This fact is also the corner stone of the ruling which forbids the handing of personal information of travelers to US officials, because in US there is legal respect of this ownership.
I believe you misunderstand. The basic idea is that within Europe, the data protection laws require certain guarantees about how personal information will be stored and processed. One such requirement is that the information may not be transferred outside Europe unless the place they're being transferred to has sufficiently strong safeguards in place to make the same guarantees. The US isn't anywhere close -- it does not recognise the level of control you describe as ownership -- and therefore any European organisation that gave the information to someone in the US would be in a deep pile or brown stuff.
Of course, I'll actually believe it when he posts his credit card numbers, nude pictures of his wife, and the itinerary and security arrangements for his family for the next month on a public web site.
Until he puts his money where his mouth is, he's just defending unethical behaviour with a sound-bite.
Our data protection laws in the UK aren't nearly as powerful as you (and most people) think, unfortunately, and while I think our current Information Commissioner is a pretty good guy, he can only protect our privacy with the powers he's given in law.
For example, take a look at the kind of data Transport for London have (or at least used to have) in their data protection entry, and tell me it's really all needed to meet the business requirements of that organisation.
Moreover, the number of exemptions is pretty staggering. Why are credit reference agencies permitted to keep vast amounts of personal data about me without my consent? (Don't tell me it's those signs at the shop counters; I read the small print, and I've read my credit report, and the two are not related in any meaningful way.) The last time I dealt with a credit reference agency (to clean up someone else's mistake that was black-marking my record incorrectly) I discovered that there were, quite literally, more inaccurate entries in my record than accurate ones. After waiting on hold for more than half an hour to speak to someone about them, I was asked after about five minutes "whether it really mattered", since "it's after 6pm and I'm supposed to be going home now". Seriously, that's what they told me, after a half-hour on hold, when the records they had on me that could directly affect my ability to get a mortgage or something were written in someone's dreamland.
Other legal powers aren't as great as you might expect, either. For one thing, while you can normally get bad information corrected, if you just don't want someone to store your personal information any more, you can't make them stop, as long as they're registered for that purpose. Take Amazon, for example. I bought from them using a credit card for the first time not so long ago. After going through the usual signing-up process and completing my order, I discovered that they are now keeping my credit card number on-file, and will use it any time someone makes an order from them using my login and password (which they control), without any further attempt to confirm my identity or intent to make that transaction. Can I make them drop that number from their database and opt to re-enter it every time I make a purchase instead? Take a guess. And this in a world where thousands of people's credit card numbers or other personal details have been "misplaced" by large businesses in the past year alone, and in a country where the law does not currently require a company making such mistakes to disclose them publicly or to pay any particularly heavy fines for doing so.
So while I agree we have better data protection laws than many, I think we have a long way to go before our data is protected as well as it should be.
Nothing non-standard in the desktop manager department here, though I've long suspected something related to the tabbing issue you mentioned. In particular, if I've got more than one Firefox instance open (as in, two entries on my task bar) then I think something is up with switching between the instances, and sometimes closing one will allow previously broken scrolling in another to work. As I said, I'm afraid I haven't yet figured out exactly when things go wrong, though.
I don't know if there's a specific bugzilla report for it. I certainly haven't been able to reproduce it in a useful way to file a bug report, but I see it very frequently, and it's become much worse somewhere along the 1.5.0.x point releases. I'm using the Win32 version, with various web development extensions and not much else in the way of add-ins, FWIW.
Why should you have any expectation of privacy on somebody else's property, unless you're in an area where they explicitly tell you that you have that privacy?
I suspect you'd find that most people, including the judge and jury, would interpret a closed-off area such as a dressing room or bathroom cubicle as an implied promise of privacy.
To take a more objective view, suppose we said that stores could provide (or not) whatever privacy guarantees they liked, but must provide very clear signage describing their policy. If a store's behaviour would change because of the signage requirement, then that's an effective admission that they were being intentionally deceptive and knew customers would expect privacy. Do you think any store's behaviour would change if it was required to put up signs saying "Notice: we are spying on you while you undress in this room"?
FWIW, I was thinking of things like dual-licensing when I mentioned being GPL-compatible. I guess technically that would be permitting two separate licenses, one of which happens to be the GPL.
Why shouldn't it be? I understand that learning to pass examinations and learning a subject are far from the same thing, but what has being in a particular room at a particular time got to do with anything, particularly if you can see everything you'd have seen in that room later, exactly as in the original (but with the helpful extra capability to pause or rewind)?
