From what I understand the act of selling the software to a company constitutes distribution and if it's GPL'd you then must allow others to have it essentially free.
Charging you for services and then not providing them is something credit card companies go after vigorously. Call your credit card company and complain. Most likely a significant percentage of their income comes in through credit cards and having Visa or MasterCard blacklist them would be something that would impact them deeply so when their investigator starts poking into things they'll pay attention.
At the very least you should be able to get your renewal fee back.
So.. what you are saying is that as long as you don't sell the software, you don't have to give it away. You can sell your services for working on software but that doesn't change the fact that you can't sell the software itself without also giving it away.
I was going to moderate but I just have to post on this.
There's nothing to stop you making money selling Free Software, you just can't stop people reading, modifying, distributing and selling the code you sold to them.
I'm so tired of people making this stupid argument. What you are saying is that you *can* charge for software but your customer must also have the option to get it for free. When offered a choice between free and for pay how many customers pay? Zero. A difference that makes no difference... isn't a difference. It's just meaningless semantics.
Your statement is incorrect. There is something to stop you from making money selling free software. That thing is the fact that you must also give it away. This is evidenced by the fact that nobody does. They make money on creating and managing distributions, selling services, custom coding, etc but not selling the software. If they could the GPL wouldn't be working.
That's not to say that free software doesn't have a viable business model. I believe it's model to be economically superior to closed source and I think it will win in the end. It will win for the same reason that DRM free MP3s will win, it's better for the customers and the customers have all the money.
I have seen raids be canceled because key individuals or classes were not available. On top of this consider I was in a leadership position.
As both a Dwarf priest and a guild master I understand people relying on you but you still have to have balance. There will always be different things vying for your time. WoW may pull especially hard but it is not an addiction. I would argue that to the contrary, WoW is a particularly healty outlet for addictive escapist personalities. It doesn't destroy the mind or the body. Its relatively cheap. You are lucid and sane the entire time and it provides diminishing returns so that sooner or later people are confronted with the reality of how pointless it is. I have seen numerous people quit the game cold turkey, completely burnt out only to come back later with very helthy (low) raid attendance and a much more healthy attitude about their time in the game.
In spite of the fact that the guild recognizes people have outside lives, in that role it was my duty to set an example and attend as many raids as possible.
I disagree. It's your desire for the group to succeed that pushed you to be there but you have to decide if your duty is to set an example by doing whatever possible to make the group succeed at a game or is your duty to set an example by having a proper life/WoW balance. We all want to succeed at the challenge set before us, but at the end of the day the loot we are striving for is simply a database entry on a server somewhere.
When you get to the point where you and your guild are completing it start to finish in under 3 hours, and BWL in under 5, I invite you to look back and make sure you have not become what I had become.
My point is that I won't get there. At least not before I hit L70 and then it won't really be a challenge will it.
WoW was originally designed well. All the content was available to 99% of us. You could get everywhere relatively easily. Then Blizzard started making the mistake of designing a lot of content for the other, much more vocal, 1% who could pour 40-80 hours a week into the game. This pushed people who didn't have that kind of time to play as much as those guys and you started to see people abandoning real life obligations for the game.
One of the problems is that a successful strategy in the game is to "gear up" guildies with high raid attendance. This strategy focuses your loot onto key people who gain much more loot than they would get with/roll. In exchange, the guild expects them to pay that investment back by continuing to have high attendance so that gear allows the gulid to more easily get more loot. Essentially, this is the goal of most DKP systems (otherwise you could just use/roll for even loot distribution.) If you are one of the geared up people this can put extra pressure for you to show up since you essentially owe the guild your attencance.
I think it's better to keep things fair and to let people put real life first. In the end it makes for lower raid attendance percentage but people who strike a balance dont quit cold turkey and delete their characters either.
then I'd have to play even more to get the loot I was after.
So. Don't go after that loot.
