How are the kids going to buy it [the violent video game] unless the parents give them money? And what happens exactly if they do buy it and the parents don't approve? They can't take the damn thing away?
Actually, if I remember from my high school "Law for Everyday Living" class correctly, common law allows minors to return goods that are not necessities (e.g., food) for a refund; and the seller must give the minor a refund even if that possibility was not specified in the contract. The parents could take the child's video game back, and they are completely legally entitled to do this (unless my memory does not serve me here).
Disclaimer: Of course, I'm not a lawyer and am not giving legal advice.
I was doing a group project once, and I was getting bored, so I was browsing around randomly on the computer's Start menu. I saw a strange program called Microsoft InfoPath. I opened it, not knowing what it would be. It provided templates for making invoices, receipts, and that sort of thing, which I promptly did. I charged one of my teammates $50 for something.
Anyway, this leads me to suspect that this is a high-tech form of sociopathy. Microsoft has created this program so that unwitting customers will accidentally make invoices to themselves, made payable to MSFT, while trying to type something. Sounds pretty sociopathic to me.
Indeed, Microsoft is the InfoPath for the digital age!
I've never liked to write on you. Truth is...I've been afraid. You give me goosbumps in all the wrong places. But it's not you. It's me. I think I've had this fear of writing since 5th grade when Mrs. Zimbalowski had us write brief compositions and then exchange them with a classmate for correction. Well, I sat next a bit of a smart aleck, Tommy Filsdenoire. He was also pretty smart and never let me off easy if I even misplaced a single comma. I always dreaded writing compositions in that class.
Mrs. Zimbalowski herself was no better. She encouraged an objective review of classmates' writing. This extended to the ideas too. I felt that, if I let something provocative slip, it would come back to haunt me next recess; often it really did. For the assignment about life goals, I wrote about becoming a pioneering male flight stewardess. It goes without saying that, after Tommy read this, I was the clown on the foursquare.
I cried for nights over these matters but had all but forgotten them by high school. I just hated writing. When a friend of mine, coincidentally also named Tom, suggested I start a blog, I resisted, but he did not give up. All my friends started blogging. That's how they communicated! I had to adapt and overcome my anxieties. Now here I am, writing safe and sound.
Speak for yourself. I always wrote papers as the ideas flowed off the top of my head. I admit, though, this style is less effective for research papers, but it is quite effective otherwise: essays, poetry, short stories, etc.
I always found the requirement of multiple drafts bothersome because I usually couldn't find anything wrong with the initial (rough) one! Most of the time, I just changed a couple of words and corrected a spelling mistake here and there.
The controversy surrounding many of these video game sale regulation bills is whether video game (and other forms of entertainment) violence leads to actual violence. Apparently, this depends to a large extent on personality. That is, people with certain personality types (namely psychopathy) will be more likely to develop negative behaviors from negative entertainment than control populations. The Dark Triad Returns: Entertainment Preferences Among Narcissists, Machiavellians, and Psychopaths has some research on the matter.
Nonsense, the beauty of first posts is that they are witty at best and may not even seem relevant at all after reading the article. The lords of Slash wouldn't have it any other way.
It's good that Microsoft will be unbundling at least one application from their operating system, but who's going to buy this? The hardcore geeks who think Microsoft is an evil monopoly are probably using something else like Linux, FreeBSD, or a Mac; and the average consumer, even in the European Union, probably doesn't care about software bundling. Actually, most consumers would probably choose the version with more features rather than specifically choose the version with a reduced feature set. Can you imagine McDonald's continuing to sell Big Macs but also selling Big Macs H, which have removed the extra beef paddy, the slice of cheese, the sauce, etc. so that it will be healthier?
Pre-.NET Visual Basic was far from the best programming language. Its support for object-oriented programming constructs was half-hearted at best. VB6 was released in 1998; people should be moving on by now, or they should have used a better tool in the first place.
These participants in the blogosphere seem to be really good at spreading hearsay and unfounded speculation, possibly as a form of pseudo-journalistic wankery. That is why I propose the term blogobaters (alternatively, blogsturbators) to describe these people. I think it's a much more fitting term than bloggers.
This is exactly the kind of anti-market government regulation we don't need! If customers don't like the service Spyware Assassin is providing, they can consider the alternatives made available to them in a purported free market. With a Republican administration in power, I would have hoped for better.
Reading the developor philosophy for the GNOME project has inspired me to develop a word processer likewise based solely on my own word processing needs. Since I have prefect spelling and diction, spelling and grammer correction tools will not be needed. This will give me time to create a much more useful feature: auto-insertion of the insperational quote of the day by me.
