"Fight them over there so we don't have to at home" is such an odious and incredibly false catch phrase. Really it disappoints me that so many Americans swallow it. How about, don't fight them over there or at home?
So, in saying that you are saying that we shouldn't have gone after Hitler? Hussein and Hitler did about the same things, both invaded other countries, both killed their own citizens, etc. Hitler never came and bombed us directly like Hussein, it was the Japanese that bombed pearl harbor, just as it was Afghanistan and the Talaban that caused 9/11. Cuba never attacked us directly, yet surely you don't think that them having missiles aimed at the US is any reason to have missiles aimed back at Cuba. The Soviet Union never attacked us directly, but surely there was a reason to keep nuclear missiles armed during the cold war.
Bottom line: If you oppose the war in Iraq for the reasons you are stating, then you are agreeing that the USA shouldn't have done anything to stop Hitler or any other foreign power that never directly attacked the US.
There are no universally accepted definitions of insurgency. The common concept, in a wide range of definitions, is that it involves a desire for political power, achieved through means illegal under the rules of the existing government. It has long been used in the professional military and political literature.
So, using that accepted common concept, there are only insurgents if they are rebelling VS the government. So of course when the government is corrupt those that are corrupt aren't the insurgents. Hussein was a bad man, Hitler was a bad man, the funny thing is though, the same people who lament that our government didn't do anything about Hitler until it involved the US (who killed his own people and invaded other countries) are the same people who think that we shouldn't go after Hussein (who killed his own people and invaded other countries).
That these Blu-ray compatible discs will be primarily used by consumers to store ripped Blu-ray movies.
You could say that about any media, CDs, DVDs, even floppy disks (for holding ripped games), but I don't see the average consumer wanting/needing that much storage, in fact my current low-end computer only has a 20 gig HD and after installing tons of programs and Xubuntu I still have 15 gigs free (now granted, my image, movie and music collection is small on that) but still, I just don't see the need of the average person to need 1 TB of BR data even to store ripped movies as it would be easier to buy a cheap 25 gig disk and burn it to there. An increase in storage space is nice, but for 98% of the population, it is needless.
By the fact that YouTube is not the "copyright police" and that if Viacom wants to take down a video they have to tell YouTube that and not expect YouTube to take down all Viacom videos.
But, compared to everything else, housing prices fell sharply. Just look at a gallon of gas back in 2000, it was $1.50-$2.00ish if I remember correctly, today it has nearly doubled to $3.50-$4.00
Well of course. Piracy is still superior in aspects other then price. For example this only works online, no standard format, is DRMed, etc. If I pirate the same song, I can usually get it in A standard format (MP3, FLAC, OGG), No DRM, can play it on every player from my car, to my generic MP3 player, to a high-end iPod, on Vista, on Linux, on Mac, even on game consoles! So until we get a large selection of DRM-free music at a cheap price that is in a standard format, I don't think piracy will ever stop until it becomes that piracy is no longer the better choice (as in the quality is worse, no advantage to it being DRM free as the "legal" downloads are DRM Free, etc.)
Yes, but there are other sites that let you do that without the hassles. Last.Fm, Pandora, even YouTube let you do the same thing without all the proprietary nonsense and in the case of YouTube there is probably one of the largest selection of music on the web on that site. If you want to rip music you can either use Audacity or download YouTube videos in FLV format and then convert them. So it is similar to Last.FM, Pandora and YouTube but has more hassles? No thanks.
No, you can't download anything from this service nor last.fm or pandora, however as with all analoge streams you can rip them using hardware or you can rip them using Audacity or a similar program.
From my experience using Audacity (for non-commercial music that I didn't want to hunt to download, so you can back off RIAA inquisitors), if you save it in a lossless format there is little difference, but if you try to encode it as MP3 or OGG at any but the highest bitrates, the quality noticeably suffers.
And that is what YouTube is for. Seriously, you can listen to any song for free without the hassle/legality of Torrenting it. And because the song is in analogue audio, you can even dump the stream to "download" it.
There is no "year of the Linux desktop", there is only a gradual increase of Linux and decrease of Windows. We are seeing that happen very quickly, there won't be a sudden release of Ubuntu that makes everyone convert to Linux, but there will be a slow change to Linux and it is happening as I type this.
