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In This June 2003 article, this company claims to make 1.5 Inch 1.5 GB drive for $65 in quantities of 10,000.

We're talking about privacy issues, and if we're going to be specific, we're talking about OnStar privacy issues. However, you are apparently one of those people that enjoys playing the "You're off-topic" card whenever it's convenient for yourself. If you care about being on-topic on a "thread" you started, how about you nip it at the bud and say "Hey, I don't want to get into this shit because it's off-topic" but that's not what you did, you taunted.

Excuse me for answering your taunt.

By the way, anything is related to anything else. The OnStar (And similar systems in deployment) have serious privacy concerns, and you seem to have missed the part about the FBI court order in this whole thing. The government has already tried to take advantage of this privacy slip and don't think they won't try again anyways. It's ignorance like your own that allows governments to get away with ignoring the constitution. People say oh, boohoo, not only do I have nothing to hide, but I also don't care, so long as I'm "safe" for a bit longer!

Not only is OnStar and similar systems on the road to becoming a required component of any automobile, it's also run, mostly, by people that care about money. The government is run, mostly, by people that care about power. Money and power go hand in hand, and it doesn't take much to figure out that backdoor deals as well as exploits of flaws in the sytem will go ignored.

You may call us paranoid, but I, sir, call you blissfully ignorant in your own little world. Your naivete contributes more than you know to the maintenance of the status quo. Do some research on history and realize that things aren't all peachy below the surface.

P.S. -- Before you even attempt to claim that the court order is proof the gov't won't be allowed to get away with attempts at the same stunts, realize that it's the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals we're talking about here, and they're overturned quite often.

"- it was designed from the ground up and is conceptually sound, unlike mozilla which was a hack job on top of netscape's browser"

Nope. They dropped the old code and started from scratch a long, looong time ago.

"- unlike other browsers (mozilla, IE), it was designed using 'mature' technology (HTML4, CSS, etc.) and does not have nearly as many compatibility woes as IE, nor as many add-on hacks, as the other browsers had, due to changing stnadards over the years (in other words: it's a newer, fresher code base)"

Nope. Konq doesn't pass basic CSS tests that I have written. Mozilla does.

"- unlike mozilla/firebird, I can use it for hours/days with many pages open (15+) without the entire affair slowing to a crawl and/or dying"

Nope in my case. I'm not sure your problem, but I have no problem with my 2-3 windows with about 7-15 tabs each, open for the entirety my computer is on. The average between reboots on my workstation is a month. I'll close Mozilla to update to a more recent nightly, but that's about it. My hardware isn't insane either --- XP 1700+ w/ 768mb RAM.

OnStar is a good system, and can even save your life in the event of an accident.

If I read this right its jut for the softphone not for the sevice that will make it work on top of that. If all you want is the soft phone, there are plenty of freeware ones available with the same featues. I've used X-Lite in the past and found it to not suck.

fact that they can spam those on their subscriber mailing list

You seem to have forgotten step where they grab Equifax's 75 million address SPAM LIST, trim it down to target their own state, then send a massive flood of UNSOLICITED BULK E-MAIL asking people to sign up for the mailing list. That is SPAM.

Congress isn't really placing themselves above the law

I guess that's true in that they put the law so far down that every spammer can be above the law. The law they passed actually legalized much formerly illegal spam. The Direct Marketing Association conciders the CAN-SPAM law to be a victory! Just check C-NET's story: It's not called 'Can' Spam for nothing.

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First of all they shouldn't be able commit abuses through e-mail that they are forbidden from commiting through normal mail. Elected officials are not permitted to abuse their office to run a private polical campaign, they are not permitted to stick the tax-payers with the bill for running that campaign.

Secondly, because it is still SPAM.

They are each sending millions of unsolicited junk E-mails with the costs almost entirely dumped on the receiving end. The actual dollar costs are split 50/50 between the sender and receiver, but the dollor costs are negligable. The real cost is human. Lets assume that only takes one second on average to spot and delete each spam. Each batch of 1,000,000 spams costs 1,000,000 people one second. The total cost is still 1,000,000 seconds. That is cost is SEVEN WEEKS of full-time work for one person.

Then multiply that by the fact that they are each sending several million spams in each batch. Multiply that by the number of state and federal elected positions. Multiply that by the number of candidates. Multiply that by the number special intrest groups. Multiply that by every year, assuming that they are nice enough to only spam us once per year.

