She certainly doesn't sound as evil as the submitter of the article would suggest.
"It is infinitely better for the EU to harmonise laws across the EU with a view to limiting patentability, than to continue with the mess of national courts and European Patent Office (EPO) systems, and the drift towards US patent models."
Sounds sensible to me, but then again, no one has ever shown me a computer program or business method that merited a patent, so I'd like to see the strictest possible limits on such patents.
In the end, it's EU directive that will have to speak for itself. I'll try and dig up a copy of the draft.
Absolutely... how is loading stuff from a disk and running it going to teach you programming?
I am currently learning Javam by working my way through 'Learning Java' (O'Reilly). The great thing is that many examples in the book are incomplete code snippets rather than runnable programs. To make them go, one usually has to supply a framework and some missing bits. Sometimes suggest a few improvements to the code you can try out. All that gives one a real hands-on experience, and having gone halfway through the book, I feel confident writing code in this language and understanding what's going on as well. (On the downside... this is not a full Java reference, nor is it very suitable for beginning programmers. Some knowledge of OO and programming in general is required)
RSI is a catch-all for a multitude of afflictions with a wide variety of causes, for example:
- leaning on your elbows a lot
- being overweight and not having enough exercise
- an incorrect posture
- not enough breaks during computer use
- stress (oh yes)
- using a mouse ill-suited to your hand
or a combination of these. Being in good shape and exercising daily reduces your risk... but not to zero. I know plenty of people in good shape that are fighting with RSI. In contrast, I'm hardly an athlete myself, overweight and not doing enough exercise. I use computers a lot more than most of my co-workers... yet I have no RSI myself. I put it down to paying attention to posture while working, using a good keyboard and mouse, and taking regular breaks.
Oh... like many other poster, I too doubt the validity of this study
"As for collecting VAT for all state, well this is the price for making buisness with those country. Do not like it ? Go away from those country."
Bah, let them make the local businesses competitive by doing away with VAT then altogether and collecting some more taxes in Income Tax. Or just let the US companies get away with it. My point was that anyone, including you or me, can do business with the whole world, without much difficulty! Imagine that! That is one of the great things about the internet, not only from the merchants' point of view, but especially from the consumer's viewpoint. Currently, not only can I buy ebooks at Amazon, but also pay to download embroidery patterns from ms. Rose in New Zealand, or a specialist application from mr. Alonso in Venezuela. Amazon will be happy to collect the EU tax, but ms. Rose and mr. Alonso will probably not bother selling abroad if they have to deal with foreign tax agencies. In fact, if their market shrinks down to domestic sales only because of this, they might not bother offering their wares online at all. And the world will be a poorer place for it.
I hate it when the bureaucrats get in the way... we need less barriers to international trade, not more.
You are right: that's the way to go about solving problems in the workplace. Getting results that way might not be so easy. I have some experience along those lines.
Managers have to juggle constantly to satisfy a number of stakeholders: the board, the shareholders, the customers, and the employees. It's no coincidence that I list employees last; sadly in these times the employees often get the short end of the deal. Not because management is unfeeling or because they don't care about employees, but it is felt that the employees can be pushed the most without breaking. Piss a client off and he'll take his business elsewhere. Disappoint the stockholders and they'll dump the stock or ask all sorts of nasty questions at the Stockholders' Meeting. But piss of your employees and they'll just keep going. Sure they'll grumble, but they won't quit on you unless you really go too far.
Also, some managers do not like you to bring them trouble. Oh they like feedback and all, but if you're the only one to come to them to "Find out what the problems of the company are, and talk about how the company is dealing with them", they might label you as "the troublesome one". You may even find that ephitet duly noted in your personnel file (oh yes...) Instead of just doing your work, you come to them to tell them how to do their work, with a bunch of issues that frankly are a big headache. Well, that depends on your boss, and how you approach him. Still, the easiest (and therefor the most common) reply would be "Just do your job like everyone else".
Getting no results from your boss, you decide to see his boss. Your problems already start even before you enter his door. For one, your boss will probably be pissed for going over his head. Managers don't like it when their people speak with their supervisors. Second, your manager's boss will already be on a personal level with your manager. He probably works intensively with him on a day-to-day basis, whereas you are just an entry on the budget sheets. If your manager has reported that everything's fine, he might think you're exaggerating and wasting his time. Then again, if you keep running into a blank wall like this, you could consider switching departments rather than quitting.
