How is it that you claim it has no impact on the amount of space available just because it is stored on a part that is reserved for promos 100% of the time? That is just the opposite - the fact that TIVO partitioned off a seperate area for this stuff means it has even MORE of an impact on the space available for your recordings because now the space is wasted 100% of the time instead of just when a promo is being stored on it. Claiming that that isn't part of what the user is paying for is is dishonest as claiming that Microsoft's normal price they give to vendors who have exclusivity deals is a "discount rate" and their jacked up rate for others is the "normal" rate. Hard drive space costs money. You *are* paying for that space, no matter what snow job you might be buying into.
The biggest problem I have with making linkers responsible for the content they link to is that the content can be changed by others without the linker taking any action of any kind, or even being aware of it. Let's say I link to a computer science page that has several well known, helpful algorithms for people to look at. Then unbeknownst to me, after I made that link the maintainer of that site decides to add DeCSS to the list of algorithms shown on the site. Why the hell should I be responsible for that? It wasn't there when I made the link.
Judges have no freakin' clue how dynamic the WWW is.
And, more importantly, if your trade secret is merely an instance of an already publicly known mathematical process, and the only thing you added was to pick the random constants that are used as the keys to feed to the algorithm, that hardly constitutes a "secret". It's like saying, "Here, I will write a piece of code:
x = 5.5 * y;
There, now I'll copyright that and I'm the only person that's allowed to multiply things by 5.4, because nobody else thought to copyright such a simple thing before so I was the first to do it, so the idea is all mine."
Plus, if you dissemate your information to *everyone* who makes DVD consoles and DVD software, with the only caveat being that they must not let users circumvent annoying features of DVD technology (like country codes and no-skip sections), then that hardly constitutes a "trade secret" even if it was a wonderful great new idea and not just an instance of an already known mathematical process.
Counting lines is a stupid way to measure code complexity. That 7 (6?) lines of perl is equally complex to the longer C code up above. The only reason you got it to fit in less lines was that you used shorter variable names, and more abbreviated shorthand ways of calling the same kinds of routines. To get a better idea of how complex a snippet of code is, don't count the lines, count the number of language tokens used. For example:
while( ) { G = 29; R = 142; ...etc...
is no more amount of code than:
while(){G=29;R=142;...etc...
They both have the exact same grammar, and use the same number of tokens.
They both take just as long to execute, but the more compact version takes more time for a human being to read. What is it about Perl that tends to make its proponets enjoy making write-only code?
Here's the problems I can see off the top of my head:
1 - What about web admins that don't want their site to be catalogued in the search engine for everyone to find? Right now there's ways to make that happen, such that the few you do want to know about your site can be given the DNS name to access it, but you want to do away with that.
2 - What about web sites that aren't linked to from anywhere else, such that Google doesn't find them? This could either be because they aren't popular, or because the site just got put up.
3 - What if I know of some obscure site that I want to visit that isn't well known, but is of interest to me? Unfortunately Google ranks it low in the list because it isn't well known, so it takes me a lot of scrolling and "next" clicking to get to it. Now if only I had some kind of unique name to refer to to that site and that site only right away with one hop. Gee I wish there was some kind of system that does that.
4 - Okay, even ignoring those other problems, lets say they all get solved. So I use Google to find all web pages. Great. Now that you've done away with DNS, how do I get to an IRC server? How do I get to the IMAP mail server on campus? How do I "ssh" in to a machine at work to work from home?
I assume a poster to slashdot would at least be aware that port 80 isn't the only way to access a host on the internet, and therefore a mapping that gets you to a host for other services is needed too. Gosh, I wonder what we could call such a mapping...
See the subject line. That's the key difference. If I type "IBM Thinkpad" into a search engine, I don't get just the one hit that the name maps to. I get a comprehensive list of many sites that deal with that string. The problem with RealNames was that they would offer you only to the "official" place for information about IBM thinkpads, where "official" is a synonym for "most willing to pay us money".
But the RealNames saga *is* about Microsoft doing something wrong. In the past. They cuddled up with RealNames in the first place. The "doing something right" in this case was merely a matter of ceasing to do something wrong that they shouldn't have started in the first place. Praising them for it is kind of silly.
