Re:Talking out both sides of out mouths.
on
Pepping Up Windows
·
· Score: 1
I dunno. I like the ability to paste the image into whatever program I'm using, without having to use an intermediate file. It's less often that I want to have a file of the screenshot than that I want the screenshot pasted into whatever document or email I'm writing. If I *do* want to save it to a file, chances are I want to crop it down to some subsection of the window, so I'm having to go through an image editor anyhow. Of course in my job I have Photoshop open 90% of the time anyhow, so it's certainly very little burden to Ctrl-N, Ctrl-V, M(arquee), select, Alt-I->P (crop), Ctrl-Shift-S (save as) such that it only takes 3-4 seconds total to save my cropped image. I recognize that that same task is more time consuming for others.
I'll give you this: CS for Final Fantasy is about as bad as it gets. My wife played for about a month, and decided she didn't like the game. We canceled the billing in the game. Next month, we got billed for it, and I called customer support. They had no record that we'd canceled the account, but would cancel the account for us now. Next month... we got billed for it again. I called customer support, and surprisingly they had no record that we'd canceled the account. They would cancel the account for us now. Neither time were they willing to offer a credit for the undue charges they'd applied, I called my credit card company and got them to reverse both charges. Fortunately my card was also up for expiration, and I got a new card with a new number at that time. Sure enough, a month later, I got a nastygram from FFXI saying that I was overdue, and that they were going to suspend my account if I didn't give them new credit card info.
I don't know if they have a plan to keep charging people until they put up a big fuss, but apparently the fuss I put up wasn't big enough to get them to stop trying to charge my card.
Warcraft on the other hand has several times given across the board extensions on subscriptions to players who have been affected by difficulties on their end. It's been a day here, and a day there, once as long as a week (which truthfully was more time than the latency issues were actually present).
Most (not all) of the complaints that have been leveraged against Warcraft would never have been uttered about any of Warcraft's current competetors or past products in the same genre. The reason, though, isn't because these other games did such a good job of it, it's specifically because these other games failed to provide anything by means of these topics of complaint whatsoever.
There is more back story present in Warcraft than in any other game I've ever played, period. Warcraft III itself serves to cover much back story that is alluded to within WOW, but not necessarily found as the primary objective of some quest. For example, have you noticed the throneroom in the ruins of Lordaeron (the city ruins over the Undercity) is the same throneroom as that where Arthas struck down his father? Around you are the pulpits of the senators which you saw in the cut scenes of Warcraft III. On the floor in front of the throne is an old dark stain, in the same spot that Arthas' father fell to.
Why do the orcs and trolls hate the humans? Why do the Tauren side with the horde, when their belief system is much more in tune with the night elves? Why are the undead no longer under the control of the Lich King? These answers and more are waiting to be unlocked in the game.
Perhaps you never noticed the dozens and dozens of books sitting around the world which you can click on and read; books which give you the history of the game world if you aren't already familiar with it from having played the earlier Warcraft games.
And how often have I heard people complain about, "Blizzard is working on feature_x, when we all know that feature_y is more important." To you, back story is important, to someone else, raid content is important, to yet another player, solo content is important, and to still another, it's important what you look like. I've heard dozens of people complain bitterly about the new dressing room feature, yet I also hear people excitedly talking about how they look in uber_gear_01. My wife won't wear upgrades if they don't look good, while I won't wear something that looks good unless it's an upgrade or I'm dorking around in town.
Very few people ever whined about a lack of back story in Everquest (what very little back story was present was weak and contrived). I've never heard someone complain about that in CoH (there's some, but it's mostly environmental -- necessary to enable suspension of disbelief, and no, quest plots don't count except for the series quests like Dr. Vahzilok).
I've never had a problem with Customer Support in the half dozen or so times I've contacted them. Some people feel like saying no when asked to restore an item that "my little brother sold" is bad CS. I personally feel like it's good CS. Players are also *much* more demanding of game CS than they are of CS in non-game related areas. Ever swear at a phone support rep from basically any company? They'll politely inform you they're going to hang up, you can call again when you can be civil. CS staff for games get sworn at incessantly, language to make my grandmother cry. They also also regularly attempted to be defrauded, "I had uber item 01, now it's gone" "Says here, you traded it to a guild mate 20 seconds before you opened your petition" "not uh!"
There are very few aspects of this game that are truly worse than other games of the same genre, really only server stability issues, and that wierd plague thing comming out of Zul'Gurub this past week (though most level 60's felt like it was the best world event from any game ever -- I know a few level 1-30's that'd disagree though).
