Nobody really know what violates copyright either, for example.
And as for your driving example... yeah, speeding is well defined. How about 'careless driving'? do you know exactly what that is, and when you've crossed it?
For Ontario Canada, for example it is: "Every person is guilty of the offence of driving carelessly who drives a vehicle or street car on a highway without due care and attention or without reasonable consideration for other persons using the highway..."
"due care and attention" and "reasonable consideration" for other people isn't exactly well defined, now is it? Does this mean you won't drive in Ontario? (Or anywhere else, as pretty much everywhere has an equivalent rule... and 10,000 more just as vague...)
And shoplifting... sure easy. What if you take to long to decide what to buy instead...how do you prove you weren't loitering?
Can you prove who you're talking to on the phone?
No. But how is that relevant? Can they prove they are talking to the right pharmacist or specialist or lab technician? Can they prove anyone else isn't listening in? No of course not, so why suddenly are you throwing this in my face? Its not a concern when they talk to anyone else.
And considering that giving medical information to a concerned relative would "violate the HIPAA" as you put it, there's nothing paranoid at all about that concern.
Giving it to a concerned relative who calls in would. However, if the patient PRE-authorizes them, in person in writing, to call you at a specific PRE-authorized number, and if the person who answers identifies themself as YOU, and can recite your birth date and account number, and throw a secret pin number or code word in there too... then what exactly are you worried about?
Because every patient has a phone that nobody else could possibly answer? Right.
Its up to the PATIENT to decide.
If I were even slightly worried someone might pick up their phone, and falsely represent themselves as me to my doctor, then I wouldn't sign the sheet. So if I'm a teenage girl who doesn't want her parents to know she's being tested for STDs then I don't sign it.
But I, however, am not in that situation. If I gave a doctor my home phone, and authorized it, I could accept it. My wife isn't going identify herself as me. And I'm prepared to accept the risk that she would. And I'm even less worried that I'm going to have some crackpot tap my phone lines to intercept the call.
Citation needed.
Would you like me to send you the copies of faxes I've received about patients on my fax line, because some doctor somewhere has mis-dialed? Presumably they are supposed to have policies in place to ensure they double check the fax number is correct, but at the end of the day, these mistakes still happen.
I'm curious what exactly you think happens when your GP refers you to a specialist, gets the results back and has a question? Do you think your GP drives accross town to meet the specialist? The two individuals exchange passports and drivers license, which they inspect high tech forgery/counterfeit detection technology, and then finally exchange notes, while furtively looking over their shoulder to see if anyone is trying to listen in?
Again, these decisions aren't made by some doctor who's out to get you. They are made by lawyers. They are made defensively to cut down on the legal costs associated with providing healthcare.
While ballooning the costs of actually providing the health care, and costing the patients thousands indirectly too. Losing half a day of work to see a doctor costs me a LOT.
Joanna knows something you don't: A/V only protects you against trivial exploits and rootkits.
Except I do know that.
Joanna assumes that if something manages to get passed her security "perimeter", an A/V certainly isn't going to stop it.
And how does running different tasks in color coded VMs protect you? All it does is mean when she's surfing for porn in "Red" and gets infected, her banking info in "Green" is safe. She's still infected though, and has to clean out Red. And all her porn passwords have been compromised.
And if her bank's dns is hijacked or there is an mitm attack, Green can be infected too.
A/V might have helped it might not have. Depending on how fresh the particular attack was.
Don't let it bother you that nobody knows exactly what would violate HIPAA
Nobody knows what the full ramifications of any piece of legislation are. Its a BS excuse. What's next?
What part of disclosing medical information to the PATIENT could violate the HIPAA? Its pure nonsense.
If they can be confident that they are disclosing the information to the patient, say, by requiring that they call the patient back on a pre-authorized number, there would be no issue with HIPAA. This is on par or better than the level of security they have when they send the data to pharmacists, or consultations with specialists, etc, which they do all the time.
What if a US president is impeached, but refuses to leave office?
"The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High crimes and misdemeanors."
Clearly he or she "Shall be removed from Office".
Of course, it doesn't really say:
a) Removed from office by whom EXACTLY? b) What if they refuse to leave? c) What if they have support from the group named in part a) above?
