I run a site on Wordpress and managing the software updates has never been a big deal for me. I have shell access at my hosting provider, so I initially just installed Wordpress using CVS. Every time they rolled out a new bugfix, I just ran a little shell script like: "update "
With recent versions of Wordpress, though, you don't even need to do that. When a new update is available, an alert appears on your admin dashboard. From there, you can actually click a button and have the system download the update and install it automatically. I know it can be a pain when to backup your database etc., but in all honesty, for minor point bugfix updates all that is seldom if ever necessary (especially if you're diligent with backups in the first place).
I can't tell if you're trying to be witty, but I'll just assume you're ignorant of the facts. In the United States, more than 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies are attributable to medical bills. If you weren't aware of that, you might want to watch the news sometime. We have this new president over here, see...
The dirty little secret is that credit rating is a system imposed by the rich elite onto the working class. The rich do not have credit, because they have no need for it. Everything they could want, they simply buy. And they buy it with money that the working class earns as a result of real work, but gets funneled to them through--guess what--credit.
Wow. A rare glimpse into the minds of the radical left. They have seen the enemy, and he is... Scrooge McDuck.
News flash for ya, kid. Anybody who gets anywhere in this world does so because of credit. That goes for the rich as well as the poor. The fact that the poor have less access to credit is what separates them from the rich, not their lack of cash. Or did you really think rich people kept all their money in their mattresses and paid their Rolls-Royce dealers in gold bars? Funny thing... last time I walked down Wall Street I didn't see so much as one guy wearing a top hat and a monocle... guess they must have all been at home, swimming in their Olympic-sized pools full of doubloons.
I'm not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I have great credit. I have great credit mostly because I have been responsible with my money. Credit allows me to live comfortably, but more importantly, it gives me access to opportunities. When I need to buy a new computer because it will increase my earning potential at my business, I'm not going to put it on layaway. I'm going to buy it today, start using it tomorrow, and pay for it later, with the increased profits that I earn by using it. And that's just part of the beauty of credit. When unexpected expenses show up, paying for them with credit allows me to manage my cash flow. The same is true for my regular bills, too. When I'm burnt out and need to go on vacation, I can do it this year, right now, and not worry about scrimping and saving through the winter so I'll have enough cash by next summer. And that one time, when someone somehow got hold of my credit information and charged $800 to my card, I just called up the credit card company and asked them to remove the charge -- which they did, and the only question they asked was whether there were any other charges I thought should be removed.
That's the reality of credit for a middle-class single dude like me. Truth to tell, I doubt this country even had a real middle class before credit became easily and widely available. Based on my experience, all that class-warfare bullshit sounds like the ravings of a 17-year-old. Those people who tell you credit ruined their lives and kept them poor? Bullshit. Spending all their money is what kept those people poor. Credit is what could have helped them stop being poor... if they knew what to do with it.
You may start with a lower score than a rich person, but your score will only go bad if you do something irresponsible, like buying something on credit which you don't pay back.
Like, for example, a couple of weeks in the hospital?
I am curious as to where this is coming from. I've interviewed Richard Stallman for interviews before, and while he set me straight on "open source vs. Free Software" terminology issues, he never expressed displeasure with the result. It wouldn't surprise me if he's been burned by interviewers many, many times in the past... but refusing to answer any questions seems counterproductive. Then again, the assertion that he "demanded control of what we published" could just be B.S. and a misinterpretation of what he actually asked for; I'd like to find out the truth.
As someone below posted, they can cap your accrual. As in, they can't take away vacation time that you've already accrued, but once you accrue a certain amount, they can say you stop accruing until you use what you already have. Which is almost the same thing as taking your vacation away... but only almost. People act like the company is cheating you, but what this really is is an incentive to take your vacation time.
