You are not a paying ebay customer. You are a customer of the person that sold you the item. Your dispute is with them. Ebay's paying customers are the sellers who pay insertion and final value fees where their space in their listing service.
While I totally agree that Ebay should be proactive in de-listing counterfeit items and banning those sellers, Ebay doesnt have your money, so why would they give it back? The seller would have to give it back to you. Ebay can choose to offer buyer protection services which act as sort of "insurance" against fraudulent vendors, but their liability stops there.
Essentially this is like asking the guy who owns a open flea market to refund money because one random floor vendor sold a fake item. The most you would expect the owner of the market to do is to facilitate your conversation with the seller and if the seller was found to be not cooperating, then eject the seller from the market so they wont scam any more customers.
Did you forget Sandy Berger removing classified documents relating to terrorist activities from the national archives and later destroying them so they could not be used by the 9/11 commission? This was the National Security Advisor to Bill Clinton. To this day, we still dont know what those documents contained. The commission eventually gave him a pass by saying they received all the documents they "needed", while never admitting to getting the ones that were destroyed.
"A pedant, or pædant, is a person who is overly concerned with formalism and precision, or who makes a show of learning." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedant)
Is it wrong to walk into a gym where you dont have a membership and start exercising just because they dont bother to check ID's at the door? Yes
This is the same thing. It is not wrong to visit a URL. It is wrong to use a pay-service that you are not paying for.
Lets try to get this into your head: You are not entitled to everything you have "access" to. If you continue to live with this mentality, DRM will be shoved at you for every kind of content imaginable.
WoW sort of has a battlefield-style PvP game called "Alterac Valley" which is one of their "Battlegrounds". It is essentially like a RTS battlefield where you play one of the myriad of players on your side. There is resource-collection, battles, taking out objectives, etc. There have been mixed results, but probably the best adaptation of RTS to MMO so far.
Yeah, because quarter after quarter of record revenues AND profits means your company is crumbling. Not to mention their stock is the highest its been in 5 years.
You dont know anything about the American system, you live in Canada. Michael Moore is a blowhard that consistently distorts facts. Google the false claims in pretty much every one of his movies.
The Atlanta Children's hospital has a sign in their admissions area that says "We do not refuse service to anyone, regardless of their ability to pay". Pretty much every emergency room will treat anyone that shows up, even if they cant pay. Publix supermarkets are now offering free anti-biotics for common problems like ear-infections and UTI. I haven't heard of anyone having problems getting their insured level of treatment. Sure there are cases of insurances companies trying to screw people out of paying a claim, but its not the norm. Many people come to America to get the best medical treatment possible. The system is by no means perfect, but its at least as good or better than anywhere else.
-David
Comcast does not guarantee any up or down as a sustained rate, it is merely a "burst" speed. This has been the way DSL and Cable connections have worked from the beginning. Remember all the people who told you that T1 was "dedicated" bandwidth, while DSL was shared and burst speed? This is why a T1 is $1000/month and your 1.5mbit DSL or cable connection is $50/month.
If a business needs sustained bandwidth, they get a T1 or a bundle of T1's, they dont get residential grade broadband that is a shared pipe with no guarantees on sustained rates.
Although I agree with you in spirit and I think that WGA does more harm to legimitate customers, there is a valid scenario where WGA could be useful to customers.
Most pirated/cracked instances of Windows OS that the average user could get their hands on contains virus/spyware/malware pre-installed. WGA *could* be designed to protect users from buying a fraudulent copy that Microsoft cannot guarantee isn't tampered with. That would be a valuable service if that goal of the service was "genuine" (no pun intended).
Microsoft knows their software is hacked and they know they can only really control the "general population", not any techinically savvy users who are determined to get things for free. So Product Activation prevents the average user from installing their 1 copy on 20 machines and sharing it with friends. WGA prevents the average user from buying Vista for 50$ from a shady vendor and expecting it to come with all the guarantees and updates of a legimiate copy. If they can pull this off in a way that is not cumbersome or insulting to abiding customers, then all is well, if they cannot pull it off, then they should pay for the mistake. There are tons of people who buy the "cheap" copy of Vista from the email solictations thinking they paid for a legal license. WGA is designed to identity to the user that they might have been sold a conterfeit product. Its not unreasonable for a company to try to prevent a criminal from making a living off of duplicating their product and reselling it.
