and often photos of the property are included in tax records. if there isn't a photo of the property there is at least an exact description. i can very easily pull those up for my county online. before that it was simply a matter of going to the courthouse. all these folks talking about privacy really don't seem to know the law at all.
Considering the explosion of surveillance in British cities, I'd think they've made it clear they don't expect any privacy in public. I fail to see how living in an "affluent area" allows you some extra privacy rights others do not have.
But hey, I guess rich people really feel like they're entitled to special treatment. You'd think having the money would be enough.
Try telling a user who has had a pirated application on their computer you can't provide it -- that's no fun at all. They've gotten used to using it and most won't accept another program in its place. Even worse you'll get nonsensical crap about free/open-source software not providing appropriate output.
And management isn't always helpful. You'd think telling them "you are breaking license agreements and exposing yourself to legal liability" would be enough, but sometimes that isn't enough. At least in this case you have someone (old fake IT guy) to blame -- that's more or less all you can do.
And let me chime in on the ZOMG install FOSS tip -- this is a great opportunity. You've already got a tailor-made excuse. "X user is using X software and we do not have a license. We can either pay X dollars for a license or use this freely available alternative that will provide the same functionality." In this economic climate, they won't even consider the pay software in most cases.
How would you argue that the economic stimulus package is either immoral or unconstitutional? It regulates interstate commerce fairly clearly. The Congress is entitled to raise funds and distribute them. "I don't like it" does not equal "unconstitutional." As to the morality of government spending? Lots of folks opposed to the stimulus supported the Iraq war. If you want to get into the relative morality of different kinds of government spending (even deficit spending), I think you'll find you're probably not on the firmest ground. Or would you argue that highway construction is somehow morally objectionable and war isn't?
What, you going to rebel against the government? That's called suicide-by-cop. It's always interesting that folks point to guns as protection against tyranny. Guess what? If you're going to try to use a gun against the government, the government will use many more against you. If you truly want to change anything in this country, the political process is the best (very very far from perfect) way to do it. You are far more likely to succeed at changing the way the government works by political processes.
Your chances aren't particularly good, but they ARE non-zero. Your chances of starting a successful revolution against the United States government with privately owned firearms are zero. Folks fetishizing weapons like this is obnoxious. Stop glorifying violence in your own mind and get with the 21st century.
You're wrong, and very much so. Bringing up "ambulance chasers" in the context of legal disputes between corporations is particularly nonsensical. Most large corporations either have legal departments or contracted legal assistance.
What's this "average lawyer" you're talking about? If he's the actual "average" lawyer, he's not involved in litigation primarily. He fills out bankruptcy and divorce paperwork and settles all of his cases out of court.
In cases of litigation between companies (like the topic at hand), the poster is correct. The dispute arises because someone is unreasonable or underinformed, and the lawyers do their job. Their job is to represent their client, whether they are wrong or right.
Does it really matter? You're not dealing with black hat hacker if the first thing he does is notify the proper authorities. More likely, it's a less-than-qualified IT staff at that school district that is in CYA mode over their own mistakes.
From personal experience, the folks running security at schools are incompetent. Their reaction to students taking security seriously is to attack the students. The head of IT at my college tried to get me expelled for demonstrating a simple security flaw to IT staff (their password list was not shadowed --- in 2001!!).
The old ways, it appears, are done. Now security is only the responsibility of the security staff. If you find something by accident, keep it secret -- otherwise you'll get charged with multiple felonies for doing the right thing.
This question seems ill-informed. Due to the stringent requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, Google is required to keep backups of their data, and are far better-equipped to do so. The writer seems to want to backup simply to say they're doing it -- not to actually protect data from loss.
considering the record industry believes that ripping a cd is "stealing" and there are few sources for drm-free downloads, they've really got us all in an ugly catch-22. i've bought music online, and i've been burned too many times with the issues of compatibility. i have an xbox 360 and an ipod. if i want to be able to play my music on all the devices i own, it's either got to be mp3s that i "stole" by ripping my music collection or.aacs that i broke the DMCA by decrypting. if you buy the record company's line that ripping is "stealing" i cannot listen to the music i want to on the devices i own.
i guess they're just trying as hard as hell to make sure i don't listen to new music (which they're doing anyways--all of it sucks!) and i don't spend any money beyond what i have already spent building my collection. i might by emi music because i can get that in a format that will play on both of my devices, but that leaves all the other riaa companies in the lurch.
regardless, a $222,000 verdict for 24 songs is ridiculous. i haven't listened to a cd in my life that was worth $20,000 a song.
