I'm not sure if this is an urban legend, but I seem to recall that at least one or two major metropolitan zoos have a couple of break-ins or attempted break-ins annually by dumbass wannabe badasses trying to get into the tiger cage or lion cage or whatnot so they can prove their manliness by fighting the dangerous beasts.
I have to wonder what inadequacy someone is compensating for when they feel it necessary to bait a dangerous animal into attacking them.
I remember taking it in 1985 (Pascal). We had a bunch of Sperry PC clones that had just been donated to the school computer lab and my dad bought me a Pascal package for my Commodore 64 so I could do my homework without having to compete for lab time after school.
At the first university I went to, I placed out of the math requirement by exam. After taking time off and then going to a community college, I was excused from math because of my high SAT scores. When I was finally ready to graduate from a university, with a Bachelor of Arts degree, my 9 year old AP Comp Sci credit satisfied the math requirement.
Those specs will still be for your more expensive PCs (i.e. $1500+ in 2004 dollars), but it seems Bill is pursuing his vision of making Windows be everything to everyone. For any of you classic SNL fans... Longhorn is supposed to be a floor wax AND a dessert topping.
Longhorn will be your media server (replacing the cable box, VCR, Tivo, and DVD player), play games via your television (replacing game consoles), interface with any networkable appliance in your home (refrigerator, heating and cooling system, alarm system) and provide a centralized control panel...
That high-end PC will sit in a closet and be accessed via 5.8ghz wi-fi through a set-top box attached to your HD capable TV, thin client portables, and touch screens on your "Longhorn Enabled" appliances.
Your Longhorn PC will be on the net and everything connected to it will be accessible (i.e. check your refrigerator inventory via a personalized web-based panel so you can prep a grocery list to pick up on the way home). Eventually, you'll walk into your house on a 48 degree (farenheit) winter day, and your home will be a sweltering 95 degrees (farenheit) inside, courtesy of the W64.HVACdemon virus, written by some pointy-headed 15 year old in Holland.
That's Bill's ultimate goal: to squeeze Microsoft "technology" into every nook and cranny of your life until everything you do has some Microsoft code enabling it or making it inaccessible unless you pay Bill. And that's why such huge specs are needed.
In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
No, that's apparently what patents are for (JPEG, one-click, etc). Based on the way they're granting patents and the low bar for inventiveness, I could probably patent the sandwich.
The invention improves the ease of manipulation of meats and other foodstuffs by placing them between two slices of bread. The process is as follows:
1. Place 2 (two) slices of bread on an even surface
2. Using a knife or other spreading utensil, apply condiments to bread slices
3. Place foodstuffs such as meats, cheeses, and vegetables on one slice of bread. This slice of bread plus condiments and foodstuffs is to be called "the sandwich base".
4. Lift second slice of bread that is unencumbered by foodstuffs, rotate 180 (one-hundred and eighty) degrees, and place atop the sandwich base.
5. Press top down firmly.
The resulting product is called "a sandwich". It may be eaten as is or sliced in half for improved presentation or manipulation.
This is not new. It just changes the rates and it's not a law employers must follow. Some may pay you time-and-a-half on $40 an hour if you've got a good contract. Others might invoke the cap.
$455 a week... Most people getting hit with that are entry level workers at firms where the competition for any job is intense and they're just glad to get a foot in the door at that company and try to move up the ladder.
At $27.63, you're making a base of $57,470 a year (52 x 40), plus getting your $27.63 an hour for hours 41 on. Your base rate is the same as the overtime rate for a guy making over $38k a year. He'd have to work 13.87 hours of overtime a week to make as much as you do without overtime. He's probably thinking "cry me a river".
The job market sorts itself out by supply and demand, just like many others. If your skill is a glut on the market, it will sell cheap. If your skill is in high demand and there aren't enough really good people to fill the available positions, you'll get a sweetheart contract to get you to come on board and stay on board for a while.
I submitted this "Ask Slashdot" item on April 2nd, well before the "My Big Fat Geek Wedding" episode aired, and it sat in "pending" status until now. Any resemblance to "The Simpsons" is coincidental.
As for a Ferengi bridesmaid having to be naked, who says it has to be female? I know of at least one woman who had her gay male best friend be her maid of honor. And no, he didn't wear a dress. He wore a man's suit, but in the same color as the bridesmaids dresses.
Oddly enough, when I was a salesperson at the Circuit City in Huntington Beach, CA, I sold a VCR to Steve Cohen, the guy who stole sex.com.
This was within a couple of months of him getting the domain. He was bragging about how he owned it and how he'd already been offered a million dollars to sell it, but he was going to hold on to it because he thought it was worth a lot more.
I don't see anyone commenting on the ludicrous nature of someone spending 14 years in freefall and not suffering significant health issues.
