What's wrong with adding a note in your calendar to log back in at 5 months and 29 days to cancel? Jeez, how helpless are people these days?
How sleazy and dishonest do you have to be to not provide such a simple and basic form of customer-service as "Do not renew" feature without terminating the service? I realize that "customer-service" has been dead for about 10 years now, and is a foreign concept for most software/hardware users these days, but it is sad that you're apologizing for it. Your computer is "bundled" with "included" security software... But if you don't pay extra, it only works for a short-time... What a bunch of crap. "Renewal billing" is so rife with sleazy little abuses like this--I can't wait for the Internet to grow up a little more and for this sort of thing to be relegated to porn, so that it is more easily avoided.
Put the REAL price of the tools that are "included" with your computer in the Ad so that users can compare apples to apples... Vendors count on people not reading the fine-print beforehand and failing to compute the real costs of that "included" software... By the time the consumer figures it out they're in no position to do anything with it.
From my perspective, the biggest problem with security applications is the licensing... The contracts are rigid, inflexible things. You buy in increments the vendor dictates--no more, no less. You are steered to the suites as a way to "maximize the value of your investment"... true, the software is sold a la carte, but the prices... They're so high you could buy the whole suite for "not that much more."
And the "premium support" that we've gotten hasn't really been great... Yet it is usually touted as the chief reason to buy a suite by anybody touting the monolith of security applications from Vendor X.
I had a specific incident with a security vendor's SMTP Gateway/AV/Antispam software earlier this year where we tried to get the "new and improved upgrade" version up and running and after troubleshooting our test server for about 2-hours with their support staff we told them in-passing that the 2nd NIC hadn't been installed when we setup the server, we had added it and then installed drivers after the fact to support the funky way it handles send/receive and reconfigured thinking it would be no big deal. The manual does not specify that its a problem, so we just installed it and moved forward. When it still couldn't send mail with the new NIC in place, we took extensive troubleshooting steps, then uninstalled/reinstalled the software to try and get it to recognize it. This didn't work either, and led to the support call after a few more things were tried...
"Oh," says the support guy. "Then you'll have to reinstall the whole OS and start over with both NICs already in place."
Not just the software... the whole OS--he says that "our uninstall sometimes fails... It is just safer to redo the OS." SO I ask him--what happens if a NIC fails in a server? If the vendor sends the same hardware to me and installs it, will the software function? "Probably not"--I'm told. Effectively, they've released a bunch of OSS tools but they've failed to do anything besides kludge them together in one web-interface. "Any" change to the hardware will require you to reinstall the software... possibly the OS if it doesn't work after re-install.
This is a part of the solution that we've paid about $30k for... It's the worst value I've ever seen... Other parts of this "enterprise suite" are just as wonderful, if not more so. So I've finally gotten support to go a la carte for better spam control... I'm buying a Barracuda ASAP to replace this clunker...everybody I know who uses one says after it learns your white-list it just sits there and sifts mail quietly with very-few false-positives and no problems. We finally got this anonymous security vendors "product" into a state I would call "operational," but the spam protection is not as good as the "older" version that it replaced. We now hear complaints every day about how much more spam is getting through...
There was a summer price cut around the time of the C2D launch. These are timed to deal with the launch of the ultra-low-end C2Ds, and the price-cuts expected as the new Core 2 Quadros push C2D prices down. AMD's got nothing new until Q3's Barcelona, so they're fighting better chips with cheaper chips.
...You're forgetting something else--AMD's chips are proven, Intel's new offerrings may be technically interesting, but they are unproven... Who remembers Itanic? Itanium2 was less of a joke, but not great. I'm happy with my existing AMD-based gear... My only regret is that the new SQL Servers we bought are already paid for before these price cuts... Drat.
I've been sitting here trying to come up with some kind of rebuttal, but everywhere I look I find myself more sadly certain that I actually agree with you. Ultimately, people have been desensitized to the idea that government is an unmitigated disaster for the citizens. That this is the status quo, and that "you can't fight city hall."
Ronald Reagan said "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'" and I think, if you look at what has happened over the last 2.5+ decades you can really see how this philosophy has spread--from being, primarily, the refuge of the right to being the default opinion of every American at birth. When I talk to people about how screwed up the war profiteering situation is they say "Surprise, surprise, a government program broken!" and laugh, but they don't care enough to, you know, do anything different. Not even lift a finger and VOTE FOR A DIFFERENT CANDIDATE. But I've long been a student of that phenomenon, and I offer this story.
