Father: "Okay, who ran a red light last Saturday at 11:30 pm?"
Kid1: "not me"
Kid2: "not me"
Kid3: "not me"
Father: "Sorry, officer, I don't know who was driving"
The situation gets even worse if you have a large extended family that allows each other to borrow vehicles. Either way, there is no way for law enforcement to know who was driving...
Touchscreen keyboard that can't be minimized? Dammit, now I've got to go read that patent, just in case my almost 20+ year old 14" monochrome IR touchscreen that displayed an onscreen keyboard that couldn't be minimized (pre windows era) has been infringing all this time! Wait, would that be pre-infringing? I think it was originally from a PLATO learning system set up, so maybe they are in trouble, too...
Um, okay...I think I hear your WoW clan calling you from your Dell/Alienware box...
Regardless of the value or performance of the hardware I admin at work and build or use at home, I enjoy optimizing the OS and applications to meet hardware limitations. One such limitation that many companies are being forced (to use your term) to pay attention to is minimizing energy usage without compromising the performance of the 'server' in question beyond acceptable parameters. Pentium 233 or 8-way server, many of the same issues are at stake and it's not a bad area of interest for the foreseeable future...
By the way, as far as being able to actually 'do stuff' as you so eloquently put it, that throwaway lets me read Slashdot out on the deck for eight hours between charges (if I read all the dupes, that is). Try THAT with your Vista-powered laptop, Junior...
So, then, if a different 'language' is in use, a possible conclusion is that the common man or woman has no hope of understanding the laws that govern them. Somehow that just doesn't seem conducive to a fully functional society...
I was given an old P-233 Sony, one of the little ones with a 1024 x 480 screen. A drive refresh from the CD produced an unstable Win98 system with an old version of IE that choked on any modern website. A couple of evenings later, it runs Puppy quickly and smoothly from a CF card instead of a HDD, greatly increasing battery life while reducing heat and noise. Runs in ramdisk, only dumping to flash when a session is ending. Even Wifi was quick to set up. So, you see, in some cases, the OS it is running DOES make a 'rat's arse' of a difference, in this case the difference is 'unstable POS' verses 'very usable and improved web browsing experience". I had to care what OS it ran. And I even tried to make the original OS work.
"Groklaw is a wonderful illustration of why becoming a lawyer requires four years of college and three years of law school and the difficult bar exam, and becoming a paralegal requires a few evening courses at the community college."
...Is it just me or do lawyers live in a different America from the one the rest of us live in? Specifically, if it requires four years of college and three years of law school and the difficult bar exam to understand the laws that govern our society, something is very, very wrong. It is no longer a matter of differences in education, but rather one of diverging societies. My guess, after reading through today's postings for several stories (RIAA, GPLv3, etc.) and the misunderstandings regarding various legal phrases, is that the average citizen (the ones being represented) and the legal system (the ones doing the representing) are fast approaching logical universes with no overlap save perhaps basic traffic laws. And let's face it, those don't even apply to *everyone*.
Duh...why do you think Max Headroom had that constantly changing background? He was a fugative! In all seriousness, a completely fabricated video is what we should come to expect from anyone that is in fear of some sort of retribution, be it Al-Queada or just some alternate social sub culture's video. The scary thing is what it could lead to: Laser printer "yellow dots" for all video equipment. Trivial to hide a machine ID in all that noisy video, but it'll give the authorities an idea of who is producing or recording the images...
Funny you mention them...I no longer buy or recommend Netgear because there was always some little corner of functionality which did not work, to put it simply. From getting the time sych from a server that quit providing it to not actually forwarding ports to not actually being able to use 802.11g channels higher than 9, every NG product I've owned had functionality which was later found to be misprogrammed in the firmware -and typically never fixed. So, is that a hardware issue or a software issue?
Actually the analogy is more apt than it appears. My guess is that they simply playing the "we can't really win a patent court case, but we can outspend you. Can you afford it?" game. Sort of like only litigating against people or companies (i.e., for piracy) that you've carefully chosen based on income bracket and you know they can't afford to fight you even if they would win, so they settle out of court for a few thousand...
...but isn't this classic Alpha behavior? Do the psychologists even study chimps and gorillas any more? If your underling (or a potential threat to your rule) only briefly shows an anger face but not long enough to be perceived as a threat, that means you 'won' the confrontation and have established your superiority in the heirarchy.
