Vacuuming is really a derivative function of a Roomba, as the Scooba attests (it washes floors -- there's still sucking involved, but the internals are way different). The Roomba platform is one way of solving the problem of moving over a variety of terrain with the ability to change direction nimbly and stay very stable. There's no reason a Roomba couldn't be, say, a courier-bot or a traction- (pull or push) bot with the right sensor suite.
As for plastic wheels shredding, do you have a different Roomba than I do? My Discovery has plastic wheels with rubber treads on the outside. No shred problems here.
If you are a lawyer who currently represents a client, the fact that the client wants to do something that is merely frivolous is not grounds enough to refuse to do it. You are acting as your client in the eyes of the law, so anything your client orders you to do that he is legally allowed to do, you must do. A lawyer has no legal recourse to being ordered to do something legal but frivolous by his client. In this case, Disney has lawyers on retainer and merely sending a C&D is not illegal, so although the Disney lawyers can privately advise against sending it, they can't outright refuse to without inviting sanctions and/or disbarment.
A lawyer can choose not to represent a client (unless he is or is acting as a public defender), but again if you already represent them you can't just drop their case cold without a damn good reason such as a conflict of interest that prevents you from ethically representing them any longer. "My client is a scumbag and I don't like him" isn't even close to sufficient reason to drop a case.
I use Dapper every day on a Dell Latitude laptop. For the most part, my experience is that the system is stable and responsive, and the apps are there to do what I need. However, video playback is still the Achilles' heel of Linux in general and Ubuntu in my specific case. It's not a codec thing -- it's issues with the interfaces. First I tried gmplayer, xine, totem-gstreamer, totem-xine, VLC, and Kaffeine. All of them had one or more of the following issues:
Wrong clip length displayed (generally 1/4 the actual length)
Jumpy/inconsistent scan forward/back
No video update when you scan forward/back
Wrong aspect ratio by default (is there a bunch of video out there in 1:1 that I don't know about?) and/or refused to display in correct AR
Eventually on a lark I tried mplayer from a shell and lo and behold, it displayed the correct length, figured out the aspect ratio on its own, and has useful forward/reverse skipping and scanning with dynamic video update during the process. It also handled a file that none of the others would play -- maybe a corrupted data stream. But that's not something a typical user will be able to figure out how to do (especially since Ubuntu's menu item for gmplayer is called "Mplayer"), nor should they be forced to.
These are decoded Tivo files, so we're talking MPEG-2 with aspect ratios ands timecodes embedded in the data stream (verified by the console vomit from mplayer) -- there's no excuse for any player that can do MPEG-2 to get either of these wrong by default.
Then there are the occasional packaging issues. Last night I got clever and decided to install mythtv's frontend to watch videos so I could maybe use closed-captioning. After the synaptic install of mythtv-frontend, I had no menu item for MythTV under Sound and Video, so I ran "mythtv &" from a shell. After much wrestling with a database error that turned out to have a simple fix, I finally got mythtv to launch, at which point it told me I shouldn't run "mythtv" but "mythfrontend" and terminated (so maybe I didn't need mysql after all?) I ran mythfrontend and after a little configuration I was watching video. Three problems here:
There's no reason the database shouldn't have been set up to begin with. I had to install mysql-server (why didn't the dependencies account for needing a database?), set the mysql password for the mythtv user (how is it that the package install can't or doesn't handle setting the mythtv user's password in mysql even though that's required for mythtv to function?), and create a database myself for mythtv to use.
Why no menu entry? And why no interactive prompting for my existing video directory if any? Debian has had debconf for how many years? The whole point of debconf is to allow for interactive responses to configuration questions where more than one (or no) reasonable default exists, and it's designed to deal with just about any interactive environment from accelerated X down to straight text with no ncurses. Did Ubuntu throw all that hard work away?
If mythtv is smart enough to know what I need to do, why doesn't it tell me and then do it? Running mythtv should have launched mythfrontend with some sort of flag to tell it to warn me what I ought to do in future. Alternately, and even simpler for both user and programmer: just do it and quit whining about it.
Yeah, this is all the mythtv package maintainer's fault, but why has a package with major deficiencies like these persisted without a fix for long enough for there to be months' worth of posts in dozens of forums complaining about pretty much the exact issues I had? Somebody should have taken over (or been assigned) this package to fix it long ago.
One of the reasons free hydrogen and helium are so scarce on earth is because they're so light (being the two lightest elements) that they tend to escape to space rather easily. The Moon can't even hold heavier molecules like O2 and N2 for any length of time; what makes anyone think there will be significant levels of helium there? Yeah, solar wind. I don't buy it. If it's there in levels concentrated enough to "mine" practically by heating it out of the lunar soil as some propose, it's probably outgassing pretty quickly too, so it won't be there long. But let's assume the castle-in-the-air builders are correct for a moment.
