The EFF has come down on this for Clearplay. I don't take whatever the EFF does as gospel, but their claim the "Public Has Right to Skip or Mute Movie Scenes" seems accurate to me.
The CleanFlicks lawsuit was properly decided according to the law. Whether the law is right or not is a seperate question. But if this other lawsuit goes against ClearPlay, I could see Tivo going the way of the world too. If you can't have something skipping certain parts of a movie for you, I could easily see an analagous argument about Tivo skipping commercials illegal too.
Sure people have curiosity for the controversial - it is human nature. He has built a reputation for trolling, but he does often has interesting ideas - even if they are wholly inaccurate and silly (kind of like Cringely).
But everyone is on to him (and has been for sometime) so while we may still put him on the front page of digg and/., we'll never believe him again. How do I know?/. debates about a Dvorak story are increasingly swamped by "dvorak is a troll" comments and 6 of the last 10 Dvorak stories on Digg got buried.
GP post was right - this does have to do with contracts. Contracts are just agreements between two parties that they consider legally binding. It doesn't have to be done on paper, they don't need a signature. I imagine this guy certainly considered his "I agree" policy a contract - in that it was binding - or else he wouldn't have sued over it.
The microsoft software claim seems to be reference to their EULA. The Windows EULA (and nearly every other EULA in existance) says in effect - if your computer breaks or you lose stuff because of our software, we aren't liable. If EULAs are not enforceable, GP was suggesting that Microsoft could be held liable (theoretically, probably not realistically) every time data was lost because of a Windows software issue.
No, rather than hoping people edit like Wikipedia (which we've seen is vulnerable to active PR campaigns, see the wikipedia entry on Walmart) - this would be more useful if you had techie friends you knew. How many times have people asked me about specs on a decent computer? Dozens, wouldn't it be easier, rather than rewrite the same comment about RAM to ten people, to just point them to your recommendations on this site.
If you want a techie's perspective on some hardware, you could see if he/she has written about it on this site before bothering you. Of course this limit of using it this way is that it works better for general suggestions rather than specific devices. But this site has a good start - being featured on/. and digg may get enough techies to flood it with recommendations that it would take a massive PR campaign to throw ratings.
For those who didn't get parent post, it is a quote from "hitchhikers guide to the galaxy". The plans to destroy Arthur Dent's house were "on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'" for six months prior to the demolition.l The plans to destroy earth were similarly on display in a place earthlings couldn't reach with their technology for 6 months prior to the destruction of the earth.
Well there is a difference. Device makers bend over backwards to provide drivers to Microsoft. They have no excuse for non-functioning devices - they are given the bloody drivers.
Linux on the other hand is generally NOT given drivers. We have to beg, borrow & steal for documentation, let alone the drivers themselves. The linux devs have an excuse - "Broadcom/ATI/whoever" WON'T GIVE THEM DRIVERS!
I used Acme quite a bit, and the ideas are innovative but they seem a to be a bit more on the cool side than the useful side. Despite all the ooohs and ahhhs, I never got the hang of it and went back to x-emacs. \
The mouse chording is a neat idea, but again speed suffers when you move to the mouse. If someone could figure out how to do one handed typing - mouse chording would be the way to go, but in the absence of that it wasn't great for me.
To be fair, I didn't ever use it exclusively, so I may have not grown as accustomed to it as I should have, just my 2 cents.
Good point, the same amount of heat does have to get dissipated. But the shell (a crappy heatsink I know) does it silently. Doing it for quiet seems a little silly to me, but as I've said before, apple has the best QA in the computer world, they've been building computers since the early 80s, they'd know the right amount of thermal grease. Heck that picture is from a technicians handbook, meaning someone who writes technician handbooks did that on purpose. If you are writing these books, I'm sure you've seen thermal grease before - I'm sure you'd know this was too much to efficiently dissipate heat.
Something else is going on here, I just don't know what.
I don't see where the fanboyism is in GP. I know it is unpopular to defend people, but gp doesn't seem to be advocating macs. Gp is saying that Apple did this intentionally - although it is a dumb idea - for reasons other than accident. Apple has the best QA in place of any computer company. They've been making computers since the early 80s. This seems like too obvious of a mistake to have been 'missed.'
Whether GP is right or not, I don't know, but this couldn't be an accident. The person who WRITES the tech manuals had to know this is too much thermal grease.
GP's reasoning seems right to me - apple couldn't figure out how to get a quieter laptop any other way, so they resorted to this, which is absolutely a bad idea. Of course more heat will shorten the life span of your chip. If I had a macbook pro, you can bet I'd get some of that paste off right off.
Not necessarily. If you read the somethingawful post - the fans went on MORE with less grease and the temperature was lower. The grease in this case is just keeping heat away from the temperature sensor. So the fans go on less.
