There's absolutely no conflict here, moral, legal, or ethical. Keep your job, keep your head up, and learn from it.
The data are published on the WWW. Since when do ethics preclude using anything besides a browser to access them? Yes, there are technical drawbacks and technical defenses; I'm not sure your boss's idea is a great long-term strategy. But if bad system design were unethical, Microsoft would sell a lot less VB.
The TOS are one company's attempt to control how you use their information. Are they enforceable? Do they actually care, if you don't republish? And why is that your concern? That's why your firm has management and lawyers.
You're not poisoning milk here; you're acquiring data for commercial purposes. Get to work, and let the legal beagles sort it out.
Taking used to be used primarily for government sponsored project. Now it is used because some random company thinks that just because they can make money with a property, they should own it.
Fooey. Companies have fought over trademarks since there were trademarks. Being sued for one is nothing new. If you don't believe me, cf. http://www.american.edu/ted/budweis.htm, and ask Budejovicky Budvar about "Budweiser".
I grant all your points, although I don't know why you say attachments are a "nasty kludge". I don't know what it means to add a kludge to a message transfer protocol that is free to mangle the message. No "\nFrom"? Please.
We're making different assumptions. I assume receiver controls his DNS and can configure SMTP hosts special to the purpose. Not only that, but it really isn't gobs and gobs of data the OP is sending, unless his company employs half of China. I'd wager even money their regular email systems handle attachments that big all the time.
If you set up your DNS with MX names under your control and spec them appropriately (and the sender does the same) SMTP gives you a one-hop file transfer system with redundancy. No firewall gimickry, no passwords, no shell. More secure, more reliable, and simpler to use than anything else.
e-mail isn't really a practical solution for a large volume data set
People keep saying that. Why? An email server specifically set up to receive large attachments would work just fine, as long as the sender's system isn't constrained.
On the wire, email is is a plain-vanilla file-transfer protocol, indistinguishable from ftp. It has the advantage of providing almost no attack surface, because the sender can't log in. As long as the data are encrypted, it's about as secure and reliable as can be.
Don't you think it matters what evidence the authorities showed Google? If you were Google's lawyer and the police showed up with enough evidence to convince any judge of the need for a warrant, why would you fight it?
So, let's see. You were a tech and decided it was your job as Defendant of Taxpayer Value to get the IT department to clamp down on riotous pirating. And instead of reforming, they fired you. I guess they learned their lesson, eh?
Would you have objected to a 1% across the board raise? Would that have cost more or less than all those precious DVD blanks?
Every job has its perks. People who work in education are trading off salary for other things. Lots of them spend their own money on classroom supplies. It all evens out.
You've got a bee in your bonnet about public schools and taxes. I hope your life is so uneventful that those things always seem paramount.
How is this "insightful" when it's fundamentally wrong? Since when is buying something stealing it, and just how much of Microsoft's capitalization can be attributed to the pre-DOS BASIC? For that matter, what part of "from the ground up" did Google or Apple write, given that the Internet and Linux and BSD and Mach are integral to their systems?
She lives on a fixed income. Why should she pay $5 a month to subsidize other people so they can get free music by violating copyright? For someone on a fixed income, another $5/mo bill is a significant hit.
I'll tell you why: for the same reason her toothpaste costs $5.
I don't watch television. I don't watch the Superbowl. But the price of everything I buy supports hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising. There's not even any guarantee that the price of product A doesn't "subsidize" the price of product B within a corporation. How does that differ from a tax?
There's a great deal more sloppiness in the assignment of who pays for what than free marketeers admit. It's not as though there's some subsidy-free platonic ideal whose pristine beauty is destroyed by a tax.
Reason #2: There are plenty of cross subsidies at the government level, too. Grandma benefits from the social welfare system, not to mention people whose salaries pay for everything from roads to national defense.
I'd like to know how they come up with $5, though. There're 26 million Canadians, maybe 2 million Internet connections, 2,000,000 * 12 * 5 = CAD 120,000,000 per year. How many songwriters? That's 100,000/yr for 1200(?) Canadian songwriters. Seems like a lot if you ask me, maybe 10X too much.
3. Always use a database connection with the lowest necessary [privileges].
That's actually the whole answer. If done right, #1 and #2 are superfluous.
