Except China has 80 times the land area and 55 times the population, they alone have approximately the world population in 1870. Having 1.34 billion people in China and 5.66 billion people not in China is different from having 0.024 billion in North Korea and 6.976 billion not in North Korea. Think back to the Cold War, without help from China, the Soviet Union, the East Bloc and with many other countries on the sidelines. The "western world" with the US, Western Europe and Australia were a smaller part of the world population than China is today. I'd at least give them far, far better odds at succeeding than North Korea ever had.
I'd say it's the other way around, even if your name is Linus bloody Torvalds and you've pretty much written the Linux kernel and a hugely popular source management system, you probably don't want to try writing a desktop environment and all the applications you'd like to use too. This whole "sane defaults and a good out of the box experience doesn't matter on Linux because users can just customize it the way they like" ignores the fact that nobody has the time to customize everything. Nobody. Sure if you're happy with a premade system for everything then maybe Linux isn't for you, but the parts that you do customize are maybe 2% and those you don't 98%. And what those 2% will be varies so in reality no part of a Linux system should ever use that as an excuse. I don't think it's worth overcomplicating it, for the most part I just want my printer to print, my scanner to scan, my wifi to connect, my audio to play and so on. Just getting everything to work the way people generally expect it to work is a good start before you start dealing with what the "extras" are that make it even better than the competition.
Today, maybe. I remember when OpenJDK was first introduced, it was the shoddy knockoff of real Java with band-aids everywhere Sun's code had to be ripped out, that most software - at least that I used - recommended that you replace it immediately for the real thing. It wasn't the default by any kind of technical merit, only the "Open" part. It lasted a good while before the tide turned and OpenJDK took over from Sun Java as the main implementation.
I call bullshit. Why would switching desktops to Linux have anything to do with whether databases and mail servers are available? I think some troll is laughing at how his completely imaginary ramblings are now sitting at +5, Informative because it said exactly what the people here wants to hear. I was almost expecting the post to end with "Oh, and users get a free pony..."
We're all adults here right? so lets cut to brass tacks gentlemen, RMS is a militant and seems to get more militant as he gets older. compare GPL V1 - V3 to see how he tries his damnedest to make sure there is NO way you can use GPL unless YOUR PROGRAM is likewise GPL.
RMS first wrote the GPL because he couldn't change the driver code of a printer he was using, obviously if his printer had been "tivoized" to only run unmodified software that'd ruin the whole point of the GPL. It may not have been explicitly forbidden by the license until the GPLv3, but it would be the intention all the way back in 1989. It's very obvious Linus and RMS have different perspectives here, Linus wants to be able to look at the code to build a better mousetrap while RMS wants to be able to fix the mousetrap he has. You may call him militant about it, but that's what the GPL is all about to him. If some vendor can put GPL code in a product and the user can't actually and practically modify it and distribute the modifications then the GPL is a failure.
Of course vendors hate that, not only do you have to show all your secret sauce but you must give all your users the right to distribute it too. So they try all sorts of funny shims and software signing and "covenant not to sue over patents" and whatnot to try getting all the benefits of the GPL code, without actually giving users the four freedom RMS intended. If GPL code wasn't popular and valuable, why are so many working so hard to find a way around the license? Of course you can say the GPL is excessive, one line of GPL code and your whole source code must be up for grabs. But asking for anything less would make a loophole big enough for a truck to drive through, as if it didn't have enough already.
I understand why companies like other licenses, if you don't have the GPLs obligations then they're still in control and choose to go binary if and when they feel like it. If it's under the GPL and you've accepted third party contributions without copyright assignment then you're more or less trapped, you'd have to back out those changes and replace them with clean code. But that mutual commitment has been the whole basis for building a community, if not it could just go away some day like OpenSolaris did. Without anything like the GPL it's basically "so long as we feel like it".
