[H]ave you ever disassembled an Apple laptop. It's pretty easy...
Easy? Umm... no. Have you ever tried to get a hard drive out of an Apple laptop?
When a Thinkpad at work gave up the ghost a month or two ago, I just flipped it over, removed one screw, and pulled out the hard drive. 3 screws later the hard drive was free of the drive sled, and then all I had to do was plug in my external drive cable and let USB mount it as an external device on my Ubuntu laptop.
When a friend's iBook gave up the ghost a couple of years ago, I had to jimmy plastic case pieces, remove dozens of screws, remove the keyboard, unhook the wireless card (and, I believe, eventually remove the whole thing), and basically tear the thing down to the bare chassis + motherboard in order to get at the hard drive. It was, to put it in the best light possible, a formidable technical exercise.
I've had to open up a couple of other Apple laptops before -- heck, my g/f's laptop recently had the harddrive die -- and in all cases I really didn't want to go through the hassle of opening them up.
Now I'm not saying that it's only Apple's laptops that have this problem -- I'm going to guess that most laptops are probably a pain to take apart -- but I it seems like many manufacturers try to make it as easy as possible to let the user get at certain parts such as the battery, RAM, hdd, wireless card, etc... For whatever reason (warranty? aesthetics?) Apple doesn't give the user easy access.
But we also don't know that it doesn't affect us...there could very well be many other effects, some of which are much more subtle, some of which could be unhealthy. The FDA should not even allow sale of these animals for food until their hazards are disproven.
Until their hazards are disproven? I'm not sure that it's scientifically possible to do that...
1. Where's the link to a current press release from Lenovo or from Novell/SuSE? The article doesn't share any links, and when I looked on both companies' sites all I could find were oldpress releases.
2. Why SuSE? Did Lenovo somehow broker an unbeatable deal on support contracts, or... ?
While googling for more news on the current development, I found an old Lenovo blog entry from September of 2007 asking "What Linux distribution would you most like to see supported on a ThinkPad?". Now I'm sure that every kind of online poll has some amount of ballot-stuffing, but out of the 64572 responses, 37% chose Ubuntu, 17% chose Mandrivia, and (much farther down the list) a mere 5% chose SuSE, SLED, or OpenSuSE. SLED got only 312 votes, giving it less than 0.5% of the votes.
As unscientific as the poll was, the author of the blog admitted in the lead-up to the poll that he figured that he needed to try out Ubuntu and that he was pretty sure what linux distribution was going to be chosen. So with all this user interest in Ubuntu, why did Lenovo go the Novell/SuSE route?
Oh well -- as long as the Thinkpad hardware is fully supported by some modern Linux distro, I figure that Ubuntu should have no problems supporting it.
From reading the links and comments on this story it sounds like the main gist is:
Ogg Theora is a nice codec, but 1) there might be patent issues with it 2) other modern codecs have several advantages, such as (to quote coolGuyZak from this thread) "superior compression, less processing power for decoding, specialized chip support, and DRM hooks"
As far as the HTML5 group goes, it sounds like they are looking for: "...a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing, that is compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable, and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies." (http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=1142&to=1143)
If the Big Companies are wary of Ogg Theora for technical or legal reasons, why don't they try to resolve these issues by: 1) putting their patents where their mouth is and trying to make the MPEG-4 standard open enough for everyone to use, OR 2) doing the programming and legal work necessary to make Ogg Theora be of "sufficient quality" and not be a "submarine patent risk" anymore ?
I mean, it's entirely possible that there are no existing media codecs that can meet the needs of HTML5, and if so then I'd really like to see that spelled out in a 5 or 6 page document, but at this point I'm much more likely to believe that a handful of large companies are trying to manipulate the standardization process for their own benefit, much to the detriment of software developers and end users.
Remember that company that was selling "redacted" versions of movies? I think that they were some very religious Christian group that wanted to give their members a way to watch videos with the guts and gore and swearing edited out. From what I recall, they were rather ethical about it (the copyright side of things), purchasing one new copy of every movie for each redacted one that they sold.
