Two words: blown insulation. You can do it (messily) yourself, and you may save as much as a couple thousand dollars a year in heating/cooling. Replacing windows might get you a few hundred more, and then there's the potential insulation benefits of Tyvek sheet and modern siding. You can cut out the exercise and do it without a gym... siding and stuff takes a lot of work.
Re:We don't need any steenkin' new paradigms...
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In Vista, you apparently are supposed to click on the small Windows logo, click on an unlabelled right arrow, and then click Shut Down to turn off the computer. You have to love progress...
Some GPS units can do just that, as an option. I know that my Magellan unit will lock the screen while in motion, if I set it to. However, this means the functions to route a detour, find a restaurant or gas station, and any control a passenger might do, will not work. It removes a lot of the utility of the navigation system.
No, I think you're not getting the point of education. If I already wrote the paper, then I already demonstrated the understanding. At that point, you move on and learn something new. Once I know how to add, making me do it again and again will help me remember it, but not help me understand adding any more than I already did.
Also, physical exercise is not that much like mental exercise. Your basic abilities are definitely aided through repitition. You mental ability to memorize, and types of mental manipulation can certainly be improved through a process similar to weight training. However, once I have learned something, I know it. Forcing me to write a paper on the American Civil War twice is not going to make me learn anything, other than that a professor or an academic policy needs to be changed. Again, writing that paper multiple times will not help me, unless your point is to improve penmanship/touch typing skill or to practice writing papers.
As for your weight training example, if the point was to learn how to lift a weight, then there is little to gain from lifting the weight fifty times past the point where I understood how it worked. If the point was to build muscle tone/mass, then there is point to lifting it the additional times. The point of a history class is not to teach me to write a paper, it is to teach me history. If I already know the bit of history, then it is certainly a waste to force me to hear it/write about it a few more times.
Yeah, that's a blatent pile of crap. *ANY* other time, it's a fools errand to do the same work twice. However, education is so twisted to the point of being backward that you get idiocy like this. If I write a procedure to manipulate a matrix in a certain way, and it took me 12 hours to develop, I'm am *definitely* going to reuse it whenever possible. To do otherwise would be a sign of mental defect, as far as I'm concerned.
What you're saying is that in a school, I should be required to waste my time repeating the same work that I'd done and that I'd already proven to understand, for the sake of some professor/teacher ego, so that they know that I was forced to spend xx additional hours of my life to make them happy. I'm sorry, but at this stage in my life, if I were to go back and take another class, and a professor attempted that kind of sanctimonious bullshit on me, they would be talking to my lawyer within that day.
My work is my work, and if I choose to reuse it in a similar situation, this not only demonstrates that I understood the assignment, but that I recognized that I had already done the assignment. It is a mark of intelligence to recognize this.
True enough about the start to shutdown thing, but some other indication may have been nice. At least they could put a little arrow on it, like in KDE, to signify that it's more than additional eye candy. It isn't a perfect solution, but it would be better than what Vista has now.
Unified UPS and laptop support explains the icon. It didn't occur to me, since I didn't find anything about my UPS in the new and not quite as useful control panel. The only mention of it that I found was in Device Manager. Again, something that actually told me what it was doing would've been nice. After all, while a UPS is battery power, much like a laptop, they are not the same, and are not intended to work quite the same. Being on battery power on my desktop machine means that something is very wrong. On a laptop, that is standard operation... the two need to be treated differently!
RC1 brought back the dozens of LUA prompts for everything. The system managed to randomly have files on the desktop be owned by Administrator. LUA prompts cause occassional corruption of my display; I have to kill and restart the Theme service to fix it. You can still select the desktop as a window, taking the focus away from all other windows with no visual cue to it. They also haven't made Aero be obvious about which window is focused, in general. It's still a slightly bigger window shadow and a red close button, and that's it. There is also no apparent way to choose not to have a wallpaper during user setup. You have to pick one, then log in, go through two dialogues, and turn it off.
For some reason my nForce4 ethernet will not run gigabit. If I try to install the non-MS supplied NVIDIA driver for the last beta, it trashes network. Theme changes crash gaim, too. I also find that the blurring in all of their transparency gives me a strain headache after a while. In the few days that I've been running it, I've learned to never look at title bars, because of the eye strain.
