Well, not exactly that, but consumer protection laws are very strict around here and one part of the protection is that any contract with worse terms than what the law provides is void.
That means that we have 2 year mandatory warranty on everything we buy and that it's impossible for stores to offer less than 2 years warranty.
I'm sorry you have become so turned against the idea that governments can be on the side of the people.
A free market is not a goal in itself, just like unlimited freedom of citizens isn't a good idea either.
It's a good idea to limit the citizens freedom to commit murder, just like it's a good idea to limit the freedom of companies to pollute and corrupt the marketplace.
Businesses cannot be allowed to rule the marketplace without oversight as it's very profitable for the monopolist to corrupt the market and keep other competitors out, this leads to less competition and less choice for the consumers.
Even if a company cannot get a monopoly it can still enter into price fixing agreements and again the market and customers lose.
There are tons of situations where companies just don't do the right thing and the market forces are too weak to steer them straight.
Saying that any regulation is always worse than no regulation is naive in the extreme.
Our laws enable us to use any phone on any network and it allows us to change operators easily without changing phones, that has led to very low prices and a wide selection of phones, saying that it's worse to have more competition and lower prices at the cost of a little regulation sounds downright silly.
A government isn't totalitarian just because it regulates a market, it's a much bigger problem if it started passing laws governing what citizens could do in the privacy of their own home.
In Denmark we have a law that against locking a phone for more than 6 months (this is also the maximum contractual binding period), that means that companies can't get away with deceptive tactics where the initial cost of the phone is 0 and the calls and subscription fees fleece the consumers forever.
I can see why asshole companies want to have the option to screw over the customers, but it must take a very special kind of thinking to want to get screwed over like this.
The lack of permanently locked phones mean that we have absolutely fierce competition in the mobile phone market, that has lead to great prices and a large selection of cool phones, not the current soviet-like lack of selection that you seem to be enjoying in the US right now.
If Apples shortsighted deal with AT&T will not allow the iPhone to be sold legally in Europe, then that's entirely Apples loss and I'm also sure that the 5 year head start will make it easy for someone to come up with an iPhone killer.
Don't discount the possibility that Apple simply builds a blacklist of all US carriers except AT&T and loads that on the iPhones that are destined for Europe.
It doesn't matter what happens when the amplifier is overdriven, because anyone that cares the least bit about sound quality, lifetime of speakers and their own hearing will never drive a transistor amp to clipping.
Tube amps are usually terrible underpowered so they are routinely overdriven, so the soft clipping matters more.
Tube amps aren't really usable as anything other than an effect box.
While we are at it any competent power amplifier will sound exactly the same as any other, given that they are both driven to the same level and not overdriven.
Not having a fax is not an indicator that you are a crappy outfit, it's simply an indicator that you started the company in the last 15 years, you know, after the Internet and email:)
If you combine greylisting with a few realtime spamtrap-driven blacklists then the greylisting period will allow the spam to be caught by the blacklists and when they retry they get through the greylist, but get caught by the blacklist.
How do you expect people to believe that you could type out that huge comment, but was unable to ask Google how Ubuntu works wrt. partitions and dual boot?
It's not as though there aren't enough answers: Results 1 - 10 of about 573,000 for ubuntu dual boot ntfs windows. (0.08 seconds)
Do yourself a favor and do a tiny bit of research and I'm sure that you will be able to set up that ubuntu dual boot.
It needs a kernel patch to do the sexy things, but it makes sense to use the same patches, as everybody who worries about io performance will be installing the atop patches
All DRM does is to piss off paying customers and allow MAFIAA execs to tell their shareholders that they are doing everything they can to protect their "valuable IP".
Now, with broadband it's easy for people to pirate content, so naturally you can't charge quite as much for the content as in the olden days, that's just the way it is, "supply 'n demand" and all that.
Responding to piracy by dramatically lowering the value of your content will not magically make people want to pay you money.
