Is that why Wal-Mart greeters always insisted that my civil rights end at the door when they attempted to check my bags all the time?
Funny you should mention that - I had just one of those experiences Friday night as I was leaving Wal-Mart with a new DVD burner and two power strips in hand. Apparently the clerk didn't deactivate the little anti-theft thingy, and the system beeped as I was leaving. The greeter came running after me yelling, "Sir! Sir!", and when I stopped and turned around she said, "I need to look in your bag". I looked back at her (thorough my Terminator sunglasses, I might add) and very quietly said, "No, you don't" in my best "don't screw with me, I'm psycho" voice. With that, she looked like she was about to burst into tears, which leads me to believe that they don't get too many people that refuse their request. Had the same thing happen a few weeks ago when leaving Target with a new blender for the wife unit, except when the security guy attempted to flag me down, I just looked him square in the eye to acknowledge that I'd heard him, and kept walking.
"Best of all, no one with the authority to do so is calling for his resignation and/or revocation of his bar certification..."
I think it speaks for itself that the judges and lawyers on the oversight board responsible for judicial conduct have consistently failed to see Sloop's behavior as something worthy of any real discipline. This is not the first time he's done something stupid, and he's still on the bench, therefore there's a tacit acceptance of his behavior by his peers. It's been my experience that while some judges are actually interested in justice for its own sake (for instance, the two other judges that were attempting to get the people in question released), others are of the mind that those black robes somehow make them superior to the "little people" and are thus above reproach.
Exactly. It takes the active cooperation of all three branches of government to give life to any given law. Any of the three can legally decide that the law is not in the public interest, and legally withhold their support - the legislature can choose to vote it down, the cop can choose not to arrest, and the jury can choose to decide "not guilty" even though actions contrary to the law have taken place.
I could point you to our illustrious Seminole County (Florida) Judge John Sloop, who one day last year put 11 people in jail for failure to appear. Problem was, those 11 people were actually at the courthouse and had simply been directed to the wrong courtroom, and most were appearing for traffic cases. Two other judges and the arresting officers told that asshole that he shouldn't have had them jailed, and yet it still took several hours before he signed the release orders and longer still until the people were let free.
Does this count as a judge that doesn't care? Better yet, this judge is now trying to defend his actions by saying he was recently diagnosed with ADHD, and as such wasn't responsible for his behavior that day. Best of all, no one with the authority to do so is calling for his resignation and/or revocation of his bar certification, even though the community clearly has wanted him out of that seat for some time.
You know, it's very easy to slam someone for not being able to pay their bills. But why don't you take a look at the credit industry sometime before sticking up for them. A lot of them are bloodsucking motherfuckers that pray on people.
Big time. They started coming down hard on these fly by night organizations in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area several years ago. These scumbag dealers would sell cars knowing full well that the customers would default on the loans, then repo the cars and put them back on the lot at the same price *that same day*. Some other fool would come along, buy the car, default, wash, repeat, rinse. Didn't matter if you only had one payment to go, and the state was able to show that this was a specific business strategy for them. Unfortunately, the people that buy from these sharks are those that can't get financing anywhere else, and thus have to deal with the ridiculous finance terms plus the fact that the cars are usually sold *way* in excess of book value.
Good idea in theory, in practice after the government throws you in jail they'll seize your bank accounts and other assets, unless you've got some gold stashed someplace safe.
Not entirely, as the quality of the design in general and the components chosen make a difference. It's interesting that my Xbox represents the *only* hard disk failure I've experienced in the last eight years, covering a total of eight computers and twelve drives, and all except two of the machines are substantially older than the Xbox.
In any event, that still doesn't excuse Microsoft for the lack of QC on the large number of early Xboxes that shipped with bad Thomson DVD drives, and their firm refusal to acknowledge that anything was wrong.
Sony has had problems with the PS2... the first batch had a significant amount of CD/DVD drive failures; I had one, but sony eventually replaced it for free.
Early Xboxes had DVD drive problems as well, and after a month of trying to get Microsoft to accept responsibility for my inability to play certain games because of the drive issue, it wasn't until I had cancelled my Live subscription and sent MS a snail-mail letter telling them I was through with them that they finally agreed to fix the damn thing, only to have the hard disk fail a year later. MS can suck it long and suck it hard, and it'll be a cold day in hell before I shell out money for a 360, given my experience with the earlier model.
