Re:Houston, we have a busted/confirmed myth
on
Ask The Mythbusters
·
· Score: 1
I like the show, but I think the Mythbusters would be more likely to bust the "myth" that we landed on the moon. And they'd base this conclusion on the fact that their rocket wasn't able to do it; therefore, it was impossible.
They're very good at working with "what if" myths ("what if I'm in a falling elevator and jump up at the last second to try to save my self?") but not very good at "did X happen" myths. Of course, it is a lot harder to disprove something didn't happen then to say it's not very likely too happen.
That's completely wrong. If an exception is thrown, any objects on the stack are correctly deallocated, including calling each object's desctructor. This is one of the big benefits of allocating on the stack.
That's what the STL is for. Need to allocate a bunch of SomeObjects? Then make a vector. Sure, this is really just hiding the new/delete, but it does more than that. It encapsulates the allocation behind an object. This means that you only have to ensure correct allocation/deallocation in one place (and this is done by your compiler maker, who hopefully knows a thing or two about good code). It also makes the code exception safe (despite what the AC says below). If an exception is thrown after the allocation, the vector's destructor will deallocate all the memory in its destructor.
Sure, there will still be reasons for new/delete (for example, objects shared among other objects), but it doesn't have to be on every object creation. If used effectively, memory practically manages itself in C++.
C++ already has a garbage collector. Just allocate your objects on the stack instead of the heap:
void foo() {
SomeObject obj;
// other code
// poof -- obj is deallocated automatically, even if an exception is thrown }
I work on a project that has tens of thousands of C++ classes, and very few "new" and "delete" operations (more "new" than "delete" because we have a class that manages reference counting like a heap garbage collector would do).
People who think they always need to "new" objects in C++ have spent way too much time using Java.
Here's another hint -- pass objects to functions as const references:
void foo(const SomeObject& obj) { // code }
This way, a copied object isn't allocated for the passing (no memory at all is in fact allocated). The biggest drawback is you can only call "const" methods on the object, but this is outweighed by not using pointers. Not that I don't like pointers, they just increase the complexity and should be used prudently. And as my.sig says, be sure to free those mallocs!
Think about it from the other direction though. Open source is a success. In fact, it's an amazing success as you pointed out. And it's done all this without any real dependence on the government, other than basic copyright (and barely even that for BSD stuff). Just like with the *AA, it's really all about control. While big corporations may have corrupted some politicians, the government still holds most of the cards and the corporation is really dependent on the government, as well as at it's mercy. The corporations of the world generally have to follow the laws of the land, or risk the consequences.
But along comes a bunch of open source coders who do whatever they want. Not only do they break the status quo, they often break the law. Sure someone in the government noticed that they passed a law (DMCA) that prevented people from decrypting DVDs and someone came along and broke that law, and worse, told everyone how to do it*. And now everyone (using open source systems) uses libdvdcss or some variant to decrypt DVDs. Never mind the fact that the law was bad, there are lots of people actively breaking it without much consequence. A similar argument could be applied to things like MP3 encoding/decoding, or the GIF patents (when they applied).
Now, I may be attributing way too much intelligence to people in the government. But I wouldn't be too surprised if there were people who thought along these lines. While high level government types may not be too bright generally, I'm sure there are (a) some bright ones, and (b) even the not-so-bright ones instinctively know when someone is out of their control and they don't like that. They didn't get into government for the big bucks or the hookers, they're there for the control.
Making open source dependent on government money would reign in those wild coders somewhat. It wouldn't be immediate, but once people get dependent on someone else's money, it's much easier to control them. So I completely agree with your final comment: Whenever you hear someone say "I'm from the government and I'm here to help," run the other way!
