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Gates Nose-Dives at CES
Lots of submissions this morning about Bill Gates' performance at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. His Media Center PC presentation crashed. (The presentation is online.) He also gave an interview to CNET, where he described anyone who doesn't support ever-increasing intellectual property laws as "communists". Boingboing has some commentary on that interview as well.
someone provide a link to the video where Windows 98 crashed on Gates and former MS employee at Comdex in Chicago circa 1998.
If the video still works, Conan O'Brian does some hilarious stand-up badmouthing Gates at minute 7. Skip the garbage before that.
Fast forward to the interesting portion of this riveting presentation.
Obviously, Gates intends to make the allusion that these people are big-C Communists (whose motivation is to keep themselves in power through suppression of the masses), rather than little-c communists (whose motivation is to serve the people through suppression of those currently in power). He's playing off the ignorant knee-jerk reaction of most Americans to equate the word
"Communism" with "Evil" (Stalin did, after all, kill millions of his own people).
For those interested, the crash for this year's CES happens at about 26 minutes in.
Just so you don't have to watch the entire video (2 hours), the crash happens when they are trying to modify a car at around the 01:13:30 mark.
Hey Bill, here are your local pizza joints.
Invention has always been about taking what others have done and pushing it to the next level. Isolated, unique, and innovative invention hasn't occured for a long long time. To get that click, did microsoft reinvent all programming languages? Did they build all their own computers and parts. Did they rediscover the associated math, numbers, languages. Of course not. They took what others had accomplished and pushed forward with their own ideas. Thus "Stealing" their intellectual property.
I assume yoy are running Linux... net/
;)
Get a new Firefox
Get MPlayer http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
Get the Mplayer-Plugin
http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge
Once compiled and installed properly, you will have in-brouwser wmv and mov movies, just like in Windows
Go2online does that pretty well, too, for those of you who don't have Macs. Sherlock is a wonderful tool, though. =)
I think what Bill meant was that Microsoft is working on these things, but Microsoft's search products don't do that well today.
From the CNET article: "What's driving [intellectual property reform], and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?"
"No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were."
Notice how Mr. Gates immediately equates intellectual-property law reform with 'communism?' It appears that the anti-trust cases are finally starting to break him down; if calling intellectual property reform "communist" is the best argument he can make, then we know his logic and rationale beginning to break down to baseless assumptions and insults.
In other words, the reformists may be winning in Gates' view.
discrete (d-skrt)
adj.
Not joined to or incorporated with another; separate; distinct.
discreet
adj 1: marked by prudence or modesty and wise self-restraint; "his trusted discreet aide"; "a discreet, finely wrought gold necklace" [ant: indiscreet] 2: unobtrusively perceptive and sympathetic; "a discerning editor"; "a discreet silence" [syn: discerning] 3: heedful of potential consequences; "circumspect actions"; "physicians are now more circumspect about recommending its use"; "a discreet investor" [syn: circumspect]
</pedantic>
Where did you get that idea? Capitalism is about efficiency. There is no garauntee regarding the fair distribution of wealth. Example: Guy who hits a ball with a stick = millionaire.
Bodily fluids. People in southwest Utah, where I lived, considered Ronald Reagan to be far too liberal, and aren't completely convinced that GW Bush isn't a Democrat in Disguise.
Best Slashdot Co
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Lower quality, but easier on the bandwidth (since their being /.'d)
http://metahost.savvislive.com/microsoft/20050105/ ms_ces_20050105_100.asx
How can this load of uninformed bullshit be modded informative?
. wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade
http://en
And I don't know about you, but my copy of the communist manifesto doesn't say much giving people a choice; it just makes an assumption that communism is a historical inevitability, and that you'd better learn to live with it.
The manifesto is like a pamphlet to describe the general idea of Communism. Throughout much of Marx and Engel's more detailed writings, they not only allude to, but directly state that the Communist economic system must be hand-in-hand with some sort of popular government, a democracy, a republic, etc. In fact, Marx and Engels frequently state throughout their work that the adoption of a Communist economic system must be brought about by the will of the people.
Just like every other communist country is a dictatorship.
The fact that they are Communist is not the reason that they were dictatorships. They were dictatorships because they were modeled after the original Soviet system. It was originally envisioned by Lenin (who grossly modified Marx and Engels work) and later modified by Stalin. When Stalin came to power, Soviet hegemony throughout Asia and Eastern Europe spread, and with it, the Soviet system of government, a dictatorship.
Don't be fooled by people. The Communist Manifesto is not the no-all, end-all of communism, just a simple leaflet compared to what is really out there.
Check out this link for Marx and Engel's real work.
Marx and Engel's Selected Works
I especially recommend that you read "The Principles of Communism".
