Yes, the US system is designed to rip off people as much as possible.
When I moved to the US from Europe it was like going back in time when it comes to a lot of stuff.
You have to pay up front for a number of minutes, if you don't use your minutes, they're gone!. Can be very expensive. Now, the "smart" cell phone companies have come up with a stroke of genius, roll-over! If you only use 100 of let's say 200 minutes, they get carried over to next months, so now you have 300 minutes. Well, if you only use 100 minutes this month too, 200 minutes will roll-over and so forth. Basically you are lending the cell phone companies money without getting interest on it.
As to long distance, I'd rather pay for each long distance call as I don't call long distance:)
Most European systems are set up so you pay a small fee each months for the service and then you get a bill at the end of the month summarizing how many calls and minutes used and you get charged fro this. Much simpler and much more just. No bullshit about lending the companies money for free and loosing whatever you have paid them.
I'm not even going to start talking about US banking systems which can be compared to banks in Europe in the 1960's. Americans still use personal checks. When I moved to the US I had not used checks since the early 80's. Going into a bank to get some service is like spending a day at an old Soviet Supermarket, hours in line. Granted some banks offer limited online services, but the bill payment system is just crazy compared to the European.
Americans have a lot to learn from Euope when it comes to cell phones and banks, that's for sure!
This stuff is just plain stupid. IMHO the movies are already cencored too much. If you don't want to watch sex and violence, rent or buy a different moive. How difficult is that? Oh, no movie to be rented that does not contain sex or violence? Though luck! I guess the rest of the world don't mind. So, why don't you prudes create your own production company and start making clean movies?
I bet they would be box-office hits.... NOT!
I agree to some extent that there is too much violence in movies as killing people is not natural. However, there is way too little sex and nudity in movies and on TV. Sex and nudity is natural, violence is not. Why is it wrong to show something natural like a naked body? My take: more sex and nudity, less violence!
Well, rather than waste your bytes on/., do as I did, go to Senator Hatch's website and send him a message complaining about his support for such an attrocity.
Here is a direct link to his feedback/email page: Contact Form
What really bothers me is the thought of my apartment talking to me when I come home after a long and crueling day at work, not to mention the reading of your email:
- Here is your new card! Platinum XYZ at 49% interest!
No thanks, I have enough spam as it is!
And since this crappy house seems to be running Windows, how on Earth am I gonna trust the biometric reader to work? Think about it! MS products is not exactly rock bottom solid... You're coming home after a rather liquid night and stare into the reader when a female voice comes back at you: "Access denied. Please evacuate the premises withing 30 sec or the Police will be notified" Heck no! I don't want that crap.
You would use the Enterprise Edition on servers at least if you want to run lets say an Oracle Database as it is not supported with the regular editions and you would not get any fixes for any problems if you run it on a non-enterprise edition.
As for the workstations in the company, you can use whatever you want. The most important machines are the servers and you would want support from RH on those. The support includes bugfixes, drivers etc and for a stable environment for the next 5 years, just as if you had bought Solaris, HP-UX, AIX or any other enterprise UNIX flavour.
Yes, that page is a good example on how to NOT design a web-page. I downloaded the source code after I had marked the whole page in order to be able to read it. Alas, the source does not compile with GCC 3.2.3.
That basically tells me that this is a piece of shit, the webpage is un-readable, the source code don't compile... Great product!
Based on the share number of galaxies and stars within each galaxy, mathematics would dictate that there are close to infinte numbger of earth like planets.
Will we ever find a planet similar to our Earth with life similar to our on it? Maybe, but the chances are extremly slim based on the the enormous distances we are talking about.
Based on this I would also say the chances are extremly slim that we will ever make contact with other intelligent beeings in the Universe. Maybe we ought to consider the possibility that intergalactic spacetravel is not physically possible hence we will never meet "aliens" from other planets?
This might come as a big surprise to you: Most people do not have Internet access!
The earths population is now over 6 billion and in order for "most" to qualify in your statement, more than 3 billion people need to have internet access and that is not the case.
Well, I had to put HR on one of my coworkers sitting right across from me due to gas problems! So, I agree, gas is not a sign of intelligent life, he's a moron.
As long as I can get at least a 1600x1200 resolution under X, I'm happy. Besides, whether the card can do 2914 or 2920 fps is really irrelevant for most users anyway. Even for a game player. I would say it is much more important that the card renders the scene correctly than x% faster. Of course, a game player may disagree with me, but trust me, there is no way you can see the difference in fps anyway.
