Boosts criminal penalties for copyright infringement originally created by the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 from five years to 10 years (and 10 years to 20 years for subsequent offenses). The NET Act targets noncommercial piracy including posting copyrighted photos, videos or news articles on a Web site if the value exceeds $1,000.
I can see "deep linking" doo doo all over the place, resulting in seizures of equipment and 10 year prison terms.
Also this was disturbing:
The SIIA's Kupferschmid, though, downplayed concerns about the expansion of the DMCA. "We really see this provision as far as any changes to the DMCA go as merely a housekeeping provision, not really a substantive change whatsoever," he said. "They're really to just make the definition of trafficking consistent throughout the DMCA and other provisions within copyright law uniform."
The SIIA's board of directors includes Symantec, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Intuit and Red Hat.
Red Hat? You are kidding me! This bill is going to make life very difficult for free software. The big publishers are going to move to DRM'd formats and you will have to chose between them and your software freedom. Projects like Wine, Mplayer and Xine are going to be hammered. As it has been in the past for record stores, it's there way or the highway for you. The harassment potential of these changes is limitless and Red Hat will learn to their cost that they are not part of the big media club. I suggest they have Kupferschmid make a retraction or leave the organization.
Re:Yes, I do remember that. It was different.
on
Viiv Falls Flat
·
· Score: 1
it still had no insight on what types of DRM will be enabled under VIIV.
The author claims hardware support for Paladium and "Output Content Protection". He further claims that unless you have "High bandwidth Digital Content Protection, support on your display" you won't be watching any movies and that Vista will try to lock you into Windoze formats. I don't have the hardware budget to keep up with such things, so I'll take his word for it and that's hardware protection for DRM.
If you combine that with rumors of Paladium blocking "unsigned" code execution, what you end up with is systems that will only work M$ junk. Given the performance of the author's ViiV system, that means nothing is really working.
It's not really surprising that would happen. Big dumb publishers don't want free computers playing their movies. The movie industry's use of CSS and subsequent abuse of the writers of DeCSS drives that point home. Their idea is to make general purpose computers suck like your current DVD player does. Microsoft and Intel are bending over backward to please them at everyone else's expense.
Yes, I do remember that. It was different.
on
Viiv Falls Flat
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This is not a first for Intel to try this though. MMX makes the internet go faster. Anyone remember that?
MMX was an actual hardware improvement that did make media "go faster". It has been used and improved by Intel and AMD. Support for the features is built into the GNU compilers and processor specific Linux kernels, which most distributions have as precompiled binaries.
ViiV's main feature seems to be hardware based DRM.
RIAA/MPAA Promise is a Cluster of Greed.
on
Viiv Falls Flat
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
PC types keep scratching their heads trying to figure out what people like about Apple. It never seems to cross their mind that it's because Apple at least delivers some of what it promises.
The key question is what promise you are talking about. The promise of content implies co-operation with big dumb publishers. Those big dumb publishers have extracted almost every content penny out of Itunes, and left Apple with the crumbs of what they make selling hardware. The artists, as usual did not get anything. The end user gets a more restricted version of what they used to get on CD and competition gets buried if all goes according to plan.
Apple, by moving to Intel, seems to have made some of the same promisses that M$ has about how to enforce their big dumb publisher promises. The speculation is that Apple got suckered into the Intel DRM that the *AAs have promised to pour their content into. We shall see about content availability, but DRM can not and will not work on a general purpose computing device. The only reason Apple stuff has worked in the past is because they were the only snake in their pit. We shall also see how well they get along with Intel and if the new dongles will work any better than the old ones.
The HP eXPerience described above is a preview of what DRM is all about. It's not really new, as anyone who's tried to use WMP knows. The primary problem is that M$ is root and you are not. They have made a system where they can add and remove files and components but you can't. When you multiply this by the problems of non free software, which requires yet another set of rules, you get much more than the sum of your troubles. Each vendor on your system wants to be root and non of them can really co-operate because they keep their source code in a vault. The only way a general purpose computing device can work the way you want it is for you to be root. That pretty much rules out DRM for anything but set top boxes. That would make the *AAs happy enough but not as happy as eliminating general purpose computing.
Every free computer with an internet connection is a potential competitor. See Star Wreck and The internet Archive Music Files. It does not take much to make a movie and even less to make music.