I do realise I paint a bleak picture here. Sure, there are good companies with good management, but my guess is that the people considering to quit en masse are not working for one of them.
"I guess you need to ask yourself what you feel is more important: the well-being of the company (and your source of employment) or your personal pride"
I submit that in any decent company, this question should not and will not come up. Even if it is already 'in deep financial shit'. In a decent company, staff may be asked to bear a heavier burden or even take less pay, while the downturn lasts. The point is that staff is asked to make a sacrifice, rather than being pushed into that situation by management firing half a department and then expecting the remaining staff to do all of the work. Also, a good company will reward their employees' loyalty when things go better again.
Don't tell me that I am somehow expected to make these sacrifices. And that is exactly the attitude of (too) many companies these days: "Times are rough and we all have to suck it up. Hey, be thankful you have a job at all". Treat people like shit and they'll return the favor one day.
And what if inviting a number of co-workers to walk out to form our own company may spell the end for your erstwhile employer, sending other people into unemployment? If you think that that fact should give you pause, think again. You are not a slave to your company nor to your coworkers.
A very good question, especially since this tax concerns non-physical goods such as web subscriptions, downloaded music and software, etc, that cannot be taxed at the border. I see three possibilities:
1) The small retailers will not bother with the hassle and expense of collecting tax for a foreign nation. The EU will not bother going after these retailers either, and all will be well.
2) The EU will force all EU ISP's to block net access to the small retailers' sites.
3) The EU (perhaps even with help from the US) will try and make these retailers reject sales from the EU.
This sounds like an administrative nightmare. The beauty of the Internet is that I can sell goods to anyone in the world who wants them, with a minimum investment in a website and the means to process credit card payments. This requirement could spell the death of that idea, and I find it incredibly selfish of the EU. What if every country made this a requirement? As a small retailer, I would suddenly find I have to collect taxes for the EU, certain US states, Russia, the Ukraine, Zimbabwe, Thailand, Australia, Venezuela... imagine the nightmare of doing administration for all this. Are they somehow counting on no other country implementing a similar policy?
There are all sorts of disaster scenarios, some quite plausible as pilots have reported similar effects when they left their phone on by accident (read the article linked to in another post). Apparently cell phones can affect:
- Navigation / GPS
- Comms
- Autopilot (possibly related to navigation system)
If you're up 30.000 feet, problems caused by mobile phones might be easily corrected. I'm much more worried about problems during takeoff or landing. Imagine a difficult landing in a low cloud cover, and a GSM screwing up the navigations!
Some idiots think it's okay to switch their phone on as soon as the aircraft leaves the runway after a landing. Imagine the GSM messing up the comms system so the pilot misses the order to 'hold at runway 30 because there's a great big 747 taking off there right now'.
Besides these issues, the issue of disrupting the GSM system pales somewhat.
"They disabled our liscence...saying we only had a one machine liscence to use the product, and the install builder software had called back to the company supplying two different IP addresses...and thus, had been registered on two different computers."
A similar case has been brought before court. The software had reported to its publisher about (apparent) illegal copies being used, without the knowledge or consent of the client company. The court ruled that obtaining such information without permission constitutes a breach of privacy, and 'electronic trespassing', a criminal offense.
I've had my share of license issues, where a license server would get confused and release (for example) the C compiler for use, and we had to call the software company to get things fixed. License servers are a pain in the neck, and they are just one more reason to use Free, Open Source tools. I am not an idealist in favour of Free software, but rather a practical guy who will dump a product if it refuses to work too often
A handwriting expert once told me that the cursive script we learn in school, is very useful for learning how to write... but falls woefully short of learning how to write effectively. The script is ill suited for writing quickly and legibly, and most of us in time acquire our own handwriting that is better suited for everyday writing... but sadly, we could do so much better if schools would teach children proper handwriting skills.
That's the problem with the US legal system: you can bring suit against someone, even if your case has no merit whatsoever. As long as you can claim any real and imaginary damages, sue the defendant in the court furthest away from his home town, and keep the case in court for the rest of his life, then you can bully him into settling, instead of him fighting a painful and expensive fight against your case. In the USA, you can win a court case and lose it at the same time, in terms of time and money lost.