People also like to complain about lack of content. With a new high end dungeon coming out, for free, every other month, and features like Battlegrounds, I think this complaint is pretty absurd. Also, invariably, someone will complain, "Why are they releasing new content when there are existing problems?"
To me, yes, it's worth that much, because it satisfies a gaming desire that would cost me a lot more than $400 over 2 years. I noticed this when I was into EQ, where I stopped buying other games since I already had a game that satisfied my gaming needs.
With games now costing $50 at a minimum, and $65 in many cases, it only takes 6-8 games to meet the $400 price of playing Warcraft for 2 years. That's only one new game every 3 months. While playing Warcraft, I feel no need to puchase other games, and in the long run, I would have spent more than $15/month on games anyhow.
First, whether you like it or not, they did commit a crime under American law. Second, they didn't just do it once, but they did it repeatedly after numerous warnings, and when the school district did what us technical folks like to consider reasonable measures of not deriving the password from information found on the back (the password wasn't directly on the back, it was derived from the information on the back), the kids used cracking tools to specifically violate a relatively reasonable measure. Any way you fluff it, it's still against the law in these United States, and last time I looked, people went to jail for that stuff.
I have no idea if this was their plan all along, I proposed the idea that it might be; if I conveyed that differently I apologise. But whether or not this was their intention, it certainly is the effect; these kids, who obviously felt there would be no real consequences to their actions now have a very different idea about how the world works.
Just because they're kids doesn't mean that they're incapable of rational thinking. So many apologists on Slashdot (I have no idea if you're one of them, so apologies if you are not) are quick to step forward and say that kids are capable of making distinctions between right and wrong when it comes to discussing video game regulations, but when it comes to them having commited a cyber crime, they're just kids, give 'em a break? If I used hacking tools to circumvent the administrative passwords on my work computers, you can bet that I would not only be fired, but that they would also bring the full weight of the law against me.
At some point in a person's life they have to make the fundamental conclusion that actions have real and lasting consequences, whether or not there is a victim of any committed crimes. "Victimless crimes" still carry jail time, and well they should.
A fundamental distinction between my driving analogy and this hacking crime is that of who the victims are, and the severity of the repercussions of those actions. But the core truth that I was attempting to convey is that many folks hereabouts have declared that the barriers to tresspassing were insufficient, so the kids didn't know they were doing anything wrong. This could have been the case the first time they broke the administrator passwords. But it was certainly not the case for subsequent times.
The limits were clearly established. These kids exceeded them. The form of this happens to be covered by US law, and hence any legal action against them was appropriate. I also think that it was appropriate that they didn't pursue this to the fullest extent they could, whether or not that was their plan from the start.
Although I know your response was a joke, I think that what happened here was basically executed perfectly.
The kids repeatedly violated guidelines that were put in place by people with the authority to put those guidelines there. Regardless of whether the measures used to enforce those guidelines were sufficient to deter activity simply by the strength of the restraints or not is unimportant. I can drive my car over the dotted yellow line in the road too if I want, and I can make my car go above the speed limit; that doesn't make it the state's fault when I careen through oncoming traffic at 120 mph.
Obviously the early traditional reprimands failed to make an impact on the students. What they needed was a good scare, and I think this is what they got. Settling on 15 hours of community service each kid doesn't sound like the prosecuting attorney(ies) ever really intended to send these kids to jail, it sounds to me like they wanted to make the kids fully aware that when you choose to violate guidelines, there are consequences (at least when you're caught, especially when you're flagrant in the actions). And I doubt, when faced with the prospect of jail time, that any of these kids failed to get that message.
Further, the message was probably received by more than just the kids involved, it was probably received by many other kids in the same district, and in surrounding districts.
As I understand it, in part, McDonalds was found at fault because their resident coffee experts (product managers for coffee, or whatever they're called there) were unable to tell the jury what temperature they keep their coffee at.
This means that they were failing to control the temperature of the coffee, and were unable to affirm that they made any efforts to keep the coffee in a temperature range that is reasonably safe. It was indifference leading to injury.
Coffee from most places would have resulted in significantly less injury, coupled with a lack of control of the temperature made her injury unnecessary and preventable.
I wouldn't expect the journalists to ignore the information, but the reporting can be done just as effectively, if not as sensationally, by pointing out what information they were able to research, without disclosing the actual information itself.
It's not the topic of the report that Google has a problem with, it's that in an effort toward getting a reaction, they damaged a man. If the reporter wanted to make his point, why didn't he put up his own personal details that he researched on Google? Or the details of his editor or neighbor? Perhaps because he doesn't want to have the barrier to accessing that information removed. I think it's obvious that there is a line between responsible reporting and what CNet did here, and I think they realized they were crossing that line in order to get a response, specifically because they did not use themselves as the target.