IANANASASOD (I Am Not A NASA Scientist Or Doctor), but all the sci-fi and sci-non-fi I've read have mentioned muscle atrophy and bone density degeneration, even with the best diet and exercise programs we currently have for "zero-gravity" living. That's why these guys who set endurance records for being in space often meet the press in a wheelchair.
Of course, picking apart these letters for accuracy is sort of silly in its own right.
Even if he gave a worldwide broadcast you couldn't ignore, anyone who disagreed with what he said would argue that it wasn't really God. It was a trick by Satan or the Jews or the Freemasons or the guys who faked the moon landing. And they'll say it was done to push an agenda that all "true believers" cannot, in good conscience, support. Thus the battles will rage on.
There are a gazillion chatrooms and bulletin boards expressly for debate and discussion of religious topics. The reason you get modded down is because when you debate religion here, you're like a smoker in an elevator. There are places to smoke and there are places for arguing religion. If I want to do either, I'll go to those places.
Until such time as I go to those places, I'll thank you not to inflict upon me either your second-hand smoke or your second-hand philosophy.
Amazing. I've tried most of the good and/or popular Windows mail clients out there. The only one I consider truly decent is Pegasus Mail. It's a closed-source freeware project and supposedly doesn't run too badly under WINE either. You need a special plug-in to make IE play nice with Pegasus, so no mail was started, but I got an error message that it tried to start a mail.
Thing is, it can't hit the send button, so all it is is an annoyance. But if you put 100 or 1000 of those links on a page, it could ostensibly work as a Denial of Service, tying up the visitor's computer as Outlook tries to open up a thousand new e-mail messages.
Here's an IE issue I discovered a while back. Someone (apparently accidentally, because this was a customer-client relationship) sent me a jpeg photo. For some reason there was a bunch of XML embedded in the photo (I think some Mac app did it).
After viewing (or trying to view this photo) with IE, it was impossible to view any graphics in IE at all until you closed out of IE and re-started it. The fix to it was to open the photo in any simple JPG viewer and re-save it, which dumped all the XML out of the photo source. But it was odd.
- Greg
Atari licensed a number of concole games from other video game manufacturers. For example, the arcade version of "Crazy Climber" was manufactured by Nichibutsu. I know one of Nichibutsu's former stateside attorneys who helped broker the licensing deal with Atari to bring "Crazy Climber" to the 2600. That was around 1980 or 1981.
A LOT of these games are 20-25 years old. In the intervening years the original licensor may have gone out of business and determining who has the licensing rights after the business was dissolved requires a lot of legwork... or there may still be pending disputes between former owners of the businesses that tie up doing anything with the game until the dispute is resolved.
Tracking down the person with rights or waiting for a rights dispute to be settled are both reasons I've heard for some classic films languishing in the vault without seeing the light of DVD.
Games disappearing from StaROMs may be ones that were licensed to them in good faith, but were later found out to have a murky provenance where determining, finding contact information for, and coming to an agreement with the party that has licensing rights became difficult.
I'm not going to comment on other aspects, but I wouldn't use the drop from 60 to 51 games as an indicator of imminent failure of the site.
Umm, IANAL either but it's always been my understanding that if you are detained somewhere and can't leave you are under arrest. If it's not a cop arresting you then it's considered a citizens arrest. Either way it has to be justified or they are looking at a false arrest charge (assuming you could get the DA in your jurisdiction to pursue the case) and a civil case if you wanted to go after them for $$$ What else would they be guility of for illegally detaining you? Kidnapping? I doubt it -- false arrest seems like the logical thing.
You don't watch many cop shows...
Perp: Am I under arrest? Cop: No, we're just taking you in for questioning.
If you're detained somewhere and can't leave, that's imprisonment or detainment. "False imprisonment" and "false arrest" are very closely related and often confused.
...false imprisonment could occur if a retail store manager suspects you have stolen some items from the store and takes you to a back office for detainment. During this time of confinement, you are refused a chance to go to the bathroom or get water and the exit to the room is repeatedly blocked by the store manager who wants to keep you detained until police arrive.
AFAIK, false arrest requires an actual arrest to occur, and when you're placed under arrest, you must be told you are "under arrest". If the police arrest the customer on good faith, based on false information from the store, the "false arrest" claim would be against the store.
If the cops showed up and didn't arrest you, you'd still have a possible claim of "false imprisonment" against the store, and possible additional claims if physical force or the threat of violence were used to make you comply with the imprisonment.
Only for the last few months have I lived within even 20 miles of a WalMart, so I have no experience with their bag-checking.
But Fry's, Best Buy, and CompUSA all do these checks to some varying degree. Every time they ask to check my bag, I say "no" and keep walking. I paid for the merchandise and once they have my money, the transaction is over and I'm well within my rights to leave the store without further delay.
