Due to that one could not always easily prove without doubt that someone had actually read the document in question. Sure they could. If the server logs the HTTP-Referer (which is quite common) they would know exactly what you did, including which search terms you used to find their page. Of course you can take steps to hide this, but TFS implies that simply using Google Cache is sufficient, which is quite misleading.
(All the more reason to read the web through Google cache!) You're horribly misinformed if you think that will help. Any images, scripts, or other "external" content referenced from the cached HTML is still fetched from the original server by your browser. Unless it's a self-contained text-only page (as if many of those exist) your IP address is still in their logs.
The first thing that occurred to me was that similar structures will tend to cluster together simply because all the various minute forces will tend to act similarly on similar strands. This is somewhat different from your oak tree example, in that the acorn indeed "senses" its environment; I'm suggesting that perhaps the strands are merely passively tending to pool together due to the prevailing eddy currents, electromagnetic forces, or whatever might act to push like strands in like directions. It seems more like acorns of a certain shape being influenced similarly by a constant wind, simply because of their natural aerodynamic profile. Similarly-shaped acorns may tend to cluster, but not because they sense each other, or their environment, in any way.
But hey, it sure does sound a lot more funding-worthy to just call them "telepathic" (as in TFA)!
Not as far as users are concerned. As far as developers are concerned, sure, but we're talking about users here. If they visit a website and it works, then upgrade to a new version of Internet Explorer and it breaks, then Microsoft is responsible as far as the user is concerned. True! I agree. You're absolutely correct. Further, the users are absolutely correct! This is exactly my point. Microsoft should bite the bullet now, rather than dragging this on indefinitely.
Users aren't so pathetic that they can't even understand that an upgrade might break something. Really, they're not morons. Users worldwide seemed not to panic when they first saw XP boot up. They managed, and they adapted. The same can (and should, as I propose) happen with IE.
Advocating forcing users to just deal with it shows you are focused on the developers and not the users, the exact thing you are accusing Microsoft of doing. The plain truth is that users are going to have to deal with it anyway. Developers can't possibly retrofit every single web site on the planet. I'm simply advocating that Microsoft step up to the plate and provide users with a single button to solve all their web woes. A single button. If you really think users are too fragile to understand that they've upgraded browsers and thus things might change, then I'd suggest you're being quite short-sighted, and perhaps confusing the concept of focus with that of coddling.
A tag is not an instance of an element type. An element is an instance of an element type. A tag is a syntactic delimiter, marking a boundary of an element. Yes, that's right, we're talking about the syntactic delimiter, not the (empty, in the case of "meta") element bounded by it. Thank you for this continued pedantry, but I don't think I'm going to get anywhere with you anyway, so I'll just leave it at that.
You advocate breaking things by default and claim Microsoft are the ones ignoring the needs of the users? You seem not to understand the situation. "Things" as you so eloquently wrote are already broken. Horribly. Look around at all the IE-only sites. Indeed my suggestion exposes those sites for what they are, if ever so briefly, until users bother to click a simple button to fix it all. The users will adapt. They're not nearly as fragile as you (or Microsoft, in this particular case) seem to think. NB: Site developers can avoid forcing users to click this button, if they fix their sites to be standards-compliant.
>meta< has been a standard HTML "tag" (you mean element type) for 13 years, first introduced in HTML 2.0 in 1995. Actually I do mean "tag" as in an instance of the "meta" element type. Trust me, I understand the concept, but your point is irrelevant, as I'm not arguing for or against the tag itself. I just want to freely ignore it, indefinitely, without ramifications. I want to follow published vetted and agreed-upon standards. Don't start down this path of "it's been in the spec since [whenever]" because you'll find Microsoft hasn't really played that game.
Don't presume to speak for everybody. Far from it, but read the comments here and in the related article from yesterday. Then, carefully, re-read my statement that prompted your snide response. Notice how I'm speaking only for those few who seem to have some tiny misgivings about this whole proposal. Just a small group, clearly not including you.
IF MS were to change the way pages rendered with existing doctypes, millions of pages could/would render differently requiring businesses and individuals across the world to either re-vamp their websites or at least change the existing doctype to a new name that referred to the old rendering style. Allow me to vehemently disagree with this premise. As it has been said, "no, there is... another" and in this case there is an option you and Microsoft have totally overlooked. Think of the ignored person behind the keyboard; let the user decide!
Yes, let the site break by default. Let it render like hell, without any change to the site. Just offer the user a "try to make this site look better" button, that will switch through the various so-called "compatibility" rendering modes.
Microsoft always does this; they ignore the user and focus on the developers (recall Ballmer's silly rant). Think about that for a moment. Their real market demand comes more indirectly from developers building software (yes, including web sites) that need Microsoft, and they know that.
But they're not blind to the users, nor do they always fear change. Think of the XP interface for folks who upgraded from 2000. It looked like a cartoon and took up lots of real estate. Users adapted; a change caused by an upgrade didn't bother them in the long run. Some [gasp] even found that Microsoft provided a nice "classic" option that restored their old look at feel. Even IE7 removed the menu bar by default, but let users restore it.
Now--stay with me for a context shift--the same can be true of a browser. The browser is a client-side piece of software. It can be upgraded, and the upgrade can make things different. Yes, even by default. But let the users click a button to have IE re-render any broken sites (site-wide, of course). Oh, what a burden, I can hear you protest. Fine, let's allow users to even set a preference that all sites should be set to use this "compatibility" mode by default. Then, if some seldom-used site looks bad because a user managed to stumble across one of the few odd standards-compliant sites (please mind the sarcasm) then they can set an exception for this site.