Finally a P2P with encryption and privacy!
on
P2P Meets Push
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· Score: 2, Interesting
From reading several of the comments here, it is obvious that people has no clue, nor even bothered reading about the program.
The connections are encrypted and you can set up your own channels and only give the key to people you trust. You can also easily change the key to each channel in case you suspect a breech in security.
I'm sure we will see a lot of use of this technology, think about it as a continued development of P2P and IRC concepts icnluding privacy and encryption which makes intercepting the transports useless unless you have the necessary keys, else you will have to retort to brute force and that may take awhile.
In most other countries than the US, this would have been illegal to collect.
I know several countries where you as a company would have to apply for a license and with very strict rules as to what you can or can not store of information and for how long and how people can ensure that all the information collected about you can be deleted permanently if you wish so.
There is no need for any company to have all that information about a person and it severly impacts my privacy.
If their drivers had been published as Open Source, we could have verfied the claims rather quickly. Now we have to rely on what NVidia comes back with. We, the consumer, has no way of verifying NVidia's claims as to whether it is a 'BUG' or a cheat.
As far as I know, I have not visited all the countries on the earth yet, but not far from it, US is one of the very few countries that have the same size and color for all their bills. This makes it really hard for people with eye problems to see the difference.
Besides that fact, if having all the bills the same size and color is the right thing to do, why not the same with the coins?
US is backwards again, as usual. But, the rest of the world knows better, thank God!
Sigh!
I knew that the US educational system was bad, but not as bad as you just demonstrated! I wrote a few lines and you can't even read them.
Let me recap: I wrote "The impose death penalty on minors." I missed a 'y' in there, but the sentence is clear, no? I didn't say I disagree with the death penalty, did I? No, I said 'minors'. But that is probably asking too much of your literacy to fathom.
And when it comes to the traffic ticket, a friend of mine forgot to pay his, was pulled over by the Police because of a suspended license due to non-payment (btw, nobody took the time to inform him that the license was suspended!) and hauled off to jail. I'm really happy that the Police caught a dangerous criminal and got him off the streets. Yikes!
And as another poster mentioned, don't try to oppose the war, because then you'll be thrown in jail (see a pattern here?) and the police demands you to answer questions that violates your rights.
Freedom and democracy? Don't even get me started on that bull. The problem is that the average American has not been further away from home than their neighbouring county and has no clue as to what is going on in the world. Try to watch a news channel here to see what is happening around the world? Impossible, because you get "The world news in 60 seconds!" Gee... Not much happening in the rest of the world I guess since you can fit it in 60 seconds!
As a foreigner from a democratic country, now living in the US, I would say that US has not had the rights that you outline for many, many years.
US is one of the most un-democratic countries I have been to, esp when it comes to free speech which is almost non-existent in this country. Free speech is good if you agree with the ruling parties, i.e either with the democrats or the republicans. If your views are not in this line, there is no free-speech. Besides, the US has been a police state for many years now. They violate basic human rights on a daily basis. The impose death penalty on minors. They throw you in jail for failing to pay a traffic ticket or other minor administraive errors.
Talking about democratic rights in the US is a joke. Sad, but true.
This is not so much about VFP as it is a testing ground for what will come from MS.
I don't think MS cares if VFP apps were to be run on Linux. The whole ordeal is more about how they are thinking of changing the EULA so that no program written for MS Windows can legally be run on anything else than Widnows.
What they are trying to do here is to ban all Windows executables from beeing run on an OS other than Windows. MS sees Linux as a long term threath and they want to do something about it. They can't buy it and kill it. They can't FUD it away. They can't compete on prize or quality. What is there left? The answer is easy: Keep people away from the opportunity to run any for of Windows programs under Linux. How? By changing the EULA and enforce it!
If they succeed with VFP, more products will follow suite and soon the EULA's will prohibit the programs from running on anything else than MS approved OS'es and we all know that MS will never approve of Linux.
This has far more grave consequences than what the VFP developer community has seen. It is the start of locking down Windows.
Then it doesn't matter which carrier or not even in which country you are. The only thing you do when you arrive at a new place is to call a special number and leave the number you can be reached at.
Example: My alpha-number is (111)222-3333 (for all you US people), now, I arrive in Kairo and call a local 800 number, identify myself and enter my hotel-number and extension. My office needs to get hold of me, they have no clue where I am, but they dial (111)222-3333 and lo and behold, my hotel phone in Kairo starts ringing and we have contact!
