Any time something like this happens everyone from the first manager with the authority to do something that refuses all the way up the chain gets held responsible for whatever happens as a result of their refusal to act.
Guy dies, they get held responsible for murder because they chose to not assist the police knowing full well that their actions would cause the death of another human being.
Yay! Then we get the phone companies coöperating with warrantless wire-tapping, because, if they don't, someone might die, and then they'd all be held accountable! Sounds like a great outcome to me! (Yeah, sure, they coöperate anyway, but I thought that most of us here thought that that was a bad thing.)
Only the iuck-lcikers in the rcord companis, game cmpanies, and book sotress think it;s perfectly acceptable to FORCE customers to keep a product they don't want.
What in the world does this mean? It looks like lots of vowels were sacrificed, but I just can't make any sense out of 'iuck-lcikers' (except assuming that it's something-lickers).
The unfair ticketing comes in when cities start tweaking the yellow light timing to generate more revenue. I think it would be more productive to outlaw this practice than to outlaw red light cameras.
As pointed out in the article linked at http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/11/1550231&tid=266, many cities simply ignore such laws. It's a lot easier for even a casual observer to detect violations of a ban on traffic cameras than of a ban on yellow-light timing.
Methinks the grandparent's point was that “TANSTASFL” would have to expand to “There ain't no such thing as a s.* free lunch”, and it wasn't obvious what the ‘missing’ word should be. (I politely refrain from guessing myself.)
Amazon could easily disable TTS in an un-hackable way. Assuming these books are PDFs, Amazon could replace every other word with a picture of that word; it would look identical to the original, but would kill TTS.
This seems eminently hackable. After all, how's Amazon going to get the pictures to replace the words? Most likely, it would be one picture per word, in which case you'd just need a pre-processor that knew which picture corresponded to which words. Even if the pictures were programmatically generated with some sort of random skew/background fuzz, it couldn't be very much, or no-one would ever read the books.
Sigh. I'm sure I'm not the only one here... I distinctly remember purchasing my first 9600bps modem. (A real Hayes, no less! I sent them a large manilla SASE and they shipped me the AT command manual for no charge.) I spent a few months mowing every lawn I could to raise the funds for it. Exactly a week after I got it installed and found a couple local BBSes I could connect to at 9600, Hayes shipped the very first 14400bps modem.
No, no, surely we don't get geek credit for starting with a 9600 baud modem. My first was a 2400 baud (US Robotics, maybe?), and I even used (but never owned) a 300 baud modem. I remember how blazing fast 14400 baud seemed when I first got my hands on it.
What is it about LaTeX that makes it so special? Can't scientific documents be laid out correctly in a word processor? I ask out of ignorance, not rhetoric.
It is probably true that there's little that vanilla LaTeX can do that a modern word processor can't, but the point is that, with a word processor, you have to *do* it, adjusting kerning and fonts and what-not; whereas TeX and its derivatives are meant precisely to insulate you from this, allowing you to focus on content while not worrying about details of layout. Unfortunately, since TeX is very much tuned to textual mathematics (hey, look at the name), this means that things can get very hairy when one tries to include pictures or other fanciness, and I think that this is where one sees a lot of LaTeX's reputation for difficulty; but, when you stick to using (La)TeX for that for which it was originally intended, you get the advantage of its considerable intelligence (and corresponding narrowness) over a word processor's considerable stupidity (but breadth).
So they could have worked out all the issues they have found then on Day one of the release someone just did that one thing they never expected.
This is a reasonable defence against most of the complaints, but to claim that Apple's testing never revealed the problems with the Stacks icons or the translucent menu bar (two issues specifically mentioned in the linked article) is a little silly. Notice that Apple's own default stars-on-purple background is particularly bad with the translucent menu bar.
This seems to be a strange quote to cite. The first commenter is asking a question about (ir)revocability of the GPL; the second says little more forceful than the concluding sentence:
So, I would hope that the GPL cannot be revoked by the licensor outside of the licensee doing something wrong because then people's rights under the license could be yanked away from them even if they did nothing to deserve such treatment.
(emphasis mine). Note also that this commenter explicitly addressed the issue you mention by pointing out that the license appears to be GPLv2, not GPLv3.
I would be pissed that all these tech companies rake in the money by ripping off my invention.
