If you look at the page he linked to, you'll see an enormous number of the "keep" votes are crossed out, followed by (quote from page):
* o User has 78 edits, 76 marked as "minor". RMG (talk • contribs) Vote discounted by closing admin JtkieferT | C | @ ---- 00:55, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
Clearly the administrator, JtkieferT, is deleting votes and using fairly arbitrary criteria to delete them.
Workaround #1. Edit/etc/hdparm.conf, add the following to the end (or modify the existing/dev/sda area, etc. This assumes your primary disk is your only disk and you're using SATA):
/dev/sda { apm = 255 spindown_time = 0 }
Then enter "sudo update-rc.d hdparm defaults" to ensure the changes take effect.
Workaround #2, edit/etc/apm/event.d/20hdparm, find the line "APMD_SPINDOWN=18" and add a zero to it (APMD_SPINDOWN=180). Again enter "sudo update-rc.d hdparm defaults".
The first of the options disables the whole spinning down thing. The second changes it so it spins down less (every 15 minutes rather than every minute and a half.)
At least, that's what the Launchpad contributors claim.
Sure, because it matters that the drivers are called "APE" rather than something else. And that CD full of unnecessary non-standard operating system level hacks (Mac OS X has keyboard and mouse drivers, you knew these were hacks) just leaped into your CD drive when you weren't looking and installed themselves.
Nothing was hidden from you. You knew what you were installing. You did it anyway. Installing third party drivers is always a gamble, if you don't need to do it, don't do it, and if you do, at least recognize that you're taking a gamble, and recognize especially that the very nature of drivers means that using them with an unsupported operating system is a very, very, big risk.
You people are aware that Mac OS X already comes with keyboard and mouse drivers, right? So anything Logitech bundles with its products as "drivers" are actually - wait for it - operating system level hacks designed to bypass the legitimate drivers and do things in a non-standard way.
And you're surprised such hacks (which is what they are, and you knew they were when you installed them, because you've been working - developing indeed - with NEXTSTEP since 1989, so there's no way you couldn't have known this) don't survive, and actually muck up, an operating system upgrade?
There's a lesson here - either don't buy a keyboard or mouse that requires non-standard drivers to operate correctly, or if you do, monitor what you install and be prepared to remove it upon an upgrade. I use a hack, DoubleCommand, because the keyboard I want to use has no Cmd key (DC can remap Alt to be my Cmd, and the numeric keypad "Enter" to be my Alt for the one occasion I need it), but I wouldn't dream of either blaming IBM, makers of my keyboard, Apple, or the authors of DoubleCommand, if I left it installed during an upgrade to Leopard and Leopard failed to boot as a result. I know it's a hack. They know it's a hack. And you know the non-standard drivers Logitech bundled with your mouse are a hack too.
In many cases (and, being the cynical bunch many in retail are, I suspect the stores assume most cases), the customer is doing something illegal - they're buying the software, installing it on their PCs, deciding to keep that copy, and then fraudulently trying to get their money back. In this case, the customer, not the store, is engaged in copyright infringement, and the store is actually the victim of fraud. In this case, the store is doing nothing illegal by accepting the return, indeed it's a victim, not the perpetrator of the crime.
The second issue is that the store is probably told by many software manufacturers that they will not accept returns. So the store isn't "allowed" to accept returns (rather, it is, but it eats the cost.) The fact there isn't a law criminalizing the returns doesn't mean that the general sense of confusion results in it being translated to that by moronic bosses and co-workers.
Far from it being unlawful to accept returned software, I believe it's unlawful not to for many instances - where the software is not fit-for-purpose, for example.
I hate to point this out, but I'm stuck running Netbeans 5 on a somewhat ancient 350MHz G3 at work, with less than an ideal amount of RAM (384Mb), and Netbeans is only slow if it needs to be swapped back into memory after switching to Firefox.
I rather like it, it's faster than Xcode (but that's not difficult.)
I'm not sure why the apologists are all talking about how much more Netbeans does than vi, it really isn't necessary, the claim that text editing is less (than) instant on a 3GHz machine is false, unless you're talking about a 3GHz machine that has 64k of RAM or something.