Though your comment about lecturers having horrible foreign accents suggests that a little bit of cultural exposure might also be useful for you.
Or it was just telling it like it is, rather than pandering to political correctness and pretending that someone whose English is inaudible/incomprehensible is as good a lecturer as someone whose English is clear and readily understood.
Discrimination on the basis of race is usually inappropriate. Discrimination on the basis of not being able to speak English properly, while doing a job that fundamentally requires the ability to do so, is entirely justified.
According to my reading of the GPL FAQ entry on mere aggregation, if the two pieces communicate data which is internal and specific to the GPLd piece, the other piece is also covered by the GPL.
Perhaps that was just an unfortunate choice of words, or a small language barrier if you're not a native English speaker. However, unless your law works very differently to most, you can't force anyone else to licence their code in any specific way, including under the GPL. To say "the other piece is also covered by the GPL" would therefore be wrong.
Of course, it may be a copyright infringement for them to use your (GPL'd) code in their product if their code is not released with a compatible licence, but that has very different implications. If they're infringing your copyright, a court might be able to issue an injunction banning the use of your code and/or award you compensation, for example. However, the code behind "the other piece" hasn't magically become licensed under the GPL, and no-one has any magical rights to see/reuse the source code.
(IANAL, don't get legal advice from Slashdot, etc. etc.)
I always assumed Darwin awards were supposed to be for people who died doing really stupid, unnecessary things. There's a difference between that and dying while doing something worthwhile but inherently dangerous. Ask the family of any solider or a fireman who lost their life on duty.
Assuming his crew had any respect for him at all, it won't be.
Perhaps. If I were his crew, I certainly wouldn't leave it anywhere his family was going to see it in the next few days.
Then again, I am oddly reminded of an episode of Stargate SG-1 called Heroes, which explored a very similar scenario in one of the few genuinely moving sci-fi episodes I've ever seen. Forgive me if this seems off-topic, but I'm sure the reference is obvious to anyone who saw that particular episode.
I also cringed that the world thought this was what Australians were like. But the more I saw of the bloke the more I realised it wasn't an act, it was genuine, unbridled enthusiasm.
FWIW, as a non-Australian, I thought he came across that way too. If he's the stereotypical Australian, you could do a lot worse.
I think this is great advice, regardless of the other tools you like to use. Firefox has some remarkably powerful and mature plug-ins available for web developers now. With the right combination, you can navigate your document's object model and see how the displayed page is being built from it, view the effective CSS on any element in your document (including any calculated values), view annotated source that shows standard compliance problems, and more, all from within your browser.
Rather than listing specific extensions (and risking missing a good one) I'd simply recommend downloading Firefox if you haven't already, going to Tools->Extensions->Get More Extensions, and browsing through the Developer Tools category. Don't forget to include the optional DOM Inspector when installing, too.
There are two ways to go about this. One -- yours -- is to *increase* heirarchalization by, in essence, creating a level of 'middle management'. That is last century thinking.
I prefer "tried and tested". YMMV.
A better way is to *increase* the number of potential editors and ensure that moderation and meta-moderation extend *all the way up*, so to speak. Good editors -- ones whose selections get large numbers of eyeballs, thus indicating that they are in tune with the Zeitgeist -- are taken more seriously, while bad editors fall by the wayside.
The thing is, you claim this approach is better, but I don't think having editors who are promoted purely for supporting the status quo is necessarily a good thing.
On the one hand, if you're talking about selecting articles relevant to the audience, it might be a good thing. On the other hand, take a look at Slashdot's moderation system. It works reasonably well, but it does have a tendency to promote groupthink, where insightful but anti-concensus comments get moderated (-1, Overrated), and incorrect but what-you-want-to-hear comments get moderated (+1, Informative). I don't, personally, think that's in the best interests of any forum that's intended for open discussion. To an extent, such a system actively works against original thinking, and each additional layer (meta-moderation, for example) strengthens this tendency.
Of course, there is also the problem with deliberate abuse. One need only look at recent trends over on Digg to see the number of articles submitted that are subsequently reported as probably in accurate. Link farmers are starting to take over at some of the big social networking sites already. Once the vultures get wise to their newly-provided equal status, I can only see this getting worse until the community finds a way to deal with this new form of spam.