I have to agree with the GP about the new start menu. It is absolutely horrible. The way that the new "All Programs" link works is very annoying. The lack of a Run option ticks me off; I have to hit "Windows Key+R", but many people don't know you can. The menu is also painfully slow to navigate. It causes a large amount of intense disc reads to load items. Basically, it manages to be bigger and more useless than the XP default start menu. Now it doesn't even say start, it just has a Windows logo. They've also even more obfuscated how in the world you turn off, or restart, your computer. It's in a little arrow button next to a picture of a lock (which locks the screen) and a picture of a power button (which suspends instead of powering off the PC).
There are other little things, like the new control panel being very annoying/hard to navigate. I have a default "my computer is not on battery" systray icon for my desktop PC. The sidebar has a widget that cycles through random backgrounds. I had to kill it just to start using the computer, as it was incredibly distracting. Then again, the sidebar exists at all by default, which is horrid.
The little 3D window chooser thing is nifty once or twice, and then pretty much worthless. It doesn't even label the windows, so if you have a few documents open, you just have to guess anyway. It also becomes more worthless as you have more windows open. It doesn't really worth intelligently if you have multiple heads, either.
There are a lot more things in there, but I'm hungry.
Actually, the sugar tarriffs are to protect the US *corn* industry from the world. There's a reason why the rest of the world uses sugar in food, rather than high fructose corn syrup. Also, they make ethanol from sugar, and not corn. There are dozens of other places where this is so.
Not in this case... the issue is that the last so much of a file is *overwritten* with 0xDF. Had the erroneous data been appended, padding it out to a 4kb boundary, then you would be correct.
Plus, why would you pad with 0xDF instead of null? (There might be a reason, but I don't know of it.)
The search that MS is including after ripping out WinFS is not worth money. Google Desktop Search and MSN Desktop are both free and already available. A lot of people love Copernic Desktop Search, too.
USB2 is an aweful lot slower than RAM, and has a theoretical max throughput of around 60MB/s. Most flash drives out there are a lot slower than that, and are often slower than my hard drive anyway. Plus I lose the use of whatever space Vista is using for cache, and shorten the lifespan of the flash drive. I can't even use the stick for caching on multiple systems. It's also not instant, as you have to set it up specially. It's only instant for whatever flash drive you set up, and only on that one computer. It's a cute gimmick and it isn't a big deal.
For reference, a decent 1GB flash drive is around 50$. A 1GB stick of RAM for a desktop is around 75$; for a notebook it's 100$. The flash drive gets you 7-10MB/s write and 9-20MB/s reads, max. A 7200rpm hard drive gets you 35-50MB/s reads, and about 17-25MB/s writes. RAM gets you 1.6GB/s to 6.4GB/s. The USB drive will have better latency than the hard drive, but the hard drive will have better throughput. RAM trumps both by two orders of magnitude.
I'm not sure what you mean about being hard to add RAM to a laptop. All you do is unscrew the typically single screw holding on the cover, and add or swap a module. I consider this to be easier than adding RAM to a desktop, since it's easier to get to and there is no groping around with internals or cables.
WPF is a large part of.NET 3.0. I don't want it. I don't need or want another pretend MS "standard" that adds yet another layer of machine performance sapping abstraction that doesn't fix the problems inherent in their platform. It will just make it harder to port away from Windows. It would be more interesting to me if it wasn't from a company with such a tremendous and horrible track record for lying, stealing, cheating, issuing closed "standards", and generally half-assing everything they do.
You know, I've seen this list dozens of times, and the majority is still complete marketing BS.
First of all, the UI changes, IE7, simple network changes, start menu, explorer changes, new dialogs, USB caching, search, WPF, backup utils, audio changes, and speech recognition are next to useless, and are certainly not worth paying for. Some of thing are even a further step backwards over the old W2k way.
The kernel scheduling, file operations, superfetch, DX10, driver changes, and driver API improvements should just have been there already. They are not worth paying for. They are definitely not worth a new OS. These things fix things that Microsoft should have been fixing in service packs.
This leaves the new TCP/IP stack, desktop compositing, and DPI independence (part of the composition engine anyway), and some new security model improvements. Considering how broken people have been saying UAC is, this *really* is leaving the network stack and the composition engine.
As far as the speed recognition FUD, yeah, it might work. It's much more likely that it just doesn't work well enough to be useful. You can't use it while on the phone, or having a conversation. You won't use it in a busy office. It's just a gimmick.
If you want to hype improvements, they *REALLY* need to be both useful and novel. Many of the things on that list we've had for years on other platforms. Many are only niche useful, or not useful at all. Most of the rest of fixes for poorly implemented MS functionality.
Actually, Federal law restricts the use of the SSN to the Social Security program. All other uses are prohibited. Of course, absolutely everyone ignores this bit of regulation, including all levels of government.
