In my experience, the only time the customer cares, is when they specify Microsoft. I've worked at my company for 4 years now, and every client I've heard express a preference, has wanted MS. The rest (the vast majority) don't care how we do it as long as they get the website they want.
Java, C, PHP, ASP - they couldn't give a toss. Well designed site that works and lets them sell things/get their prescence on the web, that's what they care about. The choice of technology is irrelevant - in fact, that's what they're paying us for.
say by slashing their prices of Windows XP/Windows 2003/Windows Whatever in half
OEM copies of Windows XP are available from selected vendors (here in the UK at least) for exactly half the price of the "full" version. To qualify for an OEM copy, you have to be buying either a new machine, or a "significant" upgrade for an existing one - a new processor or motherboard, that sort of thing.
I got mine along with a motherboard, CPU and 1/2gig of RAM. A friend bought his with a couple of Globalwin fan/heatsinks and a couple of other assorted bits (he's buying bits for a complete new machine, but from a number of different suppliers).
No, not everyone qualifies, (although I'd guess that not every retailer cares, either), but XP can already be bought for half the full retail price. You just have to know where to look.
And what exactly do you have against all the people that the recording industry employs? I'm not talking about the people at the top, who say and do the things that annoy slashdotters so much - I mean the people who are just trying to do a job they love, and earn enough money to live in relative comfort. The ones who get told what to do, rather than ever having a say in any policy.
What have they done, to make you hope that the record producers go out of business?
Ah, but few people are seeing it because it's not happening all at once.
Things like this, the general population won't know about until it's implemented and is being sold to them, and then, they'll only have the positive marketing spin (and perhaps a little bit of nay-saying in the general press, but nothing technical or deep).
Things like the laws passed in the wake of the WTC attack get through, becuase
a) it makes people feel safe, and as though people are doig soemthing about it b) "I have nothing to hide"
I do agree with you, and take some solace from the fact that I'm in (and from) the UK. Of course, where the US leads, we (blindly) follow...
Well, perhaps they are just more concerned about the potential loss of life, than some computing thing that they've never heard of?
Palladium may well be very news worthy in the industry press, but trust me, almost no-one outside of the IT industry is going to have heard of it. *Everyone* has heard about Iraq.
If it can't read the registry (especially the sam file) because it's either corrupt or not there, it will simply go right ahead, since it can't verify any password. This is probably by design.
Of course it's by design. How else could you gain access to your machine to fix a corrupt registry?
I've actually had to do this, when my machine ate the registry once when my girlfriend rebooted (cleanly) because 2k was behaving oddly. If I hadn't been able to, the only recourse I would have had would have been to perform a complete reinstall.
Re:Now I have to pay attention to TLDS - agggh
on
.NAME at a Crossroads
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Next they will try a TLD with umlauts and maybe some of the cyrilic letters.
And what exactly would be so wrong about domain names in non-ASCII character sets? If you can't read the language, then there won't be anything there for you, so why do you care? If you can read the language, then isn't it a good thing to be able to have a domain name in your own language, without having to transliterate it into a foreign character set?
The web was supposed to facilitate communication, not force everyone into a single character encoding for no better reason than the country that developed it used that one.
OR, the PC with the goods belongs to a minor, who just happened to be the purchaser of all the CDs that he ripped and shared. A minor who CAN'T ENTER INTO A LEGALLY BINDING CONTRACT such as a music licensing agreement...
What music licencing agreement? Do you mean copyright law? Believe me, minor or not, copyright law is still binding.
Read the inlay for a few of your CDs - I'd be utterly, utterly amazed if you found a licence in any of them. That's because they are *not* licenced to you. They are protected (legally) only by copyright law, which is sufficient, and it doesn't matter how old or young you are, you're still bound by it.
Wait a second. In one paragraph you say "x86 code is a horrible match for C, as anyone who has ever written a compiler will tell you. So it's not even what we need". Then, in the next, you say of the Itanium that "it will require a next generation of compilers that don't exist yet...that's a bad sign".
