Er, copyright infringement, because piracy has such a "dirty" sound to it.
And coppyright infringement is either a triviality or a birthright, so the arguments here go.
*
More seriously, I sympathize. I guess the honor system is out?
Ideally, even peer-reviewed work (or, I would hope especially peer-reviewed, because it is significantly value-added) would be in the public domain anyway. The single best approach would be to acquire grant or public funding as a one-time purchase of the data.
After honor system and public domain come the tedious closed-access or copyright-suit methods, which are vulnerable to hacking and piracy, respectively. In case there are further alternatives, I'll be lurking here to hear them.
(1) In my eveperience, people don't go far from their own lives in concocting gruesome hypotheticals... so I want you to know I consider you a friend.:)
(2) Whether you invited the officer into your house, or he/she had other reason to be there, the 4th A. still applies;
(3) The 4th A. exception that would most likely apply is "plain view," true, but it is still technically a search because it is in a private space. So, if you had at least had the foresight to put a piece of paper over the damn thing, you wouldn't be on death row now (how nice that they give you Internet access!);
(4) If the officer opened the freezer because you offered a popsicle, even if you really had intended to do the opening yourself, you still lose.
(5) Any good defense lawyer will tell you there are lots of innocent explanations for a severed head.
* Kidding aside, friend, and to distill what you said, all the gov't has to show is the necessary elements of the crime. Period. How difficult the accomplishment of these elements might have been is irrelevant, except perhaps to calculating punishment. For classic breaking and entering, for example, you don't have to break anything for "breaking." Even the opening of a door left ajar is sufficient, even if that's an internal door. The connotation of physicality or difficulty is spurious.
So, friend, breaking even the most pathetic code is enough, so long as you have the necessary state of mind. (Breaking a code while stinking drunk might be a defense to intent.)
The administrative code under which Gillies was cited specifies that "no person shall cause or permit the emission of air contaminant, including odorous air contaminant . . . if the air contaminant . . . may cause detriment to the health, safety, welfare or comfort of any person."
That's a pretty darn broad regulation once you throw "or comfort" in at the end. The stadard boilerplate formula is "health/safety/welfare" which are considerably less subjective. Badly-worded rule right there.
As for the smell, and to be technical no one has the right to force anyone else to smell anything in particular, it's technically a nuisance and could range from baking bread to sticking offal. Usually we keep conflicts down by zoning where things like pig farming can take place.
Now, I have no trouble regulating it if the coffee really smells like "burning plastic" or even vanilla hazelnut. (Between the two I'd pick the plastic, and that's because I like coffee.) Interesting Q: How do you try this in court? Take air samples and blow them in jurors' faces? I think you'd have to have a field trip.
Anyway... uh... why is this a/. story? Are we supposed to think the critical supply of roasted coffee beans is imperiled here?
For whatever comfort, the exact thought passed through my mind when I noticed this story. I mean, rockets are fun, even I did them (Estes level, naturally), but the Westinghouse stuff is about a whole lot more than gee whiz. Heck, I don't even understand those projects well enough to go gee whiz; I'd have to spend some time reading first.
Kudos to the rocket kids; but the Siemens-Westinghouse practically scare me by comparison. I keep hoping to hear they got a whole lot of help... or they're not of our species... or they're 35 y.o. physicicts that look like high-schoolers and needed the money... or something.
You have it backwards. I don't care which OS you need for which machine. What I do care about is what you can do with that machine once it is plugged in and set up. I don't care if I ever see system 9 again. I do care whether I see the applications I used to use without the headache and cost and occassional impossibility of upgrading. An upgrade merely for the privilege of continuing to use software you already own is no upgrade.
The OS X is great. OS 9 is gone. Yippee. But that's not at all the point.
But by now most OS9 apps need upgrading anyway for compatibility with others. And if you have the latest version of a modern title, then it is probably both OS9 and OSX compatible.
Photoshop 5.5 is a glaring exception -- I wish it was X-native, but it's not worth the upgrade price for that alone, Classic fortunately works fine... except for scanner support... and a noticeable performance hit here and there... and less stability for some strange reason.:( Yeah, there are workarounds, but how nice that I have a G4 that will do everything a new one does (a tad slower) AND boot into OS 9.:)
My point, with this limited example, is that nothing about Photoshop "need[s] upgrading anyway for compatibility." A picture is still a picture is still a picture.
And, again, however trivial $400 might be, multiply it by 500+ Macs adn you may see a school board thinking, hmm, maybe we should cut off our nose to spite our face and switch to 100% PC's. Backward compatibility is boring and unsexy and economical and cool.
I checked yesterday; my son's particular school has a big shipment of eMacs (is that what they're called?) coming in, which will be able to boot 9 or X. They figure this will tide them over for a few years. Then they'll see where they are. So they're buying a lot of "old" machines just under the wire.
They are still using some ancient System 7-era software which is primitive but for 1st-graders is just fine. To say they should buy upgrades -- several dozen for each program, to be precise -- is asinine (not that seamelt is saying this!).
So with OS X Apple have been nice and done you guys a favour
Some favor! They did out of self-interest, or they would have suddenly had a machine that ran no software. They needed a transitional architecture to serve their needs; now they feel it is safe to move on -- for them.
For for requiring a new OS to boot newer machines, that's not the issue at all; the OS is included. What would be an issue would be that OS in turn forcing you to update all of your software.
