If HR-1201 becomes law, every consumer could legally hack any TPM by claiming fair use, and as fair use isn't codified, there would be as many definitions of it as there are consumers.
Just a point. There are a few hundred million people in the US. All of them are not arrogant and conceited
Unfortunately when the ones that are arrogant and conceited are so good at pulling off grabbing the FP post on slashdot, it can perhaps become understandable if others are to make mistakes.
Yes, there are legitimate grievances against the US. But much or what is perceived as US arrogance is merely the US attempting to retain it's own constitutional structure.
As an American, I would gently suggest that the majority of what is perceived as US arrogance would be comprised by decades of frequently illegal covert interference by the U.S. intelligence agencies and military in the internal functions of other countries; unjustified invasions of other countries with the opposition of the entire world and many of America's own citizens; economic tendencies wherein Americans are perceived to be gradually beginning to own practically everything in certain foreign countries; frequent international trade dealings wherein America demands other countries stick to the trade treaties they have signed, yet America ignores those same treaties as it see fit on whims as small as the sale of lumber; seeming insistence that when American forces are abroad, international rules, such as the Geneva Convention or the U.N. convention against torture, apply to everyone but America; and actions like the decision by the Bush Administration, the one the events in this article are occuring in response to, to keep the DNS root servers used by the entire world under U.S. Department of Commerce control rather than handing them over to an international body (ICANN) as was originally promised under the previous president.
None of these things have to do with the U.S. "retaining it's [sic] constitutional structure".
A large portion of the world wants the US to tear up our constitution and remake ourselves in the image of the EU.
I would also gently suggest no one, anywhere, is seriously suggesting the U.S. do this.
You could, I'm sure, locate some small number of specific criticisms where expressed displeasure with U.S. actions that essentially are a matter of the U.S. protecting its own sovereignity. These are not the criticisms that are important. The actions that have earned America its reputation of international arrogance have nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with the U.S. protecting its sovereignity and "constitutional structure". In fact I would posit practically all sentiment of U.S. arrogance in civilized foreign countries could be eliminated if America would just respect the sovereignity of others.
From the perspective of corrupt authority, it is often rediculously useful to have laws which everyone is breaking, but which aren't "enforced". Set a speed limit that everyone always breaks by 10 MPH, for example, and you'll find that you can pull over absolutely anyone you like, just because you feel like it or you don't like their bumper sticker or whatever. What's that sir? No, I wasn't singling you out, you were breaking the law.
Expect the "we won't persue copying" claims, in practice, to mean that people will continue pirating, everyone will continue pirating, but only those who politically are the enemies of the record labels will be singled out for it. Want to download the entire Led Zeppelin song catalog, in clear and obvious violation of law? No one will stop you. Want to create an innovative new software program which could change the way music is distributed, but which incidentally could maybe be used to pirate music? Prepare to have the copyright directive, and tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills, come down on your head.
Ayn Rand's said exactly one lucid thing in her entire disastrous body of work, and it was this:
Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?... We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted--and you create a nation of law-breakers--and then you cash in on guilt.
Thousands of IT people around the world are loosing their jobs as software and computer needs are all hosted in some remote location by application service providers. "We'd love to keep them around", said the CEO of a major Fortune 500 company, "but it's really not that difficult to reboot my little black box that gives me access to everything I need".
I heard Scott McNealy speak last summer and he was totally gung ho about this exact idea, in nearly those exact words. Except what did he call it, um, "Utility computing". The theory is that upkeep on your computers should be something as impersonal and effortless as paying your electricity bill, and should be managed the same way, you should take one step beyond outsourcing your IT department into outsourcing the insides of the computers themselves. Because if you don't have anything running locally, you don't need a local IT department, right? This wasn't even about thin clients, so much; by McNealy's reckoning, you could do this today, nearly. He was talking about how he wished he could shut down Sun's internal mail servers, stop having to go to the bother of maintaining all the email clients and such across all the operating systems Sun internally supports, and just sign all his employees up for Yahoo Mail or something.
