The only thing that makes it at all tolerable is that my new screen is 900 pixels high instead of 768, so most of the space that the ribbon's burning up is new pixels
It's sad that silly decisions are limiting your new cool machine.
In the old days, they built giant programs to make processors feel slow (probably hasn't changed but processors have just gotten so darn fast, people don't have the same burning need to upgrade anymore). Now that we are getting good screen resolutions, they're figuring out how to keep our content limited to the same postage stamp sized area we've always hated.
I use openoffice all the time, and I'll be really bummed if I have to give up 100 vertical pixels just so I can have giant cut, copy, and paste buttons (check out the screenshot linked in TFA: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/w/images/thumb/f/f2/Prototype.jpg/778px-Prototype.jpg ). I'd much rather see as much of my document as possible than have pixels burned up for no good reason, particularly when ctrl-x, ctrl-c, and ctrl-v are so thoroughly ingrained I can't remember ever using a button or menu option to accomplish that task. I just don't get it -- waste is bad.
Which is exactly why I fear Congress getting involved. Should we end up with a system that simply adds public support to the status quo, we will all be worse off in order for a few politicians to say "I brought healthcare to all Americans." A public health program not run by insurance companies may have it's own problems, but without a non-profit competitor, the whole thing will be an epic catastrophe.
You are equating losing with the defense being weak. The cases might have lost because because the facts were terrible. Seriously, you have Thomas pulling shenanigans with her HD, and Tenenbaum "sharing" even after he's been sued, and admitting that plus admitting he lied under oath earlier. With the facts of these cases, I'm not sure he'd have won if his legal team was made up of Jerry Spence, Clarence Darrow, and God Almighty.
I don't understand why people object when a merchant asks for ID when you use a credit card. I WANT them to do that so that if I lose my wallet, it is at least a little bit more difficult for the person fraudulently using my card to rack up a bunch of bills I have to dispute. And for the life of me, I can't even begin to fathom why Visa would have a policy of NOT asking for ID. I mean, my name is already on the card, what do I lose by also showing my driver's license?
Because you probably can't afford to drop $100,000 each into the pockets of a number of congress members. Once you can do that, the laws will be written to take your concerns into account. Till then, you can pound sand.
I'm not terribly hip to publicly funded healthcare, but the fact is, it could hardly be run worse than it is now. A private for-profit sprawling bureaucracy is even LESS efficient that a public not-for-profit sprawling bureaucracy. Anyone who thinks the private insurance industry is anything but the most byzantine bureaucracy imaginable is not paying attention. What I fear most however, is a law that forces subsidization of the insurance industry without a public not-for-profit option, because the fact is, the insurance industry has the lobbying power. I fully expect to get totally raped by a Congress who only hears dollar signs (in multiples of 10,000)
For a pretty awful example, and one that scared me as I'm self-employed and buy my own insurance, many people in my situation get denied coverage based on some ridiculously technical reading of their answers to the questions asked when you sign up for coverage. For example, there is an egregious example of a woman whose policy was canceled when she sought authorization for treatment for virulent type of breast cancer. The reason? She forgot to mention she had been treated for acne, her doctor misrecorded her condition, and even after the doctor called Blue Cross to clear up the matter, they wouldn't budge.
So we have a private insurance industry that will take your money and provide nothing in return. Even at the horrible DMV, you will eventually get your license, and they certainly don't try to murder you on a technicality. The notion that the free market is doing a good job at healthcare is simply not well founded in reality, and in fact it is doing SO badly, I think even the government would struggle to fail as epically as the private insurance industry.
In the end, if I can get the same crappy coverage I have now, for less cost and without the worry that I forgot to say I had the measles when I was 6 thus causing my entire policy to be canceled as a result (this is just robbery of premiums), I'd go for it. I just don't expect Congress to actually deliver something like that. They'll just force me to get robbed.
