You don't, you won't buy it, and frankly, neither will a whole lot of other people.
I can't even think of the last time I intentionally bought a (FM, broadcast band) radio. I'm almost certain that most of my non-techie friends probably can't; to most people, radios are things that come built-in to your car, or your CD player, or your clock radio, or occasionally separately in some small package you can carry around. But generally they're cheap, built-in devices.
I don't think you're going to get people to spend money on an expensive radio receiver these days, unless the content is substantially dissimilar from what's available on FM -- and I mean content, not quality. Unless they can record it and put it on their iPod or share it, the average person doesn't give a crap about the broadcasts being digital.
The only way HD radio will ever take off is if the receivers start being built into every car radio, and then it will really only catch on at the replacement rate of most cars.
Surprise, surprise: it's closed and proprietary. And the compression algorithms are patented.
Not that there were any shortage of alternative, open and unencumbered digital audio transmission formats out there (Digital Radio Mondial being my personal favorite), the FCC went straight for the one owned by the corporation. So if you want to broadcast in HD, you'll pay a tithe to iBiquity every year. As if community and college and other small radio stations needed yet another bill to pay.
I wonder how much iBiquity paid for their little government reach-around? Hope they think they got their money's worth. I'm staying with FM, thanks very much.
I'd like to know when we decided it was acceptable for the Government to make a standard out of some company's proprietary format. It ought to work so that if you submit your format as a candidate for standardization, you agree to relinquish all rights to it, and transfer all IP that's related to it into the public domain or to a holding body. Don't want to do that? Fine, it doesn't need to be used -- there are more than enough alternatives that could have been instead.
Yes. But the reason they went `out of style' is because neither one of them ever really met the (perhaps inflated) expectations of the people making the predictions.
We don't have VR because doing good VR is hard and requires expensive hardware. Likewise with 3D -- another technology that seems to come up every few years as the `next big thing,' but then never is. AI is even more difficult than that; it's hard enough making a computer simulate a cockroach, much less a cat or dog, and certainly not a person. I suspect that that before we get a convincing AI that approaches human capabilities, they'll have gotten the size of neural-implantable electrodes down to the point where it's easier to put a human brain in a tank and attach it to interfaces that simulate senses than it is to simulate the brain itself. (Especially given that there is a market and demand for electrodes for other purposes besides brains-in-jars, e.g. artificial vision and hearing).
Partly it's a chicken-and-egg problem. The hardware developers and manufacturers, who might have the resources to bring us a $40, motion sensitive VR headset, don't think that there is a demand. But part of the reason that there isn't a demand is because of the assumption on the part of consumers that such things will always be ridiculously expensive. And so the status quo prevails.
Depends on the market conditions. While in general that might be good advice, if you're living in a location where prices are heavily inflated, it might be terrible advice instead.
Right now, for example, the housing markets in the DC area are vastly overinflated, and in the midst of a contraction. You'd be insane to buy a first home now, unless you had an inside track and were getting a below-"market" deal.
All that would happen is that you'd end up with a mortgage over the next 10, 20, or 30 years that was far more than the property would ever be worth (barring another inflationary period). So in the end, you could lose a lot of money versus renting over the same period. (Because rents might decrease during the contraction, while your mortgage payments wouldn't.)
Now, if you're in a place where the housing market is relatively stable or inflating, then it makes sense to buy a home instead of rent. It's basically "renting for free," but in addition, you can deduct the mortgage payments from your taxes, which if you're single can be really significant.
The problem for many young people, myself included, is that owning a property means tying yourself into a particular area, and that's a big step if you're not sure where you want to live for a while.
Actually, having done both, I think that a large corporation is worse. In the Army, the leadership system is designed so that every person has someone above them, who (theoretically) is tasked with basically taking care of them. That's not the case in a lot of "matrix organized" corporations. I've worked in places where it was never clear to me who my direct superior was, and I had half a dozen different managers, none of whom were really interested in my success or failure. (Heck, at some places I never even met my direct manager in the entire time I worked there.)
The Army is the ultimate top-down organization: go two levels or more above wherever you are, and you're just a number, but at least the people right above you will probably know who you are. If you have a problem, the chain of command is pretty obvious, both up and down; to me, that's always been comforting. I always knew exactly who my superiors were, and who I was responsible for.
YMMV, obviously; the Army is a huge organization and I'm sure there are as many bad officers in it as there are bad managers in any corporation, but in general I thought that people in the military took their leadership responsibilies much more seriously than their corporate counterparts, or at least that's been my experience so far.