I am a Centrist independent voter. My House district is represented by sack of shit extraordinaire, Dan Burton (R-IN)--a guy who doesn't show up for hearings on Veteran's rights and then won't talk about where he was or what he was doing (when he should have been earning his six-figure plus salary.) His last reelection was ~70% of the vote--my district is one of the ugliest gerrymanders in all of Indiana... It is guaranteed to go Republican, pretty much however you look at it. For all intents and purposes, in this context, my vote is inconsequential. And most Americans live in districts that are at least a little slanted one way or the other, many of them very intentionally. Against this backdrop it is pretty easy to understand how people get this jaded.
...if Apple doesn't consider you "Enterprise." Good luck is all I can say! My experiences with direct A/B comparison (a company with Dells running Microsoft, and Apples running OS X) shows that Apple is by far the LEAST efficient at providing hardware support. Their Hardware troubleshooting standards are ridiculous--they don't seem to have an "IT Pro" line--every caller is assumed not to know how to plug-in a network cable (or how to check and make sure the cable is connected, as I had one Apple Care rep try to patiently explain to me...) That's great if my mom is calling, but sucks if its me calling. If you don't want to play their reindeer games they accuse you of "refusing to troubleshoot."
Their parts policy works like this: You give them a CC# or you can take it to the Apple Store (and wait up to a month) or you can suck it and not get parts. They do still include a shipping label for your broken part, at least. Apple makes great gear, but their HW support stinks. If I had it all to do over again, I'd insist on having a ready stock of spare parts handy to put systems back into service while hassling with Apple's "support" line.
Bottom line: Average downtime for any Apple HW problem: 3.5 days if we could get parts to the office (or, even more rare and special, get a technician on-site,) 7-10 days if we had to take it to the Apple store. Dell: Pretty consistently fast, easy to get parts-- 5 hours for servers, ~1.5 days for desktops/laptops w/onsite service.
Huh? A bill's text is entered into the Congressional Record as soon as it is introduced, and should be available for Members to read. Action on public bills is in the public record; if we can read it, so can they.
8th grade Civics aside, maybe you weren't aware that bills often change significantly from the time they are introduced until they reach (if they reach) a final floor vote. The habit in the last several years has been for those negotiated changes to be made behind closed-doors and revealed to the whole House/Senate (and the public, as well) only minutes or hours before a vote.
I agree, what you said is how it SHOULD work, but reality and how it "Should be" are often two different things.
The reason they don't read the bills is that the majority does not provide the text of the bill until a few hours (or in some cases minutes!) before the vote. How do you suggest even the best reader complete a 500-page read of a bill with any level of insight in 30 minutes or less? This isn't a coincidence or "laziness"--it is calculated manipulation by the majority. I used to say "the Republicans" because they really perfected shutting out the minority during their last reign of terror, but the Democrats are showing they're not afraid to play the "last minute text" game too! Where, oh where, is a mainstream third-party?
This isn't a pizza-delivery, its our government. Our Representatives are behaving in a shamefully negligent manner. We need Congress to change its rules to require at LEAST 24-hours for the text being voted on the be processed by the body before a vote is taken. They could, of course, waive this requirement in emergency circumstances, but not by voice-vote. This would cut drastically down on this game... I would wager MOST congressmen don't really know what is in every bill they vote for or against. Their could be a provision to legalize the eating of puppies, or a proposition to give $200 to every guy named Steve in Tuscaloosa, AL... they'd never know until the checks were cut--and then only if the press got wind of it.
And I doubt this is a threat to Google because they will do the same thing it if it works out.
Google is already doing something in this vein... They have Google Apps, which can tie into your enterprise systems and offers your mobile workforce word processing and spreadsheets, email, IM, a start page with RSS--it isn't an operating system, not remotely, but the idea is that it represents an integrated, comprehensive application environment for our students to embrace from home, campus, or the Australian outback.
XIOS isn't really an OS, I certainly agree. But they're hardly unique. They're presenting an integrated suite of applications with an extensible API, sort of like what Google is doing. And really, it doesn't need to be an OS to make it useful and usable.
...is that it took this long to be brought up....nor is the rank hypocrisy in the proposal surprising.
Just remember: One man's violence is another man's sport. Does this mean the NFL will have to be broadcast at midnight now? What about boxing or professional wrestling? Or Ultimate Fighting, for that matter? Who will decide where the line is? What about the news: Kids can easily be watching the news--so we probably can't show anymore Iraq stories, or Afghanistan stories. That would be pretty convenient for some folks in our current political climate.
And if NFL, Ultimate Fighting, and TV News aren't covered, why not? Surely, if your moral purview insists that we must all be "protected" from violent imagery on television, surely realistic violence on television must be immoral and dangerous too. How could it not be? You're exposing a child to severe, real violence without showing the months (or years, or a lifetime) of agony that result from it. Consequence-free violence, same as fictional television--where is the difference? How could it be OK to show ACTUAL violence but not fictional violence? I'd suggest it isn't, and this proposed regulation leads us down an ugly road.
