How do we know HE bought the hardware. If the client bought it, he's stuck with it.
The first words out of his mouth should be "let me take a look at this," followed a half-hour later by "this can't be done with this hardware and software. We need to do Y."
His client isn't paying him to blindly stumble through it. They're paying him because he knows what he's doing, just like they pay their bookkeeper and lawyer. And part of that "consultant" gig is knowing when to tell a customer they wasted their money, and what the cheapest way out for them is. (That half hour should have included a call to either HP's or MS's telephone support for either a quote for the OS install he needs or permission to hack it.)
Bitching about artificial problems in the Inquirer, of all places, just makes him seem like a moron. It doesn't MATTER if the clients bought the hardware and called him up because their first vendor went belly up; it was his job to make it work, a dozen/. geeks know what it takes to make that work in windows, and him blaming MS just makes OSS look bad.
Our past president smoked weed and only God knows how many laws our current president broke...
Irrelevant. The President is essentially the guy who decides who's an ally and who's a foe -- it's about as impossible for him to "collaborate with the enemy" as it is to breath in and out at the same time.
Why should anyone care if some nuclear physicist at Los Alamos smoke pot?
Because in order to trust someone we need to know them, and their willingness to break the law and smoke pot are both two very significant factors in their personality. (Did you know that the US army cares about an applicant solider's credit rating and family history?)
Do you use a computer? Are you in any way involved in the consumer computer industry? How about the creation of digital media content? Do you like music, movies or pictures? If you said yes to any of these, DRM is going to be a major pain in YOUR ass.
Amazing. Tell me, how big a pain has iTunes been now? Or the CSS on the DVDs your grandma bought? Because that's the consumer level of tolerance for DRM, and as far as PITAs go, it's kinda minor.
Oh, for gahd's sake, just because you break a few minor laws does *not* mean that you'd be more likely sell out your country to the enemy-of-the-day.
Wrong.
If you break a few minor laws, you are more likely to turn traitor than someone who never breaks the minor laws. It's the difference between "I love my country" and "I believe in the rule of law", and it was enough for Bennedict Arnold to turn traitor.
who the heck plays a handheld for 6 hours in one sitting? 1: It's 6 hours per charge, not per sitting. I sure as heck don't use my PDA for eight hours straight, so that eight hours per-charge lasts me a few days.
2: Just about anyone who would need a portable game console can go through six hours per day. Kids on car trips, college students stuck and college with neither a ride nor homework between classes (Yes, that happens), and moms playing in small breaks around the house can all pretty easily get to six hours.
... hasn't given a damn about the constitution... For some things [the Courts] already do have the power...
You, ah, ARE aware that the Constitution sets up three branches of government, and explicitly grants the Courts a rough third of aggregate power, right?
And since they're the only branch that has no say in amending the Constitution, letting them be the ones that determine what the words mean sounds reasonably fair. (Where's the "States may outlaw abortion" amendment, anyway?)
FWIW, it is disturbing that our current administration seems reluctant to abide by Checks and Balances. But that's why we live in a democracy; when the administration no longer suits us, we can remove them from power without killing anybody.
Staying Free is a guaranteed way to lose? Tell me more, you seem to have invented a fascinating new branch of logic, cos it seems to me that if you are forced to use non-Free software (or hardware), you have already lost.
Yes, exactly. Right now, OSS is losing because of the focus on free formats, among other things.
Free Software must be able to read the not-open format, or it's useless. And useless software never becomes prevalent enough to take hold and start dictating formats.
Have a few drinks, put on an 02 tank, dive underwater, check your weight for neutral buoyancy, and then try turning a bolt on a million-dollar piece of art made out of material not that much sturdier than a cardboard box. Oh, and put a man with a loaded gun and free reign to kill you outside of the pool.
Spacewalks are NOT easy. I may be under-stating the difficulty/stress combination.
Looks like we've got ourselves a reader. I'd rather stab my eyes out than wait 15 minutes for someone to print a sub-standard crap edition of a book I'm going to buy.
