Is Unix capable of handling a database of this size and what other terrible pitfalls do you foresee?
MacOS and Filemaker.
Honestly, though, of course "Unix" can handle a database this size... it all depends on what hard ware your "unix" is running on. Obviously Linux or *BSD on a 368, 486, or Pentium system won't cut it, but if you up your ante to a dual P-II or P-III system, or even a Quad P-II Xeon system (which should be relatively "cheap" compared to offerings from Sun and Compaq), you'll be well on your way...
Ummm... The current MacOS with filesharing turned off is completely secure, actually. Or, you can turn on Guest access and run personal web sharing or WebSTAR and still have the most secure box around.
I think, if you need an SGI box with 256 or 512 processors, nothing else will do... There's no way you can make a beowolf cluster that would come close to the performance of one of these boxes (in my opionion) because the bandwidth inside each box interconnecting the boxes dwarfs anything else available.
Besides which, this isn't a single user machine. No one in the world is going to buy one so they can sit a user in front of it to make animations. This is the type of box that will get shipped to the DoD, NSA, various univerities, and large corporations that need to build virual prototypes (Detroit and Japan).
And no. At this level of the market, Linux just can't compete. Lower-end, yes, but not up here...
Even if that Gates quote is really true (it seems to be more of an urban legend than anything else), he was most definetly not talking about serious computers (workstations, servers, mainframes, super computers).
He was refering to personal computers running DOS (i'm not sure that anyone outside of Xerox had seriously done any experimenting with GUI's before at least the early 80's). But regardless, it's just silly to keep bringing that up 20 years later...
End of off-topic comment...
And yes, I know you were being sarcastic, I just failed to laugh is all...:)
Oh... that'd go over real well... Refuse me access to a resource i need to see/website i want to visit, because their network is set up in such a way that it could be used in a ddos attack?
Another example of this is how the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST computers were treated by the "Mainstream" Computer magazines published by Ziff-Davis and others. You can't sit there and say that there wasn't an editorial policy in place at these publications to discourage widespread migration to these platforms. The articles published in those magazines during that time peroid prove
How would any magazine stand to be hurt by a mass migration of users to another computing platform? All they have to do is revamp their magazine or start a second one tailored to the new one (Amiga World, Amiga Week, etc...).
It wasn't a media conspiracy that sunk Commodore and Atari, or else Apple would have sunk just as quickly. Microsoft was aligned with IBM, while IBM was THE company that many managers wanted to buy from... Other companies scrambled to make their software run on the IBM/MS-DOS platform while others scrambled to make hardware that would be deemed PC compatible...
And for all their percieved benefits, Commodore and Atari had the same failing as Apple almost suffered from - the percieved closed hardware (though, if you ask me, PC hardware is just as closed, it's just marketed as being open).
And while IBM/Microsoft had the business world in their hands, Apple struggled, bit, and clawed enough that some business apps arrived for the Mac, actively discouraged gaming so that they wouldn't be percieved as a toy, and was graced with the arrival of postscript and desktop publishing...
The amiga flourished in the video world, but aside from that it was a game machine.
Atari didn't have anythng but games, so far as i remember... a few terminal emulators and stuff like that, but really, no hard-core apps.
There's really no place that the media squeezed anyone out of the market... it was basically their own repective doings... Aiming at different segments, no evangelizing their platform enough to developers, etc. etc. etc.
As long as a company is making a profit for it's shareholders, it can pretty much do whatever it likes... It's only if the company is squandering mony and generating loses that shareholders can really care. Because long term profits can be sparked by short term losses. Disney's got the cash to buy whatever toysmart has to offer and it'd pay off in the long term just because they did the right thing...
If every company were concerned with eking every last penny from their customers on every sale, it'd be a sorry lot of companies we'ed have in the US. Instead they'er more strategic and do stuff that makes us (cnsumers) happy to get us to like them later on when it really counts.
It's not a good thing, because menu commands are not and don't stay in the same place... makes it a lot harder to support when you have to tell the user "go to the Edit menu and select Preferences, oh, it's not there? okay, click on the little arrows at the bottom f themu... do you see it now? okay now click it"...
