Besides having to pay actual damages (the full amount they overcharged), "punitive" damages should have been assessed. The concept behind punitive damages are to make them big enough to be a deterrent against repetition of such behavior.
Is $13.86 per consumer who files for a refund fair and accurate? Is this a full share of the actual damages? Does this include any punitive damages? For what the record companies made, does this kind of settlement really encourage them to deal fairly with consumers in the future?
That was the whole point of this, I thought; not just to recover funds stolen through collusion, but to smack the offenders around a bit and get the message to them that what they did was wrong. $13.86 per consumer does that?
When the record companies are owned by conglomerates that own TV networks, cable networks, newspapers, magazines, and other opinion-making power that can be used as a threat against any politicians who would oppose them, and you combine that threat with free-flowing campaign contributions, this is the best consumers will get.
Not that you/.ers can be trusted to actually read a page BEFORE commenting on it, but IMDB.com does add this note to projects that are still in the planning stages (like HhGTTG): "Note: Since this project is categorized as being in production, the data is subject to change or could be removed completely."
Worth noting, though, is that if you subscribe to their IMDbPro web site, they have news items (subscription required) available from The Hollywood Reporter that confirm the casting of Martin Freeman (Dent), Mos Def (Prefect), Rockwell (Zaphod), and others. It may still not be written in stone, but when it comes from The Hollywood Reporter, it can be considered pretty reputable.
I'm in contact with David Winning (IMDb filmography, official site). He directed a lot of episodes of "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda" (photos: 1, 2) and he's been hired on to direct at least part of the first season of "Stargate Atlantis". He's been getting a lot of recognition in the industry as one of the top directors for TV Sci-Fi in the past couple of years, so they're making some good choices for the series already. And the cool thing is that he seems really excited about the new series.
I've known David professionally for a couple of years now and he doesn't get this excited over every job, so that's got me looking forward to checking out series. It doesn't hurt that I'm a fan of SG1 also.
Joe Driver doesn't care if the engine under the hood has an X bore piston shaft or a Y bore piston shaft. Here are his concerns: Does it go? Does it go fast? Is it reliable? Does it have a stereo? Is it a manual or automatic transmission? What colors does it come in? Can I fill it up at any corner gas station?
How many people swap out the engines in a car that still runs fine? How many people are still running Windows 98 on old hardware and will upgrade their OS when they buy a new PC?
Whether things freeze at XFree86 4.3, the X people return to sanity and things continue onto 4.4, or Y replaces X altogether... Joe User (especially at a corporate desktop) is going to notice the brand of underlying windowing system about as often as a husband notices the brand of shoes his wife is wearing.
The distros will make up their own minds. For the commercial ones, the default will be the one they feel helps their distro meet the qualifications of: does it go, does it look nice, and does it run on standard unleaded?
- Greg
What if you didn't like American Gods?
on
King Rat
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· Score: 2, Insightful
American Gods felt trite and familiar to me, a re-hashing of themes and ideas that never truly gelled into something with its own sense of originality. I loved Neverwhere, which is what got me to read AG, but Gaiman fell a few notches in my estimation with AG.
So, the question is, if you loved Neverwhere, but American Gods left a bad taste in your mouth, how will King Rat fare?
They're advertising on Comedy Central all the time. "Natural Male Enhancement". They're the same herbal penis pills the scammers sell, but they try to make them look legit and pharmaceutical. They even use a made up latin-sounding name in parentheses to make it look like a real pharmaceutical.... "Enzyte (Suffragium Asotas)" like "Viagra (Cildenafil Citrate)".
Enzyte's even sponsoring a NASCAR car.
Is someone's going to sue the penis pill people, it would seem Enzyte's wearing a flashing red "sue me" sign.
The main tenet of Nazi propaganda was that the public is more likely to believe a big lie than a small one.
Seems to be a philosophy the PR flacks for VeriSign and SCO subscribe to wholeheartedly.
"You have to license your Linux installation from us." "Everybody likes Sitefinder." "I was singing in a church choir in Cucamonga when the murder happened." "I won't cum in your mouth."
It's old technology, but still... Just for purely academic reasons, I think it would be interesting to see how a ported and tuned version would work on a high-end Pentium or AMD system.
Of course, I don't program, so this is a "gee, it would be great if someone else did this" post,. Take it with as many grains of salt as you wish.
Tell that to anyone who has been on the losing end of a case where a verbal agreement was interpreted as a binding contract.
Kim Basinger got nailed on a verbal agreement dispute for backing out of "Boxing Helena" and the plaintiff was awarded millions. The award was later reduced or reversed on appeal, but her loss got Whoopi Goldberg so scared she did that awful "Theodore Rex" movie.
