"it's not designed to be rapidly accelerated for a fast trip, structurally wise"
No, but an orbit that would be helpful for lunar exploration wouldn't require jarringly fast acceleration. For Mars it would be more tricky because you would probably want to send the people in a fast spacecraft to minimize the radiation exposure. The ISS could still be used as a conveniently large cargo container sent ahead of time. Of course, it would have to take the slow track to Mars, IIRC, a slingshot that uses Venus to accelerate to a higher solar orbit.
In all seriousness, I don't think any of the countries have a sufficiently strong economy for a *manned* trip to Mars at the moment. It's just too much tonnage whether the ISS is used or not, and the unmanned trips have been risky enough without adding the human equation to it.
I suppose *some* people would be upset if a Russian booster rocket took the ISS out of orbit without telling anyone, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it ludicrous. If the U.S. doesn't pay Russia to boost the ISS during the shuttle's downtime, Russia may have no choice but to pull a repo job on it.
These chaps are not being charged with copyright infringement. They are being charged with helpings others do it
Not saying you're wrong about that, but I want to make a philosophical point: everyone everywhere is an accessory to some evil act somewhere. They do so just by engaging in commerce with, or by paying taxes to a government that engages in torture or some other shameful action.
If they're guilty of indirectly helping evil then everyone is guilty of indirectly helping evil. Now, if the powers-that-be insist on one degree of separation from evil, if that's the standard, then there are a lot of people at telecomm companies who should be in jail right now, but these are given immunity because it's not really evil that's being attacked here, that's simply a distraction. This is not to prevent evil "pirates" from attacking (ridiculous) this is to protect the assets of those who are most highly favored by the leaders of our society.
In other words, this is in the same vein of protectionism that our copyright laws have been distorted to fulfill, except this form of protectionism of the elites' assets comes without the usual corresponding protectionist response (boycott) from those whose freedoms are being sacrificed but should also have been protected. This is not the first or the only freedom that these elites will take away if they get the chance.
Whether or not you think the TPB are guilty of something, consider whether you are in favor of the monitoring of all of your communications by ISPs that (it is implied) will surely follow, and the false-positive packets that will be dropped just in case some part of your data stream resembles copyrighted content, with all of the hassles that that implies, not to mention such infrastructure once it exists being a jumping board for some future censorship.
I would take the TPB's side just to avoid that mess, personally. If this is where copyright gets us then I agree with the OP, let us end copyright.
All of the people accessing the internet are having to pay some sort of charge to connect, whether it be the monthly ISP subscription fee or some other fee (either directly or indirectly) and so it's like we've all been pooling our efforts in subsidizing the cost to produce this giant shared storehouse of information for years now. And giant it is. That's why there's so much of just about anything, and that's why any one piece of information isn't worth that much.
Thus, it should come as no surprise to anyone (except those ordered to have their heads in the sand) that the most reasonable going price for information is somewhere around $0.
They were never very high to begin with. The major sources of news in the U.S. are not known their cultural sensitivity, so against this background don't be surprised to find that a large chunk of the population (including geekdom) is blissfully ignorant of major parts of world culture and of the local meaning of world happenings. A few do take the trouble to learn more, but many of those, after years of being spoonfed, also overrate their own ability to separate truth from fiction. This gap has always been there, but at least now you can help to fix it.
"If this were any other country or ethnic group other than India or Indians, this would have been caught out."
Cry me a river. This happens with almost every other country or culture that's mentioned here. If I had a dime for each time a slashdotter made a laughingly incorrect factual claim about another country that the moderators just swallowed whole I would be richer than the CEO of an oil company.
A while back (I don't have the link) there was a story about a mind reading machine as well, but that one required quite a bit more energy, so maybe by 2020 things will be so bad that false positives will be the least of our problems. Here's my version:
TSA worker: Please enter our xray/intention/mind-reading/magnetron machine.
The passenger enters amidst a zapping sound but jumps back smarting from third-degree burns.
