But you talk as though you think I am a proponent of the left. That is the problem with most Republican supporters. Their only defense is holding up the left and pointing out how bad they are. There is hardly a dime's worth of difference between the left and big-government anti-states-rights Republicans are extremely dishonest for attacking the left with their own tyrant in the white house.
As you can see, it has been reported before. The only news is that it finally made it into the mainstream corporate-censored news stream, a bit like Abu Graib.
I was unclear when I said "in his original listing". I should have said in the language of his original listing. There was clearly no point in removing a listing that was expired, but in the coming months permitting him to make the same listing again, over and over, under the same terms that he refused to honor without a surcharge and told me there was no way he would sell without surcharge, that is Fraud, with EBay a partner in the fraud. There is no excuse
If lifting the strike is all EBay was willing to do, there is the clear answer to who is at fault. That action carries no credibility and does nothing significant to reign in the behavior by the merchant, which was obvious because despite my protests to him and EBay he continued the same practice with no modification at all. It is no excuse just because greed, as you say, happened to drive EBay to this pattern of fraudulent behavior, ignoring all bad behavior by sellers.
The simple fact is, this kind of thing never happens to me anywhere but EBay, where the environment is alligned against the buyer.
I do not have the seller name. I might be able to find it in a backup of an old e-mail, given some effort, if you in turn find a suitable public forum to continue to discuss this (this slashdot will not be suitably public after today).
But you somehow think you can find all relevant US data and facts without even dabbling in US policy? Your unwillingness to even look up the obvious makes it clear how your "investigation" would go. You do not even yet cite authoratative EU Visa or other rules. It is not that hard to find EBay rules in the EU. For example (the German is most natural for me): http://pages.ebay.de/help/policies/listing-surchar ges.html
This says basically the same thing that the US version does.
Verkäufer dürfen bei der Annahme einer Zahlung durch Kreditkarte keine Gebühr - den so genannten Kreditkartenaufschlag - erheben. Dieser Aufschlag würde dem Käufer weitere Kosten verursachen.
Die Entscheidung, ob Angebote mit diesem Grundsatz im Einklang stehen, liegt allein bei eBay. Ein Verstoß gegen diesen Grundsatz kann eine oder mehrere der folgenden Konsequenzen nach sich ziehen:...
I checked German because that was most-familiar to me. Now I check UK, and see that UK (apparently not EU, as you claimed) has made an exception, but apparently has limited the charge only to the passing on of direct bank charges, in which case, since I looked at the charge table of his credit card processor, he would have still been in even clearer violation of the law and had you understood the UK policy and law, you would have asked about that. Again, your arguments fall very flat.
In case you missed the point, the big point was not that I was at all concerned about the strike, but that the seller continued to sell in his original listing, offering to accept credit cards without mentioning his fraudulent undisclosed fees, which no doubt many EBayers accept as part of the fraud tax you have to pay to do business on EBay. The point was that EBay couldn't care less about flagrant informed violation of policy by sellers but was only concerned thbat buyers would not go along.
1. EU law is not applicable in the US, if it is really even EU law (since you don't seem able to look up even the simple US EBay policy) at ebay.com.
2. Visa completely prohibits payment surcharges in the US. There are any number of references to this on the Visa site and all over the internet for anyone willing to look: http://usa.visa.com/download/business/accepting_vi sa/ops_risk_management/rules_for_visa_merchants.pd f http://usa.visa.com/download/business/accepting_ visa/ops_risk_management/visa_risk_management_guid e_ecommerce.pdf
Search for the word 'surcharge'. Trivial to find thousands of internet documents explaining this fundamental policy of Visa and other credit cards.
4. The seller would have to mention the surcharge in his listing, which he clearly did not either before or after the dispute when he claimed to accept credit card as an alternative to PayPal, because adding unexpected surcharges is wrong.
5. I tried and tried to get anyone to look at it. They are all complicit in the fraud because they would not. No one ever challenged that I had EBay, Visa, etc. policy on my side. They just completely ignored it, except when the Seller complained with no evidence (and I had already submitted multiple evidence that he would not sell), they jumped to issue a strike on me.
6. I would take you up on looking into it further if I did not consider it only a PR ploy to pretend to take it private because we happen to be in a public forum where EBay is getting a very justified black eye by many with similar experiences. Lack of trying for resolution on my part was never an issue at the time, and the records are long erased by now because in disgust I went through the multi-month process of having my username removed.
