We seem to be crossing the barrier from capturing and prosecuting criminals to restraining the general populace in order to protect the status quo institution...
Aye, true. But this is not an "erosion of freedom." It has always been this way. I hate to sound all commie, but this is the protection of power by the bourgoisie and a correlating irrational fear that people left to their own devices (i.e., not under authoritarian control) will cause ruin. This goes all the way back to Gutenberg -- Dear God in Heaven we can't let just anyone print or there will be firey rain from the skies! This a battle to wrest information from the hands of the controlling few that has been going on for 500 years, and anti-copying technology is merely the latest front. There have been a few major victories along the way, and on the whole we are getting freer, but there is yet quite a long way to go.
What they really forgot to mention is that you will be forced to upgrade the OS and all applications for the Windows boxen 2.5 times in five years, with corresponding repurchasing of new hardware capable of supporting said software.
Anger is perhaps the symptom I've seen the most in other people...Therefore one of the worst places to work is in a place with lots of caffine addicts--they tend to get on each others' nerves.
[Veins popping] STFU you pencil-necked freak!! I'll rip your head off!! GAAAAAAHHHH!!
I like Baxter, but...
on
Coalescent
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Baxter is a great short story writer. But when he gets into the roominess of a novel you see that he has a very gloomy and pathetic opinion of humanity. I mean, having the entire human race obsessed with waging war on the Xeelee because we can't stand being second best? Come on.
I have studied these rediculous Earthlings for fifty years. My report follows. Recommend launching invasion fleet from our nearest base, which is 328 light years away. At top speed our fleet should catch the Earthlings unawares on or about January 4, 2004.
It's a blizzard where I live right now, but I see you are living comfortably on your astroturf. Let's begin.
not being able to open that complex word attachment that your coworker mailed you
Great! Now you can have all the latest viruses How very productive. If someone sends me a Word file I just politely ask them to make a PDF or RTF, and they always do. No problem there. The truth is, 95% of the time I get a Word file it's just a wrapper for a bunch of graphics. When I tell the sender that it's possible to just send the actual graphic files, they go "Oh! That's much easier!"
figure out how users, accounts, software installations etc. work (click on a link and the program installs automatically? yeah, right), not to mention the joys of the command line
Mandrake doesn't make you figure any of those things out. But PLEASE let's not start auto-installing programs by clicking a link and having everyone run as root all the time. That is unnecessary and totally fucking crazy. But while I'm at it, typing "apt-get install [program]" on the command line is every bit as easy as clicking a dozen or so times through a Windows installer. It's also substantially faster, because I don't have to hunt for the download.
become confused by some desktop environments where settings are spread around 3 different menus
Er, I guess I forgot about the Windows MONOMENU that contains all the settings for the entire computer on a single menu. Where is that again? I click My Computer, and then what?
This is getting pretty far afield, and I fully expect to be modded into hell as a "troll" for not expressing the required ultra-liberal U.S.-bashing attitudes, but here goes anyway...
it more looked like these "certain countries" wanted something like a share of the prospering
Ok, for one, NO. That's not what the superparent was talking about. But more to the point, this kind of statement is precisely why conservatives say liberals are brain-dead. (No I am not a conservative.) It utterly ignores economic reality. There is not some "magic pie" that "the West" has evilly grabbed more of than anyone else. Many 3rd-world countries have widespread poverty because all of the key ingredients for economic prosperity have been removed, and this is a direct result the brutal dictatorships described by the superparent. There is no investment spending in these countries, because getting a return on investment is impossible (if you make any money the thugs in power will take it from you). Without investment spending there is no economic prosperity. Hence, the citizens in these countries continue year by year to get poorer. It has NOTHING whatsoever to do with actions by the U.S. or any other nation.
Of course, even in your magic pie world the citizens of these countries would still be impoverished. Upon "taking" (your word) a bigger piece of the pie, do you really think the dictator would generously share the spoils with the people he rules?
I remarked to my father that Noone could ever get a job where all they did was push buttons all day. Now, except for the one knob on the 'scope under my desk, all my interfaces to the outside world ARE buttons.
The labels could just as well tax you and then sue you for copyright infringment!
Precisely. If you think this sucks because it's a forced purchase, think again. It's worse than a forced purchase. This is actually a fine for your continuous illegal activity. You get nothing in return -- not even immunity from lawsuits over the same material that you have been "judged" guilty of sharing and fined for.
Could this be Netscape vs. Internet Explorer all over again?
Who would've thunk I'd stand up against some good, old-fashioned Microsoft bashing?
