The United States aren't really united, and that's why these issues are causing such difficulty. 50 states, and 50 different sets of laws and mandates. Some allow gambling, prostitution and consensual sodomy, others outlaw anything they can spell. Maybe the country should be dissolved and the individual states be granted independence so they can choose to adhere to the WTO or not, based on their compartmentalized ideals.
The US government has made its bed by forbidding gambling activities in all but a few states. Well guess what, people want to gamble so they will go wherever gambling is allowed. When that place is the internet, it's all too easy to do. The government can't "compete" with the internet, because it's everywhere. Either legalize gambling everywhere and compete on an equal platform, or ban it everywhere and let Antigua fill their coffers with American money, but the US can't win if it won't compete.
"System and method for synthesizing object-oriented high-level code into browser-side javascript"
I suck at english, I really don't "get" what they're patenting here, a code translator or something ? Code your webpage in "MorfikLang++" and it will automagically translate into Javascript, so you can do double the debugging plus pay licensing/royalties for something everyone else has been doing natively for a couple years:P
I don't see this as affecting AJAX at all. AJAX is just a catchphrase that seems to group any functionality that doesn't result in a page reload, hopefully involving meaningful data exchange with the server. Hell, lots of people falsely believe that prototype.js == AJAX.
Besides, if they were really trying to patent AJAX, don't you think Google would play musical court chairs with them until little miss Morfik runs out of seed money ? The system is broken, that's for sure, but it's broken in favor of whoever has more money. Who the hell has more money than Google and MS ? (Bad Boy) Noooooooobody!
Actually it's the other way around. The women don't want to be shown on HD video because it makes "flaws" more visible like blemishes and implant scars. Now that depends on the woman, in this case it was Jesse Jane that made the comment. Maybe she feels vulnerable because she has weird-ass implants and patchy skin that only looks semi-decent at specific angles under carefully adjusted lighting:P Back in normal-porn land, higher-res video started many years ago when camgirls started using high-end camcorders to get 720x480 native and in a few instances up to 1024x704... this was around 2003. Just because the big guys still use 320x240 or 512x384 is just because that's the cheapest and fastest way to get it done, since they can simply use standard DV cams and downsize the video to hide the flaws and speed up encoding. A lot of porn fans don't mind low-res video much, as long as it vaguely resembles boobs. That's why we have such ridiculous things as cell/PDA porn. Mmm.. 19200 pixels of nakedness at 5 frames per second... those boobs are at least 4 pixels round, what a rack!:P
Such things used to be common, but like everything else in the world of accessories, things get worse with each successive version. I have one such 5.25" enclosure that takes a standard IEC power cord and houses the AC/DC transformer inside the enclosure. The downside is that the fan cooling this circuitry is a bit noisy (small fan + high rpms), but the standard cabling makes it extremely versatile for backups, since just about everyone who owns a computer will have the cables and I don't need to carry mine. I've got it rigged with one big backup drive, and a smaller bootable one with recovery software.
It's a shame how the accessory manufacturers are run by taiwanese profiteering gluttons, as they eventually designed one-chip adapters that do the bare minimum, so no slave support and they are often fussy about connecting older drives. I ended up finding another enclosure like my first on eBay, and transplanted its guts into a smaller project box with movable IDE and power connectors to make a ghetto hot-swap adapter. It's extremely handy to quickly snap on a hard drive, flip the switch and access it within a few seconds, especially if I'm ghosting a bunch of them... way faster than going over the network!
Well then, maybe your laptop is poorly designed! For USB to be "universal", you need to be able to connect more than 1-2 devices, given the huge number of gadgets available I'd want no less than 4 ports. There's no reason for a modern laptop not to have them, it's trivial to stack USB controllers on a board, they're so tiny!
Why the hell does the US government need control over any aspect of the internet ? The only thing they should have control over is www.whitehouse.gov... and I'd even motion to change that to www.whitehouse.gov.us. They're not the global government!
If ultimately there is no way around this master key bullshit, let's turn it inside out and give it to EVERY government. After all, the internet "belongs" to everyone, that's what makes it so great. If the internet were restricted to what the US government wants, it would be just a giant pentecostal worship site with idiots babbling in tongues and homophobic banter.
Where's that Edgar Hoover kid when you need him ?:P If he really is hated as much as is portrayed in the media and online, then why is he still in power ? So much for democracy.!