It's not a competitive market, but it's still a market. You choose how much energy to buy. In particular, you have the choice of whether or not to spend your money on energy, or on products and services that use less energy. Given there is no truly green power source at the moment that can deliver significant amounts of power (no rebuttals from the Nuclear lobby please, you haven't dealt with the waste issue yet), the reality is that reduced power consumption is the only true way to reduce greenhouse emissions.
The OP's contention that this is a problem with the plan shows an amazing degree of willful ignorance. Passing the costs of power consumption on to the energy consumer is not the problem with the plan, it's what the plan hopes to achieve. It's how the plan will work.
And virtually every economist will tell you it's fair and the way the market is supposed to work. You're supposed to pay for the costs of the consequences of the choices you make. Any economic system that doesn't pay for the costs of consumption is doomed to failure.
That's a little improbable. Dell generally doesn't do well in the consumer market, and their products are usually frowned upon by the computer literate; their main sales are corporate, and the few consumer sales they manage are generally via corporate discount programs. And while many Dells run GNU/Linux, the vast majority of these are servers, not desktops; they certainly aren't running Ubuntu.
I don't know of anyone outside of the Mac community who immediately think of Dell when they're trying to name a PC brand. They're unlikely to come across a Dell in a retail outlet (it was big news when one of the major Office* chains announced a contract to sell the things - generally you'll not find anything outside of Lenovo/IBM, Gateway, HP, and a few like Toshiba and Sony bringing up the rear, in actual brick-and-mortar stores.)
You picked the most unlikely brand/OS combination, something designed to look as un-Mac like as possible, but only from the point of view of a Mac zealot. It's slightly possible it's true, in that you might have ordered through a corporate discount program and put Ubuntu on it yourself, but then, why? Why would you, a Slashdotter, have willingly purchased some of the most over-priced, uninteresting, ugly hardware in the industry? The chances are at least 100:1 against.
I believe the chances are more than 99% that you made up that combination to further the pretense that you're not a Mac user, when, in fact, you are.
Hate to disappoint you but my 750 was still working fine last year. The Thinkpad 750 was discontinued in 1994.
Meanwhile my Powerbook G4 800MHz has been acting flaky since about a year after I bought it (if it has to do a lot of work, it overheats and tends to crash shortly thereafter), and the hinge broke last year.
Anecdotal evidence is great, huh? If only Commodore were still alive, my Amiga 500+ still works great!
It's not the first, Tiger Server is also "untied" in the sense that you don't have to buy it bundled with an Intel Mac.
However, note there is no evidence that any versions of Mac OS X capable of running on non-Apple hardware without dubious hacks and legal problems are coming out any time soon. So while you may be able to purchase it, attempting to install on a Thinkpad or some other computer that's infinitely more desirable than the Apple equivalent may be illegal and will require the help of those cracking Apple's prevention schemes.
(I'm tempted to suggest they should go ahead anyway. The idea of Apple trying, as they did with the AT&T locks, to close the barn door by issuing a crippling software update that destroys as many legitimate systems as "Apple disapproved" systems, is just hilarious.)
Well, let's start with the small point that Asda's marketshare of the computer game market (Asda being, so far as I'm aware, Wal-Mart's sole presence in the UK) is pretty tiny.
And then let's point out that two censors is not better than one. I'd rather Asda refuses to sell games 1, 2, and 3 of games 1-5, than Asda refuses to sell games 1, 2, and 3, and is unable to sell game 4, of games 1-5, because game 4 is banned by the government mandated BBFC. Especially as Asda can always be by-passed by, say, buying the games from Tesco. Or, you know, a real vendor of computer games rather than a supermarket chain owned by a US company that happens to, when operating in the US, be infamous for a censorious conservative content policy.
No, I haven't. The fact that Microsoft is making bogus copyright complaints and clearly abusing the law does not mean the movie industry has some obligation to do likewise.
That's simply not true. My wife bought a DVD box set from eBay recently that turned out to be bootlag. In the process of trying to get a refund, the seller was shut down by eBay due to piracy complaints. The whole thing made matters worse for my wife, who was accused of turning the seller in and who generally went from "slightly nuts" to full-on "Maybe we should get a restraining order".
