Well the PC Gestapo has modded you down, but it's good to see they've been counterbalanced too. Sure, there's a fine line of sexism looming (and I, for one, don't approve of genuine sexism at all) but there are also differences and it's not sensible to forbid discussion of them.
My own anecdotal experience: I've worked for a number of female bosses, probably more than male. Some were good, some were bad. In general, I honestly prefer them, but I'd definitely have to admit the bad ones were really bad, worse than the bad male bosses. I think the other posters that mentioned a selection skew in corporate management are on the right track. There are some career tracks where the very worst women seem to be the ones selected to rise, without fail. The ones that are every bit as nasty as the worst male bosses, but more devious.
On the other hand, in academic work you can get some very decent female bosses, that are often more efficient (in a good way) than their male counterparts. Less ego-driven, better at organising situations where each individual gets deployed to his or her own strong points, and everyone feels better and works better when that happens.
Of course that's still generalising, and I've seen exceptions. But I do think there's a tendency there that would probably hold up to scrutiny.
Your description of your ex-boss there sure sounds familiar. I think I may have worked for her. This would have been just a little before Fiorini came aboard, we both worked for the company that got the contract to do the technical writing when HP got rid of their in-house staff for that, so as long as I knew her she wasn't actually staff at HP, but we all had security passes and typically spent about a quarter of our time on campus. Our offices were literally right across the street. I knew she was working hard to make connections at HP and try to worm her way into management there. I didn't realise until very late in the game what a snake she was though.
Mid to late 30ish, curly (permed?) blonde (bleached?) hair. Sound like her?
Not at all.
The US Constitution grants to Congress exclusively the power to declare war. It does not give them any option to delegate that authority, or shirk that responsibility. The *resolution* you refer to, to the extent it purports to delegate inalienable authority, is simply null and void under the Constitution.
However, if you read the linked article you'll see that there are actually several good accounting programs available, including some "just as good as -- or possibly better than -- QuickBooks."
It's not about lack of software, it's about "network affects" and the irrationally high premium many people but on avoiding change.
That depends whether it's only valid in Sweden, or if us Americans can get it too. For us, $19/year is a bargain!
Sadly, the answer is no.
Tankafritt.nu verkar bara i sverige och tar inte emot medlemmar från andra länder.
Which says it only applies in Sweden and will not accept members from other countries. Which only makes sense. The cost of litigation is far higher here.
I really love the domain name, in english it would be 'thinkfree.now' - quite appropriate.
The article also mentions forcing ISPs to block P2P traffic. Routers have no way of knowing if it's authorised or not. Sounds to me like an enourmous amount of perfectly legal filesharing will be shutdown here. Then on top of that, there's the media tax. "The money collected will be paid back to the owner of the copyright" my ass. If I burn a CD of my own copyrighted works, will I get the tax refunded? If you burn a GNU/Linux cd, do you think the copyright holders are going to get paid by the Spanish government? I really don't think so.
I can't imagine a ruling that would allow people to start challenging patents on "obviousness".
I have a feeling the above post was written specifically to show how ignorant many of the moderators are. Plus 5 "insightful" - hah. Obviousness is and has always been a valid challenge to patents in this country, and to the best of my knowledge all countries. It's a specific requirement that in order to be patented, an invention must be non-obvious, and many court battles have been fought over whether or not a particular patent was obvious and thus invalid. So that's just... a rather bizaare comment, however you look at it.
The issue in this case is, however, narrow. The federal appeals court that gets ALL patent appeals (and this is a problem in its own right) has set forth a rather narrow and difficult criteria for what constitutes obviousness, resulting in many things that are 'obvious' in the normal meanings of the word being ruled 'non-obvious' legally, and the appelants are trying to get the supremes to over-rule that and impose more sane criteria.
I wish them luck, but even a good ruling here is unlikely to significantly reduce the burden the patent office is imposing on the general good.
I think you are misreading the patent-market. . . Big IT is the victim of crappy patents. Who to you think the patent trolls go after? It's not the one man IT shop with $450 in its bank account. It's Microsoft with $40 billion in cash.