Where I come from, this post's title is a joke on its own:)
Yes, we Canadians are comfortable with the fact that a large number of Americans are blissfully ignorant. On the other hand, you have more money and bigger businesses, evidence that intellect and wealth are not necessarily linked.
[/Sarcasm]
Jokes aside, religion seems far bigger in the states than it is up here in the freezing cold. That probably has a lot to do with it, as the theory of evolution goes directly against many religious writings. The preached nature of most popular religions makes such dilemmas difficult. Followers are told to blindly accept "the word of god" as law. Don't turn gay, don't eat pork, don't let women speak, and most importantly don't ask why things are the way they are! Many people can't adapt religion to reality... they don't even want to consider the fact that maybe evolution and "god" can coexist.
In the end, if the jesus freaks don't like evolution, I'm fine with it. They can run their own evolution-free colleges and teach whatever the hell they like; live their own lives and leave mine alone. The biggest reason why agnostics/atheists dislike religion is because they're always trying to push their version of reality on everyone else like it's they're goddamned Dreamhost resellers!
When I was your age, we used floppy disks as swap space.
When I was your age, we overclocked our floppy drives.
When I was your age, memory upgrades came with a soldering iron and a hand-written instruction sheet.
When I was your age, L1 cache was just a really long wire loop with high capacitance.
When I was your age, computers booted in about 2/10ths of a second.
When I was your age, Compuserve was the world's biggest dial-up network:P (try THAT on for size!)
When I was your age, we didn't let teenagers post crap on the internets, we beat them into discipline with a belt and sent them off to bible school!
When I was your age, music piracy was a big problem: PLAY "T240MNO2 G+N0C+N0CC+D+C+P2P4D+F+EP2P4F+G+F+EP2P4G+F+EC+CG+N 0C+N0CC+D+E8D+8C+4P2D+F+A2G+2F+2E2EG+2G+2F+EC+P4"
When I was your age, there was still money to be made in the computer industry.
Virtualization will slow things down... yes that's obvious, since you're emulating the hardware to a certain extent, and triggering a bazillion context switches every time I/O happens. This stuff is bad for web apps, sure, but normal people don't run just one VM per box. The benefit comes from having multiple VM's running on the same physical machine. For many outfits, it's far cheaper and more efficient to have a whole bunch of little isolated VM's running on one big beefy SMP server, than to have them all as little boxen taking up tons of space and chugging more electricity than Tokyo Square on payday. It also makes it a lot easier to migrate those VM's to bigger/better gear as needed for upgrades or failover protection, often with zero downtime (just a bit of lag during transfer). That's how you can justify spending 25k on a 16-core SMP beast with 32gb of ram and four independent RAID-5 banks. It's still cheaper than 16 separates, not just the upfront cost of equipment but also the ongoing maintenance costs.
Hell I even have a VM server in my apartment, just for the convenience of running 4 distinct OS'es on one neatly stashed box. I don't need a KVM switch or long-ass serial cable, everything's done VNC-style through the VMware console from boot to poweroff. That feature alone makes VM's immensely attractive in many scenarios. For sysadmins, you can do all the work from your desk, no need to go stand in the chilly server room for an hour waiting for a tape restore or OS reload, and you can even script a lot of functionality through the hypervisor API. I'm not saying it's the solution to everyone's problems, but for those things it was designed for, it does them extremely well.
Funny how just yesterday I was digging through my binders in search of my Delphi discs to code up a quick file management util. I'm eagerly waiting for the trial version of Delphi PHP to finish downloading, but if it's anything like Delphi/BCB I'm going to need more kleenex. Say what you will, but when it comes to rapid prototyping it's about as fast as it gets. There's a certain elegance to ObjectPascal despite its simplicity, and it can do just about anything C++ can, with less headaches. I see it as a middle ground between VB and templatized C++, plus the compiler's crazy fast, perfect for the kind of incremental debugging that comes naturally with prototyping.
If they've managed to accomplish this with PHP/Ajax, we'll be seeing a new breed of web apps, coded not by Java dweebs or Ajax hacks, but by seasoned app designers... a little less flair and CSS shenanigans, and more direct interactivity and usability.