7. The much better thing you could do is try establish a credible system for getting responses and getting this sort of issue resolved, but you will be working against EBay's status quo. Until then, eBay will be fraud's best friend, punishing only the victims, and I will hold a discussion with EBay only in a public forum where their lies become more transparent, and I will continue to state that one of the most-effective ways to avoid fraud on the internet is adding -EBay to searches.
Try looking up your own EBay policies before responding. Are you really an EBay employee, or are you just trying to make them look bad? I accept the possibility that you may be honestly deluded about EBay status quo, but you are not trying at all. It was prominently linked from the first page on policies for sellers at ebay.com.
1. The case has nothing to do with EU. Does EBay expect to cite EU law to contradict US law, Visa policy, and EBay's own policy? If ignorance could
be presumed in such a response, it would be laughable.
2. As I said before, I sent the email with the headers on multiple occasions following the instructions on the website to the letter, which claimed a response within 48 hours, but that was also fraudulent, as they never responded to any. You are lying, ignorant, or both about EBay's response. The EBay web site was also lying. They do not respond to the normal factual complaints of buyers like myself.
3. When I have followed policy and have lots of email to back it up and there was no improper action by me, there should be no question. There was no question for the credit card processor and I only sent him a fraction of the evidence I sent EBay, but they are a credible business whereas EBay is not.
4. Only a coconspirator would so-completely ignore the preponderance of evidence. As others have said, why would we expect EBay to behave otherwise, when they apparently have no interest in ever siding with a buyer against a fraudulent seller.
EBay couldn't care less about obvious fraud, clearly violating their policies. Their suspensions must be for people who refuse to pay the fraudsters, because they don't suspend the wrong-doers. Interfering with their bottom line is the only crime they abhor.
For example, a listing from a seller stating that in addition to PayPal he accepts regular crfedit card charges, no mention of extra charges for accepting
Visa, which would violate EBay and Visa policy (not to mention being illegal in some states, I believe).
Followed by a letter in the winning bid demanding extra fees if payment is made by credit card.
Followed by a reply citing Visa and EBay policy.
Following a letter that buyer couldn't care less about policy.
Followed by my filing of complaints with EBay, with messages and headers, not one of which was ever responded to, for each of his violations.
Followed by more such nonsense from the seller.
Followed by complaints to seller's credit card processor that he is violating Visa pollicy. Unlike EBay, the card processor (unlike PayPal, which is why I do not use PayPal) takes it seriously and directs me to go ahead and pay and they will suspend payment until the percentage is refunded.
So the seller now claims the item has been broken and is no longer shippable and cancels my payment entirely, but simultaneously files complaints with EBay that I refused to buy the item. I have been promptly supplying all the emails to EBay with headers in clearly-justified complaints, which they completely ignored.
A strike is issued against me even though I first lodged complaint and answered complaints with evidence that the seller refused to sell, and the seller continues to sell items under the same illegal/fraudulent terms and conditions, because EBay only cares about the bottom line.
And EBay considers me the problem, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, and the seller is no doubt here complaining about how flakey buyers are, not buying when they bid, backed up by you, his coconspirators at EBay. Buyers at EBay should all be sheep as apparently so many are.
You are the criminals that make the internet a worse place. You have no respect even for your own policy when a buyer tries to simply hold a seller to the terms of sale. You encourage the fraudulent seller.
They back up fraudulent sellers to the hilt, and never take credible action about completely clear seller violations of law, their policy, the listings, etc. If you bug them enough, they may eventually remove the strike they awarded you completely ignoring the facts of the situation, but the seller will still be out there selling under the same fraudulent terms.
EBay intersperses themselves between the buyer and seller via the environment, PayPal, etc. and favors the fraudulent person who does a lot of business over the honest one who simply wants the other to abide by the law, listing, ebay rules, etc. every time. If Merchants likewise feel they are somehow defrauded, they should offer their merchandise elsewhere and the buyers will quickly follow. They seem to benefit from the EBay lax attitude on their fraudulent behavior, which is why they stay there. Sure they complain too when anyone asks. But a simple transaction for a competetive price with a credible instrument of payment like a credit card is too much to ask of them.
