Here's a quick nitpick about the linked Countdown 101 from the summary - the clock in the picture reads +00:00:05, yet the caption says it was taken "before a Space Shuttle launch."
I enjoy bloopers, and hopefully somebody else will too.:)
If I were stupid enough to buy things I don't have the money for, I might actually lose a minute or two's sleep over that. Not everybody is fortunate enough to be able to buy a house or car with cash. We're happy for you, however.
I don't mean to get all "tin-foil hat" on you, but do you know that's the Jeff Bezos, and if so, how? It's not that I don't trust you - I'm just curious.
There is a very good, if somewhat casual, study out there that says that the BEST way to remove congenstion is to always drive slow enough to keep a goodly sized (several vehicle length) hole ahead of you.
I believe the "study" you remember may be Traffic Waves by William Beaty. I originally found this site via somebody else's sig a while back. I spent a good half hour digging it up today so others could read it.
I'm no more qualified to understand traffic than you or he is, but I read it extensively when I stumbled on it and it makes a lot of sense to me. It'd be really nice if a professional traffic engineer could chime in and say how accurate this all is.
Avery claims trademarks on all their product numbers, according to the packaging. I have a set of file folder labels numbered 25215 (TM) in front of me.
Since colors can be registered as trademarks in the U.S. (Pepsi owns a particular shade of blue, and 3M owns the yellow used in their Post-It Notes), it doesn't surprise me in the least that you can trademark numbers.
The speed limit is there for a reason - it's a safe speed to drive. If you disagree, don't blame the people following the law. Take it to whatever legislative body sets the numbers.
The speed limit also provides a nice method of synchronization between all the drivers. If everybody goes at the posted speed, there are fewer slower drivers, and the rate can be sustained for longer periods of time because fewer accidents will happen.
Now, if we could only make the silly drivers understand that the fastest way to get where they're going is to not speed, let people into lanes, and all the other things that used to be called "courtesy," we'd be in good shape.
Full disclosure: I almost always drive the speed limit (slower than the flow of traffic), although I stay in the slow lane most of the time.
Actually, most people I've talked with use NAT not for the security but because they need it to get more than one computer online (the local broadband providers provide one IP address and rent extras for about $10 per month). I think whether NAT continues to be popular or not will probably be influenced by whether residential ISPs become less stingy with the address space.
If NAT goes out of style, the home router people will just focus more on delivering good firewalls, and a lot of people (probably including me) will still buy them.
Surprisingly, simple ways of saving bandwidth can add up. Back in 2003, A List Apart guestimated that Slashdot could save 10 GB of bandwidth a day just by using CSS and modern markup.
I agree. The challenge in developing an accessible user interface is that every disability has a different set of needs. For example, a person with a hearing impairment might be able to get along just fine on a general operating system - my home computer has a pair of headphones which I basically only use when I'm listening to music.
It seems to me that operating systems today are farthest behind in serving people with visual impairments. It's obvious that a person who is totally or partially blind isn't going to have much fun trying to use a Graphical User Interface.
I think the best solution at the moment is to write software that works within existing operating systems, using the built-in accessibility toolkits. A lot of improvement could be realized in this area alone.
Apple VoiceOver is the first such functionality of its kind to be included for free with a commercial operating system. No. Windows XP has had Narrator since its release.
However, knowing Apple, VoiceOver probably works better. I haven't had a chance to test it yet.
An excellent question. Even if they do format it, there's still the question if the data is still there. I don't know enough about flash technology, but on magnetic disks a format just overwrites the tracking information, not the data itself.
Regardless of whether they're formatting, I have a feeling they're not doing a security wipe.
I don't believe it is. Their disclaimer is that if they find any patents infringed, "Microsoft also agrees to offer a royalty-free patent license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions to any such patent claims for the purpose of publishing and consuming the extensions set out in the specification."
Every instance of "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms", such as those of the Office XML formats, has made it impossible to use in GPL software in the past.
Now, if their patent license for these RSS extensions doesn't do that, then I'll be impressed.
It would be silly to rely on a site like the Internet Archive for backup purposes.
My goal was to see how the site evolved over the years of its operation. I didn't need anything from the old versions. The backups I had were more than adequate, thank you very much.
I feel they make it too easy. IA blocks not only the present version of the site, but also every page of every past version.
I can't get older pages of a web site I operated several years ago because a robots.txt file was inadvertently added that blocks it. At the time, I didn't know about the Internet Archive, and as a result potentially years of this site's history is gone.
