I do have to say that the 2010 version of office has an unheralded devastatingly good feature called Custom Ribbons. It's even better than the old menus because you pick any feature you want and line it up in your own little toolbar in the order you use stuff. So for example you dump Bold, Center, Left, Font, Size, Cut Copy Paste, Print Preview, Save-As, and Print all in a neat little row. Bang, make a document, click your buttons mostly left to right, out comes your work. Before you dismiss this, the secret is that even the menus only used X functions. The Custom Toolbar has a hard to find set of buttons that eventually let you pick *any of the thousand features* in the entire program!
So I am starting to think THAT is a new game-changer feature that some edition of Libre Office needs to notice and put through.
I'm just amazed that these trolls can even do this.
It used to be that if a twerp sued that kind of firepower on any other topic he'd be pulverized from any one of the lawyer-cannons into the next parsec.
Good effort, but I'm gonna trade a month's worth of mod points on this one.
You mean well, but they are absolutely going to interfere. Now, maybe they hope their interference will balance out plus-and-minus to a net of zero, but if everything was crispy, they wouldn't have bought it.
So the question is what do they interfere with and how much. We're burned by now, burned badly. There's been a lot of cheap attempts at "monetizing" going on. An existing company doesn't sell a cash cow, and a new company doesn't buy a cash-sink. So something's gotta give and like always, the "Higher Ups" don't want to tell us.
I'm confused. Why doesn't AOL have colossal prior art on this?
They had a Master Account system with subsidiary names. For those who are too young and need to Get Off Your Lawn, it was Dad who had the Master account, and then we young'uns had all the subsidiary names. (Sometimes several per person!) This was fairly important for RP in the Red Dragon Inn, etc. I hadn't gotten into bulletin boards by then, but it still held. But if you got too nasty, one of the Moderators would report you, and it would trickle up the food chain.
So not knowing Patentese, how did poor ol' faded glory AOL not even get a few bucks of licensing rights?
Since we're playing Anecdote Trading, when I finally had some cash to avoid scraping together beyond-cheap boxes, I didn't go for any of the major vendors. I had a buddy custom build it from scratch and every step of the way I tossed in an extra $20-40 for "nothing but quality upgrades". I haven't had to replace a thing. It's called Twilight (in the Asimovian sense of Nightfall), because I vaguely saw parts of this OS mess looming, and it has to hold together for the context of getting past what we now know as Windows 8. So right about when Windows 9 shows up, XP goes off security updates, if they "recanted from the mistakes of Windows 8" and didn't put too many evil DRM-RIAA tricks into it, then off I go with the latest and greatest to start all over. If MS implodes by then and does a "double Vista" in a row, then maybe I'll limp along on Windows 7 for a while. Either way 10 years isn't bad for a comp.
Calling the President a "poopyhead" doesn't actually hold any implied physical danger what-so-ever. Saying I am gonna _________ is a future tense action statement with a verb, sure, that would be worth looking at.
The fun starts when "loss of honor" becomes worth retaliation, as another poster below mentioned. So while there's no physical action planned, "the loss of honor is unforgiveable" etc etc.
Some of the old classic arcades had this option. I was a passable midline Mortal Kombat II-III player before I retired from most video games. A couple of fun local shops had the setting on medium. On a good day you could beat the game with a couple of bucks. Then on road trips some of the other shop owners were greedy and cranked the difficulty setting, and that became NO FUN AT ALL. I don't recall the specifics, but a couple of the characters just got way too fast with the Throw maneuvers, Goro and Motaro got out of control, and another couple characters were zinging turbo combos that were actually kinda impressively-depressive, but only worth a buck in amazement before you just walked away.
"If you gain social intelligence at the cost of creativity, have you been improved? If you can suddenly understand the opposite sex and get them to sleep with you quickly, but no longer do (basic) math in your head, is that a good trade?" Notice the word Basic. Let's change that to "Complex".