Even some of the founding fathers relied on jury nullification as I understand it because British law was seen as unjust. However, no matter how big Slashdot seems, and how notoriously it can overwhelm small sites, the fact is that at least 3 juries have listened to these cases and felt like the defendants ought to pay a substantial fine (Thomas twice and now Tenenbaum). The slashdot demographic is not widespread, merely concentrated here.
People should really understand that jury nullification is simply not a realistic notion generally, and certainly not in Tenenbaum's case where the Jury could easily have expressed its displeasure by going with the $750 level. They went with a figure 30x higher so the idea that would have found him not liable at all by nullifying the law is pretty fanciful.
Jury trials are a right in most civil and criminal cases (lets not start talking about small claims court or other specialized areas). When you file a suit, you have the option of asking for a jury trial if you pay an extra fee. If either party requests a jury, then you get a jury. Only when _neither_ party requests a jury, do you have a bench trial.
Where you are getting confused is that a judge can eliminate issues for a jury if no reasonable juror could come to anything but one conclusion based on the facts. That has nothing to do with consultation outside the jury or with it. To put this into a car analogy, suppose you rear-end someone who was legally stopped a stop light. During trial you admit that you were texting with one hand, sipping a big gulp with the other, hollering at a friend in the back seat, and not looking at the road at all. No reasonable juror would think that you were NOT negligent, thus a Judge could summarily decide that you were negligent in the accident. This gives the jury fewer questions and helps speed along the process of coming to a verdict, for example, on the issue of damages.
Not really. Social Security and its ilk are doomed. What I really want to know, is why you don't take on the burden of raising your children yourself instead of sucking up my tax dollars.
Glaciers are like batteries. With a battery, you can store up power when you are near an outlet, so you can continue to operate your device later when you aren't near an outlet. This allows continuous operation irrespective of your proximity to a receptacle.
Glaciers store up water in the form of ice during the winter. Then, in summer when precipitation is less frequent, they melt and release that water. This allows continuous access to water irrespective of the immediate level of precipitation.
Yes, we could build more reservoirs, but talk about expense. Plus they suffer silting issues and large areas have to be destroyed to build them. And if the rains stop falling anyway, then what? Build more?
Man -- I was about to mod you up till you hit on the racist BS. Overbreeding is rampant everywhere.
The fact is, the single most polluting thing a person can do is have kids. I'm intentionally child free so in the balance of things, I could drive a hummer, alone, with extra lead weights in the back, 100 miles per day. I could leave my lights on 24/7, run AC to frigid temps in the summer, blast the heat in the winter, keep a propane flare burning ten feet tall day and night in the back yard, and still not come close to the devastation caused by parenthood.
I don't actually live my life that way, because I'm a bit frugal. What mystifies me is why words such as "conservation" and "conservative" have such differing application when both imply frugality to me -- frugality in how we use environmental resources, and frugality in how we use financial resources. I want to see the birth of the frugal party. Pun intended.
Of course, if all it takes is an email from the domain you just registered for your phishing site, how is it that you won't get the email? I once bought bought cheap cert from godaddy for a site I ran (legit site) -- I never got a phone call. What's an email prove -- nothing except I can fill in some forms on a webhost admin console to set up an email. It doesn't say a thing about who I am.
Next time, go for an anonymous SSL cert. As has been pointed out by others, the cert represents the willingness of someone to pay, perhaps with a stolen credit card, but a willingness to pay and not much else.
Perhaps it isn't user laziness, but brain dead UIs that make people "click the nearest visible button". How many obtuse warnings does it take to make a person get frustrated and do something they regret? Hard to say, but I've certainly fallen victim to clicking the wrong button and I'm neither lazy nor totally computer illiterate. Just google stupid error messages. Sometimes users are the problem, sometimes programs are, and sometimes it's a combination. Flatly blaming the user for being lazy is a copout.
Aside from that, it is possible for one to get a certificate with no checks deeper than whether or not the credit card transaction was authorized. Certs seem very much like a money machine and little else.