For the record, I don't approve of the amount of violence on TV these days... I think shows like "Walker, Texas Ranger" being labelled "family programming" is a great example of what is wrong with television in this country. Walker doesn't have sex, so its "Family friendly." Walker DOES have severe violence, that would often result in death in real-life. Totally not appropriate for kids--in my opinion. However, I am far more afraid of the endgame of government getting one more "check" on our private lives. In my house, my parents monitored my television watching. They said "yes" or "no" to shows I wanted to watch when I was too young to process certain things. I didn't get to watch violence, but people who were old enough to enjoy that type of programming were still able to do so. Under this proposal, EVERYBODY has their opportunity to enjoy violent "adult" programming severely curtailed.
...They don't even have the courage to say "It's totally feasible we just can't release it because Apple would sue us into next Tuesday."
But I suppose you attract more flies with honey than vinegar. Maybe they genuinely aren't irritated about this licensing issue and just want to pressure Apple into opening negotiations. Certainly, the recent change from Apple Computer Inc to Apple, Inc. is a good sign--they've acknowledge their business is more diverse than just hardware--they are as much a software company as they are a hardware company, and maybe it can finally not be sacrilege within Apple to say that every VM would not mean one less Macintosh sold and admit that it would be a huge boon to their bottom line. These would be sales of OS X to individuals that you would simply NEVER POSSIBLY SELL A MAC TO. You have to give them the chance to get hooked... That's how I ended up as a Mac user.
I buy Macs because I started using them in school, and when the time came to purchase my own system I got a pizza-box mac. After college, replaced it with a PowerBook, replaced that with a G5 desktop, and am currently saving my pennies for a MacBook. I'd love a chance to get some virtual Mac OS X servers up and running to function as application servers--I think they'd be great. We use VMWare ESX, and it rocks, but it doesn't run... OS X. And XServes are sweet, but they have some shortcomings too. They STILL don't offer dual power-supply or SAS--two of the best features of a wintel server I recently brought online at work. It is sweet as hell--I almost wish I could get an XServe with an Opteron processor (or a Core Duo/Xeon64 etc.) We have to have SERIOUS up-time on Applications or we lose tons of money--what do we do if a PS fails during business hours? 4-hour service is nice, but with the full-load failing over to the second node of the cluster in that time, performance would get pretty bad pretty fast. The literal translation would be slower throughput of students--some people might just walk away and not sign up for classes.
Or, you could legalise weed, and make hard drugs available on prescription.
Totally agree... I just don't know how that will happen anytime soon. So many "Good Christians" in the "lock 'em all up" camp that you can't imagine it happening in too many states in the U.S. right now. Alaska has the closest thing with de facto legalization--you can have some for personal use, and can grow for personal use.
...Our prisons are so crowded with potheads we're making room by releasing murderers and rapists early.
Maybe the penalty should have been 10x the amount you earned selling the data... That way you discourage the behavior (forfeiture of all profits times 10) while not wasting prison space that needs to be saved to protect the rest of us from violent offenders.
...Let's just hope that life doesn't start imitating the "backwards" episode where they start out iin the present in India, and end up in the past in New York... I'm pretty sure that would (eventually) destroy the universe...
At the end of all this work, they will still be a monoculture in thrall to Microsoft, with millions of users sitting behind some of the fattest pipes in the world.
I think its funny the poster left the part about millions of users behind the fattest pipes around--that seems like the worst part of the story. A monstrous delivery system for Microsoft zero-day worms/exploits, etc... A virtual-WMD if you will.
Just thinking about it makes me want to tell my firewall to shun all traffic from large swaths of the world...
Another question: Couldn't this be forced through liability? I.e. These companies need to switch to using the now much-more secure SSL to handle transactions, or find themselves liable when their customers identities are stolen through their weak quasi-encryption scheme. That's why US companies did it--they didn't want to get sued because a weak protocol was cracked.
So my point is, you either have a already researched features you like and will run with or you ignore everything and pretend because you don't upgrade no one else will.
If I upgraded today I'd be putting a mostly untested, untried, totally unproven product into production on every system in my enterprise. If I did that, the only thing I would be 'ignoring' is the voice of my own experience... ANd that voice is screaming at me not to trust a 1.0 of anything, least of all from Microsoft.
Feel free to jump first into Office 2007... It is "early adopters" who miss some crucial detail (or who get hammered with an enterprise-wide shutdown when the first zero-day bug is successfully exploited by virus and worm writers) who make my job simpler... Who, in the long run, pay my bills through huge emergency consulting fees, and make my arguments for security that much easier to make.