So, you either:
1: Buy exclusively hardcover, thus missing a good majority of the works ever printed (not necessarily a bad thing; you might be down to only 60% crap) and paying a good 300% over the standard
2: Don't understand that your books are likely ALREADY printed using an identical process.
Either way, this thing won't fly (as it's been trying to for the last ten years now) if it doesn't meet the standard of quality.
I think the key concept you are missing is the linking directly to copyrighted material that the owner does not want others to link to.
Yes, exactly. Now stop there.
When you render a site as text/html or its equivalents, it gets rendered in a browser with various other linked files. It is an *integral* part of a web browser to create "bookmarks" to such pages. This is fundamental to how the web is designed. By serving a text/html or equivalent page, you're in essense granting permission for whomever seeks that page to link to it and distribute said link to others.
The fundamental difference is when you like to non-text/html data, such as videos, music files, and images. On the internet, these files should always as a matter of course be linked to from another page, and this is where the line is drawn. The article isn't about not being able to link to someone's article off their main page; the holding is that you can't leech, and if you do you can expect the law to agree with the other guy.
PreacherTom is an astroturfer for BusinessWeek magazine
No, not really.
He's what in the "old media" world we would call a "crier." He directs traffic to a given site, by saying how interesting it is. The fact that a given article actually is interesting should not be based in any way on who submits it -- be it a bored geek or a profit-seeking crier.
Protected content is DRMed movies and music. We're not talking about encrypted financial documents.
Why not?
If you've got a system with DRM capability built right in, and your company has a reason to restrict access to those, why WOULDN'T you utilize the access-restriction capability you already bought and paid for?
If it took 14 billion years for the light to reach us, and the universe is 14 billion years old, does that mean that we are on the very edge of the expanding universe?
No, because the diameter of the universe increased at a speed faster than c.
Our visual range of perception is only 14byrs radius, but the universe is substantially bigger.
Once you leave the safe world of Newtonian physics you need to develop a superhuman ability to try and NOT visualize the universe on the grand scale of the quantum scale. Human intuition and visualizations is was built for Newtons world. Once you leave that world, it breaks down and fails to be much help.
And this is why QM is and forever will be seen as the quack end of respectable science. Human intuition and ability to visualize are not tied to the Newtonian-level physics. They are tied to the words of language used to describe the concepts, and it's very hard to be a good scientist and be good at naming things, especially things that you don't really understand.
If you want to visualize QM, talk about "subreality", "patterns", and "fabric", not "waves" and "particles."
Perhaps a more interesting question would be whether the Windows-users in the Slashdot community plan to run 64-bit Vista, considering its enhanced security (PatchGuard et al.) as well as its enhanced possibilities of restricting you from doing things on your own computer.
Maybe, if the drivers ever come up to snuff in the first place. I do have a 64-bit CPU in my laptop that, at the moment, is just doing 32-bit jumping jacks.
(And as I do not intend to buy music with MS's DRM, I really don't see what you think Vista will keep me from doing with my own computer that, say, regular old XP doesn't do.)
Locking the users into proprietary software and DRM are not improvements for users.
I am writing this on my Vista-installed laptop, through Firefox. I just checked my e-mail on Thunderbird, and, if I thought it was worth my time, I could intall OpenOffice. I have a few gigabytes of music here, all MP3 without any DRM on them at all.
The only thing that Vista does to "reduce" my freedoms is have better support for DRM-enabled stores. So, if I want to purchase music instead of getting a CD from the store (as I prefer), I can go to someone other than iTunes, and put my music on a device that isn't made by Apple.
Does MS have DRM here? Sure. Can I remove it entirely at will? You betcha. Is this entirely irrelevant to the new features MS put in Vista, like the GPU-utilizing pretty windows or the "press a button and type a command" functionality of the start menu? Yep.
