After years of reading slashdot, I finally see a post I want to mod up and I don't have any mod points
How does one get mod points? After I had been on Slashdot for a while, I used to get them regularly. Then, one day, I was asked to metamoderate (which I have now been doing almost continuously 2-3 times daily for 2+ years) and have never been offered mod points since.
The next night, the same physicist, mathematician, and engineer are staying in the same hotel, but want to stay prepared by keeping buckets already full of water. Outside their rooms, another fire erupts.
The physicist steps outside with a bucket of water and pours it on the flames until they go out then returns to bed.
The engineer steps outside with a bucket meticulously filled and after a few minutes and a couple tests, the fire is extinguished.
The mathematician immediately empties his bucket, reducing the problem to one that has already been solved.
I guess your problem doesn't exist. It doesn't for me anyway, if a website doesn't work in Firefox or Opera (whichever i'm browsing with at the moment) I'll just drift away from it, to the concurrence for example, effectively lowering the income of the fleed seller and getting closer to driving them out of business
Darwinian selection at it's best baby
The (say) 90% of websites that use buggy CSS and ActiveX and IE-friendly will lose 10% of their business from "savvy" Firefox users, while retaining the 90% business from "clueless" IE users.
Meanwhile, the 10% of websites that are standards-compliant and Firefox- friendly will retain the 10% of Firefox users, while losing the 90% business from the IE users.
Just which of these two models do you think Darwinism will favour?
There should be NO protection for works that are never published. This pilot is more like a trade secret than some creative work.
There is a new law that raises illegal distribution of motion pictures into a felony, if done before their commercial release.
This should be true in general. Any work that an "owner" is not interested in exploiting for commercial gain should be strictly PD. None of this nonsense about locking up masterpieces in a vault to rot away.
What makes you think that the "owner" does not want to see it released? Just because Warner Brothers doesn't want to show it on TV doesn't mean the creator of the series wants to toss all that hard work into the trash.
And if I create a masterpiece, I should have some say in what is done with it. What if I am not happy with it and think it needs more polishing? If I don't decide to sell it within 6 months, does that give you the right to break into my home and steal it and sell it on eBay "because it ought to be in the public domain"? I think not.
Asking them to remove the Emperor would have been like asking the Vatican City to remove the the Pope
If the Vatican had, under Papal command, invaded the U.S. without warning or provocation, and lost, it would have been the duty of the United States to remove the Pope as a war criminal and head of state. This is totally separate from his position as religious leader.
And by that reasoning, if a city government chooses to permit slavery in their area, that decision is actionable by their voters only, not the Feds.
Total FUD. You are comparing apples and oranges.
Slavery in the constitution is a federal matter. Telecommunications by an act of Congress is a federal matter. Information services fall under neither category. By the constitution, all powers not speccifically enumerated are relegated to the states.
Which the cable companies would have then ignored, or had overturned at the federal level claiming that the FCC does not require this of them and federal law/policy trumps any city.
How so? The Supreme Court just ruled that cable is an information service, and not a telecommunication service. While people apparently have a right to telecommunications services, no such government-mandated right exists for information services. If a city government chooses not to permit any cable services in their area at all, that decision is actionable by their voters only, not the FCC (since it is not a telecommunication issue). And the same applies if they decide to offer a monopoly to a cable carrier.
I can't quite agree with this. The problem with the line item veto is that it gives the President WAY too much power, and would severely disrupt our system of checks and balances, rather than strengthen it.
A much better solution is to simply ban riders altogether, and let each bill pass through the entire process on its own merits.
How are these different? If every line (essentially) is a separate bill, the president will have to sign them individually. Signing some and not others is the same as using a line-item veto.
Hmmm.... and what would they be? EULA's mean diddly squat in many countries and the world is moving towards free-trade.
It's quite simple, really:
ACTIVATE WINDOWS:
We're sorry, but your version of Windows is the Indonesian Retail product. We have detected that the IP address used to activate this copy of Windows originates in the United States. Please activate Windows from an Indonesian IP address. Thank you for choosing Microsoft.
(To use my concert ticket analogy again, it'd be like having ticket takers at the front gate still, but security is lax and there's a back entrance people can easily sneak in. At this point, why not just put out a fish bowl with a sign asking people to please pay as they enter, and get rid of all security measures? Either way, a lot of people will choose to pay - because they just want to "do the right thing", while others won't.)