You mean the one that frequently has a boat load of tool bar advertisement crap spewed across it, trying to cram it down our throats? Who wants the search engine corrupting the desktop? Being used to the clean page, when I see that it is time to go elsewhere. A portal such as Yahoo looks better than that. Did I say it annoys me greatly?
>The 1.5 release has some nice new features, but there is one constant in every >release: Firefox gets an augmenting chunk of memory. >After a couple of hours, it is getting some 100 Mb of memory. > >And counting. > >I hate it to restart with all those tabs open.
I would not minimize thee importance of continuing heroic efforts of memory optimization, which I know they have spent a lot of work on in the past, and hope the continue to pursue fiercely, but here are some points you might consider:
1. "All those tabs" means all those pages active simultaneously. Presumably they are also not trivial pages containing only text, and the more-complex the pages, the more memory they consume.
2. What is the memory for, if not to be used by your active application that you are doing lots of things, opening lots of tabs, in. Would you rather have applications that are unable to use the memory that you have properly to your advantage in your active applications?
3. If you think the memory is really an effect of creeping memory leaks, try using the menu option "bookmark all tabs", closing Firefox, and reopening with the bookmark. This should restore all your tabs, and now go to each page and within a few minutes do something on each page to make sure they are active and see if your memory consumption is anywhere near where it was after 2 hours. If it is, then that would seem to be the memory required to support that many pages simultaneously active and is not some sort of creeping leak.
4. There are any number of tools to profile Mozilla for memory leaks and you can contribute.
5. Try a simpler browser that doesn't do nearly so much as Firefox does, but if the browser doesn't support tabs, do you really think memory consumption will be much less opening that many individual pages in seperate windows?
Firefox even has its own garbage collection in the Javascript interpretation, but it's memory performance is orders of magnitude better than Java-based applications including NetBeans.
And the command qualifiers claim the same thing in a ps view of the system, but the memory consumed rises towards 1GB. This is not unusual where Java is concerned. I have run JVMs for years and never found one willing to live within its bounds.
How many JVMs can you afford to run on your system for different apps, and how can you make sure they are all the right size, the garbage collectors are in an appropriate mode that can keep up with generated garbage, etc. I can run lots of native apps, which in many cases have no need for a significant heap like Java brings into the picture in far less space than a single JVM. A JVM runs much heavier on the system, and when I run Netbeans, it is continuously on the verge of eating my 1.2 GB powerbook alive, in fact I have to frequently restart Netbeans to get memory back. It has a long way to go in real practical terms even if they have theoretical solutions to some of the problems. I am porting my server software away from Java for the same reasons. This is JDK 1.4, and I am about to try it on 1.5, but I don't think there is that much difference.
If there was ever anything we need competition in, it is search engines. Whether project Gutenberg needed any competition is another question.
I don't see a lot of similarity between this project and the one Google is doing. Open versus proprietary. Free (free as in speech) information versus non-free information.
In the case of other search engines Google has put out of business (Altavista, although the web site still exists, no longer exists as the more-advanced search engine it was using the facilities of others), the competition did not make them improve at all, beyond their insight to make searching a popularity contest instead of an accurate search.
BFUD (letters intentionally perjoratively reversed) is a straw man the Agile movement beats to death, trying to justify their existence. Sure, the plans don't always work out and you have to change them in mid-stream, and you better have done some degree of planning for that. If you can't change them mid-stream, the problem was not enough planning or bad planning, not too little.
As a matter of fact, this is what good extensive up-front design process and more design along the way is most about. Having the "Big Picture" never meant having a detailed picture. It is about getting as many basics right as possible because these can be the hardest to fix later, getting it as simple, and flexible as possible, which contrary to the outspoken Agile advocacy (trying to sell their products), doesn't happen by wildly pursuing the first thing that pops into your head, and is what good software designers have been doing all along, not chasing their tails in a cycle where each generation of software doesn't learn a thing from the prior because they can't assume the responsibility that would be involved in writing it down.
If the important things are established properly, and conscientouusly revised, they can also be adjusted as necessary and the little things won't get out of control. If someone tells you up front design can't be done or is bad, it is probably just because they can't do it. Managers who think this way is called one minus management, making sure all people below you are dumber than yourself, and it doesn't produce good software, although those involved in such a process are all very proud of themselves.