One other point, I am not sure if any software was blocked during the 19 hour outage, my only inconvenience was loss of Aero graphics in Vista. I could still use every other aspect of my system and even continue to download security updates. So I am really curious if any software relied on WGA to run that was affected by the outage? (Not saying bad things didn't happen, I am just interested to see what were the worst cases causes by the outage were.)
If you shut your servers down, then you are no longer offering any service and the prosecution has already won.
The decision does not mean that past RAM contents must somehow magically be retained, it merely rejects the defense that because IP addresses are currently only stored in RAM, that they are not possible to save. So basically in this case, they must start logging from RAM into a file. If they disobey that order, it is essentially destroying evidence from that point forward. This is no different from a corporate email system that under normal circumstances destroys email older than x days, and due to a court order is required to no longer destroy email until the case is resolved. The judge wouldn't be saying the normal policy of destroying email is in conflict with the order, but if they disobey or fail to comply going forward, they would be a seriou problem.
So because you had a bad experience, it must be a terrible OS and everyone has a bad experience? By that regard, Linux is the worst OS on the planet, because there are more people who have problems with it than those that don't, (especially when you are talking about early adopters which is the fairest comparison to Vista).
In reality, people are sticking with XP because they don't perceive any need to upgrade since XP is good enough for them. I am not going to try and say Vista is the best thing since sliced bread, it has been working great for me, but I wont pretend that my experience speaks for the masses. Ultimately the upgrade and downgrade statistics will tell the tale.
The likely scenario is that Vista will get its kinks worked out, just like XP in its pre-SP1 days and it will be fine. When the next Windows comes out, we will go through this whole drama over again about how much everyone loves Vista and why do they "need" to upgrade to Windows.Next.
Although I understand the point you are trying to make, these are Liquid Hydrogen versions of their 7-series sedan. The normal gas-guzzling 7-series has MSRP of 75k-122k, so I think the people already buying the 7-series (plenty) will be happy to buy the cleaner version.
This is actually a smart way to do this. It will be expensive to manufacture new technology like this, so start with the sector of the market that is used to paying a lot of money, and as the technology is proven and commoditized, they can work it down into the lesser expensive lines.
Actually, it bears some resemblance (sp?) to "The Caves of Steel" by Asimov. The fundamental story is the same:
Human cop and Robot are paired to investigate the murder of a scientist who worked with robots. The Human distrusts robots and the Robot is somewhat of a peacemaker. Both Human and Robot learn alot while working together about the inherent differences and similarities between man and machine. Beyond that, the flow of the plot in the movie diverges from the book a great deal.
To confuse things more, one character from the book "I, Robot" is in the movie as well - "Susan Calvin"
So although the script may have started from another source, its clear they attempted to incorporate the spirit of Asimov into the movie and not just take the title.
The argument is simple. If enough people give charitably on their own, there is no need for a social welfare program. Conservatives have shown they believe in helping the poor by shelling out their own money. Liberals who try to force a government welfare program on everyone frees them up from donating their own money. I totally agree that we should help out those less fortunate and most of those "fundie-conservatives" have a religious mandate to help out the poor.
Now, I think it is a fair counter-argument you can't trust the common good to give and thus need the government program, but don't make conservatives out to be people who dont understand the economics of helping the less fortunate. My valid logical point was that conversatives believe in this more than liberals because they regularly put their own money on the line.
There is a major flaw in your argument. It turns out that conservatives give more of *their own money* to the poor than liberals. It has been shown time and again. The difference is that liberals want to give *other people's money* to the poor so they can buy votes and pretend to be compassionate. If they really cared for the poor, they would give their own personal money, not try to pass laws that redistributes money from everyone else.
The behavior is actually pretty consistent with the defintion of Republicans vs Democrat.
There are 2 major facets to legislation when it comes to how Republicans and Democrats see differently: Business & Morality
Republicans: Legislate Morality but not Business (ie: less business taxes, but more bans on abortion/homosexuality, etc.)
Democrats: Legislate Business but not Morality (ie: businesses must offer x level of health care and must increase the minimum wage, but people can do whatever they generally want behind closed doors)
Libertarian: Legislate neither Business or Morality
Populist: Legislate both Business and Morality.
At least this how the political science book in high school laid it out and it still seems like an accurate description.
This issue is a little more tough since it is regulation of a business that provides a questionably moral activity. Since the "businesses" are mostly offshore to avoid taxes, the Republicans mostly see it as a morality issue and the Democrats are the same, so they are supporting this the way that is consistent with everything else.
