AMD will need to pull a major magic rabbit out thier hats on this upcoming bulldozer [which does seem to have intel worried as they are delaying the x78 chipset and subsiquent LGA2011 cpu's and boards until AMD reviels thier hand].
I think it's been quiet well established for some time now that Intel owns the high end. That they're delaying is probably more because their $2-300 CPUs are pounding AMD pretty good already. If as usually Q3 means the very end of Q3 there's still a full quarter where Intel doesn't need to lift a finger to win.
Chances are, the average user isn't even going to notice.
I'm sorry, but the average user knows how a clock works. Whether it's their computer clock, the wall clock, the wrist watch or their cell phone, they'll notice that their laptop runs out of battery faster under Linux.
Nope, but with where Nokia is going it must be up for adoption. Maybe not officially, but if you waved a few million dollars in that direction I think they're very ready to divest that part of their business. Already they've sold off the commercial licensing to Digia, so if they're not selling it, not putting in their own phones (maybe they'll finish shipping a phone or two, but certainly not on the roadmap) then why should they continue pouring millions into it? Their market message is less than stellar clear, to say the least.
If you're working for stocks or options in a private company - any company not on a public stock exchange, get a lawyer. It's not just options, they can issue shares, split shares, all sorts of tricks and unless you have a pretty watertight shareholder agreement that says you can't be diluted it'll be worth nothing. That said, most startups couldn't function any other way, unless you've got one very rich founder most of the key people have to work for a share of the company. There's nothing inherently wrong with stock options, as long as you get someone competent to set up the papers.
To me it depends exactly what the nature of the agreement is. For example, I don't read my iTunes agreements because they're:
a) 100+ pages long on my iPhone b) Standard across a million users c) Apple won't negotiate, it's a take it or leave it d) If I don't agree, I lose access to the store - I'm already invested e) It's small money anyway
In this case I rely on the fact that if there's something really nasty in there, then a) the media will alert me and if b) they're of the "and your firstborn" variety the courts will smack it down.
There's no such thing as a boilerplate work contract. Oh, they can have a template to start with but it's always possible to amend it and that's just this company's template. Of course your bargaining power is biggest if you already have a job and multiple offers on the table, but your prospective employer won't know the latter at least. If you need to ask for clarification on some point, get that mutual understanding of it in the contract. Particularly beware of startups that have something made up on the back of a napkin. I've had to ask them to amend it because it didn't even meet the minimum requirements of the law, was simple things like what date of the month the salary was to be paid and stuff like that. It's too late trying to get things in writing when the shit has hit the fan.
In most of the software I've been part of, the actual changing of the UI - once everyone has had their say and some sort of decision has been made - has been relatively minor programming work. Move X to Y, resize that to this, put that on its own dialog page, change the color scheme and so on. Even the "Awesomebar" and removing the status line doesn't seem like that much work. I really doubt that's eaten up any serious developer time, the issues Firefox have I think are due to far deeper problems in the code base.
The challenge I've found with designers is that they're not very happy to make another boring run-of-the-mill design. They want something innovative and creative they can put in their portfolio, particularly if any are working freelance on Firefox. And that no matter the inconsistencies ("start" to stop a Windows machine anyone?) people get used to them. Anything that changes all the time is per definition bad, while to the designers it seems more like taking turns testing out their ideas.
Of course I sense I a little bit of those that continued to use typewriters and calculators after we got computers - this is the way it's always been and should forever be - but on the other hand we've had the steering wheel, gas and brake pedal on cars now for a century. Some things are simply the right way of doing it and there's no particular reason to change it. But designers get restless and so they keep wanting to try something new even when it's not requested or required.
Yeah, that happens. But that companies have completely failed to understand their customers and gone face first in the dirt has definitively happened too. Particularly when the way they think the customers want it would also make them plenty profits.
The professional market (that needs OMF, XML EDL etc.) is probably a negligible speck in their turnover, but then again, they are people who are professionals in communicating, so this is turning into a PR disaster.
