Why couldn't a computer write an essay? The kind of grammatical forms you're advocating, I could feed a program 10 nouns, 5 proper nouns, a handful of verbs, and a couple of factoids, and have it churn out a piece of unreadable tripe which would look GREAT to some sort of computerized grader. If their program uses rules to check content, I could write a program which takes semi-meaningless content and fits it perfectly into those rules. A+, everytime.
For a scientific journal you don't need to be able to formulate a compelling conclusion, or be able to clearly articulate a chain of reasoning? These are things a computer can't check. Things that are way beyond grammar. There is more to being able to write than being able to follow a few simple rules.
Besides, the sort of cookie-cutter english that would appeal to a grammar checking program is too boring even for a scientific journal.
I bet I could frequency check a history text to pull out the most commonly used words that aren't "the" or "but", and plug those into the old Essay-O-Matic and get a paper without even having to read the book. The dream of every student.
I used to teach an SAT prep class, and I spent my time trying to teach those poor suckers to be stagnant, repetitive, intellectual boors. That's what those tests check: memory, lack of imagination, and the ability to think like the damn cold fish who made up the exams in the first place.
I took the basic GRE, the one that everyone takes, not one of the specialized tests. I read a prep book beforehand, because that's what you do for a standardised test. The book claimed that the GRE never ever EVER contained complex exponents (Not really complex, just fractional or negative. The basic GRE, remember?) So when I ran into "What is 9 to the -1/2?" I just laughed a little to myself, but at the same time, I could hear this round of muttering through the room as other people hit the same problem. We'd all read the same damn book!
I'd be willing to bet that a good quarter of the people in that room blew that question because the prep books said you didn't have to know that. And this is supposed to tell something about what you learned? Even the logic section of that test was a joke.
Computers are great at testing some things, but standardised tests are easy to beat if you know the tricks, and these days everyone knows the tricks. Maybe some people aren't as good at pulling them off, but still, how acurate can they really be?
How do you step from 12 years of education where nothing but grammar, vocabulary, and spelling are taught, and then expect students to magically be creative in college? It's one thing to make sure the rules are understood, and entirely another to turn the whole process over to a machine with no more grasp on creativity or imagination than your average toaster.
It's bad enough with the standardised test obsession. I've known people who were much smarter than me who couldn't come within 20% of my score on a standardised test. Why? Because I am an excellent taker of standardised tests. Possibly the least useful skill available in someone who is done with college. It means nothing! People talk of it as "objective", and then go and take a 30 question personality quiz out of fricking Cosmo without even grasping their inherent hypocrasy.
Computer driven/scored tests and exams are worthless everywhere actual creativity is involved. Since creativity and independant thought are the qualities of thought that we need most, as we cannot get them from computers (yet), it seems utterly pointless to use computers to crush those qualities out of generations of students. It's bad enough when you have to deal with some stodgy, unimaginative professor.
The funny thing about this is that, if the essay is graded by computer, the best way to write the essay would be to have the COMPUTER write it. The same criteria that the program would use to grade the essay could very easily be turned around and used to generate an essay that the computer will love. Having a computer written term paper given an A by a computer grader is worthy of an Ionesco play.
Beyond that there is no way the computer will be able to distinguish between something truly interesting and something that just lists the facts in simple Dick and Jane language with an occasional compund sentence to keep the grammar checker happy. All it can do is check for fact1, fact2, fact3, and any interesting conclusion you draw in the paper will be completely lost. Anything more would be turing test worthy, and I heartily doubt they've achieved anything close to that.
Elegant prose is often not strictly grammatical, so a boring paper would likely score the same or better than a far better written essay with the same facts. I routinely turn off grammar checking in every program I've ever used it in. Aside from the occasional misplaced modifier or dangling participle, its worthless.
In conclusion, this idea is a pipe dream which would discourage high quality writing (i.e. the kind actual PEOPLE like to read), teach people the substandard grammatical constructs used by most grammar checking software, and create a market for software that writes term papers, thereby removing the last actual bit of work your average liberal arts major has to do. I think it's a hopelessly terrible idea. TA's already do this work; why waste time coming up with a program which will do the same thing, poorly?
