Yes, the idea that the "effective" population of today's human race is only 10,000 is the most disturbing thing in the article. If that's true then the vast majority of us are not contributing anything worth noting to the gene pool. That's not a very nice thought.
Other species would develop thicker fur in colder climates. We simply wear thicker clothes. It's not like all diversity is necessary or useful for people that reshape the environment to fit them instead.
Interest is income, I get that - but you have to pay a wealth tax on money sitting in the bank? How can you ever retire on more than a government pension?
Yes, the maximum rate is 1.1% on wealth above 540k NOK = 93k USD. So you have to make at least inflation + 1.1% to sustain your wealth. Not saying it's fair but that's the way it is. Actually, I find the inheritance tax nastier. The highest inheritance tax bracket is 15% (10% for direct descendants) above 800k NOK = 140k USD, so if you inherit 1,000,000 dollars the government takes almost 150,000$ just like that.
That was clearly the weakest part of the article, yes. First of all, there's four racks of space, not proof that any school actually is using all that capacity. Perhaps even there aren't four racks, just four drawn in on the blueprint as possible to cram into the room, ignoring HVAC and such. I think it's more likely someone wanted a server room, and that is as "small" as they'd reasonably get. Yes, perhaps today a broom closet is enough but having an actual room is practical in many ways for the people that should install or upgrade or rewire or otherwise work on it. So maybe a few square meters wasted but compared to the total floor area I suspect minimal.
For example, I recently say "Pandorum". And they're suddenly getting data on Earth from a probe in another star system that landed 6 days ago, but that'd take at least 4+ years at lightspeed. The plot's pacing just doesn't have time for realism. You can either sit back and enjoy or irritate yourself over such things, I prefer to enjoy the movie. I'm sure doctors are shaking their heads at all the "medicine" happening in movies too. Or to go back to the classics, take Star Trek and the computer that's absurdly context- and plotsensitive, you can ask questions like "Computer, were there any anomalies detected?" and it'll point out a vital plot clue in less than 5 seconds. Same with computers now, you always and only get exactly what it is the plot needs.
Normally the government won't put anything on there unless it's exhaustive, so for example they can say we will list any domestic bank accounts, in no small part because that's the only ones they can legally force to comply with anything like that. They may know of some offshore accounts, but they won't list those unless they got deals with almost every country to make sure they're listing all offshore accounts.
And don't forget, the government isn't going to let you get away with the responsibility. If it turns out some bank is missing because they failed to report it or it got lost somewhere along the way, they'll still retroactively tax you and penalty tax you.
You say that as if the government shouldn't know about it in the first place.
You got income? Income tax. You got deposits? Capital tax on interest, wealth tax on balance You got loans? Deductions. You got property? Property tax. You got a car? Wealth tax.
All of these are things you would have to declare anyway in order to stay legitimate. In many cases the government can't help but to know about it, employers have to file taxes as well including payroll, for properties and cars the government is the one tracking deeds and our version of the DMV registry and so on. All it does is saving you the paperwork, and there are lots of other taxes and deductions you have to correct yourself, it's not trying to cover everything.
We are in fact rather suspicious of data storage and in favor of privacy protection, right now for example there's a debate on EUs data storage directive. Only the largest party of the ruling government is for, five are against and one is undecided but just recently their biggest region took a "no" vote with great majority. If they too oppose the directive, it would become Norway's first EU veto since 1994. I'm hoping that will happen.
The moderators seem to think you're joking, but the right moderation is informative. We actually have passive acceptance, if you have no changes to make you don't have to do anything at all. And the government gets quite substantial amounts of data from employers, banks, property registry, car registry etc. so many people have nothing that needs changing.
For a second there I thought this was the dumbest thing ever, but upon further reflection I decided that you're absolutely right. There must be SOMEONE out there with a great experimental video codec that just needs some love.
It's more in the "and a free pony" department. There are at least 100 patents covering H.264, I know for MPEG2 there was like 600 patent claims. For H.264 pretty much all the usual suspects are on board and part of the patent pool, If a new video format were to arise, you can bet there are patent holders just waiting to see it become great, and be one of the few patents covering it and get a bigger share of the cake.
There really should be a process, though I don't mean a cheap one to fly under the radar and avoid patents, to make a standard and have it patent-proofed, that is to say all patent holders who think their patents apply must declare it now or lose their right to enforce the patent against that standard. It's all the patents that show up afterwards that is destroying the system.
