Sure Microsoft can go after companies with legal threats, but ultimately the patents would have to come out. You can't sue and not be prepared for the information to become public. There was a little software company in Utah that is finding this out. Is this just SCO vs. IBM where SCO has been replaced by a much bigger company that isn't going to run out of money in 5 years? They'll keep threatening that Linux opens your company to patent violations and lawsuits until they've milked it dry. Then when companies stop listening (if this ever happens; I doubt it would) and start using Linux, they'll start suing a few until the companies buy the newest Microsoft product. Then the Linux community will fix the patent violations in a day or two...but it will be too late, and companies will be afraid again that there are more violations and will stop using Linux...
They'll be able to repeat this process as for as many patent violations as they can come up with. Should be able to do a lot of damage.
How the hell can someone justify modding the parent flamebait? If you disagree with what he says, then post your own freaking reply, don't be a coward and simply mod him down. If you don't like how our modding system works, go to digg. There's a reason we don't have a "-1, Wrong" option. There are otheropinions that think we're doing fine in Iraq.
I suspect most of the people doing this (modding flamebait for little reason) are against the war in Iraq but haven't talked to anyone that has actually been there (see above links). They get their dose of information from the biased media (yes, [insert your favorite media channel here] IS biased because they have advertisers that want viewers. What do you think sells? What's going to create more of a reaction and cause someone to tune in? "War in Iraq largely successful, see all the power plants we've set up, see how we have to fix them every week because people steal cables and metal from them" or "2031st soldier dead after suicide car driver disguised as civilian seeks 'aid'. Still trying to identify bodies" Hint: not the first one.) and are too lazy to or don't bother tracking down all the facts for evaluation. Or maybe they just have an agenda which is too weak to express in words but delights in modding down.
Besides, if you really fear for our country's reputation with the rest of the world, then this baseless negativity (scrutiny is always good but mindless flaming isn't, which, if you took the time to read the parent's post, wasn't flamebait at all as far as I can tell) isn't going to help in the least. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you're unpatriotic for not supporting the war (which Bush's supporters did say soon after 9/11); what I AM saying is that for better or worse we've already made the decision to go across and interfere with another country, so the last thing we need to complete the job is internal dissent. We had a direct physical presence in Japan and Germany for some 5 years after WW2, and still were very involved for another 5 years after that. We didn't have to rebuild with rogue terrorist groups using citizens as shields and dressing like them for the element of surprise on our troops. We had the full support of the inhabitants, and it still took 10 years (I would say it's unreasonable to assume we could have done it much faster) to sort everything out. Our situation in Iraq? We _had_ the support of the Iraqi populace for a time, not so much anymore; there _are_ still terrorists fighting back; we're 5 years in and I'd say we need to take another good 5 years to finish up...and halfway through we've got people already fussing about how long it's taking. Shoot, it wasn't 2 years after we went in that the dissent started. Do you seriously think you can turn a country around from dictatorship for the last several hundred years, to democracy, in just a few years? The people that are a part of the police force over there only police because it pays the bills-- they don't have a sense of national patriotism for their newfound freedoms; or if they do, it's not like ours. To expect them to instantly change their worldview of the way life is ("I have no rights" to "I can do as I please") in less than 5 years is borderline insanity.
I don't know about this youtube deal; I think a lot of good will come from it...CNN or whoever hates on this with no just cause can flame all they want but if these clips are simple candid recordings of soldiers going about their lives (Hey, make it a "Reality TV" sort of show that'll be sure to garner interest), there's not much dirt they're going to be able to throw around about the veracity and truth of reports.
What I _would_ like to see is money spent creating movies that the Iraqi population can relate to, that are free to view and take home, that purpose to show the Iraqis the benefits of free choice, and how much _less_ evil democracy is compared to other forms of governm
Umm, In a blizzard, the majority of people get stuck because the ground clearance of the vehicle is to low to the ground. A high riding SUV will go far more places then any all whell drive car that doesn't sit as hit.
I have big tires with deep lugs on my pickup truck. I can usually pull all wheel drive cars out and get them unstuck in 2 wheel drive just because of this. The snow when you frame or even ground effect s(spoiler) starts dragging, it acts like a plow and builds up in front of the vehicle while your driving. When it is doing this, it compacts and almost turns into a block of ice. Once this is so big, it wedges under the vehicle and has the same effect as trying to pop a large curb on a slippery surface. If you catch it soon enough and don't dig tire depression into it, OR sit on it letting the warmth of the tires melt one in it, you can usually back out of it and drive around the blockage until it happens again but you have to watch out for other cars in the process.