A poor economy makes it impossible to throw money at a solution and hope it to work. This has lead to the rise of Linux-based UMPCs such as the EEE and the OLPC project. When someone doesn't have $2000 to spend on a shiny new Vista computer with the 4 gigs of RAM it needs and a quad core CPU, they start looking at what they really need, and if they can save $50 by not having Windows and instead have Ubuntu, they will. If they can save $300 and buy a low-end laptop like the EEE rather then a more powerful one, they will. When people start throwing money at a situation, innovation suffers. This is how Windows got its monopoly, businesses who had no clue what they really needed thought it would be better to spend $2000 and get a new Windows desktop then look at a lower-end $1000 DOS or other OS system. Today, with a slowing economy people might actually look and find that they don't need Windows and move on to Linux. A poor economy might just be what is needed for Linux.
As much as I'd like to believe you, the train-wreck of Vista was supposed to usher in the year of the Linux desktop...
Look around you, Linux adoption is higher then ever. Ubuntu has made Linux easy, Dell has Linux installed on normal PCs (along with some other computer makers), the gPC is many times sold out at Wal-Mart, the eeePC with Linux is quite popular, and the use of Linux-based tablets such as the N800 is on the increase. Never before could you get Linux so easily, it still isn't as common to walk into a large retailer and find computers pre-installed with Linux but if you spend 5 minutes hunting around, Linux is easy to find.
Oh, that's a fact, is it? So you happened to be born on a particular patch of soil and have never had a run-in with oppressive government -- luck of the draw, right? Your great-great grandfathers had the honor and the foresight to carve up the entire globe into completely arbitrary empires, and now you're happy to sit there in your Aeron chair with your computers and your big-screen TVs and your Internets and pat yourself on the back about it? "Sorry about where you were born, olde chappe, but you'd best to hie back there forthwith, wot!" Never mind the fact that the direct fallout of colonialism can be seen in the oppressive governments and violent chaos now evident in much of the developing world -- as long as they don't try to climb over "our" fence, you're OK with it, I guess?
And that is why there are perfectly legal ways to get into a country. And if they are illegal they are breaking the law and the punishment is deportation. And this isn't like "piracy" that you can say that the illegal way is somehow better because it isn't. We have visas, and green cards for a reason.
Oh yes, a war for oil. And how great has that worked out? Considering that oil is at record highs, I don't think that it was a "war for oil" because had it been a "war for oil" we would have more oil. There is no evidence it was a "war for oil". It was a war based on bad intelligence and widespread panic in the months following 9/11. As for it being a war on oil, give your baseless theories a rest and take off the tin-foil hat.
Information should never be illegal unless it is a matter of (real) national security. Terrorist tactics are not a matter of national security, therefore the information should not be illegal. With the suppression of information comes the suppression of our freedoms. Read 1984 and see how close we are to becoming a similar society. In all dictatorships, it was first the information that was "dangerous to the state" then it became "dangerous to the state's morals" until all you can get is government propaganda.
Knowing terrorist tactics neither makes you a threat nor makes you a terrorist.
Wow.... So now, not only using "piracy" do you get A) Free content B) No DRM C) Faster content (if what you are downloading hasn't been localized for where you live) but now it is more legal then buying a DVD and watching it?!?! And people wonder why "piracy" has grown.
Well that would be great, the bad part is though, most of my "technical work" as I put it, is my friends/family saying that their computer is slow and would I fix it for them, so no, I don't get paid (though, I must say I would make a decent living if I did!)
That is odd though, I have installed Firefox on many computers when I have done technical work, and most if not all still use IE as their primary browser usually filling it back up with spyware for me to remove again... About the only ways I know how to make people use Firefox is either A) switch Firefox to an IE icon, or B) delete all evidence of IE except for the.EXEs hidden in system folders. I highly, highly doubt that most Windows users using Safari are just the iTunes users, now, I would expect most of the downloads of Safari for Windows to have come from iTunes but downloads usually don't equal use of the browser.
