why would ANYONE want the kinds of copyright nonsense we have over here? Talk to your [representative] (don't know how your system works:p ) and shoot this down!
Clearly you don't know how the system works, or you'd not bother suggesting we try to get this stopped merely by talking to people...
Is it possible that one nation has made a grave error and that others should avoid doing the same?
Think of it from the point of view of the recording industry - how can it *possibly* be a grave error to extend copyrights indefinitely? The longer they last, the more opportunity to make money from there is.
Make no mistake - companies exist to make money. The only reason a content producing company like those in the recording industry would have any reason in a public domain would be to copy stuff from it for free. They have no interest in their own stuff becoming freely available, there's no money to be made in that.
As HW becomes even cheaper, the cost of Windows will surpass that of the HW - probably within a year or two.
Rubbish. I can buy XP Home for £58 - that's about $100. I do not believe for a second that the big-name system bulders, buying copies by the tens of thousands, will be paying anything like that sort of price. I also refuse to believe that hardware will ever drop to that low a price.
Either you're wrong, or we're *really* getting screwed on component prices.
Never mind mp3s, there's plenty of scope for different taxonomies with the original example of images. Pictures of me, pictures taken by me, pictures of $location, pictures taken at $exposure with $lens, pictures of $location, taken by me, with $person in, taken in the evening, using $lens...
What if I want to find every photo I have of, say, my father or daughter, or a particular friend? Or of mountains? I'm not going to organise them (in a directory structure) like that - I'll want the organised based on location and/or occasion. I could very well want to find every picture of my daughter, though, to pick out the best one to send to a friend - something like that.
Any file that could have a number of different categorisations applied in a meaningful way would benefit from properly searchable metadata. Right now, I can't think of too many file types that don't fall into that category.
i see that some brilliant person modded me as "troll". nice:/
I wouldn't worry about it, that happened to me a few months ago when I made a similarly upbeat comment about MSH. Of course, I also commited the cardinal sin of opining that MS may well come out with something (with Longhorn) that will give Linux and OS X a run for their money...
Microsoft obviously isn't doing this for protection, since the only people who've been suing Microsoft have been tiny parasite IP companies-- the kind of people who a patent shield is useless against.
No - if MS patents everything it can, then there's less chance of such a parasite from obtaining a patent that it can use against MS. Hence, it *is* (or at least *can be*) a defensive measure.
Denying your would-be attacker any way of attacking you is just as effective as being able to retaliate, if not more so.
I would suggest that the reason you find them unpredictable and counter-intuitive is that you're used to the way your preferred Unix shell does things.
If you liken up-arrowing in the command history to up-arrowing in a text file, if you make an edit in the file, your cursor doesn't magically fly down to the bottom of the file, it stays where it is. That, I suspect, is the reasoning behind the Windows command shell's behaviour - it stays where you left it. Think of it as editing the list of executed commands.
To be fair, your first two links are really the same story.
Also, a sample size of 329 PCs seems to me to be far too small to be truly representative of the tens (hundreds?) of millions of PCs currently in use world-wide.
They have the motivation to write complex malware, but do they have the motivation to write complex and cross-platform malware?
The simple answer is "Yes, if needs be".
Do you really think that in the event that heterogenous environments become commonplace, they'll all just say "oh well, it's too hard now, better forget the years of practice and honing my skills and do something else instead"?
It'll slow them down, sure, and it'll likely defeat the lessor malcontents, but there will always be people willing and able to accept the challenge.
One use I can think of immediately that doesn't require any non-MS OS is testing on multiple versions of Windows and/or IE.
As a web developer, I have to care about how my sites work and look in IE 5, IE 5.5 and IE 6 (as well as Firefox, Moz, and sometimes Opera). It's much nicer being able to do that on a single machine, than having to have several physical machines set aside for the task.
That may be true in general, but one Chinese woman I know speaks perfect English with only a very slight accent.
Also, don't kid yourself that this drive has anything to do with the customers, it is 100% about reducing costs. Until and unless there is a consumer backlash, in which case native call centres may become a selling point, companies will move call centres wherever they're cheapest.
1) I own land (my house is built on it), but I'm not aware of any tax that I have to pay because of it. I paid a one-off tax when I bought the house, but that doesn't sound like what you're suggesting
2) Currently, *everything* you produce (even this comment!) is protected by copyright. If you tax copyrighted works, then instantly every single piece of GPLed software is taxable. Is that really what you want?
As others have said, much better to tax the income generated from the sale/licensing of copyrighted works, rather than taxing their mere existence. In the extreme case, that would amount to a tax on your very thoughts.
No IP, no GPL. True, no IP no legal recourse to companies wanting to keep their stuff closed, but then they'd just turn to technological methods instead. Not fool-proof, but then nor are the laws...
I agree that the penalty is disproportionate to the crime, especially when compared with other crimes.