Generally bootleg sellers on eBay don't last long. The issue right now is that policing them is a little more difficult. Unless the eBayer is selling something that's never been on the media offered, or is stupid enough to directly admit the item is bootleg in the description, the copyright holder actually has to buy a sample before he or she can be certain that copyright violations are going on. This is in contrast to someone redistributing a studio's movie via BitTorrent, where the movie has never been released in a form that would allow for that redistribution legally. It's immediately obvious a violation of copyright is occurring and the studio can immediately start legal action.
Even then, the number of BitTorrent movie redistribution copyright violation cases is tiny. A lot of people here seem to be conflating the movie industry's efforts with the music industry's, but these are two entirely seperate actions, and the music industry isn't exactly reknowned for sitting on its hands when it comes to commercial piracy either.
Erm, who, exactly, cares? If Amiga produces something that people like, that's enough. Your attitude is why we no longer have the vibrant flurry of innovation that we last saw in the late eighties and early nineties. Everyone's on Windows, save for a small, growing, minority on Mac OS X, and a few of us use the alternatives and get laughed at for doing so.
Since I gave up on Amiga back in the mid-nineties, I've yet to come across a platform I enjoyed using as much, and realistically, I've only actually enjoyed one, Apple's Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar (10.3 had "more" but felt "worse", 10.4 took that further. I'm back on GNU/Linux, using Ubuntu.) Until someone comes up with something I look forward to using every day again, they can carry on creating as many new and wonderful operating systems as they want. And once they do, I hope they'll continue.
I'm the last person to defend the Bush regime, but bear in mind the phrase "copyright law is effective and working as planned" means "we see no need to tighten copyright law and create yet more insane crap, like the DMCA, to help copyright owners defend their copyrights."
If the industry had lost the case, given that P2P copying of music without the copyright holder's authorization is rampant, you can bet the fact would have been used in the intense lobbying to impose still more draconian copyright laws and penalties. That lobbying is going on now, the government is being told that existing laws are inadequate and need to be tightened. The music industry's win is an ironic defeat for that lobby. If the music industry can defend its copyrights using the existing legal tools, then there is little reason to provide them with more.
The biggest argument for more draconian copyright laws is rampant copyright infringement. Unfortunately, many in the tech community do not see that and think that laws get over-turned when people ignore them: with few exceptions, that attitude flies in the face of history. Those promoting copyright infringement are doing those who want to see a free exchange of information and genuinely fair use of, and improved access to, everything else no favors whatsoever.
A chimera is when the second set of DNA comes from another species
This is not true. Chimera is often used, outside of biology, to mean a creature made up of multiple species (a reference to Greek mythology) but in that instance you're not talking about biological chimerism, but some fiction where DNA is either not mentioned, or often is "merged" (cf Dark Angel.)
However, when you're talking genetics, which is what we're talking about here, you're talking about a being that is the product of two zygotes (which is generally difficult, if not impossible, if they're of different species.)
Chimeras using the biological definition are, if not common, certainly abundant, and there have been court cases involving people whose DNA tests didn't work because they were chimeras. Chimeras are particularly common if the person was conceived via IVF.
A verdict of $222,000.00, for infringement of 24 song files worth a total of $23.76?
In a case where there was zero evidence of the defendant having transferred any of those files?.
If you haven't seen evidence that the defendant transferred these files, then how can you say the files are worth a total of $23.76? If the defendant didn't transfer any files, then they're certainly not worth $23.76. Likewise, if the defendant actually transfered the 24 files a grand total of a million times, then the "worth" of the files is certainly much, much, higher, as in a few dollars short of a million if we take iTunes pricing as a market guide.
I've seen you make this somewhat deceptive argument before. Now that it's been established as law that making available is copyright infringement, and judges and juries have proven they understand why the laws on infringement set so high a value on each copyrighted work infringed, can you, maybe, stop misleading people about the ease and legality of counter-attacking the RIAA when the RIAA has you bang to rights?
Because if you don't, I can see a lot more people getting these kinds of judgements. Slashdot isn't exactly the home of the stereotype-but-atypical 80 year old without a computer getting sued because AOL screwed up, many are even boastful on this thread about their use of P2P networks to distribute copyrighted music without appropriate authorization. If they continue to believe there's some defense to this, they're well and truly screwed.
