They aren't cheating by demaning a high price, they're cheating by refusing to let me buy for a price that someone else is willing to sell at, because it would cut into their high-priced market.
It's like you selling cars, then suing the owners for selling them used and cutting into your market.
There are a bunch of lawyerly reasons of why this is legal, but they're crap. Selling person A a cheap product and then suing them for undercutting your high price to person B is just downright dishonest.
I do agree with #3 though - if you cheated me out of either the ability to buy a car from someone else at a price lower than yours, or cheated me when I tried to buy the car, I'd feel perfectly justified in cheating you, either for getting my money back, or simply taking away your ill-gotten gains.
If laws didn't support this kind of cheating, I'd be more concerned about using the courts as a recourse, but from what I understand, the BPI's actions are technically legal... Fucking unfair laws.
Pfah, I do agree that just because you don't want to pay for something you can't ethically take it. However, I do believe that if you cheat I get to do so as well to even the field.
This copyright law is clearly unjustified and unfair. It prevents a product which is being sold worldwide from being bought worldwide. They're screwing the customers out of the right to shop for the best price. It's always been a natural right for me to buy a product when you offer it for sale at a discount and take it to where there is no discount and either use it, or sell it in competition with you. When you take this right away you basically guarantee the ability to price-fix with legal backing because nobody can undercut you.
I feel cheated, and as such, see no problem in cheating back. They want to seperate me from money they didn't earn, but instead demand because of unjust laws, so I'll seperate them from my money.
Call it a reverse-tariff if you wish, but they get just as much say and respect as they're offering me.
I don't believe that it's ethical to tolerate obviously unjust laws. You're just encouraging them to keep bribing politicians for worse laws. If everyone bands together and ignores the unjust laws (and the therefore unjust enforcement of them) they lose power.
It boils down to you losing your right to complain about your treatment when you set out to cheat others. If a con man gets cheated we see it as poetic justice.
Do CNN or MSNBC want you to get information from the internet at large, or from specific corporate portals? Hell, I think MSNBC would rather lose a viewer to CNN than to blogs and independents - at least that person would still be in the "the only trust-worthy news comes from a big company" mindset.
And yes, I do think you can make *some* blanket statements about corporations. They are pretty much, by definition, about making money and they do this usually by advertising. They aren't going to want people to realize they can get content without branded portals and tons of banners.
I've read a lot of *very* good blogs about various news-worthy issues, but I haven't seen (admittedly I don't often look) any of them linked to from CNN, MSNBC, or any other huge portal. I've seen smaller news sites link to small sites on the web, but probably because they don't have lock-in so they aren't afraid of losing it - their enlightened self interest leads them to make me want to come back, rather than milking me once before I can leave.
The difference between the internet and the physical world is how quickly I, an anonymous cog in the wheel of society, can find you, a similarly anonymous person.
In meatspace I often have a hard time finding people who have a product I want and who I can talk to about it. On the net I simple go to google and then check the top few links, where there are forums for *every* obscure product, hobby, or sexual deviancy.
If something in the mainstream news (CNN, etc) doesn't ring true I can highlight a few keywords and right-click to search google for them and display it in a new tab. I instantly have access to alternate viewpoints. Further, more "in-touch" news sites often link to forums and sometiems blogs of relevance. If I went to Baghdad right now and took pictures and talked to people I could have a blog up about it in a day and I'd be getting hits from google searches in less than a week.
In the physical world I'd have to hope to meet someone at work or a party who had travelled to Iraq recently and hopefully had something informative to say.
And yes, I do believe that this scares the big corps. Just like letting people buy products over the internet scares physical retailers. Once you lose your lock-in you have to ocmpete on merit. Used to be that physical stores offer loss-leaders and could count on other sales at the same time. Now thanks to pricing sites I know where to buy and I usually go to a physical store with a specific goal - I know their prices are worse on most items and I avoid them.
News is similar, if I read everything at CNN, CNN controls my eyeballs for both political and advertising reasons. If I start to get some news elsewhere CNN has to start competing on merit, not name, or lose me completely. The net makes lock-in very hard to achieve.
