This game sounds really fun. I can just upload some random warbling melody I record of myself and then start sending out 'strike' notices to everyone I don't like. Of course, they'll be 'striking' back in no time, so it should be quite a battle to see who can get all their strikes in first.
As long as this is an all-in party we should have a ripe old time!
I read all the way through this looking for a single line of content and found none. The author seems to be demanding that it be legislated that all health IT software be licensed under some obscure variant of the GPL that he personally favors. Regardless of what you think about Free software this point of view is completely bananas and makes no sense whatsoever.
IMHO, the only action the government actually needs to take is to mandate consumer access to health records in a standard format. It matters not which format or how good or bad it is. The minute universal access to health records is guaranteed in a fixed format there will be a health IT boom like never seen before as every existing and thousands of new companies spring up to support it, not to mention hundreds of open source offerings. The only thing the government should fund is an open source reference implementation that will kick things off and set a baseline for others to follow.
> Copyright only deals with redistribution, whether in original or modified form.
I used to think that too. However it turns out there are whole branches of copyright law that deal with other aspects than "copying" or "distribution". For example, the right to perform a work (song, play, etc etc), which is in no sense copying, is restricted by copyright law.
> doesn't bother to distinguish between a creative work, and merely publishing a fact
Hmmm, IANAL, but my understanding of the situation is different to what you state. Facts are not copyrightable in Australia, but the courts HAVE recognized that there is creative work in the collection of a body of facts. So it is fine to publish the time of one train, but it is not fine to publish the time of many trains. Similarly, there is no problem with me advertising my own phone number, but publishing an equivalent of Telstra's phone book is considered a violation of copyright.
Actually, I've never understood copyright law when it comes to content that isn't actually copied. For example, even if a company independently discovers the facts of people's phone numbers and then publishes them, it's still considered a copyright violation even though not one iota of it was ever copied. Why?
Kudos, it's nice to see a fanboi come right out and proclaim their impartiality with pride for once.
In my case, I won't use linux because it has no wireless support, no accelerated graphics drivers and can't even do copy and paste between separate apps.
Oh, you say all those issues are solved? Well, you know, I just can't possibly be impartial, I have a crazy desire to take into account past experiences and cling on to them irrationally. I guess you should understand that.
I'm baffled that after all the tireless work of browser implementors, virtual machine implementors (java etc.) over the years, somebody has come up with a brainwave that making a runtime platform tied directly to a specific to a processor architecture is a good idea. Sure we happen to be at a juncture in history when we have 3 major platforms (windows, mac, linux) all primarily using intel processors, but this still seems nutso nonetheless. The fact that the described scheme does not work on 64 bit processors seems to make it completely useless as surely 64bit is going to be come standard within a year or two.
And boy does it stink to high heaven for anything more complex than a shopping list. Seriously, trying to use it for real documents is like poking your own eyeballs out with toothpicks.
Maybe not - but Apple is damn near dominant (70% market share in music players in some markets?), and Google is very close to a monopoly in both internet advertising AND search. More over, Google is in fact using its monopoly in search to push Chrome (seen those Chrome links mixed into your search results yet?). So there are some real parallels here and I think Google needs to be a little careful they don't bite off more than they can chew here. Arguing for such liberal interpretations of anti-trust laws might well come back to bite them in the not too distant future.
> This is a matter of EU anti-trust laws, under which having a monopoly in one market (personal computer operating systems in Microsoft's case) isn't illegal, but using that monopoly to try and establish another one in a different market (Internet browsers and rich Internet content) definitely is illegal.
What I find odd about this whole issue is that in this case the 'market' under discussion is one where every single product (browser) is free of charge. Any definition of 'market' I can think of involves an exchange of some kind. When there is no exchange, there is no market, and when the barriers to entry are so low (6MB download from getfirefox.com, 30 seconds of most people's time to install), it is really hard to see how this particular issue can be framed as a monopoly abuse. Or to put it better, if it *is* monopoly abuse then we are looking at a very liberal interpretation of some fundamental concepts such as "what is a market", "what is a product", and "what is an operating system" and "what is abuse" which may set precedents for a long time to come and cause some very scary unintended consequences. As much as I like to criticize large players like MS and Google, I don't want to live in a world where anybody successful becomes hamstrung and too afraid to ever innovate or compete vigorously in whatever field they are successful in. I actually *want* windows to come pre-installed with IE. My problem with IE is not that it is there on windows per se, my problem is the nature of IE - it's poor standards compliance primarily.
Wow. Thank you. This is actually quite concerning. I'm now at a loss as to how they justify this under their privacy policy. Unless I can find some kind of clarification of or control to disable this, I guess I will be deleting my account. Thanks again.
