Making sure you're charging the right amount at the time of the transaction is your onus as a business owner- just as much as making sure you pay the right amount before leaving is their onus as a customer. Try telling that to Amazon -- four or five months after the incident and they were still submitting completely false charges for a number of people's orders. Who knows when or if they will finally give up.
However, if they make the mistake, and also sell it to you at that price, then you're under no obligation to return it if they change their mind or realize their mistake later. They made the transaction. It's done. That's not how Amazon sees it.
Or because of a lack of real talent to recruit, they had to hire 10,000 PoS programmers instead of 3000 good ones, hence high payroll and emplyee overhead expenses. Surely the people at Google have read The Mythical Man Month and are smart enough to know that 3 programmers of lesser talent do not in any way equal 1 programmer of greater talent. Just as 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month, adding more people to a project rarely speeds it up and almost always slows it down.
I'd rather have a dense 1 foot square solar cell powerful enough to power my TV and computer. unfortunately, 1 square foot of sunlight contains no where near that kind of energy even at 100% efficiency That's easy - just make the TV and computer more efficient. The market is already going down that path.
Like giving people a full refund?:) MS could probably afford it.
Hotmail has been running for many years with what, millions of users, that's got to be a LOT of ad impressions that users have paid with to use the service. Let's say 10 impressions per session, at an average of 3 sessions per week for 2 million users for 10 years.
Assuming Hotmail has been dredging the users' email to provide targeted impressions, that's got to be at least 0.1 cents per impression, so 31B * $0.001 = $31M.
So $31M as a bare minimum to give people a full refund. That's certainly within MS's reach.
Oh wait, you thought because the users only indirectly pay MS through the fees MS charges advertisers for the user's attention that really the user's weren't paying anything at all? Like MS ever gives away something for nothing.
"Freedom of speech" doesn't mean you get to be anonymous. It never has. You need to completely eviscerate that false belief from your world view.
Held: Section 3599.09(A)'s prohibition of the distribution of anonymous campaign literature abridges the freedom of speech in violation of the First Amendment. --Mcintyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (1975)
Re:Has already existed and thrived for a long time
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Rewritable Song Lyrics
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· Score: 2, Informative
Exactly. It's one manifestation of the patronage economic model.
Look at the extended editions of lord of the rings movies - people paid to get their names in the credits. Personally, not my thing, but considering just how long those credit rolls go for, obviously A LOT of people thought it was valuable to them.
Re:Wright brothers are another good example
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Patents Don't Pay
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· Score: 1
Sorry, I don't buy it.
If the only benefit of an alternative solution is to avoid a patent, then is it really a worthwhile use of resources? And if there is something intrinsically better about the alternative, then that intrinsic betterness should be enough to cause someone to develop it.
After all, what's actually better - working around a man-made problem or fixing a real engineering problem?
Where do you think all those cheap DVD players come from when it is $5 per player for the license? Actually, the total of all licenses required for a complete DVD player is closer to $20. If I had the time, I would dig up the specifics of which licenses cost what, but here's a news article that makes the same general statement:
Talk about having blinders on - Free software explicitly prevents "some-guy" - be it the legal owner of the software or any other 3rd party - from creating problems like that.
This is what the FSF would like people to believe. However, it is inconsistent with what the FSF is actually doing in advocating GPLv3. GPLv2 ensured that all software remained free. The old license fully satisified that software remained "free," not just in price but in the availability of people to choose how to use it. If there is one defining event in RMS's life, it is his experience with a broken printer driver. He had a printer that stopped working because the software that came with it was buggy. When he went to fix it, he could not because the source code for the software was unavailable to him.
THAT event is the entire motivation for the FSF and the GPL - an end user with hardware that included broken and un-fixable software. DRM'd software is just another manifestation of that situation, and in fact is arguably covered in the GPLv2 with this clause:
For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. Since DRM'd software did not exist at the time of the writing of the GPLv2 it obviously could not contain specific reference to such, but both "all modules" and "scripts used to control... installation" both suggest that the FSF wanted to cover whatever it took to modify and regenerate the executable as delivered to the end user. Which is essentially what this clause in the GPLv3 makes explicit:
"Installation Information" for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.
If the CEO of a company makes a statement regarding the stock And in this case, the CEO of a company did not make a statement regarding the stock of any company, an anonymous poster did.
It think that such behaviour is smarmy but not worth much attention.
The guy is essentially just another anonymous poster. Even if his intended goal was to somehow affect the price of the company he was buying, as an anonymous poster the impact of his statements should be close to nil. If they were not nil, then the problem is with society taking the word of anonymous posters seriously, and the cure is not some sort of extended regulation, but for society to learn to think more critically.