Sigh, by the same absurd standard I'm sure I'd have no problem finding plenty BSD projects that don't make money either. In fact, I doubt I'd have much problem showing that very few commercial companies actually managed to make money on their code. What does that prove? Mostly that 90%+ of all ideas to make money is crap. I'd make a whole lot more sense to concentrate on those that do than those that don't....
Well, my primary measure has been if I leave it open on Friday, how will it react on Monday when I get back. And on that FF has failed like horribly, both Chrome and IE respond much faster. Using process explorer it seems Firefox is busy reloading a billion stack pages which a) it'd has no reason using anyway and b) even if it did, just load the few I need and display those. Maybe I'm hitting some kind of issue that leaks memory like shit, but at least that's what I find. I haven't filed a bug because honestly I don't know WTF to file the bug on, I just switched to Chrome. If I got too paranoid about what Google is doing, I'd get Chromium.. but FF is really fucked up and I don't know what'd bring it back, it'd certainly be no quick fix.
50%? No, more like below 40%, Chrome 27%, Firefox 25%, Safari about 6% and Opera 2%. At least according to statcounter it's a loooong time since IE passed the 50% mark. Like september last year or thereabouts.
It's not just an idea though. It's a body of work. Just because you've figured out a way to duplicate it with no cost to yourself doesn't magically take away its designation of "property".
Your song being on my HDD isn't like your car being on my driveway (yay car analogy). The whole HDD is my property, I didn't sell any of it to you which means it can't possibly be anyone else's property. If I see you eating a BLT sandwich and I make my own BLT sandwich - even if I just put a photo of it in a magic sandwich-duplicating machine - then that's my sandwich made of my property and really what costs I had or didn't have in the making is none of your business. What you're claiming is the exclusive right to arrange bread, bacon, lettuce and tomato in such a configuration that they make up a BLT sandwich. Even if none of the bread, bacon, lettuce or tomato is your property. That's why we call bullshit on your idea that this is a "property" right. We already have property rights and clearly it's owned by somebody else, so claiming you have any property right in it is obviously false.
Because even though a book is obviously "IP", it's sold. The publisher keeps the rights he got under copyright, the rest belongs to me. In this new economy, nothing is sold anymore. Oh, they can still use words like "buy" or "own" but they don't really mean it, because by their monopoly rights they also take every other right to dictate when, where, how and who can use it. The only limitations are what technology makes possible and how willing the customers are to get screwed over. Not only is it a breach of license, in most of the western world they've even made you a criminal for trying through the DMCA, EUCD and similar laws. And anything that needs permission from the mothership to run isn't even that, it's more like leased until they decide to end service.
As far as I'm concerned, any social contract between me and copyright holders has been broken and pissed on by the copyright holders long time ago. For them it's just about getting monopoly rents like any old oligarch that doesn't want the system to change. Any sort of progress is no longer brought forth by competition, only by mass civil disobedience that forces them to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. Without TPB and friends you could forget iTunes, forget Spotify, forget Amazon and all the rest. We'd still be buying CDs in stores because that's the way they like it. For TV and movies they still have a long way to go. Kill TPB and everything else will start going backwards, less service, less selection, less quality, more restrictions, more region codes, more "you're going to take this crap because you can't get it anywhere else" attitude.
Sure, it helps to reward the services that are at least moving in the right direction, killing off the most user-hostile versions. But whenever the market colludes and says you're all going to use CSS and AACS and HDCP and whatever and all the restrictions that come with it, when your choice to vote with the wallet is reduced to either accept it or forego pretty much all of modern media, then TPB is the third option. Fair? Not individually, which is why a lot of my downloaded media is also on the shelf behind me as unused discs. But collectively it's pretty much the only curb we have on their power grab because the law is in their pocket. And it doesn't seem they care how many other rights they trample in their quest to stomp out piracy.
If you find a party or a candidate that suits you - fine. But if you don't, then voting for the least evil is not appropriate. It sends all kinds of wrong messages. Not only does it give the party you vote for a false sense of representation, it also tells everyone that the system is fine as it is, when it really isn't (because there is nobody in it who represents you).