The reason Sun likes the idea of all software being reduced to a service provided by remote application providers is because once that happens, they can try to sell Sun hardware to the application providers.
Bonus points because it's the little guy (small inventor) giving it to the big guy (corporation).
Ah yes. Society has always had a love of stories of the little guy (thief) sticking it to the big guy (corporation). And, OK, so I mean, technically the "little guy" here is sticking it to a wide variety of "guys", ranging from big guys to middle-sized guys all the way down to open source developers living in cardboard boxes. But hey, in the process of burning down the internet they caused some fire damage to one of Microsoft's branch offices, so that makes everything OK, right? All hail these modern Robin Hoods, who steal from the rich and buy $31M condos and yachts for themselves with it.
Yes, because everybody knows that paper is a write-once, ready many system with built-in user authentication which cannot be hidden, destroyed, or otherwise tampered with.
It can be made so.
The trick here is to use an external system to verify the correctness of the voting system, called "election observers". The idea is that any person can volunteer to become an "election observer", and once they volunteer they get to sit around to verify that every voter is correctly verified and audited; ensure that everyone who comes in gets an equal chance to vote and put their vote in the box; and ensure that the box is correctly escorted and not tampered with. Because the "vote" is a piece of physical paper, this can all be done with relative ease. The database is a box. You can look at it.
When votes are electronic, this is not an option. You cannot sit there and stare at a Microsoft Access database file to ensure its integrity is preserved. You cannot sit and watch the electrons pouring over the ethernet cable to make sure none of them are being tampered with. You can of course write a computer program to do these things-- audit, observe, etc-- but then you run facefirst into a truly intractable security program, that of trusting trust. Okay, you've got this e-vote auditor program. How do you trust the auditor? How do you know the numbers the auditor is looking at are the ones that are really going into the database? How do you know the auditor hasn't been compromised?
When votes are physical objects marked in private booths and dropped into little boxes, we can trust the auditors because the task of auditing is simple, and because the auditors are numerous and diverse. Election stations will typically be watched by members of two or more political parties, meaning that if you wish to rig an election you can perhaps corrupt or fool a small number of the election observers but certainly not all of them. If you want to know how easily electronic auditors can be fooled en masse, well, look at every Microsoft worm ever. Then consider that the Nachi Worm successfully infected ATMs at banks, ATMs made incidentally by voting machine manufacturer Diebold...
The Freemasons. That's where they put the tracking device. In my teeth. My dentist betrayed me. He was just part of the network. They do it to keep tabs on you-- know where you are, hear everything by secret frequency. At first it was just the ones they'd sent back from the future, but after Tager broke the secret they had to move on to the general public, to ensure the truth didn't spread. Once they got a taste of power they wanted more. The operations expanded. 10,000 Americans every year. Now everything is in preparation for the Colonization. They hear everything. They know where to attack, when. They know where we're weak. It will begin soon.
Shit, have to go, I think I see helicopters. If I do not post on this site again you will know what happened.
"They have made their decision, now let them enforce it" is honestly the first thing that comes to mind.
Or in other words, how the hell does the FCC even have the power to enact this rule? The FCC of course has the ability to set standards for telephones; if someone wishes to patch a computer program into the "normal" phone network, then of course it's reasonable that those calls follow the same regulations as any other phone provider. But what they're talking about now sounds way, way outside the scope of anything the FCC was ever empowered or intended to regulate. It reminds me of when the FCC demanded copy control chips be put into every TV and video card, until some months later, just before the deadline for the regulations to begin, the courts, in response to inquiry by the EFF, pointed out that, no, the FCC doesn't have the right or power to demand such things.
Has anyone spoken to the EFF or ACLU about possibly challenging this new ruling in court?
How is this different from the United States where any suggested attempt to overthrow the government, assassinate the leadership, or other movements to change the political system are met with charges of treason?
It is different because in the United States, the charges of treason are made by Bill O'Reily, and in China, the charges of treason are made by a court of law.