Maybe, and this is in a sense exactly what the Autism *spectrum* is all about. A word from the New Age lit is useful here: Esoteric. Autistic people often tend to like esoteric things. The word has connotations of "obscure but with mystique wrapped in with it". Looking at the item I re-quoted, what "Creativity" are we referring to? Nice, socially understandable Creativity like a nice song? Or living in a room where the spatial layout of everything is symbolically congruent to the XOR of observed behavior in a particular bee hive and a particular ant hill that the person studied and recorded? Isn't that "Creative" too? Sure it is. But doing XOR insect calculations in your head doesn't help you in a conversation with a budding romantic partner.
So suppose the autistic person can do seven different types of that kind of creativity. None of them help with a date. He might indeed be willing to trade those kinds of calculations for "slowing down" and "magically" seeing better social results.
Hi there, I'm replying to you because you're about as high up on the chain as I can find a good place to put this.
We all got Ask-Rolled. It's five days later, and this "king.purpuriu" character is nowhere to be found. I'm not even sure he saw these comments. I get upset when an Ask Slashdot user doesn't enter the comment fray that supposedly he wants advice on.
Of course it's a marketing department, and I wouldn't put it above the New/. to "help them" with certain news items. Remember how they wanted a new "Business Intelligence" department a while back?
Don't stories all come through the Firehose? So he'd see it sitting there in the Firehose and could have as long as he wanted to type out his speech.
Meanwhile, creating an account is easy, so they could do them in batches of 5.
There aren't any antitrust issues here. Intel can do whatever it wants with it's processors so long as it doesn't use it's processors... to give another of their products an unfair advantage.
Not true. The range of Anti-Trust includes oligarchic rings. If Intel purposely altered the chip by examining instructions that Linux calls but Windows 8 Metro doesn't, and "conveniently" removes/alters those instructions, it's anti-trust. It's a variant on collusion. If you have multiple parties of overlapping business sectors working to block other products, it triggers legal implications, just different ones.
As stated elsewhere, the geeks will get it working again, but the move would result in lost development resource just fixing the problem Intel made.
It just needs to be somewhere few people have looked at. You can define an algorithm for any two numerical values added together. We keep thrashing into the Obvious problem because nobody/one lonely guy in the Midwest USA/ thinks of stuff like adding the Weight Watcher Point Count of your fridge contents with the number of times you ordered takeout to get your average ranking of a recreational gamer/nerd/techie.
See how fun it gets? It's not obvious - but once you hear it you can't "unhear it" so then it sounds obvious 7 minutes later. It doesn't even have to work. It's just an algorithm.
One of my too-many projects (and making me overall too distractible!) is an idea called "Durable News". The basic idea is to take a dis-satisfied wish such as yours today, file it, then after time passes and said opposition govt does appear, whether they do indeed reverse part/all of said proposals.
What makes such a project tricky is that political cycles are fairly long, while we are moving to a social media culture that can't remember last week, so by the time that answer comes in, the tricky part is remembering to find you for the retrospective redux.
Unfortunately you have laid out most of the remainder of the premise, leaving me for one to just hope that someday some watershed event occurs that flips the whole thing around. Even the IRS doesn't usually play too far off the known track. Sure the tax code is a nightmare, but if you follow it right, the IRS stays happy.
These bubbling enforcement mentalities are seriously threatening to become guilty until proven innocent. Someone posted as a reply to me one level up "that's not traditionally American". Unfortunately, it might become the New America if we don't watch out, and get a couple big pieces of luck.
Wait a minute though, isn't that "per copyrighted work"? That's the big problem I am seeing with these rulings. Who said that "Movies and Music are first class copyrighted works, while everything else gets to go to the back of the bus?"
Every single piece of text is a copyrighted work. It becomes magically copyrighted the instant it is created. So are pictures. But look at how those fly around without court cases.
