I always find it ironic when people on slashdot complain about being "tracked" on NYTimes webpages or other sites that require registration.
Most people have registered to use/. , and have therefore provided a valid email address. So you can't have a moral objection to giving your email addy to websites you frequent.
Even if you don't register, your IP address is logged and monitored , via the sophisticated anti troll system. Try and post more than 10 times in one day as an AC, or post as an AC in reply to a post you modded and slashcode will react.
So even as an AC you aren't really totally anonymous on slashdot, yet I don't see anyone who complains about NY Times links complaining about that. The only people who complain are the trolls that forced these features to be added to the code.
So why do we have this tedious bitching about the NY times every time a link is posted?
I registered a couple of years ago. I've never recieved a single spam to NYTimes@mydomain.com which was the email addy I used. I've never had to login because the login cookie has remained in Opera since I registered. How hard is it login and then forget about it forever more?
The only reason I haven't forgotten I've registered is the continual complaints on slashdot from people who are obsessed with privacy on the net unless karma is involved. NY Times doesn't spam registered users, and any user tracking is less sophisticated than slashcode's vital anti troll features. So bear that in mind when tommorrow's NY Times story appears and the same old complaints are dragged out yet again.
I've been outsourced twice, neither was a great experience, although the first experience, where I was "sold" to IBM at least offered better pay cheques.
The only thing I would do differently is not believe the "nice and agreeable" contract. There will be a loophole your, or their lawyers missed, it will cause problems and bitterness. Accept it will happen and plan accordingly.
Generally speaking I wouldn't recommend mergers, if you have a good product sell it to the company on an exclusive for x years contract. Don't sell the talent, it rarely works out smoothly or for the best.
The second time the company I worked for was sold, I learnt some crucial advice for the CEO. Don't say you're going to be there and support the team you built from scratch throughout the whole transition period, and then 4 days later quit, take the massive cash offer and disappear to a golf course for the rest of your life.
The people you leave behind tend to get paranoid and start looking for new jobs before you hire your first caddy...
I worked for an IT company that was sold to IBM, with all employees becoming IBMers.
A large portion of our firm, including me, were young and "hip". I had a nose and eyebrow ring, others had dyed hair, wild haircuts, or tattoos.
We stuck out like a sore thumb in IBM, a company that suits the description of borg-like grey drones far more than MS does.
After around 2 years it became clear people with less talent but better suits were getting promotions we should be getting.
Most of us started to clean up our image to get promotions, the ones that didn't ended up in dead end jobs blaming society rather than their inability to wear a long sleeved shirt to cover up their tats.
Self expression is a great thing, as long as whatever you do can be covered up, or will heal when you get bored with it. Many companies don't care what you look like, many, especially bigger blue chip corps do care. At some point you may want to work for such a company even if you don't now, so don't do anything too drastically permanent to your appearance
I really can't see how a tattoo can affect your career, unless showering with the CEO is mandatory, or you're planning to decorate your forehead or hands with neo nazi slogans.
Outlook is not Outlook Express. Outlook 2002 SP2 is pretty secure out of the box. Executable attachements are blocked with no option anywhere at all to disable this feature - you want to send someone an executable who's running Office XP, you send it zipped or you don't send it at all.
The HTML vulnerability which allowed code to run just by using the preview pane to view an email was patched in either SP1 or SP2.
I'd be interested to know how many people get infected while using Outlook 2002 SP2.
Even saying "She's really my wife out of game. Quit hitting on her, you ass" gets you nowhere with these poor desperate disrespectful kids.
Isn't the point of an RPG to enjoy a role playing game ?
Weddings in RPG's are popular because people are role playing their character is in love with another character. Why spoil real roleplayer's fun, just because of your jealousy issues? An equally valid complaint could be that MMORPG's are spoiled by people constantly speaking out of character about the fact that the elf princess is actually their real life wife, ruining the atmosphere and mood just as much as the OMG LOL 0wz0red U!!!! crowd.
Apart from spoiling the game with OOC comments, don't you think that confirming character x is really a women and not a sex starved geek male, is the cyber equivalent of walking into a biker bar and proclaiming that just because your wife is terrific in bed, doesn't mean anyone in there has the right to chat her up?
