Closed source software may have some virtues, but taking constructive criticism is definitely a major weakness.
Closed source software is often unwilling to go the way you want, while paying an open source developer will give you any pet feature you want. But whenever I've put in a fairly serious draft showing how it'll not just help my case but actually be a boon to their product citing common use cases, they listen. Not always of course, but talking to a for-profit company is easy - you know what they want so you write a business case. I have no idea what the open source developer with a bug up his ass wants, some are genuinely interested in making the best possible product while others don't seem to give a fuck if they ignore what "most people" want to do. Which is fine, just set up a huge neon sign saying "Not really for general use, just a hackish tool we bang to make work. It doesn't do half you'd expect this kind of software to do and never will, and that's the way we like it".
Economics taking a statistical approach often assumes that in the long run you have a stationary time series. This is why economics and the quants will fail miserably.
Actually, my impression is that more economists work by Moore's law. There's no scientific basis for it, but year over year growth will continue exponentially without bound. There are small setbacks but that faith is pretty unwavering.
I thought the point of the stock market was that people with money can buy shares into companies they think will be profitable. i pitty these idiots who try all their best to get as rich as possible as fast as possible. and I pitty the rest of the world, who see clearly that these guys treat everything like a lottery, and still trust them.
They operate under uncertainty of the future, which I think most of us do. You probably have different scenarios, some positive like getting a promotion or payraise, some neutral, some negative like a pay cut or getting laid off. Adjust as required if you're already unemployed. Depending on which you think is more likely, you probably have different strategies. For example, if you think you may be laid off you may be hedging trying to find a more secure job. If you're looking good, you might want to take the opportunity of a cheap foreclosure. If you're unemployed, you can do something alternative like invest in more education. Unless you're clairvoyant you're probably looking at a mixed strategy trying to account for all outcomes relative to their likelihood.
That's what they do too, on the macro level. Where's the economy going, and what investments stand to profit from that. Why do you have so much against getting value for the money? If I'm paying out of my salary, you bet I won't be pissing away money. If I'm running a company, I won't be pissing away money. And so if I have money to invest, why would I be pissing them away on companies that don't give any return? No, I'd want to model what's worth investing in and screw the rest. I know many that check out auction sites, sales and whatnot looking for a good buy. Why not a stock that's undervalued? The people I pity are those that don't understand risk, if you don't want risk keep the money in the bank. You can't just think that stocks will double your returns risk-free, it's just not how it works...
Goldman Sachs gave Brazil (the "favorite") only a 13% chance of winning the world cup.
It's been clear to me now for some time that soccer isn't about making the best team win. If a typical match result was like 9-4 it's very unlikely the weaker team would beat the stronger, and we could have done that by making scoring easier. But with results like 2-1 it's pretty much down to $random circumstance of the day. Why? Because in 80% of the matches it makes fans go "If only..." then our team would have won. You look at the one missed chance and ignore that the opponent had three. At 13% you realize this is mostly luck, it means there's at least ten countries that could win.
Personally I think Germany will pull it off though, impressive play and all their hardest competitors eliminated. Spain has Barcelona which is possibly the world's best team but their national team never quite made it, Netherlands and Uruguay have always been good nations but haven't made it to the top in ages. Because when you look at the list of winners, it's shorter than you might think and Germany is the only one left that has won in recent history (Uruguay won in 1930 and 1950).
If you refuse all exploration done using technology, you refuse everything we can't see with the naked eye. People care about discoveries, not about how long the wire between the sensor and the display is. If we send a probe 10 km below the sea, does it matter if the man watching the camera is inside the tin can or up on the surface watching the same monitor? Not to most people. Also, for 99.9% of us we'll never see it by our own eyes anyway, only what is documented. And a robot can document as well as we do, what would an astronaut on Mars tell us? Probably something like "Yep, it's just like the pictures. Want me to take some more?", so unless they can do something we can't make robots do it's just for the sake of doing it. Then it's only about bringing a bubble of human habitability there and back again, not to discover anything on the outside. That most people would not call exploring...
