until these technologies can prove they are robust enough and secure enough to keep someone from gaining easy access to their systems.
In this case "technologies" really means coding practices. Because we are talking mostly about something you do rather than something you use. The technologies can probably be used both securely or insecurely, there are benefits to both approaches. What it is really about is giving enough time for best practices to float to the top. Which means a lot of writing on messgeboards and mailing lists, and sharing experiences... and book writing.
Of course, it doesn't matter too much for a broadcast entertainment medium like cable tv, but a fragmented communications infrastructure is a disaster which should see regulation to prevent, unless of course these type of exclusionary business arrangements are already covered by competition laws.
And what I mean by that, is that in certain localities certain broadband providers are monopolies, such as my town where Comcast is the only option, so it seems that such an anticompetitive practice as bandwidth fixing must be considered illegal even under current anti competive laws... I've noticed a precipitous drop in vonage call quality these last couple weeks. Is it just vonage growing too big too fast, or is Comcast degrading their quality on purpose without telling me? I'd guess comcast is more than willing to screw over its customers to herd them into its own voip service.
But it is just this type of behavior that we hear of that now means we cannot trust that any service offered over the internet will not at some point be secretly blocked or degraded by our ISP based on some whim. Commerce will suffer, quality of life will suffer.
If it turns out that Comcast is really blocking Vonage and Congress is going to do nothing about regulating commerce then it means that Congress just allowed me to be screwed out of my money because they listened to the happy horse shit from Verizon and Comcast and ATT. It will not benefit the marketplace to allow bandwidth fixing on the internet just so that companies can squeeze their customers for a few more dimes, any more than it would have been of benefit to allow phoen companies to drop calls from competitors on a sliding scale based on the level of kickbacks they were getting from other telephone companies.
QoS is the worst thing that the IETF has ever collaborated on. Unregulated QoS will destroy the Internet.
What do you do? You could change ISPs to one who is a partner or in some other way is financially related to Amazon. But then... your access to your favorite news or sports site slows to a crawl. That's how this is going to impact you. Nice huh?
Right on the money. And there is nothing to prevent content providers from charging ISPs now either. So, Google could turn around and block access to its content from certain ISPs, after all at some point if the content provider is going to be blamed for poor performance, then why bother pretending that your content is available from a certain ISP. Just let everyone from Verizon or Comcast or whomever is engaging in anti competitive mafia like behavior that their ISP is to blame for trying to shake down the content providers or enaging in bandwidth fixing for its partners.
Could just turn into one big fiasco like cable tv, where some channels pay the cable company, some channels the cable company pays and the customer always pays for everything and has to sit through commercials on top. Of course, it doesn't matter too much for a broadcast entertainment medium like cable tv, but a fragmented communications infrastructure is a disaster which should see regulation to prevent, unless of course these type of exclusionary business arrangements are already covered by competition laws.
The Cape isn't dominated by million dollar homes; to a large extent it's "middle class" people who have a small summer place.
Well, for the most part small summer places have recently become million dollar homes... at least on paper.
One interesting alternative idea that has gained some interest is the fact that this big gray area on the map is a military reservation that isn't used for a heck of a lot right now, sure it acts as a wildlife sanctuary and such, but it would be a lot less expensive to build and maintain wind turbines on land and you would likely get just as good wind just a few miles onshore at the heights of the wind towers. Well, it is just one possible alternative. Since quality of life does sometimes include the view. And with everyone looking out towards the ocean, nobody will be looking back inland at the hundreds of hundred foot wind towers that are keeping the lights on at night and keeping some homes warm during the winter. And it would do a lot more towards national security than the areas current use.
Hmm, wasn't one of the arguments for intelligent design that the fundamental constants had to be "just right" for the universe to exist? If the shifts of other dimensions causes shifts in our universal constants...another nail in the necessity-of-God argument's coffin?
Can't argue with circular reasoning... just because.
I don't see how using open source would help the economy. In order to boost an economy, people need to buy things, and last time I checked, free open source software was *free*. Free means it doesn't cost money, and if it doesn't cost money, no one is buying it. If enough people switch to free software, the economy will be hurt rather than helped.
Buying is only a portion of what is needed to have a better economy, don't forget selling. If free software makes it easier for people to produce other things and sell them, then the overall economy will be helped.