My wife gets hassled in on line games, but she and I take it with a humourous pinch of salt. The day sex starved teenage boys get me annoyed is the day I know I've lost my sense of humour for good.
Elsewhere, PC gamers were incredibly selective with their purchases, with many well-rated games such as Tropico 2, Frontline Command and Anno 1503 struggling to sell upwards of 5k. Piracy impacting on sales?
I wonder how much Broadband is damaging sales?
And how much is people getting tired of RTS,FPS and Civ building games.
1503 is a great game, but who is going to buy that at full price as well as Tropico 2? They are essentially the same game, appealing to the same audience. Just as I'd also question whether people would buy RTCW as well as C&C - Renegade, or Warcraft III and some different RTS. Perhaps when they are in the bargin bucket, but there are only a certain number of games from the same genre people are going to want to buy at full price.
If the industry wants to blame piracy, then bite the bullet and start releasing DVD only games. Most people don't have DVD burners yet, which should reduce piracy, and all the extra content DVD offers might freshen up a tired PC gaming market, boosting sales even more as people flock to buy something different.
Yes you are the only person, and could you please stop posting the same obsessive thing over and over?
FF (Score:5, Funny)
by bludstone (103539) on Friday April 25, @03:24PM (#5810717)
Am I the only one who had the Final Fantasy battle victory music pop into their heads after seeing this headline?
"If you absolutely need some games, download them from kazaa."
Yeah, I always find downloading.exe files from strangers to be a very safe thing to do...
The last time I tried downloading a pirated ISO was when C&C generals came out - after my virus scanner had identified 1 virus and 2 trojans inside the file before the ISO download was 40% complete, I decided that installing the warezd version wasn't such a great idea.
If you can't afford the latest and greatest games, wait 6 months and get them from a bargin bin or second hand. I guarantee I'll be able to get the PS2 version of Enter the Matrix, 2 months from now for half price at my local second hand store.
I can't believe someone on games.slashdot can post all games are crap, pirate them if you really must play them, and get insightful rather than troll moderations.
Bulbs last around 2000 hours. In a way they are similar to inkjet printers because they have a "REPLACE BULB" feature built in to the projector.
After 2000 hours your projector tells you to replace the bulb, you can still use it, but run the theoretical risk of damaging the projector when the bulb blows.
Bulbs in the UK cost £2-300 approx to replace, which is one years use at 8 hours a day 5 days a week.
So while they are a cool toy, you could buy 2 CRTs or one large LCD a year, or a wide screen TV every couple of years for the cost of one bulb.
Plasma screens are interesting, but in my experience you need graphics cards with plasma screen modes otherwise they are unviewable other than in 800x600 large icon and super large text mode.
Ironically the writer of that remark illustrates his comment by attacking of all shows CSI
Whether you agree or disagree with the belief that Farscape offers something worthwhile, interesting and different to TV, I think what everyone can agree with is this one simple fact:
Anyone citing aint-it-cool to prove a point, is either trolling, creating a straw man for an easy knock down, or is a real idiot.
Unless of course the theory you're proving is that aint-it-cool is full drooling fools.
In which case, good point well made sir.
I don't know why people have to feel that the only way to advocate their tastes is to tear down the choices of others.... Maybe the shows would have more fans if their advocates weren't always acting like a bunch of juveniles.
Ironic. Use a quote from the fanboy site even fanboys are embarrased to visit, to tear down the views of people who want to see Farscape saved. Then complain that they are the ones ripping into the choices of others, rather than your good self. Calling all Farscape fans juvenile based on one quote from aint-it-cool, and ignoring all the reasoned and mature posts from/.ers on this thread is certainly not an attempt at flamebait is it ?
some knucklehead posts about how Dell will (for corporate customers) happily install a customer-provided Ghost image or provide naked PCs sans license and OS if you prove the machines are already covered by a preexisting volume license.
In the UK at least they will. You need a seriously large order , hundreds not a dozen, but they will.
You simply need to prove you have a corporate licence. If you buy them in batches of 5 - 10 like me, you're screwed however.
I fail to see how corporate clients end up with multiple licences, I sysprep and ghost around 5 new machines a month and they all have the same licence number. If you don't do a clean format of the harddrive beforehand then yes, you're asking for trouble.
