Violating terms of service is not illegal. It merely gives the other party grounds for voiding the contract (and/or litigation, if it's serious enough to make it worthwhile... and you're both in the same country).
If it were to happen to any other number, it would either be at the 8 bit number (though I doubt it) or at the 32/64 bit number they use for the larger values.
That's a good point. Has someone with Excel 2007 tested whether a similar bug comes up with (2^32)-1?
I mean, for Pete's sake, pig latin? We're going to trust that Google really needs this translated into pig latin in order to make it accessible to users?
Not needs, no. But intends, absolutely yes. Try taking a look at the Google preferences page. In the panel at the top marked "Erfaceintay Anguagelay", open the drop-down menu and scroll down to I (or if you're looking at a preferences page in English, scroll down to P). See what's there?
Then you have the camp of "ex-editors" who are really nothing more than bad editors who haven't taken the time to understand what the mission of wikipedia actually is, rather than what their contrived notions lead them to believe it is who say things like "I got scared away because what I added which was so clearly invaluable to me was removed by a long-time editor which clearly means I'm right and they're doodie heads with an agenda omg wtf @!$!".
I'm sure a fair amount of that goes on. But I think you're deluding yourself if you think that this drives people away from Wikipedia more than the opposite of what you describe: namely, editors who have tried to use well-referenced material but have been persistently reverted and ultimately driven away by people who prefer their own, unreferenced or inadequately referenced, versions.
People who have tried to use their own unreferenced material and were rebuffed, and the other types of losers that you describe... well, they may eventually learn that they went about things in the wrong way, and they may someday learn how to write properly. But the people who were rebuffed for trying to use well-grounded factual material -- they're never coming back.
I loved the bits of Thief 3 that I played, but never finished it: the reason was the excruciatingly slow load times. I gave up after only a few missions because I was just getting so bored with looking at load screens. OK, so I get that if I make a mistake, then I'm penalised by having to wait about 30 seconds before I can have another go. But if have to sit around doing nothing for 30 seconds anyway, even watching Flash ads on a crummy website would be preferable. When hard drives get faster I'll give it another go.
Apologies for replying to myself again. Well, you learn something new every day. I hadn't realised that OOo is actually LGPL. Evidently the IBM suite is proprietary, just free-as-in-beer. Oh well, go figure.
OK, OK, ctrl-N wouldn't be such a great key combination to use, but you get the idea...
On another note, I've been fiddling with the newly-released IBM Lotus Symphony, based on OOo (v.1.1, not 2.x, it seems). Apologies for posting this to the wrong story, but it is kind of relevant in the sense of providing a comparison between the two. There's a lot to like. Tabbed documents are good, and I like the expose-like ctrl-T that allows you to search text in all open documents simultaneously. (Plus they've corrected the right-click behaviour that always bugs me in OOo...)
But it seems to hide a lot of options away. They've sometimes turned tabs into dropdown menus, so e.g. that doubles the mouse-clicks required to move from paragraph styles to character styles in the stylist. More importantly, it doesn't appear to be possible to assign styles to key combinations, as I was describing in my previous post. That's a big usability downgrade right there.
Finally: I see no trace of the GPL in what I downloaded. All I found is a whole bunch of IBM-specific licences, and a bunch of notices including the following:
OpenOffice.org 1.1.0
The Program includes portions of code from the OpenOffice.org project. The source code version of the original OpenOffice.org code is available under the terms of this Sun Industry Standards Source License version ("SISSL") at http://www.openoffice.org./
What the...? Is it not possible to get the altered code?
Hmmm. There's no default shortcut or button for doing that. However, let me recommend you to "Tools - Customize - Keyboard". There you can arbitrarily assign any kind of style and any macro to pretty much any key combination. E.g. you could assign ctrl-N (for example) to "Category - Styles - Character : Default". You could then use ctrl-shift-space to remove paragraph styling, and ctrl-N for character styling.
Fix handling of fonts and typography (starting with being able to draw OpenType fonts properly and export them to PDFs at all).
Agreed.
Fix the style selection mechanism. I don't generally use around 100 styles in one document, and I don't need 15,746 different views of the styles. I just want a list of the dozen or so styles I actually care about.
