How long until Target figures out that very few people actually use their website compared to the trouble of all these lawsuits. As has been mentioned by other posters, it's quite possibly a browser config and interpretation issue. So, these lawsuits might never stop, so why not just block all access from these IP ranges?
There are incidences of mass lawsuits invoking the disabilities act even against stores which comply with it. It's not something that you can feel happy defending against and odds are that you're missing at least something somewhere, as such, it's not entirely unprofitable for the people doing it. It's not that I'm saying Target should be excluded from following guidelines, their website seems pretty unusable if you're disabled, but I am reminded by a lawsuit I'd heard about previously "hearing impaired sue Quantas for unusable phone booking system". Considering it would be infinitely easier to order from stores which ARE accessible, this screams of a shameless cash grab.
Well, as long as we're just supposing... what if after dropping the mandate, our economy starts to grow at an unprecedented rate, as the billions of man-hours per year that were previously being wasted studying such things as the rules of volleyball, the symbolism of books about talking bunnies, and the innards of fetal pigs are instead directed into more productive pursuits? Like playing Xbox360 games you mean? I suspect very strongly that this is what's going to happen.
Reading is a prerequisite for pretty much everything else in life, and written text is all around us. There are plenty of opportunities and motivations for literacy outside of a classroom. As for the "overall average of education", such a metric presumes that the number of hours spent in school is the only worthwhile measure of a person's knowledge and skill. Then why, despite everything, are there government programs to help illiterate adults in modern day Australia. Even with everything we try there are STILL people who don't know how to read sufficiently well. Making it optional in some reverse-psychology plan won't necessarily make everything better. I mean, if we lived in an ideal world, it would. But we don't. To that end I say it's not worth the risk to find out.
Given a chance, most people will also choose not to work in a coal mine, or drink urine, or watch Battlefield Earth. I eagerly await your proposal to mandate those activities for everyone, since apparently the fact that someone doesn't want to do something is enough justification to force them into doing it. That just makes no sense.
They'll still learn something no matter where they are. Most of the important stuff I learned wasn't taught in school, and there are several schools based on the idea that if you put kids in an environment where learning is possible, and let them spend their time however they want, most of them will find something that interests them, and that's what they'll devote their time to. Just because they're being tried doesn't mean that they're working. From what I've heard, some have produced above average results, some below average and most pretty much on the line. The one thing they have in common is that they force people to come.
In summary, I think it's too idealistic to say that if we let people choose to learn, more would choose to do so than at the present time. I strongly suspect, based on personal experience, that more people would choose NOT to learn.
Supposing however that it works differently. That after dropping the mandate, the country that does it will see literacy rates begin to fall as well as the overall average of education in that country. School might not be fun, it might very well be like a prison, but that's too bad, because it's the most important thing the government can do for you. The state funded school system is the result of centuries of struggle for the right of all people to receive a fair and equal opportunity at the beginning of their lives. School is forced onto students because given a chance, most students would choose NOT to bother and many of their parents won't force them.
If you remove the mandate, odds are that you'll also increase the rates of poverty in poorer areas. Decrease literacy, decrease numeracy and almost certainly lower university attendance.
One other thing, from what I've seen, these vaunted "special" courses are just a way to get rid of the poorer and less able students so they won't have to be dealt with. They receive a lower standard of education and their opportunities are reduced.
In essence, even if certain students cause problems. They still learn something, they're worth teaching and a poor learning environment is just the price we have to live with. Needless to say I think it's worth living with.
I agree, I'm running Debian stable right now on all my systems because it's the only distribution (aside from OpenSUSE) that I can be 100% sure will work stably.
However I personally think this is mostly a non-issue. Sure there are ramnifications to both sides of the coin, but that's always the case. This is an issue that anyone who gave a damn would have fixed about 10 minutes after they heard about it; leaving everyone else to discuss it endlessly.
I was looking into just such a service a while back. All you need is a modem and an account with the provider. The problem is that these people charge insanely high rates like $1 USD per MB of data. I doubt anyone who would be willing to attempt it could afford to fund such a connection. If they could however, it's very feasable as field reporters in Iraq used a similar system to transfer footage back home.
