The "buckets of urine" thing has been debunked now multiple times, but I'm curious to know something: supposed the buckets of urine were intended for use at a "violent" protest: how do you use them?
I mean, do you think these "violent protesters" are going to carry around heavy buckets of urine? What do they plan to use them for? What are the logistics of transporting and using buckets of urine in an environment in which you have to walk around with them until you use them? And then, presumbly the aim is to humiliate someone by pouring the bucket over them - how, perchance, do you get close enough to throw the urine at your victim given the heavy police presence?
And supposedly there are multiple buckets. Is the "aim" to get close to several VIPs at once and pour urine over them? 'cos if it isn't, if it's to seek them out at different times, then the first guy to get close to a VIP and throw urine at him or her is going to, well, kind of spoil the fun for the others. I mean, it's somewhat improbable the secret service are going to let the first guy get through in the first place, but even if they did, anyone carrying a bucket after the first "attack" is going to get arrested.
Here's supposedly the "smoking gun", the evidence that these damned peace-loving anti-war hippies were going to go all "violent", and I can't get my head around what the scenario is for use that our police-state apologists think they'd be used in.
Call me a naive liberal, but when I think "bucket with urine in it", I think "broken toilet", not "vicious weapon". I have a sneaking suspicion that we're looking at a severe case of projection on the part of right-wingers like you with this: you guys do seem to have an attitude of "War first, ask questions afterwards". Your assumption a heavy, unwieldy, bucket containing urine is intended for use as a weapon could simply be because you assume everyone else thinks like you do.
That's not a condition though. That's a set of circumstances in which redistribution is valid. A condition would imply that you would normally have a right to redistribute but the GPL is somehow adding something. What the GPL is saying though is that the act of distributing with source code (or distributing with an offer to make source code available, etc) is allowed. The act of distributing without source code was never allowed to begin with. Hence this is a license, not a contract. You're not accepting conditions, you have nothing to agree to (accept the license or not, you still have no right to distribute without source) you're doing the only form of allowed distribution.
If I made a license that allowed you to redistribute main.c, but offered you no permissions to distribute library.c or functionality.c, it wouldn't be a "license agreement" because it somehow imposed the condition that you cannot distribute the latter.c files. You redistributing main.c does not require that you "agree" to not distribute the other two. You don't have a choice in the matter, you're not allowed to distribute them anyway, license or no license.
Am I the only person who is not having a problem with Flash working on GNU/Linux? It works great under all the variants of Ubuntu I've installed. I have no problems watching YouTube videos, and the only time Flash isn't detected by any websites I've been to has been if I had Javascript turned off.
Well, no, but you don't say "call down this message" or "the calling is on the wall" either. They're entirely different words used entirely differently.
"Write them" is lazy and wrong. It just is. It's from the same bunch that brought you "could care less" and "anyways".
Also note that my first response was to your original statement that the code had to be disassembled and documented, which was absolutely not necessary as the BIOS was written in overly-commented assembly to begin with.
Yes, I know, and that was what I assumed you were talking about which is why I responded to you as I did.
Had the second set of programmers been given the disassembly of the BIOS, they would have had no defense against a charge of innocent infringement. It was absolutely necessary for the first set of programmers to disassemble and document what they found.
For the system to work and Compaq's programmers to avoid being charged with copyright infringement, it was necessary that they not see the code they were creating a clone of. This was the entire point of going to the trouble of having the two separated groups.
The point was not merely to duplicate the BIOS's functionality, it was to avoid infringing copyright in the process. To argue that they could have duplicated it by looking at IBM's commented source code is to completely miss the point of why it was done this way - you might just as well argue they could have created a clone by making a bit-for-bit copy of IBM's BIOS.
Hard-pressed? I'm surrounded by them. Hell, take a look at the rhetoric most are using against Obama for daring to suggest we should talk to Iran rather than immediately pulling the trigger. And summing up their attitudes as "Wanting to do what needs to be done to protect our interests and defend our nation" is massively out of line given there hasn't been a war in the last few decades that involved defending our nation. "Protecting out interests", perhaps, but those interests are frequently not worth taking up arms for.
A large number of the Republicans I know believe that any country that steps out of line should be threatened with war, and if that doesn't work, should be attacked. They're pissed we haven't invaded Iran or North Korea - yet.