The MAFIAA needs to realize that they need to compete with casual copying the same way that they would a competing business, iow, provide a better product at a fair price.
The price doesn't need to be 0 to compete with piracy, a CD or a DVD does come with built in storage, quite nice bandwidth and a license to the content, after all.
For online content you'd really need to get close to 0, perhaps a donation system could be used so content can be distributed just like it is today, but you at least get some money back from the honest users.
If you are wholly dependent on one foreign company for all of your IT needs and you don't have a problem with it then you are a primitive country, because either: * You live in mud huts and IT doesn't really mean a lot for your country. * You use plenty of IT, but havn't yet gotten to a state where you think about long term consequences.
Way back in the day when CDRs were expensive, way before burnproof I used my 166MHz Pentium to burn a CD while playing Quake at high enough resolution to make the audio stutter.
Without any getting a coaster.
I'll let you guess if I was running Linux or windows:)
The US government is a completely gutless pet of the plutocracy that really rules the country, so unless there is dramatic change of regime nothing will happen there.
The rest of the world, except the EU (it seems) doesn't really care because they are too primitive to to realize that being dependent on a single US company is a problem.
The funny thing is that the EU has a very simple solution to the MS problem; simply fine MS 10000 EUR / day / undocumented protocol identified and use the resulting money hire 10-20 hackers pr. protocol to reverse engineer it and publish the docs.
Anyone should be allowed to submit protocols, if MS has implemented both a server and a client then it needs to be documented.
Ideally this principle should extend to other areas as well, there are tons of secret protocols that do nothing more than serve as a weapon of vendor lockin.
If Microsoft were a European company not only would we not be seeing this legal action, we'd see Europe going out of it's way to protect Microsoft.
Well, then you are ill informed.
The EU is first and foremost a trade organization, the entire point of the EU is to ensure that we have an open market with unrestricted competition.
There are many examples of huge fines leveled at European companies that violated antitrust laws.
Unlike the US government the EU is not just there to prop up big business, it actually tries to keep companies in line and keep fair competition alive in the market, even when it's at the expense of some company.
ID is pure fantasy with no evidence to support it whatsoever, evolution has stood up to many years of research and has many pieces of evidence to support it.
Science is not a democracy, nature is not dictated by popular opinion, so there is no need to be fair and evenhanded about what theories you give credence to.
There is no fallout or collateral damage if MS, IBM, CA and SUN have a patent fueled showdown.
If MS disappeared tomorrow many people wouldn't even notice, although MS customers might as they would now no longer be forced to upgrade:)
If the US went away then a lot of people would be unhappy, the worlds money lenders would certainly notice, just like creditcard companies would notice if all the trailerparks went away.
DVI (and thus HDMI) is limited to very short cables, SDI does several hundred meters. There is no DRM on SDI. The cable for SDI is simple coax cable, it doesn't get much cheaper or robust than this. The connectors are BNC, also robust and cheap. The transmitters and receivers are also relatively simple and reliable.
SDI is what is currently used for digital transmission of video in professional environments, so it's not like it's completely unknown.
I'm pretty sure SDI is what we would be using if the MPAA didn't get to write standards.
Just play the movie you want and skip the menu crap all together.
I only wish that there was an enforced standard for the metadata, just a file on the disk listing all titles and options and maybe a stylesheet, that way the player can do sensible things based on what the user actually wants.
The current state of affairs (DVD menus) is horrible.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's commonly quoted as: "Wait for us, we're the leader!"
Well, not exactly that, but consumer protection laws are very strict around here and one part of the protection is that any contract with worse terms than what the law provides is void.
That means that we have 2 year mandatory warranty on everything we buy and that it's impossible for stores to offer less than 2 years warranty.
I'm sorry you have become so turned against the idea that governments can be on the side of the people.
A free market is not a goal in itself, just like unlimited freedom of citizens isn't a good idea either.