As I said in my original post, I think the future probably lies in a hybrid approach, where much of the time you do rely on the community at large to provide content, but there is also a directing influence of some sort to allow for the two big problems I've mentioned.
The difference is very noticeable between HD and regular TV. A much crisper or realistic picture.
That depends on the quality of your other hardware, IMHO.
For example, a few months ago I bought a new TV, and jumped straight from my old 14" CRT to a high quality, 32" flat panel, complete with all the HD toys. I have a serviceable but unexceptional DVD player connected to my exceptional TV.
Since setting up this system, I've rewatched quite a few of the films in my DVD collection. The most striking thing, aside from the fact that the picture is obviously much bigger physically, is how well the TV upscales standard-issue DVD. The CGI ships in sci-fi shows look amazing. The facial close-ups are pin-sharp. The explosions in action flicks are really something.
Now, sure, some things really lend themselves to HD. My other half is quite a fan of travel/nature documentaries, and when things like the BBC's Planet Earth series come out in high definition, I'm sure they'll be much sharper than in SD format, simply because an upscaler can only work with the level of detail that's there already. Things like crowd scenes and panoramic shots of mountain/forest scenery just don't scale up well, because there's too little detail to work with.
But the thing is, those are the minority of scenes, by far. My current set-up already gives me most of the advantages of my TV's higher screen resolution, without paying anything extra for one or two new players, without needing incompatible discs that I can't swap with friends for a while, without all the DRM rubbish, and so on. There is some potential advantage, and if other things were equal then sure, I'd like to have some of my DVD programmes in a hi-def format. But right now, other things are far from equal, and I have nowhere near enough incentive to buy in to either new format.
At present, you pay a flat rate for your broadband, but the costs we incur in supplying your service increase with usage. If you are up/downloading 10x as much as most customers because of your heavy broadband use, then you are costing us more than those others. With a flat pricing model, that cost is being passed on to all of our customers equally. We don't believe this is fair to the vast majority of our customers, most of whom don't make such heavy use and simply want an always-on connection with a reasonable download speed.
In recognition of this, we are giving our customers the option to decide between two alternative pricing schemes. One of these will be introduced within the next six months, at which point we will stop offering our existing flat-rate service.
For option (a), we have a tiered approach. Light users can have a max 512Kb/s connection and a monthly bandwidth cap of 1GB, for $5/month. This package is suitable for most people who use the Internet primarily for e-mail, web browsing/e-shopping, and Usenet newsgroups. Medium users can have a max 2MB/s connection and a monthly bandwidth cap of 4GB, for $15/month. This package is suitable for most people who make somewhat heavier use, such as on-line gamers or those who download occasional multimedia content. Heavy users can have a max 8MB/s connection and no monthly bandwidth cap, for $200/month. This is the only appropriate standard home user package suitable for those who run continuous, high-traffic services such as peer-to-peer file sharing or web servers linked from Slashdot articles.
For option (b), we will simply charge a fixed fee per megabyte up/downloaded, keeping the total income we receive across our entire customer base constant. We expect this to result in a cost reduction for light users of up to 90%, little change for medium users, and a tenfold increase in charges to heavy users.
Please select the option you prefer and we will go with the majority vote. For those who require guaranteed download speeds and no bandwidth cap, the same leased line services we offer to businesses are also available to private customers, with prices starting at only $1,000/month (installation charges apply).
robots.txt is more of a "please don't look at this" request to spiders. If the spider asks for the content anyway and your server happily sends it, then you can't claim this is "unauthorized" access.
Doors are more of a "please don't come into my home" request to strangers. If a thief tries the door and finds it unlocked, you can't claim this is "unauthorised access".
No, wait, that's a stupid idea, because it ignores your explicit wishes and then argues that you consented to an act that would be illegal without permission.
It's hardly insignificant if you're the guy with something else expected to be terminal that the new technique can cure, or family or friend of that guy.
Pretty much every time we have a discussion about the legality of web/Usenet archive sites, the only argument with any legal weight that's given for what would otherwise be a clear infringement of copyright is that the rightsholder is implicitly consenting to certain uses by making the material available on that medium. The degree to which this holds in general is debatable, and AFAIK has never been tested in any major court case in any jurisdiction. However, even if robots.txt is voluntary, it's a clear statement of intent. There is no way you can claim implicit permission to copy the material when the supplier explicitly indicated, using a recognised mechanism, that they did not want it copied.