I'm appalled that 70,000 SQL Servers allow table-level access to the webserver. Hello? Do just this: write a stored procedure for everything your web app does. GRANT EXECUTE on those procedures -- and nothing else -- to the account running the webserver. Go home and sleep well, knowing no INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE will have any effect at all on your database.
<grumble> There are no technical problems, only people problems. </grumble>
I think that's a pretty clear indicator that nuclear power is currently fairly competitively priced.
RTFA. "NRG Energy says its two proposed units, which would produce a total of 2,700 megawatts, or enough to power 2 million homes, would cost $6 billion to build. A conventional natural-gas plant of the same size would cost $2 billion...."
I think that's a pretty clear indicator that nuclear power uncompetitive. Besides, the data come in from everywhere. Even the industry itself demands subsidies before it will consider an application. That's not because it's afraid of environmentalist. As if!
What you want is a Carbon Tax. Make the cost of polluting commensurate with the ecological damage. Then let the power industry choose the low-cost fuel. But don't give them any money! (It spoils the suspense.)
Prediction 1: Conservation will start happening. Initially, the carbon tax would raise the cost of eletricity as it's passed on to consumers. That will create demand for more efficient appliances and things you can actually turn off. And maybe the rest of the country will emulate California, where electricity use per capita is half the rest of the country, due mainly to how the power industry is rewarded for effective conservation.
Prediction 2: We'll start adding a lot of windmills. Wind is already competitively priced, within a cent or two of coal per kwh. The Carbon Tax would reverse that situation. It will be years before we have to worry about fluctuations in power from windmills. Denmark gets 20% of its electricity from wind today. Let's get there too and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Nope, couldn't be that running fiber everywhere is a much smaller and easier task.
I see. That's why Columbia, Maryland has fiber to the curb and Manhattan doesn't. Because it's easier to make infrastructure changes in big cities!
Must be that the Japanese are so clever and the Americans so dumb.
Suggestion: try knowing what you're talking about. It isn't a matter of Americans being dumb. It's a matter of regulation that benefits the regulated, instead of the economy. Japan has examples too, cf. retailing and rice farms.
We're a long, long way away from needing to worry about fluctuations in wind velocity. For one thing, wind and solar partly offset each other, because it tends to be windier when the sun isn't shining. For another, windmills don't get sited where the wind isn't pretty reliable, because that would make them less profitable.
But let's try a fact: Other countries are already doing this. Denmark gets 20% of its electricity from windmills, slated to grow to 25% in the next few years. They're owned by little-guy cooperatives who sell their juice to the utility. If there are technical problems with fluctuating wind, it sure seems like they're solved.
Wind is entirely green and entirely feasible. Nuclear can make neither claim after 50 years of economic and ecological travesty. But leave it to the US congress to shovel the money back where it came from, instead of where it will do the most good.
Yeah, "in addition to". That is: $500 + $0 = $500.
It's instead of, because no one is talking about spending $500 million dollars on wind power. Note, there is no wind power industry to speak of, no one lobbying for subsidies or liability relief. (Perhaps the power of eminent domain would be more helpful to windmills.)
By the way, if you look into it, you'll find wind power costs roughly $1/watt to build and almost nothing to run. $500 million builds you at least 500 megawatts in windmills, or about 20% of the 2700 MW being underwritten.
The cost differential of wind versus coal is less than that. In other words, if you subsidized 2700 MW of windmills by the tune of $500 million, the resulting energy would be cheaper than the cheapest alternative. And we haven't even touched ecological damage.
Actually, there's an even better alternative: conservation. Californians use half the electricity of the average American because their electric utilities are paid for "negawatts", for reducing demand, usually be replacing inefficient appliances at the utility's expense. It costs less to replace a bunch of refrigerators than to build the equivalent power plant to run them. Not a theory, a fact. Check it out. Do the same thing with $500 million, and maybe you won't even need any of those 2700 MW (forget the rest of the expenditure).
So, remember: it's a boondoggle. There's not a single watt of electricity produced by a privately built nuclear power plant anywhere on earth. They're uneconomic. But to politicians, they're like roads and bridges: pork to lard. The road away from coal and gas runs to wind and conservation. But there's no lobby for that, not least because there's very little public understanding, and plenty of misinformation provided by the hogs at the trough.