Bill O'Reily does not [yet?] have the power to imprison or execute. The courts of China do have that power. And they use it.
The Iranians are giving us some great art, writing and cinema, but it's despite the best efforts of the government.
Like those great political films coming from Iran? Okay, have you noticed how many of these films are about the repressive nature of the state and culture within which those filmmakers live? And have you noticed the extent to which those filmmakers have to be jailed, executed, etc in order to express themselves? The good things you're seeing coming out of Iran aren't the signs of a good place, they're the signs of a bad place with a good dissident community. The fact that the dissidents can sometimes overcome the climate of censorship does not make the climate of censorship okay.
The American military and government definitely does not have the interests of the Iranians at heart right now. Iranians arguably are freer right now than the Iraqis under American rule, and if America assumed control of Iran then you can bet that among the fog of war the the burgeoning Iranian dissident movement would be hurt. But if you try to wish away the evils of the Iranian government because "at least they're not the U.S.", then you are acting against the interests of those Iranian filmmakers you like so much. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
"and I dare say not appropriate to consumers" ????
If this guy thinks that songs should be sold for more than $0.99, then he should go ahead and do so. I mean, really, go ahead and start selling songs for more than that and see how that works out. He is perfectly free to set up his own online music store, and because of the extreme flexibility of the technology involved, this will just involve getting the files on to your portable music player from a URL instead of from the iTunes application.
Once he has done this he can set the songs in his music store to cost $1.99 or $5.00 or $53.00 or absolutely whatever price he likes, and if people choose to buy it then all of that money will go right to him. While of course meanwhile the iTunes Music Store will still be back there offering quality music at $0.99 a song.
Then the market will decide for itself. That's what he says he wants, right?
In safari and it seems firefox for macintosh weirdness abounds throughout the new slashdot layout. Things show up in sans-serif fonts at random, for example the contents of the "recent posts" box on user pages, or the "allowed html" beneath a post. Things have unexplained margins or indents; for example the "Subject" box when you submit seems to be over one space from the comment box. When showing comments, all the gray boxes have surprisingly large internal margins but everything else has no margins at all, all the comments are scrunched together. Font sizes seem to vary sometimes at random, for example the first three headlines on the front page are a totally different size from the ones beneath. The whole thing looks a bit hodgepodge.
Of course, web design is unpredictable and I'm sure it'll get sorted out eventually.
The main response I'm left with is that this will make it somewhat more difficult for an interested company outsider to determine exactly how much money the XBox is losing. Before, this was easy, since the Home and Entertainment division was pretty much the "XBox and everything related" division. Now they are combining divisions, so as the XBox 360 is released the financial numbers for the XBox venture are going to be combined with other stuff and thus somewhat obscured.
What exactly goes into "entertainment and devices"?
But they aren't buying stakes in Time Warner, they're buying stakes in AOL's time warner division.
Of course, this still brings up an interesting thought. This means that if/once this all goes through, America will have basically three noteworthy television news sources; CNN, which has business entanglements with Microsoft; MSNBC, which has business entanglements with Microsoft; and Fox News, which is frequently brushing against antitrust law and, hm, how shall I put this, some people feel tends to give special deference to Republican ideology.
The reason I bring this up is this. Eventually, Microsoft is going to get into another antitrust lawsuit. Given the above, how do you think TV news is going to portray this...?
So instead of being a "feature" that potentially allows your time-shifting abilities to be blocked by the whims of media companies, it's a "feature" that potentially allows your time shifting abilities to be blocked by the whims of media companies or random electromagnetic interference???
There are a large number of problems with your suggestion. I will outline only one.
One problem is that your suggestion is wholly founded on the assumption of computational resources being valuable. This is to an extent incisive, since you have realized that the reason why the formation of zombie networks has increasingly become the endgoal of worms and such is that there is commercial value in those networks' computational resources. But this breaks down when you start to think about what they use those computational resources for.