Basically your premise there is flawed; there's a false dichotomy you've presented to fix the breaking of millions of sites. Both of your solutions require the developers to take some action, one indeed less painful than the other.
I'm fine, Microsoft, with you inventing and respecting some non-standard tag, but let me be the voice of developers everywhere begging you to please let us summarily ignore this. Further, I suggest (yes, I'm still talking to you, Microsoft!) you not burden your prized developers any further, and actually consider distributing the pain as a much smaller burden on the end-users. They can and will adapt, soon, as long as you're sure to empower them with sufficient options to fix for themselves the mess you've made by thumbing your nose at web standards for all these years. It's Ok, admit you were wrong about web standards and do an about-face, just as you did with the Internet itself a decade ago.
It's always been a federal crime, it was just seldom enforced due to technology changing faster than the legal system. Keep in mind, though, that these same miscreants--if left to their own devices--would likely grow up having zero ethical problems with literally rewriting history to suit their own agendas. Our history as a society is being converted at an alarming rate to digital medium that is subject to essentially untraceable manipulation. Do you truly want to encourage (or even fail to non-trivially discourage) this sort of behavior?
I have nothing to do with that site, and as many others have mentioned there are far better virtual slide rules available, but I did learn long ago how one of these things operates, and the instructions in TFA are horrible even if you know what you're doing.
First, the term "index" has the old-school meaning of the number "1" and it appears at either end of the C scale. On the left side of C it means 1, and the right side it means 10, but there are no actual decimal points involved (you're on your own for order of magnitude with this device) so they're equivalent at either end. Also, for multiply and divide, you don't need that hairline slider that covers all the bars; that's only useful if you need to align two values on non-adjacent rules. Just slide the center bar (the one that holds scale C) back and forth.
The other important point to note is that you'll see numerals 1-9 between 1 and 2; those are just convenience markers for 1.1 through 1.9. That first (smaller) 2 you see, reading from left to right, is really 1.2 not 2.0.
So to multiply 6x2, we can go either direction, starting at 2 and multiplying by 6, or starting at 6 and multiplying by 2. To start at 2, slide the center part of the bar so that the right-hand "index" (1) of scale C is directly above the 2.0 on scale D. Now to "multiply" you don't do anything; you just read the result, which is found on scale D, directly under the 6 you wanted to multiply. Here you'll see 1.2 is directly under the 6.
Wait, though, we used the right-hand index, which is 10 not 1, so we need to multiply the result by 10. So 1.2 becomes 12 (which is why I said you have to do your own decimal point management). To start at 6 instead, slide the right-hand "index" (1) of scale C directly above the 6 on scale D; your answer will on D again, directly under the 2.0 of slide C. Again, we used the right-hand index of 10, not 1, so we multiply the 1.2 by 10 to get 12.
How did I know to use the right-hand index rather than the left-hand index? Well, if you slide the left-hand index of C all the way to 2.0 on D, you'll notice that the 6 you need to multiply is off the edge of the device--an overflow, if you will--so you must essentially work with 10 rather than 1 and move the decimal at the end.
With this extremely trivial example, you should be able to follow the rest of the terribly-written instructions FTFA for divide (although you can do significantly more with a slide rule than just multiply and divide).
...you very likely would have passed by a sign indicating that your entry serves as your consent to having your bags (and often other personal belongings) searched. The wonderful thing about rights is that they can be so quickly and easily be surrendered.
These are typically considered valid contracts. Unlike shrinkwrap licenses, you get to read this notice ahead of time, you may choose not to enter the premises, and you do receive consideration in that you're allowed to enter their establishment. The only grounds upon which you might possibly object is that there was no "meeting of the minds" and that you thus didn't understand the rights you were waiving. My guess is that if you know your rights well enough to rightly challenge a police officer, few judges/juries are going to sympathize with your claimed ignorance. Of course it's possible the sign was missing or inadequately visible, but most major retailers wouldn't make such a mistake.
The law--both in theory and in practice--is seldom as "sane" as we'd like to think.
If you believe this is nothing more than pure incompetence, then you too have been fooled. This level of incompetence is usually indicative of strong intent that Hanlon's razor will be used by others to essentially protect the perpetrators from punishment for their immoral and/or illegal activities. This is just another way to game the system.
And if you are a person who doesn't agree with unemployment then lower the taxes a lot first. My last pay check 33% want to taxes. So I work almost two days a week to pay taxes. Now if that was much lower I could save more and in down times wouldn't be as big of an issue Just a quick clarification: In the US, unemployment taxes are paid exclusively by the employer; they are never deducted from the employee's pay. I realize that this may mean that employers simply pay you a slightly lower gross salary to off-set it, but it's definitely not part of the 33% (or whatever) you saw as a deduction from your check; it would be illegal for them to do so.
"oops, that was the destroy all data password".. sorry about that i was so shaken up by being jailed when i am innocent that i was confused and gave you the wrong one. "Oh, we understand, that's fine. We only tried it on a copy of your drive; care to try again with another copy? We'll give you lots of time to calm down, relax, and think about it."
Now that's quite a broad generalization. No disrespect was meant here. I was only trying to indicate that a totally different dynamic applies if the workforce, as a whole, is paid hourly. Unless a very significant portion of the workers are paid by the hour, these kinds of inefficiencies will go undetected by the bean-counters.