While this doesn't happen often, you can look at the ground clearance of your car, the lowest point will hit first and sometimes that is less then 4 or 6 inches on smaller cars. That means as little as 2 inches of snow with drifting can strand you. With an SUV, you usually have twice as much clearance and and more weight driving the tires to solid pavement better when spinning for traction. They can usually last a lot longer. But you can be fooled into a false safety and get stuck there too. I have 14 inches of clearance from the differential points on the axles of my pickup truck. After that, the low spot is 20 inches to the ground. I don't have to worry about that and quite frankly, I'm not driving in 10 or 15 inches of snow. But If you out in the middle of nowhere, sometime you need to drive in 4 or 6 inches of snow just to get somewhere safe.
An SUV, if it has the ground clearance, can go further then an all wheel drive car, sometimes even in 2 wheel drive. I still see plenty of drivers driving (solo) SUVs in Atlanta.
That way if they cause a wreck they'll kill OTHER families' (that can't afford anything but a small van) kids. So, Darwinism or intelligent design? =D
I for one welcome our SUV snorking overladies o.O
The ones that can afford the SUVs are the hot ones though. We all know that the hot women go after the men with the most money, regardless of his character. The smart women go after the best man. So they're not really Darwin Award material.
Your statement is ironic. Most of the people I see driving SUVs are smallish women. Because, ecosystem be damned, they want to feel safe and they just couldn't imagine driving their kids around in anything but an Expedition. That way if they cause a wreck they'll kill OTHER families' (that can't afford anything but a small van) kids.
My Compaq Sempron (non-low-power-version) notebook gets 6.25h in Windows (12 cell battery). I haven't heard of those new macbooks getting more than 4.5.
But, to be honest, we all know that a truly free society isn't free at all. You have to have some rules for life to continue. This may be one of them. How much does it matter if you can't speak a string of hexes for copyright/DMCA reasons? It doesn't. Some may say "this is a slippery slope", and that's partly true, but everyone knows that when they start trying to keep us from quoting a favorite line from a recent funny movie, people won't give a damn, and they'll just do it anyways. There will be people with money at that point that realize it's absurd, and when sued, will fight back. I don't see many other places a precedent relating to this Hex issue could lead.
So I say it's not a big deal. In fact I would even venture to say that I would support more of this. People want to be entertained, but they're also freaking lazy. When they have to work too hard to be entertained, they'll find something else cheaper, less expensive to entertain themselves with. Have any of you been to Waldenbooks at the mall lately? I recently picked up this for under $10 (by the way I'd highly recommend it; . I took a glance around and found many other cool books-- a 200 page pictured book of historically significant scientific inventions for $6, a 1" thick, 12"x18" book with nothing but pictures of planets in our solar system (and stuff about the far out ones) for $20; Barak Obama's book for $15; etc. etc.-- that had a WAY better cost/entertainment ratio than Spiderman 3 or any of those HD-DVD/Blu-ray discs. Lets see-- $20 for me [and a wife in the future hopefully] to go see a movie (not including the $8 poppcorn and $5 drinks), or $20 for any of those books I listed above that will provide hours more of entertainment?
Easy choice. Eventually when this stuff is so restricted that we can't download it for free, and so expensive that we simply can't afford it, a market will be created for cheap ways to entertain yourself-- and these $10 books at Waldenbooks and Barnes and Noble will fly off the shelves. People will visit their library more. They'll go walk at the park with friends more.
So while I think it's good to fight for our rights, the result wouldn't be that bad. "Burn the land, boil the sea, but you can't take the sky from me..."
We'll find plenty other things to occupy ourselves with. Who cares about AACS and movies and stuff when you can find something else just as, if not more entertaining, for half the price?
Fraps means nothing; I can do the exact same thing too. All the fraps work is done on the CPU, what minor encoding there is before it dumps it to the disk. That's why a minute or two of footage can run several hundred megabytes no problem-- because it's just an uncompressed video dump.
