You may reconsider your wall mount desire once you see it done. With the typical desk size, a wall mounted screen will be twice as far from your eyes as now, and look 75% smaller.
Try backing away 2 feet from your screen and see if you like working that way. I wouldn't.
I don't know about arrests, but under the DMCA, companies can seize property from people they feel have violated their IP. That is the companies themself can perform the raid, not the government.
Pretty creepy!
Here is the press release about the first such case:
http://www.directv.com/press/pressdel/0,1112,414 ,0 0.html
This is deteriorating into nonsene. You ask me to prove my accusations. But I haven't made any accusations. You suddenly demand that courtroom rules should apply to this thread, seemingly unaware that this is not a courtroom.
The "innocent until proven guilty" principle only means that the legal system should treat people as innocents (i.e. not punish them) until convicted of a crime, not that they have not actually commited the crime. I'm sure you also know that when you're not trying to win an argument.
To get back to the actual issue, what I originally commented was this statement by you:
I'm friends with four police officers in Massachusetts, three of which I see on a weekly basis. All of them are nice people, and none of them abuse their power.
This clearly says that your friends do not break the law. What you're saying now is that they have not been convicted of breaking the law. A completely different statement. I suppose I could see the fact that you no longer defend your original statement as a quiet admission that you were wrong.
This is what is called a strawman argument. Instead of responding to my actual argument, that he can't be sure his police friends are not criminals, tentacle pretends that I have claimed that his friends in fact are criminals, and responds to that instead.
This is usually done because people have no good response to the real argument and have to invent a stupider argument that they can respond to. It can possibly also be because of poor reading or comprehension skills. In either case, there is nothing for me to add.
I don't need to know them or you, all I need to know is that you're not present when they perform their job. That means that you simply can't know if what they do there.
That they are very nice and friendly too you doesn't mean that they will treat people they percieve to be scum legally. Neither does being married to a black woman, or even being black for that matter.
Things like planting evidence on or beating up people who they know are guilty of something, but don't have enough evidence for can easily be seen as a way of helping justice and doing a good thing for officers who percieve themselves as being very good upstanding people. They would most likely not discuss that with civilian friends. It's been known to be a routine tactic in many police departments.
Check out what friends and neighbours say about serial killers sometime. It's quite often that it's incomprehensible that such nice and friendly people could possibly be guilty of anything remotely so horrific. The bottom line is that you just don't ever know.
That they don't tell you about any criminal activity they engage in is no guarantee either. If the police themeselves operated by those standards, they would catch very few criminals.
I'm friends with four police officers in Massachusetts, three of which I see on a weekly basis. All of them are nice people, and none of them abuse their power.
You have absolutely no way of knowing that they don't abuse their power. Nice and friendly people are frequently guilty of horrendous crimes
While cute, the cube is also extremely practical in terms of desk space for those who do not need a lot of expansion options. It's noiselessness is also very practical, especially for musicians.
I don't know why you hate beautiful things, but for most people it's worth more to be surrounded by beauty than by ugliness, and they are happy to pay for it.
accounting, sales, marketing, execs - they all use winblows. they're forced to - they have no choice - the i/s department usually only supports M$ on the desktop.
And the real MS customer - the i/s department - is usually very happy with the products they buy from MS. I think the greatness of MS is in how they realise who the customer is (i/s) and who they can ignore (the end users).
I'd like to read more about how MS does this. I suspect there is plenty of dirty tricks going on here.
I just got annoyed at all Americans commenting who don't know anything about the subject except that the US mobile phone system must the best in the world, presumably because everything in the US is best in the world by definition. I picked your post pretty much at random from many.
This guy actually lives in the US, and has researched the phone market. He also has extensive first hand experience of the market in an other country. But instead of considering that his comparision might be valid and that he might have a point, you just assume that he must be confused about the facts. As he pointed out in his response, even your examples of that it can be cheap here too, are in fact quite expensive in an international comparision.