The GP seems to be complaining that his employer is giving him all this comp time but then there's never time to take his vacation. "Sorry, boss-man, but at this company, taking my vacation time is HR policy. I don't have any choice. If I fail to take the vacation time, they reprimand me by restricting my compensation." (In this scenario, notice the emphasis on growing a pair.)
Let me throw another one out there: Everybody hates the office martyr. You know the one. She seems to be there every night until long after everybody leaves, but she never seems to get anything done. Whenever more work lands on her plate, she complains, "OMG, can I possibly get any more work? I never have time to get anything done as it is!" You suggest that maybe she's burning out and should take some vacation time. "I caiiinnn't! Have you seen how much work they pile on me? This place would fall apart if I took three days off." Eventually everybody else starts picking up work from this employee's plate "as a favor," because she never gets anything done, and still she won't take vacation, and still she keeps complaining. Encountered one of those before?
But then there's never an opportunity to use it, and if you do manage to use comp time, you don't get a chance to use all of your vacation time, and at the end of the year you lose unused vacation time.
Not in California. You lose sick time, but vacation time is essentially money in the bank. Either they have to give you the time off or else give you the balance in cash.
That you think the defense of Intelligent Design is foolish is frankly utterly irrelevant, because they don't, and it's their opinion that counts.
Why? We all have to live with the "bigoted ideologues who stir up division in society and spread ignorance" who are the products of these seminaries. Why shouldn't we get a say?
I use Bank of America's online banking system, which has a facility for electronic payment of bills. As a result, I don't write checks for any of my monthly bills anymore (which essentially means I don't use checks at all).
Bank of America will allow you to set up any mailing address for automatic payment, so I can even use it to pay my landlord (who doesn't have his own arrangement with the bank like most utilities do). The caveat is that it takes 5-7 days for the payment to be processed into his account, because as far as I am aware, what Bank of America actually does is print up a check and mail it to him.:-S But at least I don't have to pay for the stamp.
My landlord once told me that Bank of America used to let people do automatic wire transfers into each others accounts, but they eventually suspended that service. Neither of us knows why.
Funnily enough, a few years ago I had something published in an Australian magazine. They offered to pay me by wiring the currency direct to my account. "Amazing," I thought. "Why don't more U.S. businesses operate this way?" They were paying me something in the neighborhood of $200 USD, and they said they would do the deposit in USD for me, so I wouldn't get screwed by any kind of exchange-rate shenanigans. But lo and behold, once the "currency" reached the U.S. "border," Citibank (which isn't even my bank) politely stepped in to take care of the tricky details of this "international transaction" for me -- and in the process, automatically deducted a $50 USD fee before the funds hit my account.
Obviously, doing financial transactions in bits and bytes isn't as simple as you'd think it is.
And that's different...how? Is the RAM of my iPhone somehow "soiled" because the bad Mr. App Store allowed doo-doo words to get on it? The application would work the same whether it stored a local copy or not.
The developer could have waited for parental controls to be implemented, or they could choose to filter the most objectionable terms manually - there was a clear way forward in both cases.
And the way forward was censorship, in both cases.
Seriously -- "objectionable"? Who decides? In this case, it is Apple who decides. Apple is acting as the censor, by denying the application access to distribution unless its developer agrees with Apple's position on morality/language/offensiveness/etc. Never mind that in order to see the definition of a word in the dictionary you have to look it up in the first place -- Apple wants the app developer to agree with Apple's position on principle, and ensure that even people who might want to look up such words would not be able to.
Or, look at it from a business perspective: Apple claimed that the dictionary could not be distributed because it contained words that would not be included in the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, etc. So essentially, Ninjawords' competitive advantage is the very thing that makes it undistributable. It's better, so it gets denied. Apple is protecting the interests of existing dictionary publishers at the expense of the little guy.
Or is there some other explanation where Apple's actions look justified? Cuz you haven't given it to me so far.
One of my very favourite Murdoch comments was after an interview with the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, who questioned him very well, asking questions he really did not want to answer.