This has been covered before, but PNG transparency is considered "Ancillary Chunks" in the PNG spec that clearly describes it as an optional feature. While I generally agree that IE should have supported this for a long time because it is useful, you cannot classify it as a bug, since it wasn't broken, they just chose not to implement that feature. Once it became clear that many people wanted that feature, support was added through existing "AlphaImageLoader" techniques that you can find easily by searching. I do not know the reason they waited until IE7 to natively support it without CSS/Scripting hacks, but it probably related to breaking other stuff and not having the time to effectively QA the impact, especially knowing that a workaround existed. This is pretty common behavior for any software development company.
11.3 Ancillary chunks 11.3.1 General The ancillary chunks defined in this International Standard are listed in the order in 4.7.2: Chunk types. This is not the order in which they appear in a PNG datastream. Ancillary chunks may be ignored by a decoder. For each ancillary chunk, the actions described are under the assumption that the decoder is not ignoring the chunk. 11.3.2 Transparency information... decscription of transparency ancillary chunks...
Note the "Ancillary chunks may be ignored by a decoder".
You can read the blog entry for the guy who added the PNG support in IE7 and it pretty much sums up that it wasn't added for a long time due to the breadth of the changes required to support it that might break other stuff. Again, seems like pretty reasonable behavior here, no grand conspiracy to ignore customers.
Your assertion that MS will not fix bugs you report is not correct. I worked for Microsoft in the IE Sustained Engineering group and I can tell you that many, many people are devoted to QFE (Quick Fix Engineering) work as their primary job. Where do you think the fixes in "Service Pack x" come from? Its all the individual fixes that companies and individuals reported over a certain period of time. They even take all the crashes reported electronically by Error Reporting (used to be called "Dr. Watson") and put them into buckets. Whichever buckets are at the top of the list every month, those get fixed and get included in the next SP as well. Obviously critical security bugs get released more often than the non-critical fixes that are rolled into a SP.
Just because *you* reported a bug that did not get fixed, does not mean they don't fix bugs that the general public report to them.
What so many people fail to understand is that some bugs cannot be easily fixed because third-party developers have already become dependent on working around the flawed behavior. Since almost all Microsoft products are themselves applications platforms, they would be screwing the developers who wrote their own applications around the bugged behavior. So Microsoft always walks a tightrope of fixing issues without damaging existing customer's experience, both end users and internal applications written for large corporations paying for support contracts. Generally if there is a known issue with a certain product and Microsoft chooses not to fix it, it is for a good reason, not because they don't care about your experience. I think Mozilla developers are starting to experience the same problems. Initially when they had virtually nil userbase, it was easy to be agile and fix bugs. Now that they have market share, it will be difficult to break established behavior, even if it is incorrect.
No matter what decision MS ever makes, they will get bashed for it. If they release a fix that breaks existing behavior, its labeled as "Gee, MS can't fix a bug without breaking stuff!!", if they decide not to fix it because they know it will break existing behavior, the decisions is labeled "Gee, MS is totally ignoring this bug!". In reality, a bunch of people sat in a room and fought for both sides of the argument and came to a decision that they felt was best for everyone.
A lot of very smart people keep using IE because it still loads faster and renders more websites the way the developer intended. (you can pontificate on all the crappy reasons why we are in this mess, but it is still reality)
A lot of developers still prefer IE because some dhtml features for Enterprise applications are disabled by default or broken in Firefox/Mozilla. (modal dialogs, correct rendering of dynamic scaled nested divs with scrollbars that interpret height:100% as height of container, not height of entire page)
I think Firefox does do better on CSS standards and div positioning for document layouts and I hope IE gets on the ball on CSS and PNG alpha, but Firefox and other of the "standards" browsers need to really get on the ball for using the browser as an applications platform. You still cannot beat IE for creating a "windows-like" application running in a browser without resorting to Flash or other applets. (and no, I am not condoning the use of ActiveX.)
In an idealistic world, I think your solution is very elegant and utopian. I think the reality is that most people lack "Shared mutual respect" and will steal from their neighbor in a heartbeat if there is no coercion to back everyone up. All societies must institute some level of coercion to keep the baser elements from ruining the freedoms that everyone else enjoys.
I agree we dont have some of the freedoms we once had, but despite all the problems we have today, I still think people are living longer, happier lives than ever before. Poverty, starvation and infant mortality rates in this country are nothing compared to what they used to be 50 years ago. People from all over the globe still clamour to get into this country for all the opportunity and freedom it offers. Dont get me wrong, I still think we should fight our government with our votes to regain some our basic freedoms, but I just don't think our current system is totalitarian or unreasonable.