Re:Revenue or Surveillance?
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 1
these schemes just take yet more money from the average Joe who works, because he typically doesn't have any choice as to where and when he drives when commuting to work
Uh huh. It costs $25 a day to park in Manhattan. Driving is far more expensive than public transit. The mayor's traffic study found that something like 8% of the affected drivers would be middle-income earners. Whatever else this fee is, it is definitely not a soak-the-poor scheme.
This is Manhattan we're talking about, where subways and buses, not to mention ferries and taxis, run thick. Driving here is a choice. You can drive and park many places outside the zone's perimeter and easily get the subway wherever you're going. In fact, that's what most people do.
So spare me your precious privacy concerns. The roads are a public good. When the cost of driving a car begins to approach the real ecological and social costs it imposes on the nondrivers, we can talk about parity. Meanwhile, rationing a scarce resource with pricing signals is surely better than the alternative nightmare we're living through now.
The Attorney General argues a position that advances the interests of the executive.
I'm sorry, but that's not his job and that's exactly what's wrong with this administration.
These guys are sworn to uphold the constitution, not to advance their branch's role in it. The AG was hired by the President who was hired by us -- if you can find anyone anymore who voted for him -- to further our interests, not his. His job is to enforce the laws we have, not the laws an autocrat wished to have.
From Terri Schiavo to Ronnie Brown to the tenth amendment, this administration has run everything for political gain. That got the Republicans booted out last November, but no never mind. The modus operandi, and its corrosive corrupting effect, remains. And we commit 20,000 more men -- the same men, actually, just staying longer -- to the President's own Bonfire of the Vanities.
Sure, what's popular and/or cultish will be preserved that way. And lots of stuff won't. Try getting a copy of "The Story of English" on DVD. (Try getting it on VHS! It's listed on Amazon, but you can't actually get it because it's out of print. And what's in print, if you get a used copy, is "protected" by Macrovision.) Let me know where I can download it, please.
For that matter, see if you can find a bona fide copy of the "The African Queen" on DVD. Yes, there are bootleg copies. Your quality may vary.
And that's just video. How much music is lost because it never made it from LP to CD?
Meanwhile, the media companies are ensuring that digital and even analog recordings are controlled with various forms of DRM. They're getting what they want. There's support for it even in the Linux kernel, and iTunes hasn't exactly been hurting for customers. Even as digital reproduction gets cheaper and easier, it's being undermined and sabotaged and prosecuted. Does anyone see that trend reversing?
You said it. The editors should take more responsibility for the lede in general, but getting it grammatically correct would be a fine first step. That, and maybe add "sed 's/supercede/supersede/g'" to the posting script.
It's hard to recommend/. to literate people while it practically promotes illiteracy.
You may be able to choose where you live, but you choose only among choices.
The American lifestyle and landscape is determined by more than supreme consumers demanding goods and services. The housing market functions within rules set by social policy, in particular land use policy, in particular zoning. They in turn are influenced by local and national vested interests, from real estate developers to Exxon and GM. That's why there's nothing like Copenhagen here and nothing like Phoenix in Denmark.
So, yes, your choice may be your own fault. But your menu was predetermined, and involves politics more than economics.
Tax gasoline to compensate the rest of us for the ecological damage emitted from the tailpipe and for the cost to maintain a military to "protect" oil reserves and oil-producing nations.
Actually, even at recent prices, behavior has changed. Perhaps you've read about the "restructuring" at GM and Ford? SUVs suddenly aren't selling very well.
You cite roominess, torque, and size. I suggest European drivers like those things, too. But $6/gallon gasoline -- even, it would seem, $3 -- concentrates the mind wonderfully on fuel economy.
The decision to discontinue support of VB... was related to the time it would take to bring VB to the Intel platform.
What? Did they need a cross-compiler or something?
The announcement basically says that since you like Apple so much, now you can use Apple's scripting technologies because "the longer-term solution and support of Apple technologies is worth the effort".
The real irony regards ODF and is too rich for words. Microsoft said we need Office XML because ODF isn't good enough. Then they founded an open-source project to sort-of support a converter. Now we see that Office isn't compatible with Office: if you run the same application on two different platforms it's own macro language won't work.
