Seems like half the equipment sitting on my desk right now I bought with the aid of a rebate. I got two rebates on my desktop CPU, I got a rebate on my laptop, a rebate on my wireless router, one on my Wacom tablet, another on my monitor... all of them have been honored.
In fact, if you want to go into details, the manufacturer of my laptop actually offered a rebate on it about two months after I bought mine. That pissed me off, so I doctored up a copy of the store receipt with a later date. It was honored, and I'm not sorry.
Ideas are simple. Making something of them is what patents are supposed to protect.
I'm not so sure that's true. What about the brilliant inventor who comes up with a very complicated system but has no capital with which to finance a prototype? Seems to me that patents would come in pretty handy in such a situation. Sans patent, you could spend five years searching around for independent financing while GE, which got wind of your idea somehow, has been working on developing it and refining it. Given five years' lead time, GE manages to make one or two substantial improvements on your invention, which it then turns around and patents. Sound fair?
Well, I certainly hope you suffer a better fate than me and my Nokia 770. Nokia pretty much disavowed all support for my gadget as soon as the N800 was rolling off the assembly line. Not long after that, the WiFi stopped working, rendering the whole debate about whether the world is ready for an "Internet tablet" rather moot. It still makes a pretty decent eBook reader (albeit with the worst battery in history) but not much else. After this experience, it's going to be hard for me to disassociate "Nokia" from "crap" in my mind.
BTW, blacks were not denied the right to go to school
You may have been born in Miss but you need to go back and read your post-Reconstruction history. Keeping blacks illiterate was one of the main tools the South wielded to keep them second-class citizens and, most importantly, away from the polls. Later, Brown v. Board of Education ruled that the mere fact that "they had schools they could go to" did not count as "going to school."
The fact that a store manager AND a police officer believes that they have to right to inspect what you have AND demand proof of who you are is slowly coming about. It will not be long before the feds try to insist that all "good" citizens need to have an ID with a federal number that MUST be shown whenever an official asks for it. So, yeah, these silly little cases MAY amount in the same way that Rosa not giving up a silly little seat did.
Speaking of straw men, what any of your examples has to do with Comcast throttling BitTorrent I have no idea.
This is standing up to a MUCH bigger bulley who is trying to take what is not theirs.
You mean like your right to vote; your right to go to school, even to learn to read; your right to use the same public facilities as people of different races than you; your right not to be strung up on a tree by your neck until dead and then have your body burnt in effigy -- is that that kind of thing these big, bad bully cable companies are taking from you?
Or is it more like you buying a car with a spedometer that goes up to 120MPH only to find out that your car won't go that fast? Damn, I bet Rosa would be pissed if that happened.
The Berne Convention is an international treaty that sets standard copyright terms and prohibitions and has been ratified by most of the countries you've heard of.
Computers are good at comparing strings in a spell checker, and people are good at producing typos, spelling mistakes, and approving fixes.
On the hole your write -- computers are better then nothing -- butte computers don't always sea every mistake. Humans are good it thinking. Sum should try it sum thyme. The best weigh to avoid spelling arrears is to reed more and improve you're vocabulary.
Surely you see the difference between someone who submits XYZ story because he wants you to visit some Web site, and someone who submits XYZ story because he wants you to visit XYZ story?
So if the same story got submitted by somebody other than Lucas123, then it would be OK? But because Lucas123 works for the publication that published it, it's bad and evil.
So if Taco Bell is giving away free tacos, and your mom drives down there and gets you some, that's OK. But if the guy from Taco Bell drives right up to your house and hands them to you, that's an evil marketing ploy because he's just a shill.
To get into the CompUSA in San Francisco you have to go down an elevator. To leave you have to come back up the elevator, at which point you're confronted by the bag police who want to check your receipt and search any bags you may have brought with you. Usually when they say "I need to look inside your bag," I tell them, "No thank you, I'd rather you didn't." And I walk out. And they never move a muscle. I've done this and I've seen other people do this enough times that I'm certain it's an explicit policy on CompUSA's part: Security staff are not to unlawfully detain anyone, full stop.
