Given the rarity with which people RTFA, it would be even more surprising if someone downloaded the accompanying pdf academic paper (linked from within TFA).
"People are stupid. Microsoft decided for them what they use, by distributing IE with windows."
Well, now they don't have to download it! Believe it or not, you've just summarized most of the conclusions of the paper. Of course the authors do not put it as simply as you did. (Don't blame them; HBR referees are about as good as Slashdot mods.)
OTOH, one would still have to download the pdf paper to observe that it was written not in LaTeX or similar, but in... you guess it... M$ Word. "Game over," indeed.
"I could see this as a situation where the letter said something along the lines of, 'We found that you did not do sufficient work...'... "
That was exactly my first thought on this matter. Perhaps the researcher thinks that any proposal on this topic should be funded, regardless of quality?
Grants are never awarded "perfectly," expecially in the eyes of the applicants. But this simplistic reaction is absurd.
While the researcher claims that this rejection "proves him right," I, OTOH, find that his (and/or the media's) reaction proves the committee right for having rejected him in the first place.
"Actually, a lot of Europeans (myself included) get a bit puzzled when USians mention checks all the time.... Why would you want a checking account?
Some reasons...
on the customer end: While my check use has dropped by 75% or more over the past decade, some people (like the grandparent) have not taken advantage of automatic debiting, etc. Thinking outside the/. demographic, think about the elderly (grandparents, literally this time). I cannot blame people who lived through the depression, or world wars, for not moving their money around in cyberspace.
on the business end: Some businesses which could accept automatic payments just don't bother to set up the service. As an example, our condo building takes monthly assessment payments (maintenance fees) by check only. Why? Because we are a small building, and no one has bothered to go to the bank and set up an automatic payment system. Furthermore, it would cost us some fee to do so. So of the 15 checks I write per year, those are 12.
Anyone who would rent an apartment from a small "mom and pop" building would also have to pay by check or cash. Our banks simply don't offer the service cheaply, to accept payments automatically. As an economist, I am not surprised by this. The US banking industry has consolidated through many buyouts; now there is much less competition. So why should they offer their customers such services if they don't have to? (He said sadly...)
"The law is only hard to understand because lawyers and paralegals puff themselves up by using legalisms like pro se when writing for a lay audience. PJ could have just written, "Lawsuits where the plaintff represents himself." "
Perhaps irony is when someone makes a post on Slashdot decrying the use of jargon.:-/
If I had points, you'd get 'em. (And so would IDontAgreeWithYou's funny post just above.)
I guess back in the old days, when your paper letters were subpoenaed, you had your fair second chance to run back to the office and illegally burn them. Now, it's "1984".
Well, the obvious solution is to pass a new law. We'll call it the "No fair, stuff on the internet doesn't count!" law.
Officially, Neteller is based in Isle of Man, which is a British crown dependency. Similarly, PartyPoker is in Gibralter. Tons of sportsbooks are based in the Carribean. IANAL, but I don't have to be to see that these guys planned ahead.
"Same here in Europe, all US mesurements seem to be a bit screwed (hence the US gallon etc...) there is a milliard which is what the US call a billion."
Yes, but to avoid confusion, we both have billiards.
"It is not said that all 1.5M people received each of the 50k messages."
So now we know the total numbers of messages sent is bounded between a min of 1X1.5M = 1.5M and a max of 50k X 1.5M = 75B. Gee that helps:-/
I'll have to agree with the GP: Spammers should rot in any case, but this isn't very informative regarding the degree of damage in the case. In fact the whole FA was not very informative.
"PDF belongs to adobe and to develop using it you have to pay them for their patents use. So if you want to distribute yourself some PDF that's OK but if you want to use any generating PDF or reading PDF programs you need to pay adobe the big money."
Just in case the previous posters haven't sufficiently beaten you with your own club, I'll also point out pdfTeX, which is distributed as part of the major free TeX distributions.