Total victory, no matter the costs, no matter the war crimes committed in pursuing it, relying on the ability of the victors to rewrite history, are what make many of the actions of our own leaders indistinguishable from those they love to demonize.
Become the enemy to beat them. Yet those who pursue these goals can't figure out why some Americans might oppose them.
As far as I am concerned, the library is at fault, not for not censoring their patrons, but for not putting in place a system of adequate privacy. I understand that features are coming in Mozilla that will make it even easier to make sure that all privacy-related information is purged. As far as I am concerned, this sort of feature should be required by law in libraries. The principle should extend beyond internet usage. The Patriot Act stormtroopers cannot demand a record that is not there.
Destroying evidence? If I don't want to be caught and ask for older web pages to be removed, that may contain incriminating evidence such as illegal copies of things or illegal links, is this different from a request by any other copyright holder to have his pages removed, and can it be punished? What are the archives retention policies, and have legal orders been served to prevent destruction of evidence?
What would be even better would be if the archives digitally signed their archives and kept signatures even of those things that had been asked to remove so that the validity of a copy could be established if made for legal purposes (SCO, Scientologists, and other things come to mind) even if later censored.
Yes, so how do we excuse Rumsfeld sending up-armoring kits (as the article described) rather than sending a vehicle designed for the job.
Clearly there are different classes of soldiers doing different types of jobs.
So if those who are, for example, glorified delivery services have not been trained / cannot be retrained to be safer in armorless vehicles than in an armored one, they need to send the armored vehicles or bring them home if it isn't worth the price of sending them more-appropriate equipment (bullets, personal armor, etc.).
It seems that traditional Western medicine based on scientific evidence is less and less trusted by the general public.
The FDA drug cartel often falls quite short of such a noble-sounding description.
Our medicine is largely driven by what can be devised to establish monopolies to extract the greatest profit for drug companies, not what would make people most well.
With most of the FDA either directly or indirectly on the payroll of the pharmaceutical companies, there is little reason to blindly trust either the FDA or their monopolies sanctioned by a combination of FDA approval and the USPTO. It becomes easier and easier to see them as ultimately similar to the illegal drug cartels, driven by profit and control, not by my best interest.
Combine this with any number of treatments that are scientifically sound and used to great effect in other countries but illegal to advertise in the US, if legal to use at all as well as a very strong placebo effect that by itself may be more positive than the approved methods that have so many side effects.
I must say, of all the people I know who are ordered to undergo chemotherapy, the ones who die are the ones who follow doctors orders, and the ones who are alive and healthy decades later (who were given a few months or years to live) are the ones who defied the doctors' orders. This is not a scientific observation, but it is clear that at the very least a prescription to undergo chemo is often wrong and disasterous to a person's health.
Add this to the fact that malpractice is such a leading cause of death (and Bush now wants to protect the medical monopolies from liability), it doesn't seem so wrong to defy doctors orders even if you are a clueless quack, and with a little intelligent research, you might do much better than you would using orthodox medical products.
A great safety improvement would still be proper armor. Doesn't take a genius but then the current administration is one of anti-geniuses who can't handle the truth even when their faces are rubbed in it, but sure, let's have more contests while soldiers die left and right in Iraq, and who will ever benefit if they still can't get properly-armored vehicles?
There are not just two competing standards. If I am looking for something to replace DVD, the biggest competition seems to be DVD, which itself has not really replaced CDs for many uses and will clearly be the cheaper price. The better the standard, the more compelling it could be to make inroads against CDs and DVDs. Who is going to buy either one? There needs to be more-compeling features, better capacity, more robust, etc., especially since there are so many other issues that are even less-well defined on the new media than the older media, such as how long it will last. How about a standard that at least allows me to back up, just in case? I bet that this would be far more compelling to users.
Stereograms seem like a poor, unreliable source
on
3D Face Cameras
·
· Score: 1
I am not an expert, but I have a hard time thinking of any technology that would be worse than trying to interpret stereoscopic pictures. Even the human brain frequently has significant trouble with this, and isn't trying to identify a person by the 3D bumps on his head. If you were going to do it with eyes, you would want more than two eyes, and other configuration improvements, but alternative techniques would seem to greatly reduce the need for such interpretation in the first place by producing an exact position of the reflecting surface.