One dowside to this model is that it favours people who always cheat - the honest ones end up paying so the dishonest ones can have fun. In essence, it becomes a "tax on morality" (in much the same way as lotteries have been called a "tax on stupidity").
It works reasonably well as long as the honest greatly outnumber the dishonest, but breaks down hen the reverse is true.
If the copyright on a work had already expired, it wasn't extended.
This is not entirely true. For example, the group Renaissance had a song that was based on a piece by Stravinsky which had passed in to the public domain. Subsequent legislation extended the copyright on the original piece, so in a CD re-release of their album had to omit that one song for reasons of copyright.
I, for one, hope he is guilty, because if he's innocent, he'll have gone through hell and a half for no reason other than being really, really weird. And that shouldn't be a crime in America.
Hoping someone is guilty just to salve society's conscience is a bit like robbing someone at gunpoint, and then afterwards hoping he was a criminal because then he would deserve it.
Much like the rationale for the Conquistadores raping and pillaging the Americas, because, after all, the natives were merely heathens, which made it "all right".
It may well be the compiler that is wrong, but it's still my problem.
I need code that runs correctly; standards-compliant code that doesn't is worthless to me.
This is what I mentioned at the end of my post; correct-but-unworking code is useful only for standards-conformance test suites; for practical purposes, you just want something that works (and if you are using a mechanism that isn't implemented correctly, you work around it by using something else).
Several years ago, I debugged a crash for a friend who was using Borland C++ Builder, and tracked it down to incorrect code being generated for:
r = x ? (y ? a : b) : c;
where r, a, b, c were of different types - the compiler got confused about which destructor(s) to call. The expedient solution was to just avoid using nested ? : pairs.
Is the renderer they used for the reference image proven to conform to the standard in every way, with no bugs? That's really the only way to know for certain that the test isn't flawed.
For the purposes of this one specific test, it should be very easy to write a renderer which correctly interprets only the miniscule portions of CSS and HTML actually used in this example. This may have been what was actually done here.
As for "proof", it should be possible to hand-interpret the CSS and HTML and determine exactly what the result is supposed to look like according to the standards (although this should be fairly tedious to do for any sufficiently large page).
This is certaintly true about corporate web pages. However, personal web page, especially geared towards technical users, could, in theory, create markup that doesn't look as good in IE.
Yes, but for the very same reason, such sites are likely to have even less impact on Microsoft than large commercial sites, even if they DID care (which they have amply shown that they don't).
Well, okay, but if I had a few pages of c++ code and I said that no compiler could run it, I'd be blaming my code rather than the compilers, if you know what I mean.
If your C++ program adheres to the ANSI C++ language specification, and the compilers all get it wrong, then it's the compilers' problems, not yours.
On a more practical note, it is probably unwise to write correct code that trips up bugs in every compiler on the market, but if you are creating a compiler-validation test suite, that's exactly what you want to do.
As Microsoft does have more of the market share, that shouldn't stop people from creating pages that don't work with Internet Explorer; they should be encouraged to do so, so that Internet Explorer would continue to evolve.
And just who could afford to do this? If you run a commercial web site, do you want most of your customers to see a page that looks like crap, with a footnote at the bottom saying "We know your page looks like crap, but it's Microsoft's fault, and we hope they will have it fixed within the next two years"?
What will happen is that your customers will go away until it gets fixed. Who loses? Microsoft? or you? Will Microsoft lose any sleep over the fact that you are losing customers? Very unlikely.
It looked like a good marketing strategy because it WAS indeed good marketing strategy. Almost everyone of the non-techie users I know likes the fact they can play their video clips, surf da intarweb, read e-mail, etc. without having to go out and buy another software package or download it from somewhere else.
This has nothing to do with engineering; it has everything to do with marketing.
Many OEMs bundle their computers with non-Microsoft components pre-installed, and they work correctly right out of the box. Their browsers and media players and mail readers do not need tentacles that reach right down almost into the kernel of the OS the same way Microsoft's equivalent programs do.
Microsoft could very well have produced exactly the same kind of user experience, but chose not to do so. (Well, exactly the same in all ways except the "uninstall internet explorer" which would have worked properly, rather than be a Kafkaesque nightmare).
(And I use Windows, as horribly flawed as it is. I'm not part of the "Linux rules! Microsoft is the Great Satan!" crowd so aptly represented here on/.)