Software vendor lock-in creates an artificial scarcity, which is no better for the overall economy than if any necessary good or service goes through an artificial price increase due to some price fixing arrangement.
Eventually it all comes down to human labor, if people can do more, produce more and can do it with less time and capital (money) then the overall economy will be helped. If people don't have to pay for some types of software, they can be more productive without requiring additional capital spending.
The FSF however, sharply disagrees. 'If the kernel were pure GPL in its license terms...you couldn't link proprietary video drivers into it, whether dynamically or statically.' Where do you fall on this issue?"
Well, this seems just about as annoying as Hollywood trying to dictate to me what I can and cannot be capable of doing with my computer. Just let it work. Tom me, details of how the code is linked by the kernel are irrelevant, it is no different than running any other proprietary software on the linux kernel. Sure work towards open source at every level, but let people decide if they can wait. Don't arbitrarily put legal roadblocks in people's way unless you really want to kill Linux off.
.tel provides nothing that currently isn't available right now- Companies have contact pages with the information that you need to fax, phone, or email them your enquiries, people have their email and myspace pages, and all that I can see a.tel page doing is a refer URL forwarding.
Ah yes, but you forget that URI's are for more than just webpages. Instead of a web page think that you could just have mobile.bigpat.tel in your phone's address book and you would never have to update it. Or home.bigpat.tel. If people wanted a secondary address that only friends knew about they could create secretsquirrel.bigpat.tel and give that out. Of course all the girls would still give you gofuckyourself.fakename.tel and tell you to call them sometime.
This sounds little different than the idea behind the.ind TLD, which was to be so indivuals could have websites, emails, IM and phone addresses that were directly reachable and not related to a.com which is meant to be short hand for "commercial".
The general idea is appealing though, since it would require no upgrade of the existing telephone network, but would just enable new services on top of the network. Actually, it could ease the transition away from telephone numbers altogether if people started using the URI instead of phone numbers, seems already this has begun to happen where people keep local directories (phone address books) in their phones memory rather than remember long numbers. This seems a natural extension of that.
But I liked.ind a lot better, because it is more in keeping with the original idea behind a URI..tel implies how you are going to connect, but.ind just tells you that you are trying to connect to an individual. Unless "ind" means something obscence in Swahili, of course.
Your subject line makes a good point. This is only one implementation of a very old management practice. If my memory serves, the Chinese had a system so that beaurocrats could communicate problems nearly directly to the emperor in imperial China. Which can help to weed out corruption.
Any way for lower level managers and employees to escalate problems, issues and suggestions above their immediate supervisor is a good thing. It only becomes good management if there is someone at the top that can sort things out.
Pointless SUVs carrying around just 1 person most of the time pisses me off when I see them on the road.
How about a simple idea then, insure the driver and not the vehicle. Most people that need an SUV, for legitmate reasons simply can't afford to buy another car and insure it for one to two thousand dollars a year extra. You could buy a second hand car for less than the cost of insurance for one year. I think plenty of people driving big SUVs would be quite happy to drive pipsqueek cars half the time as it would probably save them about $1300 per year, given some ballpark estimations. But if you have a lot of kids, a boat, a contracting business, do a lot of outdoor activities you quite simply need an SUV at least part of the time and the savings of $1300 means you merely break even with the cost of insuring a second more fuel efficient car. And that is only counting operational and not the capital cost of the vehicle. So simple economics, under current US motor vehicle laws, dictate that if you need an SUV even just every couple weeks or every week, then you are better off just driving it all the time.
Sure there are some people that maybe just need an SUV once or twice a year, and they would probably be better off renting. And some people in the 90s probably were just getting SUVs, just in case they ever did get a boat or married a supermodel and had 5 kids. At $0.90 a gallon 5 or 6 years ago, why the heck not? But do you really think the majority of SUV owners are getting SUVs now merely out of their own vanity?
But your attitude, which is common amongst the do nothing, do gooder class, is that if it is good for you then it must be good for everyone. It is a false premise. You might as well get pissed about the city running buses with just one or two people in them. Maybe they should just make them walk home if it isn't economical to run the Bus or maybe they should change the route. But maybe nobody would take the bus at all if they couldn't rely on it being there later to pick them up. Sure these things should be looked at with discerning eye, but the overall efficiency must be considered. Otherwise you will be falling into the same trap as armchair efficiency experts everywhere.