Hey, we're paying for that crap! They start developing off BSD or Linux and try and "privatize" what they get out of it, I, for one, will be mad as hell! that's where a lot of the original Unix stuff came from...Government sponsored research released into the private sector. If more of my tax money went to that stuff, I wouldn't mind paying them half as much.
Kazaa lite is the only way to fly. I've used it since it first came out, not because it "made it easier to pirate songs/movies/etc" but because it came out ad and spyware free! If you use plain kazaa, you're a fricking idiot.
I don't see how anyone can jump up on a high horse and claim kazaa is better/worse than kazaa lite. Like, its magically not the same filesharing if you're using Kazaa lite. As far as I'm concerned, kazaa is just a crippleware version of Kazaa lite.
Windows MAil SERVER? SCO authentication? How the HELL does that couple with open source management software?
Why do people always want my BEST skill, and two other skills that no one in the world wants. It's like, "We want a Java programmer with massive database experience...Who is a hemaphrodite, and can speak fluent sanskrit." AAAAAAAAAA!
Sure, all file systems are database driven. But, in most cases, it's just a flat table with a couple of linear searches. Like a library.
The benefits of switching this system to one that is SQL based elude me. I love SQL. I love manipulating data. That's it's strength; relating things that aren't, at first blush, related. How the hell is this going to help my harddrive? I'm not going to want queries viewing my programs in new and interesting ways.
The only use I can see for this is for some kind of networked, non-private, system, where you would want to be able to find things not normally available to you, on someone elses computer.
In terms of actual ethical thought, we have the following:
Utilitarianism: Basically, this is majority rule, so Filesharing is good.
Relativism: Good is dependant on the person who is doing the action--if they think it's good, it's good. So filesharing is good.
Emotivism: There is no good. Goooo filesharing!
Kantian Rationalism (Categorical Imperative): Kant would say, "If logic tells you this the correct/ethical course, then this is what you should be doing." Since the RIAA hasn't really put forth compelling facts or figures documenting their losses, logic has nothing to go on, and filesharing would seem to be at least not-wrong. Since, however all filesharers are providing at least storage space, and likely bandwidth as well, free of charge, to the world, and since all these things fall under charity and/or generosity, and since those things are generally considered moral, Logic says that, lacking convincing evidence of harm, Filesharing must be good!
Biblical Ethics: Don't think much of the 10 Commandments, but, as I recall, there is no "Thou Shalt Not Violate Copyrights". And, in this case, "Thou Shalt Not Steal" seems to apply more to the money gouging RIAA than the non-profit filesharers, so the Bible comes down on the side of Filesharing! Woot! Gooooo God!
Ummmmm. Aristotle and Plato don't have crap to say about this...Think that's about everybody important.
I'm all up for moral arguments, if anyone wants to chime in.
Every one of us is probably in violation of the DMCA at least once a day. I don't even think about it anymore. If everything I do is illegal, then either the law sucks, or I am a criminal genius. Either way, it's cool.
I think burning it would automatically make it better than it is right now, even if it didn't come back.
Anybody know a site that compiles a list of consumer stuff that will use this crap? The day my TV has a bios that prevents me from doing ANYTHING, is the day I stop watching tv altogether.
On the other hand, jerking the collective chains of 60 million people tech savvy enough to file share is not exactly safe.
I personally don't go in for showy digital attacks, but I admit that it pleases me when other people do, especially when the target deserves it. Therefore, I propose that everyone who fileshares throws in ten cents or a dollar into a "Fuck the RIAA" prize fund. If the numbers are accurate, we could get a nice pot of between 6 and 60 million dollars, for those who best convey our collective annoyance to our RIAA overlords.
I did some Y2K work. Simple stuff, mostly cobol and pascal on old accounting systems. From what I saw, most companies had ditched nearly all of their non-compliant software years before. The code I was working on was, to put it very kindly, "legacy". The only other things that had issues were some windows desktops, and that was hardly going to shut the company down.