The E-mail system is flawed in that anyone can set up an automated system generating spam and for merely a few dollars they can burn up more than an entire human life-span dealing with the output. A human waking life is around 1.5 billion seconds. Every 1.5 billion spams generated costs one human lifetime. The dollar cost to generate those 1.5 billion spams is far too low a price to pay to burn up a lifetime from other people.

The problem with spam is that the lionshare of the real cost is dumped on the people receiving it. Unsolicited bulk e-mail is still unsolicited bulk e-mail when it is sent by a politician or political activist. It is still spam.

P.S.
Don't think the new "CAN-SPAM" law is going to fix the spam problem. The Direct Marketing Association considers the law a victory for the spam business. Check this C-NET sory "
It's not called 'Can' Spam for nothing.

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The G5 spanks the Opteron in many of the non-gaming tests, except for the Photoshop tests.

Isn't photoshop the reason for buying a mac?

And what about all those announcements?

Microsoft asks Mac users, "How can we get your business?'

Merrill Lynch, whose technology group recently began coverage of Red Hat, noted in a research note last week that "open source and Mac adoption is still in infancy in the enterprise market." However, "we should see explosive growth in the years to come as corporations look to achieve cost savings within their IT departments."

Using IDC's own estimate for G5/OSX server shipments through 2007, as well as its internal data on OSX operating system attach rates and server pricing, Merrill reckons that the enterprise G5 market could be worth $529 million by 2007. "This represents a [compound annual growth rate] of 61 percent over the 5-year period from 2002-2007," the note said.

Japanese telco to aid Mac phone development

Mac, G5 systems move out enterprise's mainframe

New G5 chips, but no 64-bit OS X for at least two years (too late).

"We're saying that OSX/G5s will eat Unix," Gantz said.

Is Computer Associates contemplating dumping Windows?

If you have been following Microsoft attempts to hold onto counties, cities, states, governmental bodies, governments, corporations and people, you know the headlines have gone from talk to action.

The governments that are starting to move over tend to be mostly poorer countries, or ones with large, largely computer-free populaces. Brazil and China are good examples of this trend. In those places, OSX/G5 adoption has been picking up steam to the point that if a second world country told MS to take a hike, it would hardly rate a Slashdot story on a slow day. .

THE NATIONAL HEALTH Service is considering using the OSX operating system & G5s in a 2.3 billion deal that could affect as many as 800,000 PCs if a pilot is successful.

Nine German cities poised to adopt OSX/G5

Official: China to invest in OSX/G5-based software industry

The US Army has abandoned Windows and chosen OSX for a key component of its "Land Warrior" programme, according to a report in National Defense Magazine. The move, initially covering a personal computing and communications device termed the Commander's Digital Assistant (CDA), follows the failure of the previous attempt at such a device in trials in February of this year, and is part of a move to make the device simpler and less breakable.

According to program manager Lt Col Dave Gallop this is part of a broader move towards OSX/G5 by the US Army: "Evidence shows that OSX is more stable. We are moving in general to where the Army is going, to OSX/G5-based OS."

Sun Microsystems is the odd man out. It has an impressive array of powerful enemies: IBM, Microsoft, Intel, HP, Red Hat, Apple, Novell, and more. It has only a weakened Oracle as a friend, and Oracle too has made a "bet the company" move to OSX/G5. OSX/G5 threatens many of Sun's traditional products as sharply a

Hey guys, it is not $10/hr but $10/24 hour. Check this out. They will be charged $9.99 for a 24-hour pass to connect to T-Mobile's hot-spot service.

You sure about that? Court to FBI: No spying on in-car computers. So they are trying to use those capabilities.

Along with CPU power consumption, review hdparm configuration of ATA power management and spindown of the hard drive, e.g. IBM/Hitachi drives.

A shorter drive duty cycle reduces power consumption of both drive and cooling fan. With bios support, boot from ATA compact flash into a tmpfs filesystem for shortest OS-attributed duty cycle of mechanical parts. Or shrink the mechanics, circa IBM Microdrive or iPod-scale 1.8" drive.

External deep-cycle batteries must be power regulated, fused, sealed AGM or safely boxed and externally vented to remove discharged hydrogen.

Well Microsoft admitted they needed to reduce update sizes and have planned to reduce sizes by 30%

Story here

If they supply the entire DLL file instead of patches then that bloats the size of a patch.