But I hope that it doesn't support DRM! With Vista going to DRM, I may be heading to Linux full-time.
Yes, Vista seems like a naturally break away point for me. If it has invasive DRM schemes built in, then I will refuse to work with it for work, or at home. Sure not everyone one has such a luxury of choice, and depending on my future employment I may not in the future, but I hardly think Microsoft's marketing department sees much future in the slogan "Microsoft, because you have to"
DRM should be available as a little piece of software you can plug-in. But I'll be damned if I'll let a stupid movie or tv show take control over my computer just because some self important, paranoid, Hollywood prick doesn't trust me with their episode of "Lost" or "Battlestar Gallactica".
DRM at the hardware level is for shit. DRM at the OS level is for shit. If you want to sell me a playback device, that is hamstrung by the content, then don't expect me to pay much more than what I would pay for the content itself.
If all it can do is make toast, then all I am going to pay for is a toaster no matter what you call it.
I'm not convinced that that was what he was saying at all -- he was just stating that Linux, in its current state, is not suitable for the project.
And might he just mean the linux distributions and not the kernel itself. Seems when most people say Linux these days they really mean one of the packaged distributions with applications and desktop giu and not just the kernel.
If so, then he is definitely correct at least regarding some of the mainstream 7 cd sets with every application known to geekdom thrown in for good measure. Even some of the 1 CD live distros could use some custom tailoring to bring it down to a size that could fit on this device. OpenOffice alone seems far too beafy for this.
The traffic isn't literally being forwarded to NSA headquarters, the NSA has equipment colocated at the telcos which filters through all the traffic. So, their NSA software is in fact searching through all the internet traffic in the United States, unless of course the testimony of an actual technician with details of the operation doesn't do it for you.
Sure he doesn't know what it takes for a message, email, web page request, or VOIP call to actually sent back to NSA headquarters, or how long the data is kept, but at the very least the transmissions are being recorded until the software does its search. Heck maybe all those rooms are there "just in case" and only get turned on when their is a court warrant?? Time to find out.
Is a message really intercepted, if no human ever looked at it?
I don't think so. If "they" only look at certain messages, then all others have not been intercepted...
So, if you make a copy, create a computer program to search through the content, and store the entire content for later retrieval then it is still not really "intercepted" until a pair of human eyes takes a look at it or listens to the recording? With reasoning like that, you should go into politics.
Apparently AT&T has been providing some of the connection by I doubt that they are the only ones.
It has been intimated in the press that George W. Bush's illegal wire tapping went much deeper than has been admitted to. This is it. All Internet and Voice communications in the United States of America is now or was at some point being recorded by the NSA. It makes sense and it was certainly not just AT&T. Sure you can write that it was only a selected few messages or phone conversations that actually were brought to the attention of real people at NSA, probably measured in the tens of thousands out of many millions of people. But the computers, which were programmed by people, went through every message of every conversation. It is the only way to wiretap the internet in a centralized way without actually physically tapping wires.
When George Walker Bush says they only intercepted messages of terrorists and terrorist associates, it is a lie. They intercept everything and sorted it out later. What he is trying to assure you of is that they don't really care about what you had to say unless you are plotting terrorism, which is probably largely true. But how long until such a powerful tool is directed towards lesser threats? We already know that during the 90's NSA intercepted foreign communications regarding a civilian airbus deal were used by US government to help Boeing win European civilian contracts. How was that for a national security purpose? I am sure they went through mental hoops to think what they were doing was right. And before the mid 1970's the FBI used domestic terrorism as an excuse to wiretap political civil rights and anti war activists when there was no reasonable expectation that these groups or individuals would resort to violence in support of their causes.
consensis science in such an environment is particularly suspect.
I definately didn't mean to imply that it must be true just because most people say it is... regardless of if the people we are talking about are wearing lab coats or have a Phd next to their names it isn't science to take their word for it.
My point was just that it is not merely a correlation between observed warming and observed rises in CO2 levels. We have testable theories that can be tested. And that is the point of science. As you point out some of those test rely on suspect historical data, and future trends will be proof too late in some models of climate change.