My opinion... I got turned off of the feature within a couple days of using Office 2000, because it seemed more often than not i'd click the menu, then click the arrow, then find what i was looking for.
No... Most companies just don't want to support the umpteen hundred varieties of Linux and therefore choose to say that they'll only suppor their product on one distro, and since Red Hat is the most popular, they choose Red Hat.
Even if their software won't install on a stock Slackware or Debian box, it's only a matter of downloading a few libraries in order to make it work...
It seems rather insulting and even conceited to complain that "so and so ported such and such to Red Hat Linux, but they're too dumb to realize that there are other LInuxes out there", when the case is more likely that they just don't want to try to pretend to understand all the permuatations that a Linux installation can take...
Their scam has nothing to do with making people type in the URL, they just need people to click the hyperlink in the email they've been spamming people with. Then they arrive at the paypai site, which basically looks like Paypal. Sorry for pointing out the obvious...
The thing that I wonder is why is everyone of these major organizations jumping to the legal system as their primary means of problem resolution?
What other recourse do they have? Sending emails kindly asking people to stop? Or sending BIG guys in trenchcoats to peoples houses?
Right now, the law is written so that what most of these services are providing is illegal. That's that. There doesn't need to be any kindness towards people breaking the law. That may change however, as these cases go through the legal system, but right now with the law on their side, why wouldn't they want to jump into the legal system?
I have no problems with them "innovating" if they are building upon what is already there.
That's what they did with Kerberos, isn't it? Taking what was there and adding to it? What what we around here refer to "embrace and extend"
Also, if everyone only innovated based on what was already created, we wouldn't have made it as far as we have, society wise... Sometimes people need to take larger than baby steps to set us on a new course. Unfortunately, though, Microsofts steps lead only to more money for Microsoft and not a more altruistic cause.
Unfortunatley, again, it seems the only real hope to stop this is for AOL to get around to integrating Mozilla with their client software rather than sticking with IE... At least that'll move the web back to a 50-50 split between to the two and site developers will stick to the lowest common denominator of the two browsers in order to reach the widest audience. WIth the web tilted at 85-15, sites don't stand to lose TOO many people by targetting one audience...
The web doesn't reallyneed any more fragmentation.
Unless everyone moves at the speed of the standards committee, that's what's bound to happen. Not that I'm endorsing Microsoft's actions, because Netscape did the same thing years ago: introducing new features and basically pushing the HTML standard as they saw it should go.
Are you prepared to start paying in order to download your MP3's? That's what any settlement is going to take, a means of compensating artists the revenues that they could be getting if people were buying their CD's and getting royalties through the record labels.
Maybe Napster could make it so you had to fund an account, where you'd pay something like 50 cents per song you download and 10 cents per song you upload which would go to the artists... But really, who's going to stick around Napster when they have to pay to download music?
1 - There's no guarentee that all songs will have the same signature, unless people only distribute files from the same exact source - 1 person posts it and everyone else replicates it. Different CD drives, different sound cards, etc, will make small differences.
2 - Though that's an issue, it'd be great for Napster to incorporated MD5 into their servers. That way, bands that didn't want to be part of it could present Napster with a list of signatures of files that were theirs and say "Please prevent the transfer of files with these signatures". As they found variances of them, they could present those to Napster as well, though pretty soon Napster would be a legitamate service with 20,000 users trading about 500 songs and no commercial viability.
Yeah, but if 3000 people that hate napster exist and have always on connections and a few gigs of disk space to spare, it's going to cause lots of headaches for Napster users looking for whatever the 3000 are spoofing that they have. It might not spread past those 3000, but they're enough to spoil everyone's fun. It's finally reason enough for me to reinstall Napster.
If you're only trading with your friends, why not just eschew Napster and email the files back and forth or run ftp servers on your machines with accounts for just your friends to access?
You must very specifically define each trademark (and domain name) you want.
Right. They've got Microsoft trademarked.
They bought Microsoft.com Microsoft.net Microsoft.org Microsoft.is.cool boy-do-i-love.microsoft
All contain Microsoft's trademarked term. Oh... I should have been using "Linux" as my example, shouldn't I have?
