Since the money comes from the American taxpayer, count me in!
Don't forget that there is other work out there that isn't simply rebuilding infrastructure that various Presidents Bush have ordered demolished by military attack. There's health care workers needed and civil engineers required to build brand new buildings. There's oil workers required to keep sucking the black oil out of the ground to keep feeding the energy addiction of the western world. And don't forget the IT, maths, economics and language teachers that will be required for the countries in that area to drag themselves into the 21st Century.
In the meantime, I'm saving up for immigration to New Zealand, where there is no "Free Trade" agreement with the USA, and copyright laws are sane.
It's kinda funny, you know. There was a book I read as a kid, about these mutant children. One of them (the youngest) was a powerful telepath, and was contacted by another telepath from "Sealand", the last place on Earth where people were sane and mutants were accepted as a fact of life. How life imitates art.
The lesson I get from what you described is, the people are supposed to think what Big Brother Mao tells them to. This week we'll hear about how spam has been limited to 100 messages/week. Next week, we'll hear about how everyone is excited about the spam level being limited to 400 messages/week, the lowest ever since the war with Oceania started.
No, they're the ones who'd hand over some cash for a box of software.
Don't forget the money they paid for the console to run it on (which they can't use for any other purpose, despite the suitability of the equipment). And don't forget that they'll have to hand over that money again just as soon as the DVD gets scratched, because they aren't allowed to make a backup. Even if they were allowed to make a working copy, the hardware wouldn't let that copy be used.
At least, for the meantime, Microsoft is allowing X-Box titles such as Halo to be published for other platforms. I'm still not allowed to make a working copy of the DVD or CD to play from.
Later in life, the technology behind the X-Box will be added to general purpose computers ("PCs"), so you'll enjoy the inability to even run "unauthorised" software on the hardware you just bought (the party making the decision of "authorised" or not would be Microsoft in the first instance). I'm just hoping that someone will continue to manufacture user-controlled hardware.
Hmm... okay, I have to relearn Slashdot Lesson #1: don't use sarcasm. Amercians don't understand it, and most other people find it unamusing.
Not that I disagree with the priciple of giving the finger to the proprietary software world... if you wanted to appear more like an elitist prick, you couldn't have written a better post.
What's elitist about choosing to only run software that doesn't impose restrictions on how I'm allowed to use it? I'm not interested in "sticking it to the man" - I'm interested in keeping myself out of gaol. I know I'm safe when I use Debian, because I can copy the same software to every machine under my control with the express blessing of the authors. I don't have to pay royalties to anyone for setting up my girlfriend's computer so she can keep in touch by email and Jabber. I can pull an old machine out of the cupboard and set it up to serve SMTP and IMAP, without worrying about whether I've got a valid licence for that operating system.
Contrast that to the world of the X-Box game. I can't just go installing Halo on any machine I want to. That's a condition expressly imposed by the authors of the game. I can't even make a backup of the game to protect myself from theft, fire or even scratches on the DVD. Backups are expressly forbidden by the authors of the game. Heck - I don't even own any part of the game - the disk and its contents are only leased to me until such time as the game author, game publisher, or Microsoft decide that I'm not allowed to use it anymore.
As for the joke about giving up my freedoms to simply run a game - it's called absurdity:
absurdity n 1: a message whose content is at variance with reason
Doesn't it strike you that people who are willing to give up their right to do something as fundamental as make a backup copy, are living absurd lives? I guess it might, but since I hadn't illuminated further by gesticulating like a Ballmer and putting on a funny voice, you didn't understand that it was a joke.
I should, perhaps, put my sense of humour away when posting on Slashdot.
using a proprietary system does not mean a person has less freedom
You need to read up on "trustworthy computing" or "Palladium" as it's touted by Microsoft. The computer becomes a platform that is trusted by the software vendors, not by the end users. The vendor can determine what software you're allowed to use and when (and for how long).
I respectfully disagree with your opinion - using a proprietary system does mean a person has less freedom. If you can't run the software you want, when you want, you don't really have freedom of expression or thought, do you?
You mistake the Debian maintainers' pragmatic licencing approach for religious zealotry.
They are approaching the Debian GNU/Linux as a Free Software project, not a feature rich distribution project. Once you yourself can understand what the philosophy of the Debian project, you might understand that they are being incredibly pragmatic.
