It is NEVER okay for a company to install an application on my computer without my concent.
Says You. MSFT begs to differ. Did you read the EULA? You have specifically signed away all rights, explicit and implicit by opening the envelop containing CD or if it was pre-installed in your machine, by clicking OK. So if you
can switch to an alternative OS do that. If not figure out how much it would cost to do so and is the pain worth
the savings. In the long run if you try to reduce you switching costs, next time around you will be able to switch.
Microsoft does not benefit by deliberately pissing off its users in this way.
No they are merely testing, how far they can push their flock. One has periodically test these things to know how much you can get away with. Without precise knowledge of how much the users will put up with, they might be a little conservative and lose money they would have otherwise made. Further this will also raise the pain threshold of the users, once they get used to this level of pain, they will not see anything wrong with Vista.
There is a lot of variability in the English spellings of foreign names. Abdul, Abdhul, Abdulla, Abdhulla, Abdhullah... Further why would the terrorist consistently use the same name and same spelling all the time? In fact in Introduction to Evasive Techniques 101 taught in PIT (Pakistani Institute of Terrorism, West Campus, Madarassabad, Quetta, North West Frontier Province, Pakistan) first lesson, is creating a new identity for each nefarious activity the terrorist do. Sometimes for no reason at all other than to practice juggling multiple identities.
This TWL and the various hues of Terror Alert (today it is brilliant opalescent blue alert level!) are activities
done by the Government to show that it is doing something. The logic behind it is not much deeper than, "We need to
do something, this is something, so we are doing it."
The guys who got promoted to leading positions in MSFT all started when there was no difference between greedy algorithm and optimized algorithm for market share. And there is no shortage of shills who sing the tune their management loves
to hear. Feedback loop got interrupted, a siege mentality has set in and that is how MSFT became IBM.
Yes, you don't get it. As long as you are buying a MSFT product, they don't have to change their ways. All it takes is to send a critical update to render XP virtually useless. You are not free as long as you depend on MSFT.
When MSFT was touting the The Total Cost of Ownership studies, did anyone ask, if the costs included reacting to unwanted updates? How many times people have spoken about vendor lock and the risk of putting all your eggs in one
basket? Trashed everyone as MSFT hate-mongers. It will only get worse. If the revenue stream is threatened MSFT will
slip in another forced update make it more and more difficult to switch to alternatives. Because, get this, MSFT can charge you all the way up to your switching costs. The only way it can increase revenue is by increasing your switching
cost.
Put yourself in MSFT's shoes and imagine what you would do. A security issue crops up. One team comes back with a solution that does not break all the competitors products. The other team comes up with a solution that incidentally
breaks competitors products. Which one will you pick as "critical security update"? MSFT is doing exactly what it should rationally do, given its market share. It is the customers who are irrationally picking MSFT solutions against their own best interests.
I think these patents are so obviously flawed, they will be challenged and overturned the minute they try to enforce it.
I have a hunch Amazon knows it too and they will use it only to brag, "We have a portfolio of 123 patents" as part of
their presentations to investment brokers and stock analysts. But still, we definitely need some form of patent
reform.
Most modern books are created in electronic form to begin with and are printed with high speed offset printers from files. Only older books have to be scanned.
From the picture I am not able to make out how he did the most crucial thing for the helicopter, controlling of the
collective pitch (sometimes called total pitch) and the cyclic pitch. Without it, the craft will lift off and "fly"
uncontrollably and land. I see two large struts holding up the rotor hub and the hub seems to be a ball. He might have
done away with total pitch, relying on throttle ( input power) to self adjust the "lift" and the ball being pivoted
to provide just the cyclic pitch control. That will give some rudimentary direction control. Interesting toy. Hope a youtube video appears soon.
Sure I am glad there is atleast one Nigerian working with his hands and brain instead of sening emails about 18 million
dollars in a slush fund left over from the coffers of General Abacha.
All these services and more (daily cooks come in and make your curry and roti, piano/violin/karate teachers come in to teach your kids) are available in Mumbai even for middle class (by income) people.