"In sane, civilized countries, like Finland for example, this practice is blatantly illegal. Over here you cannot advertise a discount, unless it is based on an actual retail price"
Meanwhile, in insane, uncivilized countries like the US, people are forced to ask themselves whether a product is actually worth the price being asked. The horror.
Store A advertises a sofa for $1000. Store B advertises the exact same sofa for 50% off the price of $2000 (which comes out to $1000).
No matter which store I'm in, I ask myself whether the sofa is worth $1000 to me. I really don't care what its historic price was. I don't care if they did or didn't charge $2000 for it in the past. Or $5000. It costs $1000 now. Do I want it or not? It's as simple as that.
Now I admit, many people are not this rational. Or perhaps some people spent their entire lives in the US without noticing that stores do this sort of thing. So perhaps we do need yet another law to protect the stupid. But in that case please distinguish between two things: being proud to have such a law, vs. being proud to need one.
"I seem to have failed to fully convey my points. Being the patient type, I'll explain further.... Multiple Excel documents each have an entry in the Windows task bar much like every other window. Yet they do not behave like other windows."
I see that, and agree it's annoying. But if you read (your) post, you'll see that the side-by-side command gives what you asked for.
"Brackets have special meaning in the filename? That's news to me; please explain."
Being the patient type, I will. When Excel crashes, recovery files can be named such as filename[1].xls. My presumption was that MS wants to reserve the character for that purpose. In your defense, I see that MS has acknowledged this sort of thing as a bug, so I'll just concede.
"Yes, looking for more [than Copy Special]... like, maybe I add more data. It won't be duplicated in the transposed part."
You want Excel to spontaneously add data to distant parts of the spreadsheet? I certainly hope not.
"... But even worse, the transposed part isn't linked to the original data."
Now I see what you want. Let's see, what function might TRANSPOSE a block of cells...? That's like asking the square root of a million - no one will ever know.:-)
"What if Excel didn't implement its own window manager and actually allowed one to view two windows side by side in the fashion one has already learned?"
What if Users could find the "Window|Compare Side by Side" command?
"What if Excel allowed one to save to a folder with a "[" in the name, which Windows happily allows one to create?"
You know that square brackets have a special use in Excel, right?
"What if Excel had a dynamic transpose function?"
There is Edit|Paste Special|Transpose. I can only guess you were looking for more.
"What if Excel had used MEAN() instead of AVERAGE()?"
Then there'd be no need for overly picky users to write their own MEAN() function in order to save three keystrokes; what fun would that be? (You know you can write your own functions, right?)
"I've seen a few different numbers (probably for different models, I expect), but modern auto assembly lines spit out entire cars in less than one minute each.
So yes, virtually all mass-produced products take well under six minutes to put together."
There's a teeny difference between "one car per minute" and "one minute per car." The former invokes thoughts of Henry Ford. The latter, of The Flash.
"I do remember 9/11.... Afghanistan did not attack us."
You certainly have an interesting perspective on things.
"I don't see how one attack killing 3000 people... should infringe on my right to trade with whomever I want"
Yes, it's awfully convenient to partition the world into so many parts that no single thing has anything to do with another. Now back to reality: that's just not how things work. The world is a complicated place. Issues cannot always be separated from each other, and they are not simply black and white. Unfortunately, the rest of the world stereotypes my fellow Americans as seeing the world as such; and unfortunately the sterotype is too often right.
E.g., elsewhere you wrote: "When we declare war against Iran, I'll accept a closing of trade. Then, and only then, will I have a concern about Iran."
and before that (in a modded up post !?): "I should be able to trade with whomever I want to trade, without restrictions by the State. That's what freedom means."
I'm sorry to point it out, but this is exactly what I am referring to. Absolutes. Black and white. "Trade if and only if no war." The world simply does not function that way.
"Semi drivers piss me off. They either go too slow or too fast. It's like they're deliberately TRYING to get a bad reputation among all the other drivers on the road."
As opposed to car drivers?
Sure the occasional semi driver behaves like an ass, but you seem not to realize that they also need to obey the laws of physics. A loaded truck isn't going to take that next hill at 65mph. A loaded truck isn't going to slam on its brakes just because you want to go down that next hill at 65mph (or 70, or whatever). If these guys drove to please everyone else, they'd double their gasoline bill.
