Except we told Digital Convergence to FOAD in the CueCat: case and they did. Specifically I told them to "Come get some" and they never took me up on the offer.
> In all seriousness are you so delusional that you can actually believe > that the founding fathers would support the Liberals?
They were indeed liberals. But all good marxists are taught that control of language is key to controlling populations so they promptly perverted the word 'liberal', taking it for their own and perverting the meaning. Much like they use newspeak versions of words like "liberty", "freedom" and "rights", when a marxist/socialist/Democrat uses these words they aren't meaning what thee and me think, and every time we allow them to go uncorrected it slowly erodes the meaning in the minds of the masses, until eventually the words mean what Democrats have redefined it to. But since we are all still reflexivly in favor of "liberty", "freedom", "rights" and until fairly recently, "liberalism" the unwashed masses support policies 180 degrees out of phase with what those words used to mean.
I hope to see a day when the forces of Enlightenment and Liberty can proudly reclaim "Liberal" from the forces of Darkness and once again carry it proudly as our Founding Fathers did.
> Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any > man who is over thirty, and is not a conservative, has no brains. > -Winston Churchill
That quote shows that this effect was understood by Mr. Churchill. Liberals FEEL, conservatives THINK. This research seems to imply that too much of the hormones responsible for emotional sensivity leads one to touchy feely politics. Ok, so now that we know what causes Democrats, lets get to work on a cure.
> Fine, but while you're waiting for a distribution system, copyright > laws, etc. that you deem acceptable, you aren't entitled to simply > ignore the lisence under which that music is distributed.
Never said I was. But I don't have to use iTunes either. As I said, I buy music on CD, a format that meets my requirement of being unencumbered.
I have been known to grab a few tracks off the net or swaped locally. Some of those result in a purchase because mp3 files sound like ass on even a halfway serious sound system. But another news flash for you. EULAs are worthless and I publicly admit to breaking the DMCA as conscious acts of civil disobedience so stripping off FairPlay wouldn't bother me in the least. It is the crappy quality of their low bitrate AAC files and the Win/Mac only (no Linux or portable players, except iPod of course) qualities of iTunes that cause me to reject it.
And I can't for the life of me find anything illegal or immoral about the program under discussion. It allows sharing tunes on the local lan in a multi-platform environment. Not a thing wrong with that, perhaps if you capture and keep the streams, but unless a LOT of it is going on it doesn't register as a grave sin on my moral compass. 'bout like tape swapping used to be.
No it didn't. When I buy a CD I can play it wherever I want. I can copy it to my MD player, I can rip it to.mp3,.ogg,.flac, etc. All of these things are perfectly legal things for me to do.
I will buy music over the Internet when someone offers the following:
1. CD quality or better.
2. Unencumbered by technological measures, although something on the lines of SCMS would probably be acceptable, it just isn't possible to implement in open source tools. While I haven't exactly been 100% pure in not copying CDs, they ain't going to starve either. I'm not one of these freaks with thousands of CDs but I do have a pretty good stack. When the existing Copyright laws and general public morality cease to be good enough to keep the artists fed there isn't a technological measure that can be devised that is going to be good enough to fix the problem; we are boned.
3. Pricing for an album's worth of music lower than buying a CD. For a single the current average price of $1 is acceptable.
> All I would need is a worm to get inside the network from a stray > floppy disk or CD and it could spread on its own.
Which is why insecure consumer products like Windows have no place in a production environment. We eliminated the last Windows PC from our library network in 1999 and haven't once regreted it. Zero infections, zero virus scanners, zero headaches. All work product agregegated onto two file servers (one for patrons, one for staff) where it can be properly backed up and the workstations are just interchangable cogs in the great machine. The network is the computer.
Yes we did depend on VMWare running IE for a couple of vendors we depended on and one or two Windows apps, but between loud and frequent bitching, Mozilla's continual improvement and more apps having web based versions, we no longer have that problem.
It CAN be done, you CAN build a proper network centric environment with the penguin instead of handing Sun a huge sack of money.
> Regarding the DMCA: you can't fault Apple for using a law on the books
No fanboy, I CAN fault Apple when they act evil, same as I got pissed at Adobe when they used the DMCA to attack the research community and that time I got me off my butt and made me donate to the EFF. I won't be donating this this time because Real can afford their own lawyers for now. Repeat after me: ALL WHO DO EVIL ARE WICKED AND MUST BE PUNISHED UNTIL THEY REPENT OF THEIR WICKEDNESS. Even Apple.
Real == evil DRM == evil DMCA == EVIL incarnate. Except for W, Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft the most evil thing currently on planet Earth. (oh yea, forgot the PATRIOT Act) Apple == all things good, hearts, sad eyed puppies, flowers, improbably endowed anime chicks, etc.
Apple (good ++++++) invoking the DMCA (doubleplus ungood) to protect their DRM (ungood) scheme against Real (ungood) equals a slightly tarnished Apple but still (good ++++) so Apple wins. All who speak ill of Apple will be modded troll/flamebait. All who speak good of Real will be modded down. Generic rants against DRM and the DMCA will be tolerated.