Personally, I find the reasoning compelling that global warming is happening and is caused by gas emmisions from people's activities. And I think it is compelling enough to take action. But what is not clear to me is that negative effects will ultimately outweigh the positive effects. There will be winners and losers for sure, but if we just stopped harnessing fossil fuels in any wholesale way today, then there would just be losers. So, even if you agree on the science I think you can disagree on the politics reasonably based on the tenuous details of global warming.
But I live in the Northeast US which under some models sees a rise of perhaps 10 degrees of average winter temperatures and small increase in rainfall. So, I stand to gain from global warming. I am just hoping sea levels don't rise by more than a few feet, or else I could be living on an island. Even that doesn't sound too bad as long as ocean temperatures go up a bit around here.
Also, on a somewhat note - never care about a company, because the company cannot reciprocate your feelings.
If Intel comes out with a better, cheaper processor tomorrow, don't buy the AMD one, buy the intel one. Their is no point treating a company like a person.
Well, the poster specifically said he did not care about either company, just that there was still competition. And I think there is a assumption of parity when you suggest buying the product from the company with less marketshare.
Especially, as you find yourself buying a greater volume of products or more frequently, the overall health of the market is an important consideration in your self interest. It is foolish to let yourself become locked into just one Vendor or manufacturer for a class of products that you buy regularly. Or to support one company to the exclusion of others to the extent that you will be left with no real choice down the road.
People need to understand the effects of their purchasing decisions both on a personal and corporate level. Sure if there is a clear basis of superiority for less cost, then go with the better choice and hope the competition picks up in the future. But if all other qualities are nearly equal then buying from a competative company that happens to have less marketshare will go a long way towards ensuring a healthy marketplace.
It can reasonably be disputed based on our current evidence. We have established correlation, but not causation.
It can be disputed, and such a dispute can be based on reason, but I wonder what basis of dispute you would see as reasonable. Climate models based on everything we collectively know about our climate, chemistry and physics say that CO2 and other gases that are estimated to be emited by humans will raise global temperatures. Unless of course the Sun starts emitting less light, but if it starts emiting more light, then we would be doubly cooked.
There isn't just a correlation, there are testable theories of physics and chemistry that when taken in aggregate show a causal relationship to global warming.
Like our theory of gravity, it may not be complete. But that doesn't mean the apple is going to fall away from the ground and it doesn't mean that the planet will not get warmer with more CO2 in the air.
What a dick. Do you have any idea just how many organizations, profit and non, receive some funds somehow through the government? I wish this argument worked for my college tuition... since I pay taxes, and some portion of that goes to financial aid, which goes to my college, I should be able to go to college for free.
I like NPR also, but if you believe as I do that taxation, being that it is no more than forced labor, should only be used in support of our common defence and for enforcing laws that directly support public peace, then you have a real dilemna. Do you voluntarily support an organization that believes that it has a right to force people to support it? An otherwise good organization that brings us high quality information presented in a intelligable way.
As a practical matter, the philosophy of coercion and force is prevalent in our society and you will be hard pressed to live your life without having to compromise your libertarian ideals in return for something. But NPR is not one of those things, as long as they continue to receive tax money it is completely reasonable to choose not to give them any more money for that reason alone.
We live in an imperfect world which is dominated by bad ideas, there is nothing wrong with saying no to one of them every once in a while.
For the legitimate interests of fair use, including archiving in libraries, DRM must be circumvented. DRM must be considered incompatible with copyright protection.
In order for a DRM'd work to receive legal copyright protection it must be required to submit a non-DRM'd copy to the Library of Congress and 2 other public Libraries. Otherwise the whole concept of time limited copyright goes out the window, frankly. Unrestrained DRM is unconstitutional for that reason.
Just the capability of dual-booting Windows XP and OS X 10.4 would certainly put Apple into Business in a big way. Although, I would think that being able to run Windows applications inside OSX would make more sense from their perspective. Both would be the best, since some people might just like Apple hardware, but just want Windows. And some people might like OSX and just need to run a few Windows applications.
Slashdot Mirror
until these technologies can prove they are robust enough and secure enough to keep someone from gaining easy access to their systems.
In this case "technologies" really means coding practices. Because we are talking mostly about something you do rather than something you use. The technologies can probably be used both securely or insecurely, there are benefits to both approaches. What it is really about is giving enough time for best practices to float to the top. Which means a lot of writing on messgeboards and mailing lists, and sharing experiences... and book writing.
