I quit buying at Circuit City before I made my first purchase from the nitwits.
This was back when few, if any, computers were sold with CD players already installed. If you wanted one, you bought it separately and installed it yourself.
I needed one for my computer and went to Circuit City to buy one. The salesman I was dealing with was brand new and was being trained by his boss who was standing there listening.
I noticed that the CD player packaging only listed Windows 95 on the package and so I told the salesman that I would bring it back if it didn't work with Windows NT. His boss immediately jumped in and said that they would only take it back if it wouldn't run on Windows 95 and that whether or not it would run on Windows NT was immaterial.
So I left, never to return, and went to another shop and bought the same exact CD player. It worked fine.
At the time, I was looking for a good quality stereo system to replace my old one and had one picked out at Circuit City. After the Circuit City made their bullshit policies clear, I went elsewhere to buy a new stereo, too.
They also want their users to use only IE instead of Firefox, Opera, or other browsers so that they will feel uneasy should they try to switch to Linux or some other operating system.
The more software packages one uses that have counterparts on other OS's such as Linux, the more one feels at home when trying out Linux and the more likely one is to actually switch to Linux. Thus, the better for the user and the worse for Microsoft.
Defending yourself in court can be a real challenge that would pretty much require making it a full-time job.
One problem is that you have to deal with all kinds of procedural issues, most of which are well known by the lawyers, but not by the rest of us. Failing to file the proper papers or filing after a deadline can seriously damage your case. If you fail to bring up the proper arguments at the right time, you may not be permitted to bring them up later.
In other words, when you hit the ground, you have to hit the ground at full speed instead of feeling your way along.
The legal system is designed for the perpetuation of lawyers, not to arrive at a just outcome.
The telephone company can and does undercut our prices. Anyone buying the survice solely on the monthly service price will go with the telephone company.
The only difference is the service. We go out of our way to help our customers when they need it. For example, one customer called me on a Sunday afternoon and told me that the mouse on his computer had quit. I was headed his direction anyway and so I dropped a mouse off for him to use in the meantime.
One night years ago when I lived south of Houston, I was driving over to a fast food place to get something to take home for supper.
There was a van in front of me that was driving all over the road. It almost went into the ditch on each side of the road at least once.
When we go to a four lane highway, the van spent part of the time taking up both lanes going our direction and some of the time in the oncoming lanes.
I was surprised to see the van turn in ahead of me at the fast food joint and pull up to the drive through.
Being the nice guy/asshole that I am, I thought I'd do a good deed and suggest that the driver wait for someone sober to drive him home. I stood about 5 feet from the window when I made my suggestion.
It turned out to be a woman who had the foulest mouth of any woman I ever met. She was screaming unbelievably loud that she wasn't drunk, that she was only using her cell phone, and that how she drove was her business and noone elses.
So I got back in my car.
When I finally got around front, everyone inside was laughing. I guess everyone in the place, employee and customer alike, heard her tirade over the speaker system.
I told a local cop about it later. He wasn't amused at all about it.
I know an 18 year old high school dropout who is currently sitting in a county jail in Texas waiting to be transported to prison. The toughest part of being in jail for him is not having a cell phone to keep in touch with all his "friends".
He recevied probation for drug and theft charges and never made the slightest effort to do anything required for the probation. Although he claims to have had permission from the probation officer to move out of the county, when the sheriff asked me where he was and I answered Amarillo, from his reaction it was quite clear that that was a complete surprise.
If the use of cell phone was good for the brain, the twerp could have had a PhD in Mathematics by now.
Back in the punch card days, you could buy cabinets with drawers that were made for storing punch cards. They were just the right size for punch cards and not much use for anything else but storing punch cards.
I've thought about building a cabinet for storing CDs along the same lines as the punch card cabinets. Build drawers that are just the right size to store jewel boxes.
Right now I just stack them up in file cabinets. A CD cabinet would be a whole lot better.