Of course, with chimps it's actually the ones that stay on the fringes and avoid the Alpha (we'll call them Chimp Geeks) that have the most sex with the females, as the Alpha & underlings are too busy and stressed about staying on the top o' the heap...
Actually, cremation is not just energy-wasteful, it is also resource wasteful. At least if you are composted (whoops, I mean "buried with reverence"), most of your physical matter has the potential to be reused, be it by bacteria, plants or worms. Sure, cremation could be solar powered (just pop the body up to the top of the tower of that solar furnace in New Mexico for a few minutes), but wouldn't it be cool if our cultural tradition was to drop the body in a hole and plant a tree? Cemetaries could become parks for happily remembering loved ones instead of the barren (except for manicured grass and big drab squares of stone), desolate, *business-efficient*, unhappy places they are now.
"If necessary, said industry lobbyists and Republican aides in Congress, Bush intends to skirt the Senate approval process by making recess appointments to put the three nominees in the posts."
Lesson: When the street magician fingers the bright shiny coin in his right hand, keep your eyes on what the left one is doing...
I too, have had no problems with Windows crashing for the last 8 years...in fact, I don't think it ever failed to do so! Thanks, folks, I'll be here all week. And don't forget to try the veal, I hear it's GREAT!
"The likelihood of someone stating that a particular action will have a drastic and negative effect on the entire software industry increases in proportion to the distance from First Post".
And the corallary:
"Since the drastic and negative effect on the entire software industry is so unlikely, the posting will be soon followed by one invoking the Free Market, as neither will be adequately tested in reality."
Actually, in my area what makes it a monopoly is municipalities signing exclusive agreements with only one provider of cable and one provider of telephone in return for a great deal on services for the city. Problem is, our city has both Comcast and AT&T (the current long-term monopolies) pissed about the consumer side of things, so we "residential customers" don't get squat for our $$$ compared to the surrounding communities. And, it seems whomever we vote into local office gets corrupted really quickly...but I digress.
It's funny how (this being Slashdot and all) when Microsoft midlevel execs decide to spend less on QA we rip them apart but when Amazon does the same thing, it's just an "honest mistake" that Amazon should not be obligated to uphold. Code is code; you balance cost of development against quality and time to market. If Amazon were to be absolved every time they did this they could rightly cut back even further on their QA until it was a crap shoot as to what you are actually going to pay for an item. And yes, I realize that Free Market economists here on the forum will state "then the market will adjust and Amazon would go under or change their procedures", but the problem is that the Free Market is by definition amoral...and thus the whole argument over whether Amazon should do what they are doing...
You do know that the whole "Mars probe uses the Sony consumer camera sensors" thing is just a joke, right? It was limited to a set group of consumer CCD's manufactured during a certain time window at certain plant(s), etc. I highly doubt that NASA was using the same low grade equipment.
There seems to be some misunderstandings in patents court proceedings.
If I invent something today and you decided to file a patent for it (my work) before I do, my patent application will trump yours, even if the clerks initially approve yours. And then I will take you to court. Naturally you are just a puny inventor and I am a large corporation with an entire army of lawyers. Now, then, we can play this nice and you can sign over your patent in return for a T-shirt or I will fight you in court. Of course, I can't win, but I stay in battle for five years -can you?
Many went bad gradually; the sensors were not sealed properly and moisture eventually found it's way in. I had one that was able to compensate for a while by periodically remapping the pixels, but eventually the ability to form a clear image was completely lost. If you thought the thousands of consumer camera recalls cost Sony, you ought to see what this recall is going to cost them!
Re:Before anyone says anything about free speech
on
EU Bans Sock-Puppet Blogs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ah, so do you believe that a company should be allowed to print whatever it wants on, say, the label of a bottle of "medicine" that actually does nothing, or even worsens some conditions? Should they be allowed to have advertisements that say that their car gets 150 miles per gallon of gas using special magnets around the fuel line? How about claiming on a commercial that their cigarettes not only don't cause cancer and are not habit forming, but actually cure cancer instead? Isn't all of this just "Free Speech"? Of course not; there is a line, sometimes a fuzzy one, between truth and falsehoods intentionally presented as truth. You can say that it is up to the consumer and if a blatent falsehood is presented, then the buyer(s) can sue for fraud and that will take care of the problem, but at some point of obviousness, preventing fraud is one of the few things that a government is created to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Father: "Okay, who ran a red light last Saturday at 11:30 pm?" Kid1: "not me" Kid2: "not me" Kid3: "not me" Father: "Sorry, officer, I don't know who was driving"
The situation gets even worse if you have a large extended family that allows each other to borrow vehicles. Either way, there is no way for law enforcement to know who was driving...