B) reformat the hard drive, re-install the truck load of drivers that XP didn't plug-n-play, then go about putting your apps on, then ghost - sucks again - who wants to take a nifty new computer and then just wipe it out?
Seeing as Dell place a hidden 4 or 5 meg partition on all their harddrives, I would have thought as a good sysadmin you would want to format the harddrive to clear all the crap off.
Sysprep + Ghost should always be done from a clean partition, otherwise you don't know what the OEM has left behind.
Totally agree with you about the Windows Tax however, We have a corporate licence and yet Dell offer us no OS free boxes, just a 70 quid discount for the priviledge of making us remove XP Home rather than XP Pro from our new machines.
So you're worried about attendance dropping after school is over? Isn't that the idea?
Sorry I wasn't aware that school in Maine finished at 7th grade. Because if you'd RTFA you'd know they were worried about what happens when the kids enter 8th grade sans laptop.
It's a start. Spam is an international problem, and there is no chance that Korea or even US spammers are going to pay any attention to the ASA.
But it is a start. About 5% of my spam is clearly UK based, companies offering to reduce my phone bill, or grey box PCs for 200 quid etc. Hopefully I can now stop this small percentage getting through.
Bear in mind this is also for mobile text spam, which while not currently a massive problem, if not nipped in the bud could become a worse problem than email spam. Hopefully we'll see the ASA dishing out 50 grand fines , the US will see profit this gives the government and follow suit.
I would guess the Netscape, Moz and Phoenix share of the market is of much more concern to MS than Opera
Opera is of more concern to MS, because despite MS giving away a free browser with the O/S, despite there being free browsers like Mozilla available for download, some people are prepared to
pay
for Opera.
Opera is so good, people are happy to pay money for it, or are prepared to have a constant banner ad on the screen. That makes Opera a serious commercial rival. Couple that with the fact Opera is their major rival in the mobile phone market, a market MS desperately wants control of, and you start to understand why it is suspicious that the Opera stylesheet for MSN mysteriously changed a few days after Opera 7 rolled out.
If you finish the game too quickly, object to the EULA, find the DVD case is the wrong colour for your bookcase, find it isn't violent enough for your 5 year old son, or whatever, they will refund your money with no arguement.
Perhaps if people didn't assume every customer was a thief (are you in software sales, or do you work for the RIAA ? ), you might enjoy the loyalty and respect of your customers.
It's sad when the activities of a minority, create a cloud of suspicion of the activities of the rest of the law abiding population. Even if I find software cheaper elsewhere, I'll always use Game, because they treat everyone like an adult and valued customer, not a shoplifting schoolchild.
Bear in mind, that $39 is the max you'll pay for one licence.
It's $15 for an upgrade from Opera 6
It's $20 if you don't have a copy, but can prove (via scanned jpg of student ID card) that you are a student.
While it's great to use free as in free, software, when a product as good as Opera comes along, it's worth the price. Shareware games are great, but I think most of us have no qualms about spending $40-50 for Doom III
Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, zoom in and out, and best of all, save all tabbed pages, including the history for each tab, AND the position down the page, upon exit or even upon a crash.
The ability to restart
exactly where you left off is worth the price alone, just for the time it's saved me over the year I've used it.
This is simply untrue. CCTV lowers crime in the areas in which it is applied although street crime rises in surrounding areas not covered. I suppose the logical extrapolation is that everywhere "needs" to be covered by CCTV. Secondly, although it may have lead to a succesful trial and prosecution of the Bulger murderers (both children themselves it should be added). It did NOTHING to stop the murder to start with.
You say it's untrue, then go on to admit crime goes down where it's covered, and it did lead to a successful prosecution in the Bulger case. Which is
exactly what I said, and what you are trying to claim is untrue ! I never claimed it stopped the murder, I clearly stated it was useful in the detection of crime, it was certainly vital in the solving of that murder.
I think the bill (act) simply states that any "official" can ask for private data. You should need a court order to get this kind of stuff.
Hence the fight last year to stop everyone and their mother being able to access private data, which I mentioned in my parent post.
To top it all off I think that secret surveilance of individuals (e.g. phone taps, mail interception etc) should be BANNED!
