I can understand the police thinking, "wow, he's locked down the network, and now trying to run away. What is going to do to the network once he gets to Mexico?" Secondly, this:
Or better yet, not do? Just drop off the map like a giant "fuck you" and force them to hard-reset everything. To me he certainly sounds like the type who could have done it.
And when you complain that Linux has low adoption around the world (in desktops) that is your problem.
If we were one being with one set of priorities, perhaps. But many in the open source community don't see that as their problem as long as it works for them. Most recognize that there'd be perks by having a large market share, but it's not really an itch they feel like scratching. They just want to get together with other tech geeks and develop tools for tech geeks. Others want to help newbies any way they can and see the lack of adoption like a problem, but there's no way to make everybody march in line and have the same opinions. And in between you have the people that are willing to help you out some, but don't want to give the little finger and have their arm chewed off.
To be fair, being called an idiot instead of a reasonable reply is pretty much inherent to the entire IT community. We're an entire culture of people that have long since forgotten that our job is ultimately to provide a customer service.
I think the problem is that most of the people calling you an idiot, are not AT WORK. They're more like an after hours meeting of professionals, and many of the people asking are like going up to a bunch of doctors discussing medical procedures (their version of tools) and asking them to take a look at the rash on their leg. Yes, they probably could examine him but they don't want to, don't care and just want you to go away. And if you keep bugging them they'll tell you that you're an idiot. Come back for a paid appointment if you want customer service.
Many open source projects exist only to share source with other developers, they don't care about delivering a "product" or "service". Even if your problems are real, nobody is obliged to care that it doesn't work for you. Sure having users means it's a good project but they'd never run an ad campaign to get more even if they had the money. Particularly not if it's the kind of users that ask them to be the Support Desk, User Training, Free Customization or CS101. The exception are the projects and distros that actually care about customers because they're part of a cash flow, but most are all volunteers.
Particularly the cost of software completely eludes people, they're used to buying COTS software for a few dollars because it is sold in thousands if not millions of copies. Even a small enhancement will including specification, design, implementation and testing easily cost hundreds of dollars even if you charge minimum wage. Certainly way past the point most people do favors just because you asked so nicely. Same with real incident support, getting anyone with more than a support script to look at your case requires a really costly support plan.
In fact, many times I almost feel open source works almost opposite of a normal support desk. We may assist you in solving your own problem, but it's not our problem. If you think gathering all those logs, creating steps to reproduce, reading that debug output, applying those patches, rebuilding the kernel or whatever is too much work it's your problem not ours. If you can pin it down but nobody will write a patch it's your problem not ours. If you can't find the bug it's still your problem not ours. Most the anger outbreaks I see are from people desperately trying to say "It's not my problem, and no matter how much you nag it's not my problem."
If you try hard enough at hiding it, you could be in a situation where the circumstantial evidence is enough to push a jury past the "reasonable doubt" threshold, in which case you've saved yourself nothing.
Almost all the copyright infringement cases are civil, so it's the boundary of "preponderance of evidence". It is very rare that circumstantial evidence is enough in a criminal trial.
Unless I'm mistaken this is at least a violation of the Berne treaty, you can't treat domestic and international copyrights from the signatories differently... maybe we should put them on some sort of copyright watchlist;)
Been there, done that... actually I'm picking up my new video camera tomorrow. No wonder when the US model costs 999$ and the EU model 999E. Plus I get another 10 fps going from 50 to 60 fps as a bonus, as long as it doesn't break.
Already been done on a plane like they use for astronaut training I think, but from what I gather it was more like floating together because the motions of sex lead them to drift apart. I'm sure you could make it happen by pinning against a wall but then it'd probably be like on earth except much more awkward. And even if they hadn't, I think this generation has seen too much porn to care about porn in space. At least moviesex in space, if not the real kind.