In my country and most other countries, if the RIAA would bring a similar suit against me, any decent lawyer would need just a few hours to tell me I'd have a strong case in court. Then, I'd be happy to fight them in court knowing that in the (very likely) case that I'd win, the RIAA would have to reimburse my costs in full. Which is only proper: if you bring an meritless case against someone, he should not be out of pocket for any of the costs incurred.
It's pretty good yes, even though the plethora of ports, drives, buttons, temperature displays, memory stick readers etc. isn't really to my taste. On the front of a computer I'd expect a power switch, cd/r drive, perhaps a USB port, but not much more. Also, the color green he picked would not be my first choice either. It's too dark: computer manufacturers make their equipment white or beige (unless you're Dell) for a reason: it'll blend better into the environment.
The one thing that really stands out are those awful dinky top-mounted hinges that he used for the top lid. This kind of hinge screams "half-baked hobby effort" and a cabinet maker worth his salt really should know better.
Funny how half the people who proclaim this truth play the lottery themselves.
A lottery is more like a negative insurance. With insurance, you pay a small amount against the tiny chance that a big disaster will befall you, so that you'll be able to carry the financial burden at least. With a lottery, you pay a small amount against the tiny chance that your number hits, so you'll be thumping your nose at those people who told you lotteries are for people who are bad at math.
They aren't lying, the ROMs are likely to be originals, and the machines' owners are not breaking the law.
Confused?
The law (at least around here) does not state that the machine has to be truly random. The law merely specifies a minimum average payout. The machine probably has to cheat in order to meet the lawful minimum payout, without (obviously) exceeding it by too much.
Heh, I remember the gool ol' Random Runner, before it had its programming upgraded. It would offer you exactly the same gamble as the article mentions, ie. two flashing lights with 'win' and 'lose', you hit a button and one of the lights stays on. What you did on the Random Runner was keep the button depressed. If you lost, too bad, but if you won... the next level bet would start but you'd win automatically, and the next bet, and so on.
Random Runners were popular with proprietors as well, as it was easy to obtain ROMs for these machines that would drastically lower the payout. Seeig this kind of machine is like a red flag for inspectors; they'll be sure to inspect the ROM in the machine.
"Finally my name and the name of 3,551,644 other people will be sent to mars (on DVDs on board of the two landers, more details here) I hope E.T. will check this out soon:D"
He will.... and he will send you and those other 3,551,644 people a great big fine for littering!
Exactly! In fact I really prefer extra desktop space (in the form of extra monitors) over higher resolution. I have a 17" (1280x1024) TFT flanked by two 15" (1024x768) ones all running one extended desktop, all of them low cost. I think I paid about $650 for the 17" unit, and the 15" ones go for like $200 now. Working on this setup is a dream come true, and it really does allow you to be much more productive. In fact I managed to get a dual head setup at work as well for that reason.
Sure beats CRTs! After having used crisp TFT displays I will never go back to one. Besides... if you get anything over 17", you'll end up with a freaking dog kennel on your desk. And after having done without it, I found the higher resolutions of CRTs not to be all that useful.
"Would it take lots of money for a big legal team or could you just have one good(but not exceptional) lawyer?"
That is precisely the problem with the US legal system. It is a distinction which the Dutch language captures rather effectively with "gelijk hebben" and "gelijk krijgen". The first means to be right. The second means others acknowledging that you are right, deservedly or not. (lit. "to obtain/be given right") "Gelijk krijgen" in a US court is the hard part...
You can have the full strength of the law on your side, but without legal clout and stamina (i.e. a well-filled war chest) you will end up face down in the dirt against a powerful opponent. If some company takes on Microsoft, MS will simply draw the battle out with every legal trick in the books that their team of lawyers can dig up, until the plaintiff runs out of money. Then they'll make you settle or they just buy your company outright to make the lawsuit go away. A settlement is a double win for Microsoft: one less opponent in this matter, and their patent stands as strongly as it did before.
The way they calculate this is also an excellent cover-your-ass tactic. When the CEO asks "Why are actual sales so far behind projected sales?", the board does not have to own up that their marketing skillz suxx0r, or that their forecasts were beefed up to make the quarterly's look good (and hence their bonuses). Instead: "Why sir, it's because of software piracy. The shortfall in sales can be explained 100% by the piracy figures!"
