Except that as a consumer / web searcher when I search for "Louis Vuitton" (not that I have ever even heard of that brand) I *want* to see everything about it and everything like it.
The ruling is about ADVERTISEMENTS, not search results. Ads aren't what I use Google for, they're just how Google pays their bills.
No, it's not about "competitors", it's about "trademarks". So it's very simple, the French court basically says ads (not searches) can't be targetted at trademarks of another company. So other luggage makers (and especially, those cloning Vuitton) can't pay for their ads to come up on a search for Vuitton. (Though they might turn up in the search results.)
but there are people at my company who can barely use windows and you want a company to switch to a much less user friendly environment? The time to retrain people would be horrendous and not to mention training them on completely new software. Changing OS for individuals is not viable for most companies. PERIOD
The ones who "can barely use windows" will complain that the start menu is in a different place and their screensaver won't work, otherwise they won't notice what they're using to type their memos, add up their expenses, or surf their porn. It's the "power users" who've wriiten macros and such who are the difficult ones. Budget for buying Crossover for them while you gradually wean them off.
I worked in an office that due to absorbing other small companies, had CP/M, DOS, Win 3, Win 98, MacOS 7, MacOS 8, all in use, and the staff were mostly clueless; but instead of throwing a fit were mostly willing to spend the few minutes needed to locate the icons to open a word processor. print, email... and that covers 95% of what they needed. It's strange to me that it's assumed that office workers are complete sheep who will be thrown into a panic by the slightest change in their desktop; forgetting that anyone who's worked for 15 years has probably gone through DOS, Win 3/95/98/2K/XP, not to mention Wordstar/WordPerfect/Word5/6/WinWord; Lotus 123/Excel, etc, etc.
Why should one more round of change be so hard, especially with most of the change actually being behind the scenes rather than in the interface -- "open file", "select (with mouse)" "change font", "print" are all the same except for minor cosmetic differences as far as the user is concerned, whatever platform and suite you're using.
I don't see that gibberish on the linked pages (though they may have changed since it was posted). I suspect Timothy composed it (or maybe "excreted" is a better term).
>doc is much easier to edit
I thought you were listing its good points. Many companies release documents in PDF format for this very reason.
I've heard that argument before (from a former boss, actually), and it's pretty stupid. If one needs to edit a PDF, one can just use the right tools -- Acrobat as I mentioned, many other high end publishing tools. A PDF provides no guarantee against tampering. You need to use some form of digital signing, which you can do as easily on any document, down to plain text.
>and Acrobat is pretty expensive, BTW
So use OpenOffice, or Ghostscript, or one of the many other free tools that can output to PDF.
I would still like to ask "How is using a proprietary.doc better than using.pdf or any other open standard and how is Microsoft going to handle this in the future? Any plans on opening it completely?"
1) doc is much easier to edit (as long as you have MSWord -- and Acrobat is pretty expensive, BTW)
2) PDF is proprietary, though open
3) MS has free Word viewers (for Windows)
4) He'd probably also mention XML
But you need to say "better for doing what" to get any answer more than the above. doc is fine to compose and print from; has some useful features for collaboration; sucks for presentation and archival use.
This is to keep the bad guys from using the GPS signal to hit valuble targets with weapons that use the GPS signal for tracking.
The EU will LEAVE their system on in "Very accurate mode", allowing the bad guys to switch systems and hit any target of interest. Even European.
When did "bad guys" ever use GPS to hit targets? If you're tallkng about terrorists, they prefer to hand deliver their ordnance. If military, they're not going to be stupid enough to depend on an enmemy's guidance system.
On the other hand; how many ships would run aground or be lost due to not knowing their position? It's sensible for Europeans not to want o have the safety of their shipping (and air traffic) subject to having the plug pulled by a panicking US leadership. ("Mr President! Ralph Nader has a cruise misile targetted at your Texas ranch!" "Turn off GPS NOW!!")
And it continues the recent FUD theme that "Firefox is going to get screws with malware Real Soon Now". Anyway. I look forward to Firefox shrugging off any such attacks planned by the proverbial Evil Russian Mafia Hackers, while MS and its buddies like Gartner gleefully release PR stating Firefox is fucked every time a new threat appears, no matter how far it gets in the real world. I think it's obvious that Gates' decision to embed the browser into the guts of Windows makes it impossible to secure.
Sorry about the space before the 1.
Try this
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=6434 1
Please, your user number shows you've been around long enough to know that you can't type a long string in a comment without it being broken. Learn to make an HTML link. It's really not hard.