* I know that it really was the telling other people how to DeCSS that broke the DMCA, and really DVD Jon was out of the US jurisdiction, but there are still people distributing information about CSS in the US, probably in violation of that (bad) law.
if [ ! -f "$TMPFILE" ]; then
echo "$TMPFILE not created by mplayer!"
exit 1 fi
# uncomment the next line and comment out the oggenc line # to encode to mp3 instead #lame -a -m s --abr 128 --nohist $TMPFILE $OGG oggenc -b 64 $TMPFILE -o $OGG [ $? -ne 0 ] && exit $?
if [ ! -f "$OGG" ]; then
echo "$OGG not created by oggenc!"
exit 1 fi
rm $TMPFILE
In the case of this stream, the appropriate command is
(be sure to remove the/. introduced space in the rtsp URL)
Of course, it would be nice if NPR stations at least put up stuff in a more accessible format. After all, they are brought to us "by listeners like you" (and yes, I do contribute to my local station).
I don't know about military reasons, but I do know that sometimes map makers will deliberately do what you say (leave off a road, or put in a fictitious road) as a form of copyright protection watermarking. If a competitor's map has the same error, or even better, all the same errors, there's a pretty good chance they just copied the map.
^D -- end of file, logs out of most shells, and exits programs looking for user input ^S -- stop terminal output (useful if you're watching make output and see something scroll by too quickly) ^Q -- resume terminal output. Before learning this one, everything I accidently hit ^S (save reflex), I had to kill the terminal ^Z -- suspend. Stops a foreground process and gives you your command line back. Useful for GUI apps you started without '&'. Also useful with the 'bg' command. ^R -- (bash specific?) reverse search through the history for the string typed next. Very useful if you know you typed a specific command a while ago, but don't want to hit the up arrow 20 times (or grep through 'history' output)
and of course, there's always ^C, but most people know that one.
"Cogent document"? More like a giant troll. And it's not helped by the fact that the miniscule font size.
His first point about intellectual property is completely orthogonal to Open Source, since a programmer could equally create a proprietary product with the same problems. But even with that, I don't think (in my non-lawyerish way) this is a not a real problem. Any problems that do come up will be decided in a case by case basis, and we'll probably eventually have some sort of case history that allows work on outside projects not related to your employment work. Much like my current agreement with my employer.
His point about conceptual integrity has some merit, but again is orthogonal to Open Source. FOSS and proprietary software both need good design. And both have pressures against good design -- time pressures, customer needs, developers coming and leaving. Frankly, I think FOSS is better off here, since most of the design discussions are public.
Professionalism is important in some areas, and proprietary has a leg up on FOSS here, since proprietary SW can usually afford some PR or MBA person to buffer the SW people from the customer. And since FOSS programmers are usually volunteers, they are understadibly less interested in kissing butts. I guess being a SW person myself, I define professional SW as SW that works, not SW that has a nice glossy brochure. And I often love the little jokes I find in FOSS software. Some people just take life too seriously.
Finally, innovation, while important, isn't nearly as important as a good, solid system. I don't care if I'm using the system that had feature X first, as long as it has a good implementation of feature X. Linux may essentially be a copy of older UNIXes, but it does so well. My car doesn't have a heck of a lot of innovation in it -- it uses well proven technology. I don't mind my OS doing the same.
Ugh, I can't believe I wasted so much time replying to this. I should have better things to do on a Sunday afternoon:)
It looks like CNN has changed their story to "Inventor denies dead cat fuel story". Wonder if there's a cached copy of the old version somewhere. I think more than anything else, this ability to silently change a published story is dangerous, and probably leads to weak fact checking. Since there's no real negative reprocussions to publishing false stories (just change it later and pretend nothing happened) and big bonuses for being first with true stories, media outlets (especially online ones) have little reason to fact check anymore. A responsible organization would leave the original intact with a warning link pointing to the retraction or correction. But I don't think I'd count CNN (or any of the others for that matter) as a responsible organization.
Guess I'm stuck getting my news from the Daily Show and Slashdot:)
If you are going to use a debit card, create a separate account exclusively for the purpose. Limit the funding in the account to the amount you feel comfortable being without for an arbitrary period of time.
Actually, that's not a good idea. My roommate in college used his debit card to purchase something online. The merchant accidentally charged more than should have been charged (I think it was because of a coupon or something). In any case, my roommate's account was overdrawn for several days, acuring overdraft charges as well. IIRC, the merchant paid all the bank charges, but your bank won't reject a charge just because your debit account has no money in it. In fact, because of the fees, they love it when people do it.