There is the saying that "a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on", but there is precedent in the law that says your word really can be your bond, whether you like it or not. It's not as strong as a signed contract, but it's there.
So if a verbal contract can be upheld in court, why not a click wrapper? With a click wrapper you even have a detailed written contract, unlike a verbal agreement.
And that's where the guy whose lawyer girlfriend said "let me put it in front of a jury" comes in: A click wrapper is probably enough to keep the case from being dismissed so it gets to trial. If you're fighting a company with large resources, it can cost you $100,000 or more to prove them wrong at trial. And since we don't have a "loser pays" legal system, you're probably going to settle since it's cheaper than winning.
So if a click wrapper is enough of a legal club to beat you into settling, how dubious is that value?
Again, IANAL, so all the above is just IMO.
IANAL, but from what I've heard from lawyers regarding terms of service I've had to place on sites, the concept is called a "click wrapper" and is as legally valid as a written contract, especially if you make users actively agree to it by clicking a button and/or checking a box to continue. The concept is the foundation of e-commerce, because without it you couldn't legally agree to anything online.
Now, I once took a class in criminal law (community college, so again IANAL - this is just something I consider interesting). If a husband says to his wife "say one more thing and I'm going to pop you in the mouth", he cannot use her saying one more thing as a legal justification for popping her in the mouth.
She did not contractually agree to be popped in the mouth by saying one more thing, nor can he claim that he gave a "proceed at own risk" type disclaimer that let him pop her in the mouth. He's still going down for domestic abuse, regardless of his warning or her saying one more thing.
So, where these TOC's or EULA's are as egregious as "say one more thing and I'm gonna pop you in the mouth", I think they could be invalidated. But otherwise...
Microsoft strongly disclaims this is a preview and is not to be used in production systems.
SuSE 9.0 for AMD64 corrupts my BIOS every second or third time I run it and the next time I try to boot, I have to clear the CMOS and reload default BIOS or my machine freezes at "checking NVRAM".
Though the chip's been out since October, Nvidia didn't get their 64 bit Linux drivers (for their mobo chipsets or graphics cards) out until January, so I've only been able to get my onboard LAN working with ANY 64 bit Linux distribution for a few weeks.
Enough is enough. I'm tired of being a guinea pig for OS releases that aren't production ready. I'll stick with 32 bit for now.
I bought the AMD64 as my "every three year" processor upgrade, figuring that it would serve me better 2 years down the line than the P4 3.2 (not prescott). But the honest truth is that there aren't any significant consumer applications *right now* that need or truly take advantage of its 64-bit abilities. When there are enough 64 bit applications **and 64 bit DRIVERS** to make upgrading to 64 bit XP intriguing, I'll re-consider.
"They say if you want to get into an argument at the dinner table, start a conversation about religion or politics. I would argue that Linux is a cross between religion and politics."
This is the first intelligent thing I have heard Darl say throughout this process.
Hear, hear! Hate Darl with a passion, but even I had to say to myself "that's dead on". I'd only have one minor edit: "Linux is a cross between religion and politics... and so is Mac."
I wish I'd done more research on hardware compatibility, particularly motherboards, because installing 64-bit Linux has been a bitch. I'm only now getting to the point where I can have a fully-working installation without having to add in redundant devices to compensate for onboard chipsets that AMD64 Linux distros couldn't work with.
Nvidia Nforce drivers only got released in the last month so my onboard LAN on my ASUS SK8N works. Mandrake 9.2 RC1 recognizes my Promise onboard SATA RAID controller, but SuSE doesn't, and even then the driver in Mandrake is an 0.83 release.
I haven't played with the Fedora Core release candidate test version for Athlon 64 yet.
IMO, If you want to run 64-bit Native Linux on AMD64 without a lot of headaches and weeping, wait another 6 months until the distros and drivers have solidified more. In 6 months, you'll probably be able to get a CPU a generation or two higher than you can today, but for the same money, and you'll be able to install AMD64 native Linux much more easily... It's win-win.
This has the *potential* to be a very cool project. Right now it's at 0.51 release status, source only, with no docs. Only a small percentage of users will be able to get it up and running in this form. Once it hits 1.0, or even 0.9 and is stable enough, I'll be more excited.
I definitely have to agree here. It wasn't typing in the programs that taught programming skills... it was tinkering with them afterward. I always added extra functionality into my programs in computer classes, hotrodded programs I got out of magazines...
Entering in a bunch of uncommented code didn't teach much, but trying to understand all the code and then expand upon it so you could modify/subvert/hotrod the program was the learning experience. Thing is, it takes a certain kind of personality to want to tinker under the hood.
