The group is headed by Patrick Ross, a former senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a strongly free-market think tank.
Copyright is derived from the Constitution's instructions for Congress to "promote progress in science and the useful arts". But they now impede progress more than they promote it. A "free market" is unencumbered by government-created monopolies like copyright. Copyright is a misnamed privilege to restrict free expression.
Does anyone think that Ross is busy protecting freedom, progress and markets? Or is he busy grabbing as much money as he can for people with licenses to print it?
Since, as usual, no one at Bush's FBI has suffered after disclosure of this destructive abuse, the excuse will of course multiply in popularity.
Funny how Bush Gang "mistakes" always seem to benefit Bush, though his gang claims it's all just accident and happenstance. Random distributions that always favor Bush must be "miracles".
Most of the craplets are for Net services that could tap the (new, untapped, enticing) "Linux" market just as well, even if it's not worth as much in subsidies today. So even if the cost of OEM preinstalled Windows is balanced by bigger craplet subsidies that depend on Windows, probably lower subsidies from Linux craplets could still deliver more net profit to Dell with cheaper Ubuntu licenses (which aren't $0, but probably less than Windows).
The question is whether Dell marketing or Dell legal is responsible for these Ubuntu versions - or some other similar "profit greed vs loss fear" dichotomy. If it's greed, then Dell will advertise, and grow the Linux market, soon enough growing it into just a generic "PC" market, with real crossover. If it's some way to get out of some obligation, then Dell will do it, pronounce it a failure after they're in the clear, and kill the Ubuntu line. Which would be a real setback for Ubuntu on Dell, thereby for Ubuntu and therefore Linux (and for Dell, too, but what do they know/care).
This might be a make/break proposition for desktop Linux. I think Ubuntu is up to it, as is the market. Vista's introduction was even less protective of Microsoft's market clutch than was XP, which was itself pretty lame - their increased grip peaked with Win2000, after the huge Win95/98 jump.
I hope Ubuntu makes it. We deserve better than Windows, and Ubuntu is better. Dell is the vehicle to make it happen.
Why do you think that Microsoft sells its Windows preinstalls to Dell for $0?
My $100 estimate comes from the amounts I've heard MS occasionally refunding customers who demanded a refund when they bought PCs without Windows, which was something of a movement a few years ago. Cross-referenced with the difference in prices for barebones PCs vs identical ones with Windows preinstalled, which is usually over $150, discounted for Dell's volume. And compared to buying a new copy (not an upgrade) of Windows.
The craplets are different: they're purely advertising, which their vendors pay Dell to add. Microsoft doesn't pay Dell to resell its products, it bundles them under threat of denying Dell reasonably priced licenses, as proven in various monopoly cases over the past decade or so. Dell pays Microsoft to bundle Windows, so people will buy Dells when they want a "Windows machine".
In any case, I did make a mistake on the math I posted. Because I counted 5% margin on Windows Dells, even including the extra cost of the OS, but didn't count that margin towards the Ubuntu version that sells for more money but costs less to deliver (excepting support, which I detailed separately). So actually there is probably even more profit to Dell on Ubuntus than I mentioned.
To sum up my post, I want my bank password protected by technology and legal enforcement.
Instead of the way it is now, where I hand it out to anyone. Some of whom aren't just neighborhood thieves. Some of them live in countries where US law cannot reach them. Some because they are just foreign countries with a bureaucracy too inconvenient for recovering small losses. Others because their countries are largely anarchies. And some of the latter have global networks that need to steal money this way to finance their operations out of reach of any moral or legal safety.
That is the reality. The people we trust with our IDs and our account access are robbing millions all the time now. And just insuring $50+ transactions isn't protecting people. Partly because of the international nature of the threat, and yes, because of some of the countries they come from.
The people getting robbed could be scumbags themselves, but that doesn't make it OK to rob them.
You can laugh all you want. But you hand the keys to your life to a dozen people you don't know how to trust, or catch when they rob you, the way I do every week here in NYC, and you too will also demand a better way to do business. It won't seem so funny then.