I don't know - gp doesn't seem to be advocating macs. It seems right to me - apple couldn't figure out how to get a quieter laptop any other way, so they resorted to this.
Which is absolutely a bad idea. Of course more heat will shorten the life span of your chip. If I had a macbook pro, you can bet I'd get some of that paste off right off.
Off-topic I know, but I'm getting a little tired of the word "fanboy" and its derivatives - "fanboi", "fanboism" and whatever other mangled spelling people can invent. Idiot words like those are so Digg.
This sounds a lot like Nagios. From TFA I couldn't see anything Munin and Monit would do that you can't do on Nagios with a few plugins. Just a plug - Nagios is beautiful, it makes nice graphical representations of load, hits, throughput, and about anything else you can think of.
The issue isn't that they used ID cards per-se. They could have murdered people just fine without guns, just fine without cars - but they could NOT have found so many without a centralized ID system.
The other problem with your analogy is that it is silly. You can't shoot someone without hands, hands must be evil! So what? It is too late - people have hands, people have guns, people have cars. We have them so the point is moot whether or not they are good/bad. But we don't (in the US) have ID cards YET. So we have to figure out if the potential abuses are worth risking for the benefits, before we jump on to getting them.
My opinion? Seeing how abusive this administration has been with privacy, free speech and honesty as it is - I'm not sure I'd like them to know where I am and what I'm doing all the time.
The bad news is that even 1-2% means that your vote doesn't matter.
Landsburg shows that even with a perfectly even state election (50/50 in NY), statistically speaking, you are more likely to be murdered by your mother
To quote: "If Kerry (or Bush) has just a slight edge, so that each of your fellow voters has a 51 percent likelihood of voting for him, then your chance of casting the tiebreaker is about one in 10 to the 1,046th power--approximately the same chance you have of winning the Powerball jackpot 128 times in a row...
The traditional reply begins with the phrase "But if everyone thought like that...." To which the correct rejoinder is: So what? Everyone doesn't think like that. They continue to vote by the millions and tens of millions."
No what he means is that because it is difficult (though probably easier than writing for XP), and there is little demand for it, they are doing a crappy job. They don't want to show the community what they really think of them (you aren't worth our time) so they keep it closed.
They are right - they really would be ridiculed for releasing a half-way job open source even though others would fix it up nice. Real documentation might be enough for the community to write some halfway decent drivers, but again they refuse to give that too.
When most of the binary blob drivers for *nix are reverse engineered - we find that they were very inefficient, often insecure, and generally a lousy implementation. Only halfway done. Moral of the story - they don't give a crap about *nix folks.
I think the point isn't just to combat Microsoft spreading in the domain arena - but also to raise funds to combat Microsoft spreading in the political arena.
Which is exactly why Dell sells their "N" series with FreeDOS (they do have some high end desktops with RHEL). They claim they don't want to support* Linux, so they give you a completely worthless OS. They can claim you are getting an OS (that is true) and they don't have to support it.
* I don't think the issue is calls to the center, a standard Ubuntu would certainly be easier to resolve problems with than Windows, but that they don't want to make sure all their hardware is compliant, that would entail pressuring vendors to supply documentation or linux drivers, which I'm sure dell doesn't want to worry about.
I am coming out of comment retirement for this because you seem a sensible fellow. As such you deserve a sensible response.
Just because the *AA's haven't gone after people time-shifting "their own stuff" doesn't mean they won't. When it is in their interest, they will.
Sony, in establighing the betamax & time-shifting precedents, went after their own interest. They wanted their hardware to do well, to do so they had to ensure they and thier users were legally protected. If they hadn't created betamax (and were part of the MPAA back then) you can bet they would have fought for their own interests; against the evil copyright breaking machines known as the VCR.
More money and attention DO NOT make a better product. How many times has this idiocy been perpetrated on the public. More money and attention MAY make a better product. Probably will make a better service. But far more commonly it retards revolutionary ideas and merely fine-tunes current ideas and implementations.
Need evidence? Look at the companies with money and attention. What was the last revolutionary thing developed in house by Microsoft? How about Cisco? Revolutionary ideas are always from little startups with no money and even less attention.
Need more evidence? Think about good products. Which was developped with more money and attention, Linux or Windows? Rather than say one is better, that comparison shows that there is at least no difference.
Slashdot Mirror
The EFF has come down on this for Clearplay. I don't take whatever the EFF does as gospel, but their claim the "Public Has Right to Skip or Mute Movie Scenes" seems accurate to me.
The CleanFlicks lawsuit was properly decided according to the law. Whether the law is right or not is a seperate question. But if this other lawsuit goes against ClearPlay, I could see Tivo going the way of the world too. If you can't have something skipping certain parts of a movie for you, I could easily see an analagous argument about Tivo skipping commercials illegal too.
