"They" enjoy messing with you. These are people who wear uniforms to work, wore uniforms to school, and they are jealous of your freedom. Try just growing your hair past your shoulders, or growing dreadlocks, or just being black.
Well, the fact that he had used the knife to cut out a flight attendant's throat made it a bit less likely that anyone was going to confront them. One thing about the choice of the 9/11 flights is that they were bound to be filled with business travellers. Not a rugby team. Not an SCA group. Not an ironworker's convention junket, and not a charter flight of Marine recruits.
In other words, none of these flights were likely to have some he-man type that would stand up and say "awww, big man, you cut out some girl's throat with a widdle razor bwade... come-on, what else ya got? bring it on!" Nobody did that. And I think the attackers KNEW that nobody would do that when they picked the flights they did.
And they were wrong. Someone DID have the balls to stand up to them on one of the flights. I wonder if crashing the plane into the ground was the right solution, but, they didn't allow a man with a knife to control them.
It took me the better part of a summer to really get the hang of riding a bike, and I already had experience with trikes.
>A razor is a form of skateboard. i.e. 4 wheels.
Razors only have 2 wheels. Skateboards have 4 wheels, but on two trucks, not independent suspension.
I'd market these things as an alternative to GOLF CARTS. There are entire towns that have golf carts as the primary transport (Peachtree City, GA). Factory floors, college campuses, resorts... A version with a place to put your golf bag might even be a contender for an actual golf cart...
When a movie audience will sit through an accurate depiction of a client's MIS department taking away the developer's access to the dev system, or the three week wait while the DBA comes back with a schema change, or the phone call to the vendor when the development license expired, or the change from an action movie to a family drama to a comedy to an adventure movie back to an action movie as management goes through its "processes"... Maybe then...
>Problem is you're booting off a chip, not the >hard drive, so where would you save your drivers
You're not thinking "next gen arch".
You neglect the NVRAM which is ALSO on your new chip. Along with the hard crypto that identifies YOU and lets the OS Vendor control when and how you install the OS. I cringe at the thought of who "OS Vendor" is, but I would like to see the effect it would have on the market, if everyone were actually required to pay retail for the popular OS; I mean, if everybody who used it actually did pay. I wonder if "elminating piracy" would actually work against the industry by lowering the volume? I wonder if, instead of hypocrisy, we would start seeing real momentum toward alternative computing solutions? I really do sometimes wish that everyone who runs Windows had to pay for it, or it plain didn't work... No in-between, no legal gray areas. I'd feel much better about the price I paid then. As it stands, the price does not accurately reflect the market. (I have similar views regarding pay-TV. If I didn't *know* that so many were getting it "free", I might not care so much about the price. As it happens, I don't believe the price represents anything, therefore I can't buy it.)
"Admittedly, I'm over my head here, but can't you have a complex BIOS that gets out of the way when the OS boots, or acts as a mini OS when the real OS wont load?"
Sun firmware contains a FORTH interpreter that "can" do "anything". It offers all kinds of access to hardware, and can even be used to tune the OS after boot. There's a symbolic debugger, facilities for running programs that don't need an OS, and tty support. If you wanted/needed to be clever, you could do *anything* from here.
Except for the fact that PCs follow certain design factors (decisions made in the early-mid 1980s), there is no reason we couldn't have something similar in the PC world.
Not likely. Depends on your State, but, you agreed to the EULA -- the main part of the EULA that *IS* valid is that they don't give you any warranty. If this software ruins your life or breaks your computer or burns down your house, it's not Intuit's fault. If you didn't agree to that, your opportunity to do anything about it ended when you opened the package. There are plenty of clauses in software licenses that won't stand up to legal challenges (in the long run), but the disclaimer of warranty probably isn't one of them.
Pretty much everybody who has ever pressed the line of tax protest that you describe, has done time for it. I think it was irresponsible of you not to mention that detail.
"I tried several times to install TurboTax in VMWare in Windows 98 running on a Linux host. It kept crapping out, and I began to relaize the reason it was causing errors must be related to some system call that is expecting real hardware."
No matter where you stand on the Intuit issues, what you describe is a VMWare bug, no question about it.
People say "virii", not because they think they are speaking latin, but because they think it sounds good. They think it expresses what they want to mean.