On that note, it might be a better idea to smuggle a reporter into the country.
I've posted this before but it's worth mentioning again, more clearly. If you're outside the oppressive grip of greedy government, you're by definition outside the reach of any and all laws. Think about it. There are still hundreds of pirates operating right now, the international slave trade is still a massive operation not to mention natural disasters that could strike out of nowhere.
Plus, if someone wanted you gone, they could just shell you and let's face it; What you're building is basically an ICBM, You're thinking hidden space exploration platform but the world governments are thinking hidden missile launch site. Some of those governments are very direct and very paranoid.
Good point. This isn't so much a Vista bug as it is an incompatibility issue. I hate it when people refuse to fix something because that might be seen as accepting blame. I further suspect that the people with no internet access probably have very little patience for the runaround and don't particularly care who's fault it is just as long as someone fixes it.
Granted, if it were me in their situation, I'd get a linux server up and mediate the connection to the internet from my Vista computers. Since my computers DO run Vista, after years of linux only, this isn't completely hypothetical.
Yes but that's exactly the problem. In a generation there'll be new games that I'll want to play. The problem doesn't end there though, because there are still bugs in games that work almost perfectly.Not that virtualization will be all that better but a great many problems will be avoided.
Personally I disagree with that. I've always felt that a fractured community comes naturally when people can do their own thing but that this was in no way a problem. Since everyone has a different goal, they can make something that fits their ideals. There's two important principles
1. The people who design distros would not necessarily want to help on a different project if their work was unrequired. 2. The distributions exchange massive amounts of code. There is surprisingly little work being duplicated without necessity.
Linux doesn't need two desktop environments, which is a good example of duplicated work. But both desktop environments are going in different directions, if they were all on the same project, it's entirely possible that nothing would get done and development would slow down.
It's not as good as you think. Psychonauts only runs with the last two versions, since they finally implemented multi threaded 3d and Far Cry doesn't appear to run without difficulty even now. It's true that you don't need the latest applications, but odds are you don't technically need lots of things on your system possibly including a computer. I still want things to work regardless if other people think they don't matter and even after 10 years of development wine still doesn't cut it. Yes, I know it's Microsoft's fault for designing an impenetrable system but acknowledging that still doesn't get Bioshock working.
I've been using linux (not GNU/Linux) for over four years now and I'm fairly satisfied with my system. There's plenty of things that could be better but the one thing that drives me up the wall is that I had to give up gaming. Real gaming I mean, like Fear, Stalker, Titan Quest, Farcry, Bioshock and the upcoming Crysis; neither tuxracer or "Savage: Battle for Newerth" quite cuts it in comparison. The one thing that would make a massive and lasting improvement is a properly written DirectX passthrough driver for the open source virtualizer VirtualBox. It's very complicated but technically possible and considering the excellent developers that exist in the open source movement, will probably prove surprisingly quick to develop if people work at it. The main problem with the current implementations is that none of them support Pixel Shaders V2 and Parallels version 3.0 has not been released for linux.
It has the major advantage over wine that all the wierdness will work. You won't have to prepare for all the strange undocumented API calls or deal with files cropping up in your home folder to mention just a few things.
With these discrepancies between us, you can see why I might feel bitter about being shanghaied into paying Microsoft's server costs. More to the point, I don't like Microsoft, it's no hypocritical to help people or companies you like and to feel ambivalent about being forced to help people or companies you don't.
I foresaw that someone would point that out. But it's an excellent lie detector. When people lie, they use their frontal lobes far more than their long term memory, when they tell the truth, the reverse is true. That's the first thing that comes to mind but I'm sure there are other applications. In any case, my point is only to point to a situation that might fit the description mentioned previously, it's arguable what degree of precision qualifies as "Mind Reading".
It's been a while since I heard about it but I believe that with a non-poisonous magnetic dye, you can track the change in blood flow inside the brain by use of a specialized scanner. Since different parts of the brain are responsible for different general areas of thought, you can make an educated guess about what a person is thinking by observing these changes.
Funny you should mention that. I got a Mac Book as well recently, to run Linux. I appreciate good engeneering and nice design but I don't like OSX. I really don't, it's too much like windows except I don't have experience with it.