Bad analogy because if you've never heard of the microbe there's something fishy, why hasn't there been any official alert? But everybody knows there are viruses on the Internet and that you have to protect yourself against them, it's a confirmed fact you should have anti-virus. If everybody had to filter their water and you offered the ultramagic superwhoopie cleanex filter 3000 for the low, low price of 199$ many people would buy it.
Name one other profession or trade or area of expertise where expert advice is so routinely ignored for such trivial reasons. It doesn't happen with doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics or insurance agents.
Ohh I think I can answer this one. Users don't give a rat's ass whether the system is working, they just want it to be easy for themselves. Nothing so easy as to sit back, relax and say "The computer/network is down, IT is working on it. I guess there'll be a three hour lunch break today." It's the people paying that should be more hard on the questions of what REAL productivity impact does this have on the user and what REAL productivity impact could not upgrading have.
But you also have to remember the corporate politics of it. Ordering all web apps to be upgraded or replaced to be compatible with IE7/8 is a huge cost that's easy to put up on a powerpoint. A flow of IE6 problems may be hard to all count and estimate, and while it might add up over time it won't have nearly the same impact on this quarter's earnings. Particularly if it involves the risks of future security breaches where the estimates can be dismissed as alarmist. If you have the right (wrong?) kind of manager he'll figure that in a year or two he'll be at another position. So your request is declined, he gets a higher bonus by spending nothing now and by the time you really must do something with the problem it's no longer his problem. Even when people act rationally I'd go with personal rationality over corporate rationality 9 times out of 10.
I would have loved to work with a free software solution, had there been one in the line of business I'm in. I'm a consultant working on implementation of a closed source software product from another company. Very often we get asked for changes to make it work for that client that we have to just pass to our vendor as an "enhancement requests" which won't happen in anything close to the timeframe the client wants. I'm quite sure we spend more time and money creating workarounds and quickfixes than it'd take to fix the product and submit patches. So the money is there, the incentives are all correct, the value of having free software is obvious, what's the issue?
If the open source project wasn't competing with "itself", there'd be enough money in the system to package the product, provide support for it and develop it to keep and take customers from other products. But instead the competition means you get companies providing only support, but does nothing to evolve the software. Projects that only package it, but does nothing to evolve the software. Or companies rolling their own support, but does nothing to evolve the software. So the prices are pushed down, core development grinds to a halt and eventually the product is replaced with closed source that has kept up with the times. It sucks but there you have it.
I've wondered whether it'd be possible to use some form of hybrid license, where the company would license the code for some time (like 1-5 years) where all license holders could create and share derivatives but outsiders would have to pay for a (reasonable and non discriminatory) license before becoming open source. Not to really make a closed source product but to keep that base cashflow so core development continues. Sorta like "GPLish provided you and everyone you give it to holds a licence" for X years and pure GPL afterwards. It could just become a mess like the BSD advertising clause, but it could be the incentive to do more development and not just service and support.
The big downside is that there's no such community today, you'd have to try creating a new camp and you could only use BSD code in the process since this is obviously incompatble with the GPL. Hell, in the years there's a fee required to get on board it's not even OSI open source. Naturally code made into open source with that license should be compatible with the licence so you're buliding a codebase other people can create other temporarily non-free projects on. But that this in total could let people earn some for the development itself and an edge in support by baking the support fee into the licence while producing code for the community.
Software is typically a means to an end. You don't install Linux just to have Linux. You install it because you want to do something with it. Same with web browsers, office suites, and just about any other software. The exception would be games which are meant to be consumed similarly to movies and music.
I think your distinction is also why we see so much decent free software minus games and not so much of the others. It's a tool and refining it to make a better tool is desirable to most people. Games and such I want to consume, you go through a campaign or story or levels of difficulty but you don't go over and redo and refine many times over. It's no surprise to me that the most common open source games are FPS and strategy games where you play the same maps or procedurally generated ones over and over.
If you want to compare the industries, it makes sense to compare the media industry to the niche game software industry. But here you'll find very similar actions. Anti-piracy is the norm.