Large profit margins make all the difference in choosing whether to invest in a small, beginning market with big margins, or in a huge, saturated market with tiny margins.
That's why Dell is investing in delivering Linux to the market. Because it's either its own market, or a bigger margin in the same market that could buy a different product.
Do you think Dell is rolling this out because a few annoying Linux customer-wannabes have pestered it for a few years? No, they're in it for the money. I wish them the best success.
Why do I reuse the same guessable number, in plaintext, that I carry on a plastic card, and share with any number of fly-by-night vendors? Many of whom aren't even in the US, faceless on the Internet? And also with failed actors barely pretending to be waiters while I'm too drunk to remember anything?
Why doesn't my card give onetime passwords to them, attached to the transaction amount, and also reported directly to my bank for a single, auditable transaction in that amount?
And why do I use an easily guessable short numeric-only PIN at every ATM over and over? Including the ones at convenience stores run by recent immigrants who will soon flee back to faraway countries, often with little cybercops of their own, and not infrequently wracked by civil wars and even allied against the US in sponsoring terrorism, with all its attendant need for funds and lack of rule by law?
I know the insurance companies insure credit card transactions over $50. But those smaller ones add up, and the insurance costs a lot of money. To say nothing of the costs of ID theft/fraud.
Most people who have credit cards have mobile phones. Those phones should be wallets, securing these transactions with onetime passwords reported to the bank/credit corp to secure the exact transaction amount. And sync to my personal DB of transactions that I can replay. With cryptosigned receipts (and encrypted over-the-air comms).
It would save everyone a lot of money, except the thieves. And make new money for the telcos. While making my life safer and easier. Why is this taking so long?
So Dell should be making about $100 more on the Ubuntu sales than on the Windows sales, on $600 revenue. If they profit 5% on the Windows machines, that's $30, so the $130 Ubuntu profit is 22% profit, or about 4.5x the profit from Ubuntu than from Windows.
Ubuntu support might cost more to start, since the labor pool is smaller and they have to start up the operation. The open source is a mixed bag, because it sees a new release to support every 6 months, not every 5 years for Windows, though unpredictable Windows service packs vs steady apt-get upgrades is a largely unknown economic. Little of Dell's support will be helped by Dell looking at the OS sourcecode, let alone fixing it. And it's hard to tell whether Ubuntu's smaller escalation target than Microsoft's is cheaper for backend support. But this new era should produce direct comparison of substantial support statistics where only the OS differs.
So this new OS line on identical HW is likely to generate substantially more profits and lots of FUD-dispelling support costs data for Dell. So I expect Microsoft has made a deal with Dell to subsidize Windows, and (if history is any guide) plenty of anticompetitive tricks to make Ubuntu look bad compared to Windows.
But the race is on! And that bigger profit margin should encourage Dell to heavily advertise Ubuntu, at least once they've got scaling numbers for their support costs.
I wonder if today will be the Linux equivalent to the day AOL gatewayed all its users to the Internet and Usenet. I hope not - the Internet has sucked since then.
No, I don't make it sound like anything of the kind. I make it sound like Russia is a largely lawless country where AllOfMP3.com could perhaps operate, if its recent track record in the spotlight demonstrates that it can. Which is the upside of lawlessness: the bad laws are also absent or ineffective. In a nation not ruled by law, the only way to predict continuity of business is to guess from the actual tests of operation in the current conditions.
So long as the laws that do work, including the laws of economics and physics, keep the mafias at bay, Russia could be demonstrated to be a haven for distributing content according to a new, sustainable business model, unlike the rest of the world which is controlled by largely arbitrary laws that prohibit some of the simpler sustainable business models.
No, I don't care to continue discussing this with you.
All I wanted from continuing was to establish that guessing a line of scientific inquiry from "circumstantial evidence" initially explained by a hypothesis to be tested was how science works, despite your protestations to the contrary.