Again, we've got a huge installed base of Office 2003 users who are doing great--why would I disrupt their productivity for one or two minor improvements? Nobody in my enterprise is doing spreadsheets large enough to trigger the bug described in this thread... With that exception, what "Feature" is missing from Office 2003 that I need so desperately... I don't see it yet, and probably the only reason we (eventually) do it is to "keep up with the Joneses"--but that's not for another year or more.
As for Vista? I'm hoping to ride out Windows XP until we can move the desktops away from Windows entirely. We'll see if I get my wish or not...
It's that this verdict was based on SIX jurors. How is that possible? I thought a jury _had_ to be twelve members (or more)? Something I shall have to research..
Short answer: State Constitutions vary. Each state decides how many peers a "jury of your peers" needs to have in it to be fair. Twelve is traditionally the number, and most states observe this, but some use six, and some eight.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure all the states still require a unanimous verdict (all jurors in agreement) to convict.
And big fucks like you are the reason my girlfriend hates her job! Here's a newsflash, asshole: those clerks really are required by law to ID you! In fact, in my state it's required regardless of age -- she even has to ask 80-year-old geezers, because she'd get fired if she didn't.
Tell you what, why don't you post your name and address, so I can come beat the shit out of you for abusing people like my girlfriend, who are only trying to do their jobs! How would you like that, hmm?
In my state, clerks are required to show their liquor license and proof of age on demand by customers... Liquor sellers are LICENSED here--you don't just get a job at a liquor store... You get a job, then get a license, and THEN you can work. One of the stipulations of that license is that it be presented on demand of a customer. I'm within my legal rights (its "the law") to demand her ID--but I don't see you lining up to defend MY rights... Maybe you should offer to beat up all the clerks who balk at being asked to present their legally required license and identification... After all, if I bought liquor from somebody underage I would be breaking the law too! (Yeah, that law sucks too.) Seems like rank hypocrisy to me... And before you ask, yes, I have communicated my displeasure with the liquor laws to my state representative/state senator.
I know that when I worked at the liquor store, I checked ID for people who looked underage and I can confidently tell you I never sold to any minors--the "law" was that I had to check everybody, but everybody including the Excise Police knew that we weren't checking everybody--through the use of something called common-sense (that your generation may not be familiar with) we managed to achieve a balance between a law written in a vacuum and the legitimate interest of the community to restrict minors' access to booze.
Your girlfriend needs to quit her job if she doesn't like it. Working at a liquor store sucks, (I know, I've done it)--My guess is she'd find one of the various other flaws in the work to hate if that law went away tomorrow. Reality is: Adults don't like being denied access to something they are LEGALLY ENTITLED TO PURCHASE, especially when the gatekeeper doesn't even look legal to vote... and DOUBLE especially when I'm old enough to be the girl's father.
Also, word to the wise on challenging somebody to fight... It isn't wise (or impressive) to challenge men you've never met to fisticuffs online... The fact that you did so publicly illustrates what an empty threat you're making. And it further underlines your cowardice... If you were serious about settling this between you and I, you would have used my email address in my Slashdot profile and named your time and place, instead of trying to post it publicly and "look tough." Go home and whine to your girlfriend about your minimum-wage customer service jobs... But a better use of your energy would be to learn some skills to get better jobs.
To the specifics of your threat: 1) You don't want my address--undesired/unexpected visitors here get a really unpleasant greeting at the end of my HK. 2) You are a hypocrite and coward, grow up and realize that customer service jobs suck in and of themselves, not because I don't want my time wasted while people on Social Security prove they're old enough to buy a 6-pack. 3) If you really want to challenge somebody to fight, send them a private message. Anything else just looks like bluster. You've got my email--it's in my slashdot profile...
"Show me your ID if you look under 25". Much harder for a 16 year old to look 25, and adults don't really care about being IDed.
As an adult, I do have a problem with being asked for ID. I have gray hair and I'm obviously older than the little fucks asking for my ID. It's a power-trip for minimum-wage clerks.... "Sir, the law REQUIRES me to card you for appearing to be under the age of 60...."
What I usually do is demand ID from clerks in those situations, because I've run into clerks who look too young to be SELLING liquor asking me for ID.
But seriously, "appearing to be under 60." How stupid is that.... Welcome aboard the slippery slope, my friend! Some municipalities in the U.S. now require clerks to ask for identification for anybody appearing to be under the age of 60! Used to be 40, but some fucking do-gooder somewhere probably saw a special on High-Schoolers with beards that he thought looked "40". And as we all know, the worst thing that can happen to a kid is if a sip of beer crosses his lips before his 21st birthday...