As a (mediocre) ex-gamer, I think of news in Combos (different connotations of that word). So once this goes through, you think the patent trolls are bad, you haven't seen anything yet on the copyright scene. Many Someones are getting quite excited at this level of data control, for... varying connotations of "excited". (Including the NSFW ones.) Faced with that, all our wistful "gee, copyright should be reformed" will do nothing. Someone has to take this ruling, someone with a BIG scary pocket, and beat them at their own game using the best seven law teams in the world working together.
My initial suggestion: If "actions" performed in a certain manner get copyright protection, then let's suppose you click this and this and this (times 20) on a site, *the user's clicks operate first*. (Maybe get a browser plugin to script the timing or something.) Then the user's copyright to his "performance art" is created *before* the remote site's tracking cookies engage, which means the remote site is infringing on that user's copy of his clicks. I know, I know, some combination of back room deals will slow that down, but make something like THAT stick, payable to the user at $10,000 per tracking cookie, WATCH how fast someone will fix the law!
"Except, they can find those MP3s on your computer at a border patrol stop (and yes, they really are searching computers for pirated content at border crossings now) and arrest you for pirated content on your computer. You have no way of proving you got the songs legitimately. iTunes is not the solution to the problem."
Yes there is for some cases. If they're really doing that, then one of my many little projects is starting to have value. I call it various things, such as "WhiteListing" and preparing for "Digital Audits". It basically means that as far as possible, to have proven source acquisition paths for every file on your computer. Skipping the edge cases like malware and drive-by-wifi-ers, if it's on your computer, you put it there. So for every song you could have a matching PDF of the purchase, or the copy of the CC license that lets you have it.
It's REALLY hard to do! It's basically exhausting. Look at what we think "web 2.0" is = "sharing"? That's why I have snarked that Web 3.0 will be various flavors of Walled Gardens and draconian control. A really ugly use case is indie music. A cash greedy tyrranical bureaucrat will say "I don't care where it came from, if you don't have one of the seven authorized certificates for it, it counts against you". I have a ton of stuff that came from Music.Download.com back when it was freely offered for download. Oops - that site doesn't exist anymore, and I'll never see those bands again. Same rough idea with Youtube Remixes. Who the heck is someone like "DJ DeadCat" and how do I find her to get copyright clearance??
Hi there, you basically nailed a coda to what I was getting at. And yes, it is sneaky, because if a lil' ol Humanities bird like me found this many fallacies, one you brilliant types could find 300% more of them.
I do indeed feel that the coming of online education is going to send formal education reeling. The first thing we need to do is to fight screeds like this one.
'The prospect of massive-scale online schooling seems to be all the rage at the moment. Recent competing initiatives include Khan Academy, OpenCourseWare, Udacity, Coursera, and edX (the latter ones sponsored by top-name schools such Stanford, Harvard, or MIT, or else founded by ex-faculty members). The idea of universal and free access to college programs from top researchers has fired the imagination of many in the blogosphere, and some have predicted the imminent collapse of traditional universities in the face of this âoetsunamiâ. '
He's not even talking about "Statistics Courses". He's setting his problem domain (is that the word?) to *all* online courses.
Then watch what happens in this line:
"As a college educator myself, I felt compelled to survey one of these courses, so as to assess their general quality, advantages, and disadvantages."
"As a (appeal to authority), I felt compelled to survey one (singular) of these courses, so as to assess their (plural)...."
I looked over some of those myself a few months ago. Between them, there are *Hundreds* of courses. So the *Statistics Professor* picks a representative sample size of... wait for it... ONE!
If this were written up in Academic Paper language we would all be laughing hysterically.
Slashdot Mirror
I do have to say that the 2010 version of office has an unheralded devastatingly good feature called Custom Ribbons. It's even better than the old menus because you pick any feature you want and line it up in your own little toolbar in the order you use stuff. So for example you dump Bold, Center, Left, Font, Size, Cut Copy Paste, Print Preview, Save-As, and Print all in a neat little row. Bang, make a document, click your buttons mostly left to right, out comes your work. Before you dismiss this, the secret is that even the menus only used X functions. The Custom Toolbar has a hard to find set of buttons that eventually let you pick *any of the thousand features* in the entire program!