Of course, it doesn't matter too much for a broadcast entertainment medium like cable tv, but a fragmented communications infrastructure is a disaster which should see regulation to prevent, unless of course these type of exclusionary business arrangements are already covered by competition laws.
And what I mean by that, is that in certain localities certain broadband providers are monopolies, such as my town where Comcast is the only option, so it seems that such an anticompetitive practice as bandwidth fixing must be considered illegal even under current anti competive laws... I've noticed a precipitous drop in vonage call quality these last couple weeks. Is it just vonage growing too big too fast, or is Comcast degrading their quality on purpose without telling me? I'd guess comcast is more than willing to screw over its customers to herd them into its own voip service.
But it is just this type of behavior that we hear of that now means we cannot trust that any service offered over the internet will not at some point be secretly blocked or degraded by our ISP based on some whim. Commerce will suffer, quality of life will suffer.
If it turns out that Comcast is really blocking Vonage and Congress is going to do nothing about regulating commerce then it means that Congress just allowed me to be screwed out of my money because they listened to the happy horse shit from Verizon and Comcast and ATT. It will not benefit the marketplace to allow bandwidth fixing on the internet just so that companies can squeeze their customers for a few more dimes, any more than it would have been of benefit to allow phoen companies to drop calls from competitors on a sliding scale based on the level of kickbacks they were getting from other telephone companies.
QoS is the worst thing that the IETF has ever collaborated on. Unregulated QoS will destroy the Internet.
What do you do? You could change ISPs to one who is a partner or in some other way is financially related to Amazon. But then... your access to your favorite news or sports site slows to a crawl. That's how this is going to impact you. Nice huh?
Right on the money. And there is nothing to prevent content providers from charging ISPs now either. So, Google could turn around and block access to its content from certain ISPs, after all at some point if the content provider is going to be blamed for poor performance, then why bother pretending that your content is available from a certain ISP. Just let everyone from Verizon or Comcast or whomever is engaging in anti competitive mafia like behavior that their ISP is to blame for trying to shake down the content providers or enaging in bandwidth fixing for its partners.
Could just turn into one big fiasco like cable tv, where some channels pay the cable company, some channels the cable company pays and the customer always pays for everything and has to sit through commercials on top. Of course, it doesn't matter too much for a broadcast entertainment medium like cable tv, but a fragmented communications infrastructure is a disaster which should see regulation to prevent, unless of course these type of exclusionary business arrangements are already covered by competition laws.
pedophiles are the new terrorists... politically speaking.
Gotta love fear mongering. Some people just seam to be born to want to make other people jump through hoops.
hell, even a dell has smaller borders than this thing. What does it look like next to another 19", that is what I want to know.
The Cape isn't dominated by million dollar homes; to a large extent it's "middle class" people who have a small summer place.
Well, for the most part small summer places have recently become million dollar homes... at least on paper.
One interesting alternative idea that has gained some interest is the fact that this big gray area on the
map is a military reservation that isn't used for a heck of a lot right now, sure it acts as a wildlife sanctuary and such, but it would be a lot less expensive to build and maintain wind turbines on land and you would likely get just as good wind just a few miles onshore at the heights of the wind towers. Well, it is just one possible alternative. Since quality of life does sometimes include the view. And with everyone looking out towards the ocean, nobody will be looking back inland at the hundreds of hundred foot wind towers that are keeping the lights on at night and keeping some homes warm during the winter. And it would do a lot more towards national security than the areas current use.
Hmm, wasn't one of the arguments for intelligent design that the fundamental constants had to be "just right" for the universe to exist? If the shifts of other dimensions causes shifts in our universal constants...another nail in the necessity-of-God argument's coffin?
Can't argue with circular reasoning... just because.
Again, stick with mainstream if you need things work effortlessly.
The mainstream is Windows, so "effortlessly" isn't an option. Maybe OSX is what you were thinking?
I don't see how using open source would help the economy. In order to boost an economy, people need to buy things, and last time I checked, free open source software was *free*. Free means it doesn't cost money, and if it doesn't cost money, no one is buying it. If enough people switch to free software, the economy will be hurt rather than helped.
