Just like Americans have a really butchered version of English. You'll also find that the the farther north you go in Quebec, the "cleaner" the language gets, while the accent gets heavier. People who say "beurre de peanut" and "char" tend to live near provincial/US borders and thus have a pronounced english influence.
And your comment about "C'est pas froid" is just a cultural trait, and the inversion is used for emphasis. In saying "It's not cold", we're not just saying "it's hot", we're saying "it's hot, but I would have preferred/expected cold". Sarcasm and cynicism are one of many linguistic tricks we use to more finely express mood and intent. Even though I've spoken english as long as french, I often find myself searching for finer words in english that simply don't exist or aren't popular. French has a dozen ways to say the same thing, but each has its nuances that are well understood by fluent speakers. People learning french as a 2nd or 3rd language usually express great frustration with such diversity, as they need to learn ten words that all basically mean the same thing.
Imaging you're playing guitar (because I sure can't), and I ask you to play an E. Do you play the bottom string, top string, a fret on the 3rd, a chord, do you strum high on the fretbar, or closer to the pickups ? It's all the same note, but they all sound different.
And now the poor phone-girl has a legal license to enact her revenge on the poor lonely schmuck. Women are harsh enough when they don't have a valid reason to hate you... this guy's in for World War IV.
IQ is great, but it only represents maximum potential. People with stellar IQ (such as myself) can be complete morons (such as myself). I come up with as many dumb ideas as a common rap artist, maybe even more because I just exert the brain more than most people. But when I come up with a good idea, it can be very good.
On the other hand, people with low IQ (pick your favorite example) will probably have great difficulty coming up with great ideas, because they just can't stretch their mind that big, and if they do, it requires significant effort. It's kind of like two machines, one with 64mb of ram, the other with 4 gigs. They can ultimately accomplish the same thing, but if you're doing a multi-table sort across eight million records, the 4 gig machine will do it quickly, while the little one will take a few months while it swaps to hell and back. That said, you can also use the 4 gig machine to play Minesweeper:)
To wrap it all up, I don't believe in Mensa really... it's an interesting concept that forgets to account for human nature and its uncanny ability to ruin everything it touches. However, I do believe that not all humans are created equal, and that maybe we could make hot-dog meat out of the dumb ones before they learn to drive and/or run countries, but that's just my biased opinion as a high-IQ smartass:)
I didn't say the poor SMART kid couldn't join Mensa... it's only $60 a year or so. The dumb ones need not apply. I hate to kill your puppy, but Linux is NOT a Windows killer, and OO.o is not an MS Office killer. They're remarkable achievements on their own, but it's kind of like having a poor kid from the ghetto bust his ass up to a decent management role. He might have come a longer way than the trust fun kid from Beverly Hills who went to med school, but that doesn't mean ghetto boy should earn more money and fame than the Doogie Howser twit.
Linux is impressive, but it's still inferior in many ways that matter to the common user. If you want an unaccelerated desktop and your own unique branch of Apache, then Linux is your friend. If you want to download games off of Popcap.com and chat all damn day on MSN Messenger, then you're sticking to Windows, because Linux distros just can't do it. Maybe they will, eventually, but by then the Windows crowd will have moved on to something else, and the open source gang will always be playing catch up.
Here's my opinion: Forget catch-up. Ignore the competition! Come up with something that's better from the ground up. Give people a real reason to switch to Linux other than "it's free and technically superior". Free doesn't fly far in capitalist airspace. Why don't you start telling me "It gets all your stuff done faster, easier, and with less downtime"... That's what I'd like to hear, but at it stands right now it would be lies. It's not faster, it's not easier. More stable.... yeah I guess, although my Windows uptimes would put many of you to shame. It's time to stop whining and start innovating.
Indeed, the Gestapo was evil by design, but it adhered to its own charter. They knew what they were mandated to do, and did exactly that. The FBI on the other hand, they know what they're doing is wrong, not just morally wrong but legally wrong, as it is in direct contradiction to their established practices, they just do it because they can get away it.
The libertarian side of me wants to root for OpenGL, but the business side of me thinks the manufacturers had good reasons for supporting DirectX. OpenGL is great, but like all standards it's slow-moving and any changes/improvements take a while before they're refined, approved and trickled down to the masses. DirectX sees a new version every year or so, and each release has some new gimmick that will makes our lives happier and fuller, or at least come up with a new way to morph textures into Oohs and Aah From NVidia/ATI's point of view, had they stuck with OpenGL they would potentially have been held back by the standardized nature of the API.
That said, I'd like to think the OpenGL crowd could come up with a generic interface to all these new features, such that Pixel Shaders X.0 wouldn't require a new interface to be supported.
Or we could just cave in and welcome our new DirectX overlords.
I would very much like to see college/univ administrators choosing a side and standing for it, rather than just turning in "digital criminals" in bulk like they do now. It's almost a case of "cat/etc/passwd | sendmail sosumi@mafiaa.com" these days because really, who cares whether someone is a music pirate or not ? They can't prove it, and neither can the RIAA, but that doesn't prevent them from dragging the issue in court until the small guy throws in the towel.