Otherwise I agree -- use credit cards whenever possible and pay off the balance every month. Credit cards provide a nice buffer between merchants (especially the unscrupulous kind) and my money. I'd never carry my bank's debit card if it wasn't also my ATM card.
Why should he be entitled to keep earning from something he did so long ago? I'm not entitled to earn money for the work I did yesterday, let alone work I did years ago, I have to work again today to get more money. Why are artists so different?
Now, copyright is a good thing to encourage artists to create. But it should not be tied to the life of the artist, for, among other things, the reason you mentioned. Even life+10 discriminates against older artists. Why shouldn't copyright just last 20 years, like patents? As long as artists are still making money from their older creations, what motivation do they have to make new stuff?
It sickens me that no media made today will enter the public domain in my lifetime, or probably even in my children's lifetimes. Copyright law today is way out of balance. It's no wonder most people don't even know what public domain is.
And to keep this post more or less on topic, I really don't care what happens to ITMS. They won't sell to me anyway because I don't run a proprietary OS. I guess that's a good thing, though -- it keeps me from spending money there:)
Mac version? How about a Linux version? It's not like they don't base their entire business on Linux, you'd think they'd find the time to port one or two of their applications to Linux so the rest of us can use them.
Or maybe GDS just doesn't hold a candle to slocate(1)?:)
It's great to see a spammer taken down. But what about this Axciom company? According to the article, Axciom "serves large corporations by collecting and managing information for marketing purposes". Maybe they don't spam directly, but it sure sounds like they at least help spammers. And probably not just email spammers, but telephone and snail mail, as well. And apparently they're storing "personal customer records, including names, postal and e-mail addresses, bank and credit card numbers." [ephasis mine] Why does one company have so much information on so many people? And why when they are negligent with that data, do they not face any consequences?
The article seemed to imply that the snipermail spammers initially got access to more records than they were supposed to have because of something Axciom did (this isn't clear) before they started breaking passwords to get even more data. Where are the 600+ year prison terms for the Axciom management?
I think there's a lot of truth in that. For example, where would Linux be today without MS? True, a lot of the core Linux developers (not just kernel, but X, KDE/Gnome, etc.) do what they do because they want to. But I'm sure there's a good contingent of developers and users who help Linux because they don't like MS.
If Windows was a decent system for computing, I don't think Linux would be where it is today. It would probably be a lot more like the BSDs. Good, working systems, but without the push that Linux has.
Another example is Mozilla/FireFox. Without IE sucking as much as it does (side note: interesting how IE went from the best of breed browser to the suckiest browser without actually changing), would Mozilla/FireFox be as far along as it is today? Would it have 10-20% and increasing share of users?
True, MS has prevented a lot of people from accessing good technology over the years. But the fight against MS has helped to produce a lot of good technology as well.
I recently stumbled upon sshdfilter. It analyzes sshd output in real time by running sshd in with the -e option and adds attempts to login with invalid usernames to an iptables chain to drop all packets from that host. I've only been running it for a week or so, but it seems to be working well.
Seems like a similar idea to DenyHosts, just a different implementation.
Also, the local paper (I live in Brevard county) mentioned that all the bus tickets are already sold for tomorrow.
But like most posters said, just about anywhere will give you a good view. Especially any of the beaches south of KSC (Cocoa Beach through Melbourne Beach) will be good. That's where I usually watch launches from if I have the chance (i.e., they're not during work hours). Personally, since the launch is during the day, I'm just going to watch it from the office.
I completely agree with your well thought out post. However, I'd like to point out that most intellectual property in the hands of the consumer is, in fact, worthless. I say it's worthless because that consumer can't sell it, hence it's value could be argued to be $0. Historically, this hasn't been the case. Consumers have always been able to resell their books, records, tapes, CDs, etc. But most software is not resalable. Music bought through ITMS cannot be resold (so I've heard, Apple still refuses to let me buy from them, but that's a different rant). If the item you're buying cannot be resold for any price, then it could be considered worthless (though it usually does have some other value to the buyer, otherwise why buy it).
Also, in some cases, the publisher refuses to sell licenses for the item (such as abondonware). If the publisher won't sell the item, there's no active market for that item, and again, it could be argued that the value of the item is $0.
