People could sell other people what they wish to purchase!
By the Great Sky Mother, what a revolutionary idea! If people want to eat boar, I could hunt boar instead of snake, and then they'd be more willing to trade me for spear tips. They've always been reluctant to trade those for snake meat, but since they want boar, maybe I could get them some boar.
CharlesAKAChuck, you are a very very clever Cro-Magnon. This is going to change the face of 40000BC forever.;)
Instead of smashing store windows, a better analogy would be:
We sell furniture made of magical wood.
Instead of people purchasing this from us, they keep breaking in and stealing the wood in a format we don't even sell, apparently so they can make magic wands from it. (And that's not even counting the customers who buy furniture and then cut it up, in violation of the license.)
Woe is us, because we're too goddamm stupid to sell the wood by itself. Won't someone save us from having customers who want something we have and could sell them, but refuse to do so?!
It's like they're FuckTards Inc. 'Customers want something we sell but in a different format! What do we do? I know! We can sue those people!'
Hey, imbeciles...there are companies out there who would pay their CEO's right arm to know what their customers want. They're spending shitloads of money to determine if they want a button on the left or the right, cause customers might buy someone else's product if it's on 'the wrong' side, whatever that may be, they don't fucking know in advance.
Heads roll when they guess wrong! They lose millions of dollars! And just when they fix things and come out with a new version, customers want the button on the top! Damn it, start over!
And you're whining because customer are breaking through your windows and telling you exactly what they want. You're a bunch of crybabies used to telling the general public what the general public wanted, and freaking out because now you have to operate like every other business that's ever existed and create a supply to met an existing demand. Boo-fucking-hoo.
Why can't I download a movie in high quality without DRM?
People here are way too focused on DRM, like that's a problem to most people.
It's not. Most people don't give a rat's ass.
The question actually is 'Why can't I download a movie in high quality?'. Or TV show, or music.
All you people thinking this is about DRM...they're not even selling the damm product online with DRM! They'll give you some crappy stream that might work, in a web browser user interface, and whine and bitch when people quite rightly say 'Um, I watch video content on the giant monitor I have that's dedicated to that purpose, called a 'TV', from about ten feet away from me. I don't want to click around in a web browser to do it.'
DRM is actually a non-issue, especially for videos. The only reason it was slightly an issue for music was that people like to put to music on other devices to play it, and it's quadruply complicates DRM when it has to distribute like that. With videos, you can just skip this...you're selling to people who have computers connected to TVs, or at least are watching on computers. No burning to DVD or anything. And you knock $5 off the price, and make sure everyone understands this will only ever work on their computer, or a replacement computer in the future.
So you give people DRM video files of their movies and TV shows, perhaps even ones they have to be currently connected to the internet to play, but were still downloaded and high quality, and nice user interface that lets people download, even automatically in advance (And decrypts the show when it airs), and 95% of the piracy goes away.
You put ads in your TV show files, and charge $5-$10 for the movies (And make sure people can redownload them for free), and, guess what? Your entire fucking industry doesn't collapse.
DRM is a nerd issue. People aren't downloading crap because the original has DRM, because of the obvious fact that TV shows do not, in fact, have DRM. (And movie DRM hasn't caused anyone who wishes to duplicate DVD the slightest issue for a decade.)
They're downloading stuff because they want to watch it. And, like me, they're not buying a TiVo or a TV tuner setup or, god-forbid, a VCR, for their crappy-ass cable TV connection....we're going into utorrent and subscribing to tvrss.net's feed and, hey, I get Smallville each week on Friday morning. With a $35 remote and $3 S-Video cable, it even shows up on my fucking TV.
You give me a legal copy, especially if it shows up at the same time as the aired show, and I'd take it, even with ads. And, no, DVD being sold months later do not count as 'legal copies', and neither does the shitty Hulu stream.
I live in the Appalachian mountains of Northeast Georgia, and the Confederate stuff always amazes me.
Why? Because, being in the mountains, there were no plantations, and no economy dependent on slaves, and almost no slaves. We could have given a flying fuck if slavery was made legal. And we were rather pissed at those damn plantation owners in south Georgia and Alabama for getting us into this war, because they fought through us.
Hell, there's a county right next door named 'Union County' because it, too, claimed it seceded from Georgia when Georgia seceded.
And yet, everyone here seems convinced they were 'patriotic secessionists'.
