You seem to have missed the fact that in part of the world the journals want TeX and some won't won't even accept Word, so things aren't as simple as you make them out to be.
In any case, your analogy doesn't work. Rejecting a solution because you don't like the background color is (under most circumstances) silly. But that's not at all the situation here. I've given a number of good reasons for not having used or wanting to use MS Word, as have some other posters. Obviously using MS Word is a solution to the demand that you use MS Word, but it doesn't help much if you already have lots of stuff in TeX, and repeating this obvious point doesn't address all the other reasons I have for not using Word. If you're happy with Word, fine, but the entire world doesn't revolve around Microsoft or around you.
Yeah, I could probably shift to LaTeX for things I haven't yet written, but converting from complex Plain TeX to LaTeX is not trivial.
Publicon looks interesting. I hadn't heard of it, though I have used the Mathematica notebook interface so that part is not unfamiliar.
At the moment it looks like they have it only for MS Windows and Mac OS, but maybe they'll port it to GNU/Linux.
That is useful information, thanks. Am I right in thinking that their software is a plugin to MS Word, so I'll need to get access to a something with Word on it? (My machines all run GNU/Linux.)
I've answered above about reasons for using TeX. One factor that has changed is fonts. Not very long ago, there simply were not generally available fonts for some of the writing systems that I work with, in particular the so-called "Carrier syllabics". This has changed with Unicode taking off - not only are most writing systems encoded, but there are fonts available for them.
So, yes, one thing I can do and have done is to strip the TeX formatting, convert the TeX macros for unusual characters to Unicode, and so generate a plaintext Unicode document that then has to be manually reformatted in OpenOffice (if I do it) or MS Word (if I can get someobody else to do it).
That way at least the funny characters don't have to be manually re-entered.
There are really two issues here, for me. One is what to do with the rather large amount of stuff that I have already in TeX. The other is what to use for new projects. I'm not going to use MS Word itself for both technical and political reasons. OpenOffice.org Writer overcomes some of my objections to MS Word, but I still hate, and find really slow and tedious, the whole WYSIWYG approach. So I'm not committed to TeX, but I do very strongly prefer a markup system to a WYSIWYG
system.
I'm in Linguistics and do a pretty wide range of research, so depending on the paper I may need phonetic notation, all manner of writing systems, trees and other diagrams, equations, photographs, maps, and complex tables. I use TeX for several reasons. One is inertia. I switched years ago from troff to TeX, got to be pretty good at it, and haven't been strongly motivated to switch. Although I've used LaTeX a little, by the time I looked into it I had a lot invested in low-level TeX stuff that did what I wanted and it would have been a lot of work to switch.
There are a number of additional reasons why I don't use MS Word. One is that I hate WISIAYG word processing. I find it really tedious. I generate a lot of documents programmatically, for which TeX is good and Word nearly impossible. The quality of TeX output is superior to that of Word. Equations in Word are still awful. I've got one little paper with equations in it that I wrote in TeX, then translated to WordPerfect for the editor, then to MS Word for the publisher. The equations are much nicer in my version than in the journal. A final factor is that I'm a Unix guy and don't even have an MS Windows partition, so I can't run MS Word
without a good bit of trouble and expense.I do sometimes use OpenOffice.org Writer, but for most things I find it just as tedious to use as MS Word.
Unlike many TeX users I know, I'm not in love with it. The formatting is great, but the language is an abortion. I guess it made sense to use a macro language when Knuth was first working on it and had to be concerned with severe memory limitations and portability issues, but with all due respect to Knuth, TeX is really painful to if it is at all complicated, and even worse to read. TeX's handling of Unicode is also still inadequate. I'd be thrilled to see a new text formatting language, one with a layout model like TeX's but with a nice, clean modern language and Unicode as its native encoding. The closest I've seen is Lout.
It looks interesting, though I'm not sure that Lisp is my ideal choice for a text formatting language, and adopting a new system if you do complicated writing is a lot of work no matter what it is.
Docbook looks attractive, and I've been playing with it. It may be the long term solution, but even assuming that it can do everything I need, it won't be a great solution if it can't generate something that the journals will take. If they're still insisting on MS Word a few years down the road and Docbook can't generate it, it won't really be a solution.