Couldn't it be that the people developing the Itanium recognise the truth of your first statement, and are fixing that problem? In that case, isn't the need for new compilers a good thing?
Even if not, surely fixing the problem would require new compilers to be written? You can't have it both ways, you know - you can't change the microcode to better match C, and not have to change the compilers.
That ought to make the licenses a little more terse.
That's not necessarily a good thing.
A little under 4 years ago, I joined my current company. In so doing, I obviously signed a contract of employment. Now, this contract was quite long - a couple of dozen pages, in reasonably large type, and very wordy. It was also very, very precise; you knew exactly where you stood.
A couple of years ago, my company was bought by another, and everyone was invited to sign new contracts. (You didn't have to, but if you didn't, you didn't get any of the new benefits, and the old ones were obviously being terminated.) One of the things our HR drone (only polite term for her...) made a big fuss over was that the new contract was "much shorter and less legalistic" than the old one. That is true. Unfortunately, it is also much, much more vague. Depending on how you interpret certain clauses, it also may even prevent me from doing my job...
As well as that, there are a number of "policy documents" that are not part of my contract, but that set out acceptable behaviour and working practices, etc - you can still be fired for contravening them. They're "not part of the contract" because they are subject to change, and it would be "too much hassle to keep giving you new contracts".
The same sort of thing may happen if EULAs are forced to become more terse. At least now you *know* what's what, if you actually take the time to read and understand it.
But if I don't accept, that doesn't change the fact that I own the software and can use it as I please, within the bounds of copyright law
Yes, that's true. Unfortunately, it has been determined (in court) that copyright law forbids you from copying the software from the media on which you purchased it to your hard drive (aka installing it), or from there to the RAM of your computer (aka running it). That's because doing so creates a copy of it, which you are not allowed to do.
Yes, it is utterly, utterly ridiculous, but that's the basis of all EULAs - that you have to have a licence to do anything with the software other than leave it on a shelf to look pretty.
This boils to the question: is it a good thing to force the bundling of the Sun's JRE in Windows?
I may be wrong (I do do Java development, but strictly server-side), but I think that MS's JVM is frozen at roughly 1.1.4. That makes it essentially hopelessly outdated. Iirc, the collections framework wasn't introduced until 1.2, and I can't remember the last bit of non-trivial Java code I wrote that didn't use at least one class from that.
I have no problem with MS being forced to ship a strictly-compliant modern JVM written by someone other than Sun (even by MS themselves), as long as that compliance is guaranteed (and indepently vetted). Allowing them to ship their old JVM, or (worse) a new one with all the proprietary, "disguised" extensions to the API, or to not ship one at all (while the.NET framework is worked ever more tightly into the OS) is not acceptable.
But for fancy UIs, we have Flash, which is definitely faster and easier to program.
I can't comment on the ease of programming in Flash, but the speed question is increasingly becoming a non-issue. The machine I'm typing this on is running at 2.4GHz and has 512MB of RAM, and trust me, Java gui apps run plenty smooth enough on it. True, it's a fairly beefy machine, and true, lots of people are still using the machine they bought 3 years ago, but eventually, there comes a time when you must upgrade. Nothing lasts for ever, and so unless you scour eBay for spares, you're going to be buying a new, super-powerful machine eventually. As the average PC spec increases, so the perceived slowness of Swing decreases. Sure, it'll never be quantitatively as fast as native (or Flash, or whatever), but if it's qualitatively as fast (ie you can't tell the difference), who cares?
Re:Who gets the float...as if I need to ask
on
Cashless Society
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· Score: 1
if your smart card money is not in your bank account but in an intermediary float, then you will not make any interest, despite the fact that it's still your money
Just like the money in my wallet, you mean?