The trick is to keep walking. Don't stop to let them reply, to get back-up, to close a door or get in your way. Don't even break your stride... "Can I..." "No"... Out.
If you keep walking, they have to physically stop you. If they've got no hard evidence to back up their claims, and they manhandled you in any way, you can press criminal charges for battery against the employee who touched you while suing the store for big bucks.
IANAL, but this was training I received when I worked in retail. Physically touching a suspected shoplifter was a very bad thing and only certain specially-trained security people in the store were authorized to use physical force to prevent a shoplifter from escaping.
As for your "well-timed threat to sue them for false arrest"... The stores don't arrest you. The cops do. The stores may have unlawfully detained you via the threat of physical force and sullied your good name and reputation. They may have also committed battery against you by actually using physical force to detain you.
But at any store where they actually train their managers, threatening to sue for "false arrest" over a detainment just makes you look dumb.
As is my battle cry.... "Be a late adopter". Leave the headaches to the people who want to go through the hours on the phone with tech support and endless firmware upgrades and hearing "oh, that's not a bug, it's a feature".
If you're like me... wait until it's tried and true, most of the bugs have been worked out (I'd say all the bugs, but that's a pipe dream), and the price has dropped in half. Then you can buy something that will meet your meeds without driving you crazy, and without making you feel like a dolt for paying twice as much just to get a buggier version 6 months sooner.
I am not a luddite. I am just a wise man who lets the fools rush in first.
INT.A man drinks from a glass of yellow liquid as a friend stands nearby.
Man 1: Yuck. This beer tastes like urine. Man 2: Bob, that is urine.
INT.Two nerdy high school guys pass a cheerleader in a hallway.
Guy 1: Hi Heather.
Heather acknowledges the greeting by rolling her eyes in disgust. Guy 1 gets an excited look on his face.
Guy 1: She likes me!
EXT. Pitchman stands in front of a strip-mall storefront.
Pitchman: Do you know people like this? People who have absolutely no clue whatsoever?
The camera moves back to show the sign above the store.
Pitchman: Then come to The Clue Center . Our trained staff can help.
INT.An employee and a male patient are sitting in a nice office.
Employee 1: Listen, shmuck, I'm gonna explain it one more time... Everyone can tell it's a toupee.
INT.An employee and a female patient sit at a table with a toy car and a dollhouse on it.
Employee 2: This is a car. This is a house. The house is where you put your make-up on. Not the car. Or this could happen.
The employee rams the toy car into the side of the dollhouse.
INT.Pitchman stands in front of a sign, holding a pointer.
Pitchman: At The Clue Center, we'll teach you how to... think before you act... think before you speak... And for repeat customers, we'll teach you how to just think.
INT.A scientific laboratory where Dr. Melvin Splonk faces the camera.
Splonk: The Clue Center is great. Now that I shower every day, people talk to me... even when they don't have to!
INT.A living room. A plain-looking woman sits on a couch.
Woman: After just one visit to The Clue Center, I stopped waiting for Mel Gibson to call and started dating men who actually know I exist. You guys are wonderful!
CARD.The Clue Center logo, address, and phone number.
Voice Over: If you or someone you love needs a clue. Don't wait. Call The Clue Center now!
I am an 'average joe' (read: never used linux before). I have a nearly dead Win2k 400mhz pentium box. I would like to use that for some tasks here and there and windows is nearly dead (won't allow files to be dragged anymore, won't load the windows update website, etc). I would like to throw linux on it and use it as a secondary machine behind an OSX laptop, but I am not looking for a hobby. I need something I can use, not something that is a challenge to make work.
First, the Windows problems you're describing don't sound like they're due to the speed of the machine. It sounds like your Windows installation has gotten old and burdened with various gunk and junk you've picked up over the years. There are some clean-up programs that can help with this, but since you seem ready to install a new OS, why not just back up your important data, re-format the hard drive, and re-install Win2k?
What do you want to do with the machine that you think installing Linux on it will help with, but a clean, well-running installation of Win2k won't?
I am by no means advocating Windows. But there is a learning curve to any new OS. If you're an "average joe", not looking for a hobby or learning experience, and Win2k worked on your machine before, I'd say re-installing Win2k is going to be a lot easier for you than migrating to Linux.
3. Pay by credit card, remove car, perform chargeback.
That was one of the sections of the vehicle code they flaunted their violation of. The code required all impound lots to accept credit cards as a condition of operation. On the gate, they had a sign saying "no credit cards accepted". For that alone, the judge awarded me $520 (I went back with a camera and shot a photo of it).
Sadly, I didn't know this at the time, or I would have had the county sherrif out to force them to give me my car back, then I still would have sued them on the other counts.
