Most likely, Microsoft will wind up having to pay a settlement class consisting of just about anyone who owned Windows 7 and can show their system now runs Win 10 thanks to the online upgrade.
What I want to know is, how do I get Microsoft to compensate me for the time and effort of successfully preventing the upgrade, and my increased risk due to the fact that I've had to disable security updates to do so?
Bullshit. The Uniform Commercial Code and the doctrine of first sale says I own the (copy of the) software. The only thing that says I don't is a fictional, unenforceable, worthless alleged-document that isn't a valid contract because (a) it's a contract of adhesion presented after the sale is complete and (b) offers me no consideration since I already have the right to do everything it's offering me by virtue of having already bought the software.
Over the last 35 years... This demonstrates the strength of authoritarianism...
But things are rapidly changing, and beginning to show the downside of authoritarianism.
Funny, I thought the downside of authoritarianism was shown during the period immediately proceeding the 35-year one you mentioned. Did the Chinese (or any other government, for that matter) learn nothing from the Cultural Revolution?
Maybe the post I was replying to was. Flat isn't necessarily a problem, but having no borders at all could be. This goes double for the computer-illiterate: without the borders and shading mimicking physical controls, buttons are becoming increasingly abstract and thus ever more difficult to recognize as being clickable, especially for people who didn't learn the analogy back in the "beveled-edge pseudo-3D" day.
My only point was that (contrary to the previous poster's implication that 1989 was some kind of primitive age), UIs from back then were actually pretty usable because they were designed by UX engineers instead of graphic artists. Sure, they were ugly, but at least you could tell what was a button and what wasn't.
Similar annoyance points for the "flat" look. You cannot even tell a button is a button, and entry box boundaries are washed out. Shade the fsckers, people! It's not 1989.
Well that's the problem, isn't it? In 1989, UIs were designed so that it was easy to tell which controls were what.
Theoretically, that should be the arm of the federal government in charge of copyrights. Or possibly the DoJ.
Or any member of the public. After all, a plain reading of the phrase "in the public domain" means exactly that: that it is "owned" by every member of the public, collectively, so why shouldn't every "owner" have standing?
...of Usenet is of course, "you do not talk about Usenet." I'm breaking that. Sorry.
More importantly in this case, Second Rule of Usenet is "Usenet can't be subverted by its owner because, as a decentralized service, it doesn't have one." And that's why it needs to be supported instead of centralized shit like Reddit!
Agree completely. The fundamental problem is that software tends to have so much more combinatorial compexity than just about everything else (except maybe medicine or law), and even strategies used to reduce the complexity (modularization and encapsulation) that work in fields like engineering are, in software, often broken or ineffective due to poor design. (Imagine if the person designing the plumbing system in a skyscraper couldn't rely on the walls and floors staying in the same place. He'd have to invent servo-actuated movable plumbing or something, and it would be many orders of magnitude more complicated and less reliable than actual plumbing. It would be chaos! But that's how we do it in software...)
I am both a civil engineer and software "engineer." I have also visited Maryland. I can confirm that (a) civil engineers suck (despite the fact that civil engineering is often much less complex than software engineering), (b) Maryland's freeway design is weird (lots of super-tight parclos with really short merges), and (c) calling programmers "engineers" is a complete farce because compared to actual engineering, all coding is "cowboy coding." I don't care if you're "agile" or "waterfall" or how good your code review or QA is; the process is not rigorous enough to count as engineering.
Ironically, some of the worst cowboy coders I've worked with have been Professional Engineers...
I was working for a company that made pharmacy management software and helped implement support for Prescription Monitoring Program reporting. There is a gigantic amount of personal information that gets sent to the government any time someone gets prescribed a controlled substance (including personal information even of the person merely picking up the prescription, if not the patient).
Often 'a conviction' is much more important for optics than 'a correct conviction', due to other perverse systems and influences in play.
I know what you meant, but you got the terminology a little off. For the police, only an arrest is important. For the prosecutor, a conviction is important. A correct conviction is important for nobody (except the victims of the system, of course).