You're keyboard probably does have the right click (menu) button on it. It would be located right next to the right "Windows/Start" key, between Alt and Ctrl. Almost every non-Mac keyboard has those two MS sponsored buttons now. Under Windows, hitting the key is the same as Shift+F10, which is the keyboard shortcut for the right click menu.
OJ Simpson was not convicted by a jury of his peers. For this reason, he should (and did) bear no penalty under law. A seperate civil trial was filed by a private party, and the outcome of that was a monetary penalty. This is the only type of penalty that should be allowed in *ANY* civil case. In a civil trial, the plaintiff gets restitution from the defendant. There can be no government penalty in a civil trial, no should there be.
Since the doling of an actual punishment is not something you should ever have in a civil trial, then this list should not exist for a civil trial. That leaves a criminal trial. If you are not found guilty in a criminal trial, there can be no penalty. That means the list can not be used except as part of a sentencing for a guilty verdict.
Either way you look at it, the list can not, and *should not* be used. You must be proven guilty to mete out punishment. It does not matter how severe the punishment is.
The whole idea of this "civil registry" is both abhorrent and illegal. I hope those that voted for such a travesty are ejected from office at the nearest possible time. I also hope that the list isn't used to destroy someone before it is rightfully thrown out as a bad law.
Traffic law is a debatable topic. Technically, the speeding ticket isn't a legal violation in a real court. States pull tricks to get around the need for an actual trial by linking the ticket to the license, instead of a court case. If you don't follow the rules, then they will revoke the privilege of having a license. This is technically within their power, as they are not depriving you of any rights.
This law *is* meant to punish, otherwise there is no reason for it to exist. It is cruel and unusual punishment, as well as a violation of your 6th amendment rights. Just because you have a clearly warped and incorrect perspection of the law, and of the Constitution, does not make you correct. The State does not get to take action against you if you are not convicted of a crime in court, be it civil or criminal.
This isn't a good idea, regardless. It is just another McCarthy style tactic purpetrated by a misguided government institution.
Blah blah blah, think of the children. It does not matter one bit if the crime is commited against my child, your child, me, or you. The argument is a bit old, and I'm just as sick of it being spewed from the mouths of the ignorant elsewhere.
If the police can't get a conviction, then there is doubt that the person committed the crime. This is intentional, as it is better to miss a guilty man than imprison an innocent one.
Many jurisdictions *will* convice a person who knowingly causes the death of another. Infecting people with HIV/AIDS on purpose (ie: knowingly) can be considered under quite a few statutes. No, the public SHOULD NOT be warned about the guy with HIV if the only reason is that he has it. If the guy goes an infects someone on purpose, then that may be a criminal act. Otherwise, you have no right to know he has the disease.
As for the interrogation tactic, no, torture is quite illegal. Denying a person access to a lawyer is illegal. It doesn't even matter what current Federal laws says. The PATRIOT Act is illegal, too, for the same reasons. Just because the currently elected politicians can't read, and don't want to follow the law, doesn't make the law disappear. So that's correct, the alleged criminal now goes free, because the police didn't follow the rules meant to protect us all from government abuse.
I've had the signed ATI driver for Windows 2003 crash a server a few times. Then again, I've had the signed ATI drivers do almost every bad thing you can do to a Windows install. I've also had signed Creative drivers crash my multimedia machine. Signed wireless drivers have crapped up the works a few times, too. Some signed scanner drivers were causing traps on an XP machine on me last week.
Signing does not eliminate nor fix bugs. It just gives Microsoft more money, and more control over what you can do with your own computer.
Some examples of great unsigned driver projects: kX Audio, Daemon Tools, Ext2fs reader, VNC mirror driver, and Synergy. I *know* there are quite a few others.
Quoting from the pre-14th Constitution: "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
Quoting from the pre-16th Constitution: "No capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken."
That says that to do a constitutional income tax, that you would need to tax based on population. Further, income tax is *not* an excise, it is a direct tax. A direct tax is one imposed directly upon an individual. These can be such things as a wage or salary, and various forms of personal compensation.
The 1895 SCOTUS decision found the income tax, in part, unconstititional not because of it being an income tax, but because it was a direct tax that was not *apportioned*.
Also, the Civil War was 100% about states rights. It might make you warm and fuzzy to think that it was about slavery, but that would be a lie. The Emancipation Proclamation was a political move by Lincoln to strengthen the position of the North over the South. It also was intended to create an insurgency against the South from the freed slaves. Go read some primary source material on the topic.