Having someone provide oversight and separate the wheat from the chaff is a service, a value-add. Maybe somebody brilliant at some dot-com will think of it and believe it's a new idea, patent it and call it web 3.0.
One could actually well argue that the last claim I mention, what Norway is "generally perceived as" doesn't really belong in an encyclopedia, it's very subjective anyway, certainly it's not an undisputable fact.
Perhaps, but one could also argue that for someone who's looking for a broad overview of a subject such as would be found in an encyclopedia, that sort of general perception is of great value (as long as it's true, of course).
Yep, for C++ at least Visual Studio's IDE peaked around version 6. Although the standards compliance of the compiler has become much better in more recent versions (to be fair, the standard hadn't been finished when VC++6 was released) the IDE functionality has nose-dived since they started trying to be clever and make everything work the same way for every language (and that way is.Net -- just try looking in the help for a standard C++ library function in VS2005, with no.Net options or languages selected in the filters, and see how much.Net-related crap comes up). The responses from MS over things like the removal of the browse toolbar, and the not-quite-up-to-the-job replacements that finally arrived (for some of the useful features) three versions later in VS2005, are a typical example. Don't even get me started on Intellisense, and the various ways they've screwed up what should have been a really useful feature.
I work in an office full of people who develop highly portable code. We build on pretty much every major (desktop-friendly) OS there is -- Windows, MacOS, Linux, several flavours of old-school UNIX -- with most of the big compilers available. We have a free choice of which development tools to use on our own desktops. You know what the most popular choice is, by a long way? Visual C++. And you know which version a lot of people are still using (having tried all the more recent ones and reverted)? Version 6.
Incidentally, has anyone tried this new patch that's out to fix the Intellisense-dominating-your-processor-usage bug that MS finally noticed (about a year after everyone else)? It was featured on the "start page" in VC++ 2005 according to one of our guys who uses it, but doesn't even seem to be mentioned on the MSDN web site.
BTW, to stay somewhat on topic, my experience of alternative IDEs is that they often suffer similar problems to Visual Studio in becoming a Jack of all trades. Eclipse is the most obvious example IME: for all its claimed power and the evangelism it gets in connection with Java development, I tried using it for C++, and uninstalled it within a day. I always give software I'm trying out a fair run, so if I uninstall something that fast it means I've already seen enough to judge that it has no potential whatsoever to meet my requirements, which is a pretty damning indictment. Really, all programming languages are not the same, and I wish IDE developers would start realising that custom tools are the best way to deal with custom language features. Working with Perl, a regexp builder is fabulous. Working with Java, I basically never use them, so who cares? But working with Java, good class browsing tools are a must, while working with C++, not everything is in a class, nor should be. You get the idea, I'm sure; what a shame so many IDE developers apparently don't!
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you misunderstand. The basic idea is that within Europe, the data protection laws require certain guarantees about how personal information will be stored and processed. One such requirement is that the information may not be transferred outside Europe unless the place they're being transferred to has sufficiently strong safeguards in place to make the same guarantees. The US isn't anywhere close -- it does not recognise the level of control you describe as ownership -- and therefore any European organisation that gave the information to someone in the US would be in a deep pile or brown stuff.
I love that "privacy is dead" quote of his.
Of course, I'll actually believe it when he posts his credit card numbers, nude pictures of his wife, and the itinerary and security arrangements for his family for the next month on a public web site.
Until he puts his money where his mouth is, he's just defending unethical behaviour with a sound-bite.
They do if the case has a high-enough profile. Ask the former board of Enron how they're enjoying their current accommodation.
Big Business may think it's the government, but as far as I'm aware the people haven't yet agreed with them.
Our data protection laws in the UK aren't nearly as powerful as you (and most people) think, unfortunately, and while I think our current Information Commissioner is a pretty good guy, he can only protect our privacy with the powers he's given in law.
For example, take a look at the kind of data Transport for London have (or at least used to have) in their data protection entry, and tell me it's really all needed to meet the business requirements of that organisation.
Moreover, the number of exemptions is pretty staggering. Why are credit reference agencies permitted to keep vast amounts of personal data about me without my consent? (Don't tell me it's those signs at the shop counters; I read the small print, and I've read my credit report, and the two are not related in any meaningful way.) The last time I dealt with a credit reference agency (to clean up someone else's mistake that was black-marking my record incorrectly) I discovered that there were, quite literally, more inaccurate entries in my record than accurate ones. After waiting on hold for more than half an hour to speak to someone about them, I was asked after about five minutes "whether it really mattered", since "it's after 6pm and I'm supposed to be going home now". Seriously, that's what they told me, after a half-hour on hold, when the records they had on me that could directly affect my ability to get a mortgage or something were written in someone's dreamland.
