With the kind of installed base they have, who knows where in the world some critical production server would fail if they decide to remove Microsoft Pinball?
From a liability standpoint, Microsoft has absolutely no responsibility to continue to support old products and maintain backwards compatibility. They could do exactly what Apple did, which was to say, "Look, we're going to update our OS to make it better from the ground up, and you are responsible for rewriting your apps to match. We will do our best to publish APIs and specs as early as possible to help you out."
But, that being said, Microsoft can't do that. Alternate OSs such as MacOS X, Linux, BSD, and whatnot have reached the point where the only difference between them and Microsoft is application/hardware support. If Microsoft doesn't maintain backwards compatibility, there would be no reason for people to upgrade to the next version of Windows. Application developers would have to completely rewrite their apps, and may choose to also rewrite for cross-platform at the same time. It would destroy Microsoft's vendor lock-in scheme.
So don't expect Microsoft to kill backwards compatibility just to plug a few security holes. That is better accomplished with add-on software that keeps people computing the Microsoft Way (tm).
Power users who open more tabs than can fit in a single window will see arrows on the left and right side of the tab strip that let them scroll back and forth between their tabs.
Am I the only person who thinks this is a stupid and counter-productive idea? When was the last time you (the population of/., the proported "power users") actually clicked on the up and down arrows to scroll, anywhere outside a Flash application that forces you? It takes forever! I usually use the middle mouse button, click in the middle scroll area to jump, or click and drag the scroll handle.
I like the idea of having more tabs than window space, but fer cryin' out loud, two scroll buttons are not the way to handle it. How about multiple rows of tabs? Or right click + drag to scroll back and forth? Or a drop down menu of tabs?
I thought we all agreed that Flash applications that break scrolling are a Bad Thing (tm).
The man you are about to converse with is not really a high ranking General in the Nigerian army, he does not really have a rich uncle who died tragically in a plane crash in Siberia, and he absolutely DOES NOT have $53.4 million dollars to smuggle out of Nigeria for his uncle's poor orphaned children. You will not get 30%. Trust us.
ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CONTINUE?
+----+ +--------+ | OK | | CANCEL | +----+ +--------+
Maybe the goal should be, a computer in every classroom... and a computer at home for every child... More expensive I know... but it would help to regement things... Clearly, having a laptop for each child IS important for those children who have limited access to a computer at home. At least this way, the student can learn computer skills on their own...
You only have to type the period key once to end a sentence.
How about I cite someone who may cite someone who cites a paper which cites a person who cited the original news article in which the treaty was cited?
You must be a blogger.
Re:Great, more angrying up of my blood.
on
30 Days of DRM
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· Score: 1
DRM and DMCAs seem analogous to a cart and buggy and wagon industry forcing automobile owners to not drive faster than the horse-drawn carriages because of their "right" to the road.
It is old-world philosophy being artificially forced into the modern mindset.
This is more true than you realize. Let's think back to the last time there was such a major shift in our society...
To the 1860s. In addition to disputes over the morality of slavery, there was a tremendous economical divide between the northern US and the southern US, with the South preferring the "old" style economy of wealthy plantations with cheap slave labor, and the North preferring the more recent concept of free market labor. The South's economy was based largely on the export of agricultural goods produced on slave-owning plantations, and the owners of those plantations were fabulously wealthy and powerful because of it. The new system of free labor threatened that power, and the plantation owners fought to their last dying gasp to retain it. They simply could not fathom how paying their workers would earn them more money. We know now, however, that a thriving economy depends largely on paying workers decent wages.
Fast forward to today, where the giant media companies are fabulously wealthy and powerful based on an old, and soon to be outdated, model of artificial scarcity, where if I own a copy of some content and give it to you, I no longer have it. There is a new system brewing where there is no scarcity on information, because of digital transmission and the Internet. Right now there is a struggle going on between the content creators, who are clinging to their old model of artificial scarcity and current powerful stature, and the content producers, who see a new world in front of them where paying for media means paying for value, not the content itself. The content creators will fight to their last dying gasp to preserve the old way of doing things, because they simply cannot grasp how they will make more money by allowing free copying. DRM is the physical manifestation of that fight; they are forcing an old model on a new market, and it's failing.
We are at the cusp of a true Information Revolution, which will be written about many years from now as a turning point in our society. The last time we had such a revolution, it lead to the bloodiest war in the nation's history. Let's hope this time it won't come to that.