I think it's quite a dangerous thing Adobe is doing here. With entire institutions now set up and devoted to prosecuting anti-trust cases, loudly proclaiming that you own a large percentage of any particular market is no longer such a smart move any more. It may only be a matter of time before other companies start to notice this and complain that Adobe is a monopoly in this market and anything else they do will get closely scrutinized thereafter.
I do hope it happens, in fact, since I personally dislike flash intensely for almost all of it's uses in the real world.
Can you substantiate this in any way shape or form?
From my own reading of the privacy policy, there is *no* mention of anything like this whatsoever.
They mention premium accounts may have access to 'aggregated' data not available to non premium accounts. However that is a far cry from showing 'full details' of anyone.
I am quite paranoid about my privacy but I am fairly sure LinkedIn is not dumb enough to be doing what you are saying.
Abuse doesn't have to be confined to the same market. In fact, more often than not it is the cross-market effect that is what worries people.
Eg: Microsoft operating system dominance => browser dominance because they bundle the browser
Interestingly enough, Google is now using their dominance in their existing products such as search and advertising to promote Chrome. So there is actually quite a strong parallel here, although it's not as extreme (promoting your browser is much different to actually bundling it).
Anyone can get compilers trivially if they want (from microsoft, even). It turns out most people don't so Microsoft doesn't 'bloat' the system by sticking useless stuff on there. If they did you'd probably be warbling on about how a default install takes so much space.
> Windows Se7en will still require the outlandish hardware that Vista does. One of the major goals of 7 is to ensure it runs well on netbooks. People have tested it far and wide on low end configs and found it runs much better on low end hardware than Vista. You're simply wrong.
I think a lot of these features are so taken for granted that people literally forget that they need them. Until the day comes when they do - and then suddenly you *need* them really bad. I remember a simple example where I had to copy a section of a spreadsheet into a word processor document and have the document run some rudimentary calculations on the embedded spreadsheet data to publish totals in the heading. All doable quite easily using 1995 era technology, yet no web app I know of can even come close. These things are in the stone age by comparison.
Completely agree. As much as I believe Vista is slower than XP for a whole range of scenarios, I'm having a heap of trouble believing the numbers in this article.
Vista and 7 are 118% slower than XP on database tasks???? WTF? What does that even mean? I strongly suspect this reviewer has something seriously screwed up with their Vista setup, like missing drivers or some other problem. I don't know how you can possibly calculate a number like '118%', but I can't think of any way Vista is that much slower unless it's running on 1GB RAM, or windows defender is running on max settings, the SATA drivers are not installed, or some other dumb-ass stoopid thing that you would never do on a server OS.
Medical records may contain information that the patient should not see - or to put it better - doctors constrained by the restriction that the patient sees everything will not provide optimal health care. For example, if a doctor suspects a patient is an alcoholic, but letting the patient know that will cause them to stop seeing the doctor... how should that be documented? If we say the patient owns their records and can see everything then doctors simply won't document these things at all, which is not an optimal outcome.
Also - can we hold doctors legally liable for information in the health record if they themselves do not have access to it? This is a thorny issue. I would not like to be held responsible for information that I cannot even myself view. What happens if a doctor thinks of a complication after the patient left?
> And if someone shows up unresponsive in the ER, how do we send the X-ray to the remote radiologist if the patient can't release the data? And if 'emergencies' override that control, expect to see EVERY encounter be an emergency.
I think in cases like this it's the audit trail that is important, not the release. In other words, a physician should merely need to declare that it is medically necessary and authorize it with a digital signature (which may be a thumb print or swipe of a smart card or something extremely simple in practice). Then data flows freely to whoever you authorize and the important thing is not where the data goes but that the audit trail is sufficient to document it - and that the trail is open and visible to everyone including the patient (when they wake up). If everyone knows the audit trail is visible and their actions are public then they are far less likely to abuse the information.
The only one of these I will miss is Jaiku - the world desperately needs a microblogging alternative run by someone more competent than the folks who run Twitter to become popular.
I have a new laptop and have had the luxury of installing a range of different OSes to compare and see what I want to settle on. Vista 64 is on there as well as Kubuntu. I'm totally comfortable at the command line on linux and spend 75% of my day in bash.
Kubuntu impressed me by automatically installing nvidia drivers, getting my screen resolution right and getting Wifi working without any command line interaction from me. It also installed more quickly and easily than Vista, by the time you take into account a dozen manual driver updates from Dell (why a player as large as Dell can't streamline the update process is beyond me).
