I have a BS in Computer Science and can speak Spanish and Russian well and I can get by in Portuguese. I studied Spanish in college and Portuguese and Russian on my own after graduation.
While there are certainly benefits to studying another language, I'm not sure that your rationale is correct. Many people who study other languages fail to learn much if anything for a variety of reasons. Unless you are really interested and motivated to do so (thinking it will help you in the future probably won't be enough), you'll fail too. I can't imagine that you would really need to know another language for research.
Here's a few thoughts about other languages.
Spanish - Probably the easiest language to learn for any speaker of a Western European language. Things are always pronounced as they are written and the rules are consistent. The fact that Spanish is easy to learn is a Good Thing and not at all at criticism of the language.
Portuguese - Almost as easy to learn as Spanish.
Differences between Continental Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese are slightly bigger than between British and American English, so if you learn one, you'll be OK in the other.
Russian - Very difficult grammar. The declensions will take you a lot of time to learn, but the language is the most logical of all the ones I've studied.
Chinese - The grammar is about the easiest in the world. The use of tones is more complex than you could possibly imagine and 99% of the people who suggest that you learn it would fail miserably if they tried that themselves. I'm speaking of Mandarin Chinese here. I do not recommend learning the even more complex Cantonese language.
Arabic - The grammar is incredibly complex. I know little about this language, but it's not any easier than Russian and maybe harder to learn.
Japanese - No tones (yea!), but possibly the most complex grammar on the planet. It will take a long time to learn it.
German - Harder to learn than Spanish/Portuguese, easier to learn than Russian. Widely spoken in a lot of Europe and a very useful language for work in the EU.
Yes, I am going to say "I told you so". I posted in just about all of the Reiser threads that I was sure he killed his wife. Why? I had a fiancee (we did not marry though) in Ukraine a few years ago and I know American men who married women from Ukraine and Russia. One thing that is just a 100% constant with these women is that they are always devoted to their children. The idea that a Russian woman would simply abandon her children is just ludicrous in the extreme. A Russian mother would NEVER abandon her children. When Reiser claimed she had done this, I knew he killed her. Since 99% or more of you have never had relationships with women in this part of the world, I can only tell you that they simply do NOT under any circumstances abandon their children. Fathers over there do this all the time, but not mothers.
Another issue is that the women over there are vindictive to an extent that Americans (and probably any man not from there) just cannot comprehend. I found it impossible to believe as well that she would return to Russia simply because any woman I've ever met from that part of the world would instead fight her husband in court just to stick it to him as much as possible. The idea that Nina Reiser would abandon her kids and a possible chance to stick it to Hans in the legal system just to live a footloose life in Russia is impossible to believe for anyone who's had any real experience with these women.
That was the argument for why Bush was an acceptable President. "It doesn't matter that he has no foreign policy knowledge, is not intelligent, and cannot string two sentences together. As long as he has good advisors, everything will be fine."
We see how that turned out. I think Bush's problem isn't that he has advisors, but that he put his faith in worthless men like Cheney and Rumsfield instead of people who had a clue like Colin Powell.
On the other extreme, Jimmy Carter didn't listen to anybody who advised him and we saw how great that turned out too.
Back in the dot-com days, I remember that USA Today picked one company more or less at random to profile for 1 year. I do not remember the name of this company and when you read further, you'll understand why. Basically some MBA guy from Harvard (I think) got some crazy idea that re-designing a PC (Windows based) desktop to look like planets was just something that everybody had to have. He hired one of his fellow graduates to work with him on it and they got office space in San Francisco. They had few employees and those that they had got paid very little. Basically the idea was that you had different planets on your desktop to refer to different things and you could assign people and such to different planets. Like maybe you put an icon for your dad on Mars for example. They somehow got in touch with Patrick Stewart (Capt. Picard of Star Trek fame) and gave him some stock options to agree to be their company spokesperson and to be the voice on their automated phone system.
Needless to say, they had a hard time getting more money after the first initial "You're a dot-com? Let me throw money at you because you must be on to something great!" enthusiasm wore off. The idea was just stupid and I couldn't believe that 2 MBA graduates (non-techies you might note) honestly though that there was a need for such a thing. Eventually they went belly up. There was no big buyout before the bubble burst, they just failed.