I felt better after posting, so something was achieved.
Yeah, we have 3 tier system here in CA. It's a 12 miles radius, not 10. Having 4 different phone companies to deal does not seem simple to any non americans.
I've read most post in both this and the previous discussion, as well as several online news articles elsewhere, and nowhere have I seen a description of exactly what is banned under this license. What constitutes using GPLed software "with" or "in conjuction" with this MS toolkit? I suspect nobody really knows.
That this does not stop hundreds of people to voice their firm opinion about this thing they don't know what it is a bit amusing.
If mobile calls are cheap enough that there is no reason to not answer incoming calls, how can it be too expensive to make outgoing calls?
Yes, you pay more to call a mobile phone. They have special area codes, so you know what you'll pay.
Of course it's the person who makes the calls who should be paying for it. That is how every other market works. Imagine if you would have to pay airline tickets when people came visiting you...
If you find land-line billing complex, you must have trouble grasping flat rate pricing (unless you're in California, Chicago, NYC, or one of the other areas without flat-rate calling) It's very simple.
Yes, of course. If someone points out that the US is behind the rest of the world in some respect, it must be because he's an idiot who can't comprehend the very simple and superior US system.
BTW, I live in Califoria and have flat-rate calling, genius.
I have read a lot of Friedman, and I guess you're right that I overstated his position. I don't have time to search my books for quotes, but as I remember it he never clearly comes out in favor of any monetary system. He observes that commodity based schemes have their problems, but they have shown to be pretty workable and safe over the centuries, and that fiat money systems are responsible for pretty much all monetary disasters in history. I think he says that the current system with sophisticated fiat currencies is a historic experiment, and it's too early to say how it's gonna work out until it's been operating a few centuries.
So I guess what I should have said was that Friedman finds the original posters position a perfectly reasonable and respectable one, even if he may not fully agree with it. Calling it "one of the stupidest things i've ever heard" that is refuted by economics 101 is clearly a statement from an ignoramus. I'm sorry that I let myself get dragged down to that level, and I appreciate you correcting it
The problem with the gold standard is that there is only a fixed amount of gold in the world and hence a fixed supply of money. This has a tendency to actually increase inflation since having a country's currency backed by it gold, which would essentially be fixed at a maximum amount, since there is no infinite amount of gold in the world, would mean that for every extra dollar that the treasury prints out, the overall value of the currency would decrease. In short as the money supply grew, so would inflation.
Yeah, expect it's completely opposite. If money is backed by gold, the money supply is by definition the gold supply, which while not constant, grows very slowly. The money supply can only grow strongly by abandoning the gold standard, and printing more money than you have gold. You can do that without officially acknowledging that that's what you're doing, which may be what you're referring to.
In reality, inflation has been virtually non existent through history with gold based currencies.
For those of you who think I'm blowing smoke all this stuff I got out of my college economics book (Baulmer and Blinder are the authors I think ).
I'm from Sweden and have travelled extensively over many parts of the world. I have never been anywhere where it's so hard to get by on my English as Scotland (I should probably say Glascow). Sure, they understand what I say, but it's very rare for me to get what they say. And you can't ask them to switch to English, cuz that is what they're already speaking.
After 3 days, I got on a train to Greece, never to return.
Plus, trying to explain that to Joe Surfer who only saw "$0.05!!! BUY NOW!" would be something of a challenge.
It would, and I think that is the hardest part of this plan. But I think it's explainable, and if it becomes widespread, you only have to explain it once.
I wonder if it would break some lottery laws. It well might.
The best way is to lump these payments into a single transaction each month where the processor will only skim a percentage from the aggregate, not from each individual item.
But you can't aggregate them unless it's the same customer buying from the same vendor. And that's hardly common. If it's 100 different customer at one vendor, it has to be 1 transaction from each of those customers.
As many have commented, the problem with micropayments is the not so micro transaction costs. Paying somebody 5 cent makes no sense if it costs $1 to make the transaction.