Anyways... Linus went through the trouble of trademarking, or rather taking the term that someone else trademarked from them because it was obvious that they started using it after he essentially created the term. People made outcries around here with the whole LinuxOne debacle (whatever happened to them, anyhow?), using the Linus' trademark as part their name. Why's this any different?
Back to microsoft: They're not buying up all the land in Redmond if they have a block on all the xxx.microsoft.xxx names. They paid their money for the property where they put their buildings and Microsoft Way. They can do whatever they want with that property. The online world should be no different.
Why can't Microsoft, the trademark owner, just buy "Microsoft.com" and have a block put on all the other all the.net and.org variations?
Same goes for slashdot. They bought slashdot.org because they weren't a net entity or commercial entity... Looks like they finally got around to buying up the.com version, but should they have even had to? There's still a slashdot.net that's owned by someone completely unrelated to this slashdot.
All extra domains TLD's do is require people and companies to increase thier finacial outlay in order to protect the only thing that has any value on the internet: their names/web addresses.
They're not (from what i understand from the MSNBC article) even trying to dictate what goes on in other countries. They're just saying that people in Massachusetts can't place bets at US based online casino's. That's all. If they want to squander their money at offshore casino's they're free to.
And they don't appear to be threatening ISP's either. Just the ISP's clients who happen to be running casino's within the US.
You're reading what's being said and then making HUGE assumptive leaps from that, to a place where they're just based on absurd paranoid judgement.
Kiddie porn isn't legal here. You can go to jail for making it, having it, or posting it on your website. Is that a violation of your free speech? Yes or no depnding on what you think... Do the pro's of outlawing it outweigh the cons? I'd say yes. No ISP (witness the NAMBLA case and how Napster tried to say they were an ISP) is going to get in trouble for hosting anythng "by accident".
If they're notified about the fact that what their hosting is illegal and they say "screw you, we're going to host it anyways", THEN an ISP might get in trouble. Aside from that occurence, only US based companies that allow gambling on their websites stand to get into any trouble.
To carry your analogy forward, it's like congress banning AK-47's in South Africa
I actually think that my analogy would be that people with AK-47's couldn't ship them to Americans who tried to buy them. The guns would be stopped and seized at customs. End of story.
Well, there everything's settled. If an American wants to feel what it's like to own an AK-47, they need to go where it's legal to buy one.
Just as if a site is in a the US, they can't take bets.
If the site is not in the juristiction of the US, there's nothing that the US can do about it. It's that simple. The article I read seemed to be mainly centered on US based sites (either companies based in the US or hosted by US companies), because they're the only ones that can be governed by a bill passed in the US.
Again, if you don't like the laws, there are options where you can continue what you'd be doing without actually breaking the laws.
THIS ISN'T ABOUT AMERICAN SITES.... Did you read the article?
GO re-read the article. It is very specific in mentioning american sites, and uses analogies such as "picking up the phone in one state and placing a bet in another state".
They're not trying to outlaw international gambling. They're just making US residents (consumers and business owners alike) abide by US laws. End of story.
It's laws like this that are dangerous because they don't go after the criminal, they attempt to change everyone's behaviour to _prevent_ something that you shouldn't be doing.
"Speeding is illegal, so let's ban freeways!"
"Armed robbery is illegal, so let's take everyone's guns!"
They're not making blanket statements like that. They're saying "online gambling's illegal, so let's ban online casino's". It's a direct cause and effect sort of thing, like saying that "automatic weapons are illegal, so let's ban automatic weapons"... Restating the obvious.
It's the guy that's actually doing the gaming that's breaking the laws, so go after him!
It's not just the person that's making bets that's breaking the law, it's the person that's taking them as well. It also doesn't appear that there's any provision for suing the company "hosting" the website, as opposed to the company that's "operating" it. There's a distinction there.
What's the difference between going to the carribean and blowing your dollars there, and blowing them via an online route?
The difference is just that: you have to leave the country, or at least go to specific areas of the country where gambling is allowed in order to gamble. They're not going after Vegas, Atlantic City, or any of the Indian reservations. They're going after companies that operate outside of thsoe strict confines.
