I certainly agree that each bill should be fully understood before it's voted on, which would mean a LOT more time between introduction and passing, which would mean fewer bills being passed, which is fine with me except in emergency situations (like aid to hurricane victims, etc.).
I think part of the problem is that unrelated laws are being passed in the same bill & they're given media friendly names based on only one part of the bundle. A good thing would be to force the unbundling of unrelated acts. That way it would be easier to summarize the meaning of the bill & harder to hide the bad stuff.
That way a senator/congressman that wanted to vote down the "Give the police the ability to shoot anyone suspected of thinking of doing anything subversive" clause wouldn't be criticised for voting against "providing Hurricane relief to Florida" because the two things happened to be in the same bill.
If the Hurricane relief bill could legally only contain clauses relating directly to disaster relief in Southern USA people would not have to study the bills to make sure there wasn't any "accidental Fascism" contained within. Or alternatively set up a Disater Relief office with a flexible budget that can come to the aid of areas hit by natural disasters as & when required. Some years they'd be grossly under the projected budget; other years they'd be over but you wouldn't have to get a bill passed every time a hurricane hits.
Personally I'd be a lot happier to see a slowing down of legislation if it avoids the erosion of fundamental rights.
Fahreinheit 911 had a good take on the Patriot act with that Senator going "we don't have enough time to read all the bills" etc. I'm sorry but THAT'S YOUR FUCKING JOB. That's why it's called "a reading" before the law is passed - YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO READ IT. During the "reading" if it turns up late and if it takes a week to read it, fine, that'll teach the legislators to publish the draft bills early enough to get them thouroughly read before the reading.
Democracy is quietly dying because a buch of lazy people will happily pass the "Happy fluffy bunny (you'd be a nasty pinko liberal for not passing this) bill" without actually reading it and finding out that it disbands senate & congress and leaves all legislative & executive power in the hands of the president who now has an extended (life) term of office.
Tell me when the last popular free book written in modern times came. Tell me when the last popular free 3d FPS was released. Tell me when the last amateur film made it big, got shown in cinemas world wide. You cant.
But I can try:-
All of the Russian underground books in the '70s & 80s
America's Army is still quite popular - no?
Too many to mention - how about the "Blair Witch Project" for starters?
Exactly - the correct comparison for Yankee to have done is to compare how much it would cost to go from 2000 - 2003/XP compared with how much it would cost to upgrade from, say, Suse 8.0 - Suse 9.0
Of course we all know that this comparison would not produce the "desired" result so it wouldn't be published by Microsoft. Otherwise even the most clueless PHB would be able to do the maths:-
One painful transition followed by virtually free upgrades forever (plus longer lifespans for hardware and cheaper overall support costs because Unix Admins do more work & less firefighting) vs expensive upgrades every 4 years or so and regular pain every time the worm du jour rips through the organisation.
I think what we might be dealing with is fallout from the Free Trade Agreement with Canada whereby the Indian company sets up an office in Canada which then negotiates with the American company as a Canadian firm with all of the FTA related breaks but the work is actually carried out in India.
I'm sure the Canadians view this as pretty ironic given that a similar trick was used by the Americans to destroy the Canadian car industry vis using the two FTAs with Canada & Mexico to sell Mexican built cars to the Canadians as if they were American for the purposes of tarriffs.
And John Howard has just signed Australia up for an FTA with America - smart move John, we'll be thanking you for that one for the next 50 years. The only hope Australia's got IMHO is to sign a FTA with China & threaten America with mutually assured destruction if they try to play fast & loose with the terms of the contract. Note - first ever correct usage of the word "loose" in the history of slashdot
I think the main problem in Australia is that the ALP has been totally ****ing useless in the 3 years I've lived here. I was here the last time mini-Adolf got voted in and Labor happily let him reduce the agenda for the election to "foreign people are bad" notwithstanding the fact that all but about 60000 Australians have no Australian ancestry going back more than 250 years...
This time around people just seemed to ignore the fact that the 2001 Australian election was "stolen" in that Mini-Adolf lied is a$$ off about babies overboard. Since then we've had "core promises" and "non-core promises" - why the hell didn't Latham ask Mini-Adolf to say which of his promises THIS time around were "non-core promises" to remind people what a lying rodent he is?
Now he's back in and within 7 days the chancellor is warming us up to another bunch of broken promises.
That's the problem with compulsory voting - all of the really stupid people who don't really get this politics stuff HAVE to vote. Maybe we should have a large notice on the ballot paper saying "you do not win a prize if you get the winner correct" That might help...
