Yup, no "I" there, because I generally send slashdot, etc, my money. I mean ultimately I end up paying for it anyhow since the marketing budgets of these companies are passed on the consumer in increased prices. I just think it would be amusing for somebody to do that:)
What somebody should do is write an ad filtering client that does the following:
Actually download the banners in a background process
Selectively follow the links of some of the banners in a semi-random fashion
This creates the illusion that people are viewing the ads even if they are not. This makes it so you don't have to see the ads, and the sites you like will get advertiser supporting.
Can somebody explain to me what's so amazingly important about broadband. As I understand this, the media companies want to trample on all of our rights so that they can sell us more bandwidth that they can use to transmit to us the movies that they sell. Can somebody please explain to me the compelling societal interest that's being promoted here?
Bandwidth is a wonderful thing, but it seems like inacting legislation to artificially generate demand for it is an ill conceived idea. Fine, if copyright controls aren't built into every single piece of electronic equipment it might mean never watching Lord of the Rings on-line. WHO CARES? Fine, I'll go to a theater and watch it, and there I can get the experience of being with a large audience, getting the big sound and picture that I can never hope to replicate in my home. What is so almighty important to our society to be able to download this stuff?
I guess my feeling is that if the big movie studios don't want to put their stuff on-line, fine, don't, I don't really care. What's the worst that happens? Nothing. Nothing at all. They keep making money the way they always have and we keep watching movies the way we always have. The only risk to them is that somebody else is going to come along and make something of that market without any of this copy protection technology built in. So really, in the end, this is all just an effort to further the monopoly of the MPAA over movie production and distribution. Isn't that grand?
...that to really make a fair comparison, I'll need access to a mainframe running Linux. So, if Sun would be so kind, please send me a mainframe so that I can check your conclusions. I promise that I'll write a very thorough article in exchange.
The title of the article and the contents seem to be unrelated. The title says, "Linux will prevail," then goes on to says:
"Unfortunately, many computer users are unaware of the extent to which they are "jerked around" by companies that sell a license restricting the freedom to use their software."
Well, it would seem that Linux doesn't stand much of a chance if people continue to remain unaware of that issue. He's not suggesting here that they are becoming more aware or ways that they can be made more aware, he's simply stating a set back to the cause. So hardly a proof that Linux will prevail. Next he says:
"Recent announcements by Sun Microsystems, regarding its expanded support for the open-source community and its decision to provide its own Linux distribution, are welcome news. "
Excellent! So all of the Solaris desktop users may move to Linux. I'm sure we welcome all 3 of them to our happy community. Next he goes on to list hurdles that Linux needs to overcome but doesn't provide any evidence that they ARE being overcome which is somewhat important if he's trying to proove his title. So then he moves on to say:
"No one would buy a car with a welded-shut hood, yet we continue to buy software that way. The Microsoft approach limits a user to available software. With Linux, a user can grow. If a tool is missing or awkward, someone can get under the hood and fix the problem. "
The funny thing is that increasingly, especially amongst the more expensive cars, it is becoming impossible to do any real work on them yourself. Sure, you can change the oil and other fluids but beyond that many cars are impossible for the average person to do work on. Finally, he says:
"
Two paths are before us. One leads to increasing proprietary control, protectionist measures and legal threats, while the other leads to open source, freedom and accelerated innovation. I, of course, choose the latter because it is "win-win." Vital innovation, new markets and vastly improved customer service win the vote readily over the purveyors of proprietary hoarding. "
To summarize, he seems to be concluding that Linux will prevail despite some hurdles because it would be really good if it did and really bad if it didn't. Wow, that's all the evidence I needed, kudos to linux, your victory is well in hand!
This is really a poorly written article and is little more than another puff piece about how Linux is the right choice, and windows is the wrong choice. It shows no new insights on the chances of Linux surviving and only points out the same issues to be dealt with that only about a billion other articles have pointed out.
I'm wondering if they are even going to bother trying to defend this or if they have already given up. If the hobbyists consider this an important thing, then I guess it's time that we all coughed up some cash to help protect it.