And perhaps even more so when they're not being all that professional - it looks like a Really Big Deal(tm) to them so they'll run stories that it is so, throw up some extra dark clouds on the future for people using Apple in a business setting and so on. Don't piss off the media who'll present your products to the general public seems to be public relations 101. To me this sounds more like the successor to Final Cut Express than Final Cut Pro...
Because in less than a year a new version of whatever distro i put on will come out and they WILL shit themselves and die if they are updated.
You keep insisting that you must be on the bleeding edge without the bleeding. If you're selling something to a regular not-so-savvy customer IT SHOULD NOT BE UPDATING EVERY SIX MONTHS. Until you get that through your thick skull and pick a sensible distro for your use, you're going to have problems and they're due to the person in your mirror. This is starting to sound like the joke with the patient that comes into the doctor's office saying "It hurts when I poke my eye" and the doctor says "Well, stop poking it then".
Is there a simple "update drivers" button?
Yes, same as all the other updates. Of course, unless they fix your problem it won't help.
A simple and easy way that ANYONE, no matter their level of experience, can get the drivers working?
No, because they don't intentionally break. There's no magic button they can push that'll fix everything, if there was I'd put any unsupported hardware in my Linux box and push it, then the drivers would write themselves. The only thing that'd work is testing, testing and more testing. By who? Well probably the people who have that exact hardware. That's what all the vendors and OEMs do for Windows, which is why they don't break. They tell Microsoft that hey, this patch breaks a line of computers we shipped in 2007. And until you or someone else starts telling the Linux developers the same thing, well there will be breakage. It only looks like fire and forget to you because the OEMs cover 99% of the problems you would have had otherwise.
Uh, no. The Bible comes from the Apostles and various other sources, none directly written by God. Just because I describe something you did in my book, it's still my copyright not yours. To the degree that there's direct quotes of Jesus that he could claim copyright on, well he died around 35 AD so 95 years after his death would be long ago. And finally if God claims he spoke through Jesus to the disciples from Heaven, well then Heaven hasn't signed the WIPO treaty so we don't recognize his copyright. Besides he'd have to recruit from downstairs to find a copyright lawyer for his case.
I think so, here in Norway we have ex. phil. which is something like the basis of philosophy and the scientific method, but it only covers one third of the first semester and isn't entirely a waste. But basically you're pretty far ahead if you understand the basics of induction, deduction, falsifiability and what a priori knowledge is - that is what you know without experience. Hell, I think even watching the Matrix could give you a passing grade...
Want proof? proof that nobody here can deny? here you go...why does Dell, one of the largest OEMs on the planet, have to disable the repos on every. single. Ubuntu machine they sell and deal with the hassle and expense of running their own repo, even for a small subset of the hardware they sell? Why because if they don't Linux breaks drivers oh fun oh joy!
First of all, if you go to any OEMs website you will see that they usually offer plenty driver downloads, they're not leaving it all to Microsoft. So what you're complaining about is exactly the same practice they have on Windows. Secondly, Microsoft offers their prerelease patches and service packs to OEMs for compatibility testing before they arrive on Windows update, which Linux doesn't. So if Dell was to provide the same level of compatibility testing as they do on Windows, they have to redirect it to their own repos.
Sadly most the stuff that breaks is not in kernel space - Linus runs a pretty tight ship with very low tolerance for regressions. To take the whole PulseAudio mess for example, where is it? Userspace. If you have a problem with any USB-connected device, it's userspace as all basic USB I/O works fine - the rest is in userspace. The bluetooth daemon is mostly userspace. Wireless may be kernel space, but just as often the userspace init scripts and tools are fucked. Not saying the problem isn't real, but that it is mostly a problem with the distribution. That also means the choice of distribution will greatly influence your experience.
Oh and PLEASE don't say LTS, as long as Linux software is tied to the kernel you might as well call that an out of date unpatched OS, because that is what it is.
No, it's an out of date patched OS, so your customers don't get rooted. Enable the backports repo and a lot of the core software will get updated too, rather conservatively of course. Tell me, does the Windows PCs you sell update themselves from Vista to Win7 or Office 2007 to Office 2010 when it's out? Or does it for the most part just provide security patches, like an LTS release? Speaking of which, Office comes with a new version every 2-3 years. Does it then kill you to ship a 1-2 year old version of OpenOffice? Because even an LTS release upgrades every 2 years.