My impression would be quite opposite, that the mainstream game industry has far more and worse DRM than the niche games. Niche games tend to not have the time and money to waste on creative new DRMs, they might slap a standard copy protection on it but that's also it. More often than not they rely on the fact that they are niche to say "Please pay for this game, we don't have execs with multi-million dollar salaries we're just hoping the numbers work out so we can keep making games." and I'm sure it has some effect.
If you're already using a product that is good after all your criteria, why bother switching? Very often the game changers are ways to use technology that you never realized was possible. To take one example, take the Nintendo Wii. I've been a PC gamer and was happy with those, I never articulated a need for anything like the Wii. But once it's there and you can see it and try it you go "Wow, that's cool" and then you want it.
I don't need another google, google is great for what it does. But is there some other search service that could do something else that I don't yet know that I want? Maybe, I guess. I don't own an Apple product but I have no problem seeing they've made many such releases. There's many, many people I see that would have been very hard to convince to switch brands to another "regular" phone and never saw need of a smart phone before, but are iPhone fans now. They never wanted an iPhone before Apple produced one and showed them what it could do.
I had some of those growing up and it wasn't really an engineering failure, it was a mentality failure. IBM didn't built PCs, they built tanks. Their keyboards are infamous and still equally usable today 20 years later as when they were new.
That was equally much the case with the rest of their PCs, using very high quality equipment operated under very less than ideal random home/office conditions and with very much consumer software of consumer quality, not server quality. In short, it made no sense.
The result was that IBM priced themselves way out of the market of cheaper clones. It was cheaper and better to buy a clone, throw it out if it failed and buy another. You just don't do that with big iron or servers, but with desktops hell yeah.
Like the article said, it wasn't more of a failure than that PS/2 ports become the dominating keyboard/mouse connector. If there was every a silly move by IBM there it was giving away the software market to Microsoft, but the average desktop market was doomed long before the PS/2.
3) Some people use their soapbox to promote moral relativism.
I'm not sure about moral relativism, but certainly Internet has promoted moral pluralism. It's never been easier to come in contact with people of all the greater and lesser religions and other secular varieties of morality ranging from humanism to atheism to whatever. If you go back 50 years ago living in a fairly small mostly Christian village your beliefs and morals were highly insulated against outside influence.
"Because it's in the ten commandments" is an absurd argument when arguing morality with a Buddhist, you have to actually use reason to justify your morality and maybe realize other people have a different view without being unreasonable or evil. If the Church is reduced to be mere symbols and rituals of faith while morality becomes more a global matter of how people should treat each other rather than a matter between humans and God, the Church will lose very much of its power.
Just to be clear on what I meant by that, certainly the Church says a lot about how humans should relate to each other but some things, completely voluntary things like sex outside marriage, people say are "sins against God". As opposed to "thou shalt not kill", which is quite clearly a crime against another person. Going across religious boundaries you can't find a common religious morality but you can find a common secular morality. And in that morality, the Pope has much less influence.
Conversely, I was told by a lawyer that if I in any way censored or limited speech on a web site I used to run then I could've been construed as the 'Editor/Publisher', and could've be held liable for the content. If I took no action, I was in the clear. Interesting twist on common sense, no?
Well, I'd call bullshit on your lawyer's interpretation because about 99% of all online forums out there have a way to report posts to a moderator/editor/administrator who can and will remove grossly offensive content, spam, violations of ToS and so on. I've never heard of any case where anyone has lost their immunity over this and it'd be a helluva precedent for warez sites to claim they can not take down any links to avoid breaking the law. However, what you should be extremely careful with is doing any editing of posts, either leave it be or nuke from orbit. Also, you should thread very lighting in commenting on it so you don't become the content generator of a harmful message yourself.