Slashdot is really scraping the bottom of the barrel when it elevates a thread on a Trekkie BBS fantasising about "collecting $12 each from 4 million fans" to "news".
There is a whole world of interesting and worthwhile media aside from multi-mullion budger TV and movies: comics, and even books. Find something different. Science fiction is supposed to be about new ideas, not endless derivative space opera.
On your deathbed, there are two things you won't regret: not spending more time at the office; and not watching more TV.
Let's say some loon decides that he really, really wants to do this in 1910. He could try to browbeat people into building a series of aircraft cariers
Exactly -- but no one would have put the money up for such a plan, as no one will for Zubin's. No one is going to let him run the show, but having him around keeps the subject alive. Having him challenge the ideas forces Nasa to say why some gee whiz idea won't work; and maybe in the process they'll find elements of his plans are worthwhile; it's the opposite effect to that Luddite senator who used to award prizes for what he decided were "worthless" scientific projects. After losing a couple of Shuttles Nasa needs more challenges, not more suffocating caution.
Zubrin is a barking mad cult leader labouring under the messianic misapprehension....Mod me "-1 uncomfortable truth
I could say almost the same about GWB. But that doesn't mean everything either one says or does is completely insane. No one is going to put Zubrin's plans into effect in the way he wants, but having him out there certainly raises the chances of us getting to Mars at all. He seems to turn up on a lot of TV space documentaries, not as a figure of fun but as a serious talking head, and is doing a good job as a "spokesmodel" for space exploration.
Sending people to the moon does not create any seriously interesting new challenges.
I think building habitats on the moon; mining, prospecting for water, growing plants, building a rail gun launcher, etc, are all extremely interesting challenges; if not ones a theoretical physicist could get very excited about. But a farside lunar radio or light telescope might.
To get to Mars we need a ship with artificial gravity and there is no way we can lift one using conventional rocketry.
You don't need a giant Discovery-style carousel to get some g. Just have your spaceship in two parts. Tether them, let the tether out a few hundred metres and spin around their centre of mass.
A harder problem may be solar flare radiation. About the only way to shield against that is lots of mass, I think. That's where lunar (or even asteroid) mining comes in.
. For those of you that get frustrated with waiting for a half hour to talk to some grabass from India that wants you to reformat your computer, here's a few catch phrases you can study up
What a racist rant, modded informative by likeminded rednecks. How about you ponder who is hiring these Indians and firing Americans? It's the white-as-the-driven-snow WASP CEOs. The Indians didn't invade and conquer the American call centers, the American companies chose to outsource to bump up their bottom line.
The quote was from a British newspaper, and in the UK that's how you write acronyms: Qango, Nasa, Nato; but BBC, EU as you spell those out so they retain the caps.
What about spraying a black die onto the dry ice at the poles? Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment. It's been 19 seconds since you hit 'reply'. Excuse me for knowing how to type.
You could have spent a few of those seconds reviewing spelling -- for instance "dye" not "die" is a colouring agent.
It's a virgin soil and it has to remain so : we have to much to learn about it instead of polluting it
Insightful?
Terraforming Mars at the most optimistic will take centuries. During those centuries we'll have plenty of time to study Mars before there is any noticeable change. I submit that creating an ecosystem on a sterile planet, or one that harbours no multi-cellular life, as seems probable, is not polluting. In this case, the greenhouse would be literal: creating a warm hospitable environment to encourage life.
On the other hand, no-one really seems sure of the best way to fix it..
Is it too much to ask for registrars to by default deny domains names mixing language sets, especially when they're obviously meant to be visually confused with ASCII names? Even if not for phishing, every half-way popular domain is going to be cloned with one, or several, such substitutions. Names where all the glyphs are, say, Japanese, would be fine, but ones mixing Cyrillic, Greek, Latin characters should NOT be automatically accepted. But one can't help but think that Verisign et al are just drooling at the idea of every dot-com having to defensively buy all similar-looking domains. It'll probably be an option, the way buying the.net,.org..info..biz...etc is; instead of providing a means of dividing up addresses into affinity groups, it'll become just a method of extorting more money from domain owners.
I would expect them to treat their systems contractors like anybody else, as if the lives of people depended on the quality of their work.
Nobody's life depended on wifi access; it has as much relevance to the actual operations of the railway as breaking into a coke vending machine in the station does; i.e. they might lose a few cents from the "security breach" and have to spend a bit more to fix it later; despite the article's attempt to make this sound like TERRORISTS CAN CRASH TRAINS WITH LAPTOPS!!!.
