There was well-documented torture by the Chicago police less than twenty years ago (although it was illegal by then). Prior to the Miranda case, "police interrogation practices . . . were considered by many to be barbaric and unjust. Coercive interrogation tactics were known in period slang as the 'third degree.'" That was in 1966, and the Supreme Court narrowly (5-4) held that the police were required to inform a defendant that he had any rights whatsoever.
The Bill of Rights has indeed existed for a long time. It has only been over the last 50-60 years, though, that the rights in that document have evolved into what we consider them to be today.
Give me an example. I don't dispute that presidents are always trying to grab more power, but I disagree that this has increased over time, as you claim. Probably the most dictatorial president ever, the one that eliminated more civil rights than any other, was Abraham Lincoln. Bush's Guantanamo is nothing compared to Lincoln's suspension of habeaus corpus for US citizens and the arrest and detention of anyone even suspected of sympathizing with the South - with no trial, speedy or otherwise. Most of the 'rights' that people claim are being taken away didn't exist 100 years ago the way we think of them. Torture of criminal suspects was legal. Anyone expressing a dissenting opinion could be arrested.
Sure, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but it always has been, and there is nothing particularly worse about the times are living in -- it's just that we are here to see it first hand.
And that is why Bush will not be impeached, and should not (from a legal standpoint): there is no evidence that he personally did anything. Did he probably know what was going on? Yes. Did he personally lie under oath (Clinton) or have tapes been found showing he was complicit in illegal breaking and entering? No. He cannot be impeached just because you don't like him and his administration is corrupt and/or inept. There has to be some evidence that he personally committed some specific criminal act.
See my sig for the best explanation. It has nothing to do with education; it's the nature of the political process in the media age, and anyone that thinks any other country is 'better' is smoking something I would like to try.
Re:Why do this?
on
AMD's New DRM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's probably to help them with PC builders like Dell, HP, etc. If those companies wanted DRM on the chip, it would be a powerful influence for AMD to do so.
All operating systems crash with poorly written drivers.
Um, no.
At least not in the way you mean. Buggy driver sound and video drivers might cause application crashes, or even gui (e.g., X) crashes, but that is far from an operating system crash. Apple sells the hardware with the software, so driver issues are almost non-existent there. In Linux, if a sound or video crash freezes X, you just restart X. Windows is the only OS that comes to mind that blue screens (or is it black now?) or simply reboots itself when the audio or video subsystem crashes.
Interesting choices for examples of stuff people are willing to produce for free. Each and every one of those is a derivative work, or at least based on someone else's original work -- which is mostly likely copyrighted and created at least in part for profit.
Sure, you'd lose the work of some (like Harry Potter), but it wouldn't disappear entirely.
So we'd lose all of the original work, and be able to 'mod' and 'remix' each other's derivative dreck. Woo hoo.
I think your reasoning is right, but your conclusion is wrong. In my opinion, your first group -- the independent-thinking people that actually like music for its own sake -- is at least as influential as your second group -- the sheep. There is something of a ripple effect, with one independent thinker influencing a circle of people who are just trying to be cool (on the leading edge, out of the mainstream, whatever), who in turn will influence others.
Exactly, and none of these constitute 'hacking' into anyone's computer. The GP claimed to worry about false prosecution because someone could surreptitiously grab files from his computer and distribute them. If there is a worm, etc., doing this: (1) there will likely be thousands of people affected (if not 'tens of millions'}, and (2) they will all be able to point at this worm (which will have been documented by then) as the culprit.
Several version of QuickBooks are listed as 'bronze', meaning they will at least install and run. If you look under 'known issues,' do you know what you see? Nothing.
If you want to run QuickBooks under Crossover, try it. If it has a problem, then tell them about it.
now I think they're doomed to fail due to bad direction from their management.
Somehow I suspect you're just trolling. If you knew anything about Codeweavers, or had even tried the software, you should know that they determine which applications to support based on customer demand. Granted, some apps are probably too difficult to be worth the effort, which would be a judgment call, but by and large their 'direction' comes from the bottom up rather than dictated by a pointy-hair type.
You're close. A thief can never transfer good title to stolen goods -- the original owner stills owns it and can get it back from the buyer no matter how far down the chain they are. If the thief sells to buyer 1, buyer 1 to buyer 2, etc., buyer 100 would still have to give it back to the original owner, then try to get his money back from 99, 99 from 98, etc, back to the thief.