Computational resources, by themselves, aren't particularly valuable or hard to obtain; even bandwidth resources are beginning to become expendable if you're smart about how you use them. Your average PC is absolutely awash in power it doesn't need. 20 years of "your computer is obsolete as soon as you buy it" has crashed out into "your five-year-old computer technically isn't obsolete yet". People who used to buy supercomputers often now just buy cheap PCs and leash them together. Anybody who just has a legitimate need for a lot of computation these days can most easily obtain this through totally legitimate channels.
The reason why hackers, worm-builders, spyware peoples, etc obtain their resources through illegitimate means (like worms) is because they have illegitimate intents for those resources. They don't so much want 20% of the resources of a PC, they want 20% of the resources of a PC that can't be traced back to them. This is because once they have these resources, they're going to be using them for things like, warez. Sending spam without compliance with local laws. Hosting dubious and virus-like spyware. Extorting businesses for money in exchange for not launching DDOS attacks against them. If you willingly give these people 20% of your hard drive and CPU they aren't going to be using it for things like 3d rendering or protein folding; if that was all they wanted, they wouldn't need to be using hacker methods to get it in the first place.
Instead, if we go by your scenario, you'll give them 20% of your hard drive, CPU and bandwidth; they will protect you from the other hacker groups; everyone will be happy;... and then six months later your computer will be part of a gigantic DDOS or some other illegal act so large it will attract the FBI's attention. From here there are two possibilities. Possibility one is, the people you've been contracting with here are a legitimate business, in which case the FBI will get their contact information from you and have them arrested. Possibility two is, the people you've been contracting with here are not a legitimate business, in which case the FBI will arrest you for conspiring with an organized crime group. We can assume no group even remotely competent enough to even get into this hypothetical security "protection" business in the first place would be stupid enough to let possibility one happen. This leaves possibility two. See the problem?
I mean, serious question. It isn't like we'd have to rewrap the entire fifty zillion miles of power lines in the U.S., or anything. Broadband at this point is mostly a "last mile" problem. The only wires you'd have to reshield are those wires in the last mile. Once you've done that, getting lots of fiber or something directly to the NOC is easy.
I was wondering over the weekend, on a whim, whether it would make sense to create a cross-platform library that abstracts meta-data/search functionality. Like, it would provide one uniform set of utility functions, and this would turn into calls to WinFS on windows, calls to Spotlight on OS X, and calls to ReiserFS on Linux.
But I don't know enough about WinFS OR Spotlight Or ReiserFS to know if this would be even remotely useful or is just nonsense;)
If Sesame Street really wanted to prepare children for the modern world, they should warn about things like this. That way maybe we wouldn't have mixups like this all the time.
<BIG BIRD> Hi, kids! This is the letter
G! Lots of things start with G! And they are all the wholly owned property of Independent International Investment Research PLC of Britain.
Ignorance is the natural breeding ground of racism.
This means that you cannot combat racism by limiting information or expression. The only effective way you can combat racism is by countering it with good information-- demonstrating the racists wrong, rather than silencing them.
If you try to fight racism by silencing it, you are only hurting yourself in the long run. Even aside from the slippery slope problem, you inevitably wind up with a situation where the fact you are trying to silence these people brands them with a false stamp of legitimacy. The old "help help I'm being oppressed" thing is a powerful tool, even to those whose message is itself in favor of oppression; the racists can easily twist the fact the government is trying to silence them into an argument in their favor.
In the long run this just isn't helpful; it's like trying to put out a grease fire by pouring oil on it. No good will come of what Singapore is trying to do here, only collateral damage.
My point was, there are countless software vendors out there that don't open their specs/protocols.
The difference is that those software vendors have not been convicted of illegal monopoly actions in a court of law. Microsoft has, in multiple jurisdictions.
Maybe monopoly was too strong a word.
There's this widespread misconception that "monopoly" means "it is the most popular product" or "it is the only popular product". This is not the case. "Monopoly", in the sense people talk about when they talk about governments enforcing things against monopolies, has different and very specific legal connotations having to do with the way in which market power is collected and used. This is a very important distinction to make. Governments are not in the business of punishing products or businesses just for being successful. They are, however, in the business of identifying products or businesses which are having undue and negative effects on their own market, and remedying this situation.