In order to qualify for safe harbor protection, an OSP must:
* have no knowledge of, or financial benefit from, the infringing activity
* provide proper notification of its policies to its subscribers
* set up an agent to deal with copyright complaints
Google certainly has a financial benefit from hosting infringing content, as it attracts viewers which translate into advertising revenue. I don't think the safe harbor provisions apply. In any case, it's a gray area because if there's anything america has proven over the last decade, it's that even the most well written laws are subject to interpretation and manipulation. I think Google makes money from copyrighted material, but Google's lawyers would certainly argue to the contrary. Given that they have a shitload of legal jargon with which to confuse their audience, and I merely have simple stated facts, the lawyer could probably pwn me in court. Just look at the Chewbacca defense, throwing bullshit at jurors until their brain effectively shuts off. That's how court battles are often won, because let's face it: if it were a clear black-on-white case, we wouldn't need courtrooms to debate the issue, we'd just throw the bastards in jail and go back to our thoughtless, joyless totalitarian regimes.
So you're saying you've spent upwards of $300-400 on "disposable" printers in the last four years, plus all the time you've spent shopping for bargains and fussing with repetitive head cleaning and whatnot. Maybe your time is free, but mine certainly isn't. I'd rather spend the same amount of money, maybe even a teeny bit more on a single reliable printer that outlasts your 9 inkjets, and never gives me any trouble. What's even better is that when my printer runs out of ink, it costs me no more than yours to refill, or when the cartridge starts to get old I could spend $50 to get it replaced. The difference is that refill/replacement will last me another 2-3 years, whereas your next $20 might last you 6 months.
It's a bigger investment up-front, but you end up saving money (and time). It's not like printers are a rapidly advancing technology, a laser printer from eight years ago prints every bit as good as a brand new model, in fact the older ones tend to jam less often thanks to better workmanship.
I personally don't understand why the OS needs to load so much crap to just give me a GUI. We wait 30 seconds to a minute for the thing to load up, all it does is present us with a bare desktop. Dude, I could write a friggin Dos program that will show a Start menu and taskbar in less time than it takes for the display to resync. The problem is we've got a few dozen background processes that do FUCKALL, but are somehow desperately needed. And what's this trend of having things loaded 24/7 just to check for updates ? What ever happened to the simplicity of the cron job ?
I look at my current (WinXP) process list. 41 Processes running (-1 for the task monitor), and all I've got open is Firefox. I see some stupid spyware for the Lexmark printer I love to hate, and 3-4 processes for the ATI video card whose drivers have always been shite (one Canadian company I'm NOT proud of). Moving along I've got a few VMware support services, which is dumb considering they're only useful when VMware is actually running. Then a little process for my sound card: 2.5mb just to display a 32x32 icon in a taskbar.. so 4096 bytes for the RGBA icon, and 2.496mb of some other junk... it actually launches a 30mb ugly skinned mixer when you click it. Then there's a background defrag process, even though I strictly disabled any background disk processes because it makes my boot drive chug. Add in a few SVCHOST entries that do god knows what, and the total allocated VM is nearing 400mb. Notice I didn't mention any virus/malware scanners, thank god I only run them on-demand.
So why does it take 400mb of ram and enough cpu usage to hose a 486, just so a web page can sit idly on my display ? Linux may present fewer actual processes at boot, and certainly a lower memory footprint, but it takes a good 2-3 minutes to start up, most of it spent waiting on I/O while probing devices. I'm in no way a kernel hacker, in fact I wouldn't want to touch that code with a ten foot pole, but most of my tweaking efforts are spent trying to speed up booting. The way I see it, the OS needs to initialize the VM manager, a handful of urgently-needed devices like keyboard/mouse (which should be practically instant), give the NIC a few seconds to negotiate DHCP, and switch to graphics mode. It's been a few years since I've written system code, but I figure that should take a whopping 5 seconds to do, the slowest part being the DHCP request. We're talking about a strictly desktop system here, no web server or database running in the background. I'd expect a server to take a little longer to load, because it's essentially loading its "work" software as part of the boot process, whereas as desktop user would just launch apps as needed.
I think we need to refocus the true purpose of a core operating system kernel. It doesn't need to do the dishes and julienne fries, it just needs to take a PC from the BIOS screen to a clickable desktop in as few steps as possible. Let the application-specific stuff be handled by *drumroll* APPLICATIONS!
The memory companies seem to be fighting the Ghz wars of yesteryear. They release these "performance" products that boast tighter timings and higher clocks, that don't translate into significant real-world performance gains because the bottlenecks usually lie elsewhere, like the northbridge or on-CPU memory controller. Corsair strikes me as a big marketing machine with just a few uber-hyped products. Truth is, in my experiences I've seen more Corsair memory cause problems than the generic stuff, mostly because they often employ weird timings that are misdetected or even unsupported by the motherboard. The fact is that their target market is a bunch of Red Bull chugging gamer types, that don't know squat and think 1% is significant. They remind me of a certain subclass of audiophiles, people who have been caught in the sticky web of disinformation that's out there... people who will fight you to the death over the quality of their hand-made oxygen-free triple-plated phase-aligned one-way audio cables.