Actually, both get smacked on occasion. But clearly, the deep pockets are the obvious target for the patent trolls. The smaller guys mostly get hit when they're competing with someone else... like the guy that makes free software to control model trains. His proprietary competitor apparently lurked on his mailing list awhile, then ran off to patent a bunch of stuff discussed there, then sent a cease-and-desist order. I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot more of that in the future too.
Translation is a misnomer. You can never truly translate a work of any depth into another language, you can only render it. There's no substitute for reading the original...
But the university, it's alumni, employees, students, and their families, all still have to pay taxes to support all the other universities that choose to discard their principles and take the money, so they have to pay twice, once for the education they actually get, and again to subsidise the competition. It's just another way of letting the state control education while pretending we're still free.
It has a 2.4 kernel because it still supports older hardware. 2.6 does not. It doesn't even support some not-so-old hardware that 2.4 did, as I've elarned from personal experience.
I'm unsure what 'that' refers to, what you think is debateable.
English draws much of its vocabulary from French (thanks to the Norman Invasion of England in 1066), while it gets a lot of its grammar and structure from its Germanic roots. English is probably more accurately considered a Romance-influenced Germanic tongue.
Which does not contradict what I wrote at all.
Norman-french is one of the (many) ways that Latin roots have crept into English. More have come in via Classical Latin, Medieval Latin, and French and Spanish at various stages as well. English is indeed a branch of the Germanic language family, which has heavy influences from the Romance (Latinate) family.
No, of course the language per se is not particularly special, at least not in ways that are unique to it in broad outlines. The point however is what that language connects you with. The literature, a HUGE chunk of the literature of western civilisation. The classic and medieval european literature is overwhelmingly in Latin, because that was quite simply the language literate people all over western europe wrote in. And, of course, it also helps to understand the underpinnings of ALL the Romance languages. On top of that, it's crucial to understanding much of the more formal parts of the English language, even though English is not, actually, a Romance language, because so much of our terminology, in science, in law, and so forth, comes from Latin.
Best I can see they *don't* specify a font for the monospaced stuff. Which is a GOOD thing. Damn tiresome with all these silly webpages insisting on using unreadable font/size combinations because some pretentious idiot thinks he's an artiste.
So if you're having problems reading that, the problem is in your browser, not the page. There should be a setting for default fonts. Yours is set too small. Change it.
Actually, the statement you're thinking of is "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Same idea, just a bit more wordy.
It's also not definitively attributable to Franklin. He *published* the book where it appeared, he was not the sole author, and he may or may not have penned that phrase.
A similarly insightful phrase that is attributable to him with certainty is "Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power."
Nah, the first guy is right. The people on the phone lines have a software script that's very strict they have to run through to do anything for you. The 'clueful' ones you've talked to cheated - they were rapidly clicking through the script with the right answers to get what you wanted done. When they get caught doing this, they'll be disciplined for it however, and sometimes fired. Depending on who exactly catches them... I'd ignore such things when I monitored calls, but the 'by the book' folks will throw said book at the phone rep for this, so he's taking a chance with his job every time he does that.
And that's what I think a lot of folks don't get here.
There are two victims, the customer that's put through this crap, and the poor kid on the other end who would have been fired if he hadn't put him through it.
And then actually DID get fired anyway, even though he was doing EXACTLY what he was required to do by his employer, because the case got publicised. But it's no abberation. This is EXACTLY what these kids are trained to do, and required to do to if they want to keep their jobs. The executives who bear responsibility for both of these hells are still drawing enormous checks, of course.
The trend of putting the "recovery" files in a hidden partition makes it a bit of a nuisance. My last laptop included no media at all, and didn't come with anything allowing you to do a clean install of XP.
It's all rather frustrating. You'd think the manufacturers focus would be on clean, fast, easy to use systems, rather than on near-useless extras that make their hardware seem slow.
You're obviously under the misapprehension that the manufacturer considers you the customer. They don't. You're the commodity. Their customers are the other big corporations that pay them to install their crap on the machine.
What exactly do you do on the internet? I don't even have an antivirus or a firewall installed on my XP box, and I have never had issues with a single virus or worm. The closest I came was maybe a piece of spyware or two bundled with something. How do you manage to pick up three viruses in 1.5 hours?
