that tinfoil suit someone was advertising a few days ago might be just the thing for attending protests.
95GHz, the wavelength is 3.5mm. Fine metal mesh would probably work as a shield (the holes in the mesh should be small compared to the wavelength).
I'm thinking corner reflectors, myself. A corner reflector bounces the signal back in the same direction it came from. They use them on sailboats and buoys, to make them more visible to radar. That's what (in the optical equivalent) makes auto reflectors work.
The one who will get first dibs on SCO will be Novell since that ~$36M is Novell's capital (not a debt/credit) which SCO is trying to convert (fraud) into its own... a detail which SCO apparently conveniently failed to mention to the bankruptcy judge in the first hearing.
And 5 lawyers from Novell's law firm (while I'm sure they will blandly insist that their domain name is merely a contraction of their corporate name, they probably are aware of other possible interpretations) will be there. One, in addition to her law degree, has a PhD in linguistics and wrote her thesis on people who lie under oath.
'm living in Texas at the moment, and I'm quite glad that a significant number of my fellow homeowners are well-armed (and that local laws -- and juries -- are generally conducive to defensive use of deadly force).
Ah yes, Texas. What's the bag limit on trick-or-treaters this year?
As I understand it the problem is that humans don't mark the papers correctly which makes it hard for them to be read and processed efficiently.
It works fine. Fill in the circle (or complete the gap in the line) next to your choice, take the ballot over and feed it into the onsite reader. If the reader can't read it properly, it kicks it back out and beeps, and a poll worker wanders over to see if you need assistance. If it's ok, your ballot goes into a bin so it can be examined later (they do an audit count on 5% of the precincts). No expensive equipment (except the reader).
Been working that way without a hitch for 20 years.
You could use a touchscreen front end (like you suggest), for those few voters who can't use a pen or read the ballot. I think last election each polling place had one touchscreen over in the corner for that purpose, but I didn't see anyone use it so can't be sure how that worked.
if a customer has paid an OEM for software and the OEM installs a pirated version and pockets the cash, this is theft
Perhaps. Would you agree that it is also theft if MS disables a known legit copy? Theft of the price of a retail version to replace it with, or theft of services for however many hours you spend on hold trying to get them to straighten it out.
For whatever reason. Their spyware server screws up, like it did last week. You have to change out the motherboard. You replace the hard disk. None of those are legitimate reasons to break your copy.
It's actually more clearly theft than the first instance. The first instance is copyright infringement (someone made an unauthorized copy, but MS is not then missing a copy, all their real copies still work fine). In the second instance, the legit copy has been sold to you, either directly or indirectly, and when it doesn't work you have no copy. You have a loss. You have additional consequential losses, work time lost, deadlines missed.
Using the "I didn't know sneaking around on a P2P program and downloading copyrighted material from random people all over the world was wrong" defense is just lame.
But they're not suing her for downloading. They're apparently suing her for "distributing" (not just "making available") it. And they haven't even proved that the files contained material they own the rights to, much less that she actually distributed them.
Heck, I have, er, I mean a friend has, files that nobody has ever actually downloaded. And a few files that might not be precisely what the filename suggests, too. There are a lot of misnamed files floating around on P2P (some mistakes, some generated by spammers).
I'd be perfectly happy to hold the CEO personally responsible for the acts of the corporation, but it seems to me that's a much harder step than just to hold the corporation responsible. That avoids the whole question about whether the CEO knew, whether he should have known, etc. We have created a legal monster, the "corporation", and it's high time we applied to it the same rules that apply to the rest of us organisms.
The only ones hurt are those who can least afford it.
Isn't that true whenever you punish any criminal? Send Shifty Dick to the pen for six months, people that he owes money to don't get paid, his wife and kids don't get supported, the paperboy and the kid who mows the lawn don't get paid. And most B2B payments have deadlines and a provision for stiff (18% or more) interest to be charged if the payment is late, so they will get something in exchange for the slow payment.