But the people with other view points are idiots...:)
Seriosuly though, part of the reason I don't have more people around who don't agree with me is that few people care about the issues I do enough to have a useful viewpoint. Most of the time when presented with "the other viewpoint" it's some teenage Rand-follower, or a rabid Ditto-Head, or a die-hard Peace-and-Love hippie who wants to ditch the military completely.
I respect different view points, but I don't care to hear someone preach to me.
Microsoft's site is usually (there are exceptions) them preaching about their supperiority, or docs on their software which I don't use much. (Even on Windows at work I don't use their other software much.)
I do however talk to people who have rational questions about the ability of open source to provide for programmers and motivate people into the area, or the possibility of cutting down on military spending without necessarily making ourselves defenseless, etc.
It boils down to me liking to think that I have a moderate view on most things and not wanting to talk with people who aren't at least willing to listen to and present rational arguments, despite perhaps having very strong feelings.
I've frequently heard people talk about how nobody listens outside their narrow viewpoint and while I definately have seen this in action, I usually note that the people who complain about this tend to be fringe weirdos for whom listening means you must agree, or who have such bizarre (or simply irrelevant) views that it's not suprising nobody listen - partly because of disgust, but partly because few people care to discuss the war crimes of the Hopi indians or some other equally obscure topic. On the other hand, people who ask questions and listen to the answers are often innundated with people of dissimilar beliefs wanting to discuss them.
Say, on Slashdot, "I'm an athiest, I don't understand how to reconcile religion and faith with reason, can someone comment?" and you'll have a ton of people, many polite and helpful, willing to jump in.
That's what should happen. If the ISP lets you spam, they deserve to be blocked, because spammers are certainly going to be trying.
There are technological measures that can be used to stop outgoing spam, if your ISP isn't using one of these after having the problem pointed out, what can we assume other than that they don't want to stop it?
You'd expect their peers to drop their packets if they sent out malformed routing updates causing "damage" to routing tables and disrupting the net, why shouldn't peers drop their email when it has been shown to disrupt the net?
If this is common, perhaps the ISP needs to do something about it, hmmm?
How about limit new account to 100 pieces of email, and established accounts to 1000 per day. Well below spam thresholds, but higher than what most people need. Allow people to (with a review process) purchase a higher limit, just as they purchase more web space.
Also, firewall outgoing port 25 connections on trial accounts and permanently firewall off all known open relays. (Finding them is simple - watch outgoing port 25 traffic and check the hosts you see to make sure they aren't open relays.)
It might not be convenient, but if you don't do it, you make me do it with much more of a handicap because I can't simply terminate the user once I find them.
What would the ISP's response to this newbie spammer be? To tolerate the spam till it was reported? To cut off the spammer when discovered, or ask them (meanwhile suffering millions of outgoing emails) to stop? Would they implement policies and protections to stop this in the future, or simply declare that it wasn't their fault?
ISPs that want to prevent spam can implement a few simple policies - no new accounts without a valid CC or cash deposit for at least three months of service. Limits on the ammount of email that can be sent without prior warning (list maintainers can ask for an unlimited but monitored account, everyone else gets a limit of maybe 1000/day - well below mass spam numbers, but high enough for 99.9% of people to not need to ask for a higher limit). And, most importantly, immediate disconnection of anyone who spams, ideally as detected by their system without an external report.
Of course, much spam is sent by other ISP's servers, but simply taking care of your own system is the first step to a spam-free network. Then, if needed, you can do things like check the relays used (watch port-25 connections) and check them for open relays - if you find one, block that IP from inside your network.
And of course, basic network security to avoid spoofed IPs and such.
Standard tools exist to do everything mentioned. You simply need management approval - in other words, the company needs to be committed to stopping spam even if it means disconnecting a few paying customers.
If they aren't committed to this, I can't see why I shouldn't block them...
And you're going to hop up from the movie and rush home in time to administer the life-saving treatment?
What would you have done without a cell-phone? Learned two hours later that your babysitter called 911 and took the kid to emergency? So do the same thing now.
