[...] who's happiness should get preferentrial treatment?
That of whoever can get enough support for their voteban.
In single-player people can 'access' whatever content they please, online they will have to play by the rules of whatever server they are on or suffer the consequences.
No. They do not know that person X who shelled out for a licensed copy of Y then downloads Y from TPB because of the annoying DRM that came with their legit copy.
The only way for X to make their disagreement with Y's terms known to Y's producer/publisher is to not buy Y. Whether X then downloads Y does not matter much in this regard.
Because banning video games is just a thin line's-crossing away from Naziism...
Not necessarily naziism, but fascism none the less. The idea that a strong state can somehow magically make all problems go away by simply passing a law against them (and giving police unconstitutional powers to enforce those laws against a select group of targets in the process) is rather prevalent here in Germany, I'm afraid.
But in this case I am not too worried. The censorship law will be struck down by our Bundesverfassungsgericht (equivalent to US Supreme Court) for unconstitutionality on various counts. Then it's all about educating the public about what happened here - next general elections are coming up soon, and for certain parties (SPD, I'm looking at you!) there will be hell to pay for their participation in passing this atrocity.
When are we going to start countering the current trend?
When the tech-hostile ultraconservative 60-somethings from whom the parties that bring up such laws draw the majority of their voters have died off. The CDU/CSU parties which pushed this horrendous law is highly popular amongst people over 60 with low education. (Source: Zeit.de, screenshots courtesy of this excellent blog)
And I suspect the situation in other countries to be similar. Those people do not understand what the Internet is and how it works, and they have an unwavering trust in the state and government. A terrible combination.
The users of ThePirateBay may beg to differ. It is maddening, really. I can get everything there in wonderful quality, convenient and widely usable formats, and usually in a timely manner. Music in lossless quality, current episodes of US TV shows in HD quality and without any commercials, HD films with both original audio and translations - no regional discrimination, no formats that only Windows Mediaplayer can handle, no forced trailers, anti-piracy propaganda or "you may not do x, y and z with this film" nonsense, no annoying menus that take the better part of a minute to actually present me a button to watch the film, and I can freely convert all of it for my portable devices and take it with me. Plus the catalogue is huge! Even really obscure stuff that no retailer carries is available there. I have yet to see any commercial offering that even remotely comes close to this. The only feature I miss in the Bay is an option to directly send money to the artist(s).
I'd be interested in your counter-examples. Since Adobe made their online version of Photoshop, Google (et al.) made online office apps (that appear to work better than the off-line analogues), etc., I'm of the opinion that pretty much anything in userspace _can_ be converted to a browser based app.
Now the wisdom of such a move is a different question. But you were just talking about possibility. So?
No, I was not talking only about possibility, hence the phrase "regardless of specific implications".
Look at the two models:
Local applications
are stored on your machine. They do not rely on any non-local resources (in this context, specifically the Internet) unless the data they process comes from there.
can be (more or less easily) updated when Internet connection is available or an off-line update media is distributed. If you don't want a specific patch installed or need to delay its installation because it causes problems for you, you usually are free to do so.
will run as long as you wish them to, unless they use some DRM component that requires connections to an authorisation server and that server goes bust (and you cannot use a crack for legal reasons) or you switch to a software platform that the apps don't support. No-one can simply pull the plug on your local installation.
can be managed through thorough security frameworks on the system level. You can limit them in any way you want, using a number of frameworks.
integrate nicely with your interface and can use any number of platform components for this.
Browser-based applications on the other hand
either require a online connection whenever you want to use them or come with a caching scheme that essentially, well, makes them a local app when no connection is available. Kinda defeats the whole purpose of using online apps.
can be taken down for any number of reasons. Server failure, software bugs, network problems, legal issues, the hoster or developer going titsup - you just don't know when they will break, and since they "run" outside of your systems you can't do anything to fix them. Also performance issues cannot be easily alleviated on your end if the problem lies with the hoster.
will be updated and modified whenever and however the developers please. Don't like the new patch or need to have it delayed because it creates problems with some other component you use? Well, pray you are an important enough customer, or you are left out in the cold.
are outside of your control. You cannot tell what data leaves or enters your systems. If you want to set up a secure machine and have it disconnected from the internet or the network in general, how would you run browser-based apps on it?
are more or less isolated from your platform. The more isolated they are, the more limited and restricted they and their interfaces become. The less isolated they are, the more complex the browser-platform interface and the browsers themselves must become, which leads to growing security concerns.