How much demand will there really be from corporate users?
Corporate users? Almost none. The large corporations are far more comfortable with the already-entrenched MS Office Suite, with their own dataservers and networks, run by their own IT staff, or a third party contracted IT company.
The niche where this would be truly useful is the small companies; the LLCs with 1-10 employees, for whom buying an MS Office suite is prohibitively expensive, and who don't have any IT personnel or central servers. They can create their documents and spreadsheets, share them amongst the employees, and publish them to a server for storage with no hassle. Google takes the brunt of the IT infrastructure costs, giving reliable servers, slick applications, and sharing features for the cost of a few text ads. I can see many small companies, mine included, getting on board with this idea.
For the slightly larger companies who are still too small to have a serious IT infrastructure, I can see Google renting out Office Appliances similar to their Search Appliances. Google delivers it, you just plug it into your network, and voila! it's autoconfigured to provide office apps and storage space inside your firewall. This would get even more companies on board, because their documents could be stored on a physical disk they control, instead of out on The Big Bad Internet. Google could advertise and promise secure storage and access until they're blue in the face, but for many companies data isn't "secure" until it's behind their own firewall (as much as such things can be secured).
Google is filling a need for a customer base that Microsoft has long since abandoned. As a member of that customer base, I applaud their efforts.
Heroine, meth, and crack on the other hand will kill you and make you do things that you never thought you'd ever do in your life to get those drugs.
And who are you to tell me I cannot kill myself? Isn't what I do to myself none of your damn business?
Plus, if I do some of those horrible things I never thought I'd do to get those drugs, then there are already laws in place to punish me. If I kill someone? Steal something? Break and enter? People do these things all the time without the help of drugs, and they are arrested and incarcerated for it. I don't see how legalizing drugs will change this.
There are many substances that are currently legal that also kill you, and the vast majority of people stay away from them, precisely because these substances are harmful. Why would heroine, meth, and crack be any different?
He ran the license plate numbers of expensive cars he encountered in routine traffic stops through police systems to get to the owners' private information. With the help of a worker at a local bank, he picked off those with the best credit ratings.
Now wait a minute. There are two separate issues here.
The police officer has every right to run cars' license plates through the police systems and pull up the owners' private information, including names, addresses, ages, and driving/criminal records. However, the reason he was arrested was because he and his banker friend illegally used those names to obtain credit report information. A police officer cannot dig any further into a private citizen's records (other than what exists in the police database) without a warrant, and that is where he was wrong. The existance of license plate snooping in private citizens' hands is no different, because they do not legally have access to police records, credit reports, or anything else they cannot obtain right now without such snooping devices. It does not change the amount of information they have access to, it only changes the speed with which they can collect that information.
Just because it is possible to commit a crime with something does not necessitate outlawing that thing altogether. Snooping devices in the hands of private citizens is a Good Thing (tm), because it rebalances the power between the authorities and the citizens. This license plate reader is not doing anything new, since people really could just drive around all day and keep a written log of all the license plates, locations, and times on the trip, and use that information to track movements. This device just does that logging faster than a person can. And I can imagine all kinds of uses for these devices to track the authorities by private citizens. Imagine that you can upload your tracking data to a website along with lots of other people in the same town, and track the movements of the fleet of police vehicles in your town. You'd be able to see exactly how much time they spend in the speed trap on the freeway, and how much time they spend parked at the local donut shop. The possibilities are rather intriguing.
It would be better to implement what Colorado Congresman Joel Hefley pushed; have the feds (and states for state level) provide election funding for those that make a certain level of support from the voters...I think that this will have to be a grassroot effort.
Better yet: let's hire lobbyists to promise a bunch of senators campaign funds if they attach this provision as a rider on the "Oh Noes! Save Teh Children! Act of 2006".
In the UK computer generated porn is classified in law exactly the same way as regular digital / wet photography. AFAIK the same is true of drawings and paints as well.
Yes, but classified the same for what purpose?
Clearly, computer generated porn should not be sold to minors, and the FCC would have a problem with it, and companies could fire people for looking at it. But what's really at stake here is the creation of the computer generated porn. Child pornography is illegal to create because it is abusive to the children involved. Regular porn is legal to create because everything that happens in it is consentual (well, most of it...but that's a discussion for another day).