Good luck on that, it's not unusual for consumers to have completely different rights than corporations. Nor is it illegal for corporations to be nicer than they legally can be. Stuff like you describe is the reason why you ALL get shitty service in the US, because if one knowledgeable guy answers a question outside the script he'll call back more and demand that service or cry foul and sue or the next person who gets an average drone will cry foul and sue for discrimination or whatnot absurd reason. It's very hard to provide equally good service but real easy to offer equally shitty service.
True, it is based on open source but it's more than a little questionable to say it could never be the same without open source. They could have licensed Solaris or AIX or some other closed source unixish kernel if they wanted to and still built the same libraries on top. Everybody seems to jump up and down that it got open source somewhere down there but I would say it is fairly irrelevant to the success or failure of OS X. There's a reason that the desktop market has 5.33% OS X and 0.01% OpenBSD.
What good is freedom of expression if your not willing to back it with responsibility of that expression?
You can speak out about every dictatorship, every corrupt regime - but some only once. "Responsibility" is one thing, being put up against the wall and shot or imprisoned indefinately is another.
From what I understand the solid state storage act like mini capacitors that'll eventually lose charge. Never mind all the physical damage, short circuits and other things it might be killed from. In short, it's not very permanent. Only redundancy is permanent, I imagine with 10Mbit+ fiber connections we'll just synch to a storage service or friends and family or the cloud (buzzword alert) and our SSDs/HDDs are more for keeping our data on the go.
The confusing word here is software, not free. If he had said "free Blu-ray authoring tool" I would have thought gratis, but "free software Blu-ray authoring tool" makes me think of a FLOSS Blu-ray authoring tool. Otherwise the word would be redundant, like opposed to what? Are there any authoring tools not made of software? I suppose you could say as opposed to a dedicated appliance, but tI thought even that all ran on standard computers these days.
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I can understand the police thinking, "wow, he's locked down the network, and now trying to run away. What is going to do to the network once he gets to Mexico?" Secondly, this:
Or better yet, not do? Just drop off the map like a giant "fuck you" and force them to hard-reset everything. To me he certainly sounds like the type who could have done it.
And when you complain that Linux has low adoption around the world (in desktops) that is your problem.
If we were one being with one set of priorities, perhaps. But many in the open source community don't see that as their problem as long as it works for them. Most recognize that there'd be perks by having a large market share, but it's not really an itch they feel like scratching. They just want to get together with other tech geeks and develop tools for tech geeks. Others want to help newbies any way they can and see the lack of adoption like a problem, but there's no way to make everybody march in line and have the same opinions. And in between you have the people that are willing to help you out some, but don't want to give the little finger and have their arm chewed off.
To be fair, being called an idiot instead of a reasonable reply is pretty much inherent to the entire IT community. We're an entire culture of people that have long since forgotten that our job is ultimately to provide a customer service.
I think the problem is that most of the people calling you an idiot, are not AT WORK. They're more like an after hours meeting of professionals, and many of the people asking are like going up to a bunch of doctors discussing medical procedures (their version of tools) and asking them to take a look at the rash on their leg. Yes, they probably could examine him but they don't want to, don't care and just want you to go away. And if you keep bugging them they'll tell you that you're an idiot. Come back for a paid appointment if you want customer service.
Many open source projects exist only to share source with other developers, they don't care about delivering a "product" or "service". Even if your problems are real, nobody is obliged to care that it doesn't work for you. Sure having users means it's a good project but they'd never run an ad campaign to get more even if they had the money. Particularly not if it's the kind of users that ask them to be the Support Desk, User Training, Free Customization or CS101. The exception are the projects and distros that actually care about customers because they're part of a cash flow, but most are all volunteers.
Particularly the cost of software completely eludes people, they're used to buying COTS software for a few dollars because it is sold in thousands if not millions of copies. Even a small enhancement will including specification, design, implementation and testing easily cost hundreds of dollars even if you charge minimum wage. Certainly way past the point most people do favors just because you asked so nicely. Same with real incident support, getting anyone with more than a support script to look at your case requires a really costly support plan.