And if you go look again at those mid/high end Tyan boards you will find they are for Opteron/Athlon FX processors in Socket 940. The Athlon64 uses a 32bit memory bus so it could leverage commodity parts and existing designs better, and of course eliminate any possibility that a cost conscious type might build a database server out of one.
Not that I am complaining, I'm an AMD fanboy, having owned two AMD machines back to back, one a T-Bird 900 and now my A64-3200+. Also had no complaints with my AMD 486DX/4-100 box. But I also tasted and enjoyed the SMP goodness from Intel in the past decade with both a dual P-133 and a dual P-Pro 166. The competition between them is all good for us shoppers.
> Now, if AMD had done this...they would have grabbed market share. It > might still not be too late to unify the sockets...but then it looks > like it will be more difficult for AMD given the differences in the > processors available across their entire range.
AMD can't do that. They need the different sockets for now.
The Socket 754 is for the Athlon64. It is designed for folks like myself who want to get an early jump on x86_64 but can't justify the major coin for the socket 940 stuff. Since the socket 754 is using a 32bit memory bus it means it can't compete with the real 64bit kit and undermine the margins on the high end stuff, and AMD really needs to put some profits in the bank. But at the same time the Athlon64 gets them lots more machines in the field and they also need that.
You think you are joking..... but you just aren't old enough to know better. Back in the day, my dad was running DataExchange BBS. Some wanker uploaded Autocad trying to score some upload ratio and the drive died before pops noticed the file in the upload dir. He sent the drive to Seagate under warranty and found out the hard way that they DID scan all retured drives for contraband. At least they were decent enough to contact him before the FBI and accepted his explanation that he had no way to control what people upload but that the upload dir was not publicly visible.
Thankfully that was the only piece of warez in the upload dir and the datestamp made the story plausible enough they didn't send the goons because back in those days the Feds stock response was to just take all of your stuff and dare you to object. Few sysops ever saw any of their gear again because you were guilty unless you could raise the funds to prove your innocence. That was back in the dark days before the Feds hit Steve Jackson and the EFF was founded in response to fight back against the repression.
No way to really know if they still do it (even if you get away with it once, who can be sure they don't just spot check now) so 'yall be careful out there with the p0rn and warez, ok? And yes, I bet they do know how to scan an ext3 or reiserfs partition. Encrypt anything you don't want your drive vendor looking at or just ignore the warranty if the drive fails to the point where blanking is no longer an option.
I'll assume you are a wet behind the ears newbie to adult thought and explain it. Robert Novak has been in the business for decades and while often a partisan (he IS paid to be a columnist first and a journalist second), always a curmudgeon and otherwise annoying, he is not known for fabricating facts. Which was why, assuming it was an intentional leak which is likely but just as unlikely to ever be provable, he was picked as the leakee; a strong reputation for factual reporting in an industry where most reporters are useless shills. He has made it a point since his first column to always have at least one original reported FACT in every column.
But that is just the background to rebut your naive suggestion. You can believe Novak is directly employed by the RNC and it changes nothing in his reporting of bare facts regarding the Intelligence Committee report. Which fact do you wish to dispute?
1. The fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report with "unanimous approval".
2. The lack of any disenting commentary added by any of the Democrats on the Wilson affair?
3. The committee's "findings that Iraq apparently asked about buying yellowcake uranium from Niger."
4. Novak's observation that "They neither agreed to a conclusion that former diplomat Joseph Wilson was suggested for a mission to Niger by his CIA employee wife nor defended his statements to the contrary." Since there is now known to be a signed memo from Valerie Plame the reason for this silence is fairly obvious.
One thing that is clear to me is who the obvious choice is to play Wilson in the made for TV movie.... Jon Lovitz.
> What's amusing is that Republicans claim that Democrats are a bunch of > thievin', cheatin' liars while they themselves are as pristine as > new-fallen snow; and the Democrats do the exact same thing.
Actually there are some important differences. Democrats don't lie more because they are more evil than the Republicans, they lie because they can. They can because they control the mass media more completely than BillG controls the desktop. "Bush Lied, kids died." Well the reports from both the Senate Intelligence Committee (unamious vote) and the 9/11 Commission (final release pending, leaks everywhere is you care to Google) are out and Bush didn't lie, but Joseph Wilson unquestionably did lie and Richard Clarke doesn't come off very well either. You probably never heard about it, but go read the details you won't see reported in a mainstream newscast or paper.
Democrats knew he was probably lying when they used him to attack Bush, but they knew they could get away with it and they appear to have been correct. They do this on most issues, lie outragously, knowing that even if they are caught dead to rights the press will cover their butts. People like myself who actually follow politics read about the lies but then we knew Wilson was probably lying when he first opened his partisan piehole. He isn't a professional and didn't even lie very convincingly.
Republicans aren't above lying, but they have to be very careful to avoid being caught at it which means they do a lot less of it.
> This basically says the future looks bright ahead.
No it doesn't. I'd say it is a combination of many of the reasons already discussed and one that hasn't
1. MSFT stock has been dead in the water for several years.
2. Microsoft is transitioning from growth stock to stable megacorp.
3. But my fav is this line of reasoning. It is a forgone conclusion that sooner or later a major destructive Outlook/IE worm is coming. Something along the lines of a Warhol worm with a destructive payload. If a script kiddie doesn't do it Al Queda will. On that day, a $60B cash horde goes from a club to threaten competitors with to a siren call for trial lawyers that hasn't been heard since the heyday of the tobacco lawsuits. Imagine the Fortune 500 (ok, 499) joining into a Class for the mother of all class action lawsuits.