In our parliament there's 7 parties. If you add all the other ones that were running last election it was 24 choices. There's three and a half million eligible voters, which means there's over one hundred thousand voters per party. I think that's as much as any man can expect, and yet obviously none of those are going to be a perfect fit for me and 99,999 others. Alternatively you can look at it this way, If you tried making a binary tree of choices four to five choices (2^4=16, 2^5=32) is all you get. In reality most of those small parties are complete fruitloops, the bottom 11 parties got <0,1% of the votes. So for the 99,9% that's more like 250,000 people per party and less than four bits of information.
Am I able to accurately place my political point of view with that? No. Particularly not with coalitions that will lead to politics I disagree with, it's possibly even more limited than that. But I try throwing my weight on the right side of the tug-of-war, because often it doesn't matter how extreme the extremes are, just that someone can say "60% of the population wants less of X" then it's likely it'll move in the right direction, rather than me saying nothing at all. I'm often torn between two parties that both have their good and bad moments, but there no doubt in my mind that a vote for either of those two is right in the greater block politics. So it has never crossed my mind not to vote, even though I don't feel I've found "my" party.
Sure, the moment you install it from the disc. Doesn't mean Windows Update will work and there's no easy way to insert a more recent slipstream image and say "upgrade my current installation to this version" that I know of, or maybe I just didn't look hard enough. I assume Microsoft has some way to update machines on networks too secure to connect to the Internet. [Insert obvious pun that then they shouldn't be using Windows anyway]. My current install is legit anyway, but when testing things in VMs the activation and keys thing is a hassle.
People then get demotivated when their bonus depends on things totally divorced from what they actually do, e.g. you do a great job in IT this year, but your bonus goes down because you work for an oil company and the price of oil went down, something you don't have any control over even remotely.
Not to mention that the slacker next to you got exactly the same bonus. I don't mind it as part of my bonus though, because usually they wouldn't risk increasing your fixed pay that much. It's a lot easier to announce a small or no bonus than it is to announce pay cuts. I know a company that in desperation cut pay by 15%, it saved their bacon then and there but the moment the market lightened up just a little then boom, mass resignations of the good people and it didn't matter what offers they'd make at that point - nobody would risk another downturn employed there. Bonus is bonus, sure if you usually get a nice bonus you'll miss it but it doesn't have nearly the same destructive effect.
Evil will never truly triumph over Good because if it does it will have nothing left to eat next season.
Unfortunately, this isn't very true. Even if you know the job is a ripoff where someone else is taking 99% of the profits, in the choice between a job and no job people will work under sweatshop conditions to put food on the table. That is something that's happening today. To take an even more extreme historic example, the slave trade lasted for centuries. You are a slave, your children will be slaves, your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be slaves. If anyone did the starving, it wasn't the slave owners. Yes, the circle of slavery was eventually broken, but you'd need a really, really long perspective to say that Good will triumph some day. I don't see that the future holds any guarantees either, there's plenty sci-fi futures where you have robotic or unmanned weapons system that are utterly loyal. They will never desert, never refuse to obey orders, never let their feelings get in the way of killing unarmed civilians and imposing a reign of terror. Technology is no guarantee you will have more freedom, even though some technologies have obviously helped.
The Danish wikipedia will accept Danish sources, the English one generally won't. That at least seems to me to be the primary reason why the Norwegian wikipedia is sometimes better for things in, from or about Norway. But yes, for generic information I too use the English one.
If the United States' 6th most popular website according to the TOP500 list isn't good enough for you, what is? Yes, Google is about ten times bigger but it's bigger than eBay, Twitter, Craigslist, MSN and Bing. People will notice...
Nobody has been convicted or successfully sued based solely on an IP address.
You lost it in the last sentence there, nobody's been convicted in a criminal case. Plenty of people have been sued and lost in civil cases, where you don't have the presumption of innocence. A civil case is looked on as a dispute where both parties are equal and a simple preponderance of evidence is sufficient.