To you, maybe there is a difference, a cultural context that makes distinguishing the two abbreviations important
There is. And however you label it, you must distinguish between Trekkie fan fic and Gene Wolfe, Hal Clement, Le Guin et al. At least I have a word to label it (though I suppose I could just say "crap" I suppose).
SF is not the same as "sci-fi". Sci-fi is what the general public thinks of as science fiction -- mostly movie or TV derived stuff, like Trek or Star Wars. SF is what you find in books (not "novelisations"), and very little elsewhere (in film, 2001 is one of the very few that come to mind).
To those who will respond saying there is no difference; have you actually read more than one Hugo-winning book? (Do you know who "Hugo" was?)
Slashdot Mirror
The ruling is about ADVERTISEMENTS, not search results. Ads aren't what I use Google for, they're just how Google pays their bills.
No, it's not about "competitors", it's about "trademarks". So it's very simple, the French court basically says ads (not searches) can't be targetted at trademarks of another company. So other luggage makers (and especially, those cloning Vuitton) can't pay for their ads to come up on a search for Vuitton. (Though they might turn up in the search results.)
The ones who "can barely use windows" will complain that the start menu is in a different place and their screensaver won't work, otherwise they won't notice what they're using to type their memos, add up their expenses, or surf their porn. It's the "power users" who've wriiten macros and such who are the difficult ones. Budget for buying Crossover for them while you gradually wean them off.
I worked in an office that due to absorbing other small companies, had CP/M, DOS, Win 3, Win 98, MacOS 7, MacOS 8, all in use, and the staff were mostly clueless; but instead of throwing a fit were mostly willing to spend the few minutes needed to locate the icons to open a word processor. print, email... and that covers 95% of what they needed. It's strange to me that it's assumed that office workers are complete sheep who will be thrown into a panic by the slightest change in their desktop; forgetting that anyone who's worked for 15 years has probably gone through DOS, Win 3/95/98/2K/XP, not to mention Wordstar/WordPerfect/Word5/6/WinWord; Lotus 123/Excel, etc, etc.
Why should one more round of change be so hard, especially with most of the change actually being behind the scenes rather than in the interface -- "open file", "select (with mouse)" "change font", "print" are all the same except for minor cosmetic differences as far as the user is concerned, whatever platform and suite you're using.
I don't see that gibberish on the linked pages (though they may have changed since it was posted). I suspect Timothy composed it (or maybe "excreted" is a better term).
I thought you were listing its good points. Many companies release documents in PDF format for this very reason.
I've heard that argument before (from a former boss, actually), and it's pretty stupid. If one needs to edit a PDF, one can just use the right tools -- Acrobat as I mentioned, many other high end publishing tools. A PDF provides no guarantee against tampering. You need to use some form of digital signing, which you can do as easily on any document, down to plain text.
>and Acrobat is pretty expensive, BTW
So use OpenOffice, or Ghostscript, or one of the many other free tools that can output to PDF.
I said "edit", not "create".
1) doc is much easier to edit (as long as you have MSWord -- and Acrobat is pretty expensive, BTW)
2) PDF is proprietary, though open
3) MS has free Word viewers (for Windows)
4) He'd probably also mention XML
But you need to say "better for doing what" to get any answer more than the above. doc is fine to compose and print from; has some useful features for collaboration; sucks for presentation and archival use.
When did "bad guys" ever use GPS to hit targets? If you're tallkng about terrorists, they prefer to hand deliver their ordnance. If military, they're not going to be stupid enough to depend on an enmemy's guidance system.
On the other hand; how many ships would run aground or be lost due to not knowing their position? It's sensible for Europeans not to want o have the safety of their shipping (and air traffic) subject to having the plug pulled by a panicking US leadership. ("Mr President! Ralph Nader has a cruise misile targetted at your Texas ranch!" "Turn off GPS NOW!!")
And it continues the recent FUD theme that "Firefox is going to get screws with malware Real Soon Now". Anyway. I look forward to Firefox shrugging off any such attacks planned by the proverbial Evil Russian Mafia Hackers, while MS and its buddies like Gartner gleefully release PR stating Firefox is fucked every time a new threat appears, no matter how far it gets in the real world. I think it's obvious that Gates' decision to embed the browser into the guts of Windows makes it impossible to secure.
Please, your user number shows you've been around long enough to know that you can't type a long string in a comment without it being broken. Learn to make an HTML link. It's really not hard.
Slashdot is really scraping the bottom of the barrel when it elevates a thread on a Trekkie BBS fantasising about "collecting $12 each from 4 million fans" to "news".
There is a whole world of interesting and worthwhile media aside from multi-mullion budger TV and movies: comics, and even books. Find something different. Science fiction is supposed to be about new ideas, not endless derivative space opera.