Here is a way around it.
Instead of every customer paying 5 cent for your comic (or whatever), every customer could have a 1% chance/risk of paying $5. The seller gets as much money, the customers pay as much on average, and even if you're unlucky once, $5 isn't gonna break anyone's budget. And the transaction costs are cut by 99%.
It's a bit odd, but I say it could absolutely work in practice.
I love the fact that this movie is politically correct. Yes, you have a german person (heavy accent, too) who looks basically like hitler and who loves blowing things up. But he's a florist.
Don't know it this makes it more or less politically correct, but demolition expert Vincenzo Santorini is Italian. From Palermo. The heavy accent is Italian, not German.
It's sad that the obvious needs to be stated, but governments are responsible for at least 1000 times more crimes than all terrorists and kidnappers put together.
The FBI has a long history of using it's information for blackmail, and of killing political opponent and other inconvenient people.
Video on demand was tried and failed in the mid nineties. Rebranding it as some cool Tivo mutation doesn't change what it is, and the reasons it will fail.
What's interesting is that it shows how successful Tivo has become.
"This despite their consistent claims that cell phone radiation is harmless."
This reminds me of how the nuclear industry first gets forced to apply a much higher security standard than any other power industry, and then the same people take their extreme security systems as an indication of how unsafe it has to be.
It's not unlike some school bullying I've seen. It's also pretty off topic, I know...
This is getting a bit drawn out and off topic, but I'm having fun so I'll keep talking.
You miss a significant point. In the case of a TiVo, you don't rush a fix out to just a few customers, you end up rushing a fix out to ALL CUSTOMERS. The "update" code doesn't check to see if you've got a subscription or not, it just checks to see if there is a new version available and grabs it.
Do you know this for a fact? If it's true, it's probably one reason they don't make a bug release. Updating every Tivo out there is probably pretty expensive.
I believe they have the ability to send updates to specific TiVo serial numbers or a range of numbers, but they need to know those #'s first
They can. I requested 2.01 beta and got it a day or 2 later. So they could easily let people with this problem request the bug fix update one by one. If they cared enough.
Your estimate of a "fix" is also overly simplistic at best. You don't know ANYTHING about how the code is designed.
Sure. But if it's designed anywhere near a professional level, it will be this easy, or pretty close to it. If not, there is really no hope for this company.
That it should take 3 months is ridiculous. If they worked at that speed, 2.01 would have taken 40 years to do.
You don't know how the ShowNagScreen function is called or what it does. You don't know if it's all over the code, or in specific places, or running off of a timer.
The function shows the nag screen. What else could it possibly do?
You don't fix it where it's called, you fix it in the function. To get it back to only show it every 8 hours, you'd let the function remember the last time it was shown, and if it's called before that time + 8 hours it simply returns without showing the screen. That's probably how it was implemented before.
You don't know if there are any performance issues with the WasIOnceA13System check.
If there are, they could introduce this hitech invention called a "boolean variable", which makes it so they only have to run that function once. Pretty neat.
The problem is that the 2.0.1 software isn't a minor change to the old code -- it's a significant change; it isn't as simple as going back through CVS, doing a diff, and combining the code with an if statement around it.
Sure. Someone familiar with the code would have to get the old code and put it back in in a workable way.
Being a "software engineer", I'm sure you have also at some point changed one line of code that broke a core piece of the software in a non-obvious way.
I probably have. Which is why you test these things.
Now tell me again why they shouldn't bother doing any testing?
When did I tell you the first time?? You're confusing me with some fantasy figure. Of course you do some testing for a bugfix release, but not the full test cycle that you do for a major release
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Slashdot Mirror
You may reconsider your wall mount desire once you see it done. With the typical desk size, a wall mounted screen will be twice as far from your eyes as now, and look 75% smaller.
Try backing away 2 feet from your screen and see if you like working that way. I wouldn't.