Obnoxious protestations. Without letup. Except that now you're at least acknowledging the scientific nature of this kind of investigation.
So I'm done. If you'd merely disagreed politely, without so many obnoxious assaults showing you don't really understand science, I might have had some fun investigating it with you by debating the science that exists. But you've behaved so badly that I consider merely getting you to talk science a major victory. I'm sure it's all downhill from there with you, based on your past performance.
Goodbye, and you're welcome for helping you understand how science works.
Is there a SuSE liveCD that I could boot from with the ATI card installed, on which I could run SaX2, then use the SaX2 output to find drivers I could install under Debian (or any other distro)?
FWIW, Debian has repos for stable, unstable, and experimental, as well as others outside that testing regime. "Universe" is a name for an Ubuntu repo, which is very similar in structure, though independent in content, to Debian's repos (as Ubuntu is derived from Debian, including using an APT system).
(c) Russian legal changes in the past few months to the broadcast services definition and copyright collection methods have not had the impact they are seeking on AllofMp3.com's popularity
Last year, when AllOfMP3.com made headlines (on Slashdot, at least), there was some indication that Russian law would be changed by the end of last year to undermine AllOfMP3.com's freedom to operate as unhindered as they had. Were those changes made? What are the new restrictions? How have they changed AllOfMP3.com's operations? Is it merely their popularity that determines how un/safe they are, or does Russian law still protect them?
Their lack of immunoresposive antigenicity makes embryonic stemcells transplantable between individuals. While there could be ways that eating stemcells could preserve their restorative effects, I did not say the folklore is literally true, but that it suggests investigation for the "grain of truth". And parthenogenesis is another example of pluripotent primitive cells.
Any other questions I can answer, or are you unscientifically committed to insisting that shark tissue does not merit investigation by stemcell researchers?
Most pharmaceuticals were extracted from materials (usually plant or animal) to which some folk's folklore attributed therapeutic powers.
I didn't claim that fin soup would rejuvenate you. I just pointed out its traditional reputation, which is the typical starting point for investigation.
And I also pointed out that these reputed and demonstrated properties of shark tissue are explainable by what we already know of stemcells, not "magic".
So take your strawman and your obnoxious trolls and go swim with the sharks. At least that will be a meaningful contribution to using sharks to make the world a better place.
There's no pseudoscience in there. And yes, lots of science is started on "hunches" followed up by rigorous experiment. Putting together a few commonly known facts that imply a stated hypothesis to explain them to be scientifically investigated is the scientific method.
The central question is whether AllOfMP3.com is operating legally under Russian law. Or, given the totalitarian/anarchy that is modern Russia, whether a service that does what AllOfMP3.com does, operating as it does in Russia (and operating outside Russia only on the Internet), is at risk of takedown by Russian authorities (not including their mafias, but that's a basic risk of doing business in Russia).
If AllOfMP3.com doesn't survive long enough to be tested in Russian court (and subsequently in Russian police offices), we might never know whether another bizmodel or just other outside-Russian operations could survive to be tweaked into a way that survives.
Sharks continually regenerate rows of teeth, and probably many other parts lost in sharky feeding frenzies. Their cartilage is used without immune reaction in reconstructing human tissue. Their fins are prized in Chinese folk remedies as a rejuvenating soup. Now we learn they're flexible enough to clone themselves.
We should closely examine these creatures, in all their varied (and often endangered) species, for secrets to rejuvenation. Most likely we'll learn a lot we can apply to human stemcell therapies, which a lot of these "magic" properties seem likely to be backed by.
That ZDNet article by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is written like a true geek. The most important reason determining which OS people buy is marketing, not any of the technical/aesthetic reasons intrinsic to Linux.
