They released it last week?! Wow. What kind of howling-idiot company pits their marketing department against Steve Jobs? That's, well, madness of the non-Spartan variety.
Using it over access to entertainment is a misnomer.
Freedom of expression, the press, and the public domain is not a trivial thing. De-facto perpetual copyrights are as outrageous in their own way as the H-bomb is in its own way.
While I agree with many of the points you cite, you're obviously ignoring the real elephant in the room: the Iraq war. We could have gone to Mars. We could have funded the basic research needed to settle numerous open questions in science. We could afford all those tax cuts. But we can't, because the Shrub couldn't sleep at night until Saddam was deposed.
There is nothing in the PNAC agenda that is compatible with either big-L or small-l libertarianism. Manifest destiny is over. We have nothing to gain and everything to lose by trying to mimic the British Empire on our own terms. So how can we justify praising anything that Bush has done, given the magnitude of the mess he's made?
You can either go off starting random wars of aggression, or you can conduct planetary exploration. The American taxpayer, quite rightly, doesn't want to pay for both. Many don't want to pay for either, frankly.
If you would rather support explorers than crusaders, make sure the Presidential candidate you vote for in '08 agrees with your point of view, and hold him/her to it.
When I was a kid, we didn't even have MMX. You think that's bad? My computer used to interrupt me every 108 minutes to make me enter the result of a floating-point calculation.
The other thing these people never explain is how kids who grew up in Palestine, Kosovo, Baghdad, Darfur,... don't all grow up to be bloodthirsty psychopaths. How can a video game possibly trigger sociopathic behavior when real-life violence clearly does not?
You need to up your brain intake slightly. Software patent violations don't typically occur because someone cribs off another's source code, or off an existing patent disclosure. They occur because the second guy to be faced with a particular problem picks an obvious solution to that problem, which the first guy happens to have patented.
Infringement is inevitable when people are allowed to patent vague concepts and intangible ideas. This practice has to be stopped.
It's trolling when they spring up out of nowhere and start suing people. This is just the eight-year-old chair-throwing Ballmer mentality at work. Gates has him on a shorter leash than most people think.
We weren't always the pathetically-risk-averse society you know as a young person.
In my great-grandparents' lifetime, they probably saw seven people die of dysentery on the boat over to America, and you know what? They got over it. (My great-grandparents, not the dysentery victims.) Losing a space shuttle now and again wouldn't have distracted Grandpa Joe from his craps game.
If we lose that tolerance for risk altogether, we're done as a species.
Obviously I'm being trolled here, but Microsoft does not, in any way, meet the definition of a "patent troll." They are the victim of patent trolling, far more often than the instigator.
It weakens the argument against real patent trolls to plaster the label on every big company you don't like.
Um, there are no W3C standards that address this particular functionality. It is platform-specific by definition. If you are going to run some kind of obscure fetishware browser, you've got to accept that commercial developers are not going to bust their asses writing code on your behalf.
Just like the fundamentalist Socialists and Communists, who have killed more people than all the "fundamentalist" religious types. And they were.... atheists.
Personality cults are not atheistic. They are nothing but churches with a little less tolerance for competition than most.
If numbers do not belong to anybody, then one can (rather easily) encode any copyrighted work as an integer and distribute it.
Well, duh. What do you people think an.MP3 file is? A 4,000,000-digit number.
Of course you can "own" a number. This whole debate is stupid. Just because you encode a book as ASCII digits doesn't mean you own the copyright to the book.
Forcing me to pay for the activities of your religious groups, however charitable, is arguably a violation of the Establishment Clause.
If "the power to tax is the power to destroy," as is so often parroted by the Christian Right here in the US, then the power to fund is the power to establish. You Bible-beaters can't have it both ways.
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They released it last week?! Wow. What kind of howling-idiot company pits their marketing department against Steve Jobs? That's, well, madness of the non-Spartan variety.
Using it over access to entertainment is a misnomer.
Freedom of expression, the press, and the public domain is not a trivial thing. De-facto perpetual copyrights are as outrageous in their own way as the H-bomb is in its own way.
While I agree with many of the points you cite, you're obviously ignoring the real elephant in the room: the Iraq war. We could have gone to Mars. We could have funded the basic research needed to settle numerous open questions in science. We could afford all those tax cuts. But we can't, because the Shrub couldn't sleep at night until Saddam was deposed.