Its scary how rapidly you end up with a revolution or coup as the only alternative. Bottom line, if the president decides he's not going to step down, it gets ugly fast. (Because if he thinks he can get away with it, he's probably got someone backing the play... like a big chunk of the armed forces.
A "starting" physician is 6 years behind a starting electrical engineer. 2 years of residency (at a minimum!) and they have a tremendous amount more debt for those additional years of schooling. Even at that point they are considered to have very little experience.
Not really. They start getting paid as residents. Granted not 6 figures, but already well above the national average.
Meanwhile a comp sci or phys grade with a BS is what? Not a whole lot, you need your MS or PhD. Which adds years (and dollars) to the education. And yeah PhD grad student might get a bit of grant money funding while he works on some professors project while working on his(or her) thesis but they are usually living at the poverty line... if they're lucky.
(now spends another 20 minutes with that patient covering what the real issues were, and is now 15 minutes "behind" which physicians *hate*, but they have no control over)
I hate to break it to you, but that is par for the course in ANY profession where you need to meet with other people for any reason whatsoever.
Doctor. Plumber. Network Admin. Baby Sitter.
I don't book 16 15 minute appointments in a 4 hour afternoon, because there is no way in hell I'd ever get through them all. 8-10 would be pushing it.
If they want to address this, do what everyone else does: wake up to reality and stop over booking yourself. Yeah, you'll make less money if you can't book 32 patients in a day anymore. So what?
And on that note, why do I have to take half a day off work, so I can come in and meet with a doctor for 7 minutes (after waiting 40+) who has nothing important to tell me and barely looks at me. Fuck, unless they need to poke or prod or sample something I have better things to do than to lose half a day of work to see them. -- you want to tell me my test came back fine, or that I need to book another blood sample at some lab... pick up the phone tell me.
There isn't an entry on that list below six figures. And I'd say the average is easily 250k plus.
An electrical engineer "1" in the 90th percentile (ie making more than 90% of his peers), according to salary.com makes 67k. Unless he gets promoted to management, (and does less engineering and more managing) he's going to have a very tough time cracking 6 figs.
A nuclear physicist, cracks six figures. But even his 90th percentile at 126k doesn't quite reach the expected STARTING wage of "Pediatrics - Adolescents" - 130k, probably the lowest number on that list.
Many doctors and lawyers go into the field for the money. That's not really true of the hard science/engineer types. So most engineers would do it again because they actually want to spend their time engineering, and enjoy it.
That's true of a lot of doctors too...but a lot of them just picked their career by the expected income. How many engineers or mathematicians or computing scientists or physicists etc chose the career for the paycheque*. Sure we can get paid well, but lets face it... its not the license to print money being a lawyer or doctor can be.
(*Other than the brief rash of worthless eng. and comp.sci. grads chasing the.com bubble)
I never did understand why those keys [wasd] were used
I strongly suspect its a hold over convention from the earliest PC games. Back when you had 2 player multiplayer on one keyboard. The 2 player control schemes were separated as much as possible.
P1 controls were ALWAYS "WASD", specifically because it was as far left as you could go. P2 was on the far right of the keyboard, originally, around "OKL;" (take a look at a "Tandy TRS-80 CoCo2" or "Apple II" for example) and then P2 moved to the number pad when it arrived.
I remember playing a lot of old games with my brother like this.
So when you bought a new game, the primary controls were always WASD, it's what people expected, and I bet it just stuck.
You can beat free with convenience and accessibility. Nothing beats free AND more convenient/reliable, that's a given.
If they were ever to let up on their legal war on p2p infringement, the p2p infringers would be able to deliver FREE and match them on convenience/reliability.
The only reason p2p is as inconvenient as it is (and its not THAT inconvenient) is because they are playing legal whack-a-mole with it. If that whack-a-mole were to cease, free p2p would rapidly reach itunes/amazon level of convenience and reliability.
I don't use any A/V product on any of my machines (including all the virtual machines). I don't see how an A/V program could offer any increased security over the quite-reasonable-setup I already deployed with the help of virtualization.
