Microsoft's approach involves client retention. Okay, fine. But the way they're going about doing it - making it nearly impossible to write an application compatible with their formats - is anticompetitive and very evil.
And the car analogy simply does not hold. Image files are standardized, and I can expect a.png made in Photoshop to still look the same in GIMP or MS Paint. Sound formats are the same. Even for formatted text, there exists the completely open ODF format. MS's actions in making a format so closed and proprietary that often even different versions of their own software show the same file differently are simply inexcusable.
Every highschool student taking a chemistry course 'possesses material useful for acts of terror'.
Wait, what? High school chemistry students sit down with pencil and paper and do chemical equations and draw what 2-phenyl-3,7-dichloro-whatever-cyclononane looks like. They don't actually mix things together - that would be too dangerous!
And the books are too busy being pedantic about the definition of acids and bases to say anything useful about how to make stuff go boom.
I disagree. Quite a few episodes have Scotty or Geordi finding a novel solution to a problem, and Scotty did invent the equations of teleporting onto a ship at warp. Sure, their day to day jobs are about fixing and maintaining, but they do show themselves as creative engineers when the time comes for it.
Free public Wi-Fi is one of the most important public services of the 21st century. It gives anyone who can come up with the $200 for a netbook the ability to access the sum of human knowledge. It allows people to communicate over long distances in many more ways that a simple voice conversation. Anyone who comes up with the money for an unlimited internet connection and jeopardizes some of his privacy (or some convenience, if he uses some kind of proxy/encryption) to let anyone access the internet without paying high fees to greedy monopolistic corporations is doing good for society. Saying that he's doing evil since he's also allowing copyright infringement is like saying cars are evil since you can use one to get away from a robbery. All technology can be used for good and evil, but the internet being freely available to the public does hundreds of times more good than it does evil.
All righty then, I'll stick with my "shit" keyboard shortcuts and be 3 times as productive while you're fumbling around trying to hit the "X" button to close your browser.
Can we please try to avoid making emotional appeals in place of logical arguments? Letting emotions win over logic in a casino makes you lose money, letting emotions win over logic when lives are at stake makes you lose lives. Maybe if we had some cold hard rationality in the government we wouldn't have sent any soldiers over to the Middle East at all.
You do realize that one of the four freedoms is an unconditional right to use the software, right? Infringing freedoms to protect them kind of defeats the whole purpose.
You do not get to see them. As far as I understand there is no law that forces show makers to make shows available to you in whatever way possible. I don't think it is covered under any human right.
The show makers are actively using the law to make the shows unavailable to me. Normally, that's justified by the fact that they're making it available at a cost, allowing them to make money. However, when they're just sitting on it and either not offering it at all or only offering it at prohibitive prices, they're not holding up their end of the social contract, making the whole thing morally invalid.
1) Evil Corp creates an independent organization, but run by the same people, called Evil Shell Corp 2) All Evil Corp employees working on IP are fired and rehired by Evil Shell Corp, with "work-for-hire" clauses now with Evil Shell Corp 3) Evil Shell Corp agrees to license all patents to Evil Corp for zero royalties 4) Evil Corp joins DPL, and gains all the benefits of being in the pool while Evil Shell Corp can pursue whatever patent trolling action it wants
Wait, so if government interference didn't exist anyone with a few hundred thousand bucks of capital would be able to set up an ISP? Do you know how much it costs to put wires all around the country even with no regulation whatsoever?
There's nothing illegal about circumventing the law. That's why it's called "circumventing", and not "breaking". The court is reminding the FCC that there are limits on their power, the FCC is working within those limits. Provided that you agree with the limits that the court gave the FCC, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this.
Like having the government take over the parts of the industry that are inherently monopolistic (ie. wires; the barrier to entry for that essentially amounts to putting your own set of wires around the entire country) and having them rent out those wires to ISPs, who would then become competitive?
It's really the only way to have a free market in internet service at this point.