I'm an IT contractor, and I make it a point to draw my customer's attention to inefficiencies in my work environment. Why? Because it's in my best interests to maximize my productivity. Again, this was never intended as slight against those paid by the hour. In the work where I'm paid by the hour, I would never endure such an inefficiency without making the customer aware of it and trying to help fix it. I'm not saying that you, or I, or anyone else is taking advantage of the situation. But there are certainly times where the customer is unable or unwilling to remove the barriers to efficiency. Ultimately it's their calculated decision to make, and it's totally unrelated to the main point of my post.
Before praising the bean counters, ask them if they know what the company's turnover rate is for those jobs, and how that compares to the average for their competition. If they don't know those numbers, they aren't counting all the relevant beans. I'm hardly "praising" the bean counters. Apparently many of you have mistaken "understanding" for "advocacy" in my post. I don't agree at all that this is the best (or even a good) way to count what is "cost" and to increase productivity. I only noted that a bean-counter will, in fact, see the world in that way.
The real problem is at the executive levels, who base decisions purely on the bean-counter approach. Executives (who, incidentally, I believe are far too highly compensated these days) should take a grander view of "cost" into consideration. They're the ones ignoring these other longer-term costs.
There is obviously a "cost" of having an unproductive, disenfranchised, and simply burnt-out work force, but this never figures into the decision process. For public companies, it's all about shareholder equity, and the executive planning horizon is seldom beyond the current quarter. Few executives have earned a smaller bonus for overworking their people; generally quite the opposite. These soft costs are unfortunately harder to quantify, and it's not the job of the bean-counters anyway. The bean-counters are what they are; I've not praised them, but there's no reason to believe they're evil, stupid, or incompetent. If anyone is to blame, consider targeting the executives who base their decisions entirely on the counted beans.
If your salary is $50 an hour, then every second you spend on unproductive things becomes a very visible cost, especially if those seconds add up. Your fallacy is highlighted above. Most "employees" are not paid by the hour. Contractors, who are paid by the hour, simply don't complain about unproductive work conditions provided at their environment by their customers. They'll happily take the extra time required to do their job with the tools at hand; it's the capitalist way, after all.
My guess is that you've simply conflated two issues. You've forgotten that any employee on a salary will simply be expected to put in overtime to compensate for any inefficiencies. It costs the company exactly $0.00 for a salaried employee to simply "waste" those precious extra seconds that you claim will add up. They add up to nothing but more "free" hours put in by our protagonist for the company served.
If the bean-counters at the company don't see that, they're effectively incompetent. Which usually points to bad prospects for the future of the company. The bean-counters know exactly what they're doing. They're extracting more value (your time) from you at no cost. That free productivity (salaried--unpaid to the employee--overtime) looks great on the balance sheet, compared to the price of an extra monitor. If you can't see that, I think you might need to re-evaluate the target of your insults.
Since my current phone allows me to blow the text up to a size that is larger than the typeface on most children's books, I cannot see the problem. Maybe you
can start
to see the
problem
with having
a screen
that is too
small for
the font
size you
need to be
comfortable
if I
demonstrate
the
usability
of how my
phone looks
when I use a
reasonably
sized font.
Legible,
perhaps, but
certainly
not a very
productive
interface
for some of
us.
Copyright certainly has economic effects, but I am not convinced that the outcome is any better for our society especially in light of the freedoms we're giving up to support it. Well, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on the net economic effects.
The laws relating to ownership of physical property are there for a good reason: we need a way to decide how each object will be used at any given time. I can't drive the car to Seattle while you're driving it to New York, and so on Yes, this is precisely how and why copyright is different. The car builder doesn't care at all who owns it. The physical object is scarce (in one sense) by definition, because there is only one car to drive, and we can't trivially make a copy. There is inherent economic benefit to the car builder, but there is no inherent benefit at all to "build" creative intangible works, if there is no copyright. Yes, sell the support, if it's software, and sell concert tickets and trinkets if you're a musician. It doesn't mean we would have zero creative works; clearly a vast number of folks create for the very art of it and always would, even absent any potential economic advantages. My point--and the original point of copyright--is to provide significant tangible incentives for the creation of these intangible works, and as such they necessarily must deal with the concepts required to economically capitalize "ownership" of them. If you see no point in that, then you'll never see why I'm Ok with the fundamentals of copyright.
You don't get what you want by asking for exactly that and nothing more, especially if there's another group out there opposing you. Most countries clearly state they "will not negotiate with terrorists" and I suspect the same applies to criminal "pirates" of intangibles. We clearly disagree on a strategy here. We won't convince each other, although I certainly understand your point. Short of a revolution, I think you're asking for something so radical that the great masses disagree, that the governments could never even comprehend, and that would have massive unexpected (negative) economic consequences far into the future. A new economy might succeed it, but I think we'd be in overall worse shape.
You guessed right, but I'm not falling into your trap. I'm honestly not trying to "trap" you or convince you of anything. I'm asking you to understand at least, and consider at best, my point of view.
There is no One True Way to protest... Of course, and that's the point. I disagreed with Sodade (and your) tactics, and explained why. Nothing more and nothing less.
and in any case, promoting casual disregard for copyright will do more to end it than principled self-denial anyway. Governments will always tend to create laws that ensure their populations are mostly criminals. In the US, speed limit laws are summarily ignored by nearly everyone; it's quite unsafe to be the only one not to do so. I don't think this casual disregard is doing anything to end ridiculously low speed limits; it only serves to raise enforcement. Likewise I think piracy is doing nothing more than raise enforcement actions, while also helping put an (arbitrary and overstated) economic number on "lost" sales. Keeping with the analogy, I think enforcement has become draconian, and the current limits are impractical, but I see a benefit in the concept of (reasonable, meaning significantly higher than today) speed limits. I only hope you can understand this point, even if you choose to disagree.