It'll also be a cold day in hell before I buy a PS2/PSP/etc. given Sony's conduct of late, so it looks like it's back to PC gaming for me.
All true, but as has been mentioned before, no one is forcing these bands to sign, and it sounds like in most cases they're signing without really knowing what it is they're agreeing to. I won't sign a document I don't fully understand, and if there is any confusion or I'm unclear about what something really means, the money spent having a lawyer review the document beforehand will almost certainly pay for itself. If the contract is such that it puts me at an unfair disadvantage, then I thank the other party for their time and excuse myself.
The labels definitely are taking advantage of a lot of clueless musicians, but only because the musicians let them. It's just like buying a car - you may want that car really, really badly, but you absolutely have to be willing to walk away without hesitation if you expect to get a fair deal. With the car dealer as with a recording contract, you can almost always be assured that every person you come in contact with will have the other party's interests in mind, and you'll be the only one looking out for yours.
Not 100% on-topic, but this article brings to mind this little jewel I found online some years ago:
12 Things A Klingon Programmer Would Say:
12. Specifications are for the weak and timid!
11. This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual Pentium processors if I am to do battle with this code!
10. You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in the original Klingon.
9. Indentation?! -- I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!
8. What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software' releases'. Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.
7. Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters' -- they have 'arguments' -- and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.
6. Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.
5. I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a bat'leth contest. They will not concern us again.
4. A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!
3. By filing this SPR you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die!
2. You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
1. Our users will know fear and cower before our software. Ship it! Ship it, and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Bombing the camps might have made some kind of moral sense perhaps, but I think it would have done precious little to slow down the exterminations. Hitler was determined in his course of genocide, and would quickly have found other ways to "purify" his society. In any event, a fairly small percentage of the camps were operated for the purpose of mass exterminations, and one has to distinguish between work camps like Dachau and death camps like Auschwitz. Bombing the work camps would quite possibly have cost more lives than it would have saved.
Right, but concentration camps weren't located in cities.
As I recall, the camp at Dachau was located on the edge of town and thus probably would have experienced some substantial civilian casualties from high-altitude bombings. Interestingly, when that camp was discovered the Allied invaders rounded the Dachau residents up and marched them through the camp, so as to force them to see firsthand exactly what had been going on right under their noses. As others have said, the town's residents wouldn't have had access to the camp itself and thus wouldn't have had direct experience with what went on there, but there would have been clear and undeniable signs that something foul was going on, not the least of which would have been the stench of thousands of rotting corpses in train cars toward the end of the war, owing to the lack of fuel for the crematoriums.
California is *not* filing a class-action suit. A private lawyer is filing a suit on behalf of a number of California residents, but the state is not involved with it. Apparently both the submitter of the earlier Sony story and approving "editor" failed to actually read the article that was submitted.
Without the ability to effectively communicate with china and india most american companies would immediately grind down to a screeching and painful halt.
Assuming for the moment that this is correct, one should remember that there are other means of communication aside from the Internet - telephones, for instance.
However, I don't believe that is in fact a correct statement. One has to bear in mind that the main reason the U.S. imports so much is simply that it's cheaper to do so, *not* because it can't produce what it needs. The U.S. would have little difficulty being self-sustaining owing to a large, skilled population and a wealth of natural resources. Life would certainly get more expensive in the U.S., but don't kid yourself that core industries are going to die.
I believe the whole discussion is academic though. The basic facts are that the U.S. has nothing to gain and everything to lose by relinquishing control of the root servers, thus if the rest of the world wants control of the Internet, they'll have to roll their own, and that's just not going to happen. It'd be cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Well couldn't every company just be founded in Las Vegas (no state income tax) and then all their employees wouldn't be subject to state income tax, no matter what state they are actually in.
You mean like when banks incorporate in Delaware and South Dakota because the local laws allow them to charge ridiculous interest rates they couldn't get away with otherwise in the rest of the states in which they actually do business?
The listed cost for a Microsoft MSDN Universal subscription is $2799/year. I don't know exactly how much was actually paid for it in my case, as my employer pays mine and they bought a site-licensed arrangement for the approximately 20 developers where I work. In any event, it's *substantially* less than the total cost of all of the OS versions and application software included, and it's very useful to be able to get the pre-release versions of different packages that are often available.
just try downloading MS Office via a modem then... of course, you can't legally do that though
You can if you have a qualifying MSDN subscription, in which case Microsoft provides ISOs of Office, pretty much any version of Windows you might want, and a shiteload of other products online.