Honestly I'm beginning to think that the last bastion if influence individuals can have on the system is writing checks to help pay for the legal defense of the various little guys who are getting stomped on. I mean boycotts are of fairly limited value unless you can get together a large group of people and get some media attention. Personally I would love to see them fight this because I think they've got some solid legal ground here. So if the EFF, or some other group is going to start up a defense fund for these guys, let me know, I'll chip in.
The problem here is that regardless of whether there are or are not subtantial non-infringing uses is immaterial unless you've got the budget and cajones to fight it out in court. If they take down their site then they protect themselves legally. If they don't then Nintendo can go right ahead and sue them, come what may.
If Nintendo were to lose said suit, the only harm to them is the legal cost which is a drop in the bucket for them. If the accused loses, then there's legal fees and whatever damages are awarded. Heck, even if the accused wins, that will be after years of protracted legal rangling at exhorbitant costs. So the DMCA completely slants the legal playing field to the accuser. If I'm NOA, or any other company, it is in my best interest to swamp people with cease and desist letters because the odds are nobody will try to fight me. If they refuse, then it's up to me whether I feel like going after them.
Smart companies will, of course, pick and choose their battles, to work out a strong court precedent. Why go after the New York Times for publishing something when you can go after a hacker magazine? Eventually a strong legal history develops that pretty much gives any device manufacturer carte blanche to declare how people are allowed to use their systems, regardless of copyright issues.
Seems to me that there needs to be some protections in the DMCA for false accusations. While a company has to swear they are not purgoring (sp?) themselves it's next to impossible to prove that they did. They can simply say that they thought it was a violation and turns out they were wrong. There needs to be some penalty for going after somebody, otherwise there's no reason not to try to go after everybody on a whim.
Oh, and as a side note, is it just me, or did the Customs officials just get handed a huge amount of power under our noses?
No, but they had a much better legal fortification built up. Microsoft being ruled as a monopoly is what really puts them in a bind when it comes to defending themselves. With that conclusion, any lawsuit has a far reduced burden to proove to the court.
Ultimately what will bring down Microsoft isn't any sort of half-baked government settlement. What will doom them is having to fight a ton of little court battles against every company who ever thought about competing against them. Even if they win a lot of these cases, the pure distraction of having to fend off all these suits is going to hurt them.
If you take the clause at its most literal congress is authorized to extend the term of copyright for conceivably thousands of years as long as it isn't "forever". It could be argued however that in the case of something like film, having a copyright that is longer than the lifetime of the media it's recorded on, is effectively forever. Beyond that the only check against the congressional power here is your interpretation of the intent of the clause.
Fortunately most of the people perceived as right wingers are also strict constuctionists. Scalia is one of the more right wing of the justices but he's very much a strict constuctionist. If you look at what the constitution lays out for copyright protection, it sets a very clear balance between copyright owners and the public. He's probably somebody would strike down the concept of fair use without a second thought, but if you look at the literal wording of the constitution this is what it says congress has the right to do:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and invetors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
The first part of this phrase is the key to victory. There's no evidence that the items being retroactively considered for copyright extension will have any benefit to the progess of science and useful arts. If anything they are guaranteeing that items that might otherwise be useful to that progress by being released in to the public domain are being allowed to decay beyond the possibility of recovery.
Ultimately it's going to depend on where the balance is struck by the court. Technically speaking the terms of copyright are still limited even under the Sonny Bono extension. It's just a question of how far can congress go before it's violating the first part of the clause.
My feeling is that the supreme court may rule that newly created works may have this extension applied to them, but that there should be no retro-active application. Since this law is to incent production of creative works, it's very hard to suggest this is needed to incent already created works. Such a ruling would maintain the spirit of the law, assuming that they don't believe that the term of copyright has breached the threshold of being limited.
How I'd discover proxies...
on
Peek-a-Boo(ty)
·
· Score: 1
Remember, the proxies get discovered by word of mouth or perhaps off a website. The oppressive government has the same resources if not more to find these proxies. I don't need to know what you actually transmit over the proxy, as long as I know what the proxy could be used for I can do what I want with you.