This seems a touch... idiotic. I could see how it could offer more. AND I don't see how it could offer less.
For what its worth, I don't use an A/V product either.
And Like her, I also have a "pretty reasonable setup" and a dose of "common sense". But I'm still balancing the increased responsiveness and hassle-free experience vs the extra security. Its a trade-off that's worth it to me, but I recognize that it is still a trade-off.
First, cops who abuse their power for any reason deserve to be fired.
That's great. But there are a couple issues:
1) The people responsible for firing them are also police, and police like most any other group of workers who must rely on eachother in life-death situations... they get close knit.
2) The type of people that seek to become "cops" is skewed towards power hungry jerks in the first place. So you are picking from a pool that is self-selecting towards the type of people you don't want.
This isn't uncommon... some jobs are best performed by people who don't aspire to the job. From police work to politics to jury duty. Indeed, it seems that any job that gives 'power' is best performed by people who don't aspire to power. But naturally people who do aspire for power will actively seek out those jobs... and then do them poorly.
On the avergage (hello, laptops!) moving to the top of the screen is *way* faster then putting a menu on each screen and fundamentally better/waves hands and chants, screaming off into the woods//HIG HEIL!
So make that the default on laptops. But make it a choice. Because more than half the time I have my laptop plugged into a 24" screen.
Which sets me off about another Apple issue: non-standard video adaptors on laptops. I want the laptop to "just work" (isn't that an apple slogan?) when I get somewhere. I don't want to have to drag around a bunch of dongles... mini-DVI to DVI, miniDVI-to VGA, miniDisplayPort to DVI... and they overcharge for them, big time. Bestbuy wanted $75CAD for a miniDVI-DVI adaptor the other day. Ridiculous. I walked out. I'll get a knockoff online...
And speaking of display port, my HP LP2475w monitor supports displayport. My new macbook pro supports displayport (well mini displayport). Is there any particular reason apple doesn't make a mini-displayport to displayport adapter. Morons.
OS X must have been a steaming pile of shit back in 2001.
Comparable to XP Service Pack 0 really.
And then burdened with the fact that everyone still needed tons of applications that only ran in Classic, which meant the OSX experience for the first couple years was, for a lot of people... boot up osx, launch classic, and use a bunch of OS9 apps.
But still OSX by itself, wasn't all roses either. Steve Jobs likes to brag that every release of OSX has gotten faster on the same hardware, while every version of Windows has gotten slower on the same hardware. What this really should tell you is just how slow OSX10.0 was.
And other issues like inserting a bad CD locking up the whole system so that you need a paperclip or a hard reboot linger on to this day.
Not only is that completely unenforceable unless you tell Valve what you are doing it would be quite easy to circumvent by simply selling something completely worthless while giving away your steam account for free.
As I said in another reply, is it "completey unenforceable" if Gamestop started brokering steam account transfers? Or if Valve demanded ebay/craigslist remove account transfers? If they can effectively prohibit the above, then its 'enforceable enough'. They don't really care if you can manage to transfer it to your brother's best friend without them finding out about it.
If they can effectively prohibit the formation of a functioning market for the accounts and by extension for the games, then they have effectively denied you your first sale rights.
Other posters have already adequately shredded your attempt to weasel around the prohibition for charging money. And for what its worth, it doesn't matter if you charge money or not, its against the terms to even GIVE the account away.
I use steam and love it, but if they ever boot me or close their service I will use the cracked EXEs.
If you are only satisfied with the service because you can get away with violating its terms, and cracking the games, then you aren't really satisfied with the service.
So if gamestop started brokering steam account transfers, would it be 'non-enforceable' then?
Your right, its pretty non-enforceable if a couple people do it individually and privately. But if they can block gamestop from participating, and ebay, and craigslist, etc, etc... its 'enforcebable enough'.
No. Fuck that. Steam is not a decent solution. Steam sells you a 'subscription' to a game. Worse, they put it in a box, on store shelves alongside the other games that are actually for sale. And they frame everything in terms of 'buying the game', until you read the fine print, and then you find out you didn't buy anything... you've got a subscription.
Oh, and its non-transferable, so you can't resell it or even give it away. And if Steam ever shuts down, your subscription ends, and you have nothing at all once it comes time to 'validate' your 'purchase' again.