That brand new 30" LCD is too expensive. The BMW is too expensive. Being well equpped in WoW is too expensive. People make their choices. Some people (like me) chose to play WoW a lot but not THAT much. I've been playing since soon after it came out and I'm just starting into ZG and MC. Tradeoffs will always exist. Make the choices you want to make.
Teenagers are almost adults. People who think that teenagers should be under the thumb of parents until the day they turn 18 are idiots. You need to prepare them to be able to take charge of their own life and that means transitioning from an authority roll to an advisory one. This transition shouldn't happen the day after they turn 18, it needs to be gradual if it is to be successful. Parents who fail to do this end up with very poorly adjusted, rebellious, angry teenage children who don't listen. This is bad for everybody.
Arguing that it's a parent's responsibility to oversee everything a teenager does all the time shows a deep lack in understanding of what it means to be a good parent of a teenager. You need to give them the freedom to make mistakes and be their soft place to fall when it happens.
This is a dumb prank, designed to be hurtful, played on an easy to hate target. Standard teenage behavior. If being young and impulsive and hurtful were a crime, we'd all be guilty at some point. Being an adult, a person entrusted with authority and abusing the legal system in this way to clear your name after a prank is a lot less excusable. Understandable, but inexcusable. I'd fire her.
Again, is this really Microsoft's fault? I don't think so.
What if Linux doesn't have the problem but Windows does? Is it still crazy to blame Microsoft?
Windows should have package management. It's absence in a product that pulls in billions per quarter is embarrassing.
Microsoft does some great things but if it keeps sucking 90+% of the money it makes on Windows and throwing it into other places it's going to just end up like Netware.. crap that nobody sane enjoys using. They could at least steal a few more of the great ideas from the Linux guys.. maybe refine them a bit and make them better.. and roll them into Windows. That would be a start.
If they don't pull their heads out of their asses, everyone who tied their careers to knowing their software will sink with them. That's not Microsoft's problem but it sure is going to suck for a lot of people... and those are the same people who are shelling out the $200 per seat and having $180 of that go to X-Box R&D. Thanks MS.
just what is it that you think is so much better about Windows 2000 compared to XP?
Windows 2000 doesn't have activation spyware in it. As long as I can get the OS working on the hardware.. I'm good. I don't need approval from Redmond.
Windows 2000 is much lighter and cleaner out of the box. Everything you need, nothing you don't. You can hack XP to work like 2K but why spend the time when 2K will work just fine?
Windows 2000 is simpler. There are less services, less interdependencies, less things to break and go wrong. There's this strange notion going around that as long as it's "behind the scenes" people shouldn't care about it. That's complete BS. The stuff behind the scenes matters.
Hardware compatibility with XP is also an issue. Not all hardware vendors roll out new drivers perpetually. Sometimes the old software just stops working on new OSs and nobody bothers to fix it.
There are some machines that simply haven't been upgraded since the Win2K days. I know.. it's hard to believe a Microsoft OS lasting that long without needing a reinstall but it happens. Upgrading Microsoft OSs is a crap shoot. Even ignoring the cost of the software and the cost of the time to upgrade there's the risk that at the end of the day it just won't work.
As far as I can tell.. people who can't see the valid reasons for running 2K over XP are.. well.. let's just write that one off to lack of experience and immagination. It's ok though... teenagers often have a hard time grasping points of view outside of their own. You should grow out of it.
DC is much more dangerous than AC because of its ability to lock your muscles at as little as 17 volts. DC kills more people at lower voltages than AC. I personally don't like anything over 48V DC.
The idea of 300+ Volts DC scares the crap out of me. Use big fat 48V power wires if you have to, don't make 300V DC stuff common.
Since Circuit City has the software and tools to do the copy and would presumably not be handing them out to customers the standard "providing tools to circumvent copyright" issue wouldn't apply. Since backups for play on another device are fair use and legal I don't see the issue.
Obviously, since companies don't like getting sued into non-existence I suspect Circuit City feels they are on sold legal ground as well.
