Well at least the Star Trek loving cat owners amongst us;-)
If advertising on your website is "leeching" then we might as well shut the internet down now according to your principles.
Before you start bandying the word "criminals" about willy-nilly, you might like to think about this.
Under Swedish law as it has stood for the past years, what they were doing was NOT illegal, as they have never made any content available. They connect filesharers together by essentially sharing a centralised database of IP numbers, and although there is a good proportion of copyrighted material on PirateBay, there is also a lot of NON-copyrighted software.
As I understand it, the Swedish laws are being changed under pressure from the US and what they do MAY be considered illegal IN FUTURE. In which case they'll just switch servers to another haven, and business as usual. And as the case that took two years to prepare had half it's charges and evidence thrown out on day one, because the prosecuter ALSO made the same mistake as you i.e. accusing them of distributing copyright material, when this is patently not the case.
While I get your point, and am not questioning your morals, using emotive and factually incorrect language is no better than tabloid sensationalism.
No, just an epic fail at getting his facts straight...
There is around 1.3 to 1.5 billion people in China, and only about 7 billion in the entire world.
Besides, without all those chinese, where else are you going to get a takeaway at 4am ? Please don't get me wrong, I'm not attempting to follow suit... I think they are the hardest working people on the planet, which you might sniff at, but I think is admirable. If we all had the chinese work ethic, maybe we wouldn't be in such a mess.
I'm sorry, but surely in the case of XP, everyone says THAT is the one that has the better fuel economy, and improves performance.
So you want what YOU consider to be a "better" operating system, but you want to pay LESS for it than the current piece of crap they are trying to force on you.
Something like asking a Porsche dealer to sell you a Carrera for $3000, because they want you all to drive Volkwagen Beetles costing $6000.
I'm all out of car analogies for one day. You could say I've lost my drive.
HAI CAN HAS DBASE? I HAZ A VARIABLE1 IS NOTHING IM IN YR DATA;) "test.mdb"
CAN I PLZ GET column1 column2 column3
ALL UP IN table1
OMG column1 IZ BIGGER THAN 5
ALL UR BASE R BELONG 2 VARIABLE1 IM OUTTA YR DATA VISIBLE VARIABLE1 KTHXBYE
Except Revelations was tacked onto the end of the bible based on the prophecies of some old guy living in a cave for 40 years, somewhere around 300 AD I believe. Sounds like a case of one too many magic mushrooms to me.
You go to a car dealer, ask to buy the latest Toyota Landcruiser 2008 model, and then ask them to downgrade it back to the 2006 model by replacing the engine and removing the GPS computer. And you expect the car dealer to cover the cost of this.
Sorry, but even if the XP downgrade itself should be free, there's still the time and labour of some geek technician in the computer shop to wipe the drive and reinstall the other O/S. It's just a sad fact of life that some people want everything for nothing, and an even sadder fact that they feel it necessary to sue if they can't get their own way. Something akin to a 3 year old stamping her foot... petulant, that's the word I was looking for;-)
No it was more a general reaction to the games they are playing.
Yes, all companies like to make money any way they legally can, but consumer rights are protected under law in most countries, despite what they want to put in a shrink-wrapped EULA.
It's bad enough that they want to force control on our media via the DRM (and what a winner THAT was eh ?), but now they effectively want to DRM our hardware and tell us we cannot legally modify it.
Our family has a lot of mobile phones, and my 11 year old daughter especially likes to buy alternative casings in pretty colors etc. What Apple are trying now is akin to Nokia saying, "you can only buy snap on cases from us, and not from another manufacturer".
Or perhaps a closer analogy is telling us we cannot change the screensaver from the Nokia logo !
Pardon my French, but f***ing nonsense. They have already MADE their money by selling you the un-jail-broken piece of crap in the first place. It is MY choice what or what not to put on MY device that I have paid for, and if I have to modify the underlying firmware to do so, I will.
Buying an iPhone does not violate my freedom of choice to decide what I do with it, neither does it obligate me to ONLY ever buy software from Apple.
You might as well have printer manufacturers telling people it is illegal to use cheaper refillable ink cartridges... no... wait... bad example possibly.
But for down-and-dirty hack attacks, surely that's the whole reason why they use a ditributed network of bot machines... so your IP rules suddenly become worthless.
You would not buy a car sight unseen, neither would you buy a house, or any other physical commodity without first verifying it is what you wanted.
However, what happens with entertainment media ? You pay BEFORE you see it, be it movies, tv, music etc. And what happens if you are NOT entertained with the latest Britney clone, or the latest copycat movie ? Ever tried to ask for a refund after a movie because it sucked ?