If I had to make my living on the roads of America, where every (true) moron can get a driver's license just by proving they can breathe,... well, I'll let you fill in the rest.
"Online poker gaming sites rely on being able to look at a user's running processes in order to detect bots."
Not necessarily bots specifically; but more importantly, poker sites do monitor processes to prevent some kinds of cheating. Check out #7 in Party's terms and conditions. Common wisdom is that Party does screen scrapes at least, but I do not know what else they do, or how they act on it. In particular I do not know that they use the same methods as relate to the Sony issue.
I use LaTeX for just about everything. The main thing that prevents me from moving to Linux is that I'd miss my favorite programmable editor (WinEdt). (Yes, I already voted for a Linux port as "most needed new feature" over at Winedt.org.)
Meanwhile, I have had precisely zero problems running MikTeX on Windows. MikTeX can be configured to automatically fetch updated or missing packages. But with a full install, you rarely need that feature anyway. Occasionally, I tell the Wizard to update everything, and it works. Exactly what problems could the above people be having? I'm not trolling here, I really don't get it. I've lost count of the number of reasons I don't like Windows, but what's wrong with LaTeX & Friends on Windows?
Slashdot Mirror
Given the rarity with which people RTFA, it would be even more surprising if someone downloaded the accompanying pdf academic paper (linked from within TFA).
"People are stupid. Microsoft decided for them what they use, by distributing IE with windows."
Well, now they don't have to download it! Believe it or not, you've just summarized most of the conclusions of the paper. Of course the authors do not put it as simply as you did. (Don't blame them; HBR referees are about as good as Slashdot mods.)
OTOH, one would still have to download the pdf paper to observe that it was written not in LaTeX or similar, but in... you guess it... M$ Word. "Game over," indeed.
"That's why the web developer tool bar for firefox is so good. Just 2 clicks to disable javascript, and you're free to copy to your heart's content."
;)
Of course those that don't have that extension will consider Ctrl-A to be one keystroke.
"I could see this as a situation where the letter said something along the lines of, 'We found that you did not do sufficient work...' ... "
That was exactly my first thought on this matter. Perhaps the researcher thinks that any proposal on this topic should be funded, regardless of quality?
Grants are never awarded "perfectly," expecially in the eyes of the applicants. But this simplistic reaction is absurd.
While the researcher claims that this rejection "proves him right," I, OTOH, find that his (and/or the media's) reaction proves the committee right for having rejected him in the first place.
"Actually, a lot of Europeans (myself included) get a bit puzzled when USians mention checks all the time. ... Why would you want a checking account?
/. demographic, think about the elderly (grandparents, literally this time). I cannot blame people who lived through the depression, or world wars, for not moving their money around in cyberspace.
Some reasons...
on the customer end: While my check use has dropped by 75% or more over the past decade, some people (like the grandparent) have not taken advantage of automatic debiting, etc. Thinking outside the
on the business end: Some businesses which could accept automatic payments just don't bother to set up the service. As an example, our condo building takes monthly assessment payments (maintenance fees) by check only. Why? Because we are a small building, and no one has bothered to go to the bank and set up an automatic payment system. Furthermore, it would cost us some fee to do so. So of the 15 checks I write per year, those are 12.
Anyone who would rent an apartment from a small "mom and pop" building would also have to pay by check or cash. Our banks simply don't offer the service cheaply, to accept payments automatically. As an economist, I am not surprised by this. The US banking industry has consolidated through many buyouts; now there is much less competition. So why should they offer their customers such services if they don't have to? (He said sadly...)
"The law is only hard to understand because lawyers and paralegals puff themselves up by using legalisms like pro se when writing for a lay audience. PJ could have just written, "Lawsuits where the plaintff represents himself." "
:-/
Perhaps irony is when someone makes a post on Slashdot decrying the use of jargon.
(But I do agree with you, anyway.)