Corporations are treated as "people" in the US. I think that's a stupid idea, but that's what the law is. But while they get the ability to own property, and have free speech, and be responsible for their own actions, that responsibility doesn't anywhere near meet what a "natural person" has. Like doing time if they do crime, or getting the ability to "serve their country" if there's conscription (if businesses would get nationalized for the duration, we'd never have a war).
Frankly, the idea here is to punish the company's owners. That would be the stockholders, usually. Stockholders don't usually give a damn what a company does, crime or no, so long as it makes money, they go with whatever management wants, they put the people on the board that management tells them to. A fine that would be staggering for you or I is just petty cash for most corporations, but a day in jail is equally burdensome (and expensive, proportionately). I think if the company was liable to get 30 days in the pen, stockholders would pay a lot more attention to the ethics and honesty of their employees (that is, management et al.). And as a practical matter, this avoids the problem of determining exactly who knew (or should have known, or did) what. If HP hires somebody to fraudulently obtain telephone records, why should HP's punishment be any different than what the punishment would be if you or I did the same?
Because the government drives up the prices though, if it were to get out of the way healthcare prices would be lower.
Funny. When I fill a prescription in the US, the cheapest pharmacy in my city (the largest city in a medium-size state) is $330. The cheapest US mailorder source I've found (drugstore.com) is $235. If I order it from a Canadian pharmacy, the order is filled by a Swiss pharmacy (selling the same drug, made by the US pharmaceutical company in Australia) it costs $117, including air shipping. It's traveled almost all the way around the world, and has an extra middleman, and yet it costs a third of what it does here. And you're saying this is somehow the fault of the government?
Everybody here hates CEOs and likes to hold them liable for everything. I want to hold the individuals responsible. A CEO can't track every little thing every employee does. If I have a company with 10k employees and an employee trashes somebody's rebate form, you can't hold the CEO responsible. Hold the employee responsible.
The company is the one that pockets the profit. I say, hold the company responsible. Don't be any harsher on them than on an individual. If stealing that amount would put an individual in jail for 30 days, incarcerate the company for 30 days. Send the marshals around to freeze their bank accounts and padlock their doors for 30 days. First time that happens to a Fortune 500 company, that will make people sit up and pay attention.
most end users don't have to install Windows, so they don't know just how bad its installer is.
That's true. I never said making an installer that will just pop in, no muss no fuss, was easy. Or even possible. Ubuntu is the best that I've tried, of that sample of 4 installs it did almost half of them perfectly. I'm just thinking that to be handing out CDs on the street corner, it needs to yield a higher "no problem" rate than 50%.
Did you try ndiswrapper? There's even a GUI available for installing your drivers, so you never have to touch the command line.
Oh, Ubuntu quite properly resorted to ndiswrapper, and it worked. After telling me what a Bad Thing it all was. So it handled it well enough, except for giving a warning message that there wasn't anything the user could do about anyhow.
I've always been able to resize Windows partitions with no problems, but I use commandline tools like ntfsresize. Maybe the installer uses something else?
Windows "not really ready for the general public to install, not on a NON-Win machine that's been in use".
True. If Linux was the dominant desktop OS and MS was trying to convert users over to Win, users who wanted to add dual-boot would experience a lot of problems and be unhappy. In that alternate universe, we'd all drive flying cars, "Katrina" would be famous only as the name of a Bollywood actress, and George Bush would be just another rich guy with a losing sports team.
Unfortunately, it still has a way to go on #1 (have it autodetect all my hardware and just WORK). I handed out a few Ubuntu CDs.
On the first (a cheap Acer laptop) it complained about the wireless chip. No real options for the user, other than to get a new laptop. But it did work.
On the second, it attempted to make a W2K machine dual-boot, and (going with all the defaults) instead made it no-boot (Win BSOD). The user then attempted to reinstall Windows, which blew away everything. Now, I'll grant that the user made things worse, but what would you expect them to do? And how would they know?