Passenger 1: Ouch! TSA worker: What are you doing? You were supposed to pass through there. Passenger 1: I'm burned, I'm badly burned. What happened to my brain? TSA worker: (into his sleeve) Security, code polka dot, over. Intention meter is off the scale and the mind reader registers dark thoughts. TSA worker: TSA worker: You must follow procedure and get into the mind-scanner machine or you will be strip searched! Passenger 1: No way.
A bunch of soldiers with machine guns, mortar rounds and RPGs show up. One of them can barely hold back a three-headed police dog, who begins to snarl fiercely.
The first passenger keels over and dies, so she is dragged off to be strip searched. Eventually someone figures out that the machine isn't working and two technicians show up to fix it.
Tech 1: I think the volumetric irradiated power knob must be turned all the way up. Tech 2: No, no, it's turned all the way *down*. The problem is that the ray focus knob is turned all the way down. Tech 1: Like hell it is. If you think so then turn it up and get in there yourself. Tech 2: Hell no, YOU get in there and test it. Tech 1: Uh, whatever dude... I really don't feel like arguing about it. Just switch the settings however you want and let's see what happens this time.
The yellow tape is removed and the techs duck into a lounge.
IMO, the reason Bruce's site didn't pick up much steam is he insisted that his members give out their real-world name to log in. I would imagine that anyone who has witnessed with open eyes the wholesale raping of their privacy on and off the internet would have avoided giving away yet another attack vector against it. It just wouldn't be worth joining any site, no matter the quality, if the price one had to pay was to receive a permanent marketing barrage from automated telemarketing callers linking a meatspace name to a desirable demographic.
Bruce is usually spot-on on most topics, I wonder why he missed this one?
It depends where you draw the Web 1.0 line. Once the browser wars were in full swing, then of course sites ended up written for IE. Before that, the web was designed to be a collaborative research tool and deep linking was not only allowed by the "content owners" but expected. You were supposed to surf from site to site following your interests. Now each website is supposed to be its own little fiefdom where jumping offsite is discouraged. Rather than linking to the vast resources offsite, the typical website is so dependent on javascript that, if not for advertisements, you would have trouble finding a link that took you elsewhere. Hyperlinks are no longer hyperlinks, as somebody else pointed out, now they're merely user interface elements and could lead to anything (a pdf, movie, an image blowup, etc.) unexpectedly.
Incidentally, I got past the dancing monkeys, the ads floating mid-page and all of that other junk you mention by disabling javascript on those sites, if not avoiding them entirely. Thus, as the web tries to become more javascript-based the eyecatching crappola is guaranteed to return and will be harder to avoid if javascript is required to do anything, or if sites enforce the need for a specific browser in order to do anything.
Yes, we have made some progress, but by and large the internet is a lot less vibrant, a lot less interesting, a lot more centralized and a lot more controlled and watched. It hasn't yet become less useful but this is simply because of its fantastic growth momentum. However, people seem to have forgotten why it experienced its fantastic growth in the first place, and it wasn't because we were lacking ways for corporations to track all of our decisions. It wasn't because people wanted to lose control over their page navigation or their ability to read certain information wherever it may be. It wasn't because people wanted to be turned into criminals by whatever industry had their business model threatened by the invention of the digital computer.
No, I could only be optimistic if the trend were becoming overall positive rather than overall negative, and it doesn't seem headed that way right now even if at present we still have a fairly useful web.
You know, the type that worked reliably with just about any browser, the way it used to in Web 1.0 before web standards became a marketshare battleground?
Lately, websites have become picky about which browser you use for just this reason. The AJAX monster they're trying to get everyone to use is just too unwieldy and expensive to maintain in terms of programmer time if they actually have to support all of the browser versions. The outstanding bug count is too much even for some of the big players in this space, I dare say.
I'm sorry, but I'm just not that optimistic that games will be very well supported across browser versions to think that it will result in "quality". Instead I have a sneaky suspicion that someone will try to use some slick game that works on a couple of browsers to pull marketshare over to its cloud, but all the while dictating to people which browser they must waste their time upgrading in order to participate in the hypefest. Then, a few browser versions later, the game won't work anymore.
Instead, you should have baffled the moderators by making an apparently offtopic question about what to do when the camera reaches the last of its waypoints, and then given some obscure tip about keeping your buffest soldiers in mana rotation order or somesuch.
