My question is this: When the policies don't match, who is resposnible for fixing it? (In other words, which one has to change their policy? Does MS have to be willing to give refunds themselves when the stores don't want to, or do the stores have to be willing to give refunds when the supplier doesn't want to? If the answer is "neither", then the EULAs cannot be considered legally binding, since you aren't presented with the details of them until it's too late to say no to them. (You're being asked to sign a blank piece of paper to be filled in later with contract terms, essentially.)
In a way, I'd prefer it that way. If you can prove the impossiblity of doing what the EULA says you have to to back out of the contract, then that has the good effect of nullifying the EULA, a win as far as I'm concerned.
So, if I understand you correctly, it's encoding the bits as sound similar to how a phone modem does it, in such a manner that if there is "hiss" or error it can still make out the bits because they are encoded in such a way that the exact waveform isn't relevant, just that it fits within a tolerant fuzzy match. (Thus your data has to be rather sparse. You must send bits slowly enough that a single bit is encoded as a long change over many samples of the underlying medium. I.E. "An amplitude spike here means a bit of 1. That amplitude spike might consist of a hundred seperate sound samples forming a 'hump' shape If some of those samples are missing or in error, the general shape of the hump is still detectable.")
You are assuming the RIAA actually is trying to stop pirates. Past experience shows they also despise fair use (like for example, taking your favorite ten songs from different CD's you own and burning them onto a "best of" CD for yourself, or converting them to MP3 for your portable player.) They want you to pay for every copy of the song you have, and I see this as a means to get there. Until I see the mechanism by which they will ensure they DON'T flag fair users as pirates, I'm not believing them.
They lost their right to have me give them the benefit of the doubt years ago.
How does that work? MP3's have lossy compression who's goal is NOT to reproduce the bits precisely, but just good enough for human listeners to not be able to tell the difference. I would have thought that this would make it impossible to embed a key (or watermark) in the audio data since bits will come out garbled.
Forgive me for not trusting the RIAA, but what a line of bull - they think we'll believe that they "need" this to track sales, and for that reason only! That never was a problem when they made their money selling CD's. When I gave my money to Sam Goody and walked out with a CD, the recording studio had no clue who I was, and they still did just fine that way. Why the change?? I'm not believing it.
How does that proposed system tell the difference between *you* listening to copies of the song in multiple locations (like at home and at work and walking around the city with your laptop with WiFI card), versus OTHER PEOPLE listening to copies of the song? How does it know which copies are fair use and which are not? (Granted, the Music industry does't *want* you to have fair use, so I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a way to tell the difference.) This was what made Adobe's e-books so awful - they tied your copy down to the specific computer it was installed on, making it less share-able than even a paper book.
The real culprit there is IPX - a horrible broadcast protocol that flooded the LAN. A modern multiplayer game, built on TCP or UDP wouldn't be that bad.
Sometimes it happens by accident. You click on a link that CLAIMS it's going to one kind of site but is in fact going to a different type. Also, many sites were in the practice of sitting on likely typo's of popular site names. Once upon a time, mistyping "www.yaho.com" instead of "www.yahoo.com" would get you to a porn site with the assinine unclosable popups (Firking Javascript abusers).
The biggest problem is what counts as "work related"? Without a human being constantly checking everything you do on the web, you have to rely on a program to be the watchdog. And computer software is absolutely terrible at figuring out semantic context. Is it non - work related to surf eBay so it should be banned for all? The truthful answer is, "depends on context". Is it non - work related to surf a particular newsgroup? The truthful answer is, "depends on context". In fact, that's always the truthful answer. But, corporate big-wigs interested in trying to stop this problem aren't interested in the truthful answer, they want the easy answer. And the easy answer is to just ban sites rather than ban by content.
Netscape cannot cause a blue screen of death. Only the OS can. If Netscape's apps are capable of making the OS crash, that's the OS's fault, all the way. Netscape on Linux never crashes linux, but it does segfault a lot.