I'm in Linguistics, which covers a lot of areas with different publishing needs and different journals. Some journals fall more-or-less into the math and CS camp and want TeX. One leading journal the last I knew preferred Postscript (I wonder if they now prefer PDF - have to check). Some of them until fairly recently didn't make any specific demands because they still remember the days when everything came in on paper or in a zillion incompatible word processor formats. The problem is that MS Word has so dominated the market outside of some technical fields that they just assume that everybody uses Word. One editor asked me for the electronic version of the paper, without saying anything about the format. When I emailed him the TeX file, he had no idea what it was.
To some extent of course you can favor journals that accept convenient formats, but there are a lot of limitations on that. Sometimes the paper really should go to a particular journal in order to reach the appropriate audience and/or in order to get the most brownie points. Sometimes you commit the paper before you know who the publisher will be and what format it will want. That happens with conference proceedings, Festschriften, edited collections, and so forth. And some journals don't say anything up front, so if you don't think to ask in advance, you end up in the situation in which you've invested a lot of time and energy getting the paper revised and accepted, the journal has also invested time and energy, and you really don't want to pull out at that point.
Linguistics doesn't get the same kind of funding as the natural sciences and engineering, so no, we often don't have assistants to handle this kind of thing. Anyhow, I tried to hire a grad student to do the conversions and didn't get a single response. I guess they're better off financially than when I was a student.
According to the 9th circuit's decision, Lexmark didn't start the litigation, and in fact, Lexmark has never taken any action against consumers. The lawsuit was filed by a group of cartridge refillers who claimed that Lexmark was acting improperly in making the claims that it did. So it isn't Lexmark that is trying to deal with a bad business decision by litigation.
Secondly, the evidence is, according to the 9th circuit, that Lexmark didn't make a bad business decision. Originally, Lexmark didn't manufacture cartridges. It realized that this was an area in which it could make a lot of money, and it started to manufacture and sell cartridges. Under the system described, their profits rose considerably. As I read the description in the decision, it is not the case that Lexmark screwed up by offering the "prebates" and then went legal after they started losing money.
The question for me is whether the buyer knew what the deal was AT THE TIME OF PURCHASE. If I go into a store, see a big poster laying out Lexmark's proposal, decide I like it, and purchase a cartridge, a meeting of the minds has occurred and the contract is valid. If on the other hand there is no mention of the restrictions anywhere but on a part of the box that I may not even see, or only on the inside, or on a piece of paper they give me at the cash register after I buy it, then there was no meeting of the minds and I am not bound by Lexmark's restrictions. That's the way it should be at any rate, though the US courts have been losing sight of the fundamental principle of contract law and seem to think that conditions imposed unilaterally after sale are sometimes valid.
I've never bought one of these cartridges and don't have personal knowledge of what information the buyer has before buying one. The decision is, unfortunately, not detailed on this point. It does however say that the deal is laid out not only on the boxes but on Lexmark's web site and in the media. So its an open question whether or not there was a valid contract, but if the Ninth Circuit's description is right, there may well have been.
In general, nothing prevents sellers from changing their prices in the future, including in ways that make what seemed like a good deal not such a good deal, but unless they do it in bad faith, so what? If you go to a car dealer and make a deal where you get so much off the full price of a car, so that you get it for price X, and a few months later the dealer lowers the asking price on that car to X,
your deal may not seem like such a good deal, but you don't have any legal recourse and are still bound by the contract you signed with the dealer. That's assuming the dealer acted in good faith, i.e. that X+D was the real asking price when you bought your car, and that he lowered the price later for a valid reason, such as depression of the market. If the dealer artificially inflated the asking price and what you got at a discount was the real asking price, he is in trouble and could be sued for deceptive advertising and related matters. People can and do win such suits.
I'm not saying that I necessarily like Lexmark's approach. There are probably other, better arrangements. But that doesn't make what they're doing a scam or the contract you make with them unenforceable.
Personally, I think that rebate programs are a bad deal and would like to see them eliminated. It can be a pain to fill out the forms and remember to send them in within the time limit, especially if they aren't for a lot of money. I'd much rather they just cut the price. I assume that they're relying on the fact that a good percentage of buyers will not submit the rebate form and won't have to be paid. I'd like to see that kind of rebate program outlawed since it hurts consumers without as far as I can see doing anything legitimate for sellers. But is it a scam? Not really. They're not hiding anything. The buyer knows what the deal is up front.