Did you live through the 80s? If so, were you awake and/or at all aware of the U.S. economy?
If so, I can only assume that you have no understanding of economics if you think we're so much worse off now.
People gripe and moan about the failure of our education system related to the hard sciences, but compared to the social sciences such as history and economics the hard sciences are doing pretty good.
Contracting not to do a thing is quite a bit different from something being mandated/forbidden by law.
Yes, there are all kinds of limits on free speech and association, etc. Campaign contribution limits is a good example - they have been upheld, but they were challenged on free speech grounds and it could have gone either way. I'm not saying this wouldn't be a good idea, but a lot of things that people think are good ideas aren't acceptable because law is made at the borders of what is acceptable, not in the mainstream (think excluding evidence of a crime even though the criminal is blatantly guilty, just because the police didn't go about it the right way).
Um, no to both the first two (yes to the evil lawyer thing). You don't have to pay a dime of the government's court costs, win or lose. And you have a right to a free lawyer if you can't afford one.
The Lanham Act is the federal trademark code. What Autodesk is trying to argue is that anyone 'faking' their 'TrustedDWG' technology is violating their trademark. The best analogy I can think of is GM saying you can only put 'genuine GM' parts in their cars. Of course, it is a lot more complex than that here, and judges aren't known for their technological savvy. The keystone of trademark law, though, is how likely something is to confuse the consumer. In other words, for Autodesk to win they will have to show that consumers are likely to confuse this imitation 'TrustedDWG' for the real thing; i.e., that since it's a.dwg file, it must have been made/come from Autodesk.
Not sure what I think of their chances. On the one hand, AutoCAD is so ubiquitous that anyone that has any need for CAD probably automatically associates.dwg files with AutoCAD. On the other hand, well . . . who gives a shit? It'd be like MS claiming trademark in.doc files -- sure, everyone knows.doc files = Word, but it's something that's below the radar. It's not like you go into a store to buy a.doc or.dwg file, and might be confused about it's source.
It's been a while since I've looked at the Lanham Act, but I think Autodesk would have to prove some sort of damage, even if they were able to show likelihood of confusion.
I think my main gripe with Abiword was speed -- it loads much faster than OOo, but seems to thrash with even moderately lengthy documents. I just opened a 14-page document in it to refresh my memory, and there is significant lag between spinning the scroll wheel on my mouse and the time the document scrolls. That could probably be overlooked, but there is a lag when typing, too, so that the words on the screen are a second or more behind what you are actually typing. That is just unacceptable, and in my opinion makes it unusable except as a last resort.
Some or all of the problem could have been with my system (I am running KDE, and as you mention Abiword is more gnome-centric) or with the pre-existing documents I was opening in Abiword. Regardless, it didn't work for me.
I settled on Kword mostly by process of elimination; it was the only one I tried that worked acceptably. That said, it is far superior now to when I last tried it (sometime over a year ago). There are some quirky things about it, but it is polished and has nothing glaringly wrong with it.
Just so you'll know where I 'm coming from, for years WordPerfect was my word processor of choice. I considered it far superior to Word in features and usability, and at least its equal in polish. From what I've seen of more recent versions of it (post-2000) it is succumbing to the same bloat as Word, but more importantly to me it does not run on Linux (yes, they actually released a Linux version a few years ago, but it is a crippled joke, and the Windows version does not run under wine, even Crossover) and it's not worth running an emulator (such as Win4Lin, which I tried) just for it.
I like what I've seen of Gnumeric, but very rarely use a spreadsheet program. When I do, since I have Crossover and the full MS Office 2000, I generally use Excel -- which is perhaps the only MS product I unreservedly like.
I downloaded it, & like the look of it, but not being able to save as.doc will make it difficult to use it meaningfully before I buy it. That said, I've sent an email to their sales team to see if there is a way to try that feature before I buy. I hope so, & hope I like it after using it as well I do after my first-impression. Word just gives me a pain, & all the free alternatives are too quirky and/or buggy (Abiword, Kword, OOo, etc.).
Perhaps I phrased it badly -- I need 100% Word compatible formatting. In other words, when I send a client a document it needs to show up in the exact same format in which I put it, so that -- if they choose - they can simply print it off without making any changes whatsoever.
Slashdot Mirror
How does saying "light" when you meant "like" make you feel?