Other legal powers aren't as great as you might expect, either. For one thing, while you can normally get bad information corrected, if you just don't want someone to store your personal information any more, you can't make them stop, as long as they're registered for that purpose. Take Amazon, for example. I bought from them using a credit card for the first time not so long ago. After going through the usual signing-up process and completing my order, I discovered that they are now keeping my credit card number on-file, and will use it any time someone makes an order from them using my login and password (which they control), without any further attempt to confirm my identity or intent to make that transaction. Can I make them drop that number from their database and opt to re-enter it every time I make a purchase instead? Take a guess. And this in a world where thousands of people's credit card numbers or other personal details have been "misplaced" by large businesses in the past year alone, and in a country where the law does not currently require a company making such mistakes to disclose them publicly or to pay any particularly heavy fines for doing so.
So while I agree we have better data protection laws than many, I think we have a long way to go before our data is protected as well as it should be.
Nothing non-standard in the desktop manager department here, though I've long suspected something related to the tabbing issue you mentioned. In particular, if I've got more than one Firefox instance open (as in, two entries on my task bar) then I think something is up with switching between the instances, and sometimes closing one will allow previously broken scrolling in another to work. As I said, I'm afraid I haven't yet figured out exactly when things go wrong, though.
I don't know if there's a specific bugzilla report for it. I certainly haven't been able to reproduce it in a useful way to file a bug report, but I see it very frequently, and it's become much worse somewhere along the 1.5.0.x point releases. I'm using the Win32 version, with various web development extensions and not much else in the way of add-ins, FWIW.
I suspect you'd find that most people, including the judge and jury, would interpret a closed-off area such as a dressing room or bathroom cubicle as an implied promise of privacy.
To take a more objective view, suppose we said that stores could provide (or not) whatever privacy guarantees they liked, but must provide very clear signage describing their policy. If a store's behaviour would change because of the signage requirement, then that's an effective admission that they were being intentionally deceptive and knew customers would expect privacy. Do you think any store's behaviour would change if it was required to put up signs saying "Notice: we are spying on you while you undress in this room"?
Fair enough, just wanted to be clear.
FWIW, I was thinking of things like dual-licensing when I mentioned being GPL-compatible. I guess technically that would be permitting two separate licenses, one of which happens to be the GPL.
Why shouldn't it be? I understand that learning to pass examinations and learning a subject are far from the same thing, but what has being in a particular room at a particular time got to do with anything, particularly if you can see everything you'd have seen in that room later, exactly as in the original (but with the helpful extra capability to pause or rewind)?
Or it was just telling it like it is, rather than pandering to political correctness and pretending that someone whose English is inaudible/incomprehensible is as good a lecturer as someone whose English is clear and readily understood.
Discrimination on the basis of race is usually inappropriate. Discrimination on the basis of not being able to speak English properly, while doing a job that fundamentally requires the ability to do so, is entirely justified.
Perhaps that was just an unfortunate choice of words, or a small language barrier if you're not a native English speaker. However, unless your law works very differently to most, you can't force anyone else to licence their code in any specific way, including under the GPL. To say "the other piece is also covered by the GPL" would therefore be wrong.
Of course, it may be a copyright infringement for them to use your (GPL'd) code in their product if their code is not released with a compatible licence, but that has very different implications. If they're infringing your copyright, a court might be able to issue an injunction banning the use of your code and/or award you compensation, for example. However, the code behind "the other piece" hasn't magically become licensed under the GPL, and no-one has any magical rights to see/reuse the source code.
(IANAL, don't get legal advice from Slashdot, etc. etc.)
I always assumed Darwin awards were supposed to be for people who died doing really stupid, unnecessary things. There's a difference between that and dying while doing something worthwhile but inherently dangerous. Ask the family of any solider or a fireman who lost their life on duty.
Perhaps. If I were his crew, I certainly wouldn't leave it anywhere his family was going to see it in the next few days.
Then again, I am oddly reminded of an episode of Stargate SG-1 called Heroes, which explored a very similar scenario in one of the few genuinely moving sci-fi episodes I've ever seen. Forgive me if this seems off-topic, but I'm sure the reference is obvious to anyone who saw that particular episode.