The (generous) estimates I see say about 1 million metric tons of He-3 scattered across the surface of the Moon. Given the Moon's surface area is about 38.5 million square kilometers (diameter = ~3500 km, radius = ~1750 km, surface area of a sphere = 4(pi)r^2), we're looking at moving and heating 38.5 square kilometers of soil to a depth of some meters (let's say 2 to be conservative). That's close to 80 cubic kilometers (80 billion cubic meters) of soil to process per ton of He-3.
For comparison, the largest earth-moving project I am able to find on Earth is the building of the artificial island for the new Hong Kong airport -- 350 million cubic meters of material moved in two and a half years. So now we have to go to the Moon and build the Hong Kong airport island over 200 times (220 times if my numbers are correct) for each metric ton of He-3. Wouldn't it be easier, cheaper and faster to just collect the solar wind directly?
Back in the day, there was one gotta-have-it Mac control panel: SuperClock, which let you monkey with the time and date display in the menu bar. I had mine set up to display the time/date in dd-MMM-YYYY HH:mm format. For System 7.5, a large part of the update from 7.0/7.1 was the addition of a whole bundle of third-party extensions that had come to be recognized as essential, and SuperClock was at or near the top of that list.
Somewhere, the SuperClock author is crying his eyes out.
When you make something that works. You start to play with it to make it do more. It's complex. Then it fails. Then you make it simple.
This is a well-known effect in software engineering called the second-system effect. It's not just because you start wanting the product to do more, but wanting it to do everything. The seminal software-engineering work The Mythical Man-Month grew directly out of the author's experience of SSE on the OS/360 project a second-system) at IBM.
The answer to SSE is often (though not always) a ground-up reengineering (the real answer, of course, is to have a controlled specification and implementation process in place so you don't go overboard in the first place). It could be argued that every major OS revision produced at Microsoft since DOS 5.0 and NT 3.51 has been a "second system" in comparison to that which it was intended to replace.
The "source of the funding" is "a particular group of people" -- businesses and unions especially. Their ability to speak with their dollars is restricted -- they have to set up PACs to do the same thing other entities can do without all the folderol.
I'm not arguing that this is a priori a bad thing, but I am arguing that it's a restriction on speech, and in particular a restriction on speech that creates an "unprotected class" (contrast with civil-rights legislation that does the opposite).
Has everyone forgotten their Internet history? Who was the major sponsor of the 1996 CDA that would have outlawed "indecent" material on the Internet (enacted but struck down by the Supreme Court)? The 1999 Safe Schools Internet Act (never passed)? The 2000 Child Internet Protection Act that requires schools and libraries to presumptively filter Internet access to receive funding earmarked for them? Hint: the answer is the same in all three cases.
John McCain has consistently led a crusade to have government interfere in the Internet. How can anyone take him seriously as a small-government conservative or a guardian of civil liberties?
...but McCain/Feingold directly restricts the content of ads. It is illegal to refer to a candidate in an ad paid for by an organization that takes soft-money contributions. That is both a finance restriction and a content restriction. Put another way, if an act were passed prohibiting groups who have members of a particular minority from talking about candidates, would you disingenuously attempt to argue that it isn't a free-speech restriction?
Well, I've always thought of the Internet in terms of information flow, but a string of ones and zeros doesn't really do anything for people who don't know what binary is. The first thing I can come up with myself is a whole bunch of arrows pointing to a little stick-person, representing abstractly the idea that "things flow to you when you use this application", but you still have to represent "information" in some way or it just looks like you're being blown around by the wind.
About the best solution I can come up with, and it's a serious kludge, is to have each localization of the interface have some culture- or language-specific representation of "news" with arrows or other representation of the idea of that news being transmitted or given to a person.
I appreciate and agree with your desire to add to the discussion, so I tried really hard to find something in your post that related to the OLPC "View Source" button. I read your post five or six times, but I didn't find anything. There must be some subtle shade of meaning that somehow relates to the topic of discussion, but it is beyond my ability to discern. Since it is unimaginable that you would criticize my failure to contribute to the discussion in a post which itself also fails to contribute in precisely the same way, I can only apologize for my lack of perception.
I find it interesting that you are under the twin misapprehensions that a) thread drift never occurs b) your post related in some meaningful way to the View Source button. My post related in a meaningful way to your post, providing additional info to what you had noted -- your followup to it didn't really add anything to anything. (Assuming you actually do care about my opinion of the View Source button, I think it's a waste of space that could go to any of dozens of things that would be better uses of a square centimeter of keyboard real estate.)
