That, too, but once these kids grow up, they are already accustomed to being able to get movies quickly, conveniently, and in a format that gives them full control over how they watch them and what they do with them. A large fraction of these kids will probably gladly pay a small price for each download in a similar service, but will stick to BitTorrent if you try to take their freedom, convenience and inexpensive cost away from them.
I'm not sure I qualify as a broke teenage kid anymore since I've rounded 30 and make $100k+/year, but otherwise... discs are so 20th century, I tend to buy the movies I like and the shelf behind me is filling up with BluRays - but I don't watch them. Every movie on that shelf, except maybe some really, really old ones I've seen before I bought and even if I want to watch them again it's a double-click away. Might as well have been a paypal link for all I care and I'm not about to change my ways until there's a bluray-quality drm-free online store. Nothing that they have done or can do will stop the fact that bandwidth goes up, storage goes up, software gets better and every year one year's worth of the old generation dies and is replaced by the young generation. For all their little victories they shout about they lose ground every year.
I'm sorry, but I disagree. You're absolutely right that nobody is born a master, but some people simply don't have the knack. I've seen people that have been coding professionally for many years do things that make it obvious they don't get it and probably never will. Others see a pattern once and will pick it apart telling you if this is smart or really an anti-pattern. I don't mean the ideological flamewars of this approach is better than that approach, but picking good code from bad code, good patterns from bad patterns. There's always better but some are just consistently writing poor code.
Actually, quite many licenses are GPL-compatible without being the GPL. They tried very hard in the GPLv3 to make more licenses compatible by letting you add various bits:
a) Disclaiming warranty or limiting liability differently from the terms of sections 15 and 16 of this License; or b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version; or d) Limiting the use for publicity purposes of names of licensors or authors of the material; or e) Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade names, trademarks, or service marks; or f) Requiring indemnification of licensors and authors of that material by anyone who conveys the material (or modified versions of it) with contractual assumptions of liability to the recipient, for any liability that these contractual assumptions directly impose on those licensors and authors.
But yes, ultimately the GPL says "no more restrictions". It doesn't matter if those restrictions are a good idea or not, if noone thought to include them in the license text they're not permitted.
Oddly enough, if I look at the GPLv3 under patents there's one word I'm not seeing here: "Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version."
The word I don't see is "irrevocable". Does this mean Google's patent termination clause is GPLv3-compatible? Good question indeed.
Only a complete idiot would ignore how compatible a license is with other open source licenses. I can in two lines create an open source license that is totally open and totally useless. Watch:
Totally incompatible license v1.0 "You're free to use this code for anything without restriction if any and all code in derivatives is licensed under the Totally incompatible license v1.0"
This obviously meets every definition of the OSI, but it's not compatible with anything, not even the BSD license. It's utterly useless unless you want the whole universe to relicense.
It's just good common sense. Everybody knows it. It's been scientifically, irrefutably proven, so anybody who tells you differently has an agenda: there is no such thing as a government ever producing anything better than private industry, and the sooner we learn that, the sooner we'll be free of all the problems we've got here in modern socialist America -- and particularly free to ignore or simply be amused by obvious fictions like this article.
Here's the first best thing you should know about a private corporation:
A private corporation is not in any way interested in providing you with a good, cheap, modern product. If they could charge you exorbitant prices for a product with poor quality and old technology, slowly pacing it out to generate constant new purchases and maximize their profits they would. The only reason they improve is if they are exposed to competition, and only if there is no cheaper way to block it using market barriers, regulatory barriers, lock-in, price dumping and a host of other dirty tactics. If there is no anti-trust with teeth, if there are no government regulations all you get are extremely exploitative private monopolies, which are far worse than the government. You do realize that the US is the country with the most liberal rules and has been hit the hardest by the financial crisis right?
Well, we already heard they have a guy to take out IE6. I think WinME is already fairly dead, but if they could put a bounty on Vista's head too... WinXP and Win7 are actually nice products, Microsoft remind me a bit of Intel. They may hit their Itanics, but they keep coming back with a vengance.
