Nah, there's no reason to drag BayStar over the coals for this. Heck, SCO already WAS dumping everything for IP payoffs. Now it's becoming painfully clear how botched this plan was, but there's not much of an escape hatch for venture capitalists. I'd bet what Baystar really, really, pretty-please wants is to cut and run before they end up losing their entire investment. So they throw out demands that may be ignored (boot the execs), in hopes that they can escape a total loss.
Of course they're also going to push for the IP lawsuits as a desparate Plan B, it's the only way SCO will make significant returns to pay off their investment before the company's worth has dried up and they fold.
Unless of course, the addition of gasoline destroys parts of the mechanism. Pouring one gallon of gas over it (no tank to put it in) would ensure that it doesn't go anywhere, giving it a true 0 MPG.
Kind of like a bicycle... that also gets 0 MPG, since after drinking various quantities of gasoline the rider is too busy vomiting and/or dying.
Just make sure you use a solvent that evaporates. Once it's dry, you're fine as long as it doesn't eat the CD surface right away. Inks shouldn't be chemically active, or they wouldn't require strong solvents to begin with.
A better way to protect CDs would be to create something to seal and protect the foil layer. I'm not sure if clear nail polish is safe, but I've had far more problems with physical damage than any data degradation.
Software licensing to only allow you to install it on one computer is nothing new. It's ALWAYS been the rule. Expect software publishers to push for even more restricted delivery in the future, so that you don't even get a usable copy to reinstall if needed. That's the only way they can ever hope to prevent you from handing out free copies to everyone in the world.
Stealing software is far too easy, and it's reached a point where it's worth the publisher's effort to start busting heads. How many friends do you know with a copy of Photoshop? How many of those are store-bought, EULA-abiding installations? Any?
If a species is so drastically reduced that it has NO males left, then yes, it's time for extinction. No amount of hot lesbian action is going to allow them to perpetuate without having human intervention every single time. From there, what's the point? We're not "saving" anything, we're just churning out zombies while the gene pool deteriorates to nothing. Once they're so inbred and mutated that they can't survive on their own anymore, should we develop artificial life-support systems to prop them up even longer?
2) They no longer let me use my bank MasterCard as a credit card because they don't like the fees MC charges.
Hey, good for Wal-Mart. It takes a commercial behemoth to challenge the credit banks, so it's kind of sad to see that the best they could do was shrug and decline all MC charges. Credit cards are the greatest convenience scam ever imagined, and it's suicidal for any retailer to refuse their extortion now.
3) Their practice of offering lousy employee benefits is encouraging other retailers to do the same.
I get NO benefits. It's a tradeoff, either lose part of your paycheck on insurance you may not want, or get paid more and lose out on group plan discounts.
If it's shady it's not illegal, but like olde-time snake oil, hopefully it WILL be. What's wrong with demanding that software be clearly disclosed and have the ability to be disabled or completely removed at the user's choice? It's easy to blame Microsoft for some of this too, but someone will always find a way to sneak in if there's money to be made.
Boo-fucking-hoo if it doesn't harm anything, having it running and wasting resources is still a problem. Users need to have the choice to reject or remove this stuff, and know that it really is gone. Acting like there's no problem is irresponsible. It's like saying the solution to spam is to always reply asking them to take you off their list.
I thought this was an awesome idea, burn customized OS + game to DVD. Simple and self-containted, and users can still mount drives from their normal OS for background tasks.
But there's a problem. What happens in two years? When you stick your old favorite into a new system with different hardware, those static drivers won't know what to do. Installing new drivers after the game disk is loaded would be a severe inconvenience, and Joe User is probably SOL at that point.
I don't know if that would be a fatal flaw or not. If you're interested in buying Linux games in the first place, it's possible that even average users would be willing to do some tweaking. It would be a tougher balance between how good old titles are and how much of a headache they are to fix.
We're not talking about servers on a company network where quotas are enforced and not everyone is 100% trusted. This is about home desktops. If you screw up your userland, it's still a big deal if you're the only person using it.