Congress doesn't need to side with anything. The RIAA doesn't win many lawsuits, it just threatens people into settling for $3750. It's very much a poker bluff, they have no hand to play (no evidence), but they intimidate the defendants into folding to "cut their losses". The fact that lawyers get paid even if they lose is a contributing factor to this abuse, as few people can afford to front the retainer even if they have a chance of winning their attorney fees back in the counter-claim.
I like analogies, so here's a colorful one for everyone: The RIAA is like the schoolyard bully. Either you give him your lunch money and go without food for a day, or you take a chance and try to pound him into submission, but you'll get beat up pretty bad too, and if you lose you'll have to pay anyway.
I may be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that PayPerPost requires disclosure by participating bloggers. There are probably other outfits that don't disclose, but these guys try to walk the ethical line. I consider that better than most sites out there, given the glut of gadget review sites that almost always glorify whatever product they're pimping. Hell, all the PC hardware sites tend to use the same nerfed wording whether a product is better or worse than its competitor. They don't ever say "Geforce 42-XXX Uber-Leet edition sucks", instead they'll say "NVidia's product offers competitive performance with ATI's high-end offerings" leaving lots of room for interpretation. What they're really saying is "I'm going to sell this review card on ebay for 900 bucks, so I'm being ambiguously nice to the NVidia Santa Clause".
The other thing is that bloggers choose what they write. If PayPerPost is paying to say "Democrats eat babies" and you don't agree, then you don't write about it. You won't get paid, of course, but there are other paid posts you can choose from that better suit your views. Blogging is all about credibility... if you blog about stupid stuff, your readers will go somewhere else and then your advertisers will pull out, so it's in the blogger's best interests to behave responsibly. CNN wouldn't air anti-military propaganda because it doesn't fit their slant, bloggers have to make the same decisions.
What happens is they release the product anyway because GPL license holders are not likely to sue, and even if they do, the cost will be minimal. How do you value damages on something you give away for free ? The GPL is difficult to enforce for individuals, only if someone like IBM or Sun could bring a legitimite business case with tangible losses and penalties could the GPL really have any weight.
It's nice when companies respect and honor the GPL, but if they don't, it's not like the average 12 year old Debian hacker is going to have resources and desire to sue.
I'd replace war zone with kindergarten. It used to be you had to be at least somewhat smart to get on the internet, mainly because it had little to offer the common twit, as it was composed mainly of technical and scientific documents, combined with the fact that you needed either a Unix system or 3rd party software to even get connected. ISPs were a niche market for geeks and professionals, monthly access fees were relatively costly.
Today's internet access comes prepackaged with every computer with a free trial, costs less than a cheap dinner so any oregano-selling kid can afford it, and interactive web sites allow anyone to mark their territory with their digital urine. The very fact that kids and young (and/or dumb) teenagers are allowed free roaming is a direct contributor to the filth. Way back when I was in college, we had a pretty fast campus link, but it was monitored and abusers were routinely banned at the firewall. Given the novelty and appeal of the internet at the time, most students used it responsibly because we sure as hell didn't want to miss out on the fun.
The combination of uneducated, immature users and lack of punishment/enforcement had led to the chaos we see today. It certainly doesn't help that modern parents have become pussies, kids are out of control and grow up confused, aimless and irreverent. Idiocracy is not so far off and the internet is merely a window into everyone's psyche, a sample of things to come.
I wonder if they will hassle their ISP customers with extended warranties ? "Get the service plan for only 49.99 MORE per month, it's a bargain at any price! If your internet doesn't work right, just bring it back to the store and after 5-6 visits and a lot of berating, we might actually give you a new internet!"
street crime has not decreased despite the presence of CCTV
So where/why/how do they justify additional funding for something that doesn't work ? Installing cameras is one thing, paying watchmen is another, but being the laughing stock of the whole damn planet is priceless! They're proof that government surveillance is a joke, meanwhile huge casinos can track gamblers from entry to exit, with facial recognition and voice-printing at some locations. The difference is the casino has a choke point: the door. CCTV or not, a city can't do squat because by the time they see a crime on the cameras, it's too late to react. The cops are too slow to do any good, given the area they need to cover.
Ok, since they're such uber leet laptop design gurus, why don't they make a non-P.Diddy version with everything but the bling, and sell it for oh, 4-5 grand or so ?
Oh, right... because then they wouldn't be making 990k profit on the thing. Stupid me to think in terms of tangible value!