However, the idea is that when the expected risk of being caught performing an illegal action is low, the only way to create a legal deterrence is to impose a significant penalty. That's why the penalties for copyright infringement are so ludicrously high - becuase it's ludicrously easy to get away with it. Mugging, on the other hand, is generally much harder to get away with; your victim may fight back and perhaps over power you, you may be identified by them to the authorities, you may be disturbed in the act, etc. Hence, *on average* it's harder to get away with it, and so the maximum punishment is less.
That's the idea, at least - I'm making no judgment as to whether or not it actually works.
So, let's look at the supporting evidence here: an article, quoting a press release, quoting the SPA's estimation that the Mac install base accounts for 16% of personal computers.
I couldn't help but notice that the company that put out the press release has just released a Mac version of its software, and so is naturally going to be talking up the number of potential sales.
I'd like to see the original source of that 16% figure, and how it was arrived at. Until we do see it, this is just so much anecdotal evidence.
I would say yes. At least with the good dictator, things are moving in the right direction. With the bad democratic government, things could well be getting progresively worse and you're still stuck with them until at least the end of their term. 4 or 5 years is a long time to be stuck with a bad government, a lot of damage could be done.
Of course, a good, democratic government is the ideal, but if that's not an option, I'd choose the good dictatorship personally.
Then you should either have purchased XP Pro, or you should be using the Remote Assistance feature of XP Home, or VNC, or the guy should physically go to the computer.
Remote desktop is very handy, but by no means essential in most cases.
Well, that's as may be, but the fact of the matter is that connecting to a Windows machine that supports terminal services using remote desktop is in my experience far superior (in terms of responsiveness and features) than connecting to anything at all using VNC.
The only way in which VNC is better than rdesktop is in number of supported platforms. I get better performance using rdesktop over an ADSL link than I ever did using VNC over a 100Mbps LAN.
Incidently, there's an rdesktop client for Linux, and using that to connect to a Windows machine similarly yields much better performance than using VNC, so it's not just the multi-platform nature that's crippling VNC.
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why would ANYONE want the kinds of copyright nonsense we have over here? Talk to your [representative] (don't know how your system works :p ) and shoot this down!
Clearly you don't know how the system works, or you'd not bother suggesting we try to get this stopped merely by talking to people...
Is it possible that one nation has made a grave error and that others should avoid doing the same?
Think of it from the point of view of the recording industry - how can it *possibly* be a grave error to extend copyrights indefinitely? The longer they last, the more opportunity to make money from there is.
Make no mistake - companies exist to make money. The only reason a content producing company like those in the recording industry would have any reason in a public domain would be to copy stuff from it for free. They have no interest in their own stuff becoming freely available, there's no money to be made in that.
As HW becomes even cheaper, the cost of Windows will surpass that of the HW - probably within a year or two.
Rubbish. I can buy XP Home for £58 - that's about $100. I do not believe for a second that the big-name system bulders, buying copies by the tens of thousands, will be paying anything like that sort of price. I also refuse to believe that hardware will ever drop to that low a price.
Either you're wrong, or we're *really* getting screwed on component prices.
Never mind mp3s, there's plenty of scope for different taxonomies with the original example of images. Pictures of me, pictures taken by me, pictures of $location, pictures taken at $exposure with $lens, pictures of $location, taken by me, with $person in, taken in the evening, using $lens...
What if I want to find every photo I have of, say, my father or daughter, or a particular friend? Or of mountains? I'm not going to organise them (in a directory structure) like that - I'll want the organised based on location and/or occasion. I could very well want to find every picture of my daughter, though, to pick out the best one to send to a friend - something like that.
Any file that could have a number of different categorisations applied in a meaningful way would benefit from properly searchable metadata. Right now, I can't think of too many file types that don't fall into that category.
i see that some brilliant person modded me as "troll". nice :/
I wouldn't worry about it, that happened to me a few months ago when I made a similarly upbeat comment about MSH. Of course, I also commited the cardinal sin of opining that MS may well come out with something (with Longhorn) that will give Linux and OS X a run for their money...
Microsoft obviously isn't doing this for protection, since the only people who've been suing Microsoft have been tiny parasite IP companies-- the kind of people who a patent shield is useless against.
No - if MS patents everything it can, then there's less chance of such a parasite from obtaining a patent that it can use against MS. Hence, it *is* (or at least *can be*) a defensive measure.
Denying your would-be attacker any way of attacking you is just as effective as being able to retaliate, if not more so.
You said:
However, until I actually see it implemented I am regarding it as vapor ware and the latest noise from the MS executives version of WWF trash talk.
The GP merely pointed out that there is a beta implementation available. Therefore, widely-installed or not, it's hardly vapour-ware.
You may have meant "shipped with Windows", but you actually said "implemented".
I would suggest that the reason you find them unpredictable and counter-intuitive is that you're used to the way your preferred Unix shell does things.