The best thing would be to automate the scans of MRI's to find issues. Then you could go in for a health check and they could just MRI all of you and let a computer look for stuff that's wrong with you and let you know. Sure, it wouldn't find everything but my guess is if done well it could find issues before symptoms appear.
Consistency is much harder to provide at home than it is at school where the conditions are well controlled and well suited for the purpose.
The fantasy land you live in is amusing, to say the least. As a teacher I commend you on the development of your imagination!
I pitty your students for the horrible twist of fate that put them in that situation?
But seriously... parents have a much more varied conditions to deal with when providing boundaries to kids. They have early mornings and late nights when they are tired and unprepared to deal with things diplomatically. Parents have to accomplish tasks, (cooking, driving, shopping, cleaning, working.. etc.) while parenting. They have unpredictable situations that its hard to prepare themselves and/or the kids for. They have situations where discipline is awkward, difficult or simply impossible. Students are often so convinced that all rules are negotiable and that they can get their way as long as they fight long and hard enough for it that they are completely unformillar with the concept of things being otherwise.
Teachers, on the other hand, are focused primarily on the kids and spend most of the time in a confined consistent environment with support always available if needed. The children in a classroom constantly have examples set for them as to what the boundaries are as they observe their piers testing them. The rules become associated with the location and the teacher so strongly that after little time they automatically start following them when they show up. This creates an environment where kids can focus on learning and play instead of contantly testing boundries.
The only time, including Kindergarten, that we were ever controlled was when the teacher brought his or her iron fist down on the class and made us worked on regimented little projects.
If you truely believe that your memory is very bad.
A large percentage of the servers in operation now are Pentium 4 architecture which was a disaster energy efficiency wise. Now that Intel is rolling out a line with much low power consumption (even lower than AMD now) suddenly there is a push for energy efficiency?
Thank you congress for participating in Intel's latest marketing program.
While I have sadly never read Lord of the Flies I think the point you make is horribly misguided, especially when talking about the lower grades like kindergarten. Much of the goal in most kindergartens is to get the kids to understand how to operate in a classroom environment. You have to teach them not to yell, hit, bite, tattle, and how to use their words to solve their problems. You have to get them used to the world not revolving around them and get them to understand that their desire to do something is often irrelevant and direct their attention to the task at hand. If you do nothing else but get those things across the rest of the stuff will follow. Your argument makes no sense given the constant adult guidance and supervision that exists in a school setting. Schools would be the opposite of the Lord of the Flies scenario. Kids are socializing in the presence of trained experience professionals who, often times, have seen every nasty, cruel, sneaky trick those kids can think of 100 times over and simply won't fall for it.
Many children grow up without consistency and a clear set of rules within which they can operate without having to fear punishment. Consistency is much harder to provide at home than it is at school where the conditions are well controlled and well suited for the purpose. School provides a physical space and a social environment where little kids brains can relax and explore and learn. By providing a change in location, a change in the authority structure and a change in the people surrounding them, you can quickly switch kids into learning mode where as at home they're still in the place where they sleep and play and where most of life's drama and serious stress happens.
Providing a school education is hard and expensive but not providing it would cost a whole lot more in the long run. The primary differentiating factors between impoverished societies and developed ones are a flexible monetary system and public education. Without both of these things, society crumbles.
I have no problems with this setup if the computer is my Cell Phone. My PDA could be setup to only run signed apps, that wouldn't bother me much. But my PC isn't really a PC without the ability to accomplish arbitrary tasks.
The concept is also flawed. Just because something isn't an executable doesn't make it not contain instructions that tell your computer to do something. Word macro viruses is a great example of this kind of problem. It's just a simple word processing document.. but it can also be a virus. The.mp3 and.jpg buffer overrun bugs are great examples of this too. A format that doesn't even include programability can be used to induce your computer to do something against your will.