Regardless of how long Copyright is extended for (eg: Disney's current goal of forever - 1 day), no matter how tight the DMCA becomes, you will always be allowed to run the complete Debian GNU/Linux operating system.
Licencing and legal restrictions on your hardware may prevent you running Debian on your specific hardware (thanks to "Trustworthy Computing" taking over from "binary only"), but there will be no licence or legal restrictions to your using Debian on any hardware that it does work on.
You have to be a special type of person to be a Debian developer - these are people who want to dedicate their time to having an operating system they can safely give to their friends and family without risking a gaol term. People who aren't Debian developers (or fanatical users) are the ones who'd hand over their soul for the next cool gimmick ("yes, I'll accept the condition of only running the software you let me, if you'll let me pay $200 for Halo 4! That game's so cool I don't need freedom!").
My point being that Microsoft hadn't enforced their patents on the FAT file system for such a long time, that it's hardly fair (or justifiable) to start enforcing the patent now. If they didn't consider FAT to be worth protecting earlier on, they should face the fact that it's pretty much in the public domain now - you can't put the genie back in the bottle. If Microsoft had enforced their patents earlier on, the industry would have developed an alternative.
"Genius is 5% inspiration, 95% perspiration" or so the saying goes. There's nice quip I saw the other day that defines patents in the same way:
Genius is 5% inspiration, 95% perspiration. Patents are about doing the 5% now, waiting for someone else to put in the other 95%, and then suing them for it.
Note that the "it" at the end applies to both the effort expended in violating the patent and the result of that effort;)
So were the Mars rovers actually sent to Mars with the express purpose of determining the origin of BioMetal, to support the US government's militarisation of space?
And did the Russians already beat them to it?
http://www.planetbattlezone.com/
But we only ever seem to buy the ones with the dodgey engines. Our black(hawk) helicopters are so damned *noisy*! And they crash all the time. So much for stealth surveillance of the populace;)
I think patents should be treated the same way as copyright - if you don't enforce it, you obviously don't want it.
Why is Microsoft going to enforce FAT patents now? If they'd enforced them earlier, noone would have used FAT, they'd have found something else to use.
The moon is a superdense glob, set in a special orbit around Sedna, specifically to attract our attention. We have to alter its orbit in order to indicate that we are ready to be inducted into the Federation of Sentient Planets.
What they don't tell you is that the reason CD sales are down by 7% is because CD production is down by 20%. People are buying more music, but so much of it is copyright-protected optical media that the CDs are becoming extinct.
My CD purchasing is down 100% - the last three albums I wanted to buy were not CDs, they were "copyright protected" media. They won't work in my Strawberry iMac, and thanks to the "Free" Trade Agreement that our foolish Government has signed with the USA, it is now illegal for me to import my albums into iTunes anyway. I don't have a stereo system - I have a computer and a pair of desktop speakers. The only CD readers I have in the house are CD-ROM drives.
I contend that if the music industry was to start publishing CDs again, CD sales would increase.
No - the RIAA would go for the obvious target, this of course being the victim. After all, the victim was the one who (illegally) ripped the MP3 from CDs and (illegally) stored it on the iPod. Thus in the process of getting mugged and voluntarily handing over the iPod, the victim was illegally sharing intellectual property.
So if you do get mugged for your iPod, don't let the RIAA get hold of your email or IP address!
Osama Bin Laden isn't practicing terrorism to free his oppressed people. He's on a personal vendetta against the Western world - he's an agent of chaos, not a freedom fighter.
And don't forget the historical importance of such a site - people could (for example) search the archive for information about what advertisements were *really* being displayed in Times Square at the time that Spider-Man was released;)
As discussed in Plastic Money at the Questacon, the main feature of plastic currency is that it's hard to reproduce by its nature. It's also more durable than paper money.
The ink is resistant to washing, and you can't print on the plastic using conventional printers (ink, dye, laser). You can even put metallic threads (aka RFID tags) in the plastic. The whole note is plastic, so the whole note can be transparent and holographic.
The hardest part about switching to pretty coloured plastic money is convincing people that it's still real money. It's funny watching Americans visiting Australia trying to come to grips with our weird currency - I think the one thing that confuses most of them is that different denominations are different sizes. So a $50 note is larger than a $20 note for example. Want to know more?