I have 2 steam games. One I bought on purpose. One I bought by accident, not knowing it was a steam game. Both of them I bought at EB off the shelf in a box.
It was referring to OSX, which was released in spring 2001.
He mentions the 'mighty blue apple' in the top menu (OS9 still had the 'rainbow apple'). He also specifically mentions the dock and bouncing icons, which was OSX as well.
Things are only funny to me when they're true, and sadly that video props up way too many fallacies, leaving the savvy viewer merely feeling that the ignorance of the average user is being abused.
Meh. I disagree. I've experienced all of that crap first hand. OSX has gotten better since then (you'll notice that the video used a crt imac, and a plastic g4 (g5)? tower.
And yeah, I've experienced the whole app window just closes and is gone with no error message crash.
I've experienced the stupid finder locking up when you put in a CD on SEVERAL macs (including new ones). Windows does it too on bad disks sometimes, but OSX does it more, and worse -- because on a PC you can generally eject the bad disk and the OS comes right back to life... on a mac, you pretty much need to mount the CD to be able to eject it... so if its locked up mounting the thing, you can't easily eject it, short of grabbing a paperclip...or rebooting with the space bar, neither of which is convenient.
And the undeleting thing? Yep, I've been there too, as have a lot of savvy 'switchers' (remember this was made during the switcher campaign), and it underscores the issue that a lot of windows users who switched face... they found that they had to pay for a lot of utility type apps that they were used to getting for free on Windows.
The crack about the apple menu actually is in my opinion one of the biggest flaws in the OSX window manager. When you've got 2 24"+ screens, having to mouse over to the top of one screen to access a menu is demented.
The crack about Software Update hopping up and down like a terrier hits the mark too in my opinion. You can't just ignore it they way you can ignore "windows updates are ready" or the way the various linux distros notify you.
And my father's mac laptop wouldn't empty the trash recently for no apparent reason... everytime you tried finder restarted. I went through the forums, I went through Apple support, I'm a cross platform admin - comfortable with Windows, Linux, and OSX. I tried all the simple stuff, then the simple command line stuff, then the arcane command line stuff, then reinstalling OSX over top of the existing install, and finally I just threw in the towel and reinstalled OSX from scratch -- I've had lots of mac frustrations.
Oddly, he never touched on the rainbow pinwheel of death, which I've seen FAR TOO MUCH of, accessing network shares, external media and peripherals.
So, while I actually use and like OSX, and agree with your post. Macs have got plenty of its own little quirks that can drive you mad, and I really don't think much of that video was 'fallacious myths'. I have personally seen it all, and more.
it's just that from a marketing point of view I think BOINC has an advantage.
I agree. But I find it... unethical. People wouldn't pay for this if they were presented a dollar amount up front that said "this is what it costs, please pay it." but they will pay it if you can have it silently lumped in with there electricity bill, where they can't see it.
On an ethical level, how can these 'volunteers' really be giving informed consent, when most of them are unaware or barely aware that they are being charged or how much. In many cases, its an employee who has set up their work PC using and is essentially getting the company to pay for it. Or a kid in his parents basement... Mom & Dad pay the bills, including this one, without even knowing about it.
Its essentially preying on the fact that most people simply don't view their electricity charges as the metered service it is. And the fact that have no real way of auditing or itemizing the charges.
Their claim that the cost is between $3 and $8 is in a *wiki page*. If you have better figures to share, then instead of ranting in slashdot, go ahead and share them in the wiki talk page, or in BOINC mailing list.
If they'd like me to write their documentation for them then they can pay me.
Slashdot Mirror
I said, nobody knows what violates HIPAA.
Nobody really know what violates copyright either, for example.
And as for your driving example... yeah, speeding is well defined. How about 'careless driving'? do you know exactly what that is, and when you've crossed it?
For Ontario Canada, for example it is:
"Every person is guilty of the offence of driving carelessly who drives a vehicle or street car on a highway without due care and attention or without reasonable consideration for other persons using the highway..."