WTF does Hillary have to do with anything? Quit trying to turn this into some partisan false dichotomy! Trump sucks on an absolute scale, regardless of the alternatives.
(Besides: it should've been Bernie. Or Johnson, or anybody who wasn't a corrupt authoritarian asshat.)
Trump's strategy appears to be "how can I fuck up the country as badly as possible?" He's considering a climate change denier to run the EPA. He's considering an evolution denier to run the Department of Education. He's considering an oil industry exec to run the Department of the Interior. He's considering a Goldman Sachs exec to run the Treasury. It's like he heard the phrase "fox guarding the henhouse" and thought "hey, that sounds like a great idea!"
File this under "know your audience:" the EFF is writing for the likes of "series of tubes" senators (and other tech-illiterate government folks), not slashdotters.
Often times certain parts of a state report earlier than others, different sorts of people vote early in the day and late in the day, and this can cause states' results to fluctuate a lot during the night. It could look like Candidate A is winning all day long, only for B to overtake at the end.
Even worse, the differences in reporting times aren't necessarily random, but can be determined by things like actual vs. expected turnout or urban vs. rural precincts, which can correlate with party. It's entirely possible for, say, a bunch of rural Republican precincts to report early while a bunch of urban Democratic ones don't have their votes tallied until well into the night (or vice-versa).
Globalization would work fine if it had the effect of bringing developing countries' standard of living up to ours. The problem is that when labor is a "level playing field" but things like environmental protections, worker protections and taxes/infrastructure are not, it creates a race to the bottom instead.
Are you seriously suggesting that the entire FBI dropped everything else it was doing to handle this? Not only is that implausible, it's easily verifiable to be false because if that had happened, somebody would have mentioned it to the press and they'd be shouting it from the rooftops.
This is about building on to the previous model of vehicle instead of throwing away the whole car for ''next years model'. This is the way vehicles SHOULD be made.
No shit. That is the way vehicles ARE made! The only thing different about Tesla versus every other car manufacturer is the hype and marketing.
There won't be any challenges, they just won't sue you under the DMCA.
That's a victory!
They'll still void any warranty you may have and either refuse to work on it, or just fuck you bigtime if anything goes wrong that's even remotely connected to the "hack".
No, that's what the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act is for. In order to void your warranty, the burden of proof is on them to show that your modifications caused the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
What I want to know is, how do I get Microsoft to compensate me for the time and effort of successfully preventing the upgrade, and my increased risk due to the fact that I've had to disable security updates to do so?
Do you write a penalty (e.g. extra payment) into the contract for when that happens?
Bullshit. The Uniform Commercial Code and the doctrine of first sale says I own the (copy of the) software. The only thing that says I don't is a fictional, unenforceable, worthless alleged-document that isn't a valid contract because (a) it's a contract of adhesion presented after the sale is complete and (b) offers me no consideration since I already have the right to do everything it's offering me by virtue of having already bought the software.
Funny, I thought the downside of authoritarianism was shown during the period immediately proceeding the 35-year one you mentioned. Did the Chinese (or any other government, for that matter) learn nothing from the Cultural Revolution?
The only problem is, the unhealthy crap causes the change in gut biome.
Maybe the post I was replying to was. Flat isn't necessarily a problem, but having no borders at all could be. This goes double for the computer-illiterate: without the borders and shading mimicking physical controls, buttons are becoming increasingly abstract and thus ever more difficult to recognize as being clickable, especially for people who didn't learn the analogy back in the "beveled-edge pseudo-3D" day.
My only point was that (contrary to the previous poster's implication that 1989 was some kind of primitive age), UIs from back then were actually pretty usable because they were designed by UX engineers instead of graphic artists. Sure, they were ugly, but at least you could tell what was a button and what wasn't.
But usually not as much, because with shorter development cycles the customer has the opportunity to realize they need the changes earlier.
Well that's the problem, isn't it? In 1989, UIs were designed so that it was easy to tell which controls were what.
FYI, that's not true. (I'll be charitable and not accuse you of lying or jump on the "fake news" meme bandwagon... but I could have.)