Slashdot Mirror
But you talk as though you think I am a proponent of the left. That is the problem with most Republican supporters. Their only defense is holding up the left and pointing out how bad they are. There is hardly a dime's worth of difference between the left and big-government anti-states-rights Republicans are extremely dishonest for attacking the left with their own tyrant in the white house.
As you can see, it has been reported before. The only news is that it finally made it into the mainstream corporate-censored news stream, a bit like Abu Graib.
What else to expect from Bush, whose desire to shred the constitution is only barely hidden from public view.
I was unclear when I said "in his original listing". I should have said in the language of his original listing. There was clearly no point in removing a listing that was expired, but in the coming months permitting him to make the same listing again, over and over, under the same terms that he refused to honor without a surcharge and told me there was no way he would sell without surcharge, that is Fraud, with EBay a partner in the fraud. There is no excuse
If lifting the strike is all EBay was willing to do, there is the clear answer to who is at fault. That action carries no credibility and does nothing significant to reign in the behavior by the merchant, which was obvious because despite my protests to him and EBay he continued the same practice with no modification at all. It is no excuse just because greed, as you say, happened to drive EBay to this pattern of fraudulent behavior, ignoring all bad behavior by sellers.
The simple fact is, this kind of thing never happens to me anywhere but EBay, where the environment is alligned against the buyer.
I do not have the seller name. I might be able to find it in a backup of an old e-mail, given some effort, if you in turn find a suitable public forum to continue to discuss this (this slashdot will not be suitably public after today).
But you somehow think you can find all relevant US data and facts without even dabbling in US policy? Your unwillingness to even look up the obvious makes it clear how your "investigation" would go. You do not even yet cite authoratative EU Visa or other rules. It is not that hard to find EBay rules in the EU. For example (the German is most natural for me): http://pages.ebay.de/help/policies/listing-surchar ges.html
This says basically the same thing that the US version does.
Verkäufer dürfen bei der Annahme einer Zahlung durch Kreditkarte keine Gebühr - den so genannten Kreditkartenaufschlag - erheben. Dieser Aufschlag würde dem Käufer weitere Kosten verursachen.
Die Entscheidung, ob Angebote mit diesem Grundsatz im Einklang stehen, liegt allein bei eBay. Ein Verstoß gegen diesen Grundsatz kann eine oder mehrere der folgenden Konsequenzen nach sich ziehen:...
I checked German because that was most-familiar to me. Now I check UK, and see that UK (apparently not EU, as you claimed) has made an exception, but apparently has limited the charge only to the passing on of direct bank charges, in which case, since I looked at the charge table of his credit card processor, he would have still been in even clearer violation of the law and had you understood the UK policy and law, you would have asked about that. Again, your arguments fall very flat.
In case you missed the point, the big point was not that I was at all concerned about the strike, but that the seller continued to sell in his original listing, offering to accept credit cards without mentioning his fraudulent undisclosed fees, which no doubt many EBayers accept as part of the fraud tax you have to pay to do business on EBay. The point was that EBay couldn't care less about flagrant informed violation of policy by sellers but was only concerned thbat buyers would not go along.
1. EU law is not applicable in the US, if it is really even EU law (since you don't seem able to look up even the simple US EBay policy) at ebay.com.
2. Visa completely prohibits payment surcharges in the US. There are any number of references to this on the Visa site and all over the internet for anyone willing to look:i sa/ops_risk_management/rules_for_visa_merchants.pd f
_ visa/ops_risk_management/visa_risk_management_guid e_ecommerce.pdf
http://usa.visa.com/download/business/accepting_v
http://usa.visa.com/download/business/accepting
Search for the word 'surcharge'. Trivial to find thousands of internet documents explaining this fundamental policy of Visa and other credit cards.
3. EBay prohibits payment surcharges. http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-surcha rges.html
4. The seller would have to mention the surcharge in his listing, which he clearly did not either before or after the dispute when he claimed to accept credit card as an alternative to PayPal, because adding unexpected surcharges is wrong.
5. I tried and tried to get anyone to look at it. They are all complicit in the fraud because they would not. No one ever challenged that I had EBay, Visa, etc. policy on my side. They just completely ignored it, except when the Seller complained with no evidence (and I had already submitted multiple evidence that he would not sell), they jumped to issue a strike on me.