Hard drive controlers could use this type of memory for write caching without risking losing data. This is huge for RAID controlers since they could now lose their bulky batery packs and time limits on cached data integrity. This also has nice implications for write buffering in hard drive controlers since it could be done without the OS even knowing or caring. It would allow for out-of-order writes on drives where the controler decides what gets written first and even if it gets written at all without risking data integrity.
This is also huge for tiny devices that need very little local storage but do need it. Tiny linux boxes with 64MB MRam hard drives could be quite useful.
If we make mram visible to filesystems, they could decide to store their core data structures, directories, and inodes in mram space so that access to the start of each file could require only 1 drive seek.
We already have laws that make stealing illegal, there's no reason for making doing it "with a computer" special. If you break into a computer and steal money, you stole money, go to jail.
If I break into a computer and play a prank that hurts no one, why should I be facing hard jail time where if I had just broken into a building and played a prank the police would probably not even bother tracking down who did it?
Somehow people in the technology world have gotten it in their heads that people being curious and testing boundries deserves ass pounding federal prison time. This is incredibly destructive to some of the most important qualities in people: curiosity, cleverness, inventiveness all get squashed by this concept of "if we didn't intend for you to be able to do something and you do, you're a criminal".
This is highly destructive to real network security, the kind of security where even if people want to do something you didn't intend them to do, they can't. We need to go back to making tinkering with interfaces provided to you legal. The rule should be, if you don't want me to be able to tinker with the interface, don't provide it to me.
In my town, we have 2 options. DSL from AT&T or cable from Time Warner...
Actually.. you probably have 4 or 5. There's also dialup and satelite and if you live somewhere with reasonably dense population you can get internet access through digital cell phones. That's only basic methods of communication, not companies. There are multiple cell phone providers and dialup providers competing and probably satelite too.
Its not that there are 2 options, it's that there are 2 clear winners that have beaten the rest. There are places in the world with just dialup, places where they *do* vote for the theves who run the telcom system.
People whine because they don't have 20mbit connections to their houses yet. It wasn't that long ago that 10 mbit lan connections were plenty fast and people were arguing 100mbit was silly and overkill. Having a 256k upstream internet connection for less than $1000/month was a pipe dream 10 years ago. Now it's common. The technology for delivering internet access to home users is developing rapidly but deploying it to millions of homes takes serious time and money. You want a better connection.. go build one and find out just how hard it is. The system is working just fine.
And this is different from whats happening with the corrupt and bloated ISPs now, how?
The difference is competition holds such activity in check and allows for alternatives to be created and for them to grow. With universal centralized regulation there is no way to route around bad decisions and for competition to eventually force things to go in the right direction.
You may think things are bad now under our system but look at the UK. A government monopoly on the phone system including charging for local calls has made the internet practically useless for a decade. Regulating things top down works ok as long as things don't change. When they do change, bottom up market driven forces generally win.
We're not talking about small differences either. If they throttle my 6 mbit downstream to 2mbit for google video, that's still 40 times faster than dialup. Throttling and prioritization isn't anywhere near as horrible as stifiling competition.
Also, ISPs generally arent corrupt. They are corporations acting in their best interest, as they are supposed to. They are often run by people who have a phone company mindset and are used to being in a monopoly situation but they aren't a monopoly so that either will go away or they will lose customers until *they* go away.
A system that is capable of balancing itself is preferable to a goverment system that will eventually become corrupt, bloated, and through decades of stacked influence peddling will eventually serve only the corperations. It will open the floodgates to the government deciding what ISPs do by providing a framework where rules can be attached. RIAA/MPAA will giddily start lobbying for ISP's ability to lower priority and eventually block anything that might look like it could be P2P. They'll try to differentiate what you can do from consumer connections from service provider ones and work feverishly towards shaping the internet into a broadcast only medium.
And nobody will stop them. The people will lose huge oportunities that they don't know anything about and companies will lose competition.
Any law that creates a government oranization that oversees the internet is an extremely dangerous one.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I understand the act of selling the software to a company constitutes distribution and if it's GPL'd you then must allow others to have it essentially free.