Why the hell are antivirus companies so reluctant to add anti-spyware functions? I mean, boo-hoo that Gator got so upset when they were accused of making spyware, but calling it anything less than a trojan is a lie.
Firewall products have been offering popup stoppers and activity reporting for a while now. It's really time for the AV publishers to step up and do their part by keeping these things from getting a foothold. It's not like they can get in any legal trouble for blocking someone's program, since it's up to the user whether they trust McAfee or HotBar more.
I can read manpages (preferably in BSD, as they're actually correct). I can use vi, and I even prefer it over pico, nano or whatever other 'recommended' editor CD-installs give you. I've run servers for games, mail, ftp, etc... but I have yet to get a linux distro to be desktop-ready. Even now that I'm actively trying to switch, documentation holes and hardware nightmares are making it nearly impossible, so I'll probably only end up using Cygwin.
Linksys equipment won't be running Cisco's IOS, but that doesn't mean it's no good. Pretty common practice for Cisco, there are quite a few companies they've eaten just to cover a particular niche. The 675/678 DSL router sold around 1999-2002 was the same way. They took over the NetSpeed product line, and only changed the sticker on top of it.
Identical in every way, but it let them sell a budget box without dropping the price on anything that runs IOS, since this one ran a dumbed-down version called CBOS. Oh, and it let them eliminate a competitor before they could expand into a bigger threat.
I had my first throat culture last week, expecting a fistful of steel wool rammed down my throat. It was nothing, and I don't even have a high tolerance for pain. I'm almost to the point where I'm excited to lean how insignificant medical procedures really are after the hype. Blood samples, wisdom teeth extraction, ECG, various shots, tests, pills and medical torture implements... No big deal. Some were even kinda fun, in a twisted way.
Hell, at this point I'm ready to go for colonoscopy and a root canal, just to see how bad they really aren't...
It's a valid point, really. The problem is that when Microsoft says "innovation" it really just means "natural development".
Who would consider a desktop operating system complete these days if it didn't include all the same crap they're being sued over? How many people do you know that use a desktop system and never, ever use a web browser, mail client or a basic media player? Does OSX honestly come without this stuff? The only thing the MS has really done wrong is bastardize the OS market with software, since hardly anyone wants a naked OS anymore. If your grandma bought a computer and had to go buy/download a web browser, would she think it's fully functional? Screw the 'stifling innovation' charges, you can still install Mozilla, Eudora and any other replacements you want. They just play off of user apathy so that it's easier to go along with the basic tools. Isn't the lazy user equaly to blame here?
I believe it. I'm guessing vulnerability-wise, Linux today is comparable to how Windows 3.1 was. Though a *nix virus would have trouble propagating as a worm or e-mail attachment, an old-fashioned trojan would work quite well.
As an added weakness to what you've mentioned, there's also a common failing among new users to read documentation when they have problems. As long as someone will hold their hand, they'll willingly do just about anything a 'mentor' asks. Install this RPM. Trust me.
There's also the rarely-recognized Avant which acts as an IE frontend, has the now-typical blocking features, good tabbed browsing controls, and remembers your open pages like Opera.
So, that would make IE *better* than Mozilla? Gasp at the heresy!
Safe enough, though it'll hardly make a dent in the disease. CWD is NOT a virus, it's a hell of a lot worse little bugger. There's really only two ways to counteract the disease, and neither gives warm fuzzies to self-labeled environmentalists.
1-Kill the potential carriers. ALL of them, as many as can be found, reducing populations so drastically that it'll take 30-40 years for numbers to come back up, giving plenty of time for the disease to run its course in the one or two surviving carriers. Naturally, this means that wolves will starve to death, and is a potentially nasty setback in the gene pool of affected species.
2-Cure it. Not a bad solution, but it's a medical breakthrough on par with curing cancer. Still, researchers should get to work on fighting prions anyway. If anything similar to CWD ever came to affect humans it'd be a catastrophic plague. Near as we can tell it's 100% lethal, irreversible once contracted, incubates for months or years before symptoms show, about as contagious as mononucleosis, and the pathogen isn't harmed by most disinfecting techniques. The only relief about prions is that it seems to take multiple exposures of significant volume before the full effect is reached, much like low-level carcinogens.