Now, the whole question is balancing Apple's needs versus the consumers, not picking one over the other. Most arguments here appear preoccupied with whether switching to OS X is necessary -- that's beside the point. Legacy support is.
Hey buddy, I know where you can get lockpicking tools online, few questions asked... (true)
I looked at their page -- Southord's attempt to shrug off responsibility would not protect it from liability the way they appear to think. ("What? People lie?") Same idea as you can't sell booze to someone on their say-so they're 21. You have to do more, or the laws restricting transfers mean nothing.
There are examples of controlled dual-use "tools" such as explosives and locksmithing devices. (There's a federal statute specifically for the latter, though it is a bit vague and I doubt often enforced; non-Hollywood burglars usually use less finesse:).
Obviously you can get arrested as a conspirator, accessory, or accomplice to a crime. But liability goes further, it depends on your knowledge and exercise of due care.
You can get in trouble for supplying a gun to someone knowing they intend to use it for a crime; you can be liable for joyriders crashing your car after you left the keys in the ignition; there is even liability for serving one drink too many to someone before they go driving ("dram shop laws"). Said liability may be civil or criminal depending on the jurisdiction and the circumstances.
Before anyone says these sorts of liability are unfair in some abstract sense of causality, I'll add that the rules were developed in an effort to reduce the overall misery by allocating responsibility efficiently and reducing opportunities for mischief. So it has less to do with condemning anyone than with dry economics. Of course the details are open to debate.
As for shoes, well, they've been trying to get stiletto heels over 3" banned outright for years. (I'm kidding -- but I wonder if you can still take them on an airplane?)
Speaking of the difference between ADHD and bipolar, I totally forgot to mention the underappreciated problem that stimulants can set off bipolar swings big time, and younger than might have otherwise occurred. So not only are the tx for each illness different, they may also be antagonistic. Another reason for care in diagnosis.
OK, other than typos I think that completes what I meant to say. See, this is why one should go to a medical professional rather than/. for advice.
Actually, Touched By Fire really irritated me:) but Jamison's An Unquiet Mind is required reading. She literally (co)wrote the primary medical text on bipolar. More impressive than the stories on crazy dead peopple are the familial charts showing the incidence of, ah, suicide, in families such as Van Gogh's and Hemingway's. Really tragic stuff. Like a genetic plague.
Cites? Hmm. I can't recall specific studies and investigators, but here is a trusty Google search that will give you a stack of stuff to look at. The key words are "bipolar adhd comorbidity" -- esp. that last one.:) A point in addition to concern over underdiagnosis of bipolarity is the simple difficulty in distinguishing the two, as their treatments differ somewhat. For example, lithium is the gold standard for bipolar, but I don't think I've heard of its use in ADHD -- the biological mechanisms are somewhat distinct.
Classicly, too, bipolar has been misdiagnosed as schizophrenia and major depression... eventually there will be biological diagnostic tests and such to reduce some of this guesswork. Genetic typing may be a step in identifying those predisposed.
Of course I don't question the "need to move forward" and I've heard all the PR about OS X. My point is that when Apple has moved forward in the past, they've kept an eye over their shoulder to all those scrappy Mac users with legacy machines. OS X is a radical break; OK; will there be one every two years from now on? For most of us OS X is a marginal and expensive improvement, regardless of whether it is a necessary move for the company. I'm sure I use the benefits of OS X a middling amount; however, there are a surprising number of people out there happily using the fairly-stable 8.6, and I have to wonder how many people have upgraded older machines to OS X anyway, an OS that has only been out in semi-acceptable form for about a year. Certainly not the 1,000 or so Macs in our local school system. If Apple raises costs to school buyers (migrating software etc.) it may lose them; it's hard to sell school boards on what great vision Apple has.
I went and read the official Apple announcement -- apparently any bugs experienced by users are actually features.:)
I can still run ancient 68000 code from college CS, which is cool, but the Classic has failed in some significant cases, esp. anything involving older external hardware. Just how necessary it is for them to require OS X-only boot? How does it benefit us? Or are we mostly talking about Apple's bottom line?
And, to repeat myself, I mostly wonder what this portends for the future. Better to start asking Apple now (and I'm sure at least a few on their engineers read/. -- hi, how're you doing? Pass this on to the boss.:), than to find ourselves a few years down the road going WTF and Apple shrugging and saying, sorry, not supported, we figured we could make an extra $10 this way and, more importantly, we just don't care (not that we ever cared that much).
If that is the likely future (who knows what Apple's future is? certainly not Apple) I'm going to be looking for a new train.
For many many years Apple bent over backwards to allow legacy software to continue to work, through the transition to 32-bit addressing to PPC and so on. That has started to break down in recent years, and while I can appreciate the benefits of things like abandoning the 68K machines with new OS's (speed, for example), and now, to a lesser extent, booting into OS 9, I'm worried Apple may get a little too used to it, as Microsoft long has been. These moves are a great tool to force people to upgrade... and Macs users reasonably get pissed over being forced to upgrade -- hardware or OS or apps. The easy path of abandoning compatibility makes more money for Apple, but sacrifices an element of the OS that many of use consider really, really important.
I adopted OS X well, but was still have uses for OS 9, as on our iMac. The OS X was a novel transition for me, as a 15-year Mac user, because for the first time I had to upgrade several apps to work under the new OS (Classic Mode is not a panacea!). When Apple starts to disconnect from the legacy machines, the software publishers will also do so, if only because maintaining different versions for different machines is too onerous. But many of us have funky old programs that will never ever be updated because their authors have moved on, or the upgrades offer nothing we want to pay for -- we just want to continue on as we have. That won't be possible for long, esp. if the hardware path abandons our antiquated (read: 3 year-old) ways.