No, I would say trackers are perfectly in line with Sony vs Betamax. They're a neutral technology, and they have substantial non-infringing use. They are an enabler true, much like VCRs enabled you to copy TV shows, but if you say they promote copyright infringement then you're simply wrong. Once you start buying into that you start buying the MAFIAAs line that the tools themselves are criminal.
Nothing is guaranteed in stone, but if there's a threat it's that Microsoft has implemented something odd which the driver doesn't handle and fails spectacularly on. I haven't looked at exactly how NTFS driver support has been done, but if you're running the same ntfs-3g driver on Linux and Mac (it is Unixy enough for that, isn't it?) without touching a Windows box, you should be even safer. Not that I've had any problems with it for years.
Long story short, they need PR now. Next year the content industry can shut down the Pirate Party as TPB's ISP like they did with the last one and make most people forget it by 2014. So now they're hoping for controversy and press, because the Pirate Party is virtually untouchable from now and until the national election in September. It is highly questionable if running an ISP can be considered a "political activity", but just creating the debate on it is a victory. The downside is that they are again hitting the media almost as the Pirate Bay Party, when they spend the other half of the time telling everybody they're not a single issue party and there's more to their ideology than that. So they're more looking for someone to stomp their brass balls than not, really.
I'm not very surprised, personally I could quite easily answer for bit, byte, (u)char, (u)int, long, long long and the (u)int(8|16|32|64) variety, but WORD and DWORD I don't think I've seen since the Win32 API. To me that's somewhere in obscurity between an octet and a nibble, I guess it depends exactly what the job was about but I wouldn't expect every developer to know that. And while I generally stay out IT formally, I've been running circles around a few IT departments...
Sure, on the surface it sounds good for the RIAA being able to hold a gun to YouTube's head every time an infringing video is posted. But what would that in practice mean? It would mean that any video that hasn't been reviewed and approved by YouTube would be a liability - and knowing the RIAA, a big one. It'd basically be a license for the RIAA to print money off YouTube, since it's highly unlikely they could keep everything away. They could just continue to make increasingly more impossible standards of screening and cooperation for YouTube to fail.
I think if this ever gets to the Supreme court, Viacom will be handed a slapdown so big their head will be spinning for years so I almost hope they do. Imagine if every comment here had to pass through an editor in case it contained copyright text of Scientologists or whatnot, it'd be the death of all discussion forums. There's no way the Supreme Court would leave a sword of Damocles hanging over every site operator like that, they're more than smart enough to figure out their guideline would be the guideline for all copyrighted content.
Any bets on what serial killer YouTube will be likened to?
About the only way you can make sure you get decent PC hardware is to build it yourself or have enough knowledge to sub in and out parts if need be.
Really? Would you know about the "Deathstar" drives or faulty caps or Intel's math bug or nVidia's process problems or Creative's bus noise or every odd compatibility problem? Reality is that the PC has been changing at breakneck speeds, and it's a reason why they call it breakneck. In almost every other business, staying with the old model is just fine if the new one isn't ready. In the PC industry that's suicide, might as well throw yourself off a cliff and try to fly than wait for certain death.
We'll see stability when the ten year old computer is no more different than the ten year old car. Unfortunately that'll also be the day Moore's law is dead and computers have hit the ceiling. Personally I prefer the situation as it is now, as long as I have proper backups all else can be replaced. You can get a new, fully functional 1001PX nettop for about $240, at least that's what I paid for one (+VAT). Now I know that's still a lot of money for many, but to many it's not and there's always used laptops for less.
Yes, it sucks and nobody likes it but a 95% reliable cheap notebook beats a 99% reliable expensive one, and ~100% doesn't exist when you add in real world accidents not even a ToughBook would survive, like say house fire or getting stolen. You know, IBM tried this strategy in the 80s, PCs built to top tolerances and top durability and they ended up grossly overpriced and people bought clones and if they failed people threw them out and bought another clone still for less than the IBM. They are exactly as robust as the market wanted them to be, which is to say not very.