It didn't mean, "In addition to being unable to copyright the format and subject matter and types of questions asked in a FAQ, one also cannot copyright the rest of the contents of a FAQ either." It meant, "In addition to the FAQ formats being dissimilar enough in this case that copying cannot be proven, it is also the case that the very type of suit put forth by the plantiff, where it was alleged that a FAQ with similar questions and a similar format is a copyright violation, can't even be done in the first place, even if the formats really were similar." That's what the "step further" was about - in addition to the claim being unproven in this case, even if it was proven it wouldn't be enough in any case to show that the other party has a FAQ with similar questions and format.
There have been several people in this thread that have said that regulations are needed because the coasters are dangerous, and then they go on to cite cases of coasters breaking, or safety harnesses failing to hold the passenger in place, and so on. Look, people, what does that have to do with putting an upper limit on G-forces, which is what this bill is about?
I agree that I want coasters to at least be regulated enough that I know they've been maintained and don't suffer mechanical falures while I'm riding on them. But that doesn't mean I want them to become tame sissy experiences with no more thrill anymore. And besides, there is a difference between experiencing strong G's for a few seconds on the bottom of a dip in a coaster (which is typically where you get the biggest G's is when "pulling out" at the bottom of the first drop), and experiencing them steady for several minutes like an astronaut does.
There was a ride I remember at Six Flags Great America (partway between Chicago and Milwuakee on I-94) called "The Edge". It was a simple gravity dropper. Your car lifted straight up one side of the elevator to the top, the car then shifted over a few feet to the other side of the tower, where the track was, and then the car was let go. It would drop in freefall for a few seconds, and then the track would level its path to the horizontal, where a braking system would stop it. That was all there was to it - a simple ride. But one day the mechanism to move the car over to the track didn't work right, and the ride operator didn't notice, and so he went ahead and pulled the lever anyway and dropped the car on the wrong side of the elevator, where there was no track, and no brakes - just a straight drop to the ground.
It killed the occupants, smashing the car to the ground near the people in line for the ride. For *that* kind of death by carnival ride, I think the family members suing the amusement park is perfectly justified. If on the other hand the ride is advertised as "Warning, this ride in parts achieves as much as 4 times the force of gravity in the normal direction, and as much as 2 times the force of gravity in the negative direction. If you have any medical condition please consult a doctor before riding this ride, yadda, yadda.", and someone with a heart condition dies from the G's on the ride, then I don't think a lawsuit is warranted.
So to those who say the riders should beware and accept that they are taking a risk, I say, hey, there is a big difference between dying because your body can't handle the ride's normal operation, and dying because the ride malfunctions.
A lot of those 57 deaths cited are from malfunctions, not the fact that the rides have big G forces.
It's a real law in a lot of places, not just California. It's been that way since I was a kid riding the bus in the '70s and '80s here in Wisconsin. The fine isn't typically that absurdly large, though, although that might be a result of the fact that all legal operating costs for drivers in California are outrageously expensive, and not exclusive to just this fine alone.
How annoying it is depends on how busy the traffic in the street is at the time. If it's a small subdivision road I don't mind. But when they block a 4 or 6-lane boulevard in rush hour I start getting annoyed. If the children aren't responsible enough to safely cross such a busy street, then don't force them to by dropping them off on the wrong side of the really busy street. Sure, the drivers who don't watch out when they see the bus stopping, and hit the kids trying to cross the street are incompetent and dangerous, but even more so the route planners who forced those kids to have to cross a busy street are even more incompetent and dangerous. At least drop them off at intersections with crosswalks, for crying out loud, instead of having surprise dashes across the street at a spot where drivers don't normally expect to see pedestrians crossing.
There's this concept of keeping enough distance between you and the car in front so that if they slam on their brakes you have time to slam on yours - without being even close to hitting them.
If the traffic is thick enough then that just isn't possible, period, so long as there are other drivers willing to tailgate (and if the traffic is thick enough, there *will* be drivers willing to tailgate.) Why do I say this? Because if you leave a large gap between you and the car in front of you, someone else pulls in front of you to fill that gap. So you slow down more to leave a gap behind him, and someone pulls in and fills *that* gap, and so on and so forth.