He must have learned English when he was young, since Jedis seemingly get started on their training at a very young age. Notice how Yoda is always whining whenever a candidate for Jedi traineeship is brought before him: "Too old he is, too old to begin the training".
There's another thing though: he has always been strong in the Force, and because of that others may have been afraid to correct him. We sometimes get memo's from senior management with incredible spelling and grammar mistakes in them, but I'm not going to be the one to reply: "Please have your memo proofread the next time before you send it, your English stinks!".
"Yoda didn't invert *all* of his sentences, which is something the script writers in I and II should have noticed. The lines in those episodes sound as if someone wrote a bunch of bland sentences and inverted them. His lines in Empire and Return of the Jedi, OTOH, reflected genuinely the concept of a character who is approaching English (or whatever their "common tongue" really is -- linguistics is rarely addressed in the Star Wars saga) as a second language."
That always had me wondering. You would think that as an 800(?) year old guy who is supposed to be really smart (he was CEO of the Jedi's for a long time after all), and is surrounded by native speakers all the time, he'd speak English a little bit better than that. Flawed by the dark side his grammar is!
Imagine how things would have been with the old state monopoly still in place.
I remember the days when Holland had a state monopoly telco. We weren't allowed to hook up our own phones, we had to rent them from the PTT. They had a choice of about 6 phones. Making a new extension in your home? Nono, you have to get the PTT guy to do it. Voicemail, call waiting, toll-free numbers? Forget it! Top that with outrageous rates for international calling. Oh, and it wasn't that the technology for some of these goodies did not yet exist: other countries had them. PTT was in no great hurry to introduce them. Why would they be?
The first step in deregulation came when they allowed people to modify their own wiring and to hook up any (approved) piece of equipment. For the first time a wireless phone could be had. Finally, a 4-line home exchange could be had for $200 instead of $800.
Then they deregulated further and other phone companies appeared on the scene, offering carrier (pre-)select. International rates now are a fraction of what they used to be. The PTT finally introduced voicemail and other modern tools that people got used to on the mobile phones.
No, I think deregulation has brought us consumers a lot of good things. And soon, for the first time in history I will be able to subscribe to a telephone service through my ISP (using ADSL and VoIP), bypassing PTT (now KPN) completely. My gain? About half the monthly charges and lower rates to about every destination.
Like it or loathe it, videogaming is fast becoming an important everyday pastime for the masses, much like television. Strangely, it is still perceived as being something for the in-crowd, something that only nerds so. Television = mainstream, games = nerdy. At any party, when asked if I have watched the latest installment of Big Brother on TV last night, and I tell them that "no, I do not watch TV", I am met with blank stares of disbelief. But if someone asks if they have played some game or another, everyone (including the gamers) will most likely stare at the asker and wonder how on earth he can be so insensitive as to bring up a topic like that at a party.
If you had read a headline about academic papers being written about viewing habits or other TV-related stuff, you'd probably have shrugged and moved on.
KPN, the ex-state run telco, still has a monopoly over the local loop. They have grudgingly allowed ISPs to offer ADSL over their local loops, but not without sabotaging the efforts here and there. But voice telephony is the very core of KPN's business... My ISP has for ages tried to offer telephony service in addition to ADSL. KPN has quite openly sabotaged their efforts. The competition and telco watchdogs have repeatedly warned KPN: "Allow such-and-such access to your facilities to arrange co-location or pay a $150.000 fine". They just smiled and payed the fines, until my ISP's voice telephony division went bankrupt. As a result I am still forced to pay the ripoff KPN fees for my local loop in order to have my ADSL.
Now my ISP seems to go another route: they will use VOIP over my ADSL line to offer me phone services! I'll get a box which will VOIP-enable my analog phone, and I'll be able to use the phone service from my computer as well. The best part: the telco watchdog figures that with this setup, I am no longer obliged to have a KPN phone subscription! Instead I pay my ISP, who will in turn pay a (very low) nominal fee to KPN for use of the local loop. This nominal fee is set by the telco watchdog.
Slashdot Mirror
She certainly doesn't sound as evil as the submitter of the article would suggest.