Of course, apparently if you are a government, do your own job and Microsoft will sue you.
Slashdot Mirror
If HR-1201 becomes law, every consumer could legally hack any TPM by claiming fair use, and as fair use isn't codified, there would be as many definitions of it as there are consumers.
Freedom is tricky like that, isn't it?
Just a point. There are a few hundred million people in the US. All of them are not arrogant and conceited
Unfortunately when the ones that are arrogant and conceited are so good at pulling off grabbing the FP post on slashdot, it can perhaps become understandable if others are to make mistakes.
Yes, there are legitimate grievances against the US. But much or what is perceived as US arrogance is merely the US attempting to retain it's own constitutional structure.
As an American, I would gently suggest that the majority of what is perceived as US arrogance would be comprised by decades of frequently illegal covert interference by the U.S. intelligence agencies and military in the internal functions of other countries; unjustified invasions of other countries with the opposition of the entire world and many of America's own citizens; economic tendencies wherein Americans are perceived to be gradually beginning to own practically everything in certain foreign countries; frequent international trade dealings wherein America demands other countries stick to the trade treaties they have signed, yet America ignores those same treaties as it see fit on whims as small as the sale of lumber; seeming insistence that when American forces are abroad, international rules, such as the Geneva Convention or the U.N. convention against torture, apply to everyone but America; and actions like the decision by the Bush Administration, the one the events in this article are occuring in response to, to keep the DNS root servers used by the entire world under U.S. Department of Commerce control rather than handing them over to an international body (ICANN) as was originally promised under the previous president.
None of these things have to do with the U.S. "retaining it's [sic] constitutional structure".
A large portion of the world wants the US to tear up our constitution and remake ourselves in the image of the EU.
I would also gently suggest no one, anywhere, is seriously suggesting the U.S. do this.
You could, I'm sure, locate some small number of specific criticisms where expressed displeasure with U.S. actions that essentially are a matter of the U.S. protecting its own sovereignity. These are not the criticisms that are important. The actions that have earned America its reputation of international arrogance have nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with the U.S. protecting its sovereignity and "constitutional structure". In fact I would posit practically all sentiment of U.S. arrogance in civilized foreign countries could be eliminated if America would just respect the sovereignity of others.
Expect the "we won't persue copying" claims, in practice, to mean that people will continue pirating, everyone will continue pirating, but only those who politically are the enemies of the record labels will be singled out for it. Want to download the entire Led Zeppelin song catalog, in clear and obvious violation of law? No one will stop you. Want to create an innovative new software program which could change the way music is distributed, but which incidentally could maybe be used to pirate music? Prepare to have the copyright directive, and tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills, come down on your head.
Ayn Rand's said exactly one lucid thing in her entire disastrous body of work, and it was this:
Thousands of IT people around the world are loosing their jobs as software and computer needs are all hosted in some remote location by application service providers. "We'd love to keep them around", said the CEO of a major Fortune 500 company, "but it's really not that difficult to reboot my little black box that gives me access to everything I need".
I heard Scott McNealy speak last summer and he was totally gung ho about this exact idea, in nearly those exact words. Except what did he call it, um, "Utility computing". The theory is that upkeep on your computers should be something as impersonal and effortless as paying your electricity bill, and should be managed the same way, you should take one step beyond outsourcing your IT department into outsourcing the insides of the computers themselves. Because if you don't have anything running locally, you don't need a local IT department, right? This wasn't even about thin clients, so much; by McNealy's reckoning, you could do this today, nearly. He was talking about how he wished he could shut down Sun's internal mail servers, stop having to go to the bother of maintaining all the email clients and such across all the operating systems Sun internally supports, and just sign all his employees up for Yahoo Mail or something.
The reason Sun likes the idea of all software being reduced to a service provided by remote application providers is because once that happens, they can try to sell Sun hardware to the application providers.