Unlike a lot of other industries, gambling has proven that it really needs to be monitored and regulated... The amounts of money make/made it a very large and lucrative target for organized crime and swindlers. Who do you think is running those sites? I'm not say they're definitely crooked, but you have to wonder, don't you?
Not everything is the issue slashdot cracks it up to be... There is no free speech issue associated with the barring of gambling sites and fining the operators of those sites if they accept wagers from Americans. If you don't like the laws here, just leave....
I'll point out that it's never been stated that the two products are in competition with each other
Yes, it's never been stated as such, but with the GIMP constantly drawing comparisons to Photoshop around here, I trully feel its' worth it to enlighten this community as how powerful Photoshop really is, as opposed to how powerful they think it is. Yes, the GIMP can be useful at times, but it really feels like an absolute toy compared to Photoshop.
And unfortunately, with the exception of the coders at Adobe, we don't have any say in the features we want or need.
Actually, Adobe works very closely with it's largest customers (I work for one of them) to determine the features that their next product should have as well as which features are causing confusing among it's users. And it's not the coders that make the actual decisions, it's the product managers who talk with tech support and sales in order to have a product developed that will spur people to buy it or upgrade their current copies. If you're a customer of theirs, and a feature you want to see included isn't there, AND it's a feature that many other people want as well, you CAN call and try to make a difference.
Besides that, photoshop is one of the most extensible apps around with fully document API's (hence the HUGE 3rd party plug in market), so if you're a coder, you can just as easily add the features you need to their program.
That's the KEY difference between closed source and open source that's been said time and time again but overlooked: proprietary software companies develop their software for their customers, whereas open source developers develop the software for themselves. It's a big difference. Necessity is the mother of invention, and closed source companies require money...
Slashdot Mirror
Is Unix capable of handling a database of this size and what other terrible pitfalls do you foresee?
MacOS and Filemaker.
Honestly, though, of course "Unix" can handle a database this size... it all depends on what hard ware your "unix" is running on. Obviously Linux or *BSD on a 368, 486, or Pentium system won't cut it, but if you up your ante to a dual P-II or P-III system, or even a Quad P-II Xeon system (which should be relatively "cheap" compared to offerings from Sun and Compaq), you'll be well on your way...
Who cares one way or the other?
For one, it's the past.
For two, even if Microsoft still owned them, they (SoftImage) make great software, so what does it matter?
On top of what that other person said, WebStar is a fully functional webserver...
Ummm... The current MacOS with filesharing turned off is completely secure, actually. Or, you can turn on Guest access and run personal web sharing or WebSTAR and still have the most secure box around.
Sad but true, sad but true.
I think, if you need an SGI box with 256 or 512 processors, nothing else will do... There's no way you can make a beowolf cluster that would come close to the performance of one of these boxes (in my opionion) because the bandwidth inside each box interconnecting the boxes dwarfs anything else available.
Besides which, this isn't a single user machine. No one in the world is going to buy one so they can sit a user in front of it to make animations. This is the type of box that will get shipped to the DoD, NSA, various univerities, and large corporations that need to build virual prototypes (Detroit and Japan).
And no. At this level of the market, Linux just can't compete. Lower-end, yes, but not up here...
Even if that Gates quote is really true (it seems to be more of an urban legend than anything else), he was most definetly not talking about serious computers (workstations, servers, mainframes, super computers).
:)
He was refering to personal computers running DOS (i'm not sure that anyone outside of Xerox had seriously done any experimenting with GUI's before at least the early 80's). But regardless, it's just silly to keep bringing that up 20 years later...
End of off-topic comment...
And yes, I know you were being sarcastic, I just failed to laugh is all...
Oh... that'd go over real well... Refuse me access to a resource i need to see/website i want to visit, because their network is set up in such a way that it could be used in a ddos attack?
Let's think of another solution, shall we?