After the end of the interview his mic was left on and he was clearly heard to say "Fucking ABC bastards", much to the listeners amusement.
Also allowing people to read 1 story per day for free by registering would be sensible.
Now there's something to consider. You register, in the process giving certain information, such as your age, sex, location, and so on. When you register, you get a cookie. Cookie allows Murdoch company to track which stories you read, how often, and when. Big Brother? Not quite. Murdoch will be more likely to use this information for what is called "lead generation." It's the same stuff that advertisers and publishers do now, only Murdoch will be able to automate it.
Think Glengary Glenn Ross. Salesmen can't sell unless they have leads; Murdoch provides the leads. Instead of telling advertisers, "We are the biggest newspaper around, buy ads with us," Murdoch can shore up its story. "We will put your ads in front of the faces of males between the ages of 18 and 35 who watch football and go to the movies often" -- we know this information based on the fact that they read the sports pages and the movie reviews. What's more, the Murdoch publication might even be able to hand over a valid name, address, and/or telephone number for these readers. This way, advertisers can skip the banner-ad phase altogether, and go direct.
This method isn't worthwhile for marketing every type of product, but guaranteed those names will be worth something to somebody. If you wanna get scary, maybe political campaigns will be willing to pay -- it IS Fox, after all.
The average banner-ad impression nets the publication what? 50 cents, if that? You can sell a lead for 50 bucks or more, depending who the client is.
Any toolbar that needs a SEARCH to find SEARCH is broken.
That flippin' Find and Replace moves all over the place, from application to application.
Why was this marked Insightful?
Let's see... I fire up Word, I go to the Home tab... there's Find/Replace/Select, on the far right. Open up Excel, open the Home tab of the Ribbon... there it is again, Find&Select, on the far right. Let's try PowerPoint... open up the Home tab, lo and behold, it's on the far right, looking exactly like it did in Word. Even Access puts the Find/Select/etc. box on the far right of the Home tab of the Ribbon.
So which applications were you talking about that do it differently? The ones that don't use the Ribbon? Well I have great news for you: All of the Office apps will have the Ribbon in Office 2010, so everything will be just as consistent as it is in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access now. You might want to wait to upgrade until then.
P.S. Psssst... but between you and me, I use Ctrl-F.
The ribbon is the next step. IMO the ribbon UI would make a lot of sense for a device with a touchscreen, because it's much more friendly to fingers than a traditional menu. But on a desktop? It's a huge waste of screen real-estate
Please. If you hate how much space it takes up, by all means double-click on it to hide it. Is it so hard?
Client Although we are the leader in operating system software products, we face strong competition from well established companies and entities with differing approaches to the market. Competing commercial software products, including variants of Unix, are supplied by competitors, such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems and others, who are vertically integrated in both software development and hardware manufacturing and have developed operating systems that they preinstall on their own computers. Personal computer OEMs who preinstall third party operating systems may also license these firms' operating systems or Open Source software, especially offerings based on Linux. Variants of Unix run on a wide variety of computer platforms and have gained increasing acceptance as desktop operating systems, in part due to the increasing performance of standard hardware components at decreasing prices.
TFA asserts that this is the first time that Microsoft has named names of Linux vendors, but that's not strictly true either. The same 10-K filing from 2003 says the following in the "Server and Tools" section: "A number of companies supply versions of Linux, including Red Hat and VA Linux."
Overall, this is yet another total non-story based on sloppy reporting. More importantly, the Slashdot editors should be ashamed of themselves for displaying such ignorance about the competitive history between Microsoft and Linux.
You can copyright works, not words; charging per-word is a legal fiction since you cannot own a copyright on any specific word.