I can think of pretty many other arguments for why Linux isn't taking off, but I don't think yours were all that compelling. Like you say, Dell has a pretty good system for this and if that's all it would take the YotLD would have come and gone long ago. It doesn't have the entertainment apps (games, bluray playback, many streaming solution depends on Windows & DRM) for the home user nor Outlook/Office for the business user. And every app is different from what you know.
The government can spy on everybody, and shouldn't, but does; but they aren't acting on it very much.
Yes well, amassing power and abusing power at the same time doesn't tend to work so well. Dictatorship 101 says that by the time the public starts protesting, it should already be too late. The barriers, the self-imposed compartmentalization and restrictions the government puts on itself are nothing but curtains the government could pull aside or pierce at will. Handing them more and more power is like sticking your hand deeper and deeper in a bear trap on the logic that it hasn't snapped shut yet.
Besides, does the public really know what's going on? Give AT&T a national security lettter, hook up the NSA to their core server and boom, instant mass surveillance with 99.9% of AT&T not even knowing that it happens. What if the same happened to VISA, cell phone tower records, all tax records and so on, except you never heard about it? We do know they collected international transfers through the SWIFT system for years, and we only know that because other governments demand answers.
The government wants to give the impression that they're not acting on it very much. But they have over a million people on their terrorist watch list. The government has fiddled with total information awareness programs before and probably still do in secret. Don't expect them to be so blunt as to throw you in a jail cell without trial, you'll just subtly find that you kept away from any critical positions and every government agency is going over you with a fine tooth comb.
The only points you list are those where the government as a power entity doesn't care. They care about threats to their own power, who you sleep with they honestly don't care except as a potential weapon to make you resign. They only care if you want to reduce their power or increase oversight, transparency and accountability. As long as people quibble over social issues or tax rates while the power grab continues, they're happy. Why ruin people's illusion of choice? Make people believe they want it and chose it.
And we're barely self-sufficient. We would have to be a huge, huge net exporter of power for that to be a viable solution to everyone else. It's the hydro power that's enabled us to be such a big oil and gas export nation, because we haven't needed it ourselves. Sadly that's dwindling away, but we're still in a far better position than most any country for the upcoming oil crisis.
Most of the problem had gone away already in the 1998 Belfast agreement. 9/11 was more the double nails in the coffin, the funding on the one side and the belief in terrorism as a means to provoke political change on the other. The final remnants of the arsenal wasn't destroyed until 2005, but they were just holding on to it at the time. It should also be noted that the IRA struck mainly British armed forces and police officers, even though they had quite a few civilian losses as collateral damage.
Given enough bandwidth, the difference between downloading and streaming becomes almost insignificant. Currently at top speed in HD:
Downloading a Simpsons episode = Microwave some popcorn (3-4 min) Downloading a TV episode = Microwave dinner (8-10 mins) Downloading a movie = Microwave and eat dinner (25-30 mins)
As long as you put things on download before you do some chores like putting on a washing machine, starting the dish washer, vacuuming the floor or whatever it'll be done when you're ready to relax. And of course while you're watching the first one you can download for the rest of the evening in the background. And that is all if you haven't got anything downloaded from yesterday you can watch immediately while waiting for today's downloads.
When you develop and deploy your own software, you control it. I guess you missed that part about thousands of various odd tools spread around the company that needs to keep working. Most of these will require manual testing, because there's no way to automate it (unless you have a click bot actually emulating keyboard and mouse input, comparing screenshots for output and someone to record comprehensive tests) because they're old, proprietary, abandoned, unsupported or all of the above. Very often you have no clue what the users actually do, you have to give them an upgraded system and say "test it, tell me if anything's broken".
You can do it faster, but it won't make the pain much less because most the time is spent in the "testing" phase and not so much in the "fixing" phase. And even if you've identified things that need fixing, the fixing phase often means you need to upgrade that'll cause it's own breakage, replace that tool or put it in a VM or whatever, not actually fix it. And no, you will not manage to run most large businesses just on in-house or open source tools, even if your name is Google or IBM I'm sure they have plenty proprietary tools too. So all you'll see happen is that you get most of the pain, only a lot more often. Then you cut down on the testing since it's too much, shit hits the fan because you missed something and you're the one called in to explain why your IT department screwed up royally.