I pull all three items out, and just tell the TSA guy that I know I need to toss them. He glances at all three and tells me I have to ditch the deodorant and the shaving cream, but I can keep the mouthwash.
Because it's prescription.
So, the two retail aerosol cans that are nearly impossible to inject anything into are verboten, but the amber bottle with the mystery liquid in it, that's okay, because it has a sticker with a Walgreens logo on it. Fan-fucking-tastic. So the guy did you a favor and you're bitching?
Only on Slashdot...
By the way, have you read how incredibly difficult chemists have stated that it is to actually mix explosives on a plane? It requires beakers, ice and precision and the chances of making a mistake and not being able to take down the plane are quite high.
That's all fine and good for you. However, you do understand that you have no real control over Google's spam filters. Are you sure that Google never throws away a good message?
Perhaps in your business it's OK to potentially miss a message or two every now and then. Where I've worked, we ran our own mail servers and controlled the anti-spam software so if it was too restrictive we could tweak it. We operated on the assumption that it was better to get some spam than to miss real messages. At my last job, we simply could not miss any messages from certain clients and if we had to get a little spam as a result of that, that was something we lived with.
If your company doesn't have the money, time and expertise to run a mail server, I understand. But there's a trade off. Google has copies of your email and can theoretically look at it. I work for a Fortune 500 company and we simply cannot allow another company to have potential access to our email. If Google's network has a meltdown (unlikely, but can anyone say it's impossible?), your mail can't be reached.
I have a friend who is an accountant. When he turned in his notice to a Fortune 500 company (2 weeks I believe), they gave him 1 month's pay and told him (fairly politely) that he could leve immediately and good luck on his next job. However, note I said that he's an accountant.
It does seem to me that there's little point in removing access and keeping an IT guy on. If they need to remove access they should just pay you for a month and let you go. The fact that they want you to stay and took away your access says a lot of negative things about them. They don't trust you, but they want to keep you to the bitter end anyway.
Knowledge transfer as much as you wish during this time. If I was being treated this way, it sure wouldn't make me want to seek people out to give knowledge to, but I would probably help anyone who came to me with questions. I do suggest to you that you not ask for your access back. If your company wants to be a jerk about this, let it be a complete inconvenience for them and play by those rules. A company that has already shown that they don't trust you is not going to look favorably on any requests you make for restored access. In fact, they might find it suspicious that you need the access and they might suspect you of planting trojans, etc. Just live with it. In fact, you probably should fight to not get the access back and here's why. If something goes wrong after you leave, your company has shown you that they don't trust you. They might blame you for whatever happens if you get your access restored.
Most companies do not act this way. I've worked in IT for almost 22 years now (since college) and we've either just sent people packing the same day (never for IT staff, but it has happened for sales people and such) or they got to keep their access until they left.
Well, this is what happens when you go to court. You sometimes lose. Expect Autodesk to quickly settle this out of court with quite generous, but non-disclosed, terms to Mr. Vernor. I don't see how they can take the risk that an appeals court will uphold this, so I expect them to pay him a lot of money (maybe $100,000 or more) and have him agree to a non-disclosure of the settlement. The court case will be dropped and Autodesk will not admit to wrong doing and the ruling won't apply since they settled. This will keep the door open that Autodesk or some other company might be able to try a similar case in the future and get a ruling in their favor.
I absolutely hate it that Science Fiction and Fantasy are lumped together I do too, but we seem to be solidly in the minority here. I used to read more SciFi some years ago and I used to talk to co-workers who also were interested in it. I was quite surprised to find out that they saw no difference between SciFi and Fantasy and read both and that I was in the minority to only like SciFi. I have zero interest in Fantasy, but I could name some SciFi authors who I like who write both.
At my current job and my previous job, once it came off the books (after 5 years) and we no longer wanted it or wanted to replace it, it was fair game. My former employer used to sell some stuff really cheaply to employees and they only used the dumpster as a last resort. Here we just give stuff away if anyone wants it. At my last job, I had the authority to get rid of old equipment and we had an old Sun workstation that had no use for us any more but one guy wanted it. I wrote up a letter in Word and printed it out for him. It stated that the equipment was no longer on the books and that we were giving it to him for free and that I had the authority to give it to him. I signed it and told him to keep the letter just in case in the future somebody ever tried to give him some crap about it.