It's not new at all. They were doing that back... '97 I think, is when I was first exposed to it. They made it just about impossible for someone to cancel. The information on how to do it is kept as far from sight as possible, when you finally find it your told you *must* do it over the telephone, when you call the phone line you get to sit on hold for literally *hours* in some cases, when you finally get someone, it's a kid who has been trained for one thing and one thing only - to outstubborn you. They are *required* to spend about half an hour reading speech after speech to you, ask you questions and get your responses and read more speeches based on them, all designed to get you to throw your hands up in frustration and give up. Cancelling your account without going through every question and every speech and exhausting the flow chart will get the kid fired. If (as many people do) you tell him to cancel your account and hang up to avoid the next ten minute scripted reply, he's trained to pretend he didn't hear that. Even if he does everything as trained, if he cancels more than a tiny percentage of the callers he gets, he'll be fired. It's absolutely absurd, and I don't see how these bastards continue to get away with it.
My advice - don't use AOL. If for any reason you *must* use AOL, use a one-time credit card solely for that purpose. When you're ready to cancel, send them a registered letter telling them you are hereby cancelling your account, and cancel the card. It may sound like a lot of trouble, but it's NOTHING compared to trying to the living hell of trying to get it cancelled by calling their cancellation department.
Besides the unfortunately common abuse of the word 'free' ('free of charge' makes sense, but if you must shorten the phrase to a single word, I'd use 'gratis' not 'free' as 'free' without qualifiers means a lot more than just 'gratis' or 'free of charge'... anyhow) I think you've got it. Nothing is truly gratis. It's just paid for in a different way. With google, as with most things that claim to be 'free' these days it's paid for with advertising.
Frankly, I can't understand how advertising pays anything. Most advertising inspires me to boycott the sponsor, not buy from them. Unfortunately when every competitor is sponsoring idiotic advertisements and you really need the product, you can't boycott them all. But the net effect on *my* purchasing decisions, at least, is clearly negative. What kind of people buy stuff because of ads? The mind truly boggles.
The truth is, $1/song is, for many people, about what it's worth to them to avoid having to figure out a filesharing system and find what they want there. For some folks this is less trouble than others, and for some folks avoiding aggravation is worth less than others, but $1 is, I'd guess, just slightly above the mean. I have a feeling the main thing holding back sales at iTunes right now is the DRM, they might boost revenue around 10% or so (WAG) if they could drop that... dropping prices might raise sales too, but it's probably a toss up if it would raise it enough to offset the decreased revenue per sale and raise total revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the PC Gestapo has modded you down, but it's good to see they've been counterbalanced too. Sure, there's a fine line of sexism looming (and I, for one, don't approve of genuine sexism at all) but there are also differences and it's not sensible to forbid discussion of them.
My own anecdotal experience: I've worked for a number of female bosses, probably more than male. Some were good, some were bad. In general, I honestly prefer them, but I'd definitely have to admit the bad ones were really bad, worse than the bad male bosses. I think the other posters that mentioned a selection skew in corporate management are on the right track. There are some career tracks where the very worst women seem to be the ones selected to rise, without fail. The ones that are every bit as nasty as the worst male bosses, but more devious.
On the other hand, in academic work you can get some very decent female bosses, that are often more efficient (in a good way) than their male counterparts. Less ego-driven, better at organising situations where each individual gets deployed to his or her own strong points, and everyone feels better and works better when that happens.
Of course that's still generalising, and I've seen exceptions. But I do think there's a tendency there that would probably hold up to scrutiny.
Your description of your ex-boss there sure sounds familiar. I think I may have worked for her. This would have been just a little before Fiorini came aboard, we both worked for the company that got the contract to do the technical writing when HP got rid of their in-house staff for that, so as long as I knew her she wasn't actually staff at HP, but we all had security passes and typically spent about a quarter of our time on campus. Our offices were literally right across the street. I knew she was working hard to make connections at HP and try to worm her way into management there. I didn't realise until very late in the game what a snake she was though. Mid to late 30ish, curly (permed?) blonde (bleached?) hair. Sound like her?
Not at all. The US Constitution grants to Congress exclusively the power to declare war. It does not give them any option to delegate that authority, or shirk that responsibility. The *resolution* you refer to, to the extent it purports to delegate inalienable authority, is simply null and void under the Constitution.