> Depending on what happens in November, it might not be such a bad thing.
True, with this full on assault on the truth that has been going on, Kerry might actually win. But I'm still betting on enough Americans to see through the lies and the red states pull it out in the end; so have a little faith there dude. And since the mainstream press is basically trading their longterm survival for a few points for Kerry maybe we will finally see an end to their domination of public discourse when the dust settles.
We are still months away from the election and the number of people who distrust the press is at record highs, they are below politicians and even used car salesmen in some polls. If the red team had the stones to hit hard against the press's distortions and ignore Kerry they could win, not just an election, but a victory against the forces of fear and ignorance that would stand for a generation.
p.s. Yes I KNOW what you meant, I'm playing taunt the Young Socialists of Slashdot.
Interesting idea, lacking implementation
on
Build Your Robot Online
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Depending on their closed source Windows only app for designing things is a deal breaker. To make it "easy to use" it has to be crap for a skilled computer user. The sort of people they would be aiming at. Plus the Windows only requirement eliminates me instantly.
But notice how both sites are obviously the same company. I think we just saw a sponsored story, not on/. but PC World.
> in the USA the drug companies happily brutally rape the consumer/citizen > with drastically inflated prices
No, the US is subsidizing those Canadian prices.
There is only one solution to this problem. Since it is a product of governments interferring in the prices, a government solution might be the fastest solution. How about this:
The world shall be divided into three classes.
1. The 1st World, the US, Canada, Britian, France, Germany, Japan, etc.
2. The Second world. Most of the rest of the EU, etc. Nations with real wealth but not wealthy.
3. The third world.
Drugs may not be moved between classes except under controlled conditions. Drugs, as with any other good under the WTO, NAFTA, etc., can be freely traded. Any nation violating our edict shall be blockaded until they relent. FUCK THE UN.
Drug companies shall set their prices as follows. Major drug companies shall not be required to sell to the third world. However generic companies can make and sell any drug in the third world, regardless of patents in the rest of the world. Wholesale prices in the third world shall be set at 20% above cost of production.
In the second world, the price shall be calculated by passing on the cost of production, half of normal prorated cost of R&D, plus 30% for profit.
In the first world we pay cost of production plus a full share of the R&D cost plus a 50% net profit margin.
Calculating the R&D costs and spreading them by company based on their R&D efforts would be a total bitch and lead to all sorts of creeping socialism, but less than than full socialised medicine brings.
This law would have the effect of forcing you socialists on Canada and Europe to stop freeloading off of the US, lowering our cost of drugs, while at the same time making many drugs widely available in the third world. The really exensive ones still wouldn't be, but that's life.
The other option is to encourage all of the drug companies to reloacte here, close their foreign offices and then tell the socialist governments trying to mandate drug prices to FOAD; pay whatever price we decide or do without. Violating the patent and making it local would be considered the opening move in an all out tradewar. In the end this one might even be the simpler choice.
> The US has been the biggest threat to Canada through most of its > history, and we're still around.
Canada used to be an adult. Canada fielded quite a large contribution to the Allied forces in WWII. That is no longer true. Now consider how fast the nations of Eastern Europe fell to Stalin at the open of the Cold War and how close Canada is to the old Soviet Empire. Had it not been for everyone understanding that the US simply would NEVER have tolerated Soviet encroachments into North America, what would have been your odds of speaking Russian right now?
The world is an unsafe place, always has been and probably will be for the forseeable future. You Canadians hate our guts right now because we did what we thought we needed to do in the Middle East. The difference being we had a choice, you have none. If Usama decides to start blowing your shit up all you can do is ask US to kill him for you. In the end you have no choice but to accept whatever level of protection we provide you... and even more bluntly, to pay whatever tribute we ever decided to levy upon you for the privledge.
Remember, someday you may actually be right; America might fall to the Dark Side and you have no defense against that, trusting us blindly to defend you unto death, asking nothing in return. When wolves guard sheep they don't always have the sheep's best interests at heart.
> Millions of Canadian tax dollars are used to train RN's and MD's who > take work south of the border every year.
You identified the problem yourself, "economic pressure from the south" is just a obfuscating way of saying that Canada is offering less than the market price for something and wondering why supply is hard to find. Sounds like you and the government twits responsible need an Econ101 course.
Three choices:
1. Quit yer bitching and accept the shortage, knowing it will only grow worse.
2. Offer competitive wages and accept the rise in taxes to pay for your more realisticaly priced socialized medicine.
3. Leverage your socialized education system to forbid students educated by it from leaving the country for a period of time. Or stripping away the nice language, force them to sign Indentured Servitude contracts.
> I like it that we don't spend anything on military.
Which is OK so long as you remember the price you pay for that. On the plus side you guys get a lot more money to cover up the failures of socialism and postpone the day of reckoning.