Buying is only a portion of what is needed to have a better economy, don't forget selling. If free software makes it easier for people to produce other things and sell them, then the overall economy will be helped.
Software vendor lock-in creates an artificial scarcity, which is no better for the overall economy than if any necessary good or service goes through an artificial price increase due to some price fixing arrangement.
Eventually it all comes down to human labor, if people can do more, produce more and can do it with less time and capital (money) then the overall economy will be helped. If people don't have to pay for some types of software, they can be more productive without requiring additional capital spending.
The FSF however, sharply disagrees. 'If the kernel were pure GPL in its license terms...you couldn't link proprietary video drivers into it, whether dynamically or statically.' Where do you fall on this issue?"
Well, this seems just about as annoying as Hollywood trying to dictate to me what I can and cannot be capable of doing with my computer. Just let it work. Tom me, details of how the code is linked by the kernel are irrelevant, it is no different than running any other proprietary software on the linux kernel. Sure work towards open source at every level, but let people decide if they can wait. Don't arbitrarily put legal roadblocks in people's way unless you really want to kill Linux off.
.tel provides nothing that currently isn't available right now- Companies have contact pages with the information that you need to fax, phone, or email them your enquiries, people have their email and myspace pages, and all that I can see a .tel page doing is a refer URL forwarding.
.ind TLD, which was to be so indivuals could have websites, emails, IM and phone addresses that were directly reachable and not related to a .com which is meant to be short hand for "commercial".
.ind a lot better, because it is more in keeping with the original idea behind a URI. .tel implies how you are going to connect, but .ind just tells you that you are trying to connect to an individual. Unless "ind" means something obscence in Swahili, of course.
Ah yes, but you forget that URI's are for more than just webpages. Instead of a web page think that you could just have mobile.bigpat.tel in your phone's address book and you would never have to update it. Or home.bigpat.tel. If people wanted a secondary address that only friends knew about they could create secretsquirrel.bigpat.tel and give that out. Of course all the girls would still give you gofuckyourself.fakename.tel and tell you to call them sometime.
This sounds little different than the idea behind the
The general idea is appealing though, since it would require no upgrade of the existing telephone network, but would just enable new services on top of the network. Actually, it could ease the transition away from telephone numbers altogether if people started using the URI instead of phone numbers, seems already this has begun to happen where people keep local directories (phone address books) in their phones memory rather than remember long numbers. This seems a natural extension of that.
But I liked
Your subject line makes a good point. This is only one implementation of a very old management practice. If my memory serves, the Chinese had a system so that beaurocrats could communicate problems nearly directly to the emperor in imperial China. Which can help to weed out corruption.
Any way for lower level managers and employees to escalate problems, issues and suggestions above their immediate supervisor is a good thing. It only becomes good management if there is someone at the top that can sort things out.
Pointless SUVs carrying around just 1 person most of the time pisses me off when I see them on the road.
How about a simple idea then, insure the driver and not the vehicle. Most people that need an SUV, for legitmate reasons simply can't afford to buy another car and insure it for one to two thousand dollars a year extra. You could buy a second hand car for less than the cost of insurance for one year. I think plenty of people driving big SUVs would be quite happy to drive pipsqueek cars half the time as it would probably save them about $1300 per year, given some ballpark estimations. But if you have a lot of kids, a boat, a contracting business, do a lot of outdoor activities you quite simply need an SUV at least part of the time and the savings of $1300 means you merely break even with the cost of insuring a second more fuel efficient car. And that is only counting operational and not the capital cost of the vehicle. So simple economics, under current US motor vehicle laws, dictate that if you need an SUV even just every couple weeks or every week, then you are better off just driving it all the time.
Sure there are some people that maybe just need an SUV once or twice a year, and they would probably be better off renting. And some people in the 90s probably were just getting SUVs, just in case they ever did get a boat or married a supermodel and had 5 kids. At $0.90 a gallon 5 or 6 years ago, why the heck not? But do you really think the majority of SUV owners are getting SUVs now merely out of their own vanity?
