Not to mention all the negative publicity they would get if they shut down the wrong people.
They've gotten quite a bit of negative publicity from some of the suits they've filed and that hasn't slowed them down a bit. What makes you think this would be any different?
authorising an application to do X does not mean it can also do Y.
And at that point, we're right back where we started. I'm sure there's a way to give a program groups of rights (e.g., the right to make modifications to C:/Program Files, the right to make changes to certain parts of the Registry, the right to download programs...) but not full Admin rights. Not being a Vista guru (or user) I don't know how that can be done, but I'd be astonished if there weren't some way to do it.
What bothers me is nobody seems to answer the question: "What *should* they be doing?" in a reasonable manner.
I've never had the slightest problem with UAC personally, but that's because I use Linux. However, I do have a strong opinion about how UAC could be better: have it come up the first time a program needs extra privileges asking if you want that program to run as Administrator and be done with it. One warning that the program is trying to do things a normal user isn't authorized to do should be enough.
As an example from the Linux world, I can run the program that examines what services are running as a regular user. If I try to use it to turn any service on or off, however, up pops a box asking for the root password, because that needs root access. And, once I've given it that password, it doesn't need to ask again if I change a second service's settings. To me, at least, that would make sense for UAC.
as far as searching for something specific, and finding related things, MS Help wins by a long shot.
One thing for sure, it beats the Gnome system on searching. There, if you're looking for help on (let's say) the
GIMP, and search for "filter," it will take you to every instance of filter in the help system, no matter what program it's for. At a guess, that'd be because Gnome Help is one big file, instead of a different one for each application.
Damning with faint praise, indeed! Isn't every new version of an OS supposed to be better than any predecessor? If Windows 7 is only "*almost* on par with windows XP," that makes it another Great Leap Backward, doesn't it?
Read the article. They state that iexplore.exe is gone.
All they have to do is remove the icon and rename the file to something else and they've done that. I'd be more impressed if they specified that iexplore.exe was deleted and that no part of it was left, even under a different name. Normally, I'd not be so skeptical, but we've all known Microsoft to play fast and loose with the facts before.
Essentially the basic question comes down to whether patents are designed to protect and promote ideas or whether they're designed to protect and promote implementation.
I may well be wrong here, but my impression is that the original intent of patents was to protect the implementation, as you had to have, at the very least, a working model to get a patent. (Note that Abraham Lincoln actually built a model of his invention, which still exists, although a full-scale copy was never made.) Now, it seems that patents are being given to ideas, and implementation isn't important. Frankly, I'd prefer it if we went back to the way they were handled back then, because that alone would just about kill the patent trolls.
failure to bring a product to market within said grace period should place the invention in the public domain.
That would be just fine, as far as I'm concerned. If nothing else, it would completely kill the patent troll's business plan. Of course, there are sometimes problems that slow down bringing a patent to market and it might be fair to have a way for a business to get an extension to the grace period, but they'd have to prove that they were really working on it and not just stalling. As always, the devil is in the details.
YES. That is why a whole bunch of products are protected by those "Patent Pending" labels and the like
You do realize, don't you, that all the words Patent Pending do is put people on notice that they may be liable for damages later, if and when the patent is granted? In the US, at least, the phrase has no legal effect whatsoever, and is only used as a warning that borrowing the idea now might lead to trouble later.
So you think that a company has to develop a product and put it on the market before getting a patent? By your reasoning, that's the only way they could get one, and doing that leaves them open to having other people a)copy their idea and then b) using that copy as "prior art" to fight the eventual patent. Do you even take one second to think before posting?
After all, you *DO* google yourself from time to time, yes?
Yes. In fact, before posting that, I tried using my complete name, and came up with exactly zero hits. That means that there's no way of a snoopy interviewer saying, "We know that's you because it mentions your complete name, including your middle name."
Come to think of it, if you don't care too much if you get the job or not, it might be fun to tell the interviewer, "Sure, you can google me, as long as I get to google you at the same time."