"It is infinitely better for the EU to harmonise laws across the EU with a view to limiting patentability, than to continue with the mess of national courts and European Patent Office (EPO) systems, and the drift towards US patent models."
Sounds sensible to me, but then again, no one has ever shown me a computer program or business method that merited a patent, so I'd like to see the strictest possible limits on such patents.
In the end, it's EU directive that will have to speak for itself. I'll try and dig up a copy of the draft.
Absolutely... how is loading stuff from a disk and running it going to teach you programming?
I am currently learning Javam by working my way through 'Learning Java' (O'Reilly). The great thing is that many examples in the book are incomplete code snippets rather than runnable programs. To make them go, one usually has to supply a framework and some missing bits. Sometimes suggest a few improvements to the code you can try out. All that gives one a real hands-on experience, and having gone halfway through the book, I feel confident writing code in this language and understanding what's going on as well. (On the downside... this is not a full Java reference, nor is it very suitable for beginning programmers. Some knowledge of OO and programming in general is required)
RSI is a catch-all for a multitude of afflictions with a wide variety of causes, for example:
- leaning on your elbows a lot
- being overweight and not having enough exercise
- an incorrect posture
- not enough breaks during computer use
- stress (oh yes)
- using a mouse ill-suited to your hand
or a combination of these. Being in good shape and exercising daily reduces your risk... but not to zero. I know plenty of people in good shape that are fighting with RSI. In contrast, I'm hardly an athlete myself, overweight and not doing enough exercise. I use computers a lot more than most of my co-workers... yet I have no RSI myself. I put it down to paying attention to posture while working, using a good keyboard and mouse, and taking regular breaks.
Oh... like many other poster, I too doubt the validity of this study
"As for collecting VAT for all state, well this is the price for making buisness with those country. Do not like it ? Go away from those country."
Bah, let them make the local businesses competitive by doing away with VAT then altogether and collecting some more taxes in Income Tax. Or just let the US companies get away with it. My point was that anyone, including you or me, can do business with the whole world, without much difficulty! Imagine that! That is one of the great things about the internet, not only from the merchants' point of view, but especially from the consumer's viewpoint. Currently, not only can I buy ebooks at Amazon, but also pay to download embroidery patterns from ms. Rose in New Zealand, or a specialist application from mr. Alonso in Venezuela. Amazon will be happy to collect the EU tax, but ms. Rose and mr. Alonso will probably not bother selling abroad if they have to deal with foreign tax agencies. In fact, if their market shrinks down to domestic sales only because of this, they might not bother offering their wares online at all. And the world will be a poorer place for it.
I hate it when the bureaucrats get in the way... we need less barriers to international trade, not more.
You are right: that's the way to go about solving problems in the workplace. Getting results that way might not be so easy. I have some experience along those lines.
Managers have to juggle constantly to satisfy a number of stakeholders: the board, the shareholders, the customers, and the employees. It's no coincidence that I list employees last; sadly in these times the employees often get the short end of the deal. Not because management is unfeeling or because they don't care about employees, but it is felt that the employees can be pushed the most without breaking. Piss a client off and he'll take his business elsewhere. Disappoint the stockholders and they'll dump the stock or ask all sorts of nasty questions at the Stockholders' Meeting. But piss of your employees and they'll just keep going. Sure they'll grumble, but they won't quit on you unless you really go too far.
Also, some managers do not like you to bring them trouble. Oh they like feedback and all, but if you're the only one to come to them to "Find out what the problems of the company are, and talk about how the company is dealing with them", they might label you as "the troublesome one". You may even find that ephitet duly noted in your personnel file (oh yes...) Instead of just doing your work, you come to them to tell them how to do their work, with a bunch of issues that frankly are a big headache. Well, that depends on your boss, and how you approach him. Still, the easiest (and therefor the most common) reply would be "Just do your job like everyone else".
Getting no results from your boss, you decide to see his boss. Your problems already start even before you enter his door. For one, your boss will probably be pissed for going over his head. Managers don't like it when their people speak with their supervisors. Second, your manager's boss will already be on a personal level with your manager. He probably works intensively with him on a day-to-day basis, whereas you are just an entry on the budget sheets. If your manager has reported that everything's fine, he might think you're exaggerating and wasting his time. Then again, if you keep running into a blank wall like this, you could consider switching departments rather than quitting.