Already did. I don't expect it to make any difference. I know, it's kind of pessimistic, but sadly, that's the kind of guy I am when it comes to my elected representatives.:(
As long as the online music market continues to be wildly successful, it will be tough to dissuade them from continuing to take legal action. Very true. This is the part where I *thwap* my neighbors for not getting it.
The other side of the coin is that while DRM-laden stores like the iTMS are doing amazing business, the sites that specialize in legal, DRM-free music are just having trouble getting an audience -- or content. I realize this is a chicken-and-egg problem, but it seems to me that the problem with these sites is the lack of content. I've tried to listen to stuff on Magnatunes and MP3Tunes - really, I have - and frankly, the vast majority of it sucks. On the other hand, I generally enjoy CDs put out by the music industry - even the non-single tracks. I think if they could figure out how to get the content, the audience would come.
FWIW, I know that $7.99 and $21.99 are just two imaginary numbers you pulled out for the purpose of making a point They're not far off reality. I recently purchased a $9.99 compilation CD online. The same title cost $21.99 at 2-3 brick-and-mortars nearby. In all three instances, the CD was a well-known, brand-new title from a major label.
We can say that perhaps if Apple hadn't added DRM...[the] music industry might have grown 1,500% year over year rather than merely 1,000%, but I don't buy that -- particularly in light of the relative failure of the DRM-free MP3 stores. As I mentioned above, I believe the failure of the MP3 stores you mentioned can be attributed the lack of compelling content (and also, the fact that they don't have flashy TV commercials with dancing silhouettes). Perhaps, if the RIAAs of the world lined up a well-known brand against Apple (say, Wal-Mart or Tower) and gave them the permission to offer DRM-free music, they might be pleasantly surprised.
Seriously, what good does DRM do anymore? JHymn breaks it with ease.
Thanks for the debate, and welcome to my friends list (once I figure out exactly how to do that...
Like Disney DVDs, which disable controls through most of the pre-content crap?
Every Disney DVD I own, including those from their subsidiary companies, lets me press "Menu" to skip the commercials. They even mention this fact on the bottom of the screen every few minutes.
It's possible that some of their titles block this, but it's far from universal.
Until the anti-DMCA crowd accepts and acknowledges that, even though they produce crappy music, people are actively stealing significant quantities of music/movies, they will NEVER gain traction against the well organized lobbying groups.
It seems that if the anti-DMCA crowd (disclaimer: I'm one of them) were to admit that, then the recording industry would simply say, "See? Those criminals even admit that they're stealing our work! We can't stop at just the DMCA. We have to add DRM, harsher civil and criminal penalties for stealing, and everything else we can possibly do. If we don't, we'll go bankrupt because the pirates are cutting into our revenue stream."
Obviously, locking us in isn't working. I propose an alternative business method: quality service. It works something like this:
Stop suing your customers. I postulate that the vast majority of people being sued for trading have purchased at least a few CDs. Suing them is just going to irritate them and cause them not to make any other purchasers. It also irritates people who are totally legit, like me.
Stop forcing DRM on customers. It adds to the cost of the product, is easily bypassed by whomever wants to, and makes paying customers feel like they're criminals that can't be trusted.
Sell cheaper, and make up the difference on volume. More people would buy an album for $7.99 than they would at $21.99.
Those are the facts. It's a shame the RIAA (and the Canuck equivilent) won't accept them.
What's wrong with using perfectly legitimate, standards-compliant HTML to make your site easier to read by search engines? "White-hat" SEO is using structured markup, ensuring that your text is text and not images or embedded Flash, putting style in CSS where it belongs, and all the other techniques the Slashdot crowd generally considers Good Things (TM). This is what Irish Samurai claims to be doing, and if that's true, he should be thanked for it.
If other businesses that fall in ranking are worried, they can invest a little time and/or money to clean up their site's code, and they'll end up right where they should be - ranked according to $SEARCH_ENGINE_MARKET_LEADER's impartial, best judgment. The search engine will be able to deliver more accurate results, the user gets the information they want, the businesses in question get traffic most likely to result in a sale, and the quality of the World Wide Web in general increases because everybody uses good markup.
You do a bit of very basic math, call a phone number, punch in a few numbers on your touch-tone phone, and you're done. Speaking of changes, TeleFile will be turned off at the end of this year.
you'll have to document all of your purchases to qualify for the "spending up to the poverty level" rebate Nope. A check for the amount of tax that would be charged at the poverty level comes every month. See the FAQ.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a quick nitpick about the linked Countdown 101 from the summary - the clock in the picture reads +00:00:05, yet the caption says it was taken "before a Space Shuttle launch."
:)
I enjoy bloopers, and hopefully somebody else will too.