When Microsoft starts putting out a product that is worth my money, I will make every effort to pay for it. If I am forced to upgrade to Vista, at this point I see no reason why it is in any way worth my money. On top of that, Microsoft is now doing such lovely things as pressuring PC manufacturers to install their OS on machines rather than allowing a user to escape their hegemony. I have no interest in giving up my hard-earned money to further Microsoft's monopoly and their awful business practices.
And I was stupid enough to actually buy one because I was told by the admissions people it would be a vital part of class. Number of classes where I was required to use my laptop? None.
This kind of thing sounds great to college admissions people, but it doesn't really work out how they think it will. The biggest problem I think you'll face is likely getting the teachers to actually make use of the laptops. It might not be as big a problem at an art/design school (you actually HAVE to use computers for some of that stuff) but at a regular old liberal-arts college, the laptop requirement still doesn't make much sense. As for models--Dell consistently sold a crappy, low-spec laptop to Longwood students (my college) that was WAY overpriced. My first year it was something like a Pentium II 300 with no burner; I turned around and bought a gateway laptop for less that had at least 200 mhz and a burner on that POS. Dell seems to make the most of their guaranteed sales like that by selling the lowest-spec machine they can get away with.
Really, that's kind of an overstatement. Many newsrooms use Macs but most publishing software has ports for PCs. The last newsroom I worked in used all PCs--they'd switched from Macs a year before I got there. Not only that, but there's this thing called "objectivity" that most reporters want to show they have. Apple made a huge shift moving to Intel and has now entered into a strange place in business. They make a Windows-compatible (at least Vista-compatible) PC that runs their own OS. While I doubt the majority of Mac buyers will be dual-booting their machines, it is now entirely possible. THAT is a news story because no such computer has really existed before. That, and Steve puts on a good show. Bill Gates didn't put on half as good a show at CES.
I was actually thinking of the same thing. Since open source software costs nothing, it would have no value to tax; however, this sounds like a pretty stupid idea anyways. It would be a "pretty good chunk of change" because you'd have to consider the value of all software on each computer. I guess you could go by site licenses for bigger businesses, but a small business with 5 computers running office would all of a sudden have a few thousand dollars worth of software for personal property taxes. That's alot of unexpected taxation, and small businesses are forced to operate on razor-thin margins anyways. The problem is that the explosion of entitlement costs from federal programs is really hurting state budgets. Oh well... I guess if you try to do government on the cheap like some people in Washington (it's always good to claim you're "cutting the deficit" by cutting programs for the poor then giving out more money in tax cuts to the wealthy) you'll have to come up with "creative" ways to make ends meet.
Considering the promises Microsoft's made about Vista have changed as much as our reasons for going to war in Iraq, I take anything about Vista with a grain of salt. What happened to WinFS? Or Monad? While those are both "beneath the hood" features, a real shell and a better file system than NTFS would have been nice. M$ has axed both of those. I just switched from Windows to Mac. My Mac Mini easily outperforms my Athlon XP 2800 in most tasks, and I can't seem to stop myself from playing with my computer. It's not just that it's cool looking and all that, but everything makes sense. I was a Macintosh user up until 1997--then switched to Windows. From '97 till now, the Mac OS has made impressive strides. In that same time, innovation has almost ceased in Microsoft's offering. I've played with the Vista beta (but not on the same machine as Mac OS). Vista is much better than previous offerings, but too little too late.