Seriously, for your five minutes of Google searching, you could have refuted your own argument. The points supporting it are, unsurprisingly, largely from the IRS. It required a constitutional amendment (the 16th) to get the Supreme Court to back off the topic. A little actual independant thought should make one think that *maybe* there was a reason for that.
Whether or not the income tax is the fairest tax is not what I'm talking about. The whole point was to limit the revenue that the Federal had access to. The States could have an income tax as high or low as they would like... just not the Federal.
The voters already had representation in Congress though the House of *Representatives*. This is why you needed approval of both houses of Congress to pass a bill to the President. After the 17th, the States had no representation in Congress, hence the rapid loss of all States Rights. It was one of the many checks and balances in place through the Constitution, and one that was (and is still) very needed.
Now on the Prohibition front, I agree with you. Not only are these laws completely inappropriate at the Federal level, they also can never work. You can't legislate a social change any more than you can (or should) legislate morality.
Actually, the US Constitution only allowed the Federal to collect excise and tariff. The Federal was not allowed to collect income tax, so there was no direct tax on the people.
That little money allowed the Federal to pay for the essential national level infrastructure, but not enough to do much damage to our country. It was enough to pay for a navy, occasional military actions, currency, etc. These were only the things specifically enumerated in the Constitution. Pretty much every function the Federal has today is unconstitutional, or for the few that apply, used to be so before an amendment changed it.
Yes, and after that little civil war over States Rights, Lincoln then went and tried to force an income tax, which was declared unconstitutional. Almost 60 years later some foolish Populists went and passed the 16th amendment around WWI. Then they removed States representation with the 17th, and tried to outlaw alcohol with the 18th. They were not the brightest group ever.
Signed driver requirements and broken legacy software say that businesses *won't* be upgrading. I can't run my shop on Vista just because of those two things, even if I were to want to subject my users to it.
Big business won't upgrade until it has been "proven" in the marketplace, either.
No, I'm saying that unless the act of you taking the item means that the first party no longer has the item, that it isn't theft. If you take a paper off of someones desk, they no longer have the paper. If you download a copy of a song, then you have the song, and the first party still has the song, and so on. There is no deprivation of property at work in the latter example, and so it does not constitute theft.
Intent has nothing to do with this.
Besides that, in your example, if you didn't cause the persons death, then there is no murder *or* manslaughter. There may be attempted murder/manslaughter, or conspiracy to commit murder/manslaughter, charges.
I'm not working with an archaic or outdated definition of theft, either. I'm working with the current, and exact, definition of "theft" as it is both legally defined and dictionary defined as part of the english language. The word simply does not mean what you want it to mean.
Copyright was invented in response to easy reproduction of a work. Seeing as to how movable type was invented in the 13th century, I would doubt that nobody ever thought you could easily duplicate a work before the late 20th century. It just wasn't considered theft to do so, not 200 years ago, and not today. It's infringing upon the artificial legal concept of copyright to duplicate a protected work.
Again, when you take the ear of corn from among the many, *you have still deprived the owner of the ear of corn*. They no longer have it, and it is because you took it. This is exactly the same as stealing a CD from an unknown number. You still took that CD from someone, and now they don't have it. The songs are not being stolen, the CD is, and now there is one less CD, and so it is theft. Downloading a song does not make there be one less song, it does not deprive the creator of their music, your act does not create an additional cost to the creator, none of this. Nothing that is required for the action to be theft.
So no, it is NOT still stealing; it is still copyright infringment.
Access to the original work does not mean that you had to steal the work the get access. Say your friend goes and buys a CD, and then makes a copy for you, there is no theft involved. Now pretend that your friend is some random person on the Internet hosting a torrent.
Either way, you've taken the piece of paper off of the desk without consent. That wasn't *your* piece of paper, so it's theft. That probably wasn't your point, though.
There isn't anything illegal about having personal data about someone. There is something illegal about the misuse of that data. However, there are other laws at play with personal data, and various privacy laws. That makes it substantially different than a copy of some software or music. Not to mention that you probably had to take those documents without permission, thereby depriving the owner of their use, and then you would have to copy them, and then you would have to return them. That is still illegal for many reasons that have nothing to do with copyright law. One of those reasons is that step 1 is, in fact, stealing the document in the first place, even though you return it in step 3.
Your duplication of the song does not deprive the creator of the song. That's why it isn't theft. If you had to go to the creators house and steal a CD with the song on it in order to get the song, then that would be theft. You would have taken the song (on the CD), and by doing so, the creator would no longer have the song (on the CD).