I do realise I paint a bleak picture here. Sure, there are good companies with good management, but my guess is that the people considering to quit en masse are not working for one of them.
"I guess you need to ask yourself what you feel is more important: the well-being of the company (and your source of employment) or your personal pride"
I submit that in any decent company, this question should not and will not come up. Even if it is already 'in deep financial shit'. In a decent company, staff may be asked to bear a heavier burden or even take less pay, while the downturn lasts. The point is that staff is asked to make a sacrifice, rather than being pushed into that situation by management firing half a department and then expecting the remaining staff to do all of the work. Also, a good company will reward their employees' loyalty when things go better again.
Don't tell me that I am somehow expected to make these sacrifices. And that is exactly the attitude of (too) many companies these days: "Times are rough and we all have to suck it up. Hey, be thankful you have a job at all". Treat people like shit and they'll return the favor one day.
And what if inviting a number of co-workers to walk out to form our own company may spell the end for your erstwhile employer, sending other people into unemployment? If you think that that fact should give you pause, think again. You are not a slave to your company nor to your coworkers.
A very good question, especially since this tax concerns non-physical goods such as web subscriptions, downloaded music and software, etc, that cannot be taxed at the border. I see three possibilities:
1) The small retailers will not bother with the hassle and expense of collecting tax for a foreign nation. The EU will not bother going after these retailers either, and all will be well.
2) The EU will force all EU ISP's to block net access to the small retailers' sites.
3) The EU (perhaps even with help from the US) will try and make these retailers reject sales from the EU.
This sounds like an administrative nightmare. The beauty of the Internet is that I can sell goods to anyone in the world who wants them, with a minimum investment in a website and the means to process credit card payments. This requirement could spell the death of that idea, and I find it incredibly selfish of the EU. What if every country made this a requirement? As a small retailer, I would suddenly find I have to collect taxes for the EU, certain US states, Russia, the Ukraine, Zimbabwe, Thailand, Australia, Venezuela... imagine the nightmare of doing administration for all this. Are they somehow counting on no other country implementing a similar policy?
There are all sorts of disaster scenarios, some quite plausible as pilots have reported similar effects when they left their phone on by accident (read the article linked to in another post). Apparently cell phones can affect:
- Navigation / GPS
- Comms
- Autopilot (possibly related to navigation system)
If you're up 30.000 feet, problems caused by mobile phones might be easily corrected. I'm much more worried about problems during takeoff or landing. Imagine a difficult landing in a low cloud cover, and a GSM screwing up the navigations!
Some idiots think it's okay to switch their phone on as soon as the aircraft leaves the runway after a landing. Imagine the GSM messing up the comms system so the pilot misses the order to 'hold at runway 30 because there's a great big 747 taking off there right now'.
Besides these issues, the issue of disrupting the GSM system pales somewhat.
"They disabled our liscence...saying we only had a one machine liscence to use the product, and the install builder software had called back to the company supplying two different IP addresses...and thus, had been registered on two different computers."
A similar case has been brought before court. The software had reported to its publisher about (apparent) illegal copies being used, without the knowledge or consent of the client company. The court ruled that obtaining such information without permission constitutes a breach of privacy, and 'electronic trespassing', a criminal offense.
I've had my share of license issues, where a license server would get confused and release (for example) the C compiler for use, and we had to call the software company to get things fixed. License servers are a pain in the neck, and they are just one more reason to use Free, Open Source tools. I am not an idealist in favour of Free software, but rather a practical guy who will dump a product if it refuses to work too often
Cursive is ugly, useless, and difficult to read.
A handwriting expert once told me that the cursive script we learn in school, is very useful for learning how to write... but falls woefully short of learning how to write effectively. The script is ill suited for writing quickly and legibly, and most of us in time acquire our own handwriting that is better suited for everyday writing... but sadly, we could do so much better if schools would teach children proper handwriting skills.
"he DIDN'T DO ANYTHING WRONG!!!"
That's the problem with the US legal system: you can bring suit against someone, even if your case has no merit whatsoever. As long as you can claim any real and imaginary damages, sue the defendant in the court furthest away from his home town, and keep the case in court for the rest of his life, then you can bully him into settling, instead of him fighting a painful and expensive fight against your case. In the USA, you can win a court case and lose it at the same time, in terms of time and money lost.