Look at the whole damned French language for an example of what happens when people spend a few centuries speaking what they think is latin.:-)
So the problem is not that you are right or wrong, but rather, that the people you would like to persuade do not care for your argument.
It's like the people who wish media would stop using "hacker", or that slashdotters would use "GNU/Linux" when they say "Linux"... The argument is sound, and compelling, but is completely lost on those it seeks to influence! Not only do they not care, they actually prefer to stick with their chosen usage! You'd do just as well to argue that "virus" should be a mass noun or a possessive state of being: It has virus. (Like "milk" -- en français, il vaut mieux qu'on dit du virus).
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for "virii" to go away -- these people don't even CARE that some English words have latin roots!
Hey, that makes me wonder if there is any other language whose plurals are formed with a final -i or -ii?
Now, if someone DOES buy the argument that latin usage should influence English, I wonder if it is important to note that "virus" in latin refers to "poison"... I'm standing by my argument that it should be a mass plural, not a count plural!
It is easy to make the case against "virii" from the latin "virus" -- it is not "virius" therefore not "virii" in the plural.
My advice is to write and speak with proper usage, correct others when they ask you to proofread their copy, and not expect anyone else to upgrade their literacy in
"Should the police officer be allowed to arrest these guys, just because it appears as though they are planning on robbing the bank?"
He is allowed to ask them to please stay put because he has some questions. They are allowed to walk away, not answer questions, or wait. Since it appears to a reasonable person that these people might be planning a specific crime, the officer is allowed to insist that they stay put, or, to invite them to his office. Or he can arrest them. At the instant that they are not free to leave, they are also entitled to the rights of the accused. In particular, it becomes the governments' responsibility to prove there was a conspiracy to rob a bank.
When it turns out that they were waiting for a bus to go on a rock climbing trip, they aren't entitled to a refund on their tickets. (I personally feel the government should be required to compensate those who it accuses but turn out to be innocent. I take this to the extreme that, I believe a single case of an execution where the prisoner is later proven innocent, should be serious enough to bankrupt a State in compensation to the victim's family. Every day you're in prison under a false accusation should be worth a few thousand bucks. Governments should face really harsh consequences for fuckups like that -- consequences serious enough that they stand to lose their power to govern.)
You are confusing "Probable Cause" with "Clear and Present Danger".
Unless you are a peace officer, you don't need to establish probable cause in the sense that you described it. If you can persuade a judge/grand jury/cop that there was a clear and present danger to your life and limb, then you stand a good chance of not having to stand trial for assault, but it is not a guarantee!
Unless you were in a position to make an arrest or issue a warrant, "Probable Cause" is irrelevant. You, as a private citizen, don't need ANY cause to be suspicious. On the other hand, police are supposed to have a specific reason for any suspicion they raise against an individual. Trying to light a bomb, or holding a gun to someone's head are dramatic examples, but decent.
"Michael Powell is the reason ClearChan^H^H^H^H^H TicketMaster charges $7.50 for concert tickets printed on cheap ugly computerized tickets. "
Allow me to submit that a more compelling reason is that we are like pigs at a trough to BUY this crap, meaning that we at least share the blame with Powell.
It's English. It's acceptable and proper to use the personal pronoun "his" to refer to a person of indefinite gender. If you consider that a problem, you are welcome to speak a dialect of English that follows some other convention. Instead of doing that, I recommend studying French or Italian. You will come to appreciate English for its gender-neutrality!
Let's see... You're at a university. You have $5000 invested in books and tuition for this semester. If you manage to keep your grades above 2.0, you'll be allowed to borrow another $10k for the upcoming year. Half of that will be for rent, the other half for the next semester's tuition, and you don't actually know how you're going to pay for food or the following semester's tuition.
To CHANGE SCHOOLS! as you put it, would mean applying and being accepted at another institution; if it is not in the same state you will either need 3-5 times as much money or else will have a 1-2 year waiting period where you can't be going to school, in order to meet residency requirements. And you might be starting over in some parts of your degree plan when you get there.
You make it sound so simple to change schools once you've started at a university. It's probably simple enough if you're rich.
OK then, it's only because we are pigs at the trough buying this crap that selling software is a good risk for the merchant! If the stuff wasn't so popular, the situation would be bad for the retailer; maybe bad enough that they wouldn't want to carry the merch... It's just coincidental that the stuff is popular (because it's widely regarded as being universally necessary, monopoly yadda yadda). If that weren't the case, people (consumers and merchants alike) might take the terms under closer consideration.