On the third, I attempted to test what had happened on the second, by just grabbing a random used hard drive (containing some version of Windows) and installing Ubuntu on it, accepting all default choices. Ubuntu choked. (Possible causes: multiple partitions, fragmentation, Win swap file in the middle of the area Ubuntu wanted.)
So I reformatted the drive and did a clean W2K install. Ubuntu installed over that very nicely.
So, my impression is that Ubuntu is not really ready for the general public to install, not on a Win machine that's been in use. At the very least, not until it knows how to deal with fragmentation, Win swap files in inconvenient places, and the like. I'd even settle for a message like "Fool, this HD is hopelessly fragmented, fix that and move the swap file, before Ubuntu can help you." Bonus points for instructions on how to do those things. Double bonus points for creating a batch file that will run on reboot and do those things for you.
Don't get me wrong, I think Ubuntu is the best of the lot for the naive user. But the install isn't ready for prime time yet.
This is the sort of bullshit that the rest of the world likes to accuse the US of.
There's an old saying, "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."
After all, it's not like California had a state lottery. As much as it may be a shock to you, that's gambling! And it's not like you don't have bingo, or poker establishments in plain view, or even casinos. And let's not overlook the horse racing, complete with off track betting. Those things are all legal in California. I suppose if you want to make book on sports (other than horses) you may have to pop across the border to Nevada.
Californians (and inhabitants of the other states) obviously gamble. Aside from the fact that commercial gambling is a tax on people who didn't do well at math, how else is that anti-American? Because the vendors are in another country? That "free trade" stuff is hard to keep straight, isn't it?
I do not see how it could be regulated. With the current grab-all-you-can philosophy in the US players would flock to sites offering the opportunity to win big.
If those sites were US casinos, they would still be regulated. Given a level playing field, why would people bet in Antigua or Nigeria, rather than in Vegas or somewhere else where they can trust the oversight. As much as you can trust it now, anyhow. Why wouldn't US casinos offer "the opportunity to win big" online? If Vegas is delivering a 98% payout and Antigua only delivering a 50% payout, people will figure that out quickly (even if Antigua lies about it), they'll start by betting in both, and favor the one that is "lucky".
They are complaining that they can't instigate transactions online that they would be arrested for here.
Gambling is legal here. Well, for suitable values of "here". Bingo. Pulltabs. Slot machines. Casinos. Lotteries. Lotteries with websites promoting them and giving winning numbers and everything. TV ads doing the same. Horse racing. Offtrack betting, facilitated by telecommunications. Online betting.
If gambling is bad & evil, let them ban it entirely, rein in the moral debauchery encouraged by dozens of state governments, so-called "churches" and "nonprofits" and "sports". Otherwise, one (the WTO being such) gets the impression that we just don't want to allow others to share the lucrative market. No, huh? Well, then, welcome to globalization.
It's hardly secretive though. The icon is in the system tray at least.
The average user (who doesn't read/.) doesn't have a clue what all that crap on the system tray is. Take the average consumer computer that comes with all those convenient preloaded programs, it's got about 25 tiny inscrutible icons down there, the only one they've figured out is the clock. Maybe. So they ignore all that stuff.
And half the time Windows hides those icons anyhow.
Re:And yet...
on
SCO Loses
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Will the source code of SCOX's UnixWare be released to the public because of the GPL violation/copyrights owning violation?
Ultimately, that will probably be up to Novell. The judge has ruled that Novell, not SCO, still owns all the copyrights they held before they got involved with SCO. There may be parts that are still owned by other parties prior to Novell.