An entire generation is now growing up without any connection between information and property. Indeed I agree. Whether this is good or bad in the very long term remains to be seen. Ignorance is hardly the same as being a conscientious objector. You and I are different but compatible players on the same team. I wish you luck in your strategy (which is decidedly different from that of Sodade, whom you seemed to be defending) and hope you see why I will continue down my path as well.
As for those other "valid purposes"... well, I haven't seen any. ...and thus they must not exist? You say "other" so I guess you believe the GPL the only (tenuous, to you) exception? You probably don't respect me enough to learn anything from me, but I'd humbly suggest that if you do a bit of research into the (very long) history of so-called "intellectual property" (and macro-economics, while you're at it) you'll see that there's actually a method to the madness. If we lived in a utopia where the very concept of gathering possessions had became outdated, I'd be the first in line to ask to repeal all such laws. Until then, though, we are blissfully capitalist and these laws, properly throttled, do occupy a useful place in society.
That's one theory. Here's another: the only way to get things to change is through compromise and negotiation, and for that to work in your favor, you need vocal advocates of views you consider extreme, so that your own position looks moderate in comparison. I hear that strategy is going (and has gone) very well for the various religious extremists around the world, is it not? Come on. Real extremists sacrifice. If you go totally without label-produced music to protest RIAA tactics, I'll side with you. Let me say again, if you are not advocating breaking the law, then I have zero argument with you. However, if you ignore the law to get what you want anyway, then in my estimation you're not helping at all. I have no way to know which is which--I haven't seen any "open letter" from you--but I'm guessing from your responses that you don't respect this particular law.
or by pointing to people like me and saying "See? At least I'm not asking for all that!" Yes, yes, I do get your point, but it's really not very effective in the long run.
Joe Q Public already realizes file sharers aren't "bad people". If he owns a CD burner, he's probably already used it to copy music for his friends. I'd be willing to bet they consider the habitual "fuck you RIAA" types as a menace, not as saviors.
A law-abiding voice carries much farther than any thief's voice. Don't be surprised when you don't get much sympathy with insults like that. Insults? My tone was far less confrontational that the originals in both postings. Plus I was referencing the "open letter" from Sodade (650466), not you. In that letter, Sodade claims quite clearly to "steal" (I realize you probably don't agree with that term) music because there was no other viable choice. My initial response was that Sodade might care to realize where the argument was alienating even the base of potential advocates, let alone win over any others from the fence.
The point (which perhaps you've missed) is that letters like those--which you'd have us reference as the "worse" in "it could be worse"--serve very little useful purpose. We all know about the extremists, and what they do more than anything else is give the MPAA/RIAA all the political ammunition they need to continue to bully us and whittle away our current rights.
Indeed, the people who are crying "mine, mine, mine" are the copyright holders themselves. They think they can own a number and prevent other people from using it without permission. It's like a child crying because he taught a game to some other kids and now they're playing it by themselves without him - he thinks he owns that game, but like any other piece of information, it doesn't really belong to anyone. You really should try to learn a bit of history, so you'll understand (or at least acknowledge there's an argument) that copyright does have valid purposes. If nothing else, how do you think we "enforce" the GPL, for example. That's right, we count on that evil concept of copyright. I hate the way RIAA/MPAA is trying to enforce it; I hate the concept of DRM; and I hate how copyright durations have expanded. But that doesn't necessarily mean we should throw away the proverbial baby with the bathwater. Some of us want change, but change that's not so drastic (at least at first) as to do away with the entire concept of copyright.
The only way to get things to change is slowly, calculated over a very long period of time. All of these "open letters" are useless; RIAA/MPAA will use folks like this, who blatantly thumb their collective noses, to justify their outrageous bullying tactics. And Joe Q Public will either applaud that the cheaters were caught, or at the very least recognize that there are "bad people" out there, and (wrongly) conclude that the ends justify the means. There will be no groundswell of support; there will be no revolution; there will be nothing but reactive policies that will further limit our extant (but endangered) rights.
Changes like these happen on a very large time scale, generally seeded by people who actually make sacrifices along the way. In particular, they don't subvert the laws to get (or distribute) what they think is right; in terms of albums, we simply don't purchase anything at all, or we buy the occasional non-DRM-laden CDs, at inflated prices, and still keep fighting the good fight. A law-abiding voice carries much farther than any thief's voice. People like the open letter writer above only serve to lump us all into some amorphous mass of rebels with rich-kid attitudes, subverting any chance we have to reasonably push any changes through mainstream channels.
Burning a CD of songs for my friends is fucking fair use to me.
Think about that for a minute. You've got such a convenient way to rationalize this:
but that is usually stuff that they wouldn't have bought anyway.
You sound as if you're nothing more than a spoiled child, screaming that "it's not fair" that you can't get what you want. Then you're attempting to justify it on economic (not moral or ethical) grounds. Think about how this could be abuse. Consider a philanthropist deciding that all relatives, in-laws, co-workers, and so forth are "friends" and that the entire population of Berkeley were really just extended "friends" and distributing a record to all of them, or the entire state, or perhaps even the entire country or world should be fair use. That would obviously put this person is direct competition with the labels (negating the economic affects you think you're using to justify your position) yet that person (under your ideals) has exactly zero obligation to reimburse the artists or anyone else involved in creating the work in the first place. Yet if you had your way this would be perfectly fine.