Charging you for services and then not providing them is something credit card companies go after vigorously. Call your credit card company and complain. Most likely a significant percentage of their income comes in through credit cards and having Visa or MasterCard blacklist them would be something that would impact them deeply so when their investigator starts poking into things they'll pay attention.
At the very least you should be able to get your renewal fee back.
You can sell 1 copy of software. Once that copy is delivered the software can be posted for free download making you compete with free.
I would hardly call that "nothing to stop you making money selling Free Software". Thats a BIG GIANT something.
So.. what you are saying is that as long as you don't sell the software, you don't have to give it away. You can sell your services for working on software but that doesn't change the fact that you can't sell the software itself without also giving it away.
I was going to moderate but I just have to post on this.
There's nothing to stop you making money selling Free Software, you just can't stop people reading, modifying, distributing and selling the code you sold to them.
I'm so tired of people making this stupid argument. What you are saying is that you *can* charge for software but your customer must also have the option to get it for free. When offered a choice between free and for pay how many customers pay? Zero. A difference that makes no difference... isn't a difference. It's just meaningless semantics.
Your statement is incorrect. There is something to stop you from making money selling free software. That thing is the fact that you must also give it away. This is evidenced by the fact that nobody does. They make money on creating and managing distributions, selling services, custom coding, etc but not selling the software. If they could the GPL wouldn't be working.
That's not to say that free software doesn't have a viable business model. I believe it's model to be economically superior to closed source and I think it will win in the end. It will win for the same reason that DRM free MP3s will win, it's better for the customers and the customers have all the money.
I have seen raids be canceled because key individuals or classes were not available. On top of this consider I was in a leadership position.
/roll. In exchange, the guild expects them to pay that investment back by continuing to have high attendance so that gear allows the gulid to more easily get more loot. Essentially, this is the goal of most DKP systems (otherwise you could just use /roll for even loot distribution.) If you are one of the geared up people this can put extra pressure for you to show up since you essentially owe the guild your attencance.
As both a Dwarf priest and a guild master I understand people relying on you but you still have to have balance. There will always be different things vying for your time. WoW may pull especially hard but it is not an addiction. I would argue that to the contrary, WoW is a particularly healty outlet for addictive escapist personalities. It doesn't destroy the mind or the body. Its relatively cheap. You are lucid and sane the entire time and it provides diminishing returns so that sooner or later people are confronted with the reality of how pointless it is. I have seen numerous people quit the game cold turkey, completely burnt out only to come back later with very helthy (low) raid attendance and a much more healthy attitude about their time in the game.
In spite of the fact that the guild recognizes people have outside lives, in that role it was my duty to set an example and attend as many raids as possible.
I disagree. It's your desire for the group to succeed that pushed you to be there but you have to decide if your duty is to set an example by doing whatever possible to make the group succeed at a game or is your duty to set an example by having a proper life/WoW balance. We all want to succeed at the challenge set before us, but at the end of the day the loot we are striving for is simply a database entry on a server somewhere.
When you get to the point where you and your guild are completing it start to finish in under 3 hours, and BWL in under 5, I invite you to look back and make sure you have not become what I had become.
My point is that I won't get there. At least not before I hit L70 and then it won't really be a challenge will it.
WoW was originally designed well. All the content was available to 99% of us. You could get everywhere relatively easily. Then Blizzard started making the mistake of designing a lot of content for the other, much more vocal, 1% who could pour 40-80 hours a week into the game. This pushed people who didn't have that kind of time to play as much as those guys and you started to see people abandoning real life obligations for the game.
One of the problems is that a successful strategy in the game is to "gear up" guildies with high raid attendance. This strategy focuses your loot onto key people who gain much more loot than they would get with
I think it's better to keep things fair and to let people put real life first. In the end it makes for lower raid attendance percentage but people who strike a balance dont quit cold turkey and delete their characters either.
then I'd have to play even more to get the loot I was after.