Now, I don't particularaly like these arguments since that property does have value, but the publishers are making it seem to consumers that it does not. Or at least they're leaving the door open for the arguments to be made. And people are great at using arguments like these when they want to rationalize behavior they think (or know) is wrong.
Personally, I think that dropping the copyright length to something more reasonable (on the order or 10-20 years) would really help curtain infringement. People who want the item now will pay for it. People who can wait will wait. People who can't afford the latest and greatest can now use something older rather than priate the lastest stuff.
But I'm way to cynical to believe this will ever happen:(
While w3schools' browser stats may not be representative of the Internet using population as a whole, the fact that FireFox's share has been steadily increasing probably indicates that FireFox's share has probably been increasing in the general population. Is it over 25% like at w3schools? I'd be (happily) surprised if it is, but I doubt it. Like you said, that is a technical site without as broad an appeal.
Though on my own (lousy, low traffic) site, I get close to a 50% FF and IE split (and I do filter out my own hits), so maybe the general population has a higher FF usage rate than the technical population? Nah, that'd be giving the average online idiot way too much credit:)
I wish more big sites published these kind of stats, but doing so would probably be more trouble than they're worth. Or maybe in some cases, they're worth too much to give away for free.
IIRC, Slashdot stopped publishing browser stats because they showed a lot of readers were browsing a Linux site using IE on Windows. That's probably still true today.
Yes, I think they do. There are a number of benefits, both in direct savings (less bandwidth used, less of their own customers attacked, better Internet image) and in good relations (assuming it's handled correctly). Most people don't know that much about their computers. And if their ISP called up and helped them clean a virus/worm/trojan/other malware off their PC and made it run better, that customer is probably going to have a more positive view of the ISP. Of course, if the ISP blocks them and doesn't help them get back online, they'll probably have a negative view of the incident.
The VCR had significant limitations. It was difficult to program...
That's an implementation detail. Besides, most people either figured it out, or just pressed "record" when they wanted to tape something.... impossible to edit
Well, really hard anyway. I'll grant that. Though I do remember editing out the commercials (by pausing the recording) on many movies taped off TV as a child, so minor editing is possible.
Tapes did not stand up well to repeated viewings.
Maybe, but my family has many movies we "stole" off TV that have been watched many times and they're still viewable. Maybe not perfect, but still viewable.
Broadcast films were censored, cut to fit pre-defined time slots, and were otherwise abused.
And digital TV with a broadcast flag will be different how?
Slashdot Mirror
I like the show, but I think the Mythbusters would be more likely to bust the "myth" that we landed on the moon. And they'd base this conclusion on the fact that their rocket wasn't able to do it; therefore, it was impossible.
They're very good at working with "what if" myths ("what if I'm in a falling elevator and jump up at the last second to try to save my self?") but not very good at "did X happen" myths. Of course, it is a lot harder to disprove something didn't happen then to say it's not very likely too happen.
That's completely wrong. If an exception is thrown, any objects on the stack are correctly deallocated, including calling each object's desctructor. This is one of the big benefits of allocating on the stack.
That's what the STL is for. Need to allocate a bunch of SomeObjects? Then make a vector. Sure, this is really just hiding the new/delete, but it does more than that. It encapsulates the allocation behind an object. This means that you only have to ensure correct allocation/deallocation in one place (and this is done by your compiler maker, who hopefully knows a thing or two about good code). It also makes the code exception safe (despite what the AC says below). If an exception is thrown after the allocation, the vector's destructor will deallocate all the memory in its destructor.
Sure, there will still be reasons for new/delete (for example, objects shared among other objects), but it doesn't have to be on every object creation. If used effectively, memory practically manages itself in C++.
People who think they always need to "new" objects in C++ have spent way too much time using Java.
Here's another hint -- pass objects to functions as const references:This way, a copied object isn't allocated for the passing (no memory at all is in fact allocated). The biggest drawback is you can only call "const" methods on the object, but this is outweighed by not using pointers. Not that I don't like pointers, they just increase the complexity and should be used prudently. And as my
Think about it from the other direction though. Open source is a success. In fact, it's an amazing success as you pointed out. And it's done all this without any real dependence on the government, other than basic copyright (and barely even that for BSD stuff). Just like with the *AA, it's really all about control. While big corporations may have corrupted some politicians, the government still holds most of the cards and the corporation is really dependent on the government, as well as at it's mercy. The corporations of the world generally have to follow the laws of the land, or risk the consequences.
