American nationalism is obnoxious. But compared to nationalism in some other countries it's laughably tame.
China in particular is the one that sticks out most to me, because I go to school with a fair number of people who are originally from there. The levels of nationalism even the most educated and well-informed Chinese people can display (including those raised in the US) is downright scary at times.
Driving out the big players in the commercial antivirus market will do consumers a world of good. If you've had to use a computer infected with Norton or Symantec antivirus anytime in the past few years you'll know what I mean.
The only thing you should conclude is that press summaries of scientific articles are written with sensationalist headlines by people who don't have any idea what they're talking about.
The argument that an objective comparison is not significant because of design items is one thing. Having someone argue that Macs aren't overpriced for the hardware value when they very certainly are is quite another thing.
Case in point: about a year and a half ago, I bought an Asus laptop roughly equivalent to a $2500 Macbook Pro. For $1600. With no rebates. The price disparity exists and it is huge. Arguing that it is worth it is one thing. Arguing that it doesn't exist is stupid.
While that may be how it *should* be, the reality is rather different. Waiters are paid significantly less than workers that don't get tips. If they were actually paid wages equivalent to the work they're doing the up-front cost of getting food at a restaurant would be significantly higher.
Not tipping under these circumstances unless you receive absolutely terrible service is an asshole thing to do.
>>>At what point did I lose the power to choose to simply not use the service.
At absolutely no point.
Your argument about the government not needing to get involved may be a valid one, but you're completely missing the point of the article and the argument for government regulation.
The point of federal intervention would not be to take away your freedoms by denying you the ability to not agree to a privacy policy, it would be to make it more feasible to actually agree if you wanted to.
One of the larger issues I see with government regulation here is that the internet is not something that exactly respects national borders, and so having one country mandate better privacy policies is not necessarily going to do something for the web as a whole and so national governments are not necessarily the best vehicles for regulation of this type.
Research is risky, especially when the applications of that research may be a long way off.
Stockholders, and therefore companies, are concerned primarily with quarter-to-quarter profits. Spending a billion dollars on something that *may* yield results sometime years down the road is not something that large companies will do consistently.
GPG's next game is Demigod, which Stardock is publishing. Stardock is one of (if not THE) most consistently friendly developers/publishers when dealing with their customers.
Stardock has consistently made their games easy to access and they've been well rewarded with very strong sales. Even so they've had trouble being heard. I'm not especially optimistic about the success of this, but I do support it fully, and I have no reason to expect they won't continue to do the same.
Even if GPG hasn't satisfied every one of the conditions in the past they mean to in the future.
Oh come now. I dislike DRM (and the buggy, slow program that has somehow become the most popular method of digital distribution on the PC) quite a bit, but you can get least get your facts straight if you're (not your) going to argue about it.
Microsoft extended the PlaysForSure authentication to at least 2011, and you don't lose the ability to play the music you already have on your computer. What would happen is that you would no longer be able to move the music to a different computer or operating system. While certainly not a good thing, this is a far cry from all of your music being instantly gone and unplayable.
Yes, but look at relative hard drive capacities and prices. When the first version of OS X was released hard drives were a lot smaller and a lot more expensive than they are right now. Adding a few GBs for a compatibility VM would not be necessarily excessive--and if that VM was essentially Windows XP with all of the extras stripped out I don't think that a target size of a few GB would be too difficult at all.
The other thing to realize though is that Vista was a large change architecturally (although not necessarily on the surface) from XP and these major changes (mostly in terms of sound and video frameworks) accounted for more problems (NVidia's drivers, especially) in many cases than the OS itself. Windows Vista introduced several new technologies. Windows 7 will be by contrast an evolutionary release and will refine and enhance that which is present in Vista rather than trying to introduce too many radical new changes at the OS level. While Windows 8 may be (and probably IS) a very good candidate for dropping legacy compatibility and implementing it with a VM or some similar plan, Microsoft desperately needs a stable, well supported OS right now, not *more* changes.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple fans ignore so much already. Why would you think that they're going to be bothered by more DRM?
American nationalism is obnoxious. But compared to nationalism in some other countries it's laughably tame.
China in particular is the one that sticks out most to me, because I go to school with a fair number of people who are originally from there. The levels of nationalism even the most educated and well-informed Chinese people can display (including those raised in the US) is downright scary at times.
