I am too lazy to type my username. Why should I, really, when I can just press enter instead? I thought computers were there to make our lives easier, not even more annoying.
I see this as similar to how we outfit our police: We give them guns, batons, tear gas and so on so that they can, in turn, protect us from bad people with guns, knives etc. But we only give them limited weapons, ie. the cop on the beat does not run around with an AK47 or a bazooka. And we give them rules as to when, how and how much they may use those weapons. Enough to protect us but not enough to turn them into an army. (Yeah, yeah, call me a dreamer. But that is the basic idea.)
Wikileaks protects leakers by applying a measure of secrecy themselves. Nothing mind-bending to me. Besides, did not Wikileaks once publish a list of its donators that was submitted to them as a leak?
As far as the bonds, the U.S. could make those almost worthless in seconds crushing China.
Something tells me China is the one player in this game that stands to win no matter how it plays out. They could take those bonds and burn them in a bonfire right now and still be better off than the USA.
Oh well. Maybe there would not have been a Bin Laden if certain three letter agencies had not propped him up as a useful idiot a wee while ago, you know?
Seriously, we have been getting this live here in Germany for years now: Every single suspected terrorist has had some connection to a government agency. Every last one of them. From the Red Army Faction to the Oktoberfest bomber(s) to the poor sods currently on trial. Every single terrorism trial has seen some prosecutor pissing their pants over the embarrassing details that came to light. Hell, an attempt to ban our neo-fascist party the NPD was thrown out by the judges because it was impossible for them to tell the true Nazis from the police informers and undercover agents various agencies had planted in the party for years.
I do not doubt that there are genuine terrorists out there, but just how much of the whole terrorism theatre is true and how much is fake - I am not sure even the agencies themselves really know anymore.
This man caused the deaths of many, and instigated a sense of fear that today still affects millions accross the world in security, and other issues.
I cannot honestly say how much Bin Laden himself actually contributed to any loss of lives, but I can definitely say that any sense of fear along with that tide of intolerance was and is instigated not by some lone raving looney and his YouTube channel but by politicians on all sides of the fence. Osama Bin Laden has never posed any tangible threat to me. That puts him in stark contrast to the supranational police state that has been brought on us since 9/11.
Are you sure? I understood Nightly to be the latest successfully compiling build of the trunk regardless of targeted releases - which is why it is often two or more releases ahead in terms of included features. Hence, its version is currently given as 6.0a1, the latest currently envisioned release version, which will be updated to whatever is next on the roadmap. Genuinely asking, I thought that was the description at the time I started using Mindefield years ago.
[...] Most people are perfectly capable of controlling their vehicle and allowing sufficient space beyond the ridiculously low limits.
Apparently I have yet to encounter most people on the road. I always get the deranged suicidal inconsiderate moronic minority that is out to get me killed by speeding beyond their brakes' physical limitations, not keeping even a semblance of space, changing lanes at a whim with no use of either the indicator or the rear view mirror and multitasking so fervently I can hardly tell if they are driving at all or if they have an autopilot.
TFA has been updated to make it clear there was no DMCA takedown attempt. Assuming for a moment that the summary was correct: Dropbox cannot take down any third-party software unless the software itself somehow violates Dropbox's copyright on their own software. The only thing Dropbox can do against Dropship and similar tools is forbid their use in the Dropbox TOS and ban people who use them.
This has nothing to do wih the data stored on Dropbox through such third-party tools: Only the original copyright holder - or apparently someone specifically authorised to act on their behalf, though this was limited in a court case recently discussed here on/. if I recall correctly - of the material stored there can send a DMCA takedown notice - but only for the files, not for the software used to upload them.
So in the situation described in the summary Dropbox would indeed have fraudulently misused the DMCA.
That was a political decision, not a technical one. It came promptly after the Ministry went to a FDP member (that is the "Liberal" party here, essentially the sock puppet of every industry lobby in the country) and is currently the subject of several parliamentary enquiries. An analysis of the Government's official response can be found here (sorry, German only).
