I really didn't find book 10 bad, when read in one go between books 9 and 11. Reading it the first time after a year and a half waiting wasn't so good, but for future readers of the Wheel of Time I don't think they're going to feel nearly as critical of some of the later books as those of us who have spent more than half our lives waiting for the next book.
Completely agree with you. I do agree with some of the critisism of the later books - when you wait for 18 months, only get about 5 days further in the story and mostly deal with minor characters you've forgotten about in the intervening time, it does get a little annoying. But having recently reread all 11 books back to back, I enjoyed it a great deal more. I *like* long books with multiple sub-plots. I will read and I'm sure enjoy book 12, and the longer and more comprehensive it is the better as far as I'm concerned. I just wish he'd been able to finish it himself.
I remember I went to a computer fair some years ago. One of the guys selling OEM copies of xp had removed the exposed license stickers and placed them face down in the shrink wrap. He also had a "No Cameras" sign up. I asked him about it and he said "kids" were stealing the codes.
An alternative explanation would be that he was selling pirated xp licences, and didn't want any evidence.
CPUs in theory for most Intel Macs (which are socketed) - I think a few hobbyists have done so already. I imagine (and hope) that in a year or two - once there is a major perofrmance incentive to do so, you'll start to see some commercial offerings along these lines.
PCIe cards are the same as any minority OS - you need products that come with OSX drivers, and you are going to end up paying for them.
Question is, can Macs even use regular OEM cards, or is there something hardware locked still?
No, or at least not without flashing the card with copyrighted firmware. Off the shelf you get a very small subset of ATI cards (NVidea do not retail Mac compatible cards) at about 3 times the normal price.
Would you agree that it is also theft if MS disables a known legit copy?
It's probably covered in the EULA;)
Permanently disabled then yes it would be (not legally but the equivalent of) theft. But unless Microsoft have really lost it, it will be a temporary inconvenience that manifests itself very soon after purchase (hence reduced chance of major disruption to business). I can see it being a pain for people who get caught in the collateral damage, but I think it will become one of those things that people just accept.
We sell the odd Windows XP licence - mainly refurb machines with existing licences, and these do cause a few problems from time to time. But at the end of the day we can prove the licence is legit and it gets sorted out.
This scheme will cause some problems to legitimate customers of fraudulent OEMs, and also legitimate customers of legitimate OEMs; and therefore to legitimate OEMs as well.
However I doubt Microsoft is quite braindead enough to allow these problems to go past the temporary inconvenience level. If they do then yes, they'll get those massive lawsuits. As I see it, it's a scheme that allows Microsoft to pinpoint OEMs that are routinely defrauding them so that they can recover funds from them. I would expect them to quickly sort out the problems it will cause to legitimate suppliers, and also to consumers who bought a pirated copy in good faith.
If you're a customer of the OEM and the OEM is selling you, at full price, pirated software, it's not Microsoft who is screwing you.
Exactly. Whatever your opinions on "information wants to be free" or whatever, if a customer has paid an OEM for software and the OEM installs a pirated version and pockets the cash, this is theft - ok maybe not legally, but this isn't a case of people who would never buy software pirating it, it is a case of people trying to buy the software and the OEM stealing the money.
It's exactly like me stealing your car. You no longer have a car. The OEM has stolen Microsoft's money.
Comcast back in 2004 did some selective blocking of port 25. Could have been a coincidence but a heavy (about 100MB an hour) dictionary spam run at our company domain cut off at around that time IIRC.
Well there is a small difference between figuratively carpet bombing, in the sense of wiping people hard drives, and actually carpet bombing in the sense of levelling cities with high explosive. No one gets killed in the former method to start with.. Well ok probably no-one gets killed unless it shuts down a hospital with a crap computer setup or something..
Yeah ok it's not a good idea, but you have to admit it has a certain appeal in terms of getting people to actually give a shit about their computers.
There is an interesting interview in the BBC's 1973 documentary series The World at War with John McClay who was Assistant Secretary of War in 1945.