And finally: I don't see much sense in it. That is, of course, only my personal opinion, but what would I gain from using, say, Google Docs? Nothing. My documents already are accessible online yet I retain complete control over them, and thanks to a simple apt-get upgrade staying up to date is not much of an issue. The company I work for would gain nothing, either, except another critical point of failure and massive legal headaches. When Office 2007 came out we evaluated basically any office suite or service on the market to decide which way to go. And Google Docs was stricken off the list on first glance because it just cannot be integrated into our setup.
So I am highly sceptical of this whole concept. I am too young to have witnessed the high times of mainframes but that is, to a large part, what I understand to be the reasons many apps were actually moved off those big irons in the first pl
So if all download their stuff legally from then net that number of jobs will be created?
This would make for a nice test of their truthfulness: Get everyone to not download anything without a proper license for one year and see whether those jobs have been created. Oh well, if only we did not already know how this would turn out...
Somebody's making money, and it's not the pirates.
Please mod parent up. This is the central issue here. Unlicensed copies don't just magically appear out of thin air, and I certainly have not seen a massive surge in my savings account since I first surfed to TPB. The cash is going somewhere. And, seeing how many concerts I and my acquaintances have been to over the past few years, I somehow doubt that the artists actually take as much of a financial loss as the industry wants us to believe.
Oh,ofcourseestablishedcompaniesneverreleaseflawedsoftware, right? Their ActiveX control does not have to be malicious in itself, it is sufficient if it tears holes into your defense for others to abuse. ActiveX needs to die a very quick death already. And can we please club that idea that a browser, JavaScript and a bit of fairy-dust can fully replace any local application regardless of specific implications out of people's heads?
What has happened every time digital restrictions interfered with the desire to use some content: Someone will break the protection. In Steam's case this has already happened for many games.
It is. You are getting its worth in money. Anyone who gets it from a torrent apparently does not see enough value in it to pay for it. Your readers are not stupid. They could just enter the book's title into Amazon's search box if they want to buy it.
What is the really compelling technical reason to upgrade from XP, Windows 2003, Exchange 2003 if your business could run on them in the past couple of years, other than Microsoft is deciding yo kill security updates? [...]
None, I would say. A court decision in this question would indeed be very helpful. This would boil down to whether such broad waivers of warranty as customary in EULAs are actually enforcible.
You are right, but what makes Windows 7's situation peculiar is the fact that due to Vista's rather epic fail in the corporate market Microsoft currently has no viable operating system there. XP is being killed off, Windows 7 is still quite a few months away from release, and few - relative to Microsoft's total market penetration - companies have switched to Vista despite the first service pack being out for some time now. And since most companies will try to keep their infrastructure (client and server OS) within the same generation there is little incentive to upgrade to Server 2008 unless you want to move your clients to Vista (or Windows 7 once it's available), and no Server upgrade usually means no Exchange etc. upgrade, and this will cut into Microsoft's profits across most of their product line.
[...] Everybody can now claim google.philly or google.hiphop and companies can do nothing about it(or start countless lawsuits). [...]
In order to avoid a massive influx of lawsuits from corporate lawyers all over the globe any half sane TLD operator would run a sunrise period for tradename owners to grab any domains their claims cover. But that in itself will defeat the whole purpose of introducing new TLDs. Google, Coca Cola, BMW et al. will simply grab their domains under any TLD they can get and sue the living sh... out of anyone who beats them to those domains. Well, just as they have done with domains under existing TLDs.
You are the bad kid in the school yard. You see two other kids standing there with their breakfast in hand. Which one will you force to give you his sandwich: The small meagre one, or the huge muscular one?
Or just prepare your food yourself instead of warming up canned or frozen crap. It does not take a radical change of diet to live relatively healthy. Using fresh ingredients, especially fruit and vegetables, and skipping on all the various additives in industrial food goes a long way in fending off all kinds of illnesses and problems. Plus with a bit of practise it tastes way better than anything you could buy.