It's almost as much revisionist as the American revolution (Because a hell of a lot of people didn't support that either, see 'The Patriot' for details, and realized that British Army did not actually act like that, so most people were just sorta wishy washy.) and it's even more goofy, because the CSA lost.
Racism that you actually have to work at is near incomprehensible to an American mind. (Just ask Balbir Singh Sodhi about the laziness of racism here.)
But it's not so odd in other place. Even other places in the western world. Ask the third-generation Turks who are near indistinguishable from other inhabitants of France, but get discriminated against and aren't even citizens.
It's not just Jamaicans that don't like Africans. There are plenty of people in African who don't like each other.
And I'm not just talking about countries that are at war with each. People who are from stable African countries like South Africa, Kenya, Morocco, Egypt, are often not overjoyed to be lumped in with countries that have coups every 20 years, random ethic cleansing, and people starving to death because there's no economy.
I had a college roommate from Kenya who hated being called African-American because a) he wasn't American, but more importantly, b) he wasn't 'African', he was 'Kenyan'.
Which is apparently one of the more developed parts of African, and he hated being lumped in with people who couldn't stop shooting each other long enough to starve to death. (His words, not mine.) He said it would be liked if Americans were lumped in with Central America.
And don't even get me started about what he thought about Nigerians. He once told me that Kenya makes more from oil than Nigerian does...and Kenya doesn't have oil and Nigerian does. Which I'm not sure is true, but whatever.
He understood where US blacks were coming from, in that most of them didn't know where they were from (And the countries obviously wouldn't map the same anyway.), but he just found himself constantly being called 'African-American' annoying.
The police aren't supposed to present 'impartial' evidence to get warrants. They are supposed to present honest evidence.
If they think someone did something, but he is alibied by his girlfriend, but the police think she's lying, etc, we could have, essentially, the entire fucking trial for him in the damn warrant hearing, without him being present, and him having to be 'convicted' before they can search his house.
Clearly, that's a crazy and stupid concept. Warrants don't work that way.
There is a standard of evidence the police has to met to get them, and that's it. Any opposing evidence to the crime will come out in the trial for the crime. The right to search people's house and collect evidence is a much lower standard, one that doesn't require the presentation of opposing evidence.
Now, if police start wasting everyone's time by searching places that they should logically deduce don't have any evidence in them, or if they're getting search warrants solely to harass people, that's another thing. But the DA will clamp down on them before that.
The former are shielded from liability, but the latter aren't.
They're 'shielded' if what they told the judge was factually true. Which it appears to be.
The problem was the judge deciding that the facts of 'sending email' supported the charge of 'illegally accessing a computer system', which they do not. That is not the police's call, they are supposed to be aggressive in tracking down crimes, which is why they have to present evidence for a warrant instead.
Basically, in any abuse of people's civil's right, if there's a judge involved and the police didn't fake evidence or lie to said judge, blame the damn judge. It's their job to say 'As far as I can tell, this isn't even a crime'.
Don't go blaming the police unless they're doing stuff with no legal authorization at all (like randomly tazering people at protests) or have started forging evidence and lying to judges to get legal authorization to do things.
Just because the judge was acting in good faith doesn't mean he should be allowed to continue to be a judge.,P>
Judge who sign off on warrants where the material facts, as presented by the police, are true, and the warrant is later ruled invalid on other grounds, should not continue to be judges.
And, of course, the other way around...police (and DAs) that apply for warrants with untrue facts, even if they're mistakes and not malicious, should no longer continue to be police or DAs.
You can't just look at the system and go 'Well, everyone was acting in good faith, so it's fine.'. People can act in good faith and still be incompetent.
If you're convicted, you generally don't get your stuff back.
I don't understand this at all. The only punishment the state can impose on you is the once given out by the court.
Yes, often there are laws about things purchased with the proceeds of a crime, but this is an entirely separate concept from things collected as evidence. They might be the same thing, or they might not.
Same with asset seizure laws. Things that they can seize, may, or may not, be evidence, and things that are evidence may, or may not, be things they can seize.
But regardless, I often hear about things taken as evidence, not 'seized' but used a evidence, never being returned when the person is found guilty. There's nothing in the law that would allow such behavior that I can see.
If I commit a murder, and carry the body in my car, and they (quite reasonable) take my car in as evidence and use it to prove I committed the murder, and I'm found guilty, fine. But it's still my fucking car, and I should get it back.