Slashdot Mirror
Two words: blown insulation. You can do it (messily) yourself, and you may save as much as a couple thousand dollars a year in heating/cooling. Replacing windows might get you a few hundred more, and then there's the potential insulation benefits of Tyvek sheet and modern siding. You can cut out the exercise and do it without a gym... siding and stuff takes a lot of work.
In Vista, you apparently are supposed to click on the small Windows logo, click on an unlabelled right arrow, and then click Shut Down to turn off the computer. You have to love progress...
Some GPS units can do just that, as an option. I know that my Magellan unit will lock the screen while in motion, if I set it to. However, this means the functions to route a detour, find a restaurant or gas station, and any control a passenger might do, will not work. It removes a lot of the utility of the navigation system.
No, I think you're not getting the point of education. If I already wrote the paper, then I already demonstrated the understanding. At that point, you move on and learn something new. Once I know how to add, making me do it again and again will help me remember it, but not help me understand adding any more than I already did.
Also, physical exercise is not that much like mental exercise. Your basic abilities are definitely aided through repitition. You mental ability to memorize, and types of mental manipulation can certainly be improved through a process similar to weight training. However, once I have learned something, I know it. Forcing me to write a paper on the American Civil War twice is not going to make me learn anything, other than that a professor or an academic policy needs to be changed. Again, writing that paper multiple times will not help me, unless your point is to improve penmanship/touch typing skill or to practice writing papers.
As for your weight training example, if the point was to learn how to lift a weight, then there is little to gain from lifting the weight fifty times past the point where I understood how it worked. If the point was to build muscle tone/mass, then there is point to lifting it the additional times. The point of a history class is not to teach me to write a paper, it is to teach me history. If I already know the bit of history, then it is certainly a waste to force me to hear it/write about it a few more times.
Yeah, that's a blatent pile of crap. *ANY* other time, it's a fools errand to do the same work twice. However, education is so twisted to the point of being backward that you get idiocy like this. If I write a procedure to manipulate a matrix in a certain way, and it took me 12 hours to develop, I'm am *definitely* going to reuse it whenever possible. To do otherwise would be a sign of mental defect, as far as I'm concerned.
What you're saying is that in a school, I should be required to waste my time repeating the same work that I'd done and that I'd already proven to understand, for the sake of some professor/teacher ego, so that they know that I was forced to spend xx additional hours of my life to make them happy. I'm sorry, but at this stage in my life, if I were to go back and take another class, and a professor attempted that kind of sanctimonious bullshit on me, they would be talking to my lawyer within that day.
My work is my work, and if I choose to reuse it in a similar situation, this not only demonstrates that I understood the assignment, but that I recognized that I had already done the assignment. It is a mark of intelligence to recognize this.
True enough about the start to shutdown thing, but some other indication may have been nice. At least they could put a little arrow on it, like in KDE, to signify that it's more than additional eye candy. It isn't a perfect solution, but it would be better than what Vista has now.
Unified UPS and laptop support explains the icon. It didn't occur to me, since I didn't find anything about my UPS in the new and not quite as useful control panel. The only mention of it that I found was in Device Manager. Again, something that actually told me what it was doing would've been nice. After all, while a UPS is battery power, much like a laptop, they are not the same, and are not intended to work quite the same. Being on battery power on my desktop machine means that something is very wrong. On a laptop, that is standard operation... the two need to be treated differently!
RC1 brought back the dozens of LUA prompts for everything. The system managed to randomly have files on the desktop be owned by Administrator. LUA prompts cause occassional corruption of my display; I have to kill and restart the Theme service to fix it. You can still select the desktop as a window, taking the focus away from all other windows with no visual cue to it. They also haven't made Aero be obvious about which window is focused, in general. It's still a slightly bigger window shadow and a red close button, and that's it. There is also no apparent way to choose not to have a wallpaper during user setup. You have to pick one, then log in, go through two dialogues, and turn it off.
For some reason my nForce4 ethernet will not run gigabit. If I try to install the non-MS supplied NVIDIA driver for the last beta, it trashes network. Theme changes crash gaim, too. I also find that the blurring in all of their transparency gives me a strain headache after a while. In the few days that I've been running it, I've learned to never look at title bars, because of the eye strain.
I have to agree with the GP about the new start menu. It is absolutely horrible. The way that the new "All Programs" link works is very annoying. The lack of a Run option ticks me off; I have to hit "Windows Key+R", but many people don't know you can. The menu is also painfully slow to navigate. It causes a large amount of intense disc reads to load items. Basically, it manages to be bigger and more useless than the XP default start menu. Now it doesn't even say start, it just has a Windows logo. They've also even more obfuscated how in the world you turn off, or restart, your computer. It's in a little arrow button next to a picture of a lock (which locks the screen) and a picture of a power button (which suspends instead of powering off the PC).