FWIW, as a non-Australian, I thought he came across that way too. If he's the stereotypical Australian, you could do a lot worse.
I think this is great advice, regardless of the other tools you like to use. Firefox has some remarkably powerful and mature plug-ins available for web developers now. With the right combination, you can navigate your document's object model and see how the displayed page is being built from it, view the effective CSS on any element in your document (including any calculated values), view annotated source that shows standard compliance problems, and more, all from within your browser.
Rather than listing specific extensions (and risking missing a good one) I'd simply recommend downloading Firefox if you haven't already, going to Tools->Extensions->Get More Extensions, and browsing through the Developer Tools category. Don't forget to include the optional DOM Inspector when installing, too.
I prefer "tried and tested". YMMV.
The thing is, you claim this approach is better, but I don't think having editors who are promoted purely for supporting the status quo is necessarily a good thing.
On the one hand, if you're talking about selecting articles relevant to the audience, it might be a good thing. On the other hand, take a look at Slashdot's moderation system. It works reasonably well, but it does have a tendency to promote groupthink, where insightful but anti-concensus comments get moderated (-1, Overrated), and incorrect but what-you-want-to-hear comments get moderated (+1, Informative). I don't, personally, think that's in the best interests of any forum that's intended for open discussion. To an extent, such a system actively works against original thinking, and each additional layer (meta-moderation, for example) strengthens this tendency.
Of course, there is also the problem with deliberate abuse. One need only look at recent trends over on Digg to see the number of articles submitted that are subsequently reported as probably in accurate. Link farmers are starting to take over at some of the big social networking sites already. Once the vultures get wise to their newly-provided equal status, I can only see this getting worse until the community finds a way to deal with this new form of spam.
As I said in my original post, I think the future probably lies in a hybrid approach, where much of the time you do rely on the community at large to provide content, but there is also a directing influence of some sort to allow for the two big problems I've mentioned.
That depends on the quality of your other hardware, IMHO.
For example, a few months ago I bought a new TV, and jumped straight from my old 14" CRT to a high quality, 32" flat panel, complete with all the HD toys. I have a serviceable but unexceptional DVD player connected to my exceptional TV.
Since setting up this system, I've rewatched quite a few of the films in my DVD collection. The most striking thing, aside from the fact that the picture is obviously much bigger physically, is how well the TV upscales standard-issue DVD. The CGI ships in sci-fi shows look amazing. The facial close-ups are pin-sharp. The explosions in action flicks are really something.
Now, sure, some things really lend themselves to HD. My other half is quite a fan of travel/nature documentaries, and when things like the BBC's Planet Earth series come out in high definition, I'm sure they'll be much sharper than in SD format, simply because an upscaler can only work with the level of detail that's there already. Things like crowd scenes and panoramic shots of mountain/forest scenery just don't scale up well, because there's too little detail to work with.
But the thing is, those are the minority of scenes, by far. My current set-up already gives me most of the advantages of my TV's higher screen resolution, without paying anything extra for one or two new players, without needing incompatible discs that I can't swap with friends for a while, without all the DRM rubbish, and so on. There is some potential advantage, and if other things were equal then sure, I'd like to have some of my DVD programmes in a hi-def format. But right now, other things are far from equal, and I have nowhere near enough incentive to buy in to either new format.
OK, here you go:
Dear customer/potential customer,
At present, you pay a flat rate for your broadband, but the costs we incur in supplying your service increase with usage. If you are up/downloading 10x as much as most customers because of your heavy broadband use, then you are costing us more than those others. With a flat pricing model, that cost is being passed on to all of our customers equally. We don't believe this is fair to the vast majority of our customers, most of whom don't make such heavy use and simply want an always-on connection with a reasonable download speed.
In recognition of this, we are giving our customers the option to decide between two alternative pricing schemes. One of these will be introduced within the next six months, at which point we will stop offering our existing flat-rate service.
For option (a), we have a tiered approach. Light users can have a max 512Kb/s connection and a monthly bandwidth cap of 1GB, for $5/month. This package is suitable for most people who use the Internet primarily for e-mail, web browsing/e-shopping, and Usenet newsgroups. Medium users can have a max 2MB/s connection and a monthly bandwidth cap of 4GB, for $15/month. This package is suitable for most people who make somewhat heavier use, such as on-line gamers or those who download occasional multimedia content. Heavy users can have a max 8MB/s connection and no monthly bandwidth cap, for $200/month. This is the only appropriate standard home user package suitable for those who run continuous, high-traffic services such as peer-to-peer file sharing or web servers linked from Slashdot articles.