I'm still not seeing any explanation of how it works, only what happens when it does work.
1. Phisher creates (say) cïtïcorp.com and makes the home page redirect to the real citicorp.com page.
2. Googlebot browses cïtïcorp.com and gets a redirect to the real citicorp.com, and indexes its contents
3. User does a Google search looking for Citicorp, and finds cïtïcorp.com page that appears to contain the valid data (and it might be the only such page, if the legitimate page gets removed through the duplicate-removal process)
4. User clicks through to cïtïcorp.com expecting to see the valid web page
5. Phisher's server sees that the request is not from a Googlebot, so it serves up a fake page rather than redirecting to the legitimate real one.
6. User believes he is at the real citicorp.com web site, when he is in fact at the bogus cïtïcorp.com website, legitimized by Google.
7. Identity theft.
8. Profit. (OB. Slashdot joke.)
Except that Microsoft doesn't charge you for its service packs, whereas anti-virus companies charge you for their products. Microsoft says, "A flaw has been discovered, here is the patch to download." Norton/Symantec/etc say, "Here is a new virus. You can download the latest signature files if you have purchased $PRODUCT, or you can purchase $PRODUCT now for only $AMOUNT to protect yourself."
This because Microsoft service packe fix flaws in the product from the get-go. That is, they keep fixing things that you paid for and are still broken, so it's like warranty repair.
On the other hand, anti-virus updates aren't fixes to bugs in the antivirus code, but additional new functionality ("Look! In addition to the 1,000,000 viruses we protected you from last year, we now protect you from 50,000 more!"). Microsoft should be obliged to provide free repairs of their own bugs, but Norton should be under no obligation to provide free repairs of flaws caused by Microsoft's bugs.
If you want additional functionality from Microsoft (like an pgrade from Windows 98 to Windows XP), you can be sure that Microsoft WILL charge you.
Slashdot Mirror
After years of reading slashdot, I finally see a post I want to mod up and I don't have any mod points
How does one get mod points? After I had been on Slashdot for a while, I used to get them regularly. Then, one day, I was asked to metamoderate (which I have now been doing almost continuously 2-3 times daily for 2+ years) and have never been offered mod points since.
The next night, the same physicist, mathematician, and engineer are staying in the same hotel, but want to stay prepared by keeping buckets already full of water. Outside their rooms, another fire erupts.
The physicist steps outside with a bucket of water and pours it on the flames until they go out then returns to bed.
The engineer steps outside with a bucket meticulously filled and after a few minutes and a couple tests, the fire is extinguished.
The mathematician immediately empties his bucket, reducing the problem to one that has already been solved.
In Soviet Russia, hex reads dead people.
I guess your problem doesn't exist. It doesn't for me anyway, if a website doesn't work in Firefox or Opera (whichever i'm browsing with at the moment) I'll just drift away from it, to the concurrence for example, effectively lowering the income of the fleed seller and getting closer to driving them out of business
Darwinian selection at it's best baby
The (say) 90% of websites that use buggy CSS and ActiveX and IE-friendly will lose 10% of their business from "savvy" Firefox users, while retaining the 90% business from "clueless" IE users.
Meanwhile, the 10% of websites that are standards-compliant and Firefox- friendly will retain the 10% of Firefox users, while losing the 90% business from the IE users.
Just which of these two models do you think Darwinism will favour?
There should be NO protection for works that are never published. This pilot is more like a trade secret than some creative work.
There is a new law that raises illegal distribution of motion pictures into a felony, if done before their commercial release.
This should be true in general. Any work that an "owner" is not interested in exploiting for commercial gain should be strictly PD. None of this nonsense about locking up masterpieces in a vault to rot away.
What makes you think that the "owner" does not want to see it released? Just because Warner Brothers doesn't want to show it on TV doesn't mean the creator of the series wants to toss all that hard work into the trash.
And if I create a masterpiece, I should have some say in what is done with it. What if I am not happy with it and think it needs more polishing? If I don't decide to sell it within 6 months, does that give you the right to break into my home and steal it and sell it on eBay "because it ought to be in the public domain"? I think not.
Asking them to remove the Emperor would have been like asking the Vatican City to remove the the Pope
If the Vatican had, under Papal command, invaded the U.S. without warning or provocation, and lost, it would have been the duty of the United States to remove the Pope as a war criminal and head of state. This is totally separate from his position as religious leader.