With cedega I agree with you with one exception, I don't believe they're really trying. Last time I used it, two months ago, I couldn't get anything to run without crashing at some point, even the games they listed as "Supported". I fixed it by getting an old PC and slotting in an AGP Geforce 7600, that one runs Windows Xp and will until it's 200W PSU detonates. It runs everything at high detail and full speed, all my other computers just run linux and don't bother with games.
The nv drivers don't work with anything over a geforce 5xxx, so a 6xxx or 7xxx card will have a garbled screen and X won't load. You'll need to toggle to another console and change the xorg.conf file to start vesa, then restart the X server. This is why people who say we should use only OSS drivers for linux annoy me, because the OSS graphics drivers don't work on the newer systems.
I can't shake the feeling that it's not appropriate for a political organization to make web pages about the failings of it's opponents. It's lame when candidates for Prime Minister take out TV ad campaigns against the opposition and it's equally lame when the FSF does things like this. Besides, it's not like anyone except linux users will ever know it exists.
I believe there is a restriction in 64-bit vista that prevents unsigned drivers. Since we're all heading in that direction eventually, that's my operating set. Sorry for being unspecific.
I've always wondered about something. If people can't get or release open-source versions of critical drivers, like the drivers Andrew Moreton was complaining about, what are they going to do? Switch?
There HAS to be a balance between idealistic views of how the world should be and attention to how the world really is. There are plenty of examples, mostly involving failed government economic initiatives, where people acted according to an idealized version of what they thought the world should be and the situation spun off in a completely unforeseen direction, never to their benefit.
In essence, if they DID stamp out all proprietary drivers, in userspace and kernel space. Then what? I may just be cynical but I can't come up with a scenario where nvidia, ati or any of the other companies would take the risk of billions worth of lawsuits, since a suit against the foundations of their designs (probably patented) would cripple a company if it hit, and actually open source their drivers. The users would lose and the viability of linux as an non-server system would take a plunge.
At this point it would be land of the free-er. Windows doesn't allow home-coded drivers, linux wouldn't allow binary drivers. Since I don't intend to code my own drivers anytime soon, I'd switch to Windows in order to actually use my computer if something like this ever happened.
How many times was this exploited? It seems to me that OSS only works for people with LOTS of free time and little responsibilties. Even if I had known, it wouldn't have changed anything, the nv drivers never worked, I still need binaries, therefore I still need the nvidia binary drivers, regardless of their problems.
Slashdot Mirror
How long until Target figures out that very few people actually use their website compared to the trouble of all these lawsuits. As has been mentioned by other posters, it's quite possibly a browser config and interpretation issue. So, these lawsuits might never stop, so why not just block all access from these IP ranges?
There are incidences of mass lawsuits invoking the disabilities act even against stores which comply with it. It's not something that you can feel happy defending against and odds are that you're missing at least something somewhere, as such, it's not entirely unprofitable for the people doing it. It's not that I'm saying Target should be excluded from following guidelines, their website seems pretty unusable if you're disabled, but I am reminded by a lawsuit I'd heard about previously "hearing impaired sue Quantas for unusable phone booking system". Considering it would be infinitely easier to order from stores which ARE accessible, this screams of a shameless cash grab.
In summary, I think it's too idealistic to say that if we let people choose to learn, more would choose to do so than at the present time. I strongly suspect, based on personal experience, that more people would choose NOT to learn.
Supposing however that it works differently. That after dropping the mandate, the country that does it will see literacy rates begin to fall as well as the overall average of education in that country. School might not be fun, it might very well be like a prison, but that's too bad, because it's the most important thing the government can do for you. The state funded school system is the result of centuries of struggle for the right of all people to receive a fair and equal opportunity at the beginning of their lives. School is forced onto students because given a chance, most students would choose NOT to bother and many of their parents won't force them.
If you remove the mandate, odds are that you'll also increase the rates of poverty in poorer areas. Decrease literacy, decrease numeracy and almost certainly lower university attendance.