I will further note that where I work, the secretaries quit bothering me about most of the impossible things they wanted after about a year, which has left me more time to find and enjoy the excellent coffee to be had in various shops near my office, which I find better than cookies. (We usually get cookies for free whenever there's an event of any sort anyway, so don't feel as though I'm missing out.) But even if it weren't clear before, it is now eminently clear that you are a troll, so I shall cease feeding you.
Believe it or not, a lot of people are completely unaware of the fact that different word processing apps use different formats -- they think it's all the same underneath. So "Word uses a completely different data model from WordPerfect" is not the "obvious" thing I'm sure we all wish it were. Getting up on your high horse about it doesn't add anything to the discussion, and makes you look like an ass to boot. Of course, explaining this basic concept to your secretaries so they understand it and quit asking you about it might unfortunately resemble actual work, unlike snarking about it on Slashdot.
Just so you know as well, there is a world food shortage. Food is basically oil in terms of scarcity and world-wide production. We don't have the food to feed the world.
A world food shortage? Really? To date everything I've heard suggests that the issue is unequal distribution -- that there is more than enough arable land to provide a balanced diet of some variety to everyone in the world. Some countries have an abundance of natively fertile soil, such as the US and Canada; some have used clever hacks to feed themselves, like Israel; and some have serious issues with sustaining their own population without imports, like North Korea or, I presume, Japan.
In fact, Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel Prize winner for Economics, demonstrated that the issue is not a lack of ability to grow food, but distribution and choice issues, that causes hunger in many areas of the world.
The other issue... is that the icons didn't make any sense to me, nor did most of the interface. I got that the globe icon was a browser, but that was pretty much it.
I've always wondered about this. Why does a globe represent the WWW? This goes right back to the days of Mosaic, with the globe superimposed on the S (for Supercomputing?) Of course in 1992-1994 it was more commonly known as "the World Wide Web" or the "WWW" rather than just "the Web" or "the Internet", so a globe (world) was obvious. But when we're dealing with users who have no knowledge of the history of the Internet, why should a globe be the default? There have to be more intuitive icons for "information that comes from someplace else", especially when we're talking about TCP/IP to other planets now.
Sorry, those secretaries can hope all they want, but barring a major reengineering of the Word format, Reveal Codes will never happen in Word, ever. The best explanation of why is here; in summary, WordPerfect uses inline marking (think HTML), where Word uses nested containers with formatting info in binary blobs at beginning and end of the document. So Reveal Codes implemented literally in Word would just mark off the containers and parse the leading and trailing data for you; you'd still have to mentally map formatting info to the container it applied to. Word does have Reveal Formatting, but that's not nearly the same thing.
No, I saw them, I just don't know anyone that daft.
Let's be honest: you could put a horse-apple in a box, call it by a fancy-sounding name, announce it will be available in limited release on a certain date at a price of $1000 each, and people would line up to buy it just to be OMG FIRST!!!! It doesn't matter that it's (literally) a piece of crap -- to them, it's a symbol of exclusivity, and that's all that matters to some people.
The people I know don't tend to be the stand-in-line-for-a-week-before sort. They have better uses for their time and money.
Anyone who has ever believed that Microsoft is genuinely on the consumer's side in any kind of licensing question is so naive they shouldn't be allowed out of the house without a minder.
It's echoing what others have already said, but there was a time I looked for the Sony name on electronics and bought their brand (or others that used their components) almost exclusively. Sony Walkman, Sony stereo, Sony Trinitron TVs and monitors...
Since my wife got hit by the Suncomm DRM on a Sony/BMG CD about a year ago, I've still looked for the name -- to avoid it. No one I know is buying a PS3 -- everyone wants a Wii and has or wants an Xbox 360. No one I know is buying high-def movies because they're waiting for Blu-Ray to inevitably crash and burn so the format war will be over. Seems like the last year or two Sony has lost it so badly it may be impossible for them to get it back.
We're a long way from "Sony -- because Caucasians are just too damn tall."
Seriously, BitLocker doesn't do anything any other encryption scheme doesn't (it uses 128- or 256-bit AES) -- it just does it on the raw partition contents instead of within the filesystem. I just took a Windows Vista class where we got to play with BitLocker (among, of course, other things). It is not intended to protect against misuse of the whole computer, but against theft of the drive.
The primary configuration of BitLocker involves a TPM. If your computer has one, the key is stored in the TPM, and automatically provided on boot (you can optionally require a PIN). If you don't have a TPM, you can store the key on the active partition*, on a USB key, or possibly on a plain old floppy disk (our instructor wasn't sure on that one). As a last resort you can export a recovery key as a long alphanumeric string (48 characters I believe) and print it or save it somewhere.