On the other side it means you are a child nation, utterly dependent on others for protection. Namely the United States. You live carefree lives without a thought for defense or other matters of the world because WE take care of you, extending the protection of our arms to secure your safety. Your opinion in the councils of the world count for little for the same reason, the adults find it hard to take anything you say seriously because you not only aren't considered a real country, but also because in the end the world is still run by force and the threat of force and you lack the force to back up your words. You are basically Guam only bigger and with a seat in the UN general assembly. (Not that a seat in the UN counts for much, after all Morocco has exactly the same vote as all of Canada.)
Even France's voice counts more in the councils of the world because for all that they are French (silly treacherous twits) they actually possess the means of defending themselves and a small ability to project their will on the global stage, unfortunately even including the Bomb.
p.s. yes, I'm tweaking the Canadians a bit here. It's a slow news Friday, might as well stir things up a little.
I fell those winds too. Five years ago the word "Linux" was known to us tech types, period full stop. Now end users have heard of it, usually also hearing that it is 'hard to install and unfriendly afterwards'. Then I show them my laptop. They aren't switching in droves yet, but they are looking. And installing Mozilla and OO.o. Many don't yet switch over entirely, but they do play around with the alternatives and a few get hooked on tabs or some other neat feature that Microsoft hasn't invented yet.
Patience, folks. I'm not sure how this is all going to play out but I suspect it will be more of a sea change instead of a gradual process. Much like how IE displaced Netscape in a year or two as the primary browser on the Internet. With the exploits on IE coming on a weekly basis we just might get the critical mass of defectors to enable a mass exodus.
Allow me to explain that statement a bit. Currently we have a non-trivial number of sites that either require Internet Explorer or look bad without it. If we get a critical mass of defections those sites will be forced to go into panic mode; redesigning their code or losing a non-trivial percentage of users. Once that obstacle falls the pressure holding the masses of IE victims will get released and the rest of the migration could happen pretty darned fast. They see their friends/relatives/etc using Moz/Firefox/Opera and see a) neat new features, b) they are actually using something different and not having problems and mostly c) this Mozilla thing is the hot new thing and they will have to have it even if they aren't even sure why.
The usual arguments of "If it is free it has to be crappy shareware" that slow OO.o adoption don't hold fo rInternet clients since users have been trained for a decade to expect all of the basic Internet tools to be free downloads.
Verily I say unto you, Shareware has done more to harm the cause of Free Software than anything Bill Gates or Steve Balmer has done or ever will do. As it was practiced by the old school of the ASP (Association of Shareware Professionals) it was a good thing, but in the last decade it devolved into demoware, traiware, nagware, adware, spyware, etc until true Shareware has all but disappeared.
> but that is a tactic that would be as sinister to resort to as the > initial IE monopolization
While you have a point in the abstract, in the real world I can endorse banning IE. Who actually PAYS the price of the stupidity of Windows users running IE? When the Russian mafia stole thousands of people's bank account and credit card numbers, who ended up eating most of the bill? Hint, it wasn't the luser and it was certainly not Microsoft.
It would be the sanest thing in the world for all of the banks and credit card companies to get together and, as an industry, ban the use of IE for accessing their sites on an arranged date. Set enough time to give everyone fair warning, through warnings on their websites when an IE user connects, inserts in bills and mailouts of Mozilla/Netscape (AOL's marketing dept would probably find the marketing opportunities irresistable) to customers.
But after the deadline, cut them off cold. Display a notice on the order of:
"Your browser has proven to be chronically insecure and the banking industry has made a decision to refuse to assume the risks inherent with it. Please use a different browser to conduct secure financial transactions.
List of links here.
p.s. This ban will remain in force until one of the following occurs:
1. As a user known to be engaging in high risk behaviour, you may sign a waiver assuming responsibility for any and all monatary losses resulting from identity theft tracable to Internet Access, regardless of the specific circumstances or products involved.
2. The browser vendor (Microsoft Corp.) indemnifies us against losses resulting from flaws in their product.
3. Microsoft redesigns their browser, submits it's source to open scrutiny by the Internet community and they and then we reach a consensus that it no longer presents a clear and present danger.
> If I understand the boxofficemojo.com tables, it is averaging about > $1,500 per day, per screen.
Yes, a very bad omen. I really thought people were smarter than this. Almost makes me want to change to being a Democrat.... maybe Moore is right and the masses ARE so stupid they need a keeper.
But even worse, as I also predicted in this thread if F911 was a financial success, the cash in crowd in hollywood is already rushing more of this crap through the pipeline. It will mean another major decline in American moviemaking. Just when you thought it couldn't get worse than Jerry Bruckhiemer [sp].
> Well some companies are minimizing their pain by doing stock buybacks.
Do the math. How many shares could Microsoft buy back with their cash horde if the popped the whole wad on one big buyback? How much would that boost their stock price? Then what do they do next year?
Besides, they can't get rid of that stack of money anytime soon because it is the major weapon that keeps the slaves in line, fear of what havok they could wreak on anyone they decided was enemy #1. They just haven't figured out a way to use that weapon against the penguin yet. Key word being yet. They are going down but not without a fight.
Slashdot Mirror
Except we told Digital Convergence to FOAD in the CueCat: case and they did. Specifically I told them to "Come get some" and they never took me up on the offer.
http://beau.org/~jmorris/linux/cuecat/
> In all seriousness are you so delusional that you can actually believe
> that the founding fathers would support the Liberals?