Some (even more ridiculously) require TWO forms of identification for liquor purchase. And yes, you do occasionally get the one arsehole clerk on his first day who makes the senior citizen in line ahead of you at the grocery dig out two forms of ID to buy his one friggin' bottle of wine... Wasting minutes of your life that you'll never get back watching the guy dig for his second id, then argue that he was fighting in wars while the clerk was still a horny impulse in somebody's eye... Meanwhile, the minors with the requisite "real-looking" two fake IDs walk out unmolested.
Laws like this are an idiotic over-reaction... Carding people who look underage is logical. REQUIRING people to ask for identification from all customers appearing to be under 60 is not only foolish and inefficient, but also ineffective. Minors attempting to buy liquor are generally doing so with FAKE IDs, or through straw-buyers. These rules don't stop those purchases--the only people it stops from buying booze are minors with poor-quality fake-IDs, and adults who don't have a drivers license handy at the counter.
Slashdot Mirror
How sleazy and dishonest do you have to be to not provide such a simple and basic form of customer-service as "Do not renew" feature without terminating the service? I realize that "customer-service" has been dead for about 10 years now, and is a foreign concept for most software/hardware users these days, but it is sad that you're apologizing for it. Your computer is "bundled" with "included" security software... But if you don't pay extra, it only works for a short-time... What a bunch of crap. "Renewal billing" is so rife with sleazy little abuses like this--I can't wait for the Internet to grow up a little more and for this sort of thing to be relegated to porn, so that it is more easily avoided.
Put the REAL price of the tools that are "included" with your computer in the Ad so that users can compare apples to apples... Vendors count on people not reading the fine-print beforehand and failing to compute the real costs of that "included" software... By the time the consumer figures it out they're in no position to do anything with it.
From my perspective, the biggest problem with security applications is the licensing... The contracts are rigid, inflexible things. You buy in increments the vendor dictates--no more, no less. You are steered to the suites as a way to "maximize the value of your investment"... true, the software is sold a la carte, but the prices... They're so high you could buy the whole suite for "not that much more."
And the "premium support" that we've gotten hasn't really been great... Yet it is usually touted as the chief reason to buy a suite by anybody touting the monolith of security applications from Vendor X.
I had a specific incident with a security vendor's SMTP Gateway/AV/Antispam software earlier this year where we tried to get the "new and improved upgrade" version up and running and after troubleshooting our test server for about 2-hours with their support staff we told them in-passing that the 2nd NIC hadn't been installed when we setup the server, we had added it and then installed drivers after the fact to support the funky way it handles send/receive and reconfigured thinking it would be no big deal. The manual does not specify that its a problem, so we just installed it and moved forward. When it still couldn't send mail with the new NIC in place, we took extensive troubleshooting steps, then uninstalled/reinstalled the software to try and get it to recognize it. This didn't work either, and led to the support call after a few more things were tried...
"Oh," says the support guy. "Then you'll have to reinstall the whole OS and start over with both NICs already in place."
Not just the software... the whole OS--he says that "our uninstall sometimes fails... It is just safer to redo the OS." SO I ask him--what happens if a NIC fails in a server? If the vendor sends the same hardware to me and installs it, will the software function? "Probably not"--I'm told. Effectively, they've released a bunch of OSS tools but they've failed to do anything besides kludge them together in one web-interface. "Any" change to the hardware will require you to reinstall the software... possibly the OS if it doesn't work after re-install.
This is a part of the solution that we've paid about $30k for... It's the worst value I've ever seen... Other parts of this "enterprise suite" are just as wonderful, if not more so. So I've finally gotten support to go a la carte for better spam control... I'm buying a Barracuda ASAP to replace this clunker...everybody I know who uses one says after it learns your white-list it just sits there and sifts mail quietly with very-few false-positives and no problems. We finally got this anonymous security vendors "product" into a state I would call "operational," but the spam protection is not as good as the "older" version that it replaced. We now hear complaints every day about how much more spam is getting through...
I've been sitting here trying to come up with some kind of rebuttal, but everywhere I look I find myself more sadly certain that I actually agree with you. Ultimately, people have been desensitized to the idea that government is an unmitigated disaster for the citizens. That this is the status quo, and that "you can't fight city hall."
Ronald Reagan said "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'" and I think, if you look at what has happened over the last 2.5+ decades you can really see how this philosophy has spread--from being, primarily, the refuge of the right to being the default opinion of every American at birth. When I talk to people about how screwed up the war profiteering situation is they say "Surprise, surprise, a government program broken!" and laugh, but they don't care enough to, you know, do anything different. Not even lift a finger and VOTE FOR A DIFFERENT CANDIDATE. But I've long been a student of that phenomenon, and I offer this story.