It's a good idea to limit the citizens freedom to commit murder, just like it's a good idea to limit the freedom of companies to pollute and corrupt the marketplace.
Businesses cannot be allowed to rule the marketplace without oversight as it's very profitable for the monopolist to corrupt the market and keep other competitors out, this leads to less competition and less choice for the consumers.
Even if a company cannot get a monopoly it can still enter into price fixing agreements and again the market and customers lose.
There are tons of situations where companies just don't do the right thing and the market forces are too weak to steer them straight.
Saying that any regulation is always worse than no regulation is naive in the extreme.
Our laws enable us to use any phone on any network and it allows us to change operators easily without changing phones, that has led to very low prices and a wide selection of phones, saying that it's worse to have more competition and lower prices at the cost of a little regulation sounds downright silly.
A government isn't totalitarian just because it regulates a market, it's a much bigger problem if it started passing laws governing what citizens could do in the privacy of their own home.
In Denmark we have a law that against locking a phone for more than 6 months (this is also the maximum contractual binding period), that means that companies can't get away with deceptive tactics where the initial cost of the phone is 0 and the calls and subscription fees fleece the consumers forever.
I can see why asshole companies want to have the option to screw over the customers, but it must take a very special kind of thinking to want to get screwed over like this.
The lack of permanently locked phones mean that we have absolutely fierce competition in the mobile phone market, that has lead to great prices and a large selection of cool phones, not the current soviet-like lack of selection that you seem to be enjoying in the US right now.
If Apples shortsighted deal with AT&T will not allow the iPhone to be sold legally in Europe, then that's entirely Apples loss and I'm also sure that the 5 year head start will make it easy for someone to come up with an iPhone killer.
Don't discount the possibility that Apple simply builds a blacklist of all US carriers except AT&T and loads that on the iPhones that are destined for Europe.
It doesn't matter what happens when the amplifier is overdriven, because anyone that cares the least bit about sound quality, lifetime of speakers and their own hearing will never drive a transistor amp to clipping.
Tube amps are usually terrible underpowered so they are routinely overdriven, so the soft clipping matters more.
Tube amps aren't really usable as anything other than an effect box.
While we are at it any competent power amplifier will sound exactly the same as any other, given that they are both driven to the same level and not overdriven.
A fax?!
Not having a fax is not an indicator that you are a crappy outfit, it's simply an indicator that you started the company in the last 15 years, you know, after the Internet and email:)
(n/t)
Yeah, I don't know how he even got his hands on half a megabyte of ram in this day and age.
You are right, if you use greylisting alone.
If you combine greylisting with a few realtime spamtrap-driven blacklists then the greylisting period will allow the spam to be caught by the blacklists and when they retry they get through the greylist, but get caught by the blacklist.
How do you expect people to believe that you could type out that huge comment, but was unable to ask Google how Ubuntu works wrt. partitions and dual boot?
It's not as though there aren't enough answers:
Results 1 - 10 of about 573,000 for ubuntu dual boot ntfs windows. (0.08 seconds)
Do yourself a favor and do a tiny bit of research and I'm sure that you will be able to set up that ubuntu dual boot.
But unless there is a completely different series by the same name, married with children was complete crap.
Please, take a look at atop.
It needs a kernel patch to do the sexy things, but it makes sense to use the same patches, as everybody who worries about io performance will be installing the atop patches
http://www.atconsultancy.nl/atop/kernpatch.html
DRM doesn't work at all.
All DRM does is to piss off paying customers and allow MAFIAA execs to tell their shareholders that they are doing everything they can to protect their "valuable IP".
Now, with broadband it's easy for people to pirate content, so naturally you can't charge quite as much for the content as in the olden days, that's just the way it is, "supply 'n demand" and all that.
Responding to piracy by dramatically lowering the value of your content will not magically make people want to pay you money.
The MAFIAA needs to realize that they need to compete with casual copying the same way that they would a competing business, iow, provide a better product at a fair price.