There is nothing in the PNAC agenda that is compatible with either big-L or small-l libertarianism. Manifest destiny is over. We have nothing to gain and everything to lose by trying to mimic the British Empire on our own terms. So how can we justify praising anything that Bush has done, given the magnitude of the mess he's made?
I've actually read Mayer's book, unlike you (most likely), and I failed to find anything in it about Reaganomics. Page numbers, please?
WTF, I'm a very secure programmer. I even drive a Miata with a rainbow-colored Apple sticker. Nobody's paying me $200/hour.
... without giving money to AT&T. :-(
You can either go off starting random wars of aggression, or you can conduct planetary exploration. The American taxpayer, quite rightly, doesn't want to pay for both. Many don't want to pay for either, frankly.
If you would rather support explorers than crusaders, make sure the Presidential candidate you vote for in '08 agrees with your point of view, and hold him/her to it.
After all, as mewling pussies everywhere have reminded us ad nauseam, if the FBI isn't doing anything wrong, what do they have to worry about?
Where do you get that they are in favor of indecency laws
Google "PMRC."
When I was a kid, we didn't even have MMX. You think that's bad? My computer used to interrupt me every 108 minutes to make me enter the result of a floating-point calculation.
The other thing these people never explain is how kids who grew up in Palestine, Kosovo, Baghdad, Darfur, ... don't all grow up to be bloodthirsty psychopaths. How can a video game possibly trigger sociopathic behavior when real-life violence clearly does not?
You need to up your brain intake slightly. Software patent violations don't typically occur because someone cribs off another's source code, or off an existing patent disclosure. They occur because the second guy to be faced with a particular problem picks an obvious solution to that problem, which the first guy happens to have patented.
Infringement is inevitable when people are allowed to patent vague concepts and intangible ideas. This practice has to be stopped.
It's trolling when they spring up out of nowhere and start suing people. This is just the eight-year-old chair-throwing Ballmer mentality at work. Gates has him on a shorter leash than most people think.
We weren't always the pathetically-risk-averse society you know as a young person.
In my great-grandparents' lifetime, they probably saw seven people die of dysentery on the boat over to America, and you know what? They got over it. (My great-grandparents, not the dysentery victims.) Losing a space shuttle now and again wouldn't have distracted Grandpa Joe from his craps game.
If we lose that tolerance for risk altogether, we're done as a species.
Obviously I'm being trolled here, but Microsoft does not, in any way, meet the definition of a "patent troll." They are the victim of patent trolling, far more often than the instigator.
It weakens the argument against real patent trolls to plaster the label on every big company you don't like.
Not because I think he's become crooked,
Oh, he was crooked a long time ago. Google the "Keating Five" to see the sorts of people McCain has chosen to associate with over the years.
I do not understand the appeal of this simpering asstard to voters with otherwise-enlightened sensibilities.
What recourse do you have?
Deal with it and get over it?
Um, there are no W3C standards that address this particular functionality. It is platform-specific by definition. If you are going to run some kind of obscure fetishware browser, you've got to accept that commercial developers are not going to bust their asses writing code on your behalf.
Just like the fundamentalist Socialists and Communists, who have killed more people than all the "fundamentalist" religious types. And they were .... atheists.
Personality cults are not atheistic. They are nothing but churches with a little less tolerance for competition than most.
It's frightening to see how, in 4 years, the creationism vs evolution has become, in both parts, an accepted "debate".
It's depressing as hell, too. I thought this "debate" was won 70 years ago, but apparently the stupidity gene refuses to die out.
Your evolutionist religion takes more faith to believe in than mine!
Really? Even though ours works, and yours doesn't? Interesting.
If numbers do not belong to anybody, then one can (rather easily) encode any copyrighted work as an integer and distribute it.
.MP3 file is? A 4,000,000-digit number.
Well, duh. What do you people think an
Of course you can "own" a number. This whole debate is stupid. Just because you encode a book as ASCII digits doesn't mean you own the copyright to the book.
... and it turns out the copy-protection key is 04 08 0F 10 17 2A.
:( Anybody got the tech-support number handy?
Downside is that you have to enter it every 108 minutes or the game crashes.
Forcing me to pay for the activities of your religious groups, however charitable, is arguably a violation of the Establishment Clause.
If "the power to tax is the power to destroy," as is so often parroted by the Christian Right here in the US, then the power to fund is the power to establish. You Bible-beaters can't have it both ways.
It also runs under Linux, of course, being GCC. Do some homework before whining, ferPetesake.