Everyone who cares or will care knows about the FSF, and what "free software" means. If you want to discourage "not-free" software, it's time to start promoting how good free software is -- otherwise, the question is "are those freedoms worth the annoyance"
Why don't they let the paramedics break down doors? When my mother was very sick, and couldn't make it to the door, a couple of beefy fire-fighters with pry bars were called in to force an entry. They quickly broke in and evacuated her to a hospital. Those are fire-fighters, whose job it is to break into your home and douse a fire. A police officer could likewise do so, but not an EMT. Because EMTs and paramedics are not peace officers, and are not empowered to act in the name of the law. Most of the time, they're either employees of private companies (some profit, some NFP) that have a contract with the local municipality, or volunteer civilians.
If you think that the paramedics & EMTs who come when you dial 9-1-1 should be able to break down the door, go find out what the law is in your area. In some states, I suspect they can break down doors. If your state doesn't let them, write to your legislators and governor asking for them to be granted that power.
Where's the "here is how you do that in Linux" part of the movement?
It's all well and good to say that Vista is a "don't upgrade" for the next twelve months -- but there are improvements in it, some of which rise to the level of intuition, and right now there's no Free way to get those improvements.
The new element is that the Speaker of the House would become president.
Not if you impeach the VP first, give a short pause for the Pres to nominate someone (McCain? Jeb Bush?), and then impeach Bush.
Really, though, doing the job badly isn't a high crime or misdemeanor. Bush shouldn't be impeached; he should be forced to, y'know, actually compromise.
So, you can do something with a computer with NO OS on it?
Interesting. I had no idea that staring at "O/S Not Found" was that interesting. Do tell me more.
You might not care for HP's choice of OS, but a PC needs an OS or it just doesn't work. You're free to buy your PC from someone OTHER than HP, and the law should not force HP to sell you what they don't want to.
Nintendo doesn't share any responsibility, especially when you admit that customers are not using the Wiimote in a manner that is appropriate. You can't have it both ways
You're obviously not familiar with strict liability.
Let's go for a worst-case scienerio -- somone playing a Wii has the strap break, the Wii-mote flys out an open window, and in a freak accident hits the driver of a passing vehicle on the head, causing him then to run into a nearby tree and total his $30,000 car and require a $250,000 surgery.
The gentleman, or his insurance company, files suit against the homeowner and Nintendo. Nintendo tries to argue what you say -- that the 'mote wasn't being used properly. The judge rejects that, and requires them to remain a party to the lawsuit, as it was the failure of their product which caused the injury.
Yes, Nintendo can shift some of the blame back to the homeowner, and likely winds up settling in any case, but they aren't even close to totally off the hook just because they stuck a warning label on there.
1) Energy can not be created or destroyed, only transformed. Ultimately, the energy in the hydrogen economy has to come from somewhere.
This is true only in the universal sense. Terrestrially speaking, we get a set input of energy from the sun, and variable outputs of energy from simple radiation and to-enthropy losses. And a fair bit of energy is wasted by our electrical grid anyway; instead of building more copper wires, it may be better to create a co-existing system of hydrogen pipes.
Using Hydrogen as an intermediate energy carrier is by definition a losing proposition. Any energy source you use to make the hydrogen can be better exploited by using it more directly.
Only if you ignore transmission costs and economies-of-scale. Hydrogen can likely have transmission costs that are distance-independant, whereas electricity has an ever-increasing transmission loss.
Short of that, you still require massive infrastructure to support even the most simple of hydrogen economies. This adds practical and economic factors onto an already bleak prospect.
You're ignoring your own statement -- that our current infrastructure is already at the breaking point. We have to build more ANYWAY. It's only a question of if it makes sense to create a hydrogen infrastructure now.
(Oh, and "the most simple" of hydrogen economies is the very-ineffecient model of at-station generation. It starts the H for the end-user, and requires no new infrastructure to the station other than whatever they use for power.)
if you need to be able to tell the difference between two gasses which are similar in all ways not related to quantium physics then a method related to quantium physics will have to be generated in order to survive.
Except that gases that are meaningfully different to us humans and other forms of life are different on a much greater than quantum scale. And the range of those gases that there is evolutionary pressure to detect is limited to those that appear with enough regularity in the terran biosphere to either aid those that can detect them or kill those that cannot.