[...] I really don't get the slashdots hate against cloud providers, but I guess it's mostly just people who haven't even used such or worked with them and compared them to other solutions. [...]
The Cloud is like Flash, JavaScript and many other technologies: It has its uses, but too many people mistake or abuse it for something that it is not. Too much stuff is put into "the Cloud" just so it is there, often at the expense of stability, usefulness and data protection. It has become one of those buzzwords non-technical management loves to slap on their company's website to appear modern, akin to the stupid $genericproduct 2.0 before it, and the $genericproduct 2000 before that, and the $genericproduct Professional Enterprise Doubleplus Deluxe before that. "Cloud" is the new "web-based". Or the new "with virtualisation". An interesting solution to many products, but not the Swiss Army silver bullet some companies are selling it for.
Oh and FYI you don't actually have to track down drivers anymore, Windows Update takes care of that for you.
Oh, does it? Strange. The last time I installed Windows 7 I had to fidge around about an hour just to get it to recognise the SATA controller. And I still have to hunt down driver updates for my mouse, my video card and my chipset myself. And the mouse is the only item even remotely esoteric. On Linux, on the other hand, the only thing I have to take care of myself is the NVIDIA graphics driver, and that only because I run beta drivers and therefore do not want to use the built-in update mechanism.
Speak for yourself. My two year old Thinkpad runs perfectly fine under Linux. And laptops have been all Realtek or Intel or ATI or NVIDIA for years, with the odd Broadcom thrown in for good measure. Some models or rather: some brands are a bitch to get working - Yeah, I am looking at you, Sony! - but then again that has nothing to do with the machines being laptops and everything to do with them being designed by bean-counting imbeciles and slapped together by El Cheapo third-rate OEMS.
In the case at hand forking was the only sensible move. And with LibreOffice it was many things, but certainly not "knee-jerk". How else do you go about forking something? Post a five-year plan to the mailing list with a kind request for official approval within the next 6 months?
And in the LibreOffice case it had nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with the state of the very top-heavy bureaucratic development process that Sun had imposed. The fault lines within the community had been visible for years. Oracle taking over and sending some rather mixed signals, to say the least, was the last straw. But the fork would have happened anyway because of the many broken promises that Sun had made over the years. Many Linux distributions have been shipping Go-oo builds instead of vanilla OOo for years. Mac users mostly use(d) NeoOffice, which added its own patches and since version3.something includes Go-oo patches. That leaves Windows users as almost the only ones who receive vanilla OOo at all. The big bang would have come either way. And in this case, at least as I see it, the end-user stands only to gain from it.
[...] the most relevant example of such a thing happening illustrates the dangers of FOSS. [...]
Please elaborate. I cannot say anything about Hudson, but OpenOffice.org being Open Source permitted an interested community to take over where corporate interests would have hampered the software's development or even killed it completely in the long run. With at least two major Linux distributions pledging their support and a significant amount of developers migrating from OOo to the fork LibreOffice has enough backing to outlive anything Oracle may do with OOo.
Are you talking about OpenOffice.org being forked? In that case there is nothing ironic to be found. The fork was long overdue because of Sun's treatment of the community. Prior to the LibreOffice break-off there already was a fork (technically a set of patches on top of the OOo codebase, if I understand correctly, but still) that tried to overcome the slow-moving and restrictive inclusion process that Sun clang to: Go-oo. Now it will be interesting to see which suite will live and which will die.
Which is incredibly worse than the risk of your proprietary bread-and-butter software being killed off or slowly starved to death because a competitor bought the producer. Right.
[...] if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.
There is a provision about the death penalty, but not for the deprivation of rights in itself.