If you ask me, this is a strategy of convenience. On one hand, Microsoft wants to make Apple less convenient, to sell more Windows. On the other hand, the Microsoft really wants to sell more Office, because that's where the real money is.
One the third hand, making VBA work on OS X is doubtless harder than it looks, because there's no such thing as a clean interface at Microsoft. VBA is supposedly just a macro language; it should be written only in terms of the Office object model. But if doesn't include calls to Win32, I'll eat my hat.
That makes the equation: maintenance_cost > revenue.office - revenue.windows.
Exactly. I wonder why/. allows itself to use hijacked language. The title of this thread shouldn't be "U.S. Joins Hollywood in War on Piracy". It should be U.S. Joins Hollywood in War on Free Culture
I get a note periodically from my friendly local security admonisher suggesting I deinstall Firefox unless I have a "business need" to run it. Otherwise, please upgrade because "security vulnerabilities" have been found. Funny, he never suggests the same for IE, which I guess is very secure by comparison.
Labelling something that can crash the browser as a "DOS attack" misleads the uninformed and the unknowing, who all to often populate the IT departments where so many of us work. They in turn impose unnecessary work on the rest of us. And you're stressing them out, which isn't very nice.
Besides, misleading is misleading. I read the/. description and wondered how my browser could be hijacked to participate in a DOS attack. Only by following the link (um, thanks) did I learn the bark was worse than the bite.
And even then, it will block access to that material only within the country where it is deemed unlawful. The site will still be viewable from outside the country, he said.
I would like to know: if I post ISO images of Office 12 on my blog, will Microsoft allow them to be viewed in countries that don't respect U.S. copyright law?
If not, it would seem that Chinese law applies to China, but U.S. law applies to the world. At least as a matter of Microsoft policy.
On the other hand, the IE 7 beta will not be available for downloading until early next year
So, once again, we compare something freely available and available now, to something not available. And/. is all over it like white on paper. Can anyone spell "Longhorn"?
If the PC World editors want to hang onto the hype train and pretend anyone cares about Microsoft's promises, let them. And ignore them. Because by the time their vaporware materializes, it'll be competing against Firefox 2.0 and 2.5.
Slashdot Mirror
There's absolutely no conflict here, moral, legal, or ethical. Keep your job, keep your head up, and learn from it.
The data are published on the WWW. Since when do ethics preclude using anything besides a browser to access them? Yes, there are technical drawbacks and technical defenses; I'm not sure your boss's idea is a great long-term strategy. But if bad system design were unethical, Microsoft would sell a lot less VB.
The TOS are one company's attempt to control how you use their information. Are they enforceable? Do they actually care, if you don't republish? And why is that your concern? That's why your firm has management and lawyers.
You're not poisoning milk here; you're acquiring data for commercial purposes. Get to work, and let the legal beagles sort it out.
Taking used to be used primarily for government sponsored project. Now it is used because some random company thinks that just because they can make money with a property, they should own it.
Fooey. Companies have fought over trademarks since there were trademarks. Being sued for one is nothing new. If you don't believe me, cf. http://www.american.edu/ted/budweis.htm, and ask Budejovicky Budvar about "Budweiser".
I grant all your points, although I don't know why you say attachments are a "nasty kludge". I don't know what it means to add a kludge to a message transfer protocol that is free to mangle the message. No "\nFrom"? Please.
We're making different assumptions. I assume receiver controls his DNS and can configure SMTP hosts special to the purpose. Not only that, but it really isn't gobs and gobs of data the OP is sending, unless his company employs half of China. I'd wager even money their regular email systems handle attachments that big all the time.
If you set up your DNS with MX names under your control and spec them appropriately (and the sender does the same) SMTP gives you a one-hop file transfer system with redundancy. No firewall gimickry, no passwords, no shell. More secure, more reliable, and simpler to use than anything else.
e-mail isn't really a practical solution for a large volume data set
People keep saying that. Why? An email server specifically set up to receive large attachments would work just fine, as long as the sender's system isn't constrained.