Also agreed. How hard would it be to have the stylist remember which view I was last using (normally "hierarchical"), instead of always presenting me with the default?
Provide commands to revert the formatting of selected objects/text to the default for the current character/paragraph/whatever style individually. The vague "Default" command on the menu is unhelpful.
Here maybe I can be helpful: for text, select text and ctrl-shift-space; for a paragraph, put cursor within paragraph without any text selected and ctrl-shift-space.
Obligatory disclaimer/excuse: I haven't yet had chance to install 2.3, so although I've seen no reports that the above have been addressed in this version, some of this may now be out of date.
Don't let that stop you. I'm quite sure that none of the actual important stuff that impacts on people on a day-to-day basis will have been changed -- like the fact that in Impress you have to press alt twice to access the menus, or the fact that right-clicking moves the selection (contrary to the behaviour of every other piece of software on the planet, with the sole exception of a certain proprietary office suite not worth naming here).
Thanks, I'll look through your music when I have time. In the meantime I have a suggestion... I'd suggest turning off that thing that Lilypond does, of annotating every single notehead in the final PDF with an indication of exactly where the code for the notehead is in the source file. I'm pretty sure doing that multiplies the size of the PDF by a factor of at least 5. I haven't checked to find out how to turn it off, though...
Probably not. But there's no inconsistency there: the scarcity of the commercial good involved in selling admission to a concert is not an artificial scarcity, it's a scarcity imposed by physical reality.
Now, things like audio and video bootlegs of concerts, though... he hasn't got much reason to complain about those.
It's seriously not a bad suggestion, but some UI decisions seem to have been frozen years ago and aren't really open to discussion.
... and that would be another part of the problem. Seriously, they're inviting input, and that's already the kind of response one can expect? If that's the case, the UI issues are never going to be addressed seriously.
"largely settled matters"... in 1404, a flat Earth was a "largely settled matter"
Er... yes. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with this sentence. In 1404 it had indeed been well established and uncontroversial for -- ooh, getting on for two millennia -- that the earth was not flat. What are you trying to say?
Just to sum up the salient points from that article: in the US, only the lyrics are under copyright; the melody is public domain. In most of the rest of the world, both lyrics and melody are under copyright
However, I am tickled to see that the copyright on the lyrics expires at the end of next year. That's assuming that the info on Wikipedia is accurate, which obviously is a very big if. Anyway, that means that as of 1 January 2009, for most of us the melody will be copyrighted and the words public domain, while in the US the melody will be public domain and the words copyrighted... and never the twain shall meet. Until 2016, that is.
It isn't bogus, the story is accurate, and you are the clueless one. (See? Other people can throw around gratuitous insults for no reason too.) Variations in the weight (and, obviously, mass) of the kilogramme prototype have been well-known and studied for decades. Here are some previous Slashdot stories that have covered this and related topics: here, here, and here. Personally, I find it interesting to note that while the kilogramme is losing weight now, it seems that in the early 90s it was gaining weight.
And, er, which country would you suggest he move to? Are you under the impression that there are any countries that don't collect personal data on their inhabitants and conduct surveillance on them? (I omit wiretaps, of course, as there are lots of countries that don't do that.)
They probably don't have a leg to stand on anyway. Unfair terms in a warranty are void under English law, and it's hard to see how a term in a warranty pertaining to software could have any fair bearing on design flaws.
To the OP: a good first stop is www.consumerdirect.gov.uk, a site run by the Office of Fair Trading that offers advice to "consumers". Their advice is extremely vague, but you can contact them with the details of your situation. But an encouraging word from this page:
Exclusion clauses
Some traders might try to escape their responsibilities under contracts by using exclusion clauses, for instance by saying that they accept no liability for loss or damage. If an exclusion clause is unfair it is legally void and cannot be used against you.
Generally, only a court can decide if a contract term is unfair. But any exclusion of liability, whether in a contract term or on a notice, is always void if it is used for the purpose of evading liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Also, a trader selling goods cannot exclude liability for a breach of your statutory rights - for instance by displaying a sign saying: 'no refunds given.' An attempt to do this is an offence.