They say freedom isn't free. Well, this is a perfect example of a trivial cost that society should bear in order to assure freedom of speech for all of us.
Information regarding the severity of the Y2K bug is widely available from many technical resources on the internet going back to the early 90s. This information is easily accessible and of no particular bias. Referring to the Y2K bug with a hand-waving, USA-Today McNews level of dismissiveness is the equivalent of a post with no content or argument beyond calling the people involved idiots. Your pot is far blacker than the kettle, sir.
The SPDC VM is not Java. I don't think you've asked the right questions of your "people at IBM who wrote the JVM used to play BD+". So he's wrong, but not completely off his rocker.
The person I know who's involved with BD+ co-designed BD+. I guess even the devil has friends, eh?
Clearly, Microsoft doesn't want this -- that's why they stopped selling them. If true, that is a very interesting point.
For all the wailing that distributing vouchers doesn't give MS any liability, if MS stopped distributing those vouchers prematurely, and not just prematurely, but about the time that this supposed liability became public knowledge, then that says one of two things:
Random corporate shit happened and it caused a halt to the voucher distribution, or...
Microsoft's lawyers believe that the vouchers DO have the potential to put enough liability on MS to really fuck them up.
My money is on #2. And I find it very humorous to think that the extremely expensive and super effective with the sneaky-tactics lawyering team at MS missed the problem in the first place and OKed the whole SuSE voucher sneakiness. They were trying to pull a dirty-tricks campaign by manipulating SuSE and they ended up hoist by their own petard. It's just amazing that MS would make that big of a tactical blunder.
I'm sorry but that is far from supporting proof for the original authors claims.
There are a lot of DVDs that the now ancient DVD-Shrink can't rip without help - they typically have bad sectors that the playback/menu structure knows how to avoid, but anything that tries to read the sectors sequentially will have problems with. The state-of-the-fart for this tactic is macrovision's "Ripguard" but, as you can see from this posting, it is still easily circumvented, and is hardly designed to manipulate the ripping program to execute new code:
The US, just like one of its flagship companies, MicroSoft, is simply going to be hated so long as it exists. That's a massive over-simplification and a rather convenient excuse for unsociable behaviour by the state. The situation is far from binary. It is true that there will always be someone, somewhere, who hates the USA and Microsoft with a passion.
But the prevalence and strength of the dislike is entirely variable and is definitely something that can be affected by the actions of the US government on the world stage.
For example, back before events like the CIA over-throwing the democratically Mossadegh and installing the Shah and the six-day war, the USA was generally well-liked by Arabs and other muslims.
Get yourself a windows VM and download all the latest in DVD-breaking binaries: ripit4me, dvd decryptor-last, dvdshrink-last, etc. Then set windbg to be your default debugger, and start trying to break very recent DVD releases. What you'll find is that the entertainment company is employing people to literally find security holes in the input to the cracking tools - the dvd image itself, and then embed "exploits" into their dvd images. There is data on those discs that has no other purpose than to crash certain binaries. That's a grandiose claim - got any corroborative reports, like say people at Doom9 talking about it?
The ratio of men/women is in line with other countries; but as the article states, the problem is with polygamy. For every man with two wives there's another man out there with no wife. And a well-off Muslim man can have up to four wives. Ok, so we shot down the honor killing baloney. The next question is - does polygamy really cause suicide attacks? My belief is that the answer is no. I believe that is the case for at least two reasons:
Polygamy is not unique to islam -- most sub-saharan cultures accept polygamy as does traditional hinduism (although Indian law official forbids it for Hindus nowadays) yet the incidence of suicide attacks in those cultures is reportedly nil.
All suicide attacks in the west, and even many in Palestine/Israel, have been committed by people of the classes that do not accept polygamy -- polygamy is far from universal in the muslim world, it is typically only practiced by the super-rich (who often break the rule limiting them to 4 wives) or the very poor. The middle-classes typically look upon polygamy as a throwback and as socially unacceptable. Thus the pool of married women is roughly equal to the pool of unmarried men for many suicide attackers.
Just to take one example: if a system of license plate readers can detect a plate that has been flagged by some agency and prevents one, e.g., car bombing, why is that not a valid mechanism to use? The question is - is the cost of a car bombing or whatever worth more or less than the societal cost of this system?