Sure, this is a "slippery slope" argument but I can only hope you'll be able to grasp the bigger picture. You're making what you see as a responsible fair use, but there's no meaningful way to codify this approach. Further, you don't know what your friends are doing with the copies you gave them. Suppose they made "fair use" copies for all their friends, and they made "fair use" copies in turn. Your morality may be offended by these scenarios, but I'm hoping to reach your rationality.
I'm guessing you'll still justify it all by saying you're "advertising" for the labels and that the lost sales are more than made up by those of your friends who actually then buy more than they would, because you exposed them to these copies.
However, the underlying problem is that you feel entitled to something for you have absolutely no rights. Fair Use never has (and never should) have anything to do with making copies for others. It has to do with satire and some academic uses. It also has to do with allowing you to make a backup (for yourself!) and arguably to time-shift, location-shift, and device-shift the content for your own personal use.
You should certainly be allowed to play these songs for your friends, and because of the shifting you can do this at your place, their place, or anywhere else. You can let them borrow the songs for a while, or even sell (or give) them to your friends. However, you can't keep your copies as well. If your friend borrows a few songs for a weekend, you have no place listening to those same songs that weekend. You've temporarily assigned your rights to another, so you can't have your cake and eat it (the backup) too.
I'm trying to keep this from being personal, but it's people like you who cause people like me to lose credibility when fighting for actual reasonable fair use. I just want at least the same rights for music that I have with physical content (think books)--plus the various shifting concepts noted above--and nothing more. Note that shifting is conceptually a "move" not a "copy" even though the practicality of convenience means you make an actual copy.
But your position is absolutely untenable, not just to the industry, but to people like me! I had DRM as much as anybody else, and perhaps more, but I would call you out as bastardizing the very concept of "fair use" (and yes, that's even if it didn't affect me at all). It's definitely not within the spirit or letter of any related laws, yet you flaunt your disregard as if waving the flag in the name of justice for all. Most of the pre-DMCA laws and doctrines (such as that of first sale) were working perfectly fine.
Unfortunately, so many of us can't make a stand for extending reasonable rights because of extremists like you (sound familiar?). I want to make a difference, so I'd simply and respectfu
check out: US6857726 (Kia Silverbrook) [...] it seems like this is among the 1% of patents that actually describe something novel. Novel, perhaps, but not necessarily any more effective. Note that the whole point of this invention seems to deal with the fact that the print head assembly doesn't move in their innovative printer. In traditional ink jet printers, the entire print head routinely moves to a parked location, where the nozzles are either plugged or evacuated, with sponges to absorb the excess ink. Their novel approach is a system whereby the print head is fixed, and so these caps and sponges need to be movable to engage/disengage with the nozzles. That's exactly what this invention describes, if you read the claims (the section that can actually be enforced).
In fact, nothing at all suggests that this is any more effective or efficient at preventing ink evaporation than the current state of the art, and I'm not even sure I understand the point you're trying to make by citing it in the first place. Sure, these inventors considered clogging as an issue, and probably put significant thought and resources into designing a solution; I never said otherwise. However, that in no way implies that they've somehow managed to make nozzle clogs a thing of the past. In truth, it's more clear from this patent you noted that they've simply adapted current technologies to fit their novel (fixed) page-width print heads.
I just selected a particular post for a reply to issue a collective retort to the general tone of the discussion. Fair enough.
It looks like Silverbrook's business plan is to sell/license "the technology" Agreed.
Therefore it makes no sense to me that they would come to market with an inferior technology. Who would license it if there wasn't a compelling value proposition? Allow me to explain. The concept of "inferior" is subject to your viewpoint. Assuming these things are sufficiently reliable, such that they're not dismissed immediately as lemons, the fact that they clog, waste ink with endless cleaning cycles, require expensive routine maintenance, and so forth will all be seen as great attributes when they are selling this to their customers. Their customers, keep in mind, are those companies would license their technology, not the end-users. This is a decidedly different perspective, I'm sure you'll agree, than that of the end-users, yet it certainly does make a compelling business case. Clogged nozzles are simply a well-considered part of the business equation.
Some sort of disruptive technology in printing is long overdue. I think this looks very interesting, and possibly revolutionary. Perhaps my optimism is unwarranted, but I was rolling my eyes every time I read a post suggesting that this new technology would have more problems than the technology currently on the market. Quite honestly, if they had projected a significantly higher price I might have agreed with you. They could have taken the angle of high-reliability due to no moving (ink-related) parts and perhaps described how the total cost of ownership would be lower due to solving the nozzle clogging issues that plague the current generation of ink jets. However, they seem to have gone the bargain basement route, and while I'm guessing the technology is better overall than current state of the art, I simply can't see how it won't have at least the same level of problems we have now with nozzles clogging, if not vastly worse. I'd like to share your optimism, but when I encounter a print technology inventor touting several orders of magnitude more of the single most unreliable part of current printers, with hardly any mention of the clogging issue, my realism kicks in and I start to roll my eyes with the realization that this is, at best, more of the same.
Here's what I make of this whole flap [... they] are all just playing their roles... and the play is a farce.
[...] More on this theme on my blog if anyone cares I suppose you're just playing your role as well (emphasis added above).