Odds are:
a) by the time the patent application was filed, it was already obvious b) they didn't invent it, or they acquired the patent from someone else c) they have made no effort whatsoever to put the invention into production
Boy, I'll bet that the Anonymous Coward to whom you were responding has been set straight by your correction. Maybe in the next patent discussion he'll even make a joke to that effect!
Looking for information is a skill in itself, and provides all kind of background information on the subject you are looking for; you may not be directly interested in all the information, but knowledge of it cannot hurt. With a simple Google search, you find much less complete information, because you are targeting way more your searches.
Although I'm sympathetic to this argument, it seems unpleasantly reminiscent of the ones that are trotted out in response to any new technology: “Sure, you may get results your way, but my way gets results differently. Since I turned out OK, my way must be better.” These arguments seem not to allow for different people's (even different generations') styles of learning—and also make one wonder if, when ease of access is regarded as a bad thing, we should move the physical libraries farther away....
The amazing thing is that his homepage isn't even linked from the summary, only from the linked article -- which means that, to get a Slashdot effect, the majority of readers would have had to RTFA!
Unlike in the case of copying MP3s, though, there is something very tangible lost with identity (or financial or medical record) theft. If even one other person has all my personally identifying information, then I can no longer prove who I am -- and that's a big and concrete loss, unlike any abstract and hypothetical loss of profits from file sharing.
While the harsher punishments you suggest may be a bit extreme, I'm glad I'm not the only one who had this reaction -- "Oh, you ruined people's lives on a massive scale and got caught? Please stop, won't you? Please stop. No? OK, give us a couple bucks, you scamp."
Of course, identity theft is rampant, but, at least according to the story, this is just a case of selling the names for marketing purposes, not identity theft. Better identification wouldn't help much in this situation.
SAGE has been around for a long time. Will Stein's homepage seems to be down -- possibly slashdotted -- so I can't tell the exact date, but it's certainly been in existence at least since 2004.
xpdf, kpdf, Preview.app, Foxit Reader, etc. all work and between them probably support damn near any platform you would want to use. I use Foxit on my Windows machines, and I find it to be very convenient software which is fast, light, and mostly stays out of my way.
I haven't used x- or kpdf, but I have used Preview.app and Foxit Reader, and neither supports fillable PDFs (at least, Foxit didn't back when I was on Windows). Is there any multi-platform utility out there that will do this? (Are fillable PDFs not specified in the standard? I've always found this lacuna in the otherwise very handy Preview.app strange.)
The most probable reason for Apple to have partial support for the PE executable format is EFI. Both the firmware itself and all of the drivers embedded within it use the PE object format.
but the second linked article in the summary ('weren't there in Tiger') says:
PE Files were rejected on Tiger, which is interesting to me because I don't think that this is just a hold over from EFI support. I think it may be a sign of future addition of a Win32 subsystem to OS X.
If you hate DRM and use iTunes you're already very, very far from putting your money where your mouth is, and you can't put the cat back in the bag.
But iTunes has nothing to do with DRM aside from allowing you to play certain DRM'd files. Since it's a free player, you're not even supporting Apple in any real sense by using iTunes. Maybe you meant that using the iTMS (and buying other than iTunes Plus tracks) supports DRM?
So I wonder why they enabled root? perhaps when connecting from another computer to run a command via ssh it's a lot fewer steps to type. (don't have to enter the password twice). So I but the idea this is left over from development.
The article says that there's no mechanism for logging in, so that it's not even clear that these accounts do exist. (Maybe that's what you're saying, but I can't understand the last sentence.)
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, apoplexy induced by the poor summary killed the anonymous coward!
(OK, so it's not quite as punchy as “Video killed the radio star” .)
Yay! Then we get the phone companies coöperating with warrantless wire-tapping, because, if they don't, someone might die, and then they'd all be held accountable! Sounds like a great outcome to me! (Yeah, sure, they coöperate anyway, but I thought that most of us here thought that that was a bad thing .)
What in the world does this mean? It looks like lots of vowels were sacrificed, but I just can't make any sense out of 'iuck-lcikers' (except assuming that it's something-lickers).
As pointed out in the article linked at http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/11/1550231&tid=266, many cities simply ignore such laws. It's a lot easier for even a casual observer to detect violations of a ban on traffic cameras than of a ban on yellow-light timing.