Now I may not agree that censoring movies like this is a good social move, but I am sympathetic to the idea. For persons who do not own the technology or have the known-how to auto-skip over parts of movies they do not want to see (blame the DMCA from banning such tools), such persons should be able to enlist someone else to do this editing (on a personal copy of the movie) as much as they damn well please (Doctrine of First-Sale, where did you go?).
Compare that kind of "filtering" with the actions of these ISPs: With "filtering" ISPs, people are enjoined from receiving original, unadulterated* content from the tubes. It is, without a doubt, more difficult for them to access the uncensored version, and in the case of embedding new content, it could be nigh impossible for the user to sieve the added bits from the original bits.
In the case of the Curse-Curtailing-Christians above (not an actual Hardy Boys title, but it should be), the end user has actively decided that they wish to choose a NEW product -- a derivative work of the original that is more to their liking -- while still respecting the original content producers and paying them the fair market price for the original content. Very importantly, while the consumer may choose the NEW product today, the original content is still available in the marketplace, if they ever wish to see what parts had been removed.
At the end of the day it comes down to the freedom to 1) Not have your communications be censored or filtered 2) Be able to modify (for personal use) any media that you have gainfully acquired
Why is this so difficult an idea? Why have we not yet addressed this issue in America? As Pepé Le Pew might say, "Le Sigh".
* insert appropriate joke about the Internet being "Adult-e-Rated"...
The WMV format is "restricted" or, as the FSF terms it, "defective", as a matter of its design. I'd show you some docs, but they're probably not freely available anywhere for me to access them...
There might be buffer overflow bugs in the FLAC reference software, but I don't think that the bugs are there by design.
(I agree that tags like "Micro$oft" probably aren't the most grown-up thing to post, but what would/. be without a little trolling here and there to provide a nice garnish to the stories?)
If you can't solve a quadratic equation, your computer is set to inbound traffic only.
I can see it now:
"Oh MAN, I can't get online anymore. I need to get some roots. Anyone got some roots for me? Please? OMG, PLEASE someone give me some roots for this thing. I need my fix!"
If you want to learn more about CDF you could go read some dry technical document... or you could go to the w3c website for CDF and click on the link "How Does Compound Document Framework Benefit Us?". I suggest the latter.
"Not everyone knows but W3C standards like the compound frame work changed the works of integrated communications on the internet effects everyday lives and benefits us all."
If w3c standards effect anything, I hope that that they effect a nice Scottish accent.
"As you read through this article you alone will better understand and be able to see why this was an important step in today's and then world as the implementation of a common ground script writing could make your life a little more convenient"
I'm trying to understand it, but I'm still so confused...
"In today's world, we do a lot of our work and play on the base of internet."
It seems like a lot of people are focusing on Best Buy's first mistake, selling a hard-drive box filled with ceramic tiles, rather than Best Buy's SECOND mistake, taking a item away from a customer AFTER he had purchased it.
We don't have enough information to determine who put the tiles in the box, and the customer might have done it himself. Okay, sure. But look at the actual words in the article concerning the replacement:
"I [went] back to Best Buy and voiced my complaint. The employee and assistant manager were more than willing to help, saying that it happens. So they set up the return and I repurchased the drive and while I was checking the contents to ensure it was a hard drive this time, the store manager came up, took the box from me and said to take it up with the manufacturer.
Now to my surprise, I argued with the guy saying that they have already accepted the return and I have now purchased the new one. He said I was shit out of luck. I followed up with the manufacturer today and they said they would get the complaint to the Best Buy Purchasing department. Best Buy corporate said that they stand by their manager's decision.
If a person returns an item and the store takes that physical item away from them and replaces it with another physical item in return, the second that the transaction is complete, the customer OWNS the replacement item and any person -- store employee or not -- who tries to take it from them is STEALING.