You can tell your interviewer to not troll for information on google but it just will raise red flags. If I were hiring someone and was asked not to search their name, that would be the first thing I'd do after they'd left.
If an interviewer asked if he/she could google my name, I'd shrug and say, "Sure, go ahead." My name isn't that common, but there are at least three others out there, probably more, in different parts of the country. If the interviewer comes up with something unsavory, how are they going to know it's me, not one of the others?
The "US Government" might have more bandwidth than god himself, but if you think it is easy to stroll up to whatever IT guys own the fat cisco router and carve off a hunk of bandwidth pie, you've never worked in government.
If President Obama wants bandwidth, bandwidth is what President Obama is going to get. It may take a little while to set up, but believe me, he's not going to be told he can't have it.
Your only choices are pay to self-host (and that means affiliating with a hosting provider)
In case you forgot, this is the US Federal Government we're talking about here. It has ample bandwidth and as much access to the Internet Backbone as it needs. All they need to do is dedicate some servers in some government datacenter to this and Bjorn Stronginthearm's your uncle!
But on the other hand, how can the claim be evaluated without the anonymous writer being there to defend it?
If TFS is correct, the court gets to decide if the statements were obviously defamatory. As an example, if a doughnut shop complained that some anonymous poster said its doughnuts were greasy and its coffee tasted like wet cardboard, I doubt that the court would consider that anything other than expressing an opinion. If, OTOH, the poster claimed that the shop adulterated its coffee with organic fertilizer, they'd probably consider the statements defamatory, and allow the shop to go after the poster.
Oh, BTW, mind looking at the blue curve, not the 50 year avareged black one?
The climb and drop were on the blue curve, not the black one, as you'd see if you bothered to look at the image for yourself. (I ignored the average, because the year-to-year results were what was important.) And, I'm giving you local anecdotes because those are the ones I happen to know about. They used to have Ice Fairs on the Thames in that era, but it doesn't freeze either and hasn't since the mid-19th century. I'm sure if I looked around, I could find similar cases from many other places.
During the Little Ice Age, French farmers expected to get two measures of grain back for each one planted; if they got a third, it was "a gift from God." They didn't even know that Roman farmers got over a dozen back for each one planted. How much of that was better farming and how much a longer, warmer growing season? I don't know, but I'd bet that the climate change had the larger effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I know. Of course, the tinfoil hat brigade hasn't ever let little things like facts stop them before. Why do you expect them to start now?
They've gotten quite a bit of negative publicity from some of the suits they've filed and that hasn't slowed them down a bit. What makes you think this would be any different?
I believe that the word you're looking for here is "hypocrisy."
If I do, I'll buy it used. That way, they won't be forced to violate their principles by getting a royalty from the sale.
This is Ubuntu we're talking about. Everybody has sudo access to everything, because that's how you do admin and root stuff in Ubuntu.
And at that point, we're right back where we started. I'm sure there's a way to give a program groups of rights (e.g., the right to make modifications to C:/Program Files, the right to make changes to certain parts of the Registry, the right to download programs...) but not full Admin rights. Not being a Vista guru (or user) I don't know how that can be done, but I'd be astonished if there weren't some way to do it.
I've never had the slightest problem with UAC personally, but that's because I use Linux. However, I do have a strong opinion about how UAC could be better: have it come up the first time a program needs extra privileges asking if you want that program to run as Administrator and be done with it. One warning that the program is trying to do things a normal user isn't authorized to do should be enough.
As an example from the Linux world, I can run the program that examines what services are running as a regular user. If I try to use it to turn any service on or off, however, up pops a box asking for the root password, because that needs root access. And, once I've given it that password, it doesn't need to ask again if I change a second service's settings. To me, at least, that would make sense for UAC.
One thing for sure, it beats the Gnome system on searching. There, if you're looking for help on (let's say) the GIMP, and search for "filter," it will take you to every instance of filter in the help system, no matter what program it's for. At a guess, that'd be because Gnome Help is one big file, instead of a different one for each application.
So...why is it exactly that I should want to move to a new OS that is almost, but not quite as good as an OS that's now two generations back?