I assume you're referring to Excel-97, which is used in various flavors from Excel 97 up to Excel 2002. This is a stretch to call a single format, since using some features in newer versions will create problems or at least inconsistencies when they are opened in other versions. Create a PivotTable in 2002 and then open it in 97, for example. This is the reason for the whole "compatibility check" that happens whenever you try to save a document in an older format than the latest one. Even 2000 and 2002 have things that will get lost in translation.
If I want to use Excel 97, I run the risk of "mangling" documents that I work on which come from people using newer versions ("what did you do with my PivotTables?!"); with each new version of Excel, features are included that break complete interoperability with past versions, even though they claim to use the same "format." The format might be good for data interchange in the roughest sense, but it doesn't preserve a complete workflow. Thus, any application claiming "Excel compatibility" must constantly update itself with the latest reverse-engineered updates, if it wants to be a viable alternative.
Interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about a guy whose research interests are listed as "the physiological ecology of thermal relations of amphibians and reptiles to include determinations of the factors which influence lethal temperatures, critical thermal maxima and minima, thermal selection, and thermoregulatory behavior."
Slight creepy factor there. But still, interesting point, although honestly I hadn't really thought too much about the actual possibility of frog-boiling. Like Schrödinger's cat, I always figured it was more a hypothetical frog.
Huh? What you're saying doesn't make any sense. Of course Microsoft's own products have backwards compatibility. But the point is that they continue to change the formats going forward, with every new release, and then do not publish any documentation on the formats.
So if I build a product that I want to interoperate with Excel, and it uses the 1997 format, I'm okay for a while. But in the next release of Excel, by default it's going to produce documents that my application cannot read. Every time somebody sends me one, I'm going to have to reply back and ask them to do a "Save As" and give it to me in Excel-97 instead of Excel-xx, where xx is this year's flavor. In short, it's not backwards compatibility of Microsoft products that's in question at all, it's the "forwards compatibility" of other products which have to be compatible with MS' latest offerings in order to remain competitive, because of its dominance in the market.
Thus anyone who wants to make a seamlessly interoperable product has to expend a ridiculous amount of energy and manpower, constantly reverse-engineering Microsoft's latest formats. The work required to change the format is asymmetrical: on Microsoft's end (where they have all the specifications) it's quite simple, but on the receiving end it's quite difficult.
So what the GP was saying, I think, is that by creating a large installed base of users who can only read Excel-97, it might give Microsoft some impetus to not change the default format every time the mood hits them.
Well said. I don't see this service, unless it's substantially changed in the future, really holding much of a candle to Excel. The majority of Excel users I know are all corporate (myself included), and didn't have any input into the purchase of the software itself. As long as it comes bundled with the rest of Office, people will use it, meaning that for Google to have much of an effect they'd need to replicate all of Office. And I don't think people are going to want to replace their main productivity suite with some online applications, unless somebody comes up with a nice way of downloading them and making them run offline, or internet access becomes really ubiquitious. (No, EVDO doesn't cut it -- I'm talking about something that every junior consultant and secretary can have, wireless internet is still too expensive for that.)
That said, going after the "home market" for spreadsheets is a good way for them to test customer acceptance of an online application. If this works out well, perhaps we'll see more in the same vein. But I think that rather going directly for Office, the better tactic would be to go for needs that aren't quite fulfilled by conventional office suite-type programs. Rather than word processing, go for documents management and collaboration; rather than something like PowerPoint, go for easy-to-use webcasting. There are needs that Office is never going to do a good job of filling, because it's the ultimate one-size-fits all solution. Google has a lot of room to grow, just in the shadow of Office, before they'd need to take it on directly.
He would be right, because it is not covered by fair use. The courts have taken a very dim view of sampling without first getting permission of the original rights holder, and there are a number of cases to this effect.
In particular I'm thinking about Bridgeport Music vs. Dimension Films, where the sampled content was less than a second or two. Here's a fairly good summary summary that I found via Google.
Obviously there are additional issues when you are profiting off of the work versus just using it yourself, but that just makes your liability for damages less, it doesn't make it legal.