The kernel has long been on a quarterly release schedule. One month merge window, two months of weekly RCs. If Linus is feeling very generous maybe you can sneak into rc1 or rc2 but don't count on it. So every feature is known roughly two months before release, unless it's backed out because it causes too many regressions. So it's actually Firefox that is changing to releases every 3 months, even though they call them 4, 5, 6, 7 while the kernel will be 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3... just like they've been 2.6.35, 36, 37, 38... The reason they haven't moved to a yy.mm format even though it's time-based not feature-based is because there's stabilization teams adding another layer of releases. If you go to kernel.org you'll see that in addition to 3.0-rc4 the current versions are:'
Distributions that aren't rolling just skip releases, a six month window means skipping one release and a two year cycle 7 releases, give or take. The difference is that Linux doesn't just drop support, you see every release back to 32 is still supported and even 27 - that's 12 releases or three years ago is still managed by a team. In addition the distros like RHEL will support it even longer for their releases. So the release frequency is the same but the support vastly different.
I am going to have to agree. I see this as the end of one of the best innovations of modern entertainment. Instead of having 1 portal to watch most of the shows people enjoy, now we'll have to finding them on random webpages.
Or one web page that has everything no matter what show you want, where it aired and what country you're in. The TV industry is the last industry to pick up on the whole "globalization" thing.
I think piracy is on the way out anyway. Things like iTunes, Netflix,& Hulu make it really easy to get almost anything legally.
All of which only exist because big media has been dragged kicking and screaming into online distribution. Spotify was too good so they turned their free version down to crap. Every year they come up with some more obnoxious crap to shut it down and should they ever succeed you can expect your service and prices go to hell.
Apple was more than happy to push their Apple Cinema Displays long before they started with the current iMacs, which has pretty much all the same issues as TV screens. Why should they not be willing to do it on the TV front, if they're willing to do it on the monitor front? As for why, think something more like the Wii or Kinect not just a TV. Something like a "smart TV" that's a crossover between TV, console and iPad. The butterfinger interface of the iPad would work pretty good by pointing a remote, only minor changes needed. I have no doubt that Apple wants to get into the home entertainment business, if they can just find the right market opening.
There is no way in hell that a person interested in Kind of Blues would say, "Hey, you know what, I'm going to buy that chiptunes album because the album art is similar."
That'd be enough for trademark, but not copyright. For copyright the main question is whether their creative expression is part of your creative expression, if so your work is derivative. Even if it's a pixel art version of a photograph, it's clearly derivative of the original photograph. That makes it fall under copyright, and you have to look at fair use. Where it falls most flat on its face is its purpose, which is to promote another commercial work. That is pretty much never a fair use, you can talk about Google's thumbnails all day but it doesn't compare at all. That is something designed to lead you to the full image, not to lead you somewhere else. I guess you could argue the law should be less strict but from both the letter of the law and the practice of it, settling seems like a good idea.
Sometimes I find the distinction between "because you are educated" and "because you've created a theoretical, ideological model that's clearly very far from the way real people and the real world acts" is hard to make in practical discussion. In both cases it's likely to be dismissed as ivory tower thinking. It would be like someone arguing to say the sky is green. I don't want to try picking apart your model trying to find the flaws, particularly as me not finding them will convince you further of the validity of the model when it's obvious to most people that the outcome you've reached is absurd. Of course you could say I'm just dismissing the results I don't like, but honestly I don't have time to tear apart every wrong theory there is. Sometimes you just have to say "Uh.... no." and move on, at least until there's some very obvious proof you should reconsider.
And even if all of this came to pass, the most they'd manage is to turn back time to the Napster era when we know they didn't have P2P sharing problems... That's workaround #4, if they hit all centralized solutions then move to a decentralized one.
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AMD will need to pull a major magic rabbit out thier hats on this upcoming bulldozer [which does seem to have intel worried as they are delaying the x78 chipset and subsiquent LGA2011 cpu's and boards until AMD reviels thier hand].