I live in a smaller town where I could actually get elected as a city counselor if I wanted to run. I have seen that the past city government workers can make a big impact in this community. I dont think we are powerless to make change in the system we have now.
Anyways, I dont think we will be changing each other's minds anytime soon, but I have enjoyed the discourse.
I think your messages sum up why you are so at odds with government and laws established by others. I respectfully disagree with your arguments. If my neighbor decides he has the right to burn my house down to keep him warm, I expect the laws established by society to force him to pay for the damage and be punished for the behavior if his intent is found to be malign. By that same expectation I know that I am limited in my actions according to what society has deemed lawful. If you dont believe in the shared expectation of societal rules, then I do not quite understand how you expect a society to progress. I can only imagine your view is anarchy, but maybe you see it differently and I just am not enlightened yet.
Fortunately you live in a society where we will protect your right to believe what you want. As long as you dont violate anyone else's rights it is good to have an opposing viewpoint. We can only grow stronger through discussion.
I never implied I had any impact on what you do, I was just stating the obvious that if you were to choose to live in a place where you did not have to submit to any laws, that you would likely have a lesser quality of life and possibly a lack of one. If you took that as I was telling you what to do, then I apologize because it wasn't my intention.
You were born into a society that had an established set of rules and a government that is largely by and for the people. Just because you didn't vote for anyone or enter into any specific contract doesn't mean you aren't bound by the rules of that society.
The great thing about this country is that we have a codified system of laws, so it is established what is illegal and what is not according to a code. Other countries don't have codified laws, so you can be arrested or executed for no specific reason.
Part of the sacrifice of choosing to live in any community is that you must submit the the laws dictated by the beliefs of the masses. (ie: you wouldn't let someone live in your house unless they generally submitted to your rules, you wouldn't let someone live in your neighborhood if they didn't agree to the rules of the neighborhood)
There are plenty of other countries you could have been born into where you have no rights and any offense to the "rulers" can get you get killed or imprisoned without explanation or trial.
If you dont like obeying laws you didn't have input on, go live somewhere where there aren't any laws, and see how peaceful your life is.
The ASUS P5WDG2-WS has two PCI-X slots and uses the 975X chipset that is supposed to work with Core 2 Duo, but the board was released just prior to the Core 2 release and it does not look like they are going to update the BIOS to support Core 2. I dont see anything else in the lineup with PCI-X.
But PCI-X is a dying standard that is getting replaced by PCI-E x8 and x16 slots. (PCI-E x8 is 2GB/s while PCI-X is only 1.06 GB/s)
There are more and more RAID and other controllers being produced for PCIe, so hopefully there wont be an issue in the near future.
Besides, if you want the performance of a PCI-X slot, what is wrong with buying a Xeon Woodcrest (ie: Xeon 51xx) board? Woodcrest is based on the same Core 2 architecture, but has twice the cache and support multi-socket configurations. So you can get a Xeon Woodcrest system that has two Xeon 51xx processors for a total of 4 cores. When the quad-core Xeons are released, you will have 8 cores in one system.
Take a look at the Dell Precision 690 for an example of a current system using the new Woodcrest Xeons.
Transferring a copy of XP is far easier than transferring a car license. You give someone the product key and media. They try to install the OS on their machine and it may say its already been activated and it shows a phone # to call. You call up and say "Hi, I am trying to install XP and it told me to call in". They ask you why and you say "I am rebuilding my machine, I changed machines and am moving the license to this machine." They say "okay, type in these numbers as I read them." Whala, its activated. They dont ask your name or any other identifying information. Activation is never tied to your name or other identifying information. To claim its difficult to transfer to another person just goes to show how ignorant you are about how simple the XP activation process really is.
Transferring cars requires a form to fill out and a visit to the DMV for the purchaser, along with a registration fee. XP activation is a toll-free phone call and thats it. In many cases, it wont even complain if there has been a long time since the last activation.
Slashdot Mirror
You are not a paying ebay customer. You are a customer of the person that sold you the item. Your dispute is with them. Ebay's paying customers are the sellers who pay insertion and final value fees where their space in their listing service.
While I totally agree that Ebay should be proactive in de-listing counterfeit items and banning those sellers, Ebay doesnt have your money, so why would they give it back? The seller would have to give it back to you. Ebay can choose to offer buyer protection services which act as sort of "insurance" against fraudulent vendors, but their liability stops there.