They were indeed liberals. But all good marxists are taught that control of language is key to controlling populations so they promptly perverted the word 'liberal', taking it for their own and perverting the meaning. Much like they use newspeak versions of words like "liberty", "freedom" and "rights", when a marxist/socialist/Democrat uses these words they aren't meaning what thee and me think, and every time we allow them to go uncorrected it slowly erodes the meaning in the minds of the masses, until eventually the words mean what Democrats have redefined it to. But since we are all still reflexivly in favor of "liberty", "freedom", "rights" and until fairly recently, "liberalism" the unwashed masses support policies 180 degrees out of phase with what those words used to mean.
I hope to see a day when the forces of Enlightenment and Liberty can proudly reclaim "Liberal" from the forces of Darkness and once again carry it proudly as our Founding Fathers did.
> Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any
> man who is over thirty, and is not a conservative, has no brains.
> -Winston Churchill
That quote shows that this effect was understood by Mr. Churchill. Liberals FEEL, conservatives THINK. This research seems to imply that too much of the hormones responsible for emotional sensivity leads one to touchy feely politics. Ok, so now that we know what causes Democrats, lets get to work on a cure.
[ducking and putting on the asbestos underroos]
> Fine, but while you're waiting for a distribution system, copyright
> laws, etc. that you deem acceptable, you aren't entitled to simply
> ignore the lisence under which that music is distributed.
Never said I was. But I don't have to use iTunes either. As I said, I buy music on CD, a format that meets my requirement of being unencumbered.
I have been known to grab a few tracks off the net or swaped locally. Some of those result in a purchase because mp3 files sound like ass on even a halfway serious sound system. But another news flash for you. EULAs are worthless and I publicly admit to breaking the DMCA as conscious acts of civil disobedience so stripping off FairPlay wouldn't bother me in the least. It is the crappy quality of their low bitrate AAC files and the Win/Mac only (no Linux or portable players, except iPod of course) qualities of iTunes that cause me to reject it.
And I can't for the life of me find anything illegal or immoral about the program under discussion. It allows sharing tunes on the local lan in a multi-platform environment. Not a thing wrong with that, perhaps if you capture and keep the streams, but unless a LOT of it is going on it doesn't register as a grave sin on my moral compass. 'bout like tape swapping used to be.
> Then iTunes comes out, providing EXACTLY that.
.mp3, .ogg, .flac, etc. All of these things are perfectly legal things for me to do.
No it didn't. When I buy a CD I can play it wherever I want. I can copy it to my MD player, I can rip it to
I will buy music over the Internet when someone offers the following:
1. CD quality or better.
2. Unencumbered by technological measures, although something on the lines of SCMS would probably be acceptable, it just isn't possible to implement in open source tools. While I haven't exactly been 100% pure in not copying CDs, they ain't going to starve either. I'm not one of these freaks with thousands of CDs but I do have a pretty good stack. When the existing Copyright laws and general public morality cease to be good enough to keep the artists fed there isn't a technological measure that can be devised that is going to be good enough to fix the problem; we are boned.
3. Pricing for an album's worth of music lower than buying a CD. For a single the current average price of $1 is acceptable.
> All I would need is a worm to get inside the network from a stray
> floppy disk or CD and it could spread on its own.
Which is why insecure consumer products like Windows have no place in a production environment. We eliminated the last Windows PC from our library network in 1999 and haven't once regreted it. Zero infections, zero virus scanners, zero headaches. All work product agregegated onto two file servers (one for patrons, one for staff) where it can be properly backed up and the workstations are just interchangable cogs in the great machine. The network is the computer.
Yes we did depend on VMWare running IE for a couple of vendors we depended on and one or two Windows apps, but between loud and frequent bitching, Mozilla's continual improvement and more apps having web based versions, we no longer have that problem.
It CAN be done, you CAN build a proper network centric environment with the penguin instead of handing Sun a huge sack of money.
> Regarding the DMCA: you can't fault Apple for using a law on the books
No fanboy, I CAN fault Apple when they act evil, same as I got pissed at Adobe when they used the DMCA to attack the research community and that time I got me off my butt and made me donate to the EFF. I won't be donating this this time because Real can afford their own lawyers for now. Repeat after me: ALL WHO DO EVIL ARE WICKED AND MUST BE PUNISHED UNTIL THEY REPENT OF THEIR WICKEDNESS. Even Apple.
Easy, do the new PC math.
Real == evil
DRM == evil
DMCA == EVIL incarnate. Except for W, Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft the most evil thing currently on planet Earth. (oh yea, forgot the PATRIOT Act)
Apple == all things good, hearts, sad eyed puppies, flowers, improbably endowed anime chicks, etc.
Apple (good ++++++) invoking the DMCA (doubleplus ungood) to protect their DRM (ungood) scheme against Real (ungood) equals a slightly tarnished Apple but still (good ++++) so Apple wins. All who speak ill of Apple will be modded troll/flamebait. All who speak good of Real will be modded down. Generic rants against DRM and the DMCA will be tolerated.