Considering that the 875 is exactly the same as the 870 except for the unlocked multiplier, and the 870 has cost $562 then $342 is a quite significant drop and a better bargain no matter how you look at it but none of them are that great. Also, the title of Anandtech's conclusion is Final Words: Not for enthusiasts. It seems more like what's been happening in graphics cards, that you will be able to get some "pre-overclocked" systems. This is pretty much a competitior to AMDs $299 Phenom II X6 1090T, giving you 4 faster cores instead of 6 slower.
Though yeah, for desktop use I really feel the air is running out. New games are mostly built to be xbox/ps3 compatible and don't strain a modern PC much. Mostly it's server/workstation applications that really put them through their paces these days, but it's not that interesting for the home geek. And when games like Red Dead Redemption are xbox/ps3 with pc edition coming "later, maybe" you know the PC is dying as a game platform not matter how much you stick to your guns. I already have a Wii, I guess PC+Wii will get me through this generation but the next generation I fear it's almost certainly a console as my main gaming station. At least it'll make it easier to run Linux with what's left...
Well, yes and no. In a way everything is "evolved" but you can also put them to absolute tests of logic, memory, pattern recognition and so on not entirely unlike an IQ test for humans. In that sense some species will be smart and others less smart, depending on what evolutionary path they've taken. Whether that means they're less evolved or not really depends on the logic of the scale. The reason we see it as a goal is because to us it signifies a different stage of evolution where it's not about adapting to the environment, but where we adapt the environment to us. We no longer rely on primitive instincts but the collection and passing down of knowledge, through science and medicine we have made and continue to make huge leaps in our ability to survive.
Cockroaches are very evolved in terms of survivability, but they're very little evolved if we would like to have a conversation with it. That means a lot to us for example when it comes to how we treat nature, a tree is also evolved but cutting off a branch isn't like amputating a dog. And no doubt we started with simple organisms, so over time we have evolved towards more complex organisms, even if that does not imply that we are directly superior it is another reason for giving it direction. I think it is foremost though because we believe the ultimate evolutionary win is by intelligence, that through it we can make ourselves more survivable than the cockroach, fit to any environment that supports life and to create it or bring it with us where there isn't. For example To the best of our knowledge no life can live in open space or on the Moon, but we have brought humans there and back again anyway.
Copyright does not mean no-rights-to-copy. All BSD licensed work is copyrighted, for example, but you are free to make copies from now until the day you die.
Yes, but if I get a piece of code with no license I'd usually be wrong to assume it is BSD licensed.
So if you receive an MP3 with no copyright notice, what should you assume? Under copyright law it's all automatically copyrighted whether there's a notice or not, so unless there's a license grant in the MP3 info tags, a note that it's in the public domain or reference to an expired copyright then you should probably assume that you have no permissions. I suppose you could make a good faith argument that you thought Beethoven's 5th symphony was in the public domain because of the age when it turns out the recording is actually copyrighted, but it wouldn't work for most mainstream music.
Would you describe a 17 year old fucking her older boyfriend in a country where this is fully legal as child sex? And if not, how can it be child pornography? The meaning of "child" is in question here, not the difference between sex and pornography.
Uh, I don't vouch for any of this but I had no problem understanding the grandparent.
In the late 90s (what the original parent said)/early 00s (what the grandparent said) there was only 2chan, it was wild wild east and you could find all the stuff the original parent mentioned including child porn. Between then and now, child porn was cracked down on and moved to other 2chan-like sites. So when you go there now in 2010 and don't find child porn, that is perfectly logical and not in contradiction with the original parent.
Uh, because child porn producers can't enforce copyright on their work? So they aren't losing money because they're not earning it that way in the first place.
However, even the patronage model is potentially income. The more people want it, the more room there is for trading, buying access from middlemen collectors, paying for new and rare items, custom productions, maybe even live performances or participation. Even if you legalized it you could not prevent that some things would be "worth" something, and the greater the demand the greater the value. This is not unlike the old warez ratio ftps and similar, to get something you had to have something or some would offer you full leech access for a fee.
And even if we forget commercial operations altogether, will amateur production encourage more amateurs? I mean not even the RIAA has had the audacity to claim we should shut down YouTube because it could lead to more amateur musicians, but for child porn the question is very relevant. Normality is a loop effect, the more normal you find something the less inhibitions you have about it which again drives its status as normal and vice versa. If you legalize it, making it more normal to have and to watch aren't you also normalizing having those feelings and acting on those feelings?