Most people in the "First World" have no clue as to what Open in OpenOffice refers to. It is not FreeOffice or DoWhatYouWantWithItOffice or ThatCommiOffice, it is OpenOffice. Open to what? For whom? Open as opposed to what? All people know is that it is like MS Office with a built-in crack. Download, double-click, run.
Libre may not be readily understood to the fullest extent, but the word is recognised as the smarty-talk version of "free". So people will still not know exactly what freedoms they get but they realise it has something to do with freedom.
"Google" sounds like some retarded-but-cute monster from a children's TV series. "Windows" is a really lame name for an operating system. Really lame. "Ubuntu" is a word from a language only understood on one continent. Why anyone would take a company serious that is called "Apple" is beyond me. But: They all are successful. Names do not matter as much as products, especially in a market where absolutely stupid names abound.
Besides, if the word "diaspora" has such a negative association to you then that is a failure of our educational system and a sign of cultural poverty. But hey, that is just me. Then again, I understood "libre".
Does not compute. When owner 1 has sold their two games (And where does that stupid part about them pirating anything come from? How can owner 2 buy three games from owner 1 when owner 1 only has purchased two games? WTF?!) they will, in all likelihood, take those $ 40 they saved, put another $ 20 on top and buy another freshly released game. Which they most likely could not afford to do if they could not recover some of the cost from reselling - otherwise they would not need to sell their games at all. Owner 2 on the other hand obviously either does not want to or cannot pay those $ 60 for a game in the first place, so if no $ 40 used copy was available they most likely would either not buy the games at all or they could only afford one of the games. Many people who buy used games do so out of necessity. They may buy a game for the full price once their financial situation permits. And by that time they will be hooked to certain franchises or developers through the used games they bought. The used games market essentially is a marketing device, or rather it would be if it was not treated like a traitor to the nation by certain publishers.
Slashdot Mirror
I am too lazy to type my username. Why should I, really, when I can just press enter instead? I thought computers were there to make our lives easier, not even more annoying.
I see this as similar to how we outfit our police: We give them guns, batons, tear gas and so on so that they can, in turn, protect us from bad people with guns, knives etc. But we only give them limited weapons, ie. the cop on the beat does not run around with an AK47 or a bazooka. And we give them rules as to when, how and how much they may use those weapons. Enough to protect us but not enough to turn them into an army. (Yeah, yeah, call me a dreamer. But that is the basic idea.)
Wikileaks protects leakers by applying a measure of secrecy themselves. Nothing mind-bending to me. Besides, did not Wikileaks once publish a list of its donators that was submitted to them as a leak?
As far as the bonds, the U.S. could make those almost worthless in seconds crushing China.
Something tells me China is the one player in this game that stands to win no matter how it plays out. They could take those bonds and burn them in a bonfire right now and still be better off than the USA.
Maybe /. should introduce a new channel for those news. They could call it "iDle" then.
Your point being? If the gear survives in a campus environment it will definitely be just fine in a corporate network.
Indeed. Powerpoint alone easily qualifies as a crime against humanity.
Oh well. Maybe there would not have been a Bin Laden if certain three letter agencies had not propped him up as a useful idiot a wee while ago, you know?
Seriously, we have been getting this live here in Germany for years now: Every single suspected terrorist has had some connection to a government agency. Every last one of them. From the Red Army Faction to the Oktoberfest bomber(s) to the poor sods currently on trial. Every single terrorism trial has seen some prosecutor pissing their pants over the embarrassing details that came to light. Hell, an attempt to ban our neo-fascist party the NPD was thrown out by the judges because it was impossible for them to tell the true Nazis from the police informers and undercover agents various agencies had planted in the party for years.
I do not doubt that there are genuine terrorists out there, but just how much of the whole terrorism theatre is true and how much is fake - I am not sure even the agencies themselves really know anymore.
Victory? What victory? Tell me, what have we won? What good comes from Bin Laden's death?
This man caused the deaths of many, and instigated a sense of fear that today still affects millions accross the world in security, and other issues.