I see people arguing he charged $300,000 for services rendered (sheriff's story) and people arguing he merely claimed it had cost him $300,000 over three years, and refused to go forward without payment.
Regardless, with the domain name it's IP, a civil issue. It's parked, so the sheriff's office can do the WIPO cybersquatting claim, but, AFAIK and IANAL, it's not criminal.
Who owns the content? If the sheriff's department does, holding the content hostage may be illegal. But then again, there was a private towing company that illegally towed my car from a private lot where I had a legal right to park, and would not return it. They violated two sections of the vehicle code in the illegal tow, then had additional violations (actually flaunting some of them) in the operation of their impound lot. What did the cops say? "This is a civil matter. Pay the impound fees and then sue them."
The cops probably threw him in jail to try to intimidate him, which forced the DA's hand to prosecute, or perhaps it's collusion between the DA and the cops.
The facts will come out at trial. Both sides will tell their stories, a judge and 12 people too dumb to get out of jury duty will decide who is telling the truth, and regardless of the outcome, a civil suit will follow.
Welcome to America, where our courts, fine instruments of law, capable of incredible intricacy and precision in legal thought, are used to bludgeon people like a sledgehammer.
4 AMD Opteron 248's at Newegg: $5876 ($1469 ea)
4 Xeons (@Intel's announced pricing): $14768 ($3692 ea)
Did the quad Xeon system outperform the quad Opteron by a factor of 2.5:1? No. In fact, in some cases, the quad Opteron outperformed the quad Xeon. The Xeon had advantages of hyperthreading, 4x as much cache, and a clock speed 800mhz higher than the Opteron, ans still got beat.
Clock speed may sell in the consumer market ("Me want bigger!"), but in the server market, Opterons getting better performance for half the price are going to win more and more converts.
Whatdoyabet that this marriage amendment gets passed, gets ratified, gets adopted, and they overturn it anyway? Heck, it's happened to the 10th and the 2nd, why not the 28th?
How has the second amendment been overturned?
Have you even read it? "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Do unlicensed and unscreened sales at gun shows meet the definition of "well regulated"? The power exerted by lobbies like the NRA ang gun manufacturers has created gun control legislation that can be considered much WEAKER than the letter of the law as stated in the constitution. The gun freedom we have today is based on interpretations of the "spirit" of the law.
No judge can overturn the Constitution, but various people and various judges can disagree about the *interpretation* of the constitution. The fact that people think that if you stack the court with conservatives means you can overturn Roe v. Wade is proof of that. A liberal-leaning court may interpret things one way, a conservative-leaning court may interpret them another.
The one thing the Supreme Court can be expected to do is overturn itself on key decisions every 40 years. If you want things less flexible, then get very explicit constitutional amendments that can brook no variations in the interpretation of their spirit or letter.
Otherwise deal with it and stop being such a whiny little bitch.
GoDaddy.com offers a "backorder" service. There was a.com version of a.net name I owned and the owner wasn't doing anything with it, so I wanted to grab it and point it at my.net. I knew it was expiring in a few months, so I figured I'd try to backorder it in case it wasn't renewed.
The "backorder" service hovered and watched the status of the domain name, sending me updates when anything changed.
When it expired, they let me know.
When the original registrar put a 30-day Grace Period lock on it after keeping it in expiration mode for 45 days, the service let me know.
When the original registrar released it back into the wild, the backorder bot registered it in my name and let me know.
But if that name hadn't been expiring within a year of my buying the service, it would have been a total waste of money for me to buy the service. And if the prior owner had established a site with any traffic at that domain, then I would have faced a potential battle once I grabbed it. I made sure that it was not in use and was expiring within a few months before I bought the service.
Currently, VeriSign refers you to SnapNames.com for backordering. I'm not sure about any new wait list service they're planning to offer.
Here's the differences and similarities between GoDaddy's service and the SnapNames Service:
First and foremost, SnapNames costs $69 per year per domain name. GoDaddy's service costs $18.95 per year per domain name.
Each offers you the ability to check the whois for the expiration date on the doman, but both will also let you get to the checkout phase with domains that won't expire for 4 years or more in your cart and never automatically warn you.
GoDaddy will not offer you the backorder on really prominent.com domain names like Yahoo, Google, and Amazon (though it did on IMDb, Altavista, and Wired). SnapNames will.
Both warn in the fine print (SnapNames in their T&C, GoDaddy in their "tell me more") that there's no guarantee you'll get the domain even if it expires, though only SnapNames explicitly warns that there might be competition for the name if it becomes available.
Honestly, the services can easily glean date of expiration information from most of the WHOIS records. If some clueless idiot is about to spend $69 a pop to stake backorders on domains that won't expire until 2008, does either service have a responsibility to overtly warn them that this is a waste, or can they bury everything a link or two away from the process and claim it was the buyer's responsibility to check things out?