Particularly I think that goes for children, you know children aren't generally supposed to have access to any sort of porn but they do anyway. What kind of normalizing effect do you think an underage girl watching another underage girl giving a blowjob would have on her? Do you think it will be easier or more difficult for a molester to have her do the same afterwards, when she's already seen and think of people her age in a sexual context? I mean you've already seen how they mimic music videos, monkey see means monkey do.
Practically, I don't think they can win against the Internet and all the ways to share information. But I don't expect them to ever give up trying...
You should not confuse age of consent with the age something is considered child pornography. in Europe the age of consent ranges from 13-16 but the limit for child pornography is almost universally 18. You get a world of hurt from the "world community", meaning mostly the US, if you suggest anything lower. The age of consent don't matter that much because then the US can stick their head in the sand and pretend that if they can't see it, it isn't happening.
Yeah, that's what I was wondering too the moment I saw the 1 million cycles... what I heard was that SLC is usually rated for ~100k writes and MLC for ~10k writes, so completely different type of chip. So I'm not sure what this data will be relevant for, but it's not SSDs... what's this for, BIOS chips or something?
Complex life is another thing, of course... (or - we're frakked, because the aliens will turn out to be total badasses; due to evolving in very harsh conditions;p )
I'm guessing where they evolved will make precious little difference, we've built tools to let us survive far more than our bodies could take. What's a little bone exoskeleton against a kevlar vest? I'm fairly sure it's only in Avatar you can fire a machine gun all over a beast's face and not have it become a bloody pulp.
Oh, I'm not sure the analysis is that hard. The more I read newspapers, the more I get the feeling they are becoming all the same only with different headers. Less and less is news they've dug up, more and more it's just current events they can do a story on. So it's slightly more than the commentary and reviews and rehashed press releases bloggers can do, sometimes they send people out with cameras and doing interviews but it's something every paper who bothers to check the event calender and has a press card can do. Constant rounds of layoffs confirm this impression, today you don't have have time for anything but "guaranteed" stories.
You can stay on that ride all the way down, but is there money in it? It's very little like journalism and more like AP or Reuters, mass producing stories for next to nothing. That, and the market can simply be oversaturated meaning companies will in the short term sell themselves for below cost rather than fold. Of course the one with the deepest pockets will be left standing but those pockets will be awfully much slimmer before you get there. So he's bailing on a market that he doesn't see a future in, for a market he thinks there might be a future in. If there isn't, I'm sure Murdoch has some infotainment shows on TV he can promote instead so it's not like the bets are that unhedged.
I don't think there needs to be a KDE5, at least not in the way there was KDE4. The differences between Qt3 and Qt4 were huge, and more or less demanded a huge rewrite. Since then Trolltech/Nokia has been extending it for many years, and while I suspect some things will be depreciated in Qt5 I haven't seen any signs of it needing the same kind of overhaul. When and if Qt5 comes - which there's no hint of yet - I think most of Qt4 will live on which means KDE won't need to rewrite much either. And of course KDE brought some of this upon themselves by trying to redo everyhting "right" when they were rewriting anyway, which is another story.
Oh yeah, and for all the people arguing about the SC split - it's something they absolutely should have done but before KDE 4.0, because there were at least three identifiable stages:
1) The "platform" is release-ready with the KDE4 libraries 2) The "DE" is release-ready with Plasma, applets, system configuration etc. 3) The "SC" is release-ready with the actual KDE4 applications
Some applications like KDevelop only hit 4.0.0 now this month. Too many things have all been "KDE" and in various stages of readiness and it's brought nothing but confusion.
How's the market cap not relevant? It is roughly the amount of money you'd need to buy it out, go private and live off the real world growth/dividends. "Nothing to do with Apple" does not mean "nothing to do with Apple's market", if the world economy goes to shit so does Apple's sales so naturally it impacts their value. Not to mention that such effects should hit both Apple and Microsoft equally and doesn't explain why the market now think Apple is more worth.
Yes, sometimes the market is wrong - sometimes horribly wrong like in the dotcom bubble. But you don't hear about all the time when the market is right or at least approximately right which is most of the time for most of the companies.