Okay, there's an easy solution to this - don't carry that much cash (whether physical or electronic) around with you. Don't put $100 on the card, put $20. As long as you're not paid to "charge" it (and I can't imagine that you would be, no-one would use it!), what's the problem?
I also like the bit about how the use of encryption in the commission of a crime would be a felony.
Now, I don't mean to defend the proposed changes, but this sort of thing is common. Certainly, here in the UK, I'm allowed to carry tools (hammer, crowbar, etc) with me - no police officer is going to stop me for it. However, if I use those tools to steal a car, or break into a building, I'll also be charged with going equipped to do so.
Same thing here, I imagine - use PGP, fine. Use PGP whilst commiting a crime, get done for the crime and for using PGP whilst commiting it.
Yes, I agree that it makes people who use PGP look suspicious even when doing no wrong - but I can't imagine that the courts would put up with too many search warrants being issued for searches based solely or mainly on use of encryprion that failed to turn up any evidence of wrong doing. Being able to apply for a search warrant and actually being awarded one are two different things.
Most 14-year olds who pirate MP3s and DVDs are interested in FAIR USE of the products in question
And how exactly is copying/creating an mp3 or DVD of copyright material without permission "fair use"? Seems to me that that is pretty much exactly what copyright law is supposed to prevent.
Copyright provides (or, is supposed to provide) a limited-time distribution and copying monopoly. That means that you are not allowed to copy your mate's one - otherwise, everyone could just do that and, in the logical extreme, only one copy would ever be sold.
Of course, as I said, IANAL, and am willing to be proved wrong, if you can show me the paragraph(s) in the releveant statute that allows for the activities that you described.
In the case of the insurance company paying out for the stolen car, you're missing a couple of things:
1) if it's stolen from the company itself, they may just write it off as a loss
2) if it's stolen from an individual, then sure they claim, and that contributes to the insurance premiums of every car owner
3) sometimes, cars are stolen specifically to run them into the ground, then dump them somewhere, quite possibly wrecking them in the process
Okay, so point 1 is maybe a little far fetched, but point 2 is the way it works. The more people claim from an insurance company, the higher the premiums go, for everyone (or at least, for everyone in "problem areas"). Point 3 is also a real problem with your analogy. If I illegally copy some software, then destroy that copy, who cares? If I then change my mind, and copy it again, I've done no more damage than I did the first time.
However, if I steal a car, drive it around carelessly, then dump it somewhere and set fire to it, if I feel like doing it again, I have to steal another car. That's another insurance claim, and another statistic used to justify increasing insurance premiums. It's also another burnt out wreck dumped somewhere for someone to clean up. Sure, not all cars are stolen to be abused in this way, but a fair number are. It even has a specific name (at least in the UK) - joyriding. Some people do it for kicks.
Imho, a much better argument against illegally copying stuff is that it just isn't right. Sure, no-one has a right to profit from their work, only to try to profit. It's also wrong, however, to just take something, say "thanks a lot, sucker!" and give nothing back. (Unless it's being given away for free, of course, but I don't think that that's a viable model for the entirity of software production. People need to eat, and that costs money, like it or not.)
ps. Licence/License? I don't really care, I'm not a native speaker.:-P
It depends on what country you're from. In the US, I believe, it's license. Here in the UK, licence is the noun, while license is the verb - eg "I will license it to you under the terms of the Foo licence."
That's one argument against picking holes in people's spelling in posts to websites; you have to be pretty sure it's not jsut a regional variation...
# In terms of Java, Mono could prevent Java from finally attaining a foothold in the Linux world.
In what sense? If you mean in terms of desktop apps, then you may be right. Swing is slow on all but the higher end machines. On the other hand, I've spent the last 2.5 years or so developing Java-based websites that are hosted on machines running Linux; it's the core of what my company does, and I don't believe for a second that we're unusual in that.
Java already has a foothold on Linux, on the server. I don't see Mono or.NET making much of a dent in that any time soon. C# is a nice enough language, but I don't think I'd want to swtich (if only because of the lack of checked exceptions, although that's not the only reason).