DRM, at best, is a loser. At it's worst, you get what the Washington post reporter saw. The people who want copyright to last "forever less a day" and have sold you the same content on LPs, CDs and now as bits, won't ever give you a good deal. When they butt heads with Bill Gates, you get a real mess.
It takes care of Windoze.
on
Viiv Falls Flat
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
From the article:
Viiv's ingredients start with a dual-core Intel processor, which allows the computer to handle demanding video playback while also taking care of other chores, such as burning a CD or running a spyware scan.
Laughing my ass off. My 450 MHz K62 can do video playback and burn CDs at the same time, under Linux. Virus scanner? What's that?
Intel: constant vigilance for your precious Peeee Ceeeee is now possible and required! The war on TERRORISM will never end and you can do your 200 watt part.
I made it through a masters degree in engineering without buying a single textbook.
I presume you were an undergraduate somewhere and know the ways you are forced to buy new texts. Minor revisions marketed as new editions, rotating question sets, etc.
It's nice of the publishers to announce their intentions up front now, but their excuses won't win them any sympathy. The existence of cheaper distribution methods should drive prices down. If publishers chose to make paper even more inflexible and difficult than it should be, they will simply hasten the demise of their printing business. Others will, hopefully, take their place where it's appropriate.
The problem is worldwide for technical texts. My friends from India showed me their versions of the textbooks they used. Same publisher, same edition, lower price and somewhat lower quality. The publisher knew just how much they could squeeze from the market. The thing that was valuable was the US produced technical content, which was excellent. Where it's really the best, it's craved around the world regardless of language. Indeed, people will learn English just to get it. The publishers own that content and foolishly think that it can't be recreated.
general texts, internet resources and lecture materials covered the gap... so what's the big problem elsewhere?
The big problem comes when publishers seek to own the information instead of a particular expression of that information. They have the cash to make trouble.
Except for certain computer-based classes like Numerical Analysis, undergrad-level math hasn't changed in the past 100 years
Even that has not changed much in 30 years. Fortran 77 is still used and the techniques are the same as they were when Newton and then Coates thought them up. The thing that has changed is the maturation of GNU tools and the availability of great numerical packages like the Fastest Fourier Transforms in the West. A text on the subject should contain a chapter of practical free computing, but this has little to do with the principles involved.
the real purpose of the law was just to bring wireless security to the attention of these businesses. If it inspires a few of them to take a minute to evaluate their wireless security and then do something about it, chances are they will do more than just change the SSID.
All they are going to do is push a button or tell their IT dude to do the same. Most people don't have time to wade through the vendor BS to learn anyting.
It does nothing for real data security. The easiest way to get data is not to drive, it's to bomb your target's IE or Outlook, at home or at work. Your ISP gives you access to the world and the world access to you. Your WAP gives access to the portion of the world within 100m of your WAP. There are considerably more bad guys in range of your network through one than the other.
You might not have noticed that they just made free software use more difficult. You will, at the minimum get Kwifi going if you have more than one wireless network you want to use. That won't always work, because of all the different little "standards" used by equipment makers. Windoze users, of course, will have a harder time too, but they expect and travel less to begin with.
It's not funny. Mandating "security" without mandating it be implemented with accepted and published standards is counterproductive. Half ass "security" measures like this do more harm than good. If they were really worried about securing personal information, they would outlaw keeping that information with an OS that has a 12 minute half life on any network. By enacting an admittedly useless precautions, they are enforcing the notion that security in general is nothing more than an inconvenience to the user.
Sure, the off shore folks have us beat when it comes to programminng, no doubt about that -- but that's only a problem if you want to be just a programmer.
That's only true for non free software, where price is the driving issue. It's not that non free software written offshore is always worse than domestic, it's that non free will never be as good as free. In the free software world, quality is the driving issue, regardless of where it comes from. Free sotware, by leaveraging co-operative effort, puts better quality tools in your hands for less money than commercial offerings. People trying to sell software went going offshore to lower their costs, but it's a downward spiral of low quality and greed. Free software is showing them up and the whole movement will dissapear with boxed software.
That leaves a lot of opportunity for the programmer. The majority of programming jobs are in house, where free software is most useful. Those jobs are very difficult to get done with commercial or offshore software. A good manager will realize this. A programmer who is also a leader will be able to convince their manager it is true.
People will pay for the tools they need and the software will continue to be written. The non-free middle men are the ones who are on the way out.