True, Apple's P/E is 20.69 versus Microsoft's 12.96 which means people are buying more into Apple's future than Microsoft. However, it's not that much either. Microsoft is about even with IBM (11.98), while Apple is about even with Oracle (19.58). If you want something that's more speculative you have for example Yahoo (27.74) or Red Hat (64.12).
I think the market is fairly right too. Microsoft is feeling the pressure on their margins from cheap low-end computers that just can't have a OS doubling the price, while Apple keeps on hitting it big in consumer electronics. Just look at the market for smart phones pre-iPhone and post-iPhone, they only have about 16-17% market share but most others only managed to sell the phone. Apple is the only one who has gotten a real application store going and it's already the dominating web browsing phone with some 70% of the market. There are some rather serious barriers to entry and Apple just steamrolled them without price dumping and is already very profitable. Unlike Microsoft which fights hard and long but still loses money on xboxes. The jury is still out on iPads but it looks like that from the iPhones they've got the beachhead of applications to create that market. They're certainly by far the best offering ever attempted in that market.
Judging from what I see now, I think Apple is building up the prerequisites for a real entertainment center. The iTunes store keeps on getting more and more TV series and movies, with the iPhone/iPad they're building a huge collection of minigames and such. Not just another software update the AppleTV, but a real hardware revamp and reboot as an "iCenter" or whatever with much more focus on applications and games as well. With a touch sensitive remote making it kinda like iPhone/iPad but you touch on the remote, look on the big screen. There's still plenty potential in Apple, Microsoft not so much.
I mean, would you eat at a place that said "90% of our food is bought from trusted sources"?
Wrong analogy. You've never eaten anything, or drunk anything that has any form of secret recipe? Everyone from family restaurants to Coca Cola have secrets, millions eat and drink each day regardless. Oh, we've not gone over the source just like we haven't had a food taster check it for poison, but we feel safe enough. If I can switch browser without any great loss once there's actual proof of misdoing, I'm fine with that. It's the lock-ins and networks effect that hurt, if you have to either forgive them or really lose something. But web browsers don't have either with IE below 60%.
If you can't figure out that by default opening up a web browser you go to web servers using the protocol normally used for that, I don't think that's the browser's problem. It's almost as redundant as the wwws we used to have in front of every website.
Open software is open software. It does not come with any promise that you have hardware that you can retask as you please.
Perhaps this is why OSI is useless and FSF useful despite the oddities of RMS, it's the same "software you can look at but not touch" all over again. If you have read the story of why RMS created the GPL it was obvious that he wanted it to fix his broken printer, not that other people from other companies could build other printers with the same driver. There's no technical difference between fixing a simple bug and retasking the hardware, the latter is a consequence of the former which was clearly part of the purpose from the very beginning. The current half-open devices are a failure of the spirit of the license, if not the words of the GPLv1/2.
Remember that the GPLv2 was designed in 1991, before the PGP controversy and long before public signing of anything became common, when encryption was highly guarded "munitions" and only special builds could have more than 40 bit encryption, before the first PlayStation and the rise of closed consoles and gadgets, on Wikipedia there's not a single digital DRM system list going back that far and it certainly was not backed by DMCA-like laws making them a crime to circumvent. They missed it, plain and simple. Just like they missed patent covenants and other trickery, but it was never their purpose to allow it.
Developers and users come as chicken and egg, it makes sense to develop what you use it and it makes sense to use what gives the users freedom. Some projects now have the luxury of not caring about the GPLv3 because they're way past the chicken and egg and will go on regardless, like for example Linux. But for the users, the GPLv3 is undeniably better so all other things equal they should always go with the GPLv3. In the initial analysis, it doesn't matter where the users are. But eventually if the users choose GPLv3, then users will become developers and write GPLv3 code. Almost everyone is a user before they become a developer, except the preciously few founders.
Slashdot Mirror
Essentially, broke teenage kids want free stuff.
That, too, but once these kids grow up, they are already accustomed to being able to get movies quickly, conveniently, and in a format that gives them full control over how they watch them and what they do with them. A large fraction of these kids will probably gladly pay a small price for each download in a similar service, but will stick to BitTorrent if you try to take their freedom, convenience and inexpensive cost away from them.
