It doesn't even seem like it would be worth coding that in there unless the studios required it...
I think you can safely assume that all the restrictions are there at the demand of the studios. The 10 burn thing is pretty moronic, but there you go...
The previews are 30 seconds for a song, 90 seconds for an audio book. If you have one-click ordering on, then all the "Add Song"/"Add Album" buttons become "Buy Song"/"Buy Album". Apple have licensed Amazon's patents for one-click and "people who bought this also bought..." etc. (I believe they are the only other online store owner who have.)
Apple claim that the DVD burning works on Windows. As a Mac user I can say that iPod synching is effortless - I would assume that the Windows software operates the same (the iPod supports Firewire and USB 2). Apple have admitted that the iTMS makes no money at the moment and mainly exists to sell iPods.
The 5 computers thing is a restriction on the number of machines you can authorize to play DRMed music. You can share your own rips with as many on the local network as you like. You can also authorize a machine at work and copy your music there to play, but that's one less machine at home obviously. Rendezvous is very cool - it's basically plug-n-play IP (using wacky multicast DNS).
Various people have found ways to share a library between different users on Mac OS X, I would assume that similar hacks can be used with the Windows version - Google may turn up something helpful.
HFS and HFS+ are completely different and incompatible file systems. HFS+ is effectively a UNIX-style filesystem with extra magic for dealing with resource forks and (old-school) finder metadata.
Mac OS X 10.2.4 (I think?) and upwards support journaling on HFS+ as well - I've been using journaled HFS+ on my (heavily used and abused) laptop for a while and haven't suffered a single corruption of any kind.
The enhanced for loop has a horrible syntax, which only saves a few keystrokes at the expense of being very hard to read.
Yeah, it is a bit crap. I prefer the C# syntax (foreach... in...), but they were insistent on not adding new keywords in Java.
The autoboxing breaks othogonality in object identification.
It's not exactly broken. In your example foo is not an object. When you assign to x and y you automatically create an object. It's just like you'd done:
Integer x = new Integer(foo); Integer y = new Integer(foo);
Two new objects, so objects not the same.
Metadata: why not simply extend the javadoc syntax?
Systems like xdoclet already do that, but it's a bit too ad hoc for me. I'm not a big fan of functionality hidden in comments. I should be able to strip all the comments from my code and have it compile to the same program and work the same way.
Do you want to give us a simple take-home message for each of the six areas of improvement?
I'll give it a whirl...
Generics - Provides compile-time type safety for collections and eliminates the drudgery of casting.
Enhanced for loop - Eliminates the drudgery and error-proneness of iterators.
Autoboxing/unboxing - Eliminates the drudgery of manual conversion between primitive types (such as int) and wrapper types (such as Integer).
Typesafe enums - Provides all the well-known benefits of the Typesafe Enum pattern (Effective Java, Item 21) without the verbosity and the error-proneness.
Static import - Lets you avoid qualifying static members with class names, without the shortcomings of the Constant Interface antipattern (Effective Java, Item 17).
Metadata - Lets you avoid writing boilerplate code, by enabling tools to generate it from annotations in the source code. This leads to a "declarative" programming style where the programmer says what should be done and tools emit the code to do it.
Besides generics (due in the next C# release) and static imports, enhanced for loop, autoboxing, enums, and metadata are all features of C#.NET. Frankly, I think the.NET metadata system is substantially better. I also like delegates far better than anonymous inner classes, which I consider to be a sledgehammer to crack a very small design pattern.
The launch of the balloon has been delayed until Wednesday due to the weather. They reckoned that they could have launched tomorrow, but that the weather on Wednesday will be perfect so they'd rather wait a day. Apparently tomorrow will be spent taking an astronaut refresher course with the Russian advisers.
Notice that strongly typed is always used in opposition to python. Here he seems to use it as a synonym for statically typed, as most do.
It is not correct to use "static" and "strong" as synonyms. That would imply that "dynamic" and "weak" are synonyms.
A line from an interview does not an academic argument make. In that interview Guido also says:
Weak typing is not really a fair description of what's going on in Python. It's really runtime typing because every object is labeled with a type.