I'm completely with you. I went to the fuckedgoogle site that/. posted yesterday, and the guy who's writing that is just a crackpot. In one post he accused google of manipulating their stock price while SIMULTANEOUSLY saying they were going to have the biggest point loss in the history of the company. I'm sorry, but I fail to see why they'd manipulate their own stock price down. And the privacy concerns? So they keep a record of searches. I don't care. They do so many that it's impossible for anyone to come up with useful data from google. All you'll be able to tell is that lots of people search for porn. Microsoft earned its title of "most evil" because they single-mindedly destroy all of their competition through FUD and other BS. Google hasn't really gotten rid of any of their competition (Yahoo and MSN are still there--I can't really think of a "large" web portal that's not there anymore) and that doesn't seem to be their goal. Just to do what they do best. I certainly have heard more reporting of this than I've heard anyone I know complain about google. Usually when the media outlets are pushing something, it's a good idea to take it with a grain of salt.
offtopic- Kos at dailykos said yesterday that he thinks dailykos could become larger than slashdot, hits per day wise, before the end of the year--people called pullshit, but I'm really kind of interested now.
Strangely enough, these people are suing google for the actions of others. They are suing google because google's webcrawler doesn't automatically block sites containing their copyrighted works. They're basically saying it's Google's job to police the entire web to enforce their copyrights. They have no case, because they would have to prove under the DMCA that Google was built to facilitate the copying of copyrighted works. Not only that, but it'd be difficult to say that they are circumventing a copyright protection scheme because the pictures are not protected by anything more elaborate than password protection on the website. They'll lose and they're dumb for wasting the time filing the suit. This is a real good example of a frivolous lawsuit. James
At least with regards to video, they're not working on *known* hardware as much anymore--you can get plenty of add-on video boards. They don't have to deal with processor/motherboard combinations they are unfamiliar with, but even that shouldn't give them that much trouble. Everyone makes a big deal about apple's "control" of hardware and how "good" their hardware is... Okay- I've owned both and my macs have lasted longer; however, there are reasons.
My orginal Mac Plus would not be running today if I hadn't bought an additional fan to cool the power supply--alot of Mac Pluses had this problem.
My Power Mac 6100 blew up a week after the warranty ran out- Apple was nice enough to fix it.
I've had one PC stop working on me- the rest have been retired so quickly they didn't get to die.
The one thing I will say for my macs--they lasted longer. Not longer as in "they were more reliable" but as in "the software didn't get so slow on older hardware it was unusable." That, and I don't remember the old "six months and your computer acts like it's geriatric" thing that windows does so well. I want mac os x... but have nothing but an sse only machine. Gotta go buy a P4 i guess.. james
Okay- from the free software/open-source standpoint, information "wants to be free" doesn't necessarily have privacy implications. They're more concerned with keeping information that is already free free (like open-source software) and enabling other information to become part of the public domain rather than being held out of the public domain by the continual extension of copyright. That is, they are trying to either maintain the freedom to disseminate information (such as the DeCSS case) or to stop companies from profiting without end from their control over information.
At least with regards to those two cases there is no contradiction. In fact, the only people I see on the web fighting to divulge that kind of priviliged information are either corporations or phishers. The open-source community doesn't seem too big on collecting information (you can tell me I'm wrong, but if you post as an anonymous coward, you've proven me right). I think "information is free" is most definitely not a "free as in beer" thing- we've discussed that alot. It's more of a "free as in uninhibited"--like a river, there are areas that we want the river to flow without boundaries. There are also inlets of that information river where we'd like to keep things a little closer to vest. I don't see how it's contradictory--it's simply a matter of how you contstruct your metaphor in your head.
Of course, this is all IMNSHO (not that I'm anything special, just that I'm not particularly humble).
Which is more or less what Microsft relied on with the Xbox- they had a rudimentary protection scheme (cracked very quickly) that has kept MOST users from using commodity hardware as a Windows PC, even though that use would be quite easy. In fact, to this day no one has yet managed to get Windows XP or any other version of Windows running on an Xbox, which is quite an accomplishment, considering the Apple boxes were running XP the day they were relesaed. IMHO--all this "security" is so much shouting at the wind- it's pretty unlikely they're going to be able to keep people from porting osx to commodity hardware indefinitely- the lower-level kernel stuff is all there for Free BSD and it should be possible to hack around whatever they've put in.
The whole problem with the gun control lobby's logic (and seemingly yours) is that gun control if effective will remove all guns from the street. This is impossible, even in countries where martial law is in effect (re: Iraq). The point of gun control legislation is to LIMIT the number of guns on the street.
