OK... While we are whining about morphed pop-overs, so whose idea was it to do this whole mouseover text thing?
If I mouseover an unordered link list, odds are text will pop up and be EXACTLY the colored link text that was mouseovered, only a few degrees off in one direction or another. Typically, like this post, this verbiage adds no information to the discussion, and hides other information by appearing. I move these retarted mouseover tags be swept away with the rest of the poor-idea-clutter upon our next HTML housekeeping standards meeting.
With wireless technology so near to E-911 standards (location ID of caller/phone), why can't the Man just make the bad guy carry a cellphone with him, and contract with any major cellular provider to track the whereabouts of the phone at all times. Sounds like it could be some interesting code.
I think this story was on CBS News with Dan Rather[tm] a bit ago. What will be terrible if this scheme is implemented is the complexity added to the taxing solution. A flat per-gallon charge on fuel consumed is a considerably simpler system than some kind of complex system that meters miles via GPS or whatever. The more complex the system, the more points of possible failure.
Imagine being kept at a fuel pump late one Friday evening because the GPS meter reader has suddenly ceased working, or the connection cable has been expertly snipped off by a scavenger hunt participant.
I'm thinking Catherine Zeta-Jones was involved too - she probably has a gazillion T-Mo brownie points negotiated, and they'd never suspect an inside job. She probably hands out Sidekicks and BlackBerrys as party favors. Plus, she's distractingly beautiful.
Doesn't this kinda ring true of the old Terminate Stay Resident (TSR) keystoke wars of old? Granted, this was in the 8086 days, but applications like Sidekick would fight with any other program over an (Alt-something)keystroke for activation... to the point the competing programs were swapping out the address every 30 ms or so as they "patrolled" it.
An alleged breakthrough in production automobiles and their power plant, and the best they can do is a really fuzzy picture? Doesn't this bother anyone else?...Pay no attention to the man and car behind the curtain...woooooooo...
We won't really be losing anything by having these P2P programs outlawed - we'll be just like Americans, only without all that freedom stuff to confuse the issues.
Why don't they just program the automated attendant to swear back?
caller:"Hey, Widget Corp, your product sucks!" aa:"Please press 1 if you'd like to go to hell; 2 if you'd like me to insult your mother; 3 for caustic sarcasm; press 4 if you'd like to blow me; or just stay on the line and someone will tell you off."
Only those who are paranoid or have something to hide worry about someting (sic) like this.
Would you still feel this way if your wife or daughter were raped and killed by some loser ex-boyfriend who became unstable and happened across an unsecure commercial database updated daily with transactional records and address/employment data by a company who assuredly has a nice "no incidental or conesequential damage responsibility" in their state contract?
You might want to wake up a bit, and govern your actions accordingly.
-Ex Floridian, neither paranoid nor hiding my past.
BTW, Jeb! Sucks!
Let's remember that the Florida Secretary of State at the time, Katherine Harris, was also a Republican, reported directly to the candidate Bush's brother - the governor, and only needed a defensible number to certify and end the election... not an accurate one.
She also allowed the Bush Republican Guard to occupy her office during the ordeal, while the Democrats made appointments appropriately and sat in her foyer. Now, she's hoping to get kicked upstairs still on the coattails of this fiasco to the US Senate.
I think the kid would have had a better leg to stand on if the Redmond Phoenetics Cleansing and Namespace Purificication Corporation tried to come after MichaelRoweSoftware.com rather than the more casual MikeRoweSoft.com
The latter, I think, proves Master Rowe was trying to spit into the wind.
Those of us concerned with privacy and uncondoned passive RFID scanning after purchase can simply discard the tages we can find in the parking lot, perhaps picking up a few random ones discarded by others. Middle School children can collect them in their bookbags, gleefully setting off passive post-retail-sale RFID scanners on their way to school and into the classrooms. No fun like knowing you're creating bogus consumer stream data! At least until they outlaw that behaviour.
What will truly be frustrating is that as the complexity of purchasing an item from a retailer using these high-strung technologies increases, so will the inconvenience and amount of time wasted by having to wait for a system to reboot while you are in the checkout line. The self-scanning lanes at my grocery store and local Home Depot are particularly schizoid now. Their Plyskool interfaces and "Touch Mickey's Hand to Continue" processes will only be dumbed down further into the future to accomodate us aging Baby Boomers. Adding RFID will mean I might not get out of that checkout line in under 10 minutes even if I have exact change.