If I were stupid enough to buy things I don't have the money for, I might actually lose a minute or two's sleep over that.
Not everybody is fortunate enough to be able to buy a house or car with cash. We're happy for you, however.
maybe, just maybe they'll get the message.
Yep. Then they'll bill you the [roughly] $200 early cancellation fee you signed off on.
I don't mean to get all "tin-foil hat" on you, but do you know that's the Jeff Bezos, and if so, how? It's not that I don't trust you - I'm just curious.
There is a very good, if somewhat casual, study out there that says that the BEST way to remove congenstion is to always drive slow enough to keep a goodly sized (several vehicle length) hole ahead of you.
I believe the "study" you remember may be Traffic Waves by William Beaty. I originally found this site via somebody else's sig a while back. I spent a good half hour digging it up today so others could read it.
I'm no more qualified to understand traffic than you or he is, but I read it extensively when I stumbled on it and it makes a lot of sense to me. It'd be really nice if a professional traffic engineer could chime in and say how accurate this all is.
you can't trademark a number
Avery claims trademarks on all their product numbers, according to the packaging. I have a set of file folder labels numbered 25215 (TM) in front of me.
Since colors can be registered as trademarks in the U.S. (Pepsi owns a particular shade of blue, and 3M owns the yellow used in their Post-It Notes), it doesn't surprise me in the least that you can trademark numbers.
The speed limit is there for a reason - it's a safe speed to drive. If you disagree, don't blame the people following the law. Take it to whatever legislative body sets the numbers.
The speed limit also provides a nice method of synchronization between all the drivers. If everybody goes at the posted speed, there are fewer slower drivers, and the rate can be sustained for longer periods of time because fewer accidents will happen.
Now, if we could only make the silly drivers understand that the fastest way to get where they're going is to not speed, let people into lanes, and all the other things that used to be called "courtesy," we'd be in good shape.
Full disclosure: I almost always drive the speed limit (slower than the flow of traffic), although I stay in the slow lane most of the time.
Actually, most people I've talked with use NAT not for the security but because they need it to get more than one computer online (the local broadband providers provide one IP address and rent extras for about $10 per month). I think whether NAT continues to be popular or not will probably be influenced by whether residential ISPs become less stingy with the address space.
If NAT goes out of style, the home router people will just focus more on delivering good firewalls, and a lot of people (probably including me) will still buy them.
Surprisingly, simple ways of saving bandwidth can add up. Back in 2003, A List Apart guestimated that Slashdot could save 10 GB of bandwidth a day just by using CSS and modern markup.
I agree. The challenge in developing an accessible user interface is that every disability has a different set of needs. For example, a person with a hearing impairment might be able to get along just fine on a general operating system - my home computer has a pair of headphones which I basically only use when I'm listening to music.
It seems to me that operating systems today are farthest behind in serving people with visual impairments. It's obvious that a person who is totally or partially blind isn't going to have much fun trying to use a Graphical User Interface.
I think the best solution at the moment is to write software that works within existing operating systems, using the built-in accessibility toolkits. A lot of improvement could be realized in this area alone.
Apple VoiceOver is the first such functionality of its kind to be included for free with a commercial operating system.
No. Windows XP has had Narrator since its release.
However, knowing Apple, VoiceOver probably works better. I haven't had a chance to test it yet.
An excellent question. Even if they do format it, there's still the question if the data is still there. I don't know enough about flash technology, but on magnetic disks a format just overwrites the tracking information, not the data itself.
Regardless of whether they're formatting, I have a feeling they're not doing a security wipe.
I don't believe it is. Their disclaimer is that if they find any patents infringed, "Microsoft also agrees to offer a royalty-free patent license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions to any such patent claims for the purpose of publishing and consuming the extensions set out in the specification."
Every instance of "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms", such as those of the Office XML formats, has made it impossible to use in GPL software in the past.
Now, if their patent license for these RSS extensions doesn't do that, then I'll be impressed.
I'm honestly curious about this because this type of action by MS is fuzzy in my head. Is it really that bad? What should they do?
A promise to not patent whatever it is they're doing would be an excellent start.
It would be silly to rely on a site like the Internet Archive for backup purposes.
My goal was to see how the site evolved over the years of its operation. I didn't need anything from the old versions. The backups I had were more than adequate, thank you very much.
I feel they make it too easy. IA blocks not only the present version of the site, but also every page of every past version.
I can't get older pages of a web site I operated several years ago because a robots.txt file was inadvertently added that blocks it. At the time, I didn't know about the Internet Archive, and as a result potentially years of this site's history is gone.