Does this really help the oppressed?
on
Peek-a-Boo(ty)
·
· Score: 2
If I'm a Evil Opressive Government (TM), does this really do anything to circumvent my ability to oppress the masses? Great, so a bunch of dissidents decide to go out and get their information on-line through this system. I, as the Evil Oppressive Government use my intelligence networks and eventually discover this system. So what I do is find several of these proxies and begin logging their activity.
A few months later after I've seen a lot of people going to these systems I begin sending out visitors in the wee hours of the night to "educate" these people. Really these systems may actually make it EASIER to find incorrect thinking individuals. I don't have to compromise an entire network of dissidents, I just have to find a couple proxy sites and let the proxy logs do my work for me.
I've spent a lot of spare brain cycles thinking about this stuff and it seems like you really need a way to obfuscate that nature of your communication over multiple channels. You need legitimate looking sites to act as proxies and to limit the frequency and size of transmissions to reduce their visibility. Anything that can make connection profiling possible rules it out as a viable solution.
Now, this system does have a host of possible uses, don't get me wrong. It will make it possible for somebody at the library to work around net nanny software, etc. It will make it easier to avoid the snoopy firewalls at the office who want to keep track of how many times I visited Ebay today. But I don't think this will do dissidents much good.
I started running spamassasin a few weeks ago and it works wonderfully. I've got it set up on my box so that users can choose to use it or not by some simple procmail configuration.
The way I use it is have all spam messages get dumped to a common directory. This way I can verify that I didn't lose something important. In the 169 messages it filtered out during my last cleaning, 3 (all from mailing lists I'm on) we filtered improperly, and none of them were that important.
The beauty of this approach is that I can deal with wiping the spam out all at once and not have to be digging through my mail box wondering from subject lines if something is worth reading or if it's spam. I'll just do a "grep Subject: * | less" in the directory I use for storing the filtered messages and check for any mistakes. I add the mistakes into my procmail filter and voila, I get maybe half a dozen spams a week now.
In theory, open source has a greater POTENTIAL to be secure than non-open products. I say potential because while it may not happen in practice, there's a lot more opportunity for numerous people to look at it with diverse perspectives. Of course if they don't look at it, it doesn't much matter.
the other security benefit of open source is that you have the POTENTIAL to audit code before you install it. If security was absolutely critical to you, you could look at the innards of every app you download, skim it for buffer overflows, etc. In practice most people don't bother, but they could if they wanted too.
What does Sega having or not having a patent have to do with this? The DMCA is all about circumventing an access control measure to a copyrighted work, and doesn't really care about what Sega's patents are. If they want to go after the company manufacturing them for patent infringement, fine (assuming they have a patent), but that has nothing to do with this issue.
What we have happening here is that an item is being forbidden to enter the country because it MIGHT be usable for bypassing an access control to a copyrighted work. The DMCA makes no distinction about whether the item may have other leagl uses. Seems like a lawsuit is in order against the US customs department, and this has some really strong legal ground to stand on.
I can see that somebody might get their account deleted without any notification and lose all of the work they've been doing. If I have to make an effort to keep copies of everything somewhere else in case something happens, why exactly am I hosting my work there in the first place? Seems like an e-mail and a couple weeks notice would be nice.
When it comes right down to it, the broadcasters accepted the existence of VCR's only because a judge made them accept it. If the movie studios and broadcasters had their way, VCR's couldn't record, merely playback things (and preferably in a way that causes them to wear out and require replacement).
Anybody who is qualified to write about the plusses and minusses of.Net is automatically biased. A microsoft rep or VB programmer will likely right about how wonderful it is. A C programmer will say how poor the performance of VM's are and how limited they are.
Personally I think that those strongly familiar with Java are probably the most qualified to write on the subject of.Net. The CLR is very clearly a similar concept to the Java Virtual Machine, and thus an awareness of the benefits and weaknesses of that model provide useful insights into the capabilities of Microsoft's product.
Really, the only unbiased source in this debate is an uninformed source, and that's really of no help. Take what the author has said, check his facts, and judge his opinions on your own. In the end, you'll probably find that, as it has always been, certain languages and architectures are well suited to certain tasks. You aren't going to write device drivers in C# and you probably aren't going to write a cross platform GUI application in assembler.