Just because code weavers includes these hacks in their release doesn't mean it's better, in fact I would call it worse.
If by 'worse' you mean 'achieve's wine's goal of providing enough of the Windows API to run programs better than wine'.
So there are two cars. One of them has crappy air conditioning that's never very cold and smells a little weird.
The other does not have air conditioning.
Which one do you drive though Death Valley in August?
And now consider the fact that the same person is in charge of both of them, and has constantly rejected AC units for the second car because they aren't 'designed correctly'.
Oh, and using the second car is free, and the first one you have to rent from him.
That is the situation we've been in for a very long time regarding Direct X and Wine.
Why the hell does wine have a single maintainer anyway?
I mean, if there's even been a project that eligible for switching to a decentralized structure like Linux uses, Wine is it.
For those that don't know, Linus is the maintainer of Linux, but you don't send him patches. You send patches to the person that 'owns' that bit of code, or owns the subsystem if you're writing new code, like a new driver.
I.e., if I discover a weird bug in how an old SCSI controller initializes a certain kind of CD-ROM drive, and I wrote a patch to the SCSI disk driver to fix it, I'd submit it to whoever is in charge of that file. (I believe it's actually at the top of the file.) This probably will be the person that maintains most of the SCSI system, or maybe some individual owns that specific file and the head SCSI guy is someone else.
And that person reviews the patch, and is in charge of prettying it up, or making the submitter do it, and filtering bad code, and all sorts of things. And when all that is done, then, and only then, does it go upward, eventually for Linus to see.
It's easy to understand, it's a hierarchy. It isn't an incredibly deep hierarchy, just one or two people. (The subsystem maintainer and the driver maintainer, sometimes the same person.) It also means the maintainer doesn't have to be skilled in every single aspect of the code. There's several sorts of hardware that Linus freely admits he barely understands how they work at all. So he finds a person who seems to be skilled in them and sends Linus damn code, and as long as the code works and doesn't seem like crap and doesn't cause problems elsewhere, everyone's happy.
Now, I've never gone poking around in wine code, but I have compiled and ran it, and it seems to me that a lot of it is tiny DLLs, or rather loadable modules that mimic Windows DLLs, and that situation s perfect for someone being in charge of apphelp.dll or whatever.
Now, admittedly, this dibserver change seems larger than that, and would be the sort of large change that Linus steps in to deal with over on Linux, but sounds like the development process is all going through a single maintainer under all circumstances, that everyone is submitting patches to him, for everything.
Court trials and juries exist to get at the best possible interpretation of disputed facts. To kill people based on an "obvious" interpretation of facts is called a "lynching".
Words do not mean whatever you want them to mean, and even the most crazy interpretation of what happened there can't be called a 'lynching'. By definition, the government cannot lynch people.
And, um, that did have its day in court, as part of the settlement. No misbehavior was found on the part of the agents, in fact, they were doing the best thing they could possibly do, attempting to lay a 'trap' so they could catch Randy Weaver out in the open, alone, away from his house, and force him to surrender. (Because they knew he was leaving the house occasionally for supplies, but refused to open the door for US Marshals. This was before they were outright surrounding the house.) It was a much better plan than an armed assault on a house with other people in it
Sadly, he came across them as they were getting in position, and he had his sons with him, and instead of surrendering, he ran, like they expected he might. What they did not expect was him to return a few minutes later and shoot his way past them, resulting in the death of one of his sons and a Marshal.
But facts are one of those things that defenders of wackjobs never let get in their way. The simple fact is that Randy Weaver had decided that the government was out to get him because it was supposedly run by some evil people out to destroy Christians, and because of the story you're helping promote, at some point some other damn wackjob will decide exactly the same thing, get involved in another standoff where people will die, and yet again, the government will somehow be to blame.
Instead of the actual people to blame, people like you, who take tragedies and attempt to turn the government into a boogieman, making up lies like he's dead because of a mistyped date, continuing the cycle of paranoid wackjobbery.
Ruby Ridge was, indeed, fairly stupid on the part of the Federal government (And the family) but claiming that it was due entirely to one letter is misleading.
If Randy Weaver had not been a paranoid wackjob, he would have been arrested on charges of failure to appear along with the original weapons charge, he would have had his day in court where it was explained he got a letter with a different day, and the charge of 'failure to appear' would have been dropped.