Also, I think it's interesting that the gun control lobby (and others that seem to want to militarize our streets) always points to the ineffectiveness of gun control legislation to end violence as a reason to roll it back. I don't see where the logic goes from more guns===>greater safety. Guns in the home lead to more accidents and are more likely to lead to an injury of their owner than any protective function. Guns in a home are a target of theft and are later used in crimes. In England, you can hunt but they don't have an armed populace. Honestly, I can't see why anyone needs a handgun. You can't hunt with it. It's made for killing people. Why would you want to own something that was solely an instrument of murder? Do you really someday WANT to pull that trigger? Because otherwise, you can buy a paperweight and it'll serve the same function without endangering you and your family.
Gun control makes sense because an armed populace does not. The less guns in the world, the safer we'll all be. James
Jeez- this was the slowest space news I've ever seen from Slashdot. I mean, I've been watching all day, and I heard about this MINUTES ago. Geez, who screwed the pooch this time? NASA updated their webpage before/.! NASA!
Karma Whores, do your worst. This is on-topic so whatever. James
Luke "force choked" two of the guards in Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi. I think that means that light side jedi can use this power; however, it would seem it's frowned upon if used against humans or something. James
Actually, I've used other players alot because friends think I'm stupid for having spent so much on my iPod; that is, until they use the iPod next to their player. I think the best example is the Creative Zen Micro. I cannot figure out how to use the darn thing. It's got touch-sensitive controls, but the buttons don't click- it's like tapping a mouse pad, which I never did to begin with. There's some good features with the zen (a removable batter cover would be nice on a ipod, but would screw up the whole "look" of the player) but the usability makes it just plain unfun. Most of the other players remind of me of this. The click wheel is *the big feature* of the iPod. It's a great interface for scrolling through long lists, and it's so easy to use that ANYBODY (and I mean anybody - my grandfather included) can just pick up an iPod and get down. That's user-friendly, and that's Apple. Until somebody else comes up with a better idea (and so far, no luck), the iPod is going to continue its dominance. James
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and often photos of the property are included in tax records. if there isn't a photo of the property there is at least an exact description. i can very easily pull those up for my county online. before that it was simply a matter of going to the courthouse. all these folks talking about privacy really don't seem to know the law at all.
Considering the explosion of surveillance in British cities, I'd think they've made it clear they don't expect any privacy in public. I fail to see how living in an "affluent area" allows you some extra privacy rights others do not have.
But hey, I guess rich people really feel like they're entitled to special treatment. You'd think having the money would be enough.
Try telling a user who has had a pirated application on their computer you can't provide it -- that's no fun at all. They've gotten used to using it and most won't accept another program in its place. Even worse you'll get nonsensical crap about free/open-source software not providing appropriate output.
And management isn't always helpful. You'd think telling them "you are breaking license agreements and exposing yourself to legal liability" would be enough, but sometimes that isn't enough. At least in this case you have someone (old fake IT guy) to blame -- that's more or less all you can do.
And let me chime in on the ZOMG install FOSS tip -- this is a great opportunity. You've already got a tailor-made excuse. "X user is using X software and we do not have a license. We can either pay X dollars for a license or use this freely available alternative that will provide the same functionality." In this economic climate, they won't even consider the pay software in most cases.
How would you argue that the economic stimulus package is either immoral or unconstitutional? It regulates interstate commerce fairly clearly. The Congress is entitled to raise funds and distribute them. "I don't like it" does not equal "unconstitutional." As to the morality of government spending? Lots of folks opposed to the stimulus supported the Iraq war. If you want to get into the relative morality of different kinds of government spending (even deficit spending), I think you'll find you're probably not on the firmest ground. Or would you argue that highway construction is somehow morally objectionable and war isn't?
What, you going to rebel against the government? That's called suicide-by-cop. It's always interesting that folks point to guns as protection against tyranny. Guess what? If you're going to try to use a gun against the government, the government will use many more against you. If you truly want to change anything in this country, the political process is the best (very very far from perfect) way to do it. You are far more likely to succeed at changing the way the government works by political processes.