Because they don't understand enough about the physics of digital electrical signals? I assume you expect to be taken advantage of by your mechanic/doctor/banker because you don't know enough about cars/biology/financial devices? Your money deserves to be taken, right?
Monster cables are to regular cables what a chop shop is to a car mechanic, what a $100k homeopathic cure that may* cure cancer is to a doctor and what a person with a bridge to sell you is to a banker. Even a lay person should be able to smell a rat without having any particular education. Monster cables are for people that can "hear" their dollars, nothing else. People that are willing to pay good money for the sake of having a 10x more expensive cable than the rest, deserve to pay 10x more than the rest. Everybody else will return the monster cable because it made no difference at all.
the word terrorism is rather straight-forward: the use of force, or the threat of force, against a people in order to coerce them (...) Fighting a government has nothing to do with terrorism - it's fighting the actual people themselves.
I know I'm getting awfully close to trolling now, but... Granted the WTC towers were civilian, but the plane attack on the Pentagon and the final plane - bound for either the White House or the Capitol building - was squarely aimed at the government. I take it then by your definition that you don't consider these acts of terrorism?
I'm not trying to be facetious here, it really is hard. For example you might say use of force, I say poisoning a water supply. Pretty clear case of terror. You say all criminal acts, I say sedition laws that neuter free speech. Not terror. What about killing UN Peace Corps? They're clearly not an actual people, but you know the purpose is to politically destabilize the country and profit from the chaos. Assassinations of leaders that refuse to cooperate and wow to fight terror? You think that's not part of a campaign of terror? Finding a way to define terror that covers everything that is terror and excludes everything that isn't is not easy, maybe you think you got one but the world doesn't agree with you.
Will Monster make a special gold-plated, oxygenated cable for it?
Of course they will. So would I, if I could manage to get through the sales speech without breaking down in hysterical laughter. Some money just deserve to be taken.
You are confusing being a terrorist and being called a terrorist. Terrorism has a very strict definition. Your "freedom fighter" and "treasonous rebels" analogy is completely not comparable as the two terms have nothing to do with terrorism. What's so hard to understand about a word that is completely defined and without ambiguity?
Please enlighten us, as the definition of terrorism has its own wikipedia page with over 70 citations that we've never been able to agree on a concrete definition of what is a terrorist act. The UN has a political definition that is more fuzzy than a kitten, and comprehensive studies show there's very little common ground except violence or threats of violence.
For example, to pick apart the UN definition: "Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them."
War is usually enough to send people in a state of terror, and armed resistance is no exception - particularly not fighting in or around the the civil population. Laws and so criminals acts are very often defined by an oppressor or occupant, so what makes them legitimate? Particularly if you read "state of terror in (...) a group of persons" where the group of persons is the occupant - which again is very much in the eye of the beholder, then it becomes nonsense. Not to Godwin this post, but during WWII Norway was occupied by the Nazis and we capitulated. The Nazis installed a puppet government, which passed laws. With a sufficiently biased reading you can find that "Criminal acts (as defined by the puppet government) intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in a group of persons (the German occupation) for political purposes (to free Norway) are in any circumstance unjustifiable". Or if you insist they were, then I support some of the terrorists...
I think some already are, like MythBuntu. I might be wrong, but I think it uses the same mythtv package you can install on plain Ubuntu, the distro just drops many of the standard packages and makes you boot directly into myth. The latter might be good reason to have a separate distro, what a "sane" detault is probably depends on whether it's a dedicated appliance box or not.
No, without DRM, the "This rental is currently unavailable in your country" videos wouldn't be available anywhere. Why don't people understand this? Without protection, content owners will not distribute their content in ways that they think need protection. It's not that hard to understand. They won't say "oh well, we can't do anything to protect our content - lets just upload it all to usenet and go home for the weekend". Your logic is insulting.