This isn't some plot to turn America into a police state. It's an effort being undertaken by local, state, and federal law enforcement and security professionals to attempt to protect the public. That is the first and primary goal. There are no ulterior motives that rise to any meaningful level. Let's keep things in some sort of perspective. Your dismissal of the 1984 aspects is superficial. The phrase, "The path to Hell is paved with good intentions" comes to mind. The problem with the attitude that we need to deal with the abuse of power rather than the abuse of technology is that it is akin to putting all of your eggs in one basket. If the constraints on the abuse of power fail, then all the tools for a seriously repressive and continuous abuse of power will already be in place. If we limit the deployment of "dual-use" technology then if and when there is a failure in the safeguards against abuse of power, the damage will not be as great - building up the infrastructure will take time, will be more obvious to the general public and will allow more opportunity to get the system back on track.
One other point is that while things like cameras and checking ID may not always deter or prevent a crime or an attack, it often greatly assists in the investigation after the fact. We need only look as far as the London car bomb plot to know that cameras in public spaces (among a great many other tools) can be an aid. Cameras have been a valuable aid in such instances as long as they have been used. The real issue is cost effectiveness. I'm too lazy to dig up the articles, but there have been numerous reports about the effectiveness of the UK's camera system -- the results are that it has not had any effect on deterrence, crime rates are the same as they were before the cameras were installed. The criminals either don't care (typically crimes of passion) or are smart enough to stand off camera when committing their crimes.
As you say - the cameras appear to have made catching the car bombers easier - but if those bombs had exploded, the casualties would have been just as dead with or without cameras, and there is still plenty of other evidence to go with - VINs on the cars, etc.
I'd also like to point out that "terrorism" is an absolutely terrible justification for surveillance systems - terrorist attacks are so rare that any system designed specifically for them is likely to be a waste of money - one, the terrorists will just come up with a different attack vector that bypasses the system and - two, no amount of surveillance will prevent an attack, at best they aid in reconstructing the crime which, for a suicide bomber, doesn't make any difference at all.
Which is why they need boomers. Or, more accurately, is why they need everyone to *know* and never forget that they have boomers. They have Boomers over there? That settles it, I'm moving to China -- I would love a couple of hot korean chicks for myself, even if they are a little schizophrenic.
Try foobar2000 - should be at the top of a google search for foobar. It is spartan, but efficient. It requires a few add-ons like the Columns UI to make pleasant, and it is very customizable but doesn't come with anything fancy out of the box - you can roll your own or borrow from the the thousands of examples people share on the forums.
"Riyashi is hailed as a courageous resistance fighter among Palestinians throughout Gaza and the West Bank, but the truth about what drove her to such a terrible act is much more complex. Palestinians in Gaza and Israeli internal-security experts who studied the background of her case say Riyashi's husband had discovered that she was having an affair with a senior Hamas commander. Among conservative Palestinians, as in other parts of the Islamic world, an adulterous woman is often punished with death. Riyashi was given a second option: she could become a martyr. Of course, the Israeli "internal security experts" would have no interest at all in tearing down the image of this Riyashi woman.
Maybe the report is right, but the people making the report have all the reason in the world to fudge it, and lots of precedence for doing so too. Just like the constant harping on the 72 virgins thing, it provides cover for the basic fact that without the occupation of palestine, 99.9% of suicide bombings, whether male or female, would never have been committed in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Hotmail has been running for many years with what, millions of users, that's got to be a LOT of ad impressions that users have paid with to use the service. Let's say 10 impressions per session, at an average of 3 sessions per week for 2 million users for 10 years.
That's 10 * 3 * 52 * 2,000,000 * 10 = 31,200,000,000 ad impressions.
Assuming Hotmail has been dredging the users' email to provide targeted impressions, that's got to be at least 0.1 cents per impression, so 31B * $0.001 = $31M.
So $31M as a bare minimum to give people a full refund. That's certainly within MS's reach.
Oh wait, you thought because the users only indirectly pay MS through the fees MS charges advertisers for the user's attention that really the user's weren't paying anything at all? Like MS ever gives away something for nothing.
Held:
Section 3599.09(A)'s prohibition of the distribution of anonymous campaign literature abridges the freedom of speech in violation of the First Amendment.
--Mcintyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (1975)
Exactly. It's one manifestation of the patronage economic model.
Look at the extended editions of lord of the rings movies - people paid to get their names in the credits. Personally, not my thing, but considering just how long those credit rolls go for, obviously A LOT of people thought it was valuable to them.
Sorry, I don't buy it.