Not using a computer isn't really an option to me, so no it's not the same. I might compare it to Windows and OS X, but even if I find an alternative that I in total find better doesn't mean it has negative value. "I wanted to be entertained, but I was more annoyed so in total it failed to entertain me" is negative value. "The humble bundle is okay, but I really got hooked on $other_game and found that much more entertaining" just didn't give enough value compared to the alternatives. A lot of smaller tasks and even some whole applications have ended up in the "sigh, I'm not going to waste more time trying to make it work" category pulling the total score down on all alternatives though, but that's nothing unique to Linux. They're actually more annoying than the things that plain don't work, because not only do they not work but you wasted a lot of time trying.
Well, I haven't heard anyone admit to it but receiving C&D letters was the reason filtering was turned on at a previous employer of mine. And there was no witch hunt tone, just a "This is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it, please remember that what you do on the company network can be tracked back to us and reflect poorly on the company." Never heard of anyone getting punished for it, then again I of course didn't have access to anyone's HR files. That said, I don't live in the US...
Hoax? No, they had certainly scanned TPB for recent torrents - they listed me accurately, that's not a coincidence. That doesn't mean their lists are complete, accurate or anything like that, I'm sure it's easy to poison a tracker into giving out IPs that aren't actually torrenting. Maybe the trackers add some random IPs too for plausible deniability? Whatever the case, the legal value is hogwash. Why should it be a joke anyway? Grab a torrent, connect to the tracker, voila you get a list of IPs to stuff in a database. That and being illegal too, at least in my country so in any it'd be thrown out on that basis alone. But it's not like they did something magic.
In your example, HDD space is irrelevant. Whether you buy it and use through Steam or download it, you still need to install it, and after that you don't use the DVD anymore anyway (I do this often, since my connection sits between 0.75 and 1.0Mb/s).
Sure, but that is on the PC where they assume you buy HDDs as you need them. If you read the other half of the sentence you quoted it's obvious I'm now talking about doing the same in a console, since there's not really a good "one solution fits all" unless you drive up cost a lot.
From what I understand it's essentially BluRay - 25GB for a single layer disc, but they won't pay the licensing fees so it won't be called BluRay and it won't play BluRay movies. Just like the Wii discs are exactly the size of DVDs, the same capacity as DVDs, but technically they're not DVDs and it doesn't play DVD movies. I think you can be pretty sure both the drives and discs come from the very same factories that produce BluRays...
They'd take a huge step if they always offered both as an alternative. It's already this way with many Steam-required games today, you can buy them on DVD but you really only need the activation code, you can download the whole thing from Steam if you don't have the DVD handy or feel it's less hassle just to download it. It wouldn't be for everyone but I know some people with >20 Mbit Internet connections that would. If you do preloads so you only need the decryption key on release day a lot of people might choose that as well. Hard disk space might be an issue though, what HDD size should you have as standard? Some may have 30 games * 30 GB = ~1 TB, others don't use it at all and it's a waste. Maybe an eSATA port to store on an external disk, branded or bring your own? If the console will encrypt/decrypt in hardware before storing on the disk it should make the DRM pundits happy. Personally I'm rather happy with my PC, but several of my friends have either xbox or ps3 - or both - as well.
I never said that I was against interpretation of all forms (How would you even read it, then?). Just that only things that are actually there can really be interpreted. As an example, I don't believe you can just read the first amendment and say, "Freedom of speech? That must mean that all speech is protected except speech that I personally find offensive! It's in there because I said so!"
Funny that, since:
since only speech is protected
And expression (which applies to text).
