The difference - and this is important now - is that a DMCA-style prohibition of DRM circumvention doesn't "criminalize copyright infringement". It criminalizes making or using tools which might enable you to circumvent DRM. The appropriate corrolary would be if during prohibition the government had made it illegal to produce bottles, because they might be used for storing liquor. If the tools to circumvent DRM are illegal, and they crack down on the distribution of such tools, yes, I believe, a lot fewer people will crack their Napster downloads.
The thing is always in the hand of the user. With
some tools, I can completely re-flash my cell phone. If I'm smart, I
can even make the modifications I did stealth from the POV of the cell
phone company. This is and will always be true, unless you start making appliances that explode when you open them. Or when you try to make any "illegal operation" with them.
...Or until you persuade the government to criminilize attempts to defeat your DRM. Then you can make your DRM encryption as weak as you want, and let the police pick up the slack for your laziness/technological shortcomings.
That any algorithm is vulnerable to brute-force attacks is totally uninteresting. It's a given in cryptography that given encrypted data, you can try all the possible keys, or re-hash lots of data, until you find one that works. It's up to you to pick a key long enough that it will take anyone else an impractically long time to crack it.
Now, that has nothing to do with this article. These guys are alleging that SHA-1 can be defeated significantly faster than brute-force. This would be a defect in the algorithm and potentially a bad thing. So did this "have to happen"? No, absolutely not. Some algorithms are provably secure for certain purposes.
I don't know, man. If you could shield yourself from subpoenas just by keeping a shitty-ass blog that gets like one hit a month, that would be a pretty big loophole in the justice system. I have a hard time finding this appropriate.
Freedom of the press is, just like the fourth and fifth ammendments, a pretty big loophole in the justice system. On the small scale, it seems like an inconvenience, but on the large scale, it's what makes American freedom possible. Don't want to give testimony at your own hearing? Don't have to. Period. Police found incriminating evidence in your house but didn't have a warrant to search it? Not admissable. Too bad. Publish something that the government wants to investigate? Don't have to reveal your sources. Oh well.
In actuality, your example isn't really valid. If you admitted in public that you knew who was responsible for a robbery, but then refused to let the police detectives know who it was, you would in all probablity be indicted for obstruction of justice - whether you're a major publisher or just a regular guy.
You could argue the same could be said for Think Secret et al. I don't think it's the same, but that's for the courts to decide.
Well, these web sites are making their cases on Freedom of Speech
grounds, specifically (as has been stated by various lawyers and legal
briefs multiple times), and, more generally on First Amendment
grounds.
IANAL, but from what I gather from this article, freedom of speech and freedom of the press protect the same rights (if there's a case that finds otherwise, I'd love to hear about it). The primary distinction seems to be that individuals speak and institutions publish - but both are protected (and if anything, freedom of speech is the one that protects more rights). Apple is suing Nick dePlume, publisher of Think Secret, not The dePlume Organization LLC or other such entity. This is one possible reason why their lawyers are making their cases based on speech rather than press, but I'm sure if it's legally advantageous to them, they'll consider both.
Also, what constitutes a "journalist"? Anyone who has a web site? How is that defined? And yes, this is a serious question.
Well, I hope the court isn't trying to figure this out.
journalist n. 2. One who keeps a journal.
Even the lamest 'blog is a "journal" unarguably. So yes, anyone with a web site is a "journalist". The government should not get into the business of determining who's a "legitimate journalist" and who's a "illegitimate journalist not worthy of the protections of freedom of the press". To do so would amount to licensing journalists, which I think is very much the wrong idea.
But I don't see why any of this matters. The first ammendment (you know, the thing which might protect Think Secret from legal action under the UTSA) makes no mention of "journalists"; only freedom of speech and the press. Hopefully you don't actually need a Gutenberg printing press to be considered "press".
I'll do you one worse. I read "Prompt Speculation" as "Prompt Selection" and "trademarks" got brain-garbled into "patents", seeing as this is slashdot. I figured Nintendo had pattented the ability to select things at a prompt, and I thought of the 1 player / 2 player selection prompt from the original Super Mario Bros. Hm, I wonder if there's prior art.
And in this case, how much would you bet that after July, there will be hacks to disable the broadcast flag, discretly provided by manufacturers through back-channels, just like there are hacks to disable region code or macrovision on DVD players....
