But I do not believe the problem is any Government intrusion on that right. It's more of a problem of media companies having to compete for ratings by sensationalizing and making sure stories are interesting.
Partly that, but maybe it's more to the point that mass media maximizes their audience by telling us what we want to hear and validating our prejudices. That's why the "Good vs. Evil" spin - with our leaders naturally on the side of Good - permeates our news so much. It suits the needs of our elites while satisfying our cultural need to view the world this way.
Easy enough mistake to make. At their lunatic fringes, the Left and the Right start looking pretty much the same. The political continuum is a circle, not a straight line...
Because that would require learning music, writing and composing songs, playing an instrument, and maybe even developing a talent. Not a very efficient process, time-wise...
But the point of Open Source is that it doesn't matter if RedHat or any other company goes away tomorrow. That's why MS is so out of their heads over the GPL. The life cycle of the software outlives any corporate entity, and they can't bury it by buying anyone out.
Personally, I don't give a rat's ass whether Linux slays MS on the desktop. In fact, I'd almost prefer that it didn't, because then Linux would be subject to the same dumbing-down, corporate control, and user-as-property mentality that has befallen Windows.
The fact is that many people are not going to accept Linux (and open source in general) until it is EXACTLY like what they're used to in every respect, from functionality to protocols to the GUI itself. Let them continue to pay the MS tax if they insist on it. As for me, I used to dual-boot between Linux and WinNT, but my use of Windows dropped steadily until I finally just wiped it from my disk a few months ago. Not once have I missed it, and I doubt that I ever will.
Well, the frozen chicken has thawed, and I just put it in the oven (350F for 60min, if you're taking notes). No signs of life yet, but it could be because this chicken has 3 breasts, 3 thighs, 2 legs, and no head.
Anyway, I am confident that the technology will exist in the future to reverse the cooking and freezing processes and bring this bird-and-a-half back to life. With nanotechnology and the Chicken Genome Project, who's to say what might be possible?
Yeah, the frozen chicken I just bought at the grocery store has as much chance of resurrection as these morons.
And even if it were to become possible, just who, I wonder, is supposed to go to the (undoubtedly great) effort and expense of thawing their sorry asses?
There is a program called mailfilter that claims to do just this for POP3 mail; i.e., it polls your mailserver periodically, examines the headers (only) against a rule set, and deletes offending messages on the server.
Haven't used it much, so I can't really recommend it one way or the other...
I agree that the symptoms these people are experiencing are almost certainly not caused by what they think they are, but on the other hand I think the ridicule they're getting here is unnecessary and mean-spirited. The possibility that the symptoms are "psychosomatic" - e.g., stress-related or whatever - does not make them any less real, and we're fools if we think that we're guaranteed never to have to go through something similar.
That said, though, it's also true that we can't impose the burden of remediation on everyone else unless we're reasonably confident that the "true" cause has been identified, and that can only be done with the kind of controlled studies that several others have suggested here.
But give these people a break; their suffering is real even if they're grasping for bogus explanations...
Maybe it's not such a bad thing that Linux remain a "geek" OS. If it ever seriously challenged MS on the desktops of the masses, then it would inevitably be dumbed down beyond all recognition. Worse than that, it would become the same trojan horse into the pockets and privacy of its users that WinXP has become.I.e., we'd all have to switch to something else.
Linux has actually matured very quickly as a desktop for business use, and a large part of the reason it can't beat MS is (a) fear of straying from the pack and (b) legacy of both software and procedure. New (and presumably small) tech-savvy businesses that aren't afraid of cutting the umbilical may be able to gain a competitive advantage, especially with the onorous new licensing practices coming out of Redmond these days.
The essence of all of this is that the business model of RIAA's members is no longer sustainable on its own, and so they are attempting to shift the increasing costs of maintaining it to other industries (e.g., hardware manufacturers and ISPs) and to the public (e.g., surrender of "fair use" rights, monopoly pricing practices, law enforcement costs, etc.).
It won't be enough to require the defunctionalization of sound cards; they'll also need laws that criminalize the use of older cards by consumers who decline to properly downgrade their equipment (as most surely will). Or, more efficiently, Microsoft can simply drop support of older cards and formats from the next version of Windows. So I guess it's Linux that'll need to be criminalized...
I'm wondering what archeologists are going to think about this in 10,000 years when they dig it up. Of course, all modern knowledge of physics will have been long lost by then. Maybe future new-age types will find it useful for "healing" people or something...
Absolutely. The whole idea that we need expensive custom hardware to run Linux - because Linux won't support existing cheap, mass-market laptop hardware - is bizarre and smells vaguely like Microsoft FUD.
I haven't installed Linux on a laptop (oooh - I like the ring of that!), but I probably will soon. Just where are the major problems?
Engler promoting high-tech startups in Michigan... now that's a howler. Probably the best asset that this state has in that regard is one of the top research universities in the country, but to many people here (including the guv and most of the state legislature) with ties to rival schools, the U of Mich is seen as an elitist institution that needs to be cut down to size in the interests of fairness and their kids having a better chance of being admitted.
Every few years it actually becomes a political issue here that the U of M attracts too many top out-of-state students, taking up slots that rightfully belong to home-grown Michigan kids. Then Engler and the legislature start rattling their sabres, threatening to cut funding unless the Big U drops its admissions standards and stops importing so much talent from other states. Ponder that for a moment, if you're interested in building a more robust high-tech infrastructure.