The threat to take their stuff and go home is an idle threat. Look at just about every industry under government regulation. Do they bitch about it? Yes. Do they keep doing it? Yes, because they still make money on it. I can with 100% certainty say that if we passed the anti-DMCA bill and DRM was outlawed, they'd still be trying to sell their movies. They can move from a DRM-free platform to a DRM'd one, but if we reject all the DRM'd platforms they'll start selling it openly, just like the iTunes store does for music. Which last I checked, has not lead to the collapse of the music industry despite the hyperbole. When home recording got big the VCR was likened to Jack the Ripper. The content industry keeps crying wolf, and the fairy tale is coming to its classic end.
Something can be borked about my hardware, like trying to run my car in -40C (or F) or whatever. But software doesn't break down the way cars do, unless cosmic rays flipped a bit in my executable. If cars worked as unreliably as browsers, in that if you hit exactly this curve under exactly those conditions while shifting gears and braking slightly the car would spontaneously combust there'd be a recall. If fact, if you're verified it on two machines of different setup I think you can safely assume this is a problem affecting most of them, at least on the same platform and such. It's just a question of how rarely the circumstances of the crash appear and if it's specific to exactly what you're doing.
For the vast majority of it though, it's simply to big to make regular offline backups. For that, a RAID array is most certainly better than keeping it all on single drives with NO failover whatsoever. I can live with the possibility that I MIGHT lose that data, but the risks are still greatly reduced.
One alternative is to drop RAID and manually manage the redundancy yourself. I have a lot of things that are available online - it'd just be a pain to download all of it again. In fact, some of them you can now get in quite superior bluray encode complete series with very little work. I've decided to just go with JBOD on that and have proper backups of the really, really important stuff and copy-paste the folder to another drive if it's semi-important. That also means you can quickly prioritize if you just lose a drive what to save first. I've worked with RAID5. I've had RAID5 fail on me as one drive became wonky and one failed completely, meaning bye-bye the entire array as every attempt at recovery would fail. Never again, if I ever bothered it'd be a straight RAID1 array spanning many disks just to try preserving it online without going to offsite backup. RAID to me is a high availability feature, and it's just not very useful in a home setting. Either you're fine with the single disk reliability, or you need real disaster recovery (not just RAID but accidental delete/overwrite, theft, fire, whatever). Your requirements may vary but I think that's very typical.
I read the whole text - the minority opinion really gives a lot of insight into the majority opinion. Here's the basic summary as I read it:
The court rejects "machine or transformation" as a defining test, which is ultimately a test if the patent is concrete. At the same time, they strongly oppose abstract ideas as patentable and it's really awkward to see what's in between those. They give a broad interpretation of process, arguably because "times change" and we're in the "Information Age" despite that there have been endless business innovations over the last few hundred years that would be patent-eligible using this interpretation, yet nobody thought patentable. Still they oppose the patentability of abstract ideas with post-solution limitations, despite this being the majority of software patents. On the other hand, they explicitly recognize some business methods as patentable. In short, it's all very confusing but definitively patent-friendly than the minority opinion.
As an example of patents that I think would be void under this ruling, Apple had to license some patents from Apple that were essentially "sorting, grouping and hierarchical presentation on a portable audio player". I really hope that is seen as an abstract idea "sorting, grouping and hierarchical presentation" with a post-solution limitation "on portable audio player". At least I hope it will, because there wasn't much positive here. Perhaps the most positive is that they were narrowly divided and there's a fair chance it can go 5-4 the other way given a case they can not dismiss so easily. After all, none of them wanted to grant the patent and they really more or less declared it to be an abstract idea without giving any real guidelines on that.
Just FYI, that test had so many issues with no encoder settings, not even the same frames, using lossy screenshots and so much other bull it originally deserved a troll moderation. It has fixed some of the more glaring errors but nobody takes that guy seriously.
There's a university with a campus, and yet it doesn't have cell phone coverage? I guess it's just that here in Norway there's about 7 universities, obviously all with coverage. I don't even recall hearing of a college that didn't have it. This sounds like more of a remote outpost than a university to me, but kudos for an overinflated name.
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Closed source software may have some virtues, but taking constructive criticism is definitely a major weakness.