So keep going with Freeside in the off-hours (the hours that the bosses are off site). Run it in parallel with the "real" system if you have to.
Then when the "real" system falls flat on your face like you know it will, just keep running with Freeside, "until the real system gets back on its feet".
Ferengi Rule Of Acquisition 286: No good deed goes unpunished.
I don't provide free support to friends and family, mainly because they told *their* friends that I do cheap computer maintenance, and suddenly world+dog is ringing me asking for a freebie.
It's insulting and demeaning.
So these days, when people ask me to help them, I just say, "Sure, for $50 I'll check out your computer - make sure you've got the Windows CD handy in case we need to reinstall anything."
It's the second part that most people balk at.
Remember, if you pirate software, you're supporting abusive monopolies.
By the time abuse@... is receiving complaints, the spammer has already moved on to the next prepaid-hours connection.
What would be *really* nice is being able to ring up the telephone company and get them to disconnect the phone line the spammer uses.
Re:my amazement is beyond comprehension
on
More MyDoom Gloom
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· Score: 1
According to Macafee and F-Secure, the virus also copies itself to Kazaa shared file directories as things such as "winxp-rootkit". So the reason people are double-clicking the download is because they think it's something they really want!
It used to be that only courts could determine what evidence was or was not allowed to be published.
If the patent office approves this application, they'll be giving Microsoft the power of veto in publication of documents. Submit documents as evidence in Word 2003 format. Once the court has accepted the document as evidence, evoke the court's licence for Word 2003. QED.
And how do I explain to my dial-up users that the reason their bill includes 100Mb of excess this month, even though it was feeling so damned slow, is that some company was shipping them pop-up movies while they were reading web pages?
There's an awful lot of data you can download when you're busy reading email or cross-referencing web pages.
Certainly, once I get enough complaints, I can set up my HTTP proxy to ban that site, or at least redirect to a "That site was going to kill your connection" page. But that's re-active. Who knows, maybe the advertisers will be good enough to make all the movie-ads come from the one site, so I can just block that site.
Dial up users don't have GB of quota to play with, and most of my customers are still using dialup (dammit, *I* am still using dialup).
Slashdot Mirror
Since the money comes from the American taxpayer, count me in!
Don't forget that there is other work out there that isn't simply rebuilding infrastructure that various Presidents Bush have ordered demolished by military attack. There's health care workers needed and civil engineers required to build brand new buildings. There's oil workers required to keep sucking the black oil out of the ground to keep feeding the energy addiction of the western world. And don't forget the IT, maths, economics and language teachers that will be required for the countries in that area to drag themselves into the 21st Century.
In the meantime, I'm saving up for immigration to New Zealand, where there is no "Free Trade" agreement with the USA, and copyright laws are sane.
It's kinda funny, you know. There was a book I read as a kid, about these mutant children. One of them (the youngest) was a powerful telepath, and was contacted by another telepath from "Sealand", the last place on Earth where people were sane and mutants were accepted as a fact of life. How life imitates art.
The lesson I get from what you described is, the people are supposed to think what Big Brother Mao tells them to. This week we'll hear about how spam has been limited to 100 messages/week. Next week, we'll hear about how everyone is excited about the spam level being limited to 400 messages/week, the lowest ever since the war with Oceania started.
No threat to information security is as dangerous as underpaid trustees.
Don't forget the money they paid for the console to run it on (which they can't use for any other purpose, despite the suitability of the equipment). And don't forget that they'll have to hand over that money again just as soon as the DVD gets scratched, because they aren't allowed to make a backup. Even if they were allowed to make a working copy, the hardware wouldn't let that copy be used.
At least, for the meantime, Microsoft is allowing X-Box titles such as Halo to be published for other platforms. I'm still not allowed to make a working copy of the DVD or CD to play from.
Later in life, the technology behind the X-Box will be added to general purpose computers ("PCs"), so you'll enjoy the inability to even run "unauthorised" software on the hardware you just bought (the party making the decision of "authorised" or not would be Microsoft in the first instance). I'm just hoping that someone will continue to manufacture user-controlled hardware.