But along comes a bunch of open source coders who do whatever they want. Not only do they break the status quo, they often break the law. Sure someone in the government noticed that they passed a law (DMCA) that prevented people from decrypting DVDs and someone came along and broke that law, and worse, told everyone how to do it*. And now everyone (using open source systems) uses libdvdcss or some variant to decrypt DVDs. Never mind the fact that the law was bad, there are lots of people actively breaking it without much consequence. A similar argument could be applied to things like MP3 encoding/decoding, or the GIF patents (when they applied).
Now, I may be attributing way too much intelligence to people in the government. But I wouldn't be too surprised if there were people who thought along these lines. While high level government types may not be too bright generally, I'm sure there are (a) some bright ones, and (b) even the not-so-bright ones instinctively know when someone is out of their control and they don't like that. They didn't get into government for the big bucks or the hookers, they're there for the control.
Making open source dependent on government money would reign in those wild coders somewhat. It wouldn't be immediate, but once people get dependent on someone else's money, it's much easier to control them. So I completely agree with your final comment: Whenever you hear someone say "I'm from the government and I'm here to help," run the other way!
* I know that it really was the telling other people how to DeCSS that broke the DMCA, and really DVD Jon was out of the US jurisdiction, but there are still people distributing information about CSS in the US, probably in violation of that (bad) law.
Of course, it would be nice if NPR stations at least put up stuff in a more accessible format. After all, they are brought to us "by listeners like you" (and yes, I do contribute to my local station).
I'm trying to figure out how they got 5 hydrogens to bond to 1 nitrogen :)
I don't know about military reasons, but I do know that sometimes map makers will deliberately do what you say (leave off a road, or put in a fictitious road) as a form of copyright protection watermarking. If a competitor's map has the same error, or even better, all the same errors, there's a pretty good chance they just copied the map.
If only such a thing existed; something with multiple client and server implementations.
If I'm paying to watch this movie in the movie theater, why should they stuff advertisements in there as well?
Other useful control combinations:
^D -- end of file, logs out of most shells, and exits programs looking for user input
^S -- stop terminal output (useful if you're watching make output and see something scroll by too quickly)
^Q -- resume terminal output. Before learning this one, everything I accidently hit ^S (save reflex), I had to kill the terminal
^Z -- suspend. Stops a foreground process and gives you your command line back. Useful for GUI apps you started without '&'. Also useful with the 'bg' command.
^R -- (bash specific?) reverse search through the history for the string typed next. Very useful if you know you typed a specific command a while ago, but don't want to hit the up arrow 20 times (or grep through 'history' output)
and of course, there's always ^C, but most people know that one.
"Cogent document"? More like a giant troll. And it's not helped by the fact that the miniscule font size.
:)
His first point about intellectual property is completely orthogonal to Open Source, since a programmer could equally create a proprietary product with the same problems. But even with that, I don't think (in my non-lawyerish way) this is a not a real problem. Any problems that do come up will be decided in a case by case basis, and we'll probably eventually have some sort of case history that allows work on outside projects not related to your employment work. Much like my current agreement with my employer.
His point about conceptual integrity has some merit, but again is orthogonal to Open Source. FOSS and proprietary software both need good design. And both have pressures against good design -- time pressures, customer needs, developers coming and leaving. Frankly, I think FOSS is better off here, since most of the design discussions are public.
Professionalism is important in some areas, and proprietary has a leg up on FOSS here, since proprietary SW can usually afford some PR or MBA person to buffer the SW people from the customer. And since FOSS programmers are usually volunteers, they are understadibly less interested in kissing butts. I guess being a SW person myself, I define professional SW as SW that works, not SW that has a nice glossy brochure. And I often love the little jokes I find in FOSS software. Some people just take life too seriously.