I'm not sure it's appropriate behavior for a lawyer to be giving them advice that they're not.
Lending a CD to a friend is not the same thing as copying it.
In any case, it's not $9,250 for every time the song was downloaded, it's $9,250 for each song that was made available. Each of those songs could have been downloaded once, or 100,000 times. The chances are the jury came to that figure partially considering some kind of finger-in-the-air estimate of how often the songs were likely to have been downloaded.
Put it another way, if these 20 songs were, between them, downloaded a million times, then the defendant has only had to pay about 20c per copy. On the other hand, if they were never downloaded, then the fine is a little high.
That's absolutely right. The examples the GP gave were of not buying Sony laptops, minidiscs, and cameras. I'm sure Sony's CEO is going to stand up and tell all of his investors that Sony is having difficulty selling those because people keep putting them on P2P networks so everyone can download these things for free.
I doubt the jury thinks that, because I suspect the jury is made up of a representative cross section of society, the vast majority of which do not use or run P2P software to exchange music rips.
It's surprising how many people on Slashdot thinks everyone does it. Mention Kazaa to the average non-geek, and most go "Huh".
On a separate note, congratulations to Sharman Networks for standing by this woman and offering to pay the fine she's incurred using Kazaa for its intended, advertised, purpose.
The RIAA won this one. Can those who keep irresponsibly encouraging people to think they can get away with P2P copyright infringement using "The dog did it" excuses please STOP now?
Well, first of all "expect it to work on Windows" is dubious, for the reasons I listed above. And second, you research it the same way you would if you were going to buy the same thing.
Of your two examples, only web cams tend to be hit and miss under GNU/Linux (I've used a variety of cellphones from a variety of manufacturers and while there were problems with some brands in the 1990s, they've moved away from that for the most part. If it does Bluetooth, you know it'll work. If it's USB, then it'll probably have support, and checking online shouldn't be an issue.) However, in my experience, most Windows webcam bundled software is so awful that you need to do the research even if you're planning to use it under Windows.
I'd add MP3 players to that list too. The ones that are supported under GNU/Linux are also the ones that generally aren't awful under Windows. Have you ever had one of those Sony Walkman MP3 player things? Virtually unsupported under GNU/Linux, but it doesn't matter because the Windows software is so unbelievably unusable that it might just as well be unsupported under Windows too.
I seriously wouldn't get hung up on the issue. You're going to be the one recommending Epson over Lexmark for printers, checking the listings for the latest supported scanners, recommending the MP3 players, etc, etc. You're going to be doing that anyway, even if they run Windows.
Ok, so you are the one building the PCs for these people and you're bothered that you can't predict the hardware they're going to be using with them?
Realistically, if they're asking you to build them, then it's highly unlikely they'll be getting third party hardware without checking with you first anyway. Third party hardware under any OS, be it Mac, Windows, or GNU/Linux, is always a problem with non technical people. Third party drivers for Windows are rarely trouble free and frequently cause more problems than they solve - a problem Microsoft has taken note of, which is why they've been moving towards making drivers themselves where possible and trying to force the use of Microsoft-approved drivers in future versions of Windows. In practice, the 90% of devices that are supported in some form under GNU/Linux will work with equal or less hassle than the 99% of devices that have some kind of Windows compatibility.
So this isn't something to worry about. You can recommend Ubuntu to them, show them the wealth of software you can pre-install for them under that OS, and tell them that if they need a camera or printer, come to you for a recommendation. You'll be able to provide them with something low cost and trouble free. No spy-ware. No bizarre "KodakPolaroidHP SuperdooperQualityPictureMakerPrinter(tm)" that can't be uninstalled without uninstalling the driver, yet adds half an hour to the boot process and takes over the entire computer when you plug the device in. Something that "just works". Which is what they want, and it's what anyone who asks their friendly geek to build them a computer wants.
That's why my wife and I have agreed to genetically engineer our kids. We don't want to leave it to chance whether they end up with a mix of our "good" genes or our less desirable ones.
Well, that, and the fact we think it's a crying shame humans don't have tails. We plan to re-introduce tails into the species. They're extremely useful and I don't understand how we could have evolved into tailless primates in this way.