Methinks the grandparent's point was that “TANSTASFL” would have to expand to “There ain't no such thing as a s.* free lunch”, and it wasn't obvious what the ‘missing’ word should be. (I politely refrain from guessing myself.)
This seems eminently hackable. After all, how's Amazon going to get the pictures to replace the words? Most likely, it would be one picture per word, in which case you'd just need a pre-processor that knew which picture corresponded to which words. Even if the pictures were programmatically generated with some sort of random skew/background fuzz, it couldn't be very much, or no-one would ever read the books.
I guess the real lesson here is that it's spelled New Amst
No, no, surely we don't get geek credit for starting with a 9600 baud modem. My first was a 2400 baud (US Robotics, maybe?), and I even used (but never owned) a 300 baud modem. I remember how blazing fast 14400 baud seemed when I first got my hands on it.
I'm sorry, Dave, it did (essentially)—it got distinguished mention among the fictional error messages at the end of #5.
It is probably true that there's little that vanilla LaTeX can do that a modern word processor can't, but the point is that, with a word processor, you have to *do* it, adjusting kerning and fonts and what-not; whereas TeX and its derivatives are meant precisely to insulate you from this, allowing you to focus on content while not worrying about details of layout. Unfortunately, since TeX is very much tuned to textual mathematics (hey, look at the name), this means that things can get very hairy when one tries to include pictures or other fanciness, and I think that this is where one sees a lot of LaTeX's reputation for difficulty; but, when you stick to using (La)TeX for that for which it was originally intended, you get the advantage of its considerable intelligence (and corresponding narrowness) over a word processor's considerable stupidity (but breadth).
This is a reasonable defence against most of the complaints, but to claim that Apple's testing never revealed the problems with the Stacks icons or the translucent menu bar (two issues specifically mentioned in the linked article) is a little silly. Notice that Apple's own default stars-on-purple background is particularly bad with the translucent menu bar.
Boy, I'll bet that the Anonymous Coward to whom you were responding has been set straight by your correction. Maybe in the next patent discussion he'll even make a joke to that effect!
Although I'm sympathetic to this argument, it seems unpleasantly reminiscent of the ones that are trotted out in response to any new technology: “Sure, you may get results your way, but my way gets results differently. Since I turned out OK, my way must be better.” These arguments seem not to allow for different people's (even different generations') styles of learning—and also make one wonder if, when ease of access is regarded as a bad thing, we should move the physical libraries farther away
The amazing thing is that his homepage isn't even linked from the summary, only from the linked article -- which means that, to get a Slashdot effect, the majority of readers would have had to RTFA!
Unlike in the case of copying MP3s, though, there is something very tangible lost with identity (or financial or medical record) theft. If even one other person has all my personally identifying information, then I can no longer prove who I am -- and that's a big and concrete loss, unlike any abstract and hypothetical loss of profits from file sharing.
While the harsher punishments you suggest may be a bit extreme, I'm glad I'm not the only one who had this reaction -- "Oh, you ruined people's lives on a massive scale and got caught? Please stop, won't you? Please stop. No? OK, give us a couple bucks, you scamp."
Of course, identity theft is rampant, but, at least according to the story, this is just a case of selling the names for marketing purposes, not identity theft. Better identification wouldn't help much in this situation.
SAGE has been around for a long time. Will Stein's homepage seems to be down -- possibly slashdotted -- so I can't tell the exact date, but it's certainly been in existence at least since 2004.
I haven't used x- or kpdf, but I have used Preview.app and Foxit Reader, and neither supports fillable PDFs (at least, Foxit didn't back when I was on Windows). Is there any multi-platform utility out there that will do this? (Are fillable PDFs not specified in the standard? I've always found this lacuna in the otherwise very handy Preview.app strange.)
but the second linked article in the summary ('weren't there in Tiger') says:
Information on joining the ecto mailing list is available at http://www.smoe.org/ecto/ecto.html.
But iTunes has nothing to do with DRM aside from allowing you to play certain DRM'd files. Since it's a free player, you're not even supporting Apple in any real sense by using iTunes. Maybe you meant that using the iTMS (and buying other than iTunes Plus tracks) supports DRM?