Finally, for the record, most companies will cease talking with news agencies that offend them. Just like I'd never interview with 20/20 (unless I was sure I was being painted as the victim) because I don't want to give them additional fuel with which to attack me. Come to think of it, I find it unlikely that I'd interview even as the victim, because I find that sort of reporting to be in bad taste.
I don't think Google is responding in an unfair way. After all, Google could remove them from Google News, remove them from the search index, remove them from Froogle, and perhaps even put an empty field where C|Net's offices are supposed to go on Google Maps. They're just saying, "You did something we don't like. No soup, one year!"
I think it depends on the subject. If you look at the problems presented in most math books and statistics books, creation of those problems to just the right level of difficulty, where it builds entirely on things the student's done before, and only really exercises the new aspects, and the problems are also nicely formatted with all those mathematical symbols not commonly found on a keyboard, I can imagine that creation of these could certainly take an hour or more per problem.
Even if it's only 20 minutes per problem, giving students 30 problems is still 10 hours of work. If you are teaching 4 courses... well, you see the problem.
But even in subjects where the problems are easy to create, yes, I'd say that many professors really are too lazy to spend the time creating meaningful problems on their own, for a variety of reasons. Some are only teaching because that's the only way they can get their research grants, and are happy to expend a minimum of effort. Some have always been shielded from normal (non-academic) life, and don't have a good sense of how to be a good teacher (let's face it, the higher in academia you get, the less likely professors are to be good educators instead of just people who know a lot more than average about their subject).
Franky, as a student, I was usually grateful for professors who used problems out of the book, because they were less likely to have problems within the question (accidentally unsolvable problems and the like). Those problems also tended to give you a certain feel for if you had done it right. For example, if the area of the curve was exactly 4.12, instead of 3.273840183234. That's very useful when you're learning the technique and can't be self-sure of having done it right; instead spending the evening learning the *wrong* way to solve your homework.
More importantly, 10% is a large enough figure that us web developers can now make a strong case to our PHB's that the websites we develop really should be done in a way compatible with other browsers (ie standards compliant).
10% user base is actually more significant than you might think, not in a "10% is a bigger value than you think" sort of way, but in that less than 10% of 'net users are computer nerds now, meaning that it's not just techies who are using "other browsers."
Perhaps the implications of even that statement aren't immediately obvious, but to PHB's, a techy who's bucking the trend will also know enough to use IE when Firefox doesn't work. That's not going to be the case for non-technical folk, so if some appreciable portion of your users will simply give up on your site as a result of your architectural decisions, then now you're talking a real dent in income.
While Firefox still had 5% or 6% of the browser share, chances are that if a feature didn't work for someone, and they were really interested in being your customer, they'd use IE instead. Now that's no longer the case. At least via PHB logic.
"I was too lazy to lock my liquor cabinet and my kid got into it and drank himself to death. It is the alcohol companys' fault for killing my child and they along with all of their supporters should pay."..... see how stupid that sounds?
And that's why there's laws limiting the ability of children to acquire alcohol on their own. It's the same exact logic that drives people to want age restrictions placed on video games.
Looking for a php/asp/coldfusion developer to join your ranks?:-)
I work 10 hours per day - get paid for 8. In exchange for having 2 hours less time to spend with family, I am expected to do no screwing around. Period.
Ok, that's not exactly true, they don't really care if I screw around so long as I get my 12 hours worth of work done each day:-). It's only through total focus that I can get it done in 10.
I don't know about "most people," but within IS where I work, this is decidedly not true. Basically all of us type faster than we write. Each letter in typing is a simple down-up motion, and many of the motions can be done partially in parallel (for example, when typing "test", you're beginning to push e before you've fully pushed t, etc).
A good typer will always write words faster than a good handwriter unless that handwriter is one of the now rare folks who know a shorthand script based on syllables.
Depending on your handwriting, it's also hugely more readable. I've typed everything important even since I was a kid, and as a result my handwriting is really terrible. At our IS meetings, it's the exception that people are taking notes on paper, most are taking them on a laptop. Usually you have a pad of paper next to you, but that's only for if you need to draw a diagram.
I'm not a gun advocate, and I personally think that armor piercing bullets should be illegal. But I'll devil's advocate here, since I do understand the thinking.
Armor piercing bullets are legal because they would be required for a civilian revolution against the government. They are protected by the right to bear arms for the very reason that the right to bear arms exists.