On the wire, email is is a plain-vanilla file-transfer protocol, indistinguishable from ftp. It has the advantage of providing almost no attack surface, because the sender can't log in. As long as the data are encrypted, it's about as secure and reliable as can be.
Don't you think it matters what evidence the authorities showed Google? If you were Google's lawyer and the police showed up with enough evidence to convince any judge of the need for a warrant, why would you fight it?
So, let's see. You were a tech and decided it was your job as Defendant of Taxpayer Value to get the IT department to clamp down on riotous pirating. And instead of reforming, they fired you. I guess they learned their lesson, eh?
Would you have objected to a 1% across the board raise? Would that have cost more or less than all those precious DVD blanks?
Every job has its perks. People who work in education are trading off salary for other things. Lots of them spend their own money on classroom supplies. It all evens out.
You've got a bee in your bonnet about public schools and taxes. I hope your life is so uneventful that those things always seem paramount.
How is this "insightful" when it's fundamentally wrong? Since when is buying something stealing it, and just how much of Microsoft's capitalization can be attributed to the pre-DOS BASIC? For that matter, what part of "from the ground up" did Google or Apple write, given that the Internet and Linux and BSD and Mach are integral to their systems?
She lives on a fixed income. Why should she pay $5 a month to subsidize other people so they can get free music by violating copyright? For someone on a fixed income, another $5/mo bill is a significant hit.
I'll tell you why: for the same reason her toothpaste costs $5.
I don't watch television. I don't watch the Superbowl. But the price of everything I buy supports hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising. There's not even any guarantee that the price of product A doesn't "subsidize" the price of product B within a corporation. How does that differ from a tax?
There's a great deal more sloppiness in the assignment of who pays for what than free marketeers admit. It's not as though there's some subsidy-free platonic ideal whose pristine beauty is destroyed by a tax.
Reason #2: There are plenty of cross subsidies at the government level, too. Grandma benefits from the social welfare system, not to mention people whose salaries pay for everything from roads to national defense.
I'd like to know how they come up with $5, though. There're 26 million Canadians, maybe 2 million Internet connections, 2,000,000 * 12 * 5 = CAD 120,000,000 per year. How many songwriters? That's 100,000/yr for 1200(?) Canadian songwriters. Seems like a lot if you ask me, maybe 10X too much.
How's $0.50 a month sound?
3. Always use a database connection with the lowest necessary [privileges].
That's actually the whole answer. If done right, #1 and #2 are superfluous.
I'm appalled that 70,000 SQL Servers allow table-level access to the webserver. Hello? Do just this: write a stored procedure for everything your web app does. GRANT EXECUTE on those procedures -- and nothing else -- to the account running the webserver. Go home and sleep well, knowing no INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE will have any effect at all on your database.
<grumble> There are no technical problems, only people problems. </grumble>
I think that's a pretty clear indicator that nuclear power is currently fairly competitively priced.
RTFA. "NRG Energy says its two proposed units, which would produce a total of 2,700 megawatts, or enough to power 2 million homes, would cost $6 billion to build. A conventional natural-gas plant of the same size would cost $2 billion...."
I think that's a pretty clear indicator that nuclear power uncompetitive. Besides, the data come in from everywhere. Even the industry itself demands subsidies before it will consider an application. That's not because it's afraid of environmentalist. As if!
What you want is a Carbon Tax. Make the cost of polluting commensurate with the ecological damage. Then let the power industry choose the low-cost fuel. But don't give them any money! (It spoils the suspense.)
Prediction 1: Conservation will start happening. Initially, the carbon tax would raise the cost of eletricity as it's passed on to consumers. That will create demand for more efficient appliances and things you can actually turn off. And maybe the rest of the country will emulate California, where electricity use per capita is half the rest of the country, due mainly to how the power industry is rewarded for effective conservation.
Prediction 2: We'll start adding a lot of windmills. Wind is already competitively priced, within a cent or two of coal per kwh. The Carbon Tax would reverse that situation. It will be years before we have to worry about fluctuations in power from windmills. Denmark gets 20% of its electricity from wind today. Let's get there too and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Nope, couldn't be that running fiber everywhere is a much smaller and easier task.
I see. That's why Columbia, Maryland has fiber to the curb and Manhattan doesn't. Because it's easier to make infrastructure changes in big cities!