Touchscreen keyboard that can't be minimized? Dammit, now I've got to go read that patent, just in case my almost 20+ year old 14" monochrome IR touchscreen that displayed an onscreen keyboard that couldn't be minimized (pre windows era) has been infringing all this time! Wait, would that be pre-infringing? I think it was originally from a PLATO learning system set up, so maybe they are in trouble, too...
Regardless of the value or performance of the hardware I admin at work and build or use at home, I enjoy optimizing the OS and applications to meet hardware limitations. One such limitation that many companies are being forced (to use your term) to pay attention to is minimizing energy usage without compromising the performance of the 'server' in question beyond acceptable parameters. Pentium 233 or 8-way server, many of the same issues are at stake and it's not a bad area of interest for the foreseeable future...
By the way, as far as being able to actually 'do stuff' as you so eloquently put it, that throwaway lets me read Slashdot out on the deck for eight hours between charges (if I read all the dupes, that is). Try THAT with your Vista-powered laptop, Junior...
So, then, if a different 'language' is in use, a possible conclusion is that the common man or woman has no hope of understanding the laws that govern them. Somehow that just doesn't seem conducive to a fully functional society...
I was given an old P-233 Sony, one of the little ones with a 1024 x 480 screen. A drive refresh from the CD produced an unstable Win98 system with an old version of IE that choked on any modern website. A couple of evenings later, it runs Puppy quickly and smoothly from a CF card instead of a HDD, greatly increasing battery life while reducing heat and noise. Runs in ramdisk, only dumping to flash when a session is ending. Even Wifi was quick to set up. So, you see, in some cases, the OS it is running DOES make a 'rat's arse' of a difference, in this case the difference is 'unstable POS' verses 'very usable and improved web browsing experience". I had to care what OS it ran. And I even tried to make the original OS work.
Duh...why do you think Max Headroom had that constantly changing background? He was a fugative! In all seriousness, a completely fabricated video is what we should come to expect from anyone that is in fear of some sort of retribution, be it Al-Queada or just some alternate social sub culture's video. The scary thing is what it could lead to: Laser printer "yellow dots" for all video equipment. Trivial to hide a machine ID in all that noisy video, but it'll give the authorities an idea of who is producing or recording the images...
Funny you mention them...I no longer buy or recommend Netgear because there was always some little corner of functionality which did not work, to put it simply. From getting the time sych from a server that quit providing it to not actually forwarding ports to not actually being able to use 802.11g channels higher than 9, every NG product I've owned had functionality which was later found to be misprogrammed in the firmware -and typically never fixed. So, is that a hardware issue or a software issue?
Actually, Halliburton is doing quite well in Iraq...oh, wait; did you mean for the Iraqis?
Actually the analogy is more apt than it appears. My guess is that they simply playing the "we can't really win a patent court case, but we can outspend you. Can you afford it?" game. Sort of like only litigating against people or companies (i.e., for piracy) that you've carefully chosen based on income bracket and you know they can't afford to fight you even if they would win, so they settle out of court for a few thousand...
Of course, with chimps it's actually the ones that stay on the fringes and avoid the Alpha (we'll call them Chimp Geeks) that have the most sex with the females, as the Alpha & underlings are too busy and stressed about staying on the top o' the heap...
Come now, a truly evil SA would blackmail them with the porn his rootkit 'found' on their home PC...
Actually, cremation is not just energy-wasteful, it is also resource wasteful. At least if you are composted (whoops, I mean "buried with reverence"), most of your physical matter has the potential to be reused, be it by bacteria, plants or worms. Sure, cremation could be solar powered (just pop the body up to the top of the tower of that solar furnace in New Mexico for a few minutes), but wouldn't it be cool if our cultural tradition was to drop the body in a hole and plant a tree? Cemetaries could become parks for happily remembering loved ones instead of the barren (except for manicured grass and big drab squares of stone), desolate, *business-efficient*, unhappy places they are now.