In my work, I often have to write documents of moderate length (10-15 pages). I find it extremely helpful to read the document aloud after I've done all my editing. It is very easy to pass over small glue words such as "to", "at" and so forth while typing, and just as easy for the brain to insert them when they aren't actually there while reading silently. Speaking every every word and makes it easy to hear what is missing -- typically several omitted words per document.
It is also helpful to delay the read aloud session for a few hours or if possible, till the next day. It seems like our brains build up the pattern the document follows automatically inserting what isn't actually there. It is easier to hear what is wrong once that pattern has faded.
Yes, I pointed that out. Developers could get around this however, by flashing up a startup screen which requires acceptance in order to use the program. The terms could require payment and subject the user to suit if payment is not made. This is sort of interesting because developers could conceivably use this to almost completely eliminate distribution costs and at the same time, protect their work.
There is no reason for software to break at all given that the society has co-ownership rights to all software, so that the source can be released to legimate owners of software.
Why? I don't get this. Since you're so interested in cars -- if I build a car, does my neighbor have a right to use it whenever he wants without my permission (lets assume the neighbor didn't contribute to the costs, didn't help design it, didn't help build it, didn't help test it, and doesn't help fuel it and keep it maintained -- all he did was see it in my driveway and decide that he liked it)? Why should my neighbor get to have my car?
Car sales certainly can be on any terms although in today's environment, a dealer or manufacturer wouldn't last very long under your hypothetical because that type of contract is not the norm. That doesn't mean software would be sold like cars however or that cars _cannot_ be sold like software.
With software, I'm sure there would be a range, just as we have today, where some software is sold under restrictive contracts and some software is given away free. If the utility is sufficient, people will accept the terms.
Ending copyright does not end the right to engage in contracts for either the creator or user. Considering the fact that people need to make a living, I'm sure many creative methods for earning money from software would be devised.
Without copyright, all software is free by definition.
Slow down cowboy, even if copyright ended tomorrow, all that needs happen is for a software developer to say, OK -- I will only release a binary to people who sign a contract with me that says I can sue them for breach if they distribute the software, and perhaps includes a liquidated damages provision (*). Just because copyright ends, doesn't mean you have the right to have someone else's work on your own terms. The only thing it would do would be to make it impossible to sue a user who did _not_ contract with the developer -- although a startup screen offering you the ability to agree to certain terms and use the program, or close it and not use the program, would be a way around even that.
Secondly, the end of copyright does not say anything about whether a company will give you the source code, and you'll face some stiff criminal penalties if you try to break in and steal it.
All the end of copyright would do is make the world full of different individual contracts -- reducing the standardization would mean a huge amount additional lawsuits and appeals over definitions and such, and would be very costly to companies and consumers who will ultimately eat those costs in the purchase price.
(*) liquidated damages provisions can be hard to enforce, but are used where it is difficult to calculate actual damages. The thing is, if you end up getting sued, you lose even if you win because winning is costly.
But the problem here isn't the client underpaying you. It's the employer screwing the employees. How come you can charge a client 50$ for installing a chip of ram and pay your employee only 7.50$?
This is just whining. The person making $7.50 risks nothing -- he/she just has to show up and get paid. If that person is that unsatisfied, he can go out and find shop space, pay for advertising, pound the pavement to drum up business, try to hire help and then deal with all the crazy tax issues, pay other taxes, buy equipment, supplies, and so forth. When opening a business, a person sees monthly expenses double or triple while monthly income falls to near zero at the start. Over time, if the business works, the person has earned the right to make a profit. If it fails, that person basically loses everything they put into it, and perhaps even more.
Fortunately, most of us live in a world where if we really felt it was unfair to get $7.50/hr, we can have a go at running our own. It's completely legitimate to decide not take the huge risks of starting up a business. It's completely legit to take those risks. What isn't legit is to think one is entitled to the rewards of taking the risk, without ever taking the risk. This third group of people can go beg on street corners for all I care.
Realistically, one person cannot be competent at all things. I can't learn to be an expert mechanic, computer repairperson, french chef, sea captain, airline pilot, carpenter, plumber, nuclear physicist, lawyer, doctor, fluent speaker of six languages, professional level photographer, phone system installer, programmer, logger, race car driver, author and gardener.