I am a Centrist independent voter. My House district is represented by sack of shit extraordinaire, Dan Burton (R-IN)--a guy who doesn't show up for hearings on Veteran's rights and then won't talk about where he was or what he was doing (when he should have been earning his six-figure plus salary.) His last reelection was ~70% of the vote--my district is one of the ugliest gerrymanders in all of Indiana... It is guaranteed to go Republican, pretty much however you look at it. For all intents and purposes, in this context, my vote is inconsequential. And most Americans live in districts that are at least a little slanted one way or the other, many of them very intentionally. Against this backdrop it is pretty easy to understand how people get this jaded.
...if Apple doesn't consider you "Enterprise." Good luck is all I can say! My experiences with direct A/B comparison (a company with Dells running Microsoft, and Apples running OS X) shows that Apple is by far the LEAST efficient at providing hardware support. Their Hardware troubleshooting standards are ridiculous--they don't seem to have an "IT Pro" line--every caller is assumed not to know how to plug-in a network cable (or how to check and make sure the cable is connected, as I had one Apple Care rep try to patiently explain to me...) That's great if my mom is calling, but sucks if its me calling. If you don't want to play their reindeer games they accuse you of "refusing to troubleshoot."
Their parts policy works like this: You give them a CC# or you can take it to the Apple Store (and wait up to a month) or you can suck it and not get parts. They do still include a shipping label for your broken part, at least. Apple makes great gear, but their HW support stinks. If I had it all to do over again, I'd insist on having a ready stock of spare parts handy to put systems back into service while hassling with Apple's "support" line.
Bottom line: Average downtime for any Apple HW problem: 3.5 days if we could get parts to the office (or, even more rare and special, get a technician on-site,) 7-10 days if we had to take it to the Apple store. Dell: Pretty consistently fast, easy to get parts-- 5 hours for servers, ~1.5 days for desktops/laptops w/onsite service.
8th grade Civics aside, maybe you weren't aware that bills often change significantly from the time they are introduced until they reach (if they reach) a final floor vote. The habit in the last several years has been for those negotiated changes to be made behind closed-doors and revealed to the whole House/Senate (and the public, as well) only minutes or hours before a vote.
I agree, what you said is how it SHOULD work, but reality and how it "Should be" are often two different things.
The reason they don't read the bills is that the majority does not provide the text of the bill until a few hours (or in some cases minutes!) before the vote. How do you suggest even the best reader complete a 500-page read of a bill with any level of insight in 30 minutes or less? This isn't a coincidence or "laziness"--it is calculated manipulation by the majority. I used to say "the Republicans" because they really perfected shutting out the minority during their last reign of terror, but the Democrats are showing they're not afraid to play the "last minute text" game too! Where, oh where, is a mainstream third-party?
This isn't a pizza-delivery, its our government. Our Representatives are behaving in a shamefully negligent manner. We need Congress to change its rules to require at LEAST 24-hours for the text being voted on the be processed by the body before a vote is taken. They could, of course, waive this requirement in emergency circumstances, but not by voice-vote. This would cut drastically down on this game... I would wager MOST congressmen don't really know what is in every bill they vote for or against. Their could be a provision to legalize the eating of puppies, or a proposition to give $200 to every guy named Steve in Tuscaloosa, AL... they'd never know until the checks were cut--and then only if the press got wind of it.
Google is already doing something in this vein... They have Google Apps, which can tie into your enterprise systems and offers your mobile workforce word processing and spreadsheets, email, IM, a start page with RSS--it isn't an operating system, not remotely, but the idea is that it represents an integrated, comprehensive application environment for our students to embrace from home, campus, or the Australian outback.
XIOS isn't really an OS, I certainly agree. But they're hardly unique. They're presenting an integrated suite of applications with an extensible API, sort of like what Google is doing. And really, it doesn't need to be an OS to make it useful and usable.
...is that it took this long to be brought up. ...nor is the rank hypocrisy in the proposal surprising.
Just remember: One man's violence is another man's sport. Does this mean the NFL will have to be broadcast at midnight now? What about boxing or professional wrestling? Or Ultimate Fighting, for that matter? Who will decide where the line is? What about the news: Kids can easily be watching the news--so we probably can't show anymore Iraq stories, or Afghanistan stories. That would be pretty convenient for some folks in our current political climate.
And if NFL, Ultimate Fighting, and TV News aren't covered, why not? Surely, if your moral purview insists that we must all be "protected" from violent imagery on television, surely realistic violence on television must be immoral and dangerous too. How could it not be? You're exposing a child to severe, real violence without showing the months (or years, or a lifetime) of agony that result from it. Consequence-free violence, same as fictional television--where is the difference? How could it be OK to show ACTUAL violence but not fictional violence? I'd suggest it isn't, and this proposed regulation leads us down an ugly road.