I agree. My point was that while RIPA screws with our privacy, we can get the law changed. Meanwhile the Americans are on British soil, scanning every electronic and phone communication they like via Echelon, and as a foreign army, we have no power to stop them.
Somebody has already mentioned the purvasive CCTV camera that make the UK the most visually monitored country in history.
And it's been proven to reduce crime, and help crime detection, high profile cases like the murder of Jamie Bulger show how CCTV can be extremely helpful, and outweighs any paranoia concerns about being watched while in public. When CCTV is fitted into every home, then we'll complain, not before.
What about the partial criminalization of encryption under the RIP Act? You have to give the government your key if they demand it, otherwise 2 years in prison. The governement has sought, and obtained, powers to monitor e-mail, web usage and phone calls without judicial warrants.
How is being asked to hand over your key, any different to being asked to open your safe on production of a warrant ? Do search warrants mean locks and safes "are partially criminal "? As for monitoring email, web usuage and so on, the Americans have that field completely sewn up.
The private right of gun ownership has been substantially destroyed in the past several years (with a concurrent rise in violent crime, including a rapid rise in gun use by criminals).
Don't even go there. We WANT tight gun laws, we don't want a gun in every bed side drawer culture. For more information see these comments.
People now go to jail in the UK for so- called "hate speech".
And you can't yell fire in a theatre despite having "free speech". Personally I'm in favour of not being able to say "blacks go home" "Jews faked the holocaust and are all money obssessed thieves" "Muslims are a lower form of life". The law came into force, because racial minorities were being harrassed with verbal abuse morning noon and night by British racists. Your right to free speech ends when it is designed to harm me, just as yelling fire in a theatre is illegal.
What has broken their will, I don't know--years of inept socialist rule? Some post-colonial ennui? Too much spotted dick?
Nice troll, we spent the best part of 2 decades under hard right rule with Thatcher, so spare me the brits are commies crap. As for breaking our will, we broke the governments will over expanding data access laws last year , and over 5000 people wrote and complained about ID cards this year.
The current situation is silly and needs change so they have brought out photo licenses (like you have in the US) but no one can make me get one.
You can't be made to change to the photo licence but as soon as you change address, or get points on your licence, you will be required to get a photo licence. This basically is a phased in policy to stop the DVLA from being swamped back in 1998 when it became the law.
Green cards scam's, credit card fraud, theft on many levels would be wiped out.
How ?
Retina scans ? Oh lovely, I really want to shove my face into a scanner that 1000 people have used since it was last washed. God help me if I get an eye disease because that alter my retinal image meaning I can't use my credit card.
Any encryption used will be cracked given enough time, meaning false biometric information can be stored on the chip, give it 2 years and card rewriters will be available for every ganster in the human, gun and drug traffic trade.
Having a central repository of all citizens with their biometric data may be a problem, but thats another story
Indeed, it is another story, a story about complete and utter loss of privacy. Which many do not find acceptable.
As for your other points.
Bio ID doesn't work. Finger print scans have been fooled by Gummi bears . Retina scans are unpleasant, due to how close your eye has to be to the scan - did the guy at the gas station before you have conjunctivitis for example ? Trauma to the eye and some diseases can alter the retinal structure .
Identity theft will not change, any chip the government can put in a card, will be cracked within days or weeks. Once cracked fraudsters and terrorists lives are easier, because they own false id that according to the government, guarantees that it is you.
This system is a total ineffective waste of money, and erodes any privacy citizens have remaining.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot allows you to view the content but not post even anonymously without being tracked at IP address level.
The NY Times allows you to view the archive anonymously , and allows you to view the main page with a password you could google for easily.
So yeah, it's nothing like slashdot's system - NY Times intrudes far less into your privacy.
I always find it ironic when people on slashdot complain about being "tracked" on NYTimes webpages or other sites that require registration.
/. , and have therefore provided a valid email address. So you can't have a moral objection to giving your email addy to websites you frequent.
Most people have registered to use
Even if you don't register, your IP address is logged and monitored , via the sophisticated anti troll system. Try and post more than 10 times in one day as an AC, or post as an AC in reply to a post you modded and slashcode will react.
So even as an AC you aren't really totally anonymous on slashdot, yet I don't see anyone who complains about NY Times links complaining about that. The only people who complain are the trolls that forced these features to be added to the code.