I'm no fan of DRM, but it's a bit rich to complain about what happened, since it was almost certainly illegal in the first place. The possibly noninfringing use (using it in his own composition, on his own computer) was allowed, but the system stopped him from sharing it with a number of other people; the assumption by the computer and the system's designers that any sharing represents a public performance is not surprising, since once a file is shared digitally, there is no end to how far it can be shared subsequently. This could be stopped with some form of universal DRM that prevented second-generation sharing, but personally I find this "cure" worse than the "disease" represented by current limitations.
I think Word had already been knocked out of contention in this discussion. They've used it, and they'd like to see if anything is better.
I feel his pain here -- I work on a very large software project which also has all of its documentation saved as Word documents with tracked changes, and it's a real PITA. Unfortunately we have way too much stuff shared this way to ever change, or so's the thinking. It's a pain because the locking is on the whole-document level, rather than on the paragraph or section level as it might be with a Wiki. With documents that are sometimes approaching thousands of pages (yes, individual Word documents, the horror) this is a significant issue. We do a lot of "open the document as a copy, then make your changes and append your initials, then merge them later" to get around this.
I don't know what it is about Microsoft products that seems to lend themselves to being stretched to obscene lengths and put to uses that they're not well-suited to; I suppose it's because they're so widely available that they're the tool of first resort. Word isn't a document/content management system, and Excel is not a relational database, and no amount of ugly kludges is going to make it so. Too bad people will keep trying.
They still sell boxes of 1000 rds of 22LR from time to time for around $10, but I've never seen one called "Bucket 'o Bullets." The boxes I've seen are just run-of-the-mill Remington low-grade stuff.
Personally I won't use it because it's so underloaded, it produces a lot of misfeeds in semi-automatic guns that depend on the recoil energy to load the next round. I bought a box a few years ago to use in my bolt-action.22, and I expect it'll last me through the next decade, if it doesn't corrode first.
The best deal Wal-Mart used to have going was 100-rd boxes of 9mm for $10 or so, when they were on sale. Occasionally they'd have 50's of.45 ACP for $9 as well.
I generally don't shop at Wal-Mart because I'm not a big fan of their business practices and the extent to which they force outsourcing, but the majority of their ammunition seems to still be American-made, interestingly enough. (At least pistol stuff, I think they have more imported rifle ammo.) I do wonder though if by buying it there, I'm not helping them squeeze the ammunition companies offshore too, someday; I should probably just suck it up and buy it from an independent gun store.
Just out of my ass without any statistics to back this up, I'll suggest that we might just be spending/proposing to spend more money on keeping illegals out than they use up in tax funded services. That would be nice irony, however I don't know whether reality corresponds with this view.
I doubt very much that is the case. The expenses incurred by very low-income citizens and which are picked up by the taxpayers are difficult to quantify, but you have everything from the tangibles (healthcare costs, education, necessity of increased police presence) to more vague ones -- if your schools become overpopulated and student/teacher ratios increase, how do you quantify the cost of the poorer education students receive? Or if businesses can use cheap labor instead of mechanization, the loss of the skilled jobs at manufacturing companies? I could go on and on. There are a lot of indirect costs, as well as substantial direct ones (which I believe would outweigh border security anyway), that you'd have to add up.
Plus, while enforcing the border and limiting government services to legal citizens would discourage immigrants from coming to this country, just opening up government services -- even if that was cheaper in the short term -- would only encourage further immigration, and increase the cost over time. Any plan would be rolling out the welcome mat to every disaffected unskilled worker in the world, and that's definitely not where we want to go.
Our economy is struggling as it is with globalization, and we're barely making the transition to a high-skilled technology and service-based workforce as it is. Bringing ten or fifteen or twenty million unskilled workers into the very bottom echelon of our country isn't going to do any good, and a lot of harm.
The only people who would benefit from an influx of unskilled workers are the businesses that would rather not pay a decent living wage necessary to recruit an American worker, and the politicians eager to get their votes.
Amen to that. I can't find any information on it right now, but I believe that the ability to control one's own borders was part of the traditional definition of being a soverign nation. Sometimes I think we've been failing that test here in the U.S. for quite a while. Our borders are more of a shared illusion or hallucination than anything tangible.
Frankly the fact that there's any opposition to building a fence or wall along the border, on any grounds other than cost, seems ridiculous to me. There should have been one there a long time ago, but apparently we got cheap and assumed that a desert would keep people from walking across it, and thus a fence was unnecessary. Obviously we were wrong, and now we should rectify that situation.