It would be nice if the courts held consumer service/purchase agreements to a higher standard... requiring a "for dummies" version of the fine print that hits the major points in plain language to be on the front of the order form in standard type. But they don't, and if you're buying a service online, it's your job to know what the heck you're buying.
Every time I've rushed out to get the latest, coolest, neatest gadget, I've paid through the nose for something with a high learning curve and limited features.
I bought a 4x DVD burner less than a year ago and had to firmware flash it. I can get an 8x now for less.
Firmware flashing an 802.11g laptop wireless card went wrong and broke wireless networking on my laptop. As I hadn't set a system restore point, I had to re-install windows.
I rushed out and bought SuSE Linux 9.0 for AMD64 as soon as it came out. Had to wait months for drivers to support my SATA drives and the onboard ALN on my MoBo.
I'm done.
Video jukeboxes... I'll wait until trailer-park mamas are trampling each other at Walmart to get the $35 Christmas special model made by Kwok-tek or some other manufacturer you never heard of before.
Cell phones can be located physically by triangulation using relative signal strengths at cell towers. Given this works best in densely populated areas where cell towers are closer together, but it's not just something out of spy movies.
In an emergency situation, you may not be able to give your location and they may not be able to easily locate you based on your IP address. OTOH, VOIP via laptop will require the person to be near some sort of access point, meaning a land line or cell phone should be available in case of emergency.
Of course, as soon as someone dies because they couldn't get emergency service via VOIP, you know the media will run with the story and scare the heck out of everyone who watches the 11 o'clock news.
As others have noted, they've heard people state that there are stability or compatibility problems with AMD chips.
I remember the early '90s when there were some Cyrix x86 clones that were having issues, and there were some concerns about AMD. AMD busted through that for most of the people who know what's what, but the general public still has dim memories of that.
Just last week, my father told me he was buying a new PC for my stepmom. He was intrigued by the low prices on AMD Athlon XP systems, but he remembered that they had compatibility issues. It didn't take that much reassuring to get him to go for the cost savings on the AMD, but it did take some and from someone he knew to be unbiased (I have a p4 2.4 laptop and an AMD64 desktop at home).
A lot of people like to attribute the sales gap to Intel winning the battle of the megahertz myth. But there are lots of Joe Consumers out there who pay the Intel premium because still think that an AMD chip might crash or spit out garbage in situations a Pentium will handle with ease.
Until now, AMD has been seen by many as a company that copies Intel's technology... poorly. If Intel adopts x86-64 and then this, they need to spin themselves as the company that Intel is copying... poorly.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to wonder what inadequacy someone is compensating for when they feel it necessary to bait a dangerous animal into attacking them.
- Greg
At the first university I went to, I placed out of the math requirement by exam. After taking time off and then going to a community college, I was excused from math because of my high SAT scores. When I was finally ready to graduate from a university, with a Bachelor of Arts degree, my 9 year old AP Comp Sci credit satisfied the math requirement.
- Greg
Longhorn will be your media server (replacing the cable box, VCR, Tivo, and DVD player), play games via your television (replacing game consoles), interface with any networkable appliance in your home (refrigerator, heating and cooling system, alarm system) and provide a centralized control panel...
That high-end PC will sit in a closet and be accessed via 5.8ghz wi-fi through a set-top box attached to your HD capable TV, thin client portables, and touch screens on your "Longhorn Enabled" appliances.
Your Longhorn PC will be on the net and everything connected to it will be accessible (i.e. check your refrigerator inventory via a personalized web-based panel so you can prep a grocery list to pick up on the way home). Eventually, you'll walk into your house on a 48 degree (farenheit) winter day, and your home will be a sweltering 95 degrees (farenheit) inside, courtesy of the W64.HVACdemon virus, written by some pointy-headed 15 year old in Holland.
That's Bill's ultimate goal: to squeeze Microsoft "technology" into every nook and cranny of your life until everything you do has some Microsoft code enabling it or making it inaccessible unless you pay Bill. And that's why such huge specs are needed.
-- Greg
- Greg
No, that's apparently what patents are for (JPEG, one-click, etc). Based on the way they're granting patents and the low bar for inventiveness, I could probably patent the sandwich.
And there you have it...
- Greg
$455 a week... Most people getting hit with that are entry level workers at firms where the competition for any job is intense and they're just glad to get a foot in the door at that company and try to move up the ladder.
At $27.63, you're making a base of $57,470 a year (52 x 40), plus getting your $27.63 an hour for hours 41 on. Your base rate is the same as the overtime rate for a guy making over $38k a year. He'd have to work 13.87 hours of overtime a week to make as much as you do without overtime. He's probably thinking "cry me a river".