Maybe the low number of posts and such is the result of the Cogent/Sprint peering agreement falling over?
(It's strange, but it seems any time anybody releases their cloud, the internet gets cratered with peering trouble. It's particularly interesting because a cloud's selling point is strongly tied to its centrally-managed reliability, and a sputtering internet connection effectively negates that advantage over locally managed desktop apps. The biggest losers of this are Google and Amazon, as their business models are dependent on a good-smelling internet, not Microsoft... even though they are the most recent entry. Last time this happened there were announcements that major datacenters would be built...)
I guess if you wanted to be conspiracy-theoretical about it, you could say that Google Analytics became self aware and prevented any negative posts about it.
You must not have read the disclaimer I put between the parenz (or chose to ignore it to make your point), because if you go check the sourceforge software map for yourself, you'll see it's still called Azureus there, it's still #1, and as a result, it has enough name recognition among techies without looking like an obvious trademark ripoff to the public (which is what calling it Linuxus would cause... even a judge near Fort Worth might have the cognitive powers to see that!)
I admit the possibility that you may NOT be a techie and further may have no clue about what is popular in the open source realm. If you have managed to get Linux installed by some fantastic miracle of nature, it may never have occurred to you to download something beyond what is already included in your distro. In an attempt to do so, if you've visited sourceforge more than once you would recognize the name Azureus immediately. You obviously haven't.
BTW, I'm glad you mentioned OpenOffice as a name with high name recognition, but if you really want to cleanse your soul through servile obedience to your master you should have said OpenOffice.org, because representing that suite as OpenOffice by itself was the subject of another trademark dispute. Fancy that a product called Word is allowed to mimic WordPerfect at the height of its popularity, but if OpenOffice tries to do it to Office then some court magic ??? occurs and the decision flips in the other direction. Yet another data point...
And now for today's conspiracy quiz: why was Azureus renamed? Did someone not like frogs?
It's true that Lindows and Windows were mostly (*) in the same market segment.
However, when Wordperfect was #1 in its market segment, that didn't stop Microsoft from giving its competing product a similar name: Word. If a buyer in a hurry wouldn't be confused by Word versus Wordperfect, why would they be confused into thinking that Lindows would be the same as Windows? I'm not saying trademark standards should be loosened, just that they shouldn't be so inconsistent that a large company can get its way on both sides of an issue.
(*) One could argue that Lindows wasn't really selling the OS so much as *support*, and that buyers of Windows were actually getting a license, but to a buyer in a hurry they would both look like operating systems.
And some have argued that calling the product Lindows was a publicity stunt, due to the predictable reaction and the legal gray area. I don't doubt that MS calling its cloud Azure has a similar effect, the idea being to siphon a bit of the publicity and coolness factor from the #1 open source program (at least as listed on sourceforge).
My experience is MS borrows a lot from others for its trademarks, and this isn't the first time they have pulled a truncation-op on someone else's trademark. Anyone remember when Word started taking marketshare from the previously entrenched Wordperfect? That too was OK back then.
What chance do most of us have of calling a product Excelperfect? The fact is, they can do it but almost none of us can.
So it's OK for MS to remove the "us" at the end of Azureus to make Azure and everybody should be OK with that, but if somebody tries to replace the W in windows with an L to make Lindows, everyone should be up in arms about that?
In both cases, it seems like it has much more to do with WHO owns the trademark than with any sharply objective dividing line of legal fairness.
I have provided documentation of the traffic that is actually sent and received in a default install of Opera.
You have done no such thing. Claiming that opera behaves a certain way and actually proving that it behaves that way are two different things. Short of full corporate transparency, there is no way to prove that the URLs sent by the browser will not be stored, despite claims otherwise. The fact is that they are being sent from my browser. Thus, they can be stored and abused without my knowledge, and that is enough for it to be a privacy problem.
You have offered an unsubstantiated and ratheer outrageous claim.
No, actually, it is your claim that mine is a conspiracy theory that is galling, when all anyone has to do to verify my claim is to simply check the traffic from their own (recent opera) browser. If you don't want to be bothered to do it, that isn't my problem. If sniffing tools are illegal in your country, and that's why you can't see it, that's not my problem either.