Driving out the big players in the commercial antivirus market will do consumers a world of good. If you've had to use a computer infected with Norton or Symantec antivirus anytime in the past few years you'll know what I mean.
You will not need to install Silverlight to use it:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2008/11/12/office-web-to-be-multi-platform-silverlight-not-required
The only thing you should conclude is that press summaries of scientific articles are written with sensationalist headlines by people who don't have any idea what they're talking about.
There is a certain irony in seeing ads for D&D right below this post.
The argument that an objective comparison is not significant because of design items is one thing. Having someone argue that Macs aren't overpriced for the hardware value when they very certainly are is quite another thing.
Case in point: about a year and a half ago, I bought an Asus laptop roughly equivalent to a $2500 Macbook Pro. For $1600. With no rebates. The price disparity exists and it is huge. Arguing that it is worth it is one thing. Arguing that it doesn't exist is stupid.
While that may be how it *should* be, the reality is rather different. Waiters are paid significantly less than workers that don't get tips. If they were actually paid wages equivalent to the work they're doing the up-front cost of getting food at a restaurant would be significantly higher.
Not tipping under these circumstances unless you receive absolutely terrible service is an asshole thing to do.
>>>At what point did I lose the power to choose to simply not use the service.
At absolutely no point.
Your argument about the government not needing to get involved may be a valid one, but you're completely missing the point of the article and the argument for government regulation.
The point of federal intervention would not be to take away your freedoms by denying you the ability to not agree to a privacy policy, it would be to make it more feasible to actually agree if you wanted to.
One of the larger issues I see with government regulation here is that the internet is not something that exactly respects national borders, and so having one country mandate better privacy policies is not necessarily going to do something for the web as a whole and so national governments are not necessarily the best vehicles for regulation of this type.
Yes, we are. And our republic just happens to also be a democracy.
We're not a *direct* democracy, that's for sure, but democracy as a word is much more general than just that.
"We've seen tiny Web servers in the past, but rarely ones that are home-built."
You couldn't even bother to read the first sentence of the summary?
The problem is not that people don't read dialog boxes--it's that they don't read *period*.
People do not read signs.
They don't look at prices, they don't notice instructions, they don't pay attention to warnings.
That is not what the poster meant at all.
They said: "Technically, you probably have no right to play the game on WINE."
They meant: "You are not entitled to run your games on Wine."
Research is risky, especially when the applications of that research may be a long way off.
Stockholders, and therefore companies, are concerned primarily with quarter-to-quarter profits. Spending a billion dollars on something that *may* yield results sometime years down the road is not something that large companies will do consistently.
GPG's next game is Demigod, which Stardock is publishing. Stardock is one of (if not THE) most consistently friendly developers/publishers when dealing with their customers. Stardock has consistently made their games easy to access and they've been well rewarded with very strong sales. Even so they've had trouble being heard. I'm not especially optimistic about the success of this, but I do support it fully, and I have no reason to expect they won't continue to do the same. Even if GPG hasn't satisfied every one of the conditions in the past they mean to in the future.
Australia?
Oh come now. I dislike DRM (and the buggy, slow program that has somehow become the most popular method of digital distribution on the PC) quite a bit, but you can get least get your facts straight if you're (not your) going to argue about it. Microsoft extended the PlaysForSure authentication to at least 2011, and you don't lose the ability to play the music you already have on your computer. What would happen is that you would no longer be able to move the music to a different computer or operating system. While certainly not a good thing, this is a far cry from all of your music being instantly gone and unplayable.
Yes, but look at relative hard drive capacities and prices. When the first version of OS X was released hard drives were a lot smaller and a lot more expensive than they are right now. Adding a few GBs for a compatibility VM would not be necessarily excessive--and if that VM was essentially Windows XP with all of the extras stripped out I don't think that a target size of a few GB would be too difficult at all. The other thing to realize though is that Vista was a large change architecturally (although not necessarily on the surface) from XP and these major changes (mostly in terms of sound and video frameworks) accounted for more problems (NVidia's drivers, especially) in many cases than the OS itself. Windows Vista introduced several new technologies. Windows 7 will be by contrast an evolutionary release and will refine and enhance that which is present in Vista rather than trying to introduce too many radical new changes at the OS level. While Windows 8 may be (and probably IS) a very good candidate for dropping legacy compatibility and implementing it with a VM or some similar plan, Microsoft desperately needs a stable, well supported OS right now, not *more* changes.