I buy the hard plastic boxes that hold 10 cds each from rima.com, Hard Plastic Box for 10 CDs, 20-Pack. Of course, I put each CD in an individual CD sleeve.
In some cases, I put the device driver CDs together in boxes. In other cases, I'll put the various CDs for a particular CD in a box. And just slap a label on the front.
They take up a whole lot less room than individual cases and are much better at grouping things together.
Would it make the RIAA happy if allofmp3.com contacted the individual artists and paid them their royalties?
Of course not. The RIAA doesn't care a hill of beans about whether the individual artists are ever paid for their work. They just want to make sure that the major record companies get paid.
I got a few more details about who was involved and when.
The case was about 15 years ago. The heirs were Father Flanagan's Boys Town in Nebraska (or something closely related to it). The farmer was a Mr. Edge (sp?) who lived in Texas. The property was in the Texas Panhandle and the case was tried in Texas.
As I understand it, Mr. Edge had farmed the land for 15 years or more. It may have been only pastureland and he ran his cattle on it for that long. Following the death of the original owner who lived in Oklahoma, Boys Town had collected the oil and gas royalties for a number of years until the time of the trial.
If you hear any more details of it, let me know. I looked on the Internet, but found nothing.
Adverse possession can allow problems in determining the exact ownership of property to be cleared fairly quickly.
For example, I live in an area that was originally settled by Norwegian farmers. A small number of them moved elsewhere without selling or otherwise disposing of their property. Noone knew how to get ahold of them. Instead of letting the land lay fallow for many years, someone would begin farming it and eventually gain full title to it by adverse possession.
I know of another instance in which a farmer purchased land from the brother of a brother and sister who had inherited the land years before. As I understand it, the second had agreed to convey the land to the first but never actually put it in writing. Without adverse possession, she could possibly come back years later and claim the land belonging to her. I don't know whether or not she would have likely ended up with the land if she tried that, but no matter how it turned out, it would have cost the farmer a lot of money in legal fees.
Send me an e-mail to neurobotica@gmail.com and I'll see what I can find on it. It may take a week or more before I talk to someone who is familiar with the case.
Off hand, I just know the approximate identity of the heirs and a rough idea of the location of the property.
For what it's worth, the jurors didn't like the decision at all, but they felt like they had to go by their understanding of the laws involved.
In states where intent to disposess is required in adverse posession (subjective test states), the PRESENCE of a "no trespassing sign" will allow the adverse posessor to sustain his claim of open, notorious and HOSTILE as a result of the sign. (Whereas without a no trespassing sign, in the same jurisdiction, the claim for quiet title would have failed.)
A "no tresspassing" sign is not required to acquire property by adverse possession. The sign is one way of publically claiming the property, but it is by no means the only method.
In one case in my county, a farmer began farming some farmland owned by someone else. He farmed it for a number of years without paying any form of rent. If the owner had driven by, it would have been clear to him that someone else was using the land, but he was old and didn't get out much. So the farmer ended up with the property. No "No Tresspassing" signs wer required.
The strangest part was over the mineral rights. Checks for oil and gas from the property were mailed to the owner and then to his heirs for years. When the heirs tried to claim back the property, they not only ended up without possession of the property, but without possession of the mineral rights as well. Since the mineral rights were never severed from the property, whoever owned the property owned the mineral rights. And that was the farmer who gained them by adverse possession.
Years ago, I was in a software store in Webster, Texas (near Nasa's Johnson Space Center). They didn't have the packages I was looking for.
According to the salesman, there was an internal software audit coming up that week at one of the Nasa Contractors and everyone was rushing out to buy legal copies of the software they were using.
If you cite the source it is not plagiarism; so much as it simple copyright infringment.
It may or may not be copyright infringement. It all depends on whether the author still has any copyright protection over the material.
For example, you can quote the entirity of Melville's Moby Dick without infringing Mr. Melville's copyright.