People buy their OS by buying a PC with it installed. That means buying a Dell, with Windows preinstalled, or a cheaper brand, with Windows preinstalled. The beginnings of preinstalled Linux on mass-market PCs will help reverse the total Windows momentum. But no one even knows to ask - and they have to ask - for "Linux instead of Windows". People don't even know that it's a "PC", they think they're buying Windows from Dell with a PC included - which they are. No one ever heard of "Lindows", which just sounds like "Windows", anyway, so why bother mentioning it, or asking about it?
Other people get Windows because they have it on their office machine, or on their last machine, and they just want the easiest transfer of their apps and data. They don't know they can use their data on Linux, because they never heard of Linux, and the idea of transferring is totally unknown. Most don't even know there is an alternative.
And others get Windows because someone sold it to them, or that in combination with some or all of the above. OS'es don't sell themselves, and Linux is usually "sold" to new users by some Linux geek. Either facelessly in an online discussion as a solution to some Windows problem, or perhaps a friend (of a friend of an aunt...). Most of those people aren't salespeople, and many are socially unskilled, let alone persuasive. Meanwhile, everyone sees $million ad campaigns every day, everywhere, defining "computers" as "Windows". And the most $incented salespeople run by the most ruthless global $marketing org with every advantage.
Ubuntu could compete directly with Windows for marketshare. But it needs opportunities to sell, many of which are hampered by Microsoft's proven, manifold, and ever-increasing monopoly abuse. And it needs ad campaigns directing consumers to skilled and equipped armies of salespeople.
Given the real reasons people don't "buy" Linux instead of Windows, it's testament to the quality of Linux and its community that it competes at all. That is the basis, but far from the full extent, of a way to get people "in touch" with Linux enough to replace Windows with it.
As long as we're still paying farmers not to grow crops in our socialist programme to prop up their prices in a "free" market, we should pay immigrants salaries not to work, to keep American labor prices propped up.
Good advice, except I haven't physically installed the card until I can find a driver - it's the video, and I need that on the machine I'm targeting.
I could install it into a server, then ssh in and dump lspci. If it's the only videocard and no driver, will Linux still work properly? What if it's the second videocard on a server with motherboard VGA?
I am looking at the card itself, with its multiple printed labels identifying the chips and the ROMs. Maybe that's enough. Where is the list of Rage drivers in gatos?
The way to be safe(r) from scripts is to require OO.o to check the signature of any script against the sigs of all scripts in a distributed repository. All the scripts' sources are open. People can test them out, and report them to the repo's (distributed) security team. If OO.o doesn't find the sig of a script in the repo, OO.o can submit the script to the repo and warn the user their script is untested before executing it.
This kind of architecture is one way that Debian (and derivatives) is protected by APT from security holes. In fact, Debian would be even better if every install (eg. upgrading "make install") ran this process, including generating a sig for an unknown package, then sending it to the repo(s).
This (auto)registration and testing system leverages the inherent advantage of OSS. Automating the efficiency of the global community using it makes Linux the easiest and safest OS. That's how you conquer the world without getting hurt.
Muni WiFi creates competition that the incumbent telcos/cablecos have written out of the economy. It supports better roads and crime fighting more economically than just filling potholes and jailing (for a month) criminals and suspects.
And it helps create alternatives to the AP, by increasing neighborhood communication directly among neighbors, without AP's filter.
The AP is clearly siding with its corporate media buddies who don't want the people to have anything like the power the corporations have. But Municipal WiFi, though a whole industry with its ups and downs (amplified by politics and the stakes that motivate AP and its ilk), has a lot of growth and progress. Especially considering its many enemies, most of whom have corporate lobbyists pressed right to the ear of the Bush administration and plenty of Democrats, too.
Muni WiFi has a long way to go, and has to outgrow some plans too ambitious and inappropriate for a public utility. But it's evidently grown threatening enough to AP that we'll be seeing plenty of these hatchet jobs for some time - until AP and its corporate cronies are forced to change with the times they try to change with their reporting.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright is derived from the Constitution's instructions for Congress to "promote progress in science and the useful arts". But they now impede progress more than they promote it. A "free market" is unencumbered by government-created monopolies like copyright. Copyright is a misnamed privilege to restrict free expression.