I agree, but I think that before we get too complacent about the advances in autopilots, etc, we should note that we still don't have anything remotely like an autopilot in a car, which would give a far better idea of how this stuff is going to work than a plane's autopilot will. Traffic volume at the least will be wildly different.
I agree. Dell is just my biggest unfavorite at this time. Part of it is the damn customers. I went into a situation where the client needed two servers, to run some kind of fail-over redundant file server setup. Not a huge business or anything.
The techs got together, and gave them a quote for around 8000 which was about 2000 dollars of profit on top of 6000 dollars worth of machine, which was all they needed and more, a really nice deal.
The customer gets all creeped out because the boxes aren't going to be "name brand" whatever the hell that means, and goes to dell and gets 2 servers for like 8500 dollars. Then we add in around 2000 dollars worth of extra hard drives, and then come the inevitable hardware problems, and on and on.
Turned into a real fiasco--they got a bunch of substandard components put together by a company that offers substandard tech support, for an unreasonably high price. When the smoke cleared, they were pissed off at us (marketings fault).
I don't know. The way the market is right now, its silly not to make your own box. I bought a 3000 dollar dell in 1997, and a 3500 dell in 2000, and then, this year, I ripped all the video and audio stuff, and the extra hard drives out of the second dell, and built a computer with those, and some really nice high end parts, for 1600 which would have cost me 4000 from dell, with crappier parts. Screw them, I'm never going back.
Actually, it is a defense, for the same reason that, if I came on to your land, passed all the no trespassing signs, broke into your house, and then hurt myself, I could still sue you for having an unsafe environment. My having read the signs, and even committing an illegal act, does not remove your liability in this case.
The same thing applies when you sign a legal waiver. Those can be overruled if the court believes that the injury you experienced was beyond the scope of the waiver.
EULA's are very shady, for the most part, and I would say if one was ever seriously challenged in court, it would very likely be declared non-binding.
I'd like to see them go to court over this stuff sometime. With any other type of product, you have some sort of recourse if it totally sucks, but not with software. According to the terms of the EULA, it doesn't have to actually do anything, but if it does do something, and that something is bad, then it's not their fault.
I've grown to hate dell so much in the last few years. That tech support call is vintage dell. I haven't had a good experience with dell tech support in so long, I can't even remember the last time. Their service personel are hopelessly incompentent...grrrr.
Let me just give an example:
I used to work for a company that had sold a large number of dell rack servers with PERC 3 (i think) RAID controllers. Don't know who made these controllers, but they sucked. BIG TIME. It was to the point where the systems with NO redundancy, just a simple harddrive, were far more reliable.
Every time a RAID controller died, we called dell, and every time they managed to destroy the damn RAID information! EVERY TIME! It didn't matter if they sent a tech, or tried to give us phone support, BAM! The whole thing went into the toilet and we had to try and rebuild it to the point where we could get some information off it.
I've seen a damn situation where a dell tech had to go replace a FRICKING HARD DRIVE. A HOTSWAP harddrive, in a computer that didn't HAVE a raid problem, and the bastard managed to kill the RAID! All he had to do was pull the bad drive, and slot the new one in, and the damn thing would have rebuilt ITSELF!
And on top of all of this, they are SO stingy about sending parts, or replacing faulty equipment. I am NOT going to spend a month rebuilding a whole box one part at a time. That is UNACCEPTABLE! I have to spend hours on the phone trying to work through tech support on an issue where I already know what the problem is and I just need them to send me a fricking part!
I really can't come up with a company I'd be less willing to buy a computer from. I'd buy one off a blanket from a cracked out junkie in Times Square before I'd call them again.
Wow, yer right! Guess that's what I get for not RTFA. Wow. Either telemarketers are far far far more loathed than I ever suspected, or far far far more americans are with it than I ever suspected.
41 million? Wow. So that says that 1 in 7 americans hates the fricking telemarketers enough to go through the effort AND that same 1 in 7 is with it enough to know about the no call list.