In my country and most other countries, if the RIAA would bring a similar suit against me, any decent lawyer would need just a few hours to tell me I'd have a strong case in court. Then, I'd be happy to fight them in court knowing that in the (very likely) case that I'd win, the RIAA would have to reimburse my costs in full. Which is only proper: if you bring an meritless case against someone, he should not be out of pocket for any of the costs incurred.
Thanks for that... I can't play it though. Better get the latest codec. Why is it that these stupid codecs have to change every other week?
It's pretty good yes, even though the plethora of ports, drives, buttons, temperature displays, memory stick readers etc. isn't really to my taste. On the front of a computer I'd expect a power switch, cd/r drive, perhaps a USB port, but not much more. Also, the color green he picked would not be my first choice either. It's too dark: computer manufacturers make their equipment white or beige (unless you're Dell) for a reason: it'll blend better into the environment.
The one thing that really stands out are those awful dinky top-mounted hinges that he used for the top lid. This kind of hinge screams "half-baked hobby effort" and a cabinet maker worth his salt really should know better.
Funny how half the people who proclaim this truth play the lottery themselves.
A lottery is more like a negative insurance. With insurance, you pay a small amount against the tiny chance that a big disaster will befall you, so that you'll be able to carry the financial burden at least. With a lottery, you pay a small amount against the tiny chance that your number hits, so you'll be thumping your nose at those people who told you lotteries are for people who are bad at math.
They aren't lying, the ROMs are likely to be originals, and the machines' owners are not breaking the law.
Confused?
The law (at least around here) does not state that the machine has to be truly random. The law merely specifies a minimum average payout. The machine probably has to cheat in order to meet the lawful minimum payout, without (obviously) exceeding it by too much.
Heh, I remember the gool ol' Random Runner, before it had its programming upgraded. It would offer you exactly the same gamble as the article mentions, ie. two flashing lights with 'win' and 'lose', you hit a button and one of the lights stays on. What you did on the Random Runner was keep the button depressed. If you lost, too bad, but if you won... the next level bet would start but you'd win automatically, and the next bet, and so on.
Random Runners were popular with proprietors as well, as it was easy to obtain ROMs for these machines that would drastically lower the payout. Seeig this kind of machine is like a red flag for inspectors; they'll be sure to inspect the ROM in the machine.
"Finally my name and the name of 3,551,644 other people will be sent to mars (on DVDs on board of the two landers, more details here) I hope E.T. will check this out soon :D"
He will.... and he will send you and those other 3,551,644 people a great big fine for littering!
Exactly! In fact I really prefer extra desktop space (in the form of extra monitors) over higher resolution. I have a 17" (1280x1024) TFT flanked by two 15" (1024x768) ones all running one extended desktop, all of them low cost. I think I paid about $650 for the 17" unit, and the 15" ones go for like $200 now. Working on this setup is a dream come true, and it really does allow you to be much more productive. In fact I managed to get a dual head setup at work as well for that reason.
Sure beats CRTs! After having used crisp TFT displays I will never go back to one. Besides... if you get anything over 17", you'll end up with a freaking dog kennel on your desk. And after having done without it, I found the higher resolutions of CRTs not to be all that useful.
"Would it take lots of money for a big legal team or could you just have one good(but not exceptional) lawyer?"
That is precisely the problem with the US legal system. It is a distinction which the Dutch language captures rather effectively with "gelijk hebben" and "gelijk krijgen". The first means to be right. The second means others acknowledging that you are right, deservedly or not. (lit. "to obtain/be given right") "Gelijk krijgen" in a US court is the hard part...
You can have the full strength of the law on your side, but without legal clout and stamina (i.e. a well-filled war chest) you will end up face down in the dirt against a powerful opponent. If some company takes on Microsoft, MS will simply draw the battle out with every legal trick in the books that their team of lawyers can dig up, until the plaintiff runs out of money. Then they'll make you settle or they just buy your company outright to make the lawsuit go away. A settlement is a double win for Microsoft: one less opponent in this matter, and their patent stands as strongly as it did before.