True, but Black Parrot wasn't (directly) talking about Ximian, s/he was talking about Linux.
Yes, of course, Microsoft could just buy Ximian and, depending on Mono's licence, either shut it down completely or charge extortionate amounts for it.
Where'd you learn to spell? "Neck" as in the part of your body connecting your head to your shoulders is indeed spelt that way. There is a nautical term "kneck", but somehow I doubt that's relevant.
Also, in some cultures, companies and groups are rerferred to in the plural, as people refer more to the people that make them up, than to the company as an entity in its own right.
If you want reasons why slashdot won't be the next CNN, you'd want to think about things like frequent story duplication, editors that don't, and admins that sometimes pursue their own agendas even to the detriment of paying users. Oh, and remember, that bit in italics is written by the story submitter, not the slashdot editors.
Somehow bottled water manages to eke out comfortable sales despite the availability of free water in every home.
Leaving asside the fact that you pay for the water in your home, this is different anyway.
I don't buy bottled water to drink at home, I buy it when I'm out and about, am thirsty, and fancy some water. If I'm at home, where my taps are, I drink water from them.
You cannot extend that to music. Are you saying that if people are out, and fancy listening to music, they'll go buy some, when they have the same music at home already? No, of course not - they'll either make do without, or take some out with them to listen to. It's rather more portable than water, for a start, and isn't consumed on each listening (unless the industry manages to move to pay-per-use...).
Bottled water is cheap and heavy enough to warrant buying it rather than taking it with you, is strictly a one-time use, and fulfils a basic biological need. Music is expensive and light enough to warrant carrying it out with you, can be reused, and has no such biological imperative associated with it.
Slashdot Mirror
it might decide to include that app in the "OS", such as a personal firewall, for instance. Oh, wait...they already did.
As have pretty-much every single Linux distribution. What's your point? It's okay for RedHat, Madrake, et al, but not for Microsoft?
In my experience, the only time the customer cares, is when they specify Microsoft. I've worked at my company for 4 years now, and every client I've heard express a preference, has wanted MS. The rest (the vast majority) don't care how we do it as long as they get the website they want.
Java, C, PHP, ASP - they couldn't give a toss. Well designed site that works and lets them sell things/get their prescence on the web, that's what they care about. The choice of technology is irrelevant - in fact, that's what they're paying us for.
say by slashing their prices of Windows XP/Windows 2003/Windows Whatever in half
OEM copies of Windows XP are available from selected vendors (here in the UK at least) for exactly half the price of the "full" version. To qualify for an OEM copy, you have to be buying either a new machine, or a "significant" upgrade for an existing one - a new processor or motherboard, that sort of thing.
I got mine along with a motherboard, CPU and 1/2gig of RAM. A friend bought his with a couple of Globalwin fan/heatsinks and a couple of other assorted bits (he's buying bits for a complete new machine, but from a number of different suppliers).
No, not everyone qualifies, (although I'd guess that not every retailer cares, either), but XP can already be bought for half the full retail price. You just have to know where to look.
You're probably right.
I'd love to see Office (or any other piece of software) prevent me from photographing my monitor, though.
Energy is not quantised. The energy states of a bound particle, eg an electron orbiting a nucleus, are quantised.
The energy of a free particle is not, and can take on pretty-much any value.
And what exactly do you have against all the people that the recording industry employs? I'm not talking about the people at the top, who say and do the things that annoy slashdotters so much - I mean the people who are just trying to do a job they love, and earn enough money to live in relative comfort. The ones who get told what to do, rather than ever having a say in any policy.
What have they done, to make you hope that the record producers go out of business?
Ah, but few people are seeing it because it's not happening all at once.
Things like this, the general population won't know about until it's implemented and is being sold to them, and then, they'll only have the positive marketing spin (and perhaps a little bit of nay-saying in the general press, but nothing technical or deep).