I remember slamming my head onto the table over partially localised expressions in the Microsoft Office apps. At least the language for mathematical expressions is localised, and also some scripting language if I remember correctly.
What everyone before us has done when they were fed up with their rulers: Line a few of the worst offenders up against the wall. Makes one hell of an example for the rest, at least for a while.
It really depends on what part of the industry you want to get into.
C++ and Java are the two safe choices. They are needed almost everywhere, and they are here to stay. From games to desktop apps to web apps either of those two will get you quite some way. Pro: You can do almost anything with those languages. Con: Most other programmers can, too.
However if you are leaning towards a specialised niche you obviously have to learn whatever is most common there. From Fortran to Ada there are virtually unlimited choices. Pro: You will be one in a rather limited (and potentially highly paid) crowd of people who speak that language. Con: No-one else needs you. And if your language of choice becomes obsolete, you essentially are too.
What I would do: Learn Perl (to serve you personally as the programmer's swiss army chainsaw that it is) and one of C++, Ruby or Ada. Each of these three will take you onto a different path in the industry, but I'd say none of them is a completely wrong choice.
Of course, if you are really masochistic, there's always assembler languages. They are still around, and they still provide for good job opportunities, but you're in for a world of hurt, writing really ugly stuff with a tremendously low margin for errors.
Badly designed GUI + social engineering != security flaw.
I disagree. It does not matter which attack vector or medium is used to break intended behaviour. And the fact that a UI allows such a severe subversion of intended functionality simply by telling users bullshit just makes this flaw all the more serious and shameful than a true machine exploit. A simple "Please review your choice and confirm it to be counted. It has not been stored yet!" and a biiiiiig red button labeled "Yes, this is my choice! Cast my vote!" should have been enough to avoid exactly this kind of flaw.
Voting machines do one thing, and one thing only. They should be incredibly simple to engineer and implement. It is beyond me how the manifacturers managed and still manage to screw them up so royally.
I don't think so (but hey, it's the US legal system; common sense does seldom apply). Using a certain common-place technology is vastly different from openly supporting a specific faith/school of thought. Nobody in their right mind would call a judge who handles a case about a car driver hitting a pedestrian biased just because he drove to the court house in his car.
If people now harrass you for your sexuality, and then if you complain, your account gets banned because people were offended by you mentioning it, you'd be fine with that, right?
Nope. Did I say so anywhere? I made my position on the issue from TFA pretty clear here. My OP was a reply to Chris Burke's generalising and baseless claim that anyone who does not want to know others' sexual orientation is in fact homophobic and wants to retain their perfect hetero dream world. And I take serious offense and insult in this.
Slashdot Mirror
[...] who's happiness should get preferentrial treatment?
That of whoever can get enough support for their voteban.
In single-player people can 'access' whatever content they please, online they will have to play by the rules of whatever server they are on or suffer the consequences.
Would you Paypal a penny each to the actors, directors, and the key grip guy?
Why not? Makes the most sense after all.
How would the caterer get paid, and his staff? How about the electric company?
Sorry, that is a rather stupid question.
No. They do not know that person X who shelled out for a licensed copy of Y then downloads Y from TPB because of the annoying DRM that came with their legit copy.
The only way for X to make their disagreement with Y's terms known to Y's producer/publisher is to not buy Y. Whether X then downloads Y does not matter much in this regard.
Because banning video games is just a thin line's-crossing away from Naziism...
Not necessarily naziism, but fascism none the less. The idea that a strong state can somehow magically make all problems go away by simply passing a law against them (and giving police unconstitutional powers to enforce those laws against a select group of targets in the process) is rather prevalent here in Germany, I'm afraid.
But in this case I am not too worried. The censorship law will be struck down by our Bundesverfassungsgericht (equivalent to US Supreme Court) for unconstitutionality on various counts. Then it's all about educating the public about what happened here - next general elections are coming up soon, and for certain parties (SPD, I'm looking at you!) there will be hell to pay for their participation in passing this atrocity.
When are we going to start countering the current trend?