Because it's proprietary, expensive (VERY expensive - you need to buy a new computer for it), actually not the most secure (partly because the others are too obscure for anyone to bother targeting, partly because of OS-level virtualization (ie. jails), partly because of Free/OpenBSD's policies of minimalism), and because it's diverged quite a bit from the other BSDs, so you can't say one's anything close to a substitute for the other.
The worst printers or disk drives can do is fail. The worst motherboards can do is fail. Engines can fail with disastrous consequences, but aircraft makers don't trust anyone, they test everything 50 times. Trusting your data to a 3rd party can also cause disastrous consequences in the event of a leak, but you don't even control the server, so there is simply no way you can properly examine what's happening to the data.
Sorry, but I'll have to put in my bet for "local, or at least personally controlled, storage will still be dominant in 2020".
1) Every "character" in Twitter, in this algorithm, can store one of 2146369536 values, since the other 1114112 run into problems. 2) 2^4339 2146369596^140 3) Thus, any 4339-bit integer in base 2 can be converted into a 140-bit integer in base 2146369596. To encode, do this conversion. To decode, do it backwards.
I, for my part, am a libertarian, but that is a little extreme. The FAA should definitely have nothing to do with what goes on above 100km, but there are some aviation concerns that the FAA might need to handle. Things like discarded stages falling on people's heads, rockets crashing into (or at least spraying exhaust onto, or destabilizing the flight path of) planes flying through the rocket's launch trajectory and spacecraft landing (most designs involve making the craft into an airplane). There should be no regulations in space, but things going up and down are still passing through everyone else's airspace.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's approach involves client retention. Okay, fine. But the way they're going about doing it - making it nearly impossible to write an application compatible with their formats - is anticompetitive and very evil.
And the car analogy simply does not hold. Image files are standardized, and I can expect a .png made in Photoshop to still look the same in GIMP or MS Paint. Sound formats are the same. Even for formatted text, there exists the completely open ODF format. MS's actions in making a format so closed and proprietary that often even different versions of their own software show the same file differently are simply inexcusable.
Every highschool student taking a chemistry course 'possesses material useful for acts of terror'.
Wait, what? High school chemistry students sit down with pencil and paper and do chemical equations and draw what 2-phenyl-3,7-dichloro-whatever-cyclononane looks like. They don't actually mix things together - that would be too dangerous!
And the books are too busy being pedantic about the definition of acids and bases to say anything useful about how to make stuff go boom.
I disagree. Quite a few episodes have Scotty or Geordi finding a novel solution to a problem, and Scotty did invent the equations of teleporting onto a ship at warp. Sure, their day to day jobs are about fixing and maintaining, but they do show themselves as creative engineers when the time comes for it.
Free public Wi-Fi is one of the most important public services of the 21st century. It gives anyone who can come up with the $200 for a netbook the ability to access the sum of human knowledge. It allows people to communicate over long distances in many more ways that a simple voice conversation. Anyone who comes up with the money for an unlimited internet connection and jeopardizes some of his privacy (or some convenience, if he uses some kind of proxy/encryption) to let anyone access the internet without paying high fees to greedy monopolistic corporations is doing good for society. Saying that he's doing evil since he's also allowing copyright infringement is like saying cars are evil since you can use one to get away from a robbery. All technology can be used for good and evil, but the internet being freely available to the public does hundreds of times more good than it does evil.
So something like this?
All righty then, I'll stick with my "shit" keyboard shortcuts and be 3 times as productive while you're fumbling around trying to hit the "X" button to close your browser.
And say hello to theoretically unbreakable (not 10^15 years unbreakable, literally unbreakable) quantum entanglement-based one time pads.
Dear Games Workshop,
Please be advised that usage of the BattleSmasher(TM)®©(pat. pend.) name on third party websites is not legally authorized. However, we are not nearly as nice as you are, so we will be collecting $80,000 damages for each of your two uses of the BattleSmasher(TM)®©(pat. pend.) name.
Sincerely,
BattleSmasher(TM)®©(pat. pend.) Horde
Laws are made to be broken.
ie. Many laws are made to trip you up and give the government an excuse to punish whoever they feel like.