Similar statements about services - for example: 'no responsibility for loss or damage to garments, however caused' on the back of a dry cleaning ticket - are not illegal. But such terms are not enforceable if a court finds them unfair.
There's another line saying they have "more information about Unfair terms in contracts", but the link doesn't work. Like I said, it's vague. I could wish for your sake that UK law had something half as useful as exists in my country. Cold comfort, I fear.
I've got adblock. While it's cut down on the number of ads I see here on Slashdot, some are still making it through. Someone got a better list to dump in the hosts table?
Use Adblock Plus instead. It's Adblock, plus automatic updating of filters, plus tweaked to be more powerful. I have had to manually adjust Adblock settings about twice since I installed it.
Also use NoScript, which prevents execution of javascript except from whitelisted servers, and with the option of temporary whitelisting for the current session. Whitelisting is not laborious: it involves two mouse-clicks. I resisted installing NoScript for a long time, as I thought Adblock Plus by itself ought to be enough, but now that I've got it I will never, ever be getting rid of it.
Some people also advocate FlashBlock, but any Flash that makes it past the above two add-ons is almost certainly Flash that I want to see.
Oh damnit - I forgot. This is slashdot. Paying for stuff = bad.
And where in this discussion do you see anyone making the claim that anyone is entitled to this service for free? Where do you see anyone assuming that paying for stuff = bad?
I look up the page and I see dozens of posts advocating a service which is not free. Take your stereotypes somewhere else, you contemptible anonymous coward.
As a former grad student I can assure you that many established journals charge authors a publishing fee on the same order of magnitude.
I've never understood this. In my field there are no publication fees, and it's a much smaller field than any of the natural sciences. How is it that in a field where the journals have a smaller audience, a journal subscription costs only a few hundred dollars and there are no fees, while in fields where there's a potential audience of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people, the journals are ten times more expensive and charge fees to boot?
How much do referees for journals in the natural sciences get paid, anyway?
PC is a niche when it comes to the general gaming public. Maybe not to "gamers", but to the public, it is
I find it ironic that a large part of the reason that PC games have become niche is precisely the fact that publishers have made it so damned difficult to install and run PC games. The recent Bioshock SecuROM fiasco is a neat example of this. It's hard to think of a more powerful incentive to switch away from PCs for gaming than seeing bloody-minded disrepect for customers like that.
It has now reached the point where I will only buy a game if I can locate a warez version of its executable beforehand. Lunacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Violating terms of service is not illegal. It merely gives the other party grounds for voiding the contract (and/or litigation, if it's serious enough to make it worthwhile ... and you're both in the same country).
That's a good point. Has someone with Excel 2007 tested whether a similar bug comes up with (2^32)-1?
Not needs, no. But intends, absolutely yes. Try taking a look at the Google preferences page. In the panel at the top marked "Erfaceintay Anguagelay", open the drop-down menu and scroll down to I (or if you're looking at a preferences page in English, scroll down to P). See what's there?
I'm sure a fair amount of that goes on. But I think you're deluding yourself if you think that this drives people away from Wikipedia more than the opposite of what you describe: namely, editors who have tried to use well-referenced material but have been persistently reverted and ultimately driven away by people who prefer their own, unreferenced or inadequately referenced, versions.
People who have tried to use their own unreferenced material and were rebuffed, and the other types of losers that you describe ... well, they may eventually learn that they went about things in the wrong way, and they may someday learn how to write properly. But the people who were rebuffed for trying to use well-grounded factual material -- they're never coming back.
I loved the bits of Thief 3 that I played, but never finished it: the reason was the excruciatingly slow load times. I gave up after only a few missions because I was just getting so bored with looking at load screens. OK, so I get that if I make a mistake, then I'm penalised by having to wait about 30 seconds before I can have another go. But if have to sit around doing nothing for 30 seconds anyway, even watching Flash ads on a crummy website would be preferable. When hard drives get faster I'll give it another go.
Apologies for replying to myself again. Well, you learn something new every day. I hadn't realised that OOo is actually LGPL. Evidently the IBM suite is proprietary, just free-as-in-beer. Oh well, go figure.