Yes, and it's also cheaper to stay at home and never take a vacation, but people do anyway. And it's cheaper to teleconference and never actually physically go to work, but people do anyway. Why? Because we *like* it. We are a species perfectly willing to waste a little bit in order to go places ourselves. Once the lifting mechanisms improve, we just won't care anymore about the extra cost to send people. Right *now* it is orders of magnatude cheaper to send robots. That is not going to stay that way forever unless you choose to cripple development of better launch vehicles. When it merely becomes two or three times more expensive to send people, then it will happen again.
That's fine. I'm 100% convince that as lifting technology improves, the argument against unmanned missions won't matter anymore. So go ahead and believe that you are working for better lift tech for unmanned flight only. I'll know that it's really the doorway to making manned flight more feasable.
We are a curious species. We *will* travel in space once it becomes feasable. I could be convinced that for *NOW* unmanned flights are the way to go. I won't be convinced that that's all we'll ever do.
[...] He did say just that. [...] You can read it here.
This is what he said:
People who say things like "I have to [...] get thinks to look the same" are saying "I don't understand the web" and should probably not be working with it until they clue on.
Apparently you read that as "Eddy is trying to say that it's easy to make things look the same and thus people who claim they have to jump through hoops to do so don't understand the web." I read it as, "Eddy is trying to say that people who are making it a goal to get things to look the same don't understand the web. Using the web to lay things out precisely is like using a school bus to go off-road racing - that's not what it's for."
He never said they had to look the same. Please explain why that matters. Anyone who is attempting to make a page render identically in HTML on two different browsers shouldn't even be USING HTML in the first place, since that's not what it's for. It must be readable, yes. It must be functional, yes. It does not need to be identical. Anyone that says so is lying.
The real problem here is that the people who have to use the tool aren't the ones picking which tool to use, and so they automatically resent that. One very large difference between how it works in the modern workplace verus the ones of yesterday is twofold:
People today are not expected to understand their tools enough to fix them themselves, which means they *need* an IT department to do it for them. And once that happens you get forced upgrades because the IT people don't want to support multiple versions of something. In an old fashioned paper and pencil office, if you purchase a pen to use on your forms you fill out, you are expected to deal with making sure the pen works correctly yourself. If it doesn't go get another. If the stapler jams, fix it. Thus users had the choice to use whatever they felt like within reason, because it was Their Problem if it failed.
Compatability. If I use one model of stapler to staple my document, and you a different one, we can still use each other's document. Your stapling of the document with a different stapler didn't ruin my ability to read it. So we don't need to force you to use a stapler you don't like if for some reason you have a special attachment to that Red Swingline you like so much (no reason to take it away from you and piss you off). With computer software, it's not like that. You all have to be using the same thing or it doesn't work. So again, choices are forced onto users that they have no control over.
It's these forced choices that piss off the users.
I haven't needed to buy floppies lately precisely BECAUSE they can be overwritten more times than a CD-RW. I haven't actually NEEDED to, despite the fact that I still use them several times a week. So if it is true that floppy quality is going downhill, I wouldn't have noticed it since my 5-year-old ones are still enough for all my needs. If I want permanence, I burn a CD. If I want something temporary, I use a floppy. If I need something large sized such that a few floppies isn't enough to hold it, then typically it is also not something temporary and so I just burn a new CD.
What you describe will never become the standard, becuase: 1 - it is more bulky - you have to carry around a pile of peripherals instead of everything in one case, and more importantly, 2 - it's expensive to have a seperate power supply for each device.
There is nothing you can do with a floppy disk that you can't theoretically do with a cd
Yes there is. You have a disk with ten text files on it. You want to edit one of them, andding one paragraph to it, then save it. With a floppy, you can do just that - it behaves like a small filesystem. If those ten files are in an ISO 9660 image on a CD, you'll have to recreate the whole image to get the one change to the one file onto the disk.
Then add on top of that the fact that while both floppies and CD-RW's allow re-writes, CD-RW's can't handle nearly as many rewrites as a floppy can.
If your goal is to stagnate lifting technology, then by all means punt on the hard problem of getting people into space. But if your goal is to improve the space program overall, then put the money not into the payloads, but into the methods to get them up there. I see a goal of 20 or 30 pathfinders as setting sights too low. The goal should be to make space travel routine enough that we no longer have to skimp and shave off every kilogram (which is really where the impetus for unmanned missions is coming from.)