Do you really honestly think you're the first person to ever hook it up to a packet sniffer?
Go do a search, and you'll see I'm not the only person to notice this, and not even the only person to report it.
...please stop trying to spread FUD. The world doesn't need more people like you.
Actually, it is not FUD, because FUD is by nature unable to be pinned down by evidence. Anyone can try it on their own browser, which is much more believable than any evidence that I can claim to show here, which you will denounce as false anyway because of your exaggerated and preconceived notions of me as a conspiracy type.
Let everyone sniff the opera browser's output and come to their own conclusion, and not take the word of either of us.
Sorry, but your argument provides no real evidence to contradict my claim of what I witnessed coming out of Opera. Simply insisting that it is so doesn't do it for me.
The link you provide does not counter my own personally collected evidence. It's worth about as much as a typical privacy policy as far as I'm concerned.
Before you point the accusing finger of conspiracy theory, install a recent Opera, learn how to sniff traffic, then get back to me on that.
But this is one tool that doesn't work quite so well for everyone. I would compare Exchange servers to musical chairs in terms of reliability.
Money is also relevant, perhaps more than ever. Some businesses would rather stay afloat than pay someone else for licenses they never needed. If the level of scrutiny includes not using AC in the server room and risking equipment damage then it also means cutting licensing costs wherever possible and risking the ire of a monopoly gorilla.
"Irrelevant, a huge number of businesses are quite prepared to accept tying themselves to one vendor for a vital business function"
Change "are" to "were" and you're getting closer to the truth. It's a learning process for these businesses and they're starting to find out that single-vendor sourcing is criticized in business school for good reason.
"...Larger businesses have, as often as not, already got such an infrastructure so there isn't a drastic cost difference."
That doesn't mean they like paying X times the licensing cost either. And you know they must be shitting bricks right now about having all of their huge infrastructure tied to a single vendor, who can, even as they go down in flames, dictate any terms they want to try to stay afloat themselves.
In short, you may wish all of this were irrelevant but a sound business decision must include consideration of alternate sourcing, employee productivity and cost-cutting possibilities.
Hear, hear. And maybe they can finally have something that doesn't try to break protocol standards, introduce a non-interchangeable mail archival format, artificially create a need to have ten times as many server licenses as necessary... in short, businesses would do well to uh, swap it for something else.
From the sound of it, I think RIAA is interested in the public relations angle - they're trying to get the judge to think Ray is misbehaving by attempting to influence public perception. However, this is one dark kettle saying that, because RIAA's clients:
still, even to this day, sell their songs to consumers as a "buy it now" ownership deal, not as the licensing deal that their lawsuits are entirely based on. Who has been influencing public perception most opposite to the facts there?
try to promote the idea that not sharing culture is to be considered the normal human behavior, when humans clearly naturally do the opposite. Who is really trying to warp reality there? I mean, that's pretty vexatious, to think you can change human nature through "copyright education" of college students and the like.
I'll be very curious to hear what their standard for "vexatious" is going to be...
Even as we speak, speechwriters are scrambling to find the appropriate line for her to scrub her apparent lack of IT security skills on the Inbox to Everywhere. It might go something like this:
Palin: When yahoo said they wanted to protect my email privacy, I said: "Thanks... but no Thanks.
*crowd cheers*
Palin: And when yahoo advised me to use a strong password, I said "Thanks.. but no thanks."
*crowd cheers*
McCain: That's why I chose her as vice president, she knows how to use a computer to produce transparency in government.
"Welcome to another company controlled by lawyers."
Fixed it for you.
(And I even did it without shredding the evidence, NDA/gag orders, DMCA take down letters or all of the other CYA tactics peculiar to the legal profession.)
Slashdot Mirror
If a NASA dud craft falls in a crater and nobody sees it in their telescope, did it really fall?
"it's not designed to be rapidly accelerated for a fast trip, structurally wise"
No, but an orbit that would be helpful for lunar exploration wouldn't require jarringly fast acceleration. For Mars it would be more tricky because you would probably want to send the people in a fast spacecraft to minimize the radiation exposure. The ISS could still be used as a conveniently large cargo container sent ahead of time. Of course, it would have to take the slow track to Mars, IIRC, a slingshot that uses Venus to accelerate to a higher solar orbit.