I know it would kill sales if the customer had to sit down, with a pen in hand, and write "I agree (full clause)" to each clause in the contract and sign (not just initial) it...
How about a requirement that the salesperson actually reads, aloud, the full text of the EULA to the customer before the sale can be completed?
I did this once at work. Made me quite unpopular for the hour or so it took me, but, at work, I was damned sure not willing to click "I Agree" without READING the damned thing. The funny thing about that is, not being empowered by the company to make such an agreement, it was completely meaningless anyway.
To me, that is the most surprising detail in the story. It is the first report I have heard of Microsoft offering a EULA refund to anybody. Remember Windows Refund Day? Why weren't all of those people offered a refund, with or without "tax or shipping expenses?" What makes this plaintiff so special? Can anybody now use the facts brought out in this case to strengthen their claim of being elegible for a Windows refund?
>This is so clearly a conspiracy to create an >illegal marketplace.
Is it? So clearly? Then you should have little trouble persuading the US Attorney General to press criminal charges. I wonder why this hasn't been attempted?
Patent Everything NOW, so that in a couple of decades it will ALL BE FREE. I just wish all this crap had gone down during the Reagan administration -- then we'd be reaping the rewards today.
"Of course, it's extremely likely that this suit will be promptly settled -- none of the software makers want a EULA case to go forward in California."
That's why this issue needs to go beyond civil suits and into criminal territory. If there is an institutional violation of consumer protection laws, executives need to be tried under RICO, and subjected to bankrupting fines and Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
If a company routinely violates US Codes with an understanding that they are in violation, Federal racketeering charges are supposed to be the big deterrent.
Slashdot Mirror
One question:
Do you buy one-way tickets?
Also, an observation:
"They" enjoy messing with you. These are people who wear uniforms to work, wore uniforms to school, and they are jealous of your freedom. Try just growing your hair past your shoulders, or growing dreadlocks, or just being black.
Well, the fact that he had used the knife to cut out a flight attendant's throat made it a bit less likely that anyone was going to confront them. One thing about the choice of the 9/11 flights is that they were bound to be filled with business travellers. Not a rugby team. Not an SCA group. Not an ironworker's convention junket, and not a charter flight of Marine recruits.
In other words, none of these flights were likely to have some he-man type that would stand up and say "awww, big man, you cut out some girl's throat with a widdle razor bwade... come-on, what else ya got? bring it on!" Nobody did that. And I think the attackers KNEW that nobody would do that when they picked the flights they did.
And they were wrong. Someone DID have the balls to stand up to them on one of the flights. I wonder if crashing the plane into the ground was the right solution, but, they didn't allow a man with a knife to control them.
> (4 hours of training needed)
It took me the better part of a summer to really
get the hang of riding a bike, and I already had experience with trikes.
>A razor is a form of skateboard. i.e. 4 wheels.
Razors only have 2 wheels. Skateboards have 4 wheels, but on two trucks, not independent suspension.
I'd market these things as an alternative to GOLF CARTS. There are entire towns that have golf carts as the primary transport (Peachtree City, GA). Factory floors, college campuses, resorts... A version with a place to put your golf bag might even be a contender for an actual golf cart...
A real war will provide an increased demand for things like wheelchairs, artificial limbs, etc.
When a movie audience will sit through an accurate depiction of a client's MIS department taking away the developer's access to the dev system, or the three week wait while the DBA comes back with a schema change, or the phone call to the vendor when the development license expired, or the change from an action movie to a family drama to a comedy to an adventure movie back to an action movie as management goes through its "processes"... Maybe then...
>Or that you can have air burning i.e. explosions
:-)
>in space.
Um, you can burn air in space.
If you supply your own oxygen, you can burn anything in space. (Not like the movies show it,
of course, I hear ya
>Problem is you're booting off a chip, not the
>hard drive, so where would you save your drivers
You're not thinking "next gen arch".