Pfft. Forget B-movies, Return of the King did it! I'm not specifically familiar with Wilhelm, but I noticed that they used a canned scream *twice in the same movie*. I forget the exact events, think one was when a Southron fell off an oliphaunt and the other was for a random Gondor soldier falling off a wall. Even worse, I had recently seen the Two Towers, and they used the same damn sound clip at Helm's Deep, for a soldier getting thrown off a wall in similar fashion.
I've seen specific mention that PJ didn't like the SotS chapter, he'd said something along the lines that it felt awkward and out of place. I do agree a little, but the book did lean on the idea of lingering scars left by such events. There has to be some kind of a wind-down too, you don't end that kind of epic suddenly unless you're angling for another sequel later.
Haven't seen the movie yet, but I'm guessing PJ fills that need by bringing Arwen back in for more screen time than she deserves, *again*.
It's times like this that I wish it wasn't a federal offense to send feces in the mail.
What? Say it ain't so! I remember back in the dotcom glory days there was a company set up for exactly this type of service. Wish I could remember the name...
It was cheap too, not much more than the cost of shipping and a plastic bag. Too bad they never developed a self-incendiary version.
There's another option though: Go in and vote for someone who you *know* will never win. Doesn't matter as much that they'll never be in office, but vote Green or Libertarian, and encourage any other apathetic voters to do the same. If you don't like the oddball candidates, don't worry, they don't have a chance in hell of winning, and the major parties would be pissing their pants if an outside candidate ever got as much as a 15% vote.
Elevating the share of votes these third-party groups receive is about the only way we'll see change in candidates. The reason for identical Dems and Reps is the same as for the reality-TV glut. It WORKS. Even though it's generally agreed to suck, since it pays off, there's no reason to change.
Well, the simple response would be, don't do that if the result bothers you. Yes, there are a couple exploits in both Fallout games that can provide unlimited money or experience if you drill them hard enough. If you ruin the game's fun by abusing its mechanics to boredom, it's your own fault.
Incidentally, I don't know what crazy unpatched version you were playing, but there are 5 book-learned skills, and reading can't push them past 91%. If you're playing for numbers, you're missing the point anyway. Getting Sulik to curse your existence, joking with the CoC that you're here to burn down their church, and offering candy to kids only to have them run screaming in terror... *that* is what the Fallout series is all about.
(-1, trolled)
How exactly is this gengineered food 'worse'? How is the molecular structure of something changed just because it went through some spooky unnatural process? I fail to see the dilemma in normal chemistry that results from you eating something, processing it, and then discarding it after its usefulness is depleted so that something else can use the components.
Do you think you can outsmart evolution/God/whatever you want to call it?
NO. Jesus. (oops...)
It's like building a sports car, just with different materials involved. Is steel manufacturing blasphemous because it interferes with the planet's naturally occuring iron ore? The only modification is that you're messing with living things that have to directly deal with the consequences of your actions. Don't bitch because we made glowing fish, but if it turns out they develop horrible tumors or halved lifespans or severe mental distress at the awful colors, then there's a valid moral conflict.
If only it were so easy with spammers. I don't think any resolution will be possible until filters are more mainstream, like Outlook/OE. Technology is too easily fought with new technology, regardless of what side it's on. Spammers have money, antispammers just have anger and impatience.
There's no good way to incur costs on spammers without eating it yourself, such as bandwidth fees, and even then you don't know if it's really the spammer or a hijacked fly-by-night system that's on the other end. It can't be killed by adding cost, it MUST see the revenue dry up.
BTW, my favorite anti-marketing slap is for telemarketers... just answer the phone, and whenever they ask for Mr. X (who do you know that calls you Mr/Mrs?), just set the phone down and walk away. It's incredibly aggravating for them to spew the whole sales pitch only to find out that nobody's even there. Old-fashioned tarpit.