Finally, innovation, while important, isn't nearly as important as a good, solid system. I don't care if I'm using the system that had feature X first, as long as it has a good implementation of feature X. Linux may essentially be a copy of older UNIXes, but it does so well. My car doesn't have a heck of a lot of innovation in it -- it uses well proven technology. I don't mind my OS doing the same.
Ugh, I can't believe I wasted so much time replying to this. I should have better things to do on a Sunday afternoon
It looks like CNN has changed their story to "Inventor denies dead cat fuel story". Wonder if there's a cached copy of the old version somewhere. I think more than anything else, this ability to silently change a published story is dangerous, and probably leads to weak fact checking. Since there's no real negative reprocussions to publishing false stories (just change it later and pretend nothing happened) and big bonuses for being first with true stories, media outlets (especially online ones) have little reason to fact check anymore. A responsible organization would leave the original intact with a warning link pointing to the retraction or correction. But I don't think I'd count CNN (or any of the others for that matter) as a responsible organization.
:)
Guess I'm stuck getting my news from the Daily Show and Slashdot
If you are going to use a debit card, create a separate account exclusively for the purpose. Limit the funding in the account to the amount you feel comfortable being without for an arbitrary period of time.
Actually, that's not a good idea. My roommate in college used his debit card to purchase something online. The merchant accidentally charged more than should have been charged (I think it was because of a coupon or something). In any case, my roommate's account was overdrawn for several days, acuring overdraft charges as well. IIRC, the merchant paid all the bank charges, but your bank won't reject a charge just because your debit account has no money in it. In fact, because of the fees, they love it when people do it.
Otherwise I agree -- use credit cards whenever possible and pay off the balance every month. Credit cards provide a nice buffer between merchants (especially the unscrupulous kind) and my money. I'd never carry my bank's debit card if it wasn't also my ATM card.
Why should he be entitled to keep earning from something he did so long ago? I'm not entitled to earn money for the work I did yesterday, let alone work I did years ago, I have to work again today to get more money. Why are artists so different?
:)
Now, copyright is a good thing to encourage artists to create. But it should not be tied to the life of the artist, for, among other things, the reason you mentioned. Even life+10 discriminates against older artists. Why shouldn't copyright just last 20 years, like patents? As long as artists are still making money from their older creations, what motivation do they have to make new stuff?
It sickens me that no media made today will enter the public domain in my lifetime, or probably even in my children's lifetimes. Copyright law today is way out of balance. It's no wonder most people don't even know what public domain is.
And to keep this post more or less on topic, I really don't care what happens to ITMS. They won't sell to me anyway because I don't run a proprietary OS. I guess that's a good thing, though -- it keeps me from spending money there
Mac version? How about a Linux version? It's not like they don't base their entire business on Linux, you'd think they'd find the time to port one or two of their applications to Linux so the rest of us can use them.
:)
Or maybe GDS just doesn't hold a candle to slocate(1)?
It's great to see a spammer taken down. But what about this Axciom company? According to the article, Axciom "serves large corporations by collecting and managing information for marketing purposes". Maybe they don't spam directly, but it sure sounds like they at least help spammers. And probably not just email spammers, but telephone and snail mail, as well. And apparently they're storing "personal customer records, including names, postal and e-mail addresses, bank and credit card numbers." [ephasis mine] Why does one company have so much information on so many people? And why when they are negligent with that data, do they not face any consequences?
The article seemed to imply that the snipermail spammers initially got access to more records than they were supposed to have because of something Axciom did (this isn't clear) before they started breaking passwords to get even more data. Where are the 600+ year prison terms for the Axciom management?
I think there's a lot of truth in that. For example, where would Linux be today without MS? True, a lot of the core Linux developers (not just kernel, but X, KDE/Gnome, etc.) do what they do because they want to. But I'm sure there's a good contingent of developers and users who help Linux because they don't like MS.
If Windows was a decent system for computing, I don't think Linux would be where it is today. It would probably be a lot more like the BSDs. Good, working systems, but without the push that Linux has.
Another example is Mozilla/FireFox. Without IE sucking as much as it does (side note: interesting how IE went from the best of breed browser to the suckiest browser without actually changing), would Mozilla/FireFox be as far along as it is today? Would it have 10-20% and increasing share of users?