Of course, my understanding is that if you don't get your receipt stamped by the bag cops you may not be eligible for the same return policy etc. Someone who works there will have to confirm that, though, cuz I don't know for sure.
I still don't understand why they don't do what all the independent stores seem to do, though: Instead of hiring somebody to confront and antagonize people for minimum wage, why don't they just build a little shelf an have a bag check? Seems a lot more friendly to me... but then, I guess if you're paying someone to work for a big corporation at minimum wage, it's likely that a lot of things might go missing from those bags. But like I said, it works for all the independent record stores around here...
To the best of my knowledge, Firefox does not have automatic syncing of bookmarks with a central server. There are definitely add-ons that allow it (such as foxmarks and the google toolbar (I think)).
I knew there was a reason why, when the summary implied that "everyone who uses Firefox is syncing their bookmarks," I had never heard of such a thing. From the Foxmarks Web site:
Foxmarks is a startup that goes beyond the Web 2.0 hype. The company is poised to turn search upside down by harnessing the collective intelligence of its users' bookmarks to help find desired web sites much more easily... Foxmarks' novel search approach goes leaps and bounds beyond simple page ranking and text indexing. By combining algorithmic search with community knowledge-sharing and the wisdom of crowds, Foxmarks connects users with the sites that are most useful and relevant.
Great. Another service driven by selling marketing data about me to companies I've never heard of. No f'in thank you.
Libertarians can see that everything big government touches turns to shit. That's why they're libertarians.
You do realize that "big government" is the classic mantra of the conservative, right? In fact I have no idea why anyone would even imply that libertarianism is leftist... they tend to be liberal on social issues, but in every other aspect they play like lock-step conservatives. I imagine the only reason people get confused is because the Republican party is now so twisted and distorted by corruption and adherence to religious agendas that they bear no resemblance to liberarians.
I'm generally a strong believer in the GPL, but in this case I find myself sympathizing with Theo. Also, even though the BSD license allows anyone to close the source, in general, the BSD developers like to have changes given back - they just don't like forcing people to give back improvements. It's like an honor system, and in this case they feel changing the license to GPL was dishonorable, especially since the Linux devs should have known better.
It seems to me that Theo is at least in part making a distinction between someone like, say, Microsoft using BSD code -- where Microsoft is dedicated to producing proprietary products and makes no claims about the moral correctness of source code -- and people who claim to support the GPL, but who seem disinclined to share their efforts on the same terms as the original authors of the BSD code. Theo seems to be saying that legally you cannot do that -- which may be right or wrong, IANAL -- but furthermore he's saying that it seems kinda two-faced for someone who claims to be about freedom and sharing to take that attitude.
I fly out of San Francisco Airport frequently, which is a hub for United Airlines. United lets me buy a ticket online, then actually "check in" for the flight on their Web site before I leave home, a process that allows me to print out my own boarding pass. I bring that printout with me to the airport and proceed directly to the security queues. The TSA agent who looks at my ID is the first human I ever speak to. Also, if for some reason my printer is out of toner, I need only run any card in my wallet through a terminal at the airport (it needn't be the credit card I bought the ticket with, as it's only checking for my name) and receive a boarding pass there. The only time in recent memory that I've had to wait at a check-in counter was when Travelocity screwed up a friend's reservation and his ticket was canceled. Like other posters have mentioned, it's the security lines that are the main bottleneck.
Some of the original series episodes were just plain silly, just funny; for example, 'I, Mudd
It's funny you mention that. To this day, some nights I can't come home and put my key in the front door lock without hearing a little voice in the back of my head going, "Harcourt Fenton Mudd, have you been drinking again?"
Technically I'm not even interested in the deliverables, because I'm not a end user and scientific research is something the rest of the world can do. I just want to know how much this will affect my bottom line - if it makes or saves money.