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Nah, there's no reason to drag BayStar over the coals for this. Heck, SCO already WAS dumping everything for IP payoffs. Now it's becoming painfully clear how botched this plan was, but there's not much of an escape hatch for venture capitalists. I'd bet what Baystar really, really, pretty-please wants is to cut and run before they end up losing their entire investment. So they throw out demands that may be ignored (boot the execs), in hopes that they can escape a total loss.
Of course they're also going to push for the IP lawsuits as a desparate Plan B, it's the only way SCO will make significant returns to pay off their investment before the company's worth has dried up and they fold.
Unless of course, the addition of gasoline destroys parts of the mechanism. Pouring one gallon of gas over it (no tank to put it in) would ensure that it doesn't go anywhere, giving it a true 0 MPG.
Kind of like a bicycle... that also gets 0 MPG, since after drinking various quantities of gasoline the rider is too busy vomiting and/or dying.
Just make sure you use a solvent that evaporates. Once it's dry, you're fine as long as it doesn't eat the CD surface right away. Inks shouldn't be chemically active, or they wouldn't require strong solvents to begin with.
A better way to protect CDs would be to create something to seal and protect the foil layer. I'm not sure if clear nail polish is safe, but I've had far more problems with physical damage than any data degradation.
Software licensing to only allow you to install it on one computer is nothing new. It's ALWAYS been the rule. Expect software publishers to push for even more restricted delivery in the future, so that you don't even get a usable copy to reinstall if needed. That's the only way they can ever hope to prevent you from handing out free copies to everyone in the world.
Stealing software is far too easy, and it's reached a point where it's worth the publisher's effort to start busting heads. How many friends do you know with a copy of Photoshop? How many of those are store-bought, EULA-abiding installations? Any?
If a species is so drastically reduced that it has NO males left, then yes, it's time for extinction. No amount of hot lesbian action is going to allow them to perpetuate without having human intervention every single time. From there, what's the point? We're not "saving" anything, we're just churning out zombies while the gene pool deteriorates to nothing. Once they're so inbred and mutated that they can't survive on their own anymore, should we develop artificial life-support systems to prop them up even longer?
2) They no longer let me use my bank MasterCard as a credit card because they don't like the fees MC charges.
Hey, good for Wal-Mart. It takes a commercial behemoth to challenge the credit banks, so it's kind of sad to see that the best they could do was shrug and decline all MC charges. Credit cards are the greatest convenience scam ever imagined, and it's suicidal for any retailer to refuse their extortion now.
3) Their practice of offering lousy employee benefits is encouraging other retailers to do the same.
I get NO benefits. It's a tradeoff, either lose part of your paycheck on insurance you may not want, or get paid more and lose out on group plan discounts.
If it's shady it's not illegal, but like olde-time snake oil, hopefully it WILL be. What's wrong with demanding that software be clearly disclosed and have the ability to be disabled or completely removed at the user's choice? It's easy to blame Microsoft for some of this too, but someone will always find a way to sneak in if there's money to be made.
Boo-fucking-hoo if it doesn't harm anything, having it running and wasting resources is still a problem. Users need to have the choice to reject or remove this stuff, and know that it really is gone. Acting like there's no problem is irresponsible. It's like saying the solution to spam is to always reply asking them to take you off their list.
I thought this was an awesome idea, burn customized OS + game to DVD. Simple and self-containted, and users can still mount drives from their normal OS for background tasks.
But there's a problem. What happens in two years? When you stick your old favorite into a new system with different hardware, those static drivers won't know what to do. Installing new drivers after the game disk is loaded would be a severe inconvenience, and Joe User is probably SOL at that point.
I don't know if that would be a fatal flaw or not. If you're interested in buying Linux games in the first place, it's possible that even average users would be willing to do some tweaking. It would be a tougher balance between how good old titles are and how much of a headache they are to fix.
We're not talking about servers on a company network where quotas are enforced and not everyone is 100% trusted. This is about home desktops. If you screw up your userland, it's still a big deal if you're the only person using it.
Damn, people need to get tough on this shit.
That's really it.
Why the hell are antivirus companies so reluctant to add anti-spyware functions? I mean, boo-hoo that Gator got so upset when they were accused of making spyware, but calling it anything less than a trojan is a lie.