So. Don't go after that loot.
That brand new 30" LCD is too expensive. The BMW is too expensive. Being well equpped in WoW is too expensive. People make their choices. Some people (like me) chose to play WoW a lot but not THAT much. I've been playing since soon after it came out and I'm just starting into ZG and MC. Tradeoffs will always exist. Make the choices you want to make.
Teenagers are almost adults. People who think that teenagers should be under the thumb of parents until the day they turn 18 are idiots. You need to prepare them to be able to take charge of their own life and that means transitioning from an authority roll to an advisory one. This transition shouldn't happen the day after they turn 18, it needs to be gradual if it is to be successful. Parents who fail to do this end up with very poorly adjusted, rebellious, angry teenage children who don't listen. This is bad for everybody.
Arguing that it's a parent's responsibility to oversee everything a teenager does all the time shows a deep lack in understanding of what it means to be a good parent of a teenager. You need to give them the freedom to make mistakes and be their soft place to fall when it happens.
This is a dumb prank, designed to be hurtful, played on an easy to hate target. Standard teenage behavior. If being young and impulsive and hurtful were a crime, we'd all be guilty at some point. Being an adult, a person entrusted with authority and abusing the legal system in this way to clear your name after a prank is a lot less excusable. Understandable, but inexcusable. I'd fire her.
SP4 Slipstreamed install FTW.
Again, is this really Microsoft's fault? I don't think so.
What if Linux doesn't have the problem but Windows does? Is it still crazy to blame Microsoft?
Windows should have package management. It's absence in a product that pulls in billions per quarter is embarrassing.
Microsoft does some great things but if it keeps sucking 90+% of the money it makes on Windows and throwing it into other places it's going to just end up like Netware.. crap that nobody sane enjoys using. They could at least steal a few more of the great ideas from the Linux guys.. maybe refine them a bit and make them better.. and roll them into Windows. That would be a start.
If they don't pull their heads out of their asses, everyone who tied their careers to knowing their software will sink with them. That's not Microsoft's problem but it sure is going to suck for a lot of people... and those are the same people who are shelling out the $200 per seat and having $180 of that go to X-Box R&D. Thanks MS.
just what is it that you think is so much better about Windows 2000 compared to XP?
Windows 2000 doesn't have activation spyware in it. As long as I can get the OS working on the hardware.. I'm good. I don't need approval from Redmond.
Windows 2000 is much lighter and cleaner out of the box. Everything you need, nothing you don't. You can hack XP to work like 2K but why spend the time when 2K will work just fine?
Windows 2000 is simpler. There are less services, less interdependencies, less things to break and go wrong. There's this strange notion going around that as long as it's "behind the scenes" people shouldn't care about it. That's complete BS. The stuff behind the scenes matters.
Hardware compatibility with XP is also an issue. Not all hardware vendors roll out new drivers perpetually. Sometimes the old software just stops working on new OSs and nobody bothers to fix it.
There are some machines that simply haven't been upgraded since the Win2K days. I know.. it's hard to believe a Microsoft OS lasting that long without needing a reinstall but it happens. Upgrading Microsoft OSs is a crap shoot. Even ignoring the cost of the software and the cost of the time to upgrade there's the risk that at the end of the day it just won't work.
As far as I can tell.. people who can't see the valid reasons for running 2K over XP are.. well.. let's just write that one off to lack of experience and immagination. It's ok though... teenagers often have a hard time grasping points of view outside of their own. You should grow out of it.
DC is much more dangerous than AC because of its ability to lock your muscles at as little as 17 volts. DC kills more people at lower voltages than AC. I personally don't like anything over 48V DC.
The idea of 300+ Volts DC scares the crap out of me. Use big fat 48V power wires if you have to, don't make 300V DC stuff common.
In what way would this violate the DMCA?
Since Circuit City has the software and tools to do the copy and would presumably not be handing them out to customers the standard "providing tools to circumvent copyright" issue wouldn't apply. Since backups for play on another device are fair use and legal I don't see the issue.