But along comes the computer generated stuff. If nobody was abused, exploited, harmed, or degraded during the creation of the image, is it still illegal to produce? There's no question that the people who would view it are sick, but if no one is being harmed in the process, are they really criminals?
It's a touchy subject, and I'm sure it will never be resolved. I'm sure someday people will be jailed for merely viewing images created entirely in a computer because someone has labeled those images "child porn." I shudder to think.
So you have to go there, accept the 'clickwrap' license, download it somewhere, then mv it to your distfiles directory. Unnecessary mumbo jumbo.
The whole point of the "mumbo jumbo" is to get you to agree to the license terms. This is also the reason why the earlier versions of Firefox 1.5 (compiled, not the binaries) did not have the official branding enabled in Gentoo; it was a licensing issue. As soon as Gentoo got permission from the Mozilla Foundation to distribute the trademarked images in the source, they reenabled official branding in the ebuild.
But my question would be... why doesn't Portage have the ability to show you the license and have you agree to it with a simple yes/no as the package emerges? Even though the Sun lawyers seem to have sidestepped the issue for Java, I'm sure there are other packages out there with incompatible licenses, which could then be included in Portage with a clickthrough.
Anyway, good news for Java. Now I don't have to resort to the Blackdown version.
Go ahead and ask 100 people on the street whether they use Windows and whether they know what an ACL is and how to change it. Running as a Limited User is not impossible. It just requires spending a LOT of time and effort to LEARN how to do so... and that pre-supposes that the person understands the risk of running as Administrator.
Here's a wildly divergent idea... what if Windows by default forces the person using the computer to run as a limited user? This could be accomplished by a forced username creation during install (or during FirstBoot for the Dell users), and by "crippling" the Admin account, so that the only thing admins can do is install software/drivers. If the Administrator account does not have access to the sound card, or the resolution is crappy, or the colordepth is bad, or whatever, then Joe Sixpack won't run as Administrator unless he has to install software.
Yes, Microsoft would have to break some backwards compatibility with older software, but frankly, that's not their problem. The third-party developers were given access to the API and "Best Practices" when it comes to registry/filesystems permissions in their programs. If a company is still forcing people to run their software as Administrator this late in the Windows NT game, then it should be considered a bug and fixed.
It isn't going to be enough to create a Somebody Else's Problem Field around the object to be hidden. You'll also need one around the detecting device so that people ignore it. That's a much harder problem.
Not if the devices around the object all have Genuine People Personalities(tm).
this is why i labeled it fake monen, mabey sudo money would be better but it is defently not on par with anything backed by people with assetts.. now if the game company offers a buy back option for the backing then i would say it could be considered a curency. but not till then.
That's a valid point. Your mention of gift cards being legally obligated to be considered currency is the key, though. Eventually, when certain virtual systems DO have viable economies and exchange rates, laws will be written that will protect someone's online balance the same way laws are written to protect the "virtual" balances in banks, casinos, credit cards, stock transaction, etc.: the money there exists only on paper, not in any physical form. Those laws have not been written yet because the medium is too new. Give it time; I expect an online community will create a real working game "economy" that interacts with our own, with all the legal backing that goes with it, in the next few years. It might even be Second Life, considering the contract disputes going on over there now.
...and any native speaker of American English could have told the big N that this name was begging for abuse.
Sometimes even the native English speakers don't get it.
When I was in high school, the school district I lived in (Indian Prairie School District in the Chicago suburbs) was building a new high school. When it came time to name it, the name the school board came up with, and were in near-unanimous agreement on, was "Indian Prairie High School." It took one of the board member's kids to start laughing when their parents told them what the name would be for the name to even be questioned. Even then, some of the board members didn't get it, and it had to be explained. ("I. P. High? No, I pee low.")
My point is that sometimes the people in charge of naming things have lost their sense of "fourth grade toilet humor", and even when confronted with the jokes and puns will still not get it. These people need to have someone (like a son or daughter) to run things past before final decisions are made, especially for products that will be used primarily by people under the age of 21, which is Nintendo's primary market.