I'm sick and tired of the maintainers of the Star Trek franchise trying to recapture the Original Series style and universe. That series failed for a reason. It had such a good movie run due to Shatner, Nimoy, and DeForest Kelly, as well as the epic nature of the stories. In the latter respect, the movies were successful because in style and substance they were the opposite of the failed series.
That's a pretty distorted view of history. Star Trek failed for the same reasons many TV shows fail. Some of them air in the wrong time slot, some of them fail to find sponsors, some of them are gutted by shortsighted producers... Star Trek arguably experienced all of the above. The difference is that most canceled shows don't continue to maintain and grow a fan base for years after the show stops airing. The phenomenal success of Star Trek happened long before TNG -- and I daresay long before you were born, judging by the assumptions you make. People were paying good money to go to Star Trek conventions throughout the 1970s. They put a cartoon on Saturday mornings. I knew more than one kid who would watch the reruns religiously, trying to write down a copy of every Captain's Log that came out of Kirk's mouth. "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" only happened because Paramount had a brand-new Star Trek TV show featuring the original cast in the works, when somebody realized they stood to make a lot more money by releasing it to theaters instead. People lined up around the block to see "Star Trek: TMP" -- a movie based on a show that hadn't aired in 10 years.
That said, TNG may have been a decent show, but like you say yourself -- it was mainly popular because it rose above the level of most of the crap on TV. That doesn't make it good Trek. The original Enterprise didn't need no damn social worker... one drunken country doctor was good enough for them, 'nuff said.
A reboot isn't really needed. What should be done is to get together a large amount of people who worked on Star Trek in the past...
Right, right, I'm with you...
...and put together a large fan forum online.
Oh. Heck, I thought you were going to say we should put them together in one large, well-insulated box, and then drop it to the ocean floor. In the process we'd probably rid ourselves of 85 percent of the people who use the word "canon" to refer to something not related to the Roman Catholic Church.
Oh, wait a minute... you didn't use the word "canon." You said "cannon." I'm back with you. Maybe you better start over from the beginning, though, because I'm not totally sure where you're aiming and what kind of ammunition you plan to use.
Why don't you try telling that to the fact that the sun is eventually going to simply burn out, eliminating all solar-dependent life on this rock?
Actually, before that happens the sun will become a red giant star, engulf Mercury and Venus and probably the Earth as well (either that or its surface will be so close to the Earth that the entire face of the planet will melt into volcanic slag). But I guess the point is the same.
Strictly speaking, he increased the phone's value himself and then accepted compensation for it. Only his accountant knows for sure.
Unless they wrote up a contract stipulating that he would be compensated for the hacked iPhone with eight unhacked iPhones... and on a completely unrelated side issue, the Nissan was a gift.
I was once taught about firearms: 1.) You never point a gun at anyone you don't intend to shoot. 2.) You never shoot anyone you don't intend to kill. From those two basic axioms you can derive all sorts of appropriate behaviors for the care and handling of firearms, in dangerous situations and otherwise.
I like those sort of truisms. So I have two about management, or more specifically, about leadership. I no longer remember whether someone told me these or whether I made them up myself. I think I may have just made them up. But they go like this:
1. If you're in charge of a project, and you have goals and a deadline, and everything goes wrong and the deadlines are blown and the goals are not met, ALWAYS ALWAYS take the blame yourself. "I told you guys we'd be done by this date. Well, it looks like I screwed up. We're not done."
2. If you're in charge of a project and everything always goes right, the goals are met and exceeded and everything happens before deadline, ALWAYS ALWAYS give the credit to your team. "Everybody on staff came together on this one and they pulled out all the stops. There were a lot of long weekends involved for this one and I can't praise the team enough."
If you can do those two things, consistently and without hesitation, I'll guarantee you'll be a more effective leader.
A weak leader will get scared. "Wait a minute... if I follow your advice, my boss will only ever hear my name when my employees screw up. When everything is going right, I won't even get a pat on the back!"