To become actually good at something difficult, takes years of practice and study. This necessarily requires _not_ practicing and studying something else. As for people who think they are good at everything, I applaud their skills at self-esteem and self-delusion, but I wouldn't let them touch anything I cared about.
Slashdot Mirror
It's sad that silly decisions are limiting your new cool machine.
In the old days, they built giant programs to make processors feel slow (probably hasn't changed but processors have just gotten so darn fast, people don't have the same burning need to upgrade anymore). Now that we are getting good screen resolutions, they're figuring out how to keep our content limited to the same postage stamp sized area we've always hated.
I use openoffice all the time, and I'll be really bummed if I have to give up 100 vertical pixels just so I can have giant cut, copy, and paste buttons (check out the screenshot linked in TFA: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/w/images/thumb/f/f2/Prototype.jpg/778px-Prototype.jpg ). I'd much rather see as much of my document as possible than have pixels burned up for no good reason, particularly when ctrl-x, ctrl-c, and ctrl-v are so thoroughly ingrained I can't remember ever using a button or menu option to accomplish that task. I just don't get it -- waste is bad.
Which is exactly why I fear Congress getting involved. Should we end up with a system that simply adds public support to the status quo, we will all be worse off in order for a few politicians to say "I brought healthcare to all Americans." A public health program not run by insurance companies may have it's own problems, but without a non-profit competitor, the whole thing will be an epic catastrophe.
You are equating losing with the defense being weak. The cases might have lost because because the facts were terrible. Seriously, you have Thomas pulling shenanigans with her HD, and Tenenbaum "sharing" even after he's been sued, and admitting that plus admitting he lied under oath earlier. With the facts of these cases, I'm not sure he'd have won if his legal team was made up of Jerry Spence, Clarence Darrow, and God Almighty.
I don't understand why people object when a merchant asks for ID when you use a credit card. I WANT them to do that so that if I lose my wallet, it is at least a little bit more difficult for the person fraudulently using my card to rack up a bunch of bills I have to dispute. And for the life of me, I can't even begin to fathom why Visa would have a policy of NOT asking for ID. I mean, my name is already on the card, what do I lose by also showing my driver's license?
Because you probably can't afford to drop $100,000 each into the pockets of a number of congress members. Once you can do that, the laws will be written to take your concerns into account. Till then, you can pound sand.
For a pretty awful example, and one that scared me as I'm self-employed and buy my own insurance, many people in my situation get denied coverage based on some ridiculously technical reading of their answers to the questions asked when you sign up for coverage. For example, there is an egregious example of a woman whose policy was canceled when she sought authorization for treatment for virulent type of breast cancer. The reason? She forgot to mention she had been treated for acne, her doctor misrecorded her condition, and even after the doctor called Blue Cross to clear up the matter, they wouldn't budge.
So we have a private insurance industry that will take your money and provide nothing in return. Even at the horrible DMV, you will eventually get your license, and they certainly don't try to murder you on a technicality. The notion that the free market is doing a good job at healthcare is simply not well founded in reality, and in fact it is doing SO badly, I think even the government would struggle to fail as epically as the private insurance industry.
In the end, if I can get the same crappy coverage I have now, for less cost and without the worry that I forgot to say I had the measles when I was 6 thus causing my entire policy to be canceled as a result (this is just robbery of premiums), I'd go for it. I just don't expect Congress to actually deliver something like that. They'll just force me to get robbed.
Even some of the founding fathers relied on jury nullification as I understand it because British law was seen as unjust. However, no matter how big Slashdot seems, and how notoriously it can overwhelm small sites, the fact is that at least 3 juries have listened to these cases and felt like the defendants ought to pay a substantial fine (Thomas twice and now Tenenbaum). The slashdot demographic is not widespread, merely concentrated here.