Take your car for example. There are people who buy a car, and so long as it gets them to and fro, they're happy. They don't want to know how internal combustion works. They just want to know how to drive it, put gas in it, and when to bring it in for maintenance.
Then there are the guys who do their own oil changes and can change a filter or water pump, maybe might change the starter if they had a service manual and some incentive (like saving money), but that's as far as they go. It makes them feel good to know more about their car than the average Joe, but they don't have the interest to take it to the next level.
Then there are the guys who can take apart and re-assemble a carburetor blindfolded, tell you what's wrong with the car by listening to it, and aren't happy unless there's grease on their hands.
If you're the third type (but with computers instead of cars), a book like that is a godsend, because it's a great leaping-off point into tinkering with code and learning how to make your computer do all sorts of neat tricks. If you're not, then a book like that is good for propping up that chair with a short leg.
If you look in the upper right corner near the "Orkut" logo/name, you'll see "Beta" in light letters.
I'd guess the reason it's invite only is to keep things manageable. If you had a community in beta, would you want it slashdotted with new users (many of whom would bitch and moan about every glitch) while you were still trying to smooth out the rough edges?
I'm sure that once Google feels this is ready for unfettered public consumption, the invitation only rule will die.
Here's a copy of my letter to Forbes after reading that outrageous article:
For you to mourn Fax.com or even imply there was *anything* unfair about their demise is completely outrageous. To even suggest they have a 1st Amendment right to send junk faxes is preposterous.
Let's talk about the First Amendment. If the cops come by your party on a Saturday night and tell you to turn it down or they'll cite you for disturbing the peace, I'll bet you a billion dollars that no judge will accept your argument that the First Amendment allows you to play your music as loud as you want late at night in a residential area. And you're just being loud. You're not doing doughnuts on your neighbor's lawn or puking in his bushes. But it's well established that a city can make and enforce a law that says your free speech rights stop at a certain decibel level in the evening hours.
But what fax.com was doing was like not only playing their music too loud, but puking in the bushes too.
They claimed to have 46 million fax numbers (16 million in general use and 30 million "untouched"). If they sent each of those numbers just one junk fax, and we can agree that paper and toner costs per fax were 1.5 cents (half penny a sheet for paper, 1 cent a page for ink/toner), the cumulative paper and ink/toner cost of that one junk fax per machine would be $690,000.
Now imagine there wasn't a TCPA to outlaw junk faxes. Imagine there were no activists who could sue, no fines the FCC could impose, no class action causes to attract the sleazy lawyers.
Do you think you'd just get one junk fax? You'd get 5 a day, even on weekends and holidays. Cumulatively across 46 million fax machines, that 5 a day would eat up $3.45 million *DAILY* in paper and ink/toner... over $1.25 BILLION a year.
That's $1.25 ***billion*** (you know, with a B) in printing costs that the fax marketers wouldn't have to pay. Instead everyone they were faxing would have to pay a share of it. That's 83.9 billion pieces of junk mail being delivered postage due every year and the recipients have NO choice about paying.
For Forbes to do anything but celebrate the demise of Fax.com or support the TCPA shows a complete departure from any semblance of logic or morality.
You can consider me an ex-subscriber when it comes time for me to renew this year.
A bunch of neat scientific advances came out of the space program (Mercury / Apollo) because necessity is the mother of invention. There were very specific problems that needed to be solved and inordinate amounts of brainpower were thrown at solving them.
Now comes the spam wars... Once again, a specific problem that must be solved: "How do we develop a method of letting legitimate mail get to us while filtering out spam with a minimum of error?" We don't have the government throwing billions at it, but because it affects the general public, there's an inordinate amount of businesses, academics, and hobbyists throwing brainpower at it.
Despite all the talk about keys and legal threats, verifications and warrants, they just provide hurdles to be overcome, not true barriers to spamming.
But you could train a person to screen your mail with a better level of efficiency than any spam filter on the market today. And that person could catch new spam tricks before they ever got through to you.
As we continuously try to develop better and better filtering systems, I believe that the war against spam could well be be our most prolific source of advances in artificial intelligence. Spammers will throw (purchased) brainpower at coming up with ways to defeat filters and filters will have to get smarter in response.
I know, I know... You could say that I'm looking for the silver lining in this hailstorm of unsolicited pitches. But really, am I so far off? We've got a problem, we're throwing resources at solving it... like the space race, like the arms race, technologies will come out of the spam race that will have amazing implications for our lives.
