The law firm whose ad takes up 80% of the spine of the phone book.
That's a good start, and I didn't even need to open the book!
Most of that Isn't Obvious!
You've got too many subtle actions and controls for a complete idiot to undertand. Click-and-hold, press return, control-click, click the name, click the icon. How can all of these things be "obvious"?
As you point out, you can still satisfy people like my because a Mac has context menus too. Great. That's what I'd use for most things (although I'd use F2 for renaming on any OS that supports power users). The grandparent post said that context menus were stupid, redundant and useless; you've just disproved this.
How is right-clicking and selecting "Rename" any better than just clicking the frickin' icon name and typing away?
I've probably accidently activated the name edit text input box (on various OSes) several times more often than I've actually intended to rename a file. Hit the escape key X times vs. right click Y times; they both suck. Whatever.
With "point at the thing", you only get to do one action by pointing. I highly doubt renaming would be the one thing that you usually want to do a file. What? Does double clicking or command-key-clicking do the other things that you're more likely to want? Well, that's not "obvious". At least with a context menu, you get to see a list of choices.
Second: a "right-click" menu is not remotely obvious. It's clearly not obvious, by virtue of the fact that there's no indication that you can "right-click" to get a menu. For that matter, what's a "right-click" anyway?
It's no more non-obvious than a left-click. It's not even obvious that that white blob on a wire sitting near the computer is supposed to be rolled around on the desk. It looks more like a microphone to me. I've been trying to give it verbal commands all morning, but nothing's happening. It's not doing the obvious thing! Computers suck!