It's certainly not all of them, but it's a significant number. It's legitimate to characterize anyone who does not believe war should be treated as a last resort, and then only if the alternatives are worse, as pro-war. There are plenty of Republicans who are pro-war, using that definition. The only way to define them as rare is to redefine pro-war to mean something most people wouldn't identify with that term.
It was necessary. If the second group had been given IBM's commented source, they'd have been likely to have infringed IBM's copyrights quite innocently. Even if they had been given the comments and not the source, the comments are not enough to determine the quirks of the BIOS, which needed to be replicated as well as the documented behaviour.
Kinda, sorta. The original PC platform that Compaq (and others, Compaq wasn't the first) cloned included a number of IBM-developed architectural features, such as the IBM BIOS and the 8-bit bus. (I have no idea what that was called, the 16 bit version was called the ISA bus. PCI came a few years after ISA and was supposed to be a more general bus that could be used in all kinds of architectures, not just IBM PC compatibles.) The Intel CPU wasn't IBM specific and was used in a variety of machines, notably from Sirius and ACT/Apricot.
The bit that everyone danced around and IBM sued over was the BIOS. This was because some early cloners just copied the BIOS wholesale. This was fixed when one cloner, which might have been Compaq (I'll have to look it up) did a clean-room re-implementation of the IBM BIOS, so it was 100% compatible but using code developed from scratch. The story goes that this BIOS was developed using two separated rooms of completely different developers, one group disassembling the code and documenting what it does in English, the other implementing code from the spec, with lawyers running between the rooms to transfer the documentation and supervise the process.
DR DOS was Digital Research's MS DOS clone and was derived, at some level, from DOS Plus, which in turn was derived from CP/M.
And, of course, MS DOS was derived from MS DOS 1.0 (it's worth calling that an entirely different operating system, it doesn't have much in common with MS DOS 2.x onwards), which was a rebadged/bug fixed QDOS (not related to the QL operating system), which was a clone of CP/M intended for 8086 processors designed because Digital Research wouldn't prioritize their own port of the OS.
Yeah, the midichlorians really threw the spirituality/mythology themes under the bus
Never did understand that objection. The midichlorians are described as the mechanism by which people interact with The Force. The Force is still spiritual in nature, the midichlorians do nothing to change that.
(This is assuming you're not one of the people that misunderstood the description of them in TPM - I've noticed some think that Qui-Gon Jinn is describing them as the force, whereas he's quite clear in describing them as the interaction mechanism. But I've noticed some objections too from people who understood the description, but still feel it undermines the spirituality of the Force somehow, and for the life of me I don't understand why people think that.)
Damn it, I think I would have actually liked that version. It looks like virtually everything that was wrong with Return of the Jedi is fixed in the above. Or, to put it more accurately, Lucas broke the movie.
Well, sure, but there's a size limit on what people are going to put in their living rooms.
Ok, stream of consciousness ahead, don't mind me, I'm thinking now in terms of BD's ability to get traction:
It's also worth noting that there are a lot of SDTVs out there, and even with the move to ATSC, that looks set to continue for a few years as pretty much every TV sold for under $200 is an SD CRT with an ATSC tuner built in. What we're looking at here is:
A small minority will have equipment that can only show Blu-ray/HD DVD content acceptably, DVD content looking awful by comparison.
A larger minority will have equipment that shows DVDs well and HD content superbly. Of that minority, a fair number will include people whose eyesight isn't good enough to tell the difference between a well mastered DVD like Live Free or Die Hard and an HD feed unless the two are displayed side by side.
The vast majority will not have equipment that shows any significant difference between DVD and HD.
This situation will exist for a while, with the middle segment slowly growing as HDTVs of 32" and above slowly reduce in price. But, here's the kicker, by the time that minority has grown enough to make a significant difference, online services will be credible and practical. And, here's the thing, if, say, Netflix gives you the option to watch every movie ever made in 720p (remember, for the middle group, DVD already looks excellent) for a fixed fee of $20 a month (for example), then are you going to care that much about discs? Especially if a fair number of the Blu-ray discs you buy come up with a message when you try to play them informing you that you're a filthy pirate? (Not happening much right now, but wait until there are a few hundred types of Blu-ray player out there, and BD+ is on virtually everything.)
DVD was more expensive than VHS, but not by much. Until DVD came on the scene, VHS decks cost anything between $200 and $400. When DVD first started to come out, the initial players were $400-700, with the Playstation 2 doing a lot to put DVD players into people's homes when it came out.