Some will complain and say we're forking the species by doing this. I think it's a good thing, and it's going to be great that people will be able to take our changes and reintroduce them into the rest of humanity, over time.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly the administrator, JtkieferT, is deleting votes and using fairly arbitrary criteria to delete them.
Workaround #1. Edit /etc/hdparm.conf, add the following to the end (or modify the existing /dev/sda area, etc. This assumes your primary disk is your only disk and you're using SATA):
Then enter "sudo update-rc.d hdparm defaults" to ensure the changes take effect.
Workaround #2, edit /etc/apm/event.d/20hdparm, find the line "APMD_SPINDOWN=18" and add a zero to it (APMD_SPINDOWN=180). Again enter "sudo update-rc.d hdparm defaults".
The first of the options disables the whole spinning down thing. The second changes it so it spins down less (every 15 minutes rather than every minute and a half.)
At least, that's what the Launchpad contributors claim.
Sure, because it matters that the drivers are called "APE" rather than something else. And that CD full of unnecessary non-standard operating system level hacks (Mac OS X has keyboard and mouse drivers, you knew these were hacks) just leaped into your CD drive when you weren't looking and installed themselves.
Nothing was hidden from you. You knew what you were installing. You did it anyway. Installing third party drivers is always a gamble, if you don't need to do it, don't do it, and if you do, at least recognize that you're taking a gamble, and recognize especially that the very nature of drivers means that using them with an unsupported operating system is a very, very, big risk.
You people are aware that Mac OS X already comes with keyboard and mouse drivers, right? So anything Logitech bundles with its products as "drivers" are actually - wait for it - operating system level hacks designed to bypass the legitimate drivers and do things in a non-standard way.
And you're surprised such hacks (which is what they are, and you knew they were when you installed them, because you've been working - developing indeed - with NEXTSTEP since 1989, so there's no way you couldn't have known this) don't survive, and actually muck up, an operating system upgrade?
There's a lesson here - either don't buy a keyboard or mouse that requires non-standard drivers to operate correctly, or if you do, monitor what you install and be prepared to remove it upon an upgrade. I use a hack, DoubleCommand, because the keyboard I want to use has no Cmd key (DC can remap Alt to be my Cmd, and the numeric keypad "Enter" to be my Alt for the one occasion I need it), but I wouldn't dream of either blaming IBM, makers of my keyboard, Apple, or the authors of DoubleCommand, if I left it installed during an upgrade to Leopard and Leopard failed to boot as a result. I know it's a hack. They know it's a hack. And you know the non-standard drivers Logitech bundled with your mouse are a hack too.
I suspect it's a mix up of two different issues.
In many cases (and, being the cynical bunch many in retail are, I suspect the stores assume most cases), the customer is doing something illegal - they're buying the software, installing it on their PCs, deciding to keep that copy, and then fraudulently trying to get their money back. In this case, the customer, not the store, is engaged in copyright infringement, and the store is actually the victim of fraud. In this case, the store is doing nothing illegal by accepting the return, indeed it's a victim, not the perpetrator of the crime.
The second issue is that the store is probably told by many software manufacturers that they will not accept returns. So the store isn't "allowed" to accept returns (rather, it is, but it eats the cost.) The fact there isn't a law criminalizing the returns doesn't mean that the general sense of confusion results in it being translated to that by moronic bosses and co-workers.
Far from it being unlawful to accept returned software, I believe it's unlawful not to for many instances - where the software is not fit-for-purpose, for example.
I hate to point this out, but I'm stuck running Netbeans 5 on a somewhat ancient 350MHz G3 at work, with less than an ideal amount of RAM (384Mb), and Netbeans is only slow if it needs to be swapped back into memory after switching to Firefox.
I rather like it, it's faster than Xcode (but that's not difficult.)
I'm not sure why the apologists are all talking about how much more Netbeans does than vi, it really isn't necessary, the claim that text editing is less (than) instant on a 3GHz machine is false, unless you're talking about a 3GHz machine that has 64k of RAM or something.