So I am starting to think THAT is a new game-changer feature that some edition of Libre Office needs to notice and put through.
I'm just amazed that these trolls can even do this.
It used to be that if a twerp sued that kind of firepower on any other topic he'd be pulverized from any one of the lawyer-cannons into the next parsec.
Good effort, but I'm gonna trade a month's worth of mod points on this one.
You mean well, but they are absolutely going to interfere. Now, maybe they hope their interference will balance out plus-and-minus to a net of zero, but if everything was crispy, they wouldn't have bought it.
So the question is what do they interfere with and how much. We're burned by now, burned badly. There's been a lot of cheap attempts at "monetizing" going on. An existing company doesn't sell a cash cow, and a new company doesn't buy a cash-sink. So something's gotta give and like always, the "Higher Ups" don't want to tell us.
Good, this far down someone besides me finally noticed that too. "Bought a site for 1 year's worth of revenue, and the rest is free cash"?!
That's either a typical Slashdot factual error, or something dear-gawd scary just showed up.
Oh, but if they ever do, one of y'all will catch it, do the necessary screen shots, and it will spread like wildfire.
You're an intern at the White House?!
I'm confused. Why doesn't AOL have colossal prior art on this?
They had a Master Account system with subsidiary names. For those who are too young and need to Get Off Your Lawn, it was Dad who had the Master account, and then we young'uns had all the subsidiary names. (Sometimes several per person!) This was fairly important for RP in the Red Dragon Inn, etc. I hadn't gotten into bulletin boards by then, but it still held. But if you got too nasty, one of the Moderators would report you, and it would trickle up the food chain.
So not knowing Patentese, how did poor ol' faded glory AOL not even get a few bucks of licensing rights?
Since we're playing Anecdote Trading, when I finally had some cash to avoid scraping together beyond-cheap boxes, I didn't go for any of the major vendors. I had a buddy custom build it from scratch and every step of the way I tossed in an extra $20-40 for "nothing but quality upgrades". I haven't had to replace a thing. It's called Twilight (in the Asimovian sense of Nightfall), because I vaguely saw parts of this OS mess looming, and it has to hold together for the context of getting past what we now know as Windows 8. So right about when Windows 9 shows up, XP goes off security updates, if they "recanted from the mistakes of Windows 8" and didn't put too many evil DRM-RIAA tricks into it, then off I go with the latest and greatest to start all over. If MS implodes by then and does a "double Vista" in a row, then maybe I'll limp along on Windows 7 for a while. Either way 10 years isn't bad for a comp.
This sounds funny in a John de Lancie "Q" voice.
This is actually a fascinating distinction.
Calling the President a "poopyhead" doesn't actually hold any implied physical danger what-so-ever. Saying I am gonna _________ is a future tense action statement with a verb, sure, that would be worth looking at.
The fun starts when "loss of honor" becomes worth retaliation, as another poster below mentioned. So while there's no physical action planned, "the loss of honor is unforgiveable" etc etc.
Some of the old classic arcades had this option. I was a passable midline Mortal Kombat II-III player before I retired from most video games. A couple of fun local shops had the setting on medium. On a good day you could beat the game with a couple of bucks. Then on road trips some of the other shop owners were greedy and cranked the difficulty setting, and that became NO FUN AT ALL. I don't recall the specifics, but a couple of the characters just got way too fast with the Throw maneuvers, Goro and Motaro got out of control, and another couple characters were zinging turbo combos that were actually kinda impressively-depressive, but only worth a buck in amazement before you just walked away.
"If you gain social intelligence at the cost of creativity, have you been improved? If you can suddenly understand the opposite sex and get them to sleep with you quickly, but no longer do (basic) math in your head, is that a good trade?" Notice the word Basic. Let's change that to "Complex".
