People can be, and sometimes are, damaged far beyond just the face value of the transaction.
Yes, but why should the seller be liable for this damage? The way I see it, liability only exists if the damage was explicitly and intentionally caused by the seller. Otherwise, it's not in any way his fault. The way you use the product is your responsibility, even if the result of this use is damaging to you. Likewise, unless the product is explicitly advertised to perform a particular function, failure to perform it should not cause any liability on the seller's part. The transaction should not have any implicit liabilities embedded in it; when it does, there is no way to estimate the transaction value. When any odd damage claim you make can result in loss to me, I would significantly increase the price of the transaction to compensate, and you will be the one paying more.
Also common is for individual (as opposed to corporate) plaintiff's attorneys to be paid solely on a contingency basis, which is to say that they get a portion of whatever the winnings are.
I was talking about being sued, not suing others. Defense attorneys usually do not work on contingency.
Because your pill is in fact a placebo laced with cyanide, I instead of getting better end up in the hospital for 3 months, creating $500,000 in medical bills. Why should the maximum penalty for you be only $5000?
And here's the common straw man argument. If you are sold a cyanide pill, a class action lawsuit is not appropriate. No civil lawsuit is appropriate in this case. Criminal charges are appropriate, and the seller should be tried for attempted murder in the case you describe. Murderers should not be absolved by paying off the victum.
But let's take the less idiotic example of the pill just being a piece of sugar that does nothing to cure your disease. If the seller was advertising it as a cure, he is guilty of fraud and false advertising, once again criminal charges. A civil suit for breach of contract is also possible, since explicit promise was made that was not fulfilled.
Ok, what about if the seller did not say it was a cure, but you assumed it was? Then nobody's liable, and you eat the costs. That's fair. Other people should not have to pay for your bad choices.
In the US, being sued is effectively a financial death sentence. If you go to court, you come out bankrupt, whether you win or lose, unless you are a multimillionaire or a big company. When you consider this, EULAs become not only very understandable, but quite fair and proper. IMO, you should not be able to claim anything above refunding the purchase price unless you and the seller explicitly agreed otherwise.
Perhaps you should follow your own advice and post the failing test cases so we could see what's broken. Then some enterprising developer could figure out how to fix them. Complaining without specifics, as you are doing, is not practically different from being "uncritical".
For the schools it is irrelevant whether students learn valuable skills. Schools are graded on test scores and attendance. The former is improved by teaching the test. The latter is improved by tracking. Funding is determined by those two metrics, so: profit!
And just how much market clout do you think Linux desktop users have?
You must mean Google, who uses Linux throughout the company. I'd say Google has quite a bit of clout.
Yes, by buying specialty hardware that's likely to cost several times what mass market hardware does. The days of buying COTS hardware and just throwing Linux on it will be over.
I don't think Google will like that either. And you really don't want to make Google angry.
There's plenty of reason to fear what Microsoft will do with secure boot.
Except Microsoft does not make motherboards. And desktops are not the largest market for motherboards - servers are. This is becoming more and more true as people insist on moving to the cloud. Servers absolutely must be dirt cheap for providers to be profitable, and the vast majority of servers do not run Windows. These days Microsoft is not nearly as powerful as you think. Perhaps you should stop living in the 90s and learn some more about the real world today.
If motherboard manufacturers (not Microsoft) decide to not provide the option any more, we'll stop buying their boards. At this time this is a purely hypothetical and unlikely event, for that very reason. If and when it happens, we can complain and vote with our wallets; until then you're just spreading unjustified FUD.
Your solution of any value mostly to newbies who are incapable of going to the BIOS and typing in a new signing key (yes, all BIOS manufacturers worth buying, like ASUS, offer this option). I, for one, will not purchase any computer without secure boot. I like having a trusted hardware root. I like the fact that no malware can get in the boot process without my consent.
Linux developers are not trying to "force" anybody to do anything. Nvidia is trying to force the linux community to accept their unacceptable "super secret" blob into the kernel agains the linux community's development and participatation standards.
What kind of a perverted world are you living in? nVidia is not trying to force the linux community into anything. It's the linux community (meaning the users, not the kernel developers) who wants graphics drivers. We want those drivers so we can play games, run photoshop, and generally do stuff with our cool nVidia hardware. We don't give a rat's behind whether those drivers are open source or not. We just want graphics to work. We are not the ones dictating terms to nVidia. It's the kernel developers that are trying to force their conditions on nVidia and on us too.