That being said, even without the obvious puns inherent in "Wii", it sounds far too overmarketed to me. The name of a console shouldn't have ten layers of meaning, as the marketers were trying to accomplish ("You get it? Wii sounds like "we", which means group, and the two "i"s together look like two people gaming together, and the dots are like the controllers, and the "W" stands for upended mountains, or maybe a big saw or something, but the people are next to it having fun, not under it getting crushed, and that means collaboration and team play, and..."). Names should evoke a certain sense of the object they represent, be easy to pronounce and spell, and sound good next to the name of the company. Nothing more.
my real question is who the hell is willing to pay real money for fake money, they are the ones driving the market and the price ratio
It's not "fake" money. It's just money that is only used in exchange for goods/services in a specific location (or online, in this case). It's the same thing as foreign currency: you can only buy things with Yen in Japan, for instance... if you wanted to buy something in the US, you have to sell your Yen and buy Dollars, at a currency exchange. It's also similar to gift certificates. You pay money for a card that you can only use at Best Buy, and if you wanted to get that back as regular dollars, you would have to find someone to sell it to.
People buy "fake" money with "real" money all the time. It's called a money market.
The fact of the matter is that emails that many people suffer a lot of problems with emails, from my old ma to the CEOs of large companies. The current email system is flawed. Telling me that it's perfect or that it already does everything that everyone want is just frankly rubbish. The reason I find this subject so annoying is that one day there will be a better messaging system than email, but it looks like it's not going to come from the OSS community.
OK, here's where I think you are confused; perhaps no one has taken the time to explain things to you without getting too technical.
There are three* types of "undelivered" email, that would all get your mythical red dot, if I understand you correctly:
1. Email that was sent to an invalid address. A user sends an email to joe.m.bloe@company.com, except that he meant to send it to joe.t.bloe@company.com. In this case, the company.com mail server will "bounce" the email: the sender will get an email message saying, essentially, "I cannot deliver this message because there is no user named joe.m.bloe." If this bounce response is not sent, it is the fault of the administrator, not of the email protocol.
2. Email that has not yet been read. Some people might consider this "undelivered", although the server considers it delivered because it made it to the right mailbox. What happens after that is the responsibility of the recipient. If you simply HAVE to know when your message is read, then attach a read receipt, which is built right into the protocol. (Please note: most people don't like being spied on, and will not send a receipt when asked by the email client.)
3. Email that simply goes missing. This breaks down further into two categories:
a. Filtered email. The administrator of an email server can choose to filter mail, either to take out spam, curb inappropriate content, do virus checking, or whatever. False positives in this situation (non-spam email that was filtered and deleted) are the fault of the administrator/spam-blocker, not of the email protocol. The sender should be notified if a message he sent was filtered.
b. "Lost" email. "Oh, the reason why that report isn't finished yet is because.... uh.... I never got the email. Yeah." People lie. Deal with it-- it's not the email protocol's fault, nor is it the protocol's job to police it.
So the reason why most people on Slashdot aren't taking to your idea is that the current system can handle all the various contingencies that might come up. If your emails really are just disappearing without a trace (and you're sure no one is lying about it) then you need to have a serious talk with your administrator about what can be done, because there is something wrong with your company's mail system.
Many email servers are poorly administrated, it's true. But no amount of coding by the OSS community will fix that. It's not a technical problem at that point; it's a social one. The current protocol contains everything necessary to "guarantee" mail delivery, if such a thing is possible when humans are part of the system.
On the other hand, if you're just looking for an email client that will place a red dot next to an email conversation that received an Undeliverable Bounce from the server, then you might want to go suggest that feature to the Thunderbird people.
----------
*There is a fourth category--where an email was not forwarded on by one of the middleman servers between point A and point B--but given the generally robust nature of the internet, unless you are using some shady email server that might flake out at any moment (again, the fault of the administrator) or sending your email through shady proxies, the chances of this happening are so very slim as to be completely negligible.
Microsoft is certainly in their right to do this. It's no different. It should make absolutely no difference whether the product being promoted is yours or a third party's.
It absolutely makes a difference.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. That means the *rules change*. They can no longer just operate normally like a standard, non-convicted-monopolist business can. There is a very strict set of rules they have to follow in order to maintain competition in the marketplace, and these rules are different from those of other companies.
Google was right to bring this up. Since the Department of Justice doesn't seem interested in following up on the conviction, it is up to the other big players in the industry to point out the ways that Microsoft is violating the anti-trust provisions. The other browsers can default to whichever search engine they want, even if they make money from it. Microsoft cannot.