If being disturbed is a problem, don't be disturbed. If you can't do anything to help, don't let people disturb you.
Some issues don't deserve the other viewpoint. How is the point of view of pathetic little thieves relevant to anything? The article can be balanced and fair simply by stating that fax spammers cost their target money, and send their spam illegally, and as such, are justly targeted by many civil and criminal penalties.
The fact that targetting them is easy seems to simply be an optimization made necessary by their flagrant abuse of the laws. If they only rarely stepped outside the bounds, whole industries would not exist to smack them down.
The Windows GUI isn't designed by specialists, it's designed by Microsoft's GUI designers who call themselves specialists. Their credentials? Designing the Windows GUI of course.
They can't be that good if they came up with the abomination that is the WinXP start menu. I've watched so many users struggle with it and ask me to turn it back to the way it was. Their much-hyped user studies seem to be used simply to rubber-stamp their next interface, instead of making any actual improvement.
Then you talk about Usability. As if MS's 'thousands of files in a huge tree, with some scattered around the drive in other directories' and the registry that isn't a registry, but a license key storage and a way to keep from putting settings in a file in the program's directory... That certainly loses a few points for MS.
My point isn't that Linux is better, but that MS is quite bad and you simply don't see it because you're used to it.
But stick a user, someone who never needs to fiddle with the registry or open a shell, into KDE and WinXP configured in a similar way (icons on the desktop and in the main menu, etc) and I doubt either one will have trouble. The Linux user might find the lack of a specific Windows feature to be confusing, but it's not like KDE won't do that, it'll just have a different way.
If KDE isn't ready for the desktop, neither is WinXP. They're very much alike.
Actually, "real" pilots often do spend hours in MS Flightsim or similar program (often marketed as a game) practicing. They recommend it for beginners and many experienced pilots use it to practice seldom-used skills.
Even less realistic sims have uses in teaching real-world skills. I can see using an RTS-type game to train people in quickly thinking and responding to complex situations.
The military sim probably isn't supposed to simulate crawling through the jungle killing people, but how to avoid common mistakes that newbies get killed from. How to use terrain, how to react to ambush, etc. Also, it could teach the use of tools the soldier hadn't used before, like navigation via compass readings, or using a laser spotter to guide incoming air strikes, or squad movement.
No substitute for field work, but a good complement to it probably.
Very. If you want to kill them before they kill you. Pulling a trigger is easy, hitting what you aim at isn't very hard, but doing it without getting killed and while shooting the right people to help the tactical situation - yeah, that'd be hard.
You're hoping to get people who don't care about the difference, not people who can't tell the difference.
It's the reason they put KFCs near McDonalds (and vice versa). Only a moron could confuse the two, yet they hope to get some of their competitor's business. All fair and above-board.
Just as it's fair and legal for a salesman to recommend alternatives when you ask for a trademarked product by name, as long as he doesn't pretend the alternative is what you asked for. (For example, you ask for Kleenex and the salesman says "We've got it, but brand X is cheaper" and that's okay. You ask for Kleenex and he gives you a box of brand X without letting you know it isn't Kleenex and that's not okay.)
This case has two aspects. The first is the right of someone to suggest alternatives, even when the customer uses trademarked terms. The second aspect is that of returning a link that *looks* like the requested site and yet is a competitor's product.
The first aspect is, imho, a flat-out right, covered under free speech issues. The second I agree with Playboy's take on.
This is the reason why you shouldn't try to trademark existing words. You own it, in an area, and those areas are oddly defined. Is there a "Pornography" category, or does Playboy own a print-publication trademark which does not cover whatever you'd class pr0n on the net as?
It's much harder to say that Kleenex doesn't own the trademark just because it's used in a different context.
I'd say the (original) court got it right - Playboy should have known the risks and limitations going in and not trademarked a common word.
However, if you didn't grow up with the originals and aren't biased towards them, you probably don't see much difference between the editions. Yeah the Greedo thing is stupid, but so was the rest of the movie.