And by that reasoning, if a city government chooses to permit slavery in their area, that decision is actionable by their voters only, not the Feds.
Total FUD. You are comparing apples and oranges.
Slavery in the constitution is a federal matter. Telecommunications by an act of Congress is a federal matter. Information services fall under neither category. By the constitution, all powers not speccifically enumerated are relegated to the states.
Which the cable companies would have then ignored, or had overturned at the federal level claiming that the FCC does not require this of them and federal law/policy trumps any city.
How so? The Supreme Court just ruled that cable is an information service, and not a telecommunication service. While people apparently have a right to telecommunications services, no such government-mandated right exists for information services. If a city government chooses not to permit any cable services in their area at all, that decision is actionable by their voters only, not the FCC (since it is not a telecommunication issue). And the same applies if they decide to offer a monopoly to a cable carrier.
I can't quite agree with this. The problem with the line item veto is that it gives the President WAY too much power, and would severely disrupt our system of checks and balances, rather than strengthen it.
A much better solution is to simply ban riders altogether, and let each bill pass through the entire process on its own merits.
How are these different? If every line (essentially) is a separate bill, the president will have to sign them individually. Signing some and not others is the same as using a line-item veto.
Hmmm.... and what would they be? EULA's mean diddly squat in many countries and the world is moving towards free-trade.
It's quite simple, really:
ACTIVATE WINDOWS:
We're sorry, but your version of Windows is the Indonesian Retail product. We have detected that the IP address used to activate this copy of Windows originates in the United States. Please activate Windows from an Indonesian IP address. Thank you for choosing Microsoft.
(To use my concert ticket analogy again, it'd be like having ticket takers at the front gate still, but security is lax and there's a back entrance people can easily sneak in. At this point, why not just put out a fish bowl with a sign asking people to please pay as they enter, and get rid of all security measures? Either way, a lot of people will choose to pay - because they just want to "do the right thing", while others won't.)
One dowside to this model is that it favours people who always cheat - the honest ones end up paying so the dishonest ones can have fun. In essence, it becomes a "tax on morality" (in much the same way as lotteries have been called a "tax on stupidity").
It works reasonably well as long as the honest greatly outnumber the dishonest, but breaks down hen the reverse is true.
This has got to be the most clever comeback to a troll that I have ever seen! Bravo!
If the copyright on a work had already expired, it wasn't extended.
This is not entirely true. For example, the group Renaissance had a song that was based on a piece by Stravinsky which had passed in to the public domain. Subsequent legislation extended the copyright on the original piece, so in a CD re-release of their album had to omit that one song for reasons of copyright.
I, for one, hope he is guilty, because if he's innocent, he'll have gone through hell and a half for no reason other than being really, really weird. And that shouldn't be a crime in America.
Hoping someone is guilty just to salve society's conscience is a bit like robbing someone at gunpoint, and then afterwards hoping he was a criminal because then he would deserve it.
Much like the rationale for the Conquistadores raping and pillaging the Americas, because, after all, the natives were merely heathens, which made it "all right".
Make sure to get the dark chocolate M&Ms. They are hard to find, but taste much better than the milk chocolate M&Ms.
Most definitely!
The problem now is finding a dark chocolate Earth...
It may well be the compiler that is wrong, but it's still my problem.
I need code that runs correctly; standards-compliant code that doesn't is worthless to me.
This is what I mentioned at the end of my post; correct-but-unworking code is useful only for standards-conformance test suites; for practical purposes, you just want something that works (and if you are using a mechanism that isn't implemented correctly, you work around it by using something else).
Several years ago, I debugged a crash for a friend who was using Borland C++ Builder, and tracked it down to incorrect code being generated for:
r = x ? (y ? a : b) : c;
where r, a, b, c were of different types - the compiler got confused about which destructor(s) to call. The expedient solution was to just avoid using nested ? : pairs.
Is the renderer they used for the reference image proven to conform to the standard in every way, with no bugs? That's really the only way to know for certain that the test isn't flawed.
For the purposes of this one specific test, it should be very easy to write a renderer which correctly interprets only the miniscule portions of CSS and HTML actually used in this example. This may have been what was actually done here.
As for "proof", it should be possible to hand-interpret the CSS and HTML and determine exactly what the result is supposed to look like according to the standards (although this should be fairly tedious to do for any sufficiently large page).