He claims (convincingly I'd say) that he proposed to Truman that a peace offer be made on these terms of surrender: Let them have the Emperor (but as a constitutional monarch in a democratic state), let them have access to but not control over foreign raw materials, and spell out exactly what the atomic bomb was capable of. I assume some kind of American occupation would also have been part of it, but this was not mentioned in the interview
He claims Truman was interested, but the idea was later vetoed by the secretary of state (who wanted them to give up the Emperor), but McClay certainly still believed at the time of the interview that there would have been a good chance that the Japanese would have accepted the offer; that enough of the Japanese high command knew the war was lost, and these terms would have been recognised as the best that could be achieved.
It's all speculation, but interesting that a man that close to the top held (even decades later) the opinion that the use of the bomb could have been avoided.
We do seem to have gotten over most of those cyclical problems now, and I would put that down to the quasi socialist policies of the quasi-socialist government that has been in power for the last 10 years
I'd put it down to the government of the last ten years not being socialist and the independence given to the bank of England.
The railways are a disaster, made worse by a botched privatisation I completely agree. I had the pleasure of using the Dutch railway system recently and I felt like a visitor from a third world country.
But I was more thinking of the nationalised coal mines and steel works - things that really in no shape or form should be under government ownership. Control by the workers of the means of production is the ideology that IMO should be dead and buried; it means control by the state in effect. And the idea that the state is a competent body to step in to replace private industry has done so much damage, and has been so comprehensively proved wrong, that I tend to argue against it whenever I see it.
Germany. The Netherlands. Belgium. France. The UK. The Scandinavian countries. And even Canada. Need I go on?
Of course, after privatizing essential facilities such as electricity and railways, some of these countries are now significantly more fscked up than they were ten or twenty years ago.
The only way I can describe that is Bollocks.
I'm not supporting grandparent's idea that socialism is the cause of corruption in Kenya, but to see socialism in Britain as an economic success story is just plain wrong.
What was the economic legacy of socialist governments in Britain? Rampant unions, unemployment, loss making state-owned manufacturing industries that were decades out of date.
I got the feeling that they designed the form mainly to scare small companies into using an online gateway. This to be honest is a good thing IMO.
Re:It is too complex!
on
PCI Compliance
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
OR... you could just not store my data. If it's so terribly expensive and difficult to store my credit card number, then don't. Use SSL to encrypt it as it moves from me to you and you to the payment clearinghouse, and then decide not to write the number down anywhere.
If it touches your webserver at all then you need to be PCI complaint, the only solution (to avoid having to certify your webserver) is to use an online gateway where you hand the customer off to make payment. This is how it's going for small ecommerce operations. Which is a pain if you are a small ecommerce operation which needs flexibility since you never get as much control using an online processor. For everyone else it's a good thing since most small shops really shouldn't be storing card details on a publicly accessible server since they simply don't have the necessary skills inhouse.
You've probably heard this line of argument before, but what I would say is that if there hadn't been a tragedy you would have forgotten the whole incident quickly and it wouldn't have registered. It is only the coincidence (which is how I see it) that you're feeling strange and driving to your parents happened on that day that means that you hold the events in your mind and see a connection between them.
There are millions of people every day who think of an old friend for the first time in years and call him and he HASN'T just died, but this is unremarkable. It is only the few people who do this and find that the friend has just died who provide the anecdotal evidence for this kind of ESP.
Now I realise I can't provide evidence against this sort of telepathy (close friends and relations sensing extreme stress or tragedy) - unlike other ESP claims you can't duplicate this in controlled conditions. I'd also admit that if there is any sort of weak telepathic ability present in some people, it makes a degree of sense that it would be manifested in this way. But I combine 1) the complete absense of any kind or reproducability of more extreme ESP claims, with 2) the argument that in a world population of billions, some pretty strange coincidences will happen to individuals and 3) the fact that these coincidences are only remarkable when they happen, not when they don't. This leads me to be a sceptic on this matter (and an outright disbeliever on claims of more advanced, and in theory reproducable, forms of ESP).
The fact is many people have had ESP experiences that cannot be explained, and are simply ignored my the scietific community.
They have not been completely ignored. Many attempts have been made to investigate ESP in controlled conditions.
Now if ESP was valid, it would be easy to prove. Telepathy, telekinesis, predictions of the future, whatever. They're nice easy to test things, and if there was any validity to it, it would have become accepted mainstream science decades ago.