I hate spam. I would love to be left alone in a room with a spammer, a car battery, and some jumper cables. But at the same time, it's sort of neat to be watching this battle progress.
You might want to check your facts before claiming "no such thing".
Here's a case file from the National Labor Relations Board that mentions it. Or here's a search from Google that turns up 2,100 results for the exact term.
Maybe there's "no such thing" in your world. But in the real world, there is such a thing.
It's been pretty well argued that the First Amendment doesn't apply here because it's a private relationship... to wit, I could get fired for putting porn in the company newsletter and it is completely legal for them to fire me for that (in fact, they might even face some civil liability if they didn't).
Now, I could sue my employer for unfair termination, particularly if they had not detailed or educated me on their sexual harrassment policy.
But legislation has provided that operators of online forums have extensive safe harbor protections. For a while there, this was sketchy (see Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy, where an investment firm successfully sued Prodigy over a defamatory post and Prodigy lost because it was ruled they took such an active hand in controlling board content that they became lost Safe Harbor protection), but later legislation broadened safe harbor provisions to such an extent that EA/Maxis can boot anyone, clean things up as they see fit, or leave them messy, and they have little or no legal liability to the people who got booted or the people harmed/offended by content that stays. IANAL, but AFAIK, they've got a pretty free hand and the only thing to govern their actions is the free market.
Of course, it's quite possible they were just getting in over their heads when they created the online world they did.
A friend of mine was talking at work Friday about a friend of hers who would create new Sims Online characters just to bring them back to his primary character's residence, kill them, and bury them in the living room.
When the world devolves to a place where a man can find a willing victim for cannibalization online, it's hard for weirdness not to filter into online worlds. When a search for "grief players" on Google turns up 1,800 results, you know that this is no limited phenomenon.
Perhaps the question is not whether there should be freedom within alternate worlds (or as absolute as you can get within the bounds of the program), but how you have to balance freedom against other needs and wants.
How much freedom is necessary to not only complete the objectives of the game, but make the game a fun place to hang out? Should you limit interaction between avatars to only that which is needed to complete game objectives and otherwise phase out community aspects? Can you take out the elements that grief players exploit and yet leave the game with enough oomph to make it popular with a big enough mass of people for it to be profitable?
It's too easy to just lash out at EA and Maxis for booting this guy. Given, it may be a knee-jerk reaction and probably wrong on a moral or ethical level, but virtual worlds are pretty new and the optimal construction and management of them for maximum player enjoyment with minimum grief player exploitation is not a set formula by any stretch of the imagination.
Honestly, a smart move would be to create a virtual world based on that "Manhunt" game they've been advertising on TV or based on GTA. Make a world of pimps, whores, seedy strip joints, dominatrixes, S&M clubs... Make a world where giving grief to others without getting grief is the challenge, and throw in a bunch of sex and sleaze to boot.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a big commercial draw (though it probably would be), but it would probably be a great way to siphon away grief players from other games.
No city ever completely cleans up its red light district or skid row necause they need them. People are going to sell and buy drugs. People are going to sell and buy sex. People are going to fall into the gutter and be more interested in staying there than getting out. These districts serve a purpose... keeping that stuff out of the suburbs and better urban neighborhoods.
Have to agree that ADHD is the diagnosis du jour and probably would have been applied to Einstein. There *are* some kids who have very severe ADHD and *do* need ritalin, but if you think back to when you were young versus now, the percentage of kids on Ritalin has increased twentyfold... more? Either there's something in the water that is messing with the brains of more and more kids, or there's another explanation... such as overworked teachers who have 1.5 times the class size they had when we were kids and have less ability to brook disruptions, turning "challenging" children into "problem" children... HMO pediatricians who get paid based on the number of kids they see in a day rather than the quality of care they give, and find diagnoses like ADHD an effective way to get trouble kids in and out quickly.
If your daughter was having social problems... so do most really intelligent kids. Their minds are operating at a higher level than their peers and they don't have the maturity to cope with the difference. Their mental age is growing so much faster than their emotional age and they're running into a lot of frustrations.
In some cases, a very stubborn will is butting up against an inflexible world. Even if they're right and the world is wrong... they're five. They don't understand politics or how to play the game until you're so far ahead that you're making the rules. And even if they had a basic grasp... they're still FIVE. They have ideas that are really important to them and people dismiss them because of their age.
Just remember how frustrated you were at not being treated like an adult when you were 15 or 16, now apply double that frustration to a 5-year-old who sees the world as wrong and can't change it because no adult will take them seriously and all their peers can still be entertained by someone jingling keys at them.