Rant over - I feel better now
One other interesting fact about original MUD from the 1980s involving a VERY well known character:-
One player of the Essex MUD was Alan Cox, also known as Anarchy. He
wrote (with a bit of help) AberMUD, named after the University of
Aberystwyth, Wales, which he attended at the time. It was originally
implemented on a Honeywell mainframe running GCOS but was soon ported
to UNIX. Its poor design and implementation (all game information was
stored in a shared file, which meant that several processes were
constantly accessing the disc) did not endear it to many system
administrators. Nevertheless, it was the first MUD to gain widespread
popularity. After the source code reached the United States, several
people made enhancements and additions, notably Rich $alz. It now
seems to have found a home at St. Olaf University, where a few
dedicated hackers are keeping it alive despite its general grunginess.
I believe he's still programming somewhere & has improved greatly...;)
Clearly you haven't played MUD which (as far as I can tell from research) predated LORD by over 10 years. LORD according to one site I checked started in the "early '90s" whereas MUD...
> The history of MUDs all starts in the UK, about 1979. Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University, started writing MUD, a game written in BCPL on a DEC-10. Along with Richard Bartle, who tidied up the system and added a very crude database compiler for it, they produced a very good combat game for it.
When you've got a REAL terrorist threat like we did in England from the IRA you get a s**tload more than one terrorist attack in 3 years.
Oh, and thanks a bunch America for funding terrorists in one of your most "valued" allies.
When Bush announced the war on terror I initially said "good" because I thought he was going to arrest the IRA fundraisers in the USA & extradite them to England - well, maybe I didn't. But really terrorism is all a matter of perspective. It's where you sit & what you perceive.
The British army in Belfast was either protecting law abiding citizens from terrorists or a bunch of terrorists depending on your religion (usually).
Similarly some people in Iraq view American soldiers running around crushing cars with tanks as terrorists, others see that they are trying to keep the peace. You can't be black and white about this.
Individually acts of terrorism are indefensible but there is inevitably a group that seems to think they are justified.
The only real way to stop terrorism is to stop giving terrorists a reason to terrorise.
Yes, I am. I spoke to a friend who's an Office guru & he showed me how to do it.
You are correct that Word does have the facility but in my opinion it is hidden. In the Atari ST program I was referring to the option was very easy to find; click/drag the lines you want to link then select a menu option - not a tabbed dialog. Then the linkage was indicated by a vertical line in the margin so you know immediately which lines are linked. Format|Paragraph|Line & Page Breaks - is not intuitive to me. I can write a macro to streamline the process but I still lack the visual feedback.
The fact that I've been using Word since version 6 or 7 (the last 16 bit Windows 3.1 version) and have used every version since without finding out how to do this by experimentation proves my point. I'm a coder & a casual user. I don't like bad user interfaces. I work hard to avoid creating them and I have a very low tolerance for poor interface design as a result. I'm amazed that a multi billion $ organisation with huge testing labs hasn't raised this as an issue and given an alternative method to achieve it.
Never say never - in less than a year when HP are shipping those babies out at less than half price you may be tempted.
I agree totally that with the current price differential the brand value that Apple brings to the table makes everything else look very unattractive. IMO the only way HP are going to ship their IPod clones is to give them away / bundle with other products (laptops or Pocket PCs?) or reduce the price
One thing that Microsoft Word continues to have are some features very useful for the average user.
Word also has some truly amazing ommissions too. I've just been upgraded to Word 2003 at work and I notice that there is STILL no way to "link" headings and text to stop leaving an orphaned heading on one page while the information it pertains to starts the next page. I was using a word processor over 15 years ago that could do this and despite Microsoft putting everything including the kitchen sink into Word in the way of useless functionality they haven't added this useful ability (page breaks don't cut it because I want to be able to put extra text above and just guarantee that if the first line of the paragraph breaks it takes the heading with it not end up with a page break half way down the page)
Yep, back in the early 2000s Bluebyte introduced a copy protection scheme that stopped Settlers 3(?) running on my DVD Drive. The game went back; I got a refund & I haven't bought a Bluebyte game since because I've emigrated & I'm not so confident the shops will accept returns over here. Up until that point I had bought EVERY game pretty much that they had released. I'm not into Warez so I just never played Settlers 3 but it still irks me.
A gymnast with a degree in I.T. a sponsorship deal with a chewing gum manufacturer, a job at IBM & an olympic gold medal.