Rather than sending it out halfway around the globe, I think enforcing the border is a perfectly reasonable use for our military, and I can't see how it violates posse comitatus, since in my mind it's not a law enforcement function to begin with. It's basic national security. The most basic national security, in fact. If you can't use your Army to stop a flood of foreign nationals from waltzing across the border, I really question its purpose.
OMG, it's the "OMG it's a slippery slope argument" argument.
There's nothing inherently wrong with a slippery slope, if one event makes another event more likely to occur, or if it's easier to make a change in a certain direction than it is to reverse it. (E.g., the centralization of power in a small number of individuals is generally difficult to undo.) There are valid historical precedents for gradual changes in laws as part of an overall plan of drastic change, and you don't have to be Machivelli to realize that you can pretty often get people to accept things that they wouldn't take all in one go, if you do it slowly.
Rejecting a change because it might make other undesirable changes possible or more likely at some future point is just good sense: you need to make laws with the idea that people are going to try to abuse the system, and every new piece of legislation should be considered skeptically, and no ulterior motive should be overlooked. The stakes are too high for anything less.
Overall, your rejection outright of any argument that seems like a slippery slope is ignorant and shortsighted; eventually, such thinking only plays into the hands of people who realize that you can boil the frog if you only turn the heat up slowly.
Not entirely true. Nudity by itself isn't pornographic; whether something qualifies as being porn or not depends on whether it's offensive and appeals to a "purient interest" while using "contemporary community standards" and such. It also depends a lot on the context that it's distributed and reproduced. A campus newspaper that publishes photos of the track team doing a naked run would probably be fine, but a web site that compiled photos of naked, possibly underage college students wouldn't. It's a very complex and gray issue; on one hand you have actual kiddie porn, but at the other end you have National Geographic, or people who take photos of their kids while vacationing on a nude beach/resort. A lot depends on context, in terms of passing the Miller Test.
The U.S. isn't quite as bad as some other countries in this regard: there are places (I think Canada is one of them) where you can sit down at a word processor or notebook and write yourself some "child porn," even if it's never distributed and no children are ever involved. In the U.S., we've pretty clearly come down on the side of written erotica as being protected speech regardless of the ages of the characters, although simulated/animated porn is more vague (see Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition).
So I take it that you find those anonymous tip lines equally offensive? Since after all, they're making the public do what really ought to be the police's job.
I'd be all for that, but some people around here are rather attached to their government services. So as long as I have to pay for other people to not work, I'd rather pay for as few people as possible, and I'd prefer that the people that I do pay for, actually pay into the system.
Personally, about the only thing worse than the current situation is legalizing the number of immigrants we have today, and thus making them eligible for more taxpayer-funded services. That's what I find obnoxious about the Senate immigration bill -- in my opinion, it goes entirely in the wrong direction. Low-income employees generally consume more services than they pay in taxes, and thus are a net drain on the economy. Anything that lets more of them in, is a bad move and will hurt us overall.
About the only good to come out of the current immigration debate is that it's made it abundantly clear who is actually listening to their constituency and who is on the payroll of the big agribusinesses (who benefit from a cheap labor supply). I certainly know who I won't be voting for in the next election.
Can the ISP lobiests motivate the democratic party to put an end to this big brother like behavior?
That was the funniest thing I've read all morning. You might want to make your dry, sarcastic wit more obvious, though. People might misinterpret you as being serious, and think you're a complete moron or something.
In general the only difference between Democrats and Republicans is that the Republicans generally go after the "we have to do this to stop the terrorists" angle, and the Democrats tend towards "we have to protect the children!" The majority of both parties just toss around emotional arguments devoid of any rationality, going after the knee-jerk response in whatever they perceive their principal constituency to be. The only difference is whether they think they can get more of a rise out of said constituency by going at the issue from the perspective of national security or "protecting your children."
The only reason we're not living either in the "People's Republic of the United States" or "Pat Roberson's JesusLand(TM), Brought to you by Bechtel-Halliburton" is because the politicians spend enough time bickering that they generally don't have enough time at the end of the day to seriously screw things up.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't, you won't buy it, and frankly, neither will a whole lot of other people.
I can't even think of the last time I intentionally bought a (FM, broadcast band) radio. I'm almost certain that most of my non-techie friends probably can't; to most people, radios are things that come built-in to your car, or your CD player, or your clock radio, or occasionally separately in some small package you can carry around. But generally they're cheap, built-in devices.