Actually, what's more likely to happen is that advertisers will get more slick, by providing server side scripts / plugins to serve their advertising.
A few ideas:
Text-based ads within the content of an article (insepparable in HTML from the surrounding content, only distinguishable by our ability to parse the information displayed in it).
Site content which cannot be viewed until a Flash based ad sets an arbitrarily named cookie (only after the full ad has been viewed) and refreshes the page.
Ad scripts which are downloaded with other scripts that are required for the site to function
There's too much money at stake in advertising, and too much desire for you to *see* advertising on the part of those buying the advertising for it to die. There'll always be a new form, and very likely, it'll actually only become more and more annoying. As long as you're accepting information from a party that wants to serve you ads, there'll be a way for them to BUY SOYLENT BRAND SOAP TODAY -- ONLY SOYLENT SOAP PROVIDES ESSENTIAL SOYLENT NUTRIENTS! insert the ads into that information.
There was a pretty visible incident last year some time where MSN.com was rendering badly in Opera. When Opera tried to find out why, it turned out to be that MSN was serving up a different (broken) stylesheet to Opera as it was to IE. Telling Opera to identify itself as IE made MSN.com render correctly because it fetched the stylesheet typically served to IE.
Some people say it was intentional on MSN's part to make Opera users believe that Opera was sub-standard. Certainly, of all sites, MSN.com is probably the most likely to convince users of this; most users use MSN.com as their home page since that's the default, and they'll want Opera to behave the same way. Users trying out alternate browsers for the first time would be immediately put off by their favorite sites rendering so poorly in the opposing browsers, and as far as the user's concerned, it's the browser's fault since it looks just fine in IE.
The importance of college education was well illustrated by one of my college professors.
He was a chemistry professor who grew up in Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, it's apparently popular for young university students to join the Communist party for whatever reason. So whenever there's political unrest, the first thing the government does is shut down the universities.
Well, during one particularly long shut-down, the chemistry professors began to grow worried about their Potassium supplies. Potassium reacts with the atmosphere, and it reacts to water. It doesn't react with kerosene, and given the ease of access to kerosene there, they stored large chunks of potassium in jars full of kerosene.
Unfortunately in the heat of Sri Lanka, that kerosene has a tendency to evaporate, and once any of the potassium metal is exposed to the atmosphere, it reacts quite vigorously.
Well, they knew that the potassium reserves would need tending (normally not a problem since it only requires looking after every few months), and they approached the police force for permission to tend their supplies. The police thought this was absurd, "Metal reacting with AIR?" and refused the professors. No way were these cops going to let a bunch of communists have access to their chemical supplies, who knows what sort of mischief they might cause with that stuff!
As a result, the potassium supplies eventually *were* exposed, and as expected caused a significant fire (potassium reacts violently and it was sitting in an accelerant). Of course the police force refused to believe the same metal & air story that they'd previously rejected, and arrested the professors for arson.
Had these police officers taken basic chemistry, at least some would have remembered that yes, potassium does indeed react with atmosphere, and perhaps we'd better at least go in with them.
Knowledge of subjects not directly applicable to your field of work often have minor or significant impact on your actual ability to interact with the world. Undergraduate education is about providing you with some essential skills to do the career you're choosing, but it's actually more importantly about providing you some of the essential skills to excel in peripheral areas to your career.
My CS degree was pretty boring, I'd already been programming for several years before I started it, and there was not much new to learn (some of the theory classes were interesting in that they explained WHY some things worked they way they did, even though I already knew how they worked). But nonetheless my college education was highly rewarding since I elected not to perceive the "unrelated" classes as an absurd requirement made up just to drag more money out of me, but rather as something that someone smarter than me decided was part of a rounded world view.
I type as fast as I think, I type in whole words, not individual letters. It's the thought process that's the limiting factor, not my ability to press the keys.
If I was in a job where I did typesetting, and didn't have to think the words I was typing, just get them into the computer, then perhaps the Dvorak layout would have some use for me, but since that's not the case, I can't imagine that I'd really get any use out of Dvorak.
Some day, if I decide to give up my high paying programming job for a secretarial job, then I'll consider Dvorak.
Plus, Dvorak was developed in the 30's or 40's for keyboarding needs of that time, not the keyboarding needs of today, where there's a lot more symbol use. A keyboard layout that I'd truly be interested in would be one that includes curly brackets and parenthesis w/o the need for use of a shift key.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno. I like the ability to paste the image into whatever program I'm using, without having to use an intermediate file. It's less often that I want to have a file of the screenshot than that I want the screenshot pasted into whatever document or email I'm writing. If I *do* want to save it to a file, chances are I want to crop it down to some subsection of the window, so I'm having to go through an image editor anyhow. Of course in my job I have Photoshop open 90% of the time anyhow, so it's certainly very little burden to Ctrl-N, Ctrl-V, M(arquee), select, Alt-I->P (crop), Ctrl-Shift-S (save as) such that it only takes 3-4 seconds total to save my cropped image. I recognize that that same task is more time consuming for others.