When the tech-hostile ultraconservative 60-somethings from whom the parties that bring up such laws draw the majority of their voters have died off. The CDU/CSU parties which pushed this horrendous law is highly popular amongst people over 60 with low education. (Source: Zeit.de, screenshots courtesy of this excellent blog)
And I suspect the situation in other countries to be similar. Those people do not understand what the Internet is and how it works, and they have an unwavering trust in the state and government. A terrible combination.
The users of ThePirateBay may beg to differ. It is maddening, really. I can get everything there in wonderful quality, convenient and widely usable formats, and usually in a timely manner. Music in lossless quality, current episodes of US TV shows in HD quality and without any commercials, HD films with both original audio and translations - no regional discrimination, no formats that only Windows Mediaplayer can handle, no forced trailers, anti-piracy propaganda or "you may not do x, y and z with this film" nonsense, no annoying menus that take the better part of a minute to actually present me a button to watch the film, and I can freely convert all of it for my portable devices and take it with me. Plus the catalogue is huge! Even really obscure stuff that no retailer carries is available there. I have yet to see any commercial offering that even remotely comes close to this. The only feature I miss in the Bay is an option to directly send money to the artist(s).
I'd be interested in your counter-examples. Since Adobe made their online version of Photoshop, Google (et al.) made online office apps (that appear to work better than the off-line analogues), etc., I'm of the opinion that pretty much anything in userspace _can_ be converted to a browser based app.
Now the wisdom of such a move is a different question. But you were just talking about possibility. So?
No, I was not talking only about possibility, hence the phrase "regardless of specific implications".
Look at the two models:
Local applications
Browser-based applications on the other hand
And finally: I don't see much sense in it. That is, of course, only my personal opinion, but what would I gain from using, say, Google Docs? Nothing. My documents already are accessible online yet I retain complete control over them, and thanks to a simple apt-get upgrade staying up to date is not much of an issue. The company I work for would gain nothing, either, except another critical point of failure and massive legal headaches. When Office 2007 came out we evaluated basically any office suite or service on the market to decide which way to go. And Google Docs was stricken off the list on first glance because it just cannot be integrated into our setup.
So I am highly sceptical of this whole concept. I am too young to have witnessed the high times of mainframes but that is, to a large part, what I understand to be the reasons many apps were actually moved off those big irons in the first pl
So if all download their stuff legally from then net that number of jobs will be created?
This would make for a nice test of their truthfulness: Get everyone to not download anything without a proper license for one year and see whether those jobs have been created. Oh well, if only we did not already know how this would turn out...
Somebody's making money, and it's not the pirates.
Please mod parent up. This is the central issue here. Unlicensed copies don't just magically appear out of thin air, and I certainly have not seen a massive surge in my savings account since I first surfed to TPB. The cash is going somewhere. And, seeing how many concerts I and my acquaintances have been to over the past few years, I somehow doubt that the artists actually take as much of a financial loss as the industry wants us to believe.
Oh, of course established companies never release flawed software, right? Their ActiveX control does not have to be malicious in itself, it is sufficient if it tears holes into your defense for others to abuse. ActiveX needs to die a very quick death already. And can we please club that idea that a browser, JavaScript and a bit of fairy-dust can fully replace any local application regardless of specific implications out of people's heads?
What happens when steam goes bust?
What has happened every time digital restrictions interfered with the desire to use some content: Someone will break the protection. In Steam's case this has already happened for many games.
I would just like the book to be treated fairly.
It is. You are getting its worth in money. Anyone who gets it from a torrent apparently does not see enough value in it to pay for it. Your readers are not stupid. They could just enter the book's title into Amazon's search box if they want to buy it.
What is the really compelling technical reason to upgrade from XP, Windows 2003, Exchange 2003 if your business could run on them in the past couple of years, other than Microsoft is deciding yo kill security updates? [...]
None, I would say. A court decision in this question would indeed be very helpful. This would boil down to whether such broad waivers of warranty as customary in EULAs are actually enforcible.