On your deathbed, there are two things you won't regret: not spending more time at the office; and not watching more TV.
Exactly -- but no one would have put the money up for such a plan, as no one will for Zubin's. No one is going to let him run the show, but having him around keeps the subject alive. Having him challenge the ideas forces Nasa to say why some gee whiz idea won't work; and maybe in the process they'll find elements of his plans are worthwhile; it's the opposite effect to that Luddite senator who used to award prizes for what he decided were "worthless" scientific projects. After losing a couple of Shuttles Nasa needs more challenges, not more suffocating caution.
I could say almost the same about GWB. But that doesn't mean everything either one says or does is completely insane. No one is going to put Zubrin's plans into effect in the way he wants, but having him out there certainly raises the chances of us getting to Mars at all. He seems to turn up on a lot of TV space documentaries, not as a figure of fun but as a serious talking head, and is doing a good job as a "spokesmodel" for space exploration.
I think building habitats on the moon; mining, prospecting for water, growing plants, building a rail gun launcher, etc, are all extremely interesting challenges; if not ones a theoretical physicist could get very excited about. But a farside lunar radio or light telescope might.
You don't need a giant Discovery-style carousel to get some g. Just have your spaceship in two parts. Tether them, let the tether out a few hundred metres and spin around their centre of mass.
A harder problem may be solar flare radiation. About the only way to shield against that is lots of mass, I think. That's where lunar (or even asteroid) mining comes in.
What a racist rant, modded informative by likeminded rednecks. How about you ponder who is hiring these Indians and firing Americans? It's the white-as-the-driven-snow WASP CEOs. The Indians didn't invade and conquer the American call centers, the American companies chose to outsource to bump up their bottom line.
The quote was from a British newspaper, and in the UK that's how you write acronyms: Qango, Nasa, Nato; but BBC, EU as you spell those out so they retain the caps.
What about spraying a black die onto the dry ice at the poles?
Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
It's been 19 seconds since you hit 'reply'.
Excuse me for knowing how to type.
You could have spent a few of those seconds reviewing spelling -- for instance "dye" not "die" is a colouring agent.
On Mars. R T F A. Other suggestions have been to divert a few comets or ice asteroids to crash down.
If Mars could successfully hold an atmosphere, wouldn't it still have one?
Yes, in the long run it's not stable. Long run being millions of years. If we're still around we can fix it. If not, it hardly matters.
Insightful?
Terraforming Mars at the most optimistic will take centuries. During those centuries we'll have plenty of time to study Mars before there is any noticeable change. I submit that creating an ecosystem on a sterile planet, or one that harbours no multi-cellular life, as seems probable, is not polluting. In this case, the greenhouse would be literal: creating a warm hospitable environment to encourage life.
Is it too much to ask for registrars to by default deny domains names mixing language sets, especially when they're obviously meant to be visually confused with ASCII names? Even if not for phishing, every half-way popular domain is going to be cloned with one, or several, such substitutions. Names where all the glyphs are, say, Japanese, would be fine, but ones mixing Cyrillic, Greek, Latin characters should NOT be automatically accepted. But one can't help but think that Verisign et al are just drooling at the idea of every dot-com having to defensively buy all similar-looking domains. It'll probably be an option, the way buying the .net, .org. .info. .biz...etc is; instead of providing a means of dividing up addresses into affinity groups, it'll become just a method of extorting more money from domain owners.
Nobody's life depended on wifi access; it has as much relevance to the actual operations of the railway as breaking into a coke vending machine in the station does; i.e. they might lose a few cents from the "security breach" and have to spend a bit more to fix it later; despite the article's attempt to make this sound like TERRORISTS CAN CRASH TRAINS WITH LAPTOPS!!!.
There is. And however you label it, you must distinguish between Trekkie fan fic and Gene Wolfe, Hal Clement, Le Guin et al. At least I have a word to label it (though I suppose I could just say "crap" I suppose).
SF is not the same as "sci-fi". Sci-fi is what the general public thinks of as science fiction -- mostly movie or TV derived stuff, like Trek or Star Wars. SF is what you find in books (not "novelisations"), and very little elsewhere (in film, 2001 is one of the very few that come to mind).
To those who will respond saying there is no difference; have you actually read more than one Hugo-winning book? (Do you know who "Hugo" was?)
That so-called reporter Karl Schoenberger at the so-called newspaper "San Jose Mercury News" (who ever heard of them?) must have made it all up.
Dipshit. See here for some photos that went with the original story.
Rutan's just went up and down; SpaceX's are supposed to launch satellites. RTFA....