Several Southern states, including both Carolinas and Georgia (plus pseudo-Southern Texas and Florida) are all growing faster than California.
On the bright side, pretty much all that growth is occurring in the "blue" urban parts of those states.
Or any member of the public. After all, a plain reading of the phrase "in the public domain" means exactly that: that it is "owned" by every member of the public, collectively, so why shouldn't every "owner" have standing?
...of Usenet is of course, "you do not talk about Usenet." I'm breaking that. Sorry.
More importantly in this case, Second Rule of Usenet is "Usenet can't be subverted by its owner because, as a decentralized service, it doesn't have one." And that's why it needs to be supported instead of centralized shit like Reddit!
Agree completely. The fundamental problem is that software tends to have so much more combinatorial compexity than just about everything else (except maybe medicine or law), and even strategies used to reduce the complexity (modularization and encapsulation) that work in fields like engineering are, in software, often broken or ineffective due to poor design. (Imagine if the person designing the plumbing system in a skyscraper couldn't rely on the walls and floors staying in the same place. He'd have to invent servo-actuated movable plumbing or something, and it would be many orders of magnitude more complicated and less reliable than actual plumbing. It would be chaos! But that's how we do it in software...)
I am both a civil engineer and software "engineer." I have also visited Maryland. I can confirm that (a) civil engineers suck (despite the fact that civil engineering is often much less complex than software engineering), (b) Maryland's freeway design is weird (lots of super-tight parclos with really short merges), and (c) calling programmers "engineers" is a complete farce because compared to actual engineering, all coding is "cowboy coding." I don't care if you're "agile" or "waterfall" or how good your code review or QA is; the process is not rigorous enough to count as engineering.
Ironically, some of the worst cowboy coders I've worked with have been Professional Engineers...
I was working for a company that made pharmacy management software and helped implement support for Prescription Monitoring Program reporting. There is a gigantic amount of personal information that gets sent to the government any time someone gets prescribed a controlled substance (including personal information even of the person merely picking up the prescription, if not the patient).
I know what you meant, but you got the terminology a little off. For the police, only an arrest is important. For the prosecutor, a conviction is important. A correct conviction is important for nobody (except the victims of the system, of course).
WTF does Hillary have to do with anything? Quit trying to turn this into some partisan false dichotomy! Trump sucks on an absolute scale, regardless of the alternatives.
(Besides: it should've been Bernie. Or Johnson, or anybody who wasn't a corrupt authoritarian asshat.)
Trump's strategy appears to be "how can I fuck up the country as badly as possible?" He's considering a climate change denier to run the EPA. He's considering an evolution denier to run the Department of Education. He's considering an oil industry exec to run the Department of the Interior. He's considering a Goldman Sachs exec to run the Treasury. It's like he heard the phrase "fox guarding the henhouse" and thought "hey, that sounds like a great idea!"
File this under "know your audience:" the EFF is writing for the likes of "series of tubes" senators (and other tech-illiterate government folks), not slashdotters.
In my experience developers don't usually have access to a competent product manager in the first place!
Even worse, the differences in reporting times aren't necessarily random, but can be determined by things like actual vs. expected turnout or urban vs. rural precincts, which can correlate with party. It's entirely possible for, say, a bunch of rural Republican precincts to report early while a bunch of urban Democratic ones don't have their votes tallied until well into the night (or vice-versa).
Globalization would work fine if it had the effect of bringing developing countries' standard of living up to ours. The problem is that when labor is a "level playing field" but things like environmental protections, worker protections and taxes/infrastructure are not, it creates a race to the bottom instead.
Are you seriously suggesting that the entire FBI dropped everything else it was doing to handle this? Not only is that implausible, it's easily verifiable to be false because if that had happened, somebody would have mentioned it to the press and they'd be shouting it from the rooftops.
No shit. That is the way vehicles ARE made! The only thing different about Tesla versus every other car manufacturer is the hype and marketing.
That's a victory!
No, that's what the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act is for. In order to void your warranty, the burden of proof is on them to show that your modifications caused the problem.
The most common "Desktop Linux" is probably Chrome OS.