I don't think you're going to get people to spend money on an expensive radio receiver these days, unless the content is substantially dissimilar from what's available on FM -- and I mean content, not quality. Unless they can record it and put it on their iPod or share it, the average person doesn't give a crap about the broadcasts being digital.
The only way HD radio will ever take off is if the receivers start being built into every car radio, and then it will really only catch on at the replacement rate of most cars.
Nah, the American way is taking what used to be free and charging for it, while hoping people will be too stupid to notice.
It seems to work well for them, too.
Surprise, surprise: it's closed and proprietary. And the compression algorithms are patented.
Not that there were any shortage of alternative, open and unencumbered digital audio transmission formats out there (Digital Radio Mondial being my personal favorite), the FCC went straight for the one owned by the corporation. So if you want to broadcast in HD, you'll pay a tithe to iBiquity every year. As if community and college and other small radio stations needed yet another bill to pay.
I wonder how much iBiquity paid for their little government reach-around? Hope they think they got their money's worth. I'm staying with FM, thanks very much.
I'd like to know when we decided it was acceptable for the Government to make a standard out of some company's proprietary format. It ought to work so that if you submit your format as a candidate for standardization, you agree to relinquish all rights to it, and transfer all IP that's related to it into the public domain or to a holding body. Don't want to do that? Fine, it doesn't need to be used -- there are more than enough alternatives that could have been instead.
College radio is laughable. Your money is better spent on satellite radio.
I guess it's a good thing that college radio doesn't cost anything to listen to, unlike satellite radio.
Yes. But the reason they went `out of style' is because neither one of them ever really met the (perhaps inflated) expectations of the people making the predictions.
We don't have VR because doing good VR is hard and requires expensive hardware. Likewise with 3D -- another technology that seems to come up every few years as the `next big thing,' but then never is. AI is even more difficult than that; it's hard enough making a computer simulate a cockroach, much less a cat or dog, and certainly not a person. I suspect that that before we get a convincing AI that approaches human capabilities, they'll have gotten the size of neural-implantable electrodes down to the point where it's easier to put a human brain in a tank and attach it to interfaces that simulate senses than it is to simulate the brain itself. (Especially given that there is a market and demand for electrodes for other purposes besides brains-in-jars, e.g. artificial vision and hearing).
Partly it's a chicken-and-egg problem. The hardware developers and manufacturers, who might have the resources to bring us a $40, motion sensitive VR headset, don't think that there is a demand. But part of the reason that there isn't a demand is because of the assumption on the part of consumers that such things will always be ridiculously expensive. And so the status quo prevails.
Why? Entering a password means I need to move both hands to the keyboard...
Nevermind. It's just too easy.
Depends on the market conditions. While in general that might be good advice, if you're living in a location where prices are heavily inflated, it might be terrible advice instead.
Right now, for example, the housing markets in the DC area are vastly overinflated, and in the midst of a contraction. You'd be insane to buy a first home now, unless you had an inside track and were getting a below-"market" deal.
All that would happen is that you'd end up with a mortgage over the next 10, 20, or 30 years that was far more than the property would ever be worth (barring another inflationary period). So in the end, you could lose a lot of money versus renting over the same period. (Because rents might decrease during the contraction, while your mortgage payments wouldn't.)
Now, if you're in a place where the housing market is relatively stable or inflating, then it makes sense to buy a home instead of rent. It's basically "renting for free," but in addition, you can deduct the mortgage payments from your taxes, which if you're single can be really significant.
The problem for many young people, myself included, is that owning a property means tying yourself into a particular area, and that's a big step if you're not sure where you want to live for a while.
Actually, having done both, I think that a large corporation is worse. In the Army, the leadership system is designed so that every person has someone above them, who (theoretically) is tasked with basically taking care of them. That's not the case in a lot of "matrix organized" corporations. I've worked in places where it was never clear to me who my direct superior was, and I had half a dozen different managers, none of whom were really interested in my success or failure. (Heck, at some places I never even met my direct manager in the entire time I worked there.)
The Army is the ultimate top-down organization: go two levels or more above wherever you are, and you're just a number, but at least the people right above you will probably know who you are. If you have a problem, the chain of command is pretty obvious, both up and down; to me, that's always been comforting. I always knew exactly who my superiors were, and who I was responsible for.
YMMV, obviously; the Army is a huge organization and I'm sure there are as many bad officers in it as there are bad managers in any corporation, but in general I thought that people in the military took their leadership responsibilies much more seriously than their corporate counterparts, or at least that's been my experience so far.