Concretely, I first heard about this from the IT guy at my kids elementary school, which has a substantial flotilla of iMacs. He said it was going to be a pain for them, and with PC forces already snipping at the Macs -- the school admin and high school computers are PC's -- this could portend bad stuff for Mac land. It is a fact of life that the schools buy buy new machines to replace broken ones or expand, and if that necessary path is suddenly encumbered by new transitions and expenses, well, some places will decide it is an opportune time to homogenize the fleet.
Just some musings... I've felt that Microsoft has manipulated its profits and bug-fix burden for years by telling users to "get an upgrade"... Apple may drift in that direction to its long-term detriment... and yes, before anyone leaps forward, this is an obvious chip in favor of the free software movement. I'm just heavily invested in the older ways; yet (Steve? Are you listening?) I certainly don't rule out moving on. We're not at that crossroads, but I don't like the signals I glimpse ahead (hey, I maintained a metaphor.
Gee, you're by 3rd "opponent" in this thread, and here I thought I was talking to the same person.:) Oops; but I guess I'm sane.
I've had by own, ah, experiences, and am paradoxically anti-pro-drug. I don't think there should be a stigma, but also don't see how you can't say someone is better off not taking any drug (which presupposes that they've got the illness under wraps).
FWIW, my doctor "friend" did say the newest drug Atomoxetine is da bomb; although not an improvement in effect over Ritalin, it lacks some of the side effects and it sounds like it will displace Ritalin. The downside is probably that the drug will be expensive much longer than Ritalin, which is now generic (yes? to those who don't know, generic == dirt cheap). The patent-protected time-release version of Ritalin, Concerta, is also considered superior for giving fewer "up and downs" -- the once-a-day is not just a convenience issue.
My principal purpose in this thread was to try to throw up some static against the prejudiced view of drugs, that anyone naive who might stumble through here would hear the other side. So I'm kind of talking over your shoulder, too. Hey, I thought I knew my stuff having studied psych and pharmacology, yet I didn't realize until a few years ago there was an ADD variant to ADHD, or that adults had to deal with this stuff. A lot of this wasn't known well until relatively recently.
In any event, the belligerent flavor of ignorance really pisses me off.
"Driven to Distraction" has been recommended to me several times, I just, heh-heh, keep forgetting about it.:)
I'm glad you've seen good results in your own experience. If you'd like to see more "seemingly unrelated things in my life fell into a pattern" (I know what you mean -- hyperfocus was another symptom I had not heard of) look at the humor list, written by people with ADHD, and cited in one of my other posts here.
Things are changing, thank goodness.
Ah, one other novelty I wanted to mention to the OP, but wasn't sure if it would be too "negative," is that there is increasing evidence of correlation between ADHD and bipolar disorder. Manic-depression is the more evocative term for bipolar disorder. Now, correlation doesn't mean if you have one you have the other (sigh), but bipolar is serious stuff and is now being seen in children, not because of a fad but more likely on account of the realization that much underdiagnosis has gone on. When I was in school not that long ago the official word was that average onset of bipolar was age 30 -- wrong. Finally, bipolar is not the kiss of death; it is treatable, but as a very damaging disease highly associated with suicide (~25% die if untreated), it is best to keep in mind where your ADHD child may be predisposed to it.
In addition, there is increasing (and, to me, persuasive) evidence of a strong genetic predisposition, which may relieve the child of some of the "fault" for the problem and also suggest some benefit in examining family history and the experiences of siblings.
Not to compare directly, but bipolar makes ADHD look fairly... manageable. I tracked down the ADHD humor list fairly easily, but never did find a good non-gallows bipolar humor source.:)
No, that's back to scrapie (I misremembered the name earlier) -- a disease of SHEEP (and goats, I see -- which would you prefer?), and in the same class as mad cow disease and the nasty New Guinea cannibal affliction called kuru caused by eating the brains of your ancestors (all are caused by prions, a sort of ultraprimitive protein "virus").
For the interested, even Ben Browder has written about this! ("We know you all: The Shippers, the Scapers, The SACC, Farscape Anonymous, CBOOL, FaDoP, The Royal Hynerian Guards, J&ASGTT, the TAC and many other societies. We know you by names and handles far to numerous to mention here.")
You know, we already do pay for our episodes by subjecting ourselves to ads, and more significantly a lot of people are willing to pay a premium for digestible programming -- think "Six Feet Under," "Band of Brothers," "Sex in the City," "The Sopranos," various Chris Rock specials, all on HBO which i don't get because I'm too cheap.:) (I'll rent them by and by.)
So would I pay a buck an episode for Farscape? Definitely. How much more? I don't know. But the idea of paying is not per se irrational.
Being rational, if "we" did buy an episode (I'm assuming it's inconceivable, but then I also assumed this kind of rebellion would never happen) I would damn well want to know who'd get the rights on the episode (and the answer had better be "those who paid for it"). We can't go from hating the SciFi network to giving them bribes and Christmas presents. Who knows, this could be a good investment opportunity -- an offer you can't refuse. (You did say we scared you.:)
As for PBS -- I think they're great, though I don't watch them as often as I'd like. NOVA and Frontline were old favorites. But I don't think they'll pick up Farscape! They're already afraid of being laughed at by their sworn enemies who would cut funding, and they don't do the low-brow stuff, yet. Oh wait, TNN has it locked up, between Star Trek reruns, wrestlemania, and that show where they blow up the little toy cars....