I'm not sure I qualify as a broke teenage kid anymore since I've rounded 30 and make $100k+/year, but otherwise... discs are so 20th century, I tend to buy the movies I like and the shelf behind me is filling up with BluRays - but I don't watch them. Every movie on that shelf, except maybe some really, really old ones I've seen before I bought and even if I want to watch them again it's a double-click away. Might as well have been a paypal link for all I care and I'm not about to change my ways until there's a bluray-quality drm-free online store. Nothing that they have done or can do will stop the fact that bandwidth goes up, storage goes up, software gets better and every year one year's worth of the old generation dies and is replaced by the young generation. For all their little victories they shout about they lose ground every year.
I'm sorry, but I disagree. You're absolutely right that nobody is born a master, but some people simply don't have the knack. I've seen people that have been coding professionally for many years do things that make it obvious they don't get it and probably never will. Others see a pattern once and will pick it apart telling you if this is smart or really an anti-pattern. I don't mean the ideological flamewars of this approach is better than that approach, but picking good code from bad code, good patterns from bad patterns. There's always better but some are just consistently writing poor code.
Actually, quite many licenses are GPL-compatible without being the GPL. They tried very hard in the GPLv3 to make more licenses compatible by letting you add various bits:
a) Disclaiming warranty or limiting liability differently from the terms of sections 15 and 16 of this License; or
b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it; or
c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in reasonable ways as different from the original version; or
d) Limiting the use for publicity purposes of names of licensors or authors of the material; or
e) Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some trade names, trademarks, or service marks; or
f) Requiring indemnification of licensors and authors of that material by anyone who conveys the material (or modified versions of it) with contractual assumptions of liability to the recipient, for any liability that these contractual assumptions directly impose on those licensors and authors.
But yes, ultimately the GPL says "no more restrictions". It doesn't matter if those restrictions are a good idea or not, if noone thought to include them in the license text they're not permitted.
Oddly enough, if I look at the GPLv3 under patents there's one word I'm not seeing here:
"Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version."
The word I don't see is "irrevocable". Does this mean Google's patent termination clause is GPLv3-compatible? Good question indeed.
Only a complete idiot would ignore how compatible a license is with other open source licenses. I can in two lines create an open source license that is totally open and totally useless. Watch:
Totally incompatible license v1.0
"You're free to use this code for anything without restriction if any and all code in derivatives is licensed under the Totally incompatible license v1.0"
This obviously meets every definition of the OSI, but it's not compatible with anything, not even the BSD license. It's utterly useless unless you want the whole universe to relicense.
Only if you want your code on the daily WTF.
It's just good common sense. Everybody knows it. It's been scientifically, irrefutably proven, so anybody who tells you differently has an agenda: there is no such thing as a government ever producing anything better than private industry, and the sooner we learn that, the sooner we'll be free of all the problems we've got here in modern socialist America -- and particularly free to ignore or simply be amused by obvious fictions like this article.
Here's the first best thing you should know about a private corporation:
A private corporation is not in any way interested in providing you with a good, cheap, modern product. If they could charge you exorbitant prices for a product with poor quality and old technology, slowly pacing it out to generate constant new purchases and maximize their profits they would. The only reason they improve is if they are exposed to competition, and only if there is no cheaper way to block it using market barriers, regulatory barriers, lock-in, price dumping and a host of other dirty tactics. If there is no anti-trust with teeth, if there are no government regulations all you get are extremely exploitative private monopolies, which are far worse than the government. You do realize that the US is the country with the most liberal rules and has been hit the hardest by the financial crisis right?
modern socialist America
Guess not. Guess you want it to hurt even more.
Well, we already heard they have a guy to take out IE6. I think WinME is already fairly dead, but if they could put a bounty on Vista's head too... WinXP and Win7 are actually nice products, Microsoft remind me a bit of Intel. They may hit their Itanics, but they keep coming back with a vengance.