Things like the laws passed in the wake of the WTC attack get through, becuase
a) it makes people feel safe, and as though people are doig soemthing about it
b) "I have nothing to hide"
I do agree with you, and take some solace from the fact that I'm in (and from) the UK. Of course, where the US leads, we (blindly) follow...
Well, perhaps they are just more concerned about the potential loss of life, than some computing thing that they've never heard of?
Palladium may well be very news worthy in the industry press, but trust me, almost no-one outside of the IT industry is going to have heard of it. *Everyone* has heard about Iraq.
If it can't read the registry (especially the sam file) because it's either corrupt or not there, it will simply go right ahead, since it can't verify any password. This is probably by design.
Of course it's by design. How else could you gain access to your machine to fix a corrupt registry?
I've actually had to do this, when my machine ate the registry once when my girlfriend rebooted (cleanly) because 2k was behaving oddly. If I hadn't been able to, the only recourse I would have had would have been to perform a complete reinstall.
Next they will try a TLD with umlauts and maybe some of the cyrilic letters.
And what exactly would be so wrong about domain names in non-ASCII character sets? If you can't read the language, then there won't be anything there for you, so why do you care? If you can read the language, then isn't it a good thing to be able to have a domain name in your own language, without having to transliterate it into a foreign character set?
The web was supposed to facilitate communication, not force everyone into a single character encoding for no better reason than the country that developed it used that one.
OR, the PC with the goods belongs to a minor, who just happened to be the purchaser of all the CDs that he ripped and shared. A minor who CAN'T ENTER INTO A LEGALLY BINDING CONTRACT such as a music licensing agreement...
What music licencing agreement? Do you mean copyright law? Believe me, minor or not, copyright law is still binding.
Read the inlay for a few of your CDs - I'd be utterly, utterly amazed if you found a licence in any of them. That's because they are *not* licenced to you. They are protected (legally) only by copyright law, which is sufficient, and it doesn't matter how old or young you are, you're still bound by it.
Wait a second. In one paragraph you say "x86 code is a horrible match for C, as anyone who has ever written a compiler will tell you. So it's not even what we need". Then, in the next, you say of the Itanium that "it will require a next generation of compilers that don't exist yet...that's a bad sign".
Couldn't it be that the people developing the Itanium recognise the truth of your first statement, and are fixing that problem? In that case, isn't the need for new compilers a good thing?
Even if not, surely fixing the problem would require new compilers to be written? You can't have it both ways, you know - you can't change the microcode to better match C, and not have to change the compilers.
That ought to make the licenses a little more terse.
That's not necessarily a good thing.
A little under 4 years ago, I joined my current company. In so doing, I obviously signed a contract of employment. Now, this contract was quite long - a couple of dozen pages, in reasonably large type, and very wordy. It was also very, very precise; you knew exactly where you stood.
A couple of years ago, my company was bought by another, and everyone was invited to sign new contracts. (You didn't have to, but if you didn't, you didn't get any of the new benefits, and the old ones were obviously being terminated.) One of the things our HR drone (only polite term for her...) made a big fuss over was that the new contract was "much shorter and less legalistic" than the old one. That is true. Unfortunately, it is also much, much more vague. Depending on how you interpret certain clauses, it also may even prevent me from doing my job...
As well as that, there are a number of "policy documents" that are not part of my contract, but that set out acceptable behaviour and working practices, etc - you can still be fired for contravening them. They're "not part of the contract" because they are subject to change, and it would be "too much hassle to keep giving you new contracts".
The same sort of thing may happen if EULAs are forced to become more terse. At least now you *know* what's what, if you actually take the time to read and understand it.
But if I don't accept, that doesn't change the fact that I own the software and can use it as I please, within the bounds of copyright law
Yes, that's true. Unfortunately, it has been determined (in court) that copyright law forbids you from copying the software from the media on which you purchased it to your hard drive (aka installing it), or from there to the RAM of your computer (aka running it). That's because doing so creates a copy of it, which you are not allowed to do.