If I bought a Divx disc at the store, at least there was some opportunity to permanently purchase the disc. In this situation, I buy a disc, and it becomes useless. If I happen to really like the movie, then I have to go and buy it again.
With the advent of Ebay I can't fathom why any of these companies are even bothering. I can go to Amazon and order a brand new DVD, or perhaps even pick up an early used edition at Ebay. If I don't like it, then I just put it out on ebay and offload it to somebody else.
Given that when they actually dug into the responses, less than 50 were really well researched and made significant points about the case. I mean talk about signal to noise ratios.
What about having the children design the layout and architecture of a virtual city? It would be fascinating to see how a group of children from many different cultural backgrounds would want to shape the city.
Did I say anywhere in my comment that Mono was not open source? I'm well aware of the fact that it is open source. That being said, it is based on a microsoft standard which Microsoft could, down the road, co-opt to insure that the mono dependent systems would not work.
Basically what I'm getting at is that the point of GNOME originally was to have a free as in liberty GUI. Well basing your liberties on the architectures of microsoft seems rather a good way to lose them. So the ultimate goal of GNOME seems to be put at risk by this move, whereas KDE is now reliant on GPL'd libraries which means that they are not similarly at risk.
I grant you, if it was based on closed source stuff it would be much more ironic, but I think it's a fascinating turn in the lives of these two projects.
Now wouldn't it be funny if GNOME started basing itself heavily on Microsoft's architecture? I mean if I recall my history, KDE came into existence but it was based on the closed QT libraries. So then the GNOME project was founded to be a more free software purist environment. Now it seems that things are getting reversed now that you can get an open version of QT.
So you decide to write a book about the social aspects of slashdot. Well, without slashdot, this wouldn't be much of a book. Without all those people contributing to the social environment of it, it wouldn't be much of a book. While certainly there is value in your creative interpretation of what you witness, it doesn't exist in a vacuum.
I'm not suggesting that the idea itself can be protected. What I'm suggesting is that copyright exists because it recognizes that the content produced comes out of a community of ideas, and thus should return to that community at some point and hence the limited term.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, no "I" there, because I generally send slashdot, etc, my money. I mean ultimately I end up paying for it anyhow since the marketing budgets of these companies are passed on the consumer in increased prices. I just think it would be amusing for somebody to do that :)
This creates the illusion that people are viewing the ads even if they are not. This makes it so you don't have to see the ads, and the sites you like will get advertiser supporting.
Can somebody explain to me what's so amazingly important about broadband. As I understand this, the media companies want to trample on all of our rights so that they can sell us more bandwidth that they can use to transmit to us the movies that they sell. Can somebody please explain to me the compelling societal interest that's being promoted here?
Bandwidth is a wonderful thing, but it seems like inacting legislation to artificially generate demand for it is an ill conceived idea. Fine, if copyright controls aren't built into every single piece of electronic equipment it might mean never watching Lord of the Rings on-line. WHO CARES? Fine, I'll go to a theater and watch it, and there I can get the experience of being with a large audience, getting the big sound and picture that I can never hope to replicate in my home. What is so almighty important to our society to be able to download this stuff?
I guess my feeling is that if the big movie studios don't want to put their stuff on-line, fine, don't, I don't really care. What's the worst that happens? Nothing. Nothing at all. They keep making money the way they always have and we keep watching movies the way we always have. The only risk to them is that somebody else is going to come along and make something of that market without any of this copy protection technology built in. So really, in the end, this is all just an effort to further the monopoly of the MPAA over movie production and distribution. Isn't that grand?
...that to really make a fair comparison, I'll need access to a mainframe running Linux. So, if Sun would be so kind, please send me a mainframe so that I can check your conclusions. I promise that I'll write a very thorough article in exchange.
The title of the article and the contents seem to be unrelated. The title says, "Linux will prevail," then goes on to says:
"Unfortunately, many computer users are unaware of the extent to which they are "jerked around" by companies that sell a license restricting the freedom to use their software."