Obviously, since companies don't like getting sued into non-existence I suspect Circuit City feels they are on sold legal ground as well.
The best thing would be to automate the scans of MRI's to find issues. Then you could go in for a health check and they could just MRI all of you and let a computer look for stuff that's wrong with you and let you know. Sure, it wouldn't find everything but my guess is if done well it could find issues before symptoms appear.
But seriously... parents have a much more varied conditions to deal with when providing boundaries to kids. They have early mornings and late nights when they are tired and unprepared to deal with things diplomatically. Parents have to accomplish tasks, (cooking, driving, shopping, cleaning, working.. etc.) while parenting. They have unpredictable situations that its hard to prepare themselves and/or the kids for. They have situations where discipline is awkward, difficult or simply impossible. Students are often so convinced that all rules are negotiable and that they can get their way as long as they fight long and hard enough for it that they are completely unformillar with the concept of things being otherwise.
Teachers, on the other hand, are focused primarily on the kids and spend most of the time in a confined consistent environment with support always available if needed. The children in a classroom constantly have examples set for them as to what the boundaries are as they observe their piers testing them. The rules become associated with the location and the teacher so strongly that after little time they automatically start following them when they show up. This creates an environment where kids can focus on learning and play instead of contantly testing boundries.
The only time, including Kindergarten, that we were ever controlled was when the teacher brought his or her iron fist down on the class and made us worked on regimented little projects.
If you truely believe that your memory is very bad.
A large percentage of the servers in operation now are Pentium 4 architecture which was a disaster energy efficiency wise. Now that Intel is rolling out a line with much low power consumption (even lower than AMD now) suddenly there is a push for energy efficiency?
Thank you congress for participating in Intel's latest marketing program.
While I have sadly never read Lord of the Flies I think the point you make is horribly misguided, especially when talking about the lower grades like kindergarten. Much of the goal in most kindergartens is to get the kids to understand how to operate in a classroom environment. You have to teach them not to yell, hit, bite, tattle, and how to use their words to solve their problems. You have to get them used to the world not revolving around them and get them to understand that their desire to do something is often irrelevant and direct their attention to the task at hand. If you do nothing else but get those things across the rest of the stuff will follow. Your argument makes no sense given the constant adult guidance and supervision that exists in a school setting. Schools would be the opposite of the Lord of the Flies scenario. Kids are socializing in the presence of trained experience professionals who, often times, have seen every nasty, cruel, sneaky trick those kids can think of 100 times over and simply won't fall for it.
Many children grow up without consistency and a clear set of rules within which they can operate without having to fear punishment. Consistency is much harder to provide at home than it is at school where the conditions are well controlled and well suited for the purpose. School provides a physical space and a social environment where little kids brains can relax and explore and learn. By providing a change in location, a change in the authority structure and a change in the people surrounding them, you can quickly switch kids into learning mode where as at home they're still in the place where they sleep and play and where most of life's drama and serious stress happens.
Providing a school education is hard and expensive but not providing it would cost a whole lot more in the long run. The primary differentiating factors between impoverished societies and developed ones are a flexible monetary system and public education. Without both of these things, society crumbles.
I have no problems with this setup if the computer is my Cell Phone. My PDA could be setup to only run signed apps, that wouldn't bother me much. But my PC isn't really a PC without the ability to accomplish arbitrary tasks.
.mp3 and .jpg buffer overrun bugs are great examples of this too. A format that doesn't even include programability can be used to induce your computer to do something against your will.
The concept is also flawed. Just because something isn't an executable doesn't make it not contain instructions that tell your computer to do something. Word macro viruses is a great example of this kind of problem. It's just a simple word processing document.. but it can also be a virus. The
This is not the answer to computer security.
