What's the point of building that ubber quad core gaming beast with a nvidia 90000^2 graphics adapter if you are using directx 9 and it only looks like you are running a 6600? Newer cards not only offer new acceleration features but are also faster (triangles-per-sec doesn't depend on the version of DirectX you're using), which means you can turn up the details, or (when it comes to RTSes) engage in larger battles without experiencing framerate drops. A new GeForce makes sense even when you're only playing DX9 games.
then I can get sued for contributing to copywrite infringment for providing that link. No, unless you also provide that link to others outside of the MAFIAA, because MAFIAA would have to say that they're potential pirates in order to sue you.
OMG. Contributory copyright infringement + blackmail + (arguably) extortion attempt + unlawful coercion. Somebody should sue the pants off the Starforce guys. However, IANAL.
Of course not. **AA would be crazy to try to take on Google. Their case would be much weaker for two reasons. First of all, Google has the cash to put together a stellar legal team. There goes all the "rule of law" nonsense.
You're entirely missing the point. He says that programmers make money as long as they do something creative, while musicians and filmmakers do something creative and make money off it indefinitely. And he does not imply that other people's work should be freely distributed. He says that the create-once-profit-forever notion is wrong (life + 100 years is almost like forever, because most creative works are totally outdated or obscure many years before that).
You're repeating a standard fallacy of copyright die-hards - that intangible property is exactly the same as tangible property. Your argument falls apart when you consider that music is not the same as land. Let's say you wrote a piece of music. You can duplicate the notes and give them to a friend. Now you both have that piece of music and enjoy it in its fullness. On the other hand, if you have a car and share it with a friend, neither of you will be able to take full advantage of it.
So if I spend 3 years of my life writing music, that's tough shit, I don't actually 'own' it at all. I get 3 years wages. Exactly. Can you own a musical composition? What about a graphical design? An algorithm? A mathematical formula? A number? This is not a trivial question. Additionally, if you couldn't own music but could be paid for creating it, it would foster even more creativity than the current system. Consider e.g. the Tolkien estate - they're still raking in profits from J.R.R.'s works while providing nothing to the society in return. We're essentially paying them an allowance, because their grandfather happened to be a great writer. If they couldn't profit from Tolkien's immaterial works, they would be more inclined to write something themselves, or at least get a job. This is very different from somebody inheriting material property or a profitable company - the company still benefits the society, and material wealth needs to be sold in order to make money from it, therefore benefiting the buyer.
you would see a huge uptake in OSS code in commercial projects That is exactly what GPL intends to prevent - proprietary software companies making profit from code released as free software. If you want to profit from code, write your own instead of convincing others to let you profit from their code. Or you can use LGPL libraries so that you can still profit from your code, while others can also benefit from changes you made to their code.
Screen dimming (or actually focus grabbing) in gksu is configurable. I had to turn it off to be able to input the password from the on-screen keyboard (useful for tablet PCs), you have to turn on the key/apps/gksu/disable-grab in Gconf.
The first versionof gksu was around in early 2004, so I think it didn't copy Vista.
a good chunk of baseline power could be provided by solar thermal. Baseline power is the minimal power required during the day, so it has to be supplied constantly. Solar thermal plant output drops to 0 watts at night unless you use some means of energy storage, and is severely reduced during the winter or when there are thick clouds, so they're not suited to supplying baseline power unless a reliable means of storing huge amounts of energy with little loss is developed. For now, the only feasible baseline power plants are hydro, nuclear and fossil.
Generally solar is good as long as the sky is clear. Imagine what would happen to a 100% solar economy hit by a month of thick clouds. I don't think relying on something as random as the weather for your main energy supply is a good idea. It's OK e.g. when you want to power farm machines, because if there's no power you can wait, but powering cities with it doesn't seem wise. I also think that green activists should stop pretending they can do without nuclear power (at least those of them that do), because right now they can't, and telling everybody not to invest in nuclear and wait until we come up with adequate energy storage technology is making the global warming worse by preventing substantial CO2 emission reductions.
Package management doesn't guard against security vulnerabilities, it guards against installing malware. Debian SSL was not malware, it was a legitimate program with a severe bug.