I expect to impliment this feature using a relational database management system so that more similar features can be added in later versions. True, a DBMS for some quotes will increase the memory footprint of this app considerably, but it's worth it to get these quotes!
If anyone would like to suggest other features I could add, I'll be happy to ignore your pleas if I don't think I'd use that feature myself.
Author's Note:Although I generally dislike propagating hackneyed jokes, at this time, I feel compelled to share this one with the Slashdot community.
Netcraft confirms it: Mozilla Firefox browser is dead. Our sympathies go to our beloved Mozilla Foundation. They gave it their best, but Microsoft is not a foe to grapple with and survive.
After a period of growth and acceptance, Firefox's rate of gain of marketshare has slowed. At the races, we'd all like to cheer for the three-legged puppy; but we ultimately place our bets on the slim, healthy hounds. Likewise, Netcraft expects wayward Firefox users to return to Microsoft Internet Explorer like sheep returning to the flock.
Netcraft suspects the rise of Internet Explorer 7.0 out of the swamp of stagnation will prompt all good Internet users into the proper order. With IE7, Microsoft will quash what little resistance remains from the Mozilla Foundation and others who promote the multi-browser fallacy. Make no mistake: Firefox's marketshare will soon rapidly accelerate towards zero.
In conclusion, Firefox sucks, and Microsoft paid us wads of cash under the table to say so.
spun:Consider that many of the people who read slashdot are (or like to think they are) more intelligent than the average person.
You're quite generous.
I don't think the attitude expressed here is indicative of the attitude of the average web-surfer.
You are absolutely right. The precise ads that irritate many Slashdot readers are exactly what many in the mainstream find funny and memorable. I am probably near the extreme end of anti-advertising backlash among Slashdotters here. I block almost every ad I see, no matter how unobtrusive. Because of my miserly spending habits, I wouldn't buy the product advertised anyway. If I do want to buy something, I determine what needs I'm looking to fulfill; and then I seek out the products I desire. It's only then that I will consider advertising, generally.
Standard American English is just one of many varieties of the English language. In some colloquial varieties, the past participial usage of saw is correct! If you study linguistics, you will find that Ebonics and the creoles of the Caribbean are real languages with regular grammatical rules. They are merely nonstandard.
What? You mean I should actually contribute back to the community? I thought free software's purpose was, if I needed my software to perform a particular function, people all around the world would gladly write the code for me, even though I know how to code myself. I must reconsider the purpose of life if open source isn't about laziness!
True, honesty is a valuable character trait. However, that does not change the fact that this guy is hitting on people at random. I've tried this myself, and it's not altogether hopeless, at least. One out of twenty women doesn't get up and splash her coffee on me as she leaves. Actually, most people aren't absolutely opposed to having a conversation with someone they don't know if that person can handle the basics of politeness and keeping a positive attitude.
bluGill: Some of the girls working at Panera are good looking. However many of their customers are good looking, and that is good enough for me.
Do you mean to say you hit on random people who are merely enjoying an afternoon coffee and bread bowl? What have they ever done to you to deserve that?
I have recently returned from the perilous gates of Redmond, and I have seen an alpha build of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0. Firstly, let me say this: I was quite impressed. IE7 has added the features I know I've been clamoring for: tabbed browsing, improved security management, and enhanced user interface customizability. The one thing missing is a button that enables the user to visit a webpage containing one of my highly philosophical writings at random, but that can be added as an extension later.
IE7 integrates with the Windows operating system to protect the user from malicious hacker software like Mozilla Firefox. If the user inadvertently attempts to run Mozilla Firefox instead of IE7, it will know and launch in the malware's stead, thus securing the user from harmful XPIs and open standards compliance.
As an additional feature, which as a Web designer I appreciate especially, IE7 renders HTML and CSS in ways once unimagined. With this feature, I am kept on my toes and am provided an opportunity to revisit old stylesheets and code, gnawing at the puzzle of keeping my pages rendering as intended in this new version of Internet Explorer as well as in previous versions and in other browsers, such as Hot Dog, too. My fellow Web developers, you're in for some fun!
If all that wasn't enough, Microsoft has added a feature designed for the clueless newbies and enabled by default: Clippie! Yes, your friendly Office Assistant is being integrated into yet another flagship product from Redmond. Enjoy!