Firewall products have been offering popup stoppers and activity reporting for a while now. It's really time for the AV publishers to step up and do their part by keeping these things from getting a foothold. It's not like they can get in any legal trouble for blocking someone's program, since it's up to the user whether they trust McAfee or HotBar more.
Right.
I can read manpages (preferably in BSD, as they're actually correct). I can use vi, and I even prefer it over pico, nano or whatever other 'recommended' editor CD-installs give you. I've run servers for games, mail, ftp, etc... but I have yet to get a linux distro to be desktop-ready. Even now that I'm actively trying to switch, documentation holes and hardware nightmares are making it nearly impossible, so I'll probably only end up using Cygwin.
Not only that, but it's also topical... if you yell "F! Asterisk! C! K! You!", the phone system may not trigger its highest anger level.
In other news, I wrote my grandma a letter that said "F*CK you!". Don't know why the bitch was so mad, I *did* censor it....
Linksys equipment won't be running Cisco's IOS, but that doesn't mean it's no good. Pretty common practice for Cisco, there are quite a few companies they've eaten just to cover a particular niche. The 675/678 DSL router sold around 1999-2002 was the same way. They took over the NetSpeed product line, and only changed the sticker on top of it.
Identical in every way, but it let them sell a budget box without dropping the price on anything that runs IOS, since this one ran a dumbed-down version called CBOS. Oh, and it let them eliminate a competitor before they could expand into a bigger threat.
Bah! Whippersnappers!
I had my first throat culture last week, expecting a fistful of steel wool rammed down my throat. It was nothing, and I don't even have a high tolerance for pain. I'm almost to the point where I'm excited to lean how insignificant medical procedures really are after the hype. Blood samples, wisdom teeth extraction, ECG, various shots, tests, pills and medical torture implements... No big deal. Some were even kinda fun, in a twisted way.
Hell, at this point I'm ready to go for colonoscopy and a root canal, just to see how bad they really aren't...
It's a valid point, really. The problem is that when Microsoft says "innovation" it really just means "natural development".
Who would consider a desktop operating system complete these days if it didn't include all the same crap they're being sued over? How many people do you know that use a desktop system and never, ever use a web browser, mail client or a basic media player? Does OSX honestly come without this stuff?
The only thing the MS has really done wrong is bastardize the OS market with software, since hardly anyone wants a naked OS anymore. If your grandma bought a computer and had to go buy/download a web browser, would she think it's fully functional? Screw the 'stifling innovation' charges, you can still install Mozilla, Eudora and any other replacements you want. They just play off of user apathy so that it's easier to go along with the basic tools. Isn't the lazy user equaly to blame here?
I believe it. I'm guessing vulnerability-wise, Linux today is comparable to how Windows 3.1 was. Though a *nix virus would have trouble propagating as a worm or e-mail attachment, an old-fashioned trojan would work quite well.
As an added weakness to what you've mentioned, there's also a common failing among new users to read documentation when they have problems. As long as someone will hold their hand, they'll willingly do just about anything a 'mentor' asks. Install this RPM. Trust me.
There's also the rarely-recognized Avant which acts as an IE frontend, has the now-typical blocking features, good tabbed browsing controls, and remembers your open pages like Opera.
So, that would make IE *better* than Mozilla? Gasp at the heresy!
Safe enough, though it'll hardly make a dent in the disease. CWD is NOT a virus, it's a hell of a lot worse little bugger. There's really only two ways to counteract the disease, and neither gives warm fuzzies to self-labeled environmentalists.
1-Kill the potential carriers. ALL of them, as many as can be found, reducing populations so drastically that it'll take 30-40 years for numbers to come back up, giving plenty of time for the disease to run its course in the one or two surviving carriers. Naturally, this means that wolves will starve to death, and is a potentially nasty setback in the gene pool of affected species.
2-Cure it. Not a bad solution, but it's a medical breakthrough on par with curing cancer. Still, researchers should get to work on fighting prions anyway. If anything similar to CWD ever came to affect humans it'd be a catastrophic plague. Near as we can tell it's 100% lethal, irreversible once contracted, incubates for months or years before symptoms show, about as contagious as mononucleosis, and the pathogen isn't harmed by most disinfecting techniques. The only relief about prions is that it seems to take multiple exposures of significant volume before the full effect is reached, much like low-level carcinogens.