How many of these libraries think of Open Source and software platform choice? How many of them make sure their web sites are platform agnostic, equally accessible from all browsers? These people are willing to stand up
and are willing to pay more to preserve their liberty. Hats off to them. But does this stand also extends to not
having their documents locked down in a proprietary format encumbered with licenses and restrictions? I would
very much like such ideas, being independent of vendors, would extend to Corporate America too.
OMG they are forging ahead!
on
eBay The Vote
·
· Score: 1
We Americans used to lead the world in having free markets and market driven economies. Now these third world countries
are getting ahead of us. We need to work extra hard to catch up!
Basically, someone impersonates me. Some bank/merchant/credit card company extends credit without verification. The impersonator defaults. They report me as the deadbeat. That is the scenario. The creditor who mistakenly
reported me should be liable for slander. The credit reporting agencies should be considered accessory after the fact. So the real culprits are the people who extend credit without verification and people who report me as a deadbeat without justification. Normally if they have to face full consequences of their action, they will clean up their act and we would not need any special laws for identity theft.
But congress in its infinite stupidity holds the impersonator the responsible for my ruined reputation. The impersonator
is liable for lying, cheating, committing forgery and is responsible for all the damage caused to the credulous creditor. And if they call me a deadbeat without proper verification whoever reported me as the deadbeat is responsible for the
damage caused to my good name.
As usual it is a credit reporting agency liability protection act being sold to the public as an anti-ID theft law.
Do the copyright owners have to provide the entire damn clip to Google?
Or just buy the hash/indexer too from Google, run it through their materials in their secure facility and give
Google just the hash data base?
You need to compare apples to apples. (oops!) Take a machine that is preloaded with Linux and download a WinXP/Vista, if possible and try to install it yourself. Most people compare pre-installed windows user experience with download a full
os, install and run user experience of Linux.
China may also then cash in their US debt they have been buying making it worse.
That is not the big issue. They are holding our bonds, and we don't have the Gold standard. So we just print them
as many dollars as we want and give it to them. They know it too. So they won't cash the bonds, but they might start
a war.
In the last war, almost all historians agree, Germany was defeated mainly by the huge industrial output of USA. In the next Sino-US war, just see who has the industrial capacity to out produce weapons to foresee the winner.
US Congress in the pocket of US gaming industry association. The WTO is in the pocket of International gaming association. Good fight. Promises great action. Wanna bet who is going to win?
NoScript runs inside FireFox. I am thinking of a way a third party could write code and give it to me and that runs inside acroreader and block it from doing things I don't want it to do. In fact I would like some kind of code that will sandbox any application given to it. Something like "sandbox acroreader" should run acroreader and allow it to make all kinds of calls to the registry and disk etc etc. But none of these commands get past the sandbox environment. When I close I can examine all the changes acroreader (or anything else) tried to make to the OS and selectively allow/deny some changes to persist. Pipe dream?
I always disable javascript and open external links in the PDF reader. Is is enough protection? Or am I still vulnerable? Is it possible to write a NoScript like extension to acroreader?
Wow! You praise Newton's spiritual work so highly. Tell me some of the serious theistic moral spiritual insight that Newton found which was taken seriously by the Church. Even today nobody discusses or analyzes Newton's spiritual thought. If the scientists have not been putting Newton on the pedestal and showered him with respect, he would have been quietly forgotten by the Church. So much for you new found respect for Newton.
Suggesting that the religious seek the credibility of the track record of science is silly. The track record of the progress of religion includes the virtual abolishment of the once-ubiquitous practices of infanticide and slavery. The track record of science includes providing intellectual credibility and the color of rationality to the holocaust and communism.
What? Religion is taking credit for abolishment of slavery? Are you talking about the same Judeo-Christian religion that enshrines the right of slave owning in the Ten Commandments? "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, ass, ox, nor man slave nor woman slave". It is the God of Abraham who demanded infanticide as a sacrifice.
As for science lending credibility to holocaust and communism, why are you forgetting Christianity lending its support for the Inquisition, Salem witch trials, and all the atrocities committed in the name of Christ by the Conquistadors? Only after science gained a foot hold and removed the legislative power from the Church, it reformed the Church into a tolerable institution of charity. When it had the political power it attracted too many undesirable types interested in the power to the leadership positions.