If you were a new user to unix, what would you prefer:
A) open synaptic, search the thousands of packages, hope you find what you're after, install it.
B) download an app folder, drag it to your appliactions folder. go.
You have skipped a common step. You go to Google and look for the package that does what you want. This is something that's actually harder to do in the non free world, where people lie their ass off in the trade rags. Once you have the package name, installing software with synaptic, apt-get, deselect, kpackage manager or any other tool is less likely to screw up than the commercial software. Because free software users are free to share code, your distribution will take care of dependencies without you ever seeing it. Dependency problems come when you quit co-operating and act more like the non free vendors. Non free applications, self compiled source and other "extras" are much more difficult than just using the standard package in the stable repository. You can do it, and it can be fun, but the other way is much easier for people who just want to get their work done.
You can use the free software tools to find packages if you don't want to dig through reviews and screenshots. Synaptic, kpackage and apt all have search functions that work. My favorite is "apt-cache search term [terms]" because you don't have graphical overhead. Following this with "apt-get install" is easy enough, as is installing all of the recommended and suggested packages.
The important part is that the process works. It's rare that an upgrade breaks anything, even in testing when using an "apt-get update". That's what you would expect from freely shared code == the end of dependency hell.
The Second one will go Screw you and make their own design in-spite of the the talks. That is the problem with Ego Driven Software vs. Profit driven.
Oh, we've never seen that in the non free world. Have you ever seen a free software advocate hire Madonna for a release or make a speech by projecting their head onto an 80 foot screen? Do you remember a little anti-trust trail where a parade of computer industry giants testified about how often and hard M$ would screw them?
Ego Driven Software while the Code my be better quality but have a much harder time agreeing with other people. But Profit driven Software tends to be more consistent but software quality tends to be a little lower.
The free software people are agreeing about things that matter, the rest is called choice and it's nice to have. I can drag and drop files from various Gnome programs into KDE programs and vice versa. For example, I can take a thumbnail from gqview and drop it onto GIMP and GIMP will open the file for editing. Can the crappy Windoze driver software that came with your camera talk to photoshop the same way? Can you change your window manager and expect the same result? Can you drag things from your browser the same way regardless of source computer, sftp, ftp, samba, etc? Agreement and code sharing is much better in the free software world where it counts.
On Debian, I have a choice of excellence. I have a spectrum of applications for just about any task and can pick the one that works best for me. I don't want them all to work exactly the same way. All I really care about is that it's free and it does the job the way I like to do it. Only M$ would try to turn this choice into a disadvantage.
at least MS gives users the option to turn this crap off. Apple never did that.
KDE and Gnome have a simple dialogs that changes the level and color of transparency in their applications. With transparency in xorg, real transparency has been here a while now.
Trade secrets leakage are probably NOT covered by first amendment freedom of speech.
You have to come up with a good reason before you take away my ability to tell my neighbor something that might amuse them. Your financial losses don't really sway me, nor do arguments about your ideas being property in some way. I might respect your patent or your trade mark, but I'm not getting anything from you to keep my mouth shut.
Trade Secrets should remain part of civil law. They are typically enforced through a non disclosure agreement between an employee and an employer. This is an odious agreement in and of itself which is often abused. If an employee breaks that agreement, the employer may recover losses from the employee but must prove their damages. No one outside the agreement has any obligation. Putting those obligations on others gives companies the benefits of a patent without the public benefit of disclosure. Nothing is more dangerous to freedom than restrictions on press.
Espionage, however, is criminal. Breaking into someone's office or computer to get information to embarrass or damage a company is against the law, but that's a separate issue from publishing the results.
Apple can't just let this go, because letting it go is a lousy thing to do to all the Apple employees who do honor their agreements and STFU about upcoming products.
You do realize that telling all of your employees to STFU is a lousy thing to do in the first place, don't you?
Also, your adoration of Time Magazine (TM) falls in line with Apple's unAmerican "legitimate members of the press" fallacy. The former Soviet Union had a "legitimate press" which the state defined. "Truth" and "News" were the only organizations allowed to publish. It was so silly that copy machines had guards to make sure nothing "bad" was ever published. The result made true the old Russian proverb that "there's no truth in the news and no news in the truth."