For that matter, you can publish a complete copy of Moby Dick, but you would commit plagiarism if you put your name on it as the author instead of Mr. Melvill's.
As such, temp credit card numbers are no longer used either.
Actually, they are.
MBNA has such a program called ShopSafe. I use it all the time.
It's been quite a while since I did any web transaction with the regular number.
That did cause some trouble on eBay in early March. I had a temporary number on PayPal with a $25 maximum limit. When I won three bids one day (easy since they were all "Buy It Now"), I created a new temporary number with a maximum high enough to handle all three bids. The total amount was about $40.
But then I screwed up. When paying for one of the purchases, I didn't select the second temporary number. When I realized that, I tried to backup and charge it to the correct number. But what really happened was that the payment was charged to both numbers.
I contacted a customer reporesentative at PayPal by telephone who told me that the way to fix it was to contact the seller and have them refund one of the payments. The seller willingly did that with no problem but then the bid was displayed as being unpaid. PayPal then suggested that I go to the payment section and mark it that I was sending the payment by other means.
I'm still not sure what the status of the transaction is. The bid was for a magazine subscription ($7.95 for 3 year subscription isn't bad at all) with delivery of the first issue in 2-3 months and so the 3 months is not up yet.
That may work in the big cities where you have multiple companies with independent network connections.
But in small towns and rural areas, there may be multiple ISPs, but their internet connections all run through the same connection, usually owned by the telephone company. There is no route around the telephone company in such cases.
What will likely happen is that when you a buy a computer, it will already be enabled.
I've tried telling people that if they want Windoze on computers, they should buy the computer with no operating system and buy the operating system separately. That way they would avoid all the crap that the vendors install.
Slashdot Mirror
What most of us are searching for are two women at once. With that, we can generate our own energy.
You can enter IP addresses now in their TCP/IP filter?
The last time I looked (not at XP), you could enter port numbers, but not IP addresses.
The best approach would be to manually modify the routing table, assuming, of course, that is possible with XP.
I quit buying at Circuit City before I made my first purchase from the nitwits.
This was back when few, if any, computers were sold with CD players already installed. If you wanted one, you bought it separately and installed it yourself.
I needed one for my computer and went to Circuit City to buy one. The salesman I was dealing with was brand new and was being trained by his boss who was standing there listening.
I noticed that the CD player packaging only listed Windows 95 on the package and so I told the salesman that I would bring it back if it didn't work with Windows NT. His boss immediately jumped in and said that they would only take it back if it wouldn't run on Windows 95 and that whether or not it would run on Windows NT was immaterial.
So I left, never to return, and went to another shop and bought the same exact CD player. It worked fine.
At the time, I was looking for a good quality stereo system to replace my old one and had one picked out at Circuit City. After the Circuit City made their bullshit policies clear, I went elsewhere to buy a new stereo, too.
They also want their users to use only IE instead of Firefox, Opera, or other browsers so that they will feel uneasy should they try to switch to Linux or some other operating system.
The more software packages one uses that have counterparts on other OS's such as Linux, the more one feels at home when trying out Linux and the more likely one is to actually switch to Linux. Thus, the better for the user and the worse for Microsoft.
They could have just e-mailed it to everyone with a gmail account.
How about an intermediate layer between the OS and the hardware that would contain all the drivers?
The operating systems would only have to deal with a standard interface independent of the hardware.
Defending yourself in court can be a real challenge that would pretty much require making it a full-time job.
One problem is that you have to deal with all kinds of procedural issues, most of which are well known by the lawyers, but not by the rest of us. Failing to file the proper papers or filing after a deadline can seriously damage your case. If you fail to bring up the proper arguments at the right time, you may not be permitted to bring them up later.
In other words, when you hit the ground, you have to hit the ground at full speed instead of feeling your way along.
The legal system is designed for the perpetuation of lawyers, not to arrive at a just outcome.
We offer wireless to people's homes in our area.
The telephone company can and does undercut our prices. Anyone buying the survice solely on the monthly service price will go with the telephone company.