3. PROPRIETARY RIGHTS. (...) Nothing in this Agreement will be construed to limit any rights granted under the Open Source Licenses This is the relevant bit. By the way, the main points of this EULA are: 1. You may not unbrand an official build of Firefox. 2. Using Firefox does not give you the right to use Mozilla trademarks. However, since they are legally available elsewhere, and Mozilla does not sue anybody for non-slanderous uses of the logos, this is boilerplate. 3. Any proprietary stuff that may be contained in FF is off-limits. If I understand correctly, this was the Windows build made by Mozilla. Linux builds are made by the distros, so they would only need to comply with the source code licences.
And on the sixth day, God invented BitTorrent to spread bandwidth concerns across the entire internetwork. And it was good. On the seventh day, Satan invented deep packet inspection.
GNOME does not depend on Firefox in any way. The problem Mandriva had (and a problem that most distros have) was probably that FF2 required a newer library version than the one included in the distribution. On Windows, each applications typically ships its own libs; while it reduces dependencies, it introduces duplication and severely bloats install size.
I think that wide FOV displays are pointless given that a significant fraction of their intended target audience wears glasses, and their peripheral vision is severely limited. (I'm one of those)
I am serious- of all injustices in the world why has the Western world particularly adopted Tibet? No matter how you look at it, it's a rightful conquest. Do we expect France to come over and tell us to relinquish Puerto Rico? I think that if there were anti-American protests in Puerto Rico, US military wouldn't bomb in and outright shoot the protesters. In other countries, it's usually the separatist groups that are responsible for the violence, not the government.
Tibet was a theocratic feudal kingdom before China invaded, where most people were serfs who lived in hovels underneath lords. They revolt out of nationalistic pride, but in reality they are better off with China's modernizations. It is beyond me why US won't invade Cuba. They would be better off with US's modernizations.
the fear factor is what's REALLY going to scare most Chinese into avoiding "bad" sites. They're probably more afraid of being logged than blocked. The biggest fear the Chinese people have is that they don't know *what* to be afraid of. You can't tell in advance whether a particular potentially offending action will get you killed, put you in prison for life, or get no reaction whatsoever. The Communist Party has put a lot of work into creating this sort of paranoia, and just to be on the safe side people are imposing a sort of self-censorship on themselves (e.g. don't even try to access the blocked sites). This is the sort that works best.
I think that the Great Firewall is something like a high fence with lions behind it. You can easily jump over it, but most of those who do gets eaten, so the rest is less inclined to even try.
You complain that deviantart.com is blocked? You want DEVIANTS to conspire using MSN? googlepages.com and mediafire.com allow anybody to put child porn on the net, ebuddy.com caters to fetishists with MOBILE MASSAGING FOR EVERYONE, while xanga.com might look nice and family friendly on the outside, but it is a Web haven for nazis and communists! Microsoft is not trying to censor competition, it's trying to protect you and your children from molesters, terrorists, pirates and Satan! You should be grateful that they care about your well-being and protect you. Yet, you are still complaining instead of being thankful for the kind attention you receive. Man, what's happening with people nowadays? Can't any of you show some gratitude instead of moaning that Microsoft prevents you from harming yourselves and your families? I'm really disappointed with you, you rude, insensitive clods.
What about when a manufacturer discriminates against certain nationalities? I bought the game Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, and the manufacturer issued a patch that removes Securom disk checking from the game, BUT is doesn't work in Russian, Polish and Chinese releases. I am unlucky enough to have bought the Polish version instead of pirating it off the net. Now they tell me that all Poles, Russians and Chinese are thieves and give me the middle finger. Now THAT is more annoying than DRM in the first place, it really pisses me off that I'm still treated like a second-class customer because of where I live.
XP was different. I remember an article titled "The end of world is neigh, MS released good Windows" (it was in a Polish gaming magazine, so don't bother looking for it on the web). XP was the succesor to Windows 98, not windows 2000. It was much more stable, it supported a lot more hardware out-of-the-box than 2000 or 98 did (e.g wireless LAN cards), it had proper Unicode support (unlike 98), it was more user friendly, it was really better, and its hardware requirements were acceptable. Most exisitng and practically all new computers were able to run XP when it was released. On the other hand, Vista supports less harware, is less stable, less user friendly, has DRM which causes a catasrophic regression in DirectX sound quality (no harware sound processing, no EAX, NOTHING), is bloated beyond belief, even the basic version, and they completely fucked up Aero. They wanted the new interface to promote new DX10 cards, but by doing this they have given the finger to the early adopter. You not only needed the new Windows but also a new, very expensive graphics card, while the Linux crowd has been enjoying neater effects for a while on 5 year old hardware (I'm writing this from a TC1100 tablet PC which can run neat Compiz effects, and it has a Vista Experience Index of 1.0, though I usually have them turned off because they get in the way when CPU usage goes up, like when compiling).