Every object in Python has a type. Python typechecks all method calls at runtime, raising runtime exceptions where a typecheck fails. But it still typechecks! One object cannot be mistaken for another and no memory corruption can occur from using the wrong operation on an object.
The trick you pull with changing the __class__ of an object is a feature of the dynamic typing of Python. You have changed the method-resolution order at runtime, that doesn't mean that the method-resolution order will not be enforced. The AttributeError exception you see is proof positive that Python is strongly typed - a type error has been caught and has created a runtime exception.
Strong/weak and static/dynamic are orthogonal issues in typing.
The short version is that there isn't one (+):: Integer -> Integer -> Integer and one (+):: Float -> Float -> Float, but rather a single (+):: Num a => a -> a -> a. It is manifestly never possible to have a type error in this situation, so Haskell is still strongly typed.
My point was not that Haskell is not strongly-typed, but that Python is not weakly-typed because one can add an integer and a float.
The BBC is a government subsidized quasi-monopoly. Using the BBC as a good example when it comes to media consolidation is abolsutely stupid, since they stand for what we are NOT wanting to happen to US media.
The BBC is not funded by the government - it is funded by a fee levied on all owners of televisions. This fee is collected by the BBC themselves via a separate organisation (see About TV Licensing). The BBC is given this power by a Royal Charter that is renegotiated every 10 years or so. The current charter expires in 2006 (see About the BBC).
The point of all of this is that the BBC has full editorial control over its output.
Using the BBC as an example of what should not happen in America is specious at best. The BBC is a very different beast to the commercial media in the UK. The UK has strong laws governing the amount of a particular media that can be controlled by one company and the amount of cross-media ownership (similar rules govern the amount of media control that the BBC is allowed to have). This has resulted in the UK having probably the most diverse and healthy media in the world.
But hey, I live in the UK. What do I care if you guys throw away your independance.
[Side note: the BBC is the only media organisation in the UK that exists solely to produce content. Remember every time you look at an advert that the commercial media's job is not to deliver programmes to your eyes but to deliver your eyes to their advertisers.]
Unless you have a LAPTOP and want it to have more than one button. Your suggestion isn't really a viable option on a plane, train, bus, or a lot of the many of places people buy laptops so they can use them in.
Holy crap. I'm sorry. I didn't realise how much intensive contextual-menu using you do on trains and buses. I take it all back. It must be especially annoying on a laptop where the control-key is constantly sitting under your left pinky and the trackpad button is always under your thumbs. Using the two together must be a real strain.
Ergonomic my ass. Making the entire mouse a button means you can't rest your hand on the mouse. How exactly is that ergonomic? They've gone from a mouse that was nearly unclickable to one that you can't help but click accidentally. You have to rest your wrist eventually.
Don't rest your hand on the mouse. It's really bad for your wrist. Either hold the mouse lightly with your fingertips and rest your wrest on the desk, or get a proper wrist rest. Given all the intensive mousing you do, you'll be glad of that advice in a couple of years.
Just because a design flaw can be fixed, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Some people want to buy computers that they like "out of the box". (Isn't that what Macs are supposed to be?) They don't want to go out and buy an new mouse and worry about whether it will work with their Mac. (Yes, I know it will work, but does the average Joe? No, and it's a headache for them to find that out.)
I'm afraid it's a design flaw for only a very small minority of Apple's users. The truth is that multiple mouse buttons confuse most computer users. Spend some time in end-user support if you don't believe me. The "average Joe" has no need or desire for a multi-button mouse.
A user interface that requires the use of multiple button mice is crippled. With a Mac you should never need to use another button. You should never even need to use a contextual menu. They are supplied for the power-users. The kind of people who go out and buy their own mouse.
I have to use one of these pieces of shit in a music studio and that's about the only way I can describe it. I've considered dragging my own mouse up there just so I don't have to deal with that damned thing.
Then drag your own mouse up there. They're plug-n-play. You can even plug them both in at the same time.
"Hey, OS X shunts all the quartz compositing off to the video card! That's a neat idea".