Ummm... Am I the only one to be bothered by the fact that this announcement comes two days before the meeting? Kind of late to arrange a trip to Belgium. Might've been fun, though...
Best thing I ever did was to pack the TV back into its box and get it out of the living room. If I really want to watch something, I can do it with a couple minutes' setup time. So now I watch the thing for maybe 2 or 3 hours per week - a few more if there's a good game on - and it's like losing an addiction.
This was true only until the Emancipation Proclamation (1862), and even then only in some states. I believe a rather bloody war was fought over it. Your side lost, and a surprising number of people still seem upset about it.
Yeah... a hard cover is really nothing but a piece of cardboard covered with cloth. I doubt that it adds more than 30 or 40 cents to the cost of a book. But then, whenever you have a monopoly situation - which you effectively do whenever copyrights or patents are involved - the price of a thing has very little to do with its cost. The big differential in price between hard- and soft-covered books was originally (I'm guessing) a way of getting more revenue from libraries and such, where a book is more likely to be read by multiple people. Now we're all trained to perceive significantly greater value in a hard-covered book, so of course we're going to pay 3 times as much for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Partly that, but maybe it's more to the point that mass media maximizes their audience by telling us what we want to hear and validating our prejudices. That's why the "Good vs. Evil" spin - with our leaders naturally on the side of Good - permeates our news so much. It suits the needs of our elites while satisfying our cultural need to view the world this way.
Easy enough mistake to make. At their lunatic fringes, the Left and the Right start looking pretty much the same. The political continuum is a circle, not a straight line...
All you need to know: "Woof" == "Hey!"
Brain/eye bandwidth is now the real problem. Anyone working on that?
Because that would require learning music, writing and composing songs, playing an instrument, and maybe even developing a talent. Not a very efficient process, time-wise...
You know you're making progress when the beads of sweat start popping out on the foreheads of the Microsoft drones...
Personally, I don't give a rat's ass whether Linux slays MS on the desktop. In fact, I'd almost prefer that it didn't, because then Linux would be subject to the same dumbing-down, corporate control, and user-as-property mentality that has befallen Windows.
The fact is that many people are not going to accept Linux (and open source in general) until it is EXACTLY like what they're used to in every respect, from functionality to protocols to the GUI itself. Let them continue to pay the MS tax if they insist on it. As for me, I used to dual-boot between Linux and WinNT, but my use of Windows dropped steadily until I finally just wiped it from my disk a few months ago. Not once have I missed it, and I doubt that I ever will.
Umm... Gorilla marketing?
Well, at least they know the difference between they're and their...
Anyway, I am confident that the technology will exist in the future to reverse the cooking and freezing processes and bring this bird-and-a-half back to life. With nanotechnology and the Chicken Genome Project, who's to say what might be possible?
And even if it were to become possible, just who, I wonder, is supposed to go to the (undoubtedly great) effort and expense of thawing their sorry asses?
Ummm, excuse me? Did I read this correctly?
Haven't used it much, so I can't really recommend it one way or the other...
Screw the broadband... I'll take the wine and the mistress!
That said, though, it's also true that we can't impose the burden of remediation on everyone else unless we're reasonably confident that the "true" cause has been identified, and that can only be done with the kind of controlled studies that several others have suggested here.
But give these people a break; their suffering is real even if they're grasping for bogus explanations...
Linux has actually matured very quickly as a desktop for business use, and a large part of the reason it can't beat MS is (a) fear of straying from the pack and (b) legacy of both software and procedure. New (and presumably small) tech-savvy businesses that aren't afraid of cutting the umbilical may be able to gain a competitive advantage, especially with the onorous new licensing practices coming out of Redmond these days.
It won't be enough to require the defunctionalization of sound cards; they'll also need laws that criminalize the use of older cards by consumers who decline to properly downgrade their equipment (as most surely will). Or, more efficiently, Microsoft can simply drop support of older cards and formats from the next version of Windows. So I guess it's Linux that'll need to be criminalized...
I'm wondering what archeologists are going to think about this in 10,000 years when they dig it up. Of course, all modern knowledge of physics will have been long lost by then. Maybe future new-age types will find it useful for "healing" people or something...
I haven't installed Linux on a laptop (oooh - I like the ring of that!), but I probably will soon. Just where are the major problems?
Every few years it actually becomes a political issue here that the U of M attracts too many top out-of-state students, taking up slots that rightfully belong to home-grown Michigan kids. Then Engler and the legislature start rattling their sabres, threatening to cut funding unless the Big U drops its admissions standards and stops importing so much talent from other states. Ponder that for a moment, if you're interested in building a more robust high-tech infrastructure.
Ummm... Am I the only one to be bothered by the fact that this announcement comes two days before the meeting? Kind of late to arrange a trip to Belgium. Might've been fun, though...
Now if I can just kick this /. thing...
They say that TV is a drug. QED.
This was true only until the Emancipation Proclamation (1862), and even then only in some states. I believe a rather bloody war was fought over it. Your side lost, and a surprising number of people still seem upset about it.
Yeah... a hard cover is really nothing but a piece of cardboard covered with cloth. I doubt that it adds more than 30 or 40 cents to the cost of a book. But then, whenever you have a monopoly situation - which you effectively do whenever copyrights or patents are involved - the price of a thing has very little to do with its cost. The big differential in price between hard- and soft-covered books was originally (I'm guessing) a way of getting more revenue from libraries and such, where a book is more likely to be read by multiple people. Now we're all trained to perceive significantly greater value in a hard-covered book, so of course we're going to pay 3 times as much for it.