Me: "Yea, so go in and edit your HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Curr entVersion/Run" them: "What do you mean edit?" Me: "Open regedit, and modify the key" them: "So how do I open regedit?" Me: (sigh) "I quit"
I think the record companies are blaming piracy because it's a solid business case.
addDRM(music); switch (whatHappensAfter) {
case "piracy goes down":
println("See?! We TOLD you the evil pirates were stealing! DRM works!");
addMoreDRM(music,movies,television,software);
money++;
break;
case "piracy goes up":
println("Ahh! They're stealing more to spite us! This is war!");
addMoreDRM(music,movies,television,software);
money++;
break;
case "piracy stays the same":
println("Those filthy pirates will steal no matter what we do! We must make the DRM stronger!");
addMoreDRM(music,movies,television,software);
money++;
break; }
These artists just created a buffer overflow. Woo!
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From a liability standpoint, Microsoft has absolutely no responsibility to continue to support old products and maintain backwards compatibility. They could do exactly what Apple did, which was to say, "Look, we're going to update our OS to make it better from the ground up, and you are responsible for rewriting your apps to match. We will do our best to publish APIs and specs as early as possible to help you out."
But, that being said, Microsoft can't do that. Alternate OSs such as MacOS X, Linux, BSD, and whatnot have reached the point where the only difference between them and Microsoft is application/hardware support. If Microsoft doesn't maintain backwards compatibility, there would be no reason for people to upgrade to the next version of Windows. Application developers would have to completely rewrite their apps, and may choose to also rewrite for cross-platform at the same time. It would destroy Microsoft's vendor lock-in scheme.
So don't expect Microsoft to kill backwards compatibility just to plug a few security holes. That is better accomplished with add-on software that keeps people computing the Microsoft Way (tm).
Am I the only person who thinks this is a stupid and counter-productive idea? When was the last time you (the population of
I like the idea of having more tabs than window space, but fer cryin' out loud, two scroll buttons are not the way to handle it. How about multiple rows of tabs? Or right click + drag to scroll back and forth? Or a drop down menu of tabs?
I thought we all agreed that Flash applications that break scrolling are a Bad Thing (tm).
Built-Phishing Protection:
WARNING:
The man you are about to converse with is not really a high ranking General in the Nigerian army, he does not really have a rich uncle who died tragically in a plane crash in Siberia, and he absolutely DOES NOT have $53.4 million dollars to smuggle out of Nigeria for his uncle's poor orphaned children. You will not get 30%. Trust us.
ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CONTINUE?
+----+ +--------+
| OK | | CANCEL |
+----+ +--------+
The standard line.
Wake me when Opera has extension support and I can compile it myself.
You only have to type the period key once to end a sentence.
You must be a blogger.
This is more true than you realize. Let's think back to the last time there was such a major shift in our society...
To the 1860s. In addition to disputes over the morality of slavery, there was a tremendous economical divide between the northern US and the southern US, with the South preferring the "old" style economy of wealthy plantations with cheap slave labor, and the North preferring the more recent concept of free market labor. The South's economy was based largely on the export of agricultural goods produced on slave-owning plantations, and the owners of those plantations were fabulously wealthy and powerful because of it. The new system of free labor threatened that power, and the plantation owners fought to their last dying gasp to retain it. They simply could not fathom how paying their workers would earn them more money. We know now, however, that a thriving economy depends largely on paying workers decent wages.
Fast forward to today, where the giant media companies are fabulously wealthy and powerful based on an old, and soon to be outdated, model of artificial scarcity, where if I own a copy of some content and give it to you, I no longer have it. There is a new system brewing where there is no scarcity on information, because of digital transmission and the Internet. Right now there is a struggle going on between the content creators, who are clinging to their old model of artificial scarcity and current powerful stature, and the content producers, who see a new world in front of them where paying for media means paying for value, not the content itself. The content creators will fight to their last dying gasp to preserve the old way of doing things, because they simply cannot grasp how they will make more money by allowing free copying. DRM is the physical manifestation of that fight; they are forcing an old model on a new market, and it's failing.
We are at the cusp of a true Information Revolution, which will be written about many years from now as a turning point in our society. The last time we had such a revolution, it lead to the bloodiest war in the nation's history. Let's hope this time it won't come to that.
Corporate users? Almost none. The large corporations are far more comfortable with the already-entrenched MS Office Suite, with their own dataservers and networks, run by their own IT staff, or a third party contracted IT company.