They're teaming up with DirecTV but Comcast, for example, is not teaming up with TiVO. Since they're the largest cable operator in the US, it's a big deal.

The law doesn't have any problem with reaching mutually-incompatible conclusions in two distinct cases. Here, we're not even talking two cases, so Red Hat can pony up evidence of damage that convinces a jury, even if we're right.

Second thought is that this is slashdot: Our opinions are slightly less valid than CNet news.com's (although the raft of innacuracies/errors/misinterpretations in this story have me thinking they've fallen below us). To really get the mental effect of how worthless our collective wisdom is, just imagine our own reaction if SCO pointed to this thread as 'proof' that Red Hat wasn't damaged. Several slashdotters would laugh themselves to death, for starters...

The first manifestation of our collective bias is that we'd all put on a game face when asked if SCO was winning. That said, we'd all also be able to come up with at least ONCE that some PHB or suit has asked us unfavorably about Linux based on the SCO case, if Red Hat asked us for supporting evidence.

Linux grows in spite of SCO. However, without SCO's lawsuit(s), we'd definitely have seen it grow faster.

get people to stop buying the advertised products. This can't be that hard to do.

Spam costs essentially zero to send and it is often profitable with a response rate of 1-in-10,000. Unfortunately more than that are mentally ill. Unfortunately more than that are senile. Hell, half the population is just plain stupid. It is impossible to stop spam by asking people not to buy.

anti-spam bill

This bill legallizes some formerly illegal spam. The direct-marketing association considers the bill (now law) to be a VICTORY. They want to eliminate the flood of "junk-spam" that is drowning out the "high-value" spam they want to flood at you.

See this C-Net story:
It's not called 'Can' Spam for nothing

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Headline-Intel sees IBM and AMD tech doing well, decides to copy.

link

Silicon on Insulator, Copper Interconnects, DDR memory, dual core, but not HyperTransport yet.

It's an overview. No single case gets more than a brief mention, and although there has been lots of FUD and SCO has made an ass of itself, there hasn't yet been much action in court. In any case, there is a sidebar menu for "most popular headlines" which includes a link to a page about the SCO case.

To me, I think the biggest difference is that in 1998 with the RTM Worm *NIX people started to think "hey, if this box is going to be connected a network , it needs to be secure." In other words, if it could possibly have a network stack, it needed to be secured.

Microsoft didn't start thinking about that, what 13 or 14 years later, when Code Red and the lot started to hit. It wasn't rocket science, it was just a matter of time. I think it was just the beginning...

You know what scares me the most? China has access to Microsoft source code [1, 2]. What if some Chinese government insider's son decides to take the knowledge of exploits learned and release something (no different than RTM did in 1988)? What if China wanted to wage "cyberwar" on Taiwan and a worm with a multiple nasty exploits (3+) got lose to the US and abroad?

However, as per this this article, Microsoft does not intend on pushing any new security patches throughout the month of December. But then again, apparently Microsoft can even manage to NOT patch correctly...

These 'reject' chips might be the reason Emachines offers such a cheap 64 bit computer.

You've got unemployment!

Registration-free link

Anedotally: none of the iPods in my office have died. One of my coworkers ordered a 30 GB iPod two days before Apple revealed the 40 GB. He called to complain, but there was no reason to - they readily agreed to ship the 40 to him with an RMA label for the 30. Another coworker sent his back only days after getting it because it wouldn't turn on. Apple obliginly let him send it back, even though I, and other coworkers, had found instructions on how to get your iPod up and running when you let the battery drain too far. Two days later, the iPod was back, with a full charge, and instructions on how not to do it again (nevermind the fact that he did).

Non-anecdotal: Check this out. Let's then go back to the original Cnet coverage of this on November 26. The Cnet article also mentions the beginning of Apple's policy, which began before the Neistats video appeared.

Completely biased: The Neistats are media whores who use poor grammar (it's "irreplacable," not "unreplacable") and they are simply looking for some attention.

Looks like you gave them some.

So, tell us again: who was played by whom?

This "typical Mac person" is going to go finish compiling KDE on his iBook now. Y'all come back now, y'hear?

"Microsoft has broken some laws, too, yes."

Why is that OK with you? Why is somebody who breaks laws a better person then somebody who did not break laws? You judge ellison harshly even though he has never been charged with a crime and you want to give Bill gates a pass even though he has been convicted.