No, that's not a new idea. 2d video acceleration has been around since at *least* the 80s, and I would assume well before.
I'm not sure you read the comment fully. The poster said that OS X offloads the compositing to the video card. That is a new idea, and isn't done by any other desktop OS.
This means that all the nice transparency effects in OS X are available at no CPU cost (assuming you have a recent Mac with a decent graphics card). Transparent menus are actually done as OpenGL surfaces with the contents rendered as a partially transparent texture, sitting in a layer slightly above the app.
Ahhh. I was confused because I couldn't understand how the wheel could tell where it was being touched, but I think I see now. Can the solid state wheel on the iPod do this? I suppose it must be able to.
Possibly, but I don't think it has to. Like I say, I think it's a purely conceptual issue. Having to touch it in the right place would be even more confusing and wouldn't allow you to rotate continously without lifiting your finger.
Given that a scroll bar only works on one axis, the only difference is how you map that axis to your finger motions. The current scrollwheels are counter-intuitive, since it's not immediately obvious that you can use it to scroll horizontally, and it's not obvious which direction the wheel should be turned.
A flat wheel doesn't suffer this problem. You use it just the same, but it doesn't feel counter-intuitive to the user to turn a wheel clockwise to move right the way it feels odd to turn a wheel up to go left.
and suddently it can do 2d scrolling, which a 1D wheel certainly can't. What gives? The diagrams page hates Galeon so I can't look at fig 10. Can someone shed light on this?
I think it's pretty simple. It's a flat wheel. If you put your finger on the top of the wheel and move it from side to side you're moving the wheel horizontally. If you put your finger on the side of the wheel and move it backwards and forwards then you're moving the wheel vertically. The wheel spins the same way regardless.
It's a conceptual thing. The point in the patent is that current scrollwheels conceptually only scroll backwards and forwards, which makes perfect sense for vertical scrolling, but no logical sense for horizontal scrolling. A flat wheel does not suffer from this conceptual problem.
For instance, when scrolling horizontally, should scrolling the wheel forward move left or right? You might think left as you're from a left-to-right culture, but what about people from a right-to-left culture?
Go out and buy any one of a hundred multi-button USB mice and plug it into a Mac. The scrollwheel and contextual-menu buttons are supported out-of-the-box in OS X in all apps. Just because Apple don't ship a multi-button mouse does not mean that Apple don't support them.
Also, the round mice went out a long long time ago. Apple ship very nice optical mice with all Macs now. They also have a "no-button" design - rocking the mouse forward slightly clicks the mouse button. This is a very ergonomic design and means that you can use your whole hand to click, which reduces tendon strain substantially and makes the mice much better suited to anyone who suffers from RSI.
If you want to dislike Macs, pick a legitimate reason. If I had a dime for every person who says "I don't like Macs because x" and hasn't actually ever walked into an Apple store...
Conceal the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service.
My comment still stands. This says nothing about VPNs. A VPN does not conceal the origin or destination of a packet. The origin is your network. The destination is the network you are VPNing into.
Although the particular machine on either end that is sending or receiving packets is effectively hidden, that doesn't matter, because the only packets that are being routed across the telecoms service are the tunnel packets. Those have a clear origin and destination. They must be public IP addresses for the routing to work.
What the hell do you think NAT does? Hello?! Rewrites the header on outbound packets to make it look like the packet is originating from the router itself (therefore spoofing an IP)!
No, with NAT the packet does originate with the router. The system being fooled by NAT is the machine on the inside, which is fooled into believing it's packets are being routed to the outside world.
The machine on the inside of a NAT is not on the Internet, it has no capability to be the origin or destination of Internet-routed packets. The NAT router sends and receives all packets on it's behalf.
I fail to see anything in this amendment that applies to VPNs. It appears to be specifically designed to target phone phreaking. It's all about screwing with telecoms services. VPNs don't do that.
They don't obtain telecoms services without intent to pay (1a), they don't conceal the origin or destination of the traffic (1b), and they don't intercept, disrupt, re-transmit, or otherwise fuck with your, or anyone else's, service (1c).
Unless you've deliberately cracked your ISP in order to run your VPN, you've not fallen foul of this law.