The only difference is the service. We go out of our way to help our customers when they need it. For example, one customer called me on a Sunday afternoon and told me that the mouse on his computer had quit. I was headed his direction anyway and so I dropped a mouse off for him to use in the meantime.
One night years ago when I lived south of Houston, I was driving over to a fast food place to get something to take home for supper.
There was a van in front of me that was driving all over the road. It almost went into the ditch on each side of the road at least once.
When we go to a four lane highway, the van spent part of the time taking up both lanes going our direction and some of the time in the oncoming lanes.
I was surprised to see the van turn in ahead of me at the fast food joint and pull up to the drive through.
Being the nice guy/asshole that I am, I thought I'd do a good deed and suggest that the driver wait for someone sober to drive him home. I stood about 5 feet from the window when I made my suggestion.
It turned out to be a woman who had the foulest mouth of any woman I ever met. She was screaming unbelievably loud that she wasn't drunk, that she was only using her cell phone, and that how she drove was her business and noone elses.
So I got back in my car.
When I finally got around front, everyone inside was laughing. I guess everyone in the place, employee and customer alike, heard her tirade over the speaker system.
I told a local cop about it later. He wasn't amused at all about it.
I know an 18 year old high school dropout who is currently sitting in a county jail in Texas waiting to be transported to prison. The toughest part of being in jail for him is not having a cell phone to keep in touch with all his "friends".
He recevied probation for drug and theft charges and never made the slightest effort to do anything required for the probation. Although he claims to have had permission from the probation officer to move out of the county, when the sheriff asked me where he was and I answered Amarillo, from his reaction it was quite clear that that was a complete surprise.
If the use of cell phone was good for the brain, the twerp could have had a PhD in Mathematics by now.
Back in the punch card days, you could buy cabinets with drawers that were made for storing punch cards. They were just the right size for punch cards and not much use for anything else but storing punch cards.
I've thought about building a cabinet for storing CDs along the same lines as the punch card cabinets. Build drawers that are just the right size to store jewel boxes.
Right now I just stack them up in file cabinets. A CD cabinet would be a whole lot better.
I buy the hard plastic boxes that hold 10 cds each from rima.com, Hard Plastic Box for 10 CDs, 20-Pack. Of course, I put each CD in an individual CD sleeve.
In some cases, I put the device driver CDs together in boxes. In other cases, I'll put the various CDs for a particular CD in a box. And just slap a label on the front.
They take up a whole lot less room than individual cases and are much better at grouping things together.
Would it make the RIAA happy if allofmp3.com contacted the individual artists and paid them their royalties?
Of course not. The RIAA doesn't care a hill of beans about whether the individual artists are ever paid for their work. They just want to make sure that the major record companies get paid.
I got a few more details about who was involved and when.
The case was about 15 years ago. The heirs were Father Flanagan's Boys Town in Nebraska (or something closely related to it). The farmer was a Mr. Edge (sp?) who lived in Texas. The property was in the Texas Panhandle and the case was tried in Texas.
As I understand it, Mr. Edge had farmed the land for 15 years or more. It may have been only pastureland and he ran his cattle on it for that long. Following the death of the original owner who lived in Oklahoma, Boys Town had collected the oil and gas royalties for a number of years until the time of the trial.
If you hear any more details of it, let me know. I looked on the Internet, but found nothing.
Adverse possession can allow problems in determining the exact ownership of property to be cleared fairly quickly.
For example, I live in an area that was originally settled by Norwegian farmers. A small number of them moved elsewhere without selling or otherwise disposing of their property. Noone knew how to get ahold of them. Instead of letting the land lay fallow for many years, someone would begin farming it and eventually gain full title to it by adverse possession.