OK, OK, ctrl-N wouldn't be such a great key combination to use, but you get the idea ...
On another note, I've been fiddling with the newly-released IBM Lotus Symphony, based on OOo (v.1.1, not 2.x, it seems). Apologies for posting this to the wrong story, but it is kind of relevant in the sense of providing a comparison between the two. There's a lot to like. Tabbed documents are good, and I like the expose-like ctrl-T that allows you to search text in all open documents simultaneously. (Plus they've corrected the right-click behaviour that always bugs me in OOo ...)
But it seems to hide a lot of options away. They've sometimes turned tabs into dropdown menus, so e.g. that doubles the mouse-clicks required to move from paragraph styles to character styles in the stylist. More importantly, it doesn't appear to be possible to assign styles to key combinations, as I was describing in my previous post. That's a big usability downgrade right there.
Finally: I see no trace of the GPL in what I downloaded. All I found is a whole bunch of IBM-specific licences, and a bunch of notices including the following:
OpenOffice.org 1.1.0The Program includes portions of code from the OpenOffice.org project. The source code version of the original OpenOffice.org code is available under the terms of this Sun Industry Standards Source License version ("SISSL") at http://www.openoffice.org./
What the ...? Is it not possible to get the altered code?
Hmmm. There's no default shortcut or button for doing that. However, let me recommend you to "Tools - Customize - Keyboard". There you can arbitrarily assign any kind of style and any macro to pretty much any key combination. E.g. you could assign ctrl-N (for example) to "Category - Styles - Character : Default". You could then use ctrl-shift-space to remove paragraph styling, and ctrl-N for character styling.
FWIW ...
Fix handling of fonts and typography (starting with being able to draw OpenType fonts properly and export them to PDFs at all).
Agreed.
Fix the style selection mechanism. I don't generally use around 100 styles in one document, and I don't need 15,746 different views of the styles. I just want a list of the dozen or so styles I actually care about.
Also agreed. How hard would it be to have the stylist remember which view I was last using (normally "hierarchical"), instead of always presenting me with the default?
Provide commands to revert the formatting of selected objects/text to the default for the current character/paragraph/whatever style individually. The vague "Default" command on the menu is unhelpful.
Here maybe I can be helpful: for text, select text and ctrl-shift-space; for a paragraph, put cursor within paragraph without any text selected and ctrl-shift-space.
Obligatory disclaimer/excuse: I haven't yet had chance to install 2.3, so although I've seen no reports that the above have been addressed in this version, some of this may now be out of date.
Don't let that stop you. I'm quite sure that none of the actual important stuff that impacts on people on a day-to-day basis will have been changed -- like the fact that in Impress you have to press alt twice to access the menus, or the fact that right-clicking moves the selection (contrary to the behaviour of every other piece of software on the planet, with the sole exception of a certain proprietary office suite not worth naming here).
Ooo, thanks for that, useful. And please excuse my not having already looked it up.
Thanks, I'll look through your music when I have time. In the meantime I have a suggestion ... I'd suggest turning off that thing that Lilypond does, of annotating every single notehead in the final PDF with an indication of exactly where the code for the notehead is in the source file. I'm pretty sure doing that multiplies the size of the PDF by a factor of at least 5. I haven't checked to find out how to turn it off, though ...
Probably not. But there's no inconsistency there: the scarcity of the commercial good involved in selling admission to a concert is not an artificial scarcity, it's a scarcity imposed by physical reality.
Now, things like audio and video bootlegs of concerts, though ... he hasn't got much reason to complain about those.
"Fewer" can only be used with plurals. The editor is not the one who needs a grammar lesson.
If you like the sound of "one fewer reason", I can only offer my sympathies to whoever taught you English.
... and that would be another part of the problem. Seriously, they're inviting input, and that's already the kind of response one can expect? If that's the case, the UI issues are never going to be addressed seriously.
Er ... yes. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with this sentence. In 1404 it had indeed been well established and uncontroversial for -- ooh, getting on for two millennia -- that the earth was not flat. What are you trying to say?