It'll be interesting, if there is a new trial where the RIAA has to prove distribution, whether the judge considers MediaSentry downloads to be proof of infringement. I think you are missing a very important point. The first trial was a jury trial. Any subsequent trial will probably also be by jury. It matters a lot more what the jury thinks about MediaSentry's "evidence" than what the judge thinks.
The original case was lost because the lawyers for the lady were incompetent. I'm sorry, but it's true. The jury reported that they were convinced that when the PC had "missing files" it was because the woman had the PC cleaned to get rid of incriminating evidence. Her explanation was that the PC had to be repaired due to a hard disk crash and the repair involved getting a new disk drive. The jury either did not buy this explanation or was not told of it. The judge's instructions were a slam dunk to a jury that was already convinced that the woman broke the law and was trying to hide it. Unless her lawyers do a better job in round 2, don't hold your breath that she'll survive a re-trial. She's still going to have to convince another jury that she wasn't destroying incriminating evidence to cover her butt. Remember too that the people who serve on US juries are not techies. They are roofers and truck drivers. I served on a jury almost 3 years ago and I was the only IT person in the room. There were 1 or 2 teachers and a couple of other professionals, but we had a lot of people on that jury who could barely and I do mean barely do email. Fortunately our case did not involve technology.
When you have truly free elections, sometimes voters don't vote the way you want them to. That's how it works. I remember the Bush administration getting very upset at the results of a Palestinian election. Some people want democracy, but only when they agree with the outcome.
Shareholder proposals rarely pass. The failure rate is extraordinarily high. I'd love to see some stats, but I'd say you can probably count on one hand the number of shareholder proposals each year that pass in the entire NYSE or NASDAQ. The fact that this failed, whatever its value, is not surprising. The fact that somebody actually thought it had a chance of passing is surprising, but I guess that idealistic person does not know how annual shareholder meetings really work.
One would think that after a while it would get to be a chore to have to lie day after day to millions of people, but I guess the payback for "some Republicans" is great enough that their willing to step up to the challenge.
I think you are right about the majority of Republicans. They've just been bought. However, some actually do believe that stuff. It is typical Republican mantra to say "Government bad. Business good." "All regulation bad. All deregulation good." "The free market solves all ills." So I can see that there might actually be a few Republicans who honestly believe that the free market is solving this problem, but I do think that most of the Republican opposition is simply because the big providers paid them enough to oppose it.
Family of deceased military members in Iraq and Afghanistan deal with this all the time. Kid gets killed and nobody knows how to get into his Yahoo (or whatever) email. From what I've read, with very very few exceptions, the service providers will say that they are truly very sorry for the loss, but there is nothing they can do to help you get into the account if the deceased did not tell you how to get into it. Unless maybe you can get a court order somehow ordering MSN, etc. to help you get into the accounts, expect no help there. The university might help you, maybe, with proof of death if a family member (not you) asks to get into his accounts there, but expect commercial companies to refuse to help you because of confidentiality policies they have in place.
I'd politely suggest that you think about why you felt the need to ask a bunch of strangers, including me, whether it's ethical or not to crack the accounts. My personal feeling is that since the guy is dead, it's OK, but if you are old enough to post here intelligently about the situation, you should have enough of a sense of ethics to decide this kind of thing on your own without having a bunch of strangers tell you whether it's right or wrong.
The company I work for uses Verisign. We can't really use self-generated certs or cheapish certs from companies nobody has heard of. We have to use certs from somebody who is a name vendor so our customers get those warm, fuzzy feelings that customers need to keep doing business with us.
Verisign's customer support is very good. I had a relatively minor issue and they had it fixed within 1 minute of my call. I was shocked.
Verisign is not cheap. SSL certs cost $399 for just the basic bare bones ones for 1 year. You'll pay more for more bells and whistles and the longer it lasts, the more you pay, but you do get a discounted price for multi-year renewals.