I know of another instance in which a farmer purchased land from the brother of a brother and sister who had inherited the land years before. As I understand it, the second had agreed to convey the land to the first but never actually put it in writing. Without adverse possession, she could possibly come back years later and claim the land belonging to her. I don't know whether or not she would have likely ended up with the land if she tried that, but no matter how it turned out, it would have cost the farmer a lot of money in legal fees.
Send me an e-mail to neurobotica@gmail.com and I'll see what I can find on it. It may take a week or more before I talk to someone who is familiar with the case.
Off hand, I just know the approximate identity of the heirs and a rough idea of the location of the property.
For what it's worth, the jurors didn't like the decision at all, but they felt like they had to go by their understanding of the laws involved.
A "no tresspassing" sign is not required to acquire property by adverse possession. The sign is one way of publically claiming the property, but it is by no means the only method.
In one case in my county, a farmer began farming some farmland owned by someone else. He farmed it for a number of years without paying any form of rent. If the owner had driven by, it would have been clear to him that someone else was using the land, but he was old and didn't get out much. So the farmer ended up with the property. No "No Tresspassing" signs wer required.
The strangest part was over the mineral rights. Checks for oil and gas from the property were mailed to the owner and then to his heirs for years. When the heirs tried to claim back the property, they not only ended up without possession of the property, but without possession of the mineral rights as well. Since the mineral rights were never severed from the property, whoever owned the property owned the mineral rights. And that was the farmer who gained them by adverse possession.
Years ago, I was in a software store in Webster, Texas (near Nasa's Johnson Space Center). They didn't have the packages I was looking for.
According to the salesman, there was an internal software audit coming up that week at one of the Nasa Contractors and everyone was rushing out to buy legal copies of the software they were using.
I've been an eMusic subscriber since before the sale of the company and the restriction to 40 tracks per month on the basic subscription.
All they have to do to lose me is to go DRM.
It may or may not be copyright infringement. It all depends on whether the author still has any copyright protection over the material.
For example, you can quote the entirity of Melville's Moby Dick without infringing Mr. Melville's copyright.
For that matter, you can publish a complete copy of Moby Dick, but you would commit plagiarism if you put your name on it as the author instead of Mr. Melvill's.
Actually, they are.
MBNA has such a program called ShopSafe. I use it all the time.
It's been quite a while since I did any web transaction with the regular number.
That did cause some trouble on eBay in early March. I had a temporary number on PayPal with a $25 maximum limit. When I won three bids one day (easy since they were all "Buy It Now"), I created a new temporary number with a maximum high enough to handle all three bids. The total amount was about $40.
But then I screwed up. When paying for one of the purchases, I didn't select the second temporary number. When I realized that, I tried to backup and charge it to the correct number. But what really happened was that the payment was charged to both numbers.
I contacted a customer reporesentative at PayPal by telephone who told me that the way to fix it was to contact the seller and have them refund one of the payments. The seller willingly did that with no problem but then the bid was displayed as being unpaid. PayPal then suggested that I go to the payment section and mark it that I was sending the payment by other means.
I'm still not sure what the status of the transaction is. The bid was for a magazine subscription ($7.95 for 3 year subscription isn't bad at all) with delivery of the first issue in 2-3 months and so the 3 months is not up yet.
That may work in the big cities where you have multiple companies with independent network connections.
But in small towns and rural areas, there may be multiple ISPs, but their internet connections all run through the same connection, usually owned by the telephone company. There is no route around the telephone company in such cases.
Some ISPs who block port 25 will readily open them up on an individual basis if asked.
If you aren't running an SMTP server and you are running Windoze, then port 25 should be blocked.
What will likely happen is that when you a buy a computer, it will already be enabled.
I've tried telling people that if they want Windoze on computers, they should buy the computer with no operating system and buy the operating system separately. That way they would avoid all the crap that the vendors install.
Yep.
It sure was introduced by a Congressman. That doesn't mean that the Congressman wrote the bill.
The President cannot introduce legislation himself. It takes a Congressman to do that.
Even though the Congressman introduced the legislation, the legislation was drafted by the Bush administration.