6. I would take you up on looking into it further if I did not consider it only a PR ploy to pretend to take it private because we happen to be in a public forum where EBay is getting a very justified black eye by many with similar experiences. Lack of trying for resolution on my part was never an issue at the time, and the records are long erased by now because in disgust I went through the multi-month process of having my username removed.
7. The much better thing you could do is try establish a credible system for getting responses and getting this sort of issue resolved, but you will be working against EBay's status quo. Until then, eBay will be fraud's best friend, punishing only the victims, and I will hold a discussion with EBay only in a public forum where their lies become more transparent, and I will continue to state that one of the most-effective ways to avoid fraud on the internet is adding -EBay to searches.
Try looking up your own EBay policies before responding. Are you really an EBay employee, or are you just trying to make them look bad? I accept the possibility that you may be honestly deluded about EBay status quo, but you are not trying at all. It was prominently linked from the first page on policies for sellers at ebay.com.
1. The case has nothing to do with EU. Does EBay expect to cite EU law to contradict US law, Visa policy, and EBay's own policy? If ignorance could be presumed in such a response, it would be laughable. 2. As I said before, I sent the email with the headers on multiple occasions following the instructions on the website to the letter, which claimed a response within 48 hours, but that was also fraudulent, as they never responded to any. You are lying, ignorant, or both about EBay's response. The EBay web site was also lying. They do not respond to the normal factual complaints of buyers like myself. 3. When I have followed policy and have lots of email to back it up and there was no improper action by me, there should be no question. There was no question for the credit card processor and I only sent him a fraction of the evidence I sent EBay, but they are a credible business whereas EBay is not. 4. Only a coconspirator would so-completely ignore the preponderance of evidence. As others have said, why would we expect EBay to behave otherwise, when they apparently have no interest in ever siding with a buyer against a fraudulent seller.
EBay couldn't care less about obvious fraud, clearly violating their policies. Their suspensions must be for people who refuse to pay the fraudsters, because they don't suspend the wrong-doers. Interfering with their bottom line is the only crime they abhor.
For example, a listing from a seller stating that in addition to PayPal he accepts regular crfedit card charges, no mention of extra charges for accepting Visa, which would violate EBay and Visa policy (not to mention being illegal in some states, I believe).
Followed by a letter in the winning bid demanding extra fees if payment is made by credit card.
Followed by a reply citing Visa and EBay policy.
Following a letter that buyer couldn't care less about policy.
Followed by my filing of complaints with EBay, with messages and headers, not one of which was ever responded to, for each of his violations.
Followed by more such nonsense from the seller.
Followed by complaints to seller's credit card processor that he is violating Visa pollicy. Unlike EBay, the card processor (unlike PayPal, which is why I do not use PayPal) takes it seriously and directs me to go ahead and pay and they will suspend payment until the percentage is refunded.
So the seller now claims the item has been broken and is no longer shippable and cancels my payment entirely, but simultaneously files complaints with EBay that I refused to buy the item. I have been promptly supplying all the emails to EBay with headers in clearly-justified complaints, which they completely ignored.
A strike is issued against me even though I first lodged complaint and answered complaints with evidence that the seller refused to sell, and the seller continues to sell items under the same illegal/fraudulent terms and conditions, because EBay only cares about the bottom line.
And EBay considers me the problem, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, and the seller is no doubt here complaining about how flakey buyers are, not buying when they bid, backed up by you, his coconspirators at EBay. Buyers at EBay should all be sheep as apparently so many are.
You are the criminals that make the internet a worse place. You have no respect even for your own policy when a buyer tries to simply hold a seller to the terms of sale. You encourage the fraudulent seller.
They back up fraudulent sellers to the hilt, and never take credible action about completely clear seller violations of law, their policy, the listings, etc. If you bug them enough, they may eventually remove the strike they awarded you completely ignoring the facts of the situation, but the seller will still be out there selling under the same fraudulent terms.
EBay intersperses themselves between the buyer and seller via the environment, PayPal, etc. and favors the fraudulent person who does a lot of business over the honest one who simply wants the other to abide by the law, listing, ebay rules, etc. every time. If Merchants likewise feel they are somehow defrauded, they should offer their merchandise elsewhere and the buyers will quickly follow. They seem to benefit from the EBay lax attitude on their fraudulent behavior, which is why they stay there. Sure they complain too when anyone asks. But a simple transaction for a competetive price with a credible instrument of payment like a credit card is too much to ask of them.