Get some perspective.
[Interestingly, this does appear to make IP address spoofing illegal - but I consider that to be a good thing.]
Perhaps if there was a simple "dupe" button on articles in The Mysterious Future, these would get picked up quicker. When a subscriber sees a story in The Mysterious Future at the moment they have no immediate way to offer feedback on it besides emailing the editors. No-one's going to bother doing this.
That way if an article gets a dozen "dupe" marks against it while it's still in the queue, it can get held until it's checked by an editor and then pulled if necessary.
Hmm... Good questions. Any lawyer know how much the Open Office team can sue the BSA for claiming, under penalty of perjury, they represent them?
They were claiming to act for the copyright holders of "Microsoft Office". I think you'll find the original letter says:
RE: Unauthorized Distribution of the following copyrighted computer program(s):
Microsoft Office
The only reference to OpenOffice in this letter is in the filenames of the supposed "infringing content". The mistake on their part was in mistaking the files for Microsoft Office, not in mistakingly believing they represent OpenOffice.org.
This whole "let's sue the BSA for perjury" is all very amusing, but it wouldn't stand up longer than a carefully balanced cocktail stick being pissed on.
You know, many of you may find this hard to believe, but a lot of big companies actually want a subscription model for their software (and increasingly, hardware too).
It makes cost planning a lot easier and moves big purchases off the balance sheet and onto the P&L. Companies want to know how much something will cost over a period of time - subscription gives them that. Buying the software up-front requires irritating amortization and depreciation models, and decisions on the lifetime of the product and what any upgrade cycle will be. CFOs like monthly expenses more than big capital purchases.
IBM are leading the charge towards "utility computing". You can buy UNIX boxen from them with spare CPUs, where you can ring them up and ask for more processing power for more $/month. They want their software providers to follow suit and, for example, allow users to just increase their application server subscription to another processor on demand.
The extra quality benefit of the CD will not (unfortunately) be enough to lure people to immediately rush out and buy new equipment. Personally, I would love to have better sound audio, but I'm not prepared to pay the (currently) huge premium to have it.
Clever, but the difference between CDs and tapes was a fairly huge leap. The difference between DVD-A/SACD and CD in most consumer minds is fairly negligible.
I don't think DVD-A or SACD will change the marketplace. I think DVD-Video albums may though. If you already have a DVD player, then the chance to buy an album with all the videos, an interview, and some basic interactive features will be more compelling than the chance to buy a version that sounds better if you can afford the Hi-Fi gear to be able to tell the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't even seem like it would be worth coding that in there unless the studios required it...
I think you can safely assume that all the restrictions are there at the demand of the studios. The 10 burn thing is pretty moronic, but there you go...
The previews are 30 seconds for a song, 90 seconds for an audio book. If you have one-click ordering on, then all the "Add Song"/"Add Album" buttons become "Buy Song"/"Buy Album". Apple have licensed Amazon's patents for one-click and "people who bought this also bought..." etc. (I believe they are the only other online store owner who have.)
Apple claim that the DVD burning works on Windows. As a Mac user I can say that iPod synching is effortless - I would assume that the Windows software operates the same (the iPod supports Firewire and USB 2). Apple have admitted that the iTMS makes no money at the moment and mainly exists to sell iPods.
The 5 computers thing is a restriction on the number of machines you can authorize to play DRMed music. You can share your own rips with as many on the local network as you like. You can also authorize a machine at work and copy your music there to play, but that's one less machine at home obviously. Rendezvous is very cool - it's basically plug-n-play IP (using wacky multicast DNS).
Various people have found ways to share a library between different users on Mac OS X, I would assume that similar hacks can be used with the Windows version - Google may turn up something helpful.
Oh get a grip. If you're worried about hi-fidelity audio quality, you're not buying downloaded music.
You know what? Most people don't give a shit.
HFS and HFS+ are completely different and incompatible file systems. HFS+ is effectively a UNIX-style filesystem with extra magic for dealing with resource forks and (old-school) finder metadata.