I cannot honestly say how much Bin Laden himself actually contributed to any loss of lives, but I can definitely say that any sense of fear along with that tide of intolerance was and is instigated not by some lone raving looney and his YouTube channel but by politicians on all sides of the fence. Osama Bin Laden has never posed any tangible threat to me. That puts him in stark contrast to the supranational police state that has been brought on us since 9/11.
Are you sure? I understood Nightly to be the latest successfully compiling build of the trunk regardless of targeted releases - which is why it is often two or more releases ahead in terms of included features. Hence, its version is currently given as 6.0a1, the latest currently envisioned release version, which will be updated to whatever is next on the roadmap. Genuinely asking, I thought that was the description at the time I started using Mindefield years ago.
[...] Most people are perfectly capable of controlling their vehicle and allowing sufficient space beyond the ridiculously low limits.
Apparently I have yet to encounter most people on the road. I always get the deranged suicidal inconsiderate moronic minority that is out to get me killed by speeding beyond their brakes' physical limitations, not keeping even a semblance of space, changing lanes at a whim with no use of either the indicator or the rear view mirror and multitasking so fervently I can hardly tell if they are driving at all or if they have an autopilot.
TFA has been updated to make it clear there was no DMCA takedown attempt. Assuming for a moment that the summary was correct: Dropbox cannot take down any third-party software unless the software itself somehow violates Dropbox's copyright on their own software. The only thing Dropbox can do against Dropship and similar tools is forbid their use in the Dropbox TOS and ban people who use them.
This has nothing to do wih the data stored on Dropbox through such third-party tools: Only the original copyright holder - or apparently someone specifically authorised to act on their behalf, though this was limited in a court case recently discussed here on /. if I recall correctly - of the material stored there can send a DMCA takedown notice - but only for the files, not for the software used to upload them.
So in the situation described in the summary Dropbox would indeed have fraudulently misused the DMCA.
That was a political decision, not a technical one. It came promptly after the Ministry went to a FDP member (that is the "Liberal" party here, essentially the sock puppet of every industry lobby in the country) and is currently the subject of several parliamentary enquiries. An analysis of the Government's official response can be found here (sorry, German only).
That last sentence should, of course, have read "An interesting solution to many problems [...]".
[...] I really don't get the slashdots hate against cloud providers, but I guess it's mostly just people who haven't even used such or worked with them and compared them to other solutions. [...]
The Cloud is like Flash, JavaScript and many other technologies: It has its uses, but too many people mistake or abuse it for something that it is not. Too much stuff is put into "the Cloud" just so it is there, often at the expense of stability, usefulness and data protection. It has become one of those buzzwords non-technical management loves to slap on their company's website to appear modern, akin to the stupid $genericproduct 2.0 before it, and the $genericproduct 2000 before that, and the $genericproduct Professional Enterprise Doubleplus Deluxe before that. "Cloud" is the new "web-based". Or the new "with virtualisation". An interesting solution to many products, but not the Swiss Army silver bullet some companies are selling it for.
Oh and FYI you don't actually have to track down drivers anymore, Windows Update takes care of that for you.
Oh, does it? Strange. The last time I installed Windows 7 I had to fidge around about an hour just to get it to recognise the SATA controller. And I still have to hunt down driver updates for my mouse, my video card and my chipset myself. And the mouse is the only item even remotely esoteric. On Linux, on the other hand, the only thing I have to take care of myself is the NVIDIA graphics driver, and that only because I run beta drivers and therefore do not want to use the built-in update mechanism.
Speak for yourself. My two year old Thinkpad runs perfectly fine under Linux. And laptops have been all Realtek or Intel or ATI or NVIDIA for years, with the odd Broadcom thrown in for good measure. Some models or rather: some brands are a bitch to get working - Yeah, I am looking at you, Sony! - but then again that has nothing to do with the machines being laptops and everything to do with them being designed by bean-counting imbeciles and slapped together by El Cheapo third-rate OEMS.