Logically, since this is an interesction of 2 groups, there have to be 2 larger groups, one who hates the telemarketers, but doesn't know about the list or how to get on it, and one that knows about the list, but either doesn't mind the telemarketers, or is too lazy to get on the list.
Interesting. I always thought the proportion of stupid, lazy, and uneducated people was larger than 6/7ths.
It's interesting. I mean, theoretically, a virus could have legal applications i.e. war, law enforcement, etc. Pretty much like a gun.
Which would make a virus a weapon.
Or, to put it archaicly, an "arm"
Which would be protected under the second amendment! How are we going to protect our homes from the Taliban's uberhackers if we don't have our own viri? If someones breaking into my home, I'm gonna shoot them, right? Well, why not the same if someone's breaking into my computer?
I'm gonna go set up portsentry to nuke anything that portscans me! The constitution rocks!
So, they're not going to sue any Linux companies, but they're still going to try and charge all companies that use Linux these absurd liscensing fees? Oh yea, that makes sense.
If there is any justice in the world, they will be held accountable for all the crap they've said since the beginning.
It's still ongoing, but the latest bit of the saga happened yesterday, when the hopeless incompetent partner got in a fistfight with the competent partner, who, not being a complete idiot, took a hit, then pressed charges, while neatly extracting himself from his contractual obligations. They're a quarter million dollars in the hole, and all the employees who are left are spending their time looking for new jobs. It's immensely gratifying. I forsee total collapse within two months, leaving the two evil chief managers with no skills, no company, and massive debt! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Crap like this makes me think that, maybe, just maybe, there really is a God.
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Why couldn't a computer write an essay? The kind of grammatical forms you're advocating, I could feed a program 10 nouns, 5 proper nouns, a handful of verbs, and a couple of factoids, and have it churn out a piece of unreadable tripe which would look GREAT to some sort of computerized grader. If their program uses rules to check content, I could write a program which takes semi-meaningless content and fits it perfectly into those rules. A+, everytime.
For a scientific journal you don't need to be able to formulate a compelling conclusion, or be able to clearly articulate a chain of reasoning? These are things a computer can't check. Things that are way beyond grammar. There is more to being able to write than being able to follow a few simple rules.
Besides, the sort of cookie-cutter english that would appeal to a grammar checking program is too boring even for a scientific journal.
I bet I could frequency check a history text to pull out the most commonly used words that aren't "the" or "but", and plug those into the old Essay-O-Matic and get a paper without even having to read the book. The dream of every student.
I got a 1490, and I am all those things and more.
I used to teach an SAT prep class, and I spent my time trying to teach those poor suckers to be stagnant, repetitive, intellectual boors. That's what those tests check: memory, lack of imagination, and the ability to think like the damn cold fish who made up the exams in the first place.
I took the basic GRE, the one that everyone takes, not one of the specialized tests. I read a prep book beforehand, because that's what you do for a standardised test. The book claimed that the GRE never ever EVER contained complex exponents (Not really complex, just fractional or negative. The basic GRE, remember?) So when I ran into "What is 9 to the -1/2?" I just laughed a little to myself, but at the same time, I could hear this round of muttering through the room as other people hit the same problem. We'd all read the same damn book!
I'd be willing to bet that a good quarter of the people in that room blew that question because the prep books said you didn't have to know that. And this is supposed to tell something about what you learned? Even the logic section of that test was a joke.
Computers are great at testing some things, but standardised tests are easy to beat if you know the tricks, and these days everyone knows the tricks. Maybe some people aren't as good at pulling them off, but still, how acurate can they really be?
How do you step from 12 years of education where nothing but grammar, vocabulary, and spelling are taught, and then expect students to magically be creative in college? It's one thing to make sure the rules are understood, and entirely another to turn the whole process over to a machine with no more grasp on creativity or imagination than your average toaster.