But your attitude, which is common amongst the do nothing, do gooder class, is that if it is good for you then it must be good for everyone. It is a false premise. You might as well get pissed about the city running buses with just one or two people in them. Maybe they should just make them walk home if it isn't economical to run the Bus or maybe they should change the route. But maybe nobody would take the bus at all if they couldn't rely on it being there later to pick them up. Sure these things should be looked at with discerning eye, but the overall efficiency must be considered. Otherwise you will be falling into the same trap as armchair efficiency experts everywhere.
But I hope that it doesn't support DRM! With Vista going to DRM, I may be heading to Linux full-time.
Yes, Vista seems like a naturally break away point for me. If it has invasive DRM schemes built in, then I will refuse to work with it for work, or at home. Sure not everyone one has such a luxury of choice, and depending on my future employment I may not in the future, but I hardly think Microsoft's marketing department sees much future in the slogan "Microsoft, because you have to"
DRM should be available as a little piece of software you can plug-in. But I'll be damned if I'll let a stupid movie or tv show take control over my computer just because some self important, paranoid, Hollywood prick doesn't trust me with their episode of "Lost" or "Battlestar Gallactica".
DRM at the hardware level is for shit. DRM at the OS level is for shit. If you want to sell me a playback device, that is hamstrung by the content, then don't expect me to pay much more than what I would pay for the content itself.
If all it can do is make toast, then all I am going to pay for is a toaster no matter what you call it.
I'm not convinced that that was what he was saying at all -- he was just stating that Linux, in its current state, is not suitable for the project.
And might he just mean the linux distributions and not the kernel itself. Seems when most people say Linux these days they really mean one of the packaged distributions with applications and desktop giu and not just the kernel.
If so, then he is definitely correct at least regarding some of the mainstream 7 cd sets with every application known to geekdom thrown in for good measure. Even some of the 1 CD live distros could use some custom tailoring to bring it down to a size that could fit on this device. OpenOffice alone seems far too beafy for this.
A free society must choose to REMAIN free?
Actually, how about...
A free society must choose to exercise their freedom.
The traffic isn't literally being forwarded to NSA headquarters, the NSA has equipment colocated at the telcos which filters through all the traffic. So, their NSA software is in fact searching through all the internet traffic in the United States, unless of course the testimony of an actual technician with details of the operation doesn't do it for you.
m l
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70621-0.ht
Sure he doesn't know what it takes for a message, email, web page request, or VOIP call to actually sent back to NSA headquarters, or how long the data is kept, but at the very least the transmissions are being recorded until the software does its search. Heck maybe all those rooms are there "just in case" and only get turned on when their is a court warrant?? Time to find out.
Is a message really intercepted, if no human ever looked at it?
I don't think so. If "they" only look at certain messages, then all others have not been intercepted...
So, if you make a copy, create a computer program to search through the content, and store the entire content for later retrieval then it is still not really "intercepted" until a pair of human eyes takes a look at it or listens to the recording? With reasoning like that, you should go into politics.
Apparently AT&T has been providing some of the connection by I doubt that they are the only ones.
It has been intimated in the press that George W. Bush's illegal wire tapping went much deeper than has been admitted to. This is it. All Internet and Voice communications in the United States of America is now or was at some point being recorded by the NSA. It makes sense and it was certainly not just AT&T. Sure you can write that it was only a selected few messages or phone conversations that actually were brought to the attention of real people at NSA, probably measured in the tens of thousands out of many millions of people. But the computers, which were programmed by people, went through every message of every conversation. It is the only way to wiretap the internet in a centralized way without actually physically tapping wires.
When George Walker Bush says they only intercepted messages of terrorists and terrorist associates, it is a lie. They intercept everything and sorted it out later. What he is trying to assure you of is that they don't really care about what you had to say unless you are plotting terrorism, which is probably largely true. But how long until such a powerful tool is directed towards lesser threats? We already know that during the 90's NSA intercepted foreign communications regarding a civilian airbus deal were used by US government to help Boeing win European civilian contracts. How was that for a national security purpose? I am sure they went through mental hoops to think what they were doing was right. And before the mid 1970's the FBI used domestic terrorism as an excuse to wiretap political civil rights and anti war activists when there was no reasonable expectation that these groups or individuals would resort to violence in support of their causes.
A free society must choose to be free.
consensis science in such an environment is particularly suspect.
I definately didn't mean to imply that it must be true just because most people say it is... regardless of if the people we are talking about are wearing lab coats or have a Phd next to their names it isn't science to take their word for it.