My point is this: Is there another game that does a better job of these things and *isn't* a single player game?
I'll give you this: CS for Final Fantasy is about as bad as it gets. My wife played for about a month, and decided she didn't like the game. We canceled the billing in the game. Next month, we got billed for it, and I called customer support. They had no record that we'd canceled the account, but would cancel the account for us now. Next month... we got billed for it again. I called customer support, and surprisingly they had no record that we'd canceled the account. They would cancel the account for us now. Neither time were they willing to offer a credit for the undue charges they'd applied, I called my credit card company and got them to reverse both charges. Fortunately my card was also up for expiration, and I got a new card with a new number at that time. Sure enough, a month later, I got a nastygram from FFXI saying that I was overdue, and that they were going to suspend my account if I didn't give them new credit card info.
I don't know if they have a plan to keep charging people until they put up a big fuss, but apparently the fuss I put up wasn't big enough to get them to stop trying to charge my card.
Warcraft on the other hand has several times given across the board extensions on subscriptions to players who have been affected by difficulties on their end. It's been a day here, and a day there, once as long as a week (which truthfully was more time than the latency issues were actually present).
How easily everyone forgets.
Most (not all) of the complaints that have been leveraged against Warcraft would never have been uttered about any of Warcraft's current competetors or past products in the same genre. The reason, though, isn't because these other games did such a good job of it, it's specifically because these other games failed to provide anything by means of these topics of complaint whatsoever.
There is more back story present in Warcraft than in any other game I've ever played, period. Warcraft III itself serves to cover much back story that is alluded to within WOW, but not necessarily found as the primary objective of some quest. For example, have you noticed the throneroom in the ruins of Lordaeron (the city ruins over the Undercity) is the same throneroom as that where Arthas struck down his father? Around you are the pulpits of the senators which you saw in the cut scenes of Warcraft III. On the floor in front of the throne is an old dark stain, in the same spot that Arthas' father fell to.
Why do the orcs and trolls hate the humans? Why do the Tauren side with the horde, when their belief system is much more in tune with the night elves? Why are the undead no longer under the control of the Lich King? These answers and more are waiting to be unlocked in the game.
Perhaps you never noticed the dozens and dozens of books sitting around the world which you can click on and read; books which give you the history of the game world if you aren't already familiar with it from having played the earlier Warcraft games.
And how often have I heard people complain about, "Blizzard is working on feature_x, when we all know that feature_y is more important." To you, back story is important, to someone else, raid content is important, to yet another player, solo content is important, and to still another, it's important what you look like. I've heard dozens of people complain bitterly about the new dressing room feature, yet I also hear people excitedly talking about how they look in uber_gear_01. My wife won't wear upgrades if they don't look good, while I won't wear something that looks good unless it's an upgrade or I'm dorking around in town.
Very few people ever whined about a lack of back story in Everquest (what very little back story was present was weak and contrived). I've never heard someone complain about that in CoH (there's some, but it's mostly environmental -- necessary to enable suspension of disbelief, and no, quest plots don't count except for the series quests like Dr. Vahzilok).
I've never had a problem with Customer Support in the half dozen or so times I've contacted them. Some people feel like saying no when asked to restore an item that "my little brother sold" is bad CS. I personally feel like it's good CS. Players are also *much* more demanding of game CS than they are of CS in non-game related areas. Ever swear at a phone support rep from basically any company? They'll politely inform you they're going to hang up, you can call again when you can be civil. CS staff for games get sworn at incessantly, language to make my grandmother cry. They also also regularly attempted to be defrauded, "I had uber item 01, now it's gone" "Says here, you traded it to a guild mate 20 seconds before you opened your petition" "not uh!"
There are very few aspects of this game that are truly worse than other games of the same genre, really only server stability issues, and that wierd plague thing comming out of Zul'Gurub this past week (though most level 60's felt like it was the best world event from any game ever -- I know a few level 1-30's that'd disagree though).
People also like to complain about lack of content. With a new high end dungeon coming out, for free, every other month, and features like Battlegrounds, I think this complaint is pretty absurd. Also, invariably, someone will complain, "Why are they releasing new content when there are existing problems?"