If the rest of traffic is comforatble with a very small following distance, then there's nothing you as an individual driver can do to give yourself more room, short of not driving during busy times.
When someone says "Why should I pay $39.00 for something that can be obtained for free?", it would be pretty f****** stupid for me to respond as if he had used the word "free" in the context of "freedom", now wouldn't it?
Sure, if your reply was constrained to only talking about that one person. But you then expanded it to the community at large, applying your criticism to everyone who says software should be free yet wants to be paid themselves, as if that was a contradiction (which IS implying that everyone who says "software should be free" is talking only about price. I agree that that is what this one person was talking about, but your rant encompassed more than this one person.)
Hmm, well, I admit that my memory could be off, I distinctly remember it being called "6.02 beta". Unfortunatley I already clobbered the old version with the new version downloaded today, so I can't go back and check now, and I doubt the old beta will still be at Opera's site now.
I've lived in the bay area for nearly 40 years, and in that time, I've never even met someone who has suffered in an earthquake.
And I can say the same thing of tonadoes and snow and floods here in the midwest.
Just like most people who witness an earthquake aren't hurt by it, most who witness bad weather aren't hurt by it. The reports you see on TV of a bit swath of damage by a tornado are the excpetion. Pick a random path of a few miles in the midwest and you are more likely to find grass and trees and feilds than houses - so most tornados don't damage people's homes. And even the few that do don't often kill many people. (There's a reason people in the Midwest tend to build houses with basements.)
The only major damaging tornado I can recall in the area was back in, I think 1985 in the town of Barneveld, WI (and since that was over 150 miles from home, it only barely fits the criteria of "in the area".) That one was pretty bad - wiped out about every building in town (which was only about 120 buildings, since it was a small town, but still that's a lot of property damage all at once), But since I don't know anyone from the area, it still fits the criteria of "nobody I met has suffered" from a tornado, if you want to compare apples to apples with your disaster comparasins.
And "deaths" from snow are actually deaths from auto accidents while the snow made the roads slippery. (Hardly anyone dies anymore from being "caught out" in the cold of a blizzard.) How many people die on California's congested freeways? I'll take a blizzard in traffic with Wisconsin drivers who know how to drive in it any day over trying to drive on roads with way more traffic than they were ever built to handle.
(Interesting anecdote. I was visiting Louisville Kentucky on a business trip once when they had an uncharacteristic 4-inch snowfall, for which they weren't prepared. The city doesn't keep many snowplow trucks on hand since it rarely snows. I was driving in my rental car (A corsica, not a good snow car due to low ground clearance) down the freeway in the 4-inch snow at about 35 miles per hour, which I considered a prudently cautious speed given that the snow was unplowed (otherwise I would have been going faster). There was one lone snowplow out on the freeway, moving along at about 25 miles per hour. All the locals were lined up in a slow procession behind the lone snowplow. I passed the snowplow in an unplowed lane. In my cheapo rental car. The people must have thought I was nuts. I got pulled over later by a cop for driving "too fast for conditions" (I was 30 mph UNDER the speed limit, but he considered the snow to be that much of a problem). I tried explaining how a 4-inch snowfall isn't really that bad if you are used to it. You just have to look really far ahead on the road and start reacting to things you see long before you reach them. It's no different from what a semi-truck driver has to do every day. The big problem is visibility. If it's foggy or still snowing, then you have to slow down because you need to be sure your stopping distance doesn't exceed your visibility range. I said I could see plenty far ahead to stop at 35 mph. The only reason I wasn't going any faster was that the car didn't have good enough traction to accellerate more than that. I didn't dare go slower because then the car with low clearance could get stuck.
He saw my WI driver's license, and decided not to give me a ticket, but he give me a warning and force me to go into the line of slow shmucks behind the lone snowplow. I understood what road rage meant as I was forced to sit in line behind a snowplow driver who didn't know he could go a lot faster and still be safe.
The only trick to snow driving is to just remember that since all delta-V is effected through the friction between the tires and the road, when you have less friction, you can't effect as much delta-V.
And that that applies to all directions, accellerating, decellerating, and changing your momentum vector direction (turning). Also an understanding that it is better to line up the accelleration vector with the orientation of the wheels than have it be sideways to the wheels helps. That's why you have more control when you slow down a lot before the turn and accellerate back up to speed during the turn than when you try to slow down some and then turn at a constant speed. Accellerating during the turn changes the direction of the vector so that it is closer to the way the wheels are pointed, instead of being sideways to them.