If nVidia is not allowed to make drivers for Linux after a particular kernel version, then nVidia will not suffer for it - linux users will. What we'll have to do then is to stop upgrading the kernel. If Alan wants to put more walls around his garden, the result will be that fewer people will show up to play in it.
I have a suggestion for nVidia. The OpenGL API with forward-compatible 3.3 core context should be little more than a wrapper for pushing data as-is onto the card. Once the legacy stuff is removed, the only remaining item of any complexity is the glsl compiler. So, extract the compiler into a standalone executable and call it from the driver to compile shaders. Implement hash-content caching, and this will be even faster than what you've got now. If all the legacy APIs are ditched and the compiler can be easily extracted, then this should not be a lot of work.
This way not only do we get a working modern driver, but since open source drivers don't support 3.3, all GPL OpenGL code will have to be rewritten to the newer standard. Thus, all you GPL fanatics will have a taste of your own foul medicine.
It seems to be a trend these days to do things "on the go". The boss likes to know that you are working all the time, even when you are not at the office. You want to pretend you are this active guy who lives outdoors and has never sat down in a chair (because that's the type of guy that women claim to want want). Eventually we'll all realize that it is much more convenient to use a desktop on a nice big desk with a comfortable chair than it is to balance a tablet, keyboard, and mouse on your wobbly knees sitting in a lawn chair. We'll also realize that most of us are not "on the go" all the time. Most of us stay in one place and only go places for recreational purposes that do not require computing devices.
The article falls into the common error of thinking there is no stealth in space. Yes, your ship will radiate heat and propellants, but you do have the choice of direction in which to radiate them. Your space ship's bow could be at ambient temperature and projecting active camouflage starfield while directing all radiation out the back. Because there is no atmosphere and thus no scattering, this ship would not be visible if you are looking at its bow. All the emissions are directed away from you and can not be detected by you. Active camouflage takes care of most starfield occlusion tests, and the sheer size of space makes radar impractical, making the ship almost completely invisible.
Bosses prefer to maximize profitability. If things are going well they don't necessarily know the part you had to play in that.
If the boss doesn't know what you do, either he is a bad boss, or you are unimportant (and replaceable). The boss is paid the big bucks because it's his job to know what his underlings do and how well they do it, to assign work to workers to maximize productivity, and to take the necessary measures to keep the right workers and fire the wrong ones. Maximizing profitability over the long run means retaining quality staff, which means giving them raises when they deserve it.
Of course, bosses today don't really care about profitability. If the product does well, the boss gets the credit. If the product flops, his underlings get the blame and can be fired if needed. As soon as a company leaves the "the owner is the boss" stage, it's all downhill from there. In this economy, we only work in such places because there are no other places to work.
I'd rather ask along the lines of "What would I have to do get more?" then go do it, than "Can I have more?" and be told yes or no. It's less confrontational.
It's not confrontational. It's begging, and my self-esteem is not low enough to do it. Begging says "I have no value but please give me more money anyway. Pretty please?" Sometimes it works, but only to your detriment, as it brings your lack of value to the boss's attention and may expedite his plans to replace you with someone cheaper. If the boss does not know your value, that means he does not care about the quality of your work or that your work has no quality. If either case, you will henceforth be employed solely on his sufferance.
The proper way to view this situation is to recognize that your employment is a contract based on mutual exchange of value at agreed-upon rate. If you are asking for a raise, you are asking to renegotiate the contract. When negotiating a contract you get two choices: receive what you ask for, or walk away. If you just ask for a raise, it's your word only that you deserve more money. The boss does not need you as much as you need him. The company can always hire somebody else and cheaper, while you will likely suffer financial hardship if you lose the job. The only solution here is to have a more suitable "or else" for yourself, which means getting another job offer. Unless you have that other offer, the boss is in the position of power and you again live on his sufferance. Not good.