Read 'em & weep boys, Aussie girls take some beating:)
And it does look a little wordy & inefficient for doing the "stuff we do at the moment".
What interests me is what extra cool stuff can be done & if it really can replace flash & ActiveX then I'll drop my cacks to watch the monkeys fly out of my butt.
Secondly I'd like to wait until Dreamweaver makes this easy to do & not an absolute grind. Thinks, better dig out that article on writing Dreamweaver extensions in Delphi...
Yep, but Bush is doing his best to stop any form of democracy in America.
In at least some states the 3 strikes & you're out law is being used to gag peaceful political protests. Bush removed the right of protestors to claim freedom of speech as a defense so basically if you get arrested 3 times for being on a protest march you can be jailed for life.
Gotcha, I see what you mean. Basically M$ replaced an existing package that worked well (but we don't know how well it worked from the internal perspective) with an internally written package that doesn't work as well.
This sort of error should find its way back to the development team and in the end the M$ package will be good enough & it'll be worth the cost to them of developing it.
Think how badly they'd have been reamed on/. if they had continued to use a competing product (see also the hotmail debacle)
That sort of sounds pro-M$ but I'm trying to be fair here. They'd be damned if they didn't use their own package & they're being damned because they did. Naturally working for the great Satan they're eternally damned anyway but you know what I mean;)
Corporate CRM packages autodial & pass the call on to the next free operator in the group putting relevant information up on their screen when they're connected. So a) They probably didn't dial the number themselves & b) They were working off of a script.
I hope the little bastard gets his arse kicked in the coming elections, whereupon he can go visit his former cronies Bush and Blair and reminisce about their glorious pasts as nation builders and great leaders in an old age home for the mentally unstable.
Me too, but what I think will happen is he will go to America & get paid an absolute fortune for a "public speaking tour". Just like Margaret Thatcher did 10 years ago. Corrupt? Never.
I believe politicians should be prevented from doing these things after their retirement for profit. After all they are our employees when they do all of these things that make them marketable and it is worrying if they could be influenced by the possibility of a big payday after they've sold the country down the river...
Probably Government owned. England had state owned housing when I was growing up. Rents were cheaper than the private sector & there were generally large estates of government owned housing; so I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess what the crime rate was in these areas;)
It takes at least a week to put in all of the extra copy protection. After all you know Europe is such a hotbed of piracy - not like Singapore (where I once picked up a legit copy of a game a whole MONTH before it's UK release...)
Slashdot Mirror
I certainly agree that each bill should be fully understood before it's voted on, which would mean a LOT more time between introduction and passing, which would mean fewer bills being passed, which is fine with me except in emergency situations (like aid to hurricane victims, etc.).
I think part of the problem is that unrelated laws are being passed in the same bill & they're given media friendly names based on only one part of the bundle. A good thing would be to force the unbundling of unrelated acts. That way it would be easier to summarize the meaning of the bill & harder to hide the bad stuff.
That way a senator/congressman that wanted to vote down the "Give the police the ability to shoot anyone suspected of thinking of doing anything subversive" clause wouldn't be criticised for voting against "providing Hurricane relief to Florida" because the two things happened to be in the same bill.
If the Hurricane relief bill could legally only contain clauses relating directly to disaster relief in Southern USA people would not have to study the bills to make sure there wasn't any "accidental Fascism" contained within. Or alternatively set up a Disater Relief office with a flexible budget that can come to the aid of areas hit by natural disasters as & when required. Some years they'd be grossly under the projected budget; other years they'd be over but you wouldn't have to get a bill passed every time a hurricane hits.
Personally I'd be a lot happier to see a slowing down of legislation if it avoids the erosion of fundamental rights.
Fahreinheit 911 had a good take on the Patriot act with that Senator going "we don't have enough time to read all the bills" etc. I'm sorry but THAT'S YOUR FUCKING JOB. That's why it's called "a reading" before the law is passed - YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO READ IT. During the "reading" if it turns up late and if it takes a week to read it, fine, that'll teach the legislators to publish the draft bills early enough to get them thouroughly read before the reading.
Democracy is quietly dying because a buch of lazy people will happily pass the "Happy fluffy bunny (you'd be a nasty pinko liberal for not passing this) bill" without actually reading it and finding out that it disbands senate & congress and leaves all legislative & executive power in the hands of the president who now has an extended (life) term of office.
Tell me when the last popular free book written in modern times came. Tell me when the last popular free 3d FPS was released. Tell me when the last amateur film made it big, got shown in cinemas world wide. You cant.