For the record, I don't approve of the amount of violence on TV these days... I think shows like "Walker, Texas Ranger" being labelled "family programming" is a great example of what is wrong with television in this country. Walker doesn't have sex, so its "Family friendly." Walker DOES have severe violence, that would often result in death in real-life. Totally not appropriate for kids--in my opinion. However, I am far more afraid of the endgame of government getting one more "check" on our private lives. In my house, my parents monitored my television watching. They said "yes" or "no" to shows I wanted to watch when I was too young to process certain things. I didn't get to watch violence, but people who were old enough to enjoy that type of programming were still able to do so. Under this proposal, EVERYBODY has their opportunity to enjoy violent "adult" programming severely curtailed.
...They don't even have the courage to say "It's totally feasible we just can't release it because Apple would sue us into next Tuesday."
But I suppose you attract more flies with honey than vinegar. Maybe they genuinely aren't irritated about this licensing issue and just want to pressure Apple into opening negotiations. Certainly, the recent change from Apple Computer Inc to Apple, Inc. is a good sign--they've acknowledge their business is more diverse than just hardware--they are as much a software company as they are a hardware company, and maybe it can finally not be sacrilege within Apple to say that every VM would not mean one less Macintosh sold and admit that it would be a huge boon to their bottom line. These would be sales of OS X to individuals that you would simply NEVER POSSIBLY SELL A MAC TO. You have to give them the chance to get hooked... That's how I ended up as a Mac user.
I buy Macs because I started using them in school, and when the time came to purchase my own system I got a pizza-box mac. After college, replaced it with a PowerBook, replaced that with a G5 desktop, and am currently saving my pennies for a MacBook. I'd love a chance to get some virtual Mac OS X servers up and running to function as application servers--I think they'd be great. We use VMWare ESX, and it rocks, but it doesn't run... OS X. And XServes are sweet, but they have some shortcomings too. They STILL don't offer dual power-supply or SAS--two of the best features of a wintel server I recently brought online at work. It is sweet as hell--I almost wish I could get an XServe with an Opteron processor (or a Core Duo/Xeon64 etc.) We have to have SERIOUS up-time on Applications or we lose tons of money--what do we do if a PS fails during business hours? 4-hour service is nice, but with the full-load failing over to the second node of the cluster in that time, performance would get pretty bad pretty fast. The literal translation would be slower throughput of students--some people might just walk away and not sign up for classes.
Totally agree... I just don't know how that will happen anytime soon. So many "Good Christians" in the "lock 'em all up" camp that you can't imagine it happening in too many states in the U.S. right now. Alaska has the closest thing with de facto legalization--you can have some for personal use, and can grow for personal use.
...Our prisons are so crowded with potheads we're making room by releasing murderers and rapists early.
Maybe the penalty should have been 10x the amount you earned selling the data... That way you discourage the behavior (forfeiture of all profits times 10) while not wasting prison space that needs to be saved to protect the rest of us from violent offenders.
...Let's just hope that life doesn't start imitating the "backwards" episode where they start out iin the present in India, and end up in the past in New York... I'm pretty sure that would (eventually) destroy the universe...
Bender: "Well, I was on TV when I took those hostages..."
Calculon: "I saw that. You were good."
Just thinking about it makes me want to tell my firewall to shun all traffic from large swaths of the world...
Another question: Couldn't this be forced through liability? I.e. These companies need to switch to using the now much-more secure SSL to handle transactions, or find themselves liable when their customers identities are stolen through their weak quasi-encryption scheme. That's why US companies did it--they didn't want to get sued because a weak protocol was cracked.
The other ~77% were infected with worms, spyware, or viruses.
Anybody else enjoying the fun of W32.Spybot and its self-replicating variants?
Wait just a moment sir! I came in here for an argument!
If I upgraded today I'd be putting a mostly untested, untried, totally unproven product into production on every system in my enterprise. If I did that, the only thing I would be 'ignoring' is the voice of my own experience... ANd that voice is screaming at me not to trust a 1.0 of anything, least of all from Microsoft.
Feel free to jump first into Office 2007... It is "early adopters" who miss some crucial detail (or who get hammered with an enterprise-wide shutdown when the first zero-day bug is successfully exploited by virus and worm writers) who make my job simpler... Who, in the long run, pay my bills through huge emergency consulting fees, and make my arguments for security that much easier to make.
Again, we've got a huge installed base of Office 2003 users who are doing great--why would I disrupt their productivity for one or two minor improvements? Nobody in my enterprise is doing spreadsheets large enough to trigger the bug described in this thread... With that exception, what "Feature" is missing from Office 2003 that I need so desperately... I don't see it yet, and probably the only reason we (eventually) do it is to "keep up with the Joneses"--but that's not for another year or more.