That gives you one data point, but how does it uncover errors in the code that generate a false value once every X number of times with a given set of inputs?
If whatever non-free software you develop can't make a decent enough profit to recoup the $2000 licence price for the tools you use to do your work, you have problems that are way more important than Qt's price.
Well, being that I have an MSDN Universal Subscription, I don't suppose I need to be lectured on the cost/benefits of tools vs. development effort. For what Qt offers, I don't believe their pricing is reasonable, and I don't feel my time lost using another package would offset that expense, therefore I don't feel it's the right tool for the job for me. There's more than one time-efficient way to skin a cat, and not all of them cost thousands of dollars.
Not quite - the BIOS source code was published in the PC tech reference manual. The first Compaq machines had a compatible BIOS as the result of a clean-room implementation, but it wasn't reverse engineered.
Trolltech most certainly has the right to price their product at whatever point they want to, and to impose whatever restrictions they care to. I don't have any argument at all regarding that, but I don't feel that *for me* it's anything resembling a reasonable price, given my specific needs. For someone else that needs to have their cross-platform capability or other features that Qt offers, TT's pricing may represent a drop in the bucket compared to what development would cost for rolling their own or using someone else's libraries, and thus it would be a good buy for them.
Everyone considering Qt needs to weigh the costs against the benefit of using it, and proceed accordingly. For my particular requirements, Qt is simply too expensive to consider, and since I can't use it professionally, any OSS stuff I happen to release will pretty much be guaranteed to be non-Qt as well. I doubt this will make the slightest difference to anyone but myself, but I can't imagine I'm the only developer in the same situation.
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Keep in mind that 90% of all thefts are committed by employees.
It's actually more like 40-45%, but the point is still valid - employee theft is the single largest contributor to shrinkage.
Is that why Wal-Mart greeters always insisted that my civil rights end at the door when they attempted to check my bags all the time?
Funny you should mention that - I had just one of those experiences Friday night as I was leaving Wal-Mart with a new DVD burner and two power strips in hand. Apparently the clerk didn't deactivate the little anti-theft thingy, and the system beeped as I was leaving. The greeter came running after me yelling, "Sir! Sir!", and when I stopped and turned around she said, "I need to look in your bag". I looked back at her (thorough my Terminator sunglasses, I might add) and very quietly said, "No, you don't" in my best "don't screw with me, I'm psycho" voice. With that, she looked like she was about to burst into tears, which leads me to believe that they don't get too many people that refuse their request. Had the same thing happen a few weeks ago when leaving Target with a new blender for the wife unit, except when the security guy attempted to flag me down, I just looked him square in the eye to acknowledge that I'd heard him, and kept walking.
Please re-read the following quote from my post:
"Best of all, no one with the authority to do so is calling for his resignation and/or revocation of his bar certification..."
I think it speaks for itself that the judges and lawyers on the oversight board responsible for judicial conduct have consistently failed to see Sloop's behavior as something worthy of any real discipline. This is not the first time he's done something stupid, and he's still on the bench, therefore there's a tacit acceptance of his behavior by his peers. It's been my experience that while some judges are actually interested in justice for its own sake (for instance, the two other judges that were attempting to get the people in question released), others are of the mind that those black robes somehow make them superior to the "little people" and are thus above reproach.
Exactly. It takes the active cooperation of all three branches of government to give life to any given law. Any of the three can legally decide that the law is not in the public interest, and legally withhold their support - the legislature can choose to vote it down, the cop can choose not to arrest, and the jury can choose to decide "not guilty" even though actions contrary to the law have taken place.
I could point you to our illustrious Seminole County (Florida) Judge John Sloop, who one day last year put 11 people in jail for failure to appear. Problem was, those 11 people were actually at the courthouse and had simply been directed to the wrong courtroom, and most were appearing for traffic cases. Two other judges and the arresting officers told that asshole that he shouldn't have had them jailed, and yet it still took several hours before he signed the release orders and longer still until the people were let free.