So why do we have this tedious bitching about the NY times every time a link is posted?
I registered a couple of years ago. I've never recieved a single spam to NYTimes@mydomain.com which was the email addy I used. I've never had to login because the login cookie has remained in Opera since I registered. How hard is it login and then forget about it forever more?
The only reason I haven't forgotten I've registered is the continual complaints on slashdot from people who are obsessed with privacy on the net unless karma is involved. NY Times doesn't spam registered users, and any user tracking is less sophisticated than slashcode's vital anti troll features. So bear that in mind when tommorrow's NY Times story appears and the same old complaints are dragged out yet again.
I've been outsourced twice, neither was a great experience, although the first experience, where I was "sold" to IBM at least offered better pay cheques.
The only thing I would do differently is not believe the "nice and agreeable" contract. There will be a loophole your, or their lawyers missed, it will cause problems and bitterness. Accept it will happen and plan accordingly.
Generally speaking I wouldn't recommend mergers, if you have a good product sell it to the company on an exclusive for x years contract. Don't sell the talent, it rarely works out smoothly or for the best.
The second time the company I worked for was sold, I learnt some crucial advice for the CEO. Don't say you're going to be there and support the team you built from scratch throughout the whole transition period, and then 4 days later quit, take the massive cash offer and disappear to a golf course for the rest of your life.
The people you leave behind tend to get paranoid and start looking for new jobs before you hire your first caddy...
Good post.
I worked for an IT company that was sold to IBM, with all employees becoming IBMers.
A large portion of our firm, including me, were young and "hip". I had a nose and eyebrow ring, others had dyed hair, wild haircuts, or tattoos.
We stuck out like a sore thumb in IBM, a company that suits the description of borg-like grey drones far more than MS does.
After around 2 years it became clear people with less talent but better suits were getting promotions we should be getting.
Most of us started to clean up our image to get promotions, the ones that didn't ended up in dead end jobs blaming society rather than their inability to wear a long sleeved shirt to cover up their tats.
Self expression is a great thing, as long as whatever you do can be covered up, or will heal when you get bored with it. Many companies don't care what you look like, many, especially bigger blue chip corps do care. At some point you may want to work for such a company even if you don't now, so don't do anything too drastically permanent to your appearance
I really can't see how a tattoo can affect your career, unless showering with the CEO is mandatory, or you're planning to decorate your forehead or hands with neo nazi slogans.
Is it actually fair to blame Outlook these days?
Outlook is not Outlook Express. Outlook 2002 SP2 is pretty secure out of the box. Executable attachements are blocked with no option anywhere at all to disable this feature - you want to send someone an executable who's running Office XP, you send it zipped or you don't send it at all.
The HTML vulnerability which allowed code to run just by using the preview pane to view an email was patched in either SP1 or SP2.
I'd be interested to know how many people get infected while using Outlook 2002 SP2.
"if there was a "Star Wars: Death to Ewoks (and Jar Jar)", I'd buy it and play it frequently"
Guess you've never been here before
Warning, requires flash to work.
Weddings in RPG's are popular because people are role playing their character is in love with another character. Why spoil real roleplayer's fun, just because of your jealousy issues?
An equally valid complaint could be that MMORPG's are spoiled by people constantly speaking out of character about the fact that the elf princess is actually their real life wife, ruining the atmosphere and mood just as much as the OMG LOL 0wz0red U!!!! crowd.
Apart from spoiling the game with OOC comments, don't you think that confirming character x is really a women and not a sex starved geek male, is the cyber equivalent of walking into a biker bar and proclaiming that just because your wife is terrific in bed, doesn't mean anyone in there has the right to chat her up?
My wife gets hassled in on line games, but she and I take it with a humourous pinch of salt. The day sex starved teenage boys get me annoyed is the day I know I've lost my sense of humour for good.
I wonder how much Broadband is damaging sales? And how much is people getting tired of RTS,FPS and Civ building games.
1503 is a great game, but who is going to buy that at full price as well as Tropico 2? They are essentially the same game, appealing to the same audience. Just as I'd also question whether people would buy RTCW as well as C&C - Renegade, or Warcraft III and some different RTS.