... and God forbid a truck backs into the loading dock too fast and throws the RFID-POS satellite dish out of alignment. The local stock-boy-cum-tech-whiz probably wont find that problem for hours.... Or a backhoe versus a fiber cable down the street or across town...
What is to be had in the way of benefits from the increased granularity of Point-of-Sale technologies benefits only the producer and retailer, not us consumers.
Your post is VERY well stated. I think my poetry is rather lame compared to your solid arguments. Thank you for the sincere complements. Glad to see your post is modded up - its the arguement that's important, and yours is stated quite lucidly.
I look out my kitchen window and see across the yard that my stupid neighbor has left for vacation with his back door wide open.
Do I:
[ ] Call him on his cellphone and tell him
[ ] Call the police and tell them
[ ] Go and close and lock the door myself
[ ] Ignore the problem - its not mine
[ ] Wander over at will and rummage through his refrigerator
[ ] "Barrow" his snow-blower
[ ] Go through his softcore porn collection leaving samples on the doorsteps of his adjacent neighbors
"In response to what is a clear and obvious infringement on our trademark, Microsoft has taken action in select international territories to curtail infringing or misleading behavior on the part of Lindows.com," Drake said.
Now this came from a partisan Microsoft sales slime, not the courts. All the courts have apparently ruled is there exists the possiblity of trademark infringement and confusion in the marketplace. As such, the safest thing to do is protect the revenue stream of the complaintant until the issue is resolved - hence a temporary injunction.
I loathe MS as much as the next geek, but really MS has won nothing here. Move along please.
Slashdot Mirror
OK... While we are whining about morphed pop-overs, so whose idea was it to do this whole mouseover text thing?
If I mouseover an unordered link list, odds are text will pop up and be EXACTLY the colored link text that was mouseovered, only a few degrees off in one direction or another. Typically, like this post, this verbiage adds no information to the discussion, and hides other information by appearing. I move these retarted mouseover tags be swept away with the rest of the poor-idea-clutter upon our next HTML housekeeping standards meeting.
You are referring to our precious MovieOS where all is possible in front of a keyboard in the movies.
With wireless technology so near to E-911 standards (location ID of caller/phone), why can't the Man just make the bad guy carry a cellphone with him, and contract with any major cellular provider to track the whereabouts of the phone at all times. Sounds like it could be some interesting code.
I think this story was on CBS News with Dan Rather[tm] a bit ago. What will be terrible if this scheme is implemented is the complexity added to the taxing solution. A flat per-gallon charge on fuel consumed is a considerably simpler system than some kind of complex system that meters miles via GPS or whatever. The more complex the system, the more points of possible failure.
Imagine being kept at a fuel pump late one Friday evening because the GPS meter reader has suddenly ceased working, or the connection cable has been expertly snipped off by a scavenger hunt participant.
Sorry. No Fuel for You!.
Is it on eBay yet? Who's got a link?
Well... I for one would welcome our new foresight-impaired starving-in-the-streets death-awaiting senior citizen overlords.
Its too bad we are all just one catastrophic illness away from destitution... like, say, Alheimers. Why would we want to plan for that?
I'm thinking Catherine Zeta-Jones was involved too - she probably has a gazillion T-Mo brownie points negotiated, and they'd never suspect an inside job. She probably hands out Sidekicks and BlackBerrys as party favors. Plus, she's distractingly beautiful.
...and just how is this any different from somebody wearing one of those gawd-auful baseball caps with a logo or raunchy saying on it?
Color me off-topic, but NPR's Morning Edition did what I thought was a rather complementary piece on Firefox this morning. The story is posted here Security Conscious Users Test Driving Firefox Browser
Another Fiddler on Another Roof
The Day After the Day After Tomorrow
Revenge of the Godfather
The Matrix: Reloaded; Revisited
The Thing, Yet Again
Doesn't this kinda ring true of the old Terminate Stay Resident (TSR) keystoke wars of old? Granted, this was in the 8086 days, but applications like Sidekick would fight with any other program over an (Alt-something)keystroke for activation... to the point the competing programs were swapping out the address every 30 ms or so as they "patrolled" it.
Its the Matrix coming undone at the seams, and hoping for a better plotline to finish the trilogy with.