I think it's been quiet well established for some time now that Intel owns the high end. That they're delaying is probably more because their $2-300 CPUs are pounding AMD pretty good already. If as usually Q3 means the very end of Q3 there's still a full quarter where Intel doesn't need to lift a finger to win.
Chances are, the average user isn't even going to notice.
I'm sorry, but the average user knows how a clock works. Whether it's their computer clock, the wall clock, the wrist watch or their cell phone, they'll notice that their laptop runs out of battery faster under Linux.
Nope, but with where Nokia is going it must be up for adoption. Maybe not officially, but if you waved a few million dollars in that direction I think they're very ready to divest that part of their business. Already they've sold off the commercial licensing to Digia, so if they're not selling it, not putting in their own phones (maybe they'll finish shipping a phone or two, but certainly not on the roadmap) then why should they continue pouring millions into it? Their market message is less than stellar clear, to say the least.
If you're working for stocks or options in a private company - any company not on a public stock exchange, get a lawyer. It's not just options, they can issue shares, split shares, all sorts of tricks and unless you have a pretty watertight shareholder agreement that says you can't be diluted it'll be worth nothing. That said, most startups couldn't function any other way, unless you've got one very rich founder most of the key people have to work for a share of the company. There's nothing inherently wrong with stock options, as long as you get someone competent to set up the papers.
To me it depends exactly what the nature of the agreement is. For example, I don't read my iTunes agreements because they're:
a) 100+ pages long on my iPhone
b) Standard across a million users
c) Apple won't negotiate, it's a take it or leave it
d) If I don't agree, I lose access to the store - I'm already invested
e) It's small money anyway
In this case I rely on the fact that if there's something really nasty in there, then a) the media will alert me and if b) they're of the "and your firstborn" variety the courts will smack it down.
There's no such thing as a boilerplate work contract. Oh, they can have a template to start with but it's always possible to amend it and that's just this company's template. Of course your bargaining power is biggest if you already have a job and multiple offers on the table, but your prospective employer won't know the latter at least. If you need to ask for clarification on some point, get that mutual understanding of it in the contract. Particularly beware of startups that have something made up on the back of a napkin. I've had to ask them to amend it because it didn't even meet the minimum requirements of the law, was simple things like what date of the month the salary was to be paid and stuff like that. It's too late trying to get things in writing when the shit has hit the fan.
In most of the software I've been part of, the actual changing of the UI - once everyone has had their say and some sort of decision has been made - has been relatively minor programming work. Move X to Y, resize that to this, put that on its own dialog page, change the color scheme and so on. Even the "Awesomebar" and removing the status line doesn't seem like that much work. I really doubt that's eaten up any serious developer time, the issues Firefox have I think are due to far deeper problems in the code base.
The challenge I've found with designers is that they're not very happy to make another boring run-of-the-mill design. They want something innovative and creative they can put in their portfolio, particularly if any are working freelance on Firefox. And that no matter the inconsistencies ("start" to stop a Windows machine anyone?) people get used to them. Anything that changes all the time is per definition bad, while to the designers it seems more like taking turns testing out their ideas.
Of course I sense I a little bit of those that continued to use typewriters and calculators after we got computers - this is the way it's always been and should forever be - but on the other hand we've had the steering wheel, gas and brake pedal on cars now for a century. Some things are simply the right way of doing it and there's no particular reason to change it. But designers get restless and so they keep wanting to try something new even when it's not requested or required.
Yeah, that happens. But that companies have completely failed to understand their customers and gone face first in the dirt has definitively happened too. Particularly when the way they think the customers want it would also make them plenty profits.
The professional market (that needs OMF, XML EDL etc.) is probably a negligible speck in their turnover, but then again, they are people who are professionals in communicating, so this is turning into a PR disaster.
And perhaps even more so when they're not being all that professional - it looks like a Really Big Deal(tm) to them so they'll run stories that it is so, throw up some extra dark clouds on the future for people using Apple in a business setting and so on. Don't piss off the media who'll present your products to the general public seems to be public relations 101. To me this sounds more like the successor to Final Cut Express than Final Cut Pro...