It's not a competitive market, but it's still a market. You choose how much energy to buy. In particular, you have the choice of whether or not to spend your money on energy, or on products and services that use less energy. Given there is no truly green power source at the moment that can deliver significant amounts of power (no rebuttals from the Nuclear lobby please, you haven't dealt with the waste issue yet), the reality is that reduced power consumption is the only true way to reduce greenhouse emissions.
The OP's contention that this is a problem with the plan shows an amazing degree of willful ignorance. Passing the costs of power consumption on to the energy consumer is not the problem with the plan, it's what the plan hopes to achieve. It's how the plan will work.
And virtually every economist will tell you it's fair and the way the market is supposed to work. You're supposed to pay for the costs of the consequences of the choices you make. Any economic system that doesn't pay for the costs of consumption is doomed to failure.
Ok, the mere mention of a Model M makes the story believable. I'm sorry I ever doubted your story ;-)
That's a little improbable. Dell generally doesn't do well in the consumer market, and their products are usually frowned upon by the computer literate; their main sales are corporate, and the few consumer sales they manage are generally via corporate discount programs. And while many Dells run GNU/Linux, the vast majority of these are servers, not desktops; they certainly aren't running Ubuntu.
I don't know of anyone outside of the Mac community who immediately think of Dell when they're trying to name a PC brand. They're unlikely to come across a Dell in a retail outlet (it was big news when one of the major Office* chains announced a contract to sell the things - generally you'll not find anything outside of Lenovo/IBM, Gateway, HP, and a few like Toshiba and Sony bringing up the rear, in actual brick-and-mortar stores.)
You picked the most unlikely brand/OS combination, something designed to look as un-Mac like as possible, but only from the point of view of a Mac zealot. It's slightly possible it's true, in that you might have ordered through a corporate discount program and put Ubuntu on it yourself, but then, why? Why would you, a Slashdotter, have willingly purchased some of the most over-priced, uninteresting, ugly hardware in the industry? The chances are at least 100:1 against.
I believe the chances are more than 99% that you made up that combination to further the pretense that you're not a Mac user, when, in fact, you are.
Hate to disappoint you but my 750 was still working fine last year. The Thinkpad 750 was discontinued in 1994.
Meanwhile my Powerbook G4 800MHz has been acting flaky since about a year after I bought it (if it has to do a lot of work, it overheats and tends to crash shortly thereafter), and the hinge broke last year.
Anecdotal evidence is great, huh? If only Commodore were still alive, my Amiga 500+ still works great!
It's not the first, Tiger Server is also "untied" in the sense that you don't have to buy it bundled with an Intel Mac.
However, note there is no evidence that any versions of Mac OS X capable of running on non-Apple hardware without dubious hacks and legal problems are coming out any time soon. So while you may be able to purchase it, attempting to install on a Thinkpad or some other computer that's infinitely more desirable than the Apple equivalent may be illegal and will require the help of those cracking Apple's prevention schemes.
(I'm tempted to suggest they should go ahead anyway. The idea of Apple trying, as they did with the AT&T locks, to close the barn door by issuing a crippling software update that destroys as many legitimate systems as "Apple disapproved" systems, is just hilarious.)
Well, let's start with the small point that Asda's marketshare of the computer game market (Asda being, so far as I'm aware, Wal-Mart's sole presence in the UK) is pretty tiny.
And then let's point out that two censors is not better than one. I'd rather Asda refuses to sell games 1, 2, and 3 of games 1-5, than Asda refuses to sell games 1, 2, and 3, and is unable to sell game 4, of games 1-5, because game 4 is banned by the government mandated BBFC. Especially as Asda can always be by-passed by, say, buying the games from Tesco. Or, you know, a real vendor of computer games rather than a supermarket chain owned by a US company that happens to, when operating in the US, be infamous for a censorious conservative content policy.
No, I haven't. The fact that Microsoft is making bogus copyright complaints and clearly abusing the law does not mean the movie industry has some obligation to do likewise.
That's simply not true. My wife bought a DVD box set from eBay recently that turned out to be bootlag. In the process of trying to get a refund, the seller was shut down by eBay due to piracy complaints. The whole thing made matters worse for my wife, who was accused of turning the seller in and who generally went from "slightly nuts" to full-on "Maybe we should get a restraining order".