In all seriousness, I don't think any of the countries have a sufficiently strong economy for a *manned* trip to Mars at the moment. It's just too much tonnage whether the ISS is used or not, and the unmanned trips have been risky enough without adding the human equation to it.
I suppose *some* people would be upset if a Russian booster rocket took the ISS out of orbit without telling anyone, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it ludicrous. If the U.S. doesn't pay Russia to boost the ISS during the shuttle's downtime, Russia may have no choice but to pull a repo job on it.
In space, no one can hear you... nevermind.
Not saying you're wrong about that, but I want to make a philosophical point: everyone everywhere is an accessory to some evil act somewhere. They do so just by engaging in commerce with, or by paying taxes to a government that engages in torture or some other shameful action.
If they're guilty of indirectly helping evil then everyone is guilty of indirectly helping evil. Now, if the powers-that-be insist on one degree of separation from evil, if that's the standard, then there are a lot of people at telecomm companies who should be in jail right now, but these are given immunity because it's not really evil that's being attacked here, that's simply a distraction. This is not to prevent evil "pirates" from attacking (ridiculous) this is to protect the assets of those who are most highly favored by the leaders of our society.
In other words, this is in the same vein of protectionism that our copyright laws have been distorted to fulfill, except this form of protectionism of the elites' assets comes without the usual corresponding protectionist response (boycott) from those whose freedoms are being sacrificed but should also have been protected. This is not the first or the only freedom that these elites will take away if they get the chance.
Whether or not you think the TPB are guilty of something, consider whether you are in favor of the monitoring of all of your communications by ISPs that (it is implied) will surely follow, and the false-positive packets that will be dropped just in case some part of your data stream resembles copyrighted content, with all of the hassles that that implies, not to mention such infrastructure once it exists being a jumping board for some future censorship.
I would take the TPB's side just to avoid that mess, personally. If this is where copyright gets us then I agree with the OP, let us end copyright.
All of the people accessing the internet are having to pay some sort of charge to connect, whether it be the monthly ISP subscription fee or some other fee (either directly or indirectly) and so it's like we've all been pooling our efforts in subsidizing the cost to produce this giant shared storehouse of information for years now. And giant it is. That's why there's so much of just about anything, and that's why any one piece of information isn't worth that much.
Thus, it should come as no surprise to anyone (except those ordered to have their heads in the sand) that the most reasonable going price for information is somewhere around $0.
"Slashdot's standards are slipping."
They were never very high to begin with. The major sources of news in the U.S. are not known their cultural sensitivity, so against this background don't be surprised to find that a large chunk of the population (including geekdom) is blissfully ignorant of major parts of world culture and of the local meaning of world happenings. A few do take the trouble to learn more, but many of those, after years of being spoonfed, also overrate their own ability to separate truth from fiction. This gap has always been there, but at least now you can help to fix it.
"If this were any other country or ethnic group other than India or Indians, this would have been caught out."
Cry me a river. This happens with almost every other country or culture that's mentioned here. If I had a dime for each time a slashdotter made a laughingly incorrect factual claim about another country that the moderators just swallowed whole I would be richer than the CEO of an oil company.
A while back (I don't have the link) there was a story about a mind reading machine as well, but that one required quite a bit more energy, so maybe by 2020 things will be so bad that false positives will be the least of our problems. Here's my version:
TSA worker: Please enter our xray/intention/mind-reading/magnetron machine.
The passenger enters amidst a zapping sound but jumps back smarting from third-degree burns.
Passenger 1: Ouch!
TSA worker: What are you doing? You were supposed to pass through there.
Passenger 1: I'm burned, I'm badly burned. What happened to my brain?
TSA worker: (into his sleeve) Security, code polka dot, over. Intention meter is off the scale and the mind reader registers dark thoughts.
TSA worker: TSA worker: You must follow procedure and get into the mind-scanner machine or you will be strip searched!
Passenger 1: No way.