Why do you theists crave the "scientific" label so much? Why do you want to shoehorn the adjective "scientific" to the religious texts? Is it because all the theistic power bases like the church, and the political parties have lost their credibility completely? Is it because only science has some credibility and a track record of delivering progress? And you need to somehow get part of that credibility rub off on you?
is coming. Never mind ID did not predict any specific design intent about appendix other than, "we are designed, so there must be
some use for all the useless organs". But that won't stop them from predicting immediate demise of Darwinian evolution.
As usual I did not read the article, this being/. Saw the thing about the article having pictures of chicks and that motivated me to actually click on the link to see the picture. What a bummer! Instead of some real cute chicks, the article has two female Homo sapiens dressed in tuxedos tugging-of-war in snow. There should be a law against people luring unsuspecting visitors by giving titillating titles promising zoological specimens and then showing girlie pictures instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Says You. MSFT begs to differ. Did you read the EULA? You have specifically signed away all rights, explicit and implicit by opening the envelop containing CD or if it was pre-installed in your machine, by clicking OK. So if you can switch to an alternative OS do that. If not figure out how much it would cost to do so and is the pain worth the savings. In the long run if you try to reduce you switching costs, next time around you will be able to switch.
No they are merely testing, how far they can push their flock. One has periodically test these things to know how much you can get away with. Without precise knowledge of how much the users will put up with, they might be a little conservative and lose money they would have otherwise made. Further this will also raise the pain threshold of the users, once they get used to this level of pain, they will not see anything wrong with Vista.
This TWL and the various hues of Terror Alert (today it is brilliant opalescent blue alert level!) are activities done by the Government to show that it is doing something. The logic behind it is not much deeper than, "We need to do something, this is something, so we are doing it."
The guys who got promoted to leading positions in MSFT all started when there was no difference between greedy algorithm and optimized algorithm for market share. And there is no shortage of shills who sing the tune their management loves to hear. Feedback loop got interrupted, a siege mentality has set in and that is how MSFT became IBM.
Yes, you don't get it. As long as you are buying a MSFT product, they don't have to change their ways. All it takes is to send a critical update to render XP virtually useless. You are not free as long as you depend on MSFT.
When MSFT was touting the The Total Cost of Ownership studies, did anyone ask, if the costs included reacting to unwanted updates? How many times people have spoken about vendor lock and the risk of putting all your eggs in one basket? Trashed everyone as MSFT hate-mongers. It will only get worse. If the revenue stream is threatened MSFT will slip in another forced update make it more and more difficult to switch to alternatives. Because, get this, MSFT can charge you all the way up to your switching costs. The only way it can increase revenue is by increasing your switching cost.
Put yourself in MSFT's shoes and imagine what you would do. A security issue crops up. One team comes back with a solution that does not break all the competitors products. The other team comes up with a solution that incidentally breaks competitors products. Which one will you pick as "critical security update"? MSFT is doing exactly what it should rationally do, given its market share. It is the customers who are irrationally picking MSFT solutions against their own best interests.
I think these patents are so obviously flawed, they will be challenged and overturned the minute they try to enforce it. I have a hunch Amazon knows it too and they will use it only to brag, "We have a portfolio of 123 patents" as part of their presentations to investment brokers and stock analysts. But still, we definitely need some form of patent reform.
Most modern books are created in electronic form to begin with and are printed with high speed offset printers from files. Only older books have to be scanned.
Sure I am glad there is atleast one Nigerian working with his hands and brain instead of sening emails about 18 million dollars in a slush fund left over from the coffers of General Abacha.
All these services and more (daily cooks come in and make your curry and roti, piano/violin/karate teachers come in to teach your kids) are available in Mumbai even for middle class (by income) people.
How many of these libraries think of Open Source and software platform choice? How many of them make sure their web sites are platform agnostic, equally accessible from all browsers? These people are willing to stand up and are willing to pay more to preserve their liberty. Hats off to them. But does this stand also extends to not having their documents locked down in a proprietary format encumbered with licenses and restrictions? I would very much like such ideas, being independent of vendors, would extend to Corporate America too.
We Americans used to lead the world in having free markets and market driven economies. Now these third world countries are getting ahead of us. We need to work extra hard to catch up!
To control the automatic weapons firing at aircraft in south africa!