However the end result is... meh - unattractive (fonts look horrible, icons all too large, no obvious interface for scaling them down), package installer has quirky / weird behavior, a lot of expected key bindings don't work (eg. Ctrl and Alt key don't seem to be mapped where I expect - Ctrl+E doesn't do anything in Firefox,etc), integrated bluetooth doesn't seem to be working though I haven't really tried to set it up yet, audio worked to some extent but failed at some point and had to reboot before I heard anything again, I tried to play videos taken by my camera and they came up with audio but no pictures. Somehow it's just not inspiring, and although I reckon with many hours work I can probably almost get it to where Vista and Win7 are, I'm struggling to find the motivation to do that.
So at the moment it looks like Windows 7 is going to be the winner, and quite possibly I'm going to run linux in a virtual machine for various development tasks.
I know that's the popular myth, but in my experience, it does make some difference.
I have now trained my mother and my wife never to click "Allow" to anything that they didn't directly initiate themselves to install something or modify their computer. And quite literally they ring me up and ask things like "my computer just asked me if it's OK for Java update to run?". I think part of the user problem has been that for a long time malware could install itself with no questions asked so even if you trained people there was no benefit. Now there is actually a point to it and education can start to take effect... but at least it has a chance now.
Additionally, XP is still killing Vista for business sales as of 2008, two years after Vista was launched. And you can't trust MS's numbers, because the XP boxes they're selling now come with Vista licenses and XP pre-loaded, which they do so they can try to inflate their Vista numbers.
You can't trust really any numbers regarding this situation. I bought a box with XP pre-loaded from Dell last week. I did not want XP on it, but Dell forced my hand. What?! Yes - here's how it works: they offer either
XP pre-loaded with a Vista DVD
or just Vista preloaded and NO XP AT ALL.
You cannot get Vista pre-loaded AND an XP DVD. So which one do you think everybody is choosing pre-loaded? The only one that gets you 2 OSes for the price of one. It's the only common sense thing to do, and it's nothing to do with not wanting Vista.
Agree 100%. It probably sounds bizarre to people who have a different mode of use, but the lack of reasonable docking stations is probably the main reason I just purchased another Dell instead of a Mac.
When your laptop is your desktop and you have dozens of peripherals and you want a workspace that is clean and effective, the fully integrated docking station is a beauty to behold:-)
Slashdot Mirror
This game sounds really fun. I can just upload some random warbling melody I record of myself and then start sending out 'strike' notices to everyone I don't like. Of course, they'll be 'striking' back in no time, so it should be quite a battle to see who can get all their strikes in first.
As long as this is an all-in party we should have a ripe old time!
I read all the way through this looking for a single line of content and found none. The author seems to be demanding that it be legislated that all health IT software be licensed under some obscure variant of the GPL that he personally favors. Regardless of what you think about Free software this point of view is completely bananas and makes no sense whatsoever.
IMHO, the only action the government actually needs to take is to mandate consumer access to health records in a standard format. It matters not which format or how good or bad it is. The minute universal access to health records is guaranteed in a fixed format there will be a health IT boom like never seen before as every existing and thousands of new companies spring up to support it, not to mention hundreds of open source offerings. The only thing the government should fund is an open source reference implementation that will kick things off and set a baseline for others to follow.
> Copyright only deals with redistribution, whether in original or modified form.
I used to think that too. However it turns out there are whole branches of copyright law that deal with other aspects than "copying" or "distribution". For example, the right to perform a work (song, play, etc etc), which is in no sense copying, is restricted by copyright law.
> doesn't bother to distinguish between a creative work, and merely publishing a fact
Hmmm, IANAL, but my understanding of the situation is different to what you state. Facts are not copyrightable in Australia, but the courts HAVE recognized that there is creative work in the collection of a body of facts. So it is fine to publish the time of one train, but it is not fine to publish the time of many trains. Similarly, there is no problem with me advertising my own phone number, but publishing an equivalent of Telstra's phone book is considered a violation of copyright.
Actually, I've never understood copyright law when it comes to content that isn't actually copied. For example, even if a company independently discovers the facts of people's phone numbers and then publishes them, it's still considered a copyright violation even though not one iota of it was ever copied. Why?
Kudos, it's nice to see a fanboi come right out and proclaim their impartiality with pride for once.
In my case, I won't use linux because it has no wireless support, no accelerated graphics drivers and can't even do copy and paste between separate apps.
Oh, you say all those issues are solved? Well, you know, I just can't possibly be impartial, I have a crazy desire to take into account past experiences and cling on to them irrationally. I guess you should understand that.