My point was just that it is not merely a correlation between observed warming and observed rises in CO2 levels. We have testable theories that can be tested. And that is the point of science. As you point out some of those test rely on suspect historical data, and future trends will be proof too late in some models of climate change.
Personally, I find the reasoning compelling that global warming is happening and is caused by gas emmisions from people's activities. And I think it is compelling enough to take action. But what is not clear to me is that negative effects will ultimately outweigh the positive effects. There will be winners and losers for sure, but if we just stopped harnessing fossil fuels in any wholesale way today, then there would just be losers. So, even if you agree on the science I think you can disagree on the politics reasonably based on the tenuous details of global warming.
But I live in the Northeast US which under some models sees a rise of perhaps 10 degrees of average winter temperatures and small increase in rainfall. So, I stand to gain from global warming. I am just hoping sea levels don't rise by more than a few feet, or else I could be living on an island. Even that doesn't sound too bad as long as ocean temperatures go up a bit around here.
Also, on a somewhat note - never care about a company, because the company cannot reciprocate your feelings.
If Intel comes out with a better, cheaper processor tomorrow, don't buy the AMD one, buy the intel one. Their is no point treating a company like a person.
Well, the poster specifically said he did not care about either company, just that there was still competition. And I think there is a assumption of parity when you suggest buying the product from the company with less marketshare.
Especially, as you find yourself buying a greater volume of products or more frequently, the overall health of the market is an important consideration in your self interest. It is foolish to let yourself become locked into just one Vendor or manufacturer for a class of products that you buy regularly. Or to support one company to the exclusion of others to the extent that you will be left with no real choice down the road.
People need to understand the effects of their purchasing decisions both on a personal and corporate level. Sure if there is a clear basis of superiority for less cost, then go with the better choice and hope the competition picks up in the future. But if all other qualities are nearly equal then buying from a competative company that happens to have less marketshare will go a long way towards ensuring a healthy marketplace.
It can reasonably be disputed based on our current evidence. We have established correlation, but not causation.
It can be disputed, and such a dispute can be based on reason, but I wonder what basis of dispute you would see as reasonable. Climate models based on everything we collectively know about our climate, chemistry and physics say that CO2 and other gases that are estimated to be emited by humans will raise global temperatures. Unless of course the Sun starts emitting less light, but if it starts emiting more light, then we would be doubly cooked.
There isn't just a correlation, there are testable theories of physics and chemistry that when taken in aggregate show a causal relationship to global warming.
Like our theory of gravity, it may not be complete. But that doesn't mean the apple is going to fall away from the ground and it doesn't mean that the planet will not get warmer with more CO2 in the air.
What a dick. Do you have any idea just how many organizations, profit and non, receive some funds somehow through the government? I wish this argument worked for my college tuition... since I pay taxes, and some portion of that goes to financial aid, which goes to my college, I should be able to go to college for free.
I like NPR also, but if you believe as I do that taxation, being that it is no more than forced labor, should only be used in support of our common defence and for enforcing laws that directly support public peace, then you have a real dilemna. Do you voluntarily support an organization that believes that it has a right to force people to support it? An otherwise good organization that brings us high quality information presented in a intelligable way.
As a practical matter, the philosophy of coercion and force is prevalent in our society and you will be hard pressed to live your life without having to compromise your libertarian ideals in return for something. But NPR is not one of those things, as long as they continue to receive tax money it is completely reasonable to choose not to give them any more money for that reason alone.
We live in an imperfect world which is dominated by bad ideas, there is nothing wrong with saying no to one of them every once in a while.
For the legitimate interests of fair use, including archiving in libraries, DRM must be circumvented. DRM must be considered incompatible with copyright protection.
In order for a DRM'd work to receive legal copyright protection it must be required to submit a non-DRM'd copy to the Library of Congress and 2 other public Libraries. Otherwise the whole concept of time limited copyright goes out the window, frankly. Unrestrained DRM is unconstitutional for that reason.
Just the capability of dual-booting Windows XP and OS X 10.4 would certainly put Apple into Business in a big way. Although, I would think that being able to run Windows applications inside OSX would make more sense from their perspective. Both would be the best, since some people might just like Apple hardware, but just want Windows. And some people might like OSX and just need to run a few Windows applications.