When I was in pre-k/kindergarten, I had some motor difficulties that made it hard to tell my left from my right. In addition they were using color-coded reading books and I was color blind. So they told my mother I'd probably never learn to read.
I'm not going to say that those teachers were malicious or incompetent. I became a discipline problem because I was frustrated and they were trying to force me into a mold I didn't fit, but with a class full of other kids, they didn't have the time to give me the personalized attention I needed. So my need for a different method of being taught and their need for an orderly classroom converged like warm and cold fronts, creating a storm.
But my mother, who had been a third grade teacher while my dad was in grad school, had the determination my teachers didn't. She had an investment in seeing me succeed that they didn't. And, possibly most importantly, she had an ability to give me a swat if I got too out of hand... that they didn't.
It wasn't easy. I was a handful on a good day, and after the crap I'd gone through at school, I was conditioned not to like reading. But by the time I reached first grade, I was not only reading, I was testing at a reading level for a kid twice my age.
Children with active minds are an asset to the world, but they also pose their own unique challenges. They often cannot be taught on an assembly line. Your daughter will probably need a bigger investment of time than a "normal" kid, but the return on that investment will be bigger. Look for a good private school with an accelerated curriculum and spend your money there instead of on enriching a medical establishment that is preying on your child.
Okay, I don't have the medical data handy, but I recall reading somewhere that caffeine affects insulin and blood sugar (one of the reasons you're supposed to limit caffeine or cut it out on Atkins).
I know that my caffeine withdrawal headaches feel a lot like the occasional "slept through breakfast, worked through lunch" headaches I sometimes get.
YMMV, but I'd suggest trying to eat really healthy the day you quit caffeine, particularly some brown rice, whole-grain bread, and other higher-fiber sources of carbs. The combo of fiber and carbs is the key. Because of the fiber, the sugars release into your blood more slowly, helping you keep from hitting blood sugar lows.
It may not get rid of the headaches, but it should diminish the intensity.
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Is $13.86 per consumer who files for a refund fair and accurate? Is this a full share of the actual damages? Does this include any punitive damages? For what the record companies made, does this kind of settlement really encourage them to deal fairly with consumers in the future?
That was the whole point of this, I thought; not just to recover funds stolen through collusion, but to smack the offenders around a bit and get the message to them that what they did was wrong. $13.86 per consumer does that?
When the record companies are owned by conglomerates that own TV networks, cable networks, newspapers, magazines, and other opinion-making power that can be used as a threat against any politicians who would oppose them, and you combine that threat with free-flowing campaign contributions, this is the best consumers will get.
- Greg
Worth noting, though, is that if you subscribe to their IMDbPro web site, they have news items (subscription required) available from The Hollywood Reporter that confirm the casting of Martin Freeman (Dent), Mos Def (Prefect), Rockwell (Zaphod), and others. It may still not be written in stone, but when it comes from The Hollywood Reporter, it can be considered pretty reputable.
- Greg
I've known David professionally for a couple of years now and he doesn't get this excited over every job, so that's got me looking forward to checking out series. It doesn't hurt that I'm a fan of SG1 also.
- Greg
How many people swap out the engines in a car that still runs fine? How many people are still running Windows 98 on old hardware and will upgrade their OS when they buy a new PC?
Whether things freeze at XFree86 4.3, the X people return to sanity and things continue onto 4.4, or Y replaces X altogether... Joe User (especially at a corporate desktop) is going to notice the brand of underlying windowing system about as often as a husband notices the brand of shoes his wife is wearing.
The distros will make up their own minds. For the commercial ones, the default will be the one they feel helps their distro meet the qualifications of: does it go, does it look nice, and does it run on standard unleaded?
- Greg
So, the question is, if you loved Neverwhere, but American Gods left a bad taste in your mouth, how will King Rat fare?
Enzyte's even sponsoring a NASCAR car.
Is someone's going to sue the penis pill people, it would seem Enzyte's wearing a flashing red "sue me" sign.
Seems to be a philosophy the PR flacks for VeriSign and SCO subscribe to wholeheartedly.
"You have to license your Linux installation from us." "Everybody likes Sitefinder." "I was singing in a church choir in Cucamonga when the murder happened." "I won't cum in your mouth."
Sheesh.
Is that the kind of drive, ambition, and creativity the company is looking for?
It's old technology, but still... Just for purely academic reasons, I think it would be interesting to see how a ported and tuned version would work on a high-end Pentium or AMD system.
Of course, I don't program, so this is a "gee, it would be great if someone else did this" post,. Take it with as many grains of salt as you wish.
- G
Tell that to anyone who has been on the losing end of a case where a verbal agreement was interpreted as a binding contract.