Don't trust your PC to this Microsoft micro-trash. My crack team of security experts (my pet cat and a 5-year-old nephew who mentioned something about bug squashing at a Christmas gettogether) and I have developed malware detection and removal software that will kick any other anti-crap's hindquarters. Spending unheard of manhours (many of which were used to make late-night caffeine runs and failed attempts to get laid) over a span of nearly a week, my team and I developed a program that will secure your information technology from those evil evil hackers out on the big bad Internet. Now if your current ad removal system or firewall says my program is keylogging to send your credit card information to me, this is only because it's jealous. I suggest you remove other spyware removal tools and anti-virus programs as soon as possible!
I'd like to proffer the URL for my program now, but it would seem my host has mistakenly taken the site down for the moment. I intend to call them soon and have this terribly injust mistake rectified immediately.
My problem is motivating myself to do work I'm not personally interested in doing. For things like my personal website, I can create astonishing results (in my biased opinion, at least). Part of the problem, I guess, is that high school wasn't all that intellectually challenging for me; I could get by doing enough work to maintain 3.8 GPA (I gave up shooting for a 4.0 after I got a B+ in my first-semester freshman English class, which crushed my aspiration of speaking as a vale dictorian at graduation). Now I find in college the professors have TAs to actually look at the homework in depth and grade it without mercy.
In high school, students could fill their schedules with a variety of classes to make their days more interesting. Now in college, the bulk of my classes are computer science; and I'm finding learning about abstract data structures, various algorithms, and proving functions in ML to be something of a snore for me. It is a challenge, but it's like mathematics in that it's not an interesting one, for me at least.
Finally, the browser war for the Microsoft Windows desktop* is on again! In this corner, we have the reigning champion, Microsoft Internet Explorer; in the other, we have the new favorite Mozilla Firefox. The Mozilla Foundation has packed a punch with Mozilla Firefox 1.0, based on Mozilla's rapidly matured Gecko content rendering technology; but Microsoft is sure to play catchup with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0, coming not so soon in Longhorn. Our other contenders include more Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla "Seamonkey" 1.7.5 and K-Meleon) and more browsers that are simply an improved shell around an Internet Explorer content rendering component. Oh, and Opera, whose developers are crazy enough to charge money or require ads for a browser no better than the free (price and license) competition.
* Microsoft has handed the Macintosh browser market to Apple (Safari) and the Mozilla Foundation (Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla, and Camino). Other desktop systems also run a Gecko- or khtml-based browser, typically.
Slashdot Mirror
Shakrai (717556) wrote:
Actually, if I remember from my high school "Law for Everyday Living" class correctly, common law allows minors to return goods that are not necessities (e.g., food) for a refund; and the seller must give the minor a refund even if that possibility was not specified in the contract. The parents could take the child's video game back, and they are completely legally entitled to do this (unless my memory does not serve me here).
Disclaimer: Of course, I'm not a lawyer and am not giving legal advice.
I was doing a group project once, and I was getting bored, so I was browsing around randomly on the computer's Start menu. I saw a strange program called Microsoft InfoPath. I opened it, not knowing what it would be. It provided templates for making invoices, receipts, and that sort of thing, which I promptly did. I charged one of my teammates $50 for something.
Anyway, this leads me to suspect that this is a high-tech form of sociopathy. Microsoft has created this program so that unwitting customers will accidentally make invoices to themselves, made payable to MSFT, while trying to type something. Sounds pretty sociopathic to me.
Indeed, Microsoft is the InfoPath for the digital age!
Dear Blog,
I've never liked to write on you. Truth is...I've been afraid. You give me goosbumps in all the wrong places. But it's not you. It's me. I think I've had this fear of writing since 5th grade when Mrs. Zimbalowski had us write brief compositions and then exchange them with a classmate for correction. Well, I sat next a bit of a smart aleck, Tommy Filsdenoire. He was also pretty smart and never let me off easy if I even misplaced a single comma. I always dreaded writing compositions in that class.
Mrs. Zimbalowski herself was no better. She encouraged an objective review of classmates' writing. This extended to the ideas too. I felt that, if I let something provocative slip, it would come back to haunt me next recess; often it really did. For the assignment about life goals, I wrote about becoming a pioneering male flight stewardess. It goes without saying that, after Tommy read this, I was the clown on the foursquare.
I cried for nights over these matters but had all but forgotten them by high school. I just hated writing. When a friend of mine, coincidentally also named Tom, suggested I start a blog, I resisted, but he did not give up. All my friends started blogging. That's how they communicated! I had to adapt and overcome my anxieties. Now here I am, writing safe and sound.
Speak for yourself. I always wrote papers as the ideas flowed off the top of my head. I admit, though, this style is less effective for research papers, but it is quite effective otherwise: essays, poetry, short stories, etc.