Anyone who blathers that his arrest was not 'lawful' was not paying attention. He was someone out on bail from an actual criminal charge, past both the actual trial date and the date he thought he was supposed to appear. The police had every right to collect him, and spent days asking him to turn himself in before he and his boys shot at them.(1)
The courts getting something wrong and an obviously bogus charge of 'failure to appear' being filed is not valid reason to enter a shootout with the police.
At that point, the entire operation turned militarish, which caused the FBI's mistake.
While the FBI's treatment of Randy Weaver was entirely reasonable, they then make a rather large mistake when they attempted to shoot him as he fled back into his house, and hit and killed his wife, which is what they paid the settlement for.
But that wasn't some 'bureaucratic' nightmare of extreme government power. The FBI had every right in the world to arrest Randy Weaver. They just did not have the right to turn his property into some sort of 'live fire' zone and kill other people, even if he, and some other people on that property (his boys) had shot at them.
1) Some people dispute what happened in that first firefight, but those people are not paying attention. The US Marshals ran into Weaver in the woods, and yelled at him to stop, and he didn't. No shots were fired, and he ran back into the woods. A few minutes later, Weaver and his children showed back up at the same place, the place they knew had an armed US Marshal group, and shots were fired. It's hard to interpret that as anything but attempting to shoot their way past the marshals and back inside the house.
All of this ranting about government goons and guns is just melodramatic bullshit.
And it's melodramatic bullshit that immediately pops up whenever the Democrats are in office, despite this law being decades old.
But the second Democrats are in power, bam, people have to plaster us with articles about 'ways the government could attack you', despite almost all those ways being misunderstandings of the law, or, as you point out, ways of interpreting the law that would clearly never stand up in court.
Or are even just nonsensical. Did you know the local police claim the right, day or night, to enter your home, detain you, and hold you for 24 hours? Gee, that sounds a bit worse than the FCC demanding to inspect equipment, doesn't it?
Especially considering that the FCC does not, in fact, assert a right to enter your property. They assert the right to fine you if you fail to let them inspect equipment.
Hey, can't the fire marshal do the same thing? Where's the outrage over him?
And people predictably respond like paranoid asshats, as trained by the Republicans, 'I'll shoot them when they come into my house!'.
It's not Ryan Singel's fault, his writing is fairly non-biased, but 'timothy', the editor who published this, is a fascist ass.
The real irony here, of course, is that the executive branch under the last administration asserted it didn't have to follow laws in circumstances of their choosing, which was, quite obviously, a lot more dangerous to civil liberties, considering a lot of laws were passed to protect those.
The internals of computers are not rocket science. Yes, most people won't be able to figure out if need an AGP or PCI-E video card, and stuff like that, but they can certainly grasp the concept of a 'video card' or a 'hard drive'.
As an abstract concept, the "business" or "corporation" depends on that voluntary cooperation to produce a product or service that other individuals will find valuable.
Um, no.
Companies are controlled by stockholders. Stockholders have absolutely no interest in the company actually making a profit. They have an interest in getting someone else to purchase the stock they own for more money.
Ergo, they reward executive for that, not 'making a profit'. If executives raise stock prices, they get a bonus. They raise them as long as that is sustainable, the intelligent and well connected people manage to sell their stock in time, and then the price collapses, leaving the suckers who bought stock from them. Repeat until the whole system fails and the company gets bought by someone else.
This goal might include having the company make a profit, but maybe it's easier to just lay off a bunch of people, or invent crazy new policies, or whatever.
I'm honestly baffled by the idea that corporations are in business to make a profit. Why on earth would stockholders, which run the business, care about that, except as one of the many incidental factors that controls stock prices?
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People could sell other people what they wish to purchase!
By the Great Sky Mother, what a revolutionary idea! If people want to eat boar, I could hunt boar instead of snake, and then they'd be more willing to trade me for spear tips. They've always been reluctant to trade those for snake meat, but since they want boar, maybe I could get them some boar.
CharlesAKAChuck, you are a very very clever Cro-Magnon. This is going to change the face of 40000BC forever. ;)
Instead of smashing store windows, a better analogy would be:
We sell furniture made of magical wood.
Instead of people purchasing this from us, they keep breaking in and stealing the wood in a format we don't even sell, apparently so they can make magic wands from it. (And that's not even counting the customers who buy furniture and then cut it up, in violation of the license.)
