It is 60 days from the day the bill on which the charge appears is printed (aka the billing date). But since Dell said that it might take 4-6 weeks, he can dispute the charge as soon as Dell doesn't reply to one single email. Then his recourse is simply to tell the credit company that the merchandise did not arrive by the day promised and the merchant failed to respond to an inquiry. For the future though, I would ask for a tracking number as soon as something is shipped (especially when buying over the Internet).
Rather it sounds like someone agreed to no longer have it. That's what contracts are... they are formalized binding agreements. Yes, they signed those contracts as part of some deal that they "needed". But that just means that they got something in return for signing away those rights. Only very few rights are inalienable. The right to software use is hardly one of those. Just keep in mind that they got something in return for giving up the right. And they agreed to the exchange.
They are not one-time. They are "qualifier" accounts. I think it's $25 for an arena-only account which you get to play for 6 weeks. I am not sure how far you have to get to move on to the next bracket or tournament, but I am fairly certain that if you don't, you can just renew by getting another qualifier account at the end of the 6 weeks.
Is not to provide the rewards. They are fairly desperate. Despite the growing number of subscriptions (or at least accounts that at some point subscribed and probably stopped paying a while ago), the game is dying. Running a census on most US servers will show you that 55% of the characters online are level 70. Which means that most (albeit, not all) others are "alts". The problem is that Blizzard has blurred the line between many classes. When it did that and allowed a number of classes to assume roles of other classes in group play, it decreased the need to have heterogeneous groups. The only time there is a reason to have specialist classes is that generalist classes cannot achieve the extreme performance needs necessary for end-game instances. But when so many are generalists, no specialists get developed, so very little cooperation exists. By doing this, they broke down the conditions which forced people to cooperate. Now all these 70s just wonder around grinding sim-city style. Most of them never see the end-game content (post T4). Sooner or later, people leave. Certainly, many are discouraged and would not recommend the game to a friend.
All these promotions are misguided. They hope that they will compensate for what broken cooperation destroyed. But they can't. They also can't really fix the cooperation issue. The smartest of the players (who understood how to best take advantage of filling proper roles with proper classes and those classes specialties) already reached the end-game and got through it. So Blizzard had to try to retain the less intelligent players by making the end-game content more reachable for the less bright players. So they buffed up the classes that are multi-purpose allowing them to push a little further (now most can get through T5 content). But this broke the necessary cohesion so much that T6 content will never be reached.
What could they have done differently? Nothing, probably. The game has outlived its era. It was developed to work on certain hardware and it will always be limited by that. On the plus side, all the people addicted to it, can get frustrated and leave. And yes, that is a plus side.
If Blizzard is going to admit that leveling is too slow, why not help out ALL players, not just the ones bringing them more $$?
They kind of offered that option. You can always get an arena-only account and only play a 70 character in it. You get a choice of any gear in such an account. No grind necessary at all. You get to just play against human being in the most extreme game situation -- the arena.
That the British government thought THIS was the question of life, universe and everything, how is this technical news? Why is this on slashdot? Since when is politics news for geeks? It's as mainstream as it gets. How is it that technical posts get rejected and political posts are not?
I don't think teachers are being paid enough This is idiotic. I teach math at a local college. I make almost nothing. I do it for the love of it. And you would not believe the effort it takes to beat their "education" out of them. The problem is not the teacher's salaries. It's their powerlessness over the students. They are forced to social promote and to inflate grades. Most common attitude I see is students asking the question "how do you do this?" While math is all about figuring out solutions to problems (and thus developing analytical skills). When the students are first asked to figure out solutions, they adapt the attitude that "the teacher is not teaching". They want the path from a posed problem to a solution to be presented to them in every case. They fail to see math as a toolbox of instruments that are used to tackle problems. I blame computers. Internet, in particular. Too much of their interaction is modeled on make-certain-choices-and-the-predefined-solution-arrives-type interactions. Those, of course, come from internet forms. No, this is not a crying call against computers. It is a crying call against those who claim that complicated problems always have simple solutions and who teach that lie to today's students. Whether this message comes from the media, the pop culture, the confluence of political and cultural environments that these kids swim in, I don't know. But I do know that those who claim that "things have changed" and life can be easy now send the kids the message that their life should involve any slyness or trickery. And that's precisely what problem and puzzle solving is. It's a mental process of tricking one's way out of an obstacle.