Kim Basinger got nailed on a verbal agreement dispute for backing out of "Boxing Helena" and the plaintiff was awarded millions. The award was later reduced or reversed on appeal, but her loss got Whoopi Goldberg so scared she did that awful "Theodore Rex" movie.
There is the saying that "a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on", but there is precedent in the law that says your word really can be your bond, whether you like it or not. It's not as strong as a signed contract, but it's there.
So if a verbal contract can be upheld in court, why not a click wrapper? With a click wrapper you even have a detailed written contract, unlike a verbal agreement.
And that's where the guy whose lawyer girlfriend said "let me put it in front of a jury" comes in: A click wrapper is probably enough to keep the case from being dismissed so it gets to trial. If you're fighting a company with large resources, it can cost you $100,000 or more to prove them wrong at trial. And since we don't have a "loser pays" legal system, you're probably going to settle since it's cheaper than winning.
So if a click wrapper is enough of a legal club to beat you into settling, how dubious is that value? Again, IANAL, so all the above is just IMO.
- Greg
Now, I once took a class in criminal law (community college, so again IANAL - this is just something I consider interesting). If a husband says to his wife "say one more thing and I'm going to pop you in the mouth", he cannot use her saying one more thing as a legal justification for popping her in the mouth.
She did not contractually agree to be popped in the mouth by saying one more thing, nor can he claim that he gave a "proceed at own risk" type disclaimer that let him pop her in the mouth. He's still going down for domestic abuse, regardless of his warning or her saying one more thing.
So, where these TOC's or EULA's are as egregious as "say one more thing and I'm gonna pop you in the mouth", I think they could be invalidated. But otherwise...
SuSE 9.0 for AMD64 corrupts my BIOS every second or third time I run it and the next time I try to boot, I have to clear the CMOS and reload default BIOS or my machine freezes at "checking NVRAM".
Though the chip's been out since October, Nvidia didn't get their 64 bit Linux drivers (for their mobo chipsets or graphics cards) out until January, so I've only been able to get my onboard LAN working with ANY 64 bit Linux distribution for a few weeks.
Enough is enough. I'm tired of being a guinea pig for OS releases that aren't production ready. I'll stick with 32 bit for now.
I bought the AMD64 as my "every three year" processor upgrade, figuring that it would serve me better 2 years down the line than the P4 3.2 (not prescott). But the honest truth is that there aren't any significant consumer applications *right now* that need or truly take advantage of its 64-bit abilities. When there are enough 64 bit applications **and 64 bit DRIVERS** to make upgrading to 64 bit XP intriguing, I'll re-consider.
- Greg
Damn multiple-use acronyms.
This is the first intelligent thing I have heard Darl say throughout this process.
Hear, hear! Hate Darl with a passion, but even I had to say to myself "that's dead on". I'd only have one minor edit: "Linux is a cross between religion and politics... and so is Mac."
- G
Is this the boxed version or the RC1 available on their FTP and mirrors?
I wish I'd done more research on hardware compatibility, particularly motherboards, because installing 64-bit Linux has been a bitch. I'm only now getting to the point where I can have a fully-working installation without having to add in redundant devices to compensate for onboard chipsets that AMD64 Linux distros couldn't work with.
Nvidia Nforce drivers only got released in the last month so my onboard LAN on my ASUS SK8N works. Mandrake 9.2 RC1 recognizes my Promise onboard SATA RAID controller, but SuSE doesn't, and even then the driver in Mandrake is an 0.83 release.
I haven't played with the Fedora Core release candidate test version for Athlon 64 yet.
IMO, If you want to run 64-bit Native Linux on AMD64 without a lot of headaches and weeping, wait another 6 months until the distros and drivers have solidified more. In 6 months, you'll probably be able to get a CPU a generation or two higher than you can today, but for the same money, and you'll be able to install AMD64 native Linux much more easily... It's win-win.
- Greg
- Greg
Entering in a bunch of uncommented code didn't teach much, but trying to understand all the code and then expand upon it so you could modify/subvert/hotrod the program was the learning experience. Thing is, it takes a certain kind of personality to want to tinker under the hood.
Take your car for example. There are people who buy a car, and so long as it gets them to and fro, they're happy. They don't want to know how internal combustion works. They just want to know how to drive it, put gas in it, and when to bring it in for maintenance.
Then there are the guys who do their own oil changes and can change a filter or water pump, maybe might change the starter if they had a service manual and some incentive (like saving money), but that's as far as they go. It makes them feel good to know more about their car than the average Joe, but they don't have the interest to take it to the next level.