Do you think their business plan is to hype a fancy new printer technology and sell a few thousand printers before everyone knows that the things are just going to clog up? No, of course not. I think their business plan is to sell a few million printers--despite the fact that many folks will have predicted the clogs--and then to make even more by having a hand in the service contracts to repair and replace the clogged nozzles. That's exactly what the current ink jet manufacturers are doing, so I'm not sure why you'd expect this to be any different. It's called planned obsolescence.
You software geeks just aren't giving the hardware geeks the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure these things aren't totally worthless, and for a certain segment of the market they will be perfect. As noted in another reply above, if you use these printers above some undisclosed minimum amount of prints per day, I'm sure they'll be quite reliable. Perhaps more so than traditional moving-head ink jets.
To suggest that the engineers who designed an inkjet printer didn't think of "clogging" as a major potential issue is ludicrous. If you would take the time to re-read my posting, I'm sure you'll see I never even remotely suggested this. This printer clearly isn't targeted to people like me, and I'm fine with that; I wish them luck in their venture. Clearly nozzle design was a significant part of their design; the thing claims to be 1600dpi after all.
How do all of these "It's going to clog" comments keep getting modded "Insightful"? Duh! I'm not sure whether it's any more or less "insightful" than any other postings, but nobody (at the time I originally submitted the posting you're berating) had mentioned it yet. In fact, I'm really most curious whether the (well-known) problem of clogging will somehow scale better than expected for the massive increase in the number of nozzles, and if they have, how exactly they've managed it. If there were a "+1 Good Question" I'm guessing that would be more appropriate. For you, I suspect Offtopic for complaining about mods would be in order (or perhaps Troll, for making baseless accusations of ignorance).
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The first thing that occurred to me was that similar structures will tend to cluster together simply because all the various minute forces will tend to act similarly on similar strands. This is somewhat different from your oak tree example, in that the acorn indeed "senses" its environment; I'm suggesting that perhaps the strands are merely passively tending to pool together due to the prevailing eddy currents, electromagnetic forces, or whatever might act to push like strands in like directions. It seems more like acorns of a certain shape being influenced similarly by a constant wind, simply because of their natural aerodynamic profile. Similarly-shaped acorns may tend to cluster, but not because they sense each other, or their environment, in any way.
But hey, it sure does sound a lot more funding-worthy to just call them "telepathic" (as in TFA)!
Users aren't so pathetic that they can't even understand that an upgrade might break something. Really, they're not morons. Users worldwide seemed not to panic when they first saw XP boot up. They managed, and they adapted. The same can (and should, as I propose) happen with IE. Advocating forcing users to just deal with it shows you are focused on the developers and not the users, the exact thing you are accusing Microsoft of doing. The plain truth is that users are going to have to deal with it anyway. Developers can't possibly retrofit every single web site on the planet. I'm simply advocating that Microsoft step up to the plate and provide users with a single button to solve all their web woes. A single button. If you really think users are too fragile to understand that they've upgraded browsers and thus things might change, then I'd suggest you're being quite short-sighted, and perhaps confusing the concept of focus with that of coddling. A tag is not an instance of an element type. An element is an instance of an element type. A tag is a syntactic delimiter, marking a boundary of an element. Yes, that's right, we're talking about the syntactic delimiter, not the (empty, in the case of "meta") element bounded by it. Thank you for this continued pedantry, but I don't think I'm going to get anywhere with you anyway, so I'll just leave it at that.
>meta< has been a standard HTML "tag" (you mean element type) for 13 years, first introduced in HTML 2.0 in 1995. Actually I do mean "tag" as in an instance of the "meta" element type. Trust me, I understand the concept, but your point is irrelevant, as I'm not arguing for or against the tag itself. I just want to freely ignore it, indefinitely, without ramifications. I want to follow published vetted and agreed-upon standards. Don't start down this path of "it's been in the spec since [whenever]" because you'll find Microsoft hasn't really played that game.
Don't presume to speak for everybody. Far from it, but read the comments here and in the related article from yesterday. Then, carefully, re-read my statement that prompted your snide response. Notice how I'm speaking only for those few who seem to have some tiny misgivings about this whole proposal. Just a small group, clearly not including you.
Yes, let the site break by default. Let it render like hell, without any change to the site. Just offer the user a "try to make this site look better" button, that will switch through the various so-called "compatibility" rendering modes.
Microsoft always does this; they ignore the user and focus on the developers (recall Ballmer's silly rant). Think about that for a moment. Their real market demand comes more indirectly from developers building software (yes, including web sites) that need Microsoft, and they know that.
But they're not blind to the users, nor do they always fear change. Think of the XP interface for folks who upgraded from 2000. It looked like a cartoon and took up lots of real estate. Users adapted; a change caused by an upgrade didn't bother them in the long run. Some [gasp] even found that Microsoft provided a nice "classic" option that restored their old look at feel. Even IE7 removed the menu bar by default, but let users restore it.
Now--stay with me for a context shift--the same can be true of a browser. The browser is a client-side piece of software. It can be upgraded, and the upgrade can make things different. Yes, even by default. But let the users click a button to have IE re-render any broken sites (site-wide, of course). Oh, what a burden, I can hear you protest. Fine, let's allow users to even set a preference that all sites should be set to use this "compatibility" mode by default. Then, if some seldom-used site looks bad because a user managed to stumble across one of the few odd standards-compliant sites (please mind the sarcasm) then they can set an exception for this site.