Seriously, what more does the average user do with a computer ? Just because I'm a code monkey, doesn't mean my whole family is too. They're quite happy doing web, email, excel and a few Popcap games. The whole idea of a 4gb operating system to do that is ludicrous.
So then what ? Show up in court with no defender ? Same difference. Just don't give them what they want. They want money, but not really. They want control! They want to pwn your ass, so that they can go to the news outlets and say "Hey, we got another bloody pirate! And we're coming for the others!" Fuck that!
Indexing could be useful, but not everyone wants to throw disk space away if they never use the feature. Hell, I just went through a plain CentOS install for a server machine, and spent 2 more hours ripping out a bunch of crap I didn't need. 2 gigabytes of files for a machine that doesn't even have a web server set up, that's pretty pathetic. Logically it should be possible to have a kernel, web server and PHP/Perl/Python/whatever fit in no more than 256mb, and I'm being generous. But then you have to throw in the sloppy package managers that do fuck all, yet eat up gigabytes of disk space for their caches... I love Gentoo, but do I really need a full portage tree on my system ? Thousands of packages I've never heard of, and will never use. You'd think it could be a lot simpler. Have the emerge/apt/yum script request a package from the server, which also sends back a dependency tree. Client checks the tree, requests any additional packages as needed, and gets to work. Total non-tarball traffic: a couple kb for all but the worst spaghetti packages. No more sync bandwidth wasted, no more crazy disk space usage.
Hell, MS Windows Update does a weak form of this, they just don't do strong dependency checks. Works for them, and they certainly don't have any reservations about wasting disk space... the light-weight client just works better for them. Why wouldn't it work for Linux ?
I'm more than a little irritated by this whole AJAX buzz. You want to see who invented AJAX ? Go back a decade. I was using it on my little vanity page, and the code found its way into a few government intranets a friend of mine managed. Lots of other people came up with their own methods for dynamic content. The only difference is we didn't use buzz-happy XML, and we didn't give our Javascripts cute catchy names. It's such a big stupid phenomenon now, with entire books written on this non-topic, and business created specifically around it, while other businesses spend money for it. Someone may have come up with the AJAX moniker, but they certainly didn't pioneer the technique of dynamically requesting content on a as-needed basis. What, you've never seen IFRAME advertising before ?:P
I still don't quite understand why people would rush to get Vista. XP works the same if not better, there's actually mature driver support (well, mature is a relative term when talking about ATI, NVidia et al), and you know the software you need works on XP. This reminds me of over a decade ago when we all rushed to get Windows 95 the day it came out, only to pummel our PC's into dust with all the problems it caused. Printers no longer printing, internet dialer no longer dialing, and of course the joys of our old 16-bit apps crashing half the time. It was painful. I ended up dual-booting back to classic Dos + Wfw311 for a while longer while the dust settled. Vista is going to be the same story... give it a year, for most users it will have stabilized and 3rd party support will be established. Right now it doesn't even know which end to poop from.
Nintendo isn't widening the gaming market, at least not at this point in time. They are only expanding the Wii's market, because those new gamers still want nothing to do with the PS3 and 360. It's in a niche of its own right now, and will probably enjoy its unique position for years to come, until Sony and Microsoft release their next generation of consoles with ripped-off ideas that still aren't quite as good as the original. The fact that non-gamers are interested in the primal fun of throwing motion sensors around does nothing for the game industry, it's just locking them into Nintendo. It's going to be interesting when Wii gets old and something new comes around. Will they continue supporting more immersive gameplay, or will they turn the page and go back to sit-down thumb-mashing gameplay ? That would effectively lose the fringe gamers, sending back to the boring TV realm they came from.
Maybe I'm from a parallel universe where money doesn't grow on trees, but where the hell do these students get the cash to pay the settlement ? I remember when I was in college, I was a broke ass long-haired book bum. If someone had come at me back then with a lawsuit, I would have laughed my head off. So sue me, I got nothing to lose! What's the worst that can happen to a student ? Get sued, get a public defender (since you have nothing to "win" anyway), let the RIAA piss money away and if/when they win, you declare bankruptcy. And then you hire a real lawyer to build a harassment case against the RIAA for ruining your studies and your credit.
Or we could do it the old fashioned way with a brick to the head and pick-up truck ride to the landfill. We're already killing thousands of people we don't even know, in countries we can't even pronounce or spell. Why not clean our own backyard before doing our neighbors' ?