Yes, it is utterly, utterly ridiculous, but that's the basis of all EULAs - that you have to have a licence to do anything with the software other than leave it on a shelf to look pretty.
This boils to the question: is it a good thing to force the bundling of the Sun's JRE in Windows?
.NET framework is worked ever more tightly into the OS) is not acceptable.
I may be wrong (I do do Java development, but strictly server-side), but I think that MS's JVM is frozen at roughly 1.1.4. That makes it essentially hopelessly outdated. Iirc, the collections framework wasn't introduced until 1.2, and I can't remember the last bit of non-trivial Java code I wrote that didn't use at least one class from that.
I have no problem with MS being forced to ship a strictly-compliant modern JVM written by someone other than Sun (even by MS themselves), as long as that compliance is guaranteed (and indepently vetted). Allowing them to ship their old JVM, or (worse) a new one with all the proprietary, "disguised" extensions to the API, or to not ship one at all (while the
But for fancy UIs, we have Flash, which is definitely faster and easier to program.
I can't comment on the ease of programming in Flash, but the speed question is increasingly becoming a non-issue. The machine I'm typing this on is running at 2.4GHz and has 512MB of RAM, and trust me, Java gui apps run plenty smooth enough on it. True, it's a fairly beefy machine, and true, lots of people are still using the machine they bought 3 years ago, but eventually, there comes a time when you must upgrade. Nothing lasts for ever, and so unless you scour eBay for spares, you're going to be buying a new, super-powerful machine eventually. As the average PC spec increases, so the perceived slowness of Swing decreases. Sure, it'll never be quantitatively as fast as native (or Flash, or whatever), but if it's qualitatively as fast (ie you can't tell the difference), who cares?
if your smart card money is not in your bank account but in an intermediary float, then you will not make any interest, despite the fact that it's still your money
Just like the money in my wallet, you mean?
Okay, there's an easy solution to this - don't carry that much cash (whether physical or electronic) around with you. Don't put $100 on the card, put $20. As long as you're not paid to "charge" it (and I can't imagine that you would be, no-one would use it!), what's the problem?
I also like the bit about how the use of encryption in the commission of a crime would be a felony.
Now, I don't mean to defend the proposed changes, but this sort of thing is common. Certainly, here in the UK, I'm allowed to carry tools (hammer, crowbar, etc) with me - no police officer is going to stop me for it. However, if I use those tools to steal a car, or break into a building, I'll also be charged with going equipped to do so.
Same thing here, I imagine - use PGP, fine. Use PGP whilst commiting a crime, get done for the crime and for using PGP whilst commiting it.
Yes, I agree that it makes people who use PGP look suspicious even when doing no wrong - but I can't imagine that the courts would put up with too many search warrants being issued for searches based solely or mainly on use of encryprion that failed to turn up any evidence of wrong doing. Being able to apply for a search warrant and actually being awarded one are two different things.
Most 14-year olds who pirate MP3s and DVDs are interested in FAIR USE of the products in question
And how exactly is copying/creating an mp3 or DVD of copyright material without permission "fair use"? Seems to me that that is pretty much exactly what copyright law is supposed to prevent.
Copyright provides (or, is supposed to provide) a limited-time distribution and copying monopoly. That means that you are not allowed to copy your mate's one - otherwise, everyone could just do that and, in the logical extreme, only one copy would ever be sold.
Of course, as I said, IANAL, and am willing to be proved wrong, if you can show me the paragraph(s) in the releveant statute that allows for the activities that you described.