Does this count as a judge that doesn't care? Better yet, this judge is now trying to defend his actions by saying he was recently diagnosed with ADHD, and as such wasn't responsible for his behavior that day. Best of all, no one with the authority to do so is calling for his resignation and/or revocation of his bar certification, even though the community clearly has wanted him out of that seat for some time.
Most used-car dealerships that I know of aren't above collusion and price-fixing either, they just don't get the opportunity.
You know, it's very easy to slam someone for not being able to pay their bills. But why don't you take a look at the credit industry sometime before sticking up for them. A lot of them are bloodsucking motherfuckers that pray on people.
Big time. They started coming down hard on these fly by night organizations in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area several years ago. These scumbag dealers would sell cars knowing full well that the customers would default on the loans, then repo the cars and put them back on the lot at the same price *that same day*. Some other fool would come along, buy the car, default, wash, repeat, rinse. Didn't matter if you only had one payment to go, and the state was able to show that this was a specific business strategy for them. Unfortunately, the people that buy from these sharks are those that can't get financing anywhere else, and thus have to deal with the ridiculous finance terms plus the fact that the cars are usually sold *way* in excess of book value.
Good idea in theory, in practice after the government throws you in jail they'll seize your bank accounts and other assets, unless you've got some gold stashed someplace safe.
Hmm - this wingnut used to be the CEO for The Canopy Group and is a major SCO stockholder? Yeah, he'll be the first guy I run to for tech advice....
Not entirely, as the quality of the design in general and the components chosen make a difference. It's interesting that my Xbox represents the *only* hard disk failure I've experienced in the last eight years, covering a total of eight computers and twelve drives, and all except two of the machines are substantially older than the Xbox.
In any event, that still doesn't excuse Microsoft for the lack of QC on the large number of early Xboxes that shipped with bad Thomson DVD drives, and their firm refusal to acknowledge that anything was wrong.
Sony has had problems with the PS2... the first batch had a significant amount of CD/DVD drive failures; I had one, but sony eventually replaced it for free.
Early Xboxes had DVD drive problems as well, and after a month of trying to get Microsoft to accept responsibility for my inability to play certain games because of the drive issue, it wasn't until I had cancelled my Live subscription and sent MS a snail-mail letter telling them I was through with them that they finally agreed to fix the damn thing, only to have the hard disk fail a year later. MS can suck it long and suck it hard, and it'll be a cold day in hell before I shell out money for a 360, given my experience with the earlier model.
It'll also be a cold day in hell before I buy a PS2/PSP/etc. given Sony's conduct of late, so it looks like it's back to PC gaming for me.
All true, but as has been mentioned before, no one is forcing these bands to sign, and it sounds like in most cases they're signing without really knowing what it is they're agreeing to. I won't sign a document I don't fully understand, and if there is any confusion or I'm unclear about what something really means, the money spent having a lawyer review the document beforehand will almost certainly pay for itself. If the contract is such that it puts me at an unfair disadvantage, then I thank the other party for their time and excuse myself.
The labels definitely are taking advantage of a lot of clueless musicians, but only because the musicians let them. It's just like buying a car - you may want that car really, really badly, but you absolutely have to be willing to walk away without hesitation if you expect to get a fair deal. With the car dealer as with a recording contract, you can almost always be assured that every person you come in contact with will have the other party's interests in mind, and you'll be the only one looking out for yours.
Not 100% on-topic, but this article brings to mind this little jewel I found online some years ago:
12 Things A Klingon Programmer Would Say:
12. Specifications are for the weak and timid!
11. This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual Pentium processors if I am to do battle with this code!
10. You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in the original Klingon.
9. Indentation?! -- I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!
8. What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software' releases'. Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.
7. Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters' -- they have 'arguments' -- and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.
6. Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.
5. I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a bat'leth contest. They will not concern us again.
4. A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!
3. By filing this SPR you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die!
2. You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
1. Our users will know fear and cower before our software. Ship it! Ship it, and let them flee like the dogs they are!
Bombing the camps might have made some kind of moral sense perhaps, but I think it would have done precious little to slow down the exterminations. Hitler was determined in his course of genocide, and would quickly have found other ways to "purify" his society. In any event, a fairly small percentage of the camps were operated for the purpose of mass exterminations, and one has to distinguish between work camps like Dachau and death camps like Auschwitz. Bombing the work camps would quite possibly have cost more lives than it would have saved.