Does anyone think that Ross is busy protecting freedom, progress and markets? Or is he busy grabbing as much money as he can for people with licenses to print it?
The FBI has blamed its blatant longterm abuseof the Bush privacy-invasion toy "National Security Letters" on its broken database.
Since, as usual, no one at Bush's FBI has suffered after disclosure of this destructive abuse, the excuse will of course multiply in popularity.
Funny how Bush Gang "mistakes" always seem to benefit Bush, though his gang claims it's all just accident and happenstance. Random distributions that always favor Bush must be "miracles".
Most of the craplets are for Net services that could tap the (new, untapped, enticing) "Linux" market just as well, even if it's not worth as much in subsidies today. So even if the cost of OEM preinstalled Windows is balanced by bigger craplet subsidies that depend on Windows, probably lower subsidies from Linux craplets could still deliver more net profit to Dell with cheaper Ubuntu licenses (which aren't $0, but probably less than Windows).
The question is whether Dell marketing or Dell legal is responsible for these Ubuntu versions - or some other similar "profit greed vs loss fear" dichotomy. If it's greed, then Dell will advertise, and grow the Linux market, soon enough growing it into just a generic "PC" market, with real crossover. If it's some way to get out of some obligation, then Dell will do it, pronounce it a failure after they're in the clear, and kill the Ubuntu line. Which would be a real setback for Ubuntu on Dell, thereby for Ubuntu and therefore Linux (and for Dell, too, but what do they know/care).
This might be a make/break proposition for desktop Linux. I think Ubuntu is up to it, as is the market. Vista's introduction was even less protective of Microsoft's market clutch than was XP, which was itself pretty lame - their increased grip peaked with Win2000, after the huge Win95/98 jump.
I hope Ubuntu makes it. We deserve better than Windows, and Ubuntu is better. Dell is the vehicle to make it happen.
Why do you think that Microsoft sells its Windows preinstalls to Dell for $0?
My $100 estimate comes from the amounts I've heard MS occasionally refunding customers who demanded a refund when they bought PCs without Windows, which was something of a movement a few years ago. Cross-referenced with the difference in prices for barebones PCs vs identical ones with Windows preinstalled, which is usually over $150, discounted for Dell's volume. And compared to buying a new copy (not an upgrade) of Windows.
The craplets are different: they're purely advertising, which their vendors pay Dell to add. Microsoft doesn't pay Dell to resell its products, it bundles them under threat of denying Dell reasonably priced licenses, as proven in various monopoly cases over the past decade or so. Dell pays Microsoft to bundle Windows, so people will buy Dells when they want a "Windows machine".
In any case, I did make a mistake on the math I posted. Because I counted 5% margin on Windows Dells, even including the extra cost of the OS, but didn't count that margin towards the Ubuntu version that sells for more money but costs less to deliver (excepting support, which I detailed separately). So actually there is probably even more profit to Dell on Ubuntus than I mentioned.
To sum up my post, I want my bank password protected by technology and legal enforcement.
Instead of the way it is now, where I hand it out to anyone. Some of whom aren't just neighborhood thieves. Some of them live in countries where US law cannot reach them. Some because they are just foreign countries with a bureaucracy too inconvenient for recovering small losses. Others because their countries are largely anarchies. And some of the latter have global networks that need to steal money this way to finance their operations out of reach of any moral or legal safety.
That is the reality. The people we trust with our IDs and our account access are robbing millions all the time now. And just insuring $50+ transactions isn't protecting people. Partly because of the international nature of the threat, and yes, because of some of the countries they come from.
The people getting robbed could be scumbags themselves, but that doesn't make it OK to rob them.
You can laugh all you want. But you hand the keys to your life to a dozen people you don't know how to trust, or catch when they rob you, the way I do every week here in NYC, and you too will also demand a better way to do business. It won't seem so funny then.