Damn, here in Philippines, we pay for cable because the terrestrial TV sucks so bad and has commercial breaks every 6 minutes... so what's the latest gimmick of the cable company ? They start sneaking in commercials, by using the "sponsored by" monnicker.
Like I said, entertainment is the only industry where you pay for something you might not even enjoy, and later regret even purchasing.
I will quite happily pay for a VCD (they only cost a dollar, and that's the legal ones) if I know what I'm getting... my VCD collection numbers over 500 discs now. But I wouldn't think twice about grabbing a copy online first, to see if it's what I really want.
Yes, the comma works well, but possibly better might have been the use of the word "even", although enclosing the whole phrase in brackets would have been overkill.
Wish I had mod points for the finest subliminal dig at MSIE I've seen in a long time.
No, but if you leave two of them next to each other, the following morning they will have stacked on top of each other, and then miraculously after 9 months, a smaller third block will appear from nowhere, that seems to do nothing but emit an annoying shrieking sound and leak battery acid.
And I thought that censoring what my 7 year watches would be MY responsibility as a parent. Turns out you can just get the government to do it for free. Who'da thunk it ?
Just turn OFF the damn TV, parent your OWN kids, and stop spoiling the fun for the rest of us who ARE old enough and mature enough to decide what we watch.
I think [insert-deity-of-you-choice] has prior art on a "device capable of translating visual stimulus via a self-actuating neural network into audio signals".
The only difference here would be the addition of "using a computer".
Oh yes, I'm not debating the usefulness of it... I'm just saying that supplying your email should be an opt-in choice to receive those notifications, not a requirement simply to sign up for an account.
No, I think the problem was that the smoke-filled planes DIDN'T suck. There seemed to be no extractors in place whatsoever.
I remember my first flight ever, out from UK to Abu Dhabi back in 1995 on BA. While dealing with my first time nerves and dying for a smoke already having stood in line for 3 hours waiting to check in, I was offered the choice of smoking or non smoking, so I took the smoking naturally.
However, about 3 hours into the flight, I was becoming sick as a dog, because the smoke simply didn't clear from the area, and hung there like a grey sheet throughout the flight. I actually asked if I could move seat into non-smoking, and then just nip back for a quick one as I felt the need.
I mean they managed to retrofit the 747s and the A380s with video screens in the backs of seats and all the other gimics, they couldn't install a dman extractor fan in the smoking area ? No, they just banned the lot, making flying for a smoker a damn torture.
Even now, I fail to see why they couldn't use ONE toilet as a smoking room with a proper extractor... instead of putting in smoke detectors and further pissing people off. Apart from the obvious problem of one side of the plane being queued with people waiting to use it. But if you've ever done long haul economy (14 hours) from Hong Kong to Paris, you'll experience those bathroom queues anyway.
And then wait till they sell your address to a nice spam company.
There should be no reason they'd need your email address unless I wish to receive digests of posts via email. Especially if it's a forum where I can easily bookmark my posts, and check for updates when I feel like it.
How I wish you could just log in with a username and password, then set my preferences to "web only"... and never have to give my email to yet another unknown quantity.
If course you neglect the point that at the time, Netscape did suck donkey testicles, and MSIE 4 WAS the better browser.
So by doing EXACTLY the same thing as Firefox et al are apparently doing now, you condemn them for their past actions ?
Does the word "hypocritical" mean anything to you ?
What other business releases a great new product that everyone wants, and then when they sell a million units, and have the dominant market share, they say "okay boys, we've done enough, we'd better stop innovating / selling now in case we become a monopoly". You think Apple would play by these rules ?
You have to face the fact that most people buy a computer FOR the internet... whether they are a teen who wants to play online games, granny who wants to check her email, or a business who needs to send their documents to a branch office in Outer Mongolia... Internet connectivity is an implicit requirement for any O/S in the 21st Century.
So just let the OEMs bundle Firefox and Opera along with all the other crapware they push on you, and have not one, but 3 Internet Icons on the Desktop... you can even let them all be blue E's if you are worried about user association of blue E = Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Well at least the Star Trek loving cat owners amongst us ;-)
If advertising on your website is "leeching" then we might as well shut the internet down now according to your principles.
Before you start bandying the word "criminals" about willy-nilly, you might like to think about this.
Under Swedish law as it has stood for the past years, what they were doing was NOT illegal, as they have never made any content available. They connect filesharers together by essentially sharing a centralised database of IP numbers, and although there is a good proportion of copyrighted material on PirateBay, there is also a lot of NON-copyrighted software.