I don't know about arrests, but under the DMCA, companies can seize property from people they feel have violated their IP. That is the companies themself can perform the raid, not the government.
4 ,0 0.html
Pretty creepy!
Here is the press release about the first such case:
http://www.directv.com/press/pressdel/0,1112,41
Actually last I heard TiVo had over 200k users. Still not much, but it's growing quite fast and probably expotentially.
This is deteriorating into nonsene. You ask me to prove my accusations. But I haven't made any accusations. You suddenly demand that courtroom rules should apply to this thread, seemingly unaware that this is not a courtroom.
The "innocent until proven guilty" principle only means that the legal system should treat people as innocents (i.e. not punish them) until convicted of a crime, not that they have not actually commited the crime. I'm sure you also know that when you're not trying to win an argument.
To get back to the actual issue, what I originally commented was this statement by you:
I'm friends with four police officers in Massachusetts, three of which I see on a weekly basis. All of them are nice people, and none of them abuse their power.
This clearly says that your friends do not break the law. What you're saying now is that they have not been convicted of breaking the law. A completely different statement. I suppose I could see the fact that you no longer defend your original statement as a quiet admission that you were wrong.
This is what is called a strawman argument. Instead of responding to my actual argument, that he can't be sure his police friends are not criminals, tentacle pretends that I have claimed that his friends in fact are criminals, and responds to that instead.
This is usually done because people have no good response to the real argument and have to invent a stupider argument that they can respond to. It can possibly also be because of poor reading or comprehension skills. In either case, there is nothing for me to add.
I don't need to know them or you, all I need to know is that you're not present when they perform their job. That means that you simply can't know if what they do there.
That they are very nice and friendly too you doesn't mean that they will treat people they percieve to be scum legally. Neither does being married to a black woman, or even being black for that matter.
Things like planting evidence on or beating up people who they know are guilty of something, but don't have enough evidence for can easily be seen as a way of helping justice and doing a good thing for officers who percieve themselves as being very good upstanding people. They would most likely not discuss that with civilian friends. It's been known to be a routine tactic in many police departments.
Check out what friends and neighbours say about serial killers sometime. It's quite often that it's incomprehensible that such nice and friendly people could possibly be guilty of anything remotely so horrific. The bottom line is that you just don't ever know.
That they don't tell you about any criminal activity they engage in is no guarantee either. If the police themeselves operated by those standards, they would catch very few criminals.
That would explain it
I'm friends with four police officers in Massachusetts, three of which I see on a weekly basis. All of them are nice people, and none of them abuse their power.
You have absolutely no way of knowing that they don't abuse their power. Nice and friendly people are frequently guilty of horrendous crimes
While cute, the cube is also extremely practical in terms of desk space for those who do not need a lot of expansion options. It's noiselessness is also very practical, especially for musicians.
I don't know why you hate beautiful things, but for most people it's worth more to be surrounded by beauty than by ugliness, and they are happy to pay for it.
accounting, sales, marketing, execs - they all use winblows. they're forced to - they have no choice - the i/s department usually only supports M$ on the desktop.
And the real MS customer - the i/s department - is usually very happy with the products they buy from MS. I think the greatness of MS is in how they realise who the customer is (i/s) and who they can ignore (the end users).
I'd like to read more about how MS does this. I suspect there is plenty of dirty tricks going on here.
I just got annoyed at all Americans commenting who don't know anything about the subject except that the US mobile phone system must the best in the world, presumably because everything in the US is best in the world by definition. I picked your post pretty much at random from many.
This guy actually lives in the US, and has researched the phone market. He also has extensive first hand experience of the market in an other country. But instead of considering that his comparision might be valid and that he might have a point, you just assume that he must be confused about the facts. As he pointed out in his response, even your examples of that it can be cheap here too, are in fact quite expensive in an international comparision.
I felt better after posting, so something was achieved.