DVD wasn't expensive for very long. DVD became available around 1997, but players had dropped to under $150 by 1999 (my first Apex cost around $120, and I bought it around that time.)
Vista is an improvement in some areas and a liability in others. As is Blu-ray. The worst aspect of Blu-ray is that nobody will ever produce a Blu-ray player that is capable of playing every Blu-ray disc, because of the BD+ copy prevention system - which is based upon 1980s home computer game "copy-prevention" technology. This is a significant disadvantage on DVD.
At this stage, Blu-ray costs around 8x the cost of DVD and many types of player that are widely available for DVD are not available in Blu-ray form. No self-contained home theaters, and no jukeboxes, for example. In the longer term, as more models of player become available, and as Fox titles fail to play on significant numbers of them, the format will lose credibility as prices fall closer to more acceptable levels.
The format is DOA. I'm still staggered the industry went for it.
The 480i to 480p conversion wasn't a conversion of source material (ie DVDs didn't suddenly come out that were 480p60.) It was more a case of eliminating flicker on CRTs, and eliminating striping on LCDs and Plasmas. The source content on DVDs, for movies at least, has always been 480p24, munged using a system called "pulldown" that turned it into an interlaced i60 signal.
(Interestingly, the same sort of thing is being applied to HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs, albeit with some smarter logic. Some high-end TVs are being produced that do a 1080p120 thing, where they'll upconvert the incoming p24/i60/p60 signal into a p120. It's still 1080p24 input.)
But, yeah, the thing to realize about the 480p to 1080p move is that while it's a noticeable improvement in quality for some of us, DVD is already at a remarkably high quality on LCD and Plasma displays, and while virtually everyone can see both side by side and tell the difference, it's not actually obvious to many people what they're missing unless they're actually seeing the two.
Case in point: When I got my HD player at Christmas, I also got a variety of HD discs and regular DVDs. Everyone in the household ooh'd and aah'd over Blade Runner and 2001, and with good reason, the HD transfers looked fantastic.
Then everyone watched Live Free or Die Hard. Nobody said anything for the entire duration of the film. It looked superb. At the end, I commented "Yeah, it's a shame it isn't currently available on HD DVD" at which point my wife and my mother both turned to me and said "Wait, that wasn't HD?"
To me, I could see it wasn't. But I also appreciated why they thought it was. It looked great.
The situation is such that I seriously doubt there's any point in ever going better than 1080p. I don't think the vast majority of people will ever see a difference, not without TVs so large and close they're practically eye-bleeding.
This is actually untrue. The DMCA states it's illegal to make, possess, or import something that circumvents an access control mechanism or a copy control mechanism. It does not tie the prohibition to copying.
There are no distros of any visibility in the US that bundle libdvdcss that haven't been licensed in some way. It is probably that the DVD CCA would take a pragmatic view and not sue at this point, largely because it's easy for an end user to circumvent the ban anyway and because while its damaging to other manufacturers of DVD players that they have to pay CSS license fees when unauthorized distributors of libdvdcss do not, it certainly isn't damaging to Hollywood that people be able to play DVDs on GNU/Linux based computers, and at this stage the law of diminishing returns would apply when trying to push a lawsuit. But I certainly wouldn't gamble a business's livelihood on the DVD CCA's likely liberalism.
Or do you actually believe that phishers use their own credit cards to set up their scams?
Whether they do or they don't is beside the point. The question is not "Did they pay for their own computer", but "Did they manage to get an SSL certificate from a CA while keeping hidden enough to ensure there was nothing traceable back to them?"
You can remove the alert box for HTTP, because nobody expects HTTP to be secure in the first place.
I'm amazed, frankly, at the number of "Why is it that the system that leaves the user with a false sense of security gets more warnings than the one the user doesn't expect to be secure in the first place" complaints.
You need to identify yourself to the CA before they issue an SSL certificate. Even the cheapest CAs do this.
Honestly, buying an SSL certificate for a phishing site is like breaking into people's homes, stealing their TVs, and leaving a calling card with your full name and address in its place. SSL certificates identify the websites you connect to as genuine by ensuring there exists a chain of accountability.