Perhaps when they are in the bargin bucket, but there are only a certain number of games from the same genre people are going to want to buy at full price.
If the industry wants to blame piracy, then bite the bullet and start releasing DVD only games. Most people don't have DVD burners yet, which should reduce piracy, and all the extra content DVD offers might freshen up a tired PC gaming market, boosting sales even more as people flock to buy something different.
The last time I tried downloading a pirated ISO was when C&C generals came out - after my virus scanner had identified 1 virus and 2 trojans inside the file before the ISO download was 40% complete, I decided that installing the warezd version wasn't such a great idea.
If you can't afford the latest and greatest games, wait 6 months and get them from a bargin bin or second hand. I guarantee I'll be able to get the PS2 version of Enter the Matrix, 2 months from now for half price at my local second hand store.
I can't believe someone on games.slashdot can post all games are crap, pirate them if you really must play them, and get insightful rather than troll moderations.
Bulbs last around 2000 hours. In a way they are similar to inkjet printers because they have a "REPLACE BULB" feature built in to the projector.
After 2000 hours your projector tells you to replace the bulb, you can still use it, but run the theoretical risk of damaging the projector when the bulb blows.
Bulbs in the UK cost £2-300 approx to replace, which is one years use at 8 hours a day 5 days a week.
So while they are a cool toy, you could buy 2 CRTs or one large LCD a year, or a wide screen TV every couple of years for the cost of one bulb.
Plasma screens are interesting, but in my experience you need graphics cards with plasma screen modes otherwise they are unviewable other than in 800x600 large icon and super large text mode.
Anyone citing aint-it-cool to prove a point, is either trolling, creating a straw man for an easy knock down, or is a real idiot.
Unless of course the theory you're proving is that aint-it-cool is full drooling fools.
In which case, good point well made sir.
Ironic. Use a quote from the fanboy site even fanboys are embarrased to visit, to tear down the views of people who want to see Farscape saved. Then complain that they are the ones ripping into the choices of others, rather than your good self. Calling all Farscape fans juvenile based on one quote from aint-it-cool, and ignoring all the reasoned and mature posts from
Nice troll, I'm impressed.
In the UK at least they will. You need a seriously large order , hundreds not a dozen, but they will.
You simply need to prove you have a corporate licence. If you buy them in batches of 5 - 10 like me, you're screwed however.
I fail to see how corporate clients end up with multiple licences, I sysprep and ghost around 5 new machines a month and they all have the same licence number. If you don't do a clean format of the harddrive beforehand then yes, you're asking for trouble.
Sysprep + Ghost should always be done from a clean partition, otherwise you don't know what the OEM has left behind.
Totally agree with you about the Windows Tax however, We have a corporate licence and yet Dell offer us no OS free boxes, just a 70 quid discount for the priviledge of making us remove XP Home rather than XP Pro from our new machines.
So you're worried about attendance dropping after school is over? Isn't that the idea?
Sorry I wasn't aware that school in Maine finished at 7th grade. Because if you'd RTFA you'd know they were worried about what happens when the kids enter 8th grade sans laptop.
OK attendance is up - at least until they have to give the machines back at the end of the year.
But really shouldn't the money have been spent on basic infrastructure like paper books, new ceilings and full time staff ?
It's a start. Spam is an international problem, and there is no chance that Korea or even US spammers are going to pay any attention to the ASA.
But it is a start. About 5% of my spam is clearly UK based, companies offering to reduce my phone bill, or grey box PCs for 200 quid etc. Hopefully I can now stop this small percentage getting through.
Bear in mind this is also for mobile text spam, which while not currently a massive problem, if not nipped in the bud could become a worse problem than email spam. Hopefully we'll see the ASA dishing out 50 grand fines , the US will see profit this gives the government and follow suit.
Opera is so good, people are happy to pay money for it, or are prepared to have a constant banner ad on the screen. That makes Opera a serious commercial rival. Couple that with the fact Opera is their major rival in the mobile phone market, a market MS desperately wants control of, and you start to understand why it is suspicious that the Opera stylesheet for MSN mysteriously changed a few days after Opera 7 rolled out.
If you finish the game too quickly, object to the EULA, find the DVD case is the wrong colour for your bookcase, find it isn't violent enough for your 5 year old son, or whatever, they will refund your money with no arguement.