For option (b), we will simply charge a fixed fee per megabyte up/downloaded, keeping the total income we receive across our entire customer base constant. We expect this to result in a cost reduction for light users of up to 90%, little change for medium users, and a tenfold increase in charges to heavy users.
Please select the option you prefer and we will go with the majority vote. For those who require guaranteed download speeds and no bandwidth cap, the same leased line services we offer to businesses are also available to private customers, with prices starting at only $1,000/month (installation charges apply).
Kind regards,
Your ISP
Doors are more of a "please don't come into my home" request to strangers. If a thief tries the door and finds it unlocked, you can't claim this is "unauthorised access".
No, wait, that's a stupid idea, because it ignores your explicit wishes and then argues that you consented to an act that would be illegal without permission.
Oh, man, you're sooooo behind the curve.
Triangles, baby. Web 3.0 is going to be all about triangles. Hundreds of thousands of them, all lovingly rendered in real time...
It's hardly insignificant if you're the guy with something else expected to be terminal that the new technique can cure, or family or friend of that guy.
Pretty much every time we have a discussion about the legality of web/Usenet archive sites, the only argument with any legal weight that's given for what would otherwise be a clear infringement of copyright is that the rightsholder is implicitly consenting to certain uses by making the material available on that medium. The degree to which this holds in general is debatable, and AFAIK has never been tested in any major court case in any jurisdiction. However, even if robots.txt is voluntary, it's a clear statement of intent. There is no way you can claim implicit permission to copy the material when the supplier explicitly indicated, using a recognised mechanism, that they did not want it copied.
That makes comments like this one by Doc Ruby and this one by saskboy seem a little presumptuous, IMNSHO.
I think I've got prior art. :-)
Perhaps, but one could also argue that for someone who's looking for a broad overview of a subject such as would be found in an encyclopedia, that sort of general perception is of great value (as long as it's true, of course).
Yep, for C++ at least Visual Studio's IDE peaked around version 6. Although the standards compliance of the compiler has become much better in more recent versions (to be fair, the standard hadn't been finished when VC++6 was released) the IDE functionality has nose-dived since they started trying to be clever and make everything work the same way for every language (and that way is .Net -- just try looking in the help for a standard C++ library function in VS2005, with no .Net options or languages selected in the filters, and see how much .Net-related crap comes up). The responses from MS over things like the removal of the browse toolbar, and the not-quite-up-to-the-job replacements that finally arrived (for some of the useful features) three versions later in VS2005, are a typical example. Don't even get me started on Intellisense, and the various ways they've screwed up what should have been a really useful feature.
I work in an office full of people who develop highly portable code. We build on pretty much every major (desktop-friendly) OS there is -- Windows, MacOS, Linux, several flavours of old-school UNIX -- with most of the big compilers available. We have a free choice of which development tools to use on our own desktops. You know what the most popular choice is, by a long way? Visual C++. And you know which version a lot of people are still using (having tried all the more recent ones and reverted)? Version 6.
Incidentally, has anyone tried this new patch that's out to fix the Intellisense-dominating-your-processor-usage bug that MS finally noticed (about a year after everyone else)? It was featured on the "start page" in VC++ 2005 according to one of our guys who uses it, but doesn't even seem to be mentioned on the MSDN web site.
BTW, to stay somewhat on topic, my experience of alternative IDEs is that they often suffer similar problems to Visual Studio in becoming a Jack of all trades. Eclipse is the most obvious example IME: for all its claimed power and the evangelism it gets in connection with Java development, I tried using it for C++, and uninstalled it within a day. I always give software I'm trying out a fair run, so if I uninstall something that fast it means I've already seen enough to judge that it has no potential whatsoever to meet my requirements, which is a pretty damning indictment. Really, all programming languages are not the same, and I wish IDE developers would start realising that custom tools are the best way to deal with custom language features. Working with Perl, a regexp builder is fabulous. Working with Java, I basically never use them, so who cares? But working with Java, good class browsing tools are a must, while working with C++, not everything is in a class, nor should be. You get the idea, I'm sure; what a shame so many IDE developers apparently don't!