Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: OpenDocument, Intelligent Design, More DRM
Sony still not "getting it". c writes "Mark Russinovich continues his investigation of Sony's DRM as he tries out the official uninstaller. His verdict? 'I've analyzed virulent forms of spyware/adware that provide more straightforward means of uninstall.'" Relatedly Cronos1388 writes "According to the Inquirer an Italian group is also suing Sony over the rootkit." Also, an unexpected side effect of this technology is that script kiddies have been able to leverage Sony's tool to hide unauthorized cheat programs from the watchful eye of MMO creators.
Intelligent design supporters ousted. PMuse writes "The Register and others are reporting that all eight of the members of the Dover, PA school board that had required Intelligent Design to be taught alongside Evolution have been canned by voters in yesterday's election."
What does avian flu look like? DevL writes "Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson has managed to capture images of a H5N1 (bird flu) virus entering and taking control of a cell. While the text is in Swedish, the images speak for themselves."
Torrent user goes up the river. stinerman writes to tell us that the Hong Kong man who was recently arrested for making several movies available via BitTorrent has had his sentence handed down. Chan aka "Big Crook" uploaded Daredevil, Red Planet, and Miss Congeniality which landed him 3 months in jail.
Golden weighs in on OpenDocument debate. OSS_ilation writes "With so much FUD and anti-FUD flying in the face of Massachusetts' decision to go with OpenDocument, it's no surprise that open source advocate Bernard Golden weighs in with his take on current events."
User says new downloadable television just plain "sucks." Thomas Hawk writes "In the past few weeks the three major studios have all announced deals to begin offering downloadable television for consumers -- Apple/ABC, DirecTV/NBC, and Comcast/CBS. The problem with each of these respective offerings is that they largely suck. Apple sells expensive low res limited television from ABC. NBC's new service will only work on DirecTV DVRs (uh hello McFly, why pay money for this service when I can just record it for free). And CBS' downloadable programming could contain commercials."
I not sure their desire to put in DRM on their CDs won't cause them more grief than it saved them in non-pirated copies of the disc (which is probably already on P2P sites, most probably because of this fiasco)
Why don't the networks give people the choice to either download HDTV shows in WITH ADS from their site for FREE or download HDTV shows WITHOUT ADS for $2.00? They could even create their own torrent type network that only works with their network to lessen the load.
I am so sick of this.
I am also a True Believer and attend a worship service every Sunday.
That said, ID is NOT true science. It is simply a score of men who wish to get nonsense into our textbooks.
We MUST stop ID!
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
In other words, the lawyers are lining up to ease the pain of the affected consumers by securing a $2 off coupon for the next DRM'ed CD while collecting $12 million for themselves.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
It's not a "wild-eyed devotion" so much as a recognition that one thing is science and one thing is not. Kansan students are not going to be graduating knowing what is and is not science. I won't have any positions in my company available for astrologers either.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Your arguments are entirely fucking wrong, the fact that they've been modded up as insightful is just sad. There's really no other way of putting this. Intelligent Design is a metaphysical theory since it cannot be falsified. Scienctific theories are falsifiable, metaphysical theories are not. To teach metaphysical theories as scientific is to teach lies as truth. This has nothing to do with claiming religious or other metaphysical beliefs are whacko. To be a scientist or objective does not require that one disavow any unscientific beliefs, but that one recognize that they are metaphysical and not scientific.
This argument that science is wrong to discriminate against metaphysical theories is wrong. Sectarian disputes are arguments over metaphysical theories, science does not take a position on such theories and therefore cannot be drawn into such debates while retaining it's integrity. This entire attack on science as if it is antagonistic of religious beliefs is provably wrong. Those who make it should be shunned as idiots, regardless of their metaphysical positions.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Someone who is religious is different from someone who was schooled to deliberately not understand the difference between a scientific theory and what is more or less a religious belief.
I'm very glad that when I was a kid, some of my teachers took the time to go over logic and reason instead of just facts. Being able to figure something out is more useful than knowing specific tidbits of knowledge, because you can generally use that skill to find the knowledge when you need to.
Teaching creationism as something that's in the same category as evolution is a huge blow to that potentially developing framework of logic in someone's mind. There's nothing wrong with it as a religious belief, it just doesn't belong in a science class any more than cake recipes belong in a geometry class.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
It may also be possible that they could force your customers to register for the right to use your software (so they know who to 'go after', in cutting off your air supply).
And, of course, if your company gets bought out, your license disappears.
I can see lenders and shareholders running screaming from any business that embarks on a major undertaking, having accepted these terms. You would have to be either foolish or desparate to do so unless you could recoup the full cost of your endeavor with your first contract (which could raise the cost of your contract, making you non-competetive).
Unlike the ODF, which (contrary to MS's FUD) does not place any restrictions on a company using it(*), Microsoft's XML license would leave any company accepting it at the abject mercy of a convicted monopolist.
Good luck. You'll need it.
(*)Unlike KOffice (which also implements ODF), Open Office is LGPL, which means that a company could legaly compile in proprietary extensions to OO without having to release their own code. That is, in fact, precisely what SUN does with StarOffice. This opens up opportunities for local vendors that would never be available under MS-Office.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I think he was referring to the difference between scientific and not scientific.
Basically if ID is presented as a scientific theory in Kansas and the students believe this, they are at a disadvantage to students that learn ID is NOT a scientific theory.
Quit trying to make people into anti religious zealots when they may not be. I really don't care if you believe a pink unicorn created the world in 2 minutes. But I do care if you cannot determine what is scientific/verifiable/repeatable/falsifiable or not.
Cheers!
The real question is not how they can put up with what Sony did, but how they can write an OS which allows a vendor to implicitly and silently install a driver that roots the system. Why does Windows not put up a dialog box saying "Hey, this disk wants to install something. It is not signed and not certified. Do you want to allow it?"
If Windows did that much, then it would be so much easier to prevent this kind of crap. Heck, Mac puts up a warning just because an installer wants to run an external program.