Hitting the brakes while turning is actually worse than trying to turn without slowing down, since it makes the vector be perpendicular to the angled front wheels. (It's the same thing race car drivers do, but it also applies in any situation where you barely have enough friction to effect the turn). Just look a lot farther ahead on the road and remember not to make quick jerky motions (which are an attempt to do too much delta-V in one instant) and snow driving is just fine. People die driving in snow because they don't know how. Almost everyone gets into some very minor 5-10 mph fender-bender accident at some point early in their snow-driving experience and then after that they "get it" and deal with it just fine.
And as for floods, they are sometimes quite prevelent in the midwest (remember when the mississippi river flooded?) but around here in Wisconsin they aren't a big deal. We aren't as flat as most of the midwest, so the river valleys (which are of course the lowest spots there area) can hold a lot more water before it breaks out. Plus the ground tends to be able to sponge up a lot of water.
Also, with floods, there's no surprise about where one will strike. I have no sympathy for those who lost their homes in the Mississippi flooding that one year. None whatsoever. They were told they were building their homes in a flood plain. The geologists knew the river tends to have a major flood once every fifty years or so, and told people. I don't think the government should have bailed them out with FEMA funds. They lived there because the soil was soo rich (gee, I wonder why that is, duh), when they could have put their house a few miles away from the plot of land they farm and travelled to it only when working it, but NOOO that would have made too much sense.
And you don't need a PhD in linguistics to understand that "free" has two independant meanings in English and you (and the person you are responding to) are using the shallow one. Opera (the ad-less version) is non-free in *both* senses of the word, freedom and gratis, Opera with the ads is free in the "gratis" sense of the word, but still not free in the "freedom" sense of the word (can't see the source code to modify or fix the thing yourself). And there exist some people who do really care a lot about that to the point where they will pick a tool with available source code over one without. I'm not one of them, I use Opera myself, but to assume that they are always referring to price when they say "software should be free" is to misrepresent their position. Even though I don't agree entirely with them, It still bothers me to see their position misrepresented over and over. It's not fair.
I do have one problem with the "software should all be free" attitude, but it is that people refuse to see that something which is open source is harder to charge money for since people could pirate it with almost no effort at all, and thus software that is free in the freedom sense of the word yet not free in the gratis sense of the word is rather rare. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head. I was about to mention Linux distros, except that with them the price they charge is entirely on the honor system. It is perfectly legal to buy one Redhat CD and install it on 100 computers, then burn a copy of it for your friends to install on their computers. It is perfectly legal to download the whole ISO image and burn the CD without ever even buying one initial copy to start with. The only reason they can make money at the model is because there are enough people that are willing to pay them money anyway even though they are not legally required to to get the distribution. This is because most of their customer base consists of "fans" and others who want to see them do well. That model doesn't work if Redhat use was expanded to the computer using populace at large.
But saying, "these people don't realize that freedom of use inevitably leads to gratis distribtion" (which is my point) is very different from saying "These people are lazy-ass bums who want everything to be gratis" (which is how your post ends up implying things).
As you well know, the US patent office is so lax on checking things up that just because someone has a patent on something doesn't mean they invented it.
It is a little-known fact that that the user-agent string for IE often ID's itself as another browser. For example, the last time I checked, which was back in IE 4.0, IE identified itself as Mosaic, with the only mention of MSIE being in parenthesis, just like the string you show above for Opera. I suspect that websites looking for IE ignore everything but the "compatable; MSIE x.x" part of the string. They just about have to, since the principal part of the user-agent string doesn't tell them that it's IE.
It is false to say that each window being open in an SDI situation has to be another instance of the program running. One running process may be in control of multiple windows. This is how Netscape works, for example, which is why if one Netscape window locks up, they all get locked up. (unless you created the windows as seperate netscape launches instead of picking "file | New Window" off the menu to make the second window.)
Correction: "Which for *some* linux users, who are stuck using inferior mice without enough buttons (either by choice or otherwise), means both-buttons-at-once."