I can tell you quite honestly that if I had to plunk down an extra 200$ on my PC, I'd get the cheap ram and bump the CPU up a few hundred MHz. Specially tuned memory is for specially tuned applications, you know, like a real-time zillion-core supercomputer!
This card wasn't designed with the common slashdotter in mind. We have well tuned linux routers that do QoS and filtering, we have older machines running the torrents and other services 24/7 consuming less power and producing less noise, while our main rig is a screaming NO2-cooled behemoth that dims the lights every time it switches contexts.
The average twit gamer doesn't have all that. They pawned their "old" P4 for 50 bucks to put down on their $200 X-Fi Ultimate, and THAT made such a "huge" difference in framerate because it "offloads" sound processing to its own CPU. In their logic, surely a $200 network card will also yield (simple-)mind-blowing enhancements.
These are the same idiots who are going to buy my "uber-framerate booster driver", which merely slows down the system clock proportionally to the price they paid me, thus seriously warping framerate calculations... just like in the old 386/486 days. Fools are so easily parted with their money!
I know it's cliché but "Who watches the watchers?"
So the FBI admitted to acting illegally under the guise of national security and counter-terrorism... who's going to do anything about it ? They admitted to these acts because they know nothing's really going to happen to stop them. They could admit to brutally raping four-year-olds with spikey baseball bats and we'd still say "Sir, yes sir" to the men in black. We've become such a docile society that we can't even defend against our own kind. These traitors and their families should be buried alive!
The problem with Windows security isn't about the OS, it's about the tech IQ of its users. Sit that same dumb office drone in front of a Linux desktop and he/she/it will find a Linux email virus... SOMEWHERE!
On the other hand, take a brilliant coder/admin/all-around-fantastic-techie such as myself, and watch me use Windows with skill and grace... no virus or spyware scanner in sight, yet my machine is clean and exploit-free. I rely on Microsoft to keep their shit code clean, and I rely on myself to not to stupid things.
There is nothing in the world that can protect stupid users from themselves.
I'm kind of glad SAP is getting sued.... I don't like Oracle any better, but seeing SAP die means I'll have one less mega spaghetti app to maintain on my résumé. Now if only they could sue the shit out of Cognos my life would be complete.
It's bad enough having two support multiple operating systems, supporting multiple "business intelligence" suites is about as fun as trying to shove a grizzly bear up your own ass. These projects are so "large" they seem to be written by a thousand different coders, each with a different set of design specs:P
What Google possibly wants (pure speculation on my behalf) is for copyrighted material to be harmlessly removed without a lawsuit. You know, much like all the shady sites that say "If you find copyrighted material, just let me know and I'll take it down" which is NOT legal, at least not right now. Ignorance of copyright infringement does not make it any less of a crime. If Google can somehow change that, it means anyone could post anything, as long as any infringing content is taken down if the copyright owner throws a fit. Some companies will just start mass-faxing takedown notices, but some will embrace the free distribution and viral popularity. Indeed, this could mark the beginning of copyright reform... or I could be simply daydreaming. Only Google knows for sure.
That's their strategy... they harass people, guilty or not (probably not), drag them into court with all the associated costs of missing work and having to hire a lawyer (though I would personally just self-represent - why get into debt if the lawyer still can't help). Then if they start losing their dominant position, they try to back off and say "Oh so sorry, wrong vic.. off to the next sucker!". If that's not bullying then I must have been raised by wolves! The geeks among us, well, those who weren't TOO geeky surely remember childhood when they'd get picked on by some fat dumb tard... the day you whoop that tard's ass he runs for the hills in terror, never to be seen again. This is what we need to do to this mafiaa. Dismissing with prejudice is a small step, but it's still just one little slap. We need to develop some sort of strategy to seriously hurt these cartels... hell I don't care if we just drop a few thousand tonnes of cement on their headquarters... just something to say "Ok bullies, play time is over! WHo's the bitch now" type thing.
Not true... O.J. won because anyone else would have done the same damned thing! What... you thought he'd waltz into court and proclaim "Yeah, I killed that cheating bitch and her dildo friend too!"... hellllll no. Homicidal weirdos do that, something O.J. is arguably not.
Money matters in court when that money controls the law. Actors do not control the law. Politicians control the law. Religion controls the law. CEOs of multinational megacorporations control the law. All the other wealthy but non-influential people don't get preferential treatment in court. It doesn't matter whether you have an average-priced experienced lawyer, or a flashy whiz-bang zillion dollar court jester lawyer, as long as you don't have an idiot lawyer you're still in the fight.
I really like how this company went and built a solution to a problem that's been obsolete for years. Ink-jet printers suck by design. They could have been great and cheap, but much like cancer and diabetes, it is far more profitable to treat the symptoms than to "waste" time solving the problem at the source. We end up with cheap devices that go belly-up at least once a year, drink ink like a Scotsman on st-patty's, and clog/jam/seize if you leave them alone for more than a day.
For those of us who can do basic math, we sum up the cost of replacing printers and ink over a few years, spend that amount on a decent laser printer and enjoy hassle-free printing for years to come. Guess what: laser drums cover the whole page width, and toner's cheap! I can refill my toner cartridge with a $20.00 bottle of toner dust, that will last me several thousand pages.