The niche where this would be truly useful is the small companies; the LLCs with 1-10 employees, for whom buying an MS Office suite is prohibitively expensive, and who don't have any IT personnel or central servers. They can create their documents and spreadsheets, share them amongst the employees, and publish them to a server for storage with no hassle. Google takes the brunt of the IT infrastructure costs, giving reliable servers, slick applications, and sharing features for the cost of a few text ads. I can see many small companies, mine included, getting on board with this idea.
For the slightly larger companies who are still too small to have a serious IT infrastructure, I can see Google renting out Office Appliances similar to their Search Appliances. Google delivers it, you just plug it into your network, and voila! it's autoconfigured to provide office apps and storage space inside your firewall. This would get even more companies on board, because their documents could be stored on a physical disk they control, instead of out on The Big Bad Internet. Google could advertise and promise secure storage and access until they're blue in the face, but for many companies data isn't "secure" until it's behind their own firewall (as much as such things can be secured).
Google is filling a need for a customer base that Microsoft has long since abandoned. As a member of that customer base, I applaud their efforts.
Heroine, meth, and crack on the other hand will kill you and make you do things that you never thought you'd ever do in your life to get those drugs.
And who are you to tell me I cannot kill myself? Isn't what I do to myself none of your damn business?
Plus, if I do some of those horrible things I never thought I'd do to get those drugs, then there are already laws in place to punish me. If I kill someone? Steal something? Break and enter? People do these things all the time without the help of drugs, and they are arrested and incarcerated for it. I don't see how legalizing drugs will change this.
There are many substances that are currently legal that also kill you, and the vast majority of people stay away from them, precisely because these substances are harmful. Why would heroine, meth, and crack be any different?
Is that like a turban with a built-in fan? 'Cause that would come in really handy in the hot Saudi Arabian desert.
Now wait a minute. There are two separate issues here.
The police officer has every right to run cars' license plates through the police systems and pull up the owners' private information, including names, addresses, ages, and driving/criminal records. However, the reason he was arrested was because he and his banker friend illegally used those names to obtain credit report information. A police officer cannot dig any further into a private citizen's records (other than what exists in the police database) without a warrant, and that is where he was wrong. The existance of license plate snooping in private citizens' hands is no different, because they do not legally have access to police records, credit reports, or anything else they cannot obtain right now without such snooping devices. It does not change the amount of information they have access to, it only changes the speed with which they can collect that information.
Just because it is possible to commit a crime with something does not necessitate outlawing that thing altogether. Snooping devices in the hands of private citizens is a Good Thing (tm), because it rebalances the power between the authorities and the citizens. This license plate reader is not doing anything new, since people really could just drive around all day and keep a written log of all the license plates, locations, and times on the trip, and use that information to track movements. This device just does that logging faster than a person can. And I can imagine all kinds of uses for these devices to track the authorities by private citizens. Imagine that you can upload your tracking data to a website along with lots of other people in the same town, and track the movements of the fleet of police vehicles in your town. You'd be able to see exactly how much time they spend in the speed trap on the freeway, and how much time they spend parked at the local donut shop. The possibilities are rather intriguing.
Better yet: let's hire lobbyists to promise a bunch of senators campaign funds if they attach this provision as a rider on the "Oh Noes! Save Teh Children! Act of 2006".
In the UK computer generated porn is classified in law exactly the same way as regular digital / wet photography. AFAIK the same is true of drawings and paints as well.
Yes, but classified the same for what purpose?
Clearly, computer generated porn should not be sold to minors, and the FCC would have a problem with it, and companies could fire people for looking at it. But what's really at stake here is the creation of the computer generated porn. Child pornography is illegal to create because it is abusive to the children involved. Regular porn is legal to create because everything that happens in it is consentual (well, most of it...but that's a discussion for another day).
But along comes the computer generated stuff. If nobody was abused, exploited, harmed, or degraded during the creation of the image, is it still illegal to produce? There's no question that the people who would view it are sick, but if no one is being harmed in the process, are they really criminals?
It's a touchy subject, and I'm sure it will never be resolved. I'm sure someday people will be jailed for merely viewing images created entirely in a computer because someone has labeled those images "child porn." I shudder to think.
Won't someone please think of the pixels?!
Hear, hear! That's the most insightful thing I've read all day.