Bonus points because it's the little guy (small inventor) giving it to the big guy (corporation).
Ah yes. Society has always had a love of stories of the little guy (thief) sticking it to the big guy (corporation). And, OK, so I mean, technically the "little guy" here is sticking it to a wide variety of "guys", ranging from big guys to middle-sized guys all the way down to open source developers living in cardboard boxes. But hey, in the process of burning down the internet they caused some fire damage to one of Microsoft's branch offices, so that makes everything OK, right? All hail these modern Robin Hoods, who steal from the rich and buy $31M condos and yachts for themselves with it.
No.
Yes, because everybody knows that paper is a write-once, ready many system with built-in user authentication which cannot be hidden, destroyed, or otherwise tampered with.
It can be made so.
The trick here is to use an external system to verify the correctness of the voting system, called "election observers". The idea is that any person can volunteer to become an "election observer", and once they volunteer they get to sit around to verify that every voter is correctly verified and audited; ensure that everyone who comes in gets an equal chance to vote and put their vote in the box; and ensure that the box is correctly escorted and not tampered with. Because the "vote" is a piece of physical paper, this can all be done with relative ease. The database is a box. You can look at it.
When votes are electronic, this is not an option. You cannot sit there and stare at a Microsoft Access database file to ensure its integrity is preserved. You cannot sit and watch the electrons pouring over the ethernet cable to make sure none of them are being tampered with. You can of course write a computer program to do these things-- audit, observe, etc-- but then you run facefirst into a truly intractable security program, that of trusting trust. Okay, you've got this e-vote auditor program. How do you trust the auditor? How do you know the numbers the auditor is looking at are the ones that are really going into the database? How do you know the auditor hasn't been compromised?
When votes are physical objects marked in private booths and dropped into little boxes, we can trust the auditors because the task of auditing is simple, and because the auditors are numerous and diverse. Election stations will typically be watched by members of two or more political parties, meaning that if you wish to rig an election you can perhaps corrupt or fool a small number of the election observers but certainly not all of them. If you want to know how easily electronic auditors can be fooled en masse, well, look at every Microsoft worm ever. Then consider that the Nachi Worm successfully infected ATMs at banks, ATMs made incidentally by voting machine manufacturer Diebold...
The Freemasons. That's where they put the tracking device. In my teeth. My dentist betrayed me. He was just part of the network. They do it to keep tabs on you-- know where you are, hear everything by secret frequency. At first it was just the ones they'd sent back from the future, but after Tager broke the secret they had to move on to the general public, to ensure the truth didn't spread. Once they got a taste of power they wanted more. The operations expanded. 10,000 Americans every year. Now everything is in preparation for the Colonization. They hear everything. They know where to attack, when. They know where we're weak. It will begin soon.
Shit, have to go, I think I see helicopters. If I do not post on this site again you will know what happened.
"They have made their decision, now let them enforce it" is honestly the first thing that comes to mind.
Or in other words, how the hell does the FCC even have the power to enact this rule? The FCC of course has the ability to set standards for telephones; if someone wishes to patch a computer program into the "normal" phone network, then of course it's reasonable that those calls follow the same regulations as any other phone provider. But what they're talking about now sounds way, way outside the scope of anything the FCC was ever empowered or intended to regulate. It reminds me of when the FCC demanded copy control chips be put into every TV and video card, until some months later, just before the deadline for the regulations to begin, the courts, in response to inquiry by the EFF, pointed out that, no, the FCC doesn't have the right or power to demand such things.
Has anyone spoken to the EFF or ACLU about possibly challenging this new ruling in court?
How is this different from the United States where any suggested attempt to overthrow the government, assassinate the leadership, or other movements to change the political system are met with charges of treason?
It is different because in the United States, the charges of treason are made by Bill O'Reily, and in China, the charges of treason are made by a court of law.
Bill O'Reily does not [yet?] have the power to imprison or execute. The courts of China do have that power. And they use it.
The Iranians are giving us some great art, writing and cinema, but it's despite the best efforts of the government.