I built a system in the late 90's where you had a web-page where you entered an account-name. That name was tied to a cellphone number which was sent a generated password as a text-message. The password was only valid for 5 minutes.
AFAIK it's still in use and have never been cracked. I'm guessing that you're a Brit. This approach is quite impractical and potentially costly in the USA as unless you pay for a bucket of SMS messages (this is what the rest of world calls "texting"), you'll get charged for each message to your phone.
I happen to think David Lynch is a genius. Some will not agree. That's fine. However, I think hopefully we can safely agree that Lynch does know how to direct (he's been nominated for several Academy Awards). The problem with the original Dune in my opinion is that the story is vast. It was just impossible to do justice to the story in a 2.5 hour movie. I don't personally consider the differences between the film and novel to be significant and for those who do, well, just wait until you see this film. If you think that in 2.5 to 3 hours that Peter Berg will somehow be able to produce a more faithful version of Dune , well, that's a rather interesting thought that surely will be proven false. Lynch had to leave out large sections of the first book to save time and Berg will operate under the same conditions. That's why the SciFi Channel filmed Dune as a multipart story.
Vista Home Basic: $399 - $100 rebate - $100 upgrade rebate = your price $99
OK, I see this post was modded as "funny", but $399 - $100 - $100 != $99 (try $199) Unintentional mistake? Or an example of what we might call "Microsoft Math"?
Yes, there are always have been, always are and always will be people on Taiwan who are perhaps a little too trusting of China. The vast majority of Taiwanese people just want to be left alone. That is all. They don't particularly like China telling them what to do. They would not in any way do anything that would help China get the upper hand against themselves or the USA because they know that the only thing right now preventing China from turning Taiwan into Tibet Take 2 is the threat that the US military will intervene if they invade. Even during the bad days of the Communist Chinese government when Mao and his cronies still ran things, you had some defectors from Taiwan who foolishly believed that "Communist = good", "Capitalist = bad". I don't doubt that the man you knew was the way he was, but I don't think he is typical of most Taiwanese.
Reading the article (gasp!) left me with the impression that the Judge was ticked off because of the attorney's behavior and method of prosecuting their case and not that the Judge thought the patents were bogus. It's as if the plaintiff is getting nailed because it hired a pair of SOB's to press its case.
I read the same article. That's not how I read it. There were apparently 2 problems. 1) The lawsuit was frivolous and that caused the judge to set aside the jury verdict. The jury blew it, but they usually do in patent cases. 2) The attorneys acted in a bad manner, disregarding some specific instructions from the judge and proceeding onward in a case which the judge felt should never have gone to trial. But that is what attorneys do, as they know sometimes when you roll the dice, a stupid jury goes your way.
Judges don't like their time being wasted - at all. I see only good coming from this.
I read on another site how this works for music files. It's not so impressive. It does not remove DRM. It simply plays the song, using a valid license if one is required, and records the song to an MP3 file, which of course is DRM free. This might be OK for some users, but it's definitely not going to be what others will want. Perhaps a similar mechanism is done for video files, but the article I read did not discuss that.
No DRM is broken, hence lawsuits may be difficult.
If they believe his story that she abandoned her kids (she had sole custody), boyfriend and a highly paid job to live incognito in Russia he'll get off, but I seriously doubt that.
I've posted on this before, but perhaps it's worth repeating, although in a shorter version. I speak good Russian and I've spent a lot of time (too much honestly) in that part of the world. I had a fiancee at one time from Ukraine, but we never got married because I just couldn't put up with her lack of respect and constant anger management issues. I can tell you from personal experience that typically women in this part of the world are vindictive as hell. The odds of one of them disappearing to screw a guy over are incredibly small. These women would typically stick around and go to court and screw you over there via a painful and expensive divorce. They wouldn't just run away and hide. There is no realistic chance that whatever happened that Nina Reiser is hiding in Russia. It would completely unheard of for a Russian woman to abandon her kids. She would fight to the death to protect them and NEVER under any circumstances abandon them to run off with a boyfriend. It just doesn't happen. I am sure that Nina Reiser is dead and whether Hans Reiser killed her is something the trial will decide. But if any of you seriously think that Hans is being framed, all I can say is that you ever went to that part of the world and got to know the women over there, you would know that the scenario the defense is proposing is laughably improbable.