Mac OS X 10.2.4 (I think?) and upwards support journaling on HFS+ as well - I've been using journaled HFS+ on my (heavily used and abused) laptop for a while and haven't suffered a single corruption of any kind.
Yeah, it is a bit crap. I prefer the C# syntax (foreach
It's not exactly broken. In your example foo is not an object. When you assign to x and y you automatically create an object. It's just like you'd done:Two new objects, so objects not the same.
Systems like xdoclet already do that, but it's a bit too ad hoc for me. I'm not a big fan of functionality hidden in comments. I should be able to strip all the comments from my code and have it compile to the same program and work the same way.
Looking at the upcoming 1.5 release of Java, it seems to me that Java is copying features from C#. From a Sun article on what's new in Java 1.5:
Besides generics (due in the next C# release) and static imports, enhanced for loop, autoboxing, enums, and metadata are all features of C#.NET. Frankly, I think the
Exactly what do you find to be inferior?
The launch of the balloon has been delayed until Wednesday due to the weather. They reckoned that they could have launched tomorrow, but that the weather on Wednesday will be perfect so they'd rather wait a day. Apparently tomorrow will be spent taking an astronaut refresher course with the Russian advisers.
More at: UK balloon bid put back
Dude constructs new silent killing device. Slashdot celebrates geekiness.
It is not correct to use "static" and "strong" as synonyms. That would imply that "dynamic" and "weak" are synonyms.
A line from an interview does not an academic argument make. In that interview Guido also says:
Every object in Python has a type. Python typechecks all method calls at runtime, raising runtime exceptions where a typecheck fails. But it still typechecks! One object cannot be mistaken for another and no memory corruption can occur from using the wrong operation on an object.
The trick you pull with changing the __class__ of an object is a feature of the dynamic typing of Python. You have changed the method-resolution order at runtime, that doesn't mean that the method-resolution order will not be enforced. The AttributeError exception you see is proof positive that Python is strongly typed - a type error has been caught and has created a runtime exception.
Strong/weak and static/dynamic are orthogonal issues in typing.
My point was not that Haskell is not strongly-typed, but that Python is not weakly-typed because one can add an integer and a float.
Which would have been really clever and showed your deep understanding of programming languages if it weren't for the fact that you're wrong.
Observe:Haskell also casts integers to floats automatically. This is common in most languages.
You'll note from this that it's not an argument for Python not being strongly-typed.
The BBC is a government subsidized quasi-monopoly. Using the BBC as a good example when it comes to media consolidation is abolsutely stupid, since they stand for what we are NOT wanting to happen to US media.
The BBC is not funded by the government - it is funded by a fee levied on all owners of televisions. This fee is collected by the BBC themselves via a separate organisation (see About TV Licensing). The BBC is given this power by a Royal Charter that is renegotiated every 10 years or so. The current charter expires in 2006 (see About the BBC).
The point of all of this is that the BBC has full editorial control over its output.
Using the BBC as an example of what should not happen in America is specious at best. The BBC is a very different beast to the commercial media in the UK. The UK has strong laws governing the amount of a particular media that can be controlled by one company and the amount of cross-media ownership (similar rules govern the amount of media control that the BBC is allowed to have). This has resulted in the UK having probably the most diverse and healthy media in the world.
But hey, I live in the UK. What do I care if you guys throw away your independance.
[Side note: the BBC is the only media organisation in the UK that exists solely to produce content. Remember every time you look at an advert that the commercial media's job is not to deliver programmes to your eyes but to deliver your eyes to their advertisers.]
Unless you have a LAPTOP and want it to have more than one button. Your suggestion isn't really a viable option on a plane, train, bus, or a lot of the many of places people buy laptops so they can use them in.
Holy crap. I'm sorry. I didn't realise how much intensive contextual-menu using you do on trains and buses. I take it all back. It must be especially annoying on a laptop where the control-key is constantly sitting under your left pinky and the trackpad button is always under your thumbs. Using the two together must be a real strain.
Ergonomic my ass. Making the entire mouse a button means you can't rest your hand on the mouse. How exactly is that ergonomic? They've gone from a mouse that was nearly unclickable to one that you can't help but click accidentally. You have to rest your wrist eventually.