The fact that the shuttle is a waste has nothing to do with it being manned. It has to do with it being a half-assed compramise between reusable and expendable that used the worst features of each. The Russian Soyuz is manned, and very very cheap. Abandon the shuttle? Absolutely. Abandon manned flight forever? Hell No! Getting *us* off this rock should be the first motivation. All space research should be toward the goal of making a better means of getting into space so the cost of sending people isn't that big of a deal anymore. If you can carry more kilograms, that benefits the future of BOTH manned and unmanned spaceflight.
I get sick of hearing this argument about manned vs unmanned spaceflight. It's missing the point. There wouldn't even BE such an issue if the cost to lift a kilogram to orbit wasn't so horribly expensive. The only reason to replace humans with robots in space is that a robot doesn't require as much lifting capacity. But *that* is only a relevant issue because current spacelift technology isn't that good yet. You call it a waste to spend money on manned flight and instead we should spend it on unmanned probes. I call it a waste to spend money on researching how to make the the payloads lighter when we should be spending the money on how to make the lifting stronger and cheaper. Then the whole question would be rather moot.
Here's a Q: how many people have died in the unmanned space program?
The same number that died in the manned space program, since they are the same program. A vehicle that carries stuff into space is the same technology whether the "stuff" is humans or cargo or a mix of both. When technology learned to make Apollo 1 is also used today to launch an unmanned satellite, those three astronauts in Apollo 1 were, in effect, dygin for both the unmanned and manned space programs (since they are one in the same.)
The only reason manned spaceflight is expensive is because *all* spaceflight is expensive per kilogram lifted, and so the extra mass of a human body and the equipment to keep the human alive is a dearly bought thing. The fix is NOT to abandon the dream of human spaceflight and concentrate the budget on robotic science missions only. The fix is to spend the lion's share of the budget on finding out better means of getting to space so we no longer have to even have this debate. If you don't concentrate on making better launch vehicles, then spaceflight will always remain too expensive to be worth it, be it manned or robotic.
The big problem to solve is NOT what to do in space with current (expensive) technology. The big problem to solve first is how to make it cheaper so it's not such a big deal whether a mission is manned or not.
naked PR stunts like sending up the first Israeli/Saudi/schoolteacher/senior-citizen astronaut.
That would depend on the motivation. If the Israeli was sent ONLY because he's Israeli, then yes it's a PR stunt. If the Israeli was sent because he was well qualified and he just so happened to be Israeli, and so NASA decided to make a PR issue out of that, then it's not a problem by me. The fact that NASA made a PR issue out of his Israeliness wouldn't be the problem. If they used that to influence their decision to pick him over someone else, THEN that would be a problem.
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It didn't take this long to bring up a case. Remember the Windows Refund Day? It was the very same thing, but going at it from a different angle.
My question is this: When the policies don't match, who is resposnible for fixing it? (In other words, which one has to change their policy? Does MS have to be willing to give refunds themselves when the stores don't want to, or do the stores have to be willing to give refunds when the supplier doesn't want to? If the answer is "neither", then the EULAs cannot be considered legally binding, since you aren't presented with the details of them until it's too late to say no to them. (You're being asked to sign a blank piece of paper to be filled in later with contract terms, essentially.)
In a way, I'd prefer it that way. If you can prove the impossiblity of doing what the EULA says you have to to back out of the contract, then that has the good effect of nullifying the EULA, a win as far as I'm concerned.
So, if I understand you correctly, it's encoding the bits as sound similar to how a phone modem does it, in such a manner that if there is "hiss" or error it can still make out the bits because they are encoded in such a way that the exact waveform isn't relevant, just that it fits within a tolerant fuzzy match. (Thus your data has to be rather sparse. You must send bits slowly enough that a single bit is encoded as a long change over many samples of the underlying medium. I.E. "An amplitude spike here means a bit of 1. That amplitude spike might consist of a hundred seperate sound samples forming a 'hump' shape If some of those samples are missing or in error, the general shape of the hump is still detectable.")
Is that how the problem is circumvented?