Listening to phone companies explaining that it costs a lot of money to move a number is bullshit. It takes probably less then 5 minutes for them to do and is completly computerized.
I agree... I just tried to buy a new PC from Alienware wiothout (shudder) Windows XP. Their answer was: " the reason why we do not offer to send a System without and OS is because we need to ship all of our systems in a fully operational state, after going through integration, Quality Control and Diagnostics. Thanks for choosing Alienware!"
Well, I'm NOT choosing Alienware that's for sure! That is the biggest bullshit I have heard in my 20+ years in the computer business! What an MS lakey company!
Boy am I glad I work for a company that is moving away from Micrsoft at a pretty fast pace!
Personally, I haven't used any MS software at work since 1995. Been exclusively using Linux and been very happy with it. I will never give any money to MS as I have better and cheaper software running that does all the work I need to do better than similar MS software and at 0 cost. Can't beat that!
Re:It demonstrates the power of free.
on
Duke3d in Linux
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· Score: 1
I still can't see why this is news.
Releasing the source to an old game, no matter how popular it was at that time and then porting it to Linux is just going to have the effect that people say: "See, Linux is only running ancient games. Nobody makes new games for Linux"
I know this is not comnpletly true, but I can't see what releasing the source for a very old game is bringing to Linux?
I never played Duke anyway, so I have no interest in the game, but news, hardly! A nice touch from the company, sure, but nothing that I would consider worthy space on a news website like/. Oh well, I guess this says more about what is happening in the world today than the state of Linux in general.
Releasing the source to an age-old DOS game and making it work under Linux is news because?
It is embarrasing to see this happen. It is embarrasing that a release of a game should constitute news on/. Even if it is for Linux. This only goes to show that most game producers couldn't care less about Linux. They know that 99.5% of their sale will come from Windows.
I do agree that prodding the companies and urging them to make ports for Linux is a good thing, but come on... Nobody sees Linux as an acceptable gaming platform in competition with Windows or the game consoles.
Personally, I say: Games on consoles, work on PC's.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the US system is designed to rip off people as much as possible.
:)
When I moved to the US from Europe it was like going back in time when it comes to a lot of stuff.
You have to pay up front for a number of minutes, if you don't use your minutes, they're gone!. Can be very expensive. Now, the "smart" cell phone companies have come up with a stroke of genius, roll-over! If you only use 100 of let's say 200 minutes, they get carried over to next months, so now you have 300 minutes. Well, if you only use 100 minutes this month too, 200 minutes will roll-over and so forth. Basically you are lending the cell phone companies money without getting interest on it.
As to long distance, I'd rather pay for each long distance call as I don't call long distance
Most European systems are set up so you pay a small fee each months for the service and then you get a bill at the end of the month summarizing how many calls and minutes used and you get charged fro this. Much simpler and much more just. No bullshit about lending the companies money for free and loosing whatever you have paid them.
I'm not even going to start talking about US banking systems which can be compared to banks in Europe in the 1960's. Americans still use personal checks. When I moved to the US I had not used checks since the early 80's. Going into a bank to get some service is like spending a day at an old Soviet Supermarket, hours in line. Granted some banks offer limited online services, but the bill payment system is just crazy compared to the European.
Americans have a lot to learn from Euope when it comes to cell phones and banks, that's for sure!
This stuff is just plain stupid. IMHO the movies are already cencored too much. If you don't want to watch sex and violence, rent or buy a different moive. How difficult is that? Oh, no movie to be rented that does not contain sex or violence? Though luck! I guess the rest of the world don't mind. So, why don't you prudes create your own production company and start making clean movies?
I bet they would be box-office hits.... NOT!
I agree to some extent that there is too much violence in movies as killing people is not natural. However, there is way too little sex and nudity in movies and on TV. Sex and nudity is natural, violence is not. Why is it wrong to show something natural like a naked body? My take: more sex and nudity, less violence!
Well, rather than waste your bytes on /., do as I did, go to Senator Hatch's website and send him a message complaining about his support for such an attrocity.
Here is a direct link to his feedback/email page: Contact Form
Sure :)
What really bothers me is the thought of my apartment talking to me when I come home after a long and crueling day at work, not to mention the reading of your email:
- Here is your new card! Platinum XYZ at 49% interest!
No thanks, I have enough spam as it is!