Thank you, sir, for your concise and enlightening analogy.
So you have to go there, accept the 'clickwrap' license, download it somewhere, then mv it to your distfiles directory. Unnecessary mumbo jumbo.
... why doesn't Portage have the ability to show you the license and have you agree to it with a simple yes/no as the package emerges? Even though the Sun lawyers seem to have sidestepped the issue for Java, I'm sure there are other packages out there with incompatible licenses, which could then be included in Portage with a clickthrough.
The whole point of the "mumbo jumbo" is to get you to agree to the license terms. This is also the reason why the earlier versions of Firefox 1.5 (compiled, not the binaries) did not have the official branding enabled in Gentoo; it was a licensing issue. As soon as Gentoo got permission from the Mozilla Foundation to distribute the trademarked images in the source, they reenabled official branding in the ebuild.
But my question would be
Anyway, good news for Java. Now I don't have to resort to the Blackdown version.
the cool part is a cocky, badass smuggler with a cobbled-together tin can of a spaceship living on the frontier.
Hence, the success of Firefly.
Joss Whedon is my master now.
Go ahead and ask 100 people on the street whether they use Windows and whether they know what an ACL is and how to change it. ...
... what if Windows by default forces the person using the computer to run as a limited user? This could be accomplished by a forced username creation during install (or during FirstBoot for the Dell users), and by "crippling" the Admin account, so that the only thing admins can do is install software/drivers. If the Administrator account does not have access to the sound card, or the resolution is crappy, or the colordepth is bad, or whatever, then Joe Sixpack won't run as Administrator unless he has to install software.
Running as a Limited User is not impossible.
It just requires spending a LOT of time and effort to LEARN how to do so
and that pre-supposes that the person understands the risk of running as Administrator.
Here's a wildly divergent idea
Yes, Microsoft would have to break some backwards compatibility with older software, but frankly, that's not their problem. The third-party developers were given access to the API and "Best Practices" when it comes to registry/filesystems permissions in their programs. If a company is still forcing people to run their software as Administrator this late in the Windows NT game, then it should be considered a bug and fixed.
It isn't going to be enough to create a Somebody Else's Problem Field around the object to be hidden. You'll also need one around the detecting device so that people ignore it. That's a much harder problem.
Not if the devices around the object all have Genuine People Personalities(tm).
this is why i labeled it fake monen, mabey sudo money would be better but it is defently not on par with anything backed by people with assetts.. now if the game company offers a buy back option for the backing then i would say it could be considered a curency. but not till then.
That's a valid point. Your mention of gift cards being legally obligated to be considered currency is the key, though. Eventually, when certain virtual systems DO have viable economies and exchange rates, laws will be written that will protect someone's online balance the same way laws are written to protect the "virtual" balances in banks, casinos, credit cards, stock transaction, etc.: the money there exists only on paper, not in any physical form. Those laws have not been written yet because the medium is too new. Give it time; I expect an online community will create a real working game "economy" that interacts with our own, with all the legal backing that goes with it, in the next few years. It might even be Second Life, considering the contract disputes going on over there now.
...and any native speaker of American English could have told the big N that this name was begging for abuse.
Sometimes even the native English speakers don't get it.
When I was in high school, the school district I lived in (Indian Prairie School District in the Chicago suburbs) was building a new high school. When it came time to name it, the name the school board came up with, and were in near-unanimous agreement on, was "Indian Prairie High School." It took one of the board member's kids to start laughing when their parents told them what the name would be for the name to even be questioned. Even then, some of the board members didn't get it, and it had to be explained. ("I. P. High? No, I pee low.")
My point is that sometimes the people in charge of naming things have lost their sense of "fourth grade toilet humor", and even when confronted with the jokes and puns will still not get it. These people need to have someone (like a son or daughter) to run things past before final decisions are made, especially for products that will be used primarily by people under the age of 21, which is Nintendo's primary market.
That being said, even without the obvious puns inherent in "Wii", it sounds far too overmarketed to me. The name of a console shouldn't have ten layers of meaning, as the marketers were trying to accomplish ("You get it? Wii sounds like "we", which means group, and the two "i"s together look like two people gaming together, and the dots are like the controllers, and the "W" stands for upended mountains, or maybe a big saw or something, but the people are next to it having fun, not under it getting crushed, and that means collaboration and team play, and..."). Names should evoke a certain sense of the object they represent, be easy to pronounce and spell, and sound good next to the name of the company. Nothing more.
my real question is who the hell is willing to pay real money for fake money, they are the ones driving the market and the price ratio
... if you wanted to buy something in the US, you have to sell your Yen and buy Dollars, at a currency exchange. It's also similar to gift certificates. You pay money for a card that you can only use at Best Buy, and if you wanted to get that back as regular dollars, you would have to find someone to sell it to.