Must be that the Japanese are so clever and the Americans so dumb.
Suggestion: try knowing what you're talking about. It isn't a matter of Americans being dumb. It's a matter of regulation that benefits the regulated, instead of the economy. Japan has examples too, cf. retailing and rice farms.
We're a long, long way away from needing to worry about fluctuations in wind velocity. For one thing, wind and solar partly offset each other, because it tends to be windier when the sun isn't shining. For another, windmills don't get sited where the wind isn't pretty reliable, because that would make them less profitable.
But let's try a fact: Other countries are already doing this. Denmark gets 20% of its electricity from windmills, slated to grow to 25% in the next few years. They're owned by little-guy cooperatives who sell their juice to the utility. If there are technical problems with fluctuating wind, it sure seems like they're solved.
Wind is entirely green and entirely feasible. Nuclear can make neither claim after 50 years of economic and ecological travesty. But leave it to the US congress to shovel the money back where it came from, instead of where it will do the most good.
Yeah, "in addition to". That is: $500 + $0 = $500.
It's instead of, because no one is talking about spending $500 million dollars on wind power. Note, there is no wind power industry to speak of, no one lobbying for subsidies or liability relief. (Perhaps the power of eminent domain would be more helpful to windmills.)
By the way, if you look into it, you'll find wind power costs roughly $1/watt to build and almost nothing to run. $500 million builds you at least 500 megawatts in windmills, or about 20% of the 2700 MW being underwritten.
The cost differential of wind versus coal is less than that. In other words, if you subsidized 2700 MW of windmills by the tune of $500 million, the resulting energy would be cheaper than the cheapest alternative. And we haven't even touched ecological damage.
Actually, there's an even better alternative: conservation. Californians use half the electricity of the average American because their electric utilities are paid for "negawatts", for reducing demand, usually be replacing inefficient appliances at the utility's expense. It costs less to replace a bunch of refrigerators than to build the equivalent power plant to run them. Not a theory, a fact. Check it out. Do the same thing with $500 million, and maybe you won't even need any of those 2700 MW (forget the rest of the expenditure).
So, remember: it's a boondoggle. There's not a single watt of electricity produced by a privately built nuclear power plant anywhere on earth. They're uneconomic. But to politicians, they're like roads and bridges: pork to lard. The road away from coal and gas runs to wind and conservation. But there's no lobby for that, not least because there's very little public understanding, and plenty of misinformation provided by the hogs at the trough.
Uh huh. It costs $25 a day to park in Manhattan. Driving is far more expensive than public transit. The mayor's traffic study found that something like 8% of the affected drivers would be middle-income earners. Whatever else this fee is, it is definitely not a soak-the-poor scheme.
This is Manhattan we're talking about, where subways and buses, not to mention ferries and taxis, run thick. Driving here is a choice. You can drive and park many places outside the zone's perimeter and easily get the subway wherever you're going. In fact, that's what most people do.
So spare me your precious privacy concerns. The roads are a public good. When the cost of driving a car begins to approach the real ecological and social costs it imposes on the nondrivers, we can talk about parity. Meanwhile, rationing a scarce resource with pricing signals is surely better than the alternative nightmare we're living through now.
The Attorney General argues a position that advances the interests of the executive.
I'm sorry, but that's not his job and that's exactly what's wrong with this administration.
These guys are sworn to uphold the constitution, not to advance their branch's role in it. The AG was hired by the President who was hired by us -- if you can find anyone anymore who voted for him -- to further our interests, not his. His job is to enforce the laws we have, not the laws an autocrat wished to have.
From Terri Schiavo to Ronnie Brown to the tenth amendment, this administration has run everything for political gain. That got the Republicans booted out last November, but no never mind. The modus operandi, and its corrosive corrupting effect, remains. And we commit 20,000 more men -- the same men, actually, just staying longer -- to the President's own Bonfire of the Vanities.
Sure, what's popular and/or cultish will be preserved that way. And lots of stuff won't. Try getting a copy of "The Story of English" on DVD. (Try getting it on VHS! It's listed on Amazon, but you can't actually get it because it's out of print. And what's in print, if you get a used copy, is "protected" by Macrovision.) Let me know where I can download it, please.