And since this crappy house seems to be running Windows, how on Earth am I gonna trust the biometric reader to work? Think about it! MS products is not exactly rock bottom solid... You're coming home after a rather liquid night and stare into the reader when a female voice comes back at you: "Access denied. Please evacuate the premises withing 30 sec or the Police will be notified" Heck no! I don't want that crap.
Well, I heard that the new encrypted zip archives from PkWares program will have a new extension, .piz
You would use the Enterprise Edition on servers at least if you want to run lets say an Oracle Database as it is not supported with the regular editions and you would not get any fixes for any problems if you run it on a non-enterprise edition.
As for the workstations in the company, you can use whatever you want. The most important machines are the servers and you would want support from RH on those. The support includes bugfixes, drivers etc and for a stable environment for the next 5 years, just as if you had bought Solaris, HP-UX, AIX or any other enterprise UNIX flavour.
Yes, that page is a good example on how to NOT design a web-page. I downloaded the source code after I had marked the whole page in order to be able to read it. Alas, the source does not compile with GCC 3.2.3.
That basically tells me that this is a piece of shit, the webpage is un-readable, the source code don't compile... Great product!
If they only would throw in the Hilton sisters too...
:)
Nicky and Paris are yummy and ohhhhh sooooo hot
Based on the share number of galaxies and stars within each galaxy, mathematics would dictate that there are close to infinte numbger of earth like planets.
Will we ever find a planet similar to our Earth with life similar to our on it? Maybe, but the chances are extremly slim based on the the enormous distances we are talking about.
Based on this I would also say the chances are extremly slim that we will ever make contact with other intelligent beeings in the Universe. Maybe we ought to consider the possibility that intergalactic spacetravel is not physically possible hence we will never meet "aliens" from other planets?
This might come as a big surprise to you:
Most people do not have Internet access!
The earths population is now over 6 billion and in order for "most" to qualify in your statement, more than 3 billion people need to have internet access and that is not the case.
nmap 10.2.2.2 ?
Well, I had to put HR on one of my coworkers sitting right across from me due to gas problems! So, I agree, gas is not a sign of intelligent life, he's a moron.
because I never play games on my PC anyway.
As long as I can get at least a 1600x1200 resolution under X, I'm happy. Besides, whether the card can do 2914 or 2920 fps is really irrelevant for most users anyway. Even for a game player. I would say it is much more important that the card renders the scene correctly than x% faster. Of course, a game player may disagree with me, but trust me, there is no way you can see the difference in fps anyway.
From reading several of the comments here, it is obvious that people has no clue, nor even bothered reading about the program.
The connections are encrypted and you can set up your own channels and only give the key to people you trust. You can also easily change the key to each channel in case you suspect a breech in security.
I'm sure we will see a lot of use of this technology, think about it as a continued development of P2P and IRC concepts icnluding privacy and encryption which makes intercepting the transports useless unless you have the necessary keys, else you will have to retort to brute force and that may take awhile.
In most other countries than the US, this would have been illegal to collect.
I know several countries where you as a company would have to apply for a license and with very strict rules as to what you can or can not store of information and for how long and how people can ensure that all the information collected about you can be deleted permanently if you wish so.
There is no need for any company to have all that information about a person and it severly impacts my privacy.
If their drivers had been published as Open Source, we could have verfied the claims rather quickly. Now we have to rely on what NVidia comes back with. We, the consumer, has no way of verifying NVidia's claims as to whether it is a 'BUG' or a cheat.
Another nail in the closed source coffin!
Spoken as a true literate American!
As far as I know, I have not visited all the countries on the earth yet, but not far from it, US is one of the very few countries that have the same size and color for all their bills. This makes it really hard for people with eye problems to see the difference.
Besides that fact, if having all the bills the same size and color is the right thing to do, why not the same with the coins?
US is backwards again, as usual. But, the rest of the world knows better, thank God!
Sigh!
I knew that the US educational system was bad, but not as bad as you just demonstrated! I wrote a few lines and you can't even read them.
Let me recap: I wrote "The impose death penalty on minors." I missed a 'y' in there, but the sentence is clear, no? I didn't say I disagree with the death penalty, did I? No, I said 'minors'. But that is probably asking too much of your literacy to fathom.
And when it comes to the traffic ticket, a friend of mine forgot to pay his, was pulled over by the Police because of a suspended license due to non-payment (btw, nobody took the time to inform him that the license was suspended!) and hauled off to jail. I'm really happy that the Police caught a dangerous criminal and got him off the streets. Yikes!
