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Comment Re:The lesson here (Score 1) 266

There is a lot of truth to that statement. It was the cheaper consumer models that were affected. Retail profit margins are so thin that manufacturers and retailers make up for it with preloaded crapware.

Lenovo's business products were not affected by this as these aren't usually preloaded with crap. The same goes for other manufactures too. Dell and HP both offer cheap crapware infested models, along with pricier crap free business models.

You do get what you pay for.

The last consumer-grade Dell PC I bought came with a restore disk that was just a plain vanilla Windows 7 image. It didn't even have drivers. So, voila, perform a clean install right out of the box, install the drivers (from the included driver disks), and you've got a crapware-free Windows. (Of course, it's still on a consumer-grade Dell laptop, and that's a little harder to remedy. But like you say, you get what you pay for.)

Comment Re:LDS faith has taught this for 150 years (Score 0) 305

Answer - There is no section that says that. It's true that some Mormons once slaughtered a group of passing settlers. It was unequivocally a bad thing to do. It can be slightly better understood (but not excused) by understanding the circumstances. Mormons were quite paranoid of outsiders, since they and their families had been driven out of several cities, raped, and murdered. There was hysteria about Johnston's Army coming into the territory, conquering it, and again raping and murdering people (this was right in the middle of the "Utah War"). In the midst of that hysteria, one group of people went completely nuts and did some horrible, inexcusable things. At first, they told Brigham Young that Indians did it, and Brigham (probably reluctant to believe that some of his own people could do something so heinous), believed them. A local grand jury also failed to indict, again probably reluctant to believe that some of their own could do something so heinous. Years later, federal prosecutors came in, and when it became clear that John Lee and his friends had in fact been responsible, the church excommunicated them (which is the worst penalty a church can or should be able to levy). Years later, Lee was convicted by an all-Mormon jury and shot, and Brigham Young opined that Lee got less than he deserved. There have been some efforts to implicate Brigham Young as a co-conspirator, but it takes a lot of winking at the actual evidence to get there. Many people believe that he made mistakes in how he handled the situation, which is a more supportable proposition.

Bringing up facts about Mormons is fine. But if you're going to do it, learn the whole story. Don't just parrot some anti-Mormon sound bite you once heard from somebody.

Comment Re:Maybe not so useful... (Score 1) 157

They don't lose their copyright just because they stop running a server.

But they should if one were to take seriously all that is said about the reasons why we have copyright and how it should serve the good of the society as a whole.

Perhaps, but I think that's a little extreme. I am, rather, in favor of a more reasonable copyright term. (I would not have upheld the current copyright term if I were on the Supreme Court, since "life of the author" is not a determinate time.) But even then, if they never publish the source code, copyright doesn't come into it. All you could do is copy the game binary, so you would still have to reverse engineer a game server. That's the problem with the DMCA. It reaches over traditional copyright boundaries and prohibits people from doing things like implementing something on their own, which has not copyright implications.

Comment Re:Maybe not so useful... (Score 4, Interesting) 157

All this will do is at best stop the companies from filing DMCA take downs on the fans; it will in no way obligate the company to release their internal software for the servers which ran the game.

That's not a bug, that's a feature. They don't lose their copyright just because they stop running a server. This is just an exemption that wouldn't let them sue gamers for DMCA violations when they reverse engineer their own servers.

Comment Re:Great (Score 4, Insightful) 157

Now only if they'd let me live in this here abandoned house. Perrect!

That's a poor analogy. This isn't a request for a blanket copyright exemption for abandonware. This is a request for a DMCA exception that lets people who already legally own a copy of a game to continue playing it by circumventing DRM and running their own servers.

Comment Re:Edit count whoring (Score 4, Funny) 425

I will write a script that locates ambiguous usage of commas, and will replace them with the correct oxford comma usage.

Sir, that is uncouth, uncivilized and incorrect.

There are legitimate grammar and usage debates, with cogent arguments on either side. But the Oxford Comma is the One True Way. The best argument I've ever heard against it is, "Well, it saves a few drops of ink on the printed page." Anti-Oxford Comma heathens should be drawn, quartered, and burned at the stake for befouling the language.

Comment Re:I concur (Score 1) 425

This guy's my hero - misuse of "comprised" is a pet peeve of mine.

Despite sounding vaguely similar to "composed", it's not a synonym. Comprised is a near-synonym for included, but implies totality. "The band comprised a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer" means that was the entirety of the band. Since so few people actually understand this, I tend to avoid the word.

I believe you have that backwards. "Comprising" is open-ended, and means "including at least". "Consisting of" implies totality. At least in the legal world.

This is an important distinction for patent claims. If you say "A widget comprising a, b, and c," that means the widget includes a, b, and c, and anything else. If you say "A widget consisting of a, b, and c," that means it includes only a, b, and c (which is why you never see "consisting of" in a patent claim, except in Markush groups).

Comment Re:This is Texas! (Score 1) 591

First: I doubt there are any Bible haters here. Why would anyone hate book?

I guess you would have to ask the many, many Slashdot posters who regularly mock the Bible, including the GP. (That said, there are plenty of books I hate, so it's not inconceivable.)

Second: you seem not to know much about what you are talking about, hint: read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]

Um, did you read the page you linked to? Because it definitely supports exactly what I was saying. Whether you believe the Bible was divinely inspired, it was a near-contemporary account. The fact that a little blurb on Wikipedia mentions that some early-20th-Century archaeologists think Molech might have been made up is hardly conclusive evidence that Molech is "obviously" an invention of the Jews to denigrate their enemies. But regardless of what you think actually happened, the author of Chronicles was definitely saying, "Manasseh was an awful person because he sacrificed children to Molech." That's a far cry from the GP's original thesis of "Manasseh was an awful person because he did the equivalent of reading Harry Potter."

Comment Re:This is Texas! (Score 1) 591

Yeah, I know you think it's clever and edgy to make fun of people who read the Bible, but if you're going to do it, at least have some basic understanding. The passage you're referring to, in which Manasseh's evils are enumerated, includes "he caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Hinnom." This is a reference to Molech worship, in which people literally burned children to death in the arms of golden idols. Surely even for an edgy, clever Bible-hater, that's sufficiently abominable to call him evil.

Comment Re:Modula-3 FTW! (Score 1) 492

You do understand that Pascal was first released in 1970, right? Many Pascal programmers in the 1970s asked the same question - why do we need C, with its dangerous string handling and obtuse preprocessor, if it doesn't solve any new problems?

Um, you realize that C came out at almost exactly the same time, don't you? Granted, I wasn't programming anything in the 1970s, but I know enough history to know that the Unix kernel was already being ported to C right around 1970.

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