Another example of this is how the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST computers were treated by the "Mainstream" Computer magazines published by Ziff-Davis and others. You can't sit there and say that there wasn't an editorial policy in place at these publications to discourage widespread migration to these platforms. The articles published in those magazines during that time peroid prove
How would any magazine stand to be hurt by a mass migration of users to another computing platform? All they have to do is revamp their magazine or start a second one tailored to the new one (Amiga World, Amiga Week, etc...).
It wasn't a media conspiracy that sunk Commodore and Atari, or else Apple would have sunk just as quickly. Microsoft was aligned with IBM, while IBM was THE company that many managers wanted to buy from... Other companies scrambled to make their software run on the IBM/MS-DOS platform while others scrambled to make hardware that would be deemed PC compatible...
And for all their percieved benefits, Commodore and Atari had the same failing as Apple almost suffered from - the percieved closed hardware (though, if you ask me, PC hardware is just as closed, it's just marketed as being open).
And while IBM/Microsoft had the business world in their hands, Apple struggled, bit, and clawed enough that some business apps arrived for the Mac, actively discouraged gaming so that they wouldn't be percieved as a toy, and was graced with the arrival of postscript and desktop publishing...
The amiga flourished in the video world, but aside from that it was a game machine.
Atari didn't have anythng but games, so far as i remember... a few terminal emulators and stuff like that, but really, no hard-core apps.
There's really no place that the media squeezed anyone out of the market... it was basically their own repective doings... Aiming at different segments, no evangelizing their platform enough to developers, etc. etc. etc.
As long as a company is making a profit for it's shareholders, it can pretty much do whatever it likes... It's only if the company is squandering mony and generating loses that shareholders can really care. Because long term profits can be sparked by short term losses. Disney's got the cash to buy whatever toysmart has to offer and it'd pay off in the long term just because they did the right thing...
If every company were concerned with eking every last penny from their customers on every sale, it'd be a sorry lot of companies we'ed have in the US. Instead they'er more strategic and do stuff that makes us (cnsumers) happy to get us to like them later on when it really counts.
It's not a good thing, because menu commands are not and don't stay in the same place... makes it a lot harder to support when you have to tell the user "go to the Edit menu and select Preferences, oh, it's not there? okay, click on the little arrows at the bottom f themu... do you see it now? okay now click it"...
My opinion... I got turned off of the feature within a couple days of using Office 2000, because it seemed more often than not i'd click the menu, then click the arrow, then find what i was looking for.
Why do you think Disney wanted to do this?
Maybe, just maybe, sometimes companies do or want to do the right thing... Amazingly enough as it may sound...
No... Most companies just don't want to support the umpteen hundred varieties of Linux and therefore choose to say that they'll only suppor their product on one distro, and since Red Hat is the most popular, they choose Red Hat.
Even if their software won't install on a stock Slackware or Debian box, it's only a matter of downloading a few libraries in order to make it work...
It seems rather insulting and even conceited to complain that "so and so ported such and such to Red Hat Linux, but they're too dumb to realize that there are other LInuxes out there", when the case is more likely that they just don't want to try to pretend to understand all the permuatations that a Linux installation can take...
Their scam has nothing to do with making people type in the URL, they just need people to click the hyperlink in the email they've been spamming people with. Then they arrive at the paypai site, which basically looks like Paypal. Sorry for pointing out the obvious...
The thing that I wonder is why is everyone of these major organizations jumping to the legal system as their primary means of problem resolution?
What other recourse do they have? Sending emails kindly asking people to stop? Or sending BIG guys in trenchcoats to peoples houses?
Right now, the law is written so that what most of these services are providing is illegal. That's that. There doesn't need to be any kindness towards people breaking the law. That may change however, as these cases go through the legal system, but right now with the law on their side, why wouldn't they want to jump into the legal system?
I have no problems with them "innovating" if they are building upon what is already there.
That's what they did with Kerberos, isn't it? Taking what was there and adding to it? What what we around here refer to "embrace and extend"
Also, if everyone only innovated based on what was already created, we wouldn't have made it as far as we have, society wise... Sometimes people need to take larger than baby steps to set us on a new course. Unfortunately, though, Microsofts steps lead only to more money for Microsoft and not a more altruistic cause.