Well, it would seem that Linux doesn't stand much of a chance if people continue to remain unaware of that issue. He's not suggesting here that they are becoming more aware or ways that they can be made more aware, he's simply stating a set back to the cause. So hardly a proof that Linux will prevail. Next he says:
"Recent announcements by Sun Microsystems, regarding its expanded support for the open-source community and its decision to provide its own Linux distribution, are welcome news. "
Excellent! So all of the Solaris desktop users may move to Linux. I'm sure we welcome all 3 of them to our happy community. Next he goes on to list hurdles that Linux needs to overcome but doesn't provide any evidence that they ARE being overcome which is somewhat important if he's trying to proove his title. So then he moves on to say:
"No one would buy a car with a welded-shut hood, yet we continue to buy software that way. The Microsoft approach limits a user to available software. With Linux, a user can grow. If a tool is missing or awkward, someone can get under the hood and fix the problem. "
The funny thing is that increasingly, especially amongst the more expensive cars, it is becoming impossible to do any real work on them yourself. Sure, you can change the oil and other fluids but beyond that many cars are impossible for the average person to do work on. Finally, he says:
"
Two paths are before us. One leads to increasing proprietary control, protectionist measures and legal threats, while the other leads to open source, freedom and accelerated innovation. I, of course, choose the latter because it is "win-win." Vital innovation, new markets and vastly improved customer service win the vote readily over the purveyors of proprietary hoarding. "
To summarize, he seems to be concluding that Linux will prevail despite some hurdles because it would be really good if it did and really bad if it didn't. Wow, that's all the evidence I needed, kudos to linux, your victory is well in hand!
This is really a poorly written article and is little more than another puff piece about how Linux is the right choice, and windows is the wrong choice. It shows no new insights on the chances of Linux surviving and only points out the same issues to be dealt with that only about a billion other articles have pointed out.
I'm wondering if they are even going to bother trying to defend this or if they have already given up. If the hobbyists consider this an important thing, then I guess it's time that we all coughed up some cash to help protect it.
Honestly I'm beginning to think that the last bastion if influence individuals can have on the system is writing checks to help pay for the legal defense of the various little guys who are getting stomped on. I mean boycotts are of fairly limited value unless you can get together a large group of people and get some media attention. Personally I would love to see them fight this because I think they've got some solid legal ground here. So if the EFF, or some other group is going to start up a defense fund for these guys, let me know, I'll chip in.
The problem here is that regardless of whether there are or are not subtantial non-infringing uses is immaterial unless you've got the budget and cajones to fight it out in court. If they take down their site then they protect themselves legally. If they don't then Nintendo can go right ahead and sue them, come what may.
If Nintendo were to lose said suit, the only harm to them is the legal cost which is a drop in the bucket for them. If the accused loses, then there's legal fees and whatever damages are awarded. Heck, even if the accused wins, that will be after years of protracted legal rangling at exhorbitant costs. So the DMCA completely slants the legal playing field to the accuser. If I'm NOA, or any other company, it is in my best interest to swamp people with cease and desist letters because the odds are nobody will try to fight me. If they refuse, then it's up to me whether I feel like going after them.
Smart companies will, of course, pick and choose their battles, to work out a strong court precedent. Why go after the New York Times for publishing something when you can go after a hacker magazine? Eventually a strong legal history develops that pretty much gives any device manufacturer carte blanche to declare how people are allowed to use their systems, regardless of copyright issues.
Seems to me that there needs to be some protections in the DMCA for false accusations. While a company has to swear they are not purgoring (sp?) themselves it's next to impossible to prove that they did. They can simply say that they thought it was a violation and turns out they were wrong. There needs to be some penalty for going after somebody, otherwise there's no reason not to try to go after everybody on a whim.
Oh, and as a side note, is it just me, or did the Customs officials just get handed a huge amount of power under our noses?
No, but they had a much better legal fortification built up. Microsoft being ruled as a monopoly is what really puts them in a bind when it comes to defending themselves. With that conclusion, any lawsuit has a far reduced burden to proove to the court.