Evolution isn't magic. It's the recognition that vairations that are most fit to a given environment will be the ones that most survive, and in a changing environment the most varied forms of life are those that survive.
Slashdot Mirror
How do we know HE bought the hardware. If the client bought it, he's stuck with it.
/. geeks know what it takes to make that work in windows, and him blaming MS just makes OSS look bad.
The first words out of his mouth should be "let me take a look at this," followed a half-hour later by "this can't be done with this hardware and software. We need to do Y."
His client isn't paying him to blindly stumble through it. They're paying him because he knows what he's doing, just like they pay their bookkeeper and lawyer. And part of that "consultant" gig is knowing when to tell a customer they wasted their money, and what the cheapest way out for them is. (That half hour should have included a call to either HP's or MS's telephone support for either a quote for the OS install he needs or permission to hack it.)
Bitching about artificial problems in the Inquirer, of all places, just makes him seem like a moron. It doesn't MATTER if the clients bought the hardware and called him up because their first vendor went belly up; it was his job to make it work, a dozen
Our past president smoked weed and only God knows how many laws our current president broke...
Irrelevant. The President is essentially the guy who decides who's an ally and who's a foe -- it's about as impossible for him to "collaborate with the enemy" as it is to breath in and out at the same time.
Why should anyone care if some nuclear physicist at Los Alamos smoke pot?
Because in order to trust someone we need to know them, and their willingness to break the law and smoke pot are both two very significant factors in their personality. (Did you know that the US army cares about an applicant solider's credit rating and family history?)
Do you use a computer? Are you in any way involved in the consumer computer industry? How about the creation of digital media content? Do you like music, movies or pictures? If you said yes to any of these, DRM is going to be a major pain in YOUR ass.
Amazing. Tell me, how big a pain has iTunes been now? Or the CSS on the DVDs your grandma bought? Because that's the consumer level of tolerance for DRM, and as far as PITAs go, it's kinda minor.
Oh, for gahd's sake, just because you break a few minor laws does *not* mean that you'd be more likely sell out your country to the enemy-of-the-day.
Wrong.
If you break a few minor laws, you are more likely to turn traitor than someone who never breaks the minor laws. It's the difference between "I love my country" and "I believe in the rule of law", and it was enough for Bennedict Arnold to turn traitor.
2: Just about anyone who would need a portable game console can go through six hours per day. Kids on car trips, college students stuck and college with neither a ride nor homework between classes (Yes, that happens), and moms playing in small breaks around the house can all pretty easily get to six hours.
... hasn't given a damn about the constitution ... For some things [the Courts] already do have the power...
You, ah, ARE aware that the Constitution sets up three branches of government, and explicitly grants the Courts a rough third of aggregate power, right?
And since they're the only branch that has no say in amending the Constitution, letting them be the ones that determine what the words mean sounds reasonably fair. (Where's the "States may outlaw abortion" amendment, anyway?)
FWIW, it is disturbing that our current administration seems reluctant to abide by Checks and Balances. But that's why we live in a democracy; when the administration no longer suits us, we can remove them from power without killing anybody.
Staying Free is a guaranteed way to lose? Tell me more, you seem to have invented a fascinating new branch of logic, cos it seems to me that if you are forced to use non-Free software (or hardware), you have already lost.
Yes, exactly. Right now, OSS is losing because of the focus on free formats, among other things.
Free Software must be able to read the not-open format, or it's useless. And useless software never becomes prevalent enough to take hold and start dictating formats.
Is it really that difficult?
Yes.
Have a few drinks, put on an 02 tank, dive underwater, check your weight for neutral buoyancy, and then try turning a bolt on a million-dollar piece of art made out of material not that much sturdier than a cardboard box. Oh, and put a man with a loaded gun and free reign to kill you outside of the pool.
Spacewalks are NOT easy. I may be under-stating the difficulty/stress combination.
Looks like we've got ourselves a reader. I'd rather stab my eyes out than wait 15 minutes for someone to print a sub-standard crap edition of a book I'm going to buy.