The way they calculate this is also an excellent cover-your-ass tactic. When the CEO asks "Why are actual sales so far behind projected sales?", the board does not have to own up that their marketing skillz suxx0r, or that their forecasts were beefed up to make the quarterly's look good (and hence their bonuses). Instead: "Why sir, it's because of software piracy. The shortfall in sales can be explained 100% by the piracy figures!"
He must have learned English when he was young, since Jedis seemingly get started on their training at a very young age. Notice how Yoda is always whining whenever a candidate for Jedi traineeship is brought before him: "Too old he is, too old to begin the training".
There's another thing though: he has always been strong in the Force, and because of that others may have been afraid to correct him. We sometimes get memo's from senior management with incredible spelling and grammar mistakes in them, but I'm not going to be the one to reply: "Please have your memo proofread the next time before you send it, your English stinks!".
"Yoda didn't invert *all* of his sentences, which is something the script writers in I and II should have noticed. The lines in those episodes sound as if someone wrote a bunch of bland sentences and inverted them. His lines in Empire and Return of the Jedi, OTOH, reflected genuinely the concept of a character who is approaching English (or whatever their "common tongue" really is -- linguistics is rarely addressed in the Star Wars saga) as a second language."
That always had me wondering. You would think that as an 800(?) year old guy who is supposed to be really smart (he was CEO of the Jedi's for a long time after all), and is surrounded by native speakers all the time, he'd speak English a little bit better than that. Flawed by the dark side his grammar is!
Imagine how things would have been with the old state monopoly still in place.
I remember the days when Holland had a state monopoly telco. We weren't allowed to hook up our own phones, we had to rent them from the PTT. They had a choice of about 6 phones. Making a new extension in your home? Nono, you have to get the PTT guy to do it. Voicemail, call waiting, toll-free numbers? Forget it! Top that with outrageous rates for international calling. Oh, and it wasn't that the technology for some of these goodies did not yet exist: other countries had them. PTT was in no great hurry to introduce them. Why would they be?
The first step in deregulation came when they allowed people to modify their own wiring and to hook up any (approved) piece of equipment. For the first time a wireless phone could be had. Finally, a 4-line home exchange could be had for $200 instead of $800.
Then they deregulated further and other phone companies appeared on the scene, offering carrier (pre-)select. International rates now are a fraction of what they used to be. The PTT finally introduced voicemail and other modern tools that people got used to on the mobile phones.
No, I think deregulation has brought us consumers a lot of good things. And soon, for the first time in history I will be able to subscribe to a telephone service through my ISP (using ADSL and VoIP), bypassing PTT (now KPN) completely. My gain? About half the monthly charges and lower rates to about every destination.
Like it or loathe it, videogaming is fast becoming an important everyday pastime for the masses, much like television. Strangely, it is still perceived as being something for the in-crowd, something that only nerds so. Television = mainstream, games = nerdy. At any party, when asked if I have watched the latest installment of Big Brother on TV last night, and I tell them that "no, I do not watch TV", I am met with blank stares of disbelief. But if someone asks if they have played some game or another, everyone (including the gamers) will most likely stare at the asker and wonder how on earth he can be so insensitive as to bring up a topic like that at a party.
If you had read a headline about academic papers being written about viewing habits or other TV-related stuff, you'd probably have shrugged and moved on.
KPN, the ex-state run telco, still has a monopoly over the local loop. They have grudgingly allowed ISPs to offer ADSL over their local loops, but not without sabotaging the efforts here and there. But voice telephony is the very core of KPN's business... My ISP has for ages tried to offer telephony service in addition to ADSL. KPN has quite openly sabotaged their efforts. The competition and telco watchdogs have repeatedly warned KPN: "Allow such-and-such access to your facilities to arrange co-location or pay a $150.000 fine". They just smiled and payed the fines, until my ISP's voice telephony division went bankrupt. As a result I am still forced to pay the ripoff KPN fees for my local loop in order to have my ADSL.
Now my ISP seems to go another route: they will use VOIP over my ADSL line to offer me phone services! I'll get a box which will VOIP-enable my analog phone, and I'll be able to use the phone service from my computer as well. The best part: the telco watchdog figures that with this setup, I am no longer obliged to have a KPN phone subscription! Instead I pay my ISP, who will in turn pay a (very low) nominal fee to KPN for use of the local loop. This nominal fee is set by the telco watchdog.