Slashdot Mirror
The United States aren't really united, and that's why these issues are causing such difficulty. 50 states, and 50 different sets of laws and mandates. Some allow gambling, prostitution and consensual sodomy, others outlaw anything they can spell. Maybe the country should be dissolved and the individual states be granted independence so they can choose to adhere to the WTO or not, based on their compartmentalized ideals.
The US government has made its bed by forbidding gambling activities in all but a few states. Well guess what, people want to gamble so they will go wherever gambling is allowed. When that place is the internet, it's all too easy to do. The government can't "compete" with the internet, because it's everywhere. Either legalize gambling everywhere and compete on an equal platform, or ban it everywhere and let Antigua fill their coffers with American money, but the US can't win if it won't compete.
"System and method for synthesizing object-oriented high-level code into browser-side javascript"
:P
I suck at english, I really don't "get" what they're patenting here, a code translator or something ? Code your webpage in "MorfikLang++" and it will automagically translate into Javascript, so you can do double the debugging plus pay licensing/royalties for something everyone else has been doing natively for a couple years
I don't see this as affecting AJAX at all. AJAX is just a catchphrase that seems to group any functionality that doesn't result in a page reload, hopefully involving meaningful data exchange with the server. Hell, lots of people falsely believe that prototype.js == AJAX.
Besides, if they were really trying to patent AJAX, don't you think Google would play musical court chairs with them until little miss Morfik runs out of seed money ? The system is broken, that's for sure, but it's broken in favor of whoever has more money. Who the hell has more money than Google and MS ? (Bad Boy) Noooooooobody!
Actually it's the other way around. The women don't want to be shown on HD video because it makes "flaws" more visible like blemishes and implant scars. Now that depends on the woman, in this case it was Jesse Jane that made the comment. Maybe she feels vulnerable because she has weird-ass implants and patchy skin that only looks semi-decent at specific angles under carefully adjusted lighting :P Back in normal-porn land, higher-res video started many years ago when camgirls started using high-end camcorders to get 720x480 native and in a few instances up to 1024x704... this was around 2003. Just because the big guys still use 320x240 or 512x384 is just because that's the cheapest and fastest way to get it done, since they can simply use standard DV cams and downsize the video to hide the flaws and speed up encoding. A lot of porn fans don't mind low-res video much, as long as it vaguely resembles boobs. That's why we have such ridiculous things as cell/PDA porn. Mmm.. 19200 pixels of nakedness at 5 frames per second... those boobs are at least 4 pixels round, what a rack! :P
Such things used to be common, but like everything else in the world of accessories, things get worse with each successive version. I have one such 5.25" enclosure that takes a standard IEC power cord and houses the AC/DC transformer inside the enclosure. The downside is that the fan cooling this circuitry is a bit noisy (small fan + high rpms), but the standard cabling makes it extremely versatile for backups, since just about everyone who owns a computer will have the cables and I don't need to carry mine. I've got it rigged with one big backup drive, and a smaller bootable one with recovery software.
It's a shame how the accessory manufacturers are run by taiwanese profiteering gluttons, as they eventually designed one-chip adapters that do the bare minimum, so no slave support and they are often fussy about connecting older drives. I ended up finding another enclosure like my first on eBay, and transplanted its guts into a smaller project box with movable IDE and power connectors to make a ghetto hot-swap adapter. It's extremely handy to quickly snap on a hard drive, flip the switch and access it within a few seconds, especially if I'm ghosting a bunch of them... way faster than going over the network!
Well then, maybe your laptop is poorly designed! For USB to be "universal", you need to be able to connect more than 1-2 devices, given the huge number of gadgets available I'd want no less than 4 ports. There's no reason for a modern laptop not to have them, it's trivial to stack USB controllers on a board, they're so tiny!
Why the hell does the US government need control over any aspect of the internet ? The only thing they should have control over is www.whitehouse.gov... and I'd even motion to change that to www.whitehouse.gov.us. They're not the global government!
If ultimately there is no way around this master key bullshit, let's turn it inside out and give it to EVERY government. After all, the internet "belongs" to everyone, that's what makes it so great. If the internet were restricted to what the US government wants, it would be just a giant pentecostal worship site with idiots babbling in tongues and homophobic banter.
Where's that Edgar Hoover kid when you need him ? :P If he really is hated as much as is portrayed in the media and online, then why is he still in power ? So much for democracy.!
