But they forgot to trademark firefox? Whoooopppps!
They didn't forget to trademark Firefox. They just haven't had it issued yet, though it soon will be. They also may not be able to get the trademark in every country (what a suprise!).
I think it's interesting that you've made the assumption that this person is a "sexual predator". I don't think that this person's viewing of child pornography automatically makes him a sex offender. The article says he had a relatively small number of images on computer (150ish child porn and about 300 other porn), with the child porn viewed over a period of four hours. Not only does 20 years seem rather excessive, but I wonder if that sort of offense warrants any sort of jail time at all. I'd think a fine would be sufficient. Save the long jail terms for the scum that produce this sort of stuff.
If your car breaks go out and you hit someone, you're almost certainly going to be considered at fault.
Actually unless you're found negligent it is unlikely that you would be found to be at fault. It's even more unlikey that criminal charges would result (let alone a conviction). Your analogy doesn't support your argument.
Here's an analogy of my own: say you write to a company requesting a mail order catalog and they send you some illegal donkey porn instead. The police (for some reason) search your mailbox and find it. Should you be criminally charged? How about if you do see the donkey porn, but throw it away and they find it in your rubbish? I say 'no' in both cases, and I say 'no' in the case of the browser cache.
But so what? Obviously he won't be able to lead projects if people feel the way you think they will, but is that what Microsoft want from him? I doubt it. So how does the change in attitudes toward him reduce his value to Microsoft? He knows how open source works, he's not going to forget.
Meant to add that you seem to be of the opinion that the OSS driver writers are some combination of lazy, incompetent, and sadistic. Trust me, that's not the case. The problem is hard.
but how is Joe User supposed to answer these same questions? Trial and error? If there are any instructions or checklists for the user to answer these configuration questions, the device installer could programatically answer those same questions.
Joe User can look at the numbers printed on the tuner chip. Or look at the manufacturers name on the box and then trial-and-error a small set of possibilities. These are not things the driver can do.
Proprietary interfaces generally. They can query the card in some vendor specific way that we couldn't rely on even if we did reverse engineer it (and frankly there aren't that many OSS developers wanting to reverse engineer random drivers).
Can a driver determine the tuner type by querying the card?
Unfortunately no. There's no standard interface, and while you can usually guess which tuner from the product numbers (and the list in the documentation) even that's not 100% reliable.
He's got 70 fans. Airflow is the least of his problems. I'd be much more concerned about noise and power consumption than a few percent extra cooling that may be attained by having the air move bottom to top.
but it's only a matter of time before my own Mac is useless because the newer applications will no longer be compiled for G4
Did you buy that G4 with the hope that one day there might be applications you might want to use? Or did you buy it because there are applications available now that you want to use? If the answer is that later then what's the problem? And if it's the former, then that was pretty stupid, no?
At 15Hz and a mere 200x768x768 pixels, it is requires a mere 1/3GB but a whopping bandwidth of 5GB/s
You're using the wrong numbers. The system actually transfers 198 1024x768 pixel 3 bit color frames 24 times per second, at least according to the whitepaper. That's 1.4GB/s, not 5GB/s. Only the central 768 pixels of the 1024 are displayed so they could reduce the bandwidth requirement by 25%.
In the meanwhile, this will remain a gimmick or be limited for very special applications where the low quality is acceptable (hint: this probably rules out medical applications:-)
And yet the article clearly states that people are finding it useful in several industries including medical applications. Why do people on Slashdot insist on acting like they know better than the people developing the technology?
Also, you will find that Atmel, ARM, Zilog, Microchip Technology, Motorola, and others, who are not big players in the desktop market, have a huge share of the embedded systems market.
They can't all have huges shares of the embedded systems market, unless you mean collectively.
Why are chose and choose different than lose and loose anyway?
Because we're talking about English so Rules Do Not Apply! Seriously, you can't draw parallels in that way at all unless you know the etymology of the words in question. In the case of lose/loose and chose/choose, chose comes from Latin via French, lose and choose come from Old English via Middle English, and loose comes from Old Norse via Middle English.
How many people truly don't like DRM because it keeps them from making back up copies of cd's, playstation games, dvd's, etc...