If you look at the facts, Microsoft hasn't been able to replicate its "success" with IE in any other arena. Look at mobile phones, where Microsoft has been dumping cash hand over fist and hasn't even made a dent. Look at PDAs, another area where Microsoft has been gushing cash. The largest Microsoft-based competitor to Palm (the iPaq) has less than half of Palm's market share (all the rest of the Pocket PC devices combined don't add up to the iPaq's share) -- and this despite the fact that Palm's offerings have been really sucky. Look at MSN, for Christ's sake. Microsoft has spent untold billions on that p.o.s. and AOL is still has more than 20 times the subscribers.
Don't give Microsoft more credit than they deserve. Their "wins" are few and far between. Apple may be in for a fight, but it's not inevitable that Microsoft will gain anything more than a tiny fraction of the marketplace.
However I think it may perhaps be circumvented by having a MSOfficeOpenOffice converter under a BSD-like license.
That's the ticket. OpenOffice is (usually) under the GPL. It wouldn't be allowed to use this schema and remain compliant with the GPL. That's what MS wants. It would require a separate, stand-alone BSD-licensed converter. Not a huge deal. OOo could probably even invoke the converter as an external command-line utilitiy from within the suite -- it just couldn't be part of the suite itself.
Subsequently, Kasparov created a positional advantage on the human side with
a very strong finger pointed at the reset button to which Fritz didn't have an answer.
And that is why Fritz sent a Terminator back in time, to get rid of Kasparov before he was born.
What is the ridiculuous complexity making these things so easy to fcuk up?
It probably isn't the complexity of the idea. It's more like shoddily trained programmers who are hastily bashing together a voting system without proper design requirements. To make matters worse, the end product is probably built with an ultra-high-level monkey-can-do-it toolkit, and it runs on a teetering, precarious tower of MSware that uses 30 GB of code to make a socket.
It looks like this case is ripe for dismissal. However, the horrible reality is that a dismissal will liberate SCO to continue their FUD campaign in the press without having to show their evidence. The Red Hat case has a chance to make SCO shut up, but expect SCO to dodge that bullet for a long time to come and then figure out a way to settle. They will settle litigation out of court, because publicly traded companies like IBM and Red Hat can't justify the risk of trial after getting a reasonable settlement offer (which SCO can afford because they are trading at almost USD20/share now).
The shell could be smart enough to do smart things with the data
Ah, that's the part where MS always falls down, isn't it? Their "smart" choices about what to do with a bit of data are always quite wrong, but they will not be able to resist the urge to make 'grep -n' return Excel data and auto-launch Excel to display the results.
unfortunately for SCO, the code they're trying to distribute is not automatically public domain, and thus they have no right to distribute any code they can't claim direct ownership for
What planet do you live on? SCO owns all Linux code. It's theirs to do with as they see fit.
The legislative is mostly supported by huge corporations that use their power and money to buy the ones that was supposed to defend the people interests.
You know, at first I was going to blast you for being stupid. I mean, last I checked it was votes that elected representatives, not dollars. But wait a minute. In the near future when we all use Diebold SuperVote 3000(TM) voting machines, we will in fact get a nice big taste of how it feels for our votes to count for nothing. Politicians will finally, truly be for sale. So I guess you are right. Fuck me.
Clearly. Please stop pontificating. (Offtopic: You also give ample evidence that U.S. schooling is not so bad. NO, our legal system is not based on Napoleonic code. Sheesh.)
Back to the subject. There is NO guilt or innocence in a civil trial under U.S. law, and consequently no doctrine regarding the level of proof necessary to demonstrate guilt or innocence. As others have pointed out, the "burden" of evidence is on the plaintiff to demonstrate that he has suffered harm specifically at the hands of the defendant. In addition, plaintiff is constrained in certain ways as to the nature of evidence he can bring before the court. This is to prevent shady tactics "behind the scenes" -- not because there's any assumption of blame.
So you'll either have to require better training for all computer users, which probably won't happen. Or you'll have to revise the types of software that laypeople use to protect them from the world.
iTunes uses around 40 MB of RAM on my WinXP SP1 machine...Winamp uses 8-10 megs in comparison.
And? Last I checked, WinAMP has a tiny fraction of the capability of iTunes. This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.
Resizing the iTunes window is insanely slow - 100% CPU usage, and it takes a quarter to half second just for the screen to update while resizing the window.
You must be lying, or else you have something seriously wrong with your box. There is simply no way an Athlon XP with 768MB RAM can't resize iTunes better than this. I have an Athlon XP with 512 MB RAM and iTunes resizes just fine. 100% CPU usage? Please.
the ~6 second load times for iTunes that I experienced on my system
Wha? I see load times of around 1.5 seconds. Again, you're either lying or there's something seriously wrong with your machine.
One peculiar thing is that the titlebar looks very strange and is neither the titlebar that you see in OS X, or the standard Windows one
Care to point out to me where the standard Windows title bar is in WinAMP?