Nobody's seen Keanu in a while.
An alleged breakthrough in production automobiles and their power plant, and the best they can do is a really fuzzy picture?
Doesn't this bother anyone else?
Let's leave it to Google, facing an IPO, to play these numbers and the PR game how they feel will most benefit them and deter their competitors.
This post is brought to you by Microsoft [tm] Internet Explorer (r), the only browser for the Internet. Remember Mosaic and Splyglass? We don't.
I thought the idea was from a great David Mamet play called _The Water Engine_.
We won't really be losing anything by having these P2P programs outlawed - we'll be just like Americans, only without all that freedom stuff to confuse the issues.
Why don't they just program the automated attendant to swear back?
caller:"Hey, Widget Corp, your product sucks!"
aa:"Please press 1 if you'd like to go to hell; 2 if you'd like me to insult your mother; 3 for caustic sarcasm; press 4 if you'd like to blow me; or just stay on the line and someone will tell you off."
Only those who are paranoid or have something to hide worry about someting (sic) like this.
Would you still feel this way if your wife or daughter were raped and killed by some loser ex-boyfriend who became unstable and happened across an unsecure commercial database updated daily with transactional records and address/employment data by a company who assuredly has a nice "no incidental or conesequential damage responsibility" in their state contract?
You might want to wake up a bit, and govern your actions accordingly.
-Ex Floridian, neither paranoid nor hiding my past.
BTW, Jeb! Sucks!
Well stated. If I had mod points you'd get them.
Let's remember that the Florida Secretary of State at the time, Katherine Harris, was also a Republican, reported directly to the candidate Bush's brother - the governor, and only needed a defensible number to certify and end the election... not an accurate one.
She also allowed the Bush Republican Guard to occupy her office during the ordeal, while the Democrats made appointments appropriately and sat in her foyer. Now, she's hoping to get kicked upstairs still on the coattails of this fiasco to the US Senate.
plonk
I think the kid would have had a better leg to stand on if the Redmond Phoenetics Cleansing and Namespace Purificication Corporation tried to come after MichaelRoweSoftware.com rather than the more casual MikeRoweSoft.com
The latter, I think, proves Master Rowe was trying to spit into the wind.
Those of us concerned with privacy and uncondoned passive RFID scanning after purchase can simply discard the tages we can find in the parking lot, perhaps picking up a few random ones discarded by others. Middle School children can collect them in their bookbags, gleefully setting off passive post-retail-sale RFID scanners on their way to school and into the classrooms. No fun like knowing you're creating bogus consumer stream data! At least until they outlaw that behaviour.
What will truly be frustrating is that as the complexity of purchasing an item from a retailer using these high-strung technologies increases, so will the inconvenience and amount of time wasted by having to wait for a system to reboot while you are in the checkout line. The self-scanning lanes at my grocery store and local Home Depot are particularly schizoid now. Their Plyskool interfaces and "Touch Mickey's Hand to Continue" processes will only be dumbed down further into the future to accomodate us aging Baby Boomers. Adding RFID will mean I might not get out of that checkout line in under 10 minutes even if I have exact change.
What is to be had in the way of benefits from the increased granularity of Point-of-Sale technologies benefits only the producer and retailer, not us consumers.
Of course, I could be wrong.
Your post is VERY well stated. I think my poetry is rather lame compared to your solid arguments. Thank you for the sincere complements. Glad to see your post is modded up - its the arguement that's important, and yours is stated quite lucidly.
I look out my kitchen window and see across the yard that my stupid neighbor has left for vacation with his back door wide open.
Do I:
[ ] Call him on his cellphone and tell him
[ ] Call the police and tell them
[ ] Go and close and lock the door myself
[ ] Ignore the problem - its not mine
[ ] Wander over at will and rummage through his refrigerator
[ ] "Barrow" his snow-blower
[ ] Go through his softcore porn collection leaving samples on the doorsteps of his adjacent neighbors
From the article:
Now this came from a partisan Microsoft sales slime, not the courts. All the courts have apparently ruled is there exists the possiblity of trademark infringement and confusion in the marketplace. As such, the safest thing to do is protect the revenue stream of the complaintant until the issue is resolved - hence a temporary injunction.
I loathe MS as much as the next geek, but really MS has won nothing here. Move along please.