First they ignored us
Then they ridiculed us
Then they vilified us
Now they want to buy us
Tomorrow they will surrender to us
Basically, someone impersonates me. Some bank/merchant/credit card company extends credit without verification. The impersonator defaults. They report me as the deadbeat. That is the scenario. The creditor who mistakenly reported me should be liable for slander. The credit reporting agencies should be considered accessory after the fact. So the real culprits are the people who extend credit without verification and people who report me as a deadbeat without justification. Normally if they have to face full consequences of their action, they will clean up their act and we would not need any special laws for identity theft.
But congress in its infinite stupidity holds the impersonator the responsible for my ruined reputation. The impersonator is liable for lying, cheating, committing forgery and is responsible for all the damage caused to the credulous creditor. And if they call me a deadbeat without proper verification whoever reported me as the deadbeat is responsible for the damage caused to my good name.
As usual it is a credit reporting agency liability protection act being sold to the public as an anti-ID theft law.
Do the copyright owners have to provide the entire damn clip to Google? Or just buy the hash/indexer too from Google, run it through their materials in their secure facility and give Google just the hash data base?
You need to compare apples to apples. (oops!) Take a machine that is preloaded with Linux and download a WinXP/Vista, if possible and try to install it yourself. Most people compare pre-installed windows user experience with download a full os, install and run user experience of Linux.
That is not the big issue. They are holding our bonds, and we don't have the Gold standard. So we just print them as many dollars as we want and give it to them. They know it too. So they won't cash the bonds, but they might start a war.
In the last war, almost all historians agree, Germany was defeated mainly by the huge industrial output of USA. In the next Sino-US war, just see who has the industrial capacity to out produce weapons to foresee the winner.
US Congress in the pocket of US gaming industry association. The WTO is in the pocket of International gaming association. Good fight. Promises great action. Wanna bet who is going to win?
NoScript runs inside FireFox. I am thinking of a way a third party could write code and give it to me and that runs inside acroreader and block it from doing things I don't want it to do. In fact I would like some kind of code that will sandbox any application given to it. Something like "sandbox acroreader" should run acroreader and allow it to make all kinds of calls to the registry and disk etc etc. But none of these commands get past the sandbox environment. When I close I can examine all the changes acroreader (or anything else) tried to make to the OS and selectively allow/deny some changes to persist. Pipe dream?
I always disable javascript and open external links in the PDF reader. Is is enough protection? Or am I still vulnerable? Is it possible to write a NoScript like extension to acroreader?
Suggesting that the religious seek the credibility of the track record of science is silly. The track record of the progress of religion includes the virtual abolishment of the once-ubiquitous practices of infanticide and slavery. The track record of science includes providing intellectual credibility and the color of rationality to the holocaust and communism.
What? Religion is taking credit for abolishment of slavery? Are you talking about the same Judeo-Christian religion that enshrines the right of slave owning in the Ten Commandments? "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, ass, ox, nor man slave nor woman slave". It is the God of Abraham who demanded infanticide as a sacrifice.
As for science lending credibility to holocaust and communism, why are you forgetting Christianity lending its support for the Inquisition, Salem witch trials, and all the atrocities committed in the name of Christ by the Conquistadors? Only after science gained a foot hold and removed the legislative power from the Church, it reformed the Church into a tolerable institution of charity. When it had the political power it attracted too many undesirable types interested in the power to the leadership positions.
Why do you theists crave the "scientific" label so much? Why do you want to shoehorn the adjective "scientific" to the religious texts? Is it because all the theistic power bases like the church, and the political parties have lost their credibility completely? Is it because only science has some credibility and a track record of delivering progress? And you need to somehow get part of that credibility rub off on you?
is coming. Never mind ID did not predict any specific design intent about appendix other than, "we are designed, so there must be some use for all the useless organs". But that won't stop them from predicting immediate demise of Darwinian evolution.
As usual I did not read the article, this being /. Saw the thing about the article having pictures of chicks and that motivated me to actually click on the link to see the picture. What a bummer! Instead of some real cute chicks, the article has two female Homo sapiens dressed in tuxedos tugging-of-war in snow. There should be a law against people luring unsuspecting visitors by giving titillating titles promising zoological specimens and then showing girlie pictures instead.