"due care and attention" and "reasonable consideration" for other people isn't exactly well defined, now is it? Does this mean you won't drive in Ontario? (Or anywhere else, as pretty much everywhere has an equivalent rule... and 10,000 more just as vague...)
And shoplifting... sure easy. What if you take to long to decide what to buy instead...how do you prove you weren't loitering?
Can you prove who you're talking to on the phone?
No. But how is that relevant?
Can they prove they are talking to the right pharmacist or specialist or lab technician? Can they prove anyone else isn't listening in? No of course not, so why suddenly are you throwing this in my face? Its not a concern when they talk to anyone else.
And considering that giving medical information to a concerned relative would "violate the HIPAA" as you put it, there's nothing paranoid at all about that concern.
Giving it to a concerned relative who calls in would. However, if the patient PRE-authorizes them, in person in writing, to call you at a specific PRE-authorized number, and if the person who answers identifies themself as YOU, and can recite your birth date and account number, and throw a secret pin number or code word in there too... then what exactly are you worried about?
Because every patient has a phone that nobody else could possibly answer? Right.
Its up to the PATIENT to decide.
If I were even slightly worried someone might pick up their phone, and falsely represent themselves as me to my doctor, then I wouldn't sign the sheet. So if I'm a teenage girl who doesn't want her parents to know she's being tested for STDs then I don't sign it.
But I, however, am not in that situation. If I gave a doctor my home phone, and authorized it, I could accept it. My wife isn't going identify herself as me. And I'm prepared to accept the risk that she would. And I'm even less worried that I'm going to have some crackpot tap my phone lines to intercept the call.
Citation needed.
Would you like me to send you the copies of faxes I've received about patients on my fax line, because some doctor somewhere has mis-dialed? Presumably they are supposed to have policies in place to ensure they double check the fax number is correct, but at the end of the day, these mistakes still happen.
I'm curious what exactly you think happens when your GP refers you to a specialist, gets the results back and has a question? Do you think your GP drives accross town to meet the specialist? The two individuals exchange passports and drivers license, which they inspect high tech forgery/counterfeit detection technology, and then finally exchange notes, while furtively looking over their shoulder to see if anyone is trying to listen in?
Again, these decisions aren't made by some doctor who's out to get you. They are made by lawyers. They are made defensively to cut down on the legal costs associated with providing healthcare.
While ballooning the costs of actually providing the health care, and costing the patients thousands indirectly too. Losing half a day of work to see a doctor costs me a LOT.
Joanna knows something you don't: A/V only protects you against trivial exploits and rootkits.
Except I do know that.
Joanna assumes that if something manages to get passed her security "perimeter", an A/V certainly isn't going to stop it.
And how does running different tasks in color coded VMs protect you? All it does is mean when she's surfing for porn in "Red" and gets infected, her banking info in "Green" is safe. She's still infected though, and has to clean out Red. And all her porn passwords have been compromised.
And if her bank's dns is hijacked or there is an mitm attack, Green can be infected too.
A/V might have helped it might not have. Depending on how fresh the particular attack was.
Don't let it bother you that nobody knows exactly what would violate HIPAA
Nobody knows what the full ramifications of any piece of legislation are. Its a BS excuse. What's next?
What part of disclosing medical information to the PATIENT could violate the HIPAA? Its pure nonsense.
If they can be confident that they are disclosing the information to the patient, say, by requiring that they call the patient back on a pre-authorized number, there would be no issue with HIPAA. This is on par or better than the level of security they have when they send the data to pharmacists, or consultations with specialists, etc, which they do all the time.
What if a US president is impeached, but refuses to leave office?
"The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High crimes and misdemeanors."
Clearly he or she "Shall be removed from Office".
Of course, it doesn't really say:
a) Removed from office by whom EXACTLY?
b) What if they refuse to leave?
c) What if they have support from the group named in part a) above?
Its scary how rapidly you end up with a revolution or coup as the only alternative. Bottom line, if the president decides he's not going to step down, it gets ugly fast. (Because if he thinks he can get away with it, he's probably got someone backing the play... like a big chunk of the armed forces.
A "starting" physician is 6 years behind a starting electrical engineer. 2 years of residency (at a minimum!) and they have a tremendous amount more debt for those additional years of schooling. Even at that point they are considered to have very little experience.