Their sales haven't been hurt by this policy .
Perhaps if people didn't assume every customer was a thief (are you in software sales, or do you work for the RIAA ? ), you might enjoy the loyalty and respect of your customers.
It's sad when the activities of a minority, create a cloud of suspicion of the activities of the rest of the law abiding population. Even if I find software cheaper elsewhere, I'll always use Game, because they treat everyone like an adult and valued customer, not a shoplifting schoolchild.
Bear in mind, that $39 is the max you'll pay for one licence.
It's $15 for an upgrade from Opera 6
It's $20 if you don't have a copy, but can prove (via scanned jpg of student ID card) that you are a student.
While it's great to use free as in free, software, when a product as good as Opera comes along, it's worth the price. Shareware games are great, but I think most of us have no qualms about spending $40-50 for Doom III
Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, zoom in and out, and best of all, save all tabbed pages, including the history for each tab, AND the position down the page, upon exit or even upon a crash.
The ability to restart exactly where you left off is worth the price alone, just for the time it's saved me over the year I've used it.
Hence the fight last year to stop everyone and their mother being able to access private data, which I mentioned in my parent post. I agree. My point was that while RIPA screws with our privacy, we can get the law changed. Meanwhile the Americans are on British soil, scanning every electronic and phone communication they like via Echelon, and as a foreign army, we have no power to stop them.
Somebody has already mentioned the purvasive CCTV camera that make the UK the most visually monitored country in history.
And it's been proven to reduce crime, and help crime detection, high profile cases like the murder of Jamie Bulger show how CCTV can be extremely helpful, and outweighs any paranoia concerns about being watched while in public. When CCTV is fitted into every home, then we'll complain, not before.
What about the partial criminalization of encryption under the RIP Act? You have to give the government your key if they demand it, otherwise 2 years in prison. The governement has sought, and obtained, powers to monitor e-mail, web usage and phone calls without judicial warrants.
How is being asked to hand over your key, any different to being asked to open your safe on production of a warrant ? Do search warrants mean locks and safes "are partially criminal "?
As for monitoring email, web usuage and so on, the Americans have that field completely sewn up.
The private right of gun ownership has been substantially destroyed in the past several years (with a concurrent rise in violent crime, including a rapid rise in gun use by criminals).
Don't even go there. We WANT tight gun laws, we don't want a gun in every bed side drawer culture. For more information see these comments.
People now go to jail in the UK for so- called "hate speech".
And you can't yell fire in a theatre despite having "free speech". Personally I'm in favour of not being able to say "blacks go home" "Jews faked the holocaust and are all money obssessed thieves" "Muslims are a lower form of life". The law came into force, because racial minorities were being harrassed with verbal abuse morning noon and night by British racists. Your right to free speech ends when it is designed to harm me, just as yelling fire in a theatre is illegal.
What has broken their will, I don't know--years of inept socialist rule? Some post-colonial ennui? Too much spotted dick?
Nice troll, we spent the best part of 2 decades under hard right rule with Thatcher, so spare me the brits are commies crap. As for breaking our will, we broke the governments will over expanding data access laws last year , and over 5000 people wrote and complained about ID cards this year.
Retina scans ? Oh lovely, I really want to shove my face into a scanner that 1000 people have used since it was last washed. God help me if I get an eye disease because that alter my retinal image meaning I can't use my credit card.
Any encryption used will be cracked given enough time, meaning false biometric information can be stored on the chip, give it 2 years and card rewriters will be available for every ganster in the human, gun and drug traffic trade.
Indeed, it is another story, a story about complete and utter loss of privacy. Which many do not find acceptable.
As for your other points. Bio ID doesn't work. Finger print scans have been fooled by Gummi bears . Retina scans are unpleasant, due to how close your eye has to be to the scan - did the guy at the gas station before you have conjunctivitis for example ? Trauma to the eye and some diseases can alter the retinal structure .
Identity theft will not change, any chip the government can put in a card, will be cracked within days or weeks. Once cracked fraudsters and terrorists lives are easier, because they own false id that according to the government, guarantees that it is you.
This system is a total ineffective waste of money, and erodes any privacy citizens have remaining.