Title 47, Chapter 5, Subchapter II, Part I, Section 227, Article b, Item 1, Subitem B, Instance iii
Yes, that's true for now. But look closely at this part:
made with the prior express consent of the called party
You can bet your ass that they will turn any contract riders to receive marketing as an "express consent" to accept incoming cell calls. These riders are frickin everywhere.
Everyone has already pointed out the shocking illogic of this article. However, you do not seem to understand the PHB perspective. In business, disrespecting "rights" or "licenses" is Standard Operating Procedure. You simply take into account the risk of getting sued, the probable dollar amount of a settlement, and then proceed as if you didn't owe anyone anything. If and when you get sued, you deal with it then, typically by cutting a deal with the "wronged" corporation via royalties, cross-licensing, or a one-time payment.
This what pisses PHBs off about Linux and the GPL:
It's hard to estimate the risk of getting sued, and by whom.
The "damages" sought by these suits are the disclosure of the source code, which in PHB-world is a capital loss -- FAR worse than fines or royalties. It's equivalent to your warehouse burning down and not having any insurance.
They never, never think that they should abide by the software license. That just isn't part of the process. So when they blatantly steal GPL code and get caught, all the PHBs are steaming mad that the FSF (or whoever) isn't playing by "the rules of business." The PHBs see this as an attack coming out of nowhere and asking for insanely high, non-negotiable levels of damages.
Slashdot Mirror
Aye, true. But this is not an "erosion of freedom." It has always been this way. I hate to sound all commie, but this is the protection of power by the bourgoisie and a correlating irrational fear that people left to their own devices (i.e., not under authoritarian control) will cause ruin. This goes all the way back to Gutenberg -- Dear God in Heaven we can't let just anyone print or there will be firey rain from the skies! This a battle to wrest information from the hands of the controlling few that has been going on for 500 years, and anti-copying technology is merely the latest front. There have been a few major victories along the way, and on the whole we are getting freer, but there is yet quite a long way to go.
[Veins popping] STFU you pencil-necked freak!! I'll rip your head off!! GAAAAAAHHHH!!
From: Agent 7617
I have studied these rediculous Earthlings for fifty years. My report follows. Recommend launching invasion fleet from our nearest base, which is 328 light years away. At top speed our fleet should catch the Earthlings unawares on or about January 4, 2004.
not being able to open that complex word attachment that your coworker mailed you
Great! Now you can have all the latest viruses How very productive. If someone sends me a Word file I just politely ask them to make a PDF or RTF, and they always do. No problem there. The truth is, 95% of the time I get a Word file it's just a wrapper for a bunch of graphics. When I tell the sender that it's possible to just send the actual graphic files, they go "Oh! That's much easier!"
figure out how users, accounts, software installations etc. work (click on a link and the program installs automatically? yeah, right), not to mention the joys of the command line
Mandrake doesn't make you figure any of those things out. But PLEASE let's not start auto-installing programs by clicking a link and having everyone run as root all the time. That is unnecessary and totally fucking crazy. But while I'm at it, typing "apt-get install [program]" on the command line is every bit as easy as clicking a dozen or so times through a Windows installer. It's also substantially faster, because I don't have to hunt for the download.
become confused by some desktop environments where settings are spread around 3 different menus
Er, I guess I forgot about the Windows MONOMENU that contains all the settings for the entire computer on a single menu. Where is that again? I click My Computer, and then what?
not being able to play commercial games
You mean like Neverwinter Nights? Oh wait...
it more looked like these "certain countries" wanted something like a share of the prospering
Ok, for one, NO. That's not what the superparent was talking about. But more to the point, this kind of statement is precisely why conservatives say liberals are brain-dead. (No I am not a conservative.) It utterly ignores economic reality. There is not some "magic pie" that "the West" has evilly grabbed more of than anyone else. Many 3rd-world countries have widespread poverty because all of the key ingredients for economic prosperity have been removed, and this is a direct result the brutal dictatorships described by the superparent. There is no investment spending in these countries, because getting a return on investment is impossible (if you make any money the thugs in power will take it from you). Without investment spending there is no economic prosperity. Hence, the citizens in these countries continue year by year to get poorer. It has NOTHING whatsoever to do with actions by the U.S. or any other nation.
Of course, even in your magic pie world the citizens of these countries would still be impoverished. Upon "taking" (your word) a bigger piece of the pie, do you really think the dictator would generously share the spoils with the people he rules?
Pardon me?
Precisely. If you think this sucks because it's a forced purchase, think again. It's worse than a forced purchase. This is actually a fine for your continuous illegal activity. You get nothing in return -- not even immunity from lawsuits over the same material that you have been "judged" guilty of sharing and fined for.