The acute and late effects of radiation are well worked out. See here for a start. It seems the doses are low enough now for the animals to not have to worry about dying outright. That does not spare individuals from cancer. Cancer is not seen because animals might not live long enough to develop it and for the same reasons the harmful mutations are not seen:
Mary Mycio, author of Wormwood Forest, a natural history of the Chernobyl zone, points out that a mutant animal in the wild will usually die and be eaten before scientists can observe it.
An animal with cancer will soon be another animal's lunch, but it will have done well to have not died some other way first. Nature is hard.
Pouring poison on the world is a bad idea. It will do horrible things to animals too.
A product's performance doesn't live up to the hype. I know we're all shocked that he unthinkable finally happened.
What's shocking is that the rhetoric has been toned down from the usual. While this shill is still calling it the best windoze ever and better than anything thing else, he's admitting that other systems might be better in some way than the mighty late Vista:
It some ways, Windows Vista actually will exceed Mac OS X and Linux, but not to the depth we were promised.
That's quite a step from the kinds of morons who once told David Korn all about korn shells.
They need the humbling because they have never been the best at anything. They have, at best, vended a cheap alternative to even more restrictive and expensive code. Vista will have most of the flaws of their older junk and almost nothing new but decorations. Their networking still sucks, DRM will make media suck even worse, and their UI runs a distant fifth behind OSX, Enlightenment, KDE and Gnome. Even After Step goes beyond what M$ has. The same projects are eating their lunch on the application front too. KDE and Gnome have better PIM software than M$ can hope for. I don't even want to think about their browser. Sun's OO is better than M$ Office in many ways. If M$ had half a brain, they would hope and pray KDE and other projects manage to port decent software to their platform. Without that kind of third party support, M$ will quickly sink without a trace. They have lost their vibe and won't be getting it back without a lot of help.
Sales of Vista are going to be worse than those for XP and that's going to get their attention fast. They have already missed Christmass, which translates into a whole year out of the domestic market. Many of those disappointed people are going to install free software and they won't be back. The defections are going to go from a savvy trickle to a freaking flood in 2007.
It's actually very useful because everyone can be in front of a computer and still see the main screen and follow along.
He continued, "and it hardly costs a thing compared our other labs. It takes one fifth the man hours to keep up and the hardware works for year and years due to it's modularity and minimalism," but the PR department cut that out.
Even more than what he took pictures of, it sounds like the primary concern is the overall security of the area. Loading docks are where you find perhaps the biggest danger of theft in any business
That has got to be one of the lamest excuses ever. Loading docks are not secrets anywhere. They are public places you advertise so that the public can send things you buy and pick up things you sell.
I'm not sure you should compare this to xdrive. Like most M$ comairisons, it's a slander to the original. A quote or two in The Fine Article shows M$ is in the most rudimentary of planning stages:
Sources close to Microsoft described that service as one where Microsoft would back up users' personal files on CD and/or DVD. Users also would be able to back up financial files, legal documents, digital photos, online music and home videos, and even put their most important files into a "digital safe-deposit box," hosted by Microsoft, sources said.
At this point, Steve Baller, who has forbidden his children's use of IPod for the same thing, is probably imagining a real "safe-deposit" box reached by mailing your CD to Microsoft. "That's some nice data you got there, it'd be a shame if the OS you are using messed it up. Why don't you mail me what you think is important sose I can protect it for you? For a low monthly fee, I'll make sure nothing happens."
Slashdot Mirror
Most of you may have heard of New Orleans and their wireless network. Works fine, thanks.
It's nice to be able to make them to order for formerly untreatable disseases.
Boosts criminal penalties for copyright infringement originally created by the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 from five years to 10 years (and 10 years to 20 years for subsequent offenses). The NET Act targets noncommercial piracy including posting copyrighted photos, videos or news articles on a Web site if the value exceeds $1,000.
I can see "deep linking" doo doo all over the place, resulting in seizures of equipment and 10 year prison terms.
Also this was disturbing:
The SIIA's Kupferschmid, though, downplayed concerns about the expansion of the DMCA. "We really see this provision as far as any changes to the DMCA go as merely a housekeeping provision, not really a substantive change whatsoever," he said. "They're really to just make the definition of trafficking consistent throughout the DMCA and other provisions within copyright law uniform." The SIIA's board of directors includes Symantec, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Intuit and Red Hat.
Red Hat? You are kidding me! This bill is going to make life very difficult for free software. The big publishers are going to move to DRM'd formats and you will have to chose between them and your software freedom. Projects like Wine, Mplayer and Xine are going to be hammered. As it has been in the past for record stores, it's there way or the highway for you. The harassment potential of these changes is limitless and Red Hat will learn to their cost that they are not part of the big media club. I suggest they have Kupferschmid make a retraction or leave the organization.