All religion aside, stealing is wrong because, not that you get something but rather something gets taken away. For example, if I steal your car, it isn't bad because I get a car but it is because you lose your car. That is why "piracy" != stealing, because I get something and no one loses anything (and don't say that the makers lose a sale because if I buy a used video game 0% of that is going to the original makers of it). Laws were made to create order, today though, many are made to boost corporations and government.
Just asked him about this--he says part of the reason he avoids FOSS is not the software... it's the community. He got tired of dealing with the folks who looked down on him because he has certain business functions that he is required to use Windows for.
But for most if not all free software you don't even need to use the community. Take for instance Firefox, it is a browser that is installed on many Windows machines, it is F/OSS, better then IE, and is rather stable. Now how many users of Firefox have ever had to do anything with the community? My guess is very, very few. How many users of the GIMP have ever had to deal with the community, Pidgen, GNOME, KDE??? My guess is very, very few. Most (90-95%) of people using the software don't even go to the project website regularly my guess would be. About the only reason I see for a non-technical user to even need to touch the community of a F/OSS project would be to A) Report bugs or B) Complain to a distro specific forum ie: The Ubuntu Forum that something doesn't work. I don't see how the community would be a major reason to not use at least some F/OSS software, if your boss is scared of Firefox because it is F/OSS the original poster was right, he has become a zealot.
For what it's worth, I can sympathize with his lack of interest for anything he has to compile himself. I'd consider myself quite computer literate. I can and have compiled programs in the past and likely will again in the future. Still, when I am trying to figure out what software to go with, anything I have to compile (or run in any other non-direct/standard fashion) is always going to be at the bottom of the list. This goes double for smaller software projects. If I run into any problems installing or running, the last thing I want to have to trouble-shoot is if I screwed something up compiling it or if the package wasn't quite complete or if a dependency is missing or god knows what.
But for a large business it is good to compile some software by hand. For example on limited hardware, compiling a program may allow you to squeeze some extra performance out of the code or compile it to be faster then a stand-alone binary could.
Exactly. Many non-technical users judge the quality of Linux by what the DE looks like. If it has a black bar on the bottom it is futuristic and "vista-like", if it has a brightly colored bar on the bottom it is automatically XP-like and seems to be as familiar to them as XP, if it has a bar at the top and the bottom it becomes OS X-like, however if it is grey on the bottom and uses a rectangle as a applications menu, it is automatically thought as Windows 95/98/ME and old and obsolete. Now, all this could be avoided by using say, black or another color on the bottom, but grey will always make the non-technical users think that Linux is as current as Windows 98. Ubuntu with the brown color scheme seems to avoid this as brown hasn't been used much in any default Windows theme yet.
Am I the only one who thinks that's a really bad idea?
Yes and no. While you are giving an unknown script root access (a bad idea if there ever was one), it is really not much different then "sudo apt-get install *package*" on Ubuntu as in both cases you are running an unknown binary. Or it could be similar to "just add" deb *somesite* to your apt source list and then sudo apt-get install *package* or it would be just as bad to just chmod +rwx *binary* and./binary. So yes, it is a bad idea, but many other ways of downloading Linux packages are worse (as you can't check the script even).
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So, in saying that you are saying that we shouldn't have gone after Hitler? Hussein and Hitler did about the same things, both invaded other countries, both killed their own citizens, etc. Hitler never came and bombed us directly like Hussein, it was the Japanese that bombed pearl harbor, just as it was Afghanistan and the Talaban that caused 9/11. Cuba never attacked us directly, yet surely you don't think that them having missiles aimed at the US is any reason to have missiles aimed back at Cuba. The Soviet Union never attacked us directly, but surely there was a reason to keep nuclear missiles armed during the cold war.
Bottom line: If you oppose the war in Iraq for the reasons you are stating, then you are agreeing that the USA shouldn't have done anything to stop Hitler or any other foreign power that never directly attacked the US.
So, using that accepted common concept, there are only insurgents if they are rebelling VS the government. So of course when the government is corrupt those that are corrupt aren't the insurgents. Hussein was a bad man, Hitler was a bad man, the funny thing is though, the same people who lament that our government didn't do anything about Hitler until it involved the US (who killed his own people and invaded other countries) are the same people who think that we shouldn't go after Hussein (who killed his own people and invaded other countries).