Considering that the 875 is exactly the same as the 870 except for the unlocked multiplier, and the 870 has cost $562 then $342 is a quite significant drop and a better bargain no matter how you look at it but none of them are that great. Also, the title of Anandtech's conclusion is Final Words: Not for enthusiasts. It seems more like what's been happening in graphics cards, that you will be able to get some "pre-overclocked" systems. This is pretty much a competitior to AMDs $299 Phenom II X6 1090T, giving you 4 faster cores instead of 6 slower.
Though yeah, for desktop use I really feel the air is running out. New games are mostly built to be xbox/ps3 compatible and don't strain a modern PC much. Mostly it's server/workstation applications that really put them through their paces these days, but it's not that interesting for the home geek. And when games like Red Dead Redemption are xbox/ps3 with pc edition coming "later, maybe" you know the PC is dying as a game platform not matter how much you stick to your guns. I already have a Wii, I guess PC+Wii will get me through this generation but the next generation I fear it's almost certainly a console as my main gaming station. At least it'll make it easier to run Linux with what's left...
Well, yes and no. In a way everything is "evolved" but you can also put them to absolute tests of logic, memory, pattern recognition and so on not entirely unlike an IQ test for humans. In that sense some species will be smart and others less smart, depending on what evolutionary path they've taken. Whether that means they're less evolved or not really depends on the logic of the scale. The reason we see it as a goal is because to us it signifies a different stage of evolution where it's not about adapting to the environment, but where we adapt the environment to us. We no longer rely on primitive instincts but the collection and passing down of knowledge, through science and medicine we have made and continue to make huge leaps in our ability to survive.
Cockroaches are very evolved in terms of survivability, but they're very little evolved if we would like to have a conversation with it. That means a lot to us for example when it comes to how we treat nature, a tree is also evolved but cutting off a branch isn't like amputating a dog. And no doubt we started with simple organisms, so over time we have evolved towards more complex organisms, even if that does not imply that we are directly superior it is another reason for giving it direction. I think it is foremost though because we believe the ultimate evolutionary win is by intelligence, that through it we can make ourselves more survivable than the cockroach, fit to any environment that supports life and to create it or bring it with us where there isn't. For example To the best of our knowledge no life can live in open space or on the Moon, but we have brought humans there and back again anyway.
Copyright does not mean no-rights-to-copy. All BSD licensed work is copyrighted, for example, but you are free to make copies from now until the day you die.
Yes, but if I get a piece of code with no license I'd usually be wrong to assume it is BSD licensed.
So if you receive an MP3 with no copyright notice, what should you assume? Under copyright law it's all automatically copyrighted whether there's a notice or not, so unless there's a license grant in the MP3 info tags, a note that it's in the public domain or reference to an expired copyright then you should probably assume that you have no permissions. I suppose you could make a good faith argument that you thought Beethoven's 5th symphony was in the public domain because of the age when it turns out the recording is actually copyrighted, but it wouldn't work for most mainstream music.
Pornography and Sex are not the same thing.
Would you describe a 17 year old fucking her older boyfriend in a country where this is fully legal as child sex? And if not, how can it be child pornography? The meaning of "child" is in question here, not the difference between sex and pornography.
A trivial search will show the Supreme Court will rule with only 8 voting members, example of a 5-3 decision.
Uh, I don't vouch for any of this but I had no problem understanding the grandparent.
In the late 90s (what the original parent said) /early 00s (what the grandparent said) there was only 2chan, it was wild wild east and you could find all the stuff the original parent mentioned including child porn. Between then and now, child porn was cracked down on and moved to other 2chan-like sites. So when you go there now in 2010 and don't find child porn, that is perfectly logical and not in contradiction with the original parent.
Uh, because child porn producers can't enforce copyright on their work? So they aren't losing money because they're not earning it that way in the first place.
However, even the patronage model is potentially income. The more people want it, the more room there is for trading, buying access from middlemen collectors, paying for new and rare items, custom productions, maybe even live performances or participation. Even if you legalized it you could not prevent that some things would be "worth" something, and the greater the demand the greater the value. This is not unlike the old warez ratio ftps and similar, to get something you had to have something or some would offer you full leech access for a fee.
And even if we forget commercial operations altogether, will amateur production encourage more amateurs? I mean not even the RIAA has had the audacity to claim we should shut down YouTube because it could lead to more amateur musicians, but for child porn the question is very relevant. Normality is a loop effect, the more normal you find something the less inhibitions you have about it which again drives its status as normal and vice versa. If you legalize it, making it more normal to have and to watch aren't you also normalizing having those feelings and acting on those feelings?
