I've heard of instances where they fail to deliver the stuff that people sign up for (games, ringtones, etc.) and then spam the customer with useless unsolicited text messages (that cost money to receive). Plus, when people figure out that they've been ripped off and try to cancel, they can't because unsubscription requests are often ignored. (often these companies will claim that you are not signed up with them even though their name appears on your statement.
Why shouldn't the NDA do something for me?
on
Google's Evil NDA
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· Score: 1
The main problem with NDAs is that they are 100% one sided. The corporation gets everything from it, I get nothing. That is an inherently bad deal, yet corps are able to get away with it because no one says anything. If you know something about the company or have experience, you have leverage-- -don't sign it away for nothing.
IMO a far better approach would be to pay me off on a monthly to ensure my silence. If the money stops coming in I should be able to violate the agreement without penalty. Part of the reason why people are so pissed about NDAs is that they really take a loss by signing them. The education system doesn't help; rather than teach people how to deal, people are taught how to be good little employees. As a result, people don't know any better when it comes ot signing their rights away
If you want me to sign an NDA, fine; just include me in the negotiation of the terms so I walk away with something and you have a deal.
They CAN be replaced. It will start with one or two bands, then more, then one or two record companies, then more...
But how much consistent effort will it take to even make a dent in the status quo (much less get the critical mass needed to start a real self-sustaining revolution in the music biz?)
How are artists going to be recruited into the movement and be kept focused on the big picture long enough to pull this off? It's obvious that everything must be executed perfectly or else it will just fizzle after getting a fast start.
The day the linux core gets BUILT-IN windowing and graphics, and I do NOT mean just xwindows or xwindows plus yet another sometimes-there and restrictively licensed widget set, is the day we make a port that we will release to the community.
I think that merging the kernel and the windowing system is a b> terrible idea, and here's why:
1. It needlessly complicates the kernel, meaning that there are going to be more bugs/exploits.
2. Isolating the kernel from the windowing system is good because if X breaks, I can still use the kernel via a bash shell, which would probably give me the functionality that I need to repair/reinstall X. If the kernel and the windowing system were merged, I probably wouldn't have a fully functional kernel if something happened to the windowing system. The only option then would be a reformat.
The FCC should definitely be restructured and be given a refresher course of its mission... it was originally created to govern communication frequency allocation, and that's where it should stay. It should not be acting like an unofficial censorship bureau and/or advocate to the MPAA; it should be neutral on those issues.
In fact, I'm pretty sure it was disabled by default in XP
It is. You have to actively enable it.
In fact, very little about XP's default config makes sense- the recycle bin is down in the lower-right hand corner, making it easily missed at first since it is not where you normally expect it to be (somewhere in the upper left hand corner. also, the "My Computer" icon is nowhere to be seen, casing me to waste my time adding it.
What if someone does a good job on a paper, and then releases it under the GPL, Creative Commons, or Public Domain?
Perhaps I should put a disclaimer on my term papers that releases them directly into the public domain. Copy away, I don't care. (it seems hypocritical to me that children are encouraged to share in elementary school and then the same system tries to hammer copyright propaganda into them later)
It seems that the pendulum is reversing direction; now it is swinging back against the media companies. (the RIAA is having to work harder in court, and now this)
Hopefully this will be a long-term trend and not just a series of flukes.
...adding something that has a strong odor to mask the smell of plastic discs?
I've heard of people using coffee beans to cover up the smell of pot in luggage, it should do the same thing here.
Some really nasty people would probably spray their luggage with mace or cayenne pepper to burn out the dog's sense of smell.
I have an older model digital camera (Fujifilm finepix a210) and it works fine in [k]ubuntu, as it gets treated like any other flash drive or removable storage device when I plug it in with a usb cable.
I have been officially diagnosed with Aspergers and I can attest to much of what the parent has stated.
If I had been born with a typical neural system I would not be the person that I am today. True, I spent time (and still do) obsessively pursuing new interests while other people were busy making friends, but those things that I learn are all useful and many of them allow me to earn a decent income. In fact, I suspect having Aspergers allows me to become proficient at new things more quickly than most people because once I get interested in something I work at it every chance I get.
In a way, having Aspergers is an asset despite the price that I pay for it (the price can be rather steep in the areas of personal relationships and physical aptitude since I also have Dyspraxia) -- most people spend their lives becoming specialized on only a few things; due to the fact that I remember everything about my past interests I am constantly becoming more versatile and I have an ever-increasing skill set.
I'm not sure if it's true anymore since I hand-code but back in the day the main problem with WYSIWYG editors is is that they tended to generate really bad code that was difficult to go back and edit manually. Some of the worst ones generated code that was deprecated in addition to this.