People should really understand that jury nullification is simply not a realistic notion generally, and certainly not in Tenenbaum's case where the Jury could easily have expressed its displeasure by going with the $750 level. They went with a figure 30x higher so the idea that would have found him not liable at all by nullifying the law is pretty fanciful.
Jury trials are a right in most civil and criminal cases (lets not start talking about small claims court or other specialized areas). When you file a suit, you have the option of asking for a jury trial if you pay an extra fee. If either party requests a jury, then you get a jury. Only when _neither_ party requests a jury, do you have a bench trial.
Where you are getting confused is that a judge can eliminate issues for a jury if no reasonable juror could come to anything but one conclusion based on the facts. That has nothing to do with consultation outside the jury or with it. To put this into a car analogy, suppose you rear-end someone who was legally stopped a stop light. During trial you admit that you were texting with one hand, sipping a big gulp with the other, hollering at a friend in the back seat, and not looking at the road at all. No reasonable juror would think that you were NOT negligent, thus a Judge could summarily decide that you were negligent in the accident. This gives the jury fewer questions and helps speed along the process of coming to a verdict, for example, on the issue of damages.
Not really. Social Security and its ilk are doomed. What I really want to know, is why you don't take on the burden of raising your children yourself instead of sucking up my tax dollars.
Glaciers are like batteries. With a battery, you can store up power when you are near an outlet, so you can continue to operate your device later when you aren't near an outlet. This allows continuous operation irrespective of your proximity to a receptacle.
Glaciers store up water in the form of ice during the winter. Then, in summer when precipitation is less frequent, they melt and release that water. This allows continuous access to water irrespective of the immediate level of precipitation.
Yes, we could build more reservoirs, but talk about expense. Plus they suffer silting issues and large areas have to be destroyed to build them. And if the rains stop falling anyway, then what? Build more?
Man -- I was about to mod you up till you hit on the racist BS. Overbreeding is rampant everywhere.
The fact is, the single most polluting thing a person can do is have kids. I'm intentionally child free so in the balance of things, I could drive a hummer, alone, with extra lead weights in the back, 100 miles per day. I could leave my lights on 24/7, run AC to frigid temps in the summer, blast the heat in the winter, keep a propane flare burning ten feet tall day and night in the back yard, and still not come close to the devastation caused by parenthood.
I don't actually live my life that way, because I'm a bit frugal. What mystifies me is why words such as "conservation" and "conservative" have such differing application when both imply frugality to me -- frugality in how we use environmental resources, and frugality in how we use financial resources. I want to see the birth of the frugal party. Pun intended.
Mostly China.
100 years from now? should be: "banned in all 6 states"
Here's a neato business plan. Buy a bunch of certs. Sell them to other people. http://www.google.com/search?q=anonymous+ssl+cert
Of course, if all it takes is an email from the domain you just registered for your phishing site, how is it that you won't get the email? I once bought bought cheap cert from godaddy for a site I ran (legit site) -- I never got a phone call. What's an email prove -- nothing except I can fill in some forms on a webhost admin console to set up an email. It doesn't say a thing about who I am.
Next time, go for an anonymous SSL cert. As has been pointed out by others, the cert represents the willingness of someone to pay, perhaps with a stolen credit card, but a willingness to pay and not much else.
Perhaps it isn't user laziness, but brain dead UIs that make people "click the nearest visible button". How many obtuse warnings does it take to make a person get frustrated and do something they regret? Hard to say, but I've certainly fallen victim to clicking the wrong button and I'm neither lazy nor totally computer illiterate. Just google stupid error messages. Sometimes users are the problem, sometimes programs are, and sometimes it's a combination. Flatly blaming the user for being lazy is a copout.
Aside from that, it is possible for one to get a certificate with no checks deeper than whether or not the credit card transaction was authorized. Certs seem very much like a money machine and little else.
As a perfect example, see the last sentence of paragraph 1. ;-)
In my work, I often have to write documents of moderate length (10-15 pages). I find it extremely helpful to read the document aloud after I've done all my editing. It is very easy to pass over small glue words such as "to", "at" and so forth while typing, and just as easy for the brain to insert them when they aren't actually there while reading silently. Speaking every every word and makes it easy to hear what is missing -- typically several omitted words per document.