You mean the one that frequently has a boat load of tool bar advertisement crap spewed across it, trying to cram it down our throats? Who wants the search engine corrupting the desktop? Being used to the clean page, when I see that it is time to go elsewhere. A portal such as Yahoo looks better than that. Did I say it annoys me greatly?
>After a couple of hours, it is getting some 100 Mb of memory.
>
>And counting.
>
>I hate it to restart with all those tabs open.
I would not minimize thee importance of continuing heroic efforts of memory optimization, which I know they have spent a lot of work on in the past, and hope the continue to pursue fiercely, but here are some points you might consider:
1. "All those tabs" means all those pages active simultaneously. Presumably they are also not trivial pages containing only text, and the more-complex the pages, the more memory they consume.
2. What is the memory for, if not to be used by your active application that you are doing lots of things, opening lots of tabs, in. Would you rather have applications that are unable to use the memory that you have properly to your advantage in your active applications?
3. If you think the memory is really an effect of creeping memory leaks, try using the menu option "bookmark all tabs", closing Firefox, and reopening with the bookmark. This should restore all your tabs, and now go to each page and within a few minutes do something on each page to make sure they are active and see if your memory consumption is anywhere near where it was after 2 hours. If it is, then that would seem to be the memory required to support that many pages simultaneously active and is not some sort of creeping leak.
4. There are any number of tools to profile Mozilla for memory leaks and you can contribute.
5. Try a simpler browser that doesn't do nearly so much as Firefox does, but if the browser doesn't support tabs, do you really think memory consumption will be much less opening that many individual pages in seperate windows?
Firefox even has its own garbage collection in the Javascript interpretation, but it's memory performance is orders of magnitude better than Java-based applications including NetBeans.
Ahhh, using those good ol' 614MB DIMMs, eh?
No. The powerbook comes with 256 MB built in, to which I added a 1GB chip. There is only one slot to add memory. This is 12".
And the command qualifiers claim the same thing in a ps view of the system, but the memory consumed rises towards 1GB. This is not unusual where Java is concerned. I have run JVMs for years and never found one willing to live within its bounds.
How many JVMs can you afford to run on your system for different apps, and how can you make sure they are all the right size, the garbage collectors are in an appropriate mode that can keep up with generated garbage, etc. I can run lots of native apps, which in many cases have no need for a significant heap like Java brings into the picture in far less space than a single JVM. A JVM runs much heavier on the system, and when I run Netbeans, it is continuously on the verge of eating my 1.2 GB powerbook alive, in fact I have to frequently restart Netbeans to get memory back. It has a long way to go in real practical terms even if they have theoretical solutions to some of the problems. I am porting my server software away from Java for the same reasons. This is JDK 1.4, and I am about to try it on 1.5, but I don't think there is that much difference.
If there was ever anything we need competition in, it is search engines. Whether project Gutenberg needed any competition is another question.
I don't see a lot of similarity between this project and the one Google is doing. Open versus proprietary. Free (free as in speech) information versus non-free information.
In the case of other search engines Google has put out of business (Altavista, although the web site still exists, no longer exists as the more-advanced search engine it was using the facilities of others), the competition did not make them improve at all, beyond their insight to make searching a popularity contest instead of an accurate search.
BFUD (letters intentionally perjoratively reversed) is a straw man the Agile movement beats to death, trying to justify their existence. Sure, the plans don't always work out and you have to change them in mid-stream, and you better have done some degree of planning for that. If you can't change them mid-stream, the problem was not enough planning or bad planning, not too little.
As a matter of fact, this is what good extensive up-front design process and more design along the way is most about. Having the "Big Picture" never meant having a detailed picture. It is about getting as many basics right as possible because these can be the hardest to fix later, getting it as simple, and flexible as possible, which contrary to the outspoken Agile advocacy (trying to sell their products), doesn't happen by wildly pursuing the first thing that pops into your head, and is what good software designers have been doing all along, not chasing their tails in a cycle where each generation of software doesn't learn a thing from the prior because they can't assume the responsibility that would be involved in writing it down.
If the important things are established properly, and conscientouusly revised, they can also be adjusted as necessary and the little things won't get out of control. If someone tells you up front design can't be done or is bad, it is probably just because they can't do it. Managers who think this way is called one minus management, making sure all people below you are dumber than yourself, and it doesn't produce good software, although those involved in such a process are all very proud of themselves.