I'm not sure there's anything to see here folks. TFA doesn't mention what seems to be a crucial fact: Lexmark offers consumers a choice. They can buy the cartridge at the regular price without any restrictions on what they do with it or they can buy it at a discounted price, in return for which they agree to return the cartridge to Lexmark. The boxes are marked differently. There are "prebate" boxes, which carry a notice explaining that these cartridges are to be returned to Lexmark, and there are "regular" boxes.
It seems to me that this is perfectly fair, so long as the purchaser knows what the deal is up front. Its clear that he or she has a choice as to whether or not to accept the deal since Lexmark is offering both arrangments. You can't say that Lexmark is using monopoly power to force people to buy its products whether they like the contract or not if it explictly offers two different deals.
It's possible, of course, that Lexmark or the dealers that sell its products are not up front about the two deals, but the Ninth Circuit, which is known, generally, for its "left-wing" slant and is hardly anti-consumer, didn't find evidence of that. Here's the decision
Am I missing something?
My experience exactly. Mac OS X is better than MS Windows or previous versions of Mac OS because I can get at a kind of Unix, but for the most part the things that distinguish it from GNU/Linux or FreeBSD or Solaris etc. just get in my way.
As for the Mac GUI being intuitive, I can only say that
years ago, when I first used a Mac, it took me twenty
minutes to figure out that the trashcan was for deleting files. That moving the icon of a floppy disk to the trash can is the way to eject it still seems perverse.
It makes sense for people whose preferred language is always the same and always available (meaning English) to encode this in the card, but some of us like to try out different languages at ATM machines. I've done my banking thus far in: English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, German, and Polish. I've been tempted to try in Vietnamese and Hmong (Wells Fargo machine in Flagstaff), but chickened out since I don't know either language at all.
Furthermore, you don't get the same choices everywhere. If your preferred language is Spanish, you'll always have that available in the US, but in Canada your choices are English, French, and (at least in Vancouver), Chinese.
Yet another situation is one in which you usually use a certain language, either because its the most comfortable for you or because you want to practice it, but now and then want to use a different language for the benefit of someone else, say a child whom you are teaching to use the machine, who doesn't know your preferred language.
So, it makes sense to have stored preferences for those who want them, but you need to provide for the case where the preferred language isn't available, and for people who for one reason or another don't want the language to be fixed.
Kai-Fu Lee isn't your average MBA with no clue about technology. He's a computer scientist. So he probably does know about Microsoft technology.
In any case, trade secrets do not have to be technical. They include business strategy and plans. If a VP knows that Microsoft has decided that the next big market is networked refrigerator magnets that play polka music, he knows a trade secret that could be of benefit to a competitor, even if he has not the slightest knowledge of the technology.
I'm no fan of Microsoft or of placing undue restrictions on where people can work, but Microsoft may well have some legitimate concerns here.
That's a good point. People frequently misperceive risks and deal with them irrationally.There is a whole psychological literature on this, due in large part to the late Amos Tversky. One example is fear of flying. Statistically, the risk of flying is much less than the risk of being killed in an automobile accident.
The cost of smoke detectors should really be considerably less than parent calculates, for two reasons. One is that a lot of people already have them. The second is that we don't need one per person. For residential areas, you need at most one per room. Since most couples sleep in the same bedroom and kids often share rooms, the number of smoke detectors needed per person is probably less than 0.5. It should be safe to cut the cost estimate in half.
On the other hand, its hard to compare the damage at risk from terrorism with that from fire. Death by fire arises from a large number of events each of which has only a very small probability of killing more than a few people. Statistically, over a country the size of the United States, estimates of the total number of deaths by fire and other such causes are going to be quite reliable. Terrorists, unlike fire, do not strike at random. They usually want to cause as much damage as they can, and modern technology gives them the means to do that. With luck a suicide bomber kills no one but himself; without it, he'll take a dozen or so people with him. The 9/11 terrorists killed 3,000. They probably could have increased that number by an order of magnitude if they gone for something less flashy than the world trade center, say blowing up a major sports arena or concert venue while an event was going on. A small nuke could kill several hundred thousand.