Because in less than a year a new version of whatever distro i put on will come out and they WILL shit themselves and die if they are updated.
You keep insisting that you must be on the bleeding edge without the bleeding. If you're selling something to a regular not-so-savvy customer IT SHOULD NOT BE UPDATING EVERY SIX MONTHS. Until you get that through your thick skull and pick a sensible distro for your use, you're going to have problems and they're due to the person in your mirror. This is starting to sound like the joke with the patient that comes into the doctor's office saying "It hurts when I poke my eye" and the doctor says "Well, stop poking it then".
Is there a simple "update drivers" button?
Yes, same as all the other updates. Of course, unless they fix your problem it won't help.
A simple and easy way that ANYONE, no matter their level of experience, can get the drivers working?
No, because they don't intentionally break. There's no magic button they can push that'll fix everything, if there was I'd put any unsupported hardware in my Linux box and push it, then the drivers would write themselves. The only thing that'd work is testing, testing and more testing. By who? Well probably the people who have that exact hardware. That's what all the vendors and OEMs do for Windows, which is why they don't break. They tell Microsoft that hey, this patch breaks a line of computers we shipped in 2007. And until you or someone else starts telling the Linux developers the same thing, well there will be breakage. It only looks like fire and forget to you because the OEMs cover 99% of the problems you would have had otherwise.
Uh, no. The Bible comes from the Apostles and various other sources, none directly written by God. Just because I describe something you did in my book, it's still my copyright not yours. To the degree that there's direct quotes of Jesus that he could claim copyright on, well he died around 35 AD so 95 years after his death would be long ago. And finally if God claims he spoke through Jesus to the disciples from Heaven, well then Heaven hasn't signed the WIPO treaty so we don't recognize his copyright. Besides he'd have to recruit from downstairs to find a copyright lawyer for his case.
How could it possibly be better for the distribution industry to need permission than to not need it?
I think so, here in Norway we have ex. phil. which is something like the basis of philosophy and the scientific method, but it only covers one third of the first semester and isn't entirely a waste. But basically you're pretty far ahead if you understand the basics of induction, deduction, falsifiability and what a priori knowledge is - that is what you know without experience. Hell, I think even watching the Matrix could give you a passing grade...
Want proof? proof that nobody here can deny? here you go...why does Dell, one of the largest OEMs on the planet, have to disable the repos on every. single. Ubuntu machine they sell and deal with the hassle and expense of running their own repo, even for a small subset of the hardware they sell? Why because if they don't Linux breaks drivers oh fun oh joy!
First of all, if you go to any OEMs website you will see that they usually offer plenty driver downloads, they're not leaving it all to Microsoft. So what you're complaining about is exactly the same practice they have on Windows. Secondly, Microsoft offers their prerelease patches and service packs to OEMs for compatibility testing before they arrive on Windows update, which Linux doesn't. So if Dell was to provide the same level of compatibility testing as they do on Windows, they have to redirect it to their own repos.
Sadly most the stuff that breaks is not in kernel space - Linus runs a pretty tight ship with very low tolerance for regressions. To take the whole PulseAudio mess for example, where is it? Userspace. If you have a problem with any USB-connected device, it's userspace as all basic USB I/O works fine - the rest is in userspace. The bluetooth daemon is mostly userspace. Wireless may be kernel space, but just as often the userspace init scripts and tools are fucked. Not saying the problem isn't real, but that it is mostly a problem with the distribution. That also means the choice of distribution will greatly influence your experience.
Oh and PLEASE don't say LTS, as long as Linux software is tied to the kernel you might as well call that an out of date unpatched OS, because that is what it is.
No, it's an out of date patched OS, so your customers don't get rooted. Enable the backports repo and a lot of the core software will get updated too, rather conservatively of course. Tell me, does the Windows PCs you sell update themselves from Vista to Win7 or Office 2007 to Office 2010 when it's out? Or does it for the most part just provide security patches, like an LTS release? Speaking of which, Office comes with a new version every 2-3 years. Does it then kill you to ship a 1-2 year old version of OpenOffice? Because even an LTS release upgrades every 2 years.