If an employee believes that the customer tampered with the first item, then they should call the police and report the customer for fraud or for falsifying returns, or (so simple it's mindboggling) refuse to accept the return! However, once an employee accepts the return and gets to the point of putting the physical replacement in the customer's hands, I feel as though a judge is going to be sympathetic to the customer and say that he has a right to retain that physical item.
Not even did the manager take back the hardware, the manager physically removed the box from the customer's hands... a good lawyer might even be able to bring the manger up on assault charges.
Hey -- I'd work with Microsoft and Apple on just about anything, except that they're all about writing proprietary software, getting hardware patents and (ugh!) software patents, and basically leveraging the benefits of their software/hardware over the choices presented by other companies.
Microsoft has a ridiculous history of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. Apple locks their software to particular hardware, and locks up their hardware (e.g. the iPhone) and bricks it if an end-user tries to modify it.
So while Microsoft and Apple have a ton of really REALLY smart engineers working for them, if I were to work with them on security I would be afraid that:
My work would be sucked into some proprietary, patent-encumbered, closed-source hole.
By working with them I'd have to sign NDAs or I would inadvertently be tainted by their stuff and unable to work on FOSS implementations.
Now don't get me wrong -- Microsoft and Apple are just doing what they were designed to do: be companies in a free-market society, making as much profit as possible. But you have to understand that before sitting down with them to work on anything, be it security, interoperability, or even environmental responsibility.
So yes, everyone can benefit from increased security, but if Microsoft's products are less secure than Apple's, then Apple can use that as a selling point and make more money...
I save all of my files in ODF/ODT, and if I need to submit them to just about anyone else I have to convert them to an MS-Office (.doc,.xls, etc...) format. I do the same with audio files, image files, etc, using open file formats instead of their closed/proprietary/patent-encumbered brethren.
The problem is that people's computers aren't coming pre-installed with software that can read our "primary" Open File Formats. Heck -- even when I send my Macintosh-toting friends Ogg Vorbis files, they don't have any idea how to open them, so eventually I get enough complaints and just re-encode in mp3 format (and feel bad about trying and failing at spreading the Good Word).
Perhaps the best thing that us geeks could do to support open file formats is to develop a little "Unknown File Format" system utility for all of the current flavors of Windows and OSX. The utility would sit in the background and would pop up a little note whenever the user tried to open a file of an unrecognized type, telling the user that the file was, say, an XCF image file created by The GIMP, and offering to download an appropriate program to either view or edit the file.
If we had such a tool, we could feel much better about sending out open file formats like Ogg Vorbis, knowing that even clueless users would only be a click away from opening our files.
A number of pundits out there said that GoogleTV would never fly, but now we know how they're going to get all of those video clips online. Man, Google is pretty smart!
it's quite improbable they ALL have the same model of CPU
Right. Let's say that 850 people have tested this bug. Now we can just plug that into Excel......put in the 850... carry the 1... multiply through with 77.1 and... done!
Chances are 1/100,000 that they're using the same CPU model.
I agree: for most of us, we won't ever have the time to hack on the OpenMoko.
That being said, even if we aren't going to do development work, by buying Apple's hardware we're supporting Apple, not those people producing open hardware. If the iPhone were being sold at cost, it would be a different story, but I'm pretty sure that Apple is making a pretty penny on the hardware.
This is why all us geeks on Slashdot should: Buy the OpenMoko -- it's got open-specs on the hardware and software. Buy AMD chips -- AMD (unlike Intel) is cooperating with the LinuxBIOS project.
Speak with your money: support those who support FOSS.
Is there somewhere I can donate $100 to the Linux on the iPhone project?
How about the OpenMoko? I figure that they could use $100 to advance development on that hardware/software.
Speaking of which, what does the iPhone have that the OpenMoko doesn't have (or won't have when they do the v2 release)? What needs to be done to get people to choose the OpenMoko over the iPhone?
...I don't care... Linux directly or indirectly tramples over intellectual proeprty [sic]...It [is] an educational toy... It's [acting like] the IRA..."