A bunch of soldiers with machine guns, mortar rounds and RPGs show up. One of them can barely hold back a three-headed police dog, who begins to snarl fiercely.
The first passenger keels over and dies, so she is dragged off to be strip searched. Eventually someone figures out that the machine isn't working and two technicians show up to fix it.
Tech 1: I think the volumetric irradiated power knob must be turned all the way up.
Tech 2: No, no, it's turned all the way *down*. The problem is that the ray focus knob is turned all the way down.
Tech 1: Like hell it is. If you think so then turn it up and get in there yourself.
Tech 2: Hell no, YOU get in there and test it.
Tech 1: Uh, whatever dude... I really don't feel like arguing about it. Just switch the settings however you want and let's see what happens this time.
The yellow tape is removed and the techs duck into a lounge.
TSA worker: NEXT!
IMO, the reason Bruce's site didn't pick up much steam is he insisted that his members give out their real-world name to log in. I would imagine that anyone who has witnessed with open eyes the wholesale raping of their privacy on and off the internet would have avoided giving away yet another attack vector against it. It just wouldn't be worth joining any site, no matter the quality, if the price one had to pay was to receive a permanent marketing barrage from automated telemarketing callers linking a meatspace name to a desirable demographic.
Bruce is usually spot-on on most topics, I wonder why he missed this one?
It depends where you draw the Web 1.0 line. Once the browser wars were in full swing, then of course sites ended up written for IE. Before that, the web was designed to be a collaborative research tool and deep linking was not only allowed by the "content owners" but expected. You were supposed to surf from site to site following your interests. Now each website is supposed to be its own little fiefdom where jumping offsite is discouraged. Rather than linking to the vast resources offsite, the typical website is so dependent on javascript that, if not for advertisements, you would have trouble finding a link that took you elsewhere. Hyperlinks are no longer hyperlinks, as somebody else pointed out, now they're merely user interface elements and could lead to anything (a pdf, movie, an image blowup, etc.) unexpectedly.
Incidentally, I got past the dancing monkeys, the ads floating mid-page and all of that other junk you mention by disabling javascript on those sites, if not avoiding them entirely. Thus, as the web tries to become more javascript-based the eyecatching crappola is guaranteed to return and will be harder to avoid if javascript is required to do anything, or if sites enforce the need for a specific browser in order to do anything.
Yes, we have made some progress, but by and large the internet is a lot less vibrant, a lot less interesting, a lot more centralized and a lot more controlled and watched. It hasn't yet become less useful but this is simply because of its fantastic growth momentum. However, people seem to have forgotten why it experienced its fantastic growth in the first place, and it wasn't because we were lacking ways for corporations to track all of our decisions. It wasn't because people wanted to lose control over their page navigation or their ability to read certain information wherever it may be. It wasn't because people wanted to be turned into criminals by whatever industry had their business model threatened by the invention of the digital computer.
No, I could only be optimistic if the trend were becoming overall positive rather than overall negative, and it doesn't seem headed that way right now even if at present we still have a fairly useful web.
How about we start with some quality... webpages?
You know, the type that worked reliably with just about any browser, the way it used to in Web 1.0 before web standards became a marketshare battleground?
Lately, websites have become picky about which browser you use for just this reason. The AJAX monster they're trying to get everyone to use is just too unwieldy and expensive to maintain in terms of programmer time if they actually have to support all of the browser versions. The outstanding bug count is too much even for some of the big players in this space, I dare say.
I'm sorry, but I'm just not that optimistic that games will be very well supported across browser versions to think that it will result in "quality". Instead I have a sneaky suspicion that someone will try to use some slick game that works on a couple of browsers to pull marketshare over to its cloud, but all the while dictating to people which browser they must waste their time upgrading in order to participate in the hypefest. Then, a few browser versions later, the game won't work anymore.
Of course, but that would be too straightforward.
Instead, you should have baffled the moderators by making an apparently offtopic question about what to do when the camera reaches the last of its waypoints, and then given some obscure tip about keeping your buffest soldiers in mana rotation order or somesuch.
Maybe the low number of posts and such is the result of the Cogent/Sprint peering agreement falling over?