As someone who has been to Taiwan twice, I am 100% in agreement with MaWeiTao's post. If it was my call, I'd put the data center in Taiwan in a heartbeat. The worries about China invading a red herring. The KMT will surely win the upcoming presidential election and they will improve relations with China and the rhetoric will go down accordingly.
For those of you who don't know, about 25% of the population of Estonia is ethnically Russian. These people do not see themselves as Estonian citizens, but as Russians who happen to live in Estonia. Russian is no longer an official language there. Note that the Russian population doesn't want to leave as life in the EU has a lot of advantages over life in Russia, but they hate the Estonian government. The Russians conveniently overlook the fact that their government forcibly incorporated Estonia into the USSR and the locals actually actively resisted with a guerilla movement into the early 1950's (look up Forest Brothers sometime at Wikipedia). The USSR resettled Russians and Ukrainians into Estonia to dilute the local nationalism and made Russian the official language. So it's no surprise that upon gaining independence that the Estonians dropped Russian as an official language. To become Estonian citizens, people had to take a test in Estonian, which kept a lot of Russians away from citizenship as they never bothered to learn Estonian in the USSR days. I would bet almost anything that the student involved is an ethnic Russian student. If you ever have a chance to talk to Russians from there, it's quite amazing what lengths they will go to to justify the USSR's barbaric policies against Estonia.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a BS in Computer Science and can speak Spanish and Russian well and I can get by in Portuguese. I studied Spanish in college and Portuguese and Russian on my own after graduation.
While there are certainly benefits to studying another language, I'm not sure that your rationale is correct. Many people who study other languages fail to learn much if anything for a variety of reasons. Unless you are really interested and motivated to do so (thinking it will help you in the future probably won't be enough), you'll fail too. I can't imagine that you would really need to know another language for research.
Here's a few thoughts about other languages.
Spanish - Probably the easiest language to learn for any speaker of a Western European language. Things are always pronounced as they are written and the rules are consistent. The fact that Spanish is easy to learn is a Good Thing and not at all at criticism of the language.
Portuguese - Almost as easy to learn as Spanish. Differences between Continental Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese are slightly bigger than between British and American English, so if you learn one, you'll be OK in the other.
Russian - Very difficult grammar. The declensions will take you a lot of time to learn, but the language is the most logical of all the ones I've studied.
Chinese - The grammar is about the easiest in the world. The use of tones is more complex than you could possibly imagine and 99% of the people who suggest that you learn it would fail miserably if they tried that themselves. I'm speaking of Mandarin Chinese here. I do not recommend learning the even more complex Cantonese language.
Arabic - The grammar is incredibly complex. I know little about this language, but it's not any easier than Russian and maybe harder to learn.
Japanese - No tones (yea!), but possibly the most complex grammar on the planet. It will take a long time to learn it.
German - Harder to learn than Spanish/Portuguese, easier to learn than Russian. Widely spoken in a lot of Europe and a very useful language for work in the EU.
Yes, I am going to say "I told you so". I posted in just about all of the Reiser threads that I was sure he killed his wife. Why? I had a fiancee (we did not marry though) in Ukraine a few years ago and I know American men who married women from Ukraine and Russia. One thing that is just a 100% constant with these women is that they are always devoted to their children. The idea that a Russian woman would simply abandon her children is just ludicrous in the extreme. A Russian mother would NEVER abandon her children. When Reiser claimed she had done this, I knew he killed her. Since 99% or more of you have never had relationships with women in this part of the world, I can only tell you that they simply do NOT under any circumstances abandon their children. Fathers over there do this all the time, but not mothers.
Another issue is that the women over there are vindictive to an extent that Americans (and probably any man not from there) just cannot comprehend. I found it impossible to believe as well that she would return to Russia simply because any woman I've ever met from that part of the world would instead fight her husband in court just to stick it to him as much as possible. The idea that Nina Reiser would abandon her kids and a possible chance to stick it to Hans in the legal system just to live a footloose life in Russia is impossible to believe for anyone who's had any real experience with these women.
On the other extreme, Jimmy Carter didn't listen to anybody who advised him and we saw how great that turned out too.