The author claims hardware support for Paladium and "Output Content Protection". He further claims that unless you have "High bandwidth Digital Content Protection, support on your display" you won't be watching any movies and that Vista will try to lock you into Windoze formats. I don't have the hardware budget to keep up with such things, so I'll take his word for it and that's hardware protection for DRM.
If you combine that with rumors of Paladium blocking "unsigned" code execution, what you end up with is systems that will only work M$ junk. Given the performance of the author's ViiV system, that means nothing is really working.
It's not really surprising that would happen. Big dumb publishers don't want free computers playing their movies. The movie industry's use of CSS and subsequent abuse of the writers of DeCSS drives that point home. Their idea is to make general purpose computers suck like your current DVD player does. Microsoft and Intel are bending over backward to please them at everyone else's expense.
MMX was an actual hardware improvement that did make media "go faster". It has been used and improved by Intel and AMD. Support for the features is built into the GNU compilers and processor specific Linux kernels, which most distributions have as precompiled binaries.
ViiV's main feature seems to be hardware based DRM.
The key question is what promise you are talking about. The promise of content implies co-operation with big dumb publishers. Those big dumb publishers have extracted almost every content penny out of Itunes, and left Apple with the crumbs of what they make selling hardware. The artists, as usual did not get anything. The end user gets a more restricted version of what they used to get on CD and competition gets buried if all goes according to plan.
Apple, by moving to Intel, seems to have made some of the same promisses that M$ has about how to enforce their big dumb publisher promises. The speculation is that Apple got suckered into the Intel DRM that the *AAs have promised to pour their content into. We shall see about content availability, but DRM can not and will not work on a general purpose computing device. The only reason Apple stuff has worked in the past is because they were the only snake in their pit. We shall also see how well they get along with Intel and if the new dongles will work any better than the old ones.
The HP eXPerience described above is a preview of what DRM is all about. It's not really new, as anyone who's tried to use WMP knows. The primary problem is that M$ is root and you are not. They have made a system where they can add and remove files and components but you can't. When you multiply this by the problems of non free software, which requires yet another set of rules, you get much more than the sum of your troubles. Each vendor on your system wants to be root and non of them can really co-operate because they keep their source code in a vault. The only way a general purpose computing device can work the way you want it is for you to be root. That pretty much rules out DRM for anything but set top boxes. That would make the *AAs happy enough but not as happy as eliminating general purpose computing.
Every free computer with an internet connection is a potential competitor. See Star Wreck and The internet Archive Music Files. It does not take much to make a movie and even less to make music.
DRM, at best, is a loser. At it's worst, you get what the Washington post reporter saw. The people who want copyright to last "forever less a day" and have sold you the same content on LPs, CDs and now as bits, won't ever give you a good deal. When they butt heads with Bill Gates, you get a real mess.
Viiv's ingredients start with a dual-core Intel processor, which allows the computer to handle demanding video playback while also taking care of other chores, such as burning a CD or running a spyware scan.
Laughing my ass off. My 450 MHz K62 can do video playback and burn CDs at the same time, under Linux. Virus scanner? What's that?
Intel: constant vigilance for your precious Peeee Ceeeee is now possible and required! The war on TERRORISM will never end and you can do your 200 watt part.
I presume you were an undergraduate somewhere and know the ways you are forced to buy new texts. Minor revisions marketed as new editions, rotating question sets, etc.
It's nice of the publishers to announce their intentions up front now, but their excuses won't win them any sympathy. The existence of cheaper distribution methods should drive prices down. If publishers chose to make paper even more inflexible and difficult than it should be, they will simply hasten the demise of their printing business. Others will, hopefully, take their place where it's appropriate.
The problem is worldwide for technical texts. My friends from India showed me their versions of the textbooks they used. Same publisher, same edition, lower price and somewhat lower quality. The publisher knew just how much they could squeeze from the market. The thing that was valuable was the US produced technical content, which was excellent. Where it's really the best, it's craved around the world regardless of language. Indeed, people will learn English just to get it. The publishers own that content and foolishly think that it can't be recreated.
general texts, internet resources and lecture materials covered the gap... so what's the big problem elsewhere?