Maybe, and this is in a sense exactly what the Autism *spectrum* is all about. A word from the New Age lit is useful here: Esoteric. Autistic people often tend to like esoteric things. The word has connotations of "obscure but with mystique wrapped in with it". Looking at the item I re-quoted, what "Creativity" are we referring to? Nice, socially understandable Creativity like a nice song? Or living in a room where the spatial layout of everything is symbolically congruent to the XOR of observed behavior in a particular bee hive and a particular ant hill that the person studied and recorded? Isn't that "Creative" too? Sure it is. But doing XOR insect calculations in your head doesn't help you in a conversation with a budding romantic partner.
So suppose the autistic person can do seven different types of that kind of creativity. None of them help with a date. He might indeed be willing to trade those kinds of calculations for "slowing down" and "magically" seeing better social results.
Yes AC, that's indeed what I meant - I tried to quote the relevant bit I was replying to and my quotes fell off.
Hi there, I'm replying to you because you're about as high up on the chain as I can find a good place to put this.
We all got Ask-Rolled. It's five days later, and this "king.purpuriu" character is nowhere to be found. I'm not even sure he saw these comments. I get upset when an Ask Slashdot user doesn't enter the comment fray that supposedly he wants advice on.
I have an iPhone 3GS on AT&T. How do I check if Carrier IQ is on it? Did that program show up "randomly" or only on new phones after a certain date?
I bet there's a couple of parts to it.
Of course it's a marketing department, and I wouldn't put it above the New /. to "help them" with certain news items. Remember how they wanted a new "Business Intelligence" department a while back?
Don't stories all come through the Firehose? So he'd see it sitting there in the Firehose and could have as long as he wanted to type out his speech.
Meanwhile, creating an account is easy, so they could do them in batches of 5.
There aren't any antitrust issues here. Intel can do whatever it wants with it's processors so long as it doesn't use it's processors ... to give another of their products an unfair advantage.
Not true. The range of Anti-Trust includes oligarchic rings. If Intel purposely altered the chip by examining instructions that Linux calls but Windows 8 Metro doesn't, and "conveniently" removes/alters those instructions, it's anti-trust. It's a variant on collusion. If you have multiple parties of overlapping business sectors working to block other products, it triggers legal implications, just different ones.
As stated elsewhere, the geeks will get it working again, but the move would result in lost development resource just fixing the problem Intel made.
It can get pretty small.
It just needs to be somewhere few people have looked at. You can define an algorithm for any two numerical values added together. We keep thrashing into the Obvious problem because nobody/one lonely guy in the Midwest USA/ thinks of stuff like adding the Weight Watcher Point Count of your fridge contents with the number of times you ordered takeout to get your average ranking of a recreational gamer/nerd/techie.
See how fun it gets? It's not obvious - but once you hear it you can't "unhear it" so then it sounds obvious 7 minutes later. It doesn't even have to work. It's just an algorithm.
Fortunately the estate of Eduard Khil is safe because was not trolling, he was trolololling.
A 2012 edition of the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL8CD8PjVmA
One of my too-many projects (and making me overall too distractible!) is an idea called "Durable News". The basic idea is to take a dis-satisfied wish such as yours today, file it, then after time passes and said opposition govt does appear, whether they do indeed reverse part/all of said proposals.
What makes such a project tricky is that political cycles are fairly long, while we are moving to a social media culture that can't remember last week, so by the time that answer comes in, the tricky part is remembering to find you for the retrospective redux.
Nice reply, with a lot of work in it.
Unfortunately you have laid out most of the remainder of the premise, leaving me for one to just hope that someday some watershed event occurs that flips the whole thing around. Even the IRS doesn't usually play too far off the known track. Sure the tax code is a nightmare, but if you follow it right, the IRS stays happy.
These bubbling enforcement mentalities are seriously threatening to become guilty until proven innocent. Someone posted as a reply to me one level up "that's not traditionally American". Unfortunately, it might become the New America if we don't watch out, and get a couple big pieces of luck.