My guess is, no, it won't be released, because ownership is too unclear and it's too expensive to make clear (all we know is, it's not SCO). The GPL people can sue SCO for damages, I expect, and have their pick of anything left over after Novell and IBM get through picking the bones. And prevent SCO (or anybody else) from distributing any more copies in violation of the GPL. Of course, by that point, the principals of SCO may be residing in a federal facility, from which they are not allowed to distribute anything.
is no one else struck by the hypocrisy of Microsoft criticizing someone else's security measures
Well, only to a select audience. They wouldn't want to offend anyone in power by calling them out. From TFA:
This particular section of Steve's presentation dealing with the War On Terror doesn't appear on the US-developed Tech.Ed DVDs -- it was censored and removed.
here are a lot of people who are doing exactly what I say: sitting on their couch watching their plasma with a > $100/mo cable or satellite bill, driving to work in a gas guzzling SUV, then bitching that they can't afford health care
We must travel in different circles. I don't think I know anyone, rich or poor, who has a $7K plasma TV and a $40K car (which was what you originally said). So I seriously doubt that there are "a lot" of such people, but maybe you have a credible citation (talk radio shows don't count).
Your little rant sounds like it came straight off of Kos.
Gee, you make that sound like a bad thing . Sounds like you read http://www.dailykos.com/ more often than I do. If it gives you heartburn, you should stick to Limbaugh.
instead of raising taxes maybe they could've avoided spending money on a new stadium among other things.
That's exactly what I was suggesting. But maybe you didn't know that new stadium is funded by raising the local sales tax. Just like raising the gas tax (which is a fixed amount, rather than a percentage, and hasn't been raised since 1988) to pay for highway maintenance. Let people who drive pay for the bridges. If you don't like the idea of a tax, maybe calling it a "user fee" will make you happier.
Of course, you're right the money could have been taken from somewhere else in government. The hundreds of billions of dollars being pissed down a rathole in Iraq is the most obvious choice, that would buy a lot of the things we actually need. The US infrastructure has been falling apart for decades. It's not totally a Republican thing, I doubt that it's even a totally American thing. Politicians get elected by promising the sky, superhighways and safety and all manner of good things, but they hate to have to explain to people that they'll have to pay for all those good things.
But the communist mantra is that when you can't afford to pay for your own health insurance and still buy that $5000 plasma and $40,000 car you really want then that's okay, we'll just get "the government" to pay for it.
I can't afford to pay for my own health insurance, but I have a 20 year old $100 TV and a $900 car. So your BS hyperbole doesn't impress me.
If the government wasn't pissing all our money away attacking and unsuccessfully occupying a third world country that never did anything to us, simply because the power clique had delusions of grandeur, there'd be money for health care. And maintaining bridges, too. (The Republican Minnesota governor vetoed an increase in the gas tax meant to fund highway maintenance, because his "no new taxes" slogan was more important to him than public safety.)
why have we not seen legal action against users on the scale of that against the 'point-to-point' networks of eg Kazaa, Limewire?... it's strange that the content providers cannot take action against BitTorrent users in a similar manner.
They can. (They do send takedown notices to BitTorrent users.) But Kazaa users are easier victims.
The goons go after numbers. If they can nail you for many items, that's far far better than than nailing you for one item. E.g. the RIAA likes to go to court with two lists: one big list of all the files you share, and a smaller list of things they claim to have downloaded. The big list is to make you look like a criminal mastermind and guilty guilty guilty, the small list is what the lawsuit is based on (X dollars for each item on the list). That's easy to do with Kazaa, where they can browse your list of shared files making screenshots, and download whole files from a single victim. But it would be difficult to aggregate such a list for a BitTorrent user, who in any case won't tend to share many files (at least at the same time), and only shares bits and pieces of a file. If they only can claim a single file, that's not cost-effective. And much less convincing.
the RIAA should have to actually download the file from you and you only in a traceable and auditable manner before it can be presented as evidence of an infringement and then the file inspected to ensure it is something they own the copyright on.
They are claiming that they do, and listen to it to ensure that it is infringing.
Of course, if they do in fact listen to each, they should be able to provide a sworn statement from the person who listened to that particular file. Maybe even make them available for cross-examination. I don't believe they do that, so I don't see any reason to believe that it is true.
Slashdot Mirror
that tinfoil suit someone was advertising a few days ago might be just the thing for attending protests.