It hasn't. People who call it bullshit have that right. It's not a taboo subject, it's an I'm not going to waste my time on this again subject. If you beleive different, set up a decent experiment. If you can product an ESP type effect in controlled conditions you will get mainstream interest very quickly. Until you do, don't expect anyone to take you seriously. They won't, and for valid and well justified reasons.
Well it's not a crime in the sense of not being against criminal law, therefore any recompense you could seek through the courts would be monetary.
I'm not saying it's Google's finest hour, but really I think in the real world these things happen, all you can do in that instance is apologise and try and make it right. Which they've done.
Ok, but given that the wrong happened it has (now) been sorted out as well as any reasonable person could ask for.
What they've done isn't a crime (unlike stealing physical products), so monetary compensation is all you're every going to get, and twice what you paid is, lets face it, very very good - although marred somewhat by the fact that they tried to pull that Checkout credit stunt first.
Slashdot Mirror
I really didn't find book 10 bad, when read in one go between books 9 and 11. Reading it the first time after a year and a half waiting wasn't so good, but for future readers of the Wheel of Time I don't think they're going to feel nearly as critical of some of the later books as those of us who have spent more than half our lives waiting for the next book.
Completely agree with you. I do agree with some of the critisism of the later books - when you wait for 18 months, only get about 5 days further in the story and mostly deal with minor characters you've forgotten about in the intervening time, it does get a little annoying. But having recently reread all 11 books back to back, I enjoyed it a great deal more. I *like* long books with multiple sub-plots. I will read and I'm sure enjoy book 12, and the longer and more comprehensive it is the better as far as I'm concerned. I just wish he'd been able to finish it himself.
Yup, you say schadenfreude. Yet another word taken by the Borg.
CPUs in theory for most Intel Macs (which are socketed) - I think a few hobbyists have done so already. I imagine (and hope) that in a year or two - once there is a major perofrmance incentive to do so, you'll start to see some commercial offerings along these lines.
PCIe cards are the same as any minority OS - you need products that come with OSX drivers, and you are going to end up paying for them.
No, or at least not without flashing the card with copyrighted firmware. Off the shelf you get a very small subset of ATI cards (NVidea do not retail Mac compatible cards) at about 3 times the normal price.
You may well be right. We mainly deal with Macs, so if you are I'll just sit back and grab the popcorn ;)
Permanently disabled then yes it would be (not legally but the equivalent of) theft. But unless Microsoft have really lost it, it will be a temporary inconvenience that manifests itself very soon after purchase (hence reduced chance of major disruption to business). I can see it being a pain for people who get caught in the collateral damage, but I think it will become one of those things that people just accept.
We sell the odd Windows XP licence - mainly refurb machines with existing licences, and these do cause a few problems from time to time. But at the end of the day we can prove the licence is legit and it gets sorted out.
This scheme will cause some problems to legitimate customers of fraudulent OEMs, and also legitimate customers of legitimate OEMs; and therefore to legitimate OEMs as well.
However I doubt Microsoft is quite braindead enough to allow these problems to go past the temporary inconvenience level. If they do then yes, they'll get those massive lawsuits. As I see it, it's a scheme that allows Microsoft to pinpoint OEMs that are routinely defrauding them so that they can recover funds from them. I would expect them to quickly sort out the problems it will cause to legitimate suppliers, and also to consumers who bought a pirated copy in good faith.
Exactly. Whatever your opinions on "information wants to be free" or whatever, if a customer has paid an OEM for software and the OEM installs a pirated version and pockets the cash, this is theft - ok maybe not legally, but this isn't a case of people who would never buy software pirating it, it is a case of people trying to buy the software and the OEM stealing the money.
It's exactly like me stealing your car. You no longer have a car. The OEM has stolen Microsoft's money.
*intellitxt* in adblock seems to work.
Comcast back in 2004 did some selective blocking of port 25. Could have been a coincidence but a heavy (about 100MB an hour) dictionary spam run at our company domain cut off at around that time IIRC.
Well there is a small difference between figuratively carpet bombing, in the sense of wiping people hard drives, and actually carpet bombing in the sense of levelling cities with high explosive. No one gets killed in the former method to start with.. Well ok probably no-one gets killed unless it shuts down a hospital with a crap computer setup or something..
Yeah ok it's not a good idea, but you have to admit it has a certain appeal in terms of getting people to actually give a shit about their computers.