I wonder what he would prefer, if not Apache?
IIS? CommuniGate Pro? NCSA HTTPd?
Wrong.
I assume you're referring to Excel-97, which is used in various flavors from Excel 97 up to Excel 2002. This is a stretch to call a single format, since using some features in newer versions will create problems or at least inconsistencies when they are opened in other versions. Create a PivotTable in 2002 and then open it in 97, for example. This is the reason for the whole "compatibility check" that happens whenever you try to save a document in an older format than the latest one. Even 2000 and 2002 have things that will get lost in translation.
If I want to use Excel 97, I run the risk of "mangling" documents that I work on which come from people using newer versions ("what did you do with my PivotTables?!"); with each new version of Excel, features are included that break complete interoperability with past versions, even though they claim to use the same "format." The format might be good for data interchange in the roughest sense, but it doesn't preserve a complete workflow. Thus, any application claiming "Excel compatibility" must constantly update itself with the latest reverse-engineered updates, if it wants to be a viable alternative.
References:
Excel File Compatibility
How to recognize the difference among Excel 97 files, Excel 2000 files, and Excel 2002 files
Interesting. I'm not sure how I feel about a guy whose research interests are listed as "the physiological ecology of thermal relations of amphibians and reptiles to include determinations of the factors which influence lethal temperatures, critical thermal maxima and minima, thermal selection, and thermoregulatory behavior."
Slight creepy factor there. But still, interesting point, although honestly I hadn't really thought too much about the actual possibility of frog-boiling. Like Schrödinger's cat, I always figured it was more a hypothetical frog.
Good to know, though.
I like it as a collaborative tool, sadly my coauthors prefer word but what can you do
Shoot your coworkers?
Oh, you meant 'what can you do that doesn't get you 20 in Folsom.' Pity, that.
Huh? What you're saying doesn't make any sense. Of course Microsoft's own products have backwards compatibility. But the point is that they continue to change the formats going forward, with every new release, and then do not publish any documentation on the formats.
So if I build a product that I want to interoperate with Excel, and it uses the 1997 format, I'm okay for a while. But in the next release of Excel, by default it's going to produce documents that my application cannot read. Every time somebody sends me one, I'm going to have to reply back and ask them to do a "Save As" and give it to me in Excel-97 instead of Excel-xx, where xx is this year's flavor. In short, it's not backwards compatibility of Microsoft products that's in question at all, it's the "forwards compatibility" of other products which have to be compatible with MS' latest offerings in order to remain competitive, because of its dominance in the market.
Thus anyone who wants to make a seamlessly interoperable product has to expend a ridiculous amount of energy and manpower, constantly reverse-engineering Microsoft's latest formats. The work required to change the format is asymmetrical: on Microsoft's end (where they have all the specifications) it's quite simple, but on the receiving end it's quite difficult.
So what the GP was saying, I think, is that by creating a large installed base of users who can only read Excel-97, it might give Microsoft some impetus to not change the default format every time the mood hits them.
Well said. I don't see this service, unless it's substantially changed in the future, really holding much of a candle to Excel. The majority of Excel users I know are all corporate (myself included), and didn't have any input into the purchase of the software itself. As long as it comes bundled with the rest of Office, people will use it, meaning that for Google to have much of an effect they'd need to replicate all of Office. And I don't think people are going to want to replace their main productivity suite with some online applications, unless somebody comes up with a nice way of downloading them and making them run offline, or internet access becomes really ubiquitious. (No, EVDO doesn't cut it -- I'm talking about something that every junior consultant and secretary can have, wireless internet is still too expensive for that.)
That said, going after the "home market" for spreadsheets is a good way for them to test customer acceptance of an online application. If this works out well, perhaps we'll see more in the same vein. But I think that rather going directly for Office, the better tactic would be to go for needs that aren't quite fulfilled by conventional office suite-type programs. Rather than word processing, go for documents management and collaboration; rather than something like PowerPoint, go for easy-to-use webcasting. There are needs that Office is never going to do a good job of filling, because it's the ultimate one-size-fits all solution. Google has a lot of room to grow, just in the shadow of Office, before they'd need to take it on directly.
He would be right, because it is not covered by fair use. The courts have taken a very dim view of sampling without first getting permission of the original rights holder, and there are a number of cases to this effect.
In particular I'm thinking about Bridgeport Music vs. Dimension Films, where the sampled content was less than a second or two. Here's a fairly good summary summary that I found via Google.