However, if you read the linked article you'll see that there are actually several good accounting programs available, including some "just as good as -- or possibly better than -- QuickBooks."
It's not about lack of software, it's about "network affects" and the irrationally high premium many people but on avoiding change.
Yes, I understand tanka, and I assumed they meant tänka instead. As you mention, that happens frequently with URLs.
Actually, the word you're looking for is 'theft.'
The technology he's talking about is much more sophisticated than that. It doesn't care about the port. It looks on into the packet.
Sadly, the answer is no.
Tankafritt.nu verkar bara i sverige och tar inte emot medlemmar från andra länder.
Which says it only applies in Sweden and will not accept members from other countries. Which only makes sense. The cost of litigation is far higher here.
I really love the domain name, in english it would be 'thinkfree.now' - quite appropriate.
The article also mentions forcing ISPs to block P2P traffic. Routers have no way of knowing if it's authorised or not. Sounds to me like an enourmous amount of perfectly legal filesharing will be shutdown here. Then on top of that, there's the media tax. "The money collected will be paid back to the owner of the copyright" my ass. If I burn a CD of my own copyrighted works, will I get the tax refunded? If you burn a GNU/Linux cd, do you think the copyright holders are going to get paid by the Spanish government? I really don't think so.
I have a feeling the above post was written specifically to show how ignorant many of the moderators are. Plus 5 "insightful" - hah. Obviousness is and has always been a valid challenge to patents in this country, and to the best of my knowledge all countries. It's a specific requirement that in order to be patented, an invention must be non-obvious, and many court battles have been fought over whether or not a particular patent was obvious and thus invalid. So that's just... a rather bizaare comment, however you look at it.
The issue in this case is, however, narrow. The federal appeals court that gets ALL patent appeals (and this is a problem in its own right) has set forth a rather narrow and difficult criteria for what constitutes obviousness, resulting in many things that are 'obvious' in the normal meanings of the word being ruled 'non-obvious' legally, and the appelants are trying to get the supremes to over-rule that and impose more sane criteria.
I wish them luck, but even a good ruling here is unlikely to significantly reduce the burden the patent office is imposing on the general good.
Actually, both get smacked on occasion. But clearly, the deep pockets are the obvious target for the patent trolls. The smaller guys mostly get hit when they're competing with someone else... like the guy that makes free software to control model trains. His proprietary competitor apparently lurked on his mailing list awhile, then ran off to patent a bunch of stuff discussed there, then sent a cease-and-desist order. I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot more of that in the future too.
Translation is a misnomer. You can never truly translate a work of any depth into another language, you can only render it. There's no substitute for reading the original...
But the university, it's alumni, employees, students, and their families, all still have to pay taxes to support all the other universities that choose to discard their principles and take the money, so they have to pay twice, once for the education they actually get, and again to subsidise the competition. It's just another way of letting the state control education while pretending we're still free.
What hardware, specifically?
I'm unsure what 'that' refers to, what you think is debateable.
English draws much of its vocabulary from French (thanks to the Norman Invasion of England in 1066), while it gets a lot of its grammar and structure from its Germanic roots. English is probably more accurately considered a Romance-influenced Germanic tongue.
Which does not contradict what I wrote at all.
Norman-french is one of the (many) ways that Latin roots have crept into English. More have come in via Classical Latin, Medieval Latin, and French and Spanish at various stages as well. English is indeed a branch of the Germanic language family, which has heavy influences from the Romance (Latinate) family.
No, of course the language per se is not particularly special, at least not in ways that are unique to it in broad outlines. The point however is what that language connects you with. The literature, a HUGE chunk of the literature of western civilisation. The classic and medieval european literature is overwhelmingly in Latin, because that was quite simply the language literate people all over western europe wrote in. And, of course, it also helps to understand the underpinnings of ALL the Romance languages. On top of that, it's crucial to understanding much of the more formal parts of the English language, even though English is not, actually, a Romance language, because so much of our terminology, in science, in law, and so forth, comes from Latin.