True, MS has prevented a lot of people from accessing good technology over the years. But the fight against MS has helped to produce a lot of good technology as well.
I recently stumbled upon sshdfilter. It analyzes sshd output in real time by running sshd in with the -e option and adds attempts to login with invalid usernames to an iptables chain to drop all packets from that host. I've only been running it for a week or so, but it seems to be working well.
Seems like a similar idea to DenyHosts, just a different implementation.
Also, the local paper (I live in Brevard county) mentioned that all the bus tickets are already sold for tomorrow.
But like most posters said, just about anywhere will give you a good view. Especially any of the beaches south of KSC (Cocoa Beach through Melbourne Beach) will be good. That's where I usually watch launches from if I have the chance (i.e., they're not during work hours). Personally, since the launch is during the day, I'm just going to watch it from the office.
I completely agree with your well thought out post. However, I'd like to point out that most intellectual property in the hands of the consumer is, in fact, worthless. I say it's worthless because that consumer can't sell it, hence it's value could be argued to be $0. Historically, this hasn't been the case. Consumers have always been able to resell their books, records, tapes, CDs, etc. But most software is not resalable. Music bought through ITMS cannot be resold (so I've heard, Apple still refuses to let me buy from them, but that's a different rant). If the item you're buying cannot be resold for any price, then it could be considered worthless (though it usually does have some other value to the buyer, otherwise why buy it).
:(
Also, in some cases, the publisher refuses to sell licenses for the item (such as abondonware). If the publisher won't sell the item, there's no active market for that item, and again, it could be argued that the value of the item is $0.
Now, I don't particularaly like these arguments since that property does have value, but the publishers are making it seem to consumers that it does not. Or at least they're leaving the door open for the arguments to be made. And people are great at using arguments like these when they want to rationalize behavior they think (or know) is wrong.
Personally, I think that dropping the copyright length to something more reasonable (on the order or 10-20 years) would really help curtain infringement. People who want the item now will pay for it. People who can wait will wait. People who can't afford the latest and greatest can now use something older rather than priate the lastest stuff.
But I'm way to cynical to believe this will ever happen
While w3schools' browser stats may not be representative of the Internet using population as a whole, the fact that FireFox's share has been steadily increasing probably indicates that FireFox's share has probably been increasing in the general population. Is it over 25% like at w3schools? I'd be (happily) surprised if it is, but I doubt it. Like you said, that is a technical site without as broad an appeal.
:)
Though on my own (lousy, low traffic) site, I get close to a 50% FF and IE split (and I do filter out my own hits), so maybe the general population has a higher FF usage rate than the technical population? Nah, that'd be giving the average online idiot way too much credit
I wish more big sites published these kind of stats, but doing so would probably be more trouble than they're worth. Or maybe in some cases, they're worth too much to give away for free.
IIRC, Slashdot stopped publishing browser stats because they showed a lot of readers were browsing a Linux site using IE on Windows. That's probably still true today.
Yes, I think they do. There are a number of benefits, both in direct savings (less bandwidth used, less of their own customers attacked, better Internet image) and in good relations (assuming it's handled correctly). Most people don't know that much about their computers. And if their ISP called up and helped them clean a virus/worm/trojan/other malware off their PC and made it run better, that customer is probably going to have a more positive view of the ISP. Of course, if the ISP blocks them and doesn't help them get back online, they'll probably have a negative view of the incident.
The VCR had significant limitations. It was difficult to program ...
... impossible to edit
That's an implementation detail. Besides, most people either figured it out, or just pressed "record" when they wanted to tape something.
Well, really hard anyway. I'll grant that. Though I do remember editing out the commercials (by pausing the recording) on many movies taped off TV as a child, so minor editing is possible.
Tapes did not stand up well to repeated viewings.
Maybe, but my family has many movies we "stole" off TV that have been watched many times and they're still viewable. Maybe not perfect, but still viewable.
Broadcast films were censored, cut to fit pre-defined time slots, and were otherwise abused.
And digital TV with a broadcast flag will be different how?
Apparently, you've never worked for the government :)