Unfortunatley, again, it seems the only real hope to stop this is for AOL to get around to integrating Mozilla with their client software rather than sticking with IE... At least that'll move the web back to a 50-50 split between to the two and site developers will stick to the lowest common denominator of the two browsers in order to reach the widest audience. WIth the web tilted at 85-15, sites don't stand to lose TOO many people by targetting one audience...
The web doesn't reallyneed any more fragmentation.
Unless everyone moves at the speed of the standards committee, that's what's bound to happen. Not that I'm endorsing Microsoft's actions, because Netscape did the same thing years ago: introducing new features and basically pushing the HTML standard as they saw it should go.
Are you prepared to start paying in order to download your MP3's? That's what any settlement is going to take, a means of compensating artists the revenues that they could be getting if people were buying their CD's and getting royalties through the record labels.
Maybe Napster could make it so you had to fund an account, where you'd pay something like 50 cents per song you download and 10 cents per song you upload which would go to the artists... But really, who's going to stick around Napster when they have to pay to download music?
1 - There's no guarentee that all songs will have the same signature, unless people only distribute files from the same exact source - 1 person posts it and everyone else replicates it. Different CD drives, different sound cards, etc, will make small differences.
2 - Though that's an issue, it'd be great for Napster to incorporated MD5 into their servers. That way, bands that didn't want to be part of it could present Napster with a list of signatures of files that were theirs and say "Please prevent the transfer of files with these signatures". As they found variances of them, they could present those to Napster as well, though pretty soon Napster would be a legitamate service with 20,000 users trading about 500 songs and no commercial viability.
Yeah, but if 3000 people that hate napster exist and have always on connections and a few gigs of disk space to spare, it's going to cause lots of headaches for Napster users looking for whatever the 3000 are spoofing that they have. It might not spread past those 3000, but they're enough to spoil everyone's fun. It's finally reason enough for me to reinstall Napster.
If you're only trading with your friends, why not just eschew Napster and email the files back and forth or run ftp servers on your machines with accounts for just your friends to access?
You must very specifically define each trademark (and domain name) you want.
Right. They've got Microsoft trademarked.
They bought Microsoft.com
Microsoft.net
Microsoft.org
Microsoft.is.cool
boy-do-i-love.microsoft
All contain Microsoft's trademarked term. Oh... I should have been using "Linux" as my example, shouldn't I have?
Anyways... Linus went through the trouble of trademarking, or rather taking the term that someone else trademarked from them because it was obvious that they started using it after he essentially created the term. People made outcries around here with the whole LinuxOne debacle (whatever happened to them, anyhow?), using the Linus' trademark as part their name. Why's this any different?
Back to microsoft: They're not buying up all the land in Redmond if they have a block on all the
xxx.microsoft.xxx names. They paid their money for the property where they put their buildings and Microsoft Way. They can do whatever they want with that property. The online world should be no different.
Why should that be the case?
.net and .org variations?
.com version, but should they have even had to? There's still a slashdot.net that's owned by someone completely unrelated to this slashdot.
Why can't Microsoft, the trademark owner, just buy "Microsoft.com" and have a block put on all the other all the
Same goes for slashdot. They bought slashdot.org because they weren't a net entity or commercial entity... Looks like they finally got around to buying up the
All extra domains TLD's do is require people and companies to increase thier finacial outlay in order to protect the only thing that has any value on the internet: their names/web addresses.
They're not (from what i understand from the MSNBC article) even trying to dictate what goes on in other countries. They're just saying that people in Massachusetts can't place bets at US based online casino's. That's all. If they want to squander their money at offshore casino's they're free to.
And they don't appear to be threatening ISP's either. Just the ISP's clients who happen to be running casino's within the US.
You're reading what's being said and then making HUGE assumptive leaps from that, to a place where they're just based on absurd paranoid judgement.
Kiddie porn isn't legal here. You can go to jail for making it, having it, or posting it on your website. Is that a violation of your free speech? Yes or no depnding on what you think... Do the pro's of outlawing it outweigh the cons? I'd say yes. No ISP (witness the NAMBLA case and how Napster tried to say they were an ISP) is going to get in trouble for hosting anythng "by accident".