Your chances aren't particularly good, but they ARE non-zero. Your chances of starting a successful revolution against the United States government with privately owned firearms are zero. Folks fetishizing weapons like this is obnoxious. Stop glorifying violence in your own mind and get with the 21st century.
You're wrong, and very much so. Bringing up "ambulance chasers" in the context of legal disputes between corporations is particularly nonsensical. Most large corporations either have legal departments or contracted legal assistance.
What's this "average lawyer" you're talking about? If he's the actual "average" lawyer, he's not involved in litigation primarily. He fills out bankruptcy and divorce paperwork and settles all of his cases out of court.
In cases of litigation between companies (like the topic at hand), the poster is correct. The dispute arises because someone is unreasonable or underinformed, and the lawyers do their job. Their job is to represent their client, whether they are wrong or right.
Does it really matter? You're not dealing with black hat hacker if the first thing he does is notify the proper authorities. More likely, it's a less-than-qualified IT staff at that school district that is in CYA mode over their own mistakes.
From personal experience, the folks running security at schools are incompetent. Their reaction to students taking security seriously is to attack the students. The head of IT at my college tried to get me expelled for demonstrating a simple security flaw to IT staff (their password list was not shadowed --- in 2001!!).
The old ways, it appears, are done. Now security is only the responsibility of the security staff. If you find something by accident, keep it secret -- otherwise you'll get charged with multiple felonies for doing the right thing.
This question seems ill-informed. Due to the stringent requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, Google is required to keep backups of their data, and are far better-equipped to do so. The writer seems to want to backup simply to say they're doing it -- not to actually protect data from loss.
so what about the iMac?
considering the record industry believes that ripping a cd is "stealing" and there are few sources for drm-free downloads, they've really got us all in an ugly catch-22. i've bought music online, and i've been burned too many times with the issues of compatibility. i have an xbox 360 and an ipod. if i want to be able to play my music on all the devices i own, it's either got to be mp3s that i "stole" by ripping my music collection or .aacs that i broke the DMCA by decrypting. if you buy the record company's line that ripping is "stealing" i cannot listen to the music i want to on the devices i own.
i guess they're just trying as hard as hell to make sure i don't listen to new music (which they're doing anyways--all of it sucks!) and i don't spend any money beyond what i have already spent building my collection. i might by emi music because i can get that in a format that will play on both of my devices, but that leaves all the other riaa companies in the lurch.
regardless, a $222,000 verdict for 24 songs is ridiculous. i haven't listened to a cd in my life that was worth $20,000 a song.
When Microsoft starts putting out a product that is worth my money, I will make every effort to pay for it. If I am forced to upgrade to Vista, at this point I see no reason why it is in any way worth my money. On top of that, Microsoft is now doing such lovely things as pressuring PC manufacturers to install their OS on machines rather than allowing a user to escape their hegemony. I have no interest in giving up my hard-earned money to further Microsoft's monopoly and their awful business practices.
And I was stupid enough to actually buy one because I was told by the admissions people it would be a vital part of class. Number of classes where I was required to use my laptop? None.
This kind of thing sounds great to college admissions people, but it doesn't really work out how they think it will. The biggest problem I think you'll face is likely getting the teachers to actually make use of the laptops. It might not be as big a problem at an art/design school (you actually HAVE to use computers for some of that stuff) but at a regular old liberal-arts college, the laptop requirement still doesn't make much sense. As for models--Dell consistently sold a crappy, low-spec laptop to Longwood students (my college) that was WAY overpriced. My first year it was something like a Pentium II 300 with no burner; I turned around and bought a gateway laptop for less that had at least 200 mhz and a burner on that POS. Dell seems to make the most of their guaranteed sales like that by selling the lowest-spec machine they can get away with.
Really, that's kind of an overstatement. Many newsrooms use Macs but most publishing software has ports for PCs. The last newsroom I worked in used all PCs--they'd switched from Macs a year before I got there. Not only that, but there's this thing called "objectivity" that most reporters want to show they have. Apple made a huge shift moving to Intel and has now entered into a strange place in business. They make a Windows-compatible (at least Vista-compatible) PC that runs their own OS. While I doubt the majority of Mac buyers will be dual-booting their machines, it is now entirely possible. THAT is a news story because no such computer has really existed before.