That's not about them being women, it's about them having less aggressive personalities. There are plenty of men out there who are not aggressive in this way. I know I would never ask for a higher salary for myself; if the boss thought I deserved more money, he'd pay me more. If he doesn't pay me more, it means he does not believe I deserve it. Consequently, if I want more money, I'd look for another job outside the company. I'd mention the new salary before leaving, and if he doesn't match it, I'm taking the other job. I'm not going to argue or negotiate; I know it's not my strength, so I stick to the take-it-or-leave-it approach. Naturally, this means I'm going to have a lower salary than the more aggressive jerks out there, but I'm not interested in changing my personality.
That's one cause. Excessive illumination is another, as a person with sensitive eyes quickly discovers after staring at a white background for a few seconds and experiencing strain and tearing. Focus changes in particular, do not cause eyestrain in nearsighted people because we are used to blur and have acquired the ability to read text through a much wider depth of field.
Whatever the cause, brightness sensitivity is much more common among the coders I know, and white backgrounds are the worst possible thing to look at. This used to be exacerbated by CRTs with 60Hz default refresh rate. Looking at the 60Hz white background of a default Windows installation causes eyestrain and tearing within thirty seconds, making any work impossible without deep squinting. We thus become proficient at switching the color scheme as quickly as possible. Windows 7, of course, makes this more difficult, as Aero does not support changing the theme background, so a classic theme must first be enabled.
"Please don't eat me, brother Wolf!" cried the Rabbit. "Aw, all right." said the Wolf, rolling his eyes. "I'll just trade you to brother Fox for some hens. Is that ok with you?"
McIntyre vs Ohio did not affirm a right to anonymity, but rather a right to free speech, whether anonymous or not. While casting a ballot falls under the free speech category, the state is in no way obligated to provide a way to cast it in secret. You still have the right to talk or not talk about how you voted, but the state is not obligated to keep your vote from the public records.
In fact, the page you linked also cites Doe v Reed, where Scalia said:
Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism.
He does have a point, of course, as long as the US is not persecuting people for voting a certain way, but this statement indicates that any effort to require the right to anonymity throught the supreme court will fail.
The supreme court can only decide whether a law is constitutional. The constitution says nothing about anonymity, so any action on this issue must come from congressional legislation or a constitutional amendment. Good luck with that.
See? Easy as pie. Absolutely anybody ought to be able to do this. Ubuntu is not like Windows where users are assumed to be incompetent morons. On Ubuntu, every user is smart, skilled, and infinitely patient. It's paradise, really.
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Yes, but why should the seller be liable for this damage? The way I see it, liability only exists if the damage was explicitly and intentionally caused by the seller. Otherwise, it's not in any way his fault. The way you use the product is your responsibility, even if the result of this use is damaging to you. Likewise, unless the product is explicitly advertised to perform a particular function, failure to perform it should not cause any liability on the seller's part. The transaction should not have any implicit liabilities embedded in it; when it does, there is no way to estimate the transaction value. When any odd damage claim you make can result in loss to me, I would significantly increase the price of the transaction to compensate, and you will be the one paying more.
I was talking about being sued, not suing others. Defense attorneys usually do not work on contingency.
And here's the common straw man argument. If you are sold a cyanide pill, a class action lawsuit is not appropriate. No civil lawsuit is appropriate in this case. Criminal charges are appropriate, and the seller should be tried for attempted murder in the case you describe. Murderers should not be absolved by paying off the victum.
But let's take the less idiotic example of the pill just being a piece of sugar that does nothing to cure your disease. If the seller was advertising it as a cure, he is guilty of fraud and false advertising, once again criminal charges. A civil suit for breach of contract is also possible, since explicit promise was made that was not fulfilled.
Ok, what about if the seller did not say it was a cure, but you assumed it was? Then nobody's liable, and you eat the costs. That's fair. Other people should not have to pay for your bad choices.
In the US, being sued is effectively a financial death sentence. If you go to court, you come out bankrupt, whether you win or lose, unless you are a multimillionaire or a big company. When you consider this, EULAs become not only very understandable, but quite fair and proper. IMO, you should not be able to claim anything above refunding the purchase price unless you and the seller explicitly agreed otherwise.
Perhaps you should follow your own advice and post the failing test cases so we could see what's broken. Then some enterprising developer could figure out how to fix them. Complaining without specifics, as you are doing, is not practically different from being "uncritical".
I guess then you are not in the market for the optional headcrab helmet that comes with it...