I'm baffled that after all the tireless work of browser implementors, virtual machine implementors (java etc.) over the years, somebody has come up with a brainwave that making a runtime platform tied directly to a specific to a processor architecture is a good idea. Sure we happen to be at a juncture in history when we have 3 major platforms (windows, mac, linux) all primarily using intel processors, but this still seems nutso nonetheless. The fact that the described scheme does not work on 64 bit processors seems to make it completely useless as surely 64bit is going to be come standard within a year or two.
And boy does it stink to high heaven for anything more complex than a shopping list. Seriously, trying to use it for real documents is like poking your own eyeballs out with toothpicks.
> Is the iPhone or Android market dominant?
Maybe not - but Apple is damn near dominant (70% market share in music players in some markets?), and Google is very close to a monopoly in both internet advertising AND search. More over, Google is in fact using its monopoly in search to push Chrome (seen those Chrome links mixed into your search results yet?). So there are some real parallels here and I think Google needs to be a little careful they don't bite off more than they can chew here. Arguing for such liberal interpretations of anti-trust laws might well come back to bite them in the not too distant future.
> This is a matter of EU anti-trust laws, under which having a monopoly in one market (personal computer operating systems in Microsoft's case) isn't illegal, but using that monopoly to try and establish another one in a different market (Internet browsers and rich Internet content) definitely is illegal.
What I find odd about this whole issue is that in this case the 'market' under discussion is one where every single product (browser) is free of charge. Any definition of 'market' I can think of involves an exchange of some kind. When there is no exchange, there is no market, and when the barriers to entry are so low (6MB download from getfirefox.com, 30 seconds of most people's time to install), it is really hard to see how this particular issue can be framed as a monopoly abuse. Or to put it better, if it *is* monopoly abuse then we are looking at a very liberal interpretation of some fundamental concepts such as "what is a market", "what is a product", and "what is an operating system" and "what is abuse" which may set precedents for a long time to come and cause some very scary unintended consequences. As much as I like to criticize large players like MS and Google, I don't want to live in a world where anybody successful becomes hamstrung and too afraid to ever innovate or compete vigorously in whatever field they are successful in. I actually *want* windows to come pre-installed with IE. My problem with IE is not that it is there on windows per se, my problem is the nature of IE - it's poor standards compliance primarily.
Wow. Thank you. This is actually quite concerning. I'm now at a loss as to how they justify this under their privacy policy. Unless I can find some kind of clarification of or control to disable this, I guess I will be deleting my account. Thanks again.
I think it's quite a dangerous thing Adobe is doing here. With entire institutions now set up and devoted to prosecuting anti-trust cases, loudly proclaiming that you own a large percentage of any particular market is no longer such a smart move any more. It may only be a matter of time before other companies start to notice this and complain that Adobe is a monopoly in this market and anything else they do will get closely scrutinized thereafter.
I do hope it happens, in fact, since I personally dislike flash intensely for almost all of it's uses in the real world.
Can you substantiate this in any way shape or form?
From my own reading of the privacy policy, there is *no* mention of anything like this whatsoever.
They mention premium accounts may have access to 'aggregated' data not available to non premium accounts. However that is a far cry from showing 'full details' of anyone.
I am quite paranoid about my privacy but I am fairly sure LinkedIn is not dumb enough to be doing what you are saying.
Abuse doesn't have to be confined to the same market. In fact, more often than not it is the cross-market effect that is what worries people.
Eg: Microsoft operating system dominance => browser dominance because they bundle the browser
Interestingly enough, Google is now using their dominance in their existing products such as search and advertising to promote Chrome. So there is actually quite a strong parallel here, although it's not as extreme (promoting your browser is much different to actually bundling it).
Meaningless, but amusing.
I particularly like how one of them said they liked the window switching effect - which is actually *included* in Vista but *removed* Windows 7 :-)
Why do you bother to post such junk?
Anyone can get compilers trivially if they want (from microsoft, even). It turns out most people don't so Microsoft doesn't 'bloat' the system by sticking useless stuff on there. If they did you'd probably be warbling on about how a default install takes so much space.
> Windows Se7en will still require the outlandish hardware that Vista does.
One of the major goals of 7 is to ensure it runs well on netbooks. People have tested it far and wide on low end configs and found it runs much better on low end hardware than Vista. You're simply wrong.
I think a lot of these features are so taken for granted that people literally forget that they need them. Until the day comes when they do - and then suddenly you *need* them really bad. I remember a simple example where I had to copy a section of a spreadsheet into a word processor document and have the document run some rudimentary calculations on the embedded spreadsheet data to publish totals in the heading. All doable quite easily using 1995 era technology, yet no web app I know of can even come close. These things are in the stone age by comparison.
Completely agree. As much as I believe Vista is slower than XP for a whole range of scenarios, I'm having a heap of trouble believing the numbers in this article.