In the case of the insurance company paying out for the stolen car, you're missing a couple of things:
1) if it's stolen from the company itself, they may just write it off as a loss
2) if it's stolen from an individual, then sure they claim, and that contributes to the insurance premiums of every car owner
3) sometimes, cars are stolen specifically to run them into the ground, then dump them somewhere, quite possibly wrecking them in the process
Okay, so point 1 is maybe a little far fetched, but point 2 is the way it works. The more people claim from an insurance company, the higher the premiums go, for everyone (or at least, for everyone in "problem areas"). Point 3 is also a real problem with your analogy. If I illegally copy some software, then destroy that copy, who cares? If I then change my mind, and copy it again, I've done no more damage than I did the first time.
However, if I steal a car, drive it around carelessly, then dump it somewhere and set fire to it, if I feel like doing it again, I have to steal another car. That's another insurance claim, and another statistic used to justify increasing insurance premiums. It's also another burnt out wreck dumped somewhere for someone to clean up. Sure, not all cars are stolen to be abused in this way, but a fair number are. It even has a specific name (at least in the UK) - joyriding. Some people do it for kicks.
Imho, a much better argument against illegally copying stuff is that it just isn't right. Sure, no-one has a right to profit from their work, only to try to profit. It's also wrong, however, to just take something, say "thanks a lot, sucker!" and give nothing back. (Unless it's being given away for free, of course, but I don't think that that's a viable model for the entirity of software production. People need to eat, and that costs money, like it or not.)
ps. Licence/License? I don't really care, I'm not a native speaker. :-P
It depends on what country you're from. In the US, I believe, it's license. Here in the UK, licence is the noun, while license is the verb - eg "I will license it to you under the terms of the Foo licence."
That's one argument against picking holes in people's spelling in posts to websites; you have to be pretty sure it's not jsut a regional variation...
# In terms of Java, Mono could prevent Java from finally attaining a foothold in the Linux world.
.NET making much of a dent in that any time soon. C# is a nice enough language, but I don't think I'd want to swtich (if only because of the lack of checked exceptions, although that's not the only reason).
In what sense? If you mean in terms of desktop apps, then you may be right. Swing is slow on all but the higher end machines. On the other hand, I've spent the last 2.5 years or so developing Java-based websites that are hosted on machines running Linux; it's the core of what my company does, and I don't believe for a second that we're unusual in that.
Java already has a foothold on Linux, on the server. I don't see Mono or
True, but Black Parrot wasn't (directly) talking about Ximian, s/he was talking about Linux.
Yes, of course, Microsoft could just buy Ximian and, depending on Mono's licence, either shut it down completely or charge extortionate amounts for it.
Good job Linux isn't a company then, and isn't proprietary and therefore "lock-upable", isn't it?
Where'd you learn to spell? "Neck" as in the part of your body connecting your head to your shoulders is indeed spelt that way. There is a nautical term "kneck", but somehow I doubt that's relevant.
Also, in some cultures, companies and groups are rerferred to in the plural, as people refer more to the people that make them up, than to the company as an entity in its own right.
If you want reasons why slashdot won't be the next CNN, you'd want to think about things like frequent story duplication, editors that don't, and admins that sometimes pursue their own agendas even to the detriment of paying users. Oh, and remember, that bit in italics is written by the story submitter, not the slashdot editors.
Somehow bottled water manages to eke out comfortable sales despite the availability of free water in every home.
Leaving asside the fact that you pay for the water in your home, this is different anyway.
I don't buy bottled water to drink at home, I buy it when I'm out and about, am thirsty, and fancy some water. If I'm at home, where my taps are, I drink water from them.
You cannot extend that to music. Are you saying that if people are out, and fancy listening to music, they'll go buy some, when they have the same music at home already? No, of course not - they'll either make do without, or take some out with them to listen to. It's rather more portable than water, for a start, and isn't consumed on each listening (unless the industry manages to move to pay-per-use...).
Bottled water is cheap and heavy enough to warrant buying it rather than taking it with you, is strictly a one-time use, and fulfils a basic biological need. Music is expensive and light enough to warrant carrying it out with you, can be reused, and has no such biological imperative associated with it.