And if you go look again at those mid/high end Tyan boards you will find they are for Opteron/Athlon FX processors in Socket 940. The Athlon64 uses a 32bit memory bus so it could leverage commodity parts and existing designs better, and of course eliminate any possibility that a cost conscious type might build a database server out of one.
Not that I am complaining, I'm an AMD fanboy, having owned two AMD machines back to back, one a T-Bird 900 and now my A64-3200+. Also had no complaints with my AMD 486DX/4-100 box. But I also tasted and enjoyed the SMP goodness from Intel in the past decade with both a dual P-133 and a dual P-Pro 166. The competition between them is all good for us shoppers.
> Bla... S754 uses a 64-bit memory bus.
If that is so, find me a motherboard with a max memory limit above 3GB.
> Now, if AMD had done this...they would have grabbed market share. It
> might still not be too late to unify the sockets...but then it looks
> like it will be more difficult for AMD given the differences in the
> processors available across their entire range.
AMD can't do that. They need the different sockets for now.
The Socket 754 is for the Athlon64. It is designed for folks like myself who want to get an early jump on x86_64 but can't justify the major coin for the socket 940 stuff. Since the socket 754 is using a 32bit memory bus it means it can't compete with the real 64bit kit and undermine the margins on the high end stuff, and AMD really needs to put some profits in the bank. But at the same time the Athlon64 gets them lots more machines in the field and they also need that.
You think you are joking..... but you just aren't old enough to know better. Back in the day, my dad was running DataExchange BBS. Some wanker uploaded Autocad trying to score some upload ratio and the drive died before pops noticed the file in the upload dir. He sent the drive to Seagate under warranty and found out the hard way that they DID scan all retured drives for contraband. At least they were decent enough to contact him before the FBI and accepted his explanation that he had no way to control what people upload but that the upload dir was not publicly visible.
Thankfully that was the only piece of warez in the upload dir and the datestamp made the story plausible enough they didn't send the goons because back in those days the Feds stock response was to just take all of your stuff and dare you to object. Few sysops ever saw any of their gear again because you were guilty unless you could raise the funds to prove your innocence. That was back in the dark days before the Feds hit Steve Jackson and the EFF was founded in response to fight back against the repression.
No way to really know if they still do it (even if you get away with it once, who can be sure they don't just spot check now) so 'yall be careful out there with the p0rn and warez, ok? And yes, I bet they do know how to scan an ext3 or reiserfs partition. Encrypt anything you don't want your drive vendor looking at or just ignore the warranty if the drive fails to the point where blanking is no longer an option.
> Coming from Robert Novak,
I'll assume you are a wet behind the ears newbie to adult thought and explain it. Robert Novak has been in the business for decades and while often a partisan (he IS paid to be a columnist first and a journalist second), always a curmudgeon and otherwise annoying, he is not known for fabricating facts. Which was why, assuming it was an intentional leak which is likely but just as unlikely to ever be provable, he was picked as the leakee; a strong reputation for factual reporting in an industry where most reporters are useless shills. He has made it a point since his first column to always have at least one original reported FACT in every column.
But that is just the background to rebut your naive suggestion. You can believe Novak is directly employed by the RNC and it changes nothing in his reporting of bare facts regarding the Intelligence Committee report. Which fact do you wish to dispute?
1. The fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report with "unanimous approval".
2. The lack of any disenting commentary added by any of the Democrats on the Wilson affair?
3. The committee's "findings that Iraq apparently asked about buying yellowcake uranium from Niger."
4. Novak's observation that "They neither agreed to a conclusion that former diplomat Joseph Wilson was suggested for a mission to Niger by his CIA employee wife nor defended his statements to the contrary." Since there is now known to be a signed memo from Valerie Plame the reason for this silence is fairly obvious.
One thing that is clear to me is who the obvious choice is to play Wilson in the made for TV movie.... Jon Lovitz.
> What's amusing is that Republicans claim that Democrats are a bunch of
r n2 0040715.shtml
> thievin', cheatin' liars while they themselves are as pristine as
> new-fallen snow; and the Democrats do the exact same thing.
Actually there are some important differences. Democrats don't lie more because they are more evil than the Republicans, they lie because they can. They can because they control the mass media more completely than BillG controls the desktop. "Bush Lied, kids died." Well the reports from both the Senate Intelligence Committee (unamious vote) and the 9/11 Commission (final release pending, leaks everywhere is you care to Google) are out and Bush didn't lie, but Joseph Wilson unquestionably did lie and Richard Clarke doesn't come off very well either. You probably never heard about it, but go read the details you won't see reported in a mainstream newscast or paper.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/
Democrats knew he was probably lying when they used him to attack Bush, but they knew they could get away with it and they appear to have been correct. They do this on most issues, lie outragously, knowing that even if they are caught dead to rights the press will cover their butts. People like myself who actually follow politics read about the lies but then we knew Wilson was probably lying when he first opened his partisan piehole. He isn't a professional and didn't even lie very convincingly.
Republicans aren't above lying, but they have to be very careful to avoid being caught at it which means they do a lot less of it.
> This basically says the future looks bright ahead.