Bullshit. Senior management knows whose responsibility everything is. They put you there. If you screw up and you try to shift the blame somewhere else, they'll see that too, unless they're completely incompetent. If nothing else, your subordinates will see it, and they'll despise you for it. Nobody likes a manager who tries to climb the corporate ladder by standing on the backs of the rank and file. Your team will just get weaker and weaker.
I can't tell you how many times I've sat in on a small meeting and some criticisms came up about lost productivity or whatever, and the manager in charge responds with, "I know, I know, but no matter how many times I try to tell Julie what we need, she just never gets it right. She's been a real problem. I think I might have to put someone else on it"... and everybody in the room wants to vomit. You act like that and everybody can smell you from a block away.
As in so many other facets of life, it's all about respect. Give people a square deal day in and day out and they'll respect you. That respect is a kind of coinage, and it will let you make the difficult decisions when they come along -- say, if someone really and truly isn't working out.
Now that I think about it, I guess after all there's really only one axiom, and it's the Golden Rule.
it appears that the Russians are not a susceptible to "contributions" as their American and European counterparts
Really? That's how it appears to you? I mean, we can interpret these current events in various different ways, but given the historic track record of Russian government workers, yours is one interpretation that never even crossed my mind.
Slashdot Mirror
But they're all firmware upgradeable so surely these "serious issues" aren't that big of a deal?
Seems like half the equipment sitting on my desk right now I bought with the aid of a rebate. I got two rebates on my desktop CPU, I got a rebate on my laptop, a rebate on my wireless router, one on my Wacom tablet, another on my monitor ... all of them have been honored.
In fact, if you want to go into details, the manufacturer of my laptop actually offered a rebate on it about two months after I bought mine. That pissed me off, so I doctored up a copy of the store receipt with a later date. It was honored, and I'm not sorry.
I'm not so sure that's true. What about the brilliant inventor who comes up with a very complicated system but has no capital with which to finance a prototype? Seems to me that patents would come in pretty handy in such a situation. Sans patent, you could spend five years searching around for independent financing while GE, which got wind of your idea somehow, has been working on developing it and refining it. Given five years' lead time, GE manages to make one or two substantial improvements on your invention, which it then turns around and patents. Sound fair?
Well, I certainly hope you suffer a better fate than me and my Nokia 770. Nokia pretty much disavowed all support for my gadget as soon as the N800 was rolling off the assembly line. Not long after that, the WiFi stopped working, rendering the whole debate about whether the world is ready for an "Internet tablet" rather moot. It still makes a pretty decent eBook reader (albeit with the worst battery in history) but not much else. After this experience, it's going to be hard for me to disassociate "Nokia" from "crap" in my mind.
Point of order: Is it still OK to make fun of the editors for letting this question through?
I move that the Chair recognize kdawson is an idiot.
You may have been born in Miss but you need to go back and read your post-Reconstruction history. Keeping blacks illiterate was one of the main tools the South wielded to keep them second-class citizens and, most importantly, away from the polls. Later, Brown v. Board of Education ruled that the mere fact that "they had schools they could go to" did not count as "going to school."
Speaking of straw men, what any of your examples has to do with Comcast throttling BitTorrent I have no idea.You mean like your right to vote; your right to go to school, even to learn to read; your right to use the same public facilities as people of different races than you; your right not to be strung up on a tree by your neck until dead and then have your body burnt in effigy -- is that that kind of thing these big, bad bully cable companies are taking from you?
Or is it more like you buying a car with a spedometer that goes up to 120MPH only to find out that your car won't go that fast? Damn, I bet Rosa would be pissed if that happened.
The Berne Convention is an international treaty that sets standard copyright terms and prohibitions and has been ratified by most of the countries you've heard of.
On the hole your write -- computers are better then nothing -- butte computers don't always sea every mistake. Humans are good it thinking. Sum should try it sum thyme. The best weigh to avoid spelling arrears is to reed more and improve you're vocabulary.
Surely you see the difference between someone who submits XYZ story because he wants you to visit some Web site, and someone who submits XYZ story because he wants you to visit XYZ story?