If you have the key and the drive, you can get the data, and since the perpetrator probably doesn't want to type a 48-character recovery key every time he boots the PC, he most likely has a key disk of some sort laying around. You might still have to get through the PIN, but I imagine that's a lot easier to brute-force than a 256-bit key (or you can legally compel him to tell you, but we'll assume he's an uncooperative sod and refuses).
* To use BitLocker, you have to have a small active partition that is NOT the OS partition, which is where the BitLocker stuff loads from on boot. You can actually put the key here as well, if you have no TPM and don't want to have to carry around a separate disk.
The McDonald's in question was running a "unlimited coffee" promotion, and they realized that by serving the coffee extremely hot (190+ degrees F, as I recall) people would wind up drinking less because they had to wait for it to cool off. They had health inspectors come by--the inspectors measured the temperature of the coffee, told them it was DANGEROUSLY hot and needed to be served at a lower temperature. They might have even warned them multiple times about it, I don't recall. The McDonald's management chose NOT to lower the temperature of the coffee.... Imagine for a second spilling some hot coffee on your lap and getting third degree burns all over your genitals, then finding out that the restaurant was specifically warned by health inspectors that their coffee was dangerously hot and yet they decided to keep their coffee hot anyway because it was more profitable?
Wait... what?
Seriously, in all the time and with all the people I've debated the McDonald's hot-coffee case, this is the very first time I've heard of a theory that the specific restaurant was to blame, that it was for the sake of a promotion, that McDonald's had been warned by health inspectors and that it was an isolated incident. The summaries of the case I've seen all agree that McDonald's standard practice was to serve coffee at that temperature, and that there were hundreds of previous settled claims. No mention of health inspectors.
The reason Stella Liebeck got millions from the jury was because McDonald's blew her off, refusing to pay her medical claim where they had paid hundreds of others, and the jury found that to be so cold and callous that they socked McDonald's for it.
One reason we've seen more disclosures like this lately is because of a recent California law that requires disclosure in such cases if California citizens are affected by the breach. I'm not sure if the law requires actual knowledge of a particular type of data being compromised, but this could be the lever he needs to get the company to DTRT and disclose (you only have to disclose to Californians, but after that, it's pretty much going to get out so you might as well disclose nationally right off). As I understand it the penalties for non-compliance are pretty harsh, and could conceivably fall on him as well, as a person with knowledge of the breach.
Clients don't like it when you tell them "well we can't handle it right now, try us again in 3 to 6 months." Thats not cool. Clients will usually take their business else where and unless their competitor drops the ball, chances are you've lost a customer.
As others have noted, the consequences of doing business poorly can be worse than the results of not doing it at all. But the other dimension is what I call "bullshit factor". It works like this: You're a small IT shop serving, let us say, 30 small-business customers on a fairly regular basis. You're approached by a business with large needs -- needs you can't handle (say you're a sysadmin shop, and they need programmers). You decline, and you offer them a lead to a shop you are pretty sure you can handle the work.
This has two positive effects for you:
1) You have built a quid-pro-quo with the other shop. One day you may suddenly find that they have been referring customers with needs they can't handle to you. This can go forward and eventually become a formal partnership or even a merger to the benefit of both businesses.
2) This company you declined to take on now know that you're not feeding them bullshit just to get business -- you care about the quality of your work more than the quantity. People remember that -- the kind of people you want to work with do, anyway. Chances are pretty good that when they have needs you can meet, that they'll come back to you, or if you expand and become able to take on their needs, you can approach them later to see how happy they are and throw your hat in the ring if they've got problems.
Even if you never hear from or of BigCompany again, as others have noted, at least BigCompany isn't badmouthing you to their partners and hauling you into court because you screwed up (avoiding negative reputation and lawsuits is as much of a win as gaining positive reputation and money, though it's harder to quantify).
The OP does have serious staffing problems by his own admission, and if he can bite the bullet and hire some competent staff to take care of his existing needs, he'll be better served in the long run, not least because he'll have gained an idea of how to grow in an orderly fashion.
I want to say this is lame -- look at those lopsided, asymmetrical forms, that bland whiteness! But on the other hand, there's something aesthetically pleasing about rounded, continuous, organic forms. Add to that, each piece is unique and "yours" in a way no furniture built from plans or in a certain style can ever be.