Particularly I think that goes for children, you know children aren't generally supposed to have access to any sort of porn but they do anyway. What kind of normalizing effect do you think an underage girl watching another underage girl giving a blowjob would have on her? Do you think it will be easier or more difficult for a molester to have her do the same afterwards, when she's already seen and think of people her age in a sexual context? I mean you've already seen how they mimic music videos, monkey see means monkey do.
Practically, I don't think they can win against the Internet and all the ways to share information. But I don't expect them to ever give up trying...
You should not confuse age of consent with the age something is considered child pornography. in Europe the age of consent ranges from 13-16 but the limit for child pornography is almost universally 18. You get a world of hurt from the "world community", meaning mostly the US, if you suggest anything lower. The age of consent don't matter that much because then the US can stick their head in the sand and pretend that if they can't see it, it isn't happening.
Yeah, that's what I was wondering too the moment I saw the 1 million cycles... what I heard was that SLC is usually rated for ~100k writes and MLC for ~10k writes, so completely different type of chip. So I'm not sure what this data will be relevant for, but it's not SSDs... what's this for, BIOS chips or something?
Dude, at work I used to have an application with five commands:
login [user/pass@server:port]
logout
verbose [on|off]
output [file]
call [file]
Still I had to train a guy to use it, not an old geezer but younger than me in his 20s. Everything needs a manual...
Complex life is another thing, of course... (or - we're frakked, because the aliens will turn out to be total badasses; due to evolving in very harsh conditions ;p )
I'm guessing where they evolved will make precious little difference, we've built tools to let us survive far more than our bodies could take. What's a little bone exoskeleton against a kevlar vest? I'm fairly sure it's only in Avatar you can fire a machine gun all over a beast's face and not have it become a bloody pulp.
Oh, I'm not sure the analysis is that hard. The more I read newspapers, the more I get the feeling they are becoming all the same only with different headers. Less and less is news they've dug up, more and more it's just current events they can do a story on. So it's slightly more than the commentary and reviews and rehashed press releases bloggers can do, sometimes they send people out with cameras and doing interviews but it's something every paper who bothers to check the event calender and has a press card can do. Constant rounds of layoffs confirm this impression, today you don't have have time for anything but "guaranteed" stories.
You can stay on that ride all the way down, but is there money in it? It's very little like journalism and more like AP or Reuters, mass producing stories for next to nothing. That, and the market can simply be oversaturated meaning companies will in the short term sell themselves for below cost rather than fold. Of course the one with the deepest pockets will be left standing but those pockets will be awfully much slimmer before you get there. So he's bailing on a market that he doesn't see a future in, for a market he thinks there might be a future in. If there isn't, I'm sure Murdoch has some infotainment shows on TV he can promote instead so it's not like the bets are that unhedged.
I don't think there needs to be a KDE5, at least not in the way there was KDE4. The differences between Qt3 and Qt4 were huge, and more or less demanded a huge rewrite. Since then Trolltech/Nokia has been extending it for many years, and while I suspect some things will be depreciated in Qt5 I haven't seen any signs of it needing the same kind of overhaul. When and if Qt5 comes - which there's no hint of yet - I think most of Qt4 will live on which means KDE won't need to rewrite much either. And of course KDE brought some of this upon themselves by trying to redo everyhting "right" when they were rewriting anyway, which is another story.
Oh yeah, and for all the people arguing about the SC split - it's something they absolutely should have done but before KDE 4.0, because there were at least three identifiable stages:
1) The "platform" is release-ready with the KDE4 libraries
2) The "DE" is release-ready with Plasma, applets, system configuration etc.
3) The "SC" is release-ready with the actual KDE4 applications
Some applications like KDevelop only hit 4.0.0 now this month. Too many things have all been "KDE" and in various stages of readiness and it's brought nothing but confusion.
How's the market cap not relevant? It is roughly the amount of money you'd need to buy it out, go private and live off the real world growth/dividends. "Nothing to do with Apple" does not mean "nothing to do with Apple's market", if the world economy goes to shit so does Apple's sales so naturally it impacts their value. Not to mention that such effects should hit both Apple and Microsoft equally and doesn't explain why the market now think Apple is more worth.