Essentially this is like asking the guy who owns a open flea market to refund money because one random floor vendor sold a fake item. The most you would expect the owner of the market to do is to facilitate your conversation with the seller and if the seller was found to be not cooperating, then eject the seller from the market so they wont scam any more customers.
Did you forget Sandy Berger removing classified documents relating to terrorist activities from the national archives and later destroying them so they could not be used by the 9/11 commission? This was the National Security Advisor to Bill Clinton. To this day, we still dont know what those documents contained. The commission eventually gave him a pass by saying they received all the documents they "needed", while never admitting to getting the ones that were destroyed.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/09/08/berger.sentenced/
Now Sandy is foreign policy advisor for Hillary's campaign.
By this standard, this email *accident* seems like business as usual for Washington.
A pedant is -
"A pedant, or pædant, is a person who is overly concerned with formalism and precision, or who makes a show of learning." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedant)
Not informative or interesting.
Is it wrong to walk into a public building? No
Is it wrong to walk into a gym where you dont have a membership and start exercising just because they dont bother to check ID's at the door? Yes
This is the same thing. It is not wrong to visit a URL. It is wrong to use a pay-service that you are not paying for.
Lets try to get this into your head: You are not entitled to everything you have "access" to. If you continue to live with this mentality, DRM will be shoved at you for every kind of content imaginable.
WoW sort of has a battlefield-style PvP game called "Alterac Valley" which is one of their "Battlegrounds". It is essentially like a RTS battlefield where you play one of the myriad of players on your side. There is resource-collection, battles, taking out objectives, etc. There have been mixed results, but probably the best adaptation of RTS to MMO so far.
-David
Yeah, because quarter after quarter of record revenues AND profits means your company is crumbling. Not to mention their stock is the highest its been in 5 years.
But, yes crumbling, disaster!!
-David
You dont know anything about the American system, you live in Canada. Michael Moore is a blowhard that consistently distorts facts. Google the false claims in pretty much every one of his movies. The Atlanta Children's hospital has a sign in their admissions area that says "We do not refuse service to anyone, regardless of their ability to pay". Pretty much every emergency room will treat anyone that shows up, even if they cant pay. Publix supermarkets are now offering free anti-biotics for common problems like ear-infections and UTI. I haven't heard of anyone having problems getting their insured level of treatment. Sure there are cases of insurances companies trying to screw people out of paying a claim, but its not the norm. Many people come to America to get the best medical treatment possible. The system is by no means perfect, but its at least as good or better than anywhere else. -David
Comcast does not guarantee any up or down as a sustained rate, it is merely a "burst" speed. This has been the way DSL and Cable connections have worked from the beginning. Remember all the people who told you that T1 was "dedicated" bandwidth, while DSL was shared and burst speed? This is why a T1 is $1000/month and your 1.5mbit DSL or cable connection is $50/month.
If a business needs sustained bandwidth, they get a T1 or a bundle of T1's, they dont get residential grade broadband that is a shared pipe with no guarantees on sustained rates.
-David
Although I agree with you in spirit and I think that WGA does more harm to legimitate customers, there is a valid scenario where WGA could be useful to customers.
Most pirated/cracked instances of Windows OS that the average user could get their hands on contains virus/spyware/malware pre-installed. WGA *could* be designed to protect users from buying a fraudulent copy that Microsoft cannot guarantee isn't tampered with. That would be a valuable service if that goal of the service was "genuine" (no pun intended).
Microsoft knows their software is hacked and they know they can only really control the "general population", not any techinically savvy users who are determined to get things for free. So Product Activation prevents the average user from installing their 1 copy on 20 machines and sharing it with friends. WGA prevents the average user from buying Vista for 50$ from a shady vendor and expecting it to come with all the guarantees and updates of a legimiate copy. If they can pull this off in a way that is not cumbersome or insulting to abiding customers, then all is well, if they cannot pull it off, then they should pay for the mistake. There are tons of people who buy the "cheap" copy of Vista from the email solictations thinking they paid for a legal license. WGA is designed to identity to the user that they might have been sold a conterfeit product. Its not unreasonable for a company to try to prevent a criminal from making a living off of duplicating their product and reselling it.
One other point, I am not sure if any software was blocked during the 19 hour outage, my only inconvenience was loss of Aero graphics in Vista. I could still use every other aspect of my system and even continue to download security updates. So I am really curious if any software relied on WGA to run that was affected by the outage? (Not saying bad things didn't happen, I am just interested to see what were the worst cases causes by the outage were.)