95GHz, the wavelength is 3.5mm. Fine metal mesh would probably work as a shield (the holes in the mesh should be small compared to the wavelength).
I'm thinking corner reflectors, myself. A corner reflector bounces the signal back in the same direction it came from. They use them on sailboats and buoys, to make them more visible to radar. That's what (in the optical equivalent) makes auto reflectors work.
The one who will get first dibs on SCO will be Novell since that ~$36M is Novell's capital (not a debt/credit) which SCO is trying to convert (fraud) into its own... a detail which SCO apparently conveniently failed to mention to the bankruptcy judge in the first hearing.
And 5 lawyers from Novell's law firm (while I'm sure they will blandly insist that their domain name is merely a contraction of their corporate name, they probably are aware of other possible interpretations) will be there. One, in addition to her law degree, has a PhD in linguistics and wrote her thesis on people who lie under oath.
'm living in Texas at the moment, and I'm quite glad that a significant number of my fellow homeowners are well-armed (and that local laws -- and juries -- are generally conducive to defensive use of deadly force).
Ah yes, Texas. What's the bag limit on trick-or-treaters this year?
As I understand it the problem is that humans don't mark the papers correctly which makes it hard for them to be read and processed efficiently.
It works fine. Fill in the circle (or complete the gap in the line) next to your choice, take the ballot over and feed it into the onsite reader. If the reader can't read it properly, it kicks it back out and beeps, and a poll worker wanders over to see if you need assistance. If it's ok, your ballot goes into a bin so it can be examined later (they do an audit count on 5% of the precincts). No expensive equipment (except the reader).
Been working that way without a hitch for 20 years.
You could use a touchscreen front end (like you suggest), for those few voters who can't use a pen or read the ballot. I think last election each polling place had one touchscreen over in the corner for that purpose, but I didn't see anyone use it so can't be sure how that worked.
if a customer has paid an OEM for software and the OEM installs a pirated version and pockets the cash, this is theft
Perhaps. Would you agree that it is also theft if MS disables a known legit copy? Theft of the price of a retail version to replace it with, or theft of services for however many hours you spend on hold trying to get them to straighten it out.
For whatever reason. Their spyware server screws up, like it did last week. You have to change out the motherboard. You replace the hard disk. None of those are legitimate reasons to break your copy.
It's actually more clearly theft than the first instance. The first instance is copyright infringement (someone made an unauthorized copy, but MS is not then missing a copy, all their real copies still work fine). In the second instance, the legit copy has been sold to you, either directly or indirectly, and when it doesn't work you have no copy. You have a loss. You have additional consequential losses, work time lost, deadlines missed.
Using the "I didn't know sneaking around on a P2P program and downloading copyrighted material from random people all over the world was wrong" defense is just lame.
But they're not suing her for downloading. They're apparently suing her for "distributing" (not just "making available") it. And they haven't even proved that the files contained material they own the rights to, much less that she actually distributed them.
Heck, I have, er, I mean a friend has, files that nobody has ever actually downloaded. And a few files that might not be precisely what the filename suggests, too. There are a lot of misnamed files floating around on P2P (some mistakes, some generated by spammers).
The CEO is the company.
Sort of. But the CEO is not (usually) the owner.
I'd be perfectly happy to hold the CEO personally responsible for the acts of the corporation, but it seems to me that's a much harder step than just to hold the corporation responsible. That avoids the whole question about whether the CEO knew, whether he should have known, etc. We have created a legal monster, the "corporation", and it's high time we applied to it the same rules that apply to the rest of us organisms.
The only ones hurt are those who can least afford it.
Isn't that true whenever you punish any criminal? Send Shifty Dick to the pen for six months, people that he owes money to don't get paid, his wife and kids don't get supported, the paperboy and the kid who mows the lawn don't get paid. And most B2B payments have deadlines and a provision for stiff (18% or more) interest to be charged if the payment is late, so they will get something in exchange for the slow payment.