The big problem comes when publishers seek to own the information instead of a particular expression of that information. They have the cash to make trouble.
Even that has not changed much in 30 years. Fortran 77 is still used and the techniques are the same as they were when Newton and then Coates thought them up. The thing that has changed is the maturation of GNU tools and the availability of great numerical packages like the Fastest Fourier Transforms in the West. A text on the subject should contain a chapter of practical free computing, but this has little to do with the principles involved.
All they are going to do is push a button or tell their IT dude to do the same. Most people don't have time to wade through the vendor BS to learn anyting.
It does nothing for real data security. The easiest way to get data is not to drive, it's to bomb your target's IE or Outlook, at home or at work. Your ISP gives you access to the world and the world access to you. Your WAP gives access to the portion of the world within 100m of your WAP. There are considerably more bad guys in range of your network through one than the other.
It's not funny. Mandating "security" without mandating it be implemented with accepted and published standards is counterproductive. Half ass "security" measures like this do more harm than good. If they were really worried about securing personal information, they would outlaw keeping that information with an OS that has a 12 minute half life on any network. By enacting an admittedly useless precautions, they are enforcing the notion that security in general is nothing more than an inconvenience to the user.
That's only true for non free software, where price is the driving issue. It's not that non free software written offshore is always worse than domestic, it's that non free will never be as good as free. In the free software world, quality is the driving issue, regardless of where it comes from. Free sotware, by leaveraging co-operative effort, puts better quality tools in your hands for less money than commercial offerings. People trying to sell software went going offshore to lower their costs, but it's a downward spiral of low quality and greed. Free software is showing them up and the whole movement will dissapear with boxed software.
That leaves a lot of opportunity for the programmer. The majority of programming jobs are in house, where free software is most useful. Those jobs are very difficult to get done with commercial or offshore software. A good manager will realize this. A programmer who is also a leader will be able to convince their manager it is true.
People will pay for the tools they need and the software will continue to be written. The non-free middle men are the ones who are on the way out.
You have skipped a common step. You go to Google and look for the package that does what you want. This is something that's actually harder to do in the non free world, where people lie their ass off in the trade rags. Once you have the package name, installing software with synaptic, apt-get, deselect, kpackage manager or any other tool is less likely to screw up than the commercial software. Because free software users are free to share code, your distribution will take care of dependencies without you ever seeing it. Dependency problems come when you quit co-operating and act more like the non free vendors. Non free applications, self compiled source and other "extras" are much more difficult than just using the standard package in the stable repository. You can do it, and it can be fun, but the other way is much easier for people who just want to get their work done.
You can use the free software tools to find packages if you don't want to dig through reviews and screenshots. Synaptic, kpackage and apt all have search functions that work. My favorite is "apt-cache search term [terms]" because you don't have graphical overhead. Following this with "apt-get install" is easy enough, as is installing all of the recommended and suggested packages.
The important part is that the process works. It's rare that an upgrade breaks anything, even in testing when using an "apt-get update". That's what you would expect from freely shared code == the end of dependency hell.
Oh, we've never seen that in the non free world. Have you ever seen a free software advocate hire Madonna for a release or make a speech by projecting their head onto an 80 foot screen? Do you remember a little anti-trust trail where a parade of computer industry giants testified about how often and hard M$ would screw them?
Ego Driven Software while the Code my be better quality but have a much harder time agreeing with other people. But Profit driven Software tends to be more consistent but software quality tends to be a little lower.
The free software people are agreeing about things that matter, the rest is called choice and it's nice to have. I can drag and drop files from various Gnome programs into KDE programs and vice versa. For example, I can take a thumbnail from gqview and drop it onto GIMP and GIMP will open the file for editing. Can the crappy Windoze driver software that came with your camera talk to photoshop the same way? Can you change your window manager and expect the same result? Can you drag things from your browser the same way regardless of source computer, sftp, ftp, samba, etc? Agreement and code sharing is much better in the free software world where it counts.
On Debian, I have a choice of excellence. I have a spectrum of applications for just about any task and can pick the one that works best for me. I don't want them all to work exactly the same way. All I really care about is that it's free and it does the job the way I like to do it. Only M$ would try to turn this choice into a disadvantage.
KDE and Gnome have a simple dialogs that changes the level and color of transparency in their applications. With transparency in xorg, real transparency has been here a while now.