The printer scammers have already jumped onto the laser bus, and are now flooding the market with cheap color lasers that cost about the same as a premium ink-jet. What's even better is those cheap lasers eat toner like their big sisters eat ink, so you get the convenience of the word "Laser" appearing all over the box, and you won't need to adjust your budget because the new printer costs just as much to maintain as the old piece of shite.
The best way to get get better Linux support from ATI is to ignore them entirely. Even NVidia support is flakey, and rather insulting if you're trying to switch away from Windows. It's so bad that I find myself wishing I had a piece of shite GMA950 onboard vga, instead of my high-end Radeons and GeForces... I really miss the good old days of 3Dfx, with the elegantly svelte Glide API. All it did was triangles and textures, and it did them well! Really when it comes to graphics acceleration, if the big two could just quit their "trade secret" driver bullshit and give us programming specs.. nevermind the crappy ass binary drivers, just tell me how to shove my triangle strips down the GPU's throat and we'll make our own damned drivers. malloc() this, mmap() that.. bada bing!
If FBI agents don't need to get proper authorization and follow due process before they ruin someone's life over a hunch, then how long before they start executing people ? There's not much of a difference at that point. If they ignore constitutional rights whenever it is "deemed appropriate", might as well go all the way and start erasing people in bulk. After all, they're acting to protect the common, law-abiding citizen so that makes it all right ?:P
The fun part is that the FBI's shady practices probably went through some sort of approval process, but clearly the board members voting on the issue failed to serve their clients' best interests (that'd be you and me - well for now actually just you, I'm Canadian). The problem with democracy is that there's a significantly larger number of dumb people than smart. You just mention Al-Qaeda, Islam or even dare speak any language that isn't English, and all of a sudden you have an army of scared americans ready to give up everything to shoo the "terrorists" away. The bad guys aren't the ones with the holy books and bad facial hair The real terrorists live within our borders, they run companies, they run the government, and control the media. They are the ones who want to take over the country, to satisfy their lust for power and wealth. A suicide bomber might blow up few dozen people, but an out-of-control government will make everyone's lives miserable, everyone who isn't part of the clique that is.
I think it should be clear to everyone by now that the RIAA is specifically looking for press. Suing someone who truly deserves it will net you a passing mention in some news recap. Suing someone who is pitifully innocent is guaranteed to elicit all sorts of publicity and get people talking/thinking about it. It's like the music industry is trying to brand us with this overhyped nonsense. It's like those nasty political TV spots that consist of 30 seconds of name calling and finger pointing. Most educated and balanced people see them as ridiculously low-brow jabs worthy of a preschool yard, but the fools, the apes, the imbeciles that make up the largest demographic group, they somehow identify with the vapid messages, devoid of fact but bursting with emotion.
If the RIAA wanted money out of these suits, they'd sue people with money... obviously! Most people who want to sue, will first determine if their mark is "worth suing"; that concept alone is a terrifying testament to how our current legal system is broken beyond repair. Suing someone who has no income, like a child or a disabled retired individual, is about as effective as launching missiles at a puppy. It's real exciting, and real scary, but ultimately you're just wasting a ton of money to accomplish squat. My opinion is that the RIAA is going after that excitement and fear, nothing more and nothing less.
With the abundance of frivolous lawsuits and rampant abuse of broad, poorly conceived devices like RICO and DMCA, I think there should be some way to discourage abusers... a bitch slap of some sort. Ms Shell is in no way an expert on web development and hosting, and consequently has little or no knowledge the Robots.txt standard for directing web spiders. If someone rams into me because I was driving the wrong way on a one-way street, and I have no idea what a one-way street is, does that mean I can sue the other driver ? Contrary to the examples set forth by the Bush administration, ignorance does not grant unlimited rights and powers to the wielder. This woman didn't want to be spidered, she should have learned the proper way to do it. Just because you write a few English words doesn't automatically make them a legally binding contract, especially when the intended parties don't speak or understand English, as is the case with computers.
If I write "I hereby forbid anyone from breathing the air within a 10km radius of my home" in Pig Latin on a sign on my door, and then try to sue everyone who walks down the street without an O2 tank, not only am I going to get thrown out of court, I'm also probably going to have a few hundred people waiting on my doorstep to beat me with said O2 tanks for being such a tard, at the very least I'll be the laughing stock of the neighborhood and people are going to spit in my Big Mac.
To invoke the RICO act and raise charges of organized crime is sheer idiocy... Unless the Archive.org servers somehow threatened to deface her site unless certain dues were paid, then it ain't racketeering. I want this person publicly humiliated and made an example of, as a warning to other court abusers. Hell I'd accuse her of attempted fraud and lock her up with a big hairy butch cellmate. All this legal nonsense is going against progress and wasting public resources in the name of greed. They persist because of the disproportionate payoff vs risk ratio. Sue some company successfully and you can rake in millions of dollars for nothing, lose the case and you walk off with minor legal fees, which can often be twisted into an out-of-court settlement thanks to corporate blackmail. We punish people for tax fraud, retail fraud, accounting fraud... we should be just as harsh regarding court fraud.