I always found the requirement of multiple drafts bothersome because I usually couldn't find anything wrong with the initial (rough) one! Most of the time, I just changed a couple of words and corrected a spelling mistake here and there.
The controversy surrounding many of these video game sale regulation bills is whether video game (and other forms of entertainment) violence leads to actual violence. Apparently, this depends to a large extent on personality. That is, people with certain personality types (namely psychopathy) will be more likely to develop negative behaviors from negative entertainment than control populations. The Dark Triad Returns: Entertainment Preferences Among Narcissists, Machiavellians, and Psychopaths has some research on the matter.
Nonsense, the beauty of first posts is that they are witty at best and may not even seem relevant at all after reading the article. The lords of Slash wouldn't have it any other way.
You say that as though it's a bad thing!
It's good that Microsoft will be unbundling at least one application from their operating system, but who's going to buy this? The hardcore geeks who think Microsoft is an evil monopoly are probably using something else like Linux, FreeBSD, or a Mac; and the average consumer, even in the European Union, probably doesn't care about software bundling. Actually, most consumers would probably choose the version with more features rather than specifically choose the version with a reduced feature set. Can you imagine McDonald's continuing to sell Big Macs but also selling Big Macs H, which have removed the extra beef paddy, the slice of cheese, the sauce, etc. so that it will be healthier?
Pre-.NET Visual Basic was far from the best programming language. Its support for object-oriented programming constructs was half-hearted at best. VB6 was released in 1998; people should be moving on by now, or they should have used a better tool in the first place.
These participants in the blogosphere seem to be really good at spreading hearsay and unfounded speculation, possibly as a form of pseudo-journalistic wankery. That is why I propose the term blogobaters (alternatively, blogsturbators) to describe these people. I think it's a much more fitting term than bloggers.
This is exactly the kind of anti-market government regulation we don't need! If customers don't like the service Spyware Assassin is providing, they can consider the alternatives made available to them in a purported free market. With a Republican administration in power, I would have hoped for better.
Reading the developor philosophy for the GNOME project has inspired me to develop a word processer likewise based solely on my own word processing needs. Since I have prefect spelling and diction, spelling and grammer correction tools will not be needed. This will give me time to create a much more useful feature: auto-insertion of the insperational quote of the day by me.
I expect to impliment this feature using a relational database management system so that more similar features can be added in later versions. True, a DBMS for some quotes will increase the memory footprint of this app considerably, but it's worth it to get these quotes!
If anyone would like to suggest other features I could add, I'll be happy to ignore your pleas if I don't think I'd use that feature myself.
Author's Note: Although I generally dislike propagating hackneyed jokes, at this time, I feel compelled to share this one with the Slashdot community.
Netcraft confirms it: Mozilla Firefox browser is dead. Our sympathies go to our beloved Mozilla Foundation. They gave it their best, but Microsoft is not a foe to grapple with and survive.
After a period of growth and acceptance, Firefox's rate of gain of marketshare has slowed. At the races, we'd all like to cheer for the three-legged puppy; but we ultimately place our bets on the slim, healthy hounds. Likewise, Netcraft expects wayward Firefox users to return to Microsoft Internet Explorer like sheep returning to the flock.
Netcraft suspects the rise of Internet Explorer 7.0 out of the swamp of stagnation will prompt all good Internet users into the proper order. With IE7, Microsoft will quash what little resistance remains from the Mozilla Foundation and others who promote the multi-browser fallacy. Make no mistake: Firefox's marketshare will soon rapidly accelerate towards zero.
In conclusion, Firefox sucks, and Microsoft paid us wads of cash under the table to say so.
I Have Been to Redmond and Seen IE7
You're quite generous.
I don't think the attitude expressed here is indicative of the attitude of the average web-surfer.You are absolutely right. The precise ads that irritate many Slashdot readers are exactly what many in the mainstream find funny and memorable. I am probably near the extreme end of anti-advertising backlash among Slashdotters here. I block almost every ad I see, no matter how unobtrusive. Because of my miserly spending habits, I wouldn't buy the product advertised anyway. If I do want to buy something, I determine what needs I'm looking to fulfill; and then I seek out the products I desire. It's only then that I will consider advertising, generally.
I'll tell you what Microsoft IsNot:
Need I go on?
Standard American English is just one of many varieties of the English language. In some colloquial varieties, the past participial usage of saw is correct! If you study linguistics, you will find that Ebonics and the creoles of the Caribbean are real languages with regular grammatical rules. They are merely nonstandard.
