apt-get is so 1990's. Real music downloaders use Gentoo's Portage. What happens is when you download music with Portage, you compile from the source, musicians actually come into your home, play the music, recording it into your equipment, so it's optimized for your equipment rather than the usual generic CD player.
Usually this results in songs that take 5-10% less time to listen to. Excellent stuff!
That has nothing to do with the amount of violence in video games.
It's actually because of the increase in obscenity on TV. As the number of off-colour jokes and swearing has increased, so has the murder rate declined. When Janet Jackson had her wardrobe malfunction last year, nobody assaulted or killed anyone for nearly six months.
Well, first off you can't invent something that has already been invented, well, because it's already been invented... Semantics, I know...
No, not semantics, missing the point.
But more to the point, if something is obvious -- and I mean really obvious, under the legal definitions, and not just a bunch of people using hindsight to say "hey, that's obvious," then a patent should not be issued. If it is, that is a problem with the patent office. But if there is no LEGAL obviousness problem, then the patent SHOULD be issued. The problem is that there can be a pretty big disconnect between what constitutes "legal" obviousness and what many people "think" is obvious (which usually involves hindsight...).
No, that's not the problem. Something doesn't have to be "obvious" to be invented independently by multiple people. It's just the more obvious it is, the more people will invent it. That is, independently solve the same problem with the same solution without having heard of that solution before.
So, everyone would be willing to program for free, and provide tech support for free?
So, the only way to make money from programming is to slap patents on a discovery and sue anyone who doesn't license that discovery from you?
Little lesson in reality: there are people making money from software right now, in countries without software patents, and who were doing so before software was patentable in countries that have them now. The United States saw the greatest growth in software development before the late eighties.
Arguably, we don't even need many of the incentives that exist today anyway. For example, software copyrights have been proven to be relatively unnecessary, as around 90% of commercial software development is in-house, and open source, with programmers employed by anyone from small groups that need to get something done to hardware manufacturers who need to shift useful boxes, has proven to be an excellent model for the remainder.
Like I said: In software, there already are incentives to create new things. There's no need for patents. To argue otherwise is to argue that programming is not, currently, a viable profession. Millions of employed programmers will tell you otherwise.
If you are a lone programmer (or a small independent group) who comes up with something that you need to make money out of, patents genuinely help you.
No, they may help you if you're the first person to think of the idea, and have enough capital to register the patent and load a magazine of patent lawsuits into a lawyer.
If you're not the first person to think of the idea, then you're fucked. It doesn't matter that you thought of the idea yourself, that you got no help from anyone, that you didn't know the idea had been invented and that it had been patented, you're lawsuit bait, and you're going to have to either stop selling whatever it was you were selling, change it radically at much expense to you (which might not be enough), or pay someone else for the privilege of using the work you did.
Patents suck. Patents exist only to create incentive to invent new things, but they come with a price in that they punish those who invent things that have already been invented - which means if something is an obvious solution to a problem, one group can hurt many innocent inventors. In software, there already are incentives to create new things, so there's no need for patents. None whatsoever. You ONLY get the bad side. We need software patents outlawed. We need those who approve of them out of power. Out of power in the US. Out of power in the EU. We need those who lobby for them excerting undue influence on politicians to get them passed jailed. And we need those who register software patents and try to enforce them pilloried and bankrupted as the fucked up opportunists they are.
It's certainly not faster either. It's a stack-heavy threaded language that's normally interpreted. It's exceptionally light-weight, but that regularly counts against it, not for it - there's little scope for machine-aided optimization, for example. Forth is pleasantly speedy, but it's not quicker, it only got that reputation because it was faster than BASIC in the 1980s when Forth was being advocated most frequently.
Forth can be written to be easy to maintain, but only in the same way as C can. Use appropriate names, comment intelligently but not excessively, use standardized formatting and programming conventions. But, by itself, it's not that easy.