Large profit margins make all the difference in choosing whether to invest in a small, beginning market with big margins, or in a huge, saturated market with tiny margins.
That's why Dell is investing in delivering Linux to the market. Because it's either its own market, or a bigger margin in the same market that could buy a different product.
Do you think Dell is rolling this out because a few annoying Linux customer-wannabes have pestered it for a few years? No, they're in it for the money. I wish them the best success.
Why do I reuse the same guessable number, in plaintext, that I carry on a plastic card, and share with any number of fly-by-night vendors? Many of whom aren't even in the US, faceless on the Internet? And also with failed actors barely pretending to be waiters while I'm too drunk to remember anything?
Why doesn't my card give onetime passwords to them, attached to the transaction amount, and also reported directly to my bank for a single, auditable transaction in that amount?
And why do I use an easily guessable short numeric-only PIN at every ATM over and over? Including the ones at convenience stores run by recent immigrants who will soon flee back to faraway countries, often with little cybercops of their own, and not infrequently wracked by civil wars and even allied against the US in sponsoring terrorism, with all its attendant need for funds and lack of rule by law?
I know the insurance companies insure credit card transactions over $50. But those smaller ones add up, and the insurance costs a lot of money. To say nothing of the costs of ID theft/fraud.
Most people who have credit cards have mobile phones. Those phones should be wallets, securing these transactions with onetime passwords reported to the bank/credit corp to secure the exact transaction amount. And sync to my personal DB of transactions that I can replay. With cryptosigned receipts (and encrypted over-the-air comms).
It would save everyone a lot of money, except the thieves. And make new money for the telcos. While making my life safer and easier. Why is this taking so long?
So Dell should be making about $100 more on the Ubuntu sales than on the Windows sales, on $600 revenue. If they profit 5% on the Windows machines, that's $30, so the $130 Ubuntu profit is 22% profit, or about 4.5x the profit from Ubuntu than from Windows.
Ubuntu support might cost more to start, since the labor pool is smaller and they have to start up the operation. The open source is a mixed bag, because it sees a new release to support every 6 months, not every 5 years for Windows, though unpredictable Windows service packs vs steady apt-get upgrades is a largely unknown economic. Little of Dell's support will be helped by Dell looking at the OS sourcecode, let alone fixing it. And it's hard to tell whether Ubuntu's smaller escalation target than Microsoft's is cheaper for backend support. But this new era should produce direct comparison of substantial support statistics where only the OS differs.
So this new OS line on identical HW is likely to generate substantially more profits and lots of FUD-dispelling support costs data for Dell. So I expect Microsoft has made a deal with Dell to subsidize Windows, and (if history is any guide) plenty of anticompetitive tricks to make Ubuntu look bad compared to Windows.
But the race is on! And that bigger profit margin should encourage Dell to heavily advertise Ubuntu, at least once they've got scaling numbers for their support costs.
I wonder if today will be the Linux equivalent to the day AOL gatewayed all its users to the Internet and Usenet. I hope not - the Internet has sucked since then.
No, I don't make it sound like anything of the kind. I make it sound like Russia is a largely lawless country where AllOfMP3.com could perhaps operate, if its recent track record in the spotlight demonstrates that it can. Which is the upside of lawlessness: the bad laws are also absent or ineffective. In a nation not ruled by law, the only way to predict continuity of business is to guess from the actual tests of operation in the current conditions.
So long as the laws that do work, including the laws of economics and physics, keep the mafias at bay, Russia could be demonstrated to be a haven for distributing content according to a new, sustainable business model, unlike the rest of the world which is controlled by largely arbitrary laws that prohibit some of the simpler sustainable business models.
Freedom's on the march!
No, I don't care to continue discussing this with you.
All I wanted from continuing was to establish that guessing a line of scientific inquiry from "circumstantial evidence" initially explained by a hypothesis to be tested was how science works, despite your protestations to the contrary.
Obnoxious protestations. Without letup. Except that now you're at least acknowledging the scientific nature of this kind of investigation.