How many times are you going to submit the same post? How many times will the mods mark it up all the way?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I was ready to call B.S. until I started reading the Slashdot thread full of people explaining how Communism isn't so bad. I'll let them explain this to my girlfriend, who grew up in part of the former USSR (now Latvia). Funny thing - since we got together I've met many people who used to live in the Eastern Bloc - 100% of them (the ones I've met) think that Communism is about the worst thing to ever infect the planet. The scariest thing (at least to some of the posters in this thread) is that most of them now vote Republican.
What kills me is that the left-wingers who advocate communism (to call them Liberals would be an insult to, well, Liberals) so blindly ignore the fact that it has caused some of the worst environmental and human rights abuses in history. We go around villifying Hitler, and rightly so, but he was strictly junior-varsity when compared to Stalin. The most evil corporate polluters (and yes, I think that a few companies are actually evil in this regard) have nothing on Moscow's old five-year plans.
My suggestion to these wanna-be Commies is that they go live in an actual Communist country for awhile. Enjoy life in these workers' paradises full of happy people. Oh, what, these people have either thrown the Communists out, or would do so if they didn't have guns to their heads?
Yes, I know there are a few people screaming about why they can't mod this post -50 flamebait (feel free, I have karma to burn). I'm not saying everyone that supports Open Source, Creative Commons, etc. is a Communist. Far from it: I doubt that more than a tiny, tiny percentage of them actually are. I am, however, shocked at how many crawl out from under their rocks when a subject like this pops up.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
You don't live in the real world do you? In current capitalist countries, the Rich get richer and the poor a whole hell of a lot poorer. The more socialist systems, where health care, education and every other social benifit of society are guarenteed have a higher general standard of living accross the board.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I put up a torrent (177MB) just for you guys! :-)
/John Sjolander, project manager Contribio
I don't know what you guys are doing to fuck your Windows boxes up so much, but I have no problem keeping mine up and running.
What do I do to fuck up my Windows box? Connect it to the net and tried to read email, that's what. I know a lot of people who run Windows at home. Out of all those people, I can't name a single one that hasn't had a problem *IN THE PAST 2 MONTHS* with some sort of virus, spyware, random flakiness, or other bullshit. Right now, on a freshly installed XP system from the factory (with nothing else on it) Windows Update is stuck trying to install some sort of fix, but can't for some reason, with the end result being that I can't get SP2 for it. Fuck it up? Yeah, it's fucked up. But it wasn't me - it was fucked as designed.
Rebooting once a week to "keep it running smoothly." Ha. The fact that you need to do this points to something wrong with your system.
There is a torrent available of the entire video at this blog.
the Guardian online section has an article on this speech. It doesn't mention communism though, concentrating mainly on the relationship between MS and Consumer electronics companies.
4 586,00.html
"Gates grins and bears it
The Microsoft boss endured a few jokes at the US gadget show, but the software giant is starting to overcome consumer mistrust, reports Jack Schofield"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,138
Memes don't exist. Spread the Word.
For an artist to make ANY profit at all off of an RIAA-backed album, the artist has to sell 500,000 copies of the album. The artist is ultimately responsible for covering all recording and various other production and distribution costs.
The RIAA, on the other hand, makes a profit off of each and every album that gets sold, whether it's one copy or a billion. Regardless of whether an artist makes a profit or not, they are still obligated to repay the money loaned by the label at contract signing time.
Less than 1% of RIAA artists will ever sell over 500,000 copies of an album, so while that 1% does bring in an enormous amount of money, it's not like the other 99% are bleeding the industry as bad as the RIAA tries to make us all believe. That 99% however has managed to make themselves a major part of the RIAA's income.
Even if an artist doesn't sell a single copy of an album, the labels still get that loan money back, and you can be sure that there's interest added into the mix there too.
To answer your question: the artists are always on the losing end of the deal in this situation, and by most of the facts and figures I've read recently, that's an overwhelming percentage of signed artists.
Erm, incorrecto. The Spanish government fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War was a coalition government of Socialists Communists and Anarchists. Yes Anarchists. Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" is my favorite introduction to the Spanish Anarchists, well worth reading both to understand them and Orwell himself.
Thanks for the pointer to Orwell; I quickly found an online version of "Homage to Catalonia" right here. ;)
Should be a good read, me being one of those Damned anarchists and all.
"The only clear view is from atop the mountain of our dead selves." - Peter Carroll
( I imagine there is some other procedure to effectively (permenently) turn off this mis-feature; but, I haven't found it, yet.) ~ I don't know anything at all about MC, but there's a Security Center service here (on XP Pro) that I deactivated in services.msc; the Security Center itself is still available (control panel), it just doesn't nag anymore.