Would be to create a computer-based system for assisted thinking. By that I mean something along the lines of what the visual thesaurus people have created only which would allow people to populate their own interconnections. Something that would allow people to form easy ways of presenting the data they think about as well as as interconnecting it. Currently we are sinking under
the weight of the cross-referencing. It takes half-a-lifetime to train someone in some narrow subject because of interwoven network of cross-references. All this can be easily automated with a dedicated interface project. I am not sure that AI is even possible as thinker because AI is unable to go through human experience. But AI certainly is possible as a deducer of implications from what's already known... but still not of full implications.
Let's take the example of a simple idea: a pun. This is a word that in a given context can have more than one possible interpretation. One can classify either one or both of the interpretations as the ideas expressed, but that would be incorrect. Often times it is the presence of both meanings that give the pun a new meaning that joins the two contexts.
It is the interconnections between contexts that generally give new insight into subjects. Repositories of existing concepts can only be used to explore the implications of the already known connections. I don't see how they can come across connections which can be formed, but which cannot be formed from what has already been stated.
The downside to forming such a repository and such an exploratory would be that it would discourage human-based exploration of the already known ideas. Human based exploration of the already-known ideas serves as a means to training people who may at a later day discover connections which cannot be currently formed. By discouraging such training of humans it would ensure lessened pathways to exploration in the future.
Now that discrimination is illegal on the books, one cannot use privacy concerns as a legitimate reason for withholding this information. It will now be demanded under all kinds of security concerns. In the end it will be used for the purposes of discrimination in the wink-wink-nudge-nudge manner. But hey, the Civil Rights Act ended racism, right? It didn't prolong it by another 50 years by drawing a legal distinction between races. This belief that the government can force egalitarianism is how the West is choosing fall. Oh, well. Life will go on. We are not equal other than in the eyes of the creator (if you believe in such a thing). We certainly are not equal in the eyes of the fellow human beings with whom we associate. To create a law that pretends that an untruth is true is to make all laws absurd. It undermines and thus destroys the legal system. But hey, the right-hemisphere-people rejoice. I fail to see why slashdot should join them.
First things first. Especially in space. Law is a set of rules established to maintain a civilized society. When it is obvious that a society is already governed by a set of rules (such as chain of command that necessarily exists with all space travel), imposing a set of artificial and necessarily arbitrary extra rules only makes for an extra burden, and therefore, danger in the situation. If any lawyers think their contribution to the set of behaviors in space is warranted, they are playing with people's lives in order to make their livelihoods. That's reckless irresponsible at best and malicious at worst. In either case, to make space travel safer, first thing you do is kill all the lawyers.
Had to read the summary twice. 20% of per capita business income. That would be not all income. Just the business income. To explain why that matters, let's take a hypothetical situation. All business income (assuming that income means profits) could be $1. They didn't say revenue... they said income. So if all businesses spend all the money they make on reinvestment in developing new business, salaries, etc, then they have very little profit left at the end. Now take that figure and divide by the population. You get per capita business income. 20% of that is still a very, very small part of the economy. But the headline makes it sound like 20% of all the money spend in Brazil goes to MS. At the very least the title is ambiguous. It should have specified whether it was business revenue or business profits (rather than "income") that it was talking about.
You kid, but your analogy hit the nail on the head. Windows can survive without Gates... might it would even get better. Can all the personality-centered software platforms (well, Linux/GNU and Apple are the only ones I am thinking off) survive their personalities? Reiser was a popular file system. This might be telling. I am really not trolling here. I use both Windows and Linux (depending on which tools I need for a task at hand), but I don't have to make long-term strategic decisions that will effect other people. Maybe a better summary would have been a question posed to the community. The question would be what kind of process can be established to save a project like ReiserFS.
I don't know if the test took this into account, but the summary only describes throughput performance. But most HD access is burst. And it doesn't mention whether that's faster or not.
and their unit test. in my days, if you needed a language, you wrote your own assembly. and when you couldn't document it, you wrote your own mark up language.... and your own fonts. phew... multiple cores. who needs them?!
Dear Anonymous Coward who thinks that this is punishing the guilty,
Please, keep in mind the fact that it is also opening the door to punishing the innocent. It may not punish the innoncent just yet. But it opens the door to it and that is why you are the sicko. Using any excuse to open the door to punishing the innocent is how freedom dies. We don't like that. The End.
they want to HAVE SEX WITH CHILDREN. you think its a bad thing the police dont know about them? fuck privacy Ummm, let me be very clear. I'd rather some sickos fucked with children than you fucked with my privacy. Clear enough? Go ahead, insult me. An insult from a person with your position will be taken as compliment.