Woe is us, because we're too goddamm stupid to sell the wood by itself. Won't someone save us from having customers who want something we have and could sell them, but refuse to do so?!
It's like they're FuckTards Inc. 'Customers want something we sell but in a different format! What do we do? I know! We can sue those people!'
Hey, imbeciles...there are companies out there who would pay their CEO's right arm to know what their customers want. They're spending shitloads of money to determine if they want a button on the left or the right, cause customers might buy someone else's product if it's on 'the wrong' side, whatever that may be, they don't fucking know in advance.
Heads roll when they guess wrong! They lose millions of dollars! And just when they fix things and come out with a new version, customers want the button on the top! Damn it, start over!
And you're whining because customer are breaking through your windows and telling you exactly what they want. You're a bunch of crybabies used to telling the general public what the general public wanted, and freaking out because now you have to operate like every other business that's ever existed and create a supply to met an existing demand. Boo-fucking-hoo.
Why can't I download a movie in high quality without DRM?
People here are way too focused on DRM, like that's a problem to most people.
It's not. Most people don't give a rat's ass.
The question actually is 'Why can't I download a movie in high quality?'. Or TV show, or music.
All you people thinking this is about DRM...they're not even selling the damm product online with DRM! They'll give you some crappy stream that might work, in a web browser user interface, and whine and bitch when people quite rightly say 'Um, I watch video content on the giant monitor I have that's dedicated to that purpose, called a 'TV', from about ten feet away from me. I don't want to click around in a web browser to do it.'
DRM is actually a non-issue, especially for videos. The only reason it was slightly an issue for music was that people like to put to music on other devices to play it, and it's quadruply complicates DRM when it has to distribute like that. With videos, you can just skip this...you're selling to people who have computers connected to TVs, or at least are watching on computers. No burning to DVD or anything. And you knock $5 off the price, and make sure everyone understands this will only ever work on their computer, or a replacement computer in the future.
So you give people DRM video files of their movies and TV shows, perhaps even ones they have to be currently connected to the internet to play, but were still downloaded and high quality, and nice user interface that lets people download, even automatically in advance (And decrypts the show when it airs), and 95% of the piracy goes away.
You put ads in your TV show files, and charge $5-$10 for the movies (And make sure people can redownload them for free), and, guess what? Your entire fucking industry doesn't collapse.
DRM is a nerd issue. People aren't downloading crap because the original has DRM, because of the obvious fact that TV shows do not, in fact, have DRM. (And movie DRM hasn't caused anyone who wishes to duplicate DVD the slightest issue for a decade.)
They're downloading stuff because they want to watch it. And, like me, they're not buying a TiVo or a TV tuner setup or, god-forbid, a VCR, for their crappy-ass cable TV connection....we're going into utorrent and subscribing to tvrss.net's feed and, hey, I get Smallville each week on Friday morning. With a $35 remote and $3 S-Video cable, it even shows up on my fucking TV.
You give me a legal copy, especially if it shows up at the same time as the aired show, and I'd take it, even with ads. And, no, DVD being sold months later do not count as 'legal copies', and neither does the shitty Hulu stream.
Slashdotted with money.
That's what I've always thought Indian 'untouchables' who have much the same job and the same position in society, should do:
'You don't want to let me have a place in society? Fine. I'm moving to another country, have fun with your piles of rotting corpses.'
There are two kinds of people in this world I can't stand. Those intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Japanese.
I live in the Appalachian mountains of Northeast Georgia, and the Confederate stuff always amazes me.
Why? Because, being in the mountains, there were no plantations, and no economy dependent on slaves, and almost no slaves. We could have given a flying fuck if slavery was made legal. And we were rather pissed at those damn plantation owners in south Georgia and Alabama for getting us into this war, because they fought through us.
Hell, there's a county right next door named 'Union County' because it, too, claimed it seceded from Georgia when Georgia seceded.
And yet, everyone here seems convinced they were 'patriotic secessionists'.
It's almost as much revisionist as the American revolution (Because a hell of a lot of people didn't support that either, see 'The Patriot' for details, and realized that British Army did not actually act like that, so most people were just sorta wishy washy.) and it's even more goofy, because the CSA lost.