In fact, many times I almost feel open source works almost opposite of a normal support desk. We may assist you in solving your own problem, but it's not our problem. If you think gathering all those logs, creating steps to reproduce, reading that debug output, applying those patches, rebuilding the kernel or whatever is too much work it's your problem not ours. If you can pin it down but nobody will write a patch it's your problem not ours. If you can't find the bug it's still your problem not ours. Most the anger outbreaks I see are from people desperately trying to say "It's not my problem, and no matter how much you nag it's not my problem."
Xeric Xeme?
xeric dry; lacking in moisture
xeme fork-tailed gull
There's not exactly an abundance but there's a few to pick from.
If you try hard enough at hiding it, you could be in a situation where the circumstantial evidence is enough to push a jury past the "reasonable doubt" threshold, in which case you've saved yourself nothing.
Almost all the copyright infringement cases are civil, so it's the boundary of "preponderance of evidence". It is very rare that circumstantial evidence is enough in a criminal trial.
That's the statute for commiting a federal offense with a firearm, which indeed is what I was accused of doing. (...) They hit me with seven counts.
Would you be happening to do a Matrix reenactment at the time? Or how exactly would they get to 7?
Unless I'm mistaken this is at least a violation of the Berne treaty, you can't treat domestic and international copyrights from the signatories differently... maybe we should put them on some sort of copyright watchlist ;)
Been there, done that... actually I'm picking up my new video camera tomorrow. No wonder when the US model costs 999$ and the EU model 999E. Plus I get another 10 fps going from 50 to 60 fps as a bonus, as long as it doesn't break.
Already been done on a plane like they use for astronaut training I think, but from what I gather it was more like floating together because the motions of sex lead them to drift apart. I'm sure you could make it happen by pinning against a wall but then it'd probably be like on earth except much more awkward. And even if they hadn't, I think this generation has seen too much porn to care about porn in space. At least moviesex in space, if not the real kind.
Bad analogy because if you've never heard of the microbe there's something fishy, why hasn't there been any official alert? But everybody knows there are viruses on the Internet and that you have to protect yourself against them, it's a confirmed fact you should have anti-virus. If everybody had to filter their water and you offered the ultramagic superwhoopie cleanex filter 3000 for the low, low price of 199$ many people would buy it.
Name one other profession or trade or area of expertise where expert advice is so routinely ignored for such trivial reasons. It doesn't happen with doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics or insurance agents.
Ohh I think I can answer this one. Users don't give a rat's ass whether the system is working, they just want it to be easy for themselves. Nothing so easy as to sit back, relax and say "The computer/network is down, IT is working on it. I guess there'll be a three hour lunch break today." It's the people paying that should be more hard on the questions of what REAL productivity impact does this have on the user and what REAL productivity impact could not upgrading have.
But you also have to remember the corporate politics of it. Ordering all web apps to be upgraded or replaced to be compatible with IE7/8 is a huge cost that's easy to put up on a powerpoint. A flow of IE6 problems may be hard to all count and estimate, and while it might add up over time it won't have nearly the same impact on this quarter's earnings. Particularly if it involves the risks of future security breaches where the estimates can be dismissed as alarmist. If you have the right (wrong?) kind of manager he'll figure that in a year or two he'll be at another position. So your request is declined, he gets a higher bonus by spending nothing now and by the time you really must do something with the problem it's no longer his problem. Even when people act rationally I'd go with personal rationality over corporate rationality 9 times out of 10.
I would have loved to work with a free software solution, had there been one in the line of business I'm in. I'm a consultant working on implementation of a closed source software product from another company. Very often we get asked for changes to make it work for that client that we have to just pass to our vendor as an "enhancement requests" which won't happen in anything close to the timeframe the client wants. I'm quite sure we spend more time and money creating workarounds and quickfixes than it'd take to fix the product and submit patches. So the money is there, the incentives are all correct, the value of having free software is obvious, what's the issue?