Just to sum up the salient points from that article: in the US, only the lyrics are under copyright; the melody is public domain. In most of the rest of the world, both lyrics and melody are under copyright
However, I am tickled to see that the copyright on the lyrics expires at the end of next year. That's assuming that the info on Wikipedia is accurate, which obviously is a very big if. Anyway, that means that as of 1 January 2009, for most of us the melody will be copyrighted and the words public domain, while in the US the melody will be public domain and the words copyrighted ... and never the twain shall meet. Until 2016, that is.
It isn't bogus, the story is accurate, and you are the clueless one. (See? Other people can throw around gratuitous insults for no reason too.) Variations in the weight (and, obviously, mass) of the kilogramme prototype have been well-known and studied for decades. Here are some previous Slashdot stories that have covered this and related topics: here, here, and here. Personally, I find it interesting to note that while the kilogramme is losing weight now, it seems that in the early 90s it was gaining weight.
And, er, which country would you suggest he move to? Are you under the impression that there are any countries that don't collect personal data on their inhabitants and conduct surveillance on them? (I omit wiretaps, of course, as there are lots of countries that don't do that.)
I saw a 2nd-hand copy of Sacrifice on a shop shelf three years ago. I'm still kicking myself that I didn't buy it.
They probably don't have a leg to stand on anyway. Unfair terms in a warranty are void under English law, and it's hard to see how a term in a warranty pertaining to software could have any fair bearing on design flaws.
To the OP: a good first stop is www.consumerdirect.gov.uk, a site run by the Office of Fair Trading that offers advice to "consumers". Their advice is extremely vague, but you can contact them with the details of your situation. But an encouraging word from this page:
Exclusion clauses
Some traders might try to escape their responsibilities under contracts by using exclusion clauses, for instance by saying that they accept no liability for loss or damage. If an exclusion clause is unfair it is legally void and cannot be used against you.
Generally, only a court can decide if a contract term is unfair. But any exclusion of liability, whether in a contract term or on a notice, is always void if it is used for the purpose of evading liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Also, a trader selling goods cannot exclude liability for a breach of your statutory rights - for instance by displaying a sign saying: 'no refunds given.' An attempt to do this is an offence.
Similar statements about services - for example: 'no responsibility for loss or damage to garments, however caused' on the back of a dry cleaning ticket - are not illegal. But such terms are not enforceable if a court finds them unfair.
There's another line saying they have "more information about Unfair terms in contracts", but the link doesn't work. Like I said, it's vague. I could wish for your sake that UK law had something half as useful as exists in my country. Cold comfort, I fear.
Use Adblock Plus instead. It's Adblock, plus automatic updating of filters, plus tweaked to be more powerful. I have had to manually adjust Adblock settings about twice since I installed it.
Also use NoScript, which prevents execution of javascript except from whitelisted servers, and with the option of temporary whitelisting for the current session. Whitelisting is not laborious: it involves two mouse-clicks. I resisted installing NoScript for a long time, as I thought Adblock Plus by itself ought to be enough, but now that I've got it I will never, ever be getting rid of it.
Some people also advocate FlashBlock, but any Flash that makes it past the above two add-ons is almost certainly Flash that I want to see.
And where in this discussion do you see anyone making the claim that anyone is entitled to this service for free? Where do you see anyone assuming that paying for stuff = bad?
I look up the page and I see dozens of posts advocating a service which is not free. Take your stereotypes somewhere else, you contemptible anonymous coward.
I've never understood this. In my field there are no publication fees, and it's a much smaller field than any of the natural sciences. How is it that in a field where the journals have a smaller audience, a journal subscription costs only a few hundred dollars and there are no fees, while in fields where there's a potential audience of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people, the journals are ten times more expensive and charge fees to boot?
How much do referees for journals in the natural sciences get paid, anyway?
Well, it certainly matters if you're reading a Slashdot article with more than about 200 visible comments. To name one example.
I find it ironic that a large part of the reason that PC games have become niche is precisely the fact that publishers have made it so damned difficult to install and run PC games. The recent Bioshock SecuROM fiasco is a neat example of this. It's hard to think of a more powerful incentive to switch away from PCs for gaming than seeing bloody-minded disrepect for customers like that.
It has now reached the point where I will only buy a game if I can locate a warez version of its executable beforehand. Lunacy.