-David
If you shut your servers down, then you are no longer offering any service and the prosecution has already won.
The decision does not mean that past RAM contents must somehow magically be retained, it merely rejects the defense that because IP addresses are currently only stored in RAM, that they are not possible to save. So basically in this case, they must start logging from RAM into a file. If they disobey that order, it is essentially destroying evidence from that point forward. This is no different from a corporate email system that under normal circumstances destroys email older than x days, and due to a court order is required to no longer destroy email until the case is resolved. The judge wouldn't be saying the normal policy of destroying email is in conflict with the order, but if they disobey or fail to comply going forward, they would be a seriou problem.
-David
So because you had a bad experience, it must be a terrible OS and everyone has a bad experience? By that regard, Linux is the worst OS on the planet, because there are more people who have problems with it than those that don't, (especially when you are talking about early adopters which is the fairest comparison to Vista).
In reality, people are sticking with XP because they don't perceive any need to upgrade since XP is good enough for them. I am not going to try and say Vista is the best thing since sliced bread, it has been working great for me, but I wont pretend that my experience speaks for the masses. Ultimately the upgrade and downgrade statistics will tell the tale.
The likely scenario is that Vista will get its kinks worked out, just like XP in its pre-SP1 days and it will be fine. When the next Windows comes out, we will go through this whole drama over again about how much everyone loves Vista and why do they "need" to upgrade to Windows.Next.
-David
Although I understand the point you are trying to make, these are Liquid Hydrogen versions of their 7-series sedan. The normal gas-guzzling 7-series has MSRP of 75k-122k, so I think the people already buying the 7-series (plenty) will be happy to buy the cleaner version.
e ar=2007&make=BMW&model=7-Series
http://autos.msn.com/research/vip/overview.aspx?y
This is actually a smart way to do this. It will be expensive to manufacture new technology like this, so start with the sector of the market that is used to paying a lot of money, and as the technology is proven and commoditized, they can work it down into the lesser expensive lines.
-David
Actually, it bears some resemblance (sp?) to "The Caves of Steel" by Asimov. The fundamental story is the same:
Human cop and Robot are paired to investigate the murder of a scientist who worked with robots. The Human distrusts robots and the Robot is somewhat of a peacemaker. Both Human and Robot learn alot while working together about the inherent differences and similarities between man and machine. Beyond that, the flow of the plot in the movie diverges from the book a great deal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caves_of_steel
To confuse things more, one character from the book "I, Robot" is in the movie as well - "Susan Calvin"
So although the script may have started from another source, its clear they attempted to incorporate the spirit of Asimov into the movie and not just take the title.
-David
The argument is simple. If enough people give charitably on their own, there is no need for a social welfare program. Conservatives have shown they believe in helping the poor by shelling out their own money. Liberals who try to force a government welfare program on everyone frees them up from donating their own money. I totally agree that we should help out those less fortunate and most of those "fundie-conservatives" have a religious mandate to help out the poor.
Now, I think it is a fair counter-argument you can't trust the common good to give and thus need the government program, but don't make conservatives out to be people who dont understand the economics of helping the less fortunate. My valid logical point was that conversatives believe in this more than liberals because they regularly put their own money on the line.
-David
There is a major flaw in your argument. It turns out that conservatives give more of *their own money* to the poor than liberals. It has been shown time and again. The difference is that liberals want to give *other people's money* to the poor so they can buy votes and pretend to be compassionate. If they really cared for the poor, they would give their own personal money, not try to pass laws that redistributes money from everyone else.
/ main1489914.shtml0 06/12/10/who_gives/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/11/opinion
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2
-David
The behavior is actually pretty consistent with the defintion of Republicans vs Democrat.
There are 2 major facets to legislation when it comes to how Republicans and Democrats see differently: Business & Morality
Republicans: Legislate Morality but not Business (ie: less business taxes, but more bans on abortion/homosexuality, etc.)
Democrats: Legislate Business but not Morality (ie: businesses must offer x level of health care and must increase the minimum wage, but people can do whatever they generally want behind closed doors)
Libertarian: Legislate neither Business or Morality
Populist: Legislate both Business and Morality.
At least this how the political science book in high school laid it out and it still seems like an accurate description.