Me, I feel like having another beer.
Um, no. See for example the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Espionage Act of 1917. Also Senator McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s.
There was well-documented torture by the Chicago police less than twenty years ago (although it was illegal by then). Prior to the Miranda case, "police interrogation practices . . . were considered by many to be barbaric and unjust. Coercive interrogation tactics were known in period slang as the 'third degree.'" That was in 1966, and the Supreme Court narrowly (5-4) held that the police were required to inform a defendant that he had any rights whatsoever.
The Bill of Rights has indeed existed for a long time. It has only been over the last 50-60 years, though, that the rights in that document have evolved into what we consider them to be today.
Give me one example of a successful impeachment using your definition of misdemeanor.
Give me an example. I don't dispute that presidents are always trying to grab more power, but I disagree that this has increased over time, as you claim. Probably the most dictatorial president ever, the one that eliminated more civil rights than any other, was Abraham Lincoln. Bush's Guantanamo is nothing compared to Lincoln's suspension of habeaus corpus for US citizens and the arrest and detention of anyone even suspected of sympathizing with the South - with no trial, speedy or otherwise. Most of the 'rights' that people claim are being taken away didn't exist 100 years ago the way we think of them. Torture of criminal suspects was legal. Anyone expressing a dissenting opinion could be arrested.
Sure, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but it always has been, and there is nothing particularly worse about the times are living in -- it's just that we are here to see it first hand.
And that is why Bush will not be impeached, and should not (from a legal standpoint): there is no evidence that he personally did anything. Did he probably know what was going on? Yes. Did he personally lie under oath (Clinton) or have tapes been found showing he was complicit in illegal breaking and entering? No. He cannot be impeached just because you don't like him and his administration is corrupt and/or inept. There has to be some evidence that he personally committed some specific criminal act.
See my sig for the best explanation. It has nothing to do with education; it's the nature of the political process in the media age, and anyone that thinks any other country is 'better' is smoking something I would like to try.
It's probably to help them with PC builders like Dell, HP, etc. If those companies wanted DRM on the chip, it would be a powerful influence for AMD to do so.
Um, no.
At least not in the way you mean. Buggy driver sound and video drivers might cause application crashes, or even gui (e.g., X) crashes, but that is far from an operating system crash. Apple sells the hardware with the software, so driver issues are almost non-existent there. In Linux, if a sound or video crash freezes X, you just restart X. Windows is the only OS that comes to mind that blue screens (or is it black now?) or simply reboots itself when the audio or video subsystem crashes.
more like pointlessly
I think that ought to be 6*7.
Interesting choices for examples of stuff people are willing to produce for free. Each and every one of those is a derivative work, or at least based on someone else's original work -- which is mostly likely copyrighted and created at least in part for profit.
So we'd lose all of the original work, and be able to 'mod' and 'remix' each other's derivative dreck. Woo hoo.
I think your reasoning is right, but your conclusion is wrong. In my opinion, your first group -- the independent-thinking people that actually like music for its own sake -- is at least as influential as your second group -- the sheep. There is something of a ripple effect, with one independent thinker influencing a circle of people who are just trying to be cool (on the leading edge, out of the mainstream, whatever), who in turn will influence others.
Exactly, and none of these constitute 'hacking' into anyone's computer. The GP claimed to worry about false prosecution because someone could surreptitiously grab files from his computer and distribute them. If there is a worm, etc., doing this: (1) there will likely be thousands of people affected (if not 'tens of millions'}, and (2) they will all be able to point at this worm (which will have been documented by then) as the culprit.
Several version of QuickBooks are listed as 'bronze', meaning they will at least install and run. If you look under 'known issues,' do you know what you see? Nothing.
If you want to run QuickBooks under Crossover, try it. If it has a problem, then tell them about it.
Somehow I suspect you're just trolling. If you knew anything about Codeweavers, or had even tried the software, you should know that they determine which applications to support based on customer demand. Granted, some apps are probably too difficult to be worth the effort, which would be a judgment call, but by and large their 'direction' comes from the bottom up rather than dictated by a pointy-hair type.
You're close. A thief can never transfer good title to stolen goods -- the original owner stills owns it and can get it back from the buyer no matter how far down the chain they are. If the thief sells to buyer 1, buyer 1 to buyer 2, etc., buyer 100 would still have to give it back to the original owner, then try to get his money back from 99, 99 from 98, etc, back to the thief.