Yeah, we have 3 tier system here in CA. It's a 12 miles radius, not 10. Having 4 different phone companies to deal does not seem simple to any non americans.
I've read most post in both this and the previous discussion, as well as several online news articles elsewhere, and nowhere have I seen a description of exactly what is banned under this license. What constitutes using GPLed software "with" or "in conjuction" with this MS toolkit? I suspect nobody really knows.
That this does not stop hundreds of people to voice their firm opinion about this thing they don't know what it is a bit amusing.
If mobile calls are cheap enough that there is no reason to not answer incoming calls, how can it be too expensive to make outgoing calls?
Yes, you pay more to call a mobile phone. They have special area codes, so you know what you'll pay.
Of course it's the person who makes the calls who should be paying for it. That is how every other market works. Imagine if you would have to pay airline tickets when people came visiting you...
If you find land-line billing complex, you must have trouble grasping flat rate pricing (unless you're in California, Chicago, NYC, or one of the other areas without flat-rate calling) It's very simple.
Yes, of course. If someone points out that the US is behind the rest of the world in some respect, it must be because he's an idiot who can't comprehend the very simple and superior US system.
BTW, I live in Califoria and have flat-rate calling, genius.
I have read a lot of Friedman, and I guess you're right that I overstated his position. I don't have time to search my books for quotes, but as I remember it he never clearly comes out in favor of any monetary system. He observes that commodity based schemes have their problems, but they have shown to be pretty workable and safe over the centuries, and that fiat money systems are responsible for pretty much all monetary disasters in history. I think he says that the current system with sophisticated fiat currencies is a historic experiment, and it's too early to say how it's gonna work out until it's been operating a few centuries.
So I guess what I should have said was that Friedman finds the original posters position a perfectly reasonable and respectable one, even if he may not fully agree with it. Calling it "one of the stupidest things i've ever heard" that is refuted by economics 101 is clearly a statement from an ignoramus. I'm sorry that I let myself get dragged down to that level, and I appreciate you correcting it
The problem with the gold standard is that there is only a fixed amount of gold in the world and hence a fixed supply of money. This has a tendency to actually increase inflation since having a country's currency backed by it gold, which would essentially be fixed at a maximum amount, since there is no infinite amount of gold in the world, would mean that for every extra dollar that the treasury prints out, the overall value of the currency would decrease. In short as the money supply grew, so would inflation.
Yeah, expect it's completely opposite. If money is backed by gold, the money supply is by definition the gold supply, which while not constant, grows very slowly. The money supply can only grow strongly by abandoning the gold standard, and printing more money than you have gold. You can do that without officially acknowledging that that's what you're doing, which may be what you're referring to.
In reality, inflation has been virtually non existent through history with gold based currencies.
For those of you who think I'm blowing smoke all this stuff I got out of my college economics book (Baulmer and Blinder are the authors I think ).
I hope that's a misreading of the book. A good book on the subject is Money Mischief : Episodes in Monetary History by Milton Friedman.
It's worth noting that many prominent economists, including Nobel price winner Milton Friedman, agrees with this "moron".
They have taken economics 101.
I'm from Sweden and have travelled extensively over many parts of the world. I have never been anywhere where it's so hard to get by on my English as Scotland (I should probably say Glascow). Sure, they understand what I say, but it's very rare for me to get what they say. And you can't ask them to switch to English, cuz that is what they're already speaking.
After 3 days, I got on a train to Greece, never to return.
Isn't that fraud?
Only if you don't tell people upfront.
Plus, trying to explain that to Joe Surfer who only saw "$0.05!!! BUY NOW!" would be something of a challenge.
It would, and I think that is the hardest part of this plan. But I think it's explainable, and if it becomes widespread, you only have to explain it once.
I wonder if it would break some lottery laws. It well might.
The best way is to lump these payments into a single transaction each month where the processor will only skim a percentage from the aggregate, not from each individual item.
