Something to think about: Registry cleaners have a huge incentive to be ridiculously oversensitive. They have almost exactly zero incentive to be competent and intelligent about what gets labeled as 'registry cruft'. Who's gonna pay for or download a reg cleaner that says 'nah, this is mostly clean, just a bit of stuff from an old trialware software to remove'?
There are more choices than your false dichotomy of letting the CEOs control everything and full-blown socialism would indicate. A very simple, non-socialist solution would be to legally mandate total *EO pay+bonus+benefits be (no more than) a certain (likely small, 3% seems a good ballpark) percentage of company net profits. There: corporate leaders are compensated fairly for their expertise, really good CEOs can make shit-tons of money, and imbeciles like, say, Carly Fiorina get jack. As a side benefit, this would incentivize companies not to hide their profits from the IRS. I obviously haven't thought this through very deeply, but I can't find any obvious flaws in the proposition.
Supposing that humanity learning how to manipulate gravity does indeed lead to violating causality, and that we live in one universe in an infinitely bifurcating multiverse, probability could indicate that any continuing stable universe is one which does not contain the discovery of the higgs boson.
All it takes is one madman with a sufficiently powerful time machine, and the entire shape of the involved universe is irrevocably altered--effectively destroyed. Or, over infinite future time, the probability that a universe containing time travel is destroyed by a time traveler must approach 1. Perhaps it's not any ham-fisted 'self-consistency' principle keeping us out of the cookie jar, it's just that the cookie jar is a disguised thermonuclear bomb.
You speak facetiously, of course, but spending the time and effort to setup your own email server is a very valuable exercise. And at the end, you get an email account with no limits. Want ridiculously tight spam filters? Easy. Want to send and receive 1GB email attachments? Your insanity can be catered to.
And best of all, nobody is sitting there watching all of your emails and serving you ads based on what you're emailing about.
The "0%" is a lie, or a willful lack of knowledge. There are many transitional fossils that have been discovered, including dozens of specimens that illustrate the progress of humankind as a species. Only the American Taliban seriously regard the evolutionary theory as anything but well-founded science.
I think the only thing the prevalence of touchpads indicates is that most people don't care that their input isn't pixel-accurate. I have a mouse-less interface on my laptop, precisely because the touchpad is imprecise and difficult to use. I despise touchpads. Proper multi-touch pads alleviate the hate somewhat, but I still have to hold my finger in a less comfortable position, and deal with wondering whether that tap was firm enough to count as a click or not. And as for window management, the double-tap-and-hold-to-drag input style really gets annoying if you have to move something and find yourself at the border of your pad.
On the other hand, when working as a programmer I found coding some personal project for the sheer enjoyment of it to be a very welcome break from the old 8-to-6 grind of writing getters and setters. Just watching TV or reading a book didn't going to cleanse my mental palate as well as getting to tweak my Mandelbrot renders again. But then, I'm not getting a CS degree to increase my salary, I'm getting it because it's fun as hell.
You, uh, are aware that there are better alternatives to the shitheap that is outlook express, right? Thunderbird, just to pick the popular one, doesn't have any hoops at all. Why would you jump through the MS hoops for a piece of low-grade quasi-free software?
People had to take time and effort to reinvent the wheel (image format), because the inventor was extorting people who used the original wheel. If Unisys had either been unable to legally lock down that format, or if they had been intelligent with their licensing demands, a majority of that time and effort would have been spent inventing more interesting software. This is a classic example of the broken window fallacy.
And you can't consistently argue on the one hand that LZW's being locked down encouraged development of an open format, then blithely assume that if MP3 were locked down (further than it is already) it could not encourage development of an open audio format!
I'm going back to school to get a CS degree. I've been looking forward to the MSDN-AA for nearly a year. (Say what you will against proprietary things, the MS VS IDE is quite nice to work in.) I finally get access now that classes have started, and I discover the Internet's immense crop of freeloaders have trampled all over it. Thanks, guys.