And one addition actually helped, the extra "stuff" wandering about the city when Luke and Obi Wan get there. In the original it didn't seem all that wild and crazy, certainly not enough to deserve the way they talk about it, but in the new edition it actually looks exciting and dangerous.
I actually thought the Yoda fight scene was the weakest in the movie. Well, the whole movie was so weak it's hard to pick the weakest, but...
Yoda should have been an old master, using tiny movements and his wits to beat the opponent, instead of acting like a happy-fun-ball.
When I heard he was going to fight I pictured this old kung-foo movie I watched once where the old master defeats like three trained guys, not by being stronger or anything, but by not being where they had expected, moving just enough so they'd miss and then he'd pull them off-balance with a little tug and kick them on their way past. Didn't even break a sweat. That was class. Yoda the flubber-muppet was just sad.
There are still more 2k machines out there, and as XP is pretty much bug-compatible, why wouldn't crackers look for 2k bugs? When XP is dominant people will start looking at it specifically. UPnP was just so blatant it couldn't be ignored.
Inkjet prints actually take prints fairly well, especially when fresh out of the machine.
From what I've heard it takes the work of a pro to lift them from a page of text, not what a beat cop with the fingerprint kit could do, but easy enough with a computer and the right software. You get bits of a print here, bits there, and you overlap them and get the whole thing.
Your prints probably wouldn't show up in the same way on an archival quality print, but the surface would be glossy and you'd get traditional prints.
The only way to avoid leaving prints, especially if it's a crime they'd spare no expense investigating (murder, counterfeiting, etc), is to assume everything leaves prints. But then you're leaving hairs and skin flakes (from the dust around the building). Probably the best to do, if you plan this, is buy a fresh printer and paper, wear gloves while doing the setup, and ditch the printer after.
The treasury guys are supposedly fanatical about their work.
And most of the film will be bought for the same reason people buy LPs, because without any proof, people think it's better. Because while some 8" sheet of film in a Large-format camera with great lenses that gets drum-scanned at $2000/negative looks better than the output of a digital 35mm SLR, they're going to insist that "film" in the generic is all the equivalent of 800Megapixels.
Just like the "audiophiles" these days with records and tube-amps.
Who buys film anymore? I only know a few snapshooters with film cameras (who actually use them) and I don't know any pros who aren't at least 95% digital.
Kodak's film market may be growing at double-digit rates overseas, but it's got to be collapsing much faster than that here.
Maybe Lexmark would look for a partnership, because Lexmark's quality is an infamous as their ink lock-in.
Epson and Canon though own the market in photo-quality inkjet printers now. Enough so that you need a loupe to tell the difference between a color photographic-process print and a pro-quality inkjet print.
They need Kodak like, well, like modern photographers (ie Digital) need Kodak. Not at all.
It explains how a xHz signal needs to be sampled at 2xHz to reproduce it perfectly, but explains how sounds that can't be properly sampled (above xHz) interfere and therefore, need to be filtered before sampling.
As for the accuracy, mathg mathematicians better than myself say that it can... Not that it proves anything.
So no, digital will never perfectly reproduce all analog signals, but then neither will analog gear. The material used to make records (for instance) can only be formed into features so small before the grain of the material interferes (like grainy photos) and before the needle destroys the feature as it reads it.
If you assume that a record's diameter is 11" (?), this gives just under a meter (work with me) per second of material to hold features which describe the media.
If you assume that the detail in the record is a perfect minature of the 22kHz sine wave we'll use, then the peaks are 1/22,000th of a meter apart, or 1/22nd millimeter apart. This feature needs to be smooth enough the needle can glide over it, and strong enough it won't be sheared off by the diamond needle.
And that's only CD quality, it gets worse if you assume that because "analog is perfect" that it can record 50kHz sounds.
Anyways, it's somewhat accademic because you get much more noise in reproduction than even the worst (mostly) storage format/media introduces.
Slashdot Mirror
Point 2 is where you misread.
They aren't cheating by demaning a high price, they're cheating by refusing to let me buy for a price that someone else is willing to sell at, because it would cut into their high-priced market.