What part of "released today a new version...fixing the issue" did you not understand? (And depsite how the numbers look version 6.02 is actually older than version 6.0. Folks at Opera have really strange numbering conventions.)
Due to the confusing nature of how Opera numbered their releases, Opera 6.2 beta for Linux is actually an OLDER release than Opera 6.0 for Linux. (Because, you see, when it went out of beta mode into official release mode, they reset the version number to 6.0 again. It's as if they expect the dropping of the word "beta" to be more signifigant in people's eyes than the actual release number. I don't get it, since I ignore whether software has "beta" after it's name or not. The only difference between beta and released is number of bugs that have been fixed SO FAR.
But at any rate, the upshot is that when he said "6.02" he was actually referring to an older version than the recent 6.0 release, despite what the numbers might make it look like.
The biggest natural disaster in LA isn't the earthquakes. It's the idiotic notion of trying to get an arid desert to suppport such a large population. Thus you have erosion problems up the yin-yang on the occasions where it does rain and people lose their yards in mudslides, and you have to pipe in every last drop out of the Colorado River, hundreds of miles away, so the river doesn't even reach the coast in Mexico anymore.
Anyone living in a freakin' desert should *not* waste water on having a nice green lawn. If you didn't want sand and sgraggly scrub brush for your yard, you shouldn't have chosen to live where that's what the climate tends to produce.
Still prefer the East coast? Nah, but I prefer that part of the West Coast that actually has a livable temperate climate, essentially everything north of San Fran is okay. And there you start to get the *really* fun natural disasters - a few thousand or so years of nothing and then BAM, the top of one of the Cascade Mountains literally explodes. (Mt Saint Helens wasn't that unique an event for the area. It's the standard pattern for how those volcanoes tend to go. Terrifying, but it leaves behind the most beautiful landscape imaginable after the area recovers. Ever seen Crater Lake?)
Yeah, those blizzards and hurricanes must be great fun.
You don't get strong blizzards and hurricanes in the same places. Hurricanes require warm climates. And blizzards don't damage buildings much if at all - stay inside and you are fine. Dealing with a blizzard is a cakewalk.
Slashdot Mirror
How is it that you claim it has no impact on the amount of space available just because it is stored on a part that is reserved for promos 100% of the time? That is just the opposite - the fact that TIVO partitioned off a seperate area for this stuff means it has even MORE of an impact on the space available for your recordings because now the space is wasted 100% of the time instead of just when a promo is being stored on it. Claiming that that isn't part of what the user is paying for is is dishonest as claiming that Microsoft's normal price they give to vendors who have exclusivity deals is a "discount rate" and their jacked up rate for others is the "normal" rate. Hard drive space costs money. You *are* paying for that space, no matter what snow job you might be buying into.
Judges have no freakin' clue how dynamic the WWW is.
x = 5.5 * y;
There, now I'll copyright that and I'm the only person that's allowed to multiply things by 5.4, because nobody else thought to copyright such a simple thing before so I was the first to do it, so the idea is all mine."
Plus, if you dissemate your information to *everyone* who makes DVD consoles and DVD software, with the only caveat being that they must not let users circumvent annoying features of DVD technology (like country codes and no-skip sections), then that hardly constitutes a "trade secret" even if it was a wonderful great new idea and not just an instance of an already known mathematical process.
while( )
...etc...
{ G = 29;
R = 142;
is no more amount of code than: while(){G=29;R=142;...etc...
They both have the exact same grammar, and use the same number of tokens. They both take just as long to execute, but the more compact version takes more time for a human being to read. What is it about Perl that tends to make its proponets enjoy making write-only code?
1 - What about web admins that don't want their site to be catalogued in the search engine for everyone to find? Right now there's ways to make that happen, such that the few you do want to know about your site can be given the DNS name to access it, but you want to do away with that.
2 - What about web sites that aren't linked to from anywhere else, such that Google doesn't find them? This could either be because they aren't popular, or because the site just got put up.
3 - What if I know of some obscure site that I want to visit that isn't well known, but is of interest to me? Unfortunately Google ranks it low in the list because it isn't well known, so it takes me a lot of scrolling and "next" clicking to get to it. Now if only I had some kind of unique name to refer to to that site and that site only right away with one hop. Gee I wish there was some kind of system that does that.