It's not "fake" money. It's just money that is only used in exchange for goods/services in a specific location (or online, in this case). It's the same thing as foreign currency: you can only buy things with Yen in Japan, for instance
People buy "fake" money with "real" money all the time. It's called a money market.
The fact of the matter is that emails that many people suffer a lot of problems with emails, from my old ma to the CEOs of large companies. The current email system is flawed. Telling me that it's perfect or that it already does everything that everyone want is just frankly rubbish. The reason I find this subject so annoying is that one day there will be a better messaging system than email, but it looks like it's not going to come from the OSS community.
.... uh .... I never got the email. Yeah." People lie. Deal with it-- it's not the email protocol's fault, nor is it the protocol's job to police it.
OK, here's where I think you are confused; perhaps no one has taken the time to explain things to you without getting too technical.
There are three* types of "undelivered" email, that would all get your mythical red dot, if I understand you correctly:
1. Email that was sent to an invalid address. A user sends an email to joe.m.bloe@company.com, except that he meant to send it to joe.t.bloe@company.com. In this case, the company.com mail server will "bounce" the email: the sender will get an email message saying, essentially, "I cannot deliver this message because there is no user named joe.m.bloe." If this bounce response is not sent, it is the fault of the administrator, not of the email protocol.
2. Email that has not yet been read. Some people might consider this "undelivered", although the server considers it delivered because it made it to the right mailbox. What happens after that is the responsibility of the recipient. If you simply HAVE to know when your message is read, then attach a read receipt, which is built right into the protocol. (Please note: most people don't like being spied on, and will not send a receipt when asked by the email client.)
3. Email that simply goes missing. This breaks down further into two categories:
a. Filtered email. The administrator of an email server can choose to filter mail, either to take out spam, curb inappropriate content, do virus checking, or whatever. False positives in this situation (non-spam email that was filtered and deleted) are the fault of the administrator/spam-blocker, not of the email protocol. The sender should be notified if a message he sent was filtered.
b. "Lost" email. "Oh, the reason why that report isn't finished yet is because
So the reason why most people on Slashdot aren't taking to your idea is that the current system can handle all the various contingencies that might come up. If your emails really are just disappearing without a trace (and you're sure no one is lying about it) then you need to have a serious talk with your administrator about what can be done, because there is something wrong with your company's mail system.
Many email servers are poorly administrated, it's true. But no amount of coding by the OSS community will fix that. It's not a technical problem at that point; it's a social one. The current protocol contains everything necessary to "guarantee" mail delivery, if such a thing is possible when humans are part of the system.
On the other hand, if you're just looking for an email client that will place a red dot next to an email conversation that received an Undeliverable Bounce from the server, then you might want to go suggest that feature to the Thunderbird people.
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*There is a fourth category--where an email was not forwarded on by one of the middleman servers between point A and point B--but given the generally robust nature of the internet, unless you are using some shady email server that might flake out at any moment (again, the fault of the administrator) or sending your email through shady proxies, the chances of this happening are so very slim as to be completely negligible.
Microsoft is certainly in their right to do this. It's no different. It should make absolutely no difference whether the product being promoted is yours or a third party's.
It absolutely makes a difference.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. That means the *rules change*. They can no longer just operate normally like a standard, non-convicted-monopolist business can. There is a very strict set of rules they have to follow in order to maintain competition in the marketplace, and these rules are different from those of other companies.
Google was right to bring this up. Since the Department of Justice doesn't seem interested in following up on the conviction, it is up to the other big players in the industry to point out the ways that Microsoft is violating the anti-trust provisions. The other browsers can default to whichever search engine they want, even if they make money from it. Microsoft cannot.
Me: "Yea, so go in and edit your HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Curr entVersion/Run"
them: "What do you mean edit?"
Me: "Open regedit, and modify the key"
them: "So how do I open regedit?"
Me: (sigh) "I quit"
Conventions are not inherent, they are learned.