Interesting. I will bet you...one linux-compatible HDTV tuner PCI card that isn't crippled by the broadcast flag.
Region encoding isn't really comparable. Regionless DVD players aren't illegal. Defeating the broadcast flag will be.
I hope you're right. But I was also hoping that HDTV would have been way more widely adopted by 2005, and that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 wouldn't pass.
Re:Shouldn't Apple put something like this out?
on
MythTV 0.17 Released
·
· Score: 1
There are in fact debian packages for mythtv, and they really are excellent. See the packages here and modify your sources.list file accordingly. You will also need a few packages from unstable, if you are otherwise running stable or testing.
And I thought the government should stop screwing around with state issues, like the speed limit.
I realize this is getting pretty far off-topic, but this comment really piqued my curiosity. First of all, state and local governments DO pretty much set the speed limit, even on "interstates". My problem with this is that they have demonstrated themselves to be completely inept at this task in many cases and are totally willing to set low speed limits in order to gain more ticket revenue. I would love for the federal government to revoke the rights of states to set their own speed limits on highways and set some decent, logical standards.
Now, apparently I'm somewhat to the left of you, but I do appreciate the importance of state governments having appropriate power and control over their jurisdictions. But lately I've been thinking about the issue, and more and more I'm coming to the conclusion that the states' rights argument is crap. State elections are frequently too low-profile to get the attention they require to legitimately expose enough people to the issues, and state governments just plain suck.
I lived in New York state for 5 years. Have you ever read about the government of the state of New York? It is the worst, most corrupt, inefficient, broken legislature in the country. And this is New York! Not Alabama or Louisiana or such! In short, control of the governments lies in the hands of 3 people, and without the will of those 3 people nothing gets done. Next door, the (very intelligent and educated) people of Connecticut elected John Rowland. Three times! W-T-F, man.
Well, I think I've gone far enough off topic for one rant. States can have rights in proportion to how responsible they will be excersizing them.
As well as for(i=0;in;i++){ sendpacketWithThisData(&i); }
Well, that example seems perfectly parallelizable to me, but you make a good point anyway. Anything involving I/O restricts parallelization since the compiler doesn't know what the input is going to be at runtime.
Also, one thing noone seems to catch on to is that you have to consider the amount of time it takes to load code section and data onto one of the SPEs, then kick it off, detect it being finished and read the result.[...]
I think the idea is that you have a very fast bus, and independent caches per SPE.
What you've done is changed one algorithm for finding a factorial into another which does work in parallel. That's fine. But the compiler can't do that automatically with C code. As long as code can have "side-effects", it can't assume parallelization is possible or determine what it is. And except for trivial cases (e.g. if you're only doing arithmetic on constants), in C it is uncomputable whether a given algorithm will even have side-effects at run time.
Could Microsoft beat linux/open source software if they had to market their products without using FUD to undermine the credibility or quality of the alternative?
A fair question, but no. Consider for example an iterative factorial agorithm:
for (i=1;i<n;i++) { m = m * i; }
Totally unparallelizable.
This is a case where to execute the next step, you absolutely need the results of the previous step to be completed. There can be other kinds of reasons for this:
for (i=0;i<n;i++) { i = f(i); }
In this case you don't even know how many times the loop is going to execute in advance. Now, maybe if you're clever you can figure it out, but what if f() is return (rand() * i);? Ick.
To make matters worse, C lets you use pointers and do whatever you want. So given some set of instructions, there could be side affects on i (or n) that are totally unpredictable without executing the program.
What you're looking for - the problem I'm describing - is not a problem with gcc. It's a problem with the C language. If you want to get rid of side-effects and make parallelization easy, try using a pure functional language. But people don't like programming in pure functional languages (well, I don't), they like programming in C (or other procedural-style language).
Re:redundant redundant and again, redundant
on
iPod Shuffle RAID
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Yeah, really. If they were going to make a redundant RAID array they should have done it with the 60 GB iPod - you know, the one with the liquid LCD display. Just imagine how much advanced AAC codec encoded music you could fit on a BEOWULF cluster of 60 GB iPods with their HD drives assembled into a redundant RAID array! It would be expensive though; I might hit the limit on the automated ATM machine trying to pay for it, I might have to use my CC card.