Now, there are refinements to be made. For one, interpreting the motion-capture as spline curves, instead of simple smoothed collections of points as they apparently are doing now, would allow for easy tweaking of the design. It would also allow imposing some automated corrections on the form, like "shift the top of this three-legged table until the center of gravity is on a line perpendicular to the plane of the legs which intersects that plane at the geometric center of the triangle defined by the ends of the legs" (which is to say, "make this three-legged table as stable as possible").
Or, "make all four legs of this chair coplanar in a plane parallel to the plane that best fits the seat, and make the geometric center of the seat lie on a line perpendicular to the plane of the ends of the legs that also contains the geometric center of the polygon defined by the ends of the legs" ("make the chair not wobbly and stable to sit on")
There's nothing to stop you making money selling Free Software, you just can't stop people reading, modifying, distributing and selling the code you sold to them.
Which means the first entity to not like you can put you out of business by giving away what you charge for. Rare indeed is the company that has made a significant amount of money selling purely GPL- or BSD-licensed software (Red Hat is one, sendmail probably is another).
Basically if you're depending on income from software sales of GPL software to sustain your business, you're a moron. Even Red Hat these days is mostly known for selling development and support rather than the actual CDs the software comes on -- probably the only reason they even still sell CDs is to get some face time in places like CompUSA.
It's called the "McMurdo panorama", for what reason I can't find out, but the images are of the "winter haven" region in Gusev crater. The rovers have driven only a few miles each since landing nearly 3 years ago (but that's an incredible achievement compared to anything that's gone before in planetary landings).
Slashdot Mirror
Vacuuming is really a derivative function of a Roomba, as the Scooba attests (it washes floors -- there's still sucking involved, but the internals are way different). The Roomba platform is one way of solving the problem of moving over a variety of terrain with the ability to change direction nimbly and stay very stable. There's no reason a Roomba couldn't be, say, a courier-bot or a traction- (pull or push) bot with the right sensor suite.
As for plastic wheels shredding, do you have a different Roomba than I do? My Discovery has plastic wheels with rubber treads on the outside. No shred problems here.
If you are a lawyer who currently represents a client, the fact that the client wants to do something that is merely frivolous is not grounds enough to refuse to do it. You are acting as your client in the eyes of the law, so anything your client orders you to do that he is legally allowed to do, you must do. A lawyer has no legal recourse to being ordered to do something legal but frivolous by his client. In this case, Disney has lawyers on retainer and merely sending a C&D is not illegal, so although the Disney lawyers can privately advise against sending it, they can't outright refuse to without inviting sanctions and/or disbarment.
A lawyer can choose not to represent a client (unless he is or is acting as a public defender), but again if you already represent them you can't just drop their case cold without a damn good reason such as a conflict of interest that prevents you from ethically representing them any longer. "My client is a scumbag and I don't like him" isn't even close to sufficient reason to drop a case.
I use Dapper every day on a Dell Latitude laptop. For the most part, my experience is that the system is stable and responsive, and the apps are there to do what I need. However, video playback is still the Achilles' heel of Linux in general and Ubuntu in my specific case. It's not a codec thing -- it's issues with the interfaces. First I tried gmplayer, xine, totem-gstreamer, totem-xine, VLC, and Kaffeine. All of them had one or more of the following issues:
Eventually on a lark I tried mplayer from a shell and lo and behold, it displayed the correct length, figured out the aspect ratio on its own, and has useful forward/reverse skipping and scanning with dynamic video update during the process. It also handled a file that none of the others would play -- maybe a corrupted data stream. But that's not something a typical user will be able to figure out how to do (especially since Ubuntu's menu item for gmplayer is called "Mplayer"), nor should they be forced to.
These are decoded Tivo files, so we're talking MPEG-2 with aspect ratios ands timecodes embedded in the data stream (verified by the console vomit from mplayer) -- there's no excuse for any player that can do MPEG-2 to get either of these wrong by default.
Then there are the occasional packaging issues. Last night I got clever and decided to install mythtv's frontend to watch videos so I could maybe use closed-captioning. After the synaptic install of mythtv-frontend, I had no menu item for MythTV under Sound and Video, so I ran "mythtv &" from a shell. After much wrestling with a database error that turned out to have a simple fix, I finally got mythtv to launch, at which point it told me I shouldn't run "mythtv" but "mythfrontend" and terminated (so maybe I didn't need mysql after all?) I ran mythfrontend and after a little configuration I was watching video. Three problems here:
Yeah, this is all the mythtv package maintainer's fault, but why has a package with major deficiencies like these persisted without a fix for long enough for there to be months' worth of posts in dozens of forums complaining about pretty much the exact issues I had? Somebody should have taken over (or been assigned) this package to fix it long ago.