Racism that you actually have to work at is near incomprehensible to an American mind. (Just ask Balbir Singh Sodhi about the laziness of racism here.)
But it's not so odd in other place. Even other places in the western world. Ask the third-generation Turks who are near indistinguishable from other inhabitants of France, but get discriminated against and aren't even citizens.
It's not just Jamaicans that don't like Africans. There are plenty of people in African who don't like each other.
And I'm not just talking about countries that are at war with each. People who are from stable African countries like South Africa, Kenya, Morocco, Egypt, are often not overjoyed to be lumped in with countries that have coups every 20 years, random ethic cleansing, and people starving to death because there's no economy.
I had a college roommate from Kenya who hated being called African-American because a) he wasn't American, but more importantly, b) he wasn't 'African', he was 'Kenyan'.
Which is apparently one of the more developed parts of African, and he hated being lumped in with people who couldn't stop shooting each other long enough to starve to death. (His words, not mine.) He said it would be liked if Americans were lumped in with Central America.
And don't even get me started about what he thought about Nigerians. He once told me that Kenya makes more from oil than Nigerian does...and Kenya doesn't have oil and Nigerian does. Which I'm not sure is true, but whatever.
He understood where US blacks were coming from, in that most of them didn't know where they were from (And the countries obviously wouldn't map the same anyway.), but he just found himself constantly being called 'African-American' annoying.
The police aren't supposed to present 'impartial' evidence to get warrants. They are supposed to present honest evidence.
If they think someone did something, but he is alibied by his girlfriend, but the police think she's lying, etc, we could have, essentially, the entire fucking trial for him in the damn warrant hearing, without him being present, and him having to be 'convicted' before they can search his house.
Clearly, that's a crazy and stupid concept. Warrants don't work that way.
There is a standard of evidence the police has to met to get them, and that's it. Any opposing evidence to the crime will come out in the trial for the crime. The right to search people's house and collect evidence is a much lower standard, one that doesn't require the presentation of opposing evidence.
Now, if police start wasting everyone's time by searching places that they should logically deduce don't have any evidence in them, or if they're getting search warrants solely to harass people, that's another thing. But the DA will clamp down on them before that.
The former are shielded from liability, but the latter aren't.
They're 'shielded' if what they told the judge was factually true. Which it appears to be.
The problem was the judge deciding that the facts of 'sending email' supported the charge of 'illegally accessing a computer system', which they do not. That is not the police's call, they are supposed to be aggressive in tracking down crimes, which is why they have to present evidence for a warrant instead.
Basically, in any abuse of people's civil's right, if there's a judge involved and the police didn't fake evidence or lie to said judge, blame the damn judge. It's their job to say 'As far as I can tell, this isn't even a crime'.
Don't go blaming the police unless they're doing stuff with no legal authorization at all (like randomly tazering people at protests) or have started forging evidence and lying to judges to get legal authorization to do things.
Just because the judge was acting in good faith doesn't mean he should be allowed to continue to be a judge.,P> Judge who sign off on warrants where the material facts, as presented by the police, are true, and the warrant is later ruled invalid on other grounds, should not continue to be judges.
And, of course, the other way around...police (and DAs) that apply for warrants with untrue facts, even if they're mistakes and not malicious, should no longer continue to be police or DAs.
You can't just look at the system and go 'Well, everyone was acting in good faith, so it's fine.'. People can act in good faith and still be incompetent.
If you're convicted, you generally don't get your stuff back.
I don't understand this at all. The only punishment the state can impose on you is the once given out by the court.
Yes, often there are laws about things purchased with the proceeds of a crime, but this is an entirely separate concept from things collected as evidence. They might be the same thing, or they might not.
Same with asset seizure laws. Things that they can seize, may, or may not, be evidence, and things that are evidence may, or may not, be things they can seize.
But regardless, I often hear about things taken as evidence, not 'seized' but used a evidence, never being returned when the person is found guilty. There's nothing in the law that would allow such behavior that I can see.
If I commit a murder, and carry the body in my car, and they (quite reasonable) take my car in as evidence and use it to prove I committed the murder, and I'm found guilty, fine. But it's still my fucking car, and I should get it back.
They better not be waterboarding again. The US has made it perfectly clear that waterboarding is unacceptable for Japanese people to do.
Just because code weavers includes these hacks in their release doesn't mean it's better, in fact I would call it worse.