You are right, but what makes Windows 7's situation peculiar is the fact that due to Vista's rather epic fail in the corporate market Microsoft currently has no viable operating system there. XP is being killed off, Windows 7 is still quite a few months away from release, and few - relative to Microsoft's total market penetration - companies have switched to Vista despite the first service pack being out for some time now. And since most companies will try to keep their infrastructure (client and server OS) within the same generation there is little incentive to upgrade to Server 2008 unless you want to move your clients to Vista (or Windows 7 once it's available), and no Server upgrade usually means no Exchange etc. upgrade, and this will cut into Microsoft's profits across most of their product line.
[...] Everybody can now claim google.philly or google.hiphop and companies can do nothing about it(or start countless lawsuits). [...]
In order to avoid a massive influx of lawsuits from corporate lawyers all over the globe any half sane TLD operator would run a sunrise period for tradename owners to grab any domains their claims cover. But that in itself will defeat the whole purpose of introducing new TLDs. Google, Coca Cola, BMW et al. will simply grab their domains under any TLD they can get and sue the living sh... out of anyone who beats them to those domains. Well, just as they have done with domains under existing TLDs.
Totally pointless, really.
You are the bad kid in the school yard. You see two other kids standing there with their breakfast in hand. Which one will you force to give you his sandwich: The small meagre one, or the huge muscular one?
[...] Take multivitamins [...]
Or just prepare your food yourself instead of warming up canned or frozen crap. It does not take a radical change of diet to live relatively healthy. Using fresh ingredients, especially fruit and vegetables, and skipping on all the various additives in industrial food goes a long way in fending off all kinds of illnesses and problems. Plus with a bit of practise it tastes way better than anything you could buy.
I remember slamming my head onto the table over partially localised expressions in the Microsoft Office apps. At least the language for mathematical expressions is localised, and also some scripting language if I remember correctly.
And what do you propose we do?
What everyone before us has done when they were fed up with their rulers: Line a few of the worst offenders up against the wall. Makes one hell of an example for the rest, at least for a while.
It really depends on what part of the industry you want to get into.
C++ and Java are the two safe choices. They are needed almost everywhere, and they are here to stay. From games to desktop apps to web apps either of those two will get you quite some way. Pro: You can do almost anything with those languages. Con: Most other programmers can, too.
However if you are leaning towards a specialised niche you obviously have to learn whatever is most common there. From Fortran to Ada there are virtually unlimited choices. Pro: You will be one in a rather limited (and potentially highly paid) crowd of people who speak that language. Con: No-one else needs you. And if your language of choice becomes obsolete, you essentially are too.
What I would do: Learn Perl (to serve you personally as the programmer's swiss army chainsaw that it is) and one of C++, Ruby or Ada. Each of these three will take you onto a different path in the industry, but I'd say none of them is a completely wrong choice.
Of course, if you are really masochistic, there's always assembler languages. They are still around, and they still provide for good job opportunities, but you're in for a world of hurt, writing really ugly stuff with a tremendously low margin for errors.
Badly designed GUI + social engineering != security flaw.
I disagree. It does not matter which attack vector or medium is used to break intended behaviour. And the fact that a UI allows such a severe subversion of intended functionality simply by telling users bullshit just makes this flaw all the more serious and shameful than a true machine exploit. A simple "Please review your choice and confirm it to be counted. It has not been stored yet!" and a biiiiiig red button labeled "Yes, this is my choice! Cast my vote!" should have been enough to avoid exactly this kind of flaw.
Voting machines do one thing, and one thing only. They should be incredibly simple to engineer and implement. It is beyond me how the manifacturers managed and still manage to screw them up so royally.
I don't think so (but hey, it's the US legal system; common sense does seldom apply). Using a certain common-place technology is vastly different from openly supporting a specific faith/school of thought. Nobody in their right mind would call a judge who handles a case about a car driver hitting a pedestrian biased just because he drove to the court house in his car.
I must apologise, wrong context. Hibernation of course can be used even with multiple OSs.
You ever heard of dual boot?
If people now harrass you for your sexuality, and then if you complain, your account gets banned because people were offended by you mentioning it, you'd be fine with that, right?
Nope. Did I say so anywhere? I made my position on the issue from TFA pretty clear here. My OP was a reply to Chris Burke's generalising and baseless claim that anyone who does not want to know others' sexual orientation is in fact homophobic and wants to retain their perfect hetero dream world. And I take serious offense and insult in this.