Where I come from, this post's title is a joke on its own :)
Yes, we Canadians are comfortable with the fact that a large number of Americans are blissfully ignorant. On the other hand, you have more money and bigger businesses, evidence that intellect and wealth are not necessarily linked.
[/Sarcasm]
Jokes aside, religion seems far bigger in the states than it is up here in the freezing cold. That probably has a lot to do with it, as the theory of evolution goes directly against many religious writings. The preached nature of most popular religions makes such dilemmas difficult. Followers are told to blindly accept "the word of god" as law. Don't turn gay, don't eat pork, don't let women speak, and most importantly don't ask why things are the way they are! Many people can't adapt religion to reality... they don't even want to consider the fact that maybe evolution and "god" can coexist.
In the end, if the jesus freaks don't like evolution, I'm fine with it. They can run their own evolution-free colleges and teach whatever the hell they like; live their own lives and leave mine alone. The biggest reason why agnostics/atheists dislike religion is because they're always trying to push their version of reality on everyone else like it's they're goddamned Dreamhost resellers!
When I was your age, we used floppy disks as swap space.
:P (try THAT on for size!)
N 0C+N0CC+D+E8D+8C+4P2D+F+A2G+2F+2E2EG+2G+2F+EC+P4"
When I was your age, we overclocked our floppy drives.
When I was your age, memory upgrades came with a soldering iron and a hand-written instruction sheet.
When I was your age, L1 cache was just a really long wire loop with high capacitance.
When I was your age, computers booted in about 2/10ths of a second.
When I was your age, Compuserve was the world's biggest dial-up network
When I was your age, we didn't let teenagers post crap on the internets, we beat them into discipline with a belt and sent them off to bible school!
When I was your age, music piracy was a big problem: PLAY "T240MNO2 G+N0C+N0CC+D+C+P2P4D+F+EP2P4F+G+F+EP2P4G+F+EC+CG+
When I was your age, there was still money to be made in the computer industry.
Virtualization will slow things down... yes that's obvious, since you're emulating the hardware to a certain extent, and triggering a bazillion context switches every time I/O happens. This stuff is bad for web apps, sure, but normal people don't run just one VM per box. The benefit comes from having multiple VM's running on the same physical machine. For many outfits, it's far cheaper and more efficient to have a whole bunch of little isolated VM's running on one big beefy SMP server, than to have them all as little boxen taking up tons of space and chugging more electricity than Tokyo Square on payday. It also makes it a lot easier to migrate those VM's to bigger/better gear as needed for upgrades or failover protection, often with zero downtime (just a bit of lag during transfer). That's how you can justify spending 25k on a 16-core SMP beast with 32gb of ram and four independent RAID-5 banks. It's still cheaper than 16 separates, not just the upfront cost of equipment but also the ongoing maintenance costs.
Hell I even have a VM server in my apartment, just for the convenience of running 4 distinct OS'es on one neatly stashed box. I don't need a KVM switch or long-ass serial cable, everything's done VNC-style through the VMware console from boot to poweroff. That feature alone makes VM's immensely attractive in many scenarios. For sysadmins, you can do all the work from your desk, no need to go stand in the chilly server room for an hour waiting for a tape restore or OS reload, and you can even script a lot of functionality through the hypervisor API. I'm not saying it's the solution to everyone's problems, but for those things it was designed for, it does them extremely well.
Funny how just yesterday I was digging through my binders in search of my Delphi discs to code up a quick file management util. I'm eagerly waiting for the trial version of Delphi PHP to finish downloading, but if it's anything like Delphi/BCB I'm going to need more kleenex. Say what you will, but when it comes to rapid prototyping it's about as fast as it gets. There's a certain elegance to ObjectPascal despite its simplicity, and it can do just about anything C++ can, with less headaches. I see it as a middle ground between VB and templatized C++, plus the compiler's crazy fast, perfect for the kind of incremental debugging that comes naturally with prototyping.
If they've managed to accomplish this with PHP/Ajax, we'll be seeing a new breed of web apps, coded not by Java dweebs or Ajax hacks, but by seasoned app designers... a little less flair and CSS shenanigans, and more direct interactivity and usability.