I can think of pretty many other arguments for why Linux isn't taking off, but I don't think yours were all that compelling. Like you say, Dell has a pretty good system for this and if that's all it would take the YotLD would have come and gone long ago. It doesn't have the entertainment apps (games, bluray playback, many streaming solution depends on Windows & DRM) for the home user nor Outlook/Office for the business user. And every app is different from what you know.
The government can spy on everybody, and shouldn't, but does; but they aren't acting on it very much.
Yes well, amassing power and abusing power at the same time doesn't tend to work so well. Dictatorship 101 says that by the time the public starts protesting, it should already be too late. The barriers, the self-imposed compartmentalization and restrictions the government puts on itself are nothing but curtains the government could pull aside or pierce at will. Handing them more and more power is like sticking your hand deeper and deeper in a bear trap on the logic that it hasn't snapped shut yet.
Besides, does the public really know what's going on? Give AT&T a national security lettter, hook up the NSA to their core server and boom, instant mass surveillance with 99.9% of AT&T not even knowing that it happens. What if the same happened to VISA, cell phone tower records, all tax records and so on, except you never heard about it? We do know they collected international transfers through the SWIFT system for years, and we only know that because other governments demand answers.
The government wants to give the impression that they're not acting on it very much. But they have over a million people on their terrorist watch list. The government has fiddled with total information awareness programs before and probably still do in secret. Don't expect them to be so blunt as to throw you in a jail cell without trial, you'll just subtly find that you kept away from any critical positions and every government agency is going over you with a fine tooth comb.
The only points you list are those where the government as a power entity doesn't care. They care about threats to their own power, who you sleep with they honestly don't care except as a potential weapon to make you resign. They only care if you want to reduce their power or increase oversight, transparency and accountability. As long as people quibble over social issues or tax rates while the power grab continues, they're happy. Why ruin people's illusion of choice? Make people believe they want it and chose it.
And we're barely self-sufficient. We would have to be a huge, huge net exporter of power for that to be a viable solution to everyone else. It's the hydro power that's enabled us to be such a big oil and gas export nation, because we haven't needed it ourselves. Sadly that's dwindling away, but we're still in a far better position than most any country for the upcoming oil crisis.
Most of the problem had gone away already in the 1998 Belfast agreement. 9/11 was more the double nails in the coffin, the funding on the one side and the belief in terrorism as a means to provoke political change on the other. The final remnants of the arsenal wasn't destroyed until 2005, but they were just holding on to it at the time. It should also be noted that the IRA struck mainly British armed forces and police officers, even though they had quite a few civilian losses as collateral damage.
Given enough bandwidth, the difference between downloading and streaming becomes almost insignificant. Currently at top speed in HD:
Downloading a Simpsons episode = Microwave some popcorn (3-4 min)
Downloading a TV episode = Microwave dinner (8-10 mins)
Downloading a movie = Microwave and eat dinner (25-30 mins)
As long as you put things on download before you do some chores like putting on a washing machine, starting the dish washer, vacuuming the floor or whatever it'll be done when you're ready to relax. And of course while you're watching the first one you can download for the rest of the evening in the background. And that is all if you haven't got anything downloaded from yesterday you can watch immediately while waiting for today's downloads.
When you develop and deploy your own software, you control it. I guess you missed that part about thousands of various odd tools spread around the company that needs to keep working. Most of these will require manual testing, because there's no way to automate it (unless you have a click bot actually emulating keyboard and mouse input, comparing screenshots for output and someone to record comprehensive tests) because they're old, proprietary, abandoned, unsupported or all of the above. Very often you have no clue what the users actually do, you have to give them an upgraded system and say "test it, tell me if anything's broken".
You can do it faster, but it won't make the pain much less because most the time is spent in the "testing" phase and not so much in the "fixing" phase. And even if you've identified things that need fixing, the fixing phase often means you need to upgrade that'll cause it's own breakage, replace that tool or put it in a VM or whatever, not actually fix it. And no, you will not manage to run most large businesses just on in-house or open source tools, even if your name is Google or IBM I'm sure they have plenty proprietary tools too. So all you'll see happen is that you get most of the pain, only a lot more often. Then you cut down on the testing since it's too much, shit hits the fan because you missed something and you're the one called in to explain why your IT department screwed up royally.