Your education has failed you. I never claimed to have any training in teaching people with learning disabilities. So my inability to explain things to you are not a failure of my education.
Gotta love the Internet sometimes. The post which generated a 10-page discussion also got modded down to -1. This is yet another reason to have a "spam" modifier. Offtopic to some may not be offtopic to others. But spam is always offtopic. If there was a spam modifier, at least, you'd be able to set up your options to ignore "offtopic" mods and not ignore "spam" mods.
you're unwilling to acknowledge that a person's right to use the transport just might not be outweighed by other people's desire to consume fucking peanuts. And you are unable to grasp the concept of private property. Period. You don't understand that providing a service to some people doesn't have to mean that you have to provide that service to all people. You are not free until you are free to be an ass hole and chose not to be nice to some people. You think you are being nice by forcing some 3rd parties to do as you wish. Well, you are not "nice". You are pro-tyranny. In 1776, you'd fighting on the side of King George. Your argument would have been that he takes care of us so we must submit to him.
You're an idiot, pure and simple. I'll go ahead and laugh at you again.
In contrast you give up a single food item, selfish moron. I don't care about peanuts, you stupid twit. I care about whether stupid twits like you get to decide whether my right to act as I please (while not pro-actively harming anyone) can be taken away.
I believe you're failing to comprehend because you're an idiot. As is clearly evidenced by my Ph.D.
You just come across as a troll. Laughing harder at you now.
Garbage. I repeatedly stated taht I do NOT support the anonymity of the student in this case and that it's dangerous. Wow. I've been having an argument with someone who doesn't understand basic logic. Fine. I'll stop. You can go vote for the senators that decide to standardize the value of pi to be equal to 3 (for people's convenience) for all I care.
You're an empty husk of a human being, willing to throw your fellow man on the scrap heap in a misguided attempt to ensure your rights are never infringed upon. More like you are eager to throw your fellow men into uniforms on conformity to make life "nice".
You go on and on about hyprocrisy but you don't even understand the meaning of the word. Saying one thing and doing another... you know like everything you say... self-contradictions of the kind that you put forward are, by definition, hypocritical.
You must be a gem to live with. Really laughing hard now.
I repeatedly stated taht I do NOT support the anonymity of the student in this case and that it's dangerous. You little impish moron. How do you not get that you do not get to support or not support this (in your role as a school administrator -- not as an internet twit)? You only get to support things which are within your control. Once the anonymity is asserted, supporting or not supporting it is beyond your control. You can only change what you can -- your philosophy. And you fail to recognize this (as did the school in question,... I don't mention it enough... you stupid twit). So you troll about how you don't support the parents' decision. You might as well not support the Sun in its decision to rise tomorrow. It's nothing you can do anything about. It is your choice (in your role as a school administrator... in case your guppy memory forgot the subject under consideration) of philosophy to adapt that will drive what happens. Your choice of anonymity vs non-anonymity is just something you can share with your dog.... no... let me guess... A cat?
The trailer itself is plainly inflammatory. It doesn't support any of its claims. It just makes the accusations graphic. You are not likely to be shunned or feared as he would like to believe. You are, however, likely to be laughed out of the room. The academic answer to mystery has to be exploration. Hypothesizing that it is something unexplainable (ie, the flying spaghetti monster creating the universe) is simply tantamount to giving up the exploration for physical causes of events.
Slashdot Mirror
It is 60 days from the day the bill on which the charge appears is printed (aka the billing date). But since Dell said that it might take 4-6 weeks, he can dispute the charge as soon as Dell doesn't reply to one single email. Then his recourse is simply to tell the credit company that the merchandise did not arrive by the day promised and the merchant failed to respond to an inquiry. For the future though, I would ask for a tracking number as soon as something is shipped (especially when buying over the Internet).
Rather it sounds like someone agreed to no longer have it. That's what contracts are... they are formalized binding agreements. Yes, they signed those contracts as part of some deal that they "needed". But that just means that they got something in return for signing away those rights. Only very few rights are inalienable. The right to software use is hardly one of those. Just keep in mind that they got something in return for giving up the right. And they agreed to the exchange.
They are not one-time. They are "qualifier" accounts. I think it's $25 for an arena-only account which you get to play for 6 weeks. I am not sure how far you have to get to move on to the next bracket or tournament, but I am fairly certain that if you don't, you can just renew by getting another qualifier account at the end of the 6 weeks.