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Just like Americans have a really butchered version of English. You'll also find that the the farther north you go in Quebec, the "cleaner" the language gets, while the accent gets heavier. People who say "beurre de peanut" and "char" tend to live near provincial/US borders and thus have a pronounced english influence.
And your comment about "C'est pas froid" is just a cultural trait, and the inversion is used for emphasis. In saying "It's not cold", we're not just saying "it's hot", we're saying "it's hot, but I would have preferred/expected cold". Sarcasm and cynicism are one of many linguistic tricks we use to more finely express mood and intent. Even though I've spoken english as long as french, I often find myself searching for finer words in english that simply don't exist or aren't popular. French has a dozen ways to say the same thing, but each has its nuances that are well understood by fluent speakers. People learning french as a 2nd or 3rd language usually express great frustration with such diversity, as they need to learn ten words that all basically mean the same thing.
Imaging you're playing guitar (because I sure can't), and I ask you to play an E. Do you play the bottom string, top string, a fret on the 3rd, a chord, do you strum high on the fretbar, or closer to the pickups ? It's all the same note, but they all sound different.
And now the poor phone-girl has a legal license to enact her revenge on the poor lonely schmuck. Women are harsh enough when they don't have a valid reason to hate you... this guy's in for World War IV.
IQ is great, but it only represents maximum potential. People with stellar IQ (such as myself) can be complete morons (such as myself). I come up with as many dumb ideas as a common rap artist, maybe even more because I just exert the brain more than most people. But when I come up with a good idea, it can be very good.
:)
:)
On the other hand, people with low IQ (pick your favorite example) will probably have great difficulty coming up with great ideas, because they just can't stretch their mind that big, and if they do, it requires significant effort. It's kind of like two machines, one with 64mb of ram, the other with 4 gigs. They can ultimately accomplish the same thing, but if you're doing a multi-table sort across eight million records, the 4 gig machine will do it quickly, while the little one will take a few months while it swaps to hell and back. That said, you can also use the 4 gig machine to play Minesweeper
To wrap it all up, I don't believe in Mensa really... it's an interesting concept that forgets to account for human nature and its uncanny ability to ruin everything it touches. However, I do believe that not all humans are created equal, and that maybe we could make hot-dog meat out of the dumb ones before they learn to drive and/or run countries, but that's just my biased opinion as a high-IQ smartass
I didn't say the poor SMART kid couldn't join Mensa... it's only $60 a year or so. The dumb ones need not apply. I hate to kill your puppy, but Linux is NOT a Windows killer, and OO.o is not an MS Office killer. They're remarkable achievements on their own, but it's kind of like having a poor kid from the ghetto bust his ass up to a decent management role. He might have come a longer way than the trust fun kid from Beverly Hills who went to med school, but that doesn't mean ghetto boy should earn more money and fame than the Doogie Howser twit.
Linux is impressive, but it's still inferior in many ways that matter to the common user. If you want an unaccelerated desktop and your own unique branch of Apache, then Linux is your friend. If you want to download games off of Popcap.com and chat all damn day on MSN Messenger, then you're sticking to Windows, because Linux distros just can't do it. Maybe they will, eventually, but by then the Windows crowd will have moved on to something else, and the open source gang will always be playing catch up.
Here's my opinion: Forget catch-up. Ignore the competition! Come up with something that's better from the ground up. Give people a real reason to switch to Linux other than "it's free and technically superior". Free doesn't fly far in capitalist airspace. Why don't you start telling me "It gets all your stuff done faster, easier, and with less downtime"... That's what I'd like to hear, but at it stands right now it would be lies. It's not faster, it's not easier. More stable.... yeah I guess, although my Windows uptimes would put many of you to shame. It's time to stop whining and start innovating.
Indeed, the Gestapo was evil by design, but it adhered to its own charter. They knew what they were mandated to do, and did exactly that. The FBI on the other hand, they know what they're doing is wrong, not just morally wrong but legally wrong, as it is in direct contradiction to their established practices, they just do it because they can get away it.
The libertarian side of me wants to root for OpenGL, but the business side of me thinks the manufacturers had good reasons for supporting DirectX. OpenGL is great, but like all standards it's slow-moving and any changes/improvements take a while before they're refined, approved and trickled down to the masses. DirectX sees a new version every year or so, and each release has some new gimmick that will makes our lives happier and fuller, or at least come up with a new way to morph textures into Oohs and Aah From NVidia/ATI's point of view, had they stuck with OpenGL they would potentially have been held back by the standardized nature of the API.
That said, I'd like to think the OpenGL crowd could come up with a generic interface to all these new features, such that Pixel Shaders X.0 wouldn't require a new interface to be supported.
Or we could just cave in and welcome our new DirectX overlords.
I would very much like to see college/univ administrators choosing a side and standing for it, rather than just turning in "digital criminals" in bulk like they do now. It's almost a case of "cat /etc/passwd | sendmail sosumi@mafiaa.com" these days because really, who cares whether someone is a music pirate or not ? They can't prove it, and neither can the RIAA, but that doesn't prevent them from dragging the issue in court until the small guy throws in the towel.