Yes, but there is nothing about copyright that implies RAND licensing terms. If you plan to use my work in such a way that your use does not fall under the Fair Use doctrine, then you need to obtain a license from me to do so. If I want to charge some other guy $20 to license one of my copyrighted works, but I choose to charge you $2,000 to license the same work, that's my right. I can decide my fee based on the number of words you want to quote from my work, the number of lines, the size of your audience, the size of your nose, or any other basis I choose. I don't even need to disclose my method -- I could be counting words and not tell you about it. I could choose to allow everybody in the entire world to use my work for free except you, if I wanted to. So even if charging per-word is "a legal fiction," it doesn't matter; if I choose to live in a legally fictive world, that's my right, cuz I own the copyright and you do not. I alone get to choose my terms on a per-instance basis (provided the terms don't violate some other aspect of tort law).
What if the guy had used a paragraph from Dr. Phil's latest book? The AP accepted money and offered a license for a copyright they do not own. That is a contract and is arguably fraud.
Emphasis on the "arguably." The guy offers to pay AP money. In return, AP agrees not to assert any copyrights or other rights against the guy based on his use of Dr. Phil's work. And they won't! The fact that they could not have successfully done so anyway is (again, arguably) immaterial.
Look at it this way: If I sell you an elixir and I tell you it will grow hair on your head, and you use it and nothing happens, that might be fraud. If I sell you the same elixir and tell you that under no circumstances will it affect the hair on your head in any way, and you buy it and use it and no hair grows, is that fraud? Never mind that it couldn't have grown hair if I told you it would -- I never told you that it would. I told you it would do nothing, and you bought it anyway. Caveat emptor, my friend.
Actually, I think virtually all book publishers only give money up front as an "advance against royalties." Often the figure is based on an estimate of how many copies will actually sell. If you write a computer book, for example, you'll probably never see much in the way of royalties beyond the original advance, because the publisher will be able to predict the market for your book and compensate you appropriately. I've heard of few instances where modern book publishers pay by the word. Magazine publishers, on the other hand, often do -- but then, the lengths of magazine articles are usually dictated by the magazine's editors.
Another classic example is cholera, which is transmitted by human feces (particularly when it contaminates water supplies). The more diarrhea, the better for the cholera organism, so cholera strains tend to be very virulent.
Another example is anthrax, which can live outside of a host organism for a long time by becoming a spore and remaining in soil. Because of this capability, anthrax doesn't really care if it runs out of host animals; it just waits for more to come along later.
The point is that while the theory that disease organisms tend toward equilibrium with the animals they infect has some merit, this idea alone is far too simplistic to be an accurate model of all disease behavior.
the fate of all diseases and all parasites is equilibrium with its hosts. it does no good to kill off your host so quickly there's no retransmission. so after an initial sickle swinging period of mass slaughter, the strains of any disease that dominate will be those who tend to be more mild, simply because by killing less faster, they spread wider and therefore survive longer
This is a popular myth. It is true of some diseases but not of others.
Consider that not all diseases require human-to-human transmission. Some can be transmitted via non-human vectors, for instance mosquito bites. In those cases, the human does not need to be healthy enough to travel, or to come in contact with other humans. The mosquito takes care of that part, so the human can become very sick, very rapidly, without threatening the viability of the disease. Malaria, for example, is ancient, but has shown no signs of becoming less virulent with time. Similarly, the bubonic plague has not evolved to become less deadly since the major outbreaks of antiquity; we simply know more about how to treat it when it does occur.
Most diseases of humans (but not all) are believed to be zoonoses, meaning they have crossed over from animals to humans. We refer to a certain form of the influenza virus as "bird flu," but that's not really accurate, as all forms of influenza are believed to have originated with birds. It's hard to imagine a human getting sneezed on by a duck and coming down with the flu, but the transmission only needs to happen somewhere once for the disease to have a shot at viability amongst human populations.