I remember back in the day using various Performas (as well as a couple Quadra 605s) and wondering what the hell had gotten in to them. They were god-awful slow, and it just didn't make any sense. Even considering their lower clock speed and (usually) small memory configuration, they seemed disproportionally sluggish compared to their contemporaneous Mac models, the Quadra 7/8/9 series and original PowerMacs.
You mention Performas being repackaged Quadras or, later, PowerMacs. You omit that Apple at the time had 4 silly names for their desktop lines: LC, Performa, Centris, and Quadra. The Centris was the shortest lived of these names and eventually the series made a direct conversion to Quadra models. I tell you, looking back, Apple's naming scheme was unintelligible. I dare you to explain the difference between a LC model and a Performa model. What's worse, many model numbers were used across multiple lines (Apple introduced a Quadra, LC, and Performa 630 all at once), but many weren't. The LC's numbering system goes back to the later MacII days, evident by the subsequent LC II and LC III. what is really the difference between a Power Mac 6500 and a Performa 6500? What's the difference between a Centris 610 and a Quadra 610? (Answer: 5 MHz, mostly) Is a Quadra 700 better than a Quadra 650? Than a Quadra 660? (Answer: No, No.)
I agree, the 603 chip was unfairly given a bad rep. The Performa line did make one final stand, and I think it did go out on a high note. The Performa 6500 was not a shabby machine. At the time it was probably the most respectable entry level Mac Apple had ever attempted.
I'm not sure what they think they're measuring in this survey, so it's kind of futile. Coke's product offerings are pretty limited. Under the Coca-Cola/Coke brand, they sell cola, reduced-calorie cola, and flavored cola. The company makes any other products, but they don't even call it "Coca-Cola brand lemon-lime soft drink" - they call it "Sprite" with no mention of the Coke brand in the name. Sure lots of people all over the world recognize this made up phrase, but so what? The term is practically generic.
Apple and Google, OTOH, have really strong brands in the sense that those names are worth money in the market. If tomorrow Apple came out with a cell phone, a PDA, a digital wristwatch, and a Swedish-made penis enlarger pump, they could price their new wares at a premium, and still shift a million units in a day. All in business areas they're not currently in. For another example, when Froogle came out, I was excited to use it, because it was from Google. Even before anyone had used it, they had already earned karma with me because I knew their name. Lots of people are speculating about a Google browser next. Surely it will get a lot of downloads the day it comes out, if it ever does. Will more people drink another Coke? Sure, but there's only so many things the Coca-Cola people can stick the name Coke on and sell, and there's only so much money they can charge for that name.
My High School Journalism teacher was one of the few people qualified to testify in court based on her knowledge of graphology.
In the United States, pretty much ANYONE is "qualified" to testify in court (pending the permission of the judge). Credibility is up to the jury to decide. Usefulness is another matter entirely.
From IdiotOnMyLeft: It points out the fact that although it is perfectly possible to use a two button mouse on a Mac for 7 years now, developers are forced to rethink their design approach and can't flood the right click menu.
They give the trolls too much credit. I am not aware of anything that happened 7 years ago to make two button mice work with Macs. And while I'm not aware of any specific multi-button mice that will work on a Mac Plus, there are plenty of multi-button ADB mice going back nearly two decades.
On the flip side, you can have a product that sold incredibly well, yet had almost no influence on the market styling wise. Take the Dodge Neon for example. They sold a ton of them, but I didn't see anyone trying to emulate a Neon.
I don't think the Neon is a particularly distinctive looking car. Of course, Plymouth used to make an identical car, which didn't help. But I think a Kia Rio or Hyundai Accent/Elantra looks pretty similar - though I'm not sure who influenced whom. Then again, maybe the only reason I think they look similar is that they're all approximately the same amount of ugly.
Anyway, popularity/sales and influence are certainly not directly related in either direction. Sure the Neon is popular, but if you're building a small car, why would you want to immitate a Neon when you could immitate the even more popular Civic, Corolla, or Focus? But there's a limit to how popular of an item you should immitate. Camry's are so popular that they're ubiquitous in America, but their appearance is so bland you'd be nuts to immitate one. Same with Dell. Dells are so common, if you want to make your own product, you'd better distinguish it from a typical Dell box, or no one will pay any attention. The various iMacs are popular, but they're not so common that if someone else makes one, it will look old and unoriginal, even if it is obviously derivitive.