Google certainly has a financial benefit from hosting infringing content, as it attracts viewers which translate into advertising revenue. I don't think the safe harbor provisions apply. In any case, it's a gray area because if there's anything america has proven over the last decade, it's that even the most well written laws are subject to interpretation and manipulation. I think Google makes money from copyrighted material, but Google's lawyers would certainly argue to the contrary. Given that they have a shitload of legal jargon with which to confuse their audience, and I merely have simple stated facts, the lawyer could probably pwn me in court. Just look at the Chewbacca defense, throwing bullshit at jurors until their brain effectively shuts off. That's how court battles are often won, because let's face it: if it were a clear black-on-white case, we wouldn't need courtrooms to debate the issue, we'd just throw the bastards in jail and go back to our thoughtless, joyless totalitarian regimes.
So you're saying you've spent upwards of $300-400 on "disposable" printers in the last four years, plus all the time you've spent shopping for bargains and fussing with repetitive head cleaning and whatnot. Maybe your time is free, but mine certainly isn't. I'd rather spend the same amount of money, maybe even a teeny bit more on a single reliable printer that outlasts your 9 inkjets, and never gives me any trouble. What's even better is that when my printer runs out of ink, it costs me no more than yours to refill, or when the cartridge starts to get old I could spend $50 to get it replaced. The difference is that refill/replacement will last me another 2-3 years, whereas your next $20 might last you 6 months.
It's a bigger investment up-front, but you end up saving money (and time). It's not like printers are a rapidly advancing technology, a laser printer from eight years ago prints every bit as good as a brand new model, in fact the older ones tend to jam less often thanks to better workmanship.
I personally don't understand why the OS needs to load so much crap to just give me a GUI. We wait 30 seconds to a minute for the thing to load up, all it does is present us with a bare desktop. Dude, I could write a friggin Dos program that will show a Start menu and taskbar in less time than it takes for the display to resync. The problem is we've got a few dozen background processes that do FUCKALL, but are somehow desperately needed. And what's this trend of having things loaded 24/7 just to check for updates ? What ever happened to the simplicity of the cron job ?
I look at my current (WinXP) process list. 41 Processes running (-1 for the task monitor), and all I've got open is Firefox. I see some stupid spyware for the Lexmark printer I love to hate, and 3-4 processes for the ATI video card whose drivers have always been shite (one Canadian company I'm NOT proud of). Moving along I've got a few VMware support services, which is dumb considering they're only useful when VMware is actually running. Then a little process for my sound card: 2.5mb just to display a 32x32 icon in a taskbar.. so 4096 bytes for the RGBA icon, and 2.496mb of some other junk... it actually launches a 30mb ugly skinned mixer when you click it. Then there's a background defrag process, even though I strictly disabled any background disk processes because it makes my boot drive chug. Add in a few SVCHOST entries that do god knows what, and the total allocated VM is nearing 400mb. Notice I didn't mention any virus/malware scanners, thank god I only run them on-demand.
So why does it take 400mb of ram and enough cpu usage to hose a 486, just so a web page can sit idly on my display ? Linux may present fewer actual processes at boot, and certainly a lower memory footprint, but it takes a good 2-3 minutes to start up, most of it spent waiting on I/O while probing devices. I'm in no way a kernel hacker, in fact I wouldn't want to touch that code with a ten foot pole, but most of my tweaking efforts are spent trying to speed up booting. The way I see it, the OS needs to initialize the VM manager, a handful of urgently-needed devices like keyboard/mouse (which should be practically instant), give the NIC a few seconds to negotiate DHCP, and switch to graphics mode. It's been a few years since I've written system code, but I figure that should take a whopping 5 seconds to do, the slowest part being the DHCP request. We're talking about a strictly desktop system here, no web server or database running in the background. I'd expect a server to take a little longer to load, because it's essentially loading its "work" software as part of the boot process, whereas as desktop user would just launch apps as needed.
I think we need to refocus the true purpose of a core operating system kernel. It doesn't need to do the dishes and julienne fries, it just needs to take a PC from the BIOS screen to a clickable desktop in as few steps as possible. Let the application-specific stuff be handled by *drumroll* APPLICATIONS!
The memory companies seem to be fighting the Ghz wars of yesteryear. They release these "performance" products that boast tighter timings and higher clocks, that don't translate into significant real-world performance gains because the bottlenecks usually lie elsewhere, like the northbridge or on-CPU memory controller. Corsair strikes me as a big marketing machine with just a few uber-hyped products. Truth is, in my experiences I've seen more Corsair memory cause problems than the generic stuff, mostly because they often employ weird timings that are misdetected or even unsupported by the motherboard. The fact is that their target market is a bunch of Red Bull chugging gamer types, that don't know squat and think 1% is significant. They remind me of a certain subclass of audiophiles, people who have been caught in the sticky web of disinformation that's out there... people who will fight you to the death over the quality of their hand-made oxygen-free triple-plated phase-aligned one-way audio cables.
I can tell you quite honestly that if I had to plunk down an extra 200$ on my PC, I'd get the cheap ram and bump the CPU up a few hundred MHz. Specially tuned memory is for specially tuned applications, you know, like a real-time zillion-core supercomputer!