You are assuming the RIAA actually is trying to stop pirates. Past experience shows they also despise fair use (like for example, taking your favorite ten songs from different CD's you own and burning them onto a "best of" CD for yourself, or converting them to MP3 for your portable player.) They want you to pay for every copy of the song you have, and I see this as a means to get there. Until I see the mechanism by which they will ensure they DON'T flag fair users as pirates, I'm not believing them.
They lost their right to have me give them the benefit of the doubt years ago.
How does that work? MP3's have lossy compression who's goal is NOT to reproduce the bits precisely, but just good enough for human listeners to not be able to tell the difference. I would have thought that this would make it impossible to embed a key (or watermark) in the audio data since bits will come out garbled.
Forgive me for not trusting the RIAA, but what a line of bull - they think we'll believe that they "need" this to track sales, and for that reason only! That never was a problem when they made their money selling CD's. When I gave my money to Sam Goody and walked out with a CD, the recording studio had no clue who I was, and they still did just fine that way. Why the change?? I'm not believing it.
How does that proposed system tell the difference between *you* listening to copies of the song in multiple locations (like at home and at work and walking around the city with your laptop with WiFI card), versus OTHER PEOPLE listening to copies of the song? How does it know which copies are fair use and which are not? (Granted, the Music industry does't *want* you to have fair use, so I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a way to tell the difference.) This was what made Adobe's e-books so awful - they tied your copy down to the specific computer it was installed on, making it less share-able than even a paper book.
The real culprit there is IPX - a horrible broadcast protocol that flooded the LAN. A modern multiplayer game, built on TCP or UDP wouldn't be that bad.
Sometimes it happens by accident. You click on a link that CLAIMS it's going to one kind of site but is in fact going to a different type. Also, many sites were in the practice of sitting on likely typo's of popular site names. Once upon a time, mistyping "www.yaho.com" instead of "www.yahoo.com" would get you to a porn site with the assinine unclosable popups (Firking Javascript abusers).
The biggest problem is what counts as "work related"? Without a human being constantly checking everything you do on the web, you have to rely on a program to be the watchdog. And computer software is absolutely terrible at figuring out semantic context. Is it non - work related to surf eBay so it should be banned for all? The truthful answer is, "depends on context". Is it non - work related to surf a particular newsgroup? The truthful answer is, "depends on context". In fact, that's always the truthful answer. But, corporate big-wigs interested in trying to stop this problem aren't interested in the truthful answer, they want the easy answer. And the easy answer is to just ban sites rather than ban by content.
Netscape cannot cause a blue screen of death. Only the OS can. If Netscape's apps are capable of making the OS crash, that's the OS's fault, all the way. Netscape on Linux never crashes linux, but it does segfault a lot.
Yes, and it's also cheaper to stay at home and never take a vacation, but people do anyway. And it's cheaper to teleconference and never actually physically go to work, but people do anyway. Why? Because we *like* it. We are a species perfectly willing to waste a little bit in order to go places ourselves. Once the lifting mechanisms improve, we just won't care anymore about the extra cost to send people. Right *now* it is orders of magnatude cheaper to send robots. That is not going to stay that way forever unless you choose to cripple development of better launch vehicles. When it merely becomes two or three times more expensive to send people, then it will happen again.
That's fine. I'm 100% convince that as lifting technology improves, the argument against unmanned missions won't matter anymore. So go ahead and believe that you are working for better lift tech for unmanned flight only. I'll know that it's really the doorway to making manned flight more feasable.
We are a curious species. We *will* travel in space once it becomes feasable. I could be convinced that for *NOW* unmanned flights are the way to go. I won't be convinced that that's all we'll ever do.
I was, yes...
This is what he said:
Apparently you read that as "Eddy is trying to say that it's easy to make things look the same and thus people who claim they have to jump through hoops to do so don't understand the web." I read it as, "Eddy is trying to say that people who are making it a goal to get things to look the same don't understand the web. Using the web to lay things out precisely is like using a school bus to go off-road racing - that's not what it's for."
He never said they had to look the same. Please explain why that matters. Anyone who is attempting to make a page render identically in HTML on two different browsers shouldn't even be USING HTML in the first place, since that's not what it's for. It must be readable, yes. It must be functional, yes. It does not need to be identical. Anyone that says so is lying.