Sure they will. Discussion of Dvorak stories on slashdot is always swamped by highly moderated "Dvorak is a troll, don't listen" comments.
If you don't think moderators are the unwashed masses, look at Digg: 6 of the last 10 stories by Dvorak were buried.
Sure people have curiosity for the controversial - it is human nature. He has built a reputation for trolling, but he does often has interesting ideas - even if they are wholly inaccurate and silly (kind of like Cringely).
/., we'll never believe him again. How do I know? /. debates about a Dvorak story are increasingly swamped by "dvorak is a troll" comments and 6 of the last 10 Dvorak stories on Digg got buried.
But everyone is on to him (and has been for sometime) so while we may still put him on the front page of digg and
GP post was right - this does have to do with contracts. Contracts are just agreements between two parties that they consider legally binding. It doesn't have to be done on paper, they don't need a signature. I imagine this guy certainly considered his "I agree" policy a contract - in that it was binding - or else he wouldn't have sued over it.
The microsoft software claim seems to be reference to their EULA. The Windows EULA (and nearly every other EULA in existance) says in effect - if your computer breaks or you lose stuff because of our software, we aren't liable. If EULAs are not enforceable, GP was suggesting that Microsoft could be held liable (theoretically, probably not realistically) every time data was lost because of a Windows software issue.
No, rather than hoping people edit like Wikipedia (which we've seen is vulnerable to active PR campaigns, see the wikipedia entry on Walmart) - this would be more useful if you had techie friends you knew. How many times have people asked me about specs on a decent computer? Dozens, wouldn't it be easier, rather than rewrite the same comment about RAM to ten people, to just point them to your recommendations on this site.
/. and digg may get enough techies to flood it with recommendations that it would take a massive PR campaign to throw ratings.
If you want a techie's perspective on some hardware, you could see if he/she has written about it on this site before bothering you. Of course this limit of using it this way is that it works better for general suggestions rather than specific devices. But this site has a good start - being featured on
For those who didn't get parent post, it is a quote from "hitchhikers guide to the galaxy". The plans to destroy Arthur Dent's house were "on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'" for six months prior to the demolition.l The plans to destroy earth were similarly on display in a place earthlings couldn't reach with their technology for 6 months prior to the destruction of the earth.
Well there is a difference. Device makers bend over backwards to provide drivers to Microsoft. They have no excuse for non-functioning devices - they are given the bloody drivers.
Linux on the other hand is generally NOT given drivers. We have to beg, borrow & steal for documentation, let alone the drivers themselves. The linux devs have an excuse - "Broadcom/ATI/whoever" WON'T GIVE THEM DRIVERS!
The ears are directional wireless antennas. They double as USB covers when you aren't using a wireless connection.
I used Acme quite a bit, and the ideas are innovative but they seem a to be a bit more on the cool side than the useful side. Despite all the ooohs and ahhhs, I never got the hang of it and went back to x-emacs. \
The mouse chording is a neat idea, but again speed suffers when you move to the mouse. If someone could figure out how to do one handed typing - mouse chording would be the way to go, but in the absence of that it wasn't great for me.
To be fair, I didn't ever use it exclusively, so I may have not grown as accustomed to it as I should have, just my 2 cents.
Your post was right on except:
3. get rid of game rentals - why rent when for $20 you can own?
For the same reason people rent DVDs now?
Good point, the same amount of heat does have to get dissipated. But the shell (a crappy heatsink I know) does it silently. Doing it for quiet seems a little silly to me, but as I've said before, apple has the best QA in the computer world, they've been building computers since the early 80s, they'd know the right amount of thermal grease. Heck that picture is from a technicians handbook, meaning someone who writes technician handbooks did that on purpose. If you are writing these books, I'm sure you've seen thermal grease before - I'm sure you'd know this was too much to efficiently dissipate heat.
Something else is going on here, I just don't know what.
I don't see where the fanboyism is in GP. I know it is unpopular to defend people, but gp doesn't seem to be advocating macs. Gp is saying that Apple did this intentionally - although it is a dumb idea - for reasons other than accident. Apple has the best QA in place of any computer company. They've been making computers since the early 80s. This seems like too obvious of a mistake to have been 'missed.'
Whether GP is right or not, I don't know, but this couldn't be an accident. The person who WRITES the tech manuals had to know this is too much thermal grease.
GP's reasoning seems right to me - apple couldn't figure out how to get a quieter laptop any other way, so they resorted to this, which is absolutely a bad idea. Of course more heat will shorten the life span of your chip. If I had a macbook pro, you can bet I'd get some of that paste off right off.