That, and Steve puts on a good show. Bill Gates didn't put on half as good a show at CES.
I was actually thinking of the same thing. Since open source software costs nothing, it would have no value to tax; however, this sounds like a pretty stupid idea anyways. It would be a "pretty good chunk of change" because you'd have to consider the value of all software on each computer. I guess you could go by site licenses for bigger businesses, but a small business with 5 computers running office would all of a sudden have a few thousand dollars worth of software for personal property taxes. That's alot of unexpected taxation, and small businesses are forced to operate on razor-thin margins anyways. The problem is that the explosion of entitlement costs from federal programs is really hurting state budgets. Oh well... I guess if you try to do government on the cheap like some people in Washington (it's always good to claim you're "cutting the deficit" by cutting programs for the poor then giving out more money in tax cuts to the wealthy) you'll have to come up with "creative" ways to make ends meet.
Considering the promises Microsoft's made about Vista have changed as much as our reasons for going to war in Iraq, I take anything about Vista with a grain of salt. What happened to WinFS? Or Monad? While those are both "beneath the hood" features, a real shell and a better file system than NTFS would have been nice. M$ has axed both of those.
I just switched from Windows to Mac. My Mac Mini easily outperforms my Athlon XP 2800 in most tasks, and I can't seem to stop myself from playing with my computer. It's not just that it's cool looking and all that, but everything makes sense. I was a Macintosh user up until 1997--then switched to Windows. From '97 till now, the Mac OS has made impressive strides. In that same time, innovation has almost ceased in Microsoft's offering. I've played with the Vista beta (but not on the same machine as Mac OS). Vista is much better than previous offerings, but too little too late.
I'm completely with you. I went to the fuckedgoogle site that /. posted yesterday, and the guy who's writing that is just a crackpot. In one post he accused google of manipulating their stock price while SIMULTANEOUSLY saying they were going to have the biggest point loss in the history of the company. I'm sorry, but I fail to see why they'd manipulate their own stock price down.
And the privacy concerns? So they keep a record of searches. I don't care. They do so many that it's impossible for anyone to come up with useful data from google. All you'll be able to tell is that lots of people search for porn.
Microsoft earned its title of "most evil" because they single-mindedly destroy all of their competition through FUD and other BS. Google hasn't really gotten rid of any of their competition (Yahoo and MSN are still there--I can't really think of a "large" web portal that's not there anymore) and that doesn't seem to be their goal. Just to do what they do best. I certainly have heard more reporting of this than I've heard anyone I know complain about google. Usually when the media outlets are pushing something, it's a good idea to take it with a grain of salt.
offtopic- Kos at dailykos said yesterday that he thinks dailykos could become larger than slashdot, hits per day wise, before the end of the year--people called pullshit, but I'm really kind of interested now.
Strangely enough, these people are suing google for the actions of others. They are suing google because google's webcrawler doesn't automatically block sites containing their copyrighted works. They're basically saying it's Google's job to police the entire web to enforce their copyrights. They have no case, because they would have to prove under the DMCA that Google was built to facilitate the copying of copyrighted works. Not only that, but it'd be difficult to say that they are circumventing a copyright protection scheme because the pictures are not protected by anything more elaborate than password protection on the website. They'll lose and they're dumb for wasting the time filing the suit. This is a real good example of a frivolous lawsuit.
James
State my ass. We're a Commonwealth!
At least with regards to video, they're not working on *known* hardware as much anymore--you can get plenty of add-on video boards. They don't have to deal with processor/motherboard combinations they are unfamiliar with, but even that shouldn't give them that much trouble. Everyone makes a big deal about apple's "control" of hardware and how "good" their hardware is... Okay- I've owned both and my macs have lasted longer; however, there are reasons.
My orginal Mac Plus would not be running today if I hadn't bought an additional fan to cool the power supply--alot of Mac Pluses had this problem.
My Power Mac 6100 blew up a week after the warranty ran out- Apple was nice enough to fix it.
I've had one PC stop working on me- the rest have been retired so quickly they didn't get to die.