The price doesn't need to be 0 to compete with piracy, a CD or a DVD does come with built in storage, quite nice bandwidth and a license to the content, after all.
For online content you'd really need to get close to 0, perhaps a donation system could be used so content can be distributed just like it is today, but you at least get some money back from the honest users.
BluRay and HDDVD support an identical set of codecs.
BluRay is more complicated and generally more risky than HDDVD without any real gain, though.
Yes.
If you are wholly dependent on one foreign company for all of your IT needs and you don't have a problem with it then you are a primitive country, because either:
* You live in mud huts and IT doesn't really mean a lot for your country.
* You use plenty of IT, but havn't yet gotten to a state where you think about long term consequences.
Way back in the day when CDRs were expensive, way before burnproof I used my 166MHz Pentium to burn a CD while playing Quake at high enough resolution to make the audio stutter.
Without any getting a coaster.
I'll let you guess if I was running Linux or windows:)
The US government is a completely gutless pet of the plutocracy that really rules the country, so unless there is dramatic change of regime nothing will happen there.
The rest of the world, except the EU (it seems) doesn't really care because they are too primitive to to realize that being dependent on a single US company is a problem.
The funny thing is that the EU has a very simple solution to the MS problem; simply fine MS 10000 EUR / day / undocumented protocol identified and use the resulting money hire 10-20 hackers pr. protocol to reverse engineer it and publish the docs.
Anyone should be allowed to submit protocols, if MS has implemented both a server and a client then it needs to be documented.
Ideally this principle should extend to other areas as well, there are tons of secret protocols that do nothing more than serve as a weapon of vendor lockin.
That crash seems to have been the result of several problems including human error, but there was no remote control involved, see:= 19880626-0&lang=enf 296.shtml
http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id
http://www.airdisaster.com/investigations/af296/a
Well, then you are ill informed.
The EU is first and foremost a trade organization, the entire point of the EU is to ensure that we have an open market with unrestricted competition.
There are many examples of huge fines leveled at European companies that violated antitrust laws.
Unlike the US government the EU is not just there to prop up big business, it actually tries to keep companies in line and keep fair competition alive in the market, even when it's at the expense of some company.
... know that ID and creationism is BS.
ID is pure fantasy with no evidence to support it whatsoever, evolution has stood up to many years of research and has many pieces of evidence to support it.
Science is not a democracy, nature is not dictated by popular opinion, so there is no need to be fair and evenhanded about what theories you give credence to.
There is no fallout or collateral damage if MS, IBM, CA and SUN have a patent fueled showdown.
If MS disappeared tomorrow many people wouldn't even notice, although MS customers might as they would now no longer be forced to upgrade:)
If the US went away then a lot of people would be unhappy, the worlds money lenders would certainly notice, just like creditcard companies would notice if all the trailerparks went away.
That makes perfect sense and everybody would be happy with it, so it will never happen.
At least if the past actions of the MAFIAA is anything to go by:)
I think it's downright shameful that an article like that completely ignores the best video interface in the world SDI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Digital_Interf ace
DVI (and thus HDMI) is limited to very short cables, SDI does several hundred meters.
There is no DRM on SDI.
The cable for SDI is simple coax cable, it doesn't get much cheaper or robust than this.
The connectors are BNC, also robust and cheap.
The transmitters and receivers are also relatively simple and reliable.
SDI is what is currently used for digital transmission of video in professional environments, so it's not like it's completely unknown.
I'm pretty sure SDI is what we would be using if the MPAA didn't get to write standards.
The RIAA probably doesn't care about movies getting cracked...
There is already one, it's called MPlayer:)
Just play the movie you want and skip the menu crap all together.
I only wish that there was an enforced standard for the metadata, just a file on the disk listing all titles and options and maybe a stylesheet, that way the player can do sensible things based on what the user actually wants.
The current state of affairs (DVD menus) is horrible.