Not really. They start getting paid as residents. Granted not 6 figures, but already well above the national average.
Meanwhile a comp sci or phys grade with a BS is what? Not a whole lot, you need your MS or PhD. Which adds years (and dollars) to the education. And yeah PhD grad student might get a bit of grant money funding while he works on some professors project while working on his(or her) thesis but they are usually living at the poverty line... if they're lucky.
(now spends another 20 minutes with that patient covering what the real issues were, and is now 15 minutes "behind" which physicians *hate*, but they have no control over)
I hate to break it to you, but that is par for the course in ANY profession where you need to meet with other people for any reason whatsoever.
Doctor. Plumber. Network Admin. Baby Sitter.
I don't book 16 15 minute appointments in a 4 hour afternoon, because there is no way in hell I'd ever get through them all. 8-10 would be pushing it.
If they want to address this, do what everyone else does: wake up to reality and stop over booking yourself. Yeah, you'll make less money if you can't book 32 patients in a day anymore. So what?
And on that note, why do I have to take half a day off work, so I can come in and meet with a doctor for 7 minutes (after waiting 40+) who has nothing important to tell me and barely looks at me. Fuck, unless they need to poke or prod or sample something I have better things to do than to lose half a day of work to see them. -- you want to tell me my test came back fine, or that I need to book another blood sample at some lab... pick up the phone tell me.
The illusion that medicine is well-compensated for the effort is just that -- an illusion.
Relative to what, exactly?
http://www.cejkasearch.com/compensation/amga_physician_compensation_survey.htm
There isn't an entry on that list below six figures. And I'd say the average is easily 250k plus.
An electrical engineer "1" in the 90th percentile (ie making more than 90% of his peers), according to salary.com makes 67k. Unless he gets promoted to management, (and does less engineering and more managing) he's going to have a very tough time cracking 6 figs.
A nuclear physicist, cracks six figures. But even his 90th percentile at 126k doesn't quite reach the expected STARTING wage of "Pediatrics - Adolescents" - 130k, probably the lowest number on that list.
I think we engineers have it good.
Many doctors and lawyers go into the field for the money. That's not really true of the hard science/engineer types. So most engineers would do it again because they actually want to spend their time engineering, and enjoy it.
That's true of a lot of doctors too...but a lot of them just picked their career by the expected income. How many engineers or mathematicians or computing scientists or physicists etc chose the career for the paycheque*. Sure we can get paid well, but lets face it... its not the license to print money being a lawyer or doctor can be.
(*Other than the brief rash of worthless eng. and comp.sci. grads chasing the .com bubble)
I never did understand why those keys [wasd] were used
I strongly suspect its a hold over convention from the earliest PC games. Back when you had 2 player multiplayer on one keyboard. The 2 player control schemes were separated as much as possible.
P1 controls were ALWAYS "WASD", specifically because it was as far left as you could go. P2 was on the far right of the keyboard, originally, around "OKL;" (take a look at a "Tandy TRS-80 CoCo2" or "Apple II" for example) and then P2 moved to the number pad when it arrived.
I remember playing a lot of old games with my brother like this.
So when you bought a new game, the primary controls were always WASD, it's what people expected, and I bet it just stuck.
You can beat free with convenience and accessibility.
Nothing beats free AND more convenient/reliable, that's a given.
If they were ever to let up on their legal war on p2p infringement, the p2p infringers would be able to deliver FREE and match them on convenience/reliability.
The only reason p2p is as inconvenient as it is (and its not THAT inconvenient) is because they are playing legal whack-a-mole with it. If that whack-a-mole were to cease, free p2p would rapidly reach itunes/amazon level of convenience and reliability.
Actually, depending on your virus scanner, it stops about 50-90% of attacks out there. Joanna's setup is almost certainly more effective.
More effective than it would be if she took her existing setup and installed antivirus into it?
I think not.
I don't use any A/V product on any of my machines (including all the virtual machines). I don't see how an A/V program could offer any increased security over the quite-reasonable-setup I already deployed with the help of virtualization.
This seems a touch... idiotic. I could see how it could offer more. AND I don't see how it could offer less.