Like those great political films coming from Iran? Okay, have you noticed how many of these films are about the repressive nature of the state and culture within which those filmmakers live? And have you noticed the extent to which those filmmakers have to be jailed, executed, etc in order to express themselves? The good things you're seeing coming out of Iran aren't the signs of a good place, they're the signs of a bad place with a good dissident community. The fact that the dissidents can sometimes overcome the climate of censorship does not make the climate of censorship okay.
The American military and government definitely does not have the interests of the Iranians at heart right now. Iranians arguably are freer right now than the Iraqis under American rule, and if America assumed control of Iran then you can bet that among the fog of war the the burgeoning Iranian dissident movement would be hurt. But if you try to wish away the evils of the Iranian government because "at least they're not the U.S.", then you are acting against the interests of those Iranian filmmakers you like so much. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
"and I dare say not appropriate to consumers" ????
If this guy thinks that songs should be sold for more than $0.99, then he should go ahead and do so. I mean, really, go ahead and start selling songs for more than that and see how that works out. He is perfectly free to set up his own online music store, and because of the extreme flexibility of the technology involved, this will just involve getting the files on to your portable music player from a URL instead of from the iTunes application.
Once he has done this he can set the songs in his music store to cost $1.99 or $5.00 or $53.00 or absolutely whatever price he likes, and if people choose to buy it then all of that money will go right to him. While of course meanwhile the iTunes Music Store will still be back there offering quality music at $0.99 a song.
Then the market will decide for itself. That's what he says he wants, right?
In safari and it seems firefox for macintosh weirdness abounds throughout the new slashdot layout. Things show up in sans-serif fonts at random, for example the contents of the "recent posts" box on user pages, or the "allowed html" beneath a post. Things have unexplained margins or indents; for example the "Subject" box when you submit seems to be over one space from the comment box. When showing comments, all the gray boxes have surprisingly large internal margins but everything else has no margins at all, all the comments are scrunched together. Font sizes seem to vary sometimes at random, for example the first three headlines on the front page are a totally different size from the ones beneath. The whole thing looks a bit hodgepodge.
Of course, web design is unpredictable and I'm sure it'll get sorted out eventually.
The main response I'm left with is that this will make it somewhat more difficult for an interested company outsider to determine exactly how much money the XBox is losing. Before, this was easy, since the Home and Entertainment division was pretty much the "XBox and everything related" division. Now they are combining divisions, so as the XBox 360 is released the financial numbers for the XBox venture are going to be combined with other stuff and thus somewhat obscured.
What exactly goes into "entertainment and devices"?
But they aren't buying stakes in Time Warner, they're buying stakes in AOL's time warner division.
Of course, this still brings up an interesting thought. This means that if/once this all goes through, America will have basically three noteworthy television news sources; CNN, which has business entanglements with Microsoft; MSNBC, which has business entanglements with Microsoft; and Fox News, which is frequently brushing against antitrust law and, hm, how shall I put this, some people feel tends to give special deference to Republican ideology.
The reason I bring this up is this. Eventually, Microsoft is going to get into another antitrust lawsuit. Given the above, how do you think TV news is going to portray this...?
So instead of being a "feature" that potentially allows your time-shifting abilities to be blocked by the whims of media companies, it's a "feature" that potentially allows your time shifting abilities to be blocked by the whims of media companies or random electromagnetic interference???
That's even worse...
Where are they and are their women cute
They're mostly dancing in front of single-color backdrops, and their women are pretty much just silhouettes
I see, thank you.
There are a large number of problems with your suggestion. I will outline only one.
... and then six months later your computer will be part of a gigantic DDOS or some other illegal act so large it will attract the FBI's attention. From here there are two possibilities. Possibility one is, the people you've been contracting with here are a legitimate business, in which case the FBI will get their contact information from you and have them arrested. Possibility two is, the people you've been contracting with here are not a legitimate business, in which case the FBI will arrest you for conspiring with an organized crime group. We can assume no group even remotely competent enough to even get into this hypothetical security "protection" business in the first place would be stupid enough to let possibility one happen. This leaves possibility two. See the problem?