You could say that about any media, CDs, DVDs, even floppy disks (for holding ripped games), but I don't see the average consumer wanting/needing that much storage, in fact my current low-end computer only has a 20 gig HD and after installing tons of programs and Xubuntu I still have 15 gigs free (now granted, my image, movie and music collection is small on that) but still, I just don't see the need of the average person to need 1 TB of BR data even to store ripped movies as it would be easier to buy a cheap 25 gig disk and burn it to there. An increase in storage space is nice, but for 98% of the population, it is needless.
By the fact that YouTube is not the "copyright police" and that if Viacom wants to take down a video they have to tell YouTube that and not expect YouTube to take down all Viacom videos.
But, compared to everything else, housing prices fell sharply. Just look at a gallon of gas back in 2000, it was $1.50-$2.00ish if I remember correctly, today it has nearly doubled to $3.50-$4.00
Well of course. Piracy is still superior in aspects other then price. For example this only works online, no standard format, is DRMed, etc. If I pirate the same song, I can usually get it in A standard format (MP3, FLAC, OGG), No DRM, can play it on every player from my car, to my generic MP3 player, to a high-end iPod, on Vista, on Linux, on Mac, even on game consoles! So until we get a large selection of DRM-free music at a cheap price that is in a standard format, I don't think piracy will ever stop until it becomes that piracy is no longer the better choice (as in the quality is worse, no advantage to it being DRM free as the "legal" downloads are DRM Free, etc.)
Yes, now, they aren't getting as much profit as they used to, but some people are smart and are taking advantage of rock-bottom housing prices.
Yes, but there are other sites that let you do that without the hassles. Last.Fm, Pandora, even YouTube let you do the same thing without all the proprietary nonsense and in the case of YouTube there is probably one of the largest selection of music on the web on that site. If you want to rip music you can either use Audacity or download YouTube videos in FLV format and then convert them. So it is similar to Last.FM, Pandora and YouTube but has more hassles? No thanks.
No, you can't download anything from this service nor last.fm or pandora, however as with all analoge streams you can rip them using hardware or you can rip them using Audacity or a similar program.
From my experience using Audacity (for non-commercial music that I didn't want to hunt to download, so you can back off RIAA inquisitors), if you save it in a lossless format there is little difference, but if you try to encode it as MP3 or OGG at any but the highest bitrates, the quality noticeably suffers.
And that is what YouTube is for. Seriously, you can listen to any song for free without the hassle/legality of Torrenting it. And because the song is in analogue audio, you can even dump the stream to "download" it.
There is no "year of the Linux desktop", there is only a gradual increase of Linux and decrease of Windows. We are seeing that happen very quickly, there won't be a sudden release of Ubuntu that makes everyone convert to Linux, but there will be a slow change to Linux and it is happening as I type this.
A poor economy makes it impossible to throw money at a solution and hope it to work. This has lead to the rise of Linux-based UMPCs such as the EEE and the OLPC project. When someone doesn't have $2000 to spend on a shiny new Vista computer with the 4 gigs of RAM it needs and a quad core CPU, they start looking at what they really need, and if they can save $50 by not having Windows and instead have Ubuntu, they will. If they can save $300 and buy a low-end laptop like the EEE rather then a more powerful one, they will. When people start throwing money at a situation, innovation suffers. This is how Windows got its monopoly, businesses who had no clue what they really needed thought it would be better to spend $2000 and get a new Windows desktop then look at a lower-end $1000 DOS or other OS system. Today, with a slowing economy people might actually look and find that they don't need Windows and move on to Linux. A poor economy might just be what is needed for Linux.
Look around you, Linux adoption is higher then ever. Ubuntu has made Linux easy, Dell has Linux installed on normal PCs (along with some other computer makers), the gPC is many times sold out at Wal-Mart, the eeePC with Linux is quite popular, and the use of Linux-based tablets such as the N800 is on the increase. Never before could you get Linux so easily, it still isn't as common to walk into a large retailer and find computers pre-installed with Linux but if you spend 5 minutes hunting around, Linux is easy to find.