"Slashdot is credited with a 120% increase in revenue for nerds that now know how to raise their kids."
Using a combination of Slashdot demographics and basic math, I conclude that, before this story, they had 5 customers.
If I had points, you'd get 'em. (And so would IDontAgreeWithYou's funny post just above.)
I guess back in the old days, when your paper letters were subpoenaed, you had your fair second chance to run back to the office and illegally burn them. Now, it's "1984".
Well, the obvious solution is to pass a new law. We'll call it the "No fair, stuff on the internet doesn't count!" law.
Officially, Neteller is based in Isle of Man, which is a British crown dependency. Similarly, PartyPoker is in Gibralter. Tons of sportsbooks are based in the Carribean. IANAL, but I don't have to be to see that these guys planned ahead.
"At the moment DDO only allows you to achieve level 10, rank 4."
Well you can turn my MMOG up all the way up to level 11!
"I didn't see the green glowing radioactive chunk land on Bart's skateboard."
More importantly, it didn't bounce up and stick to Homer's back, when he drops it at work. Otherwise, how does it get in his car?!
(A first: I'm embarassed by a post I've made, before I even submitted it.)
"Same here in Europe, all US mesurements seem to be a bit screwed (hence the US gallon etc...) there is a milliard which is what the US call a billion."
Yes, but to avoid confusion, we both have billiards.
"It is not said that all 1.5M people received each of the 50k messages."
:-/
So now we know the total numbers of messages sent is bounded between a min of 1X1.5M = 1.5M and a max of 50k X 1.5M = 75B. Gee that helps
I'll have to agree with the GP: Spammers should rot in any case, but this isn't very informative regarding the degree of damage in the case. In fact the whole FA was not very informative.
"They called me for an interview recently and I told them no because of their China policy."
They asked me to be their janitor for minimum wage. I told them no because they keep misspelling googol.
"PDF belongs to adobe and to develop using it you have to pay them for their patents use. So if you want to distribute yourself some PDF that's OK but if you want to use any generating PDF or reading PDF programs you need to pay adobe the big money."
Just in case the previous posters haven't sufficiently beaten you with your own club, I'll also point out pdfTeX, which is distributed as part of the major free TeX distributions.
"In sane, civilized countries, like Finland for example, this practice is blatantly illegal. Over here you cannot advertise a discount, unless it is based on an actual retail price"
Meanwhile, in insane, uncivilized countries like the US, people are forced to ask themselves whether a product is actually worth the price being asked. The horror.
Store A advertises a sofa for $1000.
Store B advertises the exact same sofa for 50% off the price of $2000 (which comes out to $1000).
No matter which store I'm in, I ask myself whether the sofa is worth $1000 to me. I really don't care what its historic price was. I don't care if they did or didn't charge $2000 for it in the past. Or $5000. It costs $1000 now. Do I want it or not? It's as simple as that.
Now I admit, many people are not this rational. Or perhaps some people spent their entire lives in the US without noticing that stores do this sort of thing. So perhaps we do need yet another law to protect the stupid. But in that case please distinguish between two things: being proud to have such a law, vs. being proud to need one.
"I seem to have failed to fully convey my points. Being the patient type, I'll explain further. ...
... But even worse, the transposed part isn't linked to the original data."
:-)
Multiple Excel documents each have an entry in the Windows task bar much like every other window. Yet they do not behave like other windows."
I see that, and agree it's annoying. But if you read (your) post, you'll see that the side-by-side command gives what you asked for.
"Brackets have special meaning in the filename? That's news to me; please explain."
Being the patient type, I will. When Excel crashes, recovery files can be named such as filename[1].xls. My presumption was that MS wants to reserve the character for that purpose. In your defense, I see that MS has acknowledged this sort of thing as a bug, so I'll just concede.
"Yes, looking for more [than Copy Special]... like, maybe I add more data. It won't be duplicated in the transposed part."
You want Excel to spontaneously add data to distant parts of the spreadsheet? I certainly hope not.