Flashy sells. It sells cars, bombers and hookers why not use it to sell an OS?
Interesting idea....what if we were to use hookers to market our favorite Gnu/Linux distros...
But hold on a second: People are just going to see through whatever superficial "Candy Coat" we wrap around the OS, right?
...remember that these are primarily 15 year old kids...
Nevermind. Just put some pics in the default install and you'll have hordes of teen boys installing Ubuntu in no time...
Heck with the GPLv3, I just want to see a clip on YouTube of a becaped Eben Moglen vaulting into the courtroom with his finger in the air and an "Aha!" springing from his mouth!
They had a choice between making money in China or ruining this guy's life because he believed in freedom.
I think that you mean:
They had an opportunity to make money in China at the expense of ruining this guy's life because he believed in freedom.
I think that the issue is that companies like Yahoo and Google can earn a lot of money by allowing people in China to use their online services. Hopefully (and I think that at least some of the Google people have espoused this idea) providing such services to the Chinese people will lead to the downfall of authoritarian censorship and control. Of course, in order to keep operating in countries such as China, companies such as Yahoo may be legally required to submit to the whims of the current justice system...
So the big question is: Even if Yahoo is being required to cough up a few dissidents, in the long run is Yahoo causing more good (i.e. positive social change) than harm, or are they just in China to make money?
For the next week of your life, I kindly request that you put a video camera and GPS next to you and record everything you do in public. This includes, but is not limited to:
Everywhere you drive your car
Everything you do in your car that would be potentially visible to someone looking in a window
Everything visible through open windows of your house
Everything you do at work that is not in a closed office or in a bathroom stall (a PUBLIC space, remember?)
It's already going to be mineable from the raw data, but I would also like you to list the following information:
The license plate #'s of all of your cars
Your Home, Work, Cabin, Church, etc... addresses
An itemized list of everything that you buy, touch, look at, etc... in stores, on buses, and so forth.
That should be quite enough to get us started -- just take that week of information, put it up online by...say, next Saturday... and see exactly how comfortable you feel anymore. Don't forget to give CmdrTaco the URL so he can post it prominently on the front page of Slashdot.
Oh, and just in case you don't feel SERIOUSLY creeped-out yet, ask your wife and your two small kids to take a video camera along with them and do the same thing. Because...you know... all of this information is just a record of what you and your family is doing in public.
I was talking to a friend of mine about this yesterday -- about the rise of tons of monitoring hardware in the form of electronic tracking, video cameras, and data mining of information such as EZpass records and credit card receipts -- and what it all really boils down to is: Do we really need all of this infrastructure?
I mean, most of us slashdotters really like our privacy, but on the flip side we realize that as criminals get smarter and use more sophisticated technology, the law enforcement agencies want to use increasingly sophisticated technology to "keep up". But is it necessary or is just convenient for our privacy to slowly vanish in the wake of new monitoring and investigative technologies? I don't know -- I don't think that anyone really knows for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Easy? Umm... no. Have you ever tried to get a hard drive out of an Apple laptop?
When a Thinkpad at work gave up the ghost a month or two ago, I just flipped it over, removed one screw, and pulled out the hard drive. 3 screws later the hard drive was free of the drive sled, and then all I had to do was plug in my external drive cable and let USB mount it as an external device on my Ubuntu laptop.
When a friend's iBook gave up the ghost a couple of years ago, I had to jimmy plastic case pieces, remove dozens of screws, remove the keyboard, unhook the wireless card (and, I believe, eventually remove the whole thing), and basically tear the thing down to the bare chassis + motherboard in order to get at the hard drive. It was, to put it in the best light possible, a formidable technical exercise.
I've had to open up a couple of other Apple laptops before -- heck, my g/f's laptop recently had the harddrive die -- and in all cases I really didn't want to go through the hassle of opening them up.