Corporations are treated as "people" in the US. I think that's a stupid idea, but that's what the law is. But while they get the ability to own property, and have free speech, and be responsible for their own actions, that responsibility doesn't anywhere near meet what a "natural person" has. Like doing time if they do crime, or getting the ability to "serve their country" if there's conscription (if businesses would get nationalized for the duration, we'd never have a war).
Frankly, the idea here is to punish the company's owners. That would be the stockholders, usually. Stockholders don't usually give a damn what a company does, crime or no, so long as it makes money, they go with whatever management wants, they put the people on the board that management tells them to. A fine that would be staggering for you or I is just petty cash for most corporations, but a day in jail is equally burdensome (and expensive, proportionately). I think if the company was liable to get 30 days in the pen, stockholders would pay a lot more attention to the ethics and honesty of their employees (that is, management et al.). And as a practical matter, this avoids the problem of determining exactly who knew (or should have known, or did) what. If HP hires somebody to fraudulently obtain telephone records, why should HP's punishment be any different than what the punishment would be if you or I did the same?
Because the government drives up the prices though, if it were to get out of the way healthcare prices would be lower.
Funny. When I fill a prescription in the US, the cheapest pharmacy in my city (the largest city in a medium-size state) is $330. The cheapest US mailorder source I've found (drugstore.com) is $235. If I order it from a Canadian pharmacy, the order is filled by a Swiss pharmacy (selling the same drug, made by the US pharmaceutical company in Australia) it costs $117, including air shipping. It's traveled almost all the way around the world, and has an extra middleman, and yet it costs a third of what it does here. And you're saying this is somehow the fault of the government?
Everybody here hates CEOs and likes to hold them liable for everything. I want to hold the individuals responsible. A CEO can't track every little thing every employee does. If I have a company with 10k employees and an employee trashes somebody's rebate form, you can't hold the CEO responsible. Hold the employee responsible.
The company is the one that pockets the profit. I say, hold the company responsible. Don't be any harsher on them than on an individual. If stealing that amount would put an individual in jail for 30 days, incarcerate the company for 30 days. Send the marshals around to freeze their bank accounts and padlock their doors for 30 days. First time that happens to a Fortune 500 company, that will make people sit up and pay attention.
most end users don't have to install Windows, so they don't know just how bad its installer is.
That's true. I never said making an installer that will just pop in, no muss no fuss, was easy. Or even possible. Ubuntu is the best that I've tried, of that sample of 4 installs it did almost half of them perfectly. I'm just thinking that to be handing out CDs on the street corner, it needs to yield a higher "no problem" rate than 50%.
Did you try ndiswrapper? There's even a GUI available for installing your drivers, so you never have to touch the command line.
Oh, Ubuntu quite properly resorted to ndiswrapper, and it worked. After telling me what a Bad Thing it all was. So it handled it well enough, except for giving a warning message that there wasn't anything the user could do about anyhow.
I've always been able to resize Windows partitions with no problems, but I use commandline tools like ntfsresize. Maybe the installer uses something else?
QTParted. Which doesn't seem to defrag.
Windows "not really ready for the general public to install, not on a NON-Win machine that's been in use".
True. If Linux was the dominant desktop OS and MS was trying to convert users over to Win, users who wanted to add dual-boot would experience a lot of problems and be unhappy. In that alternate universe, we'd all drive flying cars, "Katrina" would be famous only as the name of a Bollywood actress, and George Bush would be just another rich guy with a losing sports team.
Ubuntu wins on all of those points except 5.
Unfortunately, it still has a way to go on #1 (have it autodetect all my hardware and just WORK). I handed out a few Ubuntu CDs.
On the first (a cheap Acer laptop) it complained about the wireless chip. No real options for the user, other than to get a new laptop. But it did work.
On the second, it attempted to make a W2K machine dual-boot, and (going with all the defaults) instead made it no-boot (Win BSOD). The user then attempted to reinstall Windows, which blew away everything. Now, I'll grant that the user made things worse, but what would you expect them to do? And how would they know?