For the schools it is irrelevant whether students learn valuable skills. Schools are graded on test scores and attendance. The former is improved by teaching the test. The latter is improved by tracking. Funding is determined by those two metrics, so: profit!
You must mean Google, who uses Linux throughout the company. I'd say Google has quite a bit of clout.
I don't think Google will like that either. And you really don't want to make Google angry.
Except Microsoft does not make motherboards. And desktops are not the largest market for motherboards - servers are. This is becoming more and more true as people insist on moving to the cloud. Servers absolutely must be dirt cheap for providers to be profitable, and the vast majority of servers do not run Windows. These days Microsoft is not nearly as powerful as you think. Perhaps you should stop living in the 90s and learn some more about the real world today.
If motherboard manufacturers (not Microsoft) decide to not provide the option any more, we'll stop buying their boards. At this time this is a purely hypothetical and unlikely event, for that very reason. If and when it happens, we can complain and vote with our wallets; until then you're just spreading unjustified FUD.
Your solution of any value mostly to newbies who are incapable of going to the BIOS and typing in a new signing key (yes, all BIOS manufacturers worth buying, like ASUS, offer this option). I, for one, will not purchase any computer without secure boot. I like having a trusted hardware root. I like the fact that no malware can get in the boot process without my consent.
What kind of a perverted world are you living in? nVidia is not trying to force the linux community into anything. It's the linux community (meaning the users, not the kernel developers) who wants graphics drivers. We want those drivers so we can play games, run photoshop, and generally do stuff with our cool nVidia hardware. We don't give a rat's behind whether those drivers are open source or not. We just want graphics to work. We are not the ones dictating terms to nVidia. It's the kernel developers that are trying to force their conditions on nVidia and on us too.
If nVidia is not allowed to make drivers for Linux after a particular kernel version, then nVidia will not suffer for it - linux users will. What we'll have to do then is to stop upgrading the kernel. If Alan wants to put more walls around his garden, the result will be that fewer people will show up to play in it.
I have a suggestion for nVidia. The OpenGL API with forward-compatible 3.3 core context should be little more than a wrapper for pushing data as-is onto the card. Once the legacy stuff is removed, the only remaining item of any complexity is the glsl compiler. So, extract the compiler into a standalone executable and call it from the driver to compile shaders. Implement hash-content caching, and this will be even faster than what you've got now. If all the legacy APIs are ditched and the compiler can be easily extracted, then this should not be a lot of work.
This way not only do we get a working modern driver, but since open source drivers don't support 3.3, all GPL OpenGL code will have to be rewritten to the newer standard. Thus, all you GPL fanatics will have a taste of your own foul medicine.
It seems to be a trend these days to do things "on the go". The boss likes to know that you are working all the time, even when you are not at the office. You want to pretend you are this active guy who lives outdoors and has never sat down in a chair (because that's the type of guy that women claim to want want). Eventually we'll all realize that it is much more convenient to use a desktop on a nice big desk with a comfortable chair than it is to balance a tablet, keyboard, and mouse on your wobbly knees sitting in a lawn chair. We'll also realize that most of us are not "on the go" all the time. Most of us stay in one place and only go places for recreational purposes that do not require computing devices.
That's a little harsh. Jail should be reserved for really evil tags like blink.
I guess you have to earn the right to learn...
Give out bonuses based on performance, however measured. It works for the boss, so it's likely to work just as well for the employee.
The article falls into the common error of thinking there is no stealth in space. Yes, your ship will radiate heat and propellants, but you do have the choice of direction in which to radiate them. Your space ship's bow could be at ambient temperature and projecting active camouflage starfield while directing all radiation out the back. Because there is no atmosphere and thus no scattering, this ship would not be visible if you are looking at its bow. All the emissions are directed away from you and can not be detected by you. Active camouflage takes care of most starfield occlusion tests, and the sheer size of space makes radar impractical, making the ship almost completely invisible.
Don't get me started on how transporters are not used properly in Star Trek...
If the boss doesn't know what you do, either he is a bad boss, or you are unimportant (and replaceable). The boss is paid the big bucks because it's his job to know what his underlings do and how well they do it, to assign work to workers to maximize productivity, and to take the necessary measures to keep the right workers and fire the wrong ones. Maximizing profitability over the long run means retaining quality staff, which means giving them raises when they deserve it.