This card wasn't designed with the common slashdotter in mind. We have well tuned linux routers that do QoS and filtering, we have older machines running the torrents and other services 24/7 consuming less power and producing less noise, while our main rig is a screaming NO2-cooled behemoth that dims the lights every time it switches contexts.
The average twit gamer doesn't have all that. They pawned their "old" P4 for 50 bucks to put down on their $200 X-Fi Ultimate, and THAT made such a "huge" difference in framerate because it "offloads" sound processing to its own CPU. In their logic, surely a $200 network card will also yield (simple-)mind-blowing enhancements.
These are the same idiots who are going to buy my "uber-framerate booster driver", which merely slows down the system clock proportionally to the price they paid me, thus seriously warping framerate calculations... just like in the old 386/486 days. Fools are so easily parted with their money!
I know it's cliché but "Who watches the watchers?"
So the FBI admitted to acting illegally under the guise of national security and counter-terrorism... who's going to do anything about it ? They admitted to these acts because they know nothing's really going to happen to stop them. They could admit to brutally raping four-year-olds with spikey baseball bats and we'd still say "Sir, yes sir" to the men in black. We've become such a docile society that we can't even defend against our own kind. These traitors and their families should be buried alive!
The problem with Windows security isn't about the OS, it's about the tech IQ of its users. Sit that same dumb office drone in front of a Linux desktop and he/she/it will find a Linux email virus... SOMEWHERE!
On the other hand, take a brilliant coder/admin/all-around-fantastic-techie such as myself, and watch me use Windows with skill and grace... no virus or spyware scanner in sight, yet my machine is clean and exploit-free. I rely on Microsoft to keep their shit code clean, and I rely on myself to not to stupid things.
There is nothing in the world that can protect stupid users from themselves.
I'm kind of glad SAP is getting sued.... I don't like Oracle any better, but seeing SAP die means I'll have one less mega spaghetti app to maintain on my résumé. Now if only they could sue the shit out of Cognos my life would be complete.
:P
It's bad enough having two support multiple operating systems, supporting multiple "business intelligence" suites is about as fun as trying to shove a grizzly bear up your own ass. These projects are so "large" they seem to be written by a thousand different coders, each with a different set of design specs
you shouldn't go into a sexual relationship with the expectations that movies and TV give us
I'm a porn star, you insensitive clod!
What Google possibly wants (pure speculation on my behalf) is for copyrighted material to be harmlessly removed without a lawsuit. You know, much like all the shady sites that say "If you find copyrighted material, just let me know and I'll take it down" which is NOT legal, at least not right now. Ignorance of copyright infringement does not make it any less of a crime. If Google can somehow change that, it means anyone could post anything, as long as any infringing content is taken down if the copyright owner throws a fit. Some companies will just start mass-faxing takedown notices, but some will embrace the free distribution and viral popularity. Indeed, this could mark the beginning of copyright reform... or I could be simply daydreaming. Only Google knows for sure.
That's their strategy... they harass people, guilty or not (probably not), drag them into court with all the associated costs of missing work and having to hire a lawyer (though I would personally just self-represent - why get into debt if the lawyer still can't help). Then if they start losing their dominant position, they try to back off and say "Oh so sorry, wrong vic.. off to the next sucker!". If that's not bullying then I must have been raised by wolves! The geeks among us, well, those who weren't TOO geeky surely remember childhood when they'd get picked on by some fat dumb tard... the day you whoop that tard's ass he runs for the hills in terror, never to be seen again. This is what we need to do to this mafiaa. Dismissing with prejudice is a small step, but it's still just one little slap. We need to develop some sort of strategy to seriously hurt these cartels... hell I don't care if we just drop a few thousand tonnes of cement on their headquarters... just something to say "Ok bullies, play time is over! WHo's the bitch now" type thing.
Not true... O.J. won because anyone else would have done the same damned thing! What... you thought he'd waltz into court and proclaim "Yeah, I killed that cheating bitch and her dildo friend too!"... hellllll no. Homicidal weirdos do that, something O.J. is arguably not.
Money matters in court when that money controls the law. Actors do not control the law. Politicians control the law. Religion controls the law. CEOs of multinational megacorporations control the law. All the other wealthy but non-influential people don't get preferential treatment in court. It doesn't matter whether you have an average-priced experienced lawyer, or a flashy whiz-bang zillion dollar court jester lawyer, as long as you don't have an idiot lawyer you're still in the fight.
I really like how this company went and built a solution to a problem that's been obsolete for years. Ink-jet printers suck by design. They could have been great and cheap, but much like cancer and diabetes, it is far more profitable to treat the symptoms than to "waste" time solving the problem at the source. We end up with cheap devices that go belly-up at least once a year, drink ink like a Scotsman on st-patty's, and clog/jam/seize if you leave them alone for more than a day.
For those of us who can do basic math, we sum up the cost of replacing printers and ink over a few years, spend that amount on a decent laser printer and enjoy hassle-free printing for years to come. Guess what: laser drums cover the whole page width, and toner's cheap! I can refill my toner cartridge with a $20.00 bottle of toner dust, that will last me several thousand pages.