The fact is that launch has been relatively smo
To me, yes, it's worth that much, because it satisfies a gaming desire that would cost me a lot more than $400 over 2 years. I noticed this when I was into EQ, where I stopped buying other games since I already had a game that satisfied my gaming needs.
With games now costing $50 at a minimum, and $65 in many cases, it only takes 6-8 games to meet the $400 price of playing Warcraft for 2 years. That's only one new game every 3 months. While playing Warcraft, I feel no need to puchase other games, and in the long run, I would have spent more than $15/month on games anyhow.
First, whether you like it or not, they did commit a crime under American law. Second, they didn't just do it once, but they did it repeatedly after numerous warnings, and when the school district did what us technical folks like to consider reasonable measures of not deriving the password from information found on the back (the password wasn't directly on the back, it was derived from the information on the back), the kids used cracking tools to specifically violate a relatively reasonable measure. Any way you fluff it, it's still against the law in these United States, and last time I looked, people went to jail for that stuff.
I have no idea if this was their plan all along, I proposed the idea that it might be; if I conveyed that differently I apologise. But whether or not this was their intention, it certainly is the effect; these kids, who obviously felt there would be no real consequences to their actions now have a very different idea about how the world works.
Just because they're kids doesn't mean that they're incapable of rational thinking. So many apologists on Slashdot (I have no idea if you're one of them, so apologies if you are not) are quick to step forward and say that kids are capable of making distinctions between right and wrong when it comes to discussing video game regulations, but when it comes to them having commited a cyber crime, they're just kids, give 'em a break? If I used hacking tools to circumvent the administrative passwords on my work computers, you can bet that I would not only be fired, but that they would also bring the full weight of the law against me.
At some point in a person's life they have to make the fundamental conclusion that actions have real and lasting consequences, whether or not there is a victim of any committed crimes. "Victimless crimes" still carry jail time, and well they should.
A fundamental distinction between my driving analogy and this hacking crime is that of who the victims are, and the severity of the repercussions of those actions. But the core truth that I was attempting to convey is that many folks hereabouts have declared that the barriers to tresspassing were insufficient, so the kids didn't know they were doing anything wrong. This could have been the case the first time they broke the administrator passwords. But it was certainly not the case for subsequent times.
The limits were clearly established. These kids exceeded them. The form of this happens to be covered by US law, and hence any legal action against them was appropriate. I also think that it was appropriate that they didn't pursue this to the fullest extent they could, whether or not that was their plan from the start.
Although I know your response was a joke, I think that what happened here was basically executed perfectly.
The kids repeatedly violated guidelines that were put in place by people with the authority to put those guidelines there. Regardless of whether the measures used to enforce those guidelines were sufficient to deter activity simply by the strength of the restraints or not is unimportant. I can drive my car over the dotted yellow line in the road too if I want, and I can make my car go above the speed limit; that doesn't make it the state's fault when I careen through oncoming traffic at 120 mph.
Obviously the early traditional reprimands failed to make an impact on the students. What they needed was a good scare, and I think this is what they got. Settling on 15 hours of community service each kid doesn't sound like the prosecuting attorney(ies) ever really intended to send these kids to jail, it sounds to me like they wanted to make the kids fully aware that when you choose to violate guidelines, there are consequences (at least when you're caught, especially when you're flagrant in the actions). And I doubt, when faced with the prospect of jail time, that any of these kids failed to get that message.
Further, the message was probably received by more than just the kids involved, it was probably received by many other kids in the same district, and in surrounding districts.
As I understand it, in part, McDonalds was found at fault because their resident coffee experts (product managers for coffee, or whatever they're called there) were unable to tell the jury what temperature they keep their coffee at.
This means that they were failing to control the temperature of the coffee, and were unable to affirm that they made any efforts to keep the coffee in a temperature range that is reasonably safe. It was indifference leading to injury.
Coffee from most places would have resulted in significantly less injury, coupled with a lack of control of the temperature made her injury unnecessary and preventable.
People are going to break the law, so why bother making or enforcing them? Anarchy for all!
You deserve positive moderation.
You're the first person on Slashdot that I've read who actually seems to really understand what sort of things make best practices in AJAX.
WoW has 3.5 million (read the summary of this article), and Lineage II has 2.1 million according to your data.
I wouldn't expect the journalists to ignore the information, but the reporting can be done just as effectively, if not as sensationally, by pointing out what information they were able to research, without disclosing the actual information itself.