Of course, bosses today don't really care about profitability. If the product does well, the boss gets the credit. If the product flops, his underlings get the blame and can be fired if needed. As soon as a company leaves the "the owner is the boss" stage, it's all downhill from there. In this economy, we only work in such places because there are no other places to work.
It's not confrontational. It's begging, and my self-esteem is not low enough to do it. Begging says "I have no value but please give me more money anyway. Pretty please?" Sometimes it works, but only to your detriment, as it brings your lack of value to the boss's attention and may expedite his plans to replace you with someone cheaper. If the boss does not know your value, that means he does not care about the quality of your work or that your work has no quality. If either case, you will henceforth be employed solely on his sufferance.
The proper way to view this situation is to recognize that your employment is a contract based on mutual exchange of value at agreed-upon rate. If you are asking for a raise, you are asking to renegotiate the contract. When negotiating a contract you get two choices: receive what you ask for, or walk away. If you just ask for a raise, it's your word only that you deserve more money. The boss does not need you as much as you need him. The company can always hire somebody else and cheaper, while you will likely suffer financial hardship if you lose the job. The only solution here is to have a more suitable "or else" for yourself, which means getting another job offer. Unless you have that other offer, the boss is in the position of power and you again live on his sufferance. Not good.
That's not about them being women, it's about them having less aggressive personalities. There are plenty of men out there who are not aggressive in this way. I know I would never ask for a higher salary for myself; if the boss thought I deserved more money, he'd pay me more. If he doesn't pay me more, it means he does not believe I deserve it. Consequently, if I want more money, I'd look for another job outside the company. I'd mention the new salary before leaving, and if he doesn't match it, I'm taking the other job. I'm not going to argue or negotiate; I know it's not my strength, so I stick to the take-it-or-leave-it approach. Naturally, this means I'm going to have a lower salary than the more aggressive jerks out there, but I'm not interested in changing my personality.
That's one cause. Excessive illumination is another, as a person with sensitive eyes quickly discovers after staring at a white background for a few seconds and experiencing strain and tearing. Focus changes in particular, do not cause eyestrain in nearsighted people because we are used to blur and have acquired the ability to read text through a much wider depth of field.
Whatever the cause, brightness sensitivity is much more common among the coders I know, and white backgrounds are the worst possible thing to look at. This used to be exacerbated by CRTs with 60Hz default refresh rate. Looking at the 60Hz white background of a default Windows installation causes eyestrain and tearing within thirty seconds, making any work impossible without deep squinting. We thus become proficient at switching the color scheme as quickly as possible. Windows 7, of course, makes this more difficult, as Aero does not support changing the theme background, so a classic theme must first be enabled.
Cows pay for the food they eat by giving us meat and hides in exchange. How will those 25,000 people who die of malnutrition pay?
"Please don't eat me, brother Wolf!" cried the Rabbit. "Aw, all right." said the Wolf, rolling his eyes. "I'll just trade you to brother Fox for some hens. Is that ok with you?"
McIntyre vs Ohio did not affirm a right to anonymity, but rather a right to free speech, whether anonymous or not. While casting a ballot falls under the free speech category, the state is in no way obligated to provide a way to cast it in secret. You still have the right to talk or not talk about how you voted, but the state is not obligated to keep your vote from the public records.
In fact, the page you linked also cites Doe v Reed, where Scalia said:
He does have a point, of course, as long as the US is not persecuting people for voting a certain way, but this statement indicates that any effort to require the right to anonymity throught the supreme court will fail.
The supreme court can only decide whether a law is constitutional. The constitution says nothing about anonymity, so any action on this issue must come from congressional legislation or a constitutional amendment. Good luck with that.
You forgot the other lenses and scopes, which also bring up external search results. So instead, open a terminal window and type:
% sudo dpkg --list |grep "lens" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs sudo apt-get remove
% sudo dpkg --list |grep "scope" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs sudo apt-get remove
See? Easy as pie. Absolutely anybody ought to be able to do this. Ubuntu is not like Windows where users are assumed to be incompetent morons. On Ubuntu, every user is smart, skilled, and infinitely patient. It's paradise, really.