If you liken up-arrowing in the command history to up-arrowing in a text file, if you make an edit in the file, your cursor doesn't magically fly down to the bottom of the file, it stays where it is. That, I suspect, is the reasoning behind the Windows command shell's behaviour - it stays where you left it. Think of it as editing the list of executed commands.
Not to mention that if I lost my wallet, losing the password to my PC at work (if it were in there) would be the last thing on my mind.
To be fair, your first two links are really the same story.
Also, a sample size of 329 PCs seems to me to be far too small to be truly representative of the tens (hundreds?) of millions of PCs currently in use world-wide.
They have the motivation to write complex malware, but do they have the motivation to write complex and cross-platform malware?
The simple answer is "Yes, if needs be".
Do you really think that in the event that heterogenous environments become commonplace, they'll all just say "oh well, it's too hard now, better forget the years of practice and honing my skills and do something else instead"?
It'll slow them down, sure, and it'll likely defeat the lessor malcontents, but there will always be people willing and able to accept the challenge.
To have privacy, you have to find some obscure Unix distro (Red Hat isn't obscure enough; they have that covered too) and use it.
Two words: hardware keylogger.
One use I can think of immediately that doesn't require any non-MS OS is testing on multiple versions of Windows and/or IE.
As a web developer, I have to care about how my sites work and look in IE 5, IE 5.5 and IE 6 (as well as Firefox, Moz, and sometimes Opera). It's much nicer being able to do that on a single machine, than having to have several physical machines set aside for the task.
That may be true in general, but one Chinese woman I know speaks perfect English with only a very slight accent.
Also, don't kid yourself that this drive has anything to do with the customers, it is 100% about reducing costs. Until and unless there is a consumer backlash, in which case native call centres may become a selling point, companies will move call centres wherever they're cheapest.
Two things:
1) I own land (my house is built on it), but I'm not aware of any tax that I have to pay because of it. I paid a one-off tax when I bought the house, but that doesn't sound like what you're suggesting
2) Currently, *everything* you produce (even this comment!) is protected by copyright. If you tax copyrighted works, then instantly every single piece of GPLed software is taxable. Is that really what you want?
As others have said, much better to tax the income generated from the sale/licensing of copyrighted works, rather than taxing their mere existence. In the extreme case, that would amount to a tax on your very thoughts.
No IP, no GPL. True, no IP no legal recourse to companies wanting to keep their stuff closed, but then they'd just turn to technological methods instead. Not fool-proof, but then nor are the laws...
I agree that the penalty is disproportionate to the crime, especially when compared with other crimes.
However, the idea is that when the expected risk of being caught performing an illegal action is low, the only way to create a legal deterrence is to impose a significant penalty. That's why the penalties for copyright infringement are so ludicrously high - becuase it's ludicrously easy to get away with it. Mugging, on the other hand, is generally much harder to get away with; your victim may fight back and perhaps over power you, you may be identified by them to the authorities, you may be disturbed in the act, etc. Hence, *on average* it's harder to get away with it, and so the maximum punishment is less.
That's the idea, at least - I'm making no judgment as to whether or not it actually works.
Hence the protective sphere - it'll be there to protect you, as much as it is to protect the screen.
Windows doesn't force you to run as admin, crappy developers who are too used to coding for Win9x force you to.
So, let's look at the supporting evidence here: an article, quoting a press release, quoting the SPA's estimation that the Mac install base accounts for 16% of personal computers.
I couldn't help but notice that the company that put out the press release has just released a Mac version of its software, and so is naturally going to be talking up the number of potential sales.
I'd like to see the original source of that 16% figure, and how it was arrived at. Until we do see it, this is just so much anecdotal evidence.
That's hardly a new trend, we've been causing that sort of thing for centruies...
I would say yes. At least with the good dictator, things are moving in the right direction. With the bad democratic government, things could well be getting progresively worse and you're still stuck with them until at least the end of their term. 4 or 5 years is a long time to be stuck with a bad government, a lot of damage could be done.
Of course, a good, democratic government is the ideal, but if that's not an option, I'd choose the good dictatorship personally.
Then you should either have purchased XP Pro, or you should be using the Remote Assistance feature of XP Home, or VNC, or the guy should physically go to the computer.
Remote desktop is very handy, but by no means essential in most cases.
Well, that's as may be, but the fact of the matter is that connecting to a Windows machine that supports terminal services using remote desktop is in my experience far superior (in terms of responsiveness and features) than connecting to anything at all using VNC.
The only way in which VNC is better than rdesktop is in number of supported platforms. I get better performance using rdesktop over an ADSL link than I ever did using VNC over a 100Mbps LAN.
Incidently, there's an rdesktop client for Linux, and using that to connect to a Windows machine similarly yields much better performance than using VNC, so it's not just the multi-platform nature that's crippling VNC.
We have unlimited resources wherever there is mass.
Even if we had the technology to utilise that mass as you are clearly thinking, the resources are obviously limited by the amount of mass available.
The laws of physics have not disappeared, and so there is no such thing as "unlimited resources".