It's like you selling cars, then suing the owners for selling them used and cutting into your market.
There are a bunch of lawyerly reasons of why this is legal, but they're crap. Selling person A a cheap product and then suing them for undercutting your high price to person B is just downright dishonest.
I do agree with #3 though - if you cheated me out of either the ability to buy a car from someone else at a price lower than yours, or cheated me when I tried to buy the car, I'd feel perfectly justified in cheating you, either for getting my money back, or simply taking away your ill-gotten gains.
If laws didn't support this kind of cheating, I'd be more concerned about using the courts as a recourse, but from what I understand, the BPI's actions are technically legal... Fucking unfair laws.
Pfah, I do agree that just because you don't want to pay for something you can't ethically take it. However, I do believe that if you cheat I get to do so as well to even the field.
This copyright law is clearly unjustified and unfair. It prevents a product which is being sold worldwide from being bought worldwide. They're screwing the customers out of the right to shop for the best price. It's always been a natural right for me to buy a product when you offer it for sale at a discount and take it to where there is no discount and either use it, or sell it in competition with you. When you take this right away you basically guarantee the ability to price-fix with legal backing because nobody can undercut you.
I feel cheated, and as such, see no problem in cheating back. They want to seperate me from money they didn't earn, but instead demand because of unjust laws, so I'll seperate them from my money.
Call it a reverse-tariff if you wish, but they get just as much say and respect as they're offering me.
I don't believe that it's ethical to tolerate obviously unjust laws. You're just encouraging them to keep bribing politicians for worse laws. If everyone bands together and ignores the unjust laws (and the therefore unjust enforcement of them) they lose power.
It boils down to you losing your right to complain about your treatment when you set out to cheat others. If a con man gets cheated we see it as poetic justice.
Do CNN or MSNBC want you to get information from the internet at large, or from specific corporate portals? Hell, I think MSNBC would rather lose a viewer to CNN than to blogs and independents - at least that person would still be in the "the only trust-worthy news comes from a big company" mindset.
And yes, I do think you can make *some* blanket statements about corporations. They are pretty much, by definition, about making money and they do this usually by advertising. They aren't going to want people to realize they can get content without branded portals and tons of banners.
I've read a lot of *very* good blogs about various news-worthy issues, but I haven't seen (admittedly I don't often look) any of them linked to from CNN, MSNBC, or any other huge portal. I've seen smaller news sites link to small sites on the web, but probably because they don't have lock-in so they aren't afraid of losing it - their enlightened self interest leads them to make me want to come back, rather than milking me once before I can leave.
The difference between the internet and the physical world is how quickly I, an anonymous cog in the wheel of society, can find you, a similarly anonymous person.
In meatspace I often have a hard time finding people who have a product I want and who I can talk to about it. On the net I simple go to google and then check the top few links, where there are forums for *every* obscure product, hobby, or sexual deviancy.
If something in the mainstream news (CNN, etc) doesn't ring true I can highlight a few keywords and right-click to search google for them and display it in a new tab. I instantly have access to alternate viewpoints. Further, more "in-touch" news sites often link to forums and sometiems blogs of relevance. If I went to Baghdad right now and took pictures and talked to people I could have a blog up about it in a day and I'd be getting hits from google searches in less than a week.
In the physical world I'd have to hope to meet someone at work or a party who had travelled to Iraq recently and hopefully had something informative to say.
And yes, I do believe that this scares the big corps. Just like letting people buy products over the internet scares physical retailers. Once you lose your lock-in you have to ocmpete on merit. Used to be that physical stores offer loss-leaders and could count on other sales at the same time. Now thanks to pricing sites I know where to buy and I usually go to a physical store with a specific goal - I know their prices are worse on most items and I avoid them.
News is similar, if I read everything at CNN, CNN controls my eyeballs for both political and advertising reasons. If I start to get some news elsewhere CNN has to start competing on merit, not name, or lose me completely. The net makes lock-in very hard to achieve.