Already did. I don't expect it to make any difference. I know, it's kind of pessimistic, but sadly, that's the kind of guy I am when it comes to my elected representatives. :(
As long as the online music market continues to be wildly successful, it will be tough to dissuade them from continuing to take legal action.
Very true. This is the part where I *thwap* my neighbors for not getting it.
The other side of the coin is that while DRM-laden stores like the iTMS are doing amazing business, the sites that specialize in legal, DRM-free music are just having trouble getting an audience -- or content.
I realize this is a chicken-and-egg problem, but it seems to me that the problem with these sites is the lack of content. I've tried to listen to stuff on Magnatunes and MP3Tunes - really, I have - and frankly, the vast majority of it sucks. On the other hand, I generally enjoy CDs put out by the music industry - even the non-single tracks. I think if they could figure out how to get the content, the audience would come.
FWIW, I know that $7.99 and $21.99 are just two imaginary numbers you pulled out for the purpose of making a point
They're not far off reality. I recently purchased a $9.99 compilation CD online. The same title cost $21.99 at 2-3 brick-and-mortars nearby. In all three instances, the CD was a well-known, brand-new title from a major label.
We can say that perhaps if Apple hadn't added DRM...[the] music industry might have grown 1,500% year over year rather than merely 1,000%, but I don't buy that -- particularly in light of the relative failure of the DRM-free MP3 stores.
As I mentioned above, I believe the failure of the MP3 stores you mentioned can be attributed the lack of compelling content (and also, the fact that they don't have flashy TV commercials with dancing silhouettes). Perhaps, if the RIAAs of the world lined up a well-known brand against Apple (say, Wal-Mart or Tower) and gave them the permission to offer DRM-free music, they might be pleasantly surprised.
Seriously, what good does DRM do anymore? JHymn breaks it with ease.
Thanks for the debate, and welcome to my friends list (once I figure out exactly how to do that...
Good for you.
Now, what actions have they taken?
Like Disney DVDs, which disable controls through most of the pre-content crap?
Every Disney DVD I own, including those from their subsidiary companies, lets me press "Menu" to skip the commercials. They even mention this fact on the bottom of the screen every few minutes.
It's possible that some of their titles block this, but it's far from universal.
It seems that if the anti-DMCA crowd (disclaimer: I'm one of them) were to admit that, then the recording industry would simply say, "See? Those criminals even admit that they're stealing our work! We can't stop at just the DMCA. We have to add DRM, harsher civil and criminal penalties for stealing, and everything else we can possibly do. If we don't, we'll go bankrupt because the pirates are cutting into our revenue stream."
Obviously, locking us in isn't working. I propose an alternative business method: quality service. It works something like this:
- Stop suing your customers. I postulate that the vast majority of people being sued for trading have purchased at least a few CDs. Suing them is just going to irritate them and cause them not to make any other purchasers. It also irritates people who are totally legit, like me.
- Stop forcing DRM on customers. It adds to the cost of the product, is easily bypassed by whomever wants to, and makes paying customers feel like they're criminals that can't be trusted.
- Sell cheaper, and make up the difference on volume. More people would buy an album for $7.99 than they would at $21.99.
Those are the facts. It's a shame the RIAA (and the Canuck equivilent) won't accept them.AltaVista is owned by Yahoo!, but the results are different. See for yourself:
AltaVista, Yahoo!, AlltheWeb (also owned by Yahoo!; the results are similar to AltaVista but not exactly the same).
What's wrong with using perfectly legitimate, standards-compliant HTML to make your site easier to read by search engines? "White-hat" SEO is using structured markup, ensuring that your text is text and not images or embedded Flash, putting style in CSS where it belongs, and all the other techniques the Slashdot crowd generally considers Good Things (TM). This is what Irish Samurai claims to be doing, and if that's true, he should be thanked for it.
If other businesses that fall in ranking are worried, they can invest a little time and/or money to clean up their site's code, and they'll end up right where they should be - ranked according to $SEARCH_ENGINE_MARKET_LEADER's impartial, best judgment. The search engine will be able to deliver more accurate results, the user gets the information they want, the businesses in question get traffic most likely to result in a sale, and the quality of the World Wide Web in general increases because everybody uses good markup.
I see nothing wrong with any of this.
You do a bit of very basic math, call a phone number, punch in a few numbers on your touch-tone phone, and you're done.
Speaking of changes, TeleFile will be turned off at the end of this year.
you'll have to document all of your purchases to qualify for the "spending up to the poverty level" rebate
Nope. A check for the amount of tax that would be charged at the poverty level comes every month. See the FAQ.