awfabian2

The comment you're replying to made a good point about how aggressively Disney has lobbied to keep extending copyright law to keep Mickey Mouse and such out of the public domain, whereas your comment refers to "intellectual property", which by drawing an incorrect analogy with physical property leads people into sloppy and incorrect thinking about the issues, and imprecisely lumps together several distinct areas of law, like copyright and trademark. With all due respect, your comment is one of the most ignorant things I have ever heard about intellectual property law.

As a Dvorak typing sysadmin who used to use QWERTY, the vi navigation keys work just fine on Dvorak. As it turns out, once you're used to Dvorak, you see that having the keys next to each other on the keyboard and on the home row doesn't count for anything in any regard, either memorability or efficiency. I had that reservation about Dvorak too, but ... nope. It's just not confusing or a slow down. It's far less of an issue that the sort of kludgy moded editing and reaching for escape. (I'm an Emacs user at heart. I gave both years of usage, and organically ended up using vi for quick edits, emacs for long editing sessions.)

It's sort of like the much-talked-about switch to reverse scrolling in OS X. You may think it's a big deal, but your brain makes the adjustment, and it just doesn't matter. Your vi editing efficiency should be pretty nearly unaffected. It might be very fractionally slower, since the navigation keys aren't on the home row, but .. I never notice it at all. It's definitely not far less efficient.

Not arguing that you should switch, incidentally. I could also touch type 100+ wpm on QWERTY. I never regained my original speed after switching. That's very common for very fast typists. If you don't put systematic effort into speed training, you'll lose some speed for switching. Not that it's that big of a deal.

In the US, such orders usually have to be in writing, be pretty specific, and the meaning has to be fairly clear. You would have a very difficult time holding someone in contempt for a court order that's not written. And, so, what's written IS the order, regardless of the judge's intent.

In other words, a third party judge should be able to judge compliance with the order, so it certainly would not be the case that if the original judge thinks something doesn't comply with his order that it necessarily doesn't comply.

You actually can't make that assertion in confidence. To do so, you have to measure the utility of the benefits to a given individual, and the utility of the money they spend on it, and quantify the risk of Amazon revoking/pulling the content.

As hard as it might be for you to believe, your subjective worldview is not absolute reality, and not everyone shares your world-view and definition of utility, so you can't actually judge whether their actions are self-defeating for them.

I got my first Mac about 1 year and 4 months ago. I've been pretty happy with it. My fallback plan was just to install Windows or Linux on it. To me, the worst case scenario was that I was over-paying for some decent hardware. As it turns out, I never needed to exercise the backup plan.

I've been buying Amazon ebooks for the Kindle. I like the Kindle 3 keyboard without special offers well enough, but I don't really like the "we want to make money when you use the device" angle. Making money when I'm buying content is okay, but this Kindle will have to be replaced eventually, and then my entire ebook collection is retroactively adified.

Very irritating. I suppose I'll have to rip the DRM off of them and use them with another device if every eInk kindle has mandatory ads in the future.

Just never give authorization for recurring billing. I use my credit card for one-time payments for monthly services all of the time, and I never authorize recurring billing. When you do that, you establish an on-going relationship with the merchant that isn't so easy to cancel. But you can cancel their authorization to do recurring billing in writing, and then any charge made on that ground should be refunded to you as a simple matter of course.

It generally works out pretty well if you just never authorize automatic recurring billing.

I went to a good school for CS, and some of the professors did work for private industry and interesting research, and why hardware like this can seem so dated came up a few times. One professor worked doing formal verifications of hardware and such things. (for example, Toyota might want something close to formal, mathematical proof that the chips and software in their car can never cause uncontrolled acceleration.)

Basically, if you dump a lot of money into making sure something works, and works exactly as intended, as long as it does and can do the job, you don't change anything. You don't stick in one extra memory chip without redoing your formal verifications and tolerance testing, etc. Very expensive people will have to run very expensive processes to prove that even the most minor change doesn't compromise certain key properties when you can't afford for those properties to be compromised for any reason whatsoever.

The last time I played with Opera's built-in mail client, it was pretty similar.

I think Theo actually encourages clean installs. It's no surprise the upgrade procedure would leave something to be desired.

I believe I think in words even more than average. I don't know if anyone can say how. I don't know how my brain puts together words. It's no effort for me to make a sentence; it's like they come out of a mysterious black box. But it happens all of the time, so it doesn't feel mysterious. If the black box is very central to how your brain works, it seems like the pressure of feeling and thinking, rather than erupting into images or sounds, erupts into words. Say a scary bug lands on you, and you want to swat it away. You have an immediate need to swat, and you don't think. You won't decide whether to use your right hand, or your left; you'll use your hands without thinking about it at all. Even normal actions and movements are like that, if you look; there is some small pressure with a less sudden eruption into thought or movement. So, to reiterate, that's what it seems like to me; if you miss someone, if you think in words, when the pressure builds up into a representation of your mind, it won't be a picture of the person's face, it will be words instead, "I miss Person."

I doubt the reason is technical. Showmanship is a big part of Apple's corporate DNA.

I doubt anything technical prevents instant updating. Showmanship is a big part of the corporate DNA.

I think one of the problems with Windows is monoculture. One of the great UNIX ideals is 'reject all claims of the one true way.' Microsoft always advocates the one true way--Windows, Visual Studio. Everything Microsoft. But because no-one-true-way is built into UNIX's philosophy, it becomes whatever people want. You want minimal? You can use small command line tools. Reject minimalism? Use perl and emacs. UNIX is the Borg. Apple can spruce it up into a consumer operating system. Linux can go every direction at once and not collapse, and OpenBSD can go fanatical about security.

I think, ultimately, openness, and no One True Way make UNIX evolve and survive. Whatever ultimately supplants UNIX, it's a lesson worth remembering and applying everywhere. Even when the One True Way is grafted onto UNIX (i.e., Apple with OS X), the Way of UNIX makes it possible, and ensures that it will survive over whatever temporary One True Way appeared superimposed on it.

We, the human race, made up property. And we made up intellectual property. So if you want to argue to me about morality and legality, save it. Those aren't arguments, those are superstitions and/or conventions.

Tell me why a convention should be observed. If content creators don't get paid, perhaps less content will get generated. Perhaps there will be legal consequences like getting sued by the MPAA or RIAA.

But, again, give me actual reasons, not superstition and/or convention.