"But I haven't heard anything about outright stealing technology;"

In that case you have your head buried in the sand. Sendo, Priceline , and Stac are just a few of the victims of theft of Intellectual property by MS. I am not talking about copying applications here I am talking about out and out stealing of technology and breaking contracts. Here is a quote from one of the articles I linked to.
During one of those meetings, Priceline said Microsoft CEO Bill Gates told Priceline founder Jay Walker that he wasn't going to let patent infringement claims stand in his way.

According to a Priceline press release announcing the suit, "Mr. Gates went on to say that many other companies were suing Microsoft for patent infringement and that priceline.com could, in effect, get in line."

Further down the article.
This is not the first time a company has claimed that Microsoft stole its technology after meeting to discuss a business relationship.

In December 1998, Goldtouch Technologies sued the software giant, saying Microsoft illegally copied its design for an ergonomic mouse after the two companies had discussed the product.

Other companies who've sued Microsoft for patent infringement include Eolas Technologies, which claimed earlier this year that the Redmond, Wash., giant infringed upon a plug-in patent. And in 1994, a jury ordered Microsoft to settle with Stac Electronics Inc. for violating a data-compression patent.

MS has a history of sleazy behavior like this.

"Give me more information, and then I can make a proper judgment."

I have provided you with a few links, google can provide much more.

"But I'm not really arguing that they didn't do those things"

Why not? If they did lie, cheat and steal is it OK with you? Is that moral? If I could prove to you that MS lied cheated and stole would you agree with me that they are immoral? My guess is that you don't think there is anything wrong with lying, cheating and stealing as long it's done in the name of making money.

"I asked those questions in order to contrast against Philip Morris's own violations of mores and laws, in order to show that there's complexity in the issues."

It's not that complex. Both Phillip Morris and MS are immoral companies doing immoral things. You can argue about the degree of immorality but that's a hollow argument. that's like saying one mass murderer is less immoral then another one because he killed less people.

"But are they being immoral? What are they being immoral about? Destroying other people's things? I guess in itself that's immoral."

Yes they are being immoral. Yes destroying other people's property is immoral and illegal.

"But are you trying to say there's absolutely no justification for such things? There's never a time when destroying somebody else's things is NOT immoral?"

I never said and I'd appreciate it if you did not put words into my mouth. There may very well be circumstances when it's OK to destroy other people's property. You keep trying to muddy up the issue by throwing up these stupid straw man arguments but I am not going to bite.

"Why is it so hard for you to believe that morality and ethics are a complicated issue? Countless people have struggled with these issues for thousands of years because it's so complicated, yet you seem to think it's black and white.'

It's not hard for me to believe th

How can Namco get $2,772 for a machine that plays Space Invaders when an arcade operator could spend a little more and get the ArcadePC Deluxe and 50 games? (besides breaking the licensing).

Management actually discounted the lower cost of outsourcing the work to India, but rather blamed the attitudes the local programmers (many of whom wouldn't want to work in that area of the country anyway).

/. != Linux

The small part that it had played in technology is diminishing as even Joe Six pack is figuring that Windows isn't ready for the Internet and that pretending it is is costing businesses billions, year after year, after year. Both directly and indirectly. And now that international investors have divested and that even its own emloyees have offloaded it is as irrelevant to the stock market as it is for the IT sector.

No reason to keep plugging it, if you're not on the pay roll. Doing so is not only working for free but also causing further harm and excluding other stories and even original sources.

/. != Linux

The small part that it had played in technology is diminishing as even Joe Six pack is figuring that Windows isn't ready for the Internet and that pretending it is is costing businesses billions, year after year, after year. Both directly and indirectly. And now that international investors have divested and that even its own emloyees have offloaded it is as irrelevant to the stock market as it is for the IT sector.

No reason to keep plugging it, if you're not on the pay roll. Doing so is not only working for free but also causing further harm and excluding other stories and even original sources.

The news of the day:

Real is suing Microsoft for abusing its OS monopoly in digital audio/video markets

Have you even read the article ?
From the article on news.com:
Among the security improvements in Service Pack 2 are a beefed-up version of Windows Firewall, previously called Internet Connection Firewall, and software designed to block pop-up ads and prevent the unintended downloading and installation of software.
And perhaps you should read this article as well, titled Internet Explorer to stomp pop-ups.

From the following Cnet article:
http://news.com.com/2100-7344_3-5127627.html?tag=n efd_top

All these quotes apparently came from Mr. Morton himself.