Ultimately what will bring down Microsoft isn't any sort of half-baked government settlement. What will doom them is having to fight a ton of little court battles against every company who ever thought about competing against them. Even if they win a lot of these cases, the pure distraction of having to fend off all these suits is going to hurt them.
If you take the clause at its most literal congress is authorized to extend the term of copyright for conceivably thousands of years as long as it isn't "forever". It could be argued however that in the case of something like film, having a copyright that is longer than the lifetime of the media it's recorded on, is effectively forever. Beyond that the only check against the congressional power here is your interpretation of the intent of the clause.
Fortunately most of the people perceived as right wingers are also strict constuctionists. Scalia is one of the more right wing of the justices but he's very much a strict constuctionist. If you look at what the constitution lays out for copyright protection, it sets a very clear balance between copyright owners and the public. He's probably somebody would strike down the concept of fair use without a second thought, but if you look at the literal wording of the constitution this is what it says congress has the right to do:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and invetors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
The first part of this phrase is the key to victory. There's no evidence that the items being retroactively considered for copyright extension will have any benefit to the progess of science and useful arts. If anything they are guaranteeing that items that might otherwise be useful to that progress by being released in to the public domain are being allowed to decay beyond the possibility of recovery.
Ultimately it's going to depend on where the balance is struck by the court. Technically speaking the terms of copyright are still limited even under the Sonny Bono extension. It's just a question of how far can congress go before it's violating the first part of the clause.
My feeling is that the supreme court may rule that newly created works may have this extension applied to them, but that there should be no retro-active application. Since this law is to incent production of creative works, it's very hard to suggest this is needed to incent already created works. Such a ruling would maintain the spirit of the law, assuming that they don't believe that the term of copyright has breached the threshold of being limited.
Remember, the proxies get discovered by word of mouth or perhaps off a website. The oppressive government has the same resources if not more to find these proxies. I don't need to know what you actually transmit over the proxy, as long as I know what the proxy could be used for I can do what I want with you.
If I'm a Evil Opressive Government (TM), does this really do anything to circumvent my ability to oppress the masses? Great, so a bunch of dissidents decide to go out and get their information on-line through this system. I, as the Evil Oppressive Government use my intelligence networks and eventually discover this system. So what I do is find several of these proxies and begin logging their activity.
A few months later after I've seen a lot of people going to these systems I begin sending out visitors in the wee hours of the night to "educate" these people. Really these systems may actually make it EASIER to find incorrect thinking individuals. I don't have to compromise an entire network of dissidents, I just have to find a couple proxy sites and let the proxy logs do my work for me.
I've spent a lot of spare brain cycles thinking about this stuff and it seems like you really need a way to obfuscate that nature of your communication over multiple channels. You need legitimate looking sites to act as proxies and to limit the frequency and size of transmissions to reduce their visibility. Anything that can make connection profiling possible rules it out as a viable solution.
Now, this system does have a host of possible uses, don't get me wrong. It will make it possible for somebody at the library to work around net nanny software, etc. It will make it easier to avoid the snoopy firewalls at the office who want to keep track of how many times I visited Ebay today. But I don't think this will do dissidents much good.
I started running spamassasin a few weeks ago and it works wonderfully. I've got it set up on my box so that users can choose to use it or not by some simple procmail configuration.
The way I use it is have all spam messages get dumped to a common directory. This way I can verify that I didn't lose something important. In the 169 messages it filtered out during my last cleaning, 3 (all from mailing lists I'm on) we filtered improperly, and none of them were that important.
The beauty of this approach is that I can deal with wiping the spam out all at once and not have to be digging through my mail box wondering from subject lines if something is worth reading or if it's spam. I'll just do a "grep Subject: * | less" in the directory I use for storing the filtered messages and check for any mistakes. I add the mistakes into my procmail filter and voila, I get maybe half a dozen spams a week now.
In theory, open source has a greater POTENTIAL to be secure than non-open products. I say potential because while it may not happen in practice, there's a lot more opportunity for numerous people to look at it with diverse perspectives. Of course if they don't look at it, it doesn't much matter.
the other security benefit of open source is that you have the POTENTIAL to audit code before you install it. If security was absolutely critical to you, you could look at the innards of every app you download, skim it for buffer overflows, etc. In practice most people don't bother, but they could if they wanted too.