It's bad enough with the standardised test obsession. I've known people who were much smarter than me who couldn't come within 20% of my score on a standardised test. Why? Because I am an excellent taker of standardised tests. Possibly the least useful skill available in someone who is done with college. It means nothing! People talk of it as "objective", and then go and take a 30 question personality quiz out of fricking Cosmo without even grasping their inherent hypocrasy.
Computer driven/scored tests and exams are worthless everywhere actual creativity is involved. Since creativity and independant thought are the qualities of thought that we need most, as we cannot get them from computers (yet), it seems utterly pointless to use computers to crush those qualities out of generations of students. It's bad enough when you have to deal with some stodgy, unimaginative professor.
The funny thing about this is that, if the essay is graded by computer, the best way to write the essay would be to have the COMPUTER write it. The same criteria that the program would use to grade the essay could very easily be turned around and used to generate an essay that the computer will love. Having a computer written term paper given an A by a computer grader is worthy of an Ionesco play.
Beyond that there is no way the computer will be able to distinguish between something truly interesting and something that just lists the facts in simple Dick and Jane language with an occasional compund sentence to keep the grammar checker happy. All it can do is check for fact1, fact2, fact3, and any interesting conclusion you draw in the paper will be completely lost. Anything more would be turing test worthy, and I heartily doubt they've achieved anything close to that.
Elegant prose is often not strictly grammatical, so a boring paper would likely score the same or better than a far better written essay with the same facts. I routinely turn off grammar checking in every program I've ever used it in. Aside from the occasional misplaced modifier or dangling participle, its worthless.
In conclusion, this idea is a pipe dream which would discourage high quality writing (i.e. the kind actual PEOPLE like to read), teach people the substandard grammatical constructs used by most grammar checking software, and create a market for software that writes term papers, thereby removing the last actual bit of work your average liberal arts major has to do. I think it's a hopelessly terrible idea. TA's already do this work; why waste time coming up with a program which will do the same thing, poorly?
Just my opinion.
Hey, we're paying for that crap! They start developing off BSD or Linux and try and "privatize" what they get out of it, I, for one, will be mad as hell! that's where a lot of the original Unix stuff came from...Government sponsored research released into the private sector. If more of my tax money went to that stuff, I wouldn't mind paying them half as much.
Kazaa lite is the only way to fly. I've used it since it first came out, not because it "made it easier to pirate songs/movies/etc" but because it came out ad and spyware free! If you use plain kazaa, you're a fricking idiot.
I don't see how anyone can jump up on a high horse and claim kazaa is better/worse than kazaa lite. Like, its magically not the same filesharing if you're using Kazaa lite. As far as I'm concerned, kazaa is just a crippleware version of Kazaa lite.
Just my opinion.
Windows MAil SERVER?
SCO authentication?
How the HELL does that couple with open source management software?
Why do people always want my BEST skill, and two other skills that no one in the world wants. It's like, "We want a Java programmer with massive database experience...Who is a hemaphrodite, and can speak fluent sanskrit." AAAAAAAAAA!
Sure, all file systems are database driven. But, in most cases, it's just a flat table with a couple of linear searches. Like a library.
The benefits of switching this system to one that is SQL based elude me. I love SQL. I love manipulating data. That's it's strength; relating things that aren't, at first blush, related. How the hell is this going to help my harddrive? I'm not going to want queries viewing my programs in new and interesting ways.
The only use I can see for this is for some kind of networked, non-private, system, where you would want to be able to find things not normally available to you, on someone elses computer.
If there was any way to make Windows less reliable, it would have to be coupling it with the beast that is MS SQL Server.
In terms of actual ethical thought, we have the following:
Utilitarianism: Basically, this is majority rule, so Filesharing is good.
Relativism: Good is dependant on the person who is doing the action--if they think it's good, it's good. So filesharing is good.
Emotivism: There is no good. Goooo filesharing!
Kantian Rationalism (Categorical Imperative): Kant would say, "If logic tells you this the correct/ethical course, then this is what you should be doing." Since the RIAA hasn't really put forth compelling facts or figures documenting their losses, logic has nothing to go on, and filesharing would seem to be at least not-wrong.