You have to come up with a good reason before you take away my ability to tell my neighbor something that might amuse them. Your financial losses don't really sway me, nor do arguments about your ideas being property in some way. I might respect your patent or your trade mark, but I'm not getting anything from you to keep my mouth shut.
Trade Secrets should remain part of civil law. They are typically enforced through a non disclosure agreement between an employee and an employer. This is an odious agreement in and of itself which is often abused. If an employee breaks that agreement, the employer may recover losses from the employee but must prove their damages. No one outside the agreement has any obligation. Putting those obligations on others gives companies the benefits of a patent without the public benefit of disclosure. Nothing is more dangerous to freedom than restrictions on press.
Espionage, however, is criminal. Breaking into someone's office or computer to get information to embarrass or damage a company is against the law, but that's a separate issue from publishing the results.
You do realize that telling all of your employees to STFU is a lousy thing to do in the first place, don't you?
Also, your adoration of Time Magazine (TM) falls in line with Apple's unAmerican "legitimate members of the press" fallacy. The former Soviet Union had a "legitimate press" which the state defined. "Truth" and "News" were the only organizations allowed to publish. It was so silly that copy machines had guards to make sure nothing "bad" was ever published. The result made true the old Russian proverb that "there's no truth in the news and no news in the truth."
You can recover from a punch in the face too.
The acute and late effects of radiation are well worked out. See here for a start. It seems the doses are low enough now for the animals to not have to worry about dying outright. That does not spare individuals from cancer. Cancer is not seen because animals might not live long enough to develop it and for the same reasons the harmful mutations are not seen:
Mary Mycio, author of Wormwood Forest, a natural history of the Chernobyl zone, points out that a mutant animal in the wild will usually die and be eaten before scientists can observe it.
An animal with cancer will soon be another animal's lunch, but it will have done well to have not died some other way first. Nature is hard.
Pouring poison on the world is a bad idea. It will do horrible things to animals too.
What's shocking is that the rhetoric has been toned down from the usual. While this shill is still calling it the best windoze ever and better than anything thing else, he's admitting that other systems might be better in some way than the mighty late Vista:
It some ways, Windows Vista actually will exceed Mac OS X and Linux, but not to the depth we were promised.
That's quite a step from the kinds of morons who once told David Korn all about korn shells.
They need the humbling because they have never been the best at anything. They have, at best, vended a cheap alternative to even more restrictive and expensive code. Vista will have most of the flaws of their older junk and almost nothing new but decorations. Their networking still sucks, DRM will make media suck even worse, and their UI runs a distant fifth behind OSX, Enlightenment, KDE and Gnome. Even After Step goes beyond what M$ has. The same projects are eating their lunch on the application front too. KDE and Gnome have better PIM software than M$ can hope for. I don't even want to think about their browser. Sun's OO is better than M$ Office in many ways. If M$ had half a brain, they would hope and pray KDE and other projects manage to port decent software to their platform. Without that kind of third party support, M$ will quickly sink without a trace. They have lost their vibe and won't be getting it back without a lot of help.
Sales of Vista are going to be worse than those for XP and that's going to get their attention fast. They have already missed Christmass, which translates into a whole year out of the domestic market. Many of those disappointed people are going to install free software and they won't be back. The defections are going to go from a savvy trickle to a freaking flood in 2007.
KDE and Gnome have a simple dialogs that changes the level and color of transparency in their applications.
He continued, "and it hardly costs a thing compared our other labs. It takes one fifth the man hours to keep up and the hardware works for year and years due to it's modularity and minimalism," but the PR department cut that out.
That has got to be one of the lamest excuses ever. Loading docks are not secrets anywhere. They are public places you advertise so that the public can send things you buy and pick up things you sell.
The repetition is coming from M$. It's called vaporware. Their slavish devotion to anything Google is matched only their hatred of the company.
Sources close to Microsoft described that service as one where Microsoft would back up users' personal files on CD and/or DVD. Users also would be able to back up financial files, legal documents, digital photos, online music and home videos, and even put their most important files into a "digital safe-deposit box," hosted by Microsoft, sources said.
At this point, Steve Baller, who has forbidden his children's use of IPod for the same thing, is probably imagining a real "safe-deposit" box reached by mailing your CD to Microsoft. "That's some nice data you got there, it'd be a shame if the OS you are using messed it up. Why don't you mail me what you think is important sose I can protect it for you? For a low monthly fee, I'll make sure nothing happens."