Damning with faint praise, indeed! Isn't every new version of an OS supposed to be better than any predecessor? If Windows 7 is only "*almost* on par with windows XP," that makes it another Great Leap Backward, doesn't it?
All they have to do is remove the icon and rename the file to something else and they've done that. I'd be more impressed if they specified that iexplore.exe was deleted and that no part of it was left, even under a different name. Normally, I'd not be so skeptical, but we've all known Microsoft to play fast and loose with the facts before.
I may well be wrong here, but my impression is that the original intent of patents was to protect the implementation, as you had to have, at the very least, a working model to get a patent. (Note that Abraham Lincoln actually built a model of his invention, which still exists, although a full-scale copy was never made.) Now, it seems that patents are being given to ideas, and implementation isn't important. Frankly, I'd prefer it if we went back to the way they were handled back then, because that alone would just about kill the patent trolls.
That would be just fine, as far as I'm concerned. If nothing else, it would completely kill the patent troll's business plan. Of course, there are sometimes problems that slow down bringing a patent to market and it might be fair to have a way for a business to get an extension to the grace period, but they'd have to prove that they were really working on it and not just stalling. As always, the devil is in the details.
You do realize, don't you, that all the words Patent Pending do is put people on notice that they may be liable for damages later, if and when the patent is granted? In the US, at least, the phrase has no legal effect whatsoever, and is only used as a warning that borrowing the idea now might lead to trouble later.
Didn't you know? Innovation Alliance is just a cover name. The group's real name is Patent Troll Association of America: PTAA.
So you think that a company has to develop a product and put it on the market before getting a patent? By your reasoning, that's the only way they could get one, and doing that leaves them open to having other people a)copy their idea and then b) using that copy as "prior art" to fight the eventual patent. Do you even take one second to think before posting?
Yes. In fact, before posting that, I tried using my complete name, and came up with exactly zero hits. That means that there's no way of a snoopy interviewer saying, "We know that's you because it mentions your complete name, including your middle name."
Come to think of it, if you don't care too much if you get the job or not, it might be fun to tell the interviewer, "Sure, you can google me, as long as I get to google you at the same time."
And we are the Vogons! RESISTANCE IS USELESS!
If an interviewer asked if he/she could google my name, I'd shrug and say, "Sure, go ahead." My name isn't that common, but there are at least three others out there, probably more, in different parts of the country. If the interviewer comes up with something unsavory, how are they going to know it's me, not one of the others?
If President Obama wants bandwidth, bandwidth is what President Obama is going to get. It may take a little while to set up, but believe me, he's not going to be told he can't have it.
You're a real salty dog, aren't you?
It's also a very reasonable choice from a programming POV.
In case you forgot, this is the US Federal Government we're talking about here. It has ample bandwidth and as much access to the Internet Backbone as it needs. All they need to do is dedicate some servers in some government datacenter to this and Bjorn Stronginthearm's your uncle!
If TFS is correct, the court gets to decide if the statements were obviously defamatory. As an example, if a doughnut shop complained that some anonymous poster said its doughnuts were greasy and its coffee tasted like wet cardboard, I doubt that the court would consider that anything other than expressing an opinion. If, OTOH, the poster claimed that the shop adulterated its coffee with organic fertilizer, they'd probably consider the statements defamatory, and allow the shop to go after the poster.
The climb and drop were on the blue curve, not the black one, as you'd see if you bothered to look at the image for yourself. (I ignored the average, because the year-to-year results were what was important.) And, I'm giving you local anecdotes because those are the ones I happen to know about. They used to have Ice Fairs on the Thames in that era, but it doesn't freeze either and hasn't since the mid-19th century. I'm sure if I looked around, I could find similar cases from many other places.
During the Little Ice Age, French farmers expected to get two measures of grain back for each one planted; if they got a third, it was "a gift from God." They didn't even know that Roman farmers got over a dozen back for each one planted. How much of that was better farming and how much a longer, warmer growing season? I don't know, but I'd bet that the climate change had the larger effect.