If they're notified about the fact that what their hosting is illegal and they say "screw you, we're going to host it anyways", THEN an ISP might get in trouble. Aside from that occurence, only US based companies that allow gambling on their websites stand to get into any trouble.
To carry your analogy forward, it's like congress banning AK-47's in South Africa
... Did you read the article?
I actually think that my analogy would be that people with AK-47's couldn't ship them to Americans who tried to buy them. The guns would be stopped and seized at customs. End of story.
Well, there everything's settled. If an American wants to feel what it's like to own an AK-47, they need to go where it's legal to buy one.
Just as if a site is in a the US, they can't take bets.
If the site is not in the juristiction of the US, there's nothing that the US can do about it. It's that simple. The article I read seemed to be mainly centered on US based sites (either companies based in the US or hosted by US companies), because they're the only ones that can be governed by a bill passed in the US.
Again, if you don't like the laws, there are options where you can continue what you'd be doing without actually breaking the laws.
THIS ISN'T ABOUT AMERICAN SITES.
GO re-read the article. It is very specific in mentioning american sites, and uses analogies such as "picking up the phone in one state and placing a bet in another state".
They're not trying to outlaw international gambling. They're just making US residents (consumers and business owners alike) abide by US laws. End of story.
It's laws like this that are dangerous because they don't go after the criminal, they attempt to change everyone's behaviour to _prevent_ something that you shouldn't be doing.
"Speeding is illegal, so let's ban freeways!"
"Armed robbery is illegal, so let's take everyone's guns!"
They're not making blanket statements like that. They're saying "online gambling's illegal, so let's ban online casino's". It's a direct cause and effect sort of thing, like saying that "automatic weapons are illegal, so let's ban automatic weapons"... Restating the obvious.
It's the guy that's actually doing the gaming that's breaking the laws, so go after him!
It's not just the person that's making bets that's breaking the law, it's the person that's taking them as well. It also doesn't appear that there's any provision for suing the company "hosting" the website, as opposed to the company that's "operating" it. There's a distinction there.
What's the difference between going to the carribean and blowing your dollars there, and blowing them via an online route?
The difference is just that: you have to leave the country, or at least go to specific areas of the country where gambling is allowed in order to gamble. They're not going after Vegas, Atlantic City, or any of the Indian reservations. They're going after companies that operate outside of thsoe strict confines.
Unlike a lot of other industries, gambling has proven that it really needs to be monitored and regulated... The amounts of money make/made it a very large and lucrative target for organized crime and swindlers. Who do you think is running those sites? I'm not say they're definitely crooked, but you have to wonder, don't you?
Not everything is the issue slashdot cracks it up to be... There is no free speech issue associated with the barring of gambling sites and fining the operators of those sites if they accept wagers from Americans. If you don't like the laws here, just leave....
(preparing for flames due to that sentence)
I'll point out that it's never been stated that the two products are in competition with each other
Yes, it's never been stated as such, but with the GIMP constantly drawing comparisons to Photoshop around here, I trully feel its' worth it to enlighten this community as how powerful Photoshop really is, as opposed to how powerful they think it is. Yes, the GIMP can be useful at times, but it really feels like an absolute toy compared to Photoshop.
And unfortunately, with the exception of the coders at Adobe, we don't have any say in the features we want or need.
Actually, Adobe works very closely with it's largest customers (I work for one of them) to determine the features that their next product should have as well as which features are causing confusing among it's users. And it's not the coders that make the actual decisions, it's the product managers who talk with tech support and sales in order to have a product developed that will spur people to buy it or upgrade their current copies. If you're a customer of theirs, and a feature you want to see included isn't there, AND it's a feature that many other people want as well, you CAN call and try to make a difference.
Besides that, photoshop is one of the most extensible apps around with fully document API's (hence the HUGE 3rd party plug in market), so if you're a coder, you can just as easily add the features you need to their program.
That's the KEY difference between closed source and open source that's been said time and time again but overlooked: proprietary software companies develop their software for their customers, whereas open source developers develop the software for themselves. It's a big difference. Necessity is the mother of invention, and closed source companies require money...