4 - Okay, even ignoring those other problems, lets say they all get solved. So I use Google to find all web pages. Great. Now that you've done away with DNS, how do I get to an IRC server? How do I get to the IMAP mail server on campus? How do I "ssh" in to a machine at work to work from home? I assume a poster to slashdot would at least be aware that port 80 isn't the only way to access a host on the internet, and therefore a mapping that gets you to a host for other services is needed too. Gosh, I wonder what we could call such a mapping...
See the subject line. That's the key difference. If I type "IBM Thinkpad" into a search engine, I don't get just the one hit that the name maps to. I get a comprehensive list of many sites that deal with that string. The problem with RealNames was that they would offer you only to the "official" place for information about IBM thinkpads, where "official" is a synonym for "most willing to pay us money".
But the RealNames saga *is* about Microsoft doing something wrong. In the past. They cuddled up with RealNames in the first place. The "doing something right" in this case was merely a matter of ceasing to do something wrong that they shouldn't have started in the first place. Praising them for it is kind of silly.
It didn't mean, "In addition to being unable to copyright the format and subject matter and types of questions asked in a FAQ, one also cannot copyright the rest of the contents of a FAQ either." It meant, "In addition to the FAQ formats being dissimilar enough in this case that copying cannot be proven, it is also the case that the very type of suit put forth by the plantiff, where it was alleged that a FAQ with similar questions and a similar format is a copyright violation, can't even be done in the first place, even if the formats really were similar." That's what the "step further" was about - in addition to the claim being unproven in this case, even if it was proven it wouldn't be enough in any case to show that the other party has a FAQ with similar questions and format.
I agree that maintaining two seconds is possible. I do not agree that two seconds is a safe following distance.
I agree that I want coasters to at least be regulated enough that I know they've been maintained and don't suffer mechanical falures while I'm riding on them. But that doesn't mean I want them to become tame sissy experiences with no more thrill anymore. And besides, there is a difference between experiencing strong G's for a few seconds on the bottom of a dip in a coaster (which is typically where you get the biggest G's is when "pulling out" at the bottom of the first drop), and experiencing them steady for several minutes like an astronaut does.
There was a ride I remember at Six Flags Great America (partway between Chicago and Milwuakee on I-94) called "The Edge". It was a simple gravity dropper. Your car lifted straight up one side of the elevator to the top, the car then shifted over a few feet to the other side of the tower, where the track was, and then the car was let go. It would drop in freefall for a few seconds, and then the track would level its path to the horizontal, where a braking system would stop it. That was all there was to it - a simple ride. But one day the mechanism to move the car over to the track didn't work right, and the ride operator didn't notice, and so he went ahead and pulled the lever anyway and dropped the car on the wrong side of the elevator, where there was no track, and no brakes - just a straight drop to the ground. It killed the occupants, smashing the car to the ground near the people in line for the ride. For *that* kind of death by carnival ride, I think the family members suing the amusement park is perfectly justified. If on the other hand the ride is advertised as "Warning, this ride in parts achieves as much as 4 times the force of gravity in the normal direction, and as much as 2 times the force of gravity in the negative direction. If you have any medical condition please consult a doctor before riding this ride, yadda, yadda.", and someone with a heart condition dies from the G's on the ride, then I don't think a lawsuit is warranted.
So to those who say the riders should beware and accept that they are taking a risk, I say, hey, there is a big difference between dying because your body can't handle the ride's normal operation, and dying because the ride malfunctions.
A lot of those 57 deaths cited are from malfunctions, not the fact that the rides have big G forces.
How annoying it is depends on how busy the traffic in the street is at the time. If it's a small subdivision road I don't mind. But when they block a 4 or 6-lane boulevard in rush hour I start getting annoyed. If the children aren't responsible enough to safely cross such a busy street, then don't force them to by dropping them off on the wrong side of the really busy street. Sure, the drivers who don't watch out when they see the bus stopping, and hit the kids trying to cross the street are incompetent and dangerous, but even more so the route planners who forced those kids to have to cross a busy street are even more incompetent and dangerous. At least drop them off at intersections with crosswalks, for crying out loud, instead of having surprise dashes across the street at a spot where drivers don't normally expect to see pedestrians crossing.