It's not the topic of the report that Google has a problem with, it's that in an effort toward getting a reaction, they damaged a man. If the reporter wanted to make his point, why didn't he put up his own personal details that he researched on Google? Or the details of his editor or neighbor? Perhaps because he doesn't want to have the barrier to accessing that information removed. I think it's obvious that there is a line between responsible reporting and what CNet did here, and I think they realized they were crossing that line in order to get a response, specifically because they did not use themselves as the target.
Finally, for the record, most companies will cease talking with news agencies that offend them. Just like I'd never interview with 20/20 (unless I was sure I was being painted as the victim) because I don't want to give them additional fuel with which to attack me. Come to think of it, I find it unlikely that I'd interview even as the victim, because I find that sort of reporting to be in bad taste.
I don't think Google is responding in an unfair way. After all, Google could remove them from Google News, remove them from the search index, remove them from Froogle, and perhaps even put an empty field where C|Net's offices are supposed to go on Google Maps. They're just saying, "You did something we don't like. No soup, one year!"
I think it depends on the subject. If you look at the problems presented in most math books and statistics books, creation of those problems to just the right level of difficulty, where it builds entirely on things the student's done before, and only really exercises the new aspects, and the problems are also nicely formatted with all those mathematical symbols not commonly found on a keyboard, I can imagine that creation of these could certainly take an hour or more per problem.
Even if it's only 20 minutes per problem, giving students 30 problems is still 10 hours of work. If you are teaching 4 courses... well, you see the problem.
But even in subjects where the problems are easy to create, yes, I'd say that many professors really are too lazy to spend the time creating meaningful problems on their own, for a variety of reasons. Some are only teaching because that's the only way they can get their research grants, and are happy to expend a minimum of effort. Some have always been shielded from normal (non-academic) life, and don't have a good sense of how to be a good teacher (let's face it, the higher in academia you get, the less likely professors are to be good educators instead of just people who know a lot more than average about their subject).
Franky, as a student, I was usually grateful for professors who used problems out of the book, because they were less likely to have problems within the question (accidentally unsolvable problems and the like). Those problems also tended to give you a certain feel for if you had done it right. For example, if the area of the curve was exactly 4.12, instead of 3.273840183234. That's very useful when you're learning the technique and can't be self-sure of having done it right; instead spending the evening learning the *wrong* way to solve your homework.
Someone needs to correct the misrepresentations in your post; as of this morning, we have always been at war with East Asia.
Most likely these are either resellers, farmers, or guild mules.
More importantly, 10% is a large enough figure that us web developers can now make a strong case to our PHB's that the websites we develop really should be done in a way compatible with other browsers (ie standards compliant).
10% user base is actually more significant than you might think, not in a "10% is a bigger value than you think" sort of way, but in that less than 10% of 'net users are computer nerds now, meaning that it's not just techies who are using "other browsers."
Perhaps the implications of even that statement aren't immediately obvious, but to PHB's, a techy who's bucking the trend will also know enough to use IE when Firefox doesn't work. That's not going to be the case for non-technical folk, so if some appreciable portion of your users will simply give up on your site as a result of your architectural decisions, then now you're talking a real dent in income.
While Firefox still had 5% or 6% of the browser share, chances are that if a feature didn't work for someone, and they were really interested in being your customer, they'd use IE instead. Now that's no longer the case. At least via PHB logic.
"I was too lazy to lock my liquor cabinet and my kid got into it and drank himself to death. It is the alcohol companys' fault for killing my child and they along with all of their supporters should pay." ..... see how stupid that sounds?
And that's why there's laws limiting the ability of children to acquire alcohol on their own. It's the same exact logic that drives people to want age restrictions placed on video games.
Looking for a php/asp/coldfusion developer to join your ranks? :-)
:-). It's only through total focus that I can get it done in 10.
I work 10 hours per day - get paid for 8. In exchange for having 2 hours less time to spend with family, I am expected to do no screwing around. Period.
Ok, that's not exactly true, they don't really care if I screw around so long as I get my 12 hours worth of work done each day
I don't know about "most people," but within IS where I work, this is decidedly not true. Basically all of us type faster than we write. Each letter in typing is a simple down-up motion, and many of the motions can be done partially in parallel (for example, when typing "test", you're beginning to push e before you've fully pushed t, etc).
A good typer will always write words faster than a good handwriter unless that handwriter is one of the now rare folks who know a shorthand script based on syllables.
Depending on your handwriting, it's also hugely more readable. I've typed everything important even since I was a kid, and as a result my handwriting is really terrible. At our IS meetings, it's the exception that people are taking notes on paper, most are taking them on a laptop. Usually you have a pad of paper next to you, but that's only for if you need to draw a diagram.
I'm not a gun advocate, and I personally think that armor piercing bullets should be illegal. But I'll devil's advocate here, since I do understand the thinking.