I thought the title read SCO2003.
Then I laughed out loud at the absurdity. SCO doesn't make products.
Who would've thunk I'd stand up against some good, old-fashioned Microsoft bashing?
If you look at the facts, Microsoft hasn't been able to replicate its "success" with IE in any other arena. Look at mobile phones, where Microsoft has been dumping cash hand over fist and hasn't even made a dent. Look at PDAs, another area where Microsoft has been gushing cash. The largest Microsoft-based competitor to Palm (the iPaq) has less than half of Palm's market share (all the rest of the Pocket PC devices combined don't add up to the iPaq's share) -- and this despite the fact that Palm's offerings have been really sucky. Look at MSN, for Christ's sake. Microsoft has spent untold billions on that p.o.s. and AOL is still has more than 20 times the subscribers.
Don't give Microsoft more credit than they deserve. Their "wins" are few and far between. Apple may be in for a fight, but it's not inevitable that Microsoft will gain anything more than a tiny fraction of the marketplace.
That's the ticket. OpenOffice is (usually) under the GPL. It wouldn't be allowed to use this schema and remain compliant with the GPL. That's what MS wants. It would require a separate, stand-alone BSD-licensed converter. Not a huge deal. OOo could probably even invoke the converter as an external command-line utilitiy from within the suite -- it just couldn't be part of the suite itself.
And that is why Fritz sent a Terminator back in time, to get rid of Kasparov before he was born.
It probably isn't the complexity of the idea. It's more like shoddily trained programmers who are hastily bashing together a voting system without proper design requirements. To make matters worse, the end product is probably built with an ultra-high-level monkey-can-do-it toolkit, and it runs on a teetering, precarious tower of MSware that uses 30 GB of code to make a socket.
It ain't over for a looooong time yet.
Ah, that's the part where MS always falls down, isn't it? Their "smart" choices about what to do with a bit of data are always quite wrong, but they will not be able to resist the urge to make 'grep -n' return Excel data and auto-launch Excel to display the results.
What planet do you live on? SCO owns all Linux code. It's theirs to do with as they see fit.
You know, at first I was going to blast you for being stupid. I mean, last I checked it was votes that elected representatives, not dollars. But wait a minute. In the near future when we all use Diebold SuperVote 3000(TM) voting machines, we will in fact get a nice big taste of how it feels for our votes to count for nothing. Politicians will finally, truly be for sale. So I guess you are right. Fuck me.
Clearly. Please stop pontificating. (Offtopic: You also give ample evidence that U.S. schooling is not so bad. NO, our legal system is not based on Napoleonic code. Sheesh.)
Back to the subject. There is NO guilt or innocence in a civil trial under U.S. law, and consequently no doctrine regarding the level of proof necessary to demonstrate guilt or innocence. As others have pointed out, the "burden" of evidence is on the plaintiff to demonstrate that he has suffered harm specifically at the hands of the defendant. In addition, plaintiff is constrained in certain ways as to the nature of evidence he can bring before the court. This is to prevent shady tactics "behind the scenes" -- not because there's any assumption of blame.
OR... how about outlawing the fucking spam?
And? Last I checked, WinAMP has a tiny fraction of the capability of iTunes. This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.
Resizing the iTunes window is insanely slow - 100% CPU usage, and it takes a quarter to half second just for the screen to update while resizing the window.
You must be lying, or else you have something seriously wrong with your box. There is simply no way an Athlon XP with 768MB RAM can't resize iTunes better than this. I have an Athlon XP with 512 MB RAM and iTunes resizes just fine. 100% CPU usage? Please.
the ~6 second load times for iTunes that I experienced on my system
Wha? I see load times of around 1.5 seconds. Again, you're either lying or there's something seriously wrong with your machine.
One peculiar thing is that the titlebar looks very strange and is neither the titlebar that you see in OS X, or the standard Windows one
Care to point out to me where the standard Windows title bar is in WinAMP?
Hey! Are you trying to imply that pr0n isn't a legitimate online activity?
Yes, that's true for now. But look closely at this part:
made with the prior express consent of the called party
You can bet your ass that they will turn any contract riders to receive marketing as an "express consent" to accept incoming cell calls. These riders are frickin everywhere.
This what pisses PHBs off about Linux and the GPL:
They never, never think that they should abide by the software license. That just isn't part of the process. So when they blatantly steal GPL code and get caught, all the PHBs are steaming mad that the FSF (or whoever) isn't playing by "the rules of business." The PHBs see this as an attack coming out of nowhere and asking for insanely high, non-negotiable levels of damages.
Hence, we get the vitriol of Mr. Daniel Lyons.
So, either:
Tut, tut. This isn't the site for you.