"
Now I see what you want. Let's see, what function might TRANSPOSE a block of cells...? That's like asking the square root of a million - no one will ever know.
"What if Excel didn't implement its own window manager and actually allowed one to view two windows side by side in the fashion one has already learned?"
What if Users could find the "Window|Compare Side by Side" command?
"What if Excel allowed one to save to a folder with a "[" in the name, which Windows happily allows one to create?"
You know that square brackets have a special use in Excel, right?
"What if Excel had a dynamic transpose function?"
There is Edit|Paste Special|Transpose. I can only guess you were looking for more.
"What if Excel had used MEAN() instead of AVERAGE()?"
Then there'd be no need for overly picky users to write their own MEAN() function in order to save three keystrokes; what fun would that be? (You know you can write your own functions, right?)
"I've seen a few different numbers (probably for different models, I expect), but modern auto assembly lines spit out entire cars in less than one minute each.
So yes, virtually all mass-produced products take well under six minutes to put together."
There's a teeny difference between "one car per minute" and "one minute per car." The former invokes thoughts of Henry Ford. The latter, of The Flash.
"I do remember 9/11. ... Afghanistan did not attack us."
... should infringe on my right to trade with whomever I want"
You certainly have an interesting perspective on things.
"I don't see how one attack killing 3000 people
Yes, it's awfully convenient to partition the world into so many parts that no single thing has anything to do with another. Now back to reality: that's just not how things work. The world is a complicated place. Issues cannot always be separated from each other, and they are not simply black and white. Unfortunately, the rest of the world stereotypes my fellow Americans as seeing the world as such; and unfortunately the sterotype is too often right.
E.g., elsewhere you wrote:
"When we declare war against Iran, I'll accept a closing of trade. Then, and only then, will I have a concern about Iran."
and before that (in a modded up post !?):
"I should be able to trade with whomever I want to trade, without restrictions by the State. That's what freedom means."
I'm sorry to point it out, but this is exactly what I am referring to. Absolutes. Black and white. "Trade if and only if no war." The world simply does not function that way.
MG
"Semi drivers piss me off. They either go too slow or too fast. It's like they're deliberately TRYING to get a bad reputation among all the other drivers on the road."
As opposed to car drivers?
Sure the occasional semi driver behaves like an ass, but you seem not to realize that they also need to obey the laws of physics. A loaded truck isn't going to take that next hill at 65mph. A loaded truck isn't going to slam on its brakes just because you want to go down that next hill at 65mph (or 70, or whatever). If these guys drove to please everyone else, they'd double their gasoline bill.
If I had to make my living on the roads of America, where every (true) moron can get a driver's license just by proving they can breathe,... well, I'll let you fill in the rest.
I don't know, but I'm sure Jerry Bruckheimer will tell us, one of these years.
"Will Google be able to pay the millions for all the downloads?"
[Turn wrist, touch pinky to corner of mouth] "One MILLION dollars!"
(This no longer being the 60's, somehow I think Google will manage.)
Orson Welles collection. I have it. It's worth listening to, as an educational experience at the least.
"Online poker gaming sites rely on being able to look at a user's running processes in order to detect bots."
Not necessarily bots specifically; but more importantly, poker sites do monitor processes to prevent some kinds of cheating. Check out #7 in Party's terms and conditions. Common wisdom is that Party does screen scrapes at least, but I do not know what else they do, or how they act on it. In particular I do not know that they use the same methods as relate to the Sony issue.
I use LaTeX for just about everything. The main thing that prevents me from moving to Linux is that I'd miss my favorite programmable editor (WinEdt). (Yes, I already voted for a Linux port as "most needed new feature" over at Winedt.org.)
Meanwhile, I have had precisely zero problems running MikTeX on Windows. MikTeX can be configured to automatically fetch updated or missing packages. But with a full install, you rarely need that feature anyway. Occasionally, I tell the Wizard to update everything, and it works. Exactly what problems could the above people be having? I'm not trolling here, I really don't get it. I've lost count of the number of reasons I don't like Windows, but what's wrong with LaTeX & Friends on Windows?