What? You mean I should actually contribute back to the community? I thought free software's purpose was, if I needed my software to perform a particular function, people all around the world would gladly write the code for me, even though I know how to code myself. I must reconsider the purpose of life if open source isn't about laziness!
True, honesty is a valuable character trait. However, that does not change the fact that this guy is hitting on people at random. I've tried this myself, and it's not altogether hopeless, at least. One out of twenty women doesn't get up and splash her coffee on me as she leaves. Actually, most people aren't absolutely opposed to having a conversation with someone they don't know if that person can handle the basics of politeness and keeping a positive attitude.
Do you mean to say you hit on random people who are merely enjoying an afternoon coffee and bread bowl? What have they ever done to you to deserve that?
Oh, come on now, you know my highly satirical comment was funnier than another "You insensitive clod!" comment that gets moderated funny.
I have recently returned from the perilous gates of Redmond, and I have seen an alpha build of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0. Firstly, let me say this: I was quite impressed. IE7 has added the features I know I've been clamoring for: tabbed browsing, improved security management, and enhanced user interface customizability. The one thing missing is a button that enables the user to visit a webpage containing one of my highly philosophical writings at random, but that can be added as an extension later.
IE7 integrates with the Windows operating system to protect the user from malicious hacker software like Mozilla Firefox. If the user inadvertently attempts to run Mozilla Firefox instead of IE7, it will know and launch in the malware's stead, thus securing the user from harmful XPIs and open standards compliance.
As an additional feature, which as a Web designer I appreciate especially, IE7 renders HTML and CSS in ways once unimagined. With this feature, I am kept on my toes and am provided an opportunity to revisit old stylesheets and code, gnawing at the puzzle of keeping my pages rendering as intended in this new version of Internet Explorer as well as in previous versions and in other browsers, such as Hot Dog, too. My fellow Web developers, you're in for some fun!
If all that wasn't enough, Microsoft has added a feature designed for the clueless newbies and enabled by default: Clippie! Yes, your friendly Office Assistant is being integrated into yet another flagship product from Redmond. Enjoy!
Don't trust your PC to this Microsoft micro-trash. My crack team of security experts (my pet cat and a 5-year-old nephew who mentioned something about bug squashing at a Christmas gettogether) and I have developed malware detection and removal software that will kick any other anti-crap's hindquarters. Spending unheard of manhours (many of which were used to make late-night caffeine runs and failed attempts to get laid) over a span of nearly a week, my team and I developed a program that will secure your information technology from those evil evil hackers out on the big bad Internet. Now if your current ad removal system or firewall says my program is keylogging to send your credit card information to me, this is only because it's jealous. I suggest you remove other spyware removal tools and anti-virus programs as soon as possible!
I'd like to proffer the URL for my program now, but it would seem my host has mistakenly taken the site down for the moment. I intend to call them soon and have this terribly injust mistake rectified immediately.
My problem is motivating myself to do work I'm not personally interested in doing. For things like my personal website, I can create astonishing results (in my biased opinion, at least). Part of the problem, I guess, is that high school wasn't all that intellectually challenging for me; I could get by doing enough work to maintain 3.8 GPA (I gave up shooting for a 4.0 after I got a B+ in my first-semester freshman English class, which crushed my aspiration of speaking as a vale dictorian at graduation). Now I find in college the professors have TAs to actually look at the homework in depth and grade it without mercy.
In high school, students could fill their schedules with a variety of classes to make their days more interesting. Now in college, the bulk of my classes are computer science; and I'm finding learning about abstract data structures, various algorithms, and proving functions in ML to be something of a snore for me. It is a challenge, but it's like mathematics in that it's not an interesting one, for me at least.
Finally, the browser war for the Microsoft Windows desktop* is on again! In this corner, we have the reigning champion, Microsoft Internet Explorer; in the other, we have the new favorite Mozilla Firefox. The Mozilla Foundation has packed a punch with Mozilla Firefox 1.0, based on Mozilla's rapidly matured Gecko content rendering technology; but Microsoft is sure to play catchup with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0, coming not so soon in Longhorn. Our other contenders include more Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla "Seamonkey" 1.7.5 and K-Meleon) and more browsers that are simply an improved shell around an Internet Explorer content rendering component. Oh, and Opera, whose developers are crazy enough to charge money or require ads for a browser no better than the free (price and license) competition.
* Microsoft has handed the Macintosh browser market to Apple (Safari) and the Mozilla Foundation (Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla, and Camino). Other desktop systems also run a Gecko- or khtml-based browser, typically.