(It's strange, but it seems any time anybody releases their cloud, the internet gets cratered with peering trouble. It's particularly interesting because a cloud's selling point is strongly tied to its centrally-managed reliability, and a sputtering internet connection effectively negates that advantage over locally managed desktop apps. The biggest losers of this are Google and Amazon, as their business models are dependent on a good-smelling internet, not Microsoft... even though they are the most recent entry. Last time this happened there were announcements that major datacenters would be built...)
I guess if you wanted to be conspiracy-theoretical about it, you could say that Google Analytics became self aware and prevented any negative posts about it.
You must not have read the disclaimer I put between the parenz (or chose to ignore it to make your point), because if you go check the sourceforge software map for yourself, you'll see it's still called Azureus there, it's still #1, and as a result, it has enough name recognition among techies without looking like an obvious trademark ripoff to the public (which is what calling it Linuxus would cause... even a judge near Fort Worth might have the cognitive powers to see that!)
I admit the possibility that you may NOT be a techie and further may have no clue about what is popular in the open source realm. If you have managed to get Linux installed by some fantastic miracle of nature, it may never have occurred to you to download something beyond what is already included in your distro. In an attempt to do so, if you've visited sourceforge more than once you would recognize the name Azureus immediately. You obviously haven't.
BTW, I'm glad you mentioned OpenOffice as a name with high name recognition, but if you really want to cleanse your soul through servile obedience to your master you should have said OpenOffice.org, because representing that suite as OpenOffice by itself was the subject of another trademark dispute. Fancy that a product called Word is allowed to mimic WordPerfect at the height of its popularity, but if OpenOffice tries to do it to Office then some court magic ??? occurs and the decision flips in the other direction. Yet another data point...
And now for today's conspiracy quiz: why was Azureus renamed? Did someone not like frogs?
It's true that Lindows and Windows were mostly (*) in the same market segment.
However, when Wordperfect was #1 in its market segment, that didn't stop Microsoft from giving its competing product a similar name: Word. If a buyer in a hurry wouldn't be confused by Word versus Wordperfect, why would they be confused into thinking that Lindows would be the same as Windows? I'm not saying trademark standards should be loosened, just that they shouldn't be so inconsistent that a large company can get its way on both sides of an issue.
(*)
One could argue that Lindows wasn't really selling the OS so much as *support*, and that buyers of Windows were actually getting a license, but to a buyer in a hurry they would both look like operating systems.
And some have argued that calling the product Lindows was a publicity stunt, due to the predictable reaction and the legal gray area. I don't doubt that MS calling its cloud Azure has a similar effect, the idea being to siphon a bit of the publicity and coolness factor from the #1 open source program (at least as listed on sourceforge).
My experience is MS borrows a lot from others for its trademarks, and this isn't the first time they have pulled a truncation-op on someone else's trademark. Anyone remember when Word started taking marketshare from the previously entrenched Wordperfect? That too was OK back then.
What chance do most of us have of calling a product Excelperfect? The fact is, they can do it but almost none of us can.
So it's OK for MS to remove the "us" at the end of Azureus to make Azure and everybody should be OK with that, but if somebody tries to replace the W in windows with an L to make Lindows, everyone should be up in arms about that?
In both cases, it seems like it has much more to do with WHO owns the trademark than with any sharply objective dividing line of legal fairness.
You have done no such thing. Claiming that opera behaves a certain way and actually proving that it behaves that way are two different things. Short of full corporate transparency, there is no way to prove that the URLs sent by the browser will not be stored, despite claims otherwise. The fact is that they are being sent from my browser. Thus, they can be stored and abused without my knowledge, and that is enough for it to be a privacy problem.
No, actually, it is your claim that mine is a conspiracy theory that is galling, when all anyone has to do to verify my claim is to simply check the traffic from their own (recent opera) browser. If you don't want to be bothered to do it, that isn't my problem. If sniffing tools are illegal in your country, and that's why you can't see it, that's not my problem either.
Go do a search, and you'll see I'm not the only person to notice this, and not even the only person to report it.