By the way, has any of the Mozilla folk sat down at the table and talked with the folks that own whatever IP needs licensing? Have they, you know, said "dudes, we have 33% of the browser market and our business model isn't structured for this sort of thing". My hunch is they could probably get some kind of deal hammered out. The Mozilla foundation does have some political capital you know--this is a good use of it.
The GPL and patents intentionally mix like oil and water. Directly from paragraph 7 of the GPLv2: "For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program." You can get around this by covenant not to sue *cough*Novell*cough*, but that's abusing a loophole really.
That works out great in certain circumstances, for example I can't patent something, add that to a GPL project and control distribution by selling patent licenses. But neither can Mozilla, they can't license it from MPEG LA just for themselves, the GPL basically requires them to license it for everyone. That is why you can download the Chromium source, but you will not get a patent license from that either. Only binary builds of Chrome gets the patent license, since a right to sublicense would destroy MPEG LA's revenue model.
Insisting on fighting H.264 will be exactly like refusing to support MP3/AAC and only play Ogg Vorbis files. You know those right, the popular files you see everywhere? H.264 is the standard for all forms of modern video and both Windows 7 and OS X support that out of the box, Theora is if possible even more obscure than Vorbis. All this will do is kill their marketshare and return the market to the proprietary browsers.
Mozilla think that they can bend a whole market of decoding, encoding, streaming, recording and editing by refusing to add it to their browser. They're not that important. There's fights you can win, and there's fights where you can only mitigate the damage. First time you try to play a HTML5 video, it should give you a nasty disclaimer, put the responsibility of getting a patent license if that applies, and install/cancel buttons.
"Exempt" employees are deemed "management" and therefore have to "do what it takes" to get the job done. This is typical for software developers, but most office workers too.
Which is one of the things I don't get with the US. We have in fact an almost identical formulation here in Norway, but it actually applies only to managers and people of "exceptionally independent positions". I've worked as a consultant for some years now and even I'm not an exempt worker. Why? Because I work for a consultancy company and if they point me to go work on a project, I must go work on that project. Normally we're flexible anyway because it's good for billable hours and the bonus, but if my employer instructed me to work overtime then they'd have to pay for overtime.
The only people that are exempt are the line managers and the highest tier consultants, which are more networking / key account managers / sales / strategy / product development than billable resources that count hours. And even they were considered to only barely qualify by the legal team. Basically, to qualify for this you must have substantial freedom in what, how, when you work and also in what you do and what you delegate to others. Choosing whether to miss family time or sleep from your 12 hour shifts aren't it.
If Microsoft really where to do under, the category would be "Desktop OS" and "Server OS", none of those have just Microsoft. And there's no "crisis" except on Wall Street until Microsoft starts losing money, which they are extremely far away from doing. All it means is that you're paying them far too much, they'll be pushing out new versions like EA as long as someone's willing to pay for it.
If he's still coming down straight, that's fine. If he's in a spin, the chute can start off in any direction, it can tangle in itself or in him and never extend properly. And he definately wouldn't want to be unconscious hitting the ground, without controlling the landing that too will be nasty. Automatic releases are a last-ditch emergency resort because you certainly won't survive wihtout the chute, not something you'd want to rely on.
There's no single solution to spam, obviously at times I want people that have never sent me an email before to be able to reach me. Trying to derive whether it's spam from the content will always be an approximate process. But what is not so great is that currently, all the eggs are in one basket. If you get your hands on my email address, then it's valid for years and years, and I have no practical means of switching.
What would help a great deal, is if there was a standard way to generate and revoke an email address for a specific purpose, auto-alias any reply and in the reply include a forward to a different alias. Yes, occasionally I spell it out over the phone or someone has to type it in from paper and shortness and readability is important, but many times it is not. For example, I don't publish my email address here but if I could easily generate an alias ad453785cd76786da76b7678654aa@gmail.com and have it delivered to my real address with the possibility of nuking it I'd consider it.
The rest are really continuations of the same idea, because you'd get a lot of "harmless" mail saying like "Hello, I saw your post at [slashdot comment you made] and think your posts show just the kind of employees we are looking for. We at [bullshit company w/fake web page] would like to increase our technical staff and if you are interested, please send us your resume." which serve no other purpose than to reveal your unaliased address. For that reason, all mail sent to an alias should be replied to using the same alias.