Is not to provide the rewards. They are fairly desperate. Despite the growing number of subscriptions (or at least accounts that at some point subscribed and probably stopped paying a while ago), the game is dying. Running a census on most US servers will show you that 55% of the characters online are level 70. Which means that most (albeit, not all) others are "alts". The problem is that Blizzard has blurred the line between many classes. When it did that and allowed a number of classes to assume roles of other classes in group play, it decreased the need to have heterogeneous groups. The only time there is a reason to have specialist classes is that generalist classes cannot achieve the extreme performance needs necessary for end-game instances. But when so many are generalists, no specialists get developed, so very little cooperation exists. By doing this, they broke down the conditions which forced people to cooperate. Now all these 70s just wonder around grinding sim-city style. Most of them never see the end-game content (post T4). Sooner or later, people leave. Certainly, many are discouraged and would not recommend the game to a friend.
All these promotions are misguided. They hope that they will compensate for what broken cooperation destroyed. But they can't. They also can't really fix the cooperation issue. The smartest of the players (who understood how to best take advantage of filling proper roles with proper classes and those classes specialties) already reached the end-game and got through it. So Blizzard had to try to retain the less intelligent players by making the end-game content more reachable for the less bright players. So they buffed up the classes that are multi-purpose allowing them to push a little further (now most can get through T5 content). But this broke the necessary cohesion so much that T6 content will never be reached.
What could they have done differently? Nothing, probably. The game has outlived its era. It was developed to work on certain hardware and it will always be limited by that. On the plus side, all the people addicted to it, can get frustrated and leave. And yes, that is a plus side.
If Blizzard is going to admit that leveling is too slow, why not help out ALL players, not just the ones bringing them more $$?
They kind of offered that option. You can always get an arena-only account and only play a 70 character in it. You get a choice of any gear in such an account. No grind necessary at all. You get to just play against human being in the most extreme game situation -- the arena.
That the British government thought THIS was the question of life, universe and everything, how is this technical news? Why is this on slashdot? Since when is politics news for geeks? It's as mainstream as it gets. How is it that technical posts get rejected and political posts are not?
I don't think teachers are being paid enough This is idiotic. I teach math at a local college. I make almost nothing. I do it for the love of it. And you would not believe the effort it takes to beat their "education" out of them. The problem is not the teacher's salaries. It's their powerlessness over the students. They are forced to social promote and to inflate grades. Most common attitude I see is students asking the question "how do you do this?" While math is all about figuring out solutions to problems (and thus developing analytical skills). When the students are first asked to figure out solutions, they adapt the attitude that "the teacher is not teaching". They want the path from a posed problem to a solution to be presented to them in every case. They fail to see math as a toolbox of instruments that are used to tackle problems. I blame computers. Internet, in particular. Too much of their interaction is modeled on make-certain-choices-and-the-predefined-solution-arrives-type interactions. Those, of course, come from internet forms. No, this is not a crying call against computers. It is a crying call against those who claim that complicated problems always have simple solutions and who teach that lie to today's students. Whether this message comes from the media, the pop culture, the confluence of political and cultural environments that these kids swim in, I don't know. But I do know that those who claim that "things have changed" and life can be easy now send the kids the message that their life should involve any slyness or trickery. And that's precisely what problem and puzzle solving is. It's a mental process of tricking one's way out of an obstacle.
Would be to create a computer-based system for assisted thinking. By that I mean something along the lines of what the visual thesaurus people have created only which would allow people to populate their own interconnections. Something that would allow people to form easy ways of presenting the data they think about as well as as interconnecting it. Currently we are sinking under the weight of the cross-referencing. It takes half-a-lifetime to train someone in some narrow subject because of interwoven network of cross-references. All this can be easily automated with a dedicated interface project. I am not sure that AI is even possible as thinker because AI is unable to go through human experience. But AI certainly is possible as a deducer of implications from what's already known... but still not of full implications.
Let's take the example of a simple idea: a pun. This is a word that in a given context can have more than one possible interpretation. One can classify either one or both of the interpretations as the ideas expressed, but that would be incorrect. Often times it is the presence of both meanings that give the pun a new meaning that joins the two contexts.
It is the interconnections between contexts that generally give new insight into subjects. Repositories of existing concepts can only be used to explore the implications of the already known connections. I don't see how they can come across connections which can be formed, but which cannot be formed from what has already been stated.