Back in the dot-com days, I remember that USA Today picked one company more or less at random to profile for 1 year. I do not remember the name of this company and when you read further, you'll understand why. Basically some MBA guy from Harvard (I think) got some crazy idea that re-designing a PC (Windows based) desktop to look like planets was just something that everybody had to have. He hired one of his fellow graduates to work with him on it and they got office space in San Francisco. They had few employees and those that they had got paid very little. Basically the idea was that you had different planets on your desktop to refer to different things and you could assign people and such to different planets. Like maybe you put an icon for your dad on Mars for example. They somehow got in touch with Patrick Stewart (Capt. Picard of Star Trek fame) and gave him some stock options to agree to be their company spokesperson and to be the voice on their automated phone system.
Needless to say, they had a hard time getting more money after the first initial "You're a dot-com? Let me throw money at you because you must be on to something great!" enthusiasm wore off. The idea was just stupid and I couldn't believe that 2 MBA graduates (non-techies you might note) honestly though that there was a need for such a thing. Eventually they went belly up. There was no big buyout before the bubble burst, they just failed.
By the way, have you read how incredibly difficult chemists have stated that it is to actually mix explosives on a plane? It requires beakers, ice and precision and the chances of making a mistake and not being able to take down the plane are quite high.
That's all fine and good for you. However, you do understand that you have no real control over Google's spam filters. Are you sure that Google never throws away a good message?
Perhaps in your business it's OK to potentially miss a message or two every now and then. Where I've worked, we ran our own mail servers and controlled the anti-spam software so if it was too restrictive we could tweak it. We operated on the assumption that it was better to get some spam than to miss real messages. At my last job, we simply could not miss any messages from certain clients and if we had to get a little spam as a result of that, that was something we lived with.
If your company doesn't have the money, time and expertise to run a mail server, I understand. But there's a trade off. Google has copies of your email and can theoretically look at it. I work for a Fortune 500 company and we simply cannot allow another company to have potential access to our email. If Google's network has a meltdown (unlikely, but can anyone say it's impossible?), your mail can't be reached.
I have a friend who is an accountant. When he turned in his notice to a Fortune 500 company (2 weeks I believe), they gave him 1 month's pay and told him (fairly politely) that he could leve immediately and good luck on his next job. However, note I said that he's an accountant.
It does seem to me that there's little point in removing access and keeping an IT guy on. If they need to remove access they should just pay you for a month and let you go. The fact that they want you to stay and took away your access says a lot of negative things about them. They don't trust you, but they want to keep you to the bitter end anyway.
Knowledge transfer as much as you wish during this time. If I was being treated this way, it sure wouldn't make me want to seek people out to give knowledge to, but I would probably help anyone who came to me with questions. I do suggest to you that you not ask for your access back. If your company wants to be a jerk about this, let it be a complete inconvenience for them and play by those rules. A company that has already shown that they don't trust you is not going to look favorably on any requests you make for restored access. In fact, they might find it suspicious that you need the access and they might suspect you of planting trojans, etc. Just live with it. In fact, you probably should fight to not get the access back and here's why. If something goes wrong after you leave, your company has shown you that they don't trust you. They might blame you for whatever happens if you get your access restored.
Most companies do not act this way. I've worked in IT for almost 22 years now (since college) and we've either just sent people packing the same day (never for IT staff, but it has happened for sales people and such) or they got to keep their access until they left.
Well, this is what happens when you go to court. You sometimes lose. Expect Autodesk to quickly settle this out of court with quite generous, but non-disclosed, terms to Mr. Vernor. I don't see how they can take the risk that an appeals court will uphold this, so I expect them to pay him a lot of money (maybe $100,000 or more) and have him agree to a non-disclosure of the settlement. The court case will be dropped and Autodesk will not admit to wrong doing and the ruling won't apply since they settled. This will keep the door open that Autodesk or some other company might be able to try a similar case in the future and get a ruling in their favor.