It isn't doing anything of the sort. What the browser is doing is saying "This website is asserting it's safe when it isn't." The browser has no need to do so for HTTP because the website is not using anything that might imply there's any security between the browser and the server. The user has a reasonable expectation that there's something secure about HTTPS (otherwise, why use it?), which an unsigned certificate renders meaningless.
To use a car analogy: You don't expect a car to have "Do not eat" enscribed upon it. You might expect some plastic fruit to have that label, however. Nobody expects a car to be edible, but they might expect something that looks like fruit to be.
People develop for Mono and many want it to become a standard part of GNU/Linux distributions. Wine is generally used as a last resort to run non-native applications, and has always been considered optional (well, except by Lindows/Linspire - does anyone use that any more?)
You develop for Mono because applications can run under it as fully integrated with the environment they run upon. You don't develop for Wine because your applications will look utterly stupid and feel completely unintegrated on every platform except Windows.
If Wine is a roaring success, and Microsoft brings the hammer down on it, the only people who suffer are commercial entities who refuse to develop GNU/Linux-native applications, and the occasional user who cannot find a free alternative to their favoured proprietary app.
If Mono is a roaring success, large swathes of the open source spectrum will become reliant upon it. If Microsoft brings the hammer down, it will no longer be possible to run the majority of free and open source applications on a free and open source operating system.
The thinking is the person who chose the "final mile" should pay for the additional cost of that final mile. That is, if I choose to make myself available via a cellphone, it's not fair on my callers if I force them to pay for my choice in using a cellphone.
Obviously this makes sense for phone calls, where it's not as if you have to answer a call. For SMS messaging, where you don't get a choice about whether to accept a message or not, it just plain doesn't work.
In the US, cellphone operators have chosen to deal with the "incoming calls" issue via a variety of means, but essentially you get about double the amount of minutes you would get in, say, the UK, for the same subscription, almost always coupled with a fairly generous unmetered element. Around $50 per month will get you unmetered nights and weekends, plus unmetered calls to other people on the same network at any time of day or day of the week, plus around 500 minutes to use for the remaining metered calls (incoming and outgoing.) I seriously doubt there are many phone users, outside of pre-paid, who have a single problem with the incoming calls issue.
For text messaging, the situation is more complex, with most operators giving you a ridiculously expensive per-message rate for incoming and outgoing messages (T-Mobile's prices have quadrupled in the last three or four years), but offering some kind of bolt-on to your plan that either bundles a large number of messages or makes them completely unlimited.
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The "buckets of urine" thing has been debunked now multiple times, but I'm curious to know something: supposed the buckets of urine were intended for use at a "violent" protest: how do you use them?
I mean, do you think these "violent protesters" are going to carry around heavy buckets of urine? What do they plan to use them for? What are the logistics of transporting and using buckets of urine in an environment in which you have to walk around with them until you use them? And then, presumbly the aim is to humiliate someone by pouring the bucket over them - how, perchance, do you get close enough to throw the urine at your victim given the heavy police presence?
And supposedly there are multiple buckets. Is the "aim" to get close to several VIPs at once and pour urine over them? 'cos if it isn't, if it's to seek them out at different times, then the first guy to get close to a VIP and throw urine at him or her is going to, well, kind of spoil the fun for the others. I mean, it's somewhat improbable the secret service are going to let the first guy get through in the first place, but even if they did, anyone carrying a bucket after the first "attack" is going to get arrested.
Here's supposedly the "smoking gun", the evidence that these damned peace-loving anti-war hippies were going to go all "violent", and I can't get my head around what the scenario is for use that our police-state apologists think they'd be used in.
Call me a naive liberal, but when I think "bucket with urine in it", I think "broken toilet", not "vicious weapon". I have a sneaking suspicion that we're looking at a severe case of projection on the part of right-wingers like you with this: you guys do seem to have an attitude of "War first, ask questions afterwards". Your assumption a heavy, unwieldy, bucket containing urine is intended for use as a weapon could simply be because you assume everyone else thinks like you do.
Columbo does make more sense than Matlock, Columbo was always going after arrogant "geniuses" who thought they were too smart to ever get caught.
That's not a condition though. That's a set of circumstances in which redistribution is valid. A condition would imply that you would normally have a right to redistribute but the GPL is somehow adding something. What the GPL is saying though is that the act of distributing with source code (or distributing with an offer to make source code available, etc) is allowed. The act of distributing without source code was never allowed to begin with. Hence this is a license, not a contract. You're not accepting conditions, you have nothing to agree to (accept the license or not, you still have no right to distribute without source) you're doing the only form of allowed distribution.