Don't rest your hand on the mouse. It's really bad for your wrist. Either hold the mouse lightly with your fingertips and rest your wrest on the desk, or get a proper wrist rest. Given all the intensive mousing you do, you'll be glad of that advice in a couple of years.
Just because a design flaw can be fixed, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Some people want to buy computers that they like "out of the box". (Isn't that what Macs are supposed to be?) They don't want to go out and buy an new mouse and worry about whether it will work with their Mac. (Yes, I know it will work, but does the average Joe? No, and it's a headache for them to find that out.)
I'm afraid it's a design flaw for only a very small minority of Apple's users. The truth is that multiple mouse buttons confuse most computer users. Spend some time in end-user support if you don't believe me. The "average Joe" has no need or desire for a multi-button mouse.
A user interface that requires the use of multiple button mice is crippled. With a Mac you should never need to use another button. You should never even need to use a contextual menu. They are supplied for the power-users. The kind of people who go out and buy their own mouse.
I have to use one of these pieces of shit in a music studio and that's about the only way I can describe it. I've considered dragging my own mouse up there just so I don't have to deal with that damned thing.
Then drag your own mouse up there. They're plug-n-play. You can even plug them both in at the same time.
"Hey, OS X shunts all the quartz compositing off to the video card! That's a neat idea".
No, that's not a new idea. 2d video acceleration has been around since at *least* the 80s, and I would assume well before.
I'm not sure you read the comment fully. The poster said that OS X offloads the compositing to the video card. That is a new idea, and isn't done by any other desktop OS.
This means that all the nice transparency effects in OS X are available at no CPU cost (assuming you have a recent Mac with a decent graphics card). Transparent menus are actually done as OpenGL surfaces with the contents rendered as a partially transparent texture, sitting in a layer slightly above the app.
Ahhh. I was confused because I couldn't understand how the wheel could tell where it was being touched, but I think I see now. Can the solid state wheel on the iPod do this? I suppose it must be able to.
Possibly, but I don't think it has to. Like I say, I think it's a purely conceptual issue. Having to touch it in the right place would be even more confusing and wouldn't allow you to rotate continously without lifiting your finger.
Given that a scroll bar only works on one axis, the only difference is how you map that axis to your finger motions. The current scrollwheels are counter-intuitive, since it's not immediately obvious that you can use it to scroll horizontally, and it's not obvious which direction the wheel should be turned.
A flat wheel doesn't suffer this problem. You use it just the same, but it doesn't feel counter-intuitive to the user to turn a wheel clockwise to move right the way it feels odd to turn a wheel up to go left.
and suddently it can do 2d scrolling, which a 1D wheel certainly can't. What gives? The diagrams page hates Galeon so I can't look at fig 10. Can someone shed light on this?
I think it's pretty simple. It's a flat wheel. If you put your finger on the top of the wheel and move it from side to side you're moving the wheel horizontally. If you put your finger on the side of the wheel and move it backwards and forwards then you're moving the wheel vertically. The wheel spins the same way regardless.
It's a conceptual thing. The point in the patent is that current scrollwheels conceptually only scroll backwards and forwards, which makes perfect sense for vertical scrolling, but no logical sense for horizontal scrolling. A flat wheel does not suffer from this conceptual problem.
For instance, when scrolling horizontally, should scrolling the wheel forward move left or right? You might think left as you're from a left-to-right culture, but what about people from a right-to-left culture?
Jesus christ. How many times do I read this.
Go out and buy any one of a hundred multi-button USB mice and plug it into a Mac. The scrollwheel and contextual-menu buttons are supported out-of-the-box in OS X in all apps. Just because Apple don't ship a multi-button mouse does not mean that Apple don't support them.
Also, the round mice went out a long long time ago. Apple ship very nice optical mice with all Macs now. They also have a "no-button" design - rocking the mouse forward slightly clicks the mouse button. This is a very ergonomic design and means that you can use your whole hand to click, which reduces tendon strain substantially and makes the mice much better suited to anyone who suffers from RSI.