Suggested topics: (...) "Vista is beyond repair because of DRM" Yes, it is. Look above for an example (no access to the sound hardware from DirectX).
responsibility a software company has when selling you code This is a comfortable illusion. But if you examine EULAs, e.g. Microsoft's, you learn that they have absolutely no obligation to ensure that their software is e.g. virus-free and they are not responsible for any catastrophic damage their software might cause.
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OMG. Contributory copyright infringement + blackmail + (arguably) extortion attempt + unlawful coercion. Somebody should sue the pants off the Starforce guys. However, IANAL.
You're entirely missing the point. He says that programmers make money as long as they do something creative, while musicians and filmmakers do something creative and make money off it indefinitely. And he does not imply that other people's work should be freely distributed. He says that the create-once-profit-forever notion is wrong (life + 100 years is almost like forever, because most creative works are totally outdated or obscure many years before that).
Screen dimming (or actually focus grabbing) in gksu is configurable. I had to turn it off to be able to input the password from the on-screen keyboard (useful for tablet PCs), you have to turn on the key /apps/gksu/disable-grab in Gconf.
The first versionof gksu was around in early 2004, so I think it didn't copy Vista.
When your sky looks like this for several weeks (not that uncommon in Europe), you have a problem.
Generally solar is good as long as the sky is clear. Imagine what would happen to a 100% solar economy hit by a month of thick clouds. I don't think relying on something as random as the weather for your main energy supply is a good idea. It's OK e.g. when you want to power farm machines, because if there's no power you can wait, but powering cities with it doesn't seem wise. I also think that green activists should stop pretending they can do without nuclear power (at least those of them that do), because right now they can't, and telling everybody not to invest in nuclear and wait until we come up with adequate energy storage technology is making the global warming worse by preventing substantial CO2 emission reductions.
Package management doesn't guard against security vulnerabilities, it guards against installing malware. Debian SSL was not malware, it was a legitimate program with a severe bug.
1. You may not unbrand an official build of Firefox.
2. Using Firefox does not give you the right to use Mozilla trademarks. However, since they are legally available elsewhere, and Mozilla does not sue anybody for non-slanderous uses of the logos, this is boilerplate.
3. Any proprietary stuff that may be contained in FF is off-limits.
If I understand correctly, this was the Windows build made by Mozilla. Linux builds are made by the distros, so they would only need to comply with the source code licences.
GNOME does not depend on Firefox in any way. The problem Mandriva had (and a problem that most distros have) was probably that FF2 required a newer library version than the one included in the distribution. On Windows, each applications typically ships its own libs; while it reduces dependencies, it introduces duplication and severely bloats install size.
I think that wide FOV displays are pointless given that a significant fraction of their intended target audience wears glasses, and their peripheral vision is severely limited. (I'm one of those)
At least he won't get stuffed into his locker, that's always some improvement.
I think that the Great Firewall is something like a high fence with lions behind it. You can easily jump over it, but most of those who do gets eaten, so the rest is less inclined to even try.
You complain that deviantart.com is blocked? You want DEVIANTS to conspire using MSN? googlepages.com and mediafire.com allow anybody to put child porn on the net, ebuddy.com caters to fetishists with MOBILE MASSAGING FOR EVERYONE, while xanga.com might look nice and family friendly on the outside, but it is a Web haven for nazis and communists! Microsoft is not trying to censor competition, it's trying to protect you and your children from molesters, terrorists, pirates and Satan! You should be grateful that they care about your well-being and protect you. Yet, you are still complaining instead of being thankful for the kind attention you receive. Man, what's happening with people nowadays? Can't any of you show some gratitude instead of moaning that Microsoft prevents you from harming yourselves and your families? I'm really disappointed with you, you rude, insensitive clods.
Wine doesn't need any Windows DLLs to run Half-Life 2 and other d3d games, so no.
What about when a manufacturer discriminates against certain nationalities?
I bought the game Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, and the manufacturer issued a patch that removes Securom disk checking from the game, BUT is doesn't work in Russian, Polish and Chinese releases. I am unlucky enough to have bought the Polish version instead of pirating it off the net. Now they tell me that all Poles, Russians and Chinese are thieves and give me the middle finger. Now THAT is more annoying than DRM in the first place, it really pisses me off that I'm still treated like a second-class customer because of where I live.
Use Inkscape 0.46.