You neglect the NVRAM which is ALSO on your new chip. Along with the hard crypto that identifies YOU and lets the OS Vendor control when and how you install the OS. I cringe at the thought of who "OS Vendor" is, but I would like to see the effect it would have on the market, if everyone were actually required to pay retail for the popular OS; I mean, if everybody who used it actually did pay. I wonder if "elminating piracy" would actually work against the industry by lowering the volume? I wonder if, instead of hypocrisy, we would start seeing real momentum toward alternative computing solutions? I really do sometimes wish that everyone who runs Windows had to pay for it, or it plain didn't work... No in-between, no legal gray areas. I'd feel much better about the price I paid then. As it stands, the price does not accurately reflect the market. (I have similar views regarding pay-TV. If I didn't *know* that so many were getting it "free", I might not care so much about the price. As it happens, I don't believe the price represents anything, therefore I can't buy it.)
"Admittedly, I'm over my head here, but can't you have a complex BIOS that gets out of the way when the OS boots, or acts as a mini OS when the real OS wont load?"
Sun firmware contains a FORTH interpreter that "can" do "anything". It offers all kinds of access to hardware, and can even be used to tune the OS after boot. There's a symbolic debugger, facilities for running programs that don't need an OS, and tty support. If you wanted/needed to be clever, you could do *anything* from here.
Except for the fact that PCs follow certain design factors (decisions made in the early-mid 1980s), there is no reason we couldn't have something similar in the PC world.
Evidence?
Not likely. Depends on your State, but, you agreed to the EULA -- the main part of the EULA that *IS* valid is that they don't give you any warranty. If this software ruins your life or breaks your computer or burns down your house, it's not Intuit's fault. If you didn't agree to that, your opportunity to do anything about it ended when you opened the package. There are plenty of clauses in software licenses that won't stand up to legal challenges (in the long run), but the disclaimer of warranty probably isn't one of them.
Pretty much everybody who has ever pressed the line of tax protest that you describe, has done time for it. I think it was irresponsible of you not to mention that detail.
"I tried several times to install TurboTax in VMWare in Windows 98 running on a Linux host. It kept crapping out, and I began to relaize the reason it was causing errors must be related to some system call that is expecting real hardware."
No matter where you stand on the Intuit issues, what you describe is a VMWare bug, no question about it.
> a shit stereo and bad tires.
You probably can't do anything about the stereo... but if the tyres are bad enough to kill, you might have some bargaining power.
People say "virii", not because they think they are speaking latin, but because they think it
:-)
;-)
sounds good. They think it expresses what they want to mean.
Look at the whole damned French language for an example of what happens when people spend a few centuries speaking what they think is latin.
So the problem is not that you are right or wrong, but rather, that the people you would like to persuade do not care for your argument.
It's like the people who wish media would stop using "hacker", or that slashdotters would use "GNU/Linux" when they say "Linux"... The argument is sound, and compelling, but is completely lost on those it seeks to influence! Not only do they not care, they actually prefer to stick with their chosen usage! You'd do just as well to argue that "virus" should be a mass noun or a possessive state of being: It has virus. (Like "milk" -- en français, il vaut mieux qu'on dit du virus).
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for "virii" to go away -- these people don't even CARE that some English words have latin roots!
Hey, that makes me wonder if there is any other language whose plurals are formed with a final -i or -ii?
Now, if someone DOES buy the argument that latin usage should influence English, I wonder if it is important to note that "virus" in latin refers to "poison"... I'm standing by my argument that it should be a mass plural, not a count plural!
It is easy to make the case against "virii" from the latin "virus" -- it is not "virius" therefore not "virii" in the plural.
My advice is to write and speak with proper usage, correct others when they ask you to proofread their copy, and not expect anyone else to upgrade their literacy in
What's next on your agendum?
"Should the police officer be allowed to arrest these guys, just because it appears as though they are planning on robbing the bank?"
He is allowed to ask them to please stay put because he has some questions. They are allowed to walk away, not answer questions, or wait. Since it appears to a reasonable person that these people might be planning a specific crime, the officer is allowed to insist that they stay put, or, to invite them to his office. Or he can arrest them. At the instant that they are not free to leave, they are also entitled to the rights of the accused. In particular, it becomes the governments' responsibility to prove there was a conspiracy to rob a bank.
When it turns out that they were waiting for a bus to go on a rock climbing trip, they aren't entitled to a refund on their tickets. (I personally feel the government should be required to compensate those who it accuses but turn out to be innocent. I take this to the extreme that, I believe a single case of an execution where the prisoner is later proven innocent, should be serious enough to bankrupt a State in compensation to the victim's family. Every day you're in prison under a false accusation should be worth a few thousand bucks. Governments should face really harsh consequences for fuckups like that -- consequences serious enough that they stand to lose their power to govern.)