Now I'm not saying that it's only Apple's laptops that have this problem -- I'm going to guess that most laptops are probably a pain to take apart -- but I it seems like many manufacturers try to make it as easy as possible to let the user get at certain parts such as the battery, RAM, hdd, wireless card, etc... For whatever reason (warranty? aesthetics?) Apple doesn't give the user easy access.
Until their hazards are disproven? I'm not sure that it's scientifically possible to do that...
1. Where's the link to a current press release from Lenovo or from Novell/SuSE? The article doesn't share any links, and when I looked on both companies' sites all I could find were old press releases.
2. Why SuSE? Did Lenovo somehow broker an unbeatable deal on support contracts, or... ?
While googling for more news on the current development, I found an old Lenovo blog entry from September of 2007 asking "What Linux distribution would you most like to see supported on a ThinkPad?". Now I'm sure that every kind of online poll has some amount of ballot-stuffing, but out of the 64572 responses, 37% chose Ubuntu, 17% chose Mandrivia, and (much farther down the list) a mere 5% chose SuSE, SLED, or OpenSuSE. SLED got only 312 votes, giving it less than 0.5% of the votes.
As unscientific as the poll was, the author of the blog admitted in the lead-up to the poll that he figured that he needed to try out Ubuntu and that he was pretty sure what linux distribution was going to be chosen. So with all this user interest in Ubuntu, why did Lenovo go the Novell/SuSE route?
Oh well -- as long as the Thinkpad hardware is fully supported by some modern Linux distro, I figure that Ubuntu should have no problems supporting it.
Wordpress died before there were even 2 comments on the page. Ouch!
Hooray! Let loose the hordes of slashdotties -- no need to RTFA, as you couldn't even if you tried!
From reading the links and comments on this story it sounds like the main gist is:
Ogg Theora is a nice codec, but
1) there might be patent issues with it
2) other modern codecs have several advantages, such as (to quote coolGuyZak from this thread) "superior compression, less processing power for decoding, specialized chip support, and DRM hooks"
As far as the HTML5 group goes, it sounds like they are looking for:
"...a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing, that is compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable, and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies."
(http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=1142&to=1143)
If the Big Companies are wary of Ogg Theora for technical or legal reasons, why don't they try to resolve these issues by:
1) putting their patents where their mouth is and trying to make the MPEG-4 standard open enough for everyone to use, OR
2) doing the programming and legal work necessary to make Ogg Theora be of "sufficient quality" and not be a "submarine patent risk" anymore ?
I mean, it's entirely possible that there are no existing media codecs that can meet the needs of HTML5, and if so then I'd really like to see that spelled out in a 5 or 6 page document, but at this point I'm much more likely to believe that a handful of large companies are trying to manipulate the standardization process for their own benefit, much to the detriment of software developers and end users.
Remember that company that was selling "redacted" versions of movies? I think that they were some very religious Christian group that wanted to give their members a way to watch videos with the guts and gore and swearing edited out. From what I recall, they were rather ethical about it (the copyright side of things), purchasing one new copy of every movie for each redacted one that they sold.
Now I may not agree that censoring movies like this is a good social move, but I am sympathetic to the idea. For persons who do not own the technology or have the known-how to auto-skip over parts of movies they do not want to see (blame the DMCA from banning such tools), such persons should be able to enlist someone else to do this editing (on a personal copy of the movie) as much as they damn well please (Doctrine of First-Sale, where did you go?).
Compare that kind of "filtering" with the actions of these ISPs: With "filtering" ISPs, people are enjoined from receiving original, unadulterated* content from the tubes. It is, without a doubt, more difficult for them to access the uncensored version, and in the case of embedding new content, it could be nigh impossible for the user to sieve the added bits from the original bits.
In the case of the Curse-Curtailing-Christians above (not an actual Hardy Boys title, but it should be), the end user has actively decided that they wish to choose a NEW product -- a derivative work of the original that is more to their liking -- while still respecting the original content producers and paying them the fair market price for the original content. Very importantly, while the consumer may choose the NEW product today, the original content is still available in the marketplace, if they ever wish to see what parts had been removed.