Obviously there are additional issues when you are profiting off of the work versus just using it yourself, but that just makes your liability for damages less, it doesn't make it legal.
I'm no fan of DRM, but it's a bit rich to complain about what happened, since it was almost certainly illegal in the first place. The possibly noninfringing use (using it in his own composition, on his own computer) was allowed, but the system stopped him from sharing it with a number of other people; the assumption by the computer and the system's designers that any sharing represents a public performance is not surprising, since once a file is shared digitally, there is no end to how far it can be shared subsequently. This could be stopped with some form of universal DRM that prevented second-generation sharing, but personally I find this "cure" worse than the "disease" represented by current limitations.
I think Word had already been knocked out of contention in this discussion. They've used it, and they'd like to see if anything is better.
I feel his pain here -- I work on a very large software project which also has all of its documentation saved as Word documents with tracked changes, and it's a real PITA. Unfortunately we have way too much stuff shared this way to ever change, or so's the thinking. It's a pain because the locking is on the whole-document level, rather than on the paragraph or section level as it might be with a Wiki. With documents that are sometimes approaching thousands of pages (yes, individual Word documents, the horror) this is a significant issue. We do a lot of "open the document as a copy, then make your changes and append your initials, then merge them later" to get around this.
I don't know what it is about Microsoft products that seems to lend themselves to being stretched to obscene lengths and put to uses that they're not well-suited to; I suppose it's because they're so widely available that they're the tool of first resort. Word isn't a document/content management system, and Excel is not a relational database, and no amount of ugly kludges is going to make it so. Too bad people will keep trying.
Wait, but I thought Al Gore invented the vortex?
They still sell boxes of 1000 rds of 22LR from time to time for around $10, but I've never seen one called "Bucket 'o Bullets." The boxes I've seen are just run-of-the-mill Remington low-grade stuff.
.22, and I expect it'll last me through the next decade, if it doesn't corrode first.
.45 ACP for $9 as well.
Personally I won't use it because it's so underloaded, it produces a lot of misfeeds in semi-automatic guns that depend on the recoil energy to load the next round. I bought a box a few years ago to use in my bolt-action
The best deal Wal-Mart used to have going was 100-rd boxes of 9mm for $10 or so, when they were on sale. Occasionally they'd have 50's of
I generally don't shop at Wal-Mart because I'm not a big fan of their business practices and the extent to which they force outsourcing, but the majority of their ammunition seems to still be American-made, interestingly enough. (At least pistol stuff, I think they have more imported rifle ammo.) I do wonder though if by buying it there, I'm not helping them squeeze the ammunition companies offshore too, someday; I should probably just suck it up and buy it from an independent gun store.
Just out of my ass without any statistics to back this up, I'll suggest that we might just be spending/proposing to spend more money on keeping illegals out than they use up in tax funded services. That would be nice irony, however I don't know whether reality corresponds with this view.
I doubt very much that is the case. The expenses incurred by very low-income citizens and which are picked up by the taxpayers are difficult to quantify, but you have everything from the tangibles (healthcare costs, education, necessity of increased police presence) to more vague ones -- if your schools become overpopulated and student/teacher ratios increase, how do you quantify the cost of the poorer education students receive? Or if businesses can use cheap labor instead of mechanization, the loss of the skilled jobs at manufacturing companies? I could go on and on. There are a lot of indirect costs, as well as substantial direct ones (which I believe would outweigh border security anyway), that you'd have to add up.
Plus, while enforcing the border and limiting government services to legal citizens would discourage immigrants from coming to this country, just opening up government services -- even if that was cheaper in the short term -- would only encourage further immigration, and increase the cost over time. Any plan would be rolling out the welcome mat to every disaffected unskilled worker in the world, and that's definitely not where we want to go.
Our economy is struggling as it is with globalization, and we're barely making the transition to a high-skilled technology and service-based workforce as it is. Bringing ten or fifteen or twenty million unskilled workers into the very bottom echelon of our country isn't going to do any good, and a lot of harm.
The only people who would benefit from an influx of unskilled workers are the businesses that would rather not pay a decent living wage necessary to recruit an American worker, and the politicians eager to get their votes.
Amen to that. I can't find any information on it right now, but I believe that the ability to control one's own borders was part of the traditional definition of being a soverign nation. Sometimes I think we've been failing that test here in the U.S. for quite a while. Our borders are more of a shared illusion or hallucination than anything tangible.