If I made a license that allowed you to redistribute main.c, but offered you no permissions to distribute library.c or functionality.c, it wouldn't be a "license agreement" because it somehow imposed the condition that you cannot distribute the latter .c files. You redistributing main.c does not require that you "agree" to not distribute the other two. You don't have a choice in the matter, you're not allowed to distribute them anyway, license or no license.
Am I the only person who is not having a problem with Flash working on GNU/Linux? It works great under all the variants of Ubuntu I've installed. I have no problems watching YouTube videos, and the only time Flash isn't detected by any websites I've been to has been if I had Javascript turned off.
Well, no, but you don't say "call down this message" or "the calling is on the wall" either. They're entirely different words used entirely differently.
"Write them" is lazy and wrong. It just is. It's from the same bunch that brought you "could care less" and "anyways".
Yes, I know, and that was what I assumed you were talking about which is why I responded to you as I did.
Had the second set of programmers been given the disassembly of the BIOS, they would have had no defense against a charge of innocent infringement. It was absolutely necessary for the first set of programmers to disassemble and document what they found.
For the system to work and Compaq's programmers to avoid being charged with copyright infringement, it was necessary that they not see the code they were creating a clone of. This was the entire point of going to the trouble of having the two separated groups.
The point was not merely to duplicate the BIOS's functionality, it was to avoid infringing copyright in the process. To argue that they could have duplicated it by looking at IBM's commented source code is to completely miss the point of why it was done this way - you might just as well argue they could have created a clone by making a bit-for-bit copy of IBM's BIOS.
Hard-pressed? I'm surrounded by them. Hell, take a look at the rhetoric most are using against Obama for daring to suggest we should talk to Iran rather than immediately pulling the trigger. And summing up their attitudes as "Wanting to do what needs to be done to protect our interests and defend our nation" is massively out of line given there hasn't been a war in the last few decades that involved defending our nation. "Protecting out interests", perhaps, but those interests are frequently not worth taking up arms for.
A large number of the Republicans I know believe that any country that steps out of line should be threatened with war, and if that doesn't work, should be attacked. They're pissed we haven't invaded Iran or North Korea - yet.
It's certainly not all of them, but it's a significant number. It's legitimate to characterize anyone who does not believe war should be treated as a last resort, and then only if the alternatives are worse, as pro-war. There are plenty of Republicans who are pro-war, using that definition. The only way to define them as rare is to redefine pro-war to mean something most people wouldn't identify with that term.
It was necessary. If the second group had been given IBM's commented source, they'd have been likely to have infringed IBM's copyrights quite innocently. Even if they had been given the comments and not the source, the comments are not enough to determine the quirks of the BIOS, which needed to be replicated as well as the documented behaviour.
Kinda, sorta. The original PC platform that Compaq (and others, Compaq wasn't the first) cloned included a number of IBM-developed architectural features, such as the IBM BIOS and the 8-bit bus. (I have no idea what that was called, the 16 bit version was called the ISA bus. PCI came a few years after ISA and was supposed to be a more general bus that could be used in all kinds of architectures, not just IBM PC compatibles.) The Intel CPU wasn't IBM specific and was used in a variety of machines, notably from Sirius and ACT/Apricot.
The bit that everyone danced around and IBM sued over was the BIOS. This was because some early cloners just copied the BIOS wholesale. This was fixed when one cloner, which might have been Compaq (I'll have to look it up) did a clean-room re-implementation of the IBM BIOS, so it was 100% compatible but using code developed from scratch. The story goes that this BIOS was developed using two separated rooms of completely different developers, one group disassembling the code and documenting what it does in English, the other implementing code from the spec, with lawyers running between the rooms to transfer the documentation and supervise the process.
CP/M, not DR DOS.
DR DOS was Digital Research's MS DOS clone and was derived, at some level, from DOS Plus, which in turn was derived from CP/M.
And, of course, MS DOS was derived from MS DOS 1.0 (it's worth calling that an entirely different operating system, it doesn't have much in common with MS DOS 2.x onwards), which was a rebadged/bug fixed QDOS (not related to the QL operating system), which was a clone of CP/M intended for 8086 processors designed because Digital Research wouldn't prioritize their own port of the OS.