"...the part of 2.6 that communicates with memory is less efficient, imposing a practical limit of 24GB of memory to the 32GB that 2.4 could handle. However, he believes that programmers will address the problem."

Is this reduced limit useful? Why should it be up to programmers to code around? Did I miss something?

"The new kernel also monitors for new events more frequently--1,000 times per second instead of 100--a fact that slows down the system about 1 percent..."

I assume it's to try and respond to events faster but increasing it tenfold, isn't that overkill? I mean, it slows the system down by 1% which isn't horrible and if a real-time app has a problem with it, you can always modify the kernel yourself but couldn't they have upped the polling to 250 which is a decent increase but not a 10x one.

"In addition, 2.6 requires somewhat more memory to run and shows worse performance when it has to use hard drives as extra memory under heavy loads... "

That seems reasonable that it needs a bit more memory but why should it see adverse effects under heavy loads as compared to the 2.4 kernel? Shouldn't they degrade at around the same level or are there some new file system issues that cause this?

Enlighten me.

What are you talking about? They've already licensed the code from SCO!

• Rhapsody: 250,000
• MusicMatch: 150,000 (scroll down - it's in the body of the article)
• MusicNet: 175,000
• Napster: 80,000 (read this recently, can't find the source at the moment)

Havenco and Sealand have long since parted ways

more: "There's also something you can do to help, and that is to moderate your own use of AOL a bit, during our peak evening periods ... Just as you would be sensitive about using a public phone booth if others were waiting in line to use it ... it would be helpful if you could be considerate of the needs of other members."

This link (from download.com) works:

WinAmp 5.0 Full

I found an article that quotes more accurate figures for 2002. This Zdnet.com.com article quotes a 7% global loss in CD sales in 2002. However, not even this loss in sales (not even considering the fact that the US was in a serious recession at the time) can be attributed very directly to piracy, since DVD sales increased 61%, possibly showing that there is instead a shift in what people are spending their entertainment money on, as they view DVDs as a better value for the same money.

First, you have to obtain a copy of GAY NIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it.

Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA "first post" on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website

Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on EFNet, and apply for membership.

Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today!

If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is EFNet,
and you can connect to irc.secsup.org or irc.isprime.com as one of the EFNet servers.

If you do not have an IRC client handy, you are free to use the GNAA Java IRC client by clicking here.

About Lunix

Lunix is an operating system. An operating system is the basic set of programs and utilities that make your computer run. Some other common operating systems are Unix (and its variants BSD, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, and others); DOS; Microsoft Windows; Amiga; and Mac OS.

Lunix is Free Software. Now, just because it's Free, doesn't necessarily mean it's free. Think "free" as in "free speech," not "free beer," as we in the Free Software/Open Source community like to say. In a nutshell, software that is free as in speech, like Lunix, is distributed along with its source code so that anyone who receives it is free to make changes and redistribute it. So, not only is it ok to make copies of Lunix and give them to your friends, it's also fine to tweak a few lines of the source code while you're at it -- as long as you also freely provide your modified source code to everyone else. To learn more about free software and the major software license it is distributed under, called the General Public License (GPL), go here.

If you have mod points and would like to support GNAA, please moderate this post up.

By moderating this post as "Underrated", you cannot be Meta-Moderated! Please consider this.

As others pointed out, the legitimate music download services are operating in cooperation with, and not counter to, the record companies and artists. They are resellers of the record companies' products, just like Amazon or Tower Records. A sale is a sale.

Moreover, the lawsuits in the USA appear to be working. Europe has surpassed the USA in unauthorized music downloads, a large reason for this being that Kazaa usage in the US has dropped to half of what it once was. And, in case the point isn't already clear, I've spoken to a few people who work for the legitimate music download services, and they think the lawsuits are great. The theory is that they're scaring into buying music legitimately, whether that's via old-fashioned CD, or via a legal download. Traffic on the legal sites is apparently approaching the same order of magnitude as the P2P networks: Apple has announced that they've had 25 million downloads.