Congress doesn't need to side with anything. The RIAA doesn't win many lawsuits, it just threatens people into settling for $3750. It's very much a poker bluff, they have no hand to play (no evidence), but they intimidate the defendants into folding to "cut their losses". The fact that lawyers get paid even if they lose is a contributing factor to this abuse, as few people can afford to front the retainer even if they have a chance of winning their attorney fees back in the counter-claim.
I like analogies, so here's a colorful one for everyone: The RIAA is like the schoolyard bully. Either you give him your lunch money and go without food for a day, or you take a chance and try to pound him into submission, but you'll get beat up pretty bad too, and if you lose you'll have to pay anyway.
I may be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that PayPerPost requires disclosure by participating bloggers. There are probably other outfits that don't disclose, but these guys try to walk the ethical line. I consider that better than most sites out there, given the glut of gadget review sites that almost always glorify whatever product they're pimping. Hell, all the PC hardware sites tend to use the same nerfed wording whether a product is better or worse than its competitor. They don't ever say "Geforce 42-XXX Uber-Leet edition sucks", instead they'll say "NVidia's product offers competitive performance with ATI's high-end offerings" leaving lots of room for interpretation. What they're really saying is "I'm going to sell this review card on ebay for 900 bucks, so I'm being ambiguously nice to the NVidia Santa Clause".
The other thing is that bloggers choose what they write. If PayPerPost is paying to say "Democrats eat babies" and you don't agree, then you don't write about it. You won't get paid, of course, but there are other paid posts you can choose from that better suit your views. Blogging is all about credibility... if you blog about stupid stuff, your readers will go somewhere else and then your advertisers will pull out, so it's in the blogger's best interests to behave responsibly. CNN wouldn't air anti-military propaganda because it doesn't fit their slant, bloggers have to make the same decisions.
What happens is they release the product anyway because GPL license holders are not likely to sue, and even if they do, the cost will be minimal. How do you value damages on something you give away for free ? The GPL is difficult to enforce for individuals, only if someone like IBM or Sun could bring a legitimite business case with tangible losses and penalties could the GPL really have any weight.
It's nice when companies respect and honor the GPL, but if they don't, it's not like the average 12 year old Debian hacker is going to have resources and desire to sue.
I'd replace war zone with kindergarten. It used to be you had to be at least somewhat smart to get on the internet, mainly because it had little to offer the common twit, as it was composed mainly of technical and scientific documents, combined with the fact that you needed either a Unix system or 3rd party software to even get connected. ISPs were a niche market for geeks and professionals, monthly access fees were relatively costly.
Today's internet access comes prepackaged with every computer with a free trial, costs less than a cheap dinner so any oregano-selling kid can afford it, and interactive web sites allow anyone to mark their territory with their digital urine. The very fact that kids and young (and/or dumb) teenagers are allowed free roaming is a direct contributor to the filth. Way back when I was in college, we had a pretty fast campus link, but it was monitored and abusers were routinely banned at the firewall. Given the novelty and appeal of the internet at the time, most students used it responsibly because we sure as hell didn't want to miss out on the fun.
The combination of uneducated, immature users and lack of punishment/enforcement had led to the chaos we see today. It certainly doesn't help that modern parents have become pussies, kids are out of control and grow up confused, aimless and irreverent. Idiocracy is not so far off and the internet is merely a window into everyone's psyche, a sample of things to come.
I wonder if they will hassle their ISP customers with extended warranties ? "Get the service plan for only 49.99 MORE per month, it's a bargain at any price! If your internet doesn't work right, just bring it back to the store and after 5-6 visits and a lot of berating, we might actually give you a new internet!"
street crime has not decreased despite the presence of CCTV
So where/why/how do they justify additional funding for something that doesn't work ? Installing cameras is one thing, paying watchmen is another, but being the laughing stock of the whole damn planet is priceless! They're proof that government surveillance is a joke, meanwhile huge casinos can track gamblers from entry to exit, with facial recognition and voice-printing at some locations. The difference is the casino has a choke point: the door. CCTV or not, a city can't do squat because by the time they see a crime on the cameras, it's too late to react. The cops are too slow to do any good, given the area they need to cover.
Ok, since they're such uber leet laptop design gurus, why don't they make a non-P.Diddy version with everything but the bling, and sell it for oh, 4-5 grand or so ?
Oh, right... because then they wouldn't be making 990k profit on the thing. Stupid me to think in terms of tangible value!