As for Vista? I'm hoping to ride out Windows XP until we can move the desktops away from Windows entirely. We'll see if I get my wish or not...
Short answer: State Constitutions vary. Each state decides how many peers a "jury of your peers" needs to have in it to be fair. Twelve is traditionally the number, and most states observe this, but some use six, and some eight.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure all the states still require a unanimous verdict (all jurors in agreement) to convict.
"He's dead, Jim..."
In my state, clerks are required to show their liquor license and proof of age on demand by customers... Liquor sellers are LICENSED here--you don't just get a job at a liquor store... You get a job, then get a license, and THEN you can work. One of the stipulations of that license is that it be presented on demand of a customer. I'm within my legal rights (its "the law") to demand her ID--but I don't see you lining up to defend MY rights... Maybe you should offer to beat up all the clerks who balk at being asked to present their legally required license and identification... After all, if I bought liquor from somebody underage I would be breaking the law too! (Yeah, that law sucks too.) Seems like rank hypocrisy to me... And before you ask, yes, I have communicated my displeasure with the liquor laws to my state representative/state senator.
I know that when I worked at the liquor store, I checked ID for people who looked underage and I can confidently tell you I never sold to any minors--the "law" was that I had to check everybody, but everybody including the Excise Police knew that we weren't checking everybody--through the use of something called common-sense (that your generation may not be familiar with) we managed to achieve a balance between a law written in a vacuum and the legitimate interest of the community to restrict minors' access to booze.
Your girlfriend needs to quit her job if she doesn't like it. Working at a liquor store sucks, (I know, I've done it)--My guess is she'd find one of the various other flaws in the work to hate if that law went away tomorrow. Reality is: Adults don't like being denied access to something they are LEGALLY ENTITLED TO PURCHASE, especially when the gatekeeper doesn't even look legal to vote... and DOUBLE especially when I'm old enough to be the girl's father.
Also, word to the wise on challenging somebody to fight... It isn't wise (or impressive) to challenge men you've never met to fisticuffs online... The fact that you did so publicly illustrates what an empty threat you're making. And it further underlines your cowardice... If you were serious about settling this between you and I, you would have used my email address in my Slashdot profile and named your time and place, instead of trying to post it publicly and "look tough." Go home and whine to your girlfriend about your minimum-wage customer service jobs... But a better use of your energy would be to learn some skills to get better jobs.
To the specifics of your threat: 1) You don't want my address--undesired/unexpected visitors here get a really unpleasant greeting at the end of my HK. 2) You are a hypocrite and coward, grow up and realize that customer service jobs suck in and of themselves, not because I don't want my time wasted while people on Social Security prove they're old enough to buy a 6-pack. 3) If you really want to challenge somebody to fight, send them a private message. Anything else just looks like bluster. You've got my email--it's in my slashdot profile...
"And if this is you Mom--HAPPY BIRTHDAY!"
As an adult, I do have a problem with being asked for ID. I have gray hair and I'm obviously older than the little fucks asking for my ID. It's a power-trip for minimum-wage clerks.... "Sir, the law REQUIRES me to card you for appearing to be under the age of 60...."
What I usually do is demand ID from clerks in those situations, because I've run into clerks who look too young to be SELLING liquor asking me for ID.
But seriously, "appearing to be under 60." How stupid is that.... Welcome aboard the slippery slope, my friend! Some municipalities in the U.S. now require clerks to ask for identification for anybody appearing to be under the age of 60! Used to be 40, but some fucking do-gooder somewhere probably saw a special on High-Schoolers with beards that he thought looked "40". And as we all know, the worst thing that can happen to a kid is if a sip of beer crosses his lips before his 21st birthday...
Some (even more ridiculously) require TWO forms of identification for liquor purchase. And yes, you do occasionally get the one arsehole clerk on his first day who makes the senior citizen in line ahead of you at the grocery dig out two forms of ID to buy his one friggin' bottle of wine... Wasting minutes of your life that you'll never get back watching the guy dig for his second id, then argue that he was fighting in wars while the clerk was still a horny impulse in somebody's eye... Meanwhile, the minors with the requisite "real-looking" two fake IDs walk out unmolested.
Laws like this are an idiotic over-reaction... Carding people who look underage is logical. REQUIRING people to ask for identification from all customers appearing to be under 60 is not only foolish and inefficient, but also ineffective. Minors attempting to buy liquor are generally doing so with FAKE IDs, or through straw-buyers. These rules don't stop those purchases--the only people it stops from buying booze are minors with poor-quality fake-IDs, and adults who don't have a drivers license handy at the counter.
Alien starship.