More seriously, PBS should stick to things commercial interests might not air, or might contaminate with their influence. Neat idea, though -- it could go from being the Public Broadcasting Service to the Peopl's Broadcasting Service. Oh wait, that sounds communist... here come those funding-cutters over the ridge.....
I think Farscape has serious revenue-generating possibilities -- especially if they throw in a decent movie adaptation -- but they're not there yet. That's only reason to cancel the series for the short-sighted, visionless, myopic television programming dweebazoids.
Good point, thanks. Unfortunately my frames at the bitter end are usually held together by tape and glue....
At least not as many people in developing nations are ruining their eyes with books, televisions, and monitors. I wonder about the problem noted in the article, that if anything a larger fraction of these individuals may have more serious disorders such as glaucoma that need treatment....
(1) What the heck is CommunistTroll doing plying the precedential waves? and (2) what makes you think an American lawyer gives a damn about what goes on anywhere else?:)
Actually there is money to be made in non-U.S. law affecting U.S. interests (as in, of all things, the original story here) and in "public int'l law" (PIL) which I though a joke until I had to persuade myself to take it seriously to pass the exam.
PIL is about relations among states, not individuals, and I had thought it all to be political; but some progress has been made in getting states to resolve their differences in a more or less rational way. One major problem has been the tendency of the United States to ignore embarassing decisions, as in Nicaragua, or to refuse to consent to jurisdiction in th first place, as with the int'l criminal court. I think the U.S. has some good arguments in its defense, but the general highandedness is unfortunate and damaging. Fortunately we took the high road on the Iraq question. Oh wait, no we didn't until Faction A in the White House lost out to Faction B, Colin Powell et al. I shudder to think that many people in other countries believe that all Americans act and think as one, but have been in some arguments abroad that illustrated the opposite.
REGARDLESS, thank you for the info, I am one American interested in what's going on in other places. When will there be AngloILL, consolidating all of the English-language stuff?:) And how does French law work again?
Actually -- I don't have a sample handy -- private online services already do provide cross-references using symbols in the text. I never picked up a printed volume except to (1) look for italics not in the plain-text computer version; and (2) to fix typos and such in the electronic edition. It's still a bore to type up -- especially since the pages and paragraphs align differently in different pubs.
The printed page will not go away for a while yet.
Oh thank God -- someone found my post interesting -- I know I can be a bit of a wonk.:)
Yeah, the status of published decisions in the States has been off, because obviously the opinions, orders, etc. are public domain, but the only practical way of researching them is through private firms, specifically West and, to a lesser extent, Lexis. West actually sued over its "star paging" -- which refers to physical page numbers in electronic docs. This monopoly will be short-lived once law firms get a little more cost-conscious. (For a while, one was supposed to cite to THREE separate pubs for every Supreme Court case -- very tedious to find the page numbers, esp. by hand.)
Your LII may have something in common with the Cornell LII (where I went to school) -- a painfully boring but wonderful resource of all the law that you can eat.
Anyway... the more lawyers you have, the slower things are to change. That's why California and New York, our most populous states, have some of the most bizarre legal traditions. The smallest states just threw out the old, brought in the new.
You know, I would, but (1) I tend to break my glasses (or, rather, my kids do) and (2) I'm not much shortsighted but have a strong astigmastism. That's where you have a distortion at a specific orientation, different for every person and every eye. If that orientation is off by a little, say your overly-round lenses turn, oh what a headache. But the orientation is not generally user-adjustable.
So I'm hesitant to donate, while also thinking of the plight of astigmatic folks in developing countries. My vision is no less deficient than that of someone classically short/farsighted, but significantly harder to fix. Perhaps this could help? No, pity ("The glasses do not correct astigmatism.")
Well, cool invention all the same. Now who will fund it?
A company has to compensate for losses, or it dies. It's reality, not a moral judgment.
Also, my essential argument was that it's not a Q of what the price should be, but of what it will be. That's up to the market, and I'm sure they'll be happy to lose the people who think the price is too high if they make more at a higher price with others. Capitalism.
As for not producing bad sellers -- wouldn't clairvoyance be wonderful! But they'd probably get too conservative if they had to do it that way and bury us in tripe. Look how daring TV is.
The most substantive is that some may wonder at the liberal citation of American precedent. The reason is something called choice of law, which in this cases tells the Australian court to look to American precedent in certain cases. We have similar legall traditions, but this must be quite difficult in some cases. I read one case where a serviceman sued an American company for a defective mortar or something; the place of injury tort law was determined to control -- in that case, Cambodian law.
There's no "e" in judgment -- weird lawyer thing -- no, I don't know why. This is apparently true in Australia as well as the U.S.
Australian law is ahead on the U.S. on this point: numbered paragraphs! American lawyers still cite page numbers, though few ever see physical pages. Paragraph numbering allows for for more precision, though I wish they could set them off a little, so it didn't feel as though you had someone slowly counting over your shoulder.
The tone is also more casual for a high court; American judges generally avoid using "I" in their judgments unless writing in dissent.
Slashdot Mirror
Piracy is wrong? (angelic expression)
Er, copyright infringement, because piracy has such a "dirty" sound to it.
And coppyright infringement is either a triviality or a birthright, so the arguments here go.