Seriously, what more does the average user do with a computer ? Just because I'm a code monkey, doesn't mean my whole family is too. They're quite happy doing web, email, excel and a few Popcap games. The whole idea of a 4gb operating system to do that is ludicrous.
So then what ? Show up in court with no defender ? Same difference. Just don't give them what they want. They want money, but not really. They want control! They want to pwn your ass, so that they can go to the news outlets and say "Hey, we got another bloody pirate! And we're coming for the others!" Fuck that!
Indexing could be useful, but not everyone wants to throw disk space away if they never use the feature. Hell, I just went through a plain CentOS install for a server machine, and spent 2 more hours ripping out a bunch of crap I didn't need. 2 gigabytes of files for a machine that doesn't even have a web server set up, that's pretty pathetic. Logically it should be possible to have a kernel, web server and PHP/Perl/Python/whatever fit in no more than 256mb, and I'm being generous. But then you have to throw in the sloppy package managers that do fuck all, yet eat up gigabytes of disk space for their caches... I love Gentoo, but do I really need a full portage tree on my system ? Thousands of packages I've never heard of, and will never use. You'd think it could be a lot simpler. Have the emerge/apt/yum script request a package from the server, which also sends back a dependency tree. Client checks the tree, requests any additional packages as needed, and gets to work. Total non-tarball traffic: a couple kb for all but the worst spaghetti packages. No more sync bandwidth wasted, no more crazy disk space usage.
Hell, MS Windows Update does a weak form of this, they just don't do strong dependency checks. Works for them, and they certainly don't have any reservations about wasting disk space... the light-weight client just works better for them. Why wouldn't it work for Linux ?
I'm more than a little irritated by this whole AJAX buzz. You want to see who invented AJAX ? Go back a decade. I was using it on my little vanity page, and the code found its way into a few government intranets a friend of mine managed. Lots of other people came up with their own methods for dynamic content. The only difference is we didn't use buzz-happy XML, and we didn't give our Javascripts cute catchy names. It's such a big stupid phenomenon now, with entire books written on this non-topic, and business created specifically around it, while other businesses spend money for it. Someone may have come up with the AJAX moniker, but they certainly didn't pioneer the technique of dynamically requesting content on a as-needed basis. What, you've never seen IFRAME advertising before ? :P
I still don't quite understand why people would rush to get Vista. XP works the same if not better, there's actually mature driver support (well, mature is a relative term when talking about ATI, NVidia et al), and you know the software you need works on XP. This reminds me of over a decade ago when we all rushed to get Windows 95 the day it came out, only to pummel our PC's into dust with all the problems it caused. Printers no longer printing, internet dialer no longer dialing, and of course the joys of our old 16-bit apps crashing half the time. It was painful. I ended up dual-booting back to classic Dos + Wfw311 for a while longer while the dust settled. Vista is going to be the same story... give it a year, for most users it will have stabilized and 3rd party support will be established. Right now it doesn't even know which end to poop from.
Nintendo isn't widening the gaming market, at least not at this point in time. They are only expanding the Wii's market, because those new gamers still want nothing to do with the PS3 and 360. It's in a niche of its own right now, and will probably enjoy its unique position for years to come, until Sony and Microsoft release their next generation of consoles with ripped-off ideas that still aren't quite as good as the original. The fact that non-gamers are interested in the primal fun of throwing motion sensors around does nothing for the game industry, it's just locking them into Nintendo. It's going to be interesting when Wii gets old and something new comes around. Will they continue supporting more immersive gameplay, or will they turn the page and go back to sit-down thumb-mashing gameplay ? That would effectively lose the fringe gamers, sending back to the boring TV realm they came from.
Maybe I'm from a parallel universe where money doesn't grow on trees, but where the hell do these students get the cash to pay the settlement ? I remember when I was in college, I was a broke ass long-haired book bum. If someone had come at me back then with a lawsuit, I would have laughed my head off. So sue me, I got nothing to lose! What's the worst that can happen to a student ? Get sued, get a public defender (since you have nothing to "win" anyway), let the RIAA piss money away and if/when they win, you declare bankruptcy. And then you hire a real lawyer to build a harassment case against the RIAA for ruining your studies and your credit.
Or we could do it the old fashioned way with a brick to the head and pick-up truck ride to the landfill. We're already killing thousands of people we don't even know, in countries we can't even pronounce or spell. Why not clean our own backyard before doing our neighbors' ?