On the third, I attempted to test what had happened on the second, by just grabbing a random used hard drive (containing some version of Windows) and installing Ubuntu on it, accepting all default choices. Ubuntu choked. (Possible causes: multiple partitions, fragmentation, Win swap file in the middle of the area Ubuntu wanted.)
So I reformatted the drive and did a clean W2K install. Ubuntu installed over that very nicely.
So, my impression is that Ubuntu is not really ready for the general public to install, not on a Win machine that's been in use. At the very least, not until it knows how to deal with fragmentation, Win swap files in inconvenient places, and the like. I'd even settle for a message like "Fool, this HD is hopelessly fragmented, fix that and move the swap file, before Ubuntu can help you." Bonus points for instructions on how to do those things. Double bonus points for creating a batch file that will run on reboot and do those things for you.
Don't get me wrong, I think Ubuntu is the best of the lot for the naive user. But the install isn't ready for prime time yet.
This is the sort of bullshit that the rest of the world likes to accuse the US of.
There's an old saying, "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."
After all, it's not like California had a state lottery. As much as it may be a shock to you, that's gambling! And it's not like you don't have bingo, or poker establishments in plain view, or even casinos. And let's not overlook the horse racing, complete with off track betting. Those things are all legal in California. I suppose if you want to make book on sports (other than horses) you may have to pop across the border to Nevada.
Californians (and inhabitants of the other states) obviously gamble. Aside from the fact that commercial gambling is a tax on people who didn't do well at math, how else is that anti-American? Because the vendors are in another country? That "free trade" stuff is hard to keep straight, isn't it?
I do not see how it could be regulated. With the current grab-all-you-can philosophy in the US players would flock to sites offering the opportunity to win big.
If those sites were US casinos, they would still be regulated. Given a level playing field, why would people bet in Antigua or Nigeria, rather than in Vegas or somewhere else where they can trust the oversight. As much as you can trust it now, anyhow. Why wouldn't US casinos offer "the opportunity to win big" online? If Vegas is delivering a 98% payout and Antigua only delivering a 50% payout, people will figure that out quickly (even if Antigua lies about it), they'll start by betting in both, and favor the one that is "lucky".
They are complaining that they can't instigate transactions online that they would be arrested for here.
Gambling is legal here. Well, for suitable values of "here". Bingo. Pulltabs. Slot machines. Casinos. Lotteries. Lotteries with websites promoting them and giving winning numbers and everything. TV ads doing the same. Horse racing. Offtrack betting, facilitated by telecommunications. Online betting.
If gambling is bad & evil, let them ban it entirely, rein in the moral debauchery encouraged by dozens of state governments, so-called "churches" and "nonprofits" and "sports". Otherwise, one (the WTO being such) gets the impression that we just don't want to allow others to share the lucrative market. No, huh? Well, then, welcome to globalization.
It's hardly secretive though. The icon is in the system tray at least.
/.) doesn't have a clue what all that crap on the system tray is. Take the average consumer computer that comes with all those convenient preloaded programs, it's got about 25 tiny inscrutible icons down there, the only one they've figured out is the clock. Maybe. So they ignore all that stuff.
The average user (who doesn't read
And half the time Windows hides those icons anyhow.
Will the source code of SCOX's UnixWare be released to the public because of the GPL violation/copyrights owning violation?
Ultimately, that will probably be up to Novell. The judge has ruled that Novell, not SCO, still owns all the copyrights they held before they got involved with SCO. There may be parts that are still owned by other parties prior to Novell.