*
More seriously, I sympathize. I guess the honor system is out?
Ideally, even peer-reviewed work (or, I would hope especially peer-reviewed, because it is significantly value-added) would be in the public domain anyway. The single best approach would be to acquire grant or public funding as a one-time purchase of the data.
After honor system and public domain come the tedious closed-access or copyright-suit methods, which are vulnerable to hacking and piracy, respectively. In case there are further alternatives, I'll be lurking here to hear them.
Re your "severed head" analogy:
... so I want you to know I consider you a friend. :)
(1) In my eveperience, people don't go far from their own lives in concocting gruesome hypotheticals
(2) Whether you invited the officer into your house, or he/she had other reason to be there, the 4th A. still applies;
(3) The 4th A. exception that would most likely apply is "plain view," true, but it is still technically a search because it is in a private space. So, if you had at least had the foresight to put a piece of paper over the damn thing, you wouldn't be on death row now (how nice that they give you Internet access!);
(4) If the officer opened the freezer because you offered a popsicle, even if you really had intended to do the opening yourself, you still lose.
(5) Any good defense lawyer will tell you there are lots of innocent explanations for a severed head.
*
Kidding aside, friend, and to distill what you said, all the gov't has to show is the necessary elements of the crime. Period. How difficult the accomplishment of these elements might have been is irrelevant, except perhaps to calculating punishment. For classic breaking and entering, for example, you don't have to break anything for "breaking." Even the opening of a door left ajar is sufficient, even if that's an internal door. The connotation of physicality or difficulty is spurious.
So, friend, breaking even the most pathetic code is enough, so long as you have the necessary state of mind. (Breaking a code while stinking drunk might be a defense to intent.)
The administrative code under which Gillies was cited specifies that "no person shall cause or permit the emission of air contaminant, including odorous air contaminant . . . if the air contaminant . . . may cause detriment to the health, safety, welfare or comfort of any person."
... uh ... why is this a /. story? Are we supposed to think the critical supply of roasted coffee beans is imperiled here?
That's a pretty darn broad regulation once you throw "or comfort" in at the end. The stadard boilerplate formula is "health/safety/welfare" which are considerably less subjective. Badly-worded rule right there.
As for the smell, and to be technical no one has the right to force anyone else to smell anything in particular, it's technically a nuisance and could range from baking bread to sticking offal. Usually we keep conflicts down by zoning where things like pig farming can take place.
Now, I have no trouble regulating it if the coffee really smells like "burning plastic" or even vanilla hazelnut. (Between the two I'd pick the plastic, and that's because I like coffee.) Interesting Q: How do you try this in court? Take air samples and blow them in jurors' faces? I think you'd have to have a field trip.
Anyway
For whatever comfort, the exact thought passed through my mind when I noticed this story. I mean, rockets are fun, even I did them (Estes level, naturally), but the Westinghouse stuff is about a whole lot more than gee whiz. Heck, I don't even understand those projects well enough to go gee whiz; I'd have to spend some time reading first.
... or they're not of our species ... or they're 35 y.o. physicicts that look like high-schoolers and needed the money ... or something.
Kudos to the rocket kids; but the Siemens-Westinghouse practically scare me by comparison. I keep hoping to hear they got a whole lot of help
You have it backwards. I don't care which OS you need for which machine. What I do care about is what you can do with that machine once it is plugged in and set up. I don't care if I ever see system 9 again. I do care whether I see the applications I used to use without the headache and cost and occassional impossibility of upgrading. An upgrade merely for the privilege of continuing to use software you already own is no upgrade.
The OS X is great. OS 9 is gone. Yippee. But that's not at all the point.
But by now most OS9 apps need upgrading anyway for compatibility with others. And if you have the latest version of a modern title, then it is probably both OS9 and OSX compatible.
... except for scanner support ... and a noticeable performance hit here and there ... and less stability for some strange reason. :( Yeah, there are workarounds, but how nice that I have a G4 that will do everything a new one does (a tad slower) AND boot into OS 9. :)
Photoshop 5.5 is a glaring exception -- I wish it was X-native, but it's not worth the upgrade price for that alone, Classic fortunately works fine
My point, with this limited example, is that nothing about Photoshop "need[s] upgrading anyway for compatibility." A picture is still a picture is still a picture.
And, again, however trivial $400 might be, multiply it by 500+ Macs adn you may see a school board thinking, hmm, maybe we should cut off our nose to spite our face and switch to 100% PC's. Backward compatibility is boring and unsexy and economical and cool.
I checked yesterday; my son's particular school has a big shipment of eMacs (is that what they're called?) coming in, which will be able to boot 9 or X. They figure this will tide them over for a few years. Then they'll see where they are. So they're buying a lot of "old" machines just under the wire.
They are still using some ancient System 7-era software which is primitive but for 1st-graders is just fine. To say they should buy upgrades -- several dozen for each program, to be precise -- is asinine (not that seamelt is saying this!).
So with OS X Apple have been nice and done you guys a favour
Some favor! They did out of self-interest, or they would have suddenly had a machine that ran no software. They needed a transitional architecture to serve their needs; now they feel it is safe to move on -- for them.
For for requiring a new OS to boot newer machines, that's not the issue at all; the OS is included. What would be an issue would be that OS in turn forcing you to update all of your software.
Now, the whole question is balancing Apple's needs versus the consumers, not picking one over the other. Most arguments here appear preoccupied with whether switching to OS X is necessary -- that's beside the point. Legacy support is.