Actual text:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Nope. There's no "freedom of expression" listed, are you saying it's in there because you say so? >:-)
As for.debs everywhere, that'll keep the Fedora users happy.:)
They're not exactly mutually exclusive... And you think this is a small thing but fiddling with getting shit to work quickly brings the value down into the negative - you'd actually like a refund for wasting your time on it. That's not very healthy if you're looking for repeat customers, even for free some things aren't worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
Except China has 80 times the land area and 55 times the population, they alone have approximately the world population in 1870. Having 1.34 billion people in China and 5.66 billion people not in China is different from having 0.024 billion in North Korea and 6.976 billion not in North Korea. Think back to the Cold War, without help from China, the Soviet Union, the East Bloc and with many other countries on the sidelines. The "western world" with the US, Western Europe and Australia were a smaller part of the world population than China is today. I'd at least give them far, far better odds at succeeding than North Korea ever had.
I'd say it's the other way around, even if your name is Linus bloody Torvalds and you've pretty much written the Linux kernel and a hugely popular source management system, you probably don't want to try writing a desktop environment and all the applications you'd like to use too. This whole "sane defaults and a good out of the box experience doesn't matter on Linux because users can just customize it the way they like" ignores the fact that nobody has the time to customize everything. Nobody. Sure if you're happy with a premade system for everything then maybe Linux isn't for you, but the parts that you do customize are maybe 2% and those you don't 98%. And what those 2% will be varies so in reality no part of a Linux system should ever use that as an excuse. I don't think it's worth overcomplicating it, for the most part I just want my printer to print, my scanner to scan, my wifi to connect, my audio to play and so on. Just getting everything to work the way people generally expect it to work is a good start before you start dealing with what the "extras" are that make it even better than the competition.
Today, maybe. I remember when OpenJDK was first introduced, it was the shoddy knockoff of real Java with band-aids everywhere Sun's code had to be ripped out, that most software - at least that I used - recommended that you replace it immediately for the real thing. It wasn't the default by any kind of technical merit, only the "Open" part. It lasted a good while before the tide turned and OpenJDK took over from Sun Java as the main implementation.
I call bullshit. Why would switching desktops to Linux have anything to do with whether databases and mail servers are available? I think some troll is laughing at how his completely imaginary ramblings are now sitting at +5, Informative because it said exactly what the people here wants to hear. I was almost expecting the post to end with "Oh, and users get a free pony..."
We're all adults here right? so lets cut to brass tacks gentlemen, RMS is a militant and seems to get more militant as he gets older. compare GPL V1 - V3 to see how he tries his damnedest to make sure there is NO way you can use GPL unless YOUR PROGRAM is likewise GPL.
RMS first wrote the GPL because he couldn't change the driver code of a printer he was using, obviously if his printer had been "tivoized" to only run unmodified software that'd ruin the whole point of the GPL. It may not have been explicitly forbidden by the license until the GPLv3, but it would be the intention all the way back in 1989. It's very obvious Linus and RMS have different perspectives here, Linus wants to be able to look at the code to build a better mousetrap while RMS wants to be able to fix the mousetrap he has. You may call him militant about it, but that's what the GPL is all about to him. If some vendor can put GPL code in a product and the user can't actually and practically modify it and distribute the modifications then the GPL is a failure.
Of course vendors hate that, not only do you have to show all your secret sauce but you must give all your users the right to distribute it too. So they try all sorts of funny shims and software signing and "covenant not to sue over patents" and whatnot to try getting all the benefits of the GPL code, without actually giving users the four freedom RMS intended. If GPL code wasn't popular and valuable, why are so many working so hard to find a way around the license? Of course you can say the GPL is excessive, one line of GPL code and your whole source code must be up for grabs. But asking for anything less would make a loophole big enough for a truck to drive through, as if it didn't have enough already.
I understand why companies like other licenses, if you don't have the GPLs obligations then they're still in control and choose to go binary if and when they feel like it. If it's under the GPL and you've accepted third party contributions without copyright assignment then you're more or less trapped, you'd have to back out those changes and replace them with clean code. But that mutual commitment has been the whole basis for building a community, if not it could just go away some day like OpenSolaris did. Without anything like the GPL it's basically "so long as we feel like it".
Sigh, by the same absurd standard I'm sure I'd have no problem finding plenty BSD projects that don't make money either. In fact, I doubt I'd have much problem showing that very few commercial companies actually managed to make money on their code. What does that prove? Mostly that 90%+ of all ideas to make money is crap. I'd make a whole lot more sense to concentrate on those that do than those that don't....