Re:You are mistaken about the video capabilities.
on
More On PS3 and Xbox 2
·
· Score: 1
This is true. However, the Mac Mini's Radeon 9200 has 32MB of DDR memory - as in, dedicated to video. The XBox, as I recall, has no dedicated video memory and shares the system's DDR memory for video. I don't think there's any question, the system taken as a whole, the Mac Mini is faster than an XBox. Of course, without DirectX on the Mac, there is no way to make any reasonable benchmark comparison between the two for purposes of this discussion (gaming).
And Apple is just trying to convert PC users that are scared to give up their new $80 dollar wireless usb keyboard and mouse combo they just bought.
With the mac mini, Apple isn't going after PC users who would have bought an $80 wireless usb keyboard and mouse. They're going after the guy who'll use it with their POS Dell QuietKey or $30 HP keyboard from 4 years ago, and an IntelliMouse. Either that, or people who will pick up a keyboard and mouse while they're at the Apple store - now that they're a little more reasonably priced. PS/2 to USB converters are a dime a dozen. If Apple isn't selling them in their retail stores, I bet they'll start carrying them soon.
Even if the G4 is faster than the G5 at the same clock speed, there are lots of reasons to go with a G5. Not the least of which is that the G4 doesn't run at as high a clock speed as the G5. 1.5 vs. 1.8 is one thing, 1.5 vs. 2.5 is something else entirely. Realistically, the G5 blows the G4 out of the water. The G5 is a 64-bit processor, although the utility of that in a laptop is pretty questionable. I think the big win with the G5 is that you're no longer stuck with the G4's antiquated FSB. Right now there is little reason to run a G4 at 2GHz because the memory bandwidth available to it is so low.
If the Patriot Act stands indefinitely, it will be because a revised interpretation of the 4th and 6th amendments is what the people are really looking for.
I think you're giving the electorate too much credit. The justices have their own priorities, the congress is beholden to other interests, and the electorate votes on other issues: whether they agree with a candidate's position on abortion and how their policies would affect their wallets.
The PATRIOT Act has already stood for 3 years. 3 years is WAY too long to be imprisioned without a hearing in the US. I don't think I'm in the minority of Americans in thinking that this is unconscionable. But this can happen because Congress had no problem passing it (likewise the president), the courts don't bother overturning it, and American voters don't care or don't understand for it change their votes.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference - and this is important now - is that a DMCA-style prohibition of DRM circumvention doesn't "criminalize copyright infringement". It criminalizes making or using tools which might enable you to circumvent DRM. The appropriate corrolary would be if during prohibition the government had made it illegal to produce bottles, because they might be used for storing liquor. If the tools to circumvent DRM are illegal, and they crack down on the distribution of such tools, yes, I believe, a lot fewer people will crack their Napster downloads.
The thing is always in the hand of the user. With some tools, I can completely re-flash my cell phone. If I'm smart, I can even make the modifications I did stealth from the POV of the cell phone company. This is and will always be true, unless you start making appliances that explode when you open them. Or when you try to make any "illegal operation" with them.
...Or until you persuade the government to criminilize attempts to defeat your DRM. Then you can make your DRM encryption as weak as you want, and let the police pick up the slack for your laziness/technological shortcomings.
That any algorithm is vulnerable to brute-force attacks is totally uninteresting. It's a given in cryptography that given encrypted data, you can try all the possible keys, or re-hash lots of data, until you find one that works. It's up to you to pick a key long enough that it will take anyone else an impractically long time to crack it.
Now, that has nothing to do with this article. These guys are alleging that SHA-1 can be defeated significantly faster than brute-force. This would be a defect in the algorithm and potentially a bad thing. So did this "have to happen"? No, absolutely not. Some algorithms are provably secure for certain purposes.
I don't know, man. If you could shield yourself from subpoenas just by keeping a shitty-ass blog that gets like one hit a month, that would be a pretty big loophole in the justice system. I have a hard time finding this appropriate.
Freedom of the press is, just like the fourth and fifth ammendments, a pretty big loophole in the justice system. On the small scale, it seems like an inconvenience, but on the large scale, it's what makes American freedom possible. Don't want to give testimony at your own hearing? Don't have to. Period. Police found incriminating evidence in your house but didn't have a warrant to search it? Not admissable. Too bad. Publish something that the government wants to investigate? Don't have to reveal your sources. Oh well.