What does Sega having or not having a patent have to do with this? The DMCA is all about circumventing an access control measure to a copyrighted work, and doesn't really care about what Sega's patents are. If they want to go after the company manufacturing them for patent infringement, fine (assuming they have a patent), but that has nothing to do with this issue.
What we have happening here is that an item is being forbidden to enter the country because it MIGHT be usable for bypassing an access control to a copyrighted work. The DMCA makes no distinction about whether the item may have other leagl uses. Seems like a lawsuit is in order against the US customs department, and this has some really strong legal ground to stand on.
I can see that somebody might get their account deleted without any notification and lose all of the work they've been doing. If I have to make an effort to keep copies of everything somewhere else in case something happens, why exactly am I hosting my work there in the first place? Seems like an e-mail and a couple weeks notice would be nice.
When it comes right down to it, the broadcasters accepted the existence of VCR's only because a judge made them accept it. If the movie studios and broadcasters had their way, VCR's couldn't record, merely playback things (and preferably in a way that causes them to wear out and require replacement).
Anybody who is qualified to write about the plusses and minusses of .Net is automatically biased. A microsoft rep or VB programmer will likely right about how wonderful it is. A C programmer will say how poor the performance of VM's are and how limited they are.
.Net. The CLR is very clearly a similar concept to the Java Virtual Machine, and thus an awareness of the benefits and weaknesses of that model provide useful insights into the capabilities of Microsoft's product.
Personally I think that those strongly familiar with Java are probably the most qualified to write on the subject of
Really, the only unbiased source in this debate is an uninformed source, and that's really of no help. Take what the author has said, check his facts, and judge his opinions on your own. In the end, you'll probably find that, as it has always been, certain languages and architectures are well suited to certain tasks. You aren't going to write device drivers in C# and you probably aren't going to write a cross platform GUI application in assembler.
If I bought a Divx disc at the store, at least there was some opportunity to permanently purchase the disc. In this situation, I buy a disc, and it becomes useless. If I happen to really like the movie, then I have to go and buy it again.
With the advent of Ebay I can't fathom why any of these companies are even bothering. I can go to Amazon and order a brand new DVD, or perhaps even pick up an early used edition at Ebay. If I don't like it, then I just put it out on ebay and offload it to somebody else.
Given that when they actually dug into the responses, less than 50 were really well researched and made significant points about the case. I mean talk about signal to noise ratios.
What about having the children design the layout and architecture of a virtual city? It would be fascinating to see how a group of children from many different cultural backgrounds would want to shape the city.
Did I say anywhere in my comment that Mono was not open source? I'm well aware of the fact that it is open source. That being said, it is based on a microsoft standard which Microsoft could, down the road, co-opt to insure that the mono dependent systems would not work.
Basically what I'm getting at is that the point of GNOME originally was to have a free as in liberty GUI. Well basing your liberties on the architectures of microsoft seems rather a good way to lose them. So the ultimate goal of GNOME seems to be put at risk by this move, whereas KDE is now reliant on GPL'd libraries which means that they are not similarly at risk.
I grant you, if it was based on closed source stuff it would be much more ironic, but I think it's a fascinating turn in the lives of these two projects.
Now wouldn't it be funny if GNOME started basing itself heavily on Microsoft's architecture? I mean if I recall my history, KDE came into existence but it was based on the closed QT libraries. So then the GNOME project was founded to be a more free software purist environment. Now it seems that things are getting reversed now that you can get an open version of QT.
So you decide to write a book about the social aspects of slashdot. Well, without slashdot, this wouldn't be much of a book. Without all those people contributing to the social environment of it, it wouldn't be much of a book. While certainly there is value in your creative interpretation of what you witness, it doesn't exist in a vacuum.
I'm not suggesting that the idea itself can be protected. What I'm suggesting is that copyright exists because it recognizes that the content produced comes out of a community of ideas, and thus should return to that community at some point and hence the limited term.