Well, my primary measure has been if I leave it open on Friday, how will it react on Monday when I get back. And on that FF has failed like horribly, both Chrome and IE respond much faster. Using process explorer it seems Firefox is busy reloading a billion stack pages which a) it'd has no reason using anyway and b) even if it did, just load the few I need and display those. Maybe I'm hitting some kind of issue that leaks memory like shit, but at least that's what I find. I haven't filed a bug because honestly I don't know WTF to file the bug on, I just switched to Chrome. If I got too paranoid about what Google is doing, I'd get Chromium.. but FF is really fucked up and I don't know what'd bring it back, it'd certainly be no quick fix.
50%? No, more like below 40%, Chrome 27%, Firefox 25%, Safari about 6% and Opera 2%. At least according to statcounter it's a loooong time since IE passed the 50% mark. Like september last year or thereabouts.
It's not just an idea though. It's a body of work. Just because you've figured out a way to duplicate it with no cost to yourself doesn't magically take away its designation of "property".
Your song being on my HDD isn't like your car being on my driveway (yay car analogy). The whole HDD is my property, I didn't sell any of it to you which means it can't possibly be anyone else's property. If I see you eating a BLT sandwich and I make my own BLT sandwich - even if I just put a photo of it in a magic sandwich-duplicating machine - then that's my sandwich made of my property and really what costs I had or didn't have in the making is none of your business. What you're claiming is the exclusive right to arrange bread, bacon, lettuce and tomato in such a configuration that they make up a BLT sandwich. Even if none of the bread, bacon, lettuce or tomato is your property. That's why we call bullshit on your idea that this is a "property" right. We already have property rights and clearly it's owned by somebody else, so claiming you have any property right in it is obviously false.
Because even though a book is obviously "IP", it's sold. The publisher keeps the rights he got under copyright, the rest belongs to me. In this new economy, nothing is sold anymore. Oh, they can still use words like "buy" or "own" but they don't really mean it, because by their monopoly rights they also take every other right to dictate when, where, how and who can use it. The only limitations are what technology makes possible and how willing the customers are to get screwed over. Not only is it a breach of license, in most of the western world they've even made you a criminal for trying through the DMCA, EUCD and similar laws. And anything that needs permission from the mothership to run isn't even that, it's more like leased until they decide to end service.
As far as I'm concerned, any social contract between me and copyright holders has been broken and pissed on by the copyright holders long time ago. For them it's just about getting monopoly rents like any old oligarch that doesn't want the system to change. Any sort of progress is no longer brought forth by competition, only by mass civil disobedience that forces them to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. Without TPB and friends you could forget iTunes, forget Spotify, forget Amazon and all the rest. We'd still be buying CDs in stores because that's the way they like it. For TV and movies they still have a long way to go. Kill TPB and everything else will start going backwards, less service, less selection, less quality, more restrictions, more region codes, more "you're going to take this crap because you can't get it anywhere else" attitude.
Sure, it helps to reward the services that are at least moving in the right direction, killing off the most user-hostile versions. But whenever the market colludes and says you're all going to use CSS and AACS and HDCP and whatever and all the restrictions that come with it, when your choice to vote with the wallet is reduced to either accept it or forego pretty much all of modern media, then TPB is the third option. Fair? Not individually, which is why a lot of my downloaded media is also on the shelf behind me as unused discs. But collectively it's pretty much the only curb we have on their power grab because the law is in their pocket. And it doesn't seem they care how many other rights they trample in their quest to stomp out piracy.
If you find a party or a candidate that suits you - fine. But if you don't, then voting for the least evil is not appropriate. It sends all kinds of wrong messages. Not only does it give the party you vote for a false sense of representation, it also tells everyone that the system is fine as it is, when it really isn't (because there is nobody in it who represents you).