The job market sorts itself out by supply and demand, just like many others. If your skill is a glut on the market, it will sell cheap. If your skill is in high demand and there aren't enough really good people to fill the available positions, you'll get a sweetheart contract to get you to come on board and stay on board for a while.
- Greg
As for a Ferengi bridesmaid having to be naked, who says it has to be female? I know of at least one woman who had her gay male best friend be her maid of honor. And no, he didn't wear a dress. He wore a man's suit, but in the same color as the bridesmaids dresses.
- Greg
This was within a couple of months of him getting the domain. He was bragging about how he owned it and how he'd already been offered a million dollars to sell it, but he was going to hold on to it because he thought it was worth a lot more.
Guess it was.
- Greg
IANANASASOD (I Am Not A NASA Scientist Or Doctor), but all the sci-fi and sci-non-fi I've read have mentioned muscle atrophy and bone density degeneration, even with the best diet and exercise programs we currently have for "zero-gravity" living. That's why these guys who set endurance records for being in space often meet the press in a wheelchair.
Of course, picking apart these letters for accuracy is sort of silly in its own right.
Maybe he has and nobody listened.
Even if he gave a worldwide broadcast you couldn't ignore, anyone who disagreed with what he said would argue that it wasn't really God. It was a trick by Satan or the Jews or the Freemasons or the guys who faked the moon landing. And they'll say it was done to push an agenda that all "true believers" cannot, in good conscience, support. Thus the battles will rage on.
There are a gazillion chatrooms and bulletin boards expressly for debate and discussion of religious topics. The reason you get modded down is because when you debate religion here, you're like a smoker in an elevator. There are places to smoke and there are places for arguing religion. If I want to do either, I'll go to those places.
Until such time as I go to those places, I'll thank you not to inflict upon me either your second-hand smoke or your second-hand philosophy.
Thing is, it can't hit the send button, so all it is is an annoyance. But if you put 100 or 1000 of those links on a page, it could ostensibly work as a Denial of Service, tying up the visitor's computer as Outlook tries to open up a thousand new e-mail messages.
Here's an IE issue I discovered a while back. Someone (apparently accidentally, because this was a customer-client relationship) sent me a jpeg photo. For some reason there was a bunch of XML embedded in the photo (I think some Mac app did it).
After viewing (or trying to view this photo) with IE, it was impossible to view any graphics in IE at all until you closed out of IE and re-started it. The fix to it was to open the photo in any simple JPG viewer and re-save it, which dumped all the XML out of the photo source. But it was odd. - Greg
A LOT of these games are 20-25 years old. In the intervening years the original licensor may have gone out of business and determining who has the licensing rights after the business was dissolved requires a lot of legwork... or there may still be pending disputes between former owners of the businesses that tie up doing anything with the game until the dispute is resolved.
Tracking down the person with rights or waiting for a rights dispute to be settled are both reasons I've heard for some classic films languishing in the vault without seeing the light of DVD.
Games disappearing from StaROMs may be ones that were licensed to them in good faith, but were later found out to have a murky provenance where determining, finding contact information for, and coming to an agreement with the party that has licensing rights became difficult.
I'm not going to comment on other aspects, but I wouldn't use the drop from 60 to 51 games as an indicator of imminent failure of the site.
You don't watch many cop shows...
Perp: Am I under arrest?
Cop: No, we're just taking you in for questioning.
If you're detained somewhere and can't leave, that's imprisonment or detainment. "False imprisonment" and "false arrest" are very closely related and often confused.
AFAIK, false arrest requires an actual arrest to occur, and when you're placed under arrest, you must be told you are "under arrest". If the police arrest the customer on good faith, based on false information from the store, the "false arrest" claim would be against the store.If the cops showed up and didn't arrest you, you'd still have a possible claim of "false imprisonment" against the store, and possible additional claims if physical force or the threat of violence were used to make you comply with the imprisonment.
The trick is to keep walking. Don't stop to let them reply, to get back-up, to close a door or get in your way. Don't even break your stride... "Can I..." "No"... Out.
If you keep walking, they have to physically stop you. If they've got no hard evidence to back up their claims, and they manhandled you in any way, you can press criminal charges for battery against the employee who touched you while suing the store for big bucks.
IANAL, but this was training I received when I worked in retail. Physically touching a suspected shoplifter was a very bad thing and only certain specially-trained security people in the store were authorized to use physical force to prevent a shoplifter from escaping.
As for your "well-timed threat to sue them for false arrest"... The stores don't arrest you. The cops do. The stores may have unlawfully detained you via the threat of physical force and sullied your good name and reputation. They may have also committed battery against you by actually using physical force to detain you. But at any store where they actually train their managers, threatening to sue for "false arrest" over a detainment just makes you look dumb.