Best I can see they *don't* specify a font for the monospaced stuff. Which is a GOOD thing. Damn tiresome with all these silly webpages insisting on using unreadable font/size combinations because some pretentious idiot thinks he's an artiste.
So if you're having problems reading that, the problem is in your browser, not the page. There should be a setting for default fonts. Yours is set too small. Change it.
Actually, the statement you're thinking of is "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Same idea, just a bit more wordy.
It's also not definitively attributable to Franklin. He *published* the book where it appeared, he was not the sole author, and he may or may not have penned that phrase.
A similarly insightful phrase that is attributable to him with certainty is "Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power."
Nah, the first guy is right. The people on the phone lines have a software script that's very strict they have to run through to do anything for you. The 'clueful' ones you've talked to cheated - they were rapidly clicking through the script with the right answers to get what you wanted done. When they get caught doing this, they'll be disciplined for it however, and sometimes fired. Depending on who exactly catches them... I'd ignore such things when I monitored calls, but the 'by the book' folks will throw said book at the phone rep for this, so he's taking a chance with his job every time he does that.
And that's what I think a lot of folks don't get here.
There are two victims, the customer that's put through this crap, and the poor kid on the other end who would have been fired if he hadn't put him through it.
And then actually DID get fired anyway, even though he was doing EXACTLY what he was required to do by his employer, because the case got publicised. But it's no abberation. This is EXACTLY what these kids are trained to do, and required to do to if they want to keep their jobs. The executives who bear responsibility for both of these hells are still drawing enormous checks, of course.
You're obviously under the misapprehension that the manufacturer considers you the customer. They don't. You're the commodity. Their customers are the other big corporations that pay them to install their crap on the machine.
Let a normal use the computer.
It's not new at all. They were doing that back... '97 I think, is when I was first exposed to it. They made it just about impossible for someone to cancel. The information on how to do it is kept as far from sight as possible, when you finally find it your told you *must* do it over the telephone, when you call the phone line you get to sit on hold for literally *hours* in some cases, when you finally get someone, it's a kid who has been trained for one thing and one thing only - to outstubborn you. They are *required* to spend about half an hour reading speech after speech to you, ask you questions and get your responses and read more speeches based on them, all designed to get you to throw your hands up in frustration and give up. Cancelling your account without going through every question and every speech and exhausting the flow chart will get the kid fired. If (as many people do) you tell him to cancel your account and hang up to avoid the next ten minute scripted reply, he's trained to pretend he didn't hear that. Even if he does everything as trained, if he cancels more than a tiny percentage of the callers he gets, he'll be fired. It's absolutely absurd, and I don't see how these bastards continue to get away with it.
My advice - don't use AOL. If for any reason you *must* use AOL, use a one-time credit card solely for that purpose. When you're ready to cancel, send them a registered letter telling them you are hereby cancelling your account, and cancel the card. It may sound like a lot of trouble, but it's NOTHING compared to trying to the living hell of trying to get it cancelled by calling their cancellation department.
And I bet you thought you were joking.
Besides the unfortunately common abuse of the word 'free' ('free of charge' makes sense, but if you must shorten the phrase to a single word, I'd use 'gratis' not 'free' as 'free' without qualifiers means a lot more than just 'gratis' or 'free of charge'... anyhow) I think you've got it. Nothing is truly gratis. It's just paid for in a different way. With google, as with most things that claim to be 'free' these days it's paid for with advertising.
Frankly, I can't understand how advertising pays anything. Most advertising inspires me to boycott the sponsor, not buy from them. Unfortunately when every competitor is sponsoring idiotic advertisements and you really need the product, you can't boycott them all. But the net effect on *my* purchasing decisions, at least, is clearly negative. What kind of people buy stuff because of ads? The mind truly boggles.
The truth is, $1/song is, for many people, about what it's worth to them to avoid having to figure out a filesharing system and find what they want there. For some folks this is less trouble than others, and for some folks avoiding aggravation is worth less than others, but $1 is, I'd guess, just slightly above the mean. I have a feeling the main thing holding back sales at iTunes right now is the DRM, they might boost revenue around 10% or so (WAG) if they could drop that... dropping prices might raise sales too, but it's probably a toss up if it would raise it enough to offset the decreased revenue per sale and raise total revenue.