Actually, a blanket statement that surgery had no placebo-controlled trials is false. Googling for 'surgery placebo trial' results in a first page full of links to double-blind studies done of various surgical techniques, including a trial indicating arthroscopy of the knee is essentially pointless, and several talking about tests of specific drugs during and after surgery. It may be true that some surgeries haven't received a double-blind test in full. I certainly wouldn't wish my name attached to a double-blind study involving kidney transplants for end-stage renal disease patients, on humanitarian grounds alone. Secondly, it is not true that the flu vaccine has not received double-blind testing. Just last year, Australia ran a study to determine the effectiveness of the flu vaccine for the strains common in 2008. The mechanism of flu vaccines has been quite well studied and tested. The specific variant of the flu vaccine that affects the swine flu has also been individually studied. I haven't read of any placebo-controlled studies for it, but it would certainly be unusual if that hadn't occurred. Of the half-dozen tests a cursory search was able to dig up, all indicated a positive result with very low side-effects. It would be preposterous for any researcher to publicize the results of a trial without a control group, so I think that railing against the vaccine because of a presumed lack of placebo-controlled tests is, simply, inane.
And as a final dig, if you continue to get your medical news from the NY Times, you'll live in a constant state of near-panic from whatever health scare they've dug up to boost ratings this month. They begin by talking about the elderly, then reference a study 'not designed to look at this age group' as their supporting evidence to disparage vaccines for the elderly. They may have a point that vaccines for octogenarians are not as powerfully protective as previously believed. However, spreading FUD about our best weapon against the flu is irresponsible at the very least, and slanders the doctors and researchers who've spent their lives doing good.
Not from an SD card, I can't see it. That's too (pick one) copyable, counterfeitable, normal, cheap-looking. No, if they do away with releasing software optically, physical media will be in a very tasteful custom thumb drive of some sort, with lots of special DRM built in.
There's two problems with American health care: Everything is too god-damned expensive, and everybody expects their insurance to cover everything. The latter has largely caused the former. The best replacement concept is car repair. We absolutely need medical care to be like going to a mechanic. Preventative care--biopsies, mammograms, yearly physicals--should cost roughly the same amount as what it costs to have your car's yearly maintenance needs serviced, and you should pay for it all yourself. Things like simple broken bones, the flu, basically any simple treatment that you don't get put into an ICU for, you should pay for yourself, and it should cost about the same as replacing a minor part in a car. Then you add a catastrophic insurance plan on top of that. It'd be cheap, mandatory, and cover only the stuff that would otherwise bankrupt you.
How can we get to that ideal? I have to say I doubt it's at all possible. Between the trillion-dollar health-insurance industry (scam) and the maniacs in charge of reform, you'd need an entirely new country to make it happen.
Again, I repeat: This is not about a single statement going to the wrong customer. Regardless of the fact that a customer initially requested their own information, it is inexcusable for any bank to then send them--or any other person--over 1300 instances of confidential information. Nobody asked the bank to mail that information.
Why are you attempting to apologize for the incompetence of the bank?
On Aug. 12, the bank mistakenly sent names, addresses, social security numbers and loan information of more than 1,300 customers to a Gmail address.
That's a lot of very confidential information. No bank customer has the need or right to see anybody else private information, let alone 1299 of them. And you are a moron for thinking this was about somebody's bank statement going to the wrong address.
If you're going to limit the windows guys to an OS released in 2001, and demand they perform a Linux-style administration task, you should similarly limit the Linux guys to something built in 2001 and designed to work with Windows. How easy was it for the average Mandrake 8 machine to join a Windows NT domain in 2001? How was the Samba support in Suse 7?
Compare equally, or you're only a partisan fanboy.
Um, no, not really. But then, I didn't say that. Code written in any language can turn into an unmaintainable mess. Only zealots, fanboys, and idiots believe otherwise.
Seems to me that you should make your budget estimates strictly accurate, and then directly to your boss, formally tell him that a single penny less will result in dropping something. Then, you let him choose: Decommission the mail server, delete the backups, restrict your users to 5MiB of storage, delete important features from your software, etc. Get this all in a paper trail, and when the company attempts action against you for not meeting their insane requirements, you sue the living fuck out of them. Start your own IT business with the settlement money. Retire to a Caribbean paradise. Sip fruity drinks with umbrellas in them, and shudder at the thought of ever again working for a walking embodiment of the Peter Principle.
I thought of suggesting to just to find a job with sane management, but slapped myself halfway through the thought. That's about as easy as walking to the moon.
Except that Blizzard has made their own DRM/antihack software invisible to almost all of their players, and that's the important difference. Anecdotally, I've never met anyone who was unable to play because of it. I've met several unwilling to play because of a healthy paranoia about spyware, but even as spyware it's quite technically competent.
Slashdot Mirror
Something to think about:
Registry cleaners have a huge incentive to be ridiculously oversensitive. They have almost exactly zero incentive to be competent and intelligent about what gets labeled as 'registry cruft'. Who's gonna pay for or download a reg cleaner that says 'nah, this is mostly clean, just a bit of stuff from an old trialware software to remove'?