Sure, if your reply was constrained to only talking about that one person. But you then expanded it to the community at large, applying your criticism to everyone who says software should be free yet wants to be paid themselves, as if that was a contradiction (which IS implying that everyone who says "software should be free" is talking only about price. I agree that that is what this one person was talking about, but your rant encompassed more than this one person.)
Hmm, well, I admit that my memory could be off, I distinctly remember it being called "6.02 beta". Unfortunatley I already clobbered the old version with the new version downloaded today, so I can't go back and check now, and I doubt the old beta will still be at Opera's site now.
I do have one problem with the "software should all be free" attitude, but it is that people refuse to see that something which is open source is harder to charge money for since people could pirate it with almost no effort at all, and thus software that is free in the freedom sense of the word yet not free in the gratis sense of the word is rather rare. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head. I was about to mention Linux
distros, except that with them the price they charge is entirely on the honor system. It is
perfectly legal to buy one Redhat CD and install it on 100 computers, then burn a copy of it for your friends to install on their computers. It is perfectly legal to download the whole ISO image and burn the CD without ever even buying one initial copy to start with. The only reason they can make money at the model is because there are enough people that are willing to pay them money anyway even though they are not legally required to to get the distribution. This is because most of their customer base consists of "fans" and others who want to see them do well. That model doesn't work if Redhat use was expanded to the computer using populace at large.
But saying, "these people don't realize that freedom of use inevitably leads to gratis distribtion" (which is my point) is very different from saying "These people are lazy-ass bums who want everything to be gratis" (which is how your post ends up implying things).
As you well know, the US patent office is so lax on checking things up that just because someone has a patent on something doesn't mean they invented it.
It is a little-known fact that that the user-agent string for IE often ID's itself as another browser. For example, the last time I checked, which was back in IE 4.0, IE identified itself as Mosaic, with the only mention of MSIE being in parenthesis, just like the string you show above for Opera. I suspect that websites looking for IE ignore everything but the "compatable; MSIE x.x" part of the string. They just about have to, since the principal part of the user-agent string doesn't tell them that it's IE.
It is false to say that each window being open in an SDI situation has to be another instance of the program running. One running process may be in control of multiple windows. This is how Netscape works, for example, which is why if one Netscape window locks up, they all get locked up. (unless you created the windows as seperate netscape launches instead of picking "file | New Window" off the menu to make the second window.)
Correction: "Which for *some* linux users, who are stuck using inferior mice without enough buttons (either by choice or otherwise), means both-buttons-at-once."
What part of "released today a new version...fixing the issue" did you not understand?
(And depsite how the numbers look version 6.02 is actually older than version 6.0. Folks at Opera have really strange numbering conventions.)
I meant 6.02, not 6.2. (Figured I'd get that in before someone reams me over a typo.)
But at any rate, the upshot is that when he said "6.02" he was actually referring to an older version than the recent 6.0 release, despite what the numbers might make it look like.
The biggest natural disaster in LA isn't the earthquakes. It's the idiotic notion of trying to get an arid desert to suppport such a large population. Thus you have erosion problems up the yin-yang on the occasions where it does rain and people lose their yards in mudslides, and you have to pipe in every last drop out of the Colorado River, hundreds of miles away, so the river doesn't even reach the coast in Mexico anymore.
Anyone living in a freakin' desert should *not* waste water on having a nice green lawn. If you didn't want sand and sgraggly scrub brush for your yard, you shouldn't have chosen to live where that's what the climate tends to produce.
Still prefer the East coast? Nah, but I prefer that part of the West Coast that actually has a livable temperate climate, essentially everything north of San Fran is okay. And there you start to get the *really* fun natural disasters - a few thousand or so years of nothing and then BAM, the top of one of the Cascade Mountains literally explodes. (Mt Saint Helens wasn't that unique an event for the area. It's the standard pattern for how those volcanoes tend to go. Terrifying, but it leaves behind the most beautiful landscape imaginable after the area recovers. Ever seen Crater Lake?)
You don't get strong blizzards and hurricanes in the same places. Hurricanes require warm climates. And blizzards don't damage buildings much if at all - stay inside and you are fine. Dealing with a blizzard is a cakewalk.