As I understand it, the Swedish laws are being changed under pressure from the US and what they do MAY be considered illegal IN FUTURE. In which case they'll just switch servers to another haven, and business as usual. And as the case that took two years to prepare had half it's charges and evidence thrown out on day one, because the prosecuter ALSO made the same mistake as you i.e. accusing them of distributing copyright material, when this is patently not the case.
While I get your point, and am not questioning your morals, using emotive and factually incorrect language is no better than tabloid sensationalism.
No, just an epic fail at getting his facts straight ...
There is around 1.3 to 1.5 billion people in China, and only about 7 billion in the entire world.
Besides, without all those chinese, where else are you going to get a takeaway at 4am ? Please don't get me wrong, I'm not attempting to follow suit ... I think they are the hardest working people on the planet, which you might sniff at, but I think is admirable. If we all had the chinese work ethic, maybe we wouldn't be in such a mess.
kdawson strikes again huh ?
Why, because you didn't think of it first ?
I'm sorry, but surely in the case of XP, everyone says THAT is the one that has the better fuel economy, and improves performance.
So you want what YOU consider to be a "better" operating system, but you want to pay LESS for it than the current piece of crap they are trying to force on you.
Something like asking a Porsche dealer to sell you a Carrera for $3000, because they want you all to drive Volkwagen Beetles costing $6000.
I'm all out of car analogies for one day. You could say I've lost my drive.
It's already been done ...
HAI ;) "test.mdb"
CAN HAS DBASE?
I HAZ A VARIABLE1 IS NOTHING
IM IN YR DATA
CAN I PLZ GET column1 column2 column3
ALL UP IN table1
OMG column1 IZ BIGGER THAN 5
ALL UR BASE R BELONG 2 VARIABLE1
IM OUTTA YR DATA
VISIBLE VARIABLE1
KTHXBYE
Except Revelations was tacked onto the end of the bible based on the prophecies of some old guy living in a cave for 40 years, somewhere around 300 AD I believe. Sounds like a case of one too many magic mushrooms to me.
Car analogy.
You go to a car dealer, ask to buy the latest Toyota Landcruiser 2008 model, and then ask them to downgrade it back to the 2006 model by replacing the engine and removing the GPS computer. And you expect the car dealer to cover the cost of this.
Sorry, but even if the XP downgrade itself should be free, there's still the time and labour of some geek technician in the computer shop to wipe the drive and reinstall the other O/S. It's just a sad fact of life that some people want everything for nothing, and an even sadder fact that they feel it necessary to sue if they can't get their own way. Something akin to a 3 year old stamping her foot ... petulant, that's the word I was looking for ;-)
No it was more a general reaction to the games they are playing.
Yes, all companies like to make money any way they legally can, but consumer rights are protected under law in most countries, despite what they want to put in a shrink-wrapped EULA.
It's bad enough that they want to force control on our media via the DRM (and what a winner THAT was eh ?), but now they effectively want to DRM our hardware and tell us we cannot legally modify it.
Our family has a lot of mobile phones, and my 11 year old daughter especially likes to buy alternative casings in pretty colors etc. What Apple are trying now is akin to Nokia saying, "you can only buy snap on cases from us, and not from another manufacturer".
Or perhaps a closer analogy is telling us we cannot change the screensaver from the Nokia logo !
Pardon my French, but f***ing nonsense. They have already MADE their money by selling you the un-jail-broken piece of crap in the first place. It is MY choice what or what not to put on MY device that I have paid for, and if I have to modify the underlying firmware to do so, I will.
Buying an iPhone does not violate my freedom of choice to decide what I do with it, neither does it obligate me to ONLY ever buy software from Apple.
You might as well have printer manufacturers telling people it is illegal to use cheaper refillable ink cartridges ... no ... wait ... bad example possibly.
You might want to use a fully qualified path to the rm command, but apart from that, 9/10.
For spam limitation, this is effective.
But for down-and-dirty hack attacks, surely that's the whole reason why they use a ditributed network of bot machines ... so your IP rules suddenly become worthless.
Obligatory car analogy ...
You would not buy a car sight unseen, neither would you buy a house, or any other physical commodity without first verifying it is what you wanted.
However, what happens with entertainment media ? You pay BEFORE you see it, be it movies, tv, music etc. And what happens if you are NOT entertained with the latest Britney clone, or the latest copycat movie ? Ever tried to ask for a refund after a movie because it sucked ?