If the only benefit of an alternative solution is to avoid a patent, then is it really a worthwhile use of resources? And if there is something intrinsically better about the alternative, then that intrinsic betterness should be enough to cause someone to develop it.
After all, what's actually better - working around a man-made problem or fixing a real engineering problem?
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-01/
Parody or not, she has an 'official' page with the GOP:
http://shelley.gop.com/
Talk about having blinders on - Free software explicitly prevents "some-guy" - be it the legal owner of the software or any other 3rd party - from creating problems like that.
He had a printer that stopped working because the software that came with it was buggy. When he went to fix it, he could not because the source code for the software was unavailable to him.
THAT event is the entire motivation for the FSF and the GPL - an end user with hardware that included broken and un-fixable software. DRM'd software is just another manifestation of that situation, and in fact is arguably covered in the GPLv2 with this clause: For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. Since DRM'd software did not exist at the time of the writing of the GPLv2 it obviously could not contain specific reference to such, but both "all modules" and "scripts used to control
It think that such behaviour is smarmy but not worth much attention.
The guy is essentially just another anonymous poster. Even if his intended goal was to somehow affect the price of the company he was buying, as an anonymous poster the impact of his statements should be close to nil. If they were not nil, then the problem is with society taking the word of anonymous posters seriously, and the cure is not some sort of extended regulation, but for society to learn to think more critically.
They say freedom isn't free. Well, this is a perfect example of a trivial cost that society should bear in order to assure freedom of speech for all of us.
Information regarding the severity of the Y2K bug is widely available from many technical resources on the internet going back to the early 90s. This information is easily accessible and of no particular bias. Referring to the Y2K bug with a hand-waving, USA-Today McNews level of dismissiveness is the equivalent of a post with no content or argument beyond calling the people involved idiots. Your pot is far blacker than the kettle, sir.
For all the wailing that distributing vouchers doesn't give MS any liability, if MS stopped distributing those vouchers prematurely, and not just prematurely, but about the time that this supposed liability became public knowledge, then that says one of two things:
- Random corporate shit happened and it caused a halt to the voucher distribution, or...
- Microsoft's lawyers believe that the vouchers DO have the potential to put enough liability on MS to really fuck them up.
My money is on #2. And I find it very humorous to think that the extremely expensive and super effective with the sneaky-tactics lawyering team at MS missed the problem in the first place and OKed the whole SuSE voucher sneakiness. They were trying to pull a dirty-tricks campaign by manipulating SuSE and they ended up hoist by their own petard. It's just amazing that MS would make that big of a tactical blunder.I'm sorry but that is far from supporting proof for the original authors claims.
C /t-110717.html
There are a lot of DVDs that the now ancient DVD-Shrink can't rip without help - they typically have bad sectors that the playback/menu structure knows how to avoid, but anything that tries to read the sectors sequentially will have problems with. The state-of-the-fart for this tactic is macrovision's "Ripguard" but, as you can see from this posting, it is still easily circumvented, and is hardly designed to manipulate the ripping program to execute new code:
http://forum.doom9.org/archive/index.php/t-1%20%3
But the prevalence and strength of the dislike is entirely variable and is definitely something that can be affected by the actions of the US government on the world stage.
For example, back before events like the CIA over-throwing the democratically Mossadegh and installing the Shah and the six-day war, the USA was generally well-liked by Arabs and other muslims.
The next question is - does polygamy really cause suicide attacks?
My belief is that the answer is no.
I believe that is the case for at least two reasons:
As you say - the cameras appear to have made catching the car bombers easier - but if those bombs had exploded, the casualties would have been just as dead with or without cameras, and there is still plenty of other evidence to go with - VINs on the cars, etc.
I'd also like to point out that "terrorism" is an absolutely terrible justification for surveillance systems - terrorist attacks are so rare that any system designed specifically for them is likely to be a waste of money - one, the terrorists will just come up with a different attack vector that bypasses the system and - two, no amount of surveillance will prevent an attack, at best they aid in reconstructing the crime which, for a suicide bomber, doesn't make any difference at all.
Try foobar2000 - should be at the top of a google search for foobar.
It is spartan, but efficient.
It requires a few add-ons like the Columns UI to make pleasant, and it is very customizable but doesn't come with anything fancy out of the box - you can roll your own or borrow from the the thousands of examples people share on the forums.
Maybe the report is right, but the people making the report have all the reason in the world to fudge it, and lots of precedence for doing so too. Just like the constant harping on the 72 virgins thing, it provides cover for the basic fact that without the occupation of palestine, 99.9% of suicide bombings, whether male or female, would never have been committed in the first place.