You are confusing "Probable Cause" with "Clear and Present Danger".
Unless you are a peace officer, you don't need to establish probable cause in the sense that you described it. If you can persuade a judge/grand jury/cop that there was a clear and present danger to your life and limb, then you stand a good chance of not having to stand trial for assault, but it is not a guarantee!
Unless you were in a position to make an arrest or issue a warrant, "Probable Cause" is irrelevant. You, as a private citizen, don't need ANY cause to be suspicious. On the other hand, police are supposed to have a specific reason for any suspicion they raise against an individual. Trying to light a bomb, or holding a gun to someone's head are dramatic examples, but decent.
"Michael Powell is the reason ClearChan^H^H^H^H^H TicketMaster charges $7.50 for concert tickets printed on cheap ugly computerized tickets. "
Allow me to submit that a more compelling reason is that we are like pigs at a trough to BUY this crap, meaning that we at least share the blame with Powell.
[use of his]
It's English. It's acceptable and proper to use the personal pronoun "his" to refer to a person of indefinite gender. If you consider that a problem, you are welcome to speak a dialect of English that follows some other convention. Instead of doing that, I recommend studying French or Italian. You will come to appreciate English for its gender-neutrality!
>CHANGE SCHOOLS!
Let's see... You're at a university. You have $5000 invested in books and tuition for this semester. If you manage to keep your grades above 2.0, you'll be allowed to borrow another $10k for the upcoming year. Half of that will be for rent, the other half for the next semester's tuition, and you don't actually know how you're going to pay for food or the following semester's tuition.
To CHANGE SCHOOLS! as you put it, would mean applying and being accepted at another institution; if it is not in the same state you will either need 3-5 times as much money or else will have a 1-2 year waiting period where you can't be going to school, in order to meet residency requirements. And you might be starting over in some parts of your degree plan when you get there.
You make it sound so simple to change schools once you've started at a university. It's probably simple enough if you're rich.
Look closer and realize that the combined gross assets of the "workers" won't add up to a majority share of a well-capitalized corporation.
OK then, it's only because we are pigs at the trough buying this crap that selling software is a good risk for the merchant! If the stuff wasn't so popular, the situation would be bad for the retailer; maybe bad enough that they wouldn't want to carry the merch... It's just coincidental that the stuff is popular (because it's widely regarded as being universally necessary, monopoly yadda yadda). If that weren't the case, people (consumers and merchants alike) might take the terms under closer consideration.
I know it would kill sales if the customer had to sit down, with a pen in hand, and write "I agree (full clause)" to each clause in the contract and sign (not just initial) it...
How about a requirement that the salesperson actually reads, aloud, the full text of the EULA to the customer before the sale can be completed?
I did this once at work. Made me quite unpopular for the hour or so it took me, but, at work, I was damned sure not willing to click "I Agree" without READING the damned thing. The funny thing about that is, not being empowered by the company to make such an agreement, it was completely meaningless anyway.
>Microsoft and Symantic did offer refunds
To me, that is the most surprising detail in the story. It is the first report I have heard of Microsoft offering a EULA refund to anybody. Remember Windows Refund Day? Why weren't all of those people offered a refund, with or without "tax or shipping expenses?" What makes this plaintiff so special? Can anybody now use the facts brought out in this case to strengthen their claim of being elegible for a Windows refund?
>This is so clearly a conspiracy to create an
>illegal marketplace.
Is it? So clearly? Then you should have little trouble persuading the US Attorney General to press criminal charges. I wonder why this hasn't been attempted?
Patent Everything NOW, so that in a couple of decades it will ALL BE FREE. I just wish all this crap had gone down during the Reagan administration -- then we'd be reaping the rewards today.
"Of course, it's extremely likely that this suit will be promptly settled -- none of the software makers want a EULA case to go forward in California."
That's why this issue needs to go beyond civil suits and into criminal territory. If there is an institutional violation of consumer protection laws, executives need to be tried under RICO, and subjected to bankrupting fines and Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
If a company routinely violates US Codes with an understanding that they are in violation, Federal racketeering charges are supposed to be the big deterrent.