Personally I don't make backups, so you're right about that justification in my case. But there are other legitimate reasons why I don't like DRM:
It makes using the thing I've paid for more difficult. For example, why should I have to have a game CD in the drive after I've done a "full" install? DRM inconviences me, as a legitimate user, everytime I want to use the game. Pirates, OTOH, are only inconvienced once (when they make the copy). As well as the inconvience, the constant handling means the CD is more likely to get scratched or otherwise damaged.
It gets used to create unreasonable artificial restrictions. Why shouldn't I be able to copy stuff to a medium that is more convient for me (i.e. a hard drive)? So long as I'm not sharing that stuff, I don't see any ethical or moral reason why I shouldn't be able to do what I want with it. So far very little DRM is technically capable of just preventing infringing uses, it prevents permitted use as well. Another example of this is the DVD Region Encoding scheme. It's really a price-fixing system, and even if you accept that purpose as being reasonable (which I certainly don't), the system as implemented gets in the way of legitimate uses, such as moving between countries. Why should I have to rebuy all my DVDs when moving from one country to another?
Despite all the criticism that is likely to flame on this thread, this is a step in the right direction. I rahter see Sony focus on preventing people from making copies of copies instead of making copies of originals.
It's not a step in the right direction because the resulting "copy" is not a CD I can play in most players. It's a CDROM with the music encoded as WMV files. If they think this is the answer to "casual piracy", they're even more out of touch than I thought.
I know I can go double the legal limit before I am impaired and many others are the same.
Even if this were true, you're still breaking the law. You're going to have to come up with a better argument for not having such a device than "I should be able to break the law if I want to".
In this case, the person it will be checking has proven they are willing to accept responsibility for their actions, and so the need for the device is fairly minimal
It's been fairly well established that people are terrible at judging their own level of impairment, be it due to alcohol, tiredness, or other distractions.
I know. My point is that you're being misleading if you claim the copy line command is just 'Y'. It's not. It's often a switch to command mode and then 'Y'.
Bonus if it helps drive down the price of legal online music and movies.
Don't hold your breath. Did the price of music drop when the at-the-time-uncopyable CD appeared? Did the price of movies drop when the at-the-time-uncopyable DVD appeared? Or the price of software when that first started appearing on CDROM? Copy protection will never result in a price drop.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's interesting that you've made the assumption that this person is a "sexual predator". I don't think that this person's viewing of child pornography automatically makes him a sex offender. The article says he had a relatively small number of images on computer (150ish child porn and about 300 other porn), with the child porn viewed over a period of four hours. Not only does 20 years seem rather excessive, but I wonder if that sort of offense warrants any sort of jail time at all. I'd think a fine would be sufficient. Save the long jail terms for the scum that produce this sort of stuff.
Here's an analogy of my own: say you write to a company requesting a mail order catalog and they send you some illegal donkey porn instead. The police (for some reason) search your mailbox and find it. Should you be criminally charged? How about if you do see the donkey porn, but throw it away and they find it in your rubbish? I say 'no' in both cases, and I say 'no' in the case of the browser cache.
Well put, that's exactly what I wanted to say.
But so what? Obviously he won't be able to lead projects if people feel the way you think they will, but is that what Microsoft want from him? I doubt it. So how does the change in attitudes toward him reduce his value to Microsoft? He knows how open source works, he's not going to forget.
Meant to add that you seem to be of the opinion that the OSS driver writers are some combination of lazy, incompetent, and sadistic. Trust me, that's not the case. The problem is hard.
Proprietary interfaces generally. They can query the card in some vendor specific way that we couldn't rely on even if we did reverse engineer it (and frankly there aren't that many OSS developers wanting to reverse engineer random drivers).
He's got 70 fans. Airflow is the least of his problems. I'd be much more concerned about noise and power consumption than a few percent extra cooling that may be attained by having the air move bottom to top.
Do you have evidence to support your claims, or are you speculating?
That quote from Forbes is probably the best way to go: use the prevailing average annual wage.
I know. My point is that you're being misleading if you claim the copy line command is just 'Y'. It's not. It's often a switch to command mode and then 'Y'.