The other issue is that for revocation to practically work, I can't have people who did get in contact with me over the slashdot alias that I'd like to stay in contact with keep using that alias. I have to either give them my real address or point them to a new alias. There's "Reply-To:" and just telling them in the email, but it's a bit weak. Finally a revoked address should optionally give a customer-chosen rejection reason, so that it could be things like "Switched alias, try [new address]" "This alias is expired, find my current address on slashdot.org", "If important, you can still reach me on phone 555-1234" instead of the default "No account with that name".
The best part of someone actually doing is, is that the whole system doesn't need to change. One web mail provider could create this exact setup with the controls to generate and revoke addresses, make sure your replies to an alias are aliased, update and control the Reply-To so you can't redirect it anywhere else and create the custom rejection messages. The only thing it can't do is make sure the recipient updates their address book or whatever, but if the ball gets rolling that will be fixed.
Does it matter as long as she's slammed as if it was anyway? If all she did was take something of less than 25$ value, then everything is completely out of proportion. The rest has to be justified through some hand-waving going from making available to ending up at 54000$. Conversely, I don't see the verdict getting one cent higher if they'd found a log of every peer who had ever downloaded something from her shared folders. The judge can say what he wants in his opinion, but in practice it makes no difference at all for the client.
Funny, I was always under the impression that Linux can be had cheap but not Red Hat. From what I hear the service is great and all that, but it's hardly the MacDonalds of the server world. That's more the web hosting companies that throw up cheap Linux/OpenBSD boxes in bulk.
You have a clue, you can use CentOS or any other distribution you want. Your company can't tell the difference between CentOS and something off TPB, and they're paying 1500$/year for it. And you blame Red Hat? Sorry but I'd be doing the same thing and ask if your company would need some extended warranty or monster cables with that. As usual, ignorance costs money.
Yes, but at the top is some form of directory service. If you compromise the majority of those servers you can create a new network consensus, and direct everyone to route through tor1,tor2...torX.nsa.gov. Or some suitable set of apparently random international network of nodes set up for the purpose. The layers don't work if the entire onion is rotten.
And if we wait another 100 years, then 100% of Linux code will be written by historians. That's the power of statistics.
What the hell are you talking about? Historians are people that study the past, not lived in the past.
Linux is a mature project, amounts of code written today have a minuscule impact on the overall project compared with amounts of code written in the late 90s.
Linux kernel 2.2.19 (2001): 1.8M SLOC Linux kernel 2.6.32 (2009): 12.6M SLOC
Nothing to see here. Linux is as much a volunteer project as it has ever been.
So if something was started by volunteers, it'll always be a volunteer project even though those writing code are no longer volunteers? Or did you not RTFHeadline?
Sometimes slashdot really could use a "-1, Nonsense" moderation...
Human contact has been replaced by machines lots of places like bank clerks who has been almost fully replaced by online banking and cash machines, or how about ticket machines or vending machines? I have a dishwasher and washing machine, none of those are built the way I'd wash dishes or do laundry. The point is not that machines suck at being useful, it's that they suck at being humans. I'd rather in fact not have a clippy interface to my machine if I can help it. Why does everyone seem to think a humanoid robot would be such a great solution? Would you like to piggyback on a humanoid robot to work every day? Do you honestly think it's good design to command a robot to use a remote control to tune your TV when you could command the TV to tune itself?
Don't get me wrong, eventually we will need some sort of general robot but my home could be a lot more intelligent than it is. There's no universal "bus" that things expose themselves to, and I don't mean building a special house full of special tools that are all built to work together. I mean something that'll be pretty much as basic as electricity and everything announces itself and lets me turn on and off lamps, turn up and down the heating, tune the TV, monitor the oven (maybe not set that one), check the status of my washing machine all in one dashboard right here, without getting my ass off the chair. That would at least be a start...
If what bothers you is not paying them back, then the best option is real simple:
1) Torrent away 2) Every so often, order the movies you liked best on DVD/BluRay and let the postal service handle the rest. Make it so that it averages what you "should have" been paying.
Downsides: Slightly anti-environmentalism, somewhat poor distribution of the money Upsides: Excellent convenience, that fuzzy feeling, more money to the movies you really like and a permanent copy for those few you might wish to see again*,
* Though if you use Linux and order BluRays, you'll need AnyDVD HD on Windows in a virtualbox to rip it first.