There are more choices than your false dichotomy of letting the CEOs control everything and full-blown socialism would indicate. A very simple, non-socialist solution would be to legally mandate total *EO pay+bonus+benefits be (no more than) a certain (likely small, 3% seems a good ballpark) percentage of company net profits. There: corporate leaders are compensated fairly for their expertise, really good CEOs can make shit-tons of money, and imbeciles like, say, Carly Fiorina get jack.
As a side benefit, this would incentivize companies not to hide their profits from the IRS.
I obviously haven't thought this through very deeply, but I can't find any obvious flaws in the proposition.
Supposing that humanity learning how to manipulate gravity does indeed lead to violating causality, and that we live in one universe in an infinitely bifurcating multiverse, probability could indicate that any continuing stable universe is one which does not contain the discovery of the higgs boson.
All it takes is one madman with a sufficiently powerful time machine, and the entire shape of the involved universe is irrevocably altered--effectively destroyed. Or, over infinite future time, the probability that a universe containing time travel is destroyed by a time traveler must approach 1. Perhaps it's not any ham-fisted 'self-consistency' principle keeping us out of the cookie jar, it's just that the cookie jar is a disguised thermonuclear bomb.
You speak facetiously, of course, but spending the time and effort to setup your own email server is a very valuable exercise. And at the end, you get an email account with no limits. Want ridiculously tight spam filters? Easy. Want to send and receive 1GB email attachments? Your insanity can be catered to.
And best of all, nobody is sitting there watching all of your emails and serving you ads based on what you're emailing about.
The "0%" is a lie, or a willful lack of knowledge. There are many transitional fossils that have been discovered, including dozens of specimens that illustrate the progress of humankind as a species. Only the American Taliban seriously regard the evolutionary theory as anything but well-founded science.
Is it wrong that my first reaction was to flip over to a torrent site and snag my own copy of the PDFs? Purely for research purposes, of course.
I think the only thing the prevalence of touchpads indicates is that most people don't care that their input isn't pixel-accurate. I have a mouse-less interface on my laptop, precisely because the touchpad is imprecise and difficult to use. I despise touchpads. Proper multi-touch pads alleviate the hate somewhat, but I still have to hold my finger in a less comfortable position, and deal with wondering whether that tap was firm enough to count as a click or not. And as for window management, the double-tap-and-hold-to-drag input style really gets annoying if you have to move something and find yourself at the border of your pad.
Do you only ever post when it gives you the chance to use your fancy punctuation?
On the other hand, when working as a programmer I found coding some personal project for the sheer enjoyment of it to be a very welcome break from the old 8-to-6 grind of writing getters and setters. Just watching TV or reading a book didn't going to cleanse my mental palate as well as getting to tweak my Mandelbrot renders again. But then, I'm not getting a CS degree to increase my salary, I'm getting it because it's fun as hell.
You, uh, are aware that there are better alternatives to the shitheap that is outlook express, right? Thunderbird, just to pick the popular one, doesn't have any hoops at all. Why would you jump through the MS hoops for a piece of low-grade quasi-free software?
People had to take time and effort to reinvent the wheel (image format), because the inventor was extorting people who used the original wheel. If Unisys had either been unable to legally lock down that format, or if they had been intelligent with their licensing demands, a majority of that time and effort would have been spent inventing more interesting software. This is a classic example of the broken window fallacy.
And you can't consistently argue on the one hand that LZW's being locked down encouraged development of an open format, then blithely assume that if MP3 were locked down (further than it is already) it could not encourage development of an open audio format!
I'm going back to school to get a CS degree. I've been looking forward to the MSDN-AA for nearly a year. (Say what you will against proprietary things, the MS VS IDE is quite nice to work in.) I finally get access now that classes have started, and I discover the Internet's immense crop of freeloaders have trampled all over it. Thanks, guys.
And as we all well know, the plural of anecdote is "a population-controlled double-blind study"!
Actually, a blanket statement that surgery had no placebo-controlled trials is false. Googling for 'surgery placebo trial' results in a first page full of links to double-blind studies done of various surgical techniques, including a trial indicating arthroscopy of the knee is essentially pointless, and several talking about tests of specific drugs during and after surgery. It may be true that some surgeries haven't received a double-blind test in full. I certainly wouldn't wish my name attached to a double-blind study involving kidney transplants for end-stage renal disease patients, on humanitarian grounds alone.