Did you live through the 80s? If so, were you awake and/or at all aware of the U.S. economy?
If so, I can only assume that you have no understanding of economics if you think we're so much worse off now.
People gripe and moan about the failure of our education system related to the hard sciences, but compared to the social sciences such as history and economics the hard sciences are doing pretty good.
- Those are private companies, not the government.
- Contracting not to do a thing is quite a bit different from something being mandated/forbidden by law.
Yes, there are all kinds of limits on free speech and association, etc. Campaign contribution limits is a good example - they have been upheld, but they were challenged on free speech grounds and it could have gone either way. I'm not saying this wouldn't be a good idea, but a lot of things that people think are good ideas aren't acceptable because law is made at the borders of what is acceptable, not in the mainstream (think excluding evidence of a crime even though the criminal is blatantly guilty, just because the police didn't go about it the right way).Um, no to both the first two (yes to the evil lawyer thing). You don't have to pay a dime of the government's court costs, win or lose. And you have a right to a free lawyer if you can't afford one.
The Lanham Act is the federal trademark code. What Autodesk is trying to argue is that anyone 'faking' their 'TrustedDWG' technology is violating their trademark. The best analogy I can think of is GM saying you can only put 'genuine GM' parts in their cars. Of course, it is a lot more complex than that here, and judges aren't known for their technological savvy. The keystone of trademark law, though, is how likely something is to confuse the consumer. In other words, for Autodesk to win they will have to show that consumers are likely to confuse this imitation 'TrustedDWG' for the real thing; i.e., that since it's a .dwg file, it must have been made/come from Autodesk.
Not sure what I think of their chances. On the one hand, AutoCAD is so ubiquitous that anyone that has any need for CAD probably automatically associates .dwg files with AutoCAD. On the other hand, well . . . who gives a shit? It'd be like MS claiming trademark in .doc files -- sure, everyone knows .doc files = Word, but it's something that's below the radar. It's not like you go into a store to buy a .doc or .dwg file, and might be confused about it's source.
It's been a while since I've looked at the Lanham Act, but I think Autodesk would have to prove some sort of damage, even if they were able to show likelihood of confusion.
I think my main gripe with Abiword was speed -- it loads much faster than OOo, but seems to thrash with even moderately lengthy documents. I just opened a 14-page document in it to refresh my memory, and there is significant lag between spinning the scroll wheel on my mouse and the time the document scrolls. That could probably be overlooked, but there is a lag when typing, too, so that the words on the screen are a second or more behind what you are actually typing. That is just unacceptable, and in my opinion makes it unusable except as a last resort.
Some or all of the problem could have been with my system (I am running KDE, and as you mention Abiword is more gnome-centric) or with the pre-existing documents I was opening in Abiword. Regardless, it didn't work for me.
I settled on Kword mostly by process of elimination; it was the only one I tried that worked acceptably. That said, it is far superior now to when I last tried it (sometime over a year ago). There are some quirky things about it, but it is polished and has nothing glaringly wrong with it.
Just so you'll know where I 'm coming from, for years WordPerfect was my word processor of choice. I considered it far superior to Word in features and usability, and at least its equal in polish. From what I've seen of more recent versions of it (post-2000) it is succumbing to the same bloat as Word, but more importantly to me it does not run on Linux (yes, they actually released a Linux version a few years ago, but it is a crippled joke, and the Windows version does not run under wine, even Crossover) and it's not worth running an emulator (such as Win4Lin, which I tried) just for it.
I like what I've seen of Gnumeric, but very rarely use a spreadsheet program. When I do, since I have Crossover and the full MS Office 2000, I generally use Excel -- which is perhaps the only MS product I unreservedly like.
I downloaded it, & like the look of it, but not being able to save as .doc will make it difficult to use it meaningfully before I buy it. That said, I've sent an email to their sales team to see if there is a way to try that feature before I buy. I hope so, & hope I like it after using it as well I do after my first-impression. Word just gives me a pain, & all the free alternatives are too quirky and/or buggy (Abiword, Kword, OOo, etc.).
Perhaps I phrased it badly -- I need 100% Word compatible formatting. In other words, when I send a client a document it needs to show up in the exact same format in which I put it, so that -- if they choose - they can simply print it off without making any changes whatsoever.