Hard drive controlers could use this type of memory for write caching without risking losing data. This is huge for RAID controlers since they could now lose their bulky batery packs and time limits on cached data integrity. This also has nice implications for write buffering in hard drive controlers since it could be done without the OS even knowing or caring. It would allow for out-of-order writes on drives where the controler decides what gets written first and even if it gets written at all without risking data integrity.
This is also huge for tiny devices that need very little local storage but do need it. Tiny linux boxes with 64MB MRam hard drives could be quite useful.
If we make mram visible to filesystems, they could decide to store their core data structures, directories, and inodes in mram space so that access to the start of each file could require only 1 drive seek.
We already have laws that make stealing illegal, there's no reason for making doing it "with a computer" special. If you break into a computer and steal money, you stole money, go to jail.
If I break into a computer and play a prank that hurts no one, why should I be facing hard jail time where if I had just broken into a building and played a prank the police would probably not even bother tracking down who did it?
Somehow people in the technology world have gotten it in their heads that people being curious and testing boundries deserves ass pounding federal prison time. This is incredibly destructive to some of the most important qualities in people: curiosity, cleverness, inventiveness all get squashed by this concept of "if we didn't intend for you to be able to do something and you do, you're a criminal".
This is highly destructive to real network security, the kind of security where even if people want to do something you didn't intend them to do, they can't. We need to go back to making tinkering with interfaces provided to you legal. The rule should be, if you don't want me to be able to tinker with the interface, don't provide it to me.
If hacking is a crime only criminals will hack.
In my town, we have 2 options. DSL from AT&T or cable from Time Warner...
Actually.. you probably have 4 or 5. There's also dialup and satelite and if you live somewhere with reasonably dense population you can get internet access through digital cell phones. That's only basic methods of communication, not companies. There are multiple cell phone providers and dialup providers competing and probably satelite too.
Its not that there are 2 options, it's that there are 2 clear winners that have beaten the rest. There are places in the world with just dialup, places where they *do* vote for the theves who run the telcom system.
People whine because they don't have 20mbit connections to their houses yet. It wasn't that long ago that 10 mbit lan connections were plenty fast and people were arguing 100mbit was silly and overkill. Having a 256k upstream internet connection for less than $1000/month was a pipe dream 10 years ago. Now it's common. The technology for delivering internet access to home users is developing rapidly but deploying it to millions of homes takes serious time and money. You want a better connection.. go build one and find out just how hard it is. The system is working just fine.
And this is different from whats happening with the corrupt and bloated ISPs now, how?
The difference is competition holds such activity in check and allows for alternatives to be created and for them to grow. With universal centralized regulation there is no way to route around bad decisions and for competition to eventually force things to go in the right direction.
You may think things are bad now under our system but look at the UK. A government monopoly on the phone system including charging for local calls has made the internet practically useless for a decade. Regulating things top down works ok as long as things don't change. When they do change, bottom up market driven forces generally win.
We're not talking about small differences either. If they throttle my 6 mbit downstream to 2mbit for google video, that's still 40 times faster than dialup. Throttling and prioritization isn't anywhere near as horrible as stifiling competition.
Also, ISPs generally arent corrupt. They are corporations acting in their best interest, as they are supposed to. They are often run by people who have a phone company mindset and are used to being in a monopoly situation but they aren't a monopoly so that either will go away or they will lose customers until *they* go away.
A system that is capable of balancing itself is preferable to a goverment system that will eventually become corrupt, bloated, and through decades of stacked influence peddling will eventually serve only the corperations. It will open the floodgates to the government deciding what ISPs do by providing a framework where rules can be attached. RIAA/MPAA will giddily start lobbying for ISP's ability to lower priority and eventually block anything that might look like it could be P2P. They'll try to differentiate what you can do from consumer connections from service provider ones and work feverishly towards shaping the internet into a broadcast only medium.
And nobody will stop them. The people will lose huge oportunities that they don't know anything about and companies will lose competition.
Any law that creates a government oranization that oversees the internet is an extremely dangerous one.
Really? They're going to hold a gun to someone's head?
In the case of China.. that's not out of the question.