Secondly, it is not true that the flu vaccine has not received double-blind testing. Just last year, Australia ran a study to determine the effectiveness of the flu vaccine for the strains common in 2008. The mechanism of flu vaccines has been quite well studied and tested. The specific variant of the flu vaccine that affects the swine flu has also been individually studied. I haven't read of any placebo-controlled studies for it, but it would certainly be unusual if that hadn't occurred. Of the half-dozen tests a cursory search was able to dig up, all indicated a positive result with very low side-effects. It would be preposterous for any researcher to publicize the results of a trial without a control group, so I think that railing against the vaccine because of a presumed lack of placebo-controlled tests is, simply, inane.
And as a final dig, if you continue to get your medical news from the NY Times, you'll live in a constant state of near-panic from whatever health scare they've dug up to boost ratings this month. They begin by talking about the elderly, then reference a study 'not designed to look at this age group' as their supporting evidence to disparage vaccines for the elderly. They may have a point that vaccines for octogenarians are not as powerfully protective as previously believed. However, spreading FUD about our best weapon against the flu is irresponsible at the very least, and slanders the doctors and researchers who've spent their lives doing good.
The funny part is you think Slashdot editors edit, or work sober, or even have the intelligence of a warm grapefruit. Protip: They don't.
Not from an SD card, I can't see it. That's too (pick one) copyable, counterfeitable, normal, cheap-looking. No, if they do away with releasing software optically, physical media will be in a very tasteful custom thumb drive of some sort, with lots of special DRM built in.
There's two problems with American health care: Everything is too god-damned expensive, and everybody expects their insurance to cover everything. The latter has largely caused the former. The best replacement concept is car repair. We absolutely need medical care to be like going to a mechanic. Preventative care--biopsies, mammograms, yearly physicals--should cost roughly the same amount as what it costs to have your car's yearly maintenance needs serviced, and you should pay for it all yourself. Things like simple broken bones, the flu, basically any simple treatment that you don't get put into an ICU for, you should pay for yourself, and it should cost about the same as replacing a minor part in a car. Then you add a catastrophic insurance plan on top of that. It'd be cheap, mandatory, and cover only the stuff that would otherwise bankrupt you.
How can we get to that ideal? I have to say I doubt it's at all possible. Between the trillion-dollar health-insurance industry (scam) and the maniacs in charge of reform, you'd need an entirely new country to make it happen.
Again, I repeat:
This is not about a single statement going to the wrong customer. Regardless of the fact that a customer initially requested their own information, it is inexcusable for any bank to then send them--or any other person--over 1300 instances of confidential information. Nobody asked the bank to mail that information.
Why are you attempting to apologize for the incompetence of the bank?
Actually that's not what happened.
That's a lot of very confidential information. No bank customer has the need or right to see anybody else private information, let alone 1299 of them. And you are a moron for thinking this was about somebody's bank statement going to the wrong address.
The rest of this comment may be found attached to an article about iPods, which was published 8 years ago yesterday.
If you're going to limit the windows guys to an OS released in 2001, and demand they perform a Linux-style administration task, you should similarly limit the Linux guys to something built in 2001 and designed to work with Windows. How easy was it for the average Mandrake 8 machine to join a Windows NT domain in 2001? How was the Samba support in Suse 7?
Compare equally, or you're only a partisan fanboy.
Um, no, not really. But then, I didn't say that. Code written in any language can turn into an unmaintainable mess. Only zealots, fanboys, and idiots believe otherwise.
C++ makes sure nothing gets to become a real mess
You're funny. Can I have you come and perform for my birthday party?
Seems to me that you should make your budget estimates strictly accurate, and then directly to your boss, formally tell him that a single penny less will result in dropping something. Then, you let him choose: Decommission the mail server, delete the backups, restrict your users to 5MiB of storage, delete important features from your software, etc. Get this all in a paper trail, and when the company attempts action against you for not meeting their insane requirements, you sue the living fuck out of them. Start your own IT business with the settlement money. Retire to a Caribbean paradise. Sip fruity drinks with umbrellas in them, and shudder at the thought of ever again working for a walking embodiment of the Peter Principle.
I thought of suggesting to just to find a job with sane management, but slapped myself halfway through the thought. That's about as easy as walking to the moon.
Except that Blizzard has made their own DRM/antihack software invisible to almost all of their players, and that's the important difference. Anecdotally, I've never met anyone who was unable to play because of it. I've met several unwilling to play because of a healthy paranoia about spyware, but even as spyware it's quite technically competent.