Armor piercing bullets are legal because they would be required for a civilian revolution against the government. They are protected by the right to bear arms for the very reason that the right to bear arms exists.
- Text-based ads within the content of an article (insepparable in HTML from the surrounding content, only distinguishable by our ability to parse the information displayed in it).
- Site content which cannot be viewed until a Flash based ad sets an arbitrarily named cookie (only after the full ad has been viewed) and refreshes the page.
- Ad scripts which are downloaded with other scripts that are required for the site to function
There's too much money at stake in advertising, and too much desire for you to *see* advertising on the part of those buying the advertising for it to die. There'll always be a new form, and very likely, it'll actually only become more and more annoying. As long as you're accepting information from a party that wants to serve you ads, there'll be a way for them to BUY SOYLENT BRAND SOAP TODAY -- ONLY SOYLENT SOAP PROVIDES ESSENTIAL SOYLENT NUTRIENTS! insert the ads into that information.Actually, my site is successfully driven purely by user donations, no advertising at all, and I push about 2 million page views a day.
There was a pretty visible incident last year some time where MSN.com was rendering badly in Opera. When Opera tried to find out why, it turned out to be that MSN was serving up a different (broken) stylesheet to Opera as it was to IE. Telling Opera to identify itself as IE made MSN.com render correctly because it fetched the stylesheet typically served to IE.
See this description of the event
Some people say it was intentional on MSN's part to make Opera users believe that Opera was sub-standard. Certainly, of all sites, MSN.com is probably the most likely to convince users of this; most users use MSN.com as their home page since that's the default, and they'll want Opera to behave the same way. Users trying out alternate browsers for the first time would be immediately put off by their favorite sites rendering so poorly in the opposing browsers, and as far as the user's concerned, it's the browser's fault since it looks just fine in IE.
The importance of college education was well illustrated by one of my college professors.
He was a chemistry professor who grew up in Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, it's apparently popular for young university students to join the Communist party for whatever reason. So whenever there's political unrest, the first thing the government does is shut down the universities.
Well, during one particularly long shut-down, the chemistry professors began to grow worried about their Potassium supplies. Potassium reacts with the atmosphere, and it reacts to water. It doesn't react with kerosene, and given the ease of access to kerosene there, they stored large chunks of potassium in jars full of kerosene.
Unfortunately in the heat of Sri Lanka, that kerosene has a tendency to evaporate, and once any of the potassium metal is exposed to the atmosphere, it reacts quite vigorously.
Well, they knew that the potassium reserves would need tending (normally not a problem since it only requires looking after every few months), and they approached the police force for permission to tend their supplies. The police thought this was absurd, "Metal reacting with AIR?" and refused the professors. No way were these cops going to let a bunch of communists have access to their chemical supplies, who knows what sort of mischief they might cause with that stuff!
As a result, the potassium supplies eventually *were* exposed, and as expected caused a significant fire (potassium reacts violently and it was sitting in an accelerant). Of course the police force refused to believe the same metal & air story that they'd previously rejected, and arrested the professors for arson.
Had these police officers taken basic chemistry, at least some would have remembered that yes, potassium does indeed react with atmosphere, and perhaps we'd better at least go in with them.
Knowledge of subjects not directly applicable to your field of work often have minor or significant impact on your actual ability to interact with the world. Undergraduate education is about providing you with some essential skills to do the career you're choosing, but it's actually more importantly about providing you some of the essential skills to excel in peripheral areas to your career.
My CS degree was pretty boring, I'd already been programming for several years before I started it, and there was not much new to learn (some of the theory classes were interesting in that they explained WHY some things worked they way they did, even though I already knew how they worked). But nonetheless my college education was highly rewarding since I elected not to perceive the "unrelated" classes as an absurd requirement made up just to drag more money out of me, but rather as something that someone smarter than me decided was part of a rounded world view.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it?
I type as fast as I think, I type in whole words, not individual letters. It's the thought process that's the limiting factor, not my ability to press the keys.
If I was in a job where I did typesetting, and didn't have to think the words I was typing, just get them into the computer, then perhaps the Dvorak layout would have some use for me, but since that's not the case, I can't imagine that I'd really get any use out of Dvorak.
Some day, if I decide to give up my high paying programming job for a secretarial job, then I'll consider Dvorak.
Plus, Dvorak was developed in the 30's or 40's for keyboarding needs of that time, not the keyboarding needs of today, where there's a lot more symbol use. A keyboard layout that I'd truly be interested in would be one that includes curly brackets and parenthesis w/o the need for use of a shift key.