Slashdot Mirror
I run a site on Wordpress and managing the software updates has never been a big deal for me. I have shell access at my hosting provider, so I initially just installed Wordpress using CVS. Every time they rolled out a new bugfix, I just ran a little shell script like: "update "
With recent versions of Wordpress, though, you don't even need to do that. When a new update is available, an alert appears on your admin dashboard. From there, you can actually click a button and have the system download the update and install it automatically. I know it can be a pain when to backup your database etc., but in all honesty, for minor point bugfix updates all that is seldom if ever necessary (especially if you're diligent with backups in the first place).
I can't tell if you're trying to be witty, but I'll just assume you're ignorant of the facts. In the United States, more than 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies are attributable to medical bills. If you weren't aware of that, you might want to watch the news sometime. We have this new president over here, see...
The dirty little secret is that credit rating is a system imposed by the rich elite onto the working class. The rich do not have credit, because they have no need for it. Everything they could want, they simply buy. And they buy it with money that the working class earns as a result of real work, but gets funneled to them through--guess what--credit.
Wow. A rare glimpse into the minds of the radical left. They have seen the enemy, and he is ... Scrooge McDuck.
News flash for ya, kid. Anybody who gets anywhere in this world does so because of credit. That goes for the rich as well as the poor. The fact that the poor have less access to credit is what separates them from the rich, not their lack of cash. Or did you really think rich people kept all their money in their mattresses and paid their Rolls-Royce dealers in gold bars? Funny thing... last time I walked down Wall Street I didn't see so much as one guy wearing a top hat and a monocle... guess they must have all been at home, swimming in their Olympic-sized pools full of doubloons.
I'm not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but I have great credit. I have great credit mostly because I have been responsible with my money. Credit allows me to live comfortably, but more importantly, it gives me access to opportunities. When I need to buy a new computer because it will increase my earning potential at my business, I'm not going to put it on layaway. I'm going to buy it today, start using it tomorrow, and pay for it later, with the increased profits that I earn by using it. And that's just part of the beauty of credit. When unexpected expenses show up, paying for them with credit allows me to manage my cash flow. The same is true for my regular bills, too. When I'm burnt out and need to go on vacation, I can do it this year, right now, and not worry about scrimping and saving through the winter so I'll have enough cash by next summer. And that one time, when someone somehow got hold of my credit information and charged $800 to my card, I just called up the credit card company and asked them to remove the charge -- which they did, and the only question they asked was whether there were any other charges I thought should be removed.
That's the reality of credit for a middle-class single dude like me. Truth to tell, I doubt this country even had a real middle class before credit became easily and widely available. Based on my experience, all that class-warfare bullshit sounds like the ravings of a 17-year-old. Those people who tell you credit ruined their lives and kept them poor? Bullshit. Spending all their money is what kept those people poor. Credit is what could have helped them stop being poor ... if they knew what to do with it.
You may start with a lower score than a rich person, but your score will only go bad if you do something irresponsible, like buying something on credit which you don't pay back.
Like, for example, a couple of weeks in the hospital?
I am curious as to where this is coming from. I've interviewed Richard Stallman for interviews before, and while he set me straight on "open source vs. Free Software" terminology issues, he never expressed displeasure with the result. It wouldn't surprise me if he's been burned by interviewers many, many times in the past ... but refusing to answer any questions seems counterproductive. Then again, the assertion that he "demanded control of what we published" could just be B.S. and a misinterpretation of what he actually asked for; I'd like to find out the truth.
As someone below posted, they can cap your accrual. As in, they can't take away vacation time that you've already accrued, but once you accrue a certain amount, they can say you stop accruing until you use what you already have. Which is almost the same thing as taking your vacation away ... but only almost. People act like the company is cheating you, but what this really is is an incentive to take your vacation time.
The GP seems to be complaining that his employer is giving him all this comp time but then there's never time to take his vacation. "Sorry, boss-man, but at this company, taking my vacation time is HR policy. I don't have any choice. If I fail to take the vacation time, they reprimand me by restricting my compensation." (In this scenario, notice the emphasis on growing a pair.)