Then there are the guys who can take apart and re-assemble a carburetor blindfolded, tell you what's wrong with the car by listening to it, and aren't happy unless there's grease on their hands.
If you're the third type (but with computers instead of cars), a book like that is a godsend, because it's a great leaping-off point into tinkering with code and learning how to make your computer do all sorts of neat tricks. If you're not, then a book like that is good for propping up that chair with a short leg.
- Greg
I'd guess the reason it's invite only is to keep things manageable. If you had a community in beta, would you want it slashdotted with new users (many of whom would bitch and moan about every glitch) while you were still trying to smooth out the rough edges?
I'm sure that once Google feels this is ready for unfettered public consumption, the invitation only rule will die.
Greg
Here's a copy of my letter to Forbes after reading that outrageous article:
For you to mourn Fax.com or even imply there was *anything* unfair about their demise is completely outrageous. To even suggest they have a 1st Amendment right to send junk faxes is preposterous.
Let's talk about the First Amendment. If the cops come by your party on a Saturday night and tell you to turn it down or they'll cite you for disturbing the peace, I'll bet you a billion dollars that no judge will accept your argument that the First Amendment allows you to play your music as loud as you want late at night in a residential area. And you're just being loud. You're not doing doughnuts on your neighbor's lawn or puking in his bushes. But it's well established that a city can make and enforce a law that says your free speech rights stop at a certain decibel level in the evening hours.
But what fax.com was doing was like not only playing their music too loud, but puking in the bushes too.
They claimed to have 46 million fax numbers (16 million in general use and 30 million "untouched"). If they sent each of those numbers just one junk fax, and we can agree that paper and toner costs per fax were 1.5 cents (half penny a sheet for paper, 1 cent a page for ink/toner), the cumulative paper and ink/toner cost of that one junk fax per machine would be $690,000.
Now imagine there wasn't a TCPA to outlaw junk faxes. Imagine there were no activists who could sue, no fines the FCC could impose, no class action causes to attract the sleazy lawyers.
Do you think you'd just get one junk fax? You'd get 5 a day, even on weekends and holidays. Cumulatively across 46 million fax machines, that 5 a day would eat up $3.45 million *DAILY* in paper and ink/toner... over $1.25 BILLION a year.
That's $1.25 ***billion*** (you know, with a B) in printing costs that the fax marketers wouldn't have to pay. Instead everyone they were faxing would have to pay a share of it. That's 83.9 billion pieces of junk mail being delivered postage due every year and the recipients have NO choice about paying.
For Forbes to do anything but celebrate the demise of Fax.com or support the TCPA shows a complete departure from any semblance of logic or morality.
You can consider me an ex-subscriber when it comes time for me to renew this year.
Now comes the spam wars... Once again, a specific problem that must be solved: "How do we develop a method of letting legitimate mail get to us while filtering out spam with a minimum of error?" We don't have the government throwing billions at it, but because it affects the general public, there's an inordinate amount of businesses, academics, and hobbyists throwing brainpower at it.
Despite all the talk about keys and legal threats, verifications and warrants, they just provide hurdles to be overcome, not true barriers to spamming.
But you could train a person to screen your mail with a better level of efficiency than any spam filter on the market today. And that person could catch new spam tricks before they ever got through to you.
As we continuously try to develop better and better filtering systems, I believe that the war against spam could well be be our most prolific source of advances in artificial intelligence. Spammers will throw (purchased) brainpower at coming up with ways to defeat filters and filters will have to get smarter in response.
I know, I know... You could say that I'm looking for the silver lining in this hailstorm of unsolicited pitches. But really, am I so far off? We've got a problem, we're throwing resources at solving it... like the space race, like the arms race, technologies will come out of the spam race that will have amazing implications for our lives.
I hate spam. I would love to be left alone in a room with a spammer, a car battery, and some jumper cables. But at the same time, it's sort of neat to be watching this battle progress.
Greg
Here's a case file from the National Labor Relations Board that mentions it. Or here's a search from Google that turns up 2,100 results for the exact term.
Maybe there's "no such thing" in your world. But in the real world, there is such a thing.
Greg
Now, I could sue my employer for unfair termination, particularly if they had not detailed or educated me on their sexual harrassment policy.
But legislation has provided that operators of online forums have extensive safe harbor protections. For a while there, this was sketchy (see Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy , where an investment firm successfully sued Prodigy over a defamatory post and Prodigy lost because it was ruled they took such an active hand in controlling board content that they became lost Safe Harbor protection), but later legislation broadened safe harbor provisions to such an extent that EA/Maxis can boot anyone, clean things up as they see fit, or leave them messy, and they have little or no legal liability to the people who got booted or the people harmed/offended by content that stays. IANAL, but AFAIK, they've got a pretty free hand and the only thing to govern their actions is the free market.