This issue is a little more tough since it is regulation of a business that provides a questionably moral activity. Since the "businesses" are mostly offshore to avoid taxes, the Republicans mostly see it as a morality issue and the Democrats are the same, so they are supporting this the way that is consistent with everything else.
-David
This has been covered before, but PNG transparency is considered "Ancillary Chunks" in the PNG spec that clearly describes it as an optional feature. While I generally agree that IE should have supported this for a long time because it is useful, you cannot classify it as a bug, since it wasn't broken, they just chose not to implement that feature. Once it became clear that many people wanted that feature, support was added through existing "AlphaImageLoader" techniques that you can find easily by searching. I do not know the reason they waited until IE7 to natively support it without CSS/Scripting hacks, but it probably related to breaking other stuff and not having the time to effectively QA the impact, especially knowing that a workaround existed. This is pretty common behavior for any software development company.
i llary-chunks
... decscription of transparency ancillary chunks ...
3 .aspx
From w3c PNG spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/REC-PNG-20031110/#11Anc
11.3 Ancillary chunks
11.3.1 General
The ancillary chunks defined in this International Standard are listed in the order in 4.7.2: Chunk types. This is not the order in which they appear in a PNG datastream. Ancillary chunks may be ignored by a decoder. For each ancillary chunk, the actions described are under the assumption that the decoder is not ignoring the chunk.
11.3.2 Transparency information
Note the "Ancillary chunks may be ignored by a decoder".
You can read the blog entry for the guy who added the PNG support in IE7 and it pretty much sums up that it wasn't added for a long time due to the breadth of the changes required to support it that might break other stuff. Again, seems like pretty reasonable behavior here, no grand conspiracy to ignore customers.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/26/41226
-David
Your assertion that MS will not fix bugs you report is not correct. I worked for Microsoft in the IE Sustained Engineering group and I can tell you that many, many people are devoted to QFE (Quick Fix Engineering) work as their primary job. Where do you think the fixes in "Service Pack x" come from? Its all the individual fixes that companies and individuals reported over a certain period of time. They even take all the crashes reported electronically by Error Reporting (used to be called "Dr. Watson") and put them into buckets. Whichever buckets are at the top of the list every month, those get fixed and get included in the next SP as well. Obviously critical security bugs get released more often than the non-critical fixes that are rolled into a SP.
Just because *you* reported a bug that did not get fixed, does not mean they don't fix bugs that the general public report to them.
What so many people fail to understand is that some bugs cannot be easily fixed because third-party developers have already become dependent on working around the flawed behavior. Since almost all Microsoft products are themselves applications platforms, they would be screwing the developers who wrote their own applications around the bugged behavior. So Microsoft always walks a tightrope of fixing issues without damaging existing customer's experience, both end users and internal applications written for large corporations paying for support contracts. Generally if there is a known issue with a certain product and Microsoft chooses not to fix it, it is for a good reason, not because they don't care about your experience. I think Mozilla developers are starting to experience the same problems. Initially when they had virtually nil userbase, it was easy to be agile and fix bugs. Now that they have market share, it will be difficult to break established behavior, even if it is incorrect.
No matter what decision MS ever makes, they will get bashed for it. If they release a fix that breaks existing behavior, its labeled as "Gee, MS can't fix a bug without breaking stuff!!", if they decide not to fix it because they know it will break existing behavior, the decisions is labeled "Gee, MS is totally ignoring this bug!". In reality, a bunch of people sat in a room and fought for both sides of the argument and came to a decision that they felt was best for everyone.
-David
Fry's has some blue ray drives on the shelf.
-David
A lot of very smart people keep using IE because it still loads faster and renders more websites the way the developer intended. (you can pontificate on all the crappy reasons why we are in this mess, but it is still reality)
A lot of developers still prefer IE because some dhtml features for Enterprise applications are disabled by default or broken in Firefox/Mozilla. (modal dialogs, correct rendering of dynamic scaled nested divs with scrollbars that interpret height:100% as height of container, not height of entire page)
I think Firefox does do better on CSS standards and div positioning for document layouts and I hope IE gets on the ball on CSS and PNG alpha, but Firefox and other of the "standards" browsers need to really get on the ball for using the browser as an applications platform. You still cannot beat IE for creating a "windows-like" application running in a browser without resorting to Flash or other applets. (and no, I am not condoning the use of ActiveX.)
-David
In an idealistic world, I think your solution is very elegant and utopian. I think the reality is that most people lack "Shared mutual respect" and will steal from their neighbor in a heartbeat if there is no coercion to back everyone up. All societies must institute some level of coercion to keep the baser elements from ruining the freedoms that everyone else enjoys.