If you're like me... wait until it's tried and true, most of the bugs have been worked out (I'd say all the bugs, but that's a pipe dream), and the price has dropped in half. Then you can buy something that will meet your meeds without driving you crazy, and without making you feel like a dolt for paying twice as much just to get a buggier version 6 months sooner.
I am not a luddite. I am just a wise man who lets the fools rush in first.
- Greg
INT. A man drinks from a glass of yellow liquid as a friend stands nearby.
Man 1: Yuck. This beer tastes like urine.
Man 2: Bob, that is urine.
INT. Two nerdy high school guys pass a cheerleader in a hallway.
Guy 1: Hi Heather.
Heather acknowledges the greeting by rolling her eyes in disgust. Guy 1 gets an excited look on his face.
Guy 1: She likes me!
EXT. Pitchman stands in front of a strip-mall storefront.
Pitchman: Do you know people like this? People who have absolutely no clue whatsoever?
The camera moves back to show the sign above the store.
Pitchman: Then come to The Clue Center . Our trained staff can help.
INT. An employee and a male patient are sitting in a nice office.
Employee 1: Listen, shmuck, I'm gonna explain it one more time... Everyone can tell it's a toupee.
INT. An employee and a female patient sit at a table with a toy car and a dollhouse on it.
Employee 2: This is a car. This is a house. The house is where you put your make-up on. Not the car. Or this could happen.
The employee rams the toy car into the side of the dollhouse.
INT. Pitchman stands in front of a sign, holding a pointer.
Pitchman: At The Clue Center, we'll teach you how to... think before you act... think before you speak... And for repeat customers, we'll teach you how to just think.
INT. A scientific laboratory where Dr. Melvin Splonk faces the camera.
Splonk: The Clue Center is great. Now that I shower every day, people talk to me... even when they don't have to!
INT. A living room. A plain-looking woman sits on a couch.
Woman: After just one visit to The Clue Center, I stopped waiting for Mel Gibson to call and started dating men who actually know I exist. You guys are wonderful!
CARD. The Clue Center logo, address, and phone number.
Voice Over: If you or someone you love needs a clue. Don't wait. Call The Clue Center now!
Pitchman appears in a box below the logo.
Pitchman: We're the thick-skull experts!
FADE OUT:
What do you want to do with the machine that you think installing Linux on it will help with, but a clean, well-running installation of Win2k won't?
I am by no means advocating Windows. But there is a learning curve to any new OS. If you're an "average joe", not looking for a hobby or learning experience, and Win2k worked on your machine before, I'd say re-installing Win2k is going to be a lot easier for you than migrating to Linux.
- Greg
That was one of the sections of the vehicle code they flaunted their violation of. The code required all impound lots to accept credit cards as a condition of operation. On the gate, they had a sign saying "no credit cards accepted". For that alone, the judge awarded me $520 (I went back with a camera and shot a photo of it).
Sadly, I didn't know this at the time, or I would have had the county sherrif out to force them to give me my car back, then I still would have sued them on the other counts.
- Greg
Regardless, with the domain name it's IP, a civil issue. It's parked, so the sheriff's office can do the WIPO cybersquatting claim, but, AFAIK and IANAL, it's not criminal.
Who owns the content? If the sheriff's department does, holding the content hostage may be illegal. But then again, there was a private towing company that illegally towed my car from a private lot where I had a legal right to park, and would not return it. They violated two sections of the vehicle code in the illegal tow, then had additional violations (actually flaunting some of them) in the operation of their impound lot. What did the cops say? "This is a civil matter. Pay the impound fees and then sue them."
The cops probably threw him in jail to try to intimidate him, which forced the DA's hand to prosecute, or perhaps it's collusion between the DA and the cops.
The facts will come out at trial. Both sides will tell their stories, a judge and 12 people too dumb to get out of jury duty will decide who is telling the truth, and regardless of the outcome, a civil suit will follow.
Welcome to America, where our courts, fine instruments of law, capable of incredible intricacy and precision in legal thought, are used to bludgeon people like a sledgehammer.
- Greg
4 Xeons (@Intel's announced pricing): $14768 ($3692 ea)
Did the quad Xeon system outperform the quad Opteron by a factor of 2.5:1? No. In fact, in some cases, the quad Opteron outperformed the quad Xeon. The Xeon had advantages of hyperthreading, 4x as much cache, and a clock speed 800mhz higher than the Opteron, ans still got beat.
Clock speed may sell in the consumer market ("Me want bigger!"), but in the server market, Opterons getting better performance for half the price are going to win more and more converts.
- Greg
How has the second amendment been overturned?