It's a messy relationship ;)
Never did understand that objection. The midichlorians are described as the mechanism by which people interact with The Force. The Force is still spiritual in nature, the midichlorians do nothing to change that.
(This is assuming you're not one of the people that misunderstood the description of them in TPM - I've noticed some think that Qui-Gon Jinn is describing them as the force, whereas he's quite clear in describing them as the interaction mechanism. But I've noticed some objections too from people who understood the description, but still feel it undermines the spirituality of the Force somehow, and for the life of me I don't understand why people think that.)
Damn it, I think I would have actually liked that version. It looks like virtually everything that was wrong with Return of the Jedi is fixed in the above. Or, to put it more accurately, Lucas broke the movie.
Well, sure, but there's a size limit on what people are going to put in their living rooms.
Ok, stream of consciousness ahead, don't mind me, I'm thinking now in terms of BD's ability to get traction:
It's also worth noting that there are a lot of SDTVs out there, and even with the move to ATSC, that looks set to continue for a few years as pretty much every TV sold for under $200 is an SD CRT with an ATSC tuner built in. What we're looking at here is:
This situation will exist for a while, with the middle segment slowly growing as HDTVs of 32" and above slowly reduce in price. But, here's the kicker, by the time that minority has grown enough to make a significant difference, online services will be credible and practical. And, here's the thing, if, say, Netflix gives you the option to watch every movie ever made in 720p (remember, for the middle group, DVD already looks excellent) for a fixed fee of $20 a month (for example), then are you going to care that much about discs? Especially if a fair number of the Blu-ray discs you buy come up with a message when you try to play them informing you that you're a filthy pirate? (Not happening much right now, but wait until there are a few hundred types of Blu-ray player out there, and BD+ is on virtually everything.)
DVD was more expensive than VHS, but not by much. Until DVD came on the scene, VHS decks cost anything between $200 and $400. When DVD first started to come out, the initial players were $400-700, with the Playstation 2 doing a lot to put DVD players into people's homes when it came out.
DVD wasn't expensive for very long. DVD became available around 1997, but players had dropped to under $150 by 1999 (my first Apex cost around $120, and I bought it around that time.)
Vista is an improvement in some areas and a liability in others. As is Blu-ray. The worst aspect of Blu-ray is that nobody will ever produce a Blu-ray player that is capable of playing every Blu-ray disc, because of the BD+ copy prevention system - which is based upon 1980s home computer game "copy-prevention" technology. This is a significant disadvantage on DVD.
At this stage, Blu-ray costs around 8x the cost of DVD and many types of player that are widely available for DVD are not available in Blu-ray form. No self-contained home theaters, and no jukeboxes, for example. In the longer term, as more models of player become available, and as Fox titles fail to play on significant numbers of them, the format will lose credibility as prices fall closer to more acceptable levels.
The format is DOA. I'm still staggered the industry went for it.
Yes and no.
The 480i to 480p conversion wasn't a conversion of source material (ie DVDs didn't suddenly come out that were 480p60.) It was more a case of eliminating flicker on CRTs, and eliminating striping on LCDs and Plasmas. The source content on DVDs, for movies at least, has always been 480p24, munged using a system called "pulldown" that turned it into an interlaced i60 signal.
(Interestingly, the same sort of thing is being applied to HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs, albeit with some smarter logic. Some high-end TVs are being produced that do a 1080p120 thing, where they'll upconvert the incoming p24/i60/p60 signal into a p120. It's still 1080p24 input.)
But, yeah, the thing to realize about the 480p to 1080p move is that while it's a noticeable improvement in quality for some of us, DVD is already at a remarkably high quality on LCD and Plasma displays, and while virtually everyone can see both side by side and tell the difference, it's not actually obvious to many people what they're missing unless they're actually seeing the two.
Case in point: When I got my HD player at Christmas, I also got a variety of HD discs and regular DVDs. Everyone in the household ooh'd and aah'd over Blade Runner and 2001, and with good reason, the HD transfers looked fantastic.
Then everyone watched Live Free or Die Hard. Nobody said anything for the entire duration of the film. It looked superb. At the end, I commented "Yeah, it's a shame it isn't currently available on HD DVD" at which point my wife and my mother both turned to me and said "Wait, that wasn't HD?"
To me, I could see it wasn't. But I also appreciated why they thought it was. It looked great.