Of course, it's quite possible they were just getting in over their heads when they created the online world they did.
A friend of mine was talking at work Friday about a friend of hers who would create new Sims Online characters just to bring them back to his primary character's residence, kill them, and bury them in the living room.
When the world devolves to a place where a man can find a willing victim for cannibalization online, it's hard for weirdness not to filter into online worlds. When a search for "grief players" on Google turns up 1,800 results, you know that this is no limited phenomenon.
Perhaps the question is not whether there should be freedom within alternate worlds (or as absolute as you can get within the bounds of the program), but how you have to balance freedom against other needs and wants.
How much freedom is necessary to not only complete the objectives of the game, but make the game a fun place to hang out? Should you limit interaction between avatars to only that which is needed to complete game objectives and otherwise phase out community aspects? Can you take out the elements that grief players exploit and yet leave the game with enough oomph to make it popular with a big enough mass of people for it to be profitable?
It's too easy to just lash out at EA and Maxis for booting this guy. Given, it may be a knee-jerk reaction and probably wrong on a moral or ethical level, but virtual worlds are pretty new and the optimal construction and management of them for maximum player enjoyment with minimum grief player exploitation is not a set formula by any stretch of the imagination.
Honestly, a smart move would be to create a virtual world based on that "Manhunt" game they've been advertising on TV or based on GTA. Make a world of pimps, whores, seedy strip joints, dominatrixes, S&M clubs... Make a world where giving grief to others without getting grief is the challenge, and throw in a bunch of sex and sleaze to boot.
I'm not saying this is necessarily a big commercial draw (though it probably would be), but it would probably be a great way to siphon away grief players from other games.
No city ever completely cleans up its red light district or skid row necause they need them. People are going to sell and buy drugs. People are going to sell and buy sex. People are going to fall into the gutter and be more interested in staying there than getting out. These districts serve a purpose... keeping that stuff out of the suburbs and better urban neighborhoods.
That's the sociology of the games. If you conside
If your daughter was having social problems... so do most really intelligent kids. Their minds are operating at a higher level than their peers and they don't have the maturity to cope with the difference. Their mental age is growing so much faster than their emotional age and they're running into a lot of frustrations.
In some cases, a very stubborn will is butting up against an inflexible world. Even if they're right and the world is wrong... they're five. They don't understand politics or how to play the game until you're so far ahead that you're making the rules. And even if they had a basic grasp... they're still FIVE. They have ideas that are really important to them and people dismiss them because of their age.
Just remember how frustrated you were at not being treated like an adult when you were 15 or 16, now apply double that frustration to a 5-year-old who sees the world as wrong and can't change it because no adult will take them seriously and all their peers can still be entertained by someone jingling keys at them.
When I was in pre-k/kindergarten, I had some motor difficulties that made it hard to tell my left from my right. In addition they were using color-coded reading books and I was color blind. So they told my mother I'd probably never learn to read.
I'm not going to say that those teachers were malicious or incompetent. I became a discipline problem because I was frustrated and they were trying to force me into a mold I didn't fit, but with a class full of other kids, they didn't have the time to give me the personalized attention I needed. So my need for a different method of being taught and their need for an orderly classroom converged like warm and cold fronts, creating a storm.
But my mother, who had been a third grade teacher while my dad was in grad school, had the determination my teachers didn't. She had an investment in seeing me succeed that they didn't. And, possibly most importantly, she had an ability to give me a swat if I got too out of hand... that they didn't.
It wasn't easy. I was a handful on a good day, and after the crap I'd gone through at school, I was conditioned not to like reading. But by the time I reached first grade, I was not only reading, I was testing at a reading level for a kid twice my age.
Children with active minds are an asset to the world, but they also pose their own unique challenges. They often cannot be taught on an assembly line. Your daughter will probably need a bigger investment of time than a "normal" kid, but the return on that investment will be bigger. Look for a good private school with an accelerated curriculum and spend your money there instead of on enriching a medical establishment that is preying on your child.
- Greg
I know that my caffeine withdrawal headaches feel a lot like the occasional "slept through breakfast, worked through lunch" headaches I sometimes get.
YMMV, but I'd suggest trying to eat really healthy the day you quit caffeine, particularly some brown rice, whole-grain bread, and other higher-fiber sources of carbs. The combo of fiber and carbs is the key. Because of the fiber, the sugars release into your blood more slowly, helping you keep from hitting blood sugar lows.
It may not get rid of the headaches, but it should diminish the intensity.