So if the same story got submitted by somebody other than Lucas123, then it would be OK? But because Lucas123 works for the publication that published it, it's bad and evil.
So if Taco Bell is giving away free tacos, and your mom drives down there and gets you some, that's OK. But if the guy from Taco Bell drives right up to your house and hands them to you, that's an evil marketing ploy because he's just a shill.
To get into the CompUSA in San Francisco you have to go down an elevator. To leave you have to come back up the elevator, at which point you're confronted by the bag police who want to check your receipt and search any bags you may have brought with you. Usually when they say "I need to look inside your bag," I tell them, "No thank you, I'd rather you didn't." And I walk out. And they never move a muscle. I've done this and I've seen other people do this enough times that I'm certain it's an explicit policy on CompUSA's part: Security staff are not to unlawfully detain anyone, full stop.
... but then, I guess if you're paying someone to work for a big corporation at minimum wage, it's likely that a lot of things might go missing from those bags. But like I said, it works for all the independent record stores around here...
Of course, my understanding is that if you don't get your receipt stamped by the bag cops you may not be eligible for the same return policy etc. Someone who works there will have to confirm that, though, cuz I don't know for sure.
I still don't understand why they don't do what all the independent stores seem to do, though: Instead of hiring somebody to confront and antagonize people for minimum wage, why don't they just build a little shelf an have a bag check? Seems a lot more friendly to me
I knew there was a reason why, when the summary implied that "everyone who uses Firefox is syncing their bookmarks," I had never heard of such a thing. From the Foxmarks Web site:
Great. Another service driven by selling marketing data about me to companies I've never heard of. No f'in thank you.You do realize that "big government" is the classic mantra of the conservative, right? In fact I have no idea why anyone would even imply that libertarianism is leftist ... they tend to be liberal on social issues, but in every other aspect they play like lock-step conservatives. I imagine the only reason people get confused is because the Republican party is now so twisted and distorted by corruption and adherence to religious agendas that they bear no resemblance to liberarians.
It seems to me that Theo is at least in part making a distinction between someone like, say, Microsoft using BSD code -- where Microsoft is dedicated to producing proprietary products and makes no claims about the moral correctness of source code -- and people who claim to support the GPL, but who seem disinclined to share their efforts on the same terms as the original authors of the BSD code. Theo seems to be saying that legally you cannot do that -- which may be right or wrong, IANAL -- but furthermore he's saying that it seems kinda two-faced for someone who claims to be about freedom and sharing to take that attitude.
At the risk of spoiling the joke of my previous post: Regular people with well-adjusted priorities don't care.
I fly out of San Francisco Airport frequently, which is a hub for United Airlines. United lets me buy a ticket online, then actually "check in" for the flight on their Web site before I leave home, a process that allows me to print out my own boarding pass. I bring that printout with me to the airport and proceed directly to the security queues. The TSA agent who looks at my ID is the first human I ever speak to. Also, if for some reason my printer is out of toner, I need only run any card in my wallet through a terminal at the airport (it needn't be the credit card I bought the ticket with, as it's only checking for my name) and receive a boarding pass there. The only time in recent memory that I've had to wait at a check-in counter was when Travelocity screwed up a friend's reservation and his ticket was canceled. Like other posters have mentioned, it's the security lines that are the main bottleneck.
It's funny you mention that. To this day, some nights I can't come home and put my key in the front door lock without hearing a little voice in the back of my head going, "Harcourt Fenton Mudd, have you been drinking again?"
Just so. And this is what makes America great.
Or so I'm told.