So I'm done. If you'd merely disagreed politely, without so many obnoxious assaults showing you don't really understand science, I might have had some fun investigating it with you by debating the science that exists. But you've behaved so badly that I consider merely getting you to talk science a major victory. I'm sure it's all downhill from there with you, based on your past performance.
Goodbye, and you're welcome for helping you understand how science works.
This is fun and educational.
Is there a SuSE liveCD that I could boot from with the ATI card installed, on which I could run SaX2, then use the SaX2 output to find drivers I could install under Debian (or any other distro)?
FWIW, Debian has repos for stable, unstable, and experimental, as well as others outside that testing regime. "Universe" is a name for an Ubuntu repo, which is very similar in structure, though independent in content, to Debian's repos (as Ubuntu is derived from Debian, including using an APT system).
Last year, when AllOfMP3.com made headlines (on Slashdot, at least), there was some indication that Russian law would be changed by the end of last year to undermine AllOfMP3.com's freedom to operate as unhindered as they had. Were those changes made? What are the new restrictions? How have they changed AllOfMP3.com's operations? Is it merely their popularity that determines how un/safe they are, or does Russian law still protect them?
Stemcells are pluripotent and primitive.
Their lack of immunoresposive antigenicity makes embryonic stemcells transplantable between individuals. While there could be ways that eating stemcells could preserve their restorative effects, I did not say the folklore is literally true, but that it suggests investigation for the "grain of truth". And parthenogenesis is another example of pluripotent primitive cells.
Any other questions I can answer, or are you unscientifically committed to insisting that shark tissue does not merit investigation by stemcell researchers?
Most pharmaceuticals were extracted from materials (usually plant or animal) to which some folk's folklore attributed therapeutic powers.
I didn't claim that fin soup would rejuvenate you. I just pointed out its traditional reputation, which is the typical starting point for investigation.
And I also pointed out that these reputed and demonstrated properties of shark tissue are explainable by what we already know of stemcells, not "magic".
So take your strawman and your obnoxious trolls and go swim with the sharks. At least that will be a meaningful contribution to using sharks to make the world a better place.
There's no pseudoscience in there. And yes, lots of science is started on "hunches" followed up by rigorous experiment. Putting together a few commonly known facts that imply a stated hypothesis to explain them to be scientifically investigated is the scientific method.
All of which depends on insight.
So thank you for the kind words of support.
O-frickin'-K.
The central question is whether AllOfMP3.com is operating legally under Russian law. Or, given the totalitarian/anarchy that is modern Russia, whether a service that does what AllOfMP3.com does, operating as it does in Russia (and operating outside Russia only on the Internet), is at risk of takedown by Russian authorities (not including their mafias, but that's a basic risk of doing business in Russia).
If AllOfMP3.com doesn't survive long enough to be tested in Russian court (and subsequently in Russian police offices), we might never know whether another bizmodel or just other outside-Russian operations could survive to be tweaked into a way that survives.
Sharks continually regenerate rows of teeth, and probably many other parts lost in sharky feeding frenzies. Their cartilage is used without immune reaction in reconstructing human tissue. Their fins are prized in Chinese folk remedies as a rejuvenating soup. Now we learn they're flexible enough to clone themselves.
We should closely examine these creatures, in all their varied (and often endangered) species, for secrets to rejuvenation. Most likely we'll learn a lot we can apply to human stemcell therapies, which a lot of these "magic" properties seem likely to be backed by.
That ZDNet article by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is written like a true geek. The most important reason determining which OS people buy is marketing, not any of the technical/aesthetic reasons intrinsic to Linux.
People buy their OS by buying a PC with it installed. That means buying a Dell, with Windows preinstalled, or a cheaper brand, with Windows preinstalled. The beginnings of preinstalled Linux on mass-market PCs will help reverse the total Windows momentum. But no one even knows to ask - and they have to ask - for "Linux instead of Windows". People don't even know that it's a "PC", they think they're buying Windows from Dell with a PC included - which they are. No one ever heard of "Lindows", which just sounds like "Windows", anyway, so why bother mentioning it, or asking about it?