If the open source project wasn't competing with "itself", there'd be enough money in the system to package the product, provide support for it and develop it to keep and take customers from other products. But instead the competition means you get companies providing only support, but does nothing to evolve the software. Projects that only package it, but does nothing to evolve the software. Or companies rolling their own support, but does nothing to evolve the software. So the prices are pushed down, core development grinds to a halt and eventually the product is replaced with closed source that has kept up with the times. It sucks but there you have it.
I've wondered whether it'd be possible to use some form of hybrid license, where the company would license the code for some time (like 1-5 years) where all license holders could create and share derivatives but outsiders would have to pay for a (reasonable and non discriminatory) license before becoming open source. Not to really make a closed source product but to keep that base cashflow so core development continues. Sorta like "GPLish provided you and everyone you give it to holds a licence" for X years and pure GPL afterwards. It could just become a mess like the BSD advertising clause, but it could be the incentive to do more development and not just service and support.
The big downside is that there's no such community today, you'd have to try creating a new camp and you could only use BSD code in the process since this is obviously incompatble with the GPL. Hell, in the years there's a fee required to get on board it's not even OSI open source. Naturally code made into open source with that license should be compatible with the licence so you're buliding a codebase other people can create other temporarily non-free projects on. But that this in total could let people earn some for the development itself and an edge in support by baking the support fee into the licence while producing code for the community.
Software is typically a means to an end. You don't install Linux just to have Linux. You install it because you want to do something with it. Same with web browsers, office suites, and just about any other software. The exception would be games which are meant to be consumed similarly to movies and music.
I think your distinction is also why we see so much decent free software minus games and not so much of the others. It's a tool and refining it to make a better tool is desirable to most people. Games and such I want to consume, you go through a campaign or story or levels of difficulty but you don't go over and redo and refine many times over. It's no surprise to me that the most common open source games are FPS and strategy games where you play the same maps or procedurally generated ones over and over.
If you want to compare the industries, it makes sense to compare the media industry to the niche game software industry. But here you'll find very similar actions. Anti-piracy is the norm.
My impression would be quite opposite, that the mainstream game industry has far more and worse DRM than the niche games. Niche games tend to not have the time and money to waste on creative new DRMs, they might slap a standard copy protection on it but that's also it. More often than not they rely on the fact that they are niche to say "Please pay for this game, we don't have execs with multi-million dollar salaries we're just hoping the numbers work out so we can keep making games." and I'm sure it has some effect.
WTF? No wonder apple users are called "sheeple".
If you're already using a product that is good after all your criteria, why bother switching? Very often the game changers are ways to use technology that you never realized was possible. To take one example, take the Nintendo Wii. I've been a PC gamer and was happy with those, I never articulated a need for anything like the Wii. But once it's there and you can see it and try it you go "Wow, that's cool" and then you want it.
I don't need another google, google is great for what it does. But is there some other search service that could do something else that I don't yet know that I want? Maybe, I guess. I don't own an Apple product but I have no problem seeing they've made many such releases. There's many, many people I see that would have been very hard to convince to switch brands to another "regular" phone and never saw need of a smart phone before, but are iPhone fans now. They never wanted an iPhone before Apple produced one and showed them what it could do.
I had some of those growing up and it wasn't really an engineering failure, it was a mentality failure. IBM didn't built PCs, they built tanks. Their keyboards are infamous and still equally usable today 20 years later as when they were new.
That was equally much the case with the rest of their PCs, using very high quality equipment operated under very less than ideal random home/office conditions and with very much consumer software of consumer quality, not server quality. In short, it made no sense.
The result was that IBM priced themselves way out of the market of cheaper clones. It was cheaper and better to buy a clone, throw it out if it failed and buy another. You just don't do that with big iron or servers, but with desktops hell yeah.
Like the article said, it wasn't more of a failure than that PS/2 ports become the dominating keyboard/mouse connector. If there was every a silly move by IBM there it was giving away the software market to Microsoft, but the average desktop market was doomed long before the PS/2.