The downside to forming such a repository and such an exploratory would be that it would discourage human-based exploration of the already known ideas. Human based exploration of the already-known ideas serves as a means to training people who may at a later day discover connections which cannot be currently formed. By discouraging such training of humans it would ensure lessened pathways to exploration in the future.
Now that discrimination is illegal on the books, one cannot use privacy concerns as a legitimate reason for withholding this information. It will now be demanded under all kinds of security concerns. In the end it will be used for the purposes of discrimination in the wink-wink-nudge-nudge manner. But hey, the Civil Rights Act ended racism, right? It didn't prolong it by another 50 years by drawing a legal distinction between races. This belief that the government can force egalitarianism is how the West is choosing fall. Oh, well. Life will go on. We are not equal other than in the eyes of the creator (if you believe in such a thing). We certainly are not equal in the eyes of the fellow human beings with whom we associate. To create a law that pretends that an untruth is true is to make all laws absurd. It undermines and thus destroys the legal system. But hey, the right-hemisphere-people rejoice. I fail to see why slashdot should join them.
"many feel" is news? More importantly, "news that matters"? Aha.... How about "just the facts, ma'am"? What happened to that?
First things first. Especially in space. Law is a set of rules established to maintain a civilized society. When it is obvious that a society is already governed by a set of rules (such as chain of command that necessarily exists with all space travel), imposing a set of artificial and necessarily arbitrary extra rules only makes for an extra burden, and therefore, danger in the situation. If any lawyers think their contribution to the set of behaviors in space is warranted, they are playing with people's lives in order to make their livelihoods. That's reckless irresponsible at best and malicious at worst. In either case, to make space travel safer, first thing you do is kill all the lawyers.
16 comments and every single one a troll. Overlords, shmoverlords... I still think it's cool from the technological stand point.
Had to read the summary twice. 20% of per capita business income. That would be not all income. Just the business income. To explain why that matters, let's take a hypothetical situation. All business income (assuming that income means profits) could be $1. They didn't say revenue... they said income. So if all businesses spend all the money they make on reinvestment in developing new business, salaries, etc, then they have very little profit left at the end. Now take that figure and divide by the population. You get per capita business income. 20% of that is still a very, very small part of the economy. But the headline makes it sound like 20% of all the money spend in Brazil goes to MS. At the very least the title is ambiguous. It should have specified whether it was business revenue or business profits (rather than "income") that it was talking about.
why bother with the "provision"? i thought we already established that "if the president does it, it's not illegal".
You kid, but your analogy hit the nail on the head. Windows can survive without Gates... might it would even get better. Can all the personality-centered software platforms (well, Linux/GNU and Apple are the only ones I am thinking off) survive their personalities? Reiser was a popular file system. This might be telling. I am really not trolling here. I use both Windows and Linux (depending on which tools I need for a task at hand), but I don't have to make long-term strategic decisions that will effect other people. Maybe a better summary would have been a question posed to the community. The question would be what kind of process can be established to save a project like ReiserFS.
I don't know if the test took this into account, but the summary only describes throughput performance. But most HD access is burst. And it doesn't mention whether that's faster or not.
and their unit test. in my days, if you needed a language, you wrote your own assembly. and when you couldn't document it, you wrote your own mark up language.... and your own fonts. phew... multiple cores. who needs them?!
Dear Anonymous Coward who thinks that this is punishing the guilty,
Please, keep in mind the fact that it is also opening the door to punishing the innocent. It may not punish the innoncent just yet. But it opens the door to it and that is why you are the sicko. Using any excuse to open the door to punishing the innocent is how freedom dies. We don't like that. The End.
Brazil.... tanana-na-na-na... Brazil...
Gotta love the Internet sometimes. The post which generated a 10-page discussion also got modded down to -1. This is yet another reason to have a "spam" modifier. Offtopic to some may not be offtopic to others. But spam is always offtopic. If there was a spam modifier, at least, you'd be able to set up your options to ignore "offtopic" mods and not ignore "spam" mods.
The trailer itself is plainly inflammatory. It doesn't support any of its claims. It just makes the accusations graphic. You are not likely to be shunned or feared as he would like to believe. You are, however, likely to be laughed out of the room. The academic answer to mystery has to be exploration. Hypothesizing that it is something unexplainable (ie, the flying spaghetti monster creating the universe) is simply tantamount to giving up the exploration for physical causes of events.