Since, however all filesharers are providing at least storage space, and likely bandwidth as well, free of charge, to the world, and since all these things fall under charity and/or generosity, and since those things are generally considered moral, Logic says that, lacking convincing evidence of harm, Filesharing must be good!
Biblical Ethics: Don't think much of the 10 Commandments, but, as I recall, there is no "Thou Shalt Not Violate Copyrights". And, in this case, "Thou Shalt Not Steal" seems to apply more to the money gouging RIAA than the non-profit filesharers, so the Bible comes down on the side of Filesharing! Woot! Gooooo God!
Ummmmm. Aristotle and Plato don't have crap to say about this...Think that's about everybody important.
I'm all up for moral arguments, if anyone wants to chime in.
Every one of us is probably in violation of the DMCA at least once a day. I don't even think about it anymore. If everything I do is illegal, then either the law sucks, or I am a criminal genius. Either way, it's cool.
It's not even hardwired into the card, so you can just tell the card to change it's MAC and it will.
Here's how to do it on windows.
In Linux its just as easy:
ifconfig interface hw ether 23:23:23:23:23:23
DRM is scary because, if it's done right, you wouldn't be able to turn it off. It's a much more serious effort than serial numbers and MAC addresses.
I doubt it would be that hard to come up with a bios that emulates DRM without actually having DRM.
I think burning it would automatically make it better than it is right now, even if it didn't come back.
Anybody know a site that compiles a list of consumer stuff that will use this crap? The day my TV has a bios that prevents me from doing ANYTHING, is the day I stop watching tv altogether.
It's not illegal, I agree.
On the other hand, jerking the collective chains of 60 million people tech savvy enough to file share is not exactly safe.
I personally don't go in for showy digital attacks, but I admit that it pleases me when other people do, especially when the target deserves it. Therefore, I propose that everyone who fileshares throws in ten cents or a dollar into a "Fuck the RIAA" prize fund. If the numbers are accurate, we could get a nice pot of between 6 and 60 million dollars, for those who best convey our collective annoyance to our RIAA overlords.
Just a thought.
I did some Y2K work. Simple stuff, mostly cobol and pascal on old accounting systems. From what I saw, most companies had ditched nearly all of their non-compliant software years before. The code I was working on was, to put it very kindly, "legacy". The only other things that had issues were some windows desktops, and that was hardly going to shut the company down.
I agree, but I think that before we get too complacent about the advances in autopilots, etc, we should note that we still don't have anything remotely like an autopilot in a car, which would give a far better idea of how this stuff is going to work than a plane's autopilot will. Traffic volume at the least will be wildly different.
I agree. Dell is just my biggest unfavorite at this time. Part of it is the damn customers. I went into a situation where the client needed two servers, to run some kind of fail-over redundant file server setup. Not a huge business or anything.
The techs got together, and gave them a quote for around 8000 which was about 2000 dollars of profit on top of 6000 dollars worth of machine, which was all they needed and more, a really nice deal.
The customer gets all creeped out because the boxes aren't going to be "name brand" whatever the hell that means, and goes to dell and gets 2 servers for like 8500 dollars. Then we add in around 2000 dollars worth of extra hard drives, and then come the inevitable hardware problems, and on and on.
Turned into a real fiasco--they got a bunch of substandard components put together by a company that offers substandard tech support, for an unreasonably high price. When the smoke cleared, they were pissed off at us (marketings fault).
I don't know. The way the market is right now, its silly not to make your own box. I bought a 3000 dollar dell in 1997, and a 3500 dell in 2000, and then, this year, I ripped all the video and audio stuff, and the extra hard drives out of the second dell, and built a computer with those, and some really nice high end parts, for 1600 which would have cost me 4000 from dell, with crappier parts. Screw them, I'm never going back.
Actually, it is a defense, for the same reason that, if I came on to your land, passed all the no trespassing signs, broke into your house, and then hurt myself, I could still sue you for having an unsafe environment. My having read the signs, and even committing an illegal act, does not remove your liability in this case.
