The neat thing about all these USB peripherals that Apple is making is that those of us who are too poor to afford decent Apple computers could conceivably use their mice on our intel machines. Of course, it would not have occured to anybody who has had to use a hockey puck mouse. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't want to make any mouse with more than one button.
I saw a hockey puck mouse being sold sepperately in a CompUSA that was in the middle of a vast suburban wasteland stripmall farm. I would have considered buying it as a hockey puck, but I don't think it's durable enough. It most definitely would not work as a street hockey puck, and I have a feeling that one well-placed shot for the goal would have sent the thing shattering into a million translucent pieces that would be hard to spot on ice. Maybe there are some Canadians with thoughts on using this device as a hockey puck.
Lets not forget that one of the real great interface "wins" that Windows 95 had over 3.1 was the utilization of the second mouse button. A side-effect of that is it encourages users to poke around at things that aren't made readily apparant.
This is slashdot, and I guess that means we can't expect article posters like michael to be the picture of impartial journalists. However, we shouldn't condemn them as such, because we should expect them to be slightly biased in certain ways and the fact that there is discussion about the articles offsets that. The discussion offsets the perils of less than completely unbaised journalism in kind of the same way I felt about running into an old friend of mine at her place of employment today. She hasn't heard much about the DMCA but thinks it's still a good idea despite the way it's being used as a legal baseball bat clobbering relatively harmless programs like DeCSS.
Would you have forseen the proliferation of FREE music as has been the case with mp3s? The MPAA is just looking out for their future, and the DMCA is really the only legal option they have to prevent them from having to wage a legal war against piracy on many fronts like the RIAA is up to now. I never want to take my dog for a walk in the middle of a good movie, but I'd gladly hit the pause button on an xmms session with a playlist chok full of hundreds of both legal and illegally obtained mp3s. I don't have any mp3s that are freely downloadable except for a few songs from a local band, but I do have some mp3s that I copied myself from CDs (so I would have my music in a more convienient format for me despite a decrease in quality). Those are legal under fair use. However, the DMCA might also be used to render even this as illegal as one might see that even an audio CD has some properties that might be seen as anti-copying features. I still might not even take the dog for a walk even when I'm just listening to Abbey Road (I wouldn't want to interrupt that).
It is also interesting to see FreeBSD get mentioned in the mainstream news. It doesn't seem to exist in the eyes of the mainstream press who seem to love Linux like RMS himself. Doesn't anybody realize that DeCSS can be used with FreeBSD as well? The whole non-existant stature of FreeBSD with the general media is much like the way things don't exist in the real world to some people unless they're archived in text form somewhere on the internet to be burried in the bowels of google.com somewhere.
What is important here is that people who buy and watch DVDs are aware that they may soon be in danger of losing some of their rights to watch those movies. Even people who don't have DVD players on their computers must realize this. I would like to have a DVD player in my car for when I spend hours driving on boring endless featureless freeway (read "Michigan").
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I thought it was "Third Stone from the Sun" by Jimi Hendrix of course.
The neat thing about all these USB peripherals that Apple is making is that those of us who are too poor to afford decent Apple computers could conceivably use their mice on our intel machines. Of course, it would not have occured to anybody who has had to use a hockey puck mouse. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't want to make any mouse with more than one button.
I saw a hockey puck mouse being sold sepperately in a CompUSA that was in the middle of a vast suburban wasteland stripmall farm. I would have considered buying it as a hockey puck, but I don't think it's durable enough. It most definitely would not work as a street hockey puck, and I have a feeling that one well-placed shot for the goal would have sent the thing shattering into a million translucent pieces that would be hard to spot on ice. Maybe there are some Canadians with thoughts on using this device as a hockey puck.
Lets not forget that one of the real great interface "wins" that Windows 95 had over 3.1 was the utilization of the second mouse button. A side-effect of that is it encourages users to poke around at things that aren't made readily apparant.
This is slashdot, and I guess that means we can't expect article posters like michael to be the picture of impartial journalists. However, we shouldn't condemn them as such, because we should expect them to be slightly biased in certain ways and the fact that there is discussion about the articles offsets that. The discussion offsets the perils of less than completely unbaised journalism in kind of the same way I felt about running into an old friend of mine at her place of employment today. She hasn't heard much about the DMCA but thinks it's still a good idea despite the way it's being used as a legal baseball bat clobbering relatively harmless programs like DeCSS.
Would you have forseen the proliferation of FREE music as has been the case with mp3s? The MPAA is just looking out for their future, and the DMCA is really the only legal option they have to prevent them from having to wage a legal war against piracy on many fronts like the RIAA is up to now. I never want to take my dog for a walk in the middle of a good movie, but I'd gladly hit the pause button on an xmms session with a playlist chok full of hundreds of both legal and illegally obtained mp3s. I don't have any mp3s that are freely downloadable except for a few songs from a local band, but I do have some mp3s that I copied myself from CDs (so I would have my music in a more convienient format for me despite a decrease in quality). Those are legal under fair use. However, the DMCA might also be used to render even this as illegal as one might see that even an audio CD has some properties that might be seen as anti-copying features. I still might not even take the dog for a walk even when I'm just listening to Abbey Road (I wouldn't want to interrupt that).
It is also interesting to see FreeBSD get mentioned in the mainstream news. It doesn't seem to exist in the eyes of the mainstream press who seem to love Linux like RMS himself. Doesn't anybody realize that DeCSS can be used with FreeBSD as well? The whole non-existant stature of FreeBSD with the general media is much like the way things don't exist in the real world to some people unless they're archived in text form somewhere on the internet to be burried in the bowels of google.com somewhere.
What is important here is that people who buy and watch DVDs are aware that they may soon be in danger of losing some of their rights to watch those movies. Even people who don't have DVD players on their computers must realize this. I would like to have a DVD player in my car for when I spend hours driving on boring endless featureless freeway (read "Michigan").