And as another poster mentioned, don't try to oppose the war, because then you'll be thrown in jail (see a pattern here?) and the police demands you to answer questions that violates your rights.
Freedom and democracy? Don't even get me started on that bull. The problem is that the average American has not been further away from home than their neighbouring county and has no clue as to what is going on in the world. Try to watch a news channel here to see what is happening around the world? Impossible, because you get "The world news in 60 seconds!" Gee... Not much happening in the rest of the world I guess since you can fit it in 60 seconds!
Americans = World illiterate!
As a foreigner from a democratic country, now living in the US, I would say that US has not had the rights that you outline for many, many years.
US is one of the most un-democratic countries I have been to, esp when it comes to free speech which is almost non-existent in this country. Free speech is good if you agree with the ruling parties, i.e either with the democrats or the republicans. If your views are not in this line, there is no free-speech. Besides, the US has been a police state for many years now. They violate basic human rights on a daily basis. The impose death penalty on minors. They throw you in jail for failing to pay a traffic ticket or other minor administraive errors.
Talking about democratic rights in the US is a joke. Sad, but true.
This is not so much about VFP as it is a testing ground for what will come from MS.
I don't think MS cares if VFP apps were to be run on Linux. The whole ordeal is more about how they are thinking of changing the EULA so that no program written for MS Windows can legally be run on anything else than Widnows.
What they are trying to do here is to ban all Windows executables from beeing run on an OS other than Windows. MS sees Linux as a long term threath and they want to do something about it. They can't buy it and kill it. They can't FUD it away. They can't compete on prize or quality. What is there left? The answer is easy: Keep people away from the opportunity to run any for of Windows programs under Linux. How? By changing the EULA and enforce it!
If they succeed with VFP, more products will follow suite and soon the EULA's will prohibit the programs from running on anything else than MS approved OS'es and we all know that MS will never approve of Linux.
This has far more grave consequences than what the VFP developer community has seen. It is the start of locking down Windows.
What you really need is an alpha-number.
Then it doesn't matter which carrier or not even in which country you are. The only thing you do when you arrive at a new place is to call a special number and leave the number you can be reached at.
Example: My alpha-number is (111)222-3333 (for all you US people), now, I arrive in Kairo and call a local 800 number, identify myself and enter my hotel-number and extension. My office needs to get hold of me, they have no clue where I am, but they dial (111)222-3333 and lo and behold, my hotel phone in Kairo starts ringing and we have contact!
Listening to phone companies explaining that it costs a lot of money to move a number is bullshit. It takes probably less then 5 minutes for them to do and is completly computerized.
I agree... I just tried to buy a new PC from Alienware wiothout (shudder) Windows XP. Their answer was: " the reason why we do not offer to send a System without and OS is because we need to ship all of our systems in a fully operational state, after going through integration, Quality Control and Diagnostics. Thanks for choosing Alienware!"
Well, I'm NOT choosing Alienware that's for sure! That is the biggest bullshit I have heard in my 20+ years in the computer business! What an MS lakey company!
Boy am I glad I work for a company that is moving away from Micrsoft at a pretty fast pace!
Personally, I haven't used any MS software at work since 1995. Been exclusively using Linux and been very happy with it. I will never give any money to MS as I have better and cheaper software running that does all the work I need to do better than similar MS software and at 0 cost. Can't beat that!
I still can't see why this is news.
/. Oh well, I guess this says more about what is happening in the world today than the state of Linux in general.
Releasing the source to an old game, no matter how popular it was at that time and then porting it to Linux is just going to have the effect that people say: "See, Linux is only running ancient games. Nobody makes new games for Linux"
I know this is not comnpletly true, but I can't see what releasing the source for a very old game is bringing to Linux?
I never played Duke anyway, so I have no interest in the game, but news, hardly! A nice touch from the company, sure, but nothing that I would consider worthy space on a news website like
Could someone explain why this is 'News'?
/. Even if it is for Linux. This only goes to show that most game producers couldn't care less about Linux. They know that 99.5% of their sale will come from Windows.
Releasing the source to an age-old DOS game and making it work under Linux is news because?
It is embarrasing to see this happen. It is embarrasing that a release of a game should constitute news on
I do agree that prodding the companies and urging them to make ports for Linux is a good thing, but come on... Nobody sees Linux as an acceptable gaming platform in competition with Windows or the game consoles.
Personally, I say: Games on consoles, work on PC's.