That's ok. The idea is to simply make it more difficult than not for a nabber to access the device. It's somewhat like having a lock on your house. Is that going to keep the determined robber out? Of course not; anybody in their right mind would just jump through the window rather than try to crack the lock. Having a lock simply protects you from the joe shmo "hm lets see if there's anything good in there" type that enters on a whim.
The same would apply to a fingerprint activated ipod. If someone sees an ipod lying there and nobody around, they'll be much less likely to take it if they know it's going to take a fair amount of work to actually use.
I fail to see how these would be bad. As usual, the market would determine how much it's worth.
Slashdot Mirror
They'll be able to repeat this process as for as many patent violations as they can come up with. Should be able to do a lot of damage.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=234585&cid=191 06803
Kthx.
Sorry need to turn off HTML Formatted.
How the hell can someone justify modding the parent flamebait? If you disagree with what he says, then post your own freaking reply, don't be a coward and simply mod him down. If you don't like how our modding system works, go to digg. There's a reason we don't have a "-1, Wrong" option. There are other opinions that think we're doing fine in Iraq. I suspect most of the people doing this (modding flamebait for little reason) are against the war in Iraq but haven't talked to anyone that has actually been there (see above links). They get their dose of information from the biased media (yes, [insert your favorite media channel here] IS biased because they have advertisers that want viewers. What do you think sells? What's going to create more of a reaction and cause someone to tune in? "War in Iraq largely successful, see all the power plants we've set up, see how we have to fix them every week because people steal cables and metal from them" or "2031st soldier dead after suicide car driver disguised as civilian seeks 'aid'. Still trying to identify bodies" Hint: not the first one.) and are too lazy to or don't bother tracking down all the facts for evaluation. Or maybe they just have an agenda which is too weak to express in words but delights in modding down. Besides, if you really fear for our country's reputation with the rest of the world, then this baseless negativity (scrutiny is always good but mindless flaming isn't, which, if you took the time to read the parent's post, wasn't flamebait at all as far as I can tell) isn't going to help in the least. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you're unpatriotic for not supporting the war (which Bush's supporters did say soon after 9/11); what I AM saying is that for better or worse we've already made the decision to go across and interfere with another country, so the last thing we need to complete the job is internal dissent. We had a direct physical presence in Japan and Germany for some 5 years after WW2, and still were very involved for another 5 years after that. We didn't have to rebuild with rogue terrorist groups using citizens as shields and dressing like them for the element of surprise on our troops. We had the full support of the inhabitants, and it still took 10 years (I would say it's unreasonable to assume we could have done it much faster) to sort everything out. Our situation in Iraq? We _had_ the support of the Iraqi populace for a time, not so much anymore; there _are_ still terrorists fighting back; we're 5 years in and I'd say we need to take another good 5 years to finish up...and halfway through we've got people already fussing about how long it's taking. Shoot, it wasn't 2 years after we went in that the dissent started. Do you seriously think you can turn a country around from dictatorship for the last several hundred years, to democracy, in just a few years? The people that are a part of the police force over there only police because it pays the bills-- they don't have a sense of national patriotism for their newfound freedoms; or if they do, it's not like ours. To expect them to instantly change their worldview of the way life is ("I have no rights" to "I can do as I please") in less than 5 years is borderline insanity. I don't know about this youtube deal; I think a lot of good will come from it...CNN or whoever hates on this with no just cause can flame all they want but if these clips are simple candid recordings of soldiers going about their lives (Hey, make it a "Reality TV" sort of show that'll be sure to garner interest), there's not much dirt they're going to be able to throw around about the veracity and truth of reports. What I _would_ like to see is money spent creating movies that the Iraqi population can relate to, that are free to view and take home, that purpose to show the Iraqis the benefits of free choice, and how much _less_ evil democracy is compared to other forms of governm
I have big tires with deep lugs on my pickup truck. I can usually pull all wheel drive cars out and get them unstuck in 2 wheel drive just because of this. The snow when you frame or even ground effect s(spoiler) starts dragging, it acts like a plow and builds up in front of the vehicle while your driving. When it is doing this, it compacts and almost turns into a block of ice. Once this is so big, it wedges under the vehicle and has the same effect as trying to pop a large curb on a slippery surface. If you catch it soon enough and don't dig tire depression into it, OR sit on it letting the warmth of the tires melt one in it, you can usually back out of it and drive around the blockage until it happens again but you have to watch out for other cars in the process.