Hmm... okay, I have to relearn Slashdot Lesson #1: don't use sarcasm. Amercians don't understand it, and most other people find it unamusing.
What's elitist about choosing to only run software that doesn't impose restrictions on how I'm allowed to use it? I'm not interested in "sticking it to the man" - I'm interested in keeping myself out of gaol. I know I'm safe when I use Debian, because I can copy the same software to every machine under my control with the express blessing of the authors. I don't have to pay royalties to anyone for setting up my girlfriend's computer so she can keep in touch by email and Jabber. I can pull an old machine out of the cupboard and set it up to serve SMTP and IMAP, without worrying about whether I've got a valid licence for that operating system.
Contrast that to the world of the X-Box game. I can't just go installing Halo on any machine I want to. That's a condition expressly imposed by the authors of the game. I can't even make a backup of the game to protect myself from theft, fire or even scratches on the DVD. Backups are expressly forbidden by the authors of the game. Heck - I don't even own any part of the game - the disk and its contents are only leased to me until such time as the game author, game publisher, or Microsoft decide that I'm not allowed to use it anymore.
As for the joke about giving up my freedoms to simply run a game - it's called absurdity:
Doesn't it strike you that people who are willing to give up their right to do something as fundamental as make a backup copy, are living absurd lives? I guess it might, but since I hadn't illuminated further by gesticulating like a Ballmer and putting on a funny voice, you didn't understand that it was a joke.
I should, perhaps, put my sense of humour away when posting on Slashdot.
You need to read up on "trustworthy computing" or "Palladium" as it's touted by Microsoft. The computer becomes a platform that is trusted by the software vendors, not by the end users. The vendor can determine what software you're allowed to use and when (and for how long).
I respectfully disagree with your opinion - using a proprietary system does mean a person has less freedom. If you can't run the software you want, when you want, you don't really have freedom of expression or thought, do you?
You mistake the Debian maintainers' pragmatic licencing approach for religious zealotry.
They are approaching the Debian GNU/Linux as a Free Software project, not a feature rich distribution project. Once you yourself can understand what the philosophy of the Debian project, you might understand that they are being incredibly pragmatic.
Regardless of how long Copyright is extended for (eg: Disney's current goal of forever - 1 day), no matter how tight the DMCA becomes, you will always be allowed to run the complete Debian GNU/Linux operating system.
Licencing and legal restrictions on your hardware may prevent you running Debian on your specific hardware (thanks to "Trustworthy Computing" taking over from "binary only"), but there will be no licence or legal restrictions to your using Debian on any hardware that it does work on.
You have to be a special type of person to be a Debian developer - these are people who want to dedicate their time to having an operating system they can safely give to their friends and family without risking a gaol term. People who aren't Debian developers (or fanatical users) are the ones who'd hand over their soul for the next cool gimmick ("yes, I'll accept the condition of only running the software you let me, if you'll let me pay $200 for Halo 4! That game's so cool I don't need freedom!").
My point being that Microsoft hadn't enforced their patents on the FAT file system for such a long time, that it's hardly fair (or justifiable) to start enforcing the patent now. If they didn't consider FAT to be worth protecting earlier on, they should face the fact that it's pretty much in the public domain now - you can't put the genie back in the bottle. If Microsoft had enforced their patents earlier on, the industry would have developed an alternative.
"Genius is 5% inspiration, 95% perspiration" or so the saying goes. There's nice quip I saw the other day that defines patents in the same way:
Note that the "it" at the end applies to both the effort expended in violating the patent and the result of that effort ;)
So were the Mars rovers actually sent to Mars with the express purpose of determining the origin of BioMetal, to support the US government's militarisation of space? And did the Russians already beat them to it? http://www.planetbattlezone.com/
But we only ever seem to buy the ones with the dodgey engines. Our black(hawk) helicopters are so damned *noisy*! And they crash all the time. So much for stealth surveillance of the populace ;)
See how confusing all this mess is? You even get moderated as "insightful" for pointing out the bleeding obvious! :)
I think patents should be treated the same way as copyright - if you don't enforce it, you obviously don't want it. Why is Microsoft going to enforce FAT patents now? If they'd enforced them earlier, noone would have used FAT, they'd have found something else to use.