My guess is, no, it won't be released, because ownership is too unclear and it's too expensive to make clear (all we know is, it's not SCO). The GPL people can sue SCO for damages, I expect, and have their pick of anything left over after Novell and IBM get through picking the bones. And prevent SCO (or anybody else) from distributing any more copies in violation of the GPL. Of course, by that point, the principals of SCO may be residing in a federal facility, from which they are not allowed to distribute anything.
is no one else struck by the hypocrisy of Microsoft criticizing someone else's security measures
Well, only to a select audience. They wouldn't want to offend anyone in power by calling them out. From TFA:
This particular section of Steve's presentation dealing with the War On Terror doesn't appear on the US-developed Tech.Ed DVDs -- it was censored and removed.
here are a lot of people who are doing exactly what I say: sitting on their couch watching their plasma with a > $100/mo cable or satellite bill, driving to work in a gas guzzling SUV, then bitching that they can't afford health care
We must travel in different circles. I don't think I know anyone, rich or poor, who has a $7K plasma TV and a $40K car (which was what you originally said). So I seriously doubt that there are "a lot" of such people, but maybe you have a credible citation (talk radio shows don't count).
Your little rant sounds like it came straight off of Kos.
Gee, you make that sound like a bad thing . Sounds like you read http://www.dailykos.com/ more often than I do. If it gives you heartburn, you should stick to Limbaugh.
instead of raising taxes maybe they could've avoided spending money on a new stadium among other things.
That's exactly what I was suggesting. But maybe you didn't know that new stadium is funded by raising the local sales tax. Just like raising the gas tax (which is a fixed amount, rather than a percentage, and hasn't been raised since 1988) to pay for highway maintenance. Let people who drive pay for the bridges. If you don't like the idea of a tax, maybe calling it a "user fee" will make you happier.
Of course, you're right the money could have been taken from somewhere else in government. The hundreds of billions of dollars being pissed down a rathole in Iraq is the most obvious choice, that would buy a lot of the things we actually need. The US infrastructure has been falling apart for decades. It's not totally a Republican thing, I doubt that it's even a totally American thing. Politicians get elected by promising the sky, superhighways and safety and all manner of good things, but they hate to have to explain to people that they'll have to pay for all those good things.
But the communist mantra is that when you can't afford to pay for your own health insurance and still buy that $5000 plasma and $40,000 car you really want then that's okay, we'll just get "the government" to pay for it.
I can't afford to pay for my own health insurance, but I have a 20 year old $100 TV and a $900 car. So your BS hyperbole doesn't impress me.
If the government wasn't pissing all our money away attacking and unsuccessfully occupying a third world country that never did anything to us, simply because the power clique had delusions of grandeur, there'd be money for health care. And maintaining bridges, too. (The Republican Minnesota governor vetoed an increase in the gas tax meant to fund highway maintenance, because his "no new taxes" slogan was more important to him than public safety.)
why have we not seen legal action against users on the scale of that against the 'point-to-point' networks of eg Kazaa, Limewire?... it's strange that the content providers cannot take action against BitTorrent users in a similar manner.
They can. (They do send takedown notices to BitTorrent users.) But Kazaa users are easier victims.
The goons go after numbers. If they can nail you for many items, that's far far better than than nailing you for one item. E.g. the RIAA likes to go to court with two lists: one big list of all the files you share, and a smaller list of things they claim to have downloaded. The big list is to make you look like a criminal mastermind and guilty guilty guilty, the small list is what the lawsuit is based on (X dollars for each item on the list). That's easy to do with Kazaa, where they can browse your list of shared files making screenshots, and download whole files from a single victim. But it would be difficult to aggregate such a list for a BitTorrent user, who in any case won't tend to share many files (at least at the same time), and only shares bits and pieces of a file. If they only can claim a single file, that's not cost-effective. And much less convincing.
the RIAA should have to actually download the file from you and you only in a traceable and auditable manner before it can be presented as evidence of an infringement and then the file inspected to ensure it is something they own the copyright on.
They are claiming that they do, and listen to it to ensure that it is infringing.
Of course, if they do in fact listen to each, they should be able to provide a sworn statement from the person who listened to that particular file. Maybe even make them available for cross-examination. I don't believe they do that, so I don't see any reason to believe that it is true.