All of the above has been said before, so perhaps I can offer something that hasn't been brought up here on /., at least that I've seen: some historical perspective. The shift from CD to online distribution is one of but several media format changes that the recording industry has had to endure. I wasn't around for the move from 78's to LPs or for the explosion of the cassette tape format, but I was around for the transition from LPs to CDs, and if you think the wait for record companies and artists to adopt online distribution has been frustrating, be glad you weren't an early adopter of the CD format back in the early 80's. That, too, took years before everybody on the CD train. It started with CDs occupying just a tiny rack in a store of vinyl, and prices were regularly $16.95 and above -- in 1984 dollars. Even when CDs began to occupy a significant amount of shelf space, it was a regular practice for the record company to put out new releases in vinyl first, and not bother with a CD until months later, presumably after they'd seen whether the LP's sales were strong. For early adopters who couldn't wait to hear their favorite band's latest album, this meant buying the same music twice -- a factor which probably didn't exactly encourage the record companies to end their "release the CD format later" strategy!

It's because of this experience that the "Immediate death of the RIAA predicted, film at 11" type posts, written because the move to legal online distribution isn't happening as quickly as some people would like, don't carry much weight. Some industries simply move slowly and cautiously, and the record industry is one of them.

Lastly, can we finally dispense with that old "they're suing little girls!" straw man? I think we all know what happened: the RIAA named the person who was listed in the phone company records for that address, and for some reason, the mom had used her kid's name when signing up for phone service. This could happen to any of us: if, say, you had a dispute with a local business in your town and it got to the point that you had to take legal action, if the owner had registered the business in their kid's name, then you might be in that same embarrassing situation until things got sorted out.

Looks like they agree with your idea. Microsoft to reshuffle Windows Unit

Judge orders SCO to show Linux infringement - CNET news.com

In other legal action, IBM on Wednesday subpoenaed Sun Microsystems; which recently expanded its Unix license with SCO Group and has a warrant to purchase shares in the company; Schwartz Communications; a public relations firm that represents SCO; and defense contractor Northrop Grumman. IBM spokeswoman Guarino couldn't immediately describe the purpose of the subpoenas.

I wonder why IBM subpoenaed Northrop Grumman? SCO says Grumman didn't buy any shares (although I don't believe that farther than I can kick it)...

MSNBC has been going a GREAT job of putting out the "Microsoft" side of its news stories.
Let us compare the "retirement" of Windows 98, among others.
MSNBC Link: Microsoft to retire Windows 98
and ZDNET: Microsoft to ditch older products
So, I guess this merger has been a huge success... for Microsoft.

Doesn't work for a flash-embedded movie. I've got the SWF downloaded, and even have a SWF decomplier that lets me view images and other binary data, but I don't know how to export it. If anyone knows how to do this, I'm all ears. The decompiler is Sothink's SWF decompliler availabe here

How about a developer nano-ITX board?

Or, for those of you who don't have root access at VIA, how about a biometric flash drive? A decent smartphone? How about a working LCD display, with all the wiring pre-done please.

The Netscape ISP in the UK was a no-frills ISP, which basically used the name recognition to interest people.

However the name had probably faded from too many people to be successfull.

ZDNet posted this article when it eventually closed down.

Mozillazine did cover this story of the new US based ISP on their blogs.

Perhaps IBM can subsidize such a business model. As annoying as the advertising could be, I certainly would be interested in a free PC.

The disconcerting part of the article is the data-mining, however. The article claims that the personal information is confidential but it still makes me feel wary.

I'm curious as to what the specs on these machines are. It would have to be a damn good machine for me to consider such intrusive advertising practices. I recognize that, however is not likely.

In fact, the Canadian copyright board ruled on Friday that P2P downloading of copyrighted music is legal in Canada. Uploads, however, are illegal.

CNet is running an article on this right now. The decision (PDF) is here.

Ok, gettings back to the point, P2P downloads of music have exposed me to artists I wouldn't have known of otherwise, and I have bought more music becuase of it. I do claim this is good for artists and the music industry... who it's not good for is the big record labels.

Unfortunately for the big record labels, most of the music I've wanted to buy was from independent bands. Until P2P I had largely listened to signed bands -- mostly because that's what almost everyone was exposed to. With the advent of P2P, a lot of smaller bands got far more exposure... many (most even) of them are pretty rotten, but a few are great, and I do make an effort to support them.

To be fair, I think our IP laws are in need of serious reform, but I do support the right of musicians and other people who produce creative works to receive compensation.

By the way, the rankforsales page is Mozilla hostile. Here's a better link to the story.

For further reviews on the S56:

Howard Forums

Mobile Media

ZDNet

Diebold's attitudes toward their voting machines make me wonder about their ATMs, and if they are as insecure and poorly implemented as the voting machines were demonstrated to be.

Now why would you worry about Diebold ATM's?