Have you even read it? "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Do unlicensed and unscreened sales at gun shows meet the definition of "well regulated"? The power exerted by lobbies like the NRA ang gun manufacturers has created gun control legislation that can be considered much WEAKER than the letter of the law as stated in the constitution. The gun freedom we have today is based on interpretations of the "spirit" of the law.
No judge can overturn the Constitution, but various people and various judges can disagree about the *interpretation* of the constitution. The fact that people think that if you stack the court with conservatives means you can overturn Roe v. Wade is proof of that. A liberal-leaning court may interpret things one way, a conservative-leaning court may interpret them another.
The one thing the Supreme Court can be expected to do is overturn itself on key decisions every 40 years. If you want things less flexible, then get very explicit constitutional amendments that can brook no variations in the interpretation of their spirit or letter.
Otherwise deal with it and stop being such a whiny little bitch.
The "backorder" service hovered and watched the status of the domain name, sending me updates when anything changed.
When it expired, they let me know.
When the original registrar put a 30-day Grace Period lock on it after keeping it in expiration mode for 45 days, the service let me know.
When the original registrar released it back into the wild, the backorder bot registered it in my name and let me know.
But if that name hadn't been expiring within a year of my buying the service, it would have been a total waste of money for me to buy the service. And if the prior owner had established a site with any traffic at that domain, then I would have faced a potential battle once I grabbed it. I made sure that it was not in use and was expiring within a few months before I bought the service.
Currently, VeriSign refers you to SnapNames.com for backordering. I'm not sure about any new wait list service they're planning to offer. Here's the differences and similarities between GoDaddy's service and the SnapNames Service:
- First and foremost, SnapNames costs $69 per year per domain name. GoDaddy's service costs $18.95 per year per domain name.
- Each offers you the ability to check the whois for the expiration date on the doman, but both will also let you get to the checkout phase with domains that won't expire for 4 years or more in your cart and never automatically warn you.
- GoDaddy will not offer you the backorder on really prominent
.com domain names like Yahoo, Google, and Amazon (though it did on IMDb, Altavista, and Wired). SnapNames will.
- Both warn in the fine print (SnapNames in their T&C, GoDaddy in their "tell me more") that there's no guarantee you'll get the domain even if it expires, though only SnapNames explicitly warns that there might be competition for the name if it becomes available.
Honestly, the services can easily glean date of expiration information from most of the WHOIS records. If some clueless idiot is about to spend $69 a pop to stake backorders on domains that won't expire until 2008, does either service have a responsibility to overtly warn them that this is a waste, or can they bury everything a link or two away from the process and claim it was the buyer's responsibility to check things out?It would be nice if the courts held consumer service/purchase agreements to a higher standard... requiring a "for dummies" version of the fine print that hits the major points in plain language to be on the front of the order form in standard type. But they don't, and if you're buying a service online, it's your job to know what the heck you're buying.
- Greg
- I bought a 4x DVD burner less than a year ago and had to firmware flash it. I can get an 8x now for less.
- Firmware flashing an 802.11g laptop wireless card went wrong and broke wireless networking on my laptop. As I hadn't set a system restore point, I had to re-install windows.
- I rushed out and bought SuSE Linux 9.0 for AMD64 as soon as it came out. Had to wait months for drivers to support my SATA drives and the onboard ALN on my MoBo.
I'm done.Video jukeboxes... I'll wait until trailer-park mamas are trampling each other at Walmart to get the $35 Christmas special model made by Kwok-tek or some other manufacturer you never heard of before.
- Greg
In an emergency situation, you may not be able to give your location and they may not be able to easily locate you based on your IP address. OTOH, VOIP via laptop will require the person to be near some sort of access point, meaning a land line or cell phone should be available in case of emergency.
Of course, as soon as someone dies because they couldn't get emergency service via VOIP, you know the media will run with the story and scare the heck out of everyone who watches the 11 o'clock news.
- Greg
I remember the early '90s when there were some Cyrix x86 clones that were having issues, and there were some concerns about AMD. AMD busted through that for most of the people who know what's what, but the general public still has dim memories of that.
Just last week, my father told me he was buying a new PC for my stepmom. He was intrigued by the low prices on AMD Athlon XP systems, but he remembered that they had compatibility issues. It didn't take that much reassuring to get him to go for the cost savings on the AMD, but it did take some and from someone he knew to be unbiased (I have a p4 2.4 laptop and an AMD64 desktop at home).
A lot of people like to attribute the sales gap to Intel winning the battle of the megahertz myth. But there are lots of Joe Consumers out there who pay the Intel premium because still think that an AMD chip might crash or spit out garbage in situations a Pentium will handle with ease.
Until now, AMD has been seen by many as a company that copies Intel's technology... poorly. If Intel adopts x86-64 and then this, they need to spin themselves as the company that Intel is copying... poorly.
-Gregbr>