The problem is, it is very hard to estimate the relative probability of a successful terrorist act that kills only a few and one that kills many thousands. This makes it hard to distribute resources rationally, even if you are so inclined and in principal understand how to do so.
The Snopes article about KFC's name change linked to by parent is a spoof! If you click on the more information link at the bottom of the page, it takes you to this page, which explains that everything in that section, including the KFC article, is a spoof, intended to warn people against relying on authority without checking things out themselves.
When I was grad student I worked at Bell Labs. The machines on which phonetics was done were several single-user SELS (kind of like VAXen) networked to a PDP11-23, to which the tape drive we used for backup was attached. Audio occupied a lot of space, so we each had one or more personal 100MB disk packs. When you came in you would shut down the machine, remove the scratch disk, put in one of yours, and reboot.
The disk packs were removable in the sense that you could open up the drive and take them out, but they weren't removable in the sense of being intended to be removed. These were sets of I forget how many platters on a spindle that hung down from a plastic cover with a handle on top, kind of like the covers on cake and pie stands in restaurants. When you took one out, the platters were exposed to the air, and dust, and anything else floating around. The drives lived in a machine room, but it wasn't a clean room. We tried to expose the disk packs to the air as little as possible and to inspect them as best we could, but in these conditions it is pretty much guaranteed that after a while you're going to have a head crash. You just can't fly a Boeing 747 at 600 miles an hour six inches off the ground for very long before it hits something. So backups were important. They were also somewhat tedious since they involved not only the usual business of mounting tapes on the tape drive and so forth but incantations to get the data from a disk drive on an SEL to the 11-23 to which the tape drive was attached.
To make a long story short, having collected a fair amount of data I decided it was time to make my first backup. Everything went alright until it was nearly done, at which point the disk drive decided that it would be a good time to have a head crash. That's right: it crashed DURING the backup. This is one reason I recommend against digitizing speech directly into a laptop - I just know its going to die before they back it up.
Apple is within its rights in going after people who have pirated their software or violated an NDA, but the MacBidouille post says that Apple demanded that they take down videos showing OS X running on non-Apple hardware. As the article says, that is killing the messenger, and Apple has no right to do it, morally or, at least in the US, legally. If John Doe burns down Mary Roe's house and someone photographs the smoking remains, or for that matter photographs John lighting the match, Mary has no legal or moral right to prevent the photos from being published. The photos show that the crime occurred - they don't abet it and they don't reveal information that Mary has a right to keep private. Similarly, a video of OS X running on a PC does not abet any wrong done in making it happen and it does not improperly disclose any Apple trade secrets.
My guess is that the urine just acts as the
electrolyte. It doesn't have to be extremely acidic to be a usable electrolyte. Normal urine has a pH of around 6, but the pH can be as low as 4 or as high as 8. The main mechanism used by the body to maintain pH balance is the excretion of acidic or alkaline urine. Diet has a signficant effect. Vegetarians tend to have more alkaline urine, people who eat a lot of meat more acidic urine. Starvation and dehydration increase the acidity of the urine. Also, decreased respiration during sleep results in more acidic urine, so your wake-up pee is likely to be rather acidic. So remember, charge your batteries first thing in the morning.:)
Assuming that it is the use of Active X that will make the planned approach IE-only (and there isn't much else it could be), I would point out that Active X is an enormous security problem. State agencies that don't care about standards, lock-in, and non MS Windows users may well care about security.
Yes, I used MIX C when I had to write for DOS.
It was great. A nice compiler, for which you could also get a pretty nice windowing/graphics library and various other things, for very little money. I think that the compiler by itself was only $20 when I got it. I've always wondered how the company made a profit with such low prices.
It looks like they're still in business. Their
website
was updated less than a year ago.
A few months ago I received the worst flood of email that I have ever received due to the unfortunate interaction of two computers. The sysadmin on the machine on which I actually read my mail made an error in updating the mail system (failed to install some PERL module, I think it was) that resulted in the mailer sending out bounce messages although in fact the mail was delivered. A number of these messages were in response to mail forwarded from my account at another institution. Unfortunately, that machine was not configured to detect and terminate loops, so it forwarded the bounce messages back to me, which of course triggered new bounce messages, ad infinitem. I got over 7,000 messages in about 12 hours.
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You seem to have missed the fact that in part of the world the journals want TeX and some won't won't even accept Word, so things aren't as simple as you make them out to be.