In actuality, your example isn't really valid. If you admitted in public that you knew who was responsible for a robbery, but then refused to let the police detectives know who it was, you would in all probablity be indicted for obstruction of justice - whether you're a major publisher or just a regular guy.
You could argue the same could be said for Think Secret et al. I don't think it's the same, but that's for the courts to decide.
Well, these web sites are making their cases on Freedom of Speech grounds, specifically (as has been stated by various lawyers and legal briefs multiple times), and, more generally on First Amendment grounds.
IANAL, but from what I gather from this article, freedom of speech and freedom of the press protect the same rights (if there's a case that finds otherwise, I'd love to hear about it). The primary distinction seems to be that individuals speak and institutions publish - but both are protected (and if anything, freedom of speech is the one that protects more rights). Apple is suing Nick dePlume, publisher of Think Secret, not The dePlume Organization LLC or other such entity. This is one possible reason why their lawyers are making their cases based on speech rather than press, but I'm sure if it's legally advantageous to them, they'll consider both.
Also, what constitutes a "journalist"? Anyone who has a web site? How is that defined? And yes, this is a serious question.
Well, I hope the court isn't trying to figure this out.
Even the lamest 'blog is a "journal" unarguably. So yes, anyone with a web site is a "journalist". The government should not get into the business of determining who's a "legitimate journalist" and who's a "illegitimate journalist not worthy of the protections of freedom of the press". To do so would amount to licensing journalists, which I think is very much the wrong idea.
But I don't see why any of this matters. The first ammendment (you know, the thing which might protect Think Secret from legal action under the UTSA) makes no mention of "journalists"; only freedom of speech and the press. Hopefully you don't actually need a Gutenberg printing press to be considered "press".
I'll do you one worse. I read "Prompt Speculation" as "Prompt Selection" and "trademarks" got brain-garbled into "patents", seeing as this is slashdot. I figured Nintendo had pattented the ability to select things at a prompt, and I thought of the 1 player / 2 player selection prompt from the original Super Mario Bros. Hm, I wonder if there's prior art.
And in this case, how much would you bet that after July, there will be hacks to disable the broadcast flag, discretly provided by manufacturers through back-channels, just like there are hacks to disable region code or macrovision on DVD players....
Interesting. I will bet you...one linux-compatible HDTV tuner PCI card that isn't crippled by the broadcast flag.
Region encoding isn't really comparable. Regionless DVD players aren't illegal. Defeating the broadcast flag will be.
I hope you're right. But I was also hoping that HDTV would have been way more widely adopted by 2005, and that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 wouldn't pass.
There are in fact debian packages for mythtv, and they really are excellent. See the packages here and modify your sources.list file accordingly. You will also need a few packages from unstable, if you are otherwise running stable or testing.
Technically, you're wrong, and you do pay. The price of milk is subsidized by the government.
And I thought the government should stop screwing around with state issues, like the speed limit.
I realize this is getting pretty far off-topic, but this comment really piqued my curiosity. First of all, state and local governments DO pretty much set the speed limit, even on "interstates". My problem with this is that they have demonstrated themselves to be completely inept at this task in many cases and are totally willing to set low speed limits in order to gain more ticket revenue. I would love for the federal government to revoke the rights of states to set their own speed limits on highways and set some decent, logical standards.
Now, apparently I'm somewhat to the left of you, but I do appreciate the importance of state governments having appropriate power and control over their jurisdictions. But lately I've been thinking about the issue, and more and more I'm coming to the conclusion that the states' rights argument is crap. State elections are frequently too low-profile to get the attention they require to legitimately expose enough people to the issues, and state governments just plain suck.
I lived in New York state for 5 years. Have you ever read about the government of the state of New York? It is the worst, most corrupt, inefficient, broken legislature in the country. And this is New York! Not Alabama or Louisiana or such! In short, control of the governments lies in the hands of 3 people, and without the will of those 3 people nothing gets done. Next door, the (very intelligent and educated) people of Connecticut elected John Rowland. Three times! W-T-F, man.
Well, I think I've gone far enough off topic for one rant. States can have rights in proportion to how responsible they will be excersizing them.
for(i=0;in;i++){
sendpacketWithThisData(&i);
}
Well, that example seems perfectly parallelizable to me, but you make a good point anyway. Anything involving I/O restricts parallelization since the compiler doesn't know what the input is going to be at runtime.