While this doesn't happen often, you can look at the ground clearance of your car, the lowest point will hit first and sometimes that is less then 4 or 6 inches on smaller cars. That means as little as 2 inches of snow with drifting can strand you. With an SUV, you usually have twice as much clearance and and more weight driving the tires to solid pavement better when spinning for traction. They can usually last a lot longer. But you can be fooled into a false safety and get stuck there too. I have 14 inches of clearance from the differential points on the axles of my pickup truck. After that, the low spot is 20 inches to the ground. I don't have to worry about that and quite frankly, I'm not driving in 10 or 15 inches of snow. But If you out in the middle of nowhere, sometime you need to drive in 4 or 6 inches of snow just to get somewhere safe.
An SUV, if it has the ground clearance, can go further then an all wheel drive car, sometimes even in 2 wheel drive. I still see plenty of drivers driving (solo) SUVs in Atlanta.
I for one welcome our SUV snorking overladies o.O
The ones that can afford the SUVs are the hot ones though. We all know that the hot women go after the men with the most money, regardless of his character. The smart women go after the best man. So they're not really Darwin Award material.Could someone post a story about what's going on with ABC?
Deleting posts from their message boards and then deleting posts asking ABC to explain why they're deleting perfectly legitimate posts...
Heck, we don't need a government to pull off 1984, they media's doing quite well.
My Compaq Sempron (non-low-power-version) notebook gets 6.25h in Windows (12 cell battery). I haven't heard of those new macbooks getting more than 4.5.
Heh something happened to the paragraphs...
But, to be honest, we all know that a truly free society isn't free at all. You have to have some rules for life to continue. This may be one of them. How much does it matter if you can't speak a string of hexes for copyright/DMCA reasons? It doesn't. Some may say "this is a slippery slope", and that's partly true, but everyone knows that when they start trying to keep us from quoting a favorite line from a recent funny movie, people won't give a damn, and they'll just do it anyways. There will be people with money at that point that realize it's absurd, and when sued, will fight back. I don't see many other places a precedent relating to this Hex issue could lead. So I say it's not a big deal. In fact I would even venture to say that I would support more of this. People want to be entertained, but they're also freaking lazy. When they have to work too hard to be entertained, they'll find something else cheaper, less expensive to entertain themselves with. Have any of you been to Waldenbooks at the mall lately? I recently picked up this for under $10 (by the way I'd highly recommend it; . I took a glance around and found many other cool books-- a 200 page pictured book of historically significant scientific inventions for $6, a 1" thick, 12"x18" book with nothing but pictures of planets in our solar system (and stuff about the far out ones) for $20; Barak Obama's book for $15; etc. etc.-- that had a WAY better cost/entertainment ratio than Spiderman 3 or any of those HD-DVD/Blu-ray discs. Lets see-- $20 for me [and a wife in the future hopefully] to go see a movie (not including the $8 poppcorn and $5 drinks), or $20 for any of those books I listed above that will provide hours more of entertainment? Easy choice. Eventually when this stuff is so restricted that we can't download it for free, and so expensive that we simply can't afford it, a market will be created for cheap ways to entertain yourself-- and these $10 books at Waldenbooks and Barnes and Noble will fly off the shelves. People will visit their library more. They'll go walk at the park with friends more. So while I think it's good to fight for our rights, the result wouldn't be that bad. "Burn the land, boil the sea, but you can't take the sky from me..." We'll find plenty other things to occupy ourselves with. Who cares about AACS and movies and stuff when you can find something else just as, if not more entertaining, for half the price?
Fraps means nothing; I can do the exact same thing too. All the fraps work is done on the CPU, what minor encoding there is before it dumps it to the disk. That's why a minute or two of footage can run several hundred megabytes no problem-- because it's just an uncompressed video dump.
That's ok. The idea is to simply make it more difficult than not for a nabber to access the device. It's somewhat like having a lock on your house. Is that going to keep the determined robber out? Of course not; anybody in their right mind would just jump through the window rather than try to crack the lock. Having a lock simply protects you from the joe shmo "hm lets see if there's anything good in there" type that enters on a whim.
The same would apply to a fingerprint activated ipod. If someone sees an ipod lying there and nobody around, they'll be much less likely to take it if they know it's going to take a fair amount of work to actually use.
I fail to see how these would be bad. As usual, the market would determine how much it's worth.