At the end of the day it comes down to the freedom to
1) Not have your communications be censored or filtered
2) Be able to modify (for personal use) any media that you have gainfully acquired
Why is this so difficult an idea? Why have we not yet addressed this issue in America?
As Pepé Le Pew might say, "Le Sigh".
* insert appropriate joke about the Internet being "Adult-e-Rated"...
The WMV format is "restricted" or, as the FSF terms it, "defective", as a matter of its design. I'd show you some docs, but they're probably not freely available anywhere for me to access them...
/. be without a little trolling here and there to provide a nice garnish to the stories?)
There might be buffer overflow bugs in the FLAC reference software, but I don't think that the bugs are there by design.
(I agree that tags like "Micro$oft" probably aren't the most grown-up thing to post, but what would
"Oh MAN, I can't get online anymore. I need to get some roots. Anyone got some roots for me? Please? OMG, PLEASE someone give me some roots for this thing. I need my fix!"
We'll start seeing 1-900 numbers advertising "Quadratic Equations Solved: Only $4.99/min!"
How long can you retain data if you send email with the content in the headers?
At some point, even if you have Terabytes of disk space, you're going to run out of room. Then what?
Here's a sure-fire way to mess things up:
1. Implement IP over SMTP headers. (already done, I believe)
2. Use it in Germany.
3. Watch as your ISP hates you. A lot.
But anyhow, it says that it's retaining headers, but not content. But sometimes there's content in the headers, right? Got a Catch-22 there, I think.
If w3c standards effect anything, I hope that that they effect a nice Scottish accent.
I'm trying to understand it, but I'm still so confused...
The base of Internet is, of course, 2.
We don't have enough information to determine who put the tiles in the box, and the customer might have done it himself. Okay, sure. But look at the actual words in the article concerning the replacement:If a person returns an item and the store takes that physical item away from them and replaces it with another physical item in return, the second that the transaction is complete, the customer OWNS the replacement item and any person -- store employee or not -- who tries to take it from them is STEALING.
If an employee believes that the customer tampered with the first item, then they should call the police and report the customer for fraud or for falsifying returns, or (so simple it's mindboggling) refuse to accept the return! However, once an employee accepts the return and gets to the point of putting the physical replacement in the customer's hands, I feel as though a judge is going to be sympathetic to the customer and say that he has a right to retain that physical item.
Not even did the manager take back the hardware, the manager physically removed the box from the customer's hands... a good lawyer might even be able to bring the manger up on assault charges.
Microsoft has a ridiculous history of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. Apple locks their software to particular hardware, and locks up their hardware (e.g. the iPhone) and bricks it if an end-user tries to modify it.
So while Microsoft and Apple have a ton of really REALLY smart engineers working for them, if I were to work with them on security I would be afraid that:
Now don't get me wrong -- Microsoft and Apple are just doing what they were designed to do: be companies in a free-market society, making as much profit as possible. But you have to understand that before sitting down with them to work on anything, be it security, interoperability, or even environmental responsibility.
So yes, everyone can benefit from increased security, but if Microsoft's products are less secure than Apple's, then Apple can use that as a selling point and make more money...
I save all of my files in ODF/ODT, and if I need to submit them to just about anyone else I have to convert them to an MS-Office (.doc, .xls, etc...) format. I do the same with audio files, image files, etc, using open file formats instead of their closed/proprietary/patent-encumbered brethren.
The problem is that people's computers aren't coming pre-installed with software that can read our "primary" Open File Formats. Heck -- even when I send my Macintosh-toting friends Ogg Vorbis files, they don't have any idea how to open them, so eventually I get enough complaints and just re-encode in mp3 format (and feel bad about trying and failing at spreading the Good Word).