The same thing applies when you sign a legal waiver. Those can be overruled if the court believes that the injury you experienced was beyond the scope of the waiver.
EULA's are very shady, for the most part, and I would say if one was ever seriously challenged in court, it would very likely be declared non-binding.
I'd like to see them go to court over this stuff sometime. With any other type of product, you have some sort of recourse if it totally sucks, but not with software. According to the terms of the EULA, it doesn't have to actually do anything, but if it does do something, and that something is bad, then it's not their fault.
I've grown to hate dell so much in the last few years. That tech support call is vintage dell. I haven't had a good experience with dell tech support in so long, I can't even remember the last time. Their service personel are hopelessly incompentent...grrrr.
Let me just give an example:
I used to work for a company that had sold a large number of dell rack servers with PERC 3 (i think) RAID controllers. Don't know who made these controllers, but they sucked. BIG TIME. It was to the point where the systems with NO redundancy, just a simple harddrive, were far more reliable.
Every time a RAID controller died, we called dell, and every time they managed to destroy the damn RAID information! EVERY TIME! It didn't matter if they sent a tech, or tried to give us phone support, BAM! The whole thing went into the toilet and we had to try and rebuild it to the point where we could get some information off it.
I've seen a damn situation where a dell tech had to go replace a FRICKING HARD DRIVE. A HOTSWAP harddrive, in a computer that didn't HAVE a raid problem, and the bastard managed to kill the RAID! All he had to do was pull the bad drive, and slot the new one in, and the damn thing would have rebuilt ITSELF!
And on top of all of this, they are SO stingy about sending parts, or replacing faulty equipment. I am NOT going to spend a month rebuilding a whole box one part at a time. That is UNACCEPTABLE! I have to spend hours on the phone trying to work through tech support on an issue where I already know what the problem is and I just need them to send me a fricking part!
I really can't come up with a company I'd be less willing to buy a computer from. I'd buy one off a blanket from a cracked out junkie in Times Square before I'd call them again.
Wow, yer right! Guess that's what I get for not RTFA. Wow. Either telemarketers are far far far more loathed than I ever suspected, or far far far more americans are with it than I ever suspected.
41 million? Wow. So that says that 1 in 7 americans hates the fricking telemarketers enough to go through the effort AND that same 1 in 7 is with it enough to know about the no call list.
Logically, since this is an interesction of 2 groups, there have to be 2 larger groups, one who hates the telemarketers, but doesn't know about the list or how to get on it, and one that knows about the list, but either doesn't mind the telemarketers, or is too lazy to get on the list.
Interesting. I always thought the proportion of stupid, lazy, and uneducated people was larger than 6/7ths.
It's interesting. I mean, theoretically, a virus could have legal applications i.e. war, law enforcement, etc. Pretty much like a gun.
Which would make a virus a weapon.
Or, to put it archaicly, an "arm"
Which would be protected under the second amendment! How are we going to protect our homes from the Taliban's uberhackers if we don't have our own viri? If someones breaking into my home, I'm gonna shoot them, right? Well, why not the same if someone's breaking into my computer?
I'm gonna go set up portsentry to nuke anything that portscans me! The constitution rocks!
Hehehehe. Damn. Sometimes I scare myself.
So, they're not going to sue any Linux companies, but they're still going to try and charge all companies that use Linux these absurd liscensing fees? Oh yea, that makes sense.
If there is any justice in the world, they will be held accountable for all the crap they've said since the beginning.
OOOOOooooo! You actually want the story?
It's still ongoing, but the latest bit of the saga happened yesterday, when the hopeless incompetent partner got in a fistfight with the competent partner, who, not being a complete idiot, took a hit, then pressed charges, while neatly extracting himself from his contractual obligations. They're a quarter million dollars in the hole, and all the employees who are left are spending their time looking for new jobs. It's immensely gratifying. I forsee total collapse within two months, leaving the two evil chief managers with no skills, no company, and massive debt! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Crap like this makes me think that, maybe, just maybe, there really is a God.
Mmmmmmmm. Warm fuzzy feelings.