So, you either:
1: Buy exclusively hardcover, thus missing a good majority of the works ever printed (not necessarily a bad thing; you might be down to only 60% crap) and paying a good 300% over the standard
2: Don't understand that your books are likely ALREADY printed using an identical process.
Either way, this thing won't fly (as it's been trying to for the last ten years now) if it doesn't meet the standard of quality.
I think the key concept you are missing is the linking directly to copyrighted material that the owner does not want others to link to.
Yes, exactly. Now stop there.
When you render a site as text/html or its equivalents, it gets rendered in a browser with various other linked files. It is an *integral* part of a web browser to create "bookmarks" to such pages. This is fundamental to how the web is designed. By serving a text/html or equivalent page, you're in essense granting permission for whomever seeks that page to link to it and distribute said link to others.
The fundamental difference is when you like to non-text/html data, such as videos, music files, and images. On the internet, these files should always as a matter of course be linked to from another page, and this is where the line is drawn. The article isn't about not being able to link to someone's article off their main page; the holding is that you can't leech, and if you do you can expect the law to agree with the other guy.
PreacherTom is an astroturfer for BusinessWeek magazine
No, not really.
He's what in the "old media" world we would call a "crier." He directs traffic to a given site, by saying how interesting it is. The fact that a given article actually is interesting should not be based in any way on who submits it -- be it a bored geek or a profit-seeking crier.
Protected content is DRMed movies and music. We're not talking about encrypted financial documents.
Why not?
If you've got a system with DRM capability built right in, and your company has a reason to restrict access to those, why WOULDN'T you utilize the access-restriction capability you already bought and paid for?
If it took 14 billion years for the light to reach us, and the universe is 14 billion years old, does that mean that we are on the very edge of the expanding universe?
No, because the diameter of the universe increased at a speed faster than c.
Our visual range of perception is only 14byrs radius, but the universe is substantially bigger.
Once you leave the safe world of Newtonian physics you need to develop a superhuman ability to try and NOT visualize the universe on the grand scale of the quantum scale. Human intuition and visualizations is was built for Newtons world. Once you leave that world, it breaks down and fails to be much help.
And this is why QM is and forever will be seen as the quack end of respectable science. Human intuition and ability to visualize are not tied to the Newtonian-level physics. They are tied to the words of language used to describe the concepts, and it's very hard to be a good scientist and be good at naming things, especially things that you don't really understand.
If you want to visualize QM, talk about "subreality", "patterns", and "fabric", not "waves" and "particles."
Perhaps a more interesting question would be whether the Windows-users in the Slashdot community plan to run 64-bit Vista, considering its enhanced security (PatchGuard et al.) as well as its enhanced possibilities of restricting you from doing things on your own computer.
Maybe, if the drivers ever come up to snuff in the first place. I do have a 64-bit CPU in my laptop that, at the moment, is just doing 32-bit jumping jacks.
(And as I do not intend to buy music with MS's DRM, I really don't see what you think Vista will keep me from doing with my own computer that, say, regular old XP doesn't do.)
Locking the users into proprietary software and DRM are not improvements for users.
I am writing this on my Vista-installed laptop, through Firefox. I just checked my e-mail on Thunderbird, and, if I thought it was worth my time, I could intall OpenOffice. I have a few gigabytes of music here, all MP3 without any DRM on them at all.
The only thing that Vista does to "reduce" my freedoms is have better support for DRM-enabled stores. So, if I want to purchase music instead of getting a CD from the store (as I prefer), I can go to someone other than iTunes, and put my music on a device that isn't made by Apple.
Does MS have DRM here? Sure. Can I remove it entirely at will? You betcha. Is this entirely irrelevant to the new features MS put in Vista, like the GPU-utilizing pretty windows or the "press a button and type a command" functionality of the start menu? Yep.