There are other little things, like the new control panel being very annoying/hard to navigate. I have a default "my computer is not on battery" systray icon for my desktop PC. The sidebar has a widget that cycles through random backgrounds. I had to kill it just to start using the computer, as it was incredibly distracting. Then again, the sidebar exists at all by default, which is horrid.
The little 3D window chooser thing is nifty once or twice, and then pretty much worthless. It doesn't even label the windows, so if you have a few documents open, you just have to guess anyway. It also becomes more worthless as you have more windows open. It doesn't really worth intelligently if you have multiple heads, either.
There are a lot more things in there, but I'm hungry.
Actually, the sugar tarriffs are to protect the US *corn* industry from the world. There's a reason why the rest of the world uses sugar in food, rather than high fructose corn syrup. Also, they make ethanol from sugar, and not corn. There are dozens of other places where this is so.
Not in this case... the issue is that the last so much of a file is *overwritten* with 0xDF. Had the erroneous data been appended, padding it out to a 4kb boundary, then you would be correct.
Plus, why would you pad with 0xDF instead of null? (There might be a reason, but I don't know of it.)
The search that MS is including after ripping out WinFS is not worth money. Google Desktop Search and MSN Desktop are both free and already available. A lot of people love Copernic Desktop Search, too.
.NET 3.0. I don't want it. I don't need or want another pretend MS "standard" that adds yet another layer of machine performance sapping abstraction that doesn't fix the problems inherent in their platform. It will just make it harder to port away from Windows. It would be more interesting to me if it wasn't from a company with such a tremendous and horrible track record for lying, stealing, cheating, issuing closed "standards", and generally half-assing everything they do.
USB2 is an aweful lot slower than RAM, and has a theoretical max throughput of around 60MB/s. Most flash drives out there are a lot slower than that, and are often slower than my hard drive anyway. Plus I lose the use of whatever space Vista is using for cache, and shorten the lifespan of the flash drive. I can't even use the stick for caching on multiple systems. It's also not instant, as you have to set it up specially. It's only instant for whatever flash drive you set up, and only on that one computer. It's a cute gimmick and it isn't a big deal.
For reference, a decent 1GB flash drive is around 50$. A 1GB stick of RAM for a desktop is around 75$; for a notebook it's 100$. The flash drive gets you 7-10MB/s write and 9-20MB/s reads, max. A 7200rpm hard drive gets you 35-50MB/s reads, and about 17-25MB/s writes. RAM gets you 1.6GB/s to 6.4GB/s. The USB drive will have better latency than the hard drive, but the hard drive will have better throughput. RAM trumps both by two orders of magnitude.
I'm not sure what you mean about being hard to add RAM to a laptop. All you do is unscrew the typically single screw holding on the cover, and add or swap a module. I consider this to be easier than adding RAM to a desktop, since it's easier to get to and there is no groping around with internals or cables.
WPF is a large part of
You know, I've seen this list dozens of times, and the majority is still complete marketing BS.
First of all, the UI changes, IE7, simple network changes, start menu, explorer changes, new dialogs, USB caching, search, WPF, backup utils, audio changes, and speech recognition are next to useless, and are certainly not worth paying for. Some of thing are even a further step backwards over the old W2k way.
The kernel scheduling, file operations, superfetch, DX10, driver changes, and driver API improvements should just have been there already. They are not worth paying for. They are definitely not worth a new OS. These things fix things that Microsoft should have been fixing in service packs.
This leaves the new TCP/IP stack, desktop compositing, and DPI independence (part of the composition engine anyway), and some new security model improvements. Considering how broken people have been saying UAC is, this *really* is leaving the network stack and the composition engine.
As far as the speed recognition FUD, yeah, it might work. It's much more likely that it just doesn't work well enough to be useful. You can't use it while on the phone, or having a conversation. You won't use it in a busy office. It's just a gimmick.
If you want to hype improvements, they *REALLY* need to be both useful and novel. Many of the things on that list we've had for years on other platforms. Many are only niche useful, or not useful at all. Most of the rest of fixes for poorly implemented MS functionality.
Actually, Federal law restricts the use of the SSN to the Social Security program. All other uses are prohibited. Of course, absolutely everyone ignores this bit of regulation, including all levels of government.