Basically your premise there is flawed; there's a false dichotomy you've presented to fix the breaking of millions of sites. Both of your solutions require the developers to take some action, one indeed less painful than the other.
I'm fine, Microsoft, with you inventing and respecting some non-standard tag, but let me be the voice of developers everywhere begging you to please let us summarily ignore this. Further, I suggest (yes, I'm still talking to you, Microsoft!) you not burden your prized developers any further, and actually consider distributing the pain as a much smaller burden on the end-users. They can and will adapt, soon, as long as you're sure to empower them with sufficient options to fix for themselves the mess you've made by thumbing your nose at web standards for all these years. It's Ok, admit you were wrong about web standards and do an about-face, just as you did with the Internet itself a decade ago.
I'm guessing it refers to The Chronicles of George.
Unless that's you, it's nothing personal.
It's always been a federal crime, it was just seldom enforced due to technology changing faster than the legal system. Keep in mind, though, that these same miscreants--if left to their own devices--would likely grow up having zero ethical problems with literally rewriting history to suit their own agendas. Our history as a society is being converted at an alarming rate to digital medium that is subject to essentially untraceable manipulation. Do you truly want to encourage (or even fail to non-trivially discourage) this sort of behavior?
I have nothing to do with that site, and as many others have mentioned there are far better virtual slide rules available, but I did learn long ago how one of these things operates, and the instructions in TFA are horrible even if you know what you're doing.
First, the term "index" has the old-school meaning of the number "1" and it appears at either end of the C scale. On the left side of C it means 1, and the right side it means 10, but there are no actual decimal points involved (you're on your own for order of magnitude with this device) so they're equivalent at either end. Also, for multiply and divide, you don't need that hairline slider that covers all the bars; that's only useful if you need to align two values on non-adjacent rules. Just slide the center bar (the one that holds scale C) back and forth.
The other important point to note is that you'll see numerals 1-9 between 1 and 2; those are just convenience markers for 1.1 through 1.9. That first (smaller) 2 you see, reading from left to right, is really 1.2 not 2.0.
So to multiply 6x2, we can go either direction, starting at 2 and multiplying by 6, or starting at 6 and multiplying by 2. To start at 2, slide the center part of the bar so that the right-hand "index" (1) of scale C is directly above the 2.0 on scale D. Now to "multiply" you don't do anything; you just read the result, which is found on scale D, directly under the 6 you wanted to multiply. Here you'll see 1.2 is directly under the 6.
Wait, though, we used the right-hand index, which is 10 not 1, so we need to multiply the result by 10. So 1.2 becomes 12 (which is why I said you have to do your own decimal point management). To start at 6 instead, slide the right-hand "index" (1) of scale C directly above the 6 on scale D; your answer will on D again, directly under the 2.0 of slide C. Again, we used the right-hand index of 10, not 1, so we multiply the 1.2 by 10 to get 12.
How did I know to use the right-hand index rather than the left-hand index? Well, if you slide the left-hand index of C all the way to 2.0 on D, you'll notice that the 6 you need to multiply is off the edge of the device--an overflow, if you will--so you must essentially work with 10 rather than 1 and move the decimal at the end.
With this extremely trivial example, you should be able to follow the rest of the terribly-written instructions FTFA for divide (although you can do significantly more with a slide rule than just multiply and divide).
...you very likely would have passed by a sign indicating that your entry serves as your consent to having your bags (and often other personal belongings) searched. The wonderful thing about rights is that they can be so quickly and easily be surrendered.
These are typically considered valid contracts. Unlike shrinkwrap licenses, you get to read this notice ahead of time, you may choose not to enter the premises, and you do receive consideration in that you're allowed to enter their establishment. The only grounds upon which you might possibly object is that there was no "meeting of the minds" and that you thus didn't understand the rights you were waiving. My guess is that if you know your rights well enough to rightly challenge a police officer, few judges/juries are going to sympathize with your claimed ignorance. Of course it's possible the sign was missing or inadequately visible, but most major retailers wouldn't make such a mistake.
The law--both in theory and in practice--is seldom as "sane" as we'd like to think.
If you believe this is nothing more than pure incompetence, then you too have been fooled. This level of incompetence is usually indicative of strong intent that Hanlon's razor will be used by others to essentially protect the perpetrators from punishment for their immoral and/or illegal activities. This is just another way to game the system.
The real problem is at the executive levels, who base decisions purely on the bean-counter approach. Executives (who, incidentally, I believe are far too highly compensated these days) should take a grander view of "cost" into consideration. They're the ones ignoring these other longer-term costs.
There is obviously a "cost" of having an unproductive, disenfranchised, and simply burnt-out work force, but this never figures into the decision process. For public companies, it's all about shareholder equity, and the executive planning horizon is seldom beyond the current quarter. Few executives have earned a smaller bonus for overworking their people; generally quite the opposite. These soft costs are unfortunately harder to quantify, and it's not the job of the bean-counters anyway. The bean-counters are what they are; I've not praised them, but there's no reason to believe they're evil, stupid, or incompetent. If anyone is to blame, consider targeting the executives who base their decisions entirely on the counted beans.