Can we please try to avoid making emotional appeals in place of logical arguments? Letting emotions win over logic in a casino makes you lose money, letting emotions win over logic when lives are at stake makes you lose lives. Maybe if we had some cold hard rationality in the government we wouldn't have sent any soldiers over to the Middle East at all.
If they resort to putting mandatory DRM on your brain
Become a lawyer so when the DRM, hooked up to life-critical parts of the brain, breaks you can enjoy the fallout.
You do realize that one of the four freedoms is an unconditional right to use the software, right? Infringing freedoms to protect them kind of defeats the whole purpose.
You do not get to see them. As far as I understand there is no law that forces show makers to make shows available to you in whatever way possible. I don't think it is covered under any human right.
The show makers are actively using the law to make the shows unavailable to me. Normally, that's justified by the fact that they're making it available at a cost, allowing them to make money. However, when they're just sitting on it and either not offering it at all or only offering it at prohibitive prices, they're not holding up their end of the social contract, making the whole thing morally invalid.
1) Evil Corp creates an independent organization, but run by the same people, called Evil Shell Corp
2) All Evil Corp employees working on IP are fired and rehired by Evil Shell Corp, with "work-for-hire" clauses now with Evil Shell Corp
3) Evil Shell Corp agrees to license all patents to Evil Corp for zero royalties
4) Evil Corp joins DPL, and gains all the benefits of being in the pool while Evil Shell Corp can pursue whatever patent trolling action it wants
Wait, so if government interference didn't exist anyone with a few hundred thousand bucks of capital would be able to set up an ISP? Do you know how much it costs to put wires all around the country even with no regulation whatsoever?
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nnbmlagghjjcbdhgmkedmbmedengocbn
1995? I'm pretty sure it's at least 6000 September by now.
There's nothing illegal about circumventing the law. That's why it's called "circumventing", and not "breaking". The court is reminding the FCC that there are limits on their power, the FCC is working within those limits. Provided that you agree with the limits that the court gave the FCC, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this.
Like having the government take over the parts of the industry that are inherently monopolistic (ie. wires; the barrier to entry for that essentially amounts to putting your own set of wires around the entire country) and having them rent out those wires to ISPs, who would then become competitive?
It's really the only way to have a free market in internet service at this point.
Because it's proprietary, expensive (VERY expensive - you need to buy a new computer for it), actually not the most secure (partly because the others are too obscure for anyone to bother targeting, partly because of OS-level virtualization (ie. jails), partly because of Free/OpenBSD's policies of minimalism), and because it's diverged quite a bit from the other BSDs, so you can't say one's anything close to a substitute for the other.
The worst printers or disk drives can do is fail. The worst motherboards can do is fail. Engines can fail with disastrous consequences, but aircraft makers don't trust anyone, they test everything 50 times. Trusting your data to a 3rd party can also cause disastrous consequences in the event of a leak, but you don't even control the server, so there is simply no way you can properly examine what's happening to the data.
Sorry, but I'll have to put in my bet for "local, or at least personally controlled, storage will still be dominant in 2020".
Sorry, Slashdot removed my mathematical symbols. Number 2 should read "2^4339 is less than 2146369596^140"
1) Every "character" in Twitter, in this algorithm, can store one of 2146369536 values, since the other 1114112 run into problems.
2) 2^4339 2146369596^140
3) Thus, any 4339-bit integer in base 2 can be converted into a 140-bit integer in base 2146369596. To encode, do this conversion. To decode, do it backwards.
How very reasonable, unprejudiced and rational of you.
I, for my part, am a libertarian, but that is a little extreme. The FAA should definitely have nothing to do with what goes on above 100km, but there are some aviation concerns that the FAA might need to handle. Things like discarded stages falling on people's heads, rockets crashing into (or at least spraying exhaust onto, or destabilizing the flight path of) planes flying through the rocket's launch trajectory and spacecraft landing (most designs involve making the craft into an airplane). There should be no regulations in space, but things going up and down are still passing through everyone else's airspace.