Frankly the fact that there's any opposition to building a fence or wall along the border, on any grounds other than cost, seems ridiculous to me. There should have been one there a long time ago, but apparently we got cheap and assumed that a desert would keep people from walking across it, and thus a fence was unnecessary. Obviously we were wrong, and now we should rectify that situation.
Rather than sending it out halfway around the globe, I think enforcing the border is a perfectly reasonable use for our military, and I can't see how it violates posse comitatus, since in my mind it's not a law enforcement function to begin with. It's basic national security. The most basic national security, in fact. If you can't use your Army to stop a flood of foreign nationals from waltzing across the border, I really question its purpose.
OMG, it's the "OMG it's a slippery slope argument" argument.
There's nothing inherently wrong with a slippery slope, if one event makes another event more likely to occur, or if it's easier to make a change in a certain direction than it is to reverse it. (E.g., the centralization of power in a small number of individuals is generally difficult to undo.) There are valid historical precedents for gradual changes in laws as part of an overall plan of drastic change, and you don't have to be Machivelli to realize that you can pretty often get people to accept things that they wouldn't take all in one go, if you do it slowly.
Rejecting a change because it might make other undesirable changes possible or more likely at some future point is just good sense: you need to make laws with the idea that people are going to try to abuse the system, and every new piece of legislation should be considered skeptically, and no ulterior motive should be overlooked. The stakes are too high for anything less.
Overall, your rejection outright of any argument that seems like a slippery slope is ignorant and shortsighted; eventually, such thinking only plays into the hands of people who realize that you can boil the frog if you only turn the heat up slowly.
Not entirely true. Nudity by itself isn't pornographic; whether something qualifies as being porn or not depends on whether it's offensive and appeals to a "purient interest" while using "contemporary community standards" and such. It also depends a lot on the context that it's distributed and reproduced. A campus newspaper that publishes photos of the track team doing a naked run would probably be fine, but a web site that compiled photos of naked, possibly underage college students wouldn't. It's a very complex and gray issue; on one hand you have actual kiddie porn, but at the other end you have National Geographic, or people who take photos of their kids while vacationing on a nude beach/resort. A lot depends on context, in terms of passing the Miller Test.
The U.S. isn't quite as bad as some other countries in this regard: there are places (I think Canada is one of them) where you can sit down at a word processor or notebook and write yourself some "child porn," even if it's never distributed and no children are ever involved. In the U.S., we've pretty clearly come down on the side of written erotica as being protected speech regardless of the ages of the characters, although simulated/animated porn is more vague (see Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition).
So I take it that you find those anonymous tip lines equally offensive? Since after all, they're making the public do what really ought to be the police's job.
I'd be all for that, but some people around here are rather attached to their government services. So as long as I have to pay for other people to not work, I'd rather pay for as few people as possible, and I'd prefer that the people that I do pay for, actually pay into the system.
Personally, about the only thing worse than the current situation is legalizing the number of immigrants we have today, and thus making them eligible for more taxpayer-funded services. That's what I find obnoxious about the Senate immigration bill -- in my opinion, it goes entirely in the wrong direction. Low-income employees generally consume more services than they pay in taxes, and thus are a net drain on the economy. Anything that lets more of them in, is a bad move and will hurt us overall.
About the only good to come out of the current immigration debate is that it's made it abundantly clear who is actually listening to their constituency and who is on the payroll of the big agribusinesses (who benefit from a cheap labor supply). I certainly know who I won't be voting for in the next election.
Can the ISP lobiests motivate the democratic party to put an end to this big brother like behavior?
That was the funniest thing I've read all morning. You might want to make your dry, sarcastic wit more obvious, though. People might misinterpret you as being serious, and think you're a complete moron or something.
In general the only difference between Democrats and Republicans is that the Republicans generally go after the "we have to do this to stop the terrorists" angle, and the Democrats tend towards "we have to protect the children!" The majority of both parties just toss around emotional arguments devoid of any rationality, going after the knee-jerk response in whatever they perceive their principal constituency to be. The only difference is whether they think they can get more of a rise out of said constituency by going at the issue from the perspective of national security or "protecting your children."
The only reason we're not living either in the "People's Republic of the United States" or "Pat Roberson's JesusLand(TM), Brought to you by Bechtel-Halliburton" is because the politicians spend enough time bickering that they generally don't have enough time at the end of the day to seriously screw things up.