One of the reasons free hydrogen and helium are so scarce on earth is because they're so light (being the two lightest elements) that they tend to escape to space rather easily. The Moon can't even hold heavier molecules like O2 and N2 for any length of time; what makes anyone think there will be significant levels of helium there? Yeah, solar wind. I don't buy it. If it's there in levels concentrated enough to "mine" practically by heating it out of the lunar soil as some propose, it's probably outgassing pretty quickly too, so it won't be there long. But let's assume the castle-in-the-air builders are correct for a moment.
The (generous) estimates I see say about 1 million metric tons of He-3 scattered across the surface of the Moon. Given the Moon's surface area is about 38.5 million square kilometers (diameter = ~3500 km, radius = ~1750 km, surface area of a sphere = 4(pi)r^2), we're looking at moving and heating 38.5 square kilometers of soil to a depth of some meters (let's say 2 to be conservative). That's close to 80 cubic kilometers (80 billion cubic meters) of soil to process per ton of He-3.
For comparison, the largest earth-moving project I am able to find on Earth is the building of the artificial island for the new Hong Kong airport -- 350 million cubic meters of material moved in two and a half years. So now we have to go to the Moon and build the Hong Kong airport island over 200 times (220 times if my numbers are correct) for each metric ton of He-3. Wouldn't it be easier, cheaper and faster to just collect the solar wind directly?
Back in the day, there was one gotta-have-it Mac control panel: SuperClock, which let you monkey with the time and date display in the menu bar. I had mine set up to display the time/date in dd-MMM-YYYY HH:mm format. For System 7.5, a large part of the update from 7.0/7.1 was the addition of a whole bundle of third-party extensions that had come to be recognized as essential, and SuperClock was at or near the top of that list.
Somewhere, the SuperClock author is crying his eyes out.
When you make something that works. You start to play with it to make it do more. It's complex. Then it fails. Then you make it simple.
This is a well-known effect in software engineering called the second-system effect. It's not just because you start wanting the product to do more, but wanting it to do everything. The seminal software-engineering work The Mythical Man-Month grew directly out of the author's experience of SSE on the OS/360 project a second-system) at IBM.
The answer to SSE is often (though not always) a ground-up reengineering (the real answer, of course, is to have a controlled specification and implementation process in place so you don't go overboard in the first place). It could be argued that every major OS revision produced at Microsoft since DOS 5.0 and NT 3.51 has been a "second system" in comparison to that which it was intended to replace.
The "source of the funding" is "a particular group of people" -- businesses and unions especially. Their ability to speak with their dollars is restricted -- they have to set up PACs to do the same thing other entities can do without all the folderol.
I'm not arguing that this is a priori a bad thing, but I am arguing that it's a restriction on speech, and in particular a restriction on speech that creates an "unprotected class" (contrast with civil-rights legislation that does the opposite).
Has everyone forgotten their Internet history? Who was the major sponsor of the 1996 CDA that would have outlawed "indecent" material on the Internet (enacted but struck down by the Supreme Court)? The 1999 Safe Schools Internet Act (never passed)? The 2000 Child Internet Protection Act that requires schools and libraries to presumptively filter Internet access to receive funding earmarked for them? Hint: the answer is the same in all three cases.
John McCain has consistently led a crusade to have government interfere in the Internet. How can anyone take him seriously as a small-government conservative or a guardian of civil liberties?
...but McCain/Feingold directly restricts the content of ads. It is illegal to refer to a candidate in an ad paid for by an organization that takes soft-money contributions. That is both a finance restriction and a content restriction. Put another way, if an act were passed prohibiting groups who have members of a particular minority from talking about candidates, would you disingenuously attempt to argue that it isn't a free-speech restriction?
Well, I've always thought of the Internet in terms of information flow, but a string of ones and zeros doesn't really do anything for people who don't know what binary is. The first thing I can come up with myself is a whole bunch of arrows pointing to a little stick-person, representing abstractly the idea that "things flow to you when you use this application", but you still have to represent "information" in some way or it just looks like you're being blown around by the wind.
About the best solution I can come up with, and it's a serious kludge, is to have each localization of the interface have some culture- or language-specific representation of "news" with arrows or other representation of the idea of that news being transmitted or given to a person.
I appreciate and agree with your desire to add to the discussion, so I tried really hard to find something in your post that related to the OLPC "View Source" button. I read your post five or six times, but I didn't find anything. There must be some subtle shade of meaning that somehow relates to the topic of discussion, but it is beyond my ability to discern. Since it is unimaginable that you would criticize my failure to contribute to the discussion in a post which itself also fails to contribute in precisely the same way, I can only apologize for my lack of perception.