Even Adobe Imageready (as of CS2) uses a obsolete and backwards apprach to creating rollovers from image slices. This can be done with CSS, but even the latest version of Imageready uses a badly depecated table & javascript method that IE6 with SP2 will disable by default. It is for this reason that I don't use Imageready for rollovers anymore.
I'm sure that admitting this is going to really hurt my karma, but in situations where I need a 3 column layout, I just use a table to create the columns because it always works.
I've never once had a client that actually cared about what I did with the code or if I used 100% kosher W3C-approved code. The only thing that all of my clients have wanted to hear is, "This works to solve the problem at hand and it will always work reliably."
I don't like to write kludgy code if I can help it because I consider it to be sloppy, but sometimes I just don't have a choice but to use workarounds.
For example: at one point, much of the economy of Hawaii was dependent on cane sugar. This sugar was being sold on the mainland, primarily, because let's face it, there aren't a lot of people in Hawaii, relatively speaking. It wasn't long before some enterprising farmers realised that sugar cane grows remarkably well in California, and that by producing it in California, they saved big bucks on transportation and labour costs. The result? Cheaper sugar, and they undercut the Hawaiians.
Now, this sucks big time for Hawaii: nowadays, cane sugar plantations are rare, and the industry that once held up the entire Hawaiian economy disappeared essentially overnight. Sucks to be them.
Somewhat offtopic, but the introduction of extremely cheap high fructose corn syrup did much more damage to the sugar market. Cane sugar just couldn't compete in terms of price, which is why you don't have real sugar in soda anymore.
You can't wi-fi RIAA songs to each other, but if someone ever hacks the Zune, they'll sit there and infect each other, especially if everyone is close together at the stadium or something.
Sounds like a great way to start bricking zunes in a chain reaction-type scenario.
All a malware author has to do is find a way to modify a zune player's firmware via some hypothetical exploit and then make it so it perpetually squirts firmware-modifying malware that stealth-installs, infects other players, bricks them, and then perpetually squirts to other players, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Those ringtone companies are flat-out scams.
I've heard of instances where they fail to deliver the stuff that people sign up for (games, ringtones, etc.) and then spam the customer with useless unsolicited text messages (that cost money to receive). Plus, when people figure out that they've been ripped off and try to cancel, they can't because unsubscription requests are often ignored. (often these companies will claim that you are not signed up with them even though their name appears on your statement.
The main problem with NDAs is that they are 100% one sided. The corporation gets everything from it, I get nothing. That is an inherently bad deal, yet corps are able to get away with it because no one says anything. If you know something about the company or have experience, you have leverage-- -don't sign it away for nothing.
IMO a far better approach would be to pay me off on a monthly to ensure my silence. If the money stops coming in I should be able to violate the agreement without penalty. Part of the reason why people are so pissed about NDAs is that they really take a loss by signing them. The education system doesn't help; rather than teach people how to deal, people are taught how to be good little employees. As a result, people don't know any better when it comes ot signing their rights away
If you want me to sign an NDA, fine; just include me in the negotiation of the terms so I walk away with something and you have a deal.
But how much consistent effort will it take to even make a dent in the status quo (much less get the critical mass needed to start a real self-sustaining revolution in the music biz?)
How are artists going to be recruited into the movement and be kept focused on the big picture long enough to pull this off? It's obvious that everything must be executed perfectly or else it will just fizzle after getting a fast start.
1. It needlessly complicates the kernel, meaning that there are going to be more bugs/exploits.
2. Isolating the kernel from the windowing system is good because if X breaks, I can still use the kernel via a bash shell, which would probably give me the functionality that I need to repair/reinstall X. If the kernel and the windowing system were merged, I probably wouldn't have a fully functional kernel if something happened to the windowing system. The only option then would be a reformat.
The FCC should definitely be restructured and be given a refresher course of its mission... it was originally created to govern communication frequency allocation, and that's where it should stay. It should not be acting like an unofficial censorship bureau and/or advocate to the MPAA; it should be neutral on those issues.
In post-Soviet Russia, government STILL controls you!
Why close the loopholes when you could probably use some of them yourself for your own needs?
Speaking of MSFT stock, it has been in a downtrend since late January, when Vista came out. You can see that just by looking at the stock chart.
Connection? I think so.
In fact, very little about XP's default config makes sense- the recycle bin is down in the lower-right hand corner, making it easily missed at first since it is not where you normally expect it to be (somewhere in the upper left hand corner. also, the "My Computer" icon is nowhere to be seen, casing me to waste my time adding it.