3) Some people use their soapbox to promote moral relativism.
I'm not sure about moral relativism, but certainly Internet has promoted moral pluralism. It's never been easier to come in contact with people of all the greater and lesser religions and other secular varieties of morality ranging from humanism to atheism to whatever. If you go back 50 years ago living in a fairly small mostly Christian village your beliefs and morals were highly insulated against outside influence.
"Because it's in the ten commandments" is an absurd argument when arguing morality with a Buddhist, you have to actually use reason to justify your morality and maybe realize other people have a different view without being unreasonable or evil. If the Church is reduced to be mere symbols and rituals of faith while morality becomes more a global matter of how people should treat each other rather than a matter between humans and God, the Church will lose very much of its power.
Just to be clear on what I meant by that, certainly the Church says a lot about how humans should relate to each other but some things, completely voluntary things like sex outside marriage, people say are "sins against God". As opposed to "thou shalt not kill", which is quite clearly a crime against another person. Going across religious boundaries you can't find a common religious morality but you can find a common secular morality. And in that morality, the Pope has much less influence.
Conversely, I was told by a lawyer that if I in any way censored or limited speech on a web site I used to run then I could've been construed as the 'Editor/Publisher', and could've be held liable for the content. If I took no action, I was in the clear. Interesting twist on common sense, no?
Well, I'd call bullshit on your lawyer's interpretation because about 99% of all online forums out there have a way to report posts to a moderator/editor/administrator who can and will remove grossly offensive content, spam, violations of ToS and so on. I've never heard of any case where anyone has lost their immunity over this and it'd be a helluva precedent for warez sites to claim they can not take down any links to avoid breaking the law. However, what you should be extremely careful with is doing any editing of posts, either leave it be or nuke from orbit. Also, you should thread very lighting in commenting on it so you don't become the content generator of a harmful message yourself.
Good luck on that, it's not unusual for consumers to have completely different rights than corporations. Nor is it illegal for corporations to be nicer than they legally can be. Stuff like you describe is the reason why you ALL get shitty service in the US, because if one knowledgeable guy answers a question outside the script he'll call back more and demand that service or cry foul and sue or the next person who gets an average drone will cry foul and sue for discrimination or whatnot absurd reason. It's very hard to provide equally good service but real easy to offer equally shitty service.
True, it is based on open source but it's more than a little questionable to say it could never be the same without open source. They could have licensed Solaris or AIX or some other closed source unixish kernel if they wanted to and still built the same libraries on top. Everybody seems to jump up and down that it got open source somewhere down there but I would say it is fairly irrelevant to the success or failure of OS X. There's a reason that the desktop market has 5.33% OS X and 0.01% OpenBSD.
What good is freedom of expression if your not willing to back it with responsibility of that expression?
You can speak out about every dictatorship, every corrupt regime - but some only once. "Responsibility" is one thing, being put up against the wall and shot or imprisoned indefinately is another.
Stupidity is not illegal, or the jails would really be overcrowding.
From what I understand the solid state storage act like mini capacitors that'll eventually lose charge. Never mind all the physical damage, short circuits and other things it might be killed from. In short, it's not very permanent. Only redundancy is permanent, I imagine with 10Mbit+ fiber connections we'll just synch to a storage service or friends and family or the cloud (buzzword alert) and our SSDs/HDDs are more for keeping our data on the go.
The confusing word here is software, not free. If he had said "free Blu-ray authoring tool" I would have thought gratis, but "free software Blu-ray authoring tool" makes me think of a FLOSS Blu-ray authoring tool. Otherwise the word would be redundant, like opposed to what? Are there any authoring tools not made of software? I suppose you could say as opposed to a dedicated appliance, but tI thought even that all ran on standard computers these days.
h264 has been used on Blurry disks since day 1.
If we're going to be pedantic, it's H.264.
And there's nothing else in the parent's post which suggests he might not bother spelling everything properly?