The printer scammers have already jumped onto the laser bus, and are now flooding the market with cheap color lasers that cost about the same as a premium ink-jet. What's even better is those cheap lasers eat toner like their big sisters eat ink, so you get the convenience of the word "Laser" appearing all over the box, and you won't need to adjust your budget because the new printer costs just as much to maintain as the old piece of shite.
The best way to get get better Linux support from ATI is to ignore them entirely. Even NVidia support is flakey, and rather insulting if you're trying to switch away from Windows. It's so bad that I find myself wishing I had a piece of shite GMA950 onboard vga, instead of my high-end Radeons and GeForces... I really miss the good old days of 3Dfx, with the elegantly svelte Glide API. All it did was triangles and textures, and it did them well! Really when it comes to graphics acceleration, if the big two could just quit their "trade secret" driver bullshit and give us programming specs.. nevermind the crappy ass binary drivers, just tell me how to shove my triangle strips down the GPU's throat and we'll make our own damned drivers. malloc() this, mmap() that.. bada bing!
If FBI agents don't need to get proper authorization and follow due process before they ruin someone's life over a hunch, then how long before they start executing people ? There's not much of a difference at that point. If they ignore constitutional rights whenever it is "deemed appropriate", might as well go all the way and start erasing people in bulk. After all, they're acting to protect the common, law-abiding citizen so that makes it all right ? :P
The fun part is that the FBI's shady practices probably went through some sort of approval process, but clearly the board members voting on the issue failed to serve their clients' best interests (that'd be you and me - well for now actually just you, I'm Canadian). The problem with democracy is that there's a significantly larger number of dumb people than smart. You just mention Al-Qaeda, Islam or even dare speak any language that isn't English, and all of a sudden you have an army of scared americans ready to give up everything to shoo the "terrorists" away. The bad guys aren't the ones with the holy books and bad facial hair The real terrorists live within our borders, they run companies, they run the government, and control the media. They are the ones who want to take over the country, to satisfy their lust for power and wealth. A suicide bomber might blow up few dozen people, but an out-of-control government will make everyone's lives miserable, everyone who isn't part of the clique that is.
It is somewhat problematic to try to hack a connection that won't connect. :-)
Don't you get it ? That's the fix for the exploit! Hey it works for Microsoft!
I think it should be clear to everyone by now that the RIAA is specifically looking for press. Suing someone who truly deserves it will net you a passing mention in some news recap. Suing someone who is pitifully innocent is guaranteed to elicit all sorts of publicity and get people talking/thinking about it. It's like the music industry is trying to brand us with this overhyped nonsense. It's like those nasty political TV spots that consist of 30 seconds of name calling and finger pointing. Most educated and balanced people see them as ridiculously low-brow jabs worthy of a preschool yard, but the fools, the apes, the imbeciles that make up the largest demographic group, they somehow identify with the vapid messages, devoid of fact but bursting with emotion.
If the RIAA wanted money out of these suits, they'd sue people with money... obviously! Most people who want to sue, will first determine if their mark is "worth suing"; that concept alone is a terrifying testament to how our current legal system is broken beyond repair. Suing someone who has no income, like a child or a disabled retired individual, is about as effective as launching missiles at a puppy. It's real exciting, and real scary, but ultimately you're just wasting a ton of money to accomplish squat. My opinion is that the RIAA is going after that excitement and fear, nothing more and nothing less.
With the abundance of frivolous lawsuits and rampant abuse of broad, poorly conceived devices like RICO and DMCA, I think there should be some way to discourage abusers... a bitch slap of some sort. Ms Shell is in no way an expert on web development and hosting, and consequently has little or no knowledge the Robots.txt standard for directing web spiders. If someone rams into me because I was driving the wrong way on a one-way street, and I have no idea what a one-way street is, does that mean I can sue the other driver ? Contrary to the examples set forth by the Bush administration, ignorance does not grant unlimited rights and powers to the wielder. This woman didn't want to be spidered, she should have learned the proper way to do it. Just because you write a few English words doesn't automatically make them a legally binding contract, especially when the intended parties don't speak or understand English, as is the case with computers.
If I write "I hereby forbid anyone from breathing the air within a 10km radius of my home" in Pig Latin on a sign on my door, and then try to sue everyone who walks down the street without an O2 tank, not only am I going to get thrown out of court, I'm also probably going to have a few hundred people waiting on my doorstep to beat me with said O2 tanks for being such a tard, at the very least I'll be the laughing stock of the neighborhood and people are going to spit in my Big Mac.
To invoke the RICO act and raise charges of organized crime is sheer idiocy... Unless the Archive.org servers somehow threatened to deface her site unless certain dues were paid, then it ain't racketeering. I want this person publicly humiliated and made an example of, as a warning to other court abusers. Hell I'd accuse her of attempted fraud and lock her up with a big hairy butch cellmate. All this legal nonsense is going against progress and wasting public resources in the name of greed. They persist because of the disproportionate payoff vs risk ratio. Sue some company successfully and you can rake in millions of dollars for nothing, lose the case and you walk off with minor legal fees, which can often be twisted into an out-of-court settlement thanks to corporate blackmail. We punish people for tax fraud, retail fraud, accounting fraud... we should be just as harsh regarding court fraud.