For what its worth, I don't use an A/V product either.
And Like her, I also have a "pretty reasonable setup" and a dose of "common sense". But I'm still balancing the increased responsiveness and hassle-free experience vs the extra security. Its a trade-off that's worth it to me, but I recognize that it is still a trade-off.
First, cops who abuse their power for any reason deserve to be fired.
That's great. But there are a couple issues:
1) The people responsible for firing them are also police, and police like most any other group of workers who must rely on eachother in life-death situations... they get close knit.
2) The type of people that seek to become "cops" is skewed towards power hungry jerks in the first place. So you are picking from a pool that is self-selecting towards the type of people you don't want.
This isn't uncommon... some jobs are best performed by people who don't aspire to the job. From police work to politics to jury duty. Indeed, it seems that any job that gives 'power' is best performed by people who don't aspire to power. But naturally people who do aspire for power will actively seek out those jobs... and then do them poorly.
On the avergage (hello, laptops!) moving to the top of the screen is *way* faster then putting a menu on each screen and fundamentally better /waves hands and chants, screaming off into the woods //HIG HEIL!
So make that the default on laptops. But make it a choice. Because more than half the time I have my laptop plugged into a 24" screen.
Which sets me off about another Apple issue: non-standard video adaptors on laptops. I want the laptop to "just work" (isn't that an apple slogan?) when I get somewhere. I don't want to have to drag around a bunch of dongles... mini-DVI to DVI, miniDVI-to VGA, miniDisplayPort to DVI... and they overcharge for them, big time. Bestbuy wanted $75CAD for a miniDVI-DVI adaptor the other day. Ridiculous. I walked out. I'll get a knockoff online...
And speaking of display port, my HP LP2475w monitor supports displayport. My new macbook pro supports displayport (well mini displayport). Is there any particular reason apple doesn't make a mini-displayport to displayport adapter. Morons.
But I'm ranting... I'll stop now.
OS X must have been a steaming pile of shit back in 2001.
Comparable to XP Service Pack 0 really.
And then burdened with the fact that everyone still needed tons of applications that only ran in Classic, which meant the OSX experience for the first couple years was, for a lot of people... boot up osx, launch classic, and use a bunch of OS9 apps.
But still OSX by itself, wasn't all roses either. Steve Jobs likes to brag that every release of OSX has gotten faster on the same hardware, while every version of Windows has gotten slower on the same hardware. What this really should tell you is just how slow OSX10.0 was.
And other issues like inserting a bad CD locking up the whole system so that you need a paperclip or a hard reboot linger on to this day.
Not only is that completely unenforceable unless you tell Valve what you are doing it would be quite easy to circumvent by simply selling something completely worthless while giving away your steam account for free.
As I said in another reply, is it "completey unenforceable" if Gamestop started brokering steam account transfers? Or if Valve demanded ebay/craigslist remove account transfers? If they can effectively prohibit the above, then its 'enforceable enough'. They don't really care if you can manage to transfer it to your brother's best friend without them finding out about it.
If they can effectively prohibit the formation of a functioning market for the accounts and by extension for the games, then they have effectively denied you your first sale rights.
Other posters have already adequately shredded your attempt to weasel around the prohibition for charging money. And for what its worth, it doesn't matter if you charge money or not, its against the terms to even GIVE the account away.
I buy steam games, ...
You subscribe to them. You don't buy them.
I use steam and love it, but if they ever boot me or close their service I will use the cracked EXEs.
If you are only satisfied with the service because you can get away with violating its terms, and cracking the games, then you aren't really satisfied with the service.
That comes across as awfully non-enforceable.
So if gamestop started brokering steam account transfers, would it be 'non-enforceable' then?
Your right, its pretty non-enforceable if a couple people do it individually and privately. But if they can block gamestop from participating, and ebay, and craigslist, etc, etc... its 'enforcebable enough'.
No. Fuck that. Steam is not a decent solution. Steam sells you a 'subscription' to a game. Worse, they put it in a box, on store shelves alongside the other games that are actually for sale. And they frame everything in terms of 'buying the game', until you read the fine print, and then you find out you didn't buy anything... you've got a subscription.