This is certaintly true about corporate web pages. However, personal web page, especially geared towards technical users, could, in theory, create markup that doesn't look as good in IE.
Yes, but for the very same reason, such sites are likely to have even less impact on Microsoft than large commercial sites, even if they DID care (which they have amply shown that they don't).
Well, okay, but if I had a few pages of c++ code and I said that no compiler could run it, I'd be blaming my code rather than the compilers, if you know what I mean.
If your C++ program adheres to the ANSI C++ language specification, and the compilers all get it wrong, then it's the compilers' problems, not yours.
On a more practical note, it is probably unwise to write correct code that trips up bugs in every compiler on the market, but if you are creating a compiler-validation test suite, that's exactly what you want to do.
As Microsoft does have more of the market share, that shouldn't stop people from creating pages that don't work with Internet Explorer; they should be encouraged to do so, so that Internet Explorer would continue to evolve.
And just who could afford to do this? If you run a commercial web site, do you want most of your customers to see a page that looks like crap, with a footnote at the bottom saying "We know your page looks like crap, but it's Microsoft's fault, and we hope they will have it fixed within the next two years"?
What will happen is that your customers will go away until it gets fixed. Who loses? Microsoft? or you? Will Microsoft lose any sleep over the fact that you are losing customers? Very unlikely.
It looked like a good marketing strategy because it WAS indeed good marketing strategy. Almost everyone of the non-techie users I know likes the fact they can play their video clips, surf da intarweb, read e-mail, etc. without having to go out and buy another software package or download it from somewhere else.
/.)
This has nothing to do with engineering; it has everything to do with marketing.
Many OEMs bundle their computers with non-Microsoft components pre-installed, and they work correctly right out of the box. Their browsers and media players and mail readers do not need tentacles that reach right down almost into the kernel of the OS the same way Microsoft's equivalent programs do.
Microsoft could very well have produced exactly the same kind of user experience, but chose not to do so. (Well, exactly the same in all ways except the "uninstall internet explorer" which would have worked properly, rather than be a Kafkaesque nightmare).
(And I use Windows, as horribly flawed as it is. I'm not part of the "Linux rules! Microsoft is the Great Satan!" crowd so aptly represented here on
And why on Earth would anyone want to embed video clips into MS Word documents? Just because it's possible?
Possibly in hopes that someone will come up with a printer that can print moving images?
I'm still not seeing any explanation of how it works, only what happens when it does work. 1. Phisher creates (say) cïtïcorp.com and makes the home page redirect to the real citicorp.com page. 2. Googlebot browses cïtïcorp.com and gets a redirect to the real citicorp.com, and indexes its contents 3. User does a Google search looking for Citicorp, and finds cïtïcorp.com page that appears to contain the valid data (and it might be the only such page, if the legitimate page gets removed through the duplicate-removal process) 4. User clicks through to cïtïcorp.com expecting to see the valid web page 5. Phisher's server sees that the request is not from a Googlebot, so it serves up a fake page rather than redirecting to the legitimate real one. 6. User believes he is at the real citicorp.com web site, when he is in fact at the bogus cïtïcorp.com website, legitimized by Google. 7. Identity theft. 8. Profit. (OB. Slashdot joke.)
Except that Microsoft doesn't charge you for its service packs, whereas anti-virus companies charge you for their products. Microsoft says, "A flaw has been discovered, here is the patch to download." Norton/Symantec/etc say, "Here is a new virus. You can download the latest signature files if you have purchased $PRODUCT, or you can purchase $PRODUCT now for only $AMOUNT to protect yourself."
This because Microsoft service packe fix flaws in the product from the get-go. That is, they keep fixing things that you paid for and are still broken, so it's like warranty repair.
On the other hand, anti-virus updates aren't fixes to bugs in the antivirus code, but additional new functionality ("Look! In addition to the 1,000,000 viruses we protected you from last year, we now protect you from 50,000 more!"). Microsoft should be obliged to provide free repairs of their own bugs, but Norton should be under no obligation to provide free repairs of flaws caused by Microsoft's bugs.
If you want additional functionality from Microsoft (like an pgrade from Windows 98 to Windows XP), you can be sure that Microsoft WILL charge you.
Looks like social security is really in trouble. Lets rename SSN to Social Insecurity Number (SIN).
Canada is way ahead of you here. they have SINs (Social Insurance Numbers).