The kernel has long been on a quarterly release schedule. One month merge window, two months of weekly RCs. If Linus is feeling very generous maybe you can sneak into rc1 or rc2 but don't count on it. So every feature is known roughly two months before release, unless it's backed out because it causes too many regressions. So it's actually Firefox that is changing to releases every 3 months, even though they call them 4, 5, 6, 7 while the kernel will be 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3... just like they've been 2.6.35, 36, 37, 38... The reason they haven't moved to a yy.mm format even though it's time-based not feature-based is because there's stabilization teams adding another layer of releases. If you go to kernel.org you'll see that in addition to 3.0-rc4 the current versions are:'
2.6.39.2
2.6.38.8
2.6.37.6
2.6.36.4
2.6.35.13
2.6.34.9
2.6.33.15
2.6.32.42
2.6.27.59
Distributions that aren't rolling just skip releases, a six month window means skipping one release and a two year cycle 7 releases, give or take. The difference is that Linux doesn't just drop support, you see every release back to 32 is still supported and even 27 - that's 12 releases or three years ago is still managed by a team. In addition the distros like RHEL will support it even longer for their releases. So the release frequency is the same but the support vastly different.
I am going to have to agree. I see this as the end of one of the best innovations of modern entertainment. Instead of having 1 portal to watch most of the shows people enjoy, now we'll have to finding them on random webpages.
Or one web page that has everything no matter what show you want, where it aired and what country you're in. The TV industry is the last industry to pick up on the whole "globalization" thing.
I think piracy is on the way out anyway. Things like iTunes, Netflix,& Hulu make it really easy to get almost anything legally.
All of which only exist because big media has been dragged kicking and screaming into online distribution. Spotify was too good so they turned their free version down to crap. Every year they come up with some more obnoxious crap to shut it down and should they ever succeed you can expect your service and prices go to hell.
Apple was more than happy to push their Apple Cinema Displays long before they started with the current iMacs, which has pretty much all the same issues as TV screens. Why should they not be willing to do it on the TV front, if they're willing to do it on the monitor front? As for why, think something more like the Wii or Kinect not just a TV. Something like a "smart TV" that's a crossover between TV, console and iPad. The butterfinger interface of the iPad would work pretty good by pointing a remote, only minor changes needed. I have no doubt that Apple wants to get into the home entertainment business, if they can just find the right market opening.
There is no way in hell that a person interested in Kind of Blues would say, "Hey, you know what, I'm going to buy that chiptunes album because the album art is similar."
That'd be enough for trademark, but not copyright. For copyright the main question is whether their creative expression is part of your creative expression, if so your work is derivative. Even if it's a pixel art version of a photograph, it's clearly derivative of the original photograph. That makes it fall under copyright, and you have to look at fair use. Where it falls most flat on its face is its purpose, which is to promote another commercial work. That is pretty much never a fair use, you can talk about Google's thumbnails all day but it doesn't compare at all. That is something designed to lead you to the full image, not to lead you somewhere else. I guess you could argue the law should be less strict but from both the letter of the law and the practice of it, settling seems like a good idea.
Sometimes I find the distinction between "because you are educated" and "because you've created a theoretical, ideological model that's clearly very far from the way real people and the real world acts" is hard to make in practical discussion. In both cases it's likely to be dismissed as ivory tower thinking. It would be like someone arguing to say the sky is green. I don't want to try picking apart your model trying to find the flaws, particularly as me not finding them will convince you further of the validity of the model when it's obvious to most people that the outcome you've reached is absurd. Of course you could say I'm just dismissing the results I don't like, but honestly I don't have time to tear apart every wrong theory there is. Sometimes you just have to say "Uh.... no." and move on, at least until there's some very obvious proof you should reconsider.
And even if all of this came to pass, the most they'd manage is to turn back time to the Napster era when we know they didn't have P2P sharing problems... That's workaround #4, if they hit all centralized solutions then move to a decentralized one.