In any case, your analogy doesn't work. Rejecting a solution because you don't like the background color is (under most circumstances) silly. But that's not at all the situation here. I've given a number of good reasons for not having used or wanting to use MS Word, as have some other posters. Obviously using MS Word is a solution to the demand that you use MS Word, but it doesn't help much if you already have lots of stuff in TeX, and repeating this obvious point doesn't address all the other reasons I have for not using Word. If you're happy with Word, fine, but the entire world doesn't revolve around Microsoft or around you.
Yeah, I could probably shift to LaTeX for things I haven't yet written, but converting from complex Plain TeX to LaTeX is not trivial.
Publicon looks interesting. I hadn't heard of it, though I have used the Mathematica notebook interface so that part is not unfamiliar. At the moment it looks like they have it only for MS Windows and Mac OS, but maybe they'll port it to GNU/Linux.
I wish I had mod points. This is really funny.
That is useful information, thanks. Am I right in thinking that their software is a plugin to MS Word, so I'll need to get access to a something with Word on it? (My machines all run GNU/Linux.)
I've answered above about reasons for using TeX. One factor that has changed is fonts. Not very long ago, there simply were not generally available fonts for some of the writing systems that I work with, in particular the so-called "Carrier syllabics". This has changed with Unicode taking off - not only are most writing systems encoded, but there are fonts available for them. So, yes, one thing I can do and have done is to strip the TeX formatting, convert the TeX macros for unusual characters to Unicode, and so generate a plaintext Unicode document that then has to be manually reformatted in OpenOffice (if I do it) or MS Word (if I can get someobody else to do it). That way at least the funny characters don't have to be manually re-entered.
There are really two issues here, for me. One is what to do with the rather large amount of stuff that I have already in TeX. The other is what to use for new projects. I'm not going to use MS Word itself for both technical and political reasons. OpenOffice.org Writer overcomes some of my objections to MS Word, but I still hate, and find really slow and tedious, the whole WYSIWYG approach. So I'm not committed to TeX, but I do very strongly prefer a markup system to a WYSIWYG system.
I'm in Linguistics and do a pretty wide range of research, so depending on the paper I may need phonetic notation, all manner of writing systems, trees and other diagrams, equations, photographs, maps, and complex tables. I use TeX for several reasons. One is inertia. I switched years ago from troff to TeX, got to be pretty good at it, and haven't been strongly motivated to switch. Although I've used LaTeX a little, by the time I looked into it I had a lot invested in low-level TeX stuff that did what I wanted and it would have been a lot of work to switch.
There are a number of additional reasons why I don't use MS Word. One is that I hate WISIAYG word processing. I find it really tedious. I generate a lot of documents programmatically, for which TeX is good and Word nearly impossible. The quality of TeX output is superior to that of Word. Equations in Word are still awful. I've got one little paper with equations in it that I wrote in TeX, then translated to WordPerfect for the editor, then to MS Word for the publisher. The equations are much nicer in my version than in the journal. A final factor is that I'm a Unix guy and don't even have an MS Windows partition, so I can't run MS Word without a good bit of trouble and expense.I do sometimes use OpenOffice.org Writer, but for most things I find it just as tedious to use as MS Word.
Unlike many TeX users I know, I'm not in love with it. The formatting is great, but the language is an abortion. I guess it made sense to use a macro language when Knuth was first working on it and had to be concerned with severe memory limitations and portability issues, but with all due respect to Knuth, TeX is really painful to if it is at all complicated, and even worse to read. TeX's handling of Unicode is also still inadequate. I'd be thrilled to see a new text formatting language, one with a layout model like TeX's but with a nice, clean modern language and Unicode as its native encoding. The closest I've seen is Lout. It looks interesting, though I'm not sure that Lisp is my ideal choice for a text formatting language, and adopting a new system if you do complicated writing is a lot of work no matter what it is.
Docbook looks attractive, and I've been playing with it. It may be the long term solution, but even assuming that it can do everything I need, it won't be a great solution if it can't generate something that the journals will take. If they're still insisting on MS Word a few years down the road and Docbook can't generate it, it won't really be a solution.