If by 'worse' you mean 'achieve's wine's goal of providing enough of the Windows API to run programs better than wine'.
So there are two cars. One of them has crappy air conditioning that's never very cold and smells a little weird.
The other does not have air conditioning.
Which one do you drive though Death Valley in August?
And now consider the fact that the same person is in charge of both of them, and has constantly rejected AC units for the second car because they aren't 'designed correctly'.
Oh, and using the second car is free, and the first one you have to rent from him.
That is the situation we've been in for a very long time regarding Direct X and Wine.
Why the hell does wine have a single maintainer anyway?
I mean, if there's even been a project that eligible for switching to a decentralized structure like Linux uses, Wine is it.
For those that don't know, Linus is the maintainer of Linux, but you don't send him patches. You send patches to the person that 'owns' that bit of code, or owns the subsystem if you're writing new code, like a new driver.
I.e., if I discover a weird bug in how an old SCSI controller initializes a certain kind of CD-ROM drive, and I wrote a patch to the SCSI disk driver to fix it, I'd submit it to whoever is in charge of that file. (I believe it's actually at the top of the file.) This probably will be the person that maintains most of the SCSI system, or maybe some individual owns that specific file and the head SCSI guy is someone else.
And that person reviews the patch, and is in charge of prettying it up, or making the submitter do it, and filtering bad code, and all sorts of things. And when all that is done, then, and only then, does it go upward, eventually for Linus to see.
It's easy to understand, it's a hierarchy. It isn't an incredibly deep hierarchy, just one or two people. (The subsystem maintainer and the driver maintainer, sometimes the same person.) It also means the maintainer doesn't have to be skilled in every single aspect of the code. There's several sorts of hardware that Linus freely admits he barely understands how they work at all. So he finds a person who seems to be skilled in them and sends Linus damn code, and as long as the code works and doesn't seem like crap and doesn't cause problems elsewhere, everyone's happy.
Now, I've never gone poking around in wine code, but I have compiled and ran it, and it seems to me that a lot of it is tiny DLLs, or rather loadable modules that mimic Windows DLLs, and that situation s perfect for someone being in charge of apphelp.dll or whatever.
Now, admittedly, this dibserver change seems larger than that, and would be the sort of large change that Linus steps in to deal with over on Linux, but sounds like the development process is all going through a single maintainer under all circumstances, that everyone is submitting patches to him, for everything.
Court trials and juries exist to get at the best possible interpretation of disputed facts. To kill people based on an "obvious" interpretation of facts is called a "lynching".
Words do not mean whatever you want them to mean, and even the most crazy interpretation of what happened there can't be called a 'lynching'. By definition, the government cannot lynch people.
And, um, that did have its day in court, as part of the settlement. No misbehavior was found on the part of the agents, in fact, they were doing the best thing they could possibly do, attempting to lay a 'trap' so they could catch Randy Weaver out in the open, alone, away from his house, and force him to surrender. (Because they knew he was leaving the house occasionally for supplies, but refused to open the door for US Marshals. This was before they were outright surrounding the house.) It was a much better plan than an armed assault on a house with other people in it
Sadly, he came across them as they were getting in position, and he had his sons with him, and instead of surrendering, he ran, like they expected he might. What they did not expect was him to return a few minutes later and shoot his way past them, resulting in the death of one of his sons and a Marshal.
But facts are one of those things that defenders of wackjobs never let get in their way. The simple fact is that Randy Weaver had decided that the government was out to get him because it was supposedly run by some evil people out to destroy Christians, and because of the story you're helping promote, at some point some other damn wackjob will decide exactly the same thing, get involved in another standoff where people will die, and yet again, the government will somehow be to blame.
Instead of the actual people to blame, people like you, who take tragedies and attempt to turn the government into a boogieman, making up lies like he's dead because of a mistyped date, continuing the cycle of paranoid wackjobbery.
Um, no.
Ruby Ridge was, indeed, fairly stupid on the part of the Federal government (And the family) but claiming that it was due entirely to one letter is misleading.
If Randy Weaver had not been a paranoid wackjob, he would have been arrested on charges of failure to appear along with the original weapons charge, he would have had his day in court where it was explained he got a letter with a different day, and the charge of 'failure to appear' would have been dropped.