HP used to make great LaserJets, too, all the way up to and including the 4-series and maybe some of the 5 series, you insensitive clod!
Bush vowed to pwn the EPA anyway:
= /20070401/NATIONWORLD/704010403/-1/ZONES04 and note the following:
This ruling puts the EPA in charge of regulating auto emissions, not Congress, and not the States as had previously been the case. Now reconsider it in this context; http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID
"If necessary, said industry lobbyists and Republican aides in Congress, Bush intends to skirt the Senate approval process by making recess appointments to put the three nominees in the posts."
Lesson: When the street magician fingers the bright shiny coin in his right hand, keep your eyes on what the left one is doing...
I too, have had no problems with Windows crashing for the last 8 years...in fact, I don't think it ever failed to do so! Thanks, folks, I'll be here all week. And don't forget to try the veal, I hear it's GREAT!
"The likelihood of someone stating that a particular action will have a drastic and negative effect on the entire software industry increases in proportion to the distance from First Post".
And the corallary:
"Since the drastic and negative effect on the entire software industry is so unlikely, the posting will be soon followed by one invoking the Free Market, as neither will be adequately tested in reality."
Actually, in my area what makes it a monopoly is municipalities signing exclusive agreements with only one provider of cable and one provider of telephone in return for a great deal on services for the city. Problem is, our city has both Comcast and AT&T (the current long-term monopolies) pissed about the consumer side of things, so we "residential customers" don't get squat for our $$$ compared to the surrounding communities. And, it seems whomever we vote into local office gets corrupted really quickly...but I digress.
It's funny how (this being Slashdot and all) when Microsoft midlevel execs decide to spend less on QA we rip them apart but when Amazon does the same thing, it's just an "honest mistake" that Amazon should not be obligated to uphold. Code is code; you balance cost of development against quality and time to market. If Amazon were to be absolved every time they did this they could rightly cut back even further on their QA until it was a crap shoot as to what you are actually going to pay for an item. And yes, I realize that Free Market economists here on the forum will state "then the market will adjust and Amazon would go under or change their procedures", but the problem is that the Free Market is by definition amoral...and thus the whole argument over whether Amazon should do what they are doing...
Well, in the case of the sony (I'm done capitalizing their name, I've lost that much respect), the CCD modules themselves had faulty epoxy packaging. Obligatory Slashdot story reference: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/ 10/2235206&tid=233&tid=137
You do know that the whole "Mars probe uses the Sony consumer camera sensors" thing is just a joke, right? It was limited to a set group of consumer CCD's manufactured during a certain time window at certain plant(s), etc. I highly doubt that NASA was using the same low grade equipment.
There seems to be some misunderstandings in patents court proceedings. If I invent something today and you decided to file a patent for it (my work) before I do, my patent application will trump yours, even if the clerks initially approve yours. And then I will take you to court. Naturally you are just a puny inventor and I am a large corporation with an entire army of lawyers. Now, then, we can play this nice and you can sign over your patent in return for a T-shirt or I will fight you in court. Of course, I can't win, but I stay in battle for five years -can you?
Not if I patent *pending* patents first...
Many went bad gradually; the sensors were not sealed properly and moisture eventually found it's way in. I had one that was able to compensate for a while by periodically remapping the pixels, but eventually the ability to form a clear image was completely lost. If you thought the thousands of consumer camera recalls cost Sony, you ought to see what this recall is going to cost them!
Ah, so do you believe that a company should be allowed to print whatever it wants on, say, the label of a bottle of "medicine" that actually does nothing, or even worsens some conditions? Should they be allowed to have advertisements that say that their car gets 150 miles per gallon of gas using special magnets around the fuel line? How about claiming on a commercial that their cigarettes not only don't cause cancer and are not habit forming, but actually cure cancer instead? Isn't all of this just "Free Speech"? Of course not; there is a line, sometimes a fuzzy one, between truth and falsehoods intentionally presented as truth. You can say that it is up to the consumer and if a blatent falsehood is presented, then the buyer(s) can sue for fraud and that will take care of the problem, but at some point of obviousness, preventing fraud is one of the few things that a government is created to do.