I'm in Linguistics, which covers a lot of areas with different publishing needs and different journals. Some journals fall more-or-less into the math and CS camp and want TeX. One leading journal the last I knew preferred Postscript (I wonder if they now prefer PDF - have to check). Some of them until fairly recently didn't make any specific demands because they still remember the days when everything came in on paper or in a zillion incompatible word processor formats. The problem is that MS Word has so dominated the market outside of some technical fields that they just assume that everybody uses Word. One editor asked me for the electronic version of the paper, without saying anything about the format. When I emailed him the TeX file, he had no idea what it was.
To some extent of course you can favor journals that accept convenient formats, but there are a lot of limitations on that. Sometimes the paper really should go to a particular journal in order to reach the appropriate audience and/or in order to get the most brownie points. Sometimes you commit the paper before you know who the publisher will be and what format it will want. That happens with conference proceedings, Festschriften, edited collections, and so forth. And some journals don't say anything up front, so if you don't think to ask in advance, you end up in the situation in which you've invested a lot of time and energy getting the paper revised and accepted, the journal has also invested time and energy, and you really don't want to pull out at that point.
I tried LaTeX2rtf but as its name says, it converts LaTeX and I've got plain TeX with lots of my own macros.
Linguistics doesn't get the same kind of funding as the natural sciences and engineering, so no, we often don't have assistants to handle this kind of thing. Anyhow, I tried to hire a grad student to do the conversions and didn't get a single response. I guess they're better off financially than when I was a student.
According to the 9th circuit's decision, Lexmark didn't start the litigation, and in fact, Lexmark has never taken any action against consumers. The lawsuit was filed by a group of cartridge refillers who claimed that Lexmark was acting improperly in making the claims that it did. So it isn't Lexmark that is trying to deal with a bad business decision by litigation.
Secondly, the evidence is, according to the 9th circuit, that Lexmark didn't make a bad business decision. Originally, Lexmark didn't manufacture cartridges. It realized that this was an area in which it could make a lot of money, and it started to manufacture and sell cartridges. Under the system described, their profits rose considerably. As I read the description in the decision, it is not the case that Lexmark screwed up by offering the "prebates" and then went legal after they started losing money.
The question for me is whether the buyer knew what the deal was AT THE TIME OF PURCHASE. If I go into a store, see a big poster laying out Lexmark's proposal, decide I like it, and purchase a cartridge, a meeting of the minds has occurred and the contract is valid. If on the other hand there is no mention of the restrictions anywhere but on a part of the box that I may not even see, or only on the inside, or on a piece of paper they give me at the cash register after I buy it, then there was no meeting of the minds and I am not bound by Lexmark's restrictions. That's the way it should be at any rate, though the US courts have been losing sight of the fundamental principle of contract law and seem to think that conditions imposed unilaterally after sale are sometimes valid.
I've never bought one of these cartridges and don't have personal knowledge of what information the buyer has before buying one. The decision is, unfortunately, not detailed on this point. It does however say that the deal is laid out not only on the boxes but on Lexmark's web site and in the media. So its an open question whether or not there was a valid contract, but if the Ninth Circuit's description is right, there may well have been.
In general, nothing prevents sellers from changing their prices in the future, including in ways that make what seemed like a good deal not such a good deal, but unless they do it in bad faith, so what? If you go to a car dealer and make a deal where you get so much off the full price of a car, so that you get it for price X, and a few months later the dealer lowers the asking price on that car to X, your deal may not seem like such a good deal, but you don't have any legal recourse and are still bound by the contract you signed with the dealer. That's assuming the dealer acted in good faith, i.e. that X+D was the real asking price when you bought your car, and that he lowered the price later for a valid reason, such as depression of the market. If the dealer artificially inflated the asking price and what you got at a discount was the real asking price, he is in trouble and could be sued for deceptive advertising and related matters. People can and do win such suits.
I'm not saying that I necessarily like Lexmark's approach. There are probably other, better arrangements. But that doesn't make what they're doing a scam or the contract you make with them unenforceable.
Personally, I think that rebate programs are a bad deal and would like to see them eliminated. It can be a pain to fill out the forms and remember to send them in within the time limit, especially if they aren't for a lot of money. I'd much rather they just cut the price. I assume that they're relying on the fact that a good percentage of buyers will not submit the rebate form and won't have to be paid. I'd like to see that kind of rebate program outlawed since it hurts consumers without as far as I can see doing anything legitimate for sellers. But is it a scam? Not really. They're not hiding anything. The buyer knows what the deal is up front.