One other thing, from what I've seen, these vaunted "special" courses are just a way to get rid of the poorer and less able students so they won't have to be dealt with. They receive a lower standard of education and their opportunities are reduced.
In essence, even if certain students cause problems. They still learn something, they're worth teaching and a poor learning environment is just the price we have to live with. Needless to say I think it's worth living with.
I agree, I'm running Debian stable right now on all my systems because it's the only distribution (aside from OpenSUSE) that I can be 100% sure will work stably.
However I personally think this is mostly a non-issue. Sure there are ramnifications to both sides of the coin, but that's always the case. This is an issue that anyone who gave a damn would have fixed about 10 minutes after they heard about it; leaving everyone else to discuss it endlessly.
I was looking into just such a service a while back. All you need is a modem and an account with the provider. The problem is that these people charge insanely high rates like $1 USD per MB of data. I doubt anyone who would be willing to attempt it could afford to fund such a connection. If they could however, it's very feasable as field reporters in Iraq used a similar system to transfer footage back home.
On that note, it might be a better idea to smuggle a reporter into the country.
I've posted this before but it's worth mentioning again, more clearly. If you're outside the oppressive grip of greedy government, you're by definition outside the reach of any and all laws. Think about it. There are still hundreds of pirates operating right now, the international slave trade is still a massive operation not to mention natural disasters that could strike out of nowhere.
Plus, if someone wanted you gone, they could just shell you and let's face it; What you're building is basically an ICBM, You're thinking hidden space exploration platform but the world governments are thinking hidden missile launch site. Some of those governments are very direct and very paranoid.
Impressive; I had two paragraphs typed out before I realized you were being sarcastic.
To put it another way, "It's only murder when there are laws against it."
Good point. This isn't so much a Vista bug as it is an incompatibility issue. I hate it when people refuse to fix something because that might be seen as accepting blame. I further suspect that the people with no internet access probably have very little patience for the runaround and don't particularly care who's fault it is just as long as someone fixes it.
Granted, if it were me in their situation, I'd get a linux server up and mediate the connection to the internet from my Vista computers. Since my computers DO run Vista, after years of linux only, this isn't completely hypothetical.
Yes but that's exactly the problem. In a generation there'll be new games that I'll want to play. The problem doesn't end there though, because there are still bugs in games that work almost perfectly.Not that virtualization will be all that better but a great many problems will be avoided.
Personally I disagree with that. I've always felt that a fractured community comes naturally when people can do their own thing but that this was in no way a problem. Since everyone has a different goal, they can make something that fits their ideals. There's two important principles
1. The people who design distros would not necessarily want to help on a different project if their work was unrequired.
2. The distributions exchange massive amounts of code. There is surprisingly little work being duplicated without necessity.
Linux doesn't need two desktop environments, which is a good example of duplicated work. But both desktop environments are going in different directions, if they were all on the same project, it's entirely possible that nothing would get done and development would slow down.
It's not as good as you think. Psychonauts only runs with the last two versions, since they finally implemented multi threaded 3d and Far Cry doesn't appear to run without difficulty even now. It's true that you don't need the latest applications, but odds are you don't technically need lots of things on your system possibly including a computer. I still want things to work regardless if other people think they don't matter and even after 10 years of development wine still doesn't cut it. Yes, I know it's Microsoft's fault for designing an impenetrable system but acknowledging that still doesn't get Bioshock working.
I've been using linux (not GNU/Linux) for over four years now and I'm fairly satisfied with my system. There's plenty of things that could be better but the one thing that drives me up the wall is that I had to give up gaming. Real gaming I mean, like Fear, Stalker, Titan Quest, Farcry, Bioshock and the upcoming Crysis; neither tuxracer or "Savage: Battle for Newerth" quite cuts it in comparison. The one thing that would make a massive and lasting improvement is a properly written DirectX passthrough driver for the open source virtualizer VirtualBox. It's very complicated but technically possible and considering the excellent developers that exist in the open source movement, will probably prove surprisingly quick to develop if people work at it. The main problem with the current implementations is that none of them support Pixel Shaders V2 and Parallels version 3.0 has not been released for linux. It has the major advantage over wine that all the wierdness will work. You won't have to prepare for all the strange undocumented API calls or deal with files cropping up in your home folder to mention just a few things.