If you want to dislike Macs, pick a legitimate reason. If I had a dime for every person who says "I don't like Macs because x" and hasn't actually ever walked into an Apple store...
Conceal the existence or place of origin or destination of any telecommunications service.
My comment still stands. This says nothing about VPNs. A VPN does not conceal the origin or destination of a packet. The origin is your network. The destination is the network you are VPNing into.
Although the particular machine on either end that is sending or receiving packets is effectively hidden, that doesn't matter, because the only packets that are being routed across the telecoms service are the tunnel packets. Those have a clear origin and destination. They must be public IP addresses for the routing to work.
What the hell do you think NAT does? Hello?! Rewrites the header on outbound packets to make it look like the packet is originating from the router itself (therefore spoofing an IP)!
No, with NAT the packet does originate with the router. The system being fooled by NAT is the machine on the inside, which is fooled into believing it's packets are being routed to the outside world.
The machine on the inside of a NAT is not on the Internet, it has no capability to be the origin or destination of Internet-routed packets. The NAT router sends and receives all packets on it's behalf.
Go read up on IP address spoofing.
I fail to see anything in this amendment that applies to VPNs. It appears to be specifically designed to target phone phreaking. It's all about screwing with telecoms services. VPNs don't do that.
They don't obtain telecoms services without intent to pay (1a), they don't conceal the origin or destination of the traffic (1b), and they don't intercept, disrupt, re-transmit, or otherwise fuck with your, or anyone else's, service (1c).
Unless you've deliberately cracked your ISP in order to run your VPN, you've not fallen foul of this law.
Get some perspective.
[Interestingly, this does appear to make IP address spoofing illegal - but I consider that to be a good thing.]
Perhaps if there was a simple "dupe" button on articles in The Mysterious Future, these would get picked up quicker. When a subscriber sees a story in The Mysterious Future at the moment they have no immediate way to offer feedback on it besides emailing the editors. No-one's going to bother doing this.
That way if an article gets a dozen "dupe" marks against it while it's still in the queue, it can get held until it's checked by an editor and then pulled if necessary.
This is technically impossible, for two reasons.
You, sir, are a moron.
Hmm... Good questions. Any lawyer know how much the Open Office team can sue the BSA for claiming, under penalty of perjury, they represent them?
They were claiming to act for the copyright holders of "Microsoft Office". I think you'll find the original letter says:
RE: Unauthorized Distribution of the following copyrighted computer
program(s):
Microsoft Office
The only reference to OpenOffice in this letter is in the filenames of the supposed "infringing content". The mistake on their part was in mistaking the files for Microsoft Office, not in mistakingly believing they represent OpenOffice.org.
This whole "let's sue the BSA for perjury" is all very amusing, but it wouldn't stand up longer than a carefully balanced cocktail stick being pissed on.
You know, many of you may find this hard to believe, but a lot of big companies actually want a subscription model for their software (and increasingly, hardware too).
It makes cost planning a lot easier and moves big purchases off the balance sheet and onto the P&L. Companies want to know how much something will cost over a period of time - subscription gives them that. Buying the software up-front requires irritating amortization and depreciation models, and decisions on the lifetime of the product and what any upgrade cycle will be. CFOs like monthly expenses more than big capital purchases.
IBM are leading the charge towards "utility computing". You can buy UNIX boxen from them with spare CPUs, where you can ring them up and ask for more processing power for more $/month. They want their software providers to follow suit and, for example, allow users to just increase their application server subscription to another processor on demand.
Sun are just following the market.
The extra quality benefit of the CD will not (unfortunately) be enough to lure people to immediately rush out and buy new equipment. Personally, I would love to have better sound audio, but I'm not prepared to pay the (currently) huge premium to have it.
Clever, but the difference between CDs and tapes was a fairly huge leap. The difference between DVD-A/SACD and CD in most consumer minds is fairly negligible.
I don't think DVD-A or SACD will change the marketplace. I think DVD-Video albums may though. If you already have a DVD player, then the chance to buy an album with all the videos, an interview, and some basic interactive features will be more compelling than the chance to buy a version that sounds better if you can afford the Hi-Fi gear to be able to tell the difference.