Vista and 7 are 118% slower than XP on database tasks???? WTF? What does that even mean? I strongly suspect this reviewer has something seriously screwed up with their Vista setup, like missing drivers or some other problem. I don't know how you can possibly calculate a number like '118%', but I can't think of any way Vista is that much slower unless it's running on 1GB RAM, or windows defender is running on max settings, the SATA drivers are not installed, or some other dumb-ass stoopid thing that you would never do on a server OS.
Unfortunately life is never that simple.
Medical records may contain information that the patient should not see - or to put it better - doctors constrained by the restriction that the patient sees everything will not provide optimal health care. For example, if a doctor suspects a patient is an alcoholic, but letting the patient know that will cause them to stop seeing the doctor ... how should that be documented? If we say the patient owns their records and can see everything then doctors simply won't document these things at all, which is not an optimal outcome.
Also - can we hold doctors legally liable for information in the health record if they themselves do not have access to it? This is a thorny issue. I would not like to be held responsible for information that I cannot even myself view. What happens if a doctor thinks of a complication after the patient left?
> And if someone shows up unresponsive in the ER, how do we send the X-ray to the remote radiologist if the patient can't release the data? And if 'emergencies' override that control, expect to see EVERY encounter be an emergency.
I think in cases like this it's the audit trail that is important, not the release. In other words, a physician should merely need to declare that it is medically necessary and authorize it with a digital signature (which may be a thumb print or swipe of a smart card or something extremely simple in practice). Then data flows freely to whoever you authorize and the important thing is not where the data goes but that the audit trail is sufficient to document it - and that the trail is open and visible to everyone including the patient (when they wake up). If everyone knows the audit trail is visible and their actions are public then they are far less likely to abuse the information.
The only one of these I will miss is Jaiku - the world desperately needs a microblogging alternative run by someone more competent than the folks who run Twitter to become popular.
I have a new laptop and have had the luxury of installing a range of different OSes to compare and see what I want to settle on. Vista 64 is on there as well as Kubuntu. I'm totally comfortable at the command line on linux and spend 75% of my day in bash.
Kubuntu impressed me by automatically installing nvidia drivers, getting my screen resolution right and getting Wifi working without any command line interaction from me. It also installed more quickly and easily than Vista, by the time you take into account a dozen manual driver updates from Dell (why a player as large as Dell can't streamline the update process is beyond me).
However the end result is ... meh - unattractive (fonts look horrible, icons all too large, no obvious interface for scaling them down), package installer has quirky / weird behavior, a lot of expected key bindings don't work (eg. Ctrl and Alt key don't seem to be mapped where I expect - Ctrl+E doesn't do anything in Firefox,etc), integrated bluetooth doesn't seem to be working though I haven't really tried to set it up yet, audio worked to some extent but failed at some point and had to reboot before I heard anything again, I tried to play videos taken by my camera and they came up with audio but no pictures. Somehow it's just not inspiring, and although I reckon with many hours work I can probably almost get it to where Vista and Win7 are, I'm struggling to find the motivation to do that.
So at the moment it looks like Windows 7 is going to be the winner, and quite possibly I'm going to run linux in a virtual machine for various development tasks.
I know that's the popular myth, but in my experience, it does make some difference.
I have now trained my mother and my wife never to click "Allow" to anything that they didn't directly initiate themselves to install something or modify their computer. And quite literally they ring me up and ask things like "my computer just asked me if it's OK for Java update to run?". I think part of the user problem has been that for a long time malware could install itself with no questions asked so even if you trained people there was no benefit. Now there is actually a point to it and education can start to take effect ... but at least it has a chance now.
Additionally, XP is still killing Vista for business sales as of 2008, two years after Vista was launched. And you can't trust MS's numbers, because the XP boxes they're selling now come with Vista licenses and XP pre-loaded, which they do so they can try to inflate their Vista numbers.
You can't trust really any numbers regarding this situation. I bought a box with XP pre-loaded from Dell last week. I did not want XP on it, but Dell forced my hand. What?! Yes - here's how it works: they offer either
You cannot get Vista pre-loaded AND an XP DVD. So which one do you think everybody is choosing pre-loaded? The only one that gets you 2 OSes for the price of one. It's the only common sense thing to do, and it's nothing to do with not wanting Vista.
Agree 100%. It probably sounds bizarre to people who have a different mode of use, but the lack of reasonable docking stations is probably the main reason I just purchased another Dell instead of a Mac.
When your laptop is your desktop and you have dozens of peripherals and you want a workspace that is clean and effective, the fully integrated docking station is a beauty to behold :-)