There are some differences between me and Microsoft, between Blizzard or Canonical and me as well. Besides the being given stuff for free angle.
Microsoft: Datacenters worldwide
Me: Just this computer.
Microsoft: Probably pays less than 5c per GB.
Me: Pays $2 per GB.
Microsoft: Previous yearly profits exceeding 100 million.
Me: Previous yearly profits exceeding 0 million.
With these discrepancies between us, you can see why I might feel bitter about being shanghaied into paying Microsoft's server costs. More to the point, I don't like Microsoft, it's no hypocritical to help people or companies you like and to feel ambivalent about being forced to help people or companies you don't.
Probably for the same reason that the Microsoft icon is represented by Bill Gates of Borg.
I foresaw that someone would point that out. But it's an excellent lie detector. When people lie, they use their frontal lobes far more than their long term memory, when they tell the truth, the reverse is true. That's the first thing that comes to mind but I'm sure there are other applications. In any case, my point is only to point to a situation that might fit the description mentioned previously, it's arguable what degree of precision qualifies as "Mind Reading".
It's been a while since I heard about it but I believe that with a non-poisonous magnetic dye, you can track the change in blood flow inside the brain by use of a specialized scanner. Since different parts of the brain are responsible for different general areas of thought, you can make an educated guess about what a person is thinking by observing these changes.
Funny you should mention that. I got a Mac Book as well recently, to run Linux. I appreciate good engeneering and nice design but I don't like OSX. I really don't, it's too much like windows except I don't have experience with it.
With cedega I agree with you with one exception, I don't believe they're really trying. Last time I used it, two months ago, I couldn't get anything to run without crashing at some point, even the games they listed as "Supported". I fixed it by getting an old PC and slotting in an AGP Geforce 7600, that one runs Windows Xp and will until it's 200W PSU detonates. It runs everything at high detail and full speed, all my other computers just run linux and don't bother with games.
The nv drivers don't work with anything over a geforce 5xxx, so a 6xxx or 7xxx card will have a garbled screen and X won't load. You'll need to toggle to another console and change the xorg.conf file to start vesa, then restart the X server. This is why people who say we should use only OSS drivers for linux annoy me, because the OSS graphics drivers don't work on the newer systems.
I can't shake the feeling that it's not appropriate for a political organization to make web pages about the failings of it's opponents. It's lame when candidates for Prime Minister take out TV ad campaigns against the opposition and it's equally lame when the FSF does things like this. Besides, it's not like anyone except linux users will ever know it exists.
Actually, I was thinking I'd try BSD then Solaris in that order, if BSD was unsatisfactory. But that lacks the argumentative punch.
I believe there is a restriction in 64-bit vista that prevents unsigned drivers. Since we're all heading in that direction eventually, that's my operating set. Sorry for being unspecific.
I've always wondered about something. If people can't get or release open-source versions of critical drivers, like the drivers Andrew Moreton was complaining about, what are they going to do? Switch? There HAS to be a balance between idealistic views of how the world should be and attention to how the world really is. There are plenty of examples, mostly involving failed government economic initiatives, where people acted according to an idealized version of what they thought the world should be and the situation spun off in a completely unforeseen direction, never to their benefit. In essence, if they DID stamp out all proprietary drivers, in userspace and kernel space. Then what? I may just be cynical but I can't come up with a scenario where nvidia, ati or any of the other companies would take the risk of billions worth of lawsuits, since a suit against the foundations of their designs (probably patented) would cripple a company if it hit, and actually open source their drivers. The users would lose and the viability of linux as an non-server system would take a plunge.
At this point it would be land of the free-er. Windows doesn't allow home-coded drivers, linux wouldn't allow binary drivers. Since I don't intend to code my own drivers anytime soon, I'd switch to Windows in order to actually use my computer if something like this ever happened.
How many times was this exploited? It seems to me that OSS only works for people with LOTS of free time and little responsibilties. Even if I had known, it wouldn't have changed anything, the nv drivers never worked, I still need binaries, therefore I still need the nvidia binary drivers, regardless of their problems.