That's a pretty distorted view of history. Star Trek failed for the same reasons many TV shows fail. Some of them air in the wrong time slot, some of them fail to find sponsors, some of them are gutted by shortsighted producers ... Star Trek arguably experienced all of the above. The difference is that most canceled shows don't continue to maintain and grow a fan base for years after the show stops airing. The phenomenal success of Star Trek happened long before TNG -- and I daresay long before you were born, judging by the assumptions you make. People were paying good money to go to Star Trek conventions throughout the 1970s. They put a cartoon on Saturday mornings. I knew more than one kid who would watch the reruns religiously, trying to write down a copy of every Captain's Log that came out of Kirk's mouth. "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" only happened because Paramount had a brand-new Star Trek TV show featuring the original cast in the works, when somebody realized they stood to make a lot more money by releasing it to theaters instead. People lined up around the block to see "Star Trek: TMP" -- a movie based on a show that hadn't aired in 10 years.
That said, TNG may have been a decent show, but like you say yourself -- it was mainly popular because it rose above the level of most of the crap on TV. That doesn't make it good Trek. The original Enterprise didn't need no damn social worker ... one drunken country doctor was good enough for them, 'nuff said.
Oh. Heck, I thought you were going to say we should put them together in one large, well-insulated box, and then drop it to the ocean floor. In the process we'd probably rid ourselves of 85 percent of the people who use the word "canon" to refer to something not related to the Roman Catholic Church.
Oh, wait a minute ... you didn't use the word "canon." You said "cannon." I'm back with you. Maybe you better start over from the beginning, though, because I'm not totally sure where you're aiming and what kind of ammunition you plan to use.
Actually, before that happens the sun will become a red giant star, engulf Mercury and Venus and probably the Earth as well (either that or its surface will be so close to the Earth that the entire face of the planet will melt into volcanic slag). But I guess the point is the same.
Unless they wrote up a contract stipulating that he would be compensated for the hacked iPhone with eight unhacked iPhones... and on a completely unrelated side issue, the Nissan was a gift.
I was once taught about firearms: 1.) You never point a gun at anyone you don't intend to shoot. 2.) You never shoot anyone you don't intend to kill. From those two basic axioms you can derive all sorts of appropriate behaviors for the care and handling of firearms, in dangerous situations and otherwise.
... if I follow your advice, my boss will only ever hear my name when my employees screw up. When everything is going right, I won't even get a pat on the back!"
... and everybody in the room wants to vomit. You act like that and everybody can smell you from a block away.
I like those sort of truisms. So I have two about management, or more specifically, about leadership. I no longer remember whether someone told me these or whether I made them up myself. I think I may have just made them up. But they go like this:
1. If you're in charge of a project, and you have goals and a deadline, and everything goes wrong and the deadlines are blown and the goals are not met, ALWAYS ALWAYS take the blame yourself. "I told you guys we'd be done by this date. Well, it looks like I screwed up. We're not done."
2. If you're in charge of a project and everything always goes right, the goals are met and exceeded and everything happens before deadline, ALWAYS ALWAYS give the credit to your team. "Everybody on staff came together on this one and they pulled out all the stops. There were a lot of long weekends involved for this one and I can't praise the team enough."
If you can do those two things, consistently and without hesitation, I'll guarantee you'll be a more effective leader.
A weak leader will get scared. "Wait a minute
Bullshit. Senior management knows whose responsibility everything is. They put you there. If you screw up and you try to shift the blame somewhere else, they'll see that too, unless they're completely incompetent. If nothing else, your subordinates will see it, and they'll despise you for it. Nobody likes a manager who tries to climb the corporate ladder by standing on the backs of the rank and file. Your team will just get weaker and weaker.
I can't tell you how many times I've sat in on a small meeting and some criticisms came up about lost productivity or whatever, and the manager in charge responds with, "I know, I know, but no matter how many times I try to tell Julie what we need, she just never gets it right. She's been a real problem. I think I might have to put someone else on it"
As in so many other facets of life, it's all about respect. Give people a square deal day in and day out and they'll respect you. That respect is a kind of coinage, and it will let you make the difficult decisions when they come along -- say, if someone really and truly isn't working out.
Now that I think about it, I guess after all there's really only one axiom, and it's the Golden Rule.
Really? That's how it appears to you? I mean, we can interpret these current events in various different ways, but given the historic track record of Russian government workers, yours is one interpretation that never even crossed my mind.