You're keyboard probably does have the right click (menu) button on it. It would be located right next to the right "Windows/Start" key, between Alt and Ctrl. Almost every non-Mac keyboard has those two MS sponsored buttons now. Under Windows, hitting the key is the same as Shift+F10, which is the keyboard shortcut for the right click menu.
OJ Simpson was not convicted by a jury of his peers. For this reason, he should (and did) bear no penalty under law. A seperate civil trial was filed by a private party, and the outcome of that was a monetary penalty. This is the only type of penalty that should be allowed in *ANY* civil case. In a civil trial, the plaintiff gets restitution from the defendant. There can be no government penalty in a civil trial, no should there be.
Since the doling of an actual punishment is not something you should ever have in a civil trial, then this list should not exist for a civil trial. That leaves a criminal trial. If you are not found guilty in a criminal trial, there can be no penalty. That means the list can not be used except as part of a sentencing for a guilty verdict.
Either way you look at it, the list can not, and *should not* be used. You must be proven guilty to mete out punishment. It does not matter how severe the punishment is.
The whole idea of this "civil registry" is both abhorrent and illegal. I hope those that voted for such a travesty are ejected from office at the nearest possible time. I also hope that the list isn't used to destroy someone before it is rightfully thrown out as a bad law.
Traffic law is a debatable topic. Technically, the speeding ticket isn't a legal violation in a real court. States pull tricks to get around the need for an actual trial by linking the ticket to the license, instead of a court case. If you don't follow the rules, then they will revoke the privilege of having a license. This is technically within their power, as they are not depriving you of any rights.
This law *is* meant to punish, otherwise there is no reason for it to exist. It is cruel and unusual punishment, as well as a violation of your 6th amendment rights. Just because you have a clearly warped and incorrect perspection of the law, and of the Constitution, does not make you correct. The State does not get to take action against you if you are not convicted of a crime in court, be it civil or criminal.
This isn't a good idea, regardless. It is just another McCarthy style tactic purpetrated by a misguided government institution.
Blah blah blah, think of the children. It does not matter one bit if the crime is commited against my child, your child, me, or you. The argument is a bit old, and I'm just as sick of it being spewed from the mouths of the ignorant elsewhere.
If the police can't get a conviction, then there is doubt that the person committed the crime. This is intentional, as it is better to miss a guilty man than imprison an innocent one.
Many jurisdictions *will* convice a person who knowingly causes the death of another. Infecting people with HIV/AIDS on purpose (ie: knowingly) can be considered under quite a few statutes. No, the public SHOULD NOT be warned about the guy with HIV if the only reason is that he has it. If the guy goes an infects someone on purpose, then that may be a criminal act. Otherwise, you have no right to know he has the disease.
As for the interrogation tactic, no, torture is quite illegal. Denying a person access to a lawyer is illegal. It doesn't even matter what current Federal laws says. The PATRIOT Act is illegal, too, for the same reasons. Just because the currently elected politicians can't read, and don't want to follow the law, doesn't make the law disappear. So that's correct, the alleged criminal now goes free, because the police didn't follow the rules meant to protect us all from government abuse.
I've had the signed ATI driver for Windows 2003 crash a server a few times. Then again, I've had the signed ATI drivers do almost every bad thing you can do to a Windows install. I've also had signed Creative drivers crash my multimedia machine. Signed wireless drivers have crapped up the works a few times, too. Some signed scanner drivers were causing traps on an XP machine on me last week.
Signing does not eliminate nor fix bugs. It just gives Microsoft more money, and more control over what you can do with your own computer.
Some examples of great unsigned driver projects: kX Audio, Daemon Tools, Ext2fs reader, VNC mirror driver, and Synergy. I *know* there are quite a few others.
Quoting from the pre-14th Constitution: "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
Quoting from the pre-16th Constitution: "No capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken."
That says that to do a constitutional income tax, that you would need to tax based on population. Further, income tax is *not* an excise, it is a direct tax. A direct tax is one imposed directly upon an individual. These can be such things as a wage or salary, and various forms of personal compensation.
The 1895 SCOTUS decision found the income tax, in part, unconstititional not because of it being an income tax, but because it was a direct tax that was not *apportioned*.
Also, the Civil War was 100% about states rights. It might make you warm and fuzzy to think that it was about slavery, but that would be a lie. The Emancipation Proclamation was a political move by Lincoln to strengthen the position of the North over the South. It also was intended to create an insurgency against the South from the freed slaves. Go read some primary source material on the topic.