Let me throw another one out there: Everybody hates the office martyr. You know the one. She seems to be there every night until long after everybody leaves, but she never seems to get anything done. Whenever more work lands on her plate, she complains, "OMG, can I possibly get any more work? I never have time to get anything done as it is!" You suggest that maybe she's burning out and should take some vacation time. "I caiiinnn't! Have you seen how much work they pile on me? This place would fall apart if I took three days off." Eventually everybody else starts picking up work from this employee's plate "as a favor," because she never gets anything done, and still she won't take vacation, and still she keeps complaining. Encountered one of those before?
But then there's never an opportunity to use it, and if you do manage to use comp time, you don't get a chance to use all of your vacation time, and at the end of the year you lose unused vacation time.
Not in California. You lose sick time, but vacation time is essentially money in the bank. Either they have to give you the time off or else give you the balance in cash.
That you think the defense of Intelligent Design is foolish is frankly utterly irrelevant, because they don't, and it's their opinion that counts.
Why? We all have to live with the "bigoted ideologues who stir up division in society and spread ignorance" who are the products of these seminaries. Why shouldn't we get a say?
I use Bank of America's online banking system, which has a facility for electronic payment of bills. As a result, I don't write checks for any of my monthly bills anymore (which essentially means I don't use checks at all).
Bank of America will allow you to set up any mailing address for automatic payment, so I can even use it to pay my landlord (who doesn't have his own arrangement with the bank like most utilities do). The caveat is that it takes 5-7 days for the payment to be processed into his account, because as far as I am aware, what Bank of America actually does is print up a check and mail it to him. :-S But at least I don't have to pay for the stamp.
My landlord once told me that Bank of America used to let people do automatic wire transfers into each others accounts, but they eventually suspended that service. Neither of us knows why.
Funnily enough, a few years ago I had something published in an Australian magazine. They offered to pay me by wiring the currency direct to my account. "Amazing," I thought. "Why don't more U.S. businesses operate this way?" They were paying me something in the neighborhood of $200 USD, and they said they would do the deposit in USD for me, so I wouldn't get screwed by any kind of exchange-rate shenanigans. But lo and behold, once the "currency" reached the U.S. "border," Citibank (which isn't even my bank) politely stepped in to take care of the tricky details of this "international transaction" for me -- and in the process, automatically deducted a $50 USD fee before the funds hit my account.
Obviously, doing financial transactions in bits and bytes isn't as simple as you'd think it is.
And that's different...how? Is the RAM of my iPhone somehow "soiled" because the bad Mr. App Store allowed doo-doo words to get on it? The application would work the same whether it stored a local copy or not.
The developer could have waited for parental controls to be implemented, or they could choose to filter the most objectionable terms manually - there was a clear way forward in both cases.
And the way forward was censorship, in both cases.
Seriously -- "objectionable"? Who decides? In this case, it is Apple who decides. Apple is acting as the censor, by denying the application access to distribution unless its developer agrees with Apple's position on morality/language/offensiveness/etc. Never mind that in order to see the definition of a word in the dictionary you have to look it up in the first place -- Apple wants the app developer to agree with Apple's position on principle, and ensure that even people who might want to look up such words would not be able to.
Or, look at it from a business perspective: Apple claimed that the dictionary could not be distributed because it contained words that would not be included in the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, etc. So essentially, Ninjawords' competitive advantage is the very thing that makes it undistributable. It's better, so it gets denied. Apple is protecting the interests of existing dictionary publishers at the expense of the little guy.
Or is there some other explanation where Apple's actions look justified? Cuz you haven't given it to me so far.
One of my very favourite Murdoch comments was after an interview with the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, who questioned him very well, asking questions he really did not want to answer.
After the end of the interview his mic was left on and he was clearly heard to say "Fucking ABC bastards", much to the listeners amusement.
Yeah? Well something seems to have changed.
Also allowing people to read 1 story per day for free by registering would be sensible.