One problem is that your suggestion is wholly founded on the assumption of computational resources being valuable. This is to an extent incisive, since you have realized that the reason why the formation of zombie networks has increasingly become the endgoal of worms and such is that there is commercial value in those networks' computational resources. But this breaks down when you start to think about what they use those computational resources for.
Computational resources, by themselves, aren't particularly valuable or hard to obtain; even bandwidth resources are beginning to become expendable if you're smart about how you use them. Your average PC is absolutely awash in power it doesn't need. 20 years of "your computer is obsolete as soon as you buy it" has crashed out into "your five-year-old computer technically isn't obsolete yet". People who used to buy supercomputers often now just buy cheap PCs and leash them together. Anybody who just has a legitimate need for a lot of computation these days can most easily obtain this through totally legitimate channels.
The reason why hackers, worm-builders, spyware peoples, etc obtain their resources through illegitimate means (like worms) is because they have illegitimate intents for those resources. They don't so much want 20% of the resources of a PC, they want 20% of the resources of a PC that can't be traced back to them. This is because once they have these resources, they're going to be using them for things like, warez. Sending spam without compliance with local laws. Hosting dubious and virus-like spyware. Extorting businesses for money in exchange for not launching DDOS attacks against them. If you willingly give these people 20% of your hard drive and CPU they aren't going to be using it for things like 3d rendering or protein folding; if that was all they wanted, they wouldn't need to be using hacker methods to get it in the first place.
Instead, if we go by your scenario, you'll give them 20% of your hard drive, CPU and bandwidth; they will protect you from the other hacker groups; everyone will be happy;
the unshielded wiring that is used by BPL
Okay. So how hard is it to add shielding?
I mean, serious question. It isn't like we'd have to rewrap the entire fifty zillion miles of power lines in the U.S., or anything. Broadband at this point is mostly a "last mile" problem. The only wires you'd have to reshield are those wires in the last mile. Once you've done that, getting lots of fiber or something directly to the NOC is easy.
I was wondering over the weekend, on a whim, whether it would make sense to create a cross-platform library that abstracts meta-data/search functionality. Like, it would provide one uniform set of utility functions, and this would turn into calls to WinFS on windows, calls to Spotlight on OS X, and calls to ReiserFS on Linux.
;)
But I don't know enough about WinFS OR Spotlight Or ReiserFS to know if this would be even remotely useful or is just nonsense
Ignorance is the natural breeding ground of racism.
This means that you cannot combat racism by limiting information or expression. The only effective way you can combat racism is by countering it with good information-- demonstrating the racists wrong, rather than silencing them.
If you try to fight racism by silencing it, you are only hurting yourself in the long run. Even aside from the slippery slope problem, you inevitably wind up with a situation where the fact you are trying to silence these people brands them with a false stamp of legitimacy. The old "help help I'm being oppressed" thing is a powerful tool, even to those whose message is itself in favor of oppression; the racists can easily twist the fact the government is trying to silence them into an argument in their favor.
In the long run this just isn't helpful; it's like trying to put out a grease fire by pouring oil on it. No good will come of what Singapore is trying to do here, only collateral damage.
My point was, there are countless software vendors out there that don't open their specs/protocols.
The difference is that those software vendors have not been convicted of illegal monopoly actions in a court of law. Microsoft has, in multiple jurisdictions.
Maybe monopoly was too strong a word.
There's this widespread misconception that "monopoly" means "it is the most popular product" or "it is the only popular product". This is not the case. "Monopoly", in the sense people talk about when they talk about governments enforcing things against monopolies, has different and very specific legal connotations having to do with the way in which market power is collected and used. This is a very important distinction to make. Governments are not in the business of punishing products or businesses just for being successful. They are, however, in the business of identifying products or businesses which are having undue and negative effects on their own market, and remedying this situation.
Of course, apparently if you are a government, do your own job and Microsoft will sue you.
Superdome - before
Superdome - after