I've read the GP a few times, and while I hate to say it given my bias against the excessive use of inappropriate but politically-correct technologies at the moment ("Everything MUST be implemented Object Oriented", "Why use an array when an RDBMS will do the job just as well?" "Oh sure, this quick tool to process some text could be written in 30 minutes by a moderately skilled C programmer, but there's some Python library somewhere that wouldn't be exploited if we did. Much better to Google for half a day for documentation and then spend two hours experimenting with it until we get a program that doesn't actually do the job in a reasonable space of time!"), but I think he was trolling.
Nope. That company, today, is called Tarantella. The company called SCO today used to be called Caldera. They owned SCO for a few years at a time when SCO's core Unix business was failing, and had the SCO part of the business concentrate on their Tarantella administration suite. SCO was then spun off, renamed to Tarantella, with only the Unix IP "assets" and the SCO name kept by Caldera.
Caldera was previously best known for buying Novell/Digital Research's anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft for the numerous abuses Microsoft made against DRDOS. Once Caldera won that one, they spun off what was left of the DRDOS development team in the form of Lineo.
It's fair to say they are, for the most part, an IP litigation company. They've had some good people (good in the sense of not evil) people running them for the times they've been Caldera + Some Company With Something Real For Sale, but they keep returning to a theme, spinning off the companies that do the real work and keeping the lawsuit material.
I think the page you link to has so little in common with Phishing that it's about as likely to be prosecuted under a hypothetical badly-worded anti-phishing law as it is under a hypothetical badly-worded anti-cellphone-while-driving law. It doesn't represent itself as the bank in question, no reasonable person would see it as the bank in question, and the only way anyone would class it as "phishing" would be if the author is actually keeping the login information and abusing it (in which case he should be prosecuted!)
I think, to be quite honest, it takes the cake to criticise a law you haven't read and have no reason to believe is overbroad for being overbroad or badly worded. Yeah, it might be. Likewise the law on murder might be so overbroad that you can be prosecuted under it for eating beef. But that's not the case, and there's no reason, at this stage, to believe the anti-phishing law is overbroad either. Criticise it when it's actually got something in it to criticise.
CP/M 1.3 was practically useless. IIRC, many basic operations required calling the BIOS (the BIOS, in CP/M, was essentially what today we'd call the HAL. It was OEM supplied code that provided access to the hardware, CP/M would interface with the BIOS, and user programs would interface with CP/M.) Pretty much everyone used CP/M 2.x, with a "lucky" few using CP/M Plus (CP/M 3) in the mid-eighties. I've never even come across a CP/M app that would run under CP/M 1.3, let alone come across such a system in the field.
I seriously doubt 90% of what you've written to be honest. DOS differed significantly from CP/M - it was clearly influenced by CP/M, and was designed to be largely compatable, but structurally the operating system was different, right down to the process handling. (As an example, CP/M had space for one program in memory at a time, which meant that when you ran a program, the CLI was unloaded, and when the program quit, the CLI would be reloaded as a new program.)
I think Tim deserves a break. He wrote DOS. Every claim otherwise relies upon secret conspiracies between MS and DR that are beyond questionable, they're positively ludicrous.
ISPs shouldn't be required to support VOIP, any more than they're required to support email, FTP, or any other service. An ISP should be free to choose the services that it wishes to support, and a customer can then choose an ISP that offers the services that he desires.
I agree completely. However, if an ISP chooses not to allow certain protocols to operate over the network, then I think they should be prevented from using the word "Internet" in their advertising. I think that's reasonable: if you're not actually going to provide full access to the Internet, why the hell should you be able to imply you do?
Some regulation of anything can be a good thing, it depends on the level.
I'd like to see ISPs obliged to either treat all traffic equally, not banning legal applications, limiting restrictions to actual nuisance causing by their customers (spam, "excessive usage" - with such usage clearly defined and advertised), or else cease to be able to use the word "Internet" in their advertising.
That seems fair to me. It'll probably upset the libertarians, but if someone's going to advertise access to the Internet, let them either provide it fully, or cease advertising that they do.
It