It's these forced choices that piss off the users.
I think you meant:I haven't needed to buy floppies lately precisely BECAUSE they can be overwritten more times than a CD-RW. I haven't actually NEEDED to, despite the fact that I still use them several times a week. So if it is true that floppy quality is going downhill, I wouldn't have noticed it since my 5-year-old ones are still enough for all my needs.
If I want permanence, I burn a CD. If I want something temporary, I use a floppy. If I need something large sized such that a few floppies isn't enough to hold it, then typically it is also not something temporary and so I just burn a new CD.
What you describe will never become the standard, becuase: 1 - it is more bulky - you have to carry around a pile of peripherals instead of everything in one case, and more importantly, 2 - it's expensive to have a seperate power supply for each device.
Yes there is. You have a disk with ten text files on it. You want to edit one of them, andding one paragraph to it, then save it. With a floppy, you can do just that - it behaves like a small filesystem. If those ten files are in an ISO 9660 image on a CD, you'll have to recreate the whole image to get the one change to the one file onto the disk.
Then add on top of that the fact that while both floppies and CD-RW's allow re-writes, CD-RW's can't handle nearly as many rewrites as a floppy can.
If your goal is to stagnate lifting technology, then by all means punt on the hard problem of getting people into space. But if your goal is to improve the space program overall, then put the money not into the payloads, but into the methods to get them up there. I see a goal of 20 or 30 pathfinders as setting sights too low. The goal should be to make space travel routine enough that we no longer have to skimp and shave off every kilogram (which is really where the impetus for unmanned missions is coming from.)
The fact that the shuttle is a waste has nothing to do with it being manned. It has to do with it being a half-assed compramise between reusable and expendable that used the worst features of each. The Russian Soyuz is manned, and very very cheap. Abandon the shuttle? Absolutely. Abandon manned flight forever? Hell No! Getting *us* off this rock should be the first motivation. All space research should be toward the goal of making a better means of getting into space so the cost of sending people isn't that big of a deal anymore. If you can carry more kilograms, that benefits the future of BOTH manned and unmanned spaceflight.
I get sick of hearing this argument about manned vs unmanned spaceflight. It's missing the point. There wouldn't even BE such an issue if the cost to lift a kilogram to orbit wasn't so horribly expensive. The only reason to replace humans with robots in space is that a robot doesn't require as much lifting capacity. But *that* is only a relevant issue because current spacelift technology isn't that good yet. You call it a waste to spend money on manned flight and instead we should spend it on unmanned probes. I call it a waste to spend money on researching how to make the the payloads lighter when we should be spending the money on how to make the lifting stronger and cheaper. Then the whole question would be rather moot.
The same number that died in the manned space program, since they are the same program. A vehicle that carries stuff into space is the same technology whether the "stuff" is humans or cargo or a mix of both. When technology learned to make Apollo 1 is also used today to launch an unmanned satellite, those three astronauts in Apollo 1 were, in effect, dygin for both the unmanned and manned space programs (since they are one in the same.)
The only reason manned spaceflight is expensive is because *all* spaceflight is expensive per kilogram lifted, and so the extra mass of a human body and the equipment to keep the human alive is a dearly bought thing. The fix is NOT to abandon the dream of human spaceflight and concentrate the budget on robotic science missions only. The fix is to spend the lion's share of the budget on finding out better means of getting to space so we no longer have to even have this debate. If you don't concentrate on making better launch vehicles, then spaceflight will always remain too expensive to be worth it, be it manned or robotic.
The big problem to solve is NOT what to do in space with current (expensive) technology. The big problem to solve first is how to make it cheaper so it's not such a big deal whether a mission is manned or not.
That would depend on the motivation. If the Israeli was sent ONLY because he's Israeli, then yes it's a PR stunt. If the Israeli was sent because he was well qualified and he just so happened to be Israeli, and so NASA decided to make a PR issue out of that, then it's not a problem by me. The fact that NASA made a PR issue out of his Israeliness wouldn't be the problem. If they used that to influence their decision to pick him over someone else, THEN that would be a problem.