Pfft. Forget B-movies, Return of the King did it! I'm not specifically familiar with Wilhelm, but I noticed that they used a canned scream *twice in the same movie*. I forget the exact events, think one was when a Southron fell off an oliphaunt and the other was for a random Gondor soldier falling off a wall. Even worse, I had recently seen the Two Towers, and they used the same damn sound clip at Helm's Deep, for a soldier getting thrown off a wall in similar fashion.
I've seen specific mention that PJ didn't like the SotS chapter, he'd said something along the lines that it felt awkward and out of place. I do agree a little, but the book did lean on the idea of lingering scars left by such events. There has to be some kind of a wind-down too, you don't end that kind of epic suddenly unless you're angling for another sequel later.
Haven't seen the movie yet, but I'm guessing PJ fills that need by bringing Arwen back in for more screen time than she deserves, *again*.
It's times like this that I wish it wasn't a federal offense to send feces in the mail.
What? Say it ain't so! I remember back in the dotcom glory days there was a company set up for exactly this type of service. Wish I could remember the name...
It was cheap too, not much more than the cost of shipping and a plastic bag. Too bad they never developed a self-incendiary version.
There's another option though: Go in and vote for someone who you *know* will never win. Doesn't matter as much that they'll never be in office, but vote Green or Libertarian, and encourage any other apathetic voters to do the same. If you don't like the oddball candidates, don't worry, they don't have a chance in hell of winning, and the major parties would be pissing their pants if an outside candidate ever got as much as a 15% vote.
Elevating the share of votes these third-party groups receive is about the only way we'll see change in candidates. The reason for identical Dems and Reps is the same as for the reality-TV glut. It WORKS. Even though it's generally agreed to suck, since it pays off, there's no reason to change.
Well, the simple response would be, don't do that if the result bothers you. Yes, there are a couple exploits in both Fallout games that can provide unlimited money or experience if you drill them hard enough. If you ruin the game's fun by abusing its mechanics to boredom, it's your own fault.
Incidentally, I don't know what crazy unpatched version you were playing, but there are 5 book-learned skills, and reading can't push them past 91%. If you're playing for numbers, you're missing the point anyway. Getting Sulik to curse your existence, joking with the CoC that you're here to burn down their church, and offering candy to kids only to have them run screaming in terror... *that* is what the Fallout series is all about.
(-1, trolled)
How exactly is this gengineered food 'worse'? How is the molecular structure of something changed just because it went through some spooky unnatural process? I fail to see the dilemma in normal chemistry that results from you eating something, processing it, and then discarding it after its usefulness is depleted so that something else can use the components.
Do you think you can outsmart evolution/God/whatever you want to call it?
NO. Jesus. (oops...)
It's like building a sports car, just with different materials involved. Is steel manufacturing blasphemous because it interferes with the planet's naturally occuring iron ore? The only modification is that you're messing with living things that have to directly deal with the consequences of your actions. Don't bitch because we made glowing fish, but if it turns out they develop horrible tumors or halved lifespans or severe mental distress at the awful colors, then there's a valid moral conflict.
If only it were so easy with spammers. I don't think any resolution will be possible until filters are more mainstream, like Outlook/OE. Technology is too easily fought with new technology, regardless of what side it's on. Spammers have money, antispammers just have anger and impatience.
There's no good way to incur costs on spammers without eating it yourself, such as bandwidth fees, and even then you don't know if it's really the spammer or a hijacked fly-by-night system that's on the other end. It can't be killed by adding cost, it MUST see the revenue dry up.
BTW, my favorite anti-marketing slap is for telemarketers... just answer the phone, and whenever they ask for Mr. X (who do you know that calls you Mr/Mrs?), just set the phone down and walk away. It's incredibly aggravating for them to spew the whole sales pitch only to find out that nobody's even there. Old-fashioned tarpit.