Also, one thing noone seems to catch on to is that you have to consider the amount of time it takes to load code section and data onto one of the SPEs, then kick it off, detect it being finished and read the result.[...]
I think the idea is that you have a very fast bus, and independent caches per SPE.
What you've done is changed one algorithm for finding a factorial into another which does work in parallel. That's fine. But the compiler can't do that automatically with C code. As long as code can have "side-effects", it can't assume parallelization is possible or determine what it is. And except for trivial cases (e.g. if you're only doing arithmetic on constants), in C it is uncomputable whether a given algorithm will even have side-effects at run time.
Could Microsoft beat linux/open source software if they had to market their products without using FUD to undermine the credibility or quality of the alternative?
A fair question, but no. Consider for example an iterative factorial agorithm:
Totally unparallelizable.
This is a case where to execute the next step, you absolutely need the results of the previous step to be completed. There can be other kinds of reasons for this:In this case you don't even know how many times the loop is going to execute in advance. Now, maybe if you're clever you can figure it out, but what if f() is return (rand() * i);? Ick.
To make matters worse, C lets you use pointers and do whatever you want. So given some set of instructions, there could be side affects on i (or n) that are totally unpredictable without executing the program.
What you're looking for - the problem I'm describing - is not a problem with gcc. It's a problem with the C language. If you want to get rid of side-effects and make parallelization easy, try using a pure functional language. But people don't like programming in pure functional languages (well, I don't), they like programming in C (or other procedural-style language).
Yeah, really. If they were going to make a redundant RAID array they should have done it with the 60 GB iPod - you know, the one with the liquid LCD display. Just imagine how much advanced AAC codec encoded music you could fit on a BEOWULF cluster of 60 GB iPods with their HD drives assembled into a redundant RAID array! It would be expensive though; I might hit the limit on the automated ATM machine trying to pay for it, I might have to use my CC card.
That is really incredible. Mod parent up.
I remember back in the day using various Performas (as well as a couple Quadra 605s) and wondering what the hell had gotten in to them. They were god-awful slow, and it just didn't make any sense. Even considering their lower clock speed and (usually) small memory configuration, they seemed disproportionally sluggish compared to their contemporaneous Mac models, the Quadra 7/8/9 series and original PowerMacs.
You mention Performas being repackaged Quadras or, later, PowerMacs. You omit that Apple at the time had 4 silly names for their desktop lines: LC, Performa, Centris, and Quadra. The Centris was the shortest lived of these names and eventually the series made a direct conversion to Quadra models. I tell you, looking back, Apple's naming scheme was unintelligible. I dare you to explain the difference between a LC model and a Performa model. What's worse, many model numbers were used across multiple lines (Apple introduced a Quadra, LC, and Performa 630 all at once), but many weren't. The LC's numbering system goes back to the later MacII days, evident by the subsequent LC II and LC III. what is really the difference between a Power Mac 6500 and a Performa 6500? What's the difference between a Centris 610 and a Quadra 610? (Answer: 5 MHz, mostly) Is a Quadra 700 better than a Quadra 650? Than a Quadra 660? (Answer: No, No.)
I agree, the 603 chip was unfairly given a bad rep. The Performa line did make one final stand, and I think it did go out on a high note. The Performa 6500 was not a shabby machine. At the time it was probably the most respectable entry level Mac Apple had ever attempted.
I'm not sure what they think they're measuring in this survey, so it's kind of futile. Coke's product offerings are pretty limited. Under the Coca-Cola/Coke brand, they sell cola, reduced-calorie cola, and flavored cola. The company makes any other products, but they don't even call it "Coca-Cola brand lemon-lime soft drink" - they call it "Sprite" with no mention of the Coke brand in the name. Sure lots of people all over the world recognize this made up phrase, but so what? The term is practically generic.
Apple and Google, OTOH, have really strong brands in the sense that those names are worth money in the market. If tomorrow Apple came out with a cell phone, a PDA, a digital wristwatch, and a Swedish-made penis enlarger pump, they could price their new wares at a premium, and still shift a million units in a day. All in business areas they're not currently in. For another example, when Froogle came out, I was excited to use it, because it was from Google. Even before anyone had used it, they had already earned karma with me because I knew their name. Lots of people are speculating about a Google browser next. Surely it will get a lot of downloads the day it comes out, if it ever does. Will more people drink another Coke? Sure, but there's only so many things the Coca-Cola people can stick the name Coke on and sell, and there's only so much money they can charge for that name.