But the people with other view points are idiots... :)
Seriosuly though, part of the reason I don't have more people around who don't agree with me is that few people care about the issues I do enough to have a useful viewpoint. Most of the time when presented with "the other viewpoint" it's some teenage Rand-follower, or a rabid Ditto-Head, or a die-hard Peace-and-Love hippie who wants to ditch the military completely.
I respect different view points, but I don't care to hear someone preach to me.
Microsoft's site is usually (there are exceptions) them preaching about their supperiority, or docs on their software which I don't use much. (Even on Windows at work I don't use their other software much.)
I do however talk to people who have rational questions about the ability of open source to provide for programmers and motivate people into the area, or the possibility of cutting down on military spending without necessarily making ourselves defenseless, etc.
It boils down to me liking to think that I have a moderate view on most things and not wanting to talk with people who aren't at least willing to listen to and present rational arguments, despite perhaps having very strong feelings.
I've frequently heard people talk about how nobody listens outside their narrow viewpoint and while I definately have seen this in action, I usually note that the people who complain about this tend to be fringe weirdos for whom listening means you must agree, or who have such bizarre (or simply irrelevant) views that it's not suprising nobody listen - partly because of disgust, but partly because few people care to discuss the war crimes of the Hopi indians or some other equally obscure topic. On the other hand, people who ask questions and listen to the answers are often innundated with people of dissimilar beliefs wanting to discuss them.
Say, on Slashdot, "I'm an athiest, I don't understand how to reconcile religion and faith with reason, can someone comment?" and you'll have a ton of people, many polite and helpful, willing to jump in.
That's what should happen. If the ISP lets you spam, they deserve to be blocked, because spammers are certainly going to be trying.
There are technological measures that can be used to stop outgoing spam, if your ISP isn't using one of these after having the problem pointed out, what can we assume other than that they don't want to stop it?
You'd expect their peers to drop their packets if they sent out malformed routing updates causing "damage" to routing tables and disrupting the net, why shouldn't peers drop their email when it has been shown to disrupt the net?
If this is common, perhaps the ISP needs to do something about it, hmmm?
How about limit new account to 100 pieces of email, and established accounts to 1000 per day. Well below spam thresholds, but higher than what most people need. Allow people to (with a review process) purchase a higher limit, just as they purchase more web space.
Also, firewall outgoing port 25 connections on trial accounts and permanently firewall off all known open relays. (Finding them is simple - watch outgoing port 25 traffic and check the hosts you see to make sure they aren't open relays.)
It might not be convenient, but if you don't do it, you make me do it with much more of a handicap because I can't simply terminate the user once I find them.
Correct, but he usually wrote his name with a period after the S. IMHO, probably to avoid being corrected all the time for leaving it out.
Check Snopes for more details.
What would the ISP's response to this newbie spammer be? To tolerate the spam till it was reported? To cut off the spammer when discovered, or ask them (meanwhile suffering millions of outgoing emails) to stop? Would they implement policies and protections to stop this in the future, or simply declare that it wasn't their fault?
ISPs that want to prevent spam can implement a few simple policies - no new accounts without a valid CC or cash deposit for at least three months of service. Limits on the ammount of email that can be sent without prior warning (list maintainers can ask for an unlimited but monitored account, everyone else gets a limit of maybe 1000/day - well below mass spam numbers, but high enough for 99.9% of people to not need to ask for a higher limit). And, most importantly, immediate disconnection of anyone who spams, ideally as detected by their system without an external report.
Of course, much spam is sent by other ISP's servers, but simply taking care of your own system is the first step to a spam-free network. Then, if needed, you can do things like check the relays used (watch port-25 connections) and check them for open relays - if you find one, block that IP from inside your network.
And of course, basic network security to avoid spoofed IPs and such.
Standard tools exist to do everything mentioned. You simply need management approval - in other words, the company needs to be committed to stopping spam even if it means disconnecting a few paying customers.
If they aren't committed to this, I can't see why I shouldn't block them...
And you're going to hop up from the movie and rush home in time to administer the life-saving treatment?
What would you have done without a cell-phone? Learned two hours later that your babysitter called 911 and took the kid to emergency? So do the same thing now.