There is an interesting interview in the BBC's 1973 documentary series The World at War with John McClay who was Assistant Secretary of War in 1945.
He claims (convincingly I'd say) that he proposed to Truman that a peace offer be made on these terms of surrender: Let them have the Emperor (but as a constitutional monarch in a democratic state), let them have access to but not control over foreign raw materials, and spell out exactly what the atomic bomb was capable of. I assume some kind of American occupation would also have been part of it, but this was not mentioned in the interview
He claims Truman was interested, but the idea was later vetoed by the secretary of state (who wanted them to give up the Emperor), but McClay certainly still believed at the time of the interview that there would have been a good chance that the Japanese would have accepted the offer; that enough of the Japanese high command knew the war was lost, and these terms would have been recognised as the best that could be achieved.
It's all speculation, but interesting that a man that close to the top held (even decades later) the opinion that the use of the bomb could have been avoided.
I'd put it down to the government of the last ten years not being socialist and the independence given to the bank of England.
The railways are a disaster, made worse by a botched privatisation I completely agree. I had the pleasure of using the Dutch railway system recently and I felt like a visitor from a third world country.
But I was more thinking of the nationalised coal mines and steel works - things that really in no shape or form should be under government ownership. Control by the workers of the means of production is the ideology that IMO should be dead and buried; it means control by the state in effect. And the idea that the state is a competent body to step in to replace private industry has done so much damage, and has been so comprehensively proved wrong, that I tend to argue against it whenever I see it.
The only way I can describe that is Bollocks.
I'm not supporting grandparent's idea that socialism is the cause of corruption in Kenya, but to see socialism in Britain as an economic success story is just plain wrong.
What was the economic legacy of socialist governments in Britain? Rampant unions, unemployment, loss making state-owned manufacturing industries that were decades out of date.
caricaturisationI got the feeling that they designed the form mainly to scare small companies into using an online gateway. This to be honest is a good thing IMO.
You've probably heard this line of argument before, but what I would say is that if there hadn't been a tragedy you would have forgotten the whole incident quickly and it wouldn't have registered. It is only the coincidence (which is how I see it) that you're feeling strange and driving to your parents happened on that day that means that you hold the events in your mind and see a connection between them.
There are millions of people every day who think of an old friend for the first time in years and call him and he HASN'T just died, but this is unremarkable. It is only the few people who do this and find that the friend has just died who provide the anecdotal evidence for this kind of ESP.
Now I realise I can't provide evidence against this sort of telepathy (close friends and relations sensing extreme stress or tragedy) - unlike other ESP claims you can't duplicate this in controlled conditions. I'd also admit that if there is any sort of weak telepathic ability present in some people, it makes a degree of sense that it would be manifested in this way. But I combine 1) the complete absense of any kind or reproducability of more extreme ESP claims, with 2) the argument that in a world population of billions, some pretty strange coincidences will happen to individuals and 3) the fact that these coincidences are only remarkable when they happen, not when they don't. This leads me to be a sceptic on this matter (and an outright disbeliever on claims of more advanced, and in theory reproducable, forms of ESP).
They have not been completely ignored. Many attempts have been made to investigate ESP in controlled conditions.
Now if ESP was valid, it would be easy to prove. Telepathy, telekinesis, predictions of the future, whatever. They're nice easy to test things, and if there was any validity to it, it would have become accepted mainstream science decades ago.
It hasn't. People who call it bullshit have that right. It's not a taboo subject, it's an I'm not going to waste my time on this again subject. If you beleive different, set up a decent experiment. If you can product an ESP type effect in controlled conditions you will get mainstream interest very quickly. Until you do, don't expect anyone to take you seriously. They won't, and for valid and well justified reasons.
If they didn't their lawyers are complete muppets, which seems unlikely.
Well it's not a crime in the sense of not being against criminal law, therefore any recompense you could seek through the courts would be monetary.
I'm not saying it's Google's finest hour, but really I think in the real world these things happen, all you can do in that instance is apologise and try and make it right. Which they've done.
Ok, but given that the wrong happened it has (now) been sorted out as well as any reasonable person could ask for.
What they've done isn't a crime (unlike stealing physical products), so monetary compensation is all you're every going to get, and twice what you paid is, lets face it, very very good - although marred somewhat by the fact that they tried to pull that Checkout credit stunt first.