Closed source software is often unwilling to go the way you want, while paying an open source developer will give you any pet feature you want. But whenever I've put in a fairly serious draft showing how it'll not just help my case but actually be a boon to their product citing common use cases, they listen. Not always of course, but talking to a for-profit company is easy - you know what they want so you write a business case. I have no idea what the open source developer with a bug up his ass wants, some are genuinely interested in making the best possible product while others don't seem to give a fuck if they ignore what "most people" want to do. Which is fine, just set up a huge neon sign saying "Not really for general use, just a hackish tool we bang to make work. It doesn't do half you'd expect this kind of software to do and never will, and that's the way we like it".
Economics taking a statistical approach often assumes that in the long run you have a stationary time series. This is why economics and the quants will fail miserably.
Actually, my impression is that more economists work by Moore's law. There's no scientific basis for it, but year over year growth will continue exponentially without bound. There are small setbacks but that faith is pretty unwavering.
Hey mods, go watch the newest Futurama episode. Highly relevant.
And why I went "lol" instead of "huh?" to the GP is why I torrent shows...
I thought the point of the stock market was that people with money can buy shares into companies they think will be profitable. i pitty these idiots who try all their best to get as rich as possible as fast as possible. and I pitty the rest of the world, who see clearly that these guys treat everything like a lottery, and still trust them.
They operate under uncertainty of the future, which I think most of us do. You probably have different scenarios, some positive like getting a promotion or payraise, some neutral, some negative like a pay cut or getting laid off. Adjust as required if you're already unemployed. Depending on which you think is more likely, you probably have different strategies. For example, if you think you may be laid off you may be hedging trying to find a more secure job. If you're looking good, you might want to take the opportunity of a cheap foreclosure. If you're unemployed, you can do something alternative like invest in more education. Unless you're clairvoyant you're probably looking at a mixed strategy trying to account for all outcomes relative to their likelihood.
That's what they do too, on the macro level. Where's the economy going, and what investments stand to profit from that. Why do you have so much against getting value for the money? If I'm paying out of my salary, you bet I won't be pissing away money. If I'm running a company, I won't be pissing away money. And so if I have money to invest, why would I be pissing them away on companies that don't give any return? No, I'd want to model what's worth investing in and screw the rest. I know many that check out auction sites, sales and whatnot looking for a good buy. Why not a stock that's undervalued? The people I pity are those that don't understand risk, if you don't want risk keep the money in the bank. You can't just think that stocks will double your returns risk-free, it's just not how it works...
Goldman Sachs gave Brazil (the "favorite") only a 13% chance of winning the world cup.
It's been clear to me now for some time that soccer isn't about making the best team win. If a typical match result was like 9-4 it's very unlikely the weaker team would beat the stronger, and we could have done that by making scoring easier. But with results like 2-1 it's pretty much down to $random circumstance of the day. Why? Because in 80% of the matches it makes fans go "If only..." then our team would have won. You look at the one missed chance and ignore that the opponent had three. At 13% you realize this is mostly luck, it means there's at least ten countries that could win.
Personally I think Germany will pull it off though, impressive play and all their hardest competitors eliminated. Spain has Barcelona which is possibly the world's best team but their national team never quite made it, Netherlands and Uruguay have always been good nations but haven't made it to the top in ages. Because when you look at the list of winners, it's shorter than you might think and Germany is the only one left that has won in recent history (Uruguay won in 1930 and 1950).
If you refuse all exploration done using technology, you refuse everything we can't see with the naked eye. People care about discoveries, not about how long the wire between the sensor and the display is. If we send a probe 10 km below the sea, does it matter if the man watching the camera is inside the tin can or up on the surface watching the same monitor? Not to most people. Also, for 99.9% of us we'll never see it by our own eyes anyway, only what is documented. And a robot can document as well as we do, what would an astronaut on Mars tell us? Probably something like "Yep, it's just like the pictures. Want me to take some more?", so unless they can do something we can't make robots do it's just for the sake of doing it. Then it's only about bringing a bubble of human habitability there and back again, not to discover anything on the outside. That most people would not call exploring...