Now there's something to consider. You register, in the process giving certain information, such as your age, sex, location, and so on. When you register, you get a cookie. Cookie allows Murdoch company to track which stories you read, how often, and when. Big Brother? Not quite. Murdoch will be more likely to use this information for what is called "lead generation." It's the same stuff that advertisers and publishers do now, only Murdoch will be able to automate it.
Think Glengary Glenn Ross. Salesmen can't sell unless they have leads; Murdoch provides the leads. Instead of telling advertisers, "We are the biggest newspaper around, buy ads with us," Murdoch can shore up its story. "We will put your ads in front of the faces of males between the ages of 18 and 35 who watch football and go to the movies often" -- we know this information based on the fact that they read the sports pages and the movie reviews. What's more, the Murdoch publication might even be able to hand over a valid name, address, and/or telephone number for these readers. This way, advertisers can skip the banner-ad phase altogether, and go direct.
This method isn't worthwhile for marketing every type of product, but guaranteed those names will be worth something to somebody. If you wanna get scary, maybe political campaigns will be willing to pay -- it IS Fox, after all.
The average banner-ad impression nets the publication what? 50 cents, if that? You can sell a lead for 50 bucks or more, depending who the client is.
To say nothing of Publisher, InfoPath, and Groove, which also don't use the Ribbon. But they are all getting the Ribbon in Office 2010.
Any toolbar that needs a SEARCH to find SEARCH is broken.
That flippin' Find and Replace moves all over the place, from application to application.
Why was this marked Insightful?
Let's see... I fire up Word, I go to the Home tab ... there's Find/Replace/Select, on the far right. Open up Excel, open the Home tab of the Ribbon ... there it is again, Find&Select, on the far right. Let's try PowerPoint... open up the Home tab, lo and behold, it's on the far right, looking exactly like it did in Word. Even Access puts the Find/Select/etc. box on the far right of the Home tab of the Ribbon.
So which applications were you talking about that do it differently? The ones that don't use the Ribbon? Well I have great news for you: All of the Office apps will have the Ribbon in Office 2010, so everything will be just as consistent as it is in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access now. You might want to wait to upgrade until then.
P.S. Psssst... but between you and me, I use Ctrl-F.
The ribbon is the next step. IMO the ribbon UI would make a lot of sense for a device with a touchscreen, because it's much more friendly to fingers than a traditional menu. But on a desktop? It's a huge waste of screen real-estate
Please. If you hate how much space it takes up, by all means double-click on it to hide it. Is it so hard?
It might be the first time they have put it in their 10-K report...
It isn't. Here is one from 2003:
Client
Although we are the leader in operating system software products, we face strong competition from well established companies and entities with differing approaches to the market. Competing commercial software products, including variants of Unix, are supplied by competitors, such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems and others, who are vertically integrated in both software development and hardware manufacturing and have developed operating systems that they preinstall on their own computers. Personal computer OEMs who preinstall third party operating systems may also license these firms' operating systems or Open Source software, especially offerings based on Linux. Variants of Unix run on a wide variety of computer platforms and have gained increasing acceptance as desktop operating systems, in part due to the increasing performance of standard hardware components at decreasing prices.
TFA asserts that this is the first time that Microsoft has named names of Linux vendors, but that's not strictly true either. The same 10-K filing from 2003 says the following in the "Server and Tools" section: "A number of companies supply versions of Linux, including Red Hat and VA Linux."
Overall, this is yet another total non-story based on sloppy reporting. More importantly, the Slashdot editors should be ashamed of themselves for displaying such ignorance about the competitive history between Microsoft and Linux.
You can copyright works, not words; charging per-word is a legal fiction since you cannot own a copyright on any specific word.