Anyone who blathers that his arrest was not 'lawful' was not paying attention. He was someone out on bail from an actual criminal charge, past both the actual trial date and the date he thought he was supposed to appear. The police had every right to collect him, and spent days asking him to turn himself in before he and his boys shot at them.(1)
The courts getting something wrong and an obviously bogus charge of 'failure to appear' being filed is not valid reason to enter a shootout with the police.
At that point, the entire operation turned militarish, which caused the FBI's mistake.
While the FBI's treatment of Randy Weaver was entirely reasonable, they then make a rather large mistake when they attempted to shoot him as he fled back into his house, and hit and killed his wife, which is what they paid the settlement for.
But that wasn't some 'bureaucratic' nightmare of extreme government power. The FBI had every right in the world to arrest Randy Weaver. They just did not have the right to turn his property into some sort of 'live fire' zone and kill other people, even if he, and some other people on that property (his boys) had shot at them.
1) Some people dispute what happened in that first firefight, but those people are not paying attention. The US Marshals ran into Weaver in the woods, and yelled at him to stop, and he didn't. No shots were fired, and he ran back into the woods. A few minutes later, Weaver and his children showed back up at the same place, the place they knew had an armed US Marshal group, and shots were fired. It's hard to interpret that as anything but attempting to shoot their way past the marshals and back inside the house.
All of this ranting about government goons and guns is just melodramatic bullshit.
And it's melodramatic bullshit that immediately pops up whenever the Democrats are in office, despite this law being decades old.
But the second Democrats are in power, bam, people have to plaster us with articles about 'ways the government could attack you', despite almost all those ways being misunderstandings of the law, or, as you point out, ways of interpreting the law that would clearly never stand up in court.
Or are even just nonsensical. Did you know the local police claim the right, day or night, to enter your home, detain you, and hold you for 24 hours? Gee, that sounds a bit worse than the FCC demanding to inspect equipment, doesn't it?
Especially considering that the FCC does not, in fact, assert a right to enter your property. They assert the right to fine you if you fail to let them inspect equipment.
Hey, can't the fire marshal do the same thing? Where's the outrage over him?
And people predictably respond like paranoid asshats, as trained by the Republicans, 'I'll shoot them when they come into my house!'.
It's not Ryan Singel's fault, his writing is fairly non-biased, but 'timothy', the editor who published this, is a fascist ass.
The real irony here, of course, is that the executive branch under the last administration asserted it didn't have to follow laws in circumstances of their choosing, which was, quite obviously, a lot more dangerous to civil liberties, considering a lot of laws were passed to protect those.
But it's okay if you're a Republican, I guess.
Except that's not the FCC, that the police after a radio station was proven, in court, to be violation of the law.
And all you people are total fucking morons who didn't read the article. Did you hear what horrible thing the FCC did to start this?
They fined people who operated pirate radios (Which is, um, illegal.), and refused to let them inspect them.
There is absolutely no mention whatsoever of the FCC forcing entry to anyone's house.
Reinstalling a computer is like disassembling and rebuilding the engine in a car.
He wasn't trying to evade a cop. You can't evade cops on a planet where they can teleport you into custody.
He was trying to destroy the car. Which he succeeded at.
It doesn't even count as a 'car chase' in any meaningful sense.
However, that was really just a lame excuse for product placement. (The car had some dash-installed old Nokia sound system/communicator.)
Indeed.
The internals of computers are not rocket science. Yes, most people won't be able to figure out if need an AGP or PCI-E video card, and stuff like that, but they can certainly grasp the concept of a 'video card' or a 'hard drive'.
As an abstract concept, the "business" or "corporation" depends on that voluntary cooperation to produce a product or service that other individuals will find valuable.
Um, no.
Companies are controlled by stockholders. Stockholders have absolutely no interest in the company actually making a profit. They have an interest in getting someone else to purchase the stock they own for more money.
Ergo, they reward executive for that, not 'making a profit'. If executives raise stock prices, they get a bonus. They raise them as long as that is sustainable, the intelligent and well connected people manage to sell their stock in time, and then the price collapses, leaving the suckers who bought stock from them. Repeat until the whole system fails and the company gets bought by someone else.
This goal might include having the company make a profit, but maybe it's easier to just lay off a bunch of people, or invent crazy new policies, or whatever.
I'm honestly baffled by the idea that corporations are in business to make a profit. Why on earth would stockholders, which run the business, care about that, except as one of the many incidental factors that controls stock prices?