What if someone does a good job on a paper, and then releases it under the GPL, Creative Commons, or Public Domain?
Perhaps I should put a disclaimer on my term papers that releases them directly into the public domain. Copy away, I don't care. (it seems hypocritical to me that children are encouraged to share in elementary school and then the same system tries to hammer copyright propaganda into them later)
It seems that the pendulum is reversing direction; now it is swinging back against the media companies. (the RIAA is having to work harder in court, and now this) Hopefully this will be a long-term trend and not just a series of flukes.
...adding something that has a strong odor to mask the smell of plastic discs? I've heard of people using coffee beans to cover up the smell of pot in luggage, it should do the same thing here. Some really nasty people would probably spray their luggage with mace or cayenne pepper to burn out the dog's sense of smell.
I have an older model digital camera (Fujifilm finepix a210) and it works fine in [k]ubuntu, as it gets treated like any other flash drive or removable storage device when I plug it in with a usb cable.
I've often wondered if there is any possible explanation for the shuttle being so damage-prone that a chunk of foam would damage it.
you could just install the kubuntu desktop.
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
That will at least get you a working KDE base, and will probably install kmail, too.
All your seeds are belong to us
...If I had the mod points I would do it myself.
I have been officially diagnosed with Aspergers and I can attest to much of what the parent has stated.
If I had been born with a typical neural system I would not be the person that I am today. True, I spent time (and still do) obsessively pursuing new interests while other people were busy making friends, but those things that I learn are all useful and many of them allow me to earn a decent income. In fact, I suspect having Aspergers allows me to become proficient at new things more quickly than most people because once I get interested in something I work at it every chance I get.
In a way, having Aspergers is an asset despite the price that I pay for it (the price can be rather steep in the areas of personal relationships and physical aptitude since I also have Dyspraxia) -- most people spend their lives becoming specialized on only a few things; due to the fact that I remember everything about my past interests I am constantly becoming more versatile and I have an ever-increasing skill set.
As long as this deal doesn't turn [k]Ubuntu into a Linspire clone, I'll be happy.
It serves a purpose... it is good for those times when something goes wrong with the X server.
I'm not sure if it's true anymore since I hand-code but back in the day the main problem with WYSIWYG editors is is that they tended to generate really bad code that was difficult to go back and edit manually. Some of the worst ones generated code that was deprecated in addition to this.
Even Adobe Imageready (as of CS2) uses a obsolete and backwards apprach to creating rollovers from image slices. This can be done with CSS, but even the latest version of Imageready uses a badly depecated table & javascript method that IE6 with SP2 will disable by default. It is for this reason that I don't use Imageready for rollovers anymore.
I'm sure that admitting this is going to really hurt my karma, but in situations where I need a 3 column layout, I just use a table to create the columns because it always works.
I've never once had a client that actually cared about what I did with the code or if I used 100% kosher W3C-approved code. The only thing that all of my clients have wanted to hear is, "This works to solve the problem at hand and it will always work reliably."
I don't like to write kludgy code if I can help it because I consider it to be sloppy, but sometimes I just don't have a choice but to use workarounds.
Are the pictures mirrored anywhere?
It would seem that after less than an hour of slashdot traffic, their server has melted into slag.
For example: at one point, much of the economy of Hawaii was dependent on cane sugar. This sugar was being sold on the mainland, primarily, because let's face it, there aren't a lot of people in Hawaii, relatively speaking. It wasn't long before some enterprising farmers realised that sugar cane grows remarkably well in California, and that by producing it in California, they saved big bucks on transportation and labour costs. The result? Cheaper sugar, and they undercut the Hawaiians. Now, this sucks big time for Hawaii: nowadays, cane sugar plantations are rare, and the industry that once held up the entire Hawaiian economy disappeared essentially overnight. Sucks to be them.
Somewhat offtopic, but the introduction of extremely cheap high fructose corn syrup did much more damage to the sugar market. Cane sugar just couldn't compete in terms of price, which is why you don't have real sugar in soda anymore.
This brings back the old M&M's marketing phrase, with a twist:
"Pentium melts in your PC, not in your hand"
You can't wi-fi RIAA songs to each other, but if someone ever hacks the Zune, they'll sit there and infect each other, especially if everyone is close together at the stadium or something.
Sounds like a great way to start bricking zunes in a chain reaction-type scenario.
All a malware author has to do is find a way to modify a zune player's firmware via some hypothetical exploit and then make it so it perpetually squirts firmware-modifying malware that stealth-installs, infects other players, bricks them, and then perpetually squirts to other players, etc.