I agree we dont have some of the freedoms we once had, but despite all the problems we have today, I still think people are living longer, happier lives than ever before. Poverty, starvation and infant mortality rates in this country are nothing compared to what they used to be 50 years ago. People from all over the globe still clamour to get into this country for all the opportunity and freedom it offers. Dont get me wrong, I still think we should fight our government with our votes to regain some our basic freedoms, but I just don't think our current system is totalitarian or unreasonable.
I live in a smaller town where I could actually get elected as a city counselor if I wanted to run. I have seen that the past city government workers can make a big impact in this community. I dont think we are powerless to make change in the system we have now.
Anyways, I dont think we will be changing each other's minds anytime soon, but I have enjoyed the discourse.
-David
I think your messages sum up why you are so at odds with government and laws established by others. I respectfully disagree with your arguments. If my neighbor decides he has the right to burn my house down to keep him warm, I expect the laws established by society to force him to pay for the damage and be punished for the behavior if his intent is found to be malign. By that same expectation I know that I am limited in my actions according to what society has deemed lawful. If you dont believe in the shared expectation of societal rules, then I do not quite understand how you expect a society to progress. I can only imagine your view is anarchy, but maybe you see it differently and I just am not enlightened yet.
Fortunately you live in a society where we will protect your right to believe what you want. As long as you dont violate anyone else's rights it is good to have an opposing viewpoint. We can only grow stronger through discussion.
I never implied I had any impact on what you do, I was just stating the obvious that if you were to choose to live in a place where you did not have to submit to any laws, that you would likely have a lesser quality of life and possibly a lack of one. If you took that as I was telling you what to do, then I apologize because it wasn't my intention.
-David
You were born into a society that had an established set of rules and a government that is largely by and for the people. Just because you didn't vote for anyone or enter into any specific contract doesn't mean you aren't bound by the rules of that society.
The great thing about this country is that we have a codified system of laws, so it is established what is illegal and what is not according to a code. Other countries don't have codified laws, so you can be arrested or executed for no specific reason.
Part of the sacrifice of choosing to live in any community is that you must submit the the laws dictated by the beliefs of the masses. (ie: you wouldn't let someone live in your house unless they generally submitted to your rules, you wouldn't let someone live in your neighborhood if they didn't agree to the rules of the neighborhood)
There are plenty of other countries you could have been born into where you have no rights and any offense to the "rulers" can get you get killed or imprisoned without explanation or trial.
If you dont like obeying laws you didn't have input on, go live somewhere where there aren't any laws, and see how peaceful your life is.
-David
The ASUS P5WDG2-WS has two PCI-X slots and uses the 975X chipset that is supposed to work with Core 2 Duo, but the board was released just prior to the Core 2 release and it does not look like they are going to update the BIOS to support Core 2. I dont see anything else in the lineup with PCI-X.
But PCI-X is a dying standard that is getting replaced by PCI-E x8 and x16 slots. (PCI-E x8 is 2GB/s while PCI-X is only 1.06 GB/s)
There are more and more RAID and other controllers being produced for PCIe, so hopefully there wont be an issue in the near future.
Besides, if you want the performance of a PCI-X slot, what is wrong with buying a Xeon Woodcrest (ie: Xeon 51xx) board? Woodcrest is based on the same Core 2 architecture, but has twice the cache and support multi-socket configurations. So you can get a Xeon Woodcrest system that has two Xeon 51xx processors for a total of 4 cores. When the quad-core Xeons are released, you will have 8 cores in one system.
Take a look at the Dell Precision 690 for an example of a current system using the new Woodcrest Xeons.
-David
Transferring a copy of XP is far easier than transferring a car license. You give someone the product key and media. They try to install the OS on their machine and it may say its already been activated and it shows a phone # to call. You call up and say "Hi, I am trying to install XP and it told me to call in". They ask you why and you say "I am rebuilding my machine, I changed machines and am moving the license to this machine." They say "okay, type in these numbers as I read them." Whala, its activated. They dont ask your name or any other identifying information. Activation is never tied to your name or other identifying information. To claim its difficult to transfer to another person just goes to show how ignorant you are about how simple the XP activation process really is.
Transferring cars requires a form to fill out and a visit to the DMV for the purchaser, along with a registration fee. XP activation is a toll-free phone call and thats it. In many cases, it wont even complain if there has been a long time since the last activation.
-David