My guess is that you've simply conflated two issues. You've forgotten that any employee on a salary will simply be expected to put in overtime to compensate for any inefficiencies. It costs the company exactly $0.00 for a salaried employee to simply "waste" those precious extra seconds that you claim will add up. They add up to nothing but more "free" hours put in by our protagonist for the company served. If the bean-counters at the company don't see that, they're effectively incompetent. Which usually points to bad prospects for the future of the company. The bean-counters know exactly what they're doing. They're extracting more value (your time) from you at no cost. That free productivity (salaried--unpaid to the employee--overtime) looks great on the balance sheet, compared to the price of an extra monitor. If you can't see that, I think you might need to re-evaluate the target of your insults.
can start
to see the
problem
with having
a screen
that is too
small for
the font
size you
need to be
comfortable
if I
demonstrate
the
usability
of how my
phone looks
when I use a
reasonably
sized font.
Legible,
perhaps, but
certainly
not a very
productive
interface
for some of
us.
The point (which perhaps you've missed) is that letters like those--which you'd have us reference as the "worse" in "it could be worse"--serve very little useful purpose. We all know about the extremists, and what they do more than anything else is give the MPAA/RIAA all the political ammunition they need to continue to bully us and whittle away our current rights.
The only way to get things to change is slowly, calculated over a very long period of time. All of these "open letters" are useless; RIAA/MPAA will use folks like this, who blatantly thumb their collective noses, to justify their outrageous bullying tactics. And Joe Q Public will either applaud that the cheaters were caught, or at the very least recognize that there are "bad people" out there, and (wrongly) conclude that the ends justify the means. There will be no groundswell of support; there will be no revolution; there will be nothing but reactive policies that will further limit our extant (but endangered) rights.
Changes like these happen on a very large time scale, generally seeded by people who actually make sacrifices along the way. In particular, they don't subvert the laws to get (or distribute) what they think is right; in terms of albums, we simply don't purchase anything at all, or we buy the occasional non-DRM-laden CDs, at inflated prices, and still keep fighting the good fight. A law-abiding voice carries much farther than any thief's voice. People like the open letter writer above only serve to lump us all into some amorphous mass of rebels with rich-kid attitudes, subverting any chance we have to reasonably push any changes through mainstream channels.
Burning a CD of songs for my friends is fucking fair use to me.
Think about that for a minute. You've got such a convenient way to rationalize this:
but that is usually stuff that they wouldn't have bought anyway.
You sound as if you're nothing more than a spoiled child, screaming that "it's not fair" that you can't get what you want. Then you're attempting to justify it on economic (not moral or ethical) grounds. Think about how this could be abuse. Consider a philanthropist deciding that all relatives, in-laws, co-workers, and so forth are "friends" and that the entire population of Berkeley were really just extended "friends" and distributing a record to all of them, or the entire state, or perhaps even the entire country or world should be fair use. That would obviously put this person is direct competition with the labels (negating the economic affects you think you're using to justify your position) yet that person (under your ideals) has exactly zero obligation to reimburse the artists or anyone else involved in creating the work in the first place. Yet if you had your way this would be perfectly fine.
Sure, this is a "slippery slope" argument but I can only hope you'll be able to grasp the bigger picture. You're making what you see as a responsible fair use, but there's no meaningful way to codify this approach. Further, you don't know what your friends are doing with the copies you gave them. Suppose they made "fair use" copies for all their friends, and they made "fair use" copies in turn. Your morality may be offended by these scenarios, but I'm hoping to reach your rationality.
I'm guessing you'll still justify it all by saying you're "advertising" for the labels and that the lost sales are more than made up by those of your friends who actually then buy more than they would, because you exposed them to these copies.
However, the underlying problem is that you feel entitled to something for you have absolutely no rights. Fair Use never has (and never should) have anything to do with making copies for others. It has to do with satire and some academic uses. It also has to do with allowing you to make a backup (for yourself!) and arguably to time-shift, location-shift, and device-shift the content for your own personal use.
You should certainly be allowed to play these songs for your friends, and because of the shifting you can do this at your place, their place, or anywhere else. You can let them borrow the songs for a while, or even sell (or give) them to your friends. However, you can't keep your copies as well. If your friend borrows a few songs for a weekend, you have no place listening to those same songs that weekend. You've temporarily assigned your rights to another, so you can't have your cake and eat it (the backup) too.
I'm trying to keep this from being personal, but it's people like you who cause people like me to lose credibility when fighting for actual reasonable fair use. I just want at least the same rights for music that I have with physical content (think books)--plus the various shifting concepts noted above--and nothing more. Note that shifting is conceptually a "move" not a "copy" even though the practicality of convenience means you make an actual copy.
But your position is absolutely untenable, not just to the industry, but to people like me! I had DRM as much as anybody else, and perhaps more, but I would call you out as bastardizing the very concept of "fair use" (and yes, that's even if it didn't affect me at all). It's definitely not within the spirit or letter of any related laws, yet you flaunt your disregard as if waving the flag in the name of justice for all. Most of the pre-DMCA laws and doctrines (such as that of first sale) were working perfectly fine.
Unfortunately, so many of us can't make a stand for extending reasonable rights because of extremists like you (sound familiar?). I want to make a difference, so I'd simply and respectfu
In fact, nothing at all suggests that this is any more effective or efficient at preventing ink evaporation than the current state of the art, and I'm not even sure I understand the point you're trying to make by citing it in the first place. Sure, these inventors considered clogging as an issue, and probably put significant thought and resources into designing a solution; I never said otherwise. However, that in no way implies that they've somehow managed to make nozzle clogs a thing of the past. In truth, it's more clear from this patent you noted that they've simply adapted current technologies to fit their novel (fixed) page-width print heads.
[...]
More on this theme on my blog if anyone cares I suppose you're just playing your role as well (emphasis added above).