Seriously, for your five minutes of Google searching, you could have refuted your own argument. The points supporting it are, unsurprisingly, largely from the IRS. It required a constitutional amendment (the 16th) to get the Supreme Court to back off the topic. A little actual independant thought should make one think that *maybe* there was a reason for that.
Whether or not the income tax is the fairest tax is not what I'm talking about. The whole point was to limit the revenue that the Federal had access to. The States could have an income tax as high or low as they would like... just not the Federal.
The voters already had representation in Congress though the House of *Representatives*. This is why you needed approval of both houses of Congress to pass a bill to the President. After the 17th, the States had no representation in Congress, hence the rapid loss of all States Rights. It was one of the many checks and balances in place through the Constitution, and one that was (and is still) very needed.
Now on the Prohibition front, I agree with you. Not only are these laws completely inappropriate at the Federal level, they also can never work. You can't legislate a social change any more than you can (or should) legislate morality.
Actually, the US Constitution only allowed the Federal to collect excise and tariff. The Federal was not allowed to collect income tax, so there was no direct tax on the people.
That little money allowed the Federal to pay for the essential national level infrastructure, but not enough to do much damage to our country. It was enough to pay for a navy, occasional military actions, currency, etc. These were only the things specifically enumerated in the Constitution. Pretty much every function the Federal has today is unconstitutional, or for the few that apply, used to be so before an amendment changed it.
Yes, and after that little civil war over States Rights, Lincoln then went and tried to force an income tax, which was declared unconstitutional. Almost 60 years later some foolish Populists went and passed the 16th amendment around WWI. Then they removed States representation with the 17th, and tried to outlaw alcohol with the 18th. They were not the brightest group ever.
Signed driver requirements and broken legacy software say that businesses *won't* be upgrading. I can't run my shop on Vista just because of those two things, even if I were to want to subject my users to it.
Big business won't upgrade until it has been "proven" in the marketplace, either.
You can swap a few pins on a normal power supply to have it work on a Dell motherboard. Just for future reference. ;-)
No, I'm saying that unless the act of you taking the item means that the first party no longer has the item, that it isn't theft. If you take a paper off of someones desk, they no longer have the paper. If you download a copy of a song, then you have the song, and the first party still has the song, and so on. There is no deprivation of property at work in the latter example, and so it does not constitute theft.
Intent has nothing to do with this.
Besides that, in your example, if you didn't cause the persons death, then there is no murder *or* manslaughter. There may be attempted murder/manslaughter, or conspiracy to commit murder/manslaughter, charges.
I'm not working with an archaic or outdated definition of theft, either. I'm working with the current, and exact, definition of "theft" as it is both legally defined and dictionary defined as part of the english language. The word simply does not mean what you want it to mean.
Copyright was invented in response to easy reproduction of a work. Seeing as to how movable type was invented in the 13th century, I would doubt that nobody ever thought you could easily duplicate a work before the late 20th century. It just wasn't considered theft to do so, not 200 years ago, and not today. It's infringing upon the artificial legal concept of copyright to duplicate a protected work.
Again, when you take the ear of corn from among the many, *you have still deprived the owner of the ear of corn*. They no longer have it, and it is because you took it. This is exactly the same as stealing a CD from an unknown number. You still took that CD from someone, and now they don't have it. The songs are not being stolen, the CD is, and now there is one less CD, and so it is theft. Downloading a song does not make there be one less song, it does not deprive the creator of their music, your act does not create an additional cost to the creator, none of this. Nothing that is required for the action to be theft.
So no, it is NOT still stealing; it is still copyright infringment.
Access to the original work does not mean that you had to steal the work the get access. Say your friend goes and buys a CD, and then makes a copy for you, there is no theft involved. Now pretend that your friend is some random person on the Internet hosting a torrent.
Either way, you've taken the piece of paper off of the desk without consent. That wasn't *your* piece of paper, so it's theft. That probably wasn't your point, though.
There isn't anything illegal about having personal data about someone. There is something illegal about the misuse of that data. However, there are other laws at play with personal data, and various privacy laws. That makes it substantially different than a copy of some software or music. Not to mention that you probably had to take those documents without permission, thereby depriving the owner of their use, and then you would have to copy them, and then you would have to return them. That is still illegal for many reasons that have nothing to do with copyright law. One of those reasons is that step 1 is, in fact, stealing the document in the first place, even though you return it in step 3.
Your duplication of the song does not deprive the creator of the song. That's why it isn't theft. If you had to go to the creators house and steal a CD with the song on it in order to get the song, then that would be theft. You would have taken the song (on the CD), and by doing so, the creator would no longer have the song (on the CD).