If being disturbed is a problem, don't be disturbed. If you can't do anything to help, don't let people disturb you.
Some issues don't deserve the other viewpoint. How is the point of view of pathetic little thieves relevant to anything? The article can be balanced and fair simply by stating that fax spammers cost their target money, and send their spam illegally, and as such, are justly targeted by many civil and criminal penalties.
The fact that targetting them is easy seems to simply be an optimization made necessary by their flagrant abuse of the laws. If they only rarely stepped outside the bounds, whole industries would not exist to smack them down.
The Windows GUI isn't designed by specialists, it's designed by Microsoft's GUI designers who call themselves specialists. Their credentials? Designing the Windows GUI of course.
They can't be that good if they came up with the abomination that is the WinXP start menu. I've watched so many users struggle with it and ask me to turn it back to the way it was. Their much-hyped user studies seem to be used simply to rubber-stamp their next interface, instead of making any actual improvement.
Then you talk about Usability. As if MS's 'thousands of files in a huge tree, with some scattered around the drive in other directories' and the registry that isn't a registry, but a license key storage and a way to keep from putting settings in a file in the program's directory... That certainly loses a few points for MS.
My point isn't that Linux is better, but that MS is quite bad and you simply don't see it because you're used to it.
But stick a user, someone who never needs to fiddle with the registry or open a shell, into KDE and WinXP configured in a similar way (icons on the desktop and in the main menu, etc) and I doubt either one will have trouble. The Linux user might find the lack of a specific Windows feature to be confusing, but it's not like KDE won't do that, it'll just have a different way.
If KDE isn't ready for the desktop, neither is WinXP. They're very much alike.
Actually, "real" pilots often do spend hours in MS Flightsim or similar program (often marketed as a game) practicing. They recommend it for beginners and many experienced pilots use it to practice seldom-used skills.
Even less realistic sims have uses in teaching real-world skills. I can see using an RTS-type game to train people in quickly thinking and responding to complex situations.
The military sim probably isn't supposed to simulate crawling through the jungle killing people, but how to avoid common mistakes that newbies get killed from. How to use terrain, how to react to ambush, etc. Also, it could teach the use of tools the soldier hadn't used before, like navigation via compass readings, or using a laser spotter to guide incoming air strikes, or squad movement.
No substitute for field work, but a good complement to it probably.
Very. If you want to kill them before they kill you. Pulling a trigger is easy, hitting what you aim at isn't very hard, but doing it without getting killed and while shooting the right people to help the tactical situation - yeah, that'd be hard.
Sure. Microsoft should have the right to have a link that comes up on google (if they pay for it) that says "Alternatives to Linux". Why the hell not?
What they shouldn't be able to do is pretend to "be" Linux. Setting up fake sites and such.
You're hoping to get people who don't care about the difference, not people who can't tell the difference.
It's the reason they put KFCs near McDonalds (and vice versa). Only a moron could confuse the two, yet they hope to get some of their competitor's business. All fair and above-board.
Just as it's fair and legal for a salesman to recommend alternatives when you ask for a trademarked product by name, as long as he doesn't pretend the alternative is what you asked for. (For example, you ask for Kleenex and the salesman says "We've got it, but brand X is cheaper" and that's okay. You ask for Kleenex and he gives you a box of brand X without letting you know it isn't Kleenex and that's not okay.)
This case has two aspects. The first is the right of someone to suggest alternatives, even when the customer uses trademarked terms. The second aspect is that of returning a link that *looks* like the requested site and yet is a competitor's product.
The first aspect is, imho, a flat-out right, covered under free speech issues. The second I agree with Playboy's take on.
This is the reason why you shouldn't try to trademark existing words. You own it, in an area, and those areas are oddly defined. Is there a "Pornography" category, or does Playboy own a print-publication trademark which does not cover whatever you'd class pr0n on the net as?
It's much harder to say that Kleenex doesn't own the trademark just because it's used in a different context.
I'd say the (original) court got it right - Playboy should have known the risks and limitations going in and not trademarked a common word.