For that matter, see if you can find a bona fide copy of the "The African Queen" on DVD. Yes, there are bootleg copies. Your quality may vary.
And that's just video. How much music is lost because it never made it from LP to CD?
Meanwhile, the media companies are ensuring that digital and even analog recordings are controlled with various forms of DRM. They're getting what they want. There's support for it even in the Linux kernel, and iTunes hasn't exactly been hurting for customers. Even as digital reproduction gets cheaper and easier, it's being undermined and sabotaged and prosecuted. Does anyone see that trend reversing?
You said it. The editors should take more responsibility for the lede in general, but getting it grammatically correct would be a fine first step. That, and maybe add "sed 's/supercede/supersede/g'" to the posting script.
/. to literate people while it practically promotes illiteracy.
It's hard to recommend
You may be able to choose where you live, but you choose only among choices.
The American lifestyle and landscape is determined by more than supreme consumers demanding goods and services. The housing market functions within rules set by social policy, in particular land use policy, in particular zoning. They in turn are influenced by local and national vested interests, from real estate developers to Exxon and GM. That's why there's nothing like Copenhagen here and nothing like Phoenix in Denmark.
So, yes, your choice may be your own fault. But your menu was predetermined, and involves politics more than economics.
Tax gasoline to compensate the rest of us for the ecological damage emitted from the tailpipe and for the cost to maintain a military to "protect" oil reserves and oil-producing nations.
Actually, even at recent prices, behavior has changed. Perhaps you've read about the "restructuring" at GM and Ford? SUVs suddenly aren't selling very well.
You cite roominess, torque, and size. I suggest European drivers like those things, too. But $6/gallon gasoline -- even, it would seem, $3 -- concentrates the mind wonderfully on fuel economy.
From the eweek article:
What? Did they need a cross-compiler or something?
The announcement basically says that since you like Apple so much, now you can use Apple's scripting technologies because "the longer-term solution and support of Apple technologies is worth the effort".
The real irony regards ODF and is too rich for words. Microsoft said we need Office XML because ODF isn't good enough. Then they founded an open-source project to sort-of support a converter. Now we see that Office isn't compatible with Office: if you run the same application on two different platforms it's own macro language won't work.
If you ask me, this is a strategy of convenience. On one hand, Microsoft wants to make Apple less convenient, to sell more Windows. On the other hand, the Microsoft really wants to sell more Office, because that's where the real money is.
One the third hand, making VBA work on OS X is doubtless harder than it looks, because there's no such thing as a clean interface at Microsoft. VBA is supposedly just a macro language; it should be written only in terms of the Office object model. But if doesn't include calls to Win32, I'll eat my hat.
That makes the equation: maintenance_cost > revenue.office - revenue.windows.
Exactly. I wonder why /. allows itself to use hijacked language. The title of this thread shouldn't be "U.S. Joins Hollywood in War on Piracy". It should be U.S. Joins Hollywood in War on Free Culture
I get a note periodically from my friendly local security admonisher suggesting I deinstall Firefox unless I have a "business need" to run it. Otherwise, please upgrade because "security vulnerabilities" have been found. Funny, he never suggests the same for IE, which I guess is very secure by comparison.
/. description and wondered how my browser could be hijacked to participate in a DOS attack. Only by following the link (um, thanks) did I learn the bark was worse than the bite.
Labelling something that can crash the browser as a "DOS attack" misleads the uninformed and the unknowing, who all to often populate the IT departments where so many of us work. They in turn impose unnecessary work on the rest of us. And you're stressing them out, which isn't very nice.
Besides, misleading is misleading. I read the
I would like to know: if I post ISO images of Office 12 on my blog, will Microsoft allow them to be viewed in countries that don't respect U.S. copyright law?
If not, it would seem that Chinese law applies to China, but U.S. law applies to the world. At least as a matter of Microsoft policy.
So, once again, we compare something freely available and available now, to something not available. And /. is all over it like white on paper. Can anyone spell "Longhorn"?
If the PC World editors want to hang onto the hype train and pretend anyone cares about Microsoft's promises, let them. And ignore them. Because by the time their vaporware materializes, it'll be competing against Firefox 2.0 and 2.5.