Generally bootleg sellers on eBay don't last long. The issue right now is that policing them is a little more difficult. Unless the eBayer is selling something that's never been on the media offered, or is stupid enough to directly admit the item is bootleg in the description, the copyright holder actually has to buy a sample before he or she can be certain that copyright violations are going on. This is in contrast to someone redistributing a studio's movie via BitTorrent, where the movie has never been released in a form that would allow for that redistribution legally. It's immediately obvious a violation of copyright is occurring and the studio can immediately start legal action.
Even then, the number of BitTorrent movie redistribution copyright violation cases is tiny. A lot of people here seem to be conflating the movie industry's efforts with the music industry's, but these are two entirely seperate actions, and the music industry isn't exactly reknowned for sitting on its hands when it comes to commercial piracy either.
Erm, who, exactly, cares? If Amiga produces something that people like, that's enough. Your attitude is why we no longer have the vibrant flurry of innovation that we last saw in the late eighties and early nineties. Everyone's on Windows, save for a small, growing, minority on Mac OS X, and a few of us use the alternatives and get laughed at for doing so.
Since I gave up on Amiga back in the mid-nineties, I've yet to come across a platform I enjoyed using as much, and realistically, I've only actually enjoyed one, Apple's Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar (10.3 had "more" but felt "worse", 10.4 took that further. I'm back on GNU/Linux, using Ubuntu.) Until someone comes up with something I look forward to using every day again, they can carry on creating as many new and wonderful operating systems as they want. And once they do, I hope they'll continue.
I'm the last person to defend the Bush regime, but bear in mind the phrase "copyright law is effective and working as planned" means "we see no need to tighten copyright law and create yet more insane crap, like the DMCA, to help copyright owners defend their copyrights."
If the industry had lost the case, given that P2P copying of music without the copyright holder's authorization is rampant, you can bet the fact would have been used in the intense lobbying to impose still more draconian copyright laws and penalties. That lobbying is going on now, the government is being told that existing laws are inadequate and need to be tightened. The music industry's win is an ironic defeat for that lobby. If the music industry can defend its copyrights using the existing legal tools, then there is little reason to provide them with more.
The biggest argument for more draconian copyright laws is rampant copyright infringement. Unfortunately, many in the tech community do not see that and think that laws get over-turned when people ignore them: with few exceptions, that attitude flies in the face of history. Those promoting copyright infringement are doing those who want to see a free exchange of information and genuinely fair use of, and improved access to, everything else no favors whatsoever.
This is not true. Chimera is often used, outside of biology, to mean a creature made up of multiple species (a reference to Greek mythology) but in that instance you're not talking about biological chimerism, but some fiction where DNA is either not mentioned, or often is "merged" (cf Dark Angel.)
However, when you're talking genetics, which is what we're talking about here, you're talking about a being that is the product of two zygotes (which is generally difficult, if not impossible, if they're of different species.)
Chimeras using the biological definition are, if not common, certainly abundant, and there have been court cases involving people whose DNA tests didn't work because they were chimeras. Chimeras are particularly common if the person was conceived via IVF.
If you haven't seen evidence that the defendant transferred these files, then how can you say the files are worth a total of $23.76? If the defendant didn't transfer any files, then they're certainly not worth $23.76. Likewise, if the defendant actually transfered the 24 files a grand total of a million times, then the "worth" of the files is certainly much, much, higher, as in a few dollars short of a million if we take iTunes pricing as a market guide.
I've seen you make this somewhat deceptive argument before. Now that it's been established as law that making available is copyright infringement, and judges and juries have proven they understand why the laws on infringement set so high a value on each copyrighted work infringed, can you, maybe, stop misleading people about the ease and legality of counter-attacking the RIAA when the RIAA has you bang to rights?
Because if you don't, I can see a lot more people getting these kinds of judgements. Slashdot isn't exactly the home of the stereotype-but-atypical 80 year old without a computer getting sued because AOL screwed up, many are even boastful on this thread about their use of P2P networks to distribute copyrighted music without appropriate authorization. If they continue to believe there's some defense to this, they're well and truly screwed.
I'm not sure it's appropriate behavior for a lawyer to be giving them advice that they're not.
Lending a CD to a friend is not the same thing as copying it.