I find it interesting that you are under the twin misapprehensions that a) thread drift never occurs b) your post related in some meaningful way to the View Source button. My post related in a meaningful way to your post, providing additional info to what you had noted -- your followup to it didn't really add anything to anything. (Assuming you actually do care about my opinion of the View Source button, I think it's a waste of space that could go to any of dozens of things that would be better uses of a square centimeter of keyboard real estate.)
I will further note that where I work, the secretaries quit bothering me about most of the impossible things they wanted after about a year, which has left me more time to find and enjoy the excellent coffee to be had in various shops near my office, which I find better than cookies. (We usually get cookies for free whenever there's an event of any sort anyway, so don't feel as though I'm missing out.) But even if it weren't clear before, it is now eminently clear that you are a troll, so I shall cease feeding you.
Believe it or not, a lot of people are completely unaware of the fact that different word processing apps use different formats -- they think it's all the same underneath. So "Word uses a completely different data model from WordPerfect" is not the "obvious" thing I'm sure we all wish it were. Getting up on your high horse about it doesn't add anything to the discussion, and makes you look like an ass to boot. Of course, explaining this basic concept to your secretaries so they understand it and quit asking you about it might unfortunately resemble actual work, unlike snarking about it on Slashdot.
Just so you know as well, there is a world food shortage. Food is basically oil in terms of scarcity and world-wide production. We don't have the food to feed the world.
A world food shortage? Really? To date everything I've heard suggests that the issue is unequal distribution -- that there is more than enough arable land to provide a balanced diet of some variety to everyone in the world. Some countries have an abundance of natively fertile soil, such as the US and Canada; some have used clever hacks to feed themselves, like Israel; and some have serious issues with sustaining their own population without imports, like North Korea or, I presume, Japan.
In fact, Amartya Sen, the 1998 Nobel Prize winner for Economics, demonstrated that the issue is not a lack of ability to grow food, but distribution and choice issues, that causes hunger in many areas of the world.
The other issue... is that the icons didn't make any sense to me, nor did most of the interface. I got that the globe icon was a browser, but that was pretty much it.
I've always wondered about this. Why does a globe represent the WWW? This goes right back to the days of Mosaic, with the globe superimposed on the S (for Supercomputing?) Of course in 1992-1994 it was more commonly known as "the World Wide Web" or the "WWW" rather than just "the Web" or "the Internet", so a globe (world) was obvious. But when we're dealing with users who have no knowledge of the history of the Internet, why should a globe be the default? There have to be more intuitive icons for "information that comes from someplace else", especially when we're talking about TCP/IP to other planets now.
Sorry, those secretaries can hope all they want, but barring a major reengineering of the Word format, Reveal Codes will never happen in Word, ever. The best explanation of why is here; in summary, WordPerfect uses inline marking (think HTML), where Word uses nested containers with formatting info in binary blobs at beginning and end of the document. So Reveal Codes implemented literally in Word would just mark off the containers and parse the leading and trailing data for you; you'd still have to mentally map formatting info to the container it applied to. Word does have Reveal Formatting, but that's not nearly the same thing.
Let's be honest: you could put a horse-apple in a box, call it by a fancy-sounding name, announce it will be available in limited release on a certain date at a price of $1000 each, and people would line up to buy it just to be OMG FIRST!!!! It doesn't matter that it's (literally) a piece of crap -- to them, it's a symbol of exclusivity, and that's all that matters to some people.
The people I know don't tend to be the stand-in-line-for-a-week-before sort. They have better uses for their time and money.
Anyone who has ever believed that Microsoft is genuinely on the consumer's side in any kind of licensing question is so naive they shouldn't be allowed out of the house without a minder.
It's echoing what others have already said, but there was a time I looked for the Sony name on electronics and bought their brand (or others that used their components) almost exclusively. Sony Walkman, Sony stereo, Sony Trinitron TVs and monitors...
Since my wife got hit by the Suncomm DRM on a Sony/BMG CD about a year ago, I've still looked for the name -- to avoid it. No one I know is buying a PS3 -- everyone wants a Wii and has or wants an Xbox 360. No one I know is buying high-def movies because they're waiting for Blu-Ray to inevitably crash and burn so the format war will be over. Seems like the last year or two Sony has lost it so badly it may be impossible for them to get it back.
We're a long way from "Sony -- because Caucasians are just too damn tall."
The primary configuration of BitLocker involves a TPM. If your computer has one, the key is stored in the TPM, and automatically provided on boot (you can optionally require a PIN). If you don't have a TPM, you can store the key on the active partition*, on a USB key, or possibly on a plain old floppy disk (our instructor wasn't sure on that one). As a last resort you can export a recovery key as a long alphanumeric string (48 characters I believe) and print it or save it somewhere.