No it doesn't. I'd say it is a combination of many of the reasons already discussed and one that hasn't
1. MSFT stock has been dead in the water for several years.
2. Microsoft is transitioning from growth stock to stable megacorp.
3. But my fav is this line of reasoning. It is a forgone conclusion that sooner or later a major destructive Outlook/IE worm is coming. Something along the lines of a Warhol worm with a destructive payload. If a script kiddie doesn't do it Al Queda will. On that day, a $60B cash horde goes from a club to threaten competitors with to a siren call for trial lawyers that hasn't been heard since the heyday of the tobacco lawsuits. Imagine the Fortune 500 (ok, 499) joining into a Class for the mother of all class action lawsuits.
> Depending on what happens in November, it might not be such a bad thing.
True, with this full on assault on the truth that has been going on, Kerry might actually win. But I'm still betting on enough Americans to see through the lies and the red states pull it out in the end; so have a little faith there dude. And since the mainstream press is basically trading their longterm survival for a few points for Kerry maybe we will finally see an end to their domination of public discourse when the dust settles.
We are still months away from the election and the number of people who distrust the press is at record highs, they are below politicians and even used car salesmen in some polls. If the red team had the stones to hit hard against the press's distortions and ignore Kerry they could win, not just an election, but a victory against the forces of fear and ignorance that would stand for a generation.
p.s. Yes I KNOW what you meant, I'm playing taunt the Young Socialists of Slashdot.
Depending on their closed source Windows only app for designing things is a deal breaker. To make it "easy to use" it has to be crap for a skilled computer user. The sort of people they would be aiming at. Plus the Windows only requirement eliminates me instantly.
/. but PC World.
But notice how both sites are obviously the same company. I think we just saw a sponsored story, not on
> in the USA the drug companies happily brutally rape the consumer/citizen
> with drastically inflated prices
No, the US is subsidizing those Canadian prices.
There is only one solution to this problem. Since it is a product of governments interferring in the prices, a government solution might be the fastest solution. How about this:
The world shall be divided into three classes.
1. The 1st World, the US, Canada, Britian, France, Germany, Japan, etc.
2. The Second world. Most of the rest of the EU, etc. Nations with real wealth but not wealthy.
3. The third world.
Drugs may not be moved between classes except under controlled conditions. Drugs, as with any other good under the WTO, NAFTA, etc., can be freely traded. Any nation violating our edict shall be blockaded until they relent. FUCK THE UN.
Drug companies shall set their prices as follows. Major drug companies shall not be required to sell to the third world. However generic companies can make and sell any drug in the third world, regardless of patents in the rest of the world. Wholesale prices in the third world shall be set at 20% above cost of production.
In the second world, the price shall be calculated by passing on the cost of production, half of normal prorated cost of R&D, plus 30% for profit.
In the first world we pay cost of production plus a full share of the R&D cost plus a 50% net profit margin.
Calculating the R&D costs and spreading them by company based on their R&D efforts would be a total bitch and lead to all sorts of creeping socialism, but less than than full socialised medicine brings.
This law would have the effect of forcing you socialists on Canada and Europe to stop freeloading off of the US, lowering our cost of drugs, while at the same time making many drugs widely available in the third world. The really exensive ones still wouldn't be, but that's life.
The other option is to encourage all of the drug companies to reloacte here, close their foreign offices and then tell the socialist governments trying to mandate drug prices to FOAD; pay whatever price we decide or do without. Violating the patent and making it local would be considered the opening move in an all out tradewar. In the end this one might even be the simpler choice.
> The US has been the biggest threat to Canada through most of its
> history, and we're still around.
Canada used to be an adult. Canada fielded quite a large contribution to the Allied forces in WWII. That is no longer true. Now consider how fast the nations of Eastern Europe fell to Stalin at the open of the Cold War and how close Canada is to the old Soviet Empire. Had it not been for everyone understanding that the US simply would NEVER have tolerated Soviet encroachments into North America, what would have been your odds of speaking Russian right now?
The world is an unsafe place, always has been and probably will be for the forseeable future. You Canadians hate our guts right now because we did what we thought we needed to do in the Middle East. The difference being we had a choice, you have none. If Usama decides to start blowing your shit up all you can do is ask US to kill him for you. In the end you have no choice but to accept whatever level of protection we provide you... and even more bluntly, to pay whatever tribute we ever decided to levy upon you for the privledge.
Remember, someday you may actually be right; America might fall to the Dark Side and you have no defense against that, trusting us blindly to defend you unto death, asking nothing in return. When wolves guard sheep they don't always have the sheep's best interests at heart.
> Millions of Canadian tax dollars are used to train RN's and MD's who
> take work south of the border every year.
You identified the problem yourself, "economic pressure from the south" is just a obfuscating way of saying that Canada is offering less than the market price for something and wondering why supply is hard to find. Sounds like you and the government twits responsible need an Econ101 course.
Three choices:
1. Quit yer bitching and accept the shortage, knowing it will only grow worse.
2. Offer competitive wages and accept the rise in taxes to pay for your more realisticaly priced socialized medicine.
3. Leverage your socialized education system to forbid students educated by it from leaving the country for a period of time. Or stripping away the nice language, force them to sign Indentured Servitude contracts.
> I like it that we don't spend anything on military.
Which is OK so long as you remember the price you pay for that. On the plus side you guys get a lot more money to cover up the failures of socialism and postpone the day of reckoning.