Yes, but there is nothing about copyright that implies RAND licensing terms. If you plan to use my work in such a way that your use does not fall under the Fair Use doctrine, then you need to obtain a license from me to do so. If I want to charge some other guy $20 to license one of my copyrighted works, but I choose to charge you $2,000 to license the same work, that's my right. I can decide my fee based on the number of words you want to quote from my work, the number of lines, the size of your audience, the size of your nose, or any other basis I choose. I don't even need to disclose my method -- I could be counting words and not tell you about it. I could choose to allow everybody in the entire world to use my work for free except you, if I wanted to. So even if charging per-word is "a legal fiction," it doesn't matter; if I choose to live in a legally fictive world, that's my right, cuz I own the copyright and you do not. I alone get to choose my terms on a per-instance basis (provided the terms don't violate some other aspect of tort law).
What if the guy had used a paragraph from Dr. Phil's latest book?
The AP accepted money and offered a license for a copyright they do not own.
That is a contract and is arguably fraud.
Emphasis on the "arguably." The guy offers to pay AP money. In return, AP agrees not to assert any copyrights or other rights against the guy based on his use of Dr. Phil's work. And they won't! The fact that they could not have successfully done so anyway is (again, arguably) immaterial.
Look at it this way: If I sell you an elixir and I tell you it will grow hair on your head, and you use it and nothing happens, that might be fraud. If I sell you the same elixir and tell you that under no circumstances will it affect the hair on your head in any way, and you buy it and use it and no hair grows, is that fraud? Never mind that it couldn't have grown hair if I told you it would -- I never told you that it would. I told you it would do nothing, and you bought it anyway. Caveat emptor, my friend.
Actually, I think virtually all book publishers only give money up front as an "advance against royalties." Often the figure is based on an estimate of how many copies will actually sell. If you write a computer book, for example, you'll probably never see much in the way of royalties beyond the original advance, because the publisher will be able to predict the market for your book and compensate you appropriately. I've heard of few instances where modern book publishers pay by the word. Magazine publishers, on the other hand, often do -- but then, the lengths of magazine articles are usually dictated by the magazine's editors.
The Associated Press collects articles from reporters all over the world. I doubt those reporters submit articles royalty-free.
Really? I have never heard of a news reporter earning royalties. Reporters who want royalties write books.
Another classic example is cholera, which is transmitted by human feces (particularly when it contaminates water supplies). The more diarrhea, the better for the cholera organism, so cholera strains tend to be very virulent.
Another example is anthrax, which can live outside of a host organism for a long time by becoming a spore and remaining in soil. Because of this capability, anthrax doesn't really care if it runs out of host animals; it just waits for more to come along later.
The point is that while the theory that disease organisms tend toward equilibrium with the animals they infect has some merit, this idea alone is far too simplistic to be an accurate model of all disease behavior.
the fate of all diseases and all parasites is equilibrium with its hosts. it does no good to kill off your host so quickly there's no retransmission. so after an initial sickle swinging period of mass slaughter, the strains of any disease that dominate will be those who tend to be more mild, simply because by killing less faster, they spread wider and therefore survive longer
This is a popular myth. It is true of some diseases but not of others.
Consider that not all diseases require human-to-human transmission. Some can be transmitted via non-human vectors, for instance mosquito bites. In those cases, the human does not need to be healthy enough to travel, or to come in contact with other humans. The mosquito takes care of that part, so the human can become very sick, very rapidly, without threatening the viability of the disease. Malaria, for example, is ancient, but has shown no signs of becoming less virulent with time. Similarly, the bubonic plague has not evolved to become less deadly since the major outbreaks of antiquity; we simply know more about how to treat it when it does occur.
Most diseases of humans (but not all) are believed to be zoonoses, meaning they have crossed over from animals to humans. We refer to a certain form of the influenza virus as "bird flu," but that's not really accurate, as all forms of influenza are believed to have originated with birds. It's hard to imagine a human getting sneezed on by a duck and coming down with the flu, but the transmission only needs to happen somewhere once for the disease to have a shot at viability amongst human populations.