And that is why there are perfectly legal ways to get into a country. And if they are illegal they are breaking the law and the punishment is deportation. And this isn't like "piracy" that you can say that the illegal way is somehow better because it isn't. We have visas, and green cards for a reason.
Oh yes, a war for oil. And how great has that worked out? Considering that oil is at record highs, I don't think that it was a "war for oil" because had it been a "war for oil" we would have more oil. There is no evidence it was a "war for oil". It was a war based on bad intelligence and widespread panic in the months following 9/11. As for it being a war on oil, give your baseless theories a rest and take off the tin-foil hat.
Information should never be illegal unless it is a matter of (real) national security. Terrorist tactics are not a matter of national security, therefore the information should not be illegal. With the suppression of information comes the suppression of our freedoms. Read 1984 and see how close we are to becoming a similar society. In all dictatorships, it was first the information that was "dangerous to the state" then it became "dangerous to the state's morals" until all you can get is government propaganda.
Knowing terrorist tactics neither makes you a threat nor makes you a terrorist.
Wow.... So now, not only using "piracy" do you get A) Free content B) No DRM C) Faster content (if what you are downloading hasn't been localized for where you live) but now it is more legal then buying a DVD and watching it?!?! And people wonder why "piracy" has grown.
Well that would be great, the bad part is though, most of my "technical work" as I put it, is my friends/family saying that their computer is slow and would I fix it for them, so no, I don't get paid (though, I must say I would make a decent living if I did!)
That is odd though, I have installed Firefox on many computers when I have done technical work, and most if not all still use IE as their primary browser usually filling it back up with spyware for me to remove again... About the only ways I know how to make people use Firefox is either A) switch Firefox to an IE icon, or B) delete all evidence of IE except for the .EXEs hidden in system folders. I highly, highly doubt that most Windows users using Safari are just the iTunes users, now, I would expect most of the downloads of Safari for Windows to have come from iTunes but downloads usually don't equal use of the browser.
All religion aside, stealing is wrong because, not that you get something but rather something gets taken away. For example, if I steal your car, it isn't bad because I get a car but it is because you lose your car. That is why "piracy" != stealing, because I get something and no one loses anything (and don't say that the makers lose a sale because if I buy a used video game 0% of that is going to the original makers of it). Laws were made to create order, today though, many are made to boost corporations and government.
But for most if not all free software you don't even need to use the community. Take for instance Firefox, it is a browser that is installed on many Windows machines, it is F/OSS, better then IE, and is rather stable. Now how many users of Firefox have ever had to do anything with the community? My guess is very, very few. How many users of the GIMP have ever had to deal with the community, Pidgen, GNOME, KDE??? My guess is very, very few. Most (90-95%) of people using the software don't even go to the project website regularly my guess would be. About the only reason I see for a non-technical user to even need to touch the community of a F/OSS project would be to A) Report bugs or B) Complain to a distro specific forum ie: The Ubuntu Forum that something doesn't work. I don't see how the community would be a major reason to not use at least some F/OSS software, if your boss is scared of Firefox because it is F/OSS the original poster was right, he has become a zealot.
But for a large business it is good to compile some software by hand. For example on limited hardware, compiling a program may allow you to squeeze some extra performance out of the code or compile it to be faster then a stand-alone binary could.
Exactly. Many non-technical users judge the quality of Linux by what the DE looks like. If it has a black bar on the bottom it is futuristic and "vista-like", if it has a brightly colored bar on the bottom it is automatically XP-like and seems to be as familiar to them as XP, if it has a bar at the top and the bottom it becomes OS X-like, however if it is grey on the bottom and uses a rectangle as a applications menu, it is automatically thought as Windows 95/98/ME and old and obsolete. Now, all this could be avoided by using say, black or another color on the bottom, but grey will always make the non-technical users think that Linux is as current as Windows 98. Ubuntu with the brown color scheme seems to avoid this as brown hasn't been used much in any default Windows theme yet.
Yes and no. While you are giving an unknown script root access (a bad idea if there ever was one), it is really not much different then "sudo apt-get install *package*" on Ubuntu as in both cases you are running an unknown binary. Or it could be similar to "just add" deb *somesite* to your apt source list and then sudo apt-get install *package* or it would be just as bad to just chmod +rwx *binary* and