The moon is a superdense glob, set in a special orbit around Sedna, specifically to attract our attention. We have to alter its orbit in order to indicate that we are ready to be inducted into the Federation of Sentient Planets.
What they don't tell you is that the reason CD sales are down by 7% is because CD production is down by 20%. People are buying more music, but so much of it is copyright-protected optical media that the CDs are becoming extinct.
My CD purchasing is down 100% - the last three albums I wanted to buy were not CDs, they were "copyright protected" media. They won't work in my Strawberry iMac, and thanks to the "Free" Trade Agreement that our foolish Government has signed with the USA, it is now illegal for me to import my albums into iTunes anyway. I don't have a stereo system - I have a computer and a pair of desktop speakers. The only CD readers I have in the house are CD-ROM drives.
I contend that if the music industry was to start publishing CDs again, CD sales would increase.
No - the RIAA would go for the obvious target, this of course being the victim. After all, the victim was the one who (illegally) ripped the MP3 from CDs and (illegally) stored it on the iPod. Thus in the process of getting mugged and voluntarily handing over the iPod, the victim was illegally sharing intellectual property.
So if you do get mugged for your iPod, don't let the RIAA get hold of your email or IP address!
Osama Bin Laden isn't practicing terrorism to free his oppressed people. He's on a personal vendetta against the Western world - he's an agent of chaos, not a freedom fighter.
And don't forget the historical importance of such a site - people could (for example) search the archive for information about what advertisements were *really* being displayed in Times Square at the time that Spider-Man was released ;)
As discussed in Plastic Money at the Questacon, the main feature of plastic currency is that it's hard to reproduce by its nature. It's also more durable than paper money.
The ink is resistant to washing, and you can't print on the plastic using conventional printers (ink, dye, laser). You can even put metallic threads (aka RFID tags) in the plastic. The whole note is plastic, so the whole note can be transparent and holographic.
The hardest part about switching to pretty coloured plastic money is convincing people that it's still real money. It's funny watching Americans visiting Australia trying to come to grips with our weird currency - I think the one thing that confuses most of them is that different denominations are different sizes. So a $50 note is larger than a $20 note for example. Want to know more?
So keep going with Freeside in the off-hours (the hours that the bosses are off site). Run it in parallel with the "real" system if you have to.
Then when the "real" system falls flat on your face like you know it will, just keep running with Freeside, "until the real system gets back on its feet".
Has worked for me before.
Ferengi Rule Of Acquisition 286: No good deed goes unpunished.
I don't provide free support to friends and family, mainly because they told *their* friends that I do cheap computer maintenance, and suddenly world+dog is ringing me asking for a freebie.
It's insulting and demeaning.
So these days, when people ask me to help them, I just say, "Sure, for $50 I'll check out your computer - make sure you've got the Windows CD handy in case we need to reinstall anything."
It's the second part that most people balk at.
Remember, if you pirate software, you're supporting abusive monopolies.
By the time abuse@... is receiving complaints, the spammer has already moved on to the next prepaid-hours connection.
What would be *really* nice is being able to ring up the telephone company and get them to disconnect the phone line the spammer uses.
According to Macafee and F-Secure, the virus also copies itself to Kazaa shared file directories as things such as "winxp-rootkit". So the reason people are double-clicking the download is because they think it's something they really want!
As if you needed *another* reason to avoid Kazaa!
It used to be that only courts could determine what evidence was or was not allowed to be published.
If the patent office approves this application, they'll be giving Microsoft the power of veto in publication of documents. Submit documents as evidence in Word 2003 format. Once the court has accepted the document as evidence, evoke the court's licence for Word 2003. QED.
And how do I explain to my dial-up users that the reason their bill includes 100Mb of excess this month, even though it was feeling so damned slow, is that some company was shipping them pop-up movies while they were reading web pages?
There's an awful lot of data you can download when you're busy reading email or cross-referencing web pages.
Certainly, once I get enough complaints, I can set up my HTTP proxy to ban that site, or at least redirect to a "That site was going to kill your connection" page. But that's re-active. Who knows, maybe the advertisers will be good enough to make all the movie-ads come from the one site, so I can just block that site.
Dial up users don't have GB of quota to play with, and most of my customers are still using dialup (dammit, *I* am still using dialup).
Cool :) Thanks!