At my current job and my previous job, once it came off the books (after 5 years) and we no longer wanted it or wanted to replace it, it was fair game. My former employer used to sell some stuff really cheaply to employees and they only used the dumpster as a last resort. Here we just give stuff away if anyone wants it. At my last job, I had the authority to get rid of old equipment and we had an old Sun workstation that had no use for us any more but one guy wanted it. I wrote up a letter in Word and printed it out for him. It stated that the equipment was no longer on the books and that we were giving it to him for free and that I had the authority to give it to him. I signed it and told him to keep the letter just in case in the future somebody ever tried to give him some crap about it.
I'll wipe the drive and put a free Linux on them and give them away to single mothers so their children have a way to work at home.
And what kind of jobs do you expect these children, who are working at home, to get?
When you have truly free elections, sometimes voters don't vote the way you want them to. That's how it works. I remember the Bush administration getting very upset at the results of a Palestinian election. Some people want democracy, but only when they agree with the outcome.
Shareholder proposals rarely pass. The failure rate is extraordinarily high. I'd love to see some stats, but I'd say you can probably count on one hand the number of shareholder proposals each year that pass in the entire NYSE or NASDAQ. The fact that this failed, whatever its value, is not surprising. The fact that somebody actually thought it had a chance of passing is surprising, but I guess that idealistic person does not know how annual shareholder meetings really work.
One would think that after a while it would get to be a chore to have to lie day after day to millions of people, but I guess the payback for "some Republicans" is great enough that their willing to step up to the challenge.
I think you are right about the majority of Republicans. They've just been bought. However, some actually do believe that stuff. It is typical Republican mantra to say "Government bad. Business good." "All regulation bad. All deregulation good." "The free market solves all ills." So I can see that there might actually be a few Republicans who honestly believe that the free market is solving this problem, but I do think that most of the Republican opposition is simply because the big providers paid them enough to oppose it.Family of deceased military members in Iraq and Afghanistan deal with this all the time. Kid gets killed and nobody knows how to get into his Yahoo (or whatever) email. From what I've read, with very very few exceptions, the service providers will say that they are truly very sorry for the loss, but there is nothing they can do to help you get into the account if the deceased did not tell you how to get into it. Unless maybe you can get a court order somehow ordering MSN, etc. to help you get into the accounts, expect no help there. The university might help you, maybe, with proof of death if a family member (not you) asks to get into his accounts there, but expect commercial companies to refuse to help you because of confidentiality policies they have in place. I'd politely suggest that you think about why you felt the need to ask a bunch of strangers, including me, whether it's ethical or not to crack the accounts. My personal feeling is that since the guy is dead, it's OK, but if you are old enough to post here intelligently about the situation, you should have enough of a sense of ethics to decide this kind of thing on your own without having a bunch of strangers tell you whether it's right or wrong.
The company I work for uses Verisign. We can't really use self-generated certs or cheapish certs from companies nobody has heard of. We have to use certs from somebody who is a name vendor so our customers get those warm, fuzzy feelings that customers need to keep doing business with us. Verisign's customer support is very good. I had a relatively minor issue and they had it fixed within 1 minute of my call. I was shocked. Verisign is not cheap. SSL certs cost $399 for just the basic bare bones ones for 1 year. You'll pay more for more bells and whistles and the longer it lasts, the more you pay, but you do get a discounted price for multi-year renewals.
I happen to think David Lynch is a genius. Some will not agree. That's fine. However, I think hopefully we can safely agree that Lynch does know how to direct (he's been nominated for several Academy Awards). The problem with the original Dune in my opinion is that the story is vast. It was just impossible to do justice to the story in a 2.5 hour movie. I don't personally consider the differences between the film and novel to be significant and for those who do, well, just wait until you see this film. If you think that in 2.5 to 3 hours that Peter Berg will somehow be able to produce a more faithful version of Dune , well, that's a rather interesting thought that surely will be proven false. Lynch had to leave out large sections of the first book to save time and Berg will operate under the same conditions. That's why the SciFi Channel filmed Dune as a multipart story.
Only it would be
Vista Home Basic: $399 - $100 rebate - $100 upgrade rebate = your price $99
OK, I see this post was modded as "funny", but
$399 - $100 - $100 != $99 (try $199)
Unintentional mistake? Or an example of what we might call "Microsoft Math"?