I'm not sure there's anything to see here folks. TFA doesn't mention what seems to be a crucial fact: Lexmark offers consumers a choice. They can buy the cartridge at the regular price without any restrictions on what they do with it or they can buy it at a discounted price, in return for which they agree to return the cartridge to Lexmark. The boxes are marked differently. There are "prebate" boxes, which carry a notice explaining that these cartridges are to be returned to Lexmark, and there are "regular" boxes.
It seems to me that this is perfectly fair, so long as the purchaser knows what the deal is up front. Its clear that he or she has a choice as to whether or not to accept the deal since Lexmark is offering both arrangments. You can't say that Lexmark is using monopoly power to force people to buy its products whether they like the contract or not if it explictly offers two different deals. It's possible, of course, that Lexmark or the dealers that sell its products are not up front about the two deals, but the Ninth Circuit, which is known, generally, for its "left-wing" slant and is hardly anti-consumer, didn't find evidence of that. Here's the decision Am I missing something?
My experience exactly. Mac OS X is better than MS Windows or previous versions of Mac OS because I can get at a kind of Unix, but for the most part the things that distinguish it from GNU/Linux or FreeBSD or Solaris etc. just get in my way.
As for the Mac GUI being intuitive, I can only say that years ago, when I first used a Mac, it took me twenty minutes to figure out that the trashcan was for deleting files. That moving the icon of a floppy disk to the trash can is the way to eject it still seems perverse.
It makes sense for people whose preferred language is always the same and always available (meaning English) to encode this in the card, but some of us like to try out different languages at ATM machines. I've done my banking thus far in: English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, German, and Polish. I've been tempted to try in Vietnamese and Hmong (Wells Fargo machine in Flagstaff), but chickened out since I don't know either language at all.
Furthermore, you don't get the same choices everywhere. If your preferred language is Spanish, you'll always have that available in the US, but in Canada your choices are English, French, and (at least in Vancouver), Chinese.
Yet another situation is one in which you usually use a certain language, either because its the most comfortable for you or because you want to practice it, but now and then want to use a different language for the benefit of someone else, say a child whom you are teaching to use the machine, who doesn't know your preferred language.
So, it makes sense to have stored preferences for those who want them, but you need to provide for the case where the preferred language isn't available, and for people who for one reason or another don't want the language to be fixed.
Kai-Fu Lee isn't your average MBA with no clue about technology. He's a computer scientist. So he probably does know about Microsoft technology.
In any case, trade secrets do not have to be technical. They include business strategy and plans. If a VP knows that Microsoft has decided that the next big market is networked refrigerator magnets that play polka music, he knows a trade secret that could be of benefit to a competitor, even if he has not the slightest knowledge of the technology.
I'm no fan of Microsoft or of placing undue restrictions on where people can work, but Microsoft may well have some legitimate concerns here.
That's a good point. People frequently misperceive risks and deal with them irrationally.There is a whole psychological literature on this, due in large part to the late Amos Tversky. One example is fear of flying. Statistically, the risk of flying is much less than the risk of being killed in an automobile accident.
The cost of smoke detectors should really be considerably less than parent calculates, for two reasons. One is that a lot of people already have them. The second is that we don't need one per person. For residential areas, you need at most one per room. Since most couples sleep in the same bedroom and kids often share rooms, the number of smoke detectors needed per person is probably less than 0.5. It should be safe to cut the cost estimate in half.
On the other hand, its hard to compare the damage at risk from terrorism with that from fire. Death by fire arises from a large number of events each of which has only a very small probability of killing more than a few people. Statistically, over a country the size of the United States, estimates of the total number of deaths by fire and other such causes are going to be quite reliable. Terrorists, unlike fire, do not strike at random. They usually want to cause as much damage as they can, and modern technology gives them the means to do that. With luck a suicide bomber kills no one but himself; without it, he'll take a dozen or so people with him. The 9/11 terrorists killed 3,000. They probably could have increased that number by an order of magnitude if they gone for something less flashy than the world trade center, say blowing up a major sports arena or concert venue while an event was going on. A small nuke could kill several hundred thousand. The problem is, it is very hard to estimate the relative probability of a successful terrorist act that kills only a few and one that kills many thousands. This makes it hard to distribute resources rationally, even if you are so inclined and in principal understand how to do so.