Perhaps the best thing that us geeks could do to support open file formats is to develop a little "Unknown File Format" system utility for all of the current flavors of Windows and OSX. The utility would sit in the background and would pop up a little note whenever the user tried to open a file of an unrecognized type, telling the user that the file was, say, an XCF image file created by The GIMP, and offering to download an appropriate program to either view or edit the file.
If we had such a tool, we could feel much better about sending out open file formats like Ogg Vorbis, knowing that even clueless users would only be a click away from opening our files.
A number of pundits out there said that GoogleTV would never fly, but now we know how they're going to get all of those video clips online. Man, Google is pretty smart!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=J9SK_M_nVWA
Now I'm no birdkeeper, but have you ever tried to gzip a pigeon before?
Right. Let's say that 850 people have tested this bug. Now we can just plug that into Excel...
Chances are 1/100,000 that they're using the same CPU model.
I agree: for most of us, we won't ever have the time to hack on the OpenMoko.
That being said, even if we aren't going to do development work, by buying Apple's hardware we're supporting Apple, not those people producing open hardware. If the iPhone were being sold at cost, it would be a different story, but I'm pretty sure that Apple is making a pretty penny on the hardware.
This is why all us geeks on Slashdot should:
Buy the OpenMoko -- it's got open-specs on the hardware and software.
Buy AMD chips -- AMD (unlike Intel) is cooperating with the LinuxBIOS project.
Speak with your money: support those who support FOSS.
How about the OpenMoko? I figure that they could use $100 to advance development on that hardware/software.
Speaking of which, what does the iPhone have that the OpenMoko doesn't have (or won't have when they do the v2 release)? What needs to be done to get people to choose the OpenMoko over the iPhone?
I can just see someone drawing a nice rubenesque hippo with the Ubuntu circle-logo branded into his rumpus...
If only I were a better artist!
Theo, is that you?
Yeah, but the weasel has to be crossing his fingers behind his back...
Nevermind. Just put some pics in the default install and you'll have hordes of teen boys installing Ubuntu in no time...
Heck with the GPLv3, I just want to see a clip on YouTube of a becaped Eben Moglen vaulting into the courtroom with his finger in the air and an "Aha!" springing from his mouth!
P.S. "becaped" is so a word.
They had an opportunity to make money in China at the expense of ruining this guy's life because he believed in freedom.
I think that the issue is that companies like Yahoo and Google can earn a lot of money by allowing people in China to use their online services. Hopefully (and I think that at least some of the Google people have espoused this idea) providing such services to the Chinese people will lead to the downfall of authoritarian censorship and control. Of course, in order to keep operating in countries such as China, companies such as Yahoo may be legally required to submit to the whims of the current justice system...
So the big question is: Even if Yahoo is being required to cough up a few dissidents, in the long run is Yahoo causing more good (i.e. positive social change) than harm, or are they just in China to make money?
For the next week of your life, I kindly request that you put a video camera and GPS next to you and record everything you do in public.
This includes, but is not limited to:
It's already going to be mineable from the raw data, but I would also like you to list the following information:
That should be quite enough to get us started -- just take that week of information, put it up online by...say, next Saturday... and see exactly how comfortable you feel anymore. Don't forget to give CmdrTaco the URL so he can post it prominently on the front page of Slashdot.
Oh, and just in case you don't feel SERIOUSLY creeped-out yet, ask your wife and your two small kids to take a video camera along with them and do the same thing. Because...you know... all of this information is just a record of what you and your family is doing in public.
I was talking to a friend of mine about this yesterday -- about the rise of tons of monitoring hardware in the form of electronic tracking, video cameras, and data mining of information such as EZpass records and credit card receipts -- and what it all really boils down to is: Do we really need all of this infrastructure?
I mean, most of us slashdotters really like our privacy, but on the flip side we realize that as criminals get smarter and use more sophisticated technology, the law enforcement agencies want to use increasingly sophisticated technology to "keep up". But is it necessary or is just convenient for our privacy to slowly vanish in the wake of new monitoring and investigative technologies? I don't know -- I don't think that anyone really knows for sure.