In our parliament there's 7 parties. If you add all the other ones that were running last election it was 24 choices. There's three and a half million eligible voters, which means there's over one hundred thousand voters per party. I think that's as much as any man can expect, and yet obviously none of those are going to be a perfect fit for me and 99,999 others. Alternatively you can look at it this way, If you tried making a binary tree of choices four to five choices (2^4=16, 2^5=32) is all you get. In reality most of those small parties are complete fruitloops, the bottom 11 parties got <0,1% of the votes. So for the 99,9% that's more like 250,000 people per party and less than four bits of information.
Am I able to accurately place my political point of view with that? No. Particularly not with coalitions that will lead to politics I disagree with, it's possibly even more limited than that. But I try throwing my weight on the right side of the tug-of-war, because often it doesn't matter how extreme the extremes are, just that someone can say "60% of the population wants less of X" then it's likely it'll move in the right direction, rather than me saying nothing at all. I'm often torn between two parties that both have their good and bad moments, but there no doubt in my mind that a vote for either of those two is right in the greater block politics. So it has never crossed my mind not to vote, even though I don't feel I've found "my" party.
Sure, the moment you install it from the disc. Doesn't mean Windows Update will work and there's no easy way to insert a more recent slipstream image and say "upgrade my current installation to this version" that I know of, or maybe I just didn't look hard enough. I assume Microsoft has some way to update machines on networks too secure to connect to the Internet. [Insert obvious pun that then they shouldn't be using Windows anyway]. My current install is legit anyway, but when testing things in VMs the activation and keys thing is a hassle.
People then get demotivated when their bonus depends on things totally divorced from what they actually do, e.g. you do a great job in IT this year, but your bonus goes down because you work for an oil company and the price of oil went down, something you don't have any control over even remotely.
Not to mention that the slacker next to you got exactly the same bonus. I don't mind it as part of my bonus though, because usually they wouldn't risk increasing your fixed pay that much. It's a lot easier to announce a small or no bonus than it is to announce pay cuts. I know a company that in desperation cut pay by 15%, it saved their bacon then and there but the moment the market lightened up just a little then boom, mass resignations of the good people and it didn't matter what offers they'd make at that point - nobody would risk another downturn employed there. Bonus is bonus, sure if you usually get a nice bonus you'll miss it but it doesn't have nearly the same destructive effect.
Evil will never truly triumph over Good because if it does it will have nothing left to eat next season.
Unfortunately, this isn't very true. Even if you know the job is a ripoff where someone else is taking 99% of the profits, in the choice between a job and no job people will work under sweatshop conditions to put food on the table. That is something that's happening today. To take an even more extreme historic example, the slave trade lasted for centuries. You are a slave, your children will be slaves, your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be slaves. If anyone did the starving, it wasn't the slave owners. Yes, the circle of slavery was eventually broken, but you'd need a really, really long perspective to say that Good will triumph some day. I don't see that the future holds any guarantees either, there's plenty sci-fi futures where you have robotic or unmanned weapons system that are utterly loyal. They will never desert, never refuse to obey orders, never let their feelings get in the way of killing unarmed civilians and imposing a reign of terror. Technology is no guarantee you will have more freedom, even though some technologies have obviously helped.
The Danish wikipedia will accept Danish sources, the English one generally won't. That at least seems to me to be the primary reason why the Norwegian wikipedia is sometimes better for things in, from or about Norway. But yes, for generic information I too use the English one.
If the United States' 6th most popular website according to the TOP500 list isn't good enough for you, what is? Yes, Google is about ten times bigger but it's bigger than eBay, Twitter, Craigslist, MSN and Bing. People will notice...
Nobody has been convicted or successfully sued based solely on an IP address.
You lost it in the last sentence there, nobody's been convicted in a criminal case. Plenty of people have been sued and lost in civil cases, where you don't have the presumption of innocence. A civil case is looked on as a dispute where both parties are equal and a simple preponderance of evidence is sufficient.
Are you talking about the humble bundle or linux?