Hey buddy, I know where you can get lockpicking tools online, few questions asked... (true)
I looked at their page -- Southord's attempt to shrug off responsibility would not protect it from liability the way they appear to think. ("What? People lie?") Same idea as you can't sell booze to someone on their say-so they're 21. You have to do more, or the laws restricting transfers mean nothing.
There are examples of controlled dual-use "tools" such as explosives and locksmithing devices. (There's a federal statute specifically for the latter, though it is a bit vague and I doubt often enforced; non-Hollywood burglars usually use less finesse :).
Obviously you can get arrested as a conspirator, accessory, or accomplice to a crime. But liability goes further, it depends on your knowledge and exercise of due care.
You can get in trouble for supplying a gun to someone knowing they intend to use it for a crime; you can be liable for joyriders crashing your car after you left the keys in the ignition; there is even liability for serving one drink too many to someone before they go driving ("dram shop laws"). Said liability may be civil or criminal depending on the jurisdiction and the circumstances.
Before anyone says these sorts of liability are unfair in some abstract sense of causality, I'll add that the rules were developed in an effort to reduce the overall misery by allocating responsibility efficiently and reducing opportunities for mischief. So it has less to do with condemning anyone than with dry economics. Of course the details are open to debate.
As for shoes, well, they've been trying to get stiletto heels over 3" banned outright for years. (I'm kidding -- but I wonder if you can still take them on an airplane?)
I *hope* this is what you were asking about!
Speaking of the difference between ADHD and bipolar, I totally forgot to mention the underappreciated problem that stimulants can set off bipolar swings big time, and younger than might have otherwise occurred. So not only are the tx for each illness different, they may also be antagonistic. Another reason for care in diagnosis.
/. for advice.
OK, other than typos I think that completes what I meant to say. See, this is why one should go to a medical professional rather than
Actually, Touched By Fire really irritated me :) but Jamison's An Unquiet Mind is required reading. She literally (co)wrote the primary medical text on bipolar. More impressive than the stories on crazy dead peopple are the familial charts showing the incidence of, ah, suicide, in families such as Van Gogh's and Hemingway's. Really tragic stuff. Like a genetic plague.
:) A point in addition to concern over underdiagnosis of bipolarity is the simple difficulty in distinguishing the two, as their treatments differ somewhat. For example, lithium is the gold standard for bipolar, but I don't think I've heard of its use in ADHD -- the biological mechanisms are somewhat distinct.
... eventually there will be biological diagnostic tests and such to reduce some of this guesswork. Genetic typing may be a step in identifying those predisposed.
Cites? Hmm. I can't recall specific studies and investigators, but here is a trusty Google search that will give you a stack of stuff to look at. The key words are "bipolar adhd comorbidity" -- esp. that last one.
Classicly, too, bipolar has been misdiagnosed as schizophrenia and major depression
Of course I don't question the "need to move forward" and I've heard all the PR about OS X. My point is that when Apple has moved forward in the past, they've kept an eye over their shoulder to all those scrappy Mac users with legacy machines. OS X is a radical break; OK; will there be one every two years from now on? For most of us OS X is a marginal and expensive improvement, regardless of whether it is a necessary move for the company. I'm sure I use the benefits of OS X a middling amount; however, there are a surprising number of people out there happily using the fairly-stable 8.6, and I have to wonder how many people have upgraded older machines to OS X anyway, an OS that has only been out in semi-acceptable form for about a year. Certainly not the 1,000 or so Macs in our local school system. If Apple raises costs to school buyers (migrating software etc.) it may lose them; it's hard to sell school boards on what great vision Apple has.
:)
/. -- hi, how're you doing? Pass this on to the boss. :), than to find ourselves a few years down the road going WTF and Apple shrugging and saying, sorry, not supported, we figured we could make an extra $10 this way and, more importantly, we just don't care (not that we ever cared that much).
I went and read the official Apple announcement -- apparently any bugs experienced by users are actually features.
I can still run ancient 68000 code from college CS, which is cool, but the Classic has failed in some significant cases, esp. anything involving older external hardware. Just how necessary it is for them to require OS X-only boot? How does it benefit us? Or are we mostly talking about Apple's bottom line?
And, to repeat myself, I mostly wonder what this portends for the future. Better to start asking Apple now (and I'm sure at least a few on their engineers read
If that is the likely future (who knows what Apple's future is? certainly not Apple) I'm going to be looking for a new train.
For many many years Apple bent over backwards to allow legacy software to continue to work, through the transition to 32-bit addressing to PPC and so on. That has started to break down in recent years, and while I can appreciate the benefits of things like abandoning the 68K machines with new OS's (speed, for example), and now, to a lesser extent, booting into OS 9, I'm worried Apple may get a little too used to it, as Microsoft long has been. These moves are a great tool to force people to upgrade ... and Macs users reasonably get pissed over being forced to upgrade -- hardware or OS or apps. The easy path of abandoning compatibility makes more money for Apple, but sacrifices an element of the OS that many of use consider really, really important.
... I've felt that Microsoft has manipulated its profits and bug-fix burden for years by telling users to "get an upgrade" ... Apple may drift in that direction to its long-term detriment ... and yes, before anyone leaps forward, this is an obvious chip in favor of the free software movement. I'm just heavily invested in the older ways; yet (Steve? Are you listening?) I certainly don't rule out moving on. We're not at that crossroads, but I don't like the signals I glimpse ahead (hey, I maintained a metaphor.