My High School Journalism teacher was one of the few people qualified to testify in court based on her knowledge of graphology.
In the United States, pretty much ANYONE is "qualified" to testify in court (pending the permission of the judge). Credibility is up to the jury to decide. Usefulness is another matter entirely.
From IdiotOnMyLeft: It points out the fact that although it is perfectly possible to use a two button mouse on a Mac for 7 years now, developers are forced to rethink their design approach and can't flood the right click menu.
They give the trolls too much credit. I am not aware of anything that happened 7 years ago to make two button mice work with Macs. And while I'm not aware of any specific multi-button mice that will work on a Mac Plus, there are plenty of multi-button ADB mice going back nearly two decades.
On the flip side, you can have a product that sold incredibly well, yet had almost no influence on the market styling wise. Take the Dodge Neon for example. They sold a ton of them, but I didn't see anyone trying to emulate a Neon.
I don't think the Neon is a particularly distinctive looking car. Of course, Plymouth used to make an identical car, which didn't help. But I think a Kia Rio or Hyundai Accent/Elantra looks pretty similar - though I'm not sure who influenced whom. Then again, maybe the only reason I think they look similar is that they're all approximately the same amount of ugly.
Anyway, popularity/sales and influence are certainly not directly related in either direction. Sure the Neon is popular, but if you're building a small car, why would you want to immitate a Neon when you could immitate the even more popular Civic, Corolla, or Focus? But there's a limit to how popular of an item you should immitate. Camry's are so popular that they're ubiquitous in America, but their appearance is so bland you'd be nuts to immitate one. Same with Dell. Dells are so common, if you want to make your own product, you'd better distinguish it from a typical Dell box, or no one will pay any attention. The various iMacs are popular, but they're not so common that if someone else makes one, it will look old and unoriginal, even if it is obviously derivitive.
This is true. However, the Mac Mini's Radeon 9200 has 32MB of DDR memory - as in, dedicated to video. The XBox, as I recall, has no dedicated video memory and shares the system's DDR memory for video. I don't think there's any question, the system taken as a whole, the Mac Mini is faster than an XBox. Of course, without DirectX on the Mac, there is no way to make any reasonable benchmark comparison between the two for purposes of this discussion (gaming).
And Apple is just trying to convert PC users that are scared to give up their new $80 dollar wireless usb keyboard and mouse combo they just bought.
With the mac mini, Apple isn't going after PC users who would have bought an $80 wireless usb keyboard and mouse. They're going after the guy who'll use it with their POS Dell QuietKey or $30 HP keyboard from 4 years ago, and an IntelliMouse. Either that, or people who will pick up a keyboard and mouse while they're at the Apple store - now that they're a little more reasonably priced. PS/2 to USB converters are a dime a dozen. If Apple isn't selling them in their retail stores, I bet they'll start carrying them soon.
Even if the G4 is faster than the G5 at the same clock speed, there are lots of reasons to go with a G5. Not the least of which is that the G4 doesn't run at as high a clock speed as the G5. 1.5 vs. 1.8 is one thing, 1.5 vs. 2.5 is something else entirely. Realistically, the G5 blows the G4 out of the water. The G5 is a 64-bit processor, although the utility of that in a laptop is pretty questionable. I think the big win with the G5 is that you're no longer stuck with the G4's antiquated FSB. Right now there is little reason to run a G4 at 2GHz because the memory bandwidth available to it is so low.
If the Patriot Act stands indefinitely, it will be because a revised interpretation of the 4th and 6th amendments is what the people are really looking for.
I think you're giving the electorate too much credit. The justices have their own priorities, the congress is beholden to other interests, and the electorate votes on other issues: whether they agree with a candidate's position on abortion and how their policies would affect their wallets.
The PATRIOT Act has already stood for 3 years. 3 years is WAY too long to be imprisioned without a hearing in the US. I don't think I'm in the minority of Americans in thinking that this is unconscionable. But this can happen because Congress had no problem passing it (likewise the president), the courts don't bother overturning it, and American voters don't care or don't understand for it change their votes.