However, if you didn't grow up with the originals and aren't biased towards them, you probably don't see much difference between the editions. Yeah the Greedo thing is stupid, but so was the rest of the movie.
And one addition actually helped, the extra "stuff" wandering about the city when Luke and Obi Wan get there. In the original it didn't seem all that wild and crazy, certainly not enough to deserve the way they talk about it, but in the new edition it actually looks exciting and dangerous.
I actually thought the Yoda fight scene was the weakest in the movie. Well, the whole movie was so weak it's hard to pick the weakest, but...
Yoda should have been an old master, using tiny movements and his wits to beat the opponent, instead of acting like a happy-fun-ball.
When I heard he was going to fight I pictured this old kung-foo movie I watched once where the old master defeats like three trained guys, not by being stronger or anything, but by not being where they had expected, moving just enough so they'd miss and then he'd pull them off-balance with a little tug and kick them on their way past. Didn't even break a sweat. That was class. Yoda the flubber-muppet was just sad.
There are still more 2k machines out there, and as XP is pretty much bug-compatible, why wouldn't crackers look for 2k bugs? When XP is dominant people will start looking at it specifically. UPnP was just so blatant it couldn't be ignored.
Inkjet prints actually take prints fairly well, especially when fresh out of the machine.
From what I've heard it takes the work of a pro to lift them from a page of text, not what a beat cop with the fingerprint kit could do, but easy enough with a computer and the right software. You get bits of a print here, bits there, and you overlap them and get the whole thing.
Your prints probably wouldn't show up in the same way on an archival quality print, but the surface would be glossy and you'd get traditional prints.
The only way to avoid leaving prints, especially if it's a crime they'd spare no expense investigating (murder, counterfeiting, etc), is to assume everything leaves prints. But then you're leaving hairs and skin flakes (from the dust around the building). Probably the best to do, if you plan this, is buy a fresh printer and paper, wear gloves while doing the setup, and ditch the printer after.
The treasury guys are supposedly fanatical about their work.
And most of the film will be bought for the same reason people buy LPs, because without any proof, people think it's better. Because while some 8" sheet of film in a Large-format camera with great lenses that gets drum-scanned at $2000/negative looks better than the output of a digital 35mm SLR, they're going to insist that "film" in the generic is all the equivalent of 800Megapixels.
Just like the "audiophiles" these days with records and tube-amps.
Who buys film anymore? I only know a few snapshooters with film cameras (who actually use them) and I don't know any pros who aren't at least 95% digital.
Kodak's film market may be growing at double-digit rates overseas, but it's got to be collapsing much faster than that here.
Maybe Lexmark would look for a partnership, because Lexmark's quality is an infamous as their ink lock-in.
Epson and Canon though own the market in photo-quality inkjet printers now. Enough so that you need a loupe to tell the difference between a color photographic-process print and a pro-quality inkjet print.
They need Kodak like, well, like modern photographers (ie Digital) need Kodak. Not at all.
Check out the Nyquist Sampling Frequency.
It explains how a xHz signal needs to be sampled at 2xHz to reproduce it perfectly, but explains how sounds that can't be properly sampled (above xHz) interfere and therefore, need to be filtered before sampling.
As for the accuracy, mathg mathematicians better than myself say that it can... Not that it proves anything.
So no, digital will never perfectly reproduce all analog signals, but then neither will analog gear. The material used to make records (for instance) can only be formed into features so small before the grain of the material interferes (like grainy photos) and before the needle destroys the feature as it reads it.
If you assume that a record's diameter is 11" (?), this gives just under a meter (work with me) per second of material to hold features which describe the media.
If you assume that the detail in the record is a perfect minature of the 22kHz sine wave we'll use, then the peaks are 1/22,000th of a meter apart, or 1/22nd millimeter apart. This feature needs to be smooth enough the needle can glide over it, and strong enough it won't be sheared off by the diamond needle.
And that's only CD quality, it gets worse if you assume that because "analog is perfect" that it can record 50kHz sounds.
Anyways, it's somewhat accademic because you get much more noise in reproduction than even the worst (mostly) storage format/media introduces.