Oh, and its non-transferable, so you can't resell it or even give it away. And if Steam ever shuts down, your subscription ends, and you have nothing at all once it comes time to 'validate' your 'purchase' again.
I have 2 steam games. One I bought on purpose. One I bought by accident, not knowing it was a steam game. Both of them I bought at EB off the shelf in a box.
The video was made in 2001 and referring to OS9.
It was referring to OSX, which was released in spring 2001.
He mentions the 'mighty blue apple' in the top menu (OS9 still had the 'rainbow apple').
He also specifically mentions the dock and bouncing icons, which was OSX as well.
Things are only funny to me when they're true, and sadly that video props up way too many fallacies, leaving the savvy viewer merely feeling that the ignorance of the average user is being abused.
Meh. I disagree. I've experienced all of that crap first hand. OSX has gotten better since then (you'll notice that the video used a crt imac, and a plastic g4 (g5)? tower.
And yeah, I've experienced the whole app window just closes and is gone with no error message crash.
I've experienced the stupid finder locking up when you put in a CD on SEVERAL macs (including new ones). Windows does it too on bad disks sometimes, but OSX does it more, and worse -- because on a PC you can generally eject the bad disk and the OS comes right back to life... on a mac, you pretty much need to mount the CD to be able to eject it... so if its locked up mounting the thing, you can't easily eject it, short of grabbing a paperclip...or rebooting with the space bar, neither of which is convenient.
And the undeleting thing? Yep, I've been there too, as have a lot of savvy 'switchers' (remember this was made during the switcher campaign), and it underscores the issue that a lot of windows users who switched face ... they found that they had to pay for a lot of utility type apps that they were used to getting for free on Windows.
The crack about the apple menu actually is in my opinion one of the biggest flaws in the OSX window manager. When you've got 2 24"+ screens, having to mouse over to the top of one screen to access a menu is demented.
The crack about Software Update hopping up and down like a terrier hits the mark too in my opinion. You can't just ignore it they way you can ignore "windows updates are ready" or the way the various linux distros notify you.
And my father's mac laptop wouldn't empty the trash recently for no apparent reason... everytime you tried finder restarted. I went through the forums, I went through Apple support, I'm a cross platform admin - comfortable with Windows, Linux, and OSX. I tried all the simple stuff, then the simple command line stuff, then the arcane command line stuff, then reinstalling OSX over top of the existing install, and finally I just threw in the towel and reinstalled OSX from scratch -- I've had lots of mac frustrations.
Oddly, he never touched on the rainbow pinwheel of death, which I've seen FAR TOO MUCH of, accessing network shares, external media and peripherals.
So, while I actually use and like OSX, and agree with your post. Macs have got plenty of its own little quirks that can drive you mad, and I really don't think much of that video was 'fallacious myths'. I have personally seen it all, and more.
Yup. Crash Different.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTqmFNTNgsU
it's just that from a marketing point of view I think BOINC has an advantage.
I agree. But I find it ... unethical. People wouldn't pay for this if they were presented a dollar amount up front that said "this is what it costs, please pay it." but they will pay it if you can have it silently lumped in with there electricity bill, where they can't see it.
On an ethical level, how can these 'volunteers' really be giving informed consent, when most of them are unaware or barely aware that they are being charged or how much. In many cases, its an employee who has set up their work PC using and is essentially getting the company to pay for it. Or a kid in his parents basement... Mom & Dad pay the bills, including this one, without even knowing about it.
Its essentially preying on the fact that most people simply don't view their electricity charges as the metered service it is. And the fact that have no real way of auditing or itemizing the charges.
I find that distasteful.
Their claim that the cost is between $3 and $8 is in a *wiki page*. If you have better figures to share, then instead of ranting in slashdot, go ahead and share them in the wiki talk page, or in BOINC mailing list.
If they'd like me to write their documentation for them then they can pay me.
IE8 was obsolete before it was ever released.
I never said it was cutting edge, or best-in-class.
Its adequate, functional, and fixes a ton of the worst issues of IE6.
I never said it was a Porsche or a Tesla.
If IE8 were a car its a new Ford Focus.