I adopted OS X well, but was still have uses for OS 9, as on our iMac. The OS X was a novel transition for me, as a 15-year Mac user, because for the first time I had to upgrade several apps to work under the new OS (Classic Mode is not a panacea!). When Apple starts to disconnect from the legacy machines, the software publishers will also do so, if only because maintaining different versions for different machines is too onerous. But many of us have funky old programs that will never ever be updated because their authors have moved on, or the upgrades offer nothing we want to pay for -- we just want to continue on as we have. That won't be possible for long, esp. if the hardware path abandons our antiquated (read: 3 year-old) ways.
Concretely, I first heard about this from the IT guy at my kids elementary school, which has a substantial flotilla of iMacs. He said it was going to be a pain for them, and with PC forces already snipping at the Macs -- the school admin and high school computers are PC's -- this could portend bad stuff for Mac land. It is a fact of life that the schools buy buy new machines to replace broken ones or expand, and if that necessary path is suddenly encumbered by new transitions and expenses, well, some places will decide it is an opportune time to homogenize the fleet.
Just some musings
Gee, you're by 3rd "opponent" in this thread, and here I thought I was talking to the same person. :) Oops; but I guess I'm sane.
:)
... manageable. I tracked down the ADHD humor list fairly easily, but never did find a good non-gallows bipolar humor source. :)
I've had by own, ah, experiences, and am paradoxically anti-pro-drug. I don't think there should be a stigma, but also don't see how you can't say someone is better off not taking any drug (which presupposes that they've got the illness under wraps).
FWIW, my doctor "friend" did say the newest drug Atomoxetine is da bomb; although not an improvement in effect over Ritalin, it lacks some of the side effects and it sounds like it will displace Ritalin. The downside is probably that the drug will be expensive much longer than Ritalin, which is now generic (yes? to those who don't know, generic == dirt cheap). The patent-protected time-release version of Ritalin, Concerta, is also considered superior for giving fewer "up and downs" -- the once-a-day is not just a convenience issue.
My principal purpose in this thread was to try to throw up some static against the prejudiced view of drugs, that anyone naive who might stumble through here would hear the other side. So I'm kind of talking over your shoulder, too. Hey, I thought I knew my stuff having studied psych and pharmacology, yet I didn't realize until a few years ago there was an ADD variant to ADHD, or that adults had to deal with this stuff. A lot of this wasn't known well until relatively recently.
In any event, the belligerent flavor of ignorance really pisses me off.
"Driven to Distraction" has been recommended to me several times, I just, heh-heh, keep forgetting about it.
I'm glad you've seen good results in your own experience. If you'd like to see more "seemingly unrelated things in my life fell into a pattern" (I know what you mean -- hyperfocus was another symptom I had not heard of) look at the humor list, written by people with ADHD, and cited in one of my other posts here.
Things are changing, thank goodness.
Ah, one other novelty I wanted to mention to the OP, but wasn't sure if it would be too "negative," is that there is increasing evidence of correlation between ADHD and bipolar disorder. Manic-depression is the more evocative term for bipolar disorder. Now, correlation doesn't mean if you have one you have the other (sigh), but bipolar is serious stuff and is now being seen in children, not because of a fad but more likely on account of the realization that much underdiagnosis has gone on. When I was in school not that long ago the official word was that average onset of bipolar was age 30 -- wrong. Finally, bipolar is not the kiss of death; it is treatable, but as a very damaging disease highly associated with suicide (~25% die if untreated), it is best to keep in mind where your ADHD child may be predisposed to it.
In addition, there is increasing (and, to me, persuasive) evidence of a strong genetic predisposition, which may relieve the child of some of the "fault" for the problem and also suggest some benefit in examining family history and the experiences of siblings.
Not to compare directly, but bipolar makes ADHD look fairly
No, more like, "Set your phasers on force 3. To kill." -- James T. Kirk
I say screw the warning shots and that PC "stun" setting.
No, that's back to scrapie (I misremembered the name earlier) -- a disease of SHEEP (and goats, I see -- which would you prefer?), and in the same class as mad cow disease and the nasty New Guinea cannibal affliction called kuru caused by eating the brains of your ancestors (all are caused by prions, a sort of ultraprimitive protein "virus").
For the interested, even Ben Browder has written about this! ("We know you all: The Shippers, the Scapers, The SACC, Farscape Anonymous, CBOOL, FaDoP, The Royal Hynerian Guards, J&ASGTT, the TAC and many other societies. We know you by names and handles far to numerous to mention here.")
You know, we already do pay for our episodes by subjecting ourselves to ads, and more significantly a lot of people are willing to pay a premium for digestible programming -- think "Six Feet Under," "Band of Brothers," "Sex in the City," "The Sopranos," various Chris Rock specials, all on HBO which i don't get because I'm too cheap. :) (I'll rent them by and by.)
:)
... here come those funding-cutters over the ridge.....
So would I pay a buck an episode for Farscape? Definitely. How much more? I don't know. But the idea of paying is not per se irrational.
Being rational, if "we" did buy an episode (I'm assuming it's inconceivable, but then I also assumed this kind of rebellion would never happen) I would damn well want to know who'd get the rights on the episode (and the answer had better be "those who paid for it"). We can't go from hating the SciFi network to giving them bribes and Christmas presents. Who knows, this could be a good investment opportunity -- an offer you can't refuse. (You did say we scared you.