No, I would say trackers are perfectly in line with Sony vs Betamax. They're a neutral technology, and they have substantial non-infringing use. They are an enabler true, much like VCRs enabled you to copy TV shows, but if you say they promote copyright infringement then you're simply wrong. Once you start buying into that you start buying the MAFIAAs line that the tools themselves are criminal.
Nothing is guaranteed in stone, but if there's a threat it's that Microsoft has implemented something odd which the driver doesn't handle and fails spectacularly on. I haven't looked at exactly how NTFS driver support has been done, but if you're running the same ntfs-3g driver on Linux and Mac (it is Unixy enough for that, isn't it?) without touching a Windows box, you should be even safer. Not that I've had any problems with it for years.
Long story short, they need PR now. Next year the content industry can shut down the Pirate Party as TPB's ISP like they did with the last one and make most people forget it by 2014. So now they're hoping for controversy and press, because the Pirate Party is virtually untouchable from now and until the national election in September. It is highly questionable if running an ISP can be considered a "political activity", but just creating the debate on it is a victory. The downside is that they are again hitting the media almost as the Pirate Bay Party, when they spend the other half of the time telling everybody they're not a single issue party and there's more to their ideology than that. So they're more looking for someone to stomp their brass balls than not, really.
I'm not very surprised, personally I could quite easily answer for bit, byte, (u)char, (u)int, long, long long and the (u)int(8|16|32|64) variety, but WORD and DWORD I don't think I've seen since the Win32 API. To me that's somewhere in obscurity between an octet and a nibble, I guess it depends exactly what the job was about but I wouldn't expect every developer to know that. And while I generally stay out IT formally, I've been running circles around a few IT departments...
Sure, on the surface it sounds good for the RIAA being able to hold a gun to YouTube's head every time an infringing video is posted. But what would that in practice mean? It would mean that any video that hasn't been reviewed and approved by YouTube would be a liability - and knowing the RIAA, a big one. It'd basically be a license for the RIAA to print money off YouTube, since it's highly unlikely they could keep everything away. They could just continue to make increasingly more impossible standards of screening and cooperation for YouTube to fail.
I think if this ever gets to the Supreme court, Viacom will be handed a slapdown so big their head will be spinning for years so I almost hope they do. Imagine if every comment here had to pass through an editor in case it contained copyright text of Scientologists or whatnot, it'd be the death of all discussion forums. There's no way the Supreme Court would leave a sword of Damocles hanging over every site operator like that, they're more than smart enough to figure out their guideline would be the guideline for all copyrighted content.
Any bets on what serial killer YouTube will be likened to?
About the only way you can make sure you get decent PC hardware is to build it yourself or have enough knowledge to sub in and out parts if need be.
Really? Would you know about the "Deathstar" drives or faulty caps or Intel's math bug or nVidia's process problems or Creative's bus noise or every odd compatibility problem? Reality is that the PC has been changing at breakneck speeds, and it's a reason why they call it breakneck. In almost every other business, staying with the old model is just fine if the new one isn't ready. In the PC industry that's suicide, might as well throw yourself off a cliff and try to fly than wait for certain death.
We'll see stability when the ten year old computer is no more different than the ten year old car. Unfortunately that'll also be the day Moore's law is dead and computers have hit the ceiling. Personally I prefer the situation as it is now, as long as I have proper backups all else can be replaced. You can get a new, fully functional 1001PX nettop for about $240, at least that's what I paid for one (+VAT). Now I know that's still a lot of money for many, but to many it's not and there's always used laptops for less.
Yes, it sucks and nobody likes it but a 95% reliable cheap notebook beats a 99% reliable expensive one, and ~100% doesn't exist when you add in real world accidents not even a ToughBook would survive, like say house fire or getting stolen. You know, IBM tried this strategy in the 80s, PCs built to top tolerances and top durability and they ended up grossly overpriced and people bought clones and if they failed people threw them out and bought another clone still for less than the IBM. They are exactly as robust as the market wanted them to be, which is to say not very.