Other people get Windows because they have it on their office machine, or on their last machine, and they just want the easiest transfer of their apps and data. They don't know they can use their data on Linux, because they never heard of Linux, and the idea of transferring is totally unknown. Most don't even know there is an alternative.
And others get Windows because someone sold it to them, or that in combination with some or all of the above. OS'es don't sell themselves, and Linux is usually "sold" to new users by some Linux geek. Either facelessly in an online discussion as a solution to some Windows problem, or perhaps a friend (of a friend of an aunt...). Most of those people aren't salespeople, and many are socially unskilled, let alone persuasive. Meanwhile, everyone sees $million ad campaigns every day, everywhere, defining "computers" as "Windows". And the most $incented salespeople run by the most ruthless global $marketing org with every advantage.
Ubuntu could compete directly with Windows for marketshare. But it needs opportunities to sell, many of which are hampered by Microsoft's proven, manifold, and ever-increasing monopoly abuse. And it needs ad campaigns directing consumers to skilled and equipped armies of salespeople.
Given the real reasons people don't "buy" Linux instead of Windows, it's testament to the quality of Linux and its community that it competes at all. That is the basis, but far from the full extent, of a way to get people "in touch" with Linux enough to replace Windows with it.
Thanks. As usual, "just try it" is the fastest way to at least find out that it doesn't work.
Does SaX2 run properly under Debian or Ubuntu?
As long as we're still paying farmers not to grow crops in our socialist programme to prop up their prices in a "free" market, we should pay immigrants salaries not to work, to keep American labor prices propped up.
Good advice, except I haven't physically installed the card until I can find a driver - it's the video, and I need that on the machine I'm targeting.
I could install it into a server, then ssh in and dump lspci. If it's the only videocard and no driver, will Linux still work properly? What if it's the second videocard on a server with motherboard VGA?
I am looking at the card itself, with its multiple printed labels identifying the chips and the ROMs. Maybe that's enough. Where is the list of Rage drivers in gatos?
The way to be safe(r) from scripts is to require OO.o to check the signature of any script against the sigs of all scripts in a distributed repository. All the scripts' sources are open. People can test them out, and report them to the repo's (distributed) security team. If OO.o doesn't find the sig of a script in the repo, OO.o can submit the script to the repo and warn the user their script is untested before executing it.
This kind of architecture is one way that Debian (and derivatives) is protected by APT from security holes. In fact, Debian would be even better if every install (eg. upgrading "make install") ran this process, including generating a sig for an unknown package, then sending it to the repo(s).
This (auto)registration and testing system leverages the inherent advantage of OSS. Automating the efficiency of the global community using it makes Linux the easiest and safest OS. That's how you conquer the world without getting hurt.
How about a driver for this ATI All-In-Wonder 3D Rage II +DVD PCI card I can't find drivers for?
Muni WiFi creates competition that the incumbent telcos/cablecos have written out of the economy. It supports better roads and crime fighting more economically than just filling potholes and jailing (for a month) criminals and suspects.
And it helps create alternatives to the AP, by increasing neighborhood communication directly among neighbors, without AP's filter.
The AP is clearly siding with its corporate media buddies who don't want the people to have anything like the power the corporations have. But Municipal WiFi, though a whole industry with its ups and downs (amplified by politics and the stakes that motivate AP and its ilk), has a lot of growth and progress. Especially considering its many enemies, most of whom have corporate lobbyists pressed right to the ear of the Bush administration and plenty of Democrats, too.
Muni WiFi has a long way to go, and has to outgrow some plans too ambitious and inappropriate for a public utility. But it's evidently grown threatening enough to AP that we'll be seeing plenty of these hatchet jobs for some time - until AP and its corporate cronies are forced to change with the times they try to change with their reporting.