Damn, here in Philippines, we pay for cable because the terrestrial TV sucks so bad and has commercial breaks every 6 minutes ... so what's the latest gimmick of the cable company ? They start sneaking in commercials, by using the "sponsored by" monnicker.
Like I said, entertainment is the only industry where you pay for something you might not even enjoy, and later regret even purchasing.
I will quite happily pay for a VCD (they only cost a dollar, and that's the legal ones) if I know what I'm getting ... my VCD collection numbers over 500 discs now. But I wouldn't think twice about grabbing a copy online first, to see if it's what I really want.
Yes, the comma works well, but possibly better might have been the use of the word "even", although enclosing the whole phrase in brackets would have been overkill.
Wish I had mod points for the finest subliminal dig at MSIE I've seen in a long time.
No, but if you leave two of them next to each other, the following morning they will have stacked on top of each other, and then miraculously after 9 months, a smaller third block will appear from nowhere, that seems to do nothing but emit an annoying shrieking sound and leak battery acid.
So was last Tuesday in October then ?
Either I just lost 3 months of my life, or you posted the same link twice !
And I thought that censoring what my 7 year watches would be MY responsibility as a parent. Turns out you can just get the government to do it for free. Who'da thunk it ?
Just turn OFF the damn TV, parent your OWN kids, and stop spoiling the fun for the rest of us who ARE old enough and mature enough to decide what we watch.
Google sponsored ad noticed at the top of the page ...
Text to Speech Suite 2009
New Text to Speech software release Free download today
www.SpeakComputers.com/
Sweet sweet irony, but it's reassuring to see that their contextual ads DO work.
Only if you were using kindle to read slashdot out loud.
So when the law comes calling, just say you're dyslexic. AFAIK, that is a "valid" disability.
I think [insert-deity-of-you-choice] has prior art on a "device capable of translating visual stimulus via a self-actuating neural network into audio signals".
The only difference here would be the addition of "using a computer".
Oh yes, I'm not debating the usefulness of it ... I'm just saying that supplying your email should be an opt-in choice to receive those notifications, not a requirement simply to sign up for an account.
No, I think the problem was that the smoke-filled planes DIDN'T suck. There seemed to be no extractors in place whatsoever.
I remember my first flight ever, out from UK to Abu Dhabi back in 1995 on BA. While dealing with my first time nerves and dying for a smoke already having stood in line for 3 hours waiting to check in, I was offered the choice of smoking or non smoking, so I took the smoking naturally.
However, about 3 hours into the flight, I was becoming sick as a dog, because the smoke simply didn't clear from the area, and hung there like a grey sheet throughout the flight. I actually asked if I could move seat into non-smoking, and then just nip back for a quick one as I felt the need.
I mean they managed to retrofit the 747s and the A380s with video screens in the backs of seats and all the other gimics, they couldn't install a dman extractor fan in the smoking area ? No, they just banned the lot, making flying for a smoker a damn torture.
Even now, I fail to see why they couldn't use ONE toilet as a smoking room with a proper extractor ... instead of putting in smoke detectors and further pissing people off. Apart from the obvious problem of one side of the plane being queued with people waiting to use it. But if you've ever done long haul economy (14 hours) from Hong Kong to Paris, you'll experience those bathroom queues anyway.
And then wait till they sell your address to a nice spam company.
There should be no reason they'd need your email address unless I wish to receive digests of posts via email. Especially if it's a forum where I can easily bookmark my posts, and check for updates when I feel like it.
How I wish you could just log in with a username and password, then set my preferences to "web only" ... and never have to give my email to yet another unknown quantity.
If course you neglect the point that at the time, Netscape did suck donkey testicles, and MSIE 4 WAS the better browser.
So by doing EXACTLY the same thing as Firefox et al are apparently doing now, you condemn them for their past actions ?
Does the word "hypocritical" mean anything to you ?
What other business releases a great new product that everyone wants, and then when they sell a million units, and have the dominant market share, they say "okay boys, we've done enough, we'd better stop innovating / selling now in case we become a monopoly". You think Apple would play by these rules ?
You have to face the fact that most people buy a computer FOR the internet ... whether they are a teen who wants to play online games, granny who wants to check her email, or a business who needs to send their documents to a branch office in Outer Mongolia ... Internet connectivity is an implicit requirement for any O/S in the 21st Century.
So just let the OEMs bundle Firefox and Opera along with all the other crapware they push on you, and have not one, but 3 Internet Icons on the Desktop ... you can even let them all be blue E's if you are worried about user association of blue E = Internet.