Because they don't understand enough about the physics of digital electrical signals? I assume you expect to be taken advantage of by your mechanic/doctor/banker because you don't know enough about cars/biology/financial devices? Your money deserves to be taken, right?
Monster cables are to regular cables what a chop shop is to a car mechanic, what a $100k homeopathic cure that may* cure cancer is to a doctor and what a person with a bridge to sell you is to a banker. Even a lay person should be able to smell a rat without having any particular education. Monster cables are for people that can "hear" their dollars, nothing else. People that are willing to pay good money for the sake of having a 10x more expensive cable than the rest, deserve to pay 10x more than the rest. Everybody else will return the monster cable because it made no difference at all.
the word terrorism is rather straight-forward: the use of force, or the threat of force, against a people in order to coerce them (...) Fighting a government has nothing to do with terrorism - it's fighting the actual people themselves.
I know I'm getting awfully close to trolling now, but... Granted the WTC towers were civilian, but the plane attack on the Pentagon and the final plane - bound for either the White House or the Capitol building - was squarely aimed at the government. I take it then by your definition that you don't consider these acts of terrorism?
I'm not trying to be facetious here, it really is hard. For example you might say use of force, I say poisoning a water supply. Pretty clear case of terror. You say all criminal acts, I say sedition laws that neuter free speech. Not terror. What about killing UN Peace Corps? They're clearly not an actual people, but you know the purpose is to politically destabilize the country and profit from the chaos. Assassinations of leaders that refuse to cooperate and wow to fight terror? You think that's not part of a campaign of terror? Finding a way to define terror that covers everything that is terror and excludes everything that isn't is not easy, maybe you think you got one but the world doesn't agree with you.
Will Monster make a special gold-plated, oxygenated cable for it?
Of course they will. So would I, if I could manage to get through the sales speech without breaking down in hysterical laughter. Some money just deserve to be taken.
You are confusing being a terrorist and being called a terrorist. Terrorism has a very strict definition. Your "freedom fighter" and "treasonous rebels" analogy is completely not comparable as the two terms have nothing to do with terrorism. What's so hard to understand about a word that is completely defined and without ambiguity?
Please enlighten us, as the definition of terrorism has its own wikipedia page with over 70 citations that we've never been able to agree on a concrete definition of what is a terrorist act. The UN has a political definition that is more fuzzy than a kitten, and comprehensive studies show there's very little common ground except violence or threats of violence.
For example, to pick apart the UN definition: "Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them."
War is usually enough to send people in a state of terror, and armed resistance is no exception - particularly not fighting in or around the the civil population. Laws and so criminals acts are very often defined by an oppressor or occupant, so what makes them legitimate? Particularly if you read "state of terror in (...) a group of persons" where the group of persons is the occupant - which again is very much in the eye of the beholder, then it becomes nonsense. Not to Godwin this post, but during WWII Norway was occupied by the Nazis and we capitulated. The Nazis installed a puppet government, which passed laws. With a sufficiently biased reading you can find that "Criminal acts (as defined by the puppet government) intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in a group of persons (the German occupation) for political purposes (to free Norway) are in any circumstance unjustifiable". Or if you insist they were, then I support some of the terrorists...
I think some already are, like MythBuntu. I might be wrong, but I think it uses the same mythtv package you can install on plain Ubuntu, the distro just drops many of the standard packages and makes you boot directly into myth. The latter might be good reason to have a separate distro, what a "sane" detault is probably depends on whether it's a dedicated appliance box or not.
I miss the WORLD-wide web :(
It's spelled b-i-t-t-o-r-r-e-n-t these days.
No, without DRM, the "This rental is currently unavailable in your country" videos wouldn't be available anywhere. Why don't people understand this? Without protection, content owners will not distribute their content in ways that they think need protection. It's not that hard to understand. They won't say "oh well, we can't do anything to protect our content - lets just upload it all to usenet and go home for the weekend". Your logic is insulting.