The one thing I will say for my macs--they lasted longer. Not longer as in "they were more reliable" but as in "the software didn't get so slow on older hardware it was unusable." That, and I don't remember the old "six months and your computer acts like it's geriatric" thing that windows does so well. I want mac os x... but have nothing but an sse only machine. Gotta go buy a P4 i guess..
james
Okay- from the free software/open-source standpoint, information "wants to be free" doesn't necessarily have privacy implications. They're more concerned with keeping information that is already free free (like open-source software) and enabling other information to become part of the public domain rather than being held out of the public domain by the continual extension of copyright. That is, they are trying to either maintain the freedom to disseminate information (such as the DeCSS case) or to stop companies from profiting without end from their control over information.
At least with regards to those two cases there is no contradiction. In fact, the only people I see on the web fighting to divulge that kind of priviliged information are either corporations or phishers. The open-source community doesn't seem too big on collecting information (you can tell me I'm wrong, but if you post as an anonymous coward, you've proven me right). I think "information is free" is most definitely not a "free as in beer" thing- we've discussed that alot. It's more of a "free as in uninhibited"--like a river, there are areas that we want the river to flow without boundaries. There are also inlets of that information river where we'd like to keep things a little closer to vest. I don't see how it's contradictory--it's simply a matter of how you contstruct your metaphor in your head.
Of course, this is all IMNSHO (not that I'm anything special, just that I'm not particularly humble).
James
Which is more or less what Microsft relied on with the Xbox- they had a rudimentary protection scheme (cracked very quickly) that has kept MOST users from using commodity hardware as a Windows PC, even though that use would be quite easy. In fact, to this day no one has yet managed to get Windows XP or any other version of Windows running on an Xbox, which is quite an accomplishment, considering the Apple boxes were running XP the day they were relesaed. IMHO--all this "security" is so much shouting at the wind- it's pretty unlikely they're going to be able to keep people from porting osx to commodity hardware indefinitely- the lower-level kernel stuff is all there for Free BSD and it should be possible to hack around whatever they've put in.
The whole problem with the gun control lobby's logic (and seemingly yours) is that gun control if effective will remove all guns from the street. This is impossible, even in countries where martial law is in effect (re: Iraq). The point of gun control legislation is to LIMIT the number of guns on the street.
Also, I think it's interesting that the gun control lobby (and others that seem to want to militarize our streets) always points to the ineffectiveness of gun control legislation to end violence as a reason to roll it back. I don't see where the logic goes from more guns===>greater safety. Guns in the home lead to more accidents and are more likely to lead to an injury of their owner than any protective function. Guns in a home are a target of theft and are later used in crimes. In England, you can hunt but they don't have an armed populace. Honestly, I can't see why anyone needs a handgun. You can't hunt with it. It's made for killing people. Why would you want to own something that was solely an instrument of murder? Do you really someday WANT to pull that trigger? Because otherwise, you can buy a paperweight and it'll serve the same function without endangering you and your family.
Gun control makes sense because an armed populace does not. The less guns in the world, the safer we'll all be.
James
Jeez- this was the slowest space news I've ever seen from Slashdot. I mean, I've been watching all day, and I heard about this MINUTES ago. Geez, who screwed the pooch this time? NASA updated their webpage before /.! NASA!
Karma Whores, do your worst. This is on-topic so whatever.
James
Luke "force choked" two of the guards in Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi. I think that means that light side jedi can use this power; however, it would seem it's frowned upon if used against humans or something.
James
Actually, I've used other players alot because friends think I'm stupid for having spent so much on my iPod; that is, until they use the iPod next to their player. I think the best example is the Creative Zen Micro. I cannot figure out how to use the darn thing. It's got touch-sensitive controls, but the buttons don't click- it's like tapping a mouse pad, which I never did to begin with. There's some good features with the zen (a removable batter cover would be nice on a ipod, but would screw up the whole "look" of the player) but the usability makes it just plain unfun. Most of the other players remind of me of this. The click wheel is *the big feature* of the iPod. It's a great interface for scrolling through long lists, and it's so easy to use that ANYBODY (and I mean anybody - my grandfather included) can just pick up an iPod and get down. That's user-friendly, and that's Apple. Until somebody else comes up with a better idea (and so far, no luck), the iPod is going to continue its dominance.
James