Not necessarily. If you read the somethingawful post - the fans went on MORE with less grease and the temperature was lower. The grease in this case is just keeping heat away from the temperature sensor. So the fans go on less.
I don't know - gp doesn't seem to be advocating macs. It seems right to me - apple couldn't figure out how to get a quieter laptop any other way, so they resorted to this.
Which is absolutely a bad idea. Of course more heat will shorten the life span of your chip. If I had a macbook pro, you can bet I'd get some of that paste off right off.
Off-topic I know, but I'm getting a little tired of the word "fanboy" and its derivatives - "fanboi", "fanboism" and whatever other mangled spelling people can invent. Idiot words like those are so Digg.
This sounds a lot like Nagios. From TFA I couldn't see anything Munin and Monit would do that you can't do on Nagios with a few plugins. Just a plug - Nagios is beautiful, it makes nice graphical representations of load, hits, throughput, and about anything else you can think of.
The issue isn't that they used ID cards per-se. They could have murdered people just fine without guns, just fine without cars - but they could NOT have found so many without a centralized ID system.
The other problem with your analogy is that it is silly. You can't shoot someone without hands, hands must be evil! So what? It is too late - people have hands, people have guns, people have cars. We have them so the point is moot whether or not they are good/bad. But we don't (in the US) have ID cards YET. So we have to figure out if the potential abuses are worth risking for the benefits, before we jump on to getting them.
My opinion? Seeing how abusive this administration has been with privacy, free speech and honesty as it is - I'm not sure I'd like them to know where I am and what I'm doing all the time.
The bad news is that even 1-2% means that your vote doesn't matter.
... ." To which the correct rejoinder is: So what? Everyone doesn't think like that. They continue to vote by the millions and tens of millions."
Landsburg shows that even with a perfectly even state election (50/50 in NY), statistically speaking, you are more likely to be murdered by your mother
To quote: "If Kerry (or Bush) has just a slight edge, so that each of your fellow voters has a 51 percent likelihood of voting for him, then your chance of casting the tiebreaker is about one in 10 to the 1,046th power--approximately the same chance you have of winning the Powerball jackpot 128 times in a row...
The traditional reply begins with the phrase "But if everyone thought like that
No what he means is that because it is difficult (though probably easier than writing for XP), and there is little demand for it, they are doing a crappy job. They don't want to show the community what they really think of them (you aren't worth our time) so they keep it closed.
They are right - they really would be ridiculed for releasing a half-way job open source even though others would fix it up nice. Real documentation might be enough for the community to write some halfway decent drivers, but again they refuse to give that too.
When most of the binary blob drivers for *nix are reverse engineered - we find that they were very inefficient, often insecure, and generally a lousy implementation. Only halfway done. Moral of the story - they don't give a crap about *nix folks.
I think the point isn't just to combat Microsoft spreading in the domain arena - but also to raise funds to combat Microsoft spreading in the political arena.
Which is exactly why Dell sells their "N" series with FreeDOS (they do have some high end desktops with RHEL). They claim they don't want to support* Linux, so they give you a completely worthless OS. They can claim you are getting an OS (that is true) and they don't have to support it.
* I don't think the issue is calls to the center, a standard Ubuntu would certainly be easier to resolve problems with than Windows, but that they don't want to make sure all their hardware is compliant, that would entail pressuring vendors to supply documentation or linux drivers, which I'm sure dell doesn't want to worry about.
I am coming out of comment retirement for this because you seem a sensible fellow. As such you deserve a sensible response.
Just because the *AA's haven't gone after people time-shifting "their own stuff" doesn't mean they won't. When it is in their interest, they will.
Sony, in establighing the betamax & time-shifting precedents, went after their own interest. They wanted their hardware to do well, to do so they had to ensure they and thier users were legally protected. If they hadn't created betamax (and were part of the MPAA back then) you can bet they would have fought for their own interests; against the evil copyright breaking machines known as the VCR.
That is the freaking funniest thing I have ever ever ever read on slashdot. Cheers.
Sean
Has anyone else noticed, if you click in the left column of a long thread (like this one) in Firefox, the stupid site will page down?
This is a dupe ask slashdot. Here is the original.
Marke me as a troll/flamebait but...
More money and attention DO NOT make a better product. How many times has this idiocy been perpetrated on the public. More money and attention MAY make a better product. Probably will make a better service. But far more commonly it retards revolutionary ideas and merely fine-tunes current ideas and implementations.
Need evidence? Look at the companies with money and attention. What was the last revolutionary thing developed in house by Microsoft? How about Cisco? Revolutionary ideas are always from little startups with no money and even less attention.
Need more evidence? Think about good products. Which was developped with more money and attention, Linux or Windows? Rather than say one is better, that comparison shows that there is at least no difference.
----------------------
Sig? Me angry, no sig.