The threat to take their stuff and go home is an idle threat. Look at just about every industry under government regulation. Do they bitch about it? Yes. Do they keep doing it? Yes, because they still make money on it. I can with 100% certainty say that if we passed the anti-DMCA bill and DRM was outlawed, they'd still be trying to sell their movies. They can move from a DRM-free platform to a DRM'd one, but if we reject all the DRM'd platforms they'll start selling it openly, just like the iTunes store does for music. Which last I checked, has not lead to the collapse of the music industry despite the hyperbole. When home recording got big the VCR was likened to Jack the Ripper. The content industry keeps crying wolf, and the fairy tale is coming to its classic end.
Something can be borked about my hardware, like trying to run my car in -40C (or F) or whatever. But software doesn't break down the way cars do, unless cosmic rays flipped a bit in my executable. If cars worked as unreliably as browsers, in that if you hit exactly this curve under exactly those conditions while shifting gears and braking slightly the car would spontaneously combust there'd be a recall. If fact, if you're verified it on two machines of different setup I think you can safely assume this is a problem affecting most of them, at least on the same platform and such. It's just a question of how rarely the circumstances of the crash appear and if it's specific to exactly what you're doing.
For the vast majority of it though, it's simply to big to make regular offline backups. For that, a RAID array is most certainly better than keeping it all on single drives with NO failover whatsoever. I can live with the possibility that I MIGHT lose that data, but the risks are still greatly reduced.
One alternative is to drop RAID and manually manage the redundancy yourself. I have a lot of things that are available online - it'd just be a pain to download all of it again. In fact, some of them you can now get in quite superior bluray encode complete series with very little work. I've decided to just go with JBOD on that and have proper backups of the really, really important stuff and copy-paste the folder to another drive if it's semi-important. That also means you can quickly prioritize if you just lose a drive what to save first. I've worked with RAID5. I've had RAID5 fail on me as one drive became wonky and one failed completely, meaning bye-bye the entire array as every attempt at recovery would fail. Never again, if I ever bothered it'd be a straight RAID1 array spanning many disks just to try preserving it online without going to offsite backup. RAID to me is a high availability feature, and it's just not very useful in a home setting. Either you're fine with the single disk reliability, or you need real disaster recovery (not just RAID but accidental delete/overwrite, theft, fire, whatever). Your requirements may vary but I think that's very typical.
Apple had to license some patents from Creative
I read the whole text - the minority opinion really gives a lot of insight into the majority opinion. Here's the basic summary as I read it:
The court rejects "machine or transformation" as a defining test, which is ultimately a test if the patent is concrete. At the same time, they strongly oppose abstract ideas as patentable and it's really awkward to see what's in between those. They give a broad interpretation of process, arguably because "times change" and we're in the "Information Age" despite that there have been endless business innovations over the last few hundred years that would be patent-eligible using this interpretation, yet nobody thought patentable. Still they oppose the patentability of abstract ideas with post-solution limitations, despite this being the majority of software patents. On the other hand, they explicitly recognize some business methods as patentable. In short, it's all very confusing but definitively patent-friendly than the minority opinion.
As an example of patents that I think would be void under this ruling, Apple had to license some patents from Apple that were essentially "sorting, grouping and hierarchical presentation on a portable audio player". I really hope that is seen as an abstract idea "sorting, grouping and hierarchical presentation" with a post-solution limitation "on portable audio player". At least I hope it will, because there wasn't much positive here. Perhaps the most positive is that they were narrowly divided and there's a fair chance it can go 5-4 the other way given a case they can not dismiss so easily. After all, none of them wanted to grant the patent and they really more or less declared it to be an abstract idea without giving any real guidelines on that.
Just FYI, that test had so many issues with no encoder settings, not even the same frames, using lossy screenshots and so much other bull it originally deserved a troll moderation. It has fixed some of the more glaring errors but nobody takes that guy seriously.
There's a university with a campus, and yet it doesn't have cell phone coverage? I guess it's just that here in Norway there's about 7 universities, obviously all with coverage. I don't even recall hearing of a college that didn't have it. This sounds like more of a remote outpost than a university to me, but kudos for an overinflated name.