In any case, it's not $9,250 for every time the song was downloaded, it's $9,250 for each song that was made available. Each of those songs could have been downloaded once, or 100,000 times. The chances are the jury came to that figure partially considering some kind of finger-in-the-air estimate of how often the songs were likely to have been downloaded.
Put it another way, if these 20 songs were, between them, downloaded a million times, then the defendant has only had to pay about 20c per copy. On the other hand, if they were never downloaded, then the fine is a little high.
That's absolutely right. The examples the GP gave were of not buying Sony laptops, minidiscs, and cameras. I'm sure Sony's CEO is going to stand up and tell all of his investors that Sony is having difficulty selling those because people keep putting them on P2P networks so everyone can download these things for free.
I doubt the jury thinks that, because I suspect the jury is made up of a representative cross section of society, the vast majority of which do not use or run P2P software to exchange music rips.
It's surprising how many people on Slashdot thinks everyone does it. Mention Kazaa to the average non-geek, and most go "Huh".
On a separate note, congratulations to Sharman Networks for standing by this woman and offering to pay the fine she's incurred using Kazaa for its intended, advertised, purpose.
So, erm, where was this smackdown?
The RIAA won this one. Can those who keep irresponsibly encouraging people to think they can get away with P2P copyright infringement using "The dog did it" excuses please STOP now?
Well, first of all "expect it to work on Windows" is dubious, for the reasons I listed above. And second, you research it the same way you would if you were going to buy the same thing.
Of your two examples, only web cams tend to be hit and miss under GNU/Linux (I've used a variety of cellphones from a variety of manufacturers and while there were problems with some brands in the 1990s, they've moved away from that for the most part. If it does Bluetooth, you know it'll work. If it's USB, then it'll probably have support, and checking online shouldn't be an issue.) However, in my experience, most Windows webcam bundled software is so awful that you need to do the research even if you're planning to use it under Windows.
I'd add MP3 players to that list too. The ones that are supported under GNU/Linux are also the ones that generally aren't awful under Windows. Have you ever had one of those Sony Walkman MP3 player things? Virtually unsupported under GNU/Linux, but it doesn't matter because the Windows software is so unbelievably unusable that it might just as well be unsupported under Windows too.
I seriously wouldn't get hung up on the issue. You're going to be the one recommending Epson over Lexmark for printers, checking the listings for the latest supported scanners, recommending the MP3 players, etc, etc. You're going to be doing that anyway, even if they run Windows.
Ok, so you are the one building the PCs for these people and you're bothered that you can't predict the hardware they're going to be using with them?
Realistically, if they're asking you to build them, then it's highly unlikely they'll be getting third party hardware without checking with you first anyway. Third party hardware under any OS, be it Mac, Windows, or GNU/Linux, is always a problem with non technical people. Third party drivers for Windows are rarely trouble free and frequently cause more problems than they solve - a problem Microsoft has taken note of, which is why they've been moving towards making drivers themselves where possible and trying to force the use of Microsoft-approved drivers in future versions of Windows. In practice, the 90% of devices that are supported in some form under GNU/Linux will work with equal or less hassle than the 99% of devices that have some kind of Windows compatibility.
So this isn't something to worry about. You can recommend Ubuntu to them, show them the wealth of software you can pre-install for them under that OS, and tell them that if they need a camera or printer, come to you for a recommendation. You'll be able to provide them with something low cost and trouble free. No spy-ware. No bizarre "KodakPolaroidHP SuperdooperQualityPictureMakerPrinter(tm)" that can't be uninstalled without uninstalling the driver, yet adds half an hour to the boot process and takes over the entire computer when you plug the device in. Something that "just works". Which is what they want, and it's what anyone who asks their friendly geek to build them a computer wants.
That's why my wife and I have agreed to genetically engineer our kids. We don't want to leave it to chance whether they end up with a mix of our "good" genes or our less desirable ones.
Well, that, and the fact we think it's a crying shame humans don't have tails. We plan to re-introduce tails into the species. They're extremely useful and I don't understand how we could have evolved into tailless primates in this way.
Some will complain and say we're forking the species by doing this. I think it's a good thing, and it's going to be great that people will be able to take our changes and reintroduce them into the rest of humanity, over time.