Actually, it is not FUD, because FUD is by nature unable to be pinned down by evidence. Anyone can try it on their own browser, which is much more believable than any evidence that I can claim to show here, which you will denounce as false anyway because of your exaggerated and preconceived notions of me as a conspiracy type.
Let everyone sniff the opera browser's output and come to their own conclusion, and not take the word of either of us.
Sorry, but your argument provides no real evidence to contradict my claim of what I witnessed coming out of Opera. Simply insisting that it is so doesn't do it for me.
The link you provide does not counter my own personally collected evidence. It's worth about as much as a typical privacy policy as far as I'm concerned.
Before you point the accusing finger of conspiracy theory, install a recent Opera, learn how to sniff traffic, then get back to me on that.
My claim that it's spyware stands.
Sorry to break your perceptions, but Opera is actually a festering privacy nightmare.
By default it sends each and every one of your URL requests to click-tracker site. If you don't believe me, check with a packet sniffer.
If it had been open source, I dare say that wouldn't have been the default.
Young soldiers also spend a lot of time daydreaming about sex.
Tank Soldier: "Did you just think an order that I should load the cannon repeatedly?"
Tank Sargeant: "No, uh, never mind that. It was *cough* something else."
Tank Soldier: "Hey, you just thought of smacking me on the face!"
Tank Sargeant: "Did not."
Tank Soldier: "Did too."
Tank Sargeant: "What? That's my girlfriend you were just thinking about!"
Tank Soldier: "I'm thinking it on purpose. So there."
Somwhere on the battlefield, a tank starts going in circles for no apparent reason.
But this is one tool that doesn't work quite so well for everyone. I would compare Exchange servers to musical chairs in terms of reliability.
Money is also relevant, perhaps more than ever. Some businesses would rather stay afloat than pay someone else for licenses they never needed. If the level of scrutiny includes not using AC in the server room and risking equipment damage then it also means cutting licensing costs wherever possible and risking the ire of a monopoly gorilla.
Change "are" to "were" and you're getting closer to the truth. It's a learning process for these businesses and they're starting to find out that single-vendor sourcing is criticized in business school for good reason.
That doesn't mean they like paying X times the licensing cost either. And you know they must be shitting bricks right now about having all of their huge infrastructure tied to a single vendor, who can, even as they go down in flames, dictate any terms they want to try to stay afloat themselves.
In short, you may wish all of this were irrelevant but a sound business decision must include consideration of alternate sourcing, employee productivity and cost-cutting possibilities.
"...they can finally have something that works!"
Hear, hear. And maybe they can finally have something that doesn't try to break protocol standards, introduce a non-interchangeable mail archival format, artificially create a need to have ten times as many server licenses as necessary... in short, businesses would do well to uh, swap it for something else.
From the sound of it, I think RIAA is interested in the public relations angle - they're trying to get the judge to think Ray is misbehaving by attempting to influence public perception. However, this is one dark kettle saying that, because RIAA's clients:
still, even to this day, sell their songs to consumers as a "buy it now" ownership deal, not as the licensing deal that their lawsuits are entirely based on. Who has been influencing public perception most opposite to the facts there?
try to promote the idea that not sharing culture is to be considered the normal human behavior, when humans clearly naturally do the opposite. Who is really trying to warp reality there? I mean, that's pretty vexatious, to think you can change human nature through "copyright education" of college students and the like.
I'll be very curious to hear what their standard for "vexatious" is going to be...
Even as we speak, speechwriters are scrambling to find the appropriate line for her to scrub her apparent lack of IT security skills on the Inbox to Everywhere. It might go something like this:
Palin: When yahoo said they wanted to protect my email privacy, I said: "Thanks... but no Thanks.
*crowd cheers*
Palin: And when yahoo advised me to use a strong password, I said "Thanks.. but no thanks."
*crowd cheers*
McCain: That's why I chose her as vice president, she knows how to use a computer to produce transparency in government.
*crowd cheers*
*crowd cheers*
*crowd cheers*
Tech: Jeff, I think the laughtrack box is stuck.
Not exactly.
Fixed it for you.
(And I even did it without shredding the evidence, NDA/gag orders, DMCA take down letters or all of the other CYA tactics peculiar to the legal profession.)