But you can't aggregate them unless it's the same customer buying from the same vendor. And that's hardly common. If it's 100 different customer at one vendor, it has to be 1 transaction from each of those customers.
As many have commented, the problem with micropayments is the not so micro transaction costs. Paying somebody 5 cent makes no sense if it costs $1 to make the transaction.
Here is a way around it.
Instead of every customer paying 5 cent for your comic (or whatever), every customer could have a 1% chance/risk of paying $5. The seller gets as much money, the customers pay as much on average, and even if you're unlucky once, $5 isn't gonna break anyone's budget. And the transaction costs are cut by 99%.
It's a bit odd, but I say it could absolutely work in practice.
I love the fact that this movie is politically correct. Yes, you have a german person (heavy accent, too) who looks basically like hitler and who loves blowing things up. But he's a florist.
Don't know it this makes it more or less politically correct, but demolition expert Vincenzo Santorini is Italian. From Palermo. The heavy accent is Italian, not German.
It's sad that the obvious needs to be stated, but governments are responsible for at least 1000 times more crimes than all terrorists and kidnappers put together.
The FBI has a long history of using it's information for blackmail, and of killing political opponent and other inconvenient people.
Video on demand was tried and failed in the mid nineties. Rebranding it as some cool Tivo mutation doesn't change what it is, and the reasons it will fail.
What's interesting is that it shows how successful Tivo has become.
"This despite their consistent claims that cell phone radiation is harmless."
This reminds me of how the nuclear industry first gets forced to apply a much higher security standard than any other power industry, and then the same people take their extreme security systems as an indication of how unsafe it has to be.
It's not unlike some school bullying I've seen. It's also pretty off topic, I know...
This is getting a bit drawn out and off topic, but I'm having fun so I'll keep talking.
You miss a significant point. In the case of a TiVo, you don't rush a fix out to just a few customers, you end up rushing a fix out to ALL CUSTOMERS. The "update" code doesn't check to see if you've got a subscription or not, it just checks to see if there is a new version available and grabs it.
Do you know this for a fact? If it's true, it's probably one reason they don't make a bug release. Updating every Tivo out there is probably pretty expensive.
I believe they have the ability to send updates to specific TiVo serial numbers or a range of numbers, but they need to know those #'s first
They can. I requested 2.01 beta and got it a day or 2 later. So they could easily let people with this problem request the bug fix update one by one. If they cared enough.
Your estimate of a "fix" is also overly simplistic at best. You don't know ANYTHING about how the code is designed.
Sure. But if it's designed anywhere near a professional level, it will be this easy, or pretty close to it. If not, there is really no hope for this company.
That it should take 3 months is ridiculous. If they worked at that speed, 2.01 would have taken 40 years to do.
You don't know how the ShowNagScreen function is called or what it does. You don't know if it's all over the code, or in specific places, or running off of a timer.
The function shows the nag screen. What else could it possibly do?
You don't fix it where it's called, you fix it in the function. To get it back to only show it every 8 hours, you'd let the function remember the last time it was shown, and if it's called before that time + 8 hours it simply returns without showing the screen. That's probably how it was implemented before.
You don't know if there are any performance issues with the WasIOnceA13System check.
If there are, they could introduce this hitech invention called a "boolean variable", which makes it so they only have to run that function once. Pretty neat.
The problem is that the 2.0.1 software isn't a minor change to the old code -- it's a significant change; it isn't as simple as going back through CVS, doing a diff, and combining the code with an if statement around it.
Sure. Someone familiar with the code would have to get the old code and put it back in in a workable way.
Being a "software engineer", I'm sure you have also at some point changed one line of code that broke a core piece of the software in a non-obvious way.
I probably have. Which is why you test these things.
Now tell me again why they shouldn't bother doing any testing?
When did I tell you the first time?? You're confusing me with some fantasy figure. Of course you do some testing for a bugfix release, but not the full test cycle that you do for a major release
.