Yes, sometimes the market is wrong - sometimes horribly wrong like in the dotcom bubble. But you don't hear about all the time when the market is right or at least approximately right which is most of the time for most of the companies.
True, Apple's P/E is 20.69 versus Microsoft's 12.96 which means people are buying more into Apple's future than Microsoft. However, it's not that much either. Microsoft is about even with IBM (11.98), while Apple is about even with Oracle (19.58). If you want something that's more speculative you have for example Yahoo (27.74) or Red Hat (64.12).
I think the market is fairly right too. Microsoft is feeling the pressure on their margins from cheap low-end computers that just can't have a OS doubling the price, while Apple keeps on hitting it big in consumer electronics. Just look at the market for smart phones pre-iPhone and post-iPhone, they only have about 16-17% market share but most others only managed to sell the phone. Apple is the only one who has gotten a real application store going and it's already the dominating web browsing phone with some 70% of the market. There are some rather serious barriers to entry and Apple just steamrolled them without price dumping and is already very profitable. Unlike Microsoft which fights hard and long but still loses money on xboxes. The jury is still out on iPads but it looks like that from the iPhones they've got the beachhead of applications to create that market. They're certainly by far the best offering ever attempted in that market.
Judging from what I see now, I think Apple is building up the prerequisites for a real entertainment center. The iTunes store keeps on getting more and more TV series and movies, with the iPhone/iPad they're building a huge collection of minigames and such. Not just another software update the AppleTV, but a real hardware revamp and reboot as an "iCenter" or whatever with much more focus on applications and games as well. With a touch sensitive remote making it kinda like iPhone/iPad but you touch on the remote, look on the big screen. There's still plenty potential in Apple, Microsoft not so much.
I mean, would you eat at a place that said "90% of our food is bought from trusted sources"?
Wrong analogy. You've never eaten anything, or drunk anything that has any form of secret recipe? Everyone from family restaurants to Coca Cola have secrets, millions eat and drink each day regardless. Oh, we've not gone over the source just like we haven't had a food taster check it for poison, but we feel safe enough. If I can switch browser without any great loss once there's actual proof of misdoing, I'm fine with that. It's the lock-ins and networks effect that hurt, if you have to either forgive them or really lose something. But web browsers don't have either with IE below 60%.
If you can't figure out that by default opening up a web browser you go to web servers using the protocol normally used for that, I don't think that's the browser's problem. It's almost as redundant as the wwws we used to have in front of every website.
Open software is open software. It does not come with any promise that you have hardware that you can retask as you please.
Perhaps this is why OSI is useless and FSF useful despite the oddities of RMS, it's the same "software you can look at but not touch" all over again. If you have read the story of why RMS created the GPL it was obvious that he wanted it to fix his broken printer, not that other people from other companies could build other printers with the same driver. There's no technical difference between fixing a simple bug and retasking the hardware, the latter is a consequence of the former which was clearly part of the purpose from the very beginning. The current half-open devices are a failure of the spirit of the license, if not the words of the GPLv1/2.
Remember that the GPLv2 was designed in 1991, before the PGP controversy and long before public signing of anything became common, when encryption was highly guarded "munitions" and only special builds could have more than 40 bit encryption, before the first PlayStation and the rise of closed consoles and gadgets, on Wikipedia there's not a single digital DRM system list going back that far and it certainly was not backed by DMCA-like laws making them a crime to circumvent. They missed it, plain and simple. Just like they missed patent covenants and other trickery, but it was never their purpose to allow it.
Developers and users come as chicken and egg, it makes sense to develop what you use it and it makes sense to use what gives the users freedom. Some projects now have the luxury of not caring about the GPLv3 because they're way past the chicken and egg and will go on regardless, like for example Linux. But for the users, the GPLv3 is undeniably better so all other things equal they should always go with the GPLv3. In the initial analysis, it doesn't matter where the users are. But eventually if the users choose GPLv3, then users will become developers and write GPLv3 code. Almost everyone is a user before they become a developer, except the preciously few founders.