Yes, there are always have been, always are and always will be people on Taiwan who are perhaps a little too trusting of China. The vast majority of Taiwanese people just want to be left alone. That is all. They don't particularly like China telling them what to do. They would not in any way do anything that would help China get the upper hand against themselves or the USA because they know that the only thing right now preventing China from turning Taiwan into Tibet Take 2 is the threat that the US military will intervene if they invade. Even during the bad days of the Communist Chinese government when Mao and his cronies still ran things, you had some defectors from Taiwan who foolishly believed that "Communist = good", "Capitalist = bad". I don't doubt that the man you knew was the way he was, but I don't think he is typical of most Taiwanese.
Reading the article (gasp!) left me with the impression that the Judge was ticked off because of the attorney's behavior and method of prosecuting their case and not that the Judge thought the patents were bogus. It's as if the plaintiff is getting nailed because it hired a pair of SOB's to press its case.
I read the same article. That's not how I read it. There were apparently 2 problems.
1) The lawsuit was frivolous and that caused the judge to set aside the jury verdict. The jury blew it, but they usually do in patent cases.
2) The attorneys acted in a bad manner, disregarding some specific instructions from the judge and proceeding onward in a case which the judge felt should never have gone to trial. But that is what attorneys do, as they know sometimes when you roll the dice, a stupid jury goes your way.
Judges don't like their time being wasted - at all. I see only good coming from this.
I read on another site how this works for music files. It's not so impressive. It does not remove DRM. It simply plays the song, using a valid license if one is required, and records the song to an MP3 file, which of course is DRM free. This might be OK for some users, but it's definitely not going to be what others will want. Perhaps a similar mechanism is done for video files, but the article I read did not discuss that.
No DRM is broken, hence lawsuits may be difficult.
If they believe his story that she abandoned her kids (she had sole custody), boyfriend and a highly paid job to live incognito in Russia he'll get off, but I seriously doubt that.
I've posted on this before, but perhaps it's worth repeating, although in a shorter version. I speak good Russian and I've spent a lot of time (too much honestly) in that part of the world. I had a fiancee at one time from Ukraine, but we never got married because I just couldn't put up with her lack of respect and constant anger management issues. I can tell you from personal experience that typically women in this part of the world are vindictive as hell. The odds of one of them disappearing to screw a guy over are incredibly small. These women would typically stick around and go to court and screw you over there via a painful and expensive divorce. They wouldn't just run away and hide. There is no realistic chance that whatever happened that Nina Reiser is hiding in Russia. It would completely unheard of for a Russian woman to abandon her kids. She would fight to the death to protect them and NEVER under any circumstances abandon them to run off with a boyfriend. It just doesn't happen. I am sure that Nina Reiser is dead and whether Hans Reiser killed her is something the trial will decide. But if any of you seriously think that Hans is being framed, all I can say is that you ever went to that part of the world and got to know the women over there, you would know that the scenario the defense is proposing is laughably improbable.
As someone who has been to Taiwan twice, I am 100% in agreement with MaWeiTao's post. If it was my call, I'd put the data center in Taiwan in a heartbeat. The worries about China invading a red herring. The KMT will surely win the upcoming presidential election and they will improve relations with China and the rhetoric will go down accordingly.
For those of you who don't know, about 25% of the population of Estonia is ethnically Russian. These people do not see themselves as Estonian citizens, but as Russians who happen to live in Estonia. Russian is no longer an official language there. Note that the Russian population doesn't want to leave as life in the EU has a lot of advantages over life in Russia, but they hate the Estonian government. The Russians conveniently overlook the fact that their government forcibly incorporated Estonia into the USSR and the locals actually actively resisted with a guerilla movement into the early 1950's (look up Forest Brothers sometime at Wikipedia). The USSR resettled Russians and Ukrainians into Estonia to dilute the local nationalism and made Russian the official language. So it's no surprise that upon gaining independence that the Estonians dropped Russian as an official language. To become Estonian citizens, people had to take a test in Estonian, which kept a lot of Russians away from citizenship as they never bothered to learn Estonian in the USSR days. I would bet almost anything that the student involved is an ethnic Russian student. If you ever have a chance to talk to Russians from there, it's quite amazing what lengths they will go to to justify the USSR's barbaric policies against Estonia.