Wait a minute though, isn't that "per copyrighted work"? That's the big problem I am seeing with these rulings. Who said that "Movies and Music are first class copyrighted works, while everything else gets to go to the back of the bus?"
Every single piece of text is a copyrighted work. It becomes magically copyrighted the instant it is created. So are pictures. But look at how those fly around without court cases.
As a (mediocre) ex-gamer, I think of news in Combos (different connotations of that word). So once this goes through, you think the patent trolls are bad, you haven't seen anything yet on the copyright scene. Many Someones are getting quite excited at this level of data control, for ... varying connotations of "excited". (Including the NSFW ones.) Faced with that, all our wistful "gee, copyright should be reformed" will do nothing. Someone has to take this ruling, someone with a BIG scary pocket, and beat them at their own game using the best seven law teams in the world working together.
My initial suggestion: If "actions" performed in a certain manner get copyright protection, then let's suppose you click this and this and this (times 20) on a site, *the user's clicks operate first*. (Maybe get a browser plugin to script the timing or something.) Then the user's copyright to his "performance art" is created *before* the remote site's tracking cookies engage, which means the remote site is infringing on that user's copy of his clicks. I know, I know, some combination of back room deals will slow that down, but make something like THAT stick, payable to the user at $10,000 per tracking cookie, WATCH how fast someone will fix the law!
"Except, they can find those MP3s on your computer at a border patrol stop (and yes, they really are searching computers for pirated content at border crossings now) and arrest you for pirated content on your computer. You have no way of proving you got the songs legitimately. iTunes is not the solution to the problem."
Yes there is for some cases. If they're really doing that, then one of my many little projects is starting to have value. I call it various things, such as "WhiteListing" and preparing for "Digital Audits". It basically means that as far as possible, to have proven source acquisition paths for every file on your computer. Skipping the edge cases like malware and drive-by-wifi-ers, if it's on your computer, you put it there. So for every song you could have a matching PDF of the purchase, or the copy of the CC license that lets you have it.
It's REALLY hard to do! It's basically exhausting. Look at what we think "web 2.0" is = "sharing"? That's why I have snarked that Web 3.0 will be various flavors of Walled Gardens and draconian control. A really ugly use case is indie music. A cash greedy tyrranical bureaucrat will say "I don't care where it came from, if you don't have one of the seven authorized certificates for it, it counts against you". I have a ton of stuff that came from Music.Download.com back when it was freely offered for download. Oops - that site doesn't exist anymore, and I'll never see those bands again. Same rough idea with Youtube Remixes. Who the heck is someone like "DJ DeadCat" and how do I find her to get copyright clearance??
Hi there, you basically nailed a coda to what I was getting at. And yes, it is sneaky, because if a lil' ol Humanities bird like me found this many fallacies, one you brilliant types could find 300% more of them.
I do indeed feel that the coming of online education is going to send formal education reeling. The first thing we need to do is to fight screeds like this one.
By implication, he did, and that's the problem.
'The prospect of massive-scale online schooling seems to be all the rage at the moment. Recent competing initiatives include Khan Academy, OpenCourseWare, Udacity, Coursera, and edX (the latter ones sponsored by top-name schools such Stanford, Harvard, or MIT, or else founded by ex-faculty members). The idea of universal and free access to college programs from top researchers has fired the imagination of many in the blogosphere, and some have predicted the imminent collapse of traditional universities in the face of this âoetsunamiâ. '
He's not even talking about "Statistics Courses". He's setting his problem domain (is that the word?) to *all* online courses.
Then watch what happens in this line:
"As a college educator myself, I felt compelled to survey one of these courses, so as to assess their general quality, advantages, and disadvantages."
"As a (appeal to authority), I felt compelled to survey one (singular) of these courses, so as to assess their (plural) ...."
I looked over some of those myself a few months ago. Between them, there are *Hundreds* of courses. So the *Statistics Professor* picks a representative sample size of ... wait for it ... ONE!
If this were written up in Academic Paper language we would all be laughing hysterically.