As for PBS -- I think they're great, though I don't watch them as often as I'd like. NOVA and Frontline were old favorites. But I don't think they'll pick up Farscape! They're already afraid of being laughed at by their sworn enemies who would cut funding, and they don't do the low-brow stuff, yet. Oh wait, TNN has it locked up, between Star Trek reruns, wrestlemania, and that show where they blow up the little toy cars....
More seriously, PBS should stick to things commercial interests might not air, or might contaminate with their influence. Neat idea, though -- it could go from being the Public Broadcasting Service to the Peopl's Broadcasting Service. Oh wait, that sounds communist
I think Farscape has serious revenue-generating possibilities -- especially if they throw in a decent movie adaptation -- but they're not there yet. That's only reason to cancel the series for the short-sighted, visionless, myopic television programming dweebazoids.
Good point, thanks. Unfortunately my frames at the bitter end are usually held together by tape and glue....
At least not as many people in developing nations are ruining their eyes with books, televisions, and monitors. I wonder about the problem noted in the article, that if anything a larger fraction of these individuals may have more serious disorders such as glaucoma that need treatment....
(1) What the heck is CommunistTroll doing plying the precedential waves? and (2) what makes you think an American lawyer gives a damn about what goes on anywhere else? :)
:) And how does French law work again?
Actually there is money to be made in non-U.S. law affecting U.S. interests (as in, of all things, the original story here) and in "public int'l law" (PIL) which I though a joke until I had to persuade myself to take it seriously to pass the exam.
PIL is about relations among states, not individuals, and I had thought it all to be political; but some progress has been made in getting states to resolve their differences in a more or less rational way. One major problem has been the tendency of the United States to ignore embarassing decisions, as in Nicaragua, or to refuse to consent to jurisdiction in th first place, as with the int'l criminal court. I think the U.S. has some good arguments in its defense, but the general highandedness is unfortunate and damaging. Fortunately we took the high road on the Iraq question. Oh wait, no we didn't until Faction A in the White House lost out to Faction B, Colin Powell et al. I shudder to think that many people in other countries believe that all Americans act and think as one, but have been in some arguments abroad that illustrated the opposite.
REGARDLESS, thank you for the info, I am one American interested in what's going on in other places. When will there be AngloILL, consolidating all of the English-language stuff?
Actually -- I don't have a sample handy -- private online services already do provide cross-references using symbols in the text. I never picked up a printed volume except to (1) look for italics not in the plain-text computer version; and (2) to fix typos and such in the electronic edition. It's still a bore to type up -- especially since the pages and paragraphs align differently in different pubs.
The printed page will not go away for a while yet.
Oh thank God -- someone found my post interesting -- I know I can be a bit of a wonk. :)
... the more lawyers you have, the slower things are to change. That's why California and New York, our most populous states, have some of the most bizarre legal traditions. The smallest states just threw out the old, brought in the new.
Yeah, the status of published decisions in the States has been off, because obviously the opinions, orders, etc. are public domain, but the only practical way of researching them is through private firms, specifically West and, to a lesser extent, Lexis. West actually sued over its "star paging" -- which refers to physical page numbers in electronic docs. This monopoly will be short-lived once law firms get a little more cost-conscious. (For a while, one was supposed to cite to THREE separate pubs for every Supreme Court case -- very tedious to find the page numbers, esp. by hand.)
Your LII may have something in common with the Cornell LII (where I went to school) -- a painfully boring but wonderful resource of all the law that you can eat.
Anyway
You know, I would, but (1) I tend to break my glasses (or, rather, my kids do) and (2) I'm not much shortsighted but have a strong astigmastism. That's where you have a distortion at a specific orientation, different for every person and every eye. If that orientation is off by a little, say your overly-round lenses turn, oh what a headache. But the orientation is not generally user-adjustable.
So I'm hesitant to donate, while also thinking of the plight of astigmatic folks in developing countries. My vision is no less deficient than that of someone classically short/farsighted, but significantly harder to fix. Perhaps this could help? No, pity ("The glasses do not correct astigmatism.")
Well, cool invention all the same. Now who will fund it?
A company has to compensate for losses, or it dies. It's reality, not a moral judgment.
Also, my essential argument was that it's not a Q of what the price should be, but of what it will be. That's up to the market, and I'm sure they'll be happy to lose the people who think the price is too high if they make more at a higher price with others. Capitalism.
As for not producing bad sellers -- wouldn't clairvoyance be wonderful! But they'd probably get too conservative if they had to do it that way and bury us in tripe. Look how daring TV is.
Thanks for the link.
:)
A few possibly interesting observations:
The most substantive is that some may wonder at the liberal citation of American precedent. The reason is something called choice of law, which in this cases tells the Australian court to look to American precedent in certain cases. We have similar legall traditions, but this must be quite difficult in some cases. I read one case where a serviceman sued an American company for a defective mortar or something; the place of injury tort law was determined to control -- in that case, Cambodian law.
There's no "e" in judgment -- weird lawyer thing -- no, I don't know why. This is apparently true in Australia as well as the U.S.
Australian law is ahead on the U.S. on this point: numbered paragraphs! American lawyers still cite page numbers, though few ever see physical pages. Paragraph numbering allows for for more precision, though I wish they could set them off a little, so it didn't feel as though you had someone slowly counting over your shoulder.
The tone is also more casual for a high court; American judges generally avoid using "I" in their judgments unless writing in dissent.
(Well, i think these things are interesting.