Total victory, no matter the costs, no matter the war crimes committed in pursuing it, relying on the ability of the victors to rewrite history, are what make many of the actions of our own leaders indistinguishable from those they love to demonize.
Become the enemy to beat them. Yet those who pursue these goals can't figure out why some Americans might oppose them.
As far as I am concerned, the library is at fault, not for not censoring their patrons, but for not putting in place a system of adequate privacy. I understand that features are coming in Mozilla that will make it even easier to make sure that all privacy-related information is purged. As far as I am concerned, this sort of feature should be required by law in libraries. The principle should extend beyond internet usage. The Patriot Act stormtroopers cannot demand a record that is not there.
Destroying evidence? If I don't want to be caught and ask for older web pages to be removed, that may contain incriminating evidence such as illegal copies of things or illegal links, is this different from a request by any other copyright holder to have his pages removed, and can it be punished? What are the archives retention policies, and have legal orders been served to prevent destruction of evidence?
What would be even better would be if the archives digitally signed their archives and kept signatures even of those things that had been asked to remove so that the validity of a copy could be established if made for legal purposes (SCO, Scientologists, and other things come to mind) even if later censored.
Yes, so how do we excuse Rumsfeld sending up-armoring kits (as the article described) rather than sending a vehicle designed for the job.
Clearly there are different classes of soldiers doing different types of jobs.
So if those who are, for example, glorified delivery services have not been trained / cannot be retrained to be safer in armorless vehicles than in an armored one, they need to send the armored vehicles or bring them home if it isn't worth the price of sending them more-appropriate equipment (bullets, personal armor, etc.).
It seems that traditional Western medicine based on scientific evidence is less and less trusted by the general public.
The FDA drug cartel often falls quite short of such a noble-sounding description.
Our medicine is largely driven by what can be devised to establish monopolies to extract the greatest profit for drug companies, not what would make people most well.
With most of the FDA either directly or indirectly on the payroll of the pharmaceutical companies, there is little reason to blindly trust either the FDA or their monopolies sanctioned by a combination of FDA approval and the USPTO. It becomes easier and easier to see them as ultimately similar to the illegal drug cartels, driven by profit and control, not by my best interest.
Combine this with any number of treatments that are scientifically sound and used to great effect in other countries but illegal to advertise in the US, if legal to use at all as well as a very strong placebo effect that by itself may be more positive than the approved methods that have so many side effects.
I must say, of all the people I know who are ordered to undergo chemotherapy, the ones who die are the ones who follow doctors orders, and the ones who are alive and healthy decades later (who were given a few months or years to live) are the ones who defied the doctors' orders. This is not a scientific observation, but it is clear that at the very least a prescription to undergo chemo is often wrong and disasterous to a person's health.
Add this to the fact that malpractice is such a leading cause of death (and Bush now wants to protect the medical monopolies from liability), it doesn't seem so wrong to defy doctors orders even if you are a clueless quack, and with a little intelligent research, you might do much better than you would using orthodox medical products.
A great safety improvement would still be proper armor. Doesn't take a genius but then the current administration is one of anti-geniuses who can't handle the truth even when their faces are rubbed in it, but sure, let's have more contests while soldiers die left and right in Iraq, and who will ever benefit if they still can't get properly-armored vehicles?
There are not just two competing standards. If I am looking for something to replace DVD, the biggest competition seems to be DVD, which itself has not really replaced CDs for many uses and will clearly be the cheaper price. The better the standard, the more compelling it could be to make inroads against CDs and DVDs. Who is going to buy either one? There needs to be more-compeling features, better capacity, more robust, etc., especially since there are so many other issues that are even less-well defined on the new media than the older media, such as how long it will last. How about a standard that at least allows me to back up, just in case? I bet that this would be far more compelling to users.
I am not an expert, but I have a hard time thinking of any technology that would be worse than trying to interpret stereoscopic pictures. Even the human brain frequently has significant trouble with this, and isn't trying to identify a person by the 3D bumps on his head. If you were going to do it with eyes, you would want more than two eyes, and other configuration improvements, but alternative techniques would seem to greatly reduce the need for such interpretation in the first place by producing an exact position of the reflecting surface.