The Snopes article about KFC's name change linked to by parent is a spoof! If you click on the more information link at the bottom of the page, it takes you to this page, which explains that everything in that section, including the KFC article, is a spoof, intended to warn people against relying on authority without checking things out themselves.
Of course, for the hard core some choices would be different:
When I was grad student I worked at Bell Labs. The machines on which phonetics was done were several single-user SELS (kind of like VAXen) networked to a PDP11-23, to which the tape drive we used for backup was attached. Audio occupied a lot of space, so we each had one or more personal 100MB disk packs. When you came in you would shut down the machine, remove the scratch disk, put in one of yours, and reboot.
The disk packs were removable in the sense that you could open up the drive and take them out, but they weren't removable in the sense of being intended to be removed. These were sets of I forget how many platters on a spindle that hung down from a plastic cover with a handle on top, kind of like the covers on cake and pie stands in restaurants. When you took one out, the platters were exposed to the air, and dust, and anything else floating around. The drives lived in a machine room, but it wasn't a clean room. We tried to expose the disk packs to the air as little as possible and to inspect them as best we could, but in these conditions it is pretty much guaranteed that after a while you're going to have a head crash. You just can't fly a Boeing 747 at 600 miles an hour six inches off the ground for very long before it hits something. So backups were important. They were also somewhat tedious since they involved not only the usual business of mounting tapes on the tape drive and so forth but incantations to get the data from a disk drive on an SEL to the 11-23 to which the tape drive was attached.
To make a long story short, having collected a fair amount of data I decided it was time to make my first backup. Everything went alright until it was nearly done, at which point the disk drive decided that it would be a good time to have a head crash. That's right: it crashed DURING the backup. This is one reason I recommend against digitizing speech directly into a laptop - I just know its going to die before they back it up.
Apple is within its rights in going after people who have pirated their software or violated an NDA, but the MacBidouille post says that Apple demanded that they take down videos showing OS X running on non-Apple hardware. As the article says, that is killing the messenger, and Apple has no right to do it, morally or, at least in the US, legally. If John Doe burns down Mary Roe's house and someone photographs the smoking remains, or for that matter photographs John lighting the match, Mary has no legal or moral right to prevent the photos from being published. The photos show that the crime occurred - they don't abet it and they don't reveal information that Mary has a right to keep private. Similarly, a video of OS X running on a PC does not abet any wrong done in making it happen and it does not improperly disclose any Apple trade secrets.
My guess is that the urine just acts as the electrolyte. It doesn't have to be extremely acidic to be a usable electrolyte. Normal urine has a pH of around 6, but the pH can be as low as 4 or as high as 8. The main mechanism used by the body to maintain pH balance is the excretion of acidic or alkaline urine. Diet has a signficant effect. Vegetarians tend to have more alkaline urine, people who eat a lot of meat more acidic urine. Starvation and dehydration increase the acidity of the urine. Also, decreased respiration during sleep results in more acidic urine, so your wake-up pee is likely to be rather acidic. So remember, charge your batteries first thing in the morning. :)
Assuming that it is the use of Active X that will make the planned approach IE-only (and there isn't much else it could be), I would point out that Active X is an enormous security problem. State agencies that don't care about standards, lock-in, and non MS Windows users may well care about security.
The article says "state-level". The IRS is part of the federal government.
Yes, I used MIX C when I had to write for DOS. It was great. A nice compiler, for which you could also get a pretty nice windowing/graphics library and various other things, for very little money. I think that the compiler by itself was only $20 when I got it. I've always wondered how the company made a profit with such low prices.
It looks like they're still in business. Their website was updated less than a year ago.
A few months ago I received the worst flood of email that I have ever received due to the unfortunate interaction of two computers. The sysadmin on the machine on which I actually read my mail made an error in updating the mail system (failed to install some PERL module, I think it was) that resulted in the mailer sending out bounce messages although in fact the mail was delivered. A number of these messages were in response to mail forwarded from my account at another institution. Unfortunately, that machine was not configured to detect and terminate loops, so it forwarded the bounce messages back to me, which of course triggered new bounce messages, ad infinitem. I got over 7,000 messages in about 12 hours.