But I can try:-
All of the Russian underground books in the '70s & 80s
America's Army is still quite popular - no?
Too many to mention - how about the "Blair Witch Project" for starters?
Exactly - the correct comparison for Yankee to have done is to compare how much it would cost to go from 2000 - 2003/XP compared with how much it would cost to upgrade from, say, Suse 8.0 - Suse 9.0
Of course we all know that this comparison would not produce the "desired" result so it wouldn't be published by Microsoft. Otherwise even the most clueless PHB would be able to do the maths:-
One painful transition followed by virtually free upgrades forever (plus longer lifespans for hardware and cheaper overall support costs because Unix Admins do more work & less firefighting) vs expensive upgrades every 4 years or so and regular pain every time the worm du jour rips through the organisation.
duh...
I "Borrowed" it from another message board - it made me laugh, mind you you haven't met my wife :)
Mind you I'm getting a bit bored with it now so in deference to your seniority I'll change it..
I think what we might be dealing with is fallout from the Free Trade Agreement with Canada whereby the Indian company sets up an office in Canada which then negotiates with the American company as a Canadian firm with all of the FTA related breaks but the work is actually carried out in India.
I'm sure the Canadians view this as pretty ironic given that a similar trick was used by the Americans to destroy the Canadian car industry vis using the two FTAs with Canada & Mexico to sell Mexican built cars to the Canadians as if they were American for the purposes of tarriffs.
And John Howard has just signed Australia up for an FTA with America - smart move John, we'll be thanking you for that one for the next 50 years. The only hope Australia's got IMHO is to sign a FTA with China & threaten America with mutually assured destruction if they try to play fast & loose with the terms of the contract. Note - first ever correct usage of the word "loose" in the history of slashdot
I think the main problem in Australia is that the ALP has been totally ****ing useless in the 3 years I've lived here. I was here the last time mini-Adolf got voted in and Labor happily let him reduce the agenda for the election to "foreign people are bad" notwithstanding the fact that all but about 60000 Australians have no Australian ancestry going back more than 250 years...
This time around people just seemed to ignore the fact that the 2001 Australian election was "stolen" in that Mini-Adolf lied is a$$ off about babies overboard. Since then we've had "core promises" and "non-core promises" - why the hell didn't Latham ask Mini-Adolf to say which of his promises THIS time around were "non-core promises" to remind people what a lying rodent he is?
Now he's back in and within 7 days the chancellor is warming us up to another bunch of broken promises.
That's the problem with compulsory voting - all of the really stupid people who don't really get this politics stuff HAVE to vote. Maybe we should have a large notice on the ballot paper saying "you do not win a prize if you get the winner correct" That might help...
Rant over - I feel better now
One other interesting fact about original MUD from the 1980s involving a VERY well known character:-
;)
One player of the Essex MUD was Alan Cox, also known as Anarchy. He wrote (with a bit of help) AberMUD, named after the University of Aberystwyth, Wales, which he attended at the time. It was originally implemented on a Honeywell mainframe running GCOS but was soon ported to UNIX. Its poor design and implementation (all game information was stored in a shared file, which meant that several processes were constantly accessing the disc) did not endear it to many system administrators. Nevertheless, it was the first MUD to gain widespread popularity. After the source code reached the United States, several people made enhancements and additions, notably Rich $alz. It now seems to have found a home at St. Olaf University, where a few dedicated hackers are keeping it alive despite its general grunginess.
I believe he's still programming somewhere & has improved greatly...
Clearly you haven't played MUD which (as far as I can tell from research) predated LORD by over 10 years. LORD according to one site I checked started in the "early '90s" whereas MUD...
> The history of MUDs all starts in the UK, about 1979. Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University, started writing MUD, a game written in BCPL on a DEC-10. Along with Richard Bartle, who tidied up the system and added a very crude database compiler for it, they produced a very good combat game for it.
YOU stomp on George Lucas' childhood dreams
Fortunately for George, goats don't hire attorneys & sue.
:)
Allegedly
When you've got a REAL terrorist threat like we did in England from the IRA you get a s**tload more than one terrorist attack in 3 years.
Oh, and thanks a bunch America for funding terrorists in one of your most "valued" allies.
When Bush announced the war on terror I initially said "good" because I thought he was going to arrest the IRA fundraisers in the USA & extradite them to England - well, maybe I didn't. But really terrorism is all a matter of perspective. It's where you sit & what you perceive.
The British army in Belfast was either protecting law abiding citizens from terrorists or a bunch of terrorists depending on your religion (usually).