If you have the key and the drive, you can get the data, and since the perpetrator probably doesn't want to type a 48-character recovery key every time he boots the PC, he most likely has a key disk of some sort laying around. You might still have to get through the PIN, but I imagine that's a lot easier to brute-force than a 256-bit key (or you can legally compel him to tell you, but we'll assume he's an uncooperative sod and refuses).
* To use BitLocker, you have to have a small active partition that is NOT the OS partition, which is where the BitLocker stuff loads from on boot. You can actually put the key here as well, if you have no TPM and don't want to have to carry around a separate disk.
Wait... what?
Seriously, in all the time and with all the people I've debated the McDonald's hot-coffee case, this is the very first time I've heard of a theory that the specific restaurant was to blame, that it was for the sake of a promotion, that McDonald's had been warned by health inspectors and that it was an isolated incident. The summaries of the case I've seen all agree that McDonald's standard practice was to serve coffee at that temperature, and that there were hundreds of previous settled claims. No mention of health inspectors.
The reason Stella Liebeck got millions from the jury was because McDonald's blew her off, refusing to pay her medical claim where they had paid hundreds of others, and the jury found that to be so cold and callous that they socked McDonald's for it.
One reason we've seen more disclosures like this lately is because of a recent California law that requires disclosure in such cases if California citizens are affected by the breach. I'm not sure if the law requires actual knowledge of a particular type of data being compromised, but this could be the lever he needs to get the company to DTRT and disclose (you only have to disclose to Californians, but after that, it's pretty much going to get out so you might as well disclose nationally right off). As I understand it the penalties for non-compliance are pretty harsh, and could conceivably fall on him as well, as a person with knowledge of the breach.
As others have noted, the consequences of doing business poorly can be worse than the results of not doing it at all. But the other dimension is what I call "bullshit factor". It works like this: You're a small IT shop serving, let us say, 30 small-business customers on a fairly regular basis. You're approached by a business with large needs -- needs you can't handle (say you're a sysadmin shop, and they need programmers). You decline, and you offer them a lead to a shop you are pretty sure you can handle the work.
This has two positive effects for you:
1) You have built a quid-pro-quo with the other shop. One day you may suddenly find that they have been referring customers with needs they can't handle to you. This can go forward and eventually become a formal partnership or even a merger to the benefit of both businesses.
2) This company you declined to take on now know that you're not feeding them bullshit just to get business -- you care about the quality of your work more than the quantity. People remember that -- the kind of people you want to work with do, anyway. Chances are pretty good that when they have needs you can meet, that they'll come back to you, or if you expand and become able to take on their needs, you can approach them later to see how happy they are and throw your hat in the ring if they've got problems.
Even if you never hear from or of BigCompany again, as others have noted, at least BigCompany isn't badmouthing you to their partners and hauling you into court because you screwed up (avoiding negative reputation and lawsuits is as much of a win as gaining positive reputation and money, though it's harder to quantify).
The OP does have serious staffing problems by his own admission, and if he can bite the bullet and hire some competent staff to take care of his existing needs, he'll be better served in the long run, not least because he'll have gained an idea of how to grow in an orderly fashion.
Now, there are refinements to be made. For one, interpreting the motion-capture as spline curves, instead of simple smoothed collections of points as they apparently are doing now, would allow for easy tweaking of the design. It would also allow imposing some automated corrections on the form, like "shift the top of this three-legged table until the center of gravity is on a line perpendicular to the plane of the legs which intersects that plane at the geometric center of the triangle defined by the ends of the legs" (which is to say, "make this three-legged table as stable as possible").
Or, "make all four legs of this chair coplanar in a plane parallel to the plane that best fits the seat, and make the geometric center of the seat lie on a line perpendicular to the plane of the ends of the legs that also contains the geometric center of the polygon defined by the ends of the legs" ("make the chair not wobbly and stable to sit on")
Which means the first entity to not like you can put you out of business by giving away what you charge for. Rare indeed is the company that has made a significant amount of money selling purely GPL- or BSD-licensed software (Red Hat is one, sendmail probably is another).
Basically if you're depending on income from software sales of GPL software to sustain your business, you're a moron. Even Red Hat these days is mostly known for selling development and support rather than the actual CDs the software comes on -- probably the only reason they even still sell CDs is to get some face time in places like CompUSA.
It's called the "McMurdo panorama", for what reason I can't find out, but the images are of the "winter haven" region in Gusev crater. The rovers have driven only a few miles each since landing nearly 3 years ago (but that's an incredible achievement compared to anything that's gone before in planetary landings).