On the other side it means you are a child nation, utterly dependent on others for protection. Namely the United States. You live carefree lives without a thought for defense or other matters of the world because WE take care of you, extending the protection of our arms to secure your safety. Your opinion in the councils of the world count for little for the same reason, the adults find it hard to take anything you say seriously because you not only aren't considered a real country, but also because in the end the world is still run by force and the threat of force and you lack the force to back up your words. You are basically Guam only bigger and with a seat in the UN general assembly. (Not that a seat in the UN counts for much, after all Morocco has exactly the same vote as all of Canada.)
Even France's voice counts more in the councils of the world because for all that they are French (silly treacherous twits) they actually possess the means of defending themselves and a small ability to project their will on the global stage, unfortunately even including the Bomb.
p.s. yes, I'm tweaking the Canadians a bit here. It's a slow news Friday, might as well stir things up a little.
I fell those winds too. Five years ago the word "Linux" was known to us tech types, period full stop. Now end users have heard of it, usually also hearing that it is 'hard to install and unfriendly afterwards'. Then I show them my laptop. They aren't switching in droves yet, but they are looking. And installing Mozilla and OO.o. Many don't yet switch over entirely, but they do play around with the alternatives and a few get hooked on tabs or some other neat feature that Microsoft hasn't invented yet.
Patience, folks. I'm not sure how this is all going to play out but I suspect it will be more of a sea change instead of a gradual process. Much like how IE displaced Netscape in a year or two as the primary browser on the Internet. With the exploits on IE coming on a weekly basis we just might get the critical mass of defectors to enable a mass exodus.
Allow me to explain that statement a bit. Currently we have a non-trivial number of sites that either require Internet Explorer or look bad without it. If we get a critical mass of defections those sites will be forced to go into panic mode; redesigning their code or losing a non-trivial percentage of users. Once that obstacle falls the pressure holding the masses of IE victims will get released and the rest of the migration could happen pretty darned fast. They see their friends/relatives/etc using Moz/Firefox/Opera and see a) neat new features, b) they are actually using something different and not having problems and mostly c) this Mozilla thing is the hot new thing and they will have to have it even if they aren't even sure why.
The usual arguments of "If it is free it has to be crappy shareware" that slow OO.o adoption don't hold fo rInternet clients since users have been trained for a decade to expect all of the basic Internet tools to be free downloads.
Verily I say unto you, Shareware has done more to harm the cause of Free Software than anything Bill Gates or Steve Balmer has done or ever will do. As it was practiced by the old school of the ASP (Association of Shareware Professionals) it was a good thing, but in the last decade it devolved into demoware, traiware, nagware, adware, spyware, etc until true Shareware has all but disappeared.
> but that is a tactic that would be as sinister to resort to as the
> initial IE monopolization
While you have a point in the abstract, in the real world I can endorse banning IE. Who actually PAYS the price of the stupidity of Windows users running IE? When the Russian mafia stole thousands of people's bank account and credit card numbers, who ended up eating most of the bill? Hint, it wasn't the luser and it was certainly not Microsoft.
It would be the sanest thing in the world for all of the banks and credit card companies to get together and, as an industry, ban the use of IE for accessing their sites on an arranged date. Set enough time to give everyone fair warning, through warnings on their websites when an IE user connects, inserts in bills and mailouts of Mozilla/Netscape (AOL's marketing dept would probably find the marketing opportunities irresistable) to customers.
But after the deadline, cut them off cold. Display a notice on the order of:
"Your browser has proven to be chronically insecure and the banking industry has made a decision to refuse to assume the risks inherent with it. Please use a different browser to conduct secure financial transactions.
List of links here.
p.s. This ban will remain in force until one of the following occurs:
1. As a user known to be engaging in high risk behaviour, you may sign a waiver assuming responsibility for any and all monatary losses resulting from identity theft tracable to Internet Access, regardless of the specific circumstances or products involved.
2. The browser vendor (Microsoft Corp.) indemnifies us against losses resulting from flaws in their product.
3. Microsoft redesigns their browser, submits it's source to open scrutiny by the Internet community and they and then we reach a consensus that it no longer presents a clear and present danger.
> Today, July 11, it is playing in 2011.
This was as predicted.
> If I understand the boxofficemojo.com tables, it is averaging about
> $1,500 per day, per screen.
Yes, a very bad omen. I really thought people were smarter than this. Almost makes me want to change to being a Democrat.... maybe Moore is right and the masses ARE so stupid they need a keeper.
But even worse, as I also predicted in this thread if F911 was a financial success, the cash in crowd in hollywood is already rushing more of this crap through the pipeline. It will mean another major decline in American moviemaking. Just when you thought it couldn't get worse than Jerry Bruckhiemer [sp].
> Well some companies are minimizing their pain by doing stock buybacks.
Do the math. How many shares could Microsoft buy back with their cash horde if the popped the whole wad on one big buyback? How much would that boost their stock price? Then what do they do next year?
Besides, they can't get rid of that stack of money anytime soon because it is the major weapon that keeps the slaves in line, fear of what havok they could wreak on anyone they decided was enemy #1. They just haven't figured out a way to use that weapon against the penguin yet. Key word being yet. They are going down but not without a fight.