It is also helpful to delay the read aloud session for a few hours or if possible, till the next day. It seems like our brains build up the pattern the document follows automatically inserting what isn't actually there. It is easier to hear what is wrong once that pattern has faded.
Yes, I pointed that out. Developers could get around this however, by flashing up a startup screen which requires acceptance in order to use the program. The terms could require payment and subject the user to suit if payment is not made. This is sort of interesting because developers could conceivably use this to almost completely eliminate distribution costs and at the same time, protect their work.
Why? I don't get this. Since you're so interested in cars -- if I build a car, does my neighbor have a right to use it whenever he wants without my permission (lets assume the neighbor didn't contribute to the costs, didn't help design it, didn't help build it, didn't help test it, and doesn't help fuel it and keep it maintained -- all he did was see it in my driveway and decide that he liked it)? Why should my neighbor get to have my car?
Car sales certainly can be on any terms although in today's environment, a dealer or manufacturer wouldn't last very long under your hypothetical because that type of contract is not the norm. That doesn't mean software would be sold like cars however or that cars _cannot_ be sold like software.
With software, I'm sure there would be a range, just as we have today, where some software is sold under restrictive contracts and some software is given away free. If the utility is sufficient, people will accept the terms.
Ending copyright does not end the right to engage in contracts for either the creator or user. Considering the fact that people need to make a living, I'm sure many creative methods for earning money from software would be devised.
Slow down cowboy, even if copyright ended tomorrow, all that needs happen is for a software developer to say, OK -- I will only release a binary to people who sign a contract with me that says I can sue them for breach if they distribute the software, and perhaps includes a liquidated damages provision (*). Just because copyright ends, doesn't mean you have the right to have someone else's work on your own terms. The only thing it would do would be to make it impossible to sue a user who did _not_ contract with the developer -- although a startup screen offering you the ability to agree to certain terms and use the program, or close it and not use the program, would be a way around even that.
Secondly, the end of copyright does not say anything about whether a company will give you the source code, and you'll face some stiff criminal penalties if you try to break in and steal it.
All the end of copyright would do is make the world full of different individual contracts -- reducing the standardization would mean a huge amount additional lawsuits and appeals over definitions and such, and would be very costly to companies and consumers who will ultimately eat those costs in the purchase price.
(*) liquidated damages provisions can be hard to enforce, but are used where it is difficult to calculate actual damages. The thing is, if you end up getting sued, you lose even if you win because winning is costly.
This is just whining. The person making $7.50 risks nothing -- he/she just has to show up and get paid. If that person is that unsatisfied, he can go out and find shop space, pay for advertising, pound the pavement to drum up business, try to hire help and then deal with all the crazy tax issues, pay other taxes, buy equipment, supplies, and so forth. When opening a business, a person sees monthly expenses double or triple while monthly income falls to near zero at the start. Over time, if the business works, the person has earned the right to make a profit. If it fails, that person basically loses everything they put into it, and perhaps even more.
Fortunately, most of us live in a world where if we really felt it was unfair to get $7.50/hr, we can have a go at running our own. It's completely legitimate to decide not take the huge risks of starting up a business. It's completely legit to take those risks. What isn't legit is to think one is entitled to the rewards of taking the risk, without ever taking the risk. This third group of people can go beg on street corners for all I care.
Realistically, one person cannot be competent at all things. I can't learn to be an expert mechanic, computer repairperson, french chef, sea captain, airline pilot, carpenter, plumber, nuclear physicist, lawyer, doctor, fluent speaker of six languages, professional level photographer, phone system installer, programmer, logger, race car driver, author and gardener.
To become actually good at something difficult, takes years of practice and study. This necessarily requires _not_ practicing and studying something else. As for people who think they are good at everything, I applaud their skills at self-esteem and self-delusion, but I wouldn't let them touch anything I cared about.