In the case at hand forking was the only sensible move. And with LibreOffice it was many things, but certainly not "knee-jerk". How else do you go about forking something? Post a five-year plan to the mailing list with a kind request for official approval within the next 6 months?
And in the LibreOffice case it had nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with the state of the very top-heavy bureaucratic development process that Sun had imposed. The fault lines within the community had been visible for years. Oracle taking over and sending some rather mixed signals, to say the least, was the last straw. But the fork would have happened anyway because of the many broken promises that Sun had made over the years. Many Linux distributions have been shipping Go-oo builds instead of vanilla OOo for years. Mac users mostly use(d) NeoOffice, which added its own patches and since version3.something includes Go-oo patches. That leaves Windows users as almost the only ones who receive vanilla OOo at all. The big bang would have come either way. And in this case, at least as I see it, the end-user stands only to gain from it.
[...] the most relevant example of such a thing happening illustrates the dangers of FOSS. [...]
Please elaborate. I cannot say anything about Hudson, but OpenOffice.org being Open Source permitted an interested community to take over where corporate interests would have hampered the software's development or even killed it completely in the long run. With at least two major Linux distributions pledging their support and a significant amount of developers migrating from OOo to the fork LibreOffice has enough backing to outlive anything Oracle may do with OOo.
Are you talking about OpenOffice.org being forked? In that case there is nothing ironic to be found. The fork was long overdue because of Sun's treatment of the community. Prior to the LibreOffice break-off there already was a fork (technically a set of patches on top of the OOo codebase, if I understand correctly, but still) that tried to overcome the slow-moving and restrictive inclusion process that Sun clang to: Go-oo. Now it will be interesting to see which suite will live and which will die.
Which is incredibly worse than the risk of your proprietary bread-and-butter software being killed off or slowly starved to death because a competitor bought the producer. Right.
[...] if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.
There is a provision about the death penalty, but not for the deprivation of rights in itself.
Most people in the "First World" have no clue as to what Open in OpenOffice refers to. It is not FreeOffice or DoWhatYouWantWithItOffice or ThatCommiOffice, it is OpenOffice. Open to what? For whom? Open as opposed to what? All people know is that it is like MS Office with a built-in crack. Download, double-click, run.
Libre may not be readily understood to the fullest extent, but the word is recognised as the smarty-talk version of "free". So people will still not know exactly what freedoms they get but they realise it has something to do with freedom.
"Google" sounds like some retarded-but-cute monster from a children's TV series. "Windows" is a really lame name for an operating system. Really lame. "Ubuntu" is a word from a language only understood on one continent. Why anyone would take a company serious that is called "Apple" is beyond me. But: They all are successful. Names do not matter as much as products, especially in a market where absolutely stupid names abound.
Besides, if the word "diaspora" has such a negative association to you then that is a failure of our educational system and a sign of cultural poverty. But hey, that is just me. Then again, I understood "libre".
How do you define "Third World" exactly?
Does not compute. When owner 1 has sold their two games (And where does that stupid part about them pirating anything come from? How can owner 2 buy three games from owner 1 when owner 1 only has purchased two games? WTF?!) they will, in all likelihood, take those $ 40 they saved, put another $ 20 on top and buy another freshly released game. Which they most likely could not afford to do if they could not recover some of the cost from reselling - otherwise they would not need to sell their games at all. Owner 2 on the other hand obviously either does not want to or cannot pay those $ 60 for a game in the first place, so if no $ 40 used copy was available they most likely would either not buy the games at all or they could only afford one of the games. Many people who buy used games do so out of necessity. They may buy a game for the full price once their financial situation permits. And by that time they will be hooked to certain franchises or developers through the used games they bought. The used games market essentially is a marketing device, or rather it would be if it was not treated like a traitor to the nation by certain publishers.