Everyone who cares or will care knows about the FSF, and what "free software" means. If you want to discourage "not-free" software, it's time to start promoting how good free software is -- otherwise, the question is "are those freedoms worth the annoyance"
If you think that the paramedics & EMTs who come when you dial 9-1-1 should be able to break down the door, go find out what the law is in your area. In some states, I suspect they can break down doors. If your state doesn't let them, write to your legislators and governor asking for them to be granted that power.
Where's the "here is how you do that in Linux" part of the movement?
It's all well and good to say that Vista is a "don't upgrade" for the next twelve months -- but there are improvements in it, some of which rise to the level of intuition, and right now there's no Free way to get those improvements.
The new element is that the Speaker of the House would become president.
Not if you impeach the VP first, give a short pause for the Pres to nominate someone (McCain? Jeb Bush?), and then impeach Bush.
Really, though, doing the job badly isn't a high crime or misdemeanor. Bush shouldn't be impeached; he should be forced to, y'know, actually compromise.
Boy, they have a lot of misplaced faith.
True. Because we all know how many space vehicles have been saved by last-minute operator adjustments during liftoff and final descent.
So, you can do something with a computer with NO OS on it?
Interesting. I had no idea that staring at "O/S Not Found" was that interesting. Do tell me more.
You might not care for HP's choice of OS, but a PC needs an OS or it just doesn't work. You're free to buy your PC from someone OTHER than HP, and the law should not force HP to sell you what they don't want to.
Nintendo doesn't share any responsibility, especially when you admit that customers are not using the Wiimote in a manner that is appropriate. You can't have it both ways
You're obviously not familiar with strict liability.
Let's go for a worst-case scienerio -- somone playing a Wii has the strap break, the Wii-mote flys out an open window, and in a freak accident hits the driver of a passing vehicle on the head, causing him then to run into a nearby tree and total his $30,000 car and require a $250,000 surgery.
The gentleman, or his insurance company, files suit against the homeowner and Nintendo. Nintendo tries to argue what you say -- that the 'mote wasn't being used properly. The judge rejects that, and requires them to remain a party to the lawsuit, as it was the failure of their product which caused the injury.
Yes, Nintendo can shift some of the blame back to the homeowner, and likely winds up settling in any case, but they aren't even close to totally off the hook just because they stuck a warning label on there.
1) Energy can not be created or destroyed, only transformed. Ultimately, the energy in the hydrogen economy has to come from somewhere.
This is true only in the universal sense. Terrestrially speaking, we get a set input of energy from the sun, and variable outputs of energy from simple radiation and to-enthropy losses. And a fair bit of energy is wasted by our electrical grid anyway; instead of building more copper wires, it may be better to create a co-existing system of hydrogen pipes.
Using Hydrogen as an intermediate energy carrier is by definition a losing proposition. Any energy source you use to make the hydrogen can be better exploited by using it more directly.
Only if you ignore transmission costs and economies-of-scale. Hydrogen can likely have transmission costs that are distance-independant, whereas electricity has an ever-increasing transmission loss.
Short of that, you still require massive infrastructure to support even the most simple of hydrogen economies. This adds practical and economic factors onto an already bleak prospect.
You're ignoring your own statement -- that our current infrastructure is already at the breaking point. We have to build more ANYWAY. It's only a question of if it makes sense to create a hydrogen infrastructure now.
(Oh, and "the most simple" of hydrogen economies is the very-ineffecient model of at-station generation. It starts the H for the end-user, and requires no new infrastructure to the station other than whatever they use for power.)
Seriously, it's not that hard a target!
Quick -- name ten things you think MS Office doesn't do great, and how you would fix them in OOo.
It's a harder target than you think.
if you need to be able to tell the difference between two gasses which are similar in all ways not related to quantium physics then a method related to quantium physics will have to be generated in order to survive.
Except that gases that are meaningfully different to us humans and other forms of life are different on a much greater than quantum scale. And the range of those gases that there is evolutionary pressure to detect is limited to those that appear with enough regularity in the terran biosphere to either aid those that can detect them or kill those that cannot.
Evolution isn't magic. It's the recognition that vairations that are most fit to a given environment will be the ones that most survive, and in a changing environment the most varied forms of life are those that survive.