Right, but concentration camps weren't located in cities.
As I recall, the camp at Dachau was located on the edge of town and thus probably would have experienced some substantial civilian casualties from high-altitude bombings. Interestingly, when that camp was discovered the Allied invaders rounded the Dachau residents up and marched them through the camp, so as to force them to see firsthand exactly what had been going on right under their noses. As others have said, the town's residents wouldn't have had access to the camp itself and thus wouldn't have had direct experience with what went on there, but there would have been clear and undeniable signs that something foul was going on, not the least of which would have been the stench of thousands of rotting corpses in train cars toward the end of the war, owing to the lack of fuel for the crematoriums.
California is *not* filing a class-action suit. A private lawyer is filing a suit on behalf of a number of California residents, but the state is not involved with it. Apparently both the submitter of the earlier Sony story and approving "editor" failed to actually read the article that was submitted.
Without the ability to effectively communicate with china and india most american companies would immediately grind down to a screeching and painful halt.
Assuming for the moment that this is correct, one should remember that there are other means of communication aside from the Internet - telephones, for instance.
However, I don't believe that is in fact a correct statement. One has to bear in mind that the main reason the U.S. imports so much is simply that it's cheaper to do so, *not* because it can't produce what it needs. The U.S. would have little difficulty being self-sustaining owing to a large, skilled population and a wealth of natural resources. Life would certainly get more expensive in the U.S., but don't kid yourself that core industries are going to die.
I believe the whole discussion is academic though. The basic facts are that the U.S. has nothing to gain and everything to lose by relinquishing control of the root servers, thus if the rest of the world wants control of the Internet, they'll have to roll their own, and that's just not going to happen. It'd be cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Universally, everyone that works on or around submarines refers to them as "boats" though. At least in the U.S.
Well couldn't every company just be founded in Las Vegas (no state income tax) and then all their employees wouldn't be subject to state income tax, no matter what state they are actually in.
You mean like when banks incorporate in Delaware and South Dakota because the local laws allow them to charge ridiculous interest rates they couldn't get away with otherwise in the rest of the states in which they actually do business?
The listed cost for a Microsoft MSDN Universal subscription is $2799/year. I don't know exactly how much was actually paid for it in my case, as my employer pays mine and they bought a site-licensed arrangement for the approximately 20 developers where I work. In any event, it's *substantially* less than the total cost of all of the OS versions and application software included, and it's very useful to be able to get the pre-release versions of different packages that are often available.
just try downloading MS Office via a modem then... of course, you can't legally do that though
You can if you have a qualifying MSDN subscription, in which case Microsoft provides ISOs of Office, pretty much any version of Windows you might want, and a shiteload of other products online.
That gives you one data point, but how does it uncover errors in the code that generate a false value once every X number of times with a given set of inputs?
If whatever non-free software you develop can't make a decent enough profit to recoup the $2000 licence price for the tools you use to do your work, you have problems that are way more important than Qt's price.
Well, being that I have an MSDN Universal Subscription, I don't suppose I need to be lectured on the cost/benefits of tools vs. development effort. For what Qt offers, I don't believe their pricing is reasonable, and I don't feel my time lost using another package would offset that expense, therefore I don't feel it's the right tool for the job for me. There's more than one time-efficient way to skin a cat, and not all of them cost thousands of dollars.
Not quite - the BIOS source code was published in the PC tech reference manual. The first Compaq machines had a compatible BIOS as the result of a clean-room implementation, but it wasn't reverse engineered.
Trolltech most certainly has the right to price their product at whatever point they want to, and to impose whatever restrictions they care to. I don't have any argument at all regarding that, but I don't feel that *for me* it's anything resembling a reasonable price, given my specific needs. For someone else that needs to have their cross-platform capability or other features that Qt offers, TT's pricing may represent a drop in the bucket compared to what development would cost for rolling their own or using someone else's libraries, and thus it would be a good buy for them.
Everyone considering Qt needs to weigh the costs against the benefit of using it, and proceed accordingly. For my particular requirements, Qt is simply too expensive to consider, and since I can't use it professionally, any OSS stuff I happen to release will pretty much be guaranteed to be non-Qt as well. I doubt this will make the slightest difference to anyone but myself, but I can't imagine I'm the only developer in the same situation.