Not using a computer isn't really an option to me, so no it's not the same. I might compare it to Windows and OS X, but even if I find an alternative that I in total find better doesn't mean it has negative value. "I wanted to be entertained, but I was more annoyed so in total it failed to entertain me" is negative value. "The humble bundle is okay, but I really got hooked on $other_game and found that much more entertaining" just didn't give enough value compared to the alternatives. A lot of smaller tasks and even some whole applications have ended up in the "sigh, I'm not going to waste more time trying to make it work" category pulling the total score down on all alternatives though, but that's nothing unique to Linux. They're actually more annoying than the things that plain don't work, because not only do they not work but you wasted a lot of time trying.
Well, I haven't heard anyone admit to it but receiving C&D letters was the reason filtering was turned on at a previous employer of mine. And there was no witch hunt tone, just a "This is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it, please remember that what you do on the company network can be tracked back to us and reflect poorly on the company." Never heard of anyone getting punished for it, then again I of course didn't have access to anyone's HR files. That said, I don't live in the US...
Hoax? No, they had certainly scanned TPB for recent torrents - they listed me accurately, that's not a coincidence. That doesn't mean their lists are complete, accurate or anything like that, I'm sure it's easy to poison a tracker into giving out IPs that aren't actually torrenting. Maybe the trackers add some random IPs too for plausible deniability? Whatever the case, the legal value is hogwash. Why should it be a joke anyway? Grab a torrent, connect to the tracker, voila you get a list of IPs to stuff in a database. That and being illegal too, at least in my country so in any it'd be thrown out on that basis alone. But it's not like they did something magic.
In your example, HDD space is irrelevant. Whether you buy it and use through Steam or download it, you still need to install it, and after that you don't use the DVD anymore anyway (I do this often, since my connection sits between 0.75 and 1.0Mb/s).
Sure, but that is on the PC where they assume you buy HDDs as you need them. If you read the other half of the sentence you quoted it's obvious I'm now talking about doing the same in a console, since there's not really a good "one solution fits all" unless you drive up cost a lot.
From what I understand it's essentially BluRay - 25GB for a single layer disc, but they won't pay the licensing fees so it won't be called BluRay and it won't play BluRay movies. Just like the Wii discs are exactly the size of DVDs, the same capacity as DVDs, but technically they're not DVDs and it doesn't play DVD movies. I think you can be pretty sure both the drives and discs come from the very same factories that produce BluRays...
They'd take a huge step if they always offered both as an alternative. It's already this way with many Steam-required games today, you can buy them on DVD but you really only need the activation code, you can download the whole thing from Steam if you don't have the DVD handy or feel it's less hassle just to download it. It wouldn't be for everyone but I know some people with >20 Mbit Internet connections that would. If you do preloads so you only need the decryption key on release day a lot of people might choose that as well. Hard disk space might be an issue though, what HDD size should you have as standard? Some may have 30 games * 30 GB = ~1 TB, others don't use it at all and it's a waste. Maybe an eSATA port to store on an external disk, branded or bring your own? If the console will encrypt/decrypt in hardware before storing on the disk it should make the DRM pundits happy. Personally I'm rather happy with my PC, but several of my friends have either xbox or ps3 - or both - as well.
I never said that I was against interpretation of all forms (How would you even read it, then?). Just that only things that are actually there can really be interpreted. As an example, I don't believe you can just read the first amendment and say, "Freedom of speech? That must mean that all speech is protected except speech that I personally find offensive! It's in there because I said so!"
Funny that, since:
since only speech is protected
And expression (which applies to text).
Actual text:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Nope. There's no "freedom of expression" listed, are you saying it's in there because you say so? >:-)
As for .debs everywhere, that'll keep the Fedora users happy. :)
They're not exactly mutually exclusive... And you think this is a small thing but fiddling with getting shit to work quickly brings the value down into the negative - you'd actually like a refund for wasting your time on it. That's not very healthy if you're looking for repeat customers, even for free some things aren't worth it.