Similarly some people in Iraq view American soldiers running around crushing cars with tanks as terrorists, others see that they are trying to keep the peace. You can't be black and white about this.
Individually acts of terrorism are indefensible but there is inevitably a group that seems to think they are justified.
The only real way to stop terrorism is to stop giving terrorists a reason to terrorise.
Yes, I am. I spoke to a friend who's an Office guru & he showed me how to do it.
You are correct that Word does have the facility but in my opinion it is hidden. In the Atari ST program I was referring to the option was very easy to find; click/drag the lines you want to link then select a menu option - not a tabbed dialog. Then the linkage was indicated by a vertical line in the margin so you know immediately which lines are linked. Format|Paragraph|Line & Page Breaks - is not intuitive to me. I can write a macro to streamline the process but I still lack the visual feedback.
The fact that I've been using Word since version 6 or 7 (the last 16 bit Windows 3.1 version) and have used every version since without finding out how to do this by experimentation proves my point. I'm a coder & a casual user. I don't like bad user interfaces. I work hard to avoid creating them and I have a very low tolerance for poor interface design as a result. I'm amazed that a multi billion $ organisation with huge testing labs hasn't raised this as an issue and given an alternative method to achieve it.
Never say never - in less than a year when HP are shipping those babies out at less than half price you may be tempted.
I agree totally that with the current price differential the brand value that Apple brings to the table makes everything else look very unattractive. IMO the only way HP are going to ship their IPod clones is to give them away / bundle with other products (laptops or Pocket PCs?) or reduce the price
Yep, back in the early 2000s Bluebyte introduced a copy protection scheme that stopped Settlers 3(?) running on my DVD Drive. The game went back; I got a refund & I haven't bought a Bluebyte game since because I've emigrated & I'm not so confident the shops will accept returns over here. Up until that point I had bought EVERY game pretty much that they had released. I'm not into Warez so I just never played Settlers 3 but it still irks me.
http://www.mlc.vic.edu.au/news/old_collegian_alisa __348.htm
:)
A gymnast with a degree in I.T. a sponsorship deal with a chewing gum manufacturer, a job at IBM & an olympic gold medal.
Read 'em & weep boys, Aussie girls take some beating
And it does look a little wordy & inefficient for doing the "stuff we do at the moment".
What interests me is what extra cool stuff can be done & if it really can replace flash & ActiveX then I'll drop my cacks to watch the monkeys fly out of my butt.
Secondly I'd like to wait until Dreamweaver makes this easy to do & not an absolute grind. Thinks, better dig out that article on writing Dreamweaver extensions in Delphi...
Yep, but Bush is doing his best to stop any form of democracy in America.
In at least some states the 3 strikes & you're out law is being used to gag peaceful political protests. Bush removed the right of protestors to claim freedom of speech as a defense so basically if you get arrested 3 times for being on a protest march you can be jailed for life.
Home of the free?
Gotcha, I see what you mean. Basically M$ replaced an existing package that worked well (but we don't know how well it worked from the internal perspective) with an internally written package that doesn't work as well. /. if they had continued to use a competing product (see also the hotmail debacle) ;)
This sort of error should find its way back to the development team and in the end the M$ package will be good enough & it'll be worth the cost to them of developing it.
Think how badly they'd have been reamed on
That sort of sounds pro-M$ but I'm trying to be fair here. They'd be damned if they didn't use their own package & they're being damned because they did. Naturally working for the great Satan they're eternally damned anyway but you know what I mean
Corporate CRM packages autodial & pass the call on to the next free operator in the group putting relevant information up on their screen when they're connected. So a) They probably didn't dial the number themselves & b) They were working off of a script.
Me too, but what I think will happen is he will go to America & get paid an absolute fortune for a "public speaking tour". Just like Margaret Thatcher did 10 years ago. Corrupt? Never.
I believe politicians should be prevented from doing these things after their retirement for profit. After all they are our employees when they do all of these things that make them marketable and it is worrying if they could be influenced by the possibility of a big payday after they've sold the country down the river...
I couldn't get to page 2 - just when it was getting interesting...
Probably Government owned. England had state owned housing when I was growing up. Rents were cheaper than the private sector & there were generally large estates of government owned housing; so I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess what the crime rate was in these areas ;)
It takes at least a week to put in all of the extra copy protection. After all you know Europe is such a hotbed of piracy - not like Singapore (where I once picked up a legit copy of a game a whole MONTH before it's UK release...)