The situation is such that I seriously doubt there's any point in ever going better than 1080p. I don't think the vast majority of people will ever see a difference, not without TVs so large and close they're practically eye-bleeding.
You've been reading Slashdot for how long and you think the defining point of a certified geek is that they can spell correctly?
Geez!
Project much?
This is actually untrue. The DMCA states it's illegal to make, possess, or import something that circumvents an access control mechanism or a copy control mechanism. It does not tie the prohibition to copying.
There are no distros of any visibility in the US that bundle libdvdcss that haven't been licensed in some way. It is probably that the DVD CCA would take a pragmatic view and not sue at this point, largely because it's easy for an end user to circumvent the ban anyway and because while its damaging to other manufacturers of DVD players that they have to pay CSS license fees when unauthorized distributors of libdvdcss do not, it certainly isn't damaging to Hollywood that people be able to play DVDs on GNU/Linux based computers, and at this stage the law of diminishing returns would apply when trying to push a lawsuit. But I certainly wouldn't gamble a business's livelihood on the DVD CCA's likely liberalism.
Whether they do or they don't is beside the point. The question is not "Did they pay for their own computer", but "Did they manage to get an SSL certificate from a CA while keeping hidden enough to ensure there was nothing traceable back to them?"
You can remove the alert box for HTTP, because nobody expects HTTP to be secure in the first place.
I'm amazed, frankly, at the number of "Why is it that the system that leaves the user with a false sense of security gets more warnings than the one the user doesn't expect to be secure in the first place" complaints.
You need to identify yourself to the CA before they issue an SSL certificate. Even the cheapest CAs do this.
Honestly, buying an SSL certificate for a phishing site is like breaking into people's homes, stealing their TVs, and leaving a calling card with your full name and address in its place. SSL certificates identify the websites you connect to as genuine by ensuring there exists a chain of accountability.
It isn't doing anything of the sort. What the browser is doing is saying "This website is asserting it's safe when it isn't." The browser has no need to do so for HTTP because the website is not using anything that might imply there's any security between the browser and the server. The user has a reasonable expectation that there's something secure about HTTPS (otherwise, why use it?), which an unsigned certificate renders meaningless.
To use a car analogy: You don't expect a car to have "Do not eat" enscribed upon it. You might expect some plastic fruit to have that label, however. Nobody expects a car to be edible, but they might expect something that looks like fruit to be.
People develop for Mono and many want it to become a standard part of GNU/Linux distributions. Wine is generally used as a last resort to run non-native applications, and has always been considered optional (well, except by Lindows/Linspire - does anyone use that any more?)
You develop for Mono because applications can run under it as fully integrated with the environment they run upon. You don't develop for Wine because your applications will look utterly stupid and feel completely unintegrated on every platform except Windows.
If Wine is a roaring success, and Microsoft brings the hammer down on it, the only people who suffer are commercial entities who refuse to develop GNU/Linux-native applications, and the occasional user who cannot find a free alternative to their favoured proprietary app.
If Mono is a roaring success, large swathes of the open source spectrum will become reliant upon it. If Microsoft brings the hammer down, it will no longer be possible to run the majority of free and open source applications on a free and open source operating system.
The thinking is the person who chose the "final mile" should pay for the additional cost of that final mile. That is, if I choose to make myself available via a cellphone, it's not fair on my callers if I force them to pay for my choice in using a cellphone.
Obviously this makes sense for phone calls, where it's not as if you have to answer a call. For SMS messaging, where you don't get a choice about whether to accept a message or not, it just plain doesn't work.
In the US, cellphone operators have chosen to deal with the "incoming calls" issue via a variety of means, but essentially you get about double the amount of minutes you would get in, say, the UK, for the same subscription, almost always coupled with a fairly generous unmetered element. Around $50 per month will get you unmetered nights and weekends, plus unmetered calls to other people on the same network at any time of day or day of the week, plus around 500 minutes to use for the remaining metered calls (incoming and outgoing.) I seriously doubt there are many phone users, outside of pre-paid, who have a single problem with the incoming calls issue.
For text messaging, the situation is more complex, with most operators giving you a ridiculously expensive per-message rate for incoming and outgoing messages (T-Mobile's prices have quadrupled in the last three or four years), but offering some kind of bolt-on to your plan that either bundles a large number of messages or makes them completely unlimited.