But those services that can be digitized, is normally cheaper online. Take my online bank for example, no fees whatsoever for doing things online. Do anything in a physical bank here in Norway these days? Expect a 1-5$ fee depending on what you're doing, and I'm not talking about any special service either. The iTunes store is much cheaper than retail CD stores. Online shops are in general much cheaper than retail sites, even if it's real goods sent by mail. The only reason pizza delivery costs extra is because they can't ship it out of a big server farm or warehouse, they must have people near you on duty on time to make it, which makes it cheaper to have everyone in the area come to you than you coming to everyone in the area. There's absolutely no reason an online movie store should cost more, except that the copyright holders got a monopoly on it and can set prices at will.
The real issue they have is that people overestimate how much distribution costs. Pressed CD/DVDs are cheaper pressed than burned, jewel/DVD cases cost very little in bulk and that printing press will print covers way cheaper than your home ink printer. What costs is shelf space in high-priced central retail shops, going with an online store the overhead is really quite low and the amount of unsold goods also much lower, unlike the retailer who sometimes have to do real bargain bin cleanouts that they have to take into their margins. Or maybe they underestimate how much a data file is, when it's not a tangible object. All the costs that went into production and marketing are already sunk costs, that 100,000$ scene doesn't become a 50,000$ scene just because you get it online rather than on a cheap plastic platter.
Quite frankly, I was hoping something like iTunes Plus would come for video (1080p/no DRM) or something like Spotify for music would take off, but so far the closest thing is Voddler which is nothing but a GPL-violating bandit shop (check their forums, and the comments on the allegedly "answered" questions) so I don't imagine there's much hope.
What's next? "44% of people scan front page headlines of newspaper in newspaper vending machine without making a purchase, clearly indicating that Seven Eleven is stealing revenue from the newspapers."
Exactly. I think newspapers were selling on the album model, before the internet you bought it just in case there was any interesting news. Now that there's a track = article model like with music, and people just aren't interested in 90% of what's in it, In any case, I'd love to see them try eradicating free news. The only thing that'll do is kill those who try so maybe the reminder can survive on the concentrated ad revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
Gladiators were taught to fight with heavy wooden swords so that the real sword would be easier to handle.
Surely it is better to give students crippled operating systems such as Vista so that their introduction to real world technology is a pleasant one?
In this case, I think it will only lead to harakiri attempts with wooden swords - and failing.
Yes, the idea that the "effective" population of today's human race is only 10,000 is the most disturbing thing in the article. If that's true then the vast majority of us are not contributing anything worth noting to the gene pool. That's not a very nice thought.
Other species would develop thicker fur in colder climates. We simply wear thicker clothes. It's not like all diversity is necessary or useful for people that reshape the environment to fit them instead.
Interest is income, I get that - but you have to pay a wealth tax on money sitting in the bank? How can you ever retire on more than a government pension?
Yes, the maximum rate is 1.1% on wealth above 540k NOK = 93k USD. So you have to make at least inflation + 1.1% to sustain your wealth. Not saying it's fair but that's the way it is. Actually, I find the inheritance tax nastier. The highest inheritance tax bracket is 15% (10% for direct descendants) above 800k NOK = 140k USD, so if you inherit 1,000,000 dollars the government takes almost 150,000$ just like that.
That was clearly the weakest part of the article, yes. First of all, there's four racks of space, not proof that any school actually is using all that capacity. Perhaps even there aren't four racks, just four drawn in on the blueprint as possible to cram into the room, ignoring HVAC and such. I think it's more likely someone wanted a server room, and that is as "small" as they'd reasonably get. Yes, perhaps today a broom closet is enough but having an actual room is practical in many ways for the people that should install or upgrade or rewire or otherwise work on it. So maybe a few square meters wasted but compared to the total floor area I suspect minimal.
For example, I recently say "Pandorum". And they're suddenly getting data on Earth from a probe in another star system that landed 6 days ago, but that'd take at least 4+ years at lightspeed. The plot's pacing just doesn't have time for realism. You can either sit back and enjoy or irritate yourself over such things, I prefer to enjoy the movie. I'm sure doctors are shaking their heads at all the "medicine" happening in movies too. Or to go back to the classics, take Star Trek and the computer that's absurdly context- and plotsensitive, you can ask questions like "Computer, were there any anomalies detected?" and it'll point out a vital plot clue in less than 5 seconds. Same with computers now, you always and only get exactly what it is the plot needs.
Normally the government won't put anything on there unless it's exhaustive, so for example they can say we will list any domestic bank accounts, in no small part because that's the only ones they can legally force to comply with anything like that. They may know of some offshore accounts, but they won't list those unless they got deals with almost every country to make sure they're listing all offshore accounts.
And don't forget, the government isn't going to let you get away with the responsibility. If it turns out some bank is missing because they failed to report it or it got lost somewhere along the way, they'll still retroactively tax you and penalty tax you.
And you say that like it's a *good* thing...
You say that as if the government shouldn't know about it in the first place.
You got income? Income tax.
You got deposits? Capital tax on interest, wealth tax on balance
You got loans? Deductions.
You got property? Property tax.
You got a car? Wealth tax.
All of these are things you would have to declare anyway in order to stay legitimate. In many cases the government can't help but to know about it, employers have to file taxes as well including payroll, for properties and cars the government is the one tracking deeds and our version of the DMV registry and so on. All it does is saving you the paperwork, and there are lots of other taxes and deductions you have to correct yourself, it's not trying to cover everything.
We are in fact rather suspicious of data storage and in favor of privacy protection, right now for example there's a debate on EUs data storage directive. Only the largest party of the ruling government is for, five are against and one is undecided but just recently their biggest region took a "no" vote with great majority. If they too oppose the directive, it would become Norway's first EU veto since 1994. I'm hoping that will happen.
The moderators seem to think you're joking, but the right moderation is informative. We actually have passive acceptance, if you have no changes to make you don't have to do anything at all. And the government gets quite substantial amounts of data from employers, banks, property registry, car registry etc. so many people have nothing that needs changing.
For a second there I thought this was the dumbest thing ever, but upon further reflection I decided that you're absolutely right. There must be SOMEONE out there with a great experimental video codec that just needs some love.
It's more in the "and a free pony" department. There are at least 100 patents covering H.264, I know for MPEG2 there was like 600 patent claims. For H.264 pretty much all the usual suspects are on board and part of the patent pool, If a new video format were to arise, you can bet there are patent holders just waiting to see it become great, and be one of the few patents covering it and get a bigger share of the cake.
There really should be a process, though I don't mean a cheap one to fly under the radar and avoid patents, to make a standard and have it patent-proofed, that is to say all patent holders who think their patents apply must declare it now or lose their right to enforce the patent against that standard. It's all the patents that show up afterwards that is destroying the system.
By the way, has any of the Mozilla folk sat down at the table and talked with the folks that own whatever IP needs licensing? Have they, you know, said "dudes, we have 33% of the browser market and our business model isn't structured for this sort of thing". My hunch is they could probably get some kind of deal hammered out. The Mozilla foundation does have some political capital you know--this is a good use of it.
The GPL and patents intentionally mix like oil and water. Directly from paragraph 7 of the GPLv2: "For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program." You can get around this by covenant not to sue *cough*Novell*cough*, but that's abusing a loophole really.
That works out great in certain circumstances, for example I can't patent something, add that to a GPL project and control distribution by selling patent licenses. But neither can Mozilla, they can't license it from MPEG LA just for themselves, the GPL basically requires them to license it for everyone. That is why you can download the Chromium source, but you will not get a patent license from that either. Only binary builds of Chrome gets the patent license, since a right to sublicense would destroy MPEG LA's revenue model.
Insisting on fighting H.264 will be exactly like refusing to support MP3/AAC and only play Ogg Vorbis files. You know those right, the popular files you see everywhere? H.264 is the standard for all forms of modern video and both Windows 7 and OS X support that out of the box, Theora is if possible even more obscure than Vorbis. All this will do is kill their marketshare and return the market to the proprietary browsers.
Mozilla think that they can bend a whole market of decoding, encoding, streaming, recording and editing by refusing to add it to their browser. They're not that important. There's fights you can win, and there's fights where you can only mitigate the damage. First time you try to play a HTML5 video, it should give you a nasty disclaimer, put the responsibility of getting a patent license if that applies, and install/cancel buttons.
"Exempt" employees are deemed "management" and therefore have to "do what it takes" to get the job done. This is typical for software developers, but most office workers too.
Which is one of the things I don't get with the US. We have in fact an almost identical formulation here in Norway, but it actually applies only to managers and people of "exceptionally independent positions". I've worked as a consultant for some years now and even I'm not an exempt worker. Why? Because I work for a consultancy company and if they point me to go work on a project, I must go work on that project. Normally we're flexible anyway because it's good for billable hours and the bonus, but if my employer instructed me to work overtime then they'd have to pay for overtime.
The only people that are exempt are the line managers and the highest tier consultants, which are more networking / key account managers / sales / strategy / product development than billable resources that count hours. And even they were considered to only barely qualify by the legal team. Basically, to qualify for this you must have substantial freedom in what, how, when you work and also in what you do and what you delegate to others. Choosing whether to miss family time or sleep from your 12 hour shifts aren't it.
If Microsoft really where to do under, the category would be "Desktop OS" and "Server OS", none of those have just Microsoft. And there's no "crisis" except on Wall Street until Microsoft starts losing money, which they are extremely far away from doing. All it means is that you're paying them far too much, they'll be pushing out new versions like EA as long as someone's willing to pay for it.
If he's still coming down straight, that's fine. If he's in a spin, the chute can start off in any direction, it can tangle in itself or in him and never extend properly. And he definately wouldn't want to be unconscious hitting the ground, without controlling the landing that too will be nasty. Automatic releases are a last-ditch emergency resort because you certainly won't survive wihtout the chute, not something you'd want to rely on.
There's no single solution to spam, obviously at times I want people that have never sent me an email before to be able to reach me. Trying to derive whether it's spam from the content will always be an approximate process. But what is not so great is that currently, all the eggs are in one basket. If you get your hands on my email address, then it's valid for years and years, and I have no practical means of switching.
What would help a great deal, is if there was a standard way to generate and revoke an email address for a specific purpose, auto-alias any reply and in the reply include a forward to a different alias. Yes, occasionally I spell it out over the phone or someone has to type it in from paper and shortness and readability is important, but many times it is not. For example, I don't publish my email address here but if I could easily generate an alias ad453785cd76786da76b7678654aa@gmail.com and have it delivered to my real address with the possibility of nuking it I'd consider it.
The rest are really continuations of the same idea, because you'd get a lot of "harmless" mail saying like "Hello, I saw your post at [slashdot comment you made] and think your posts show just the kind of employees we are looking for. We at [bullshit company w/fake web page] would like to increase our technical staff and if you are interested, please send us your resume." which serve no other purpose than to reveal your unaliased address. For that reason, all mail sent to an alias should be replied to using the same alias.
The other issue is that for revocation to practically work, I can't have people who did get in contact with me over the slashdot alias that I'd like to stay in contact with keep using that alias. I have to either give them my real address or point them to a new alias. There's "Reply-To:" and just telling them in the email, but it's a bit weak. Finally a revoked address should optionally give a customer-chosen rejection reason, so that it could be things like "Switched alias, try [new address]" "This alias is expired, find my current address on slashdot.org", "If important, you can still reach me on phone 555-1234" instead of the default "No account with that name".
The best part of someone actually doing is, is that the whole system doesn't need to change. One web mail provider could create this exact setup with the controls to generate and revoke addresses, make sure your replies to an alias are aliased, update and control the Reply-To so you can't redirect it anywhere else and create the custom rejection messages. The only thing it can't do is make sure the recipient updates their address book or whatever, but if the ball gets rolling that will be fixed.
Does it matter as long as she's slammed as if it was anyway? If all she did was take something of less than 25$ value, then everything is completely out of proportion. The rest has to be justified through some hand-waving going from making available to ending up at 54000$. Conversely, I don't see the verdict getting one cent higher if they'd found a log of every peer who had ever downloaded something from her shared folders. The judge can say what he wants in his opinion, but in practice it makes no difference at all for the client.
Funny, I was always under the impression that Linux can be had cheap but not Red Hat. From what I hear the service is great and all that, but it's hardly the MacDonalds of the server world. That's more the web hosting companies that throw up cheap Linux/OpenBSD boxes in bulk.
You have a clue, you can use CentOS or any other distribution you want. Your company can't tell the difference between CentOS and something off TPB, and they're paying 1500$/year for it. And you blame Red Hat? Sorry but I'd be doing the same thing and ask if your company would need some extended warranty or monster cables with that. As usual, ignorance costs money.
If Hollywood was involved, they'd already have sent the team from Armageddon.
Yes, but at the top is some form of directory service. If you compromise the majority of those servers you can create a new network consensus, and direct everyone to route through tor1,tor2...torX.nsa.gov. Or some suitable set of apparently random international network of nodes set up for the purpose. The layers don't work if the entire onion is rotten.
And if we wait another 100 years, then 100% of Linux code will be written by historians. That's the power of statistics.
What the hell are you talking about? Historians are people that study the past, not lived in the past.
Linux is a mature project, amounts of code written today have a minuscule impact on the overall project compared with amounts of code written in the late 90s.
Linux kernel 2.2.19 (2001): 1.8M SLOC
Linux kernel 2.6.32 (2009): 12.6M SLOC
Nothing to see here. Linux is as much a volunteer project as it has ever been.
So if something was started by volunteers, it'll always be a volunteer project even though those writing code are no longer volunteers? Or did you not RTFHeadline?
Sometimes slashdot really could use a "-1, Nonsense" moderation...
Human contact has been replaced by machines lots of places like bank clerks who has been almost fully replaced by online banking and cash machines, or how about ticket machines or vending machines? I have a dishwasher and washing machine, none of those are built the way I'd wash dishes or do laundry. The point is not that machines suck at being useful, it's that they suck at being humans. I'd rather in fact not have a clippy interface to my machine if I can help it. Why does everyone seem to think a humanoid robot would be such a great solution? Would you like to piggyback on a humanoid robot to work every day? Do you honestly think it's good design to command a robot to use a remote control to tune your TV when you could command the TV to tune itself?
Don't get me wrong, eventually we will need some sort of general robot but my home could be a lot more intelligent than it is. There's no universal "bus" that things expose themselves to, and I don't mean building a special house full of special tools that are all built to work together. I mean something that'll be pretty much as basic as electricity and everything announces itself and lets me turn on and off lamps, turn up and down the heating, tune the TV, monitor the oven (maybe not set that one), check the status of my washing machine all in one dashboard right here, without getting my ass off the chair. That would at least be a start...
If what bothers you is not paying them back, then the best option is real simple:
1) Torrent away
2) Every so often, order the movies you liked best on DVD/BluRay and let the postal service handle the rest. Make it so that it averages what you "should have" been paying.
Downsides: Slightly anti-environmentalism, somewhat poor distribution of the money
Upsides: Excellent convenience, that fuzzy feeling, more money to the movies you really like and a permanent copy for those few you might wish to see again*,
* Though if you use Linux and order BluRays, you'll need AnyDVD HD on Windows in a virtualbox to rip it first.
But those services that can be digitized, is normally cheaper online. Take my online bank for example, no fees whatsoever for doing things online. Do anything in a physical bank here in Norway these days? Expect a 1-5$ fee depending on what you're doing, and I'm not talking about any special service either. The iTunes store is much cheaper than retail CD stores. Online shops are in general much cheaper than retail sites, even if it's real goods sent by mail. The only reason pizza delivery costs extra is because they can't ship it out of a big server farm or warehouse, they must have people near you on duty on time to make it, which makes it cheaper to have everyone in the area come to you than you coming to everyone in the area. There's absolutely no reason an online movie store should cost more, except that the copyright holders got a monopoly on it and can set prices at will.
The real issue they have is that people overestimate how much distribution costs. Pressed CD/DVDs are cheaper pressed than burned, jewel/DVD cases cost very little in bulk and that printing press will print covers way cheaper than your home ink printer. What costs is shelf space in high-priced central retail shops, going with an online store the overhead is really quite low and the amount of unsold goods also much lower, unlike the retailer who sometimes have to do real bargain bin cleanouts that they have to take into their margins. Or maybe they underestimate how much a data file is, when it's not a tangible object. All the costs that went into production and marketing are already sunk costs, that 100,000$ scene doesn't become a 50,000$ scene just because you get it online rather than on a cheap plastic platter.
Quite frankly, I was hoping something like iTunes Plus would come for video (1080p/no DRM) or something like Spotify for music would take off, but so far the closest thing is Voddler which is nothing but a GPL-violating bandit shop (check their forums, and the comments on the allegedly "answered" questions) so I don't imagine there's much hope.
What's next? "44% of people scan front page headlines of newspaper in newspaper vending machine without making a purchase, clearly indicating that Seven Eleven is stealing revenue from the newspapers."
Exactly. I think newspapers were selling on the album model, before the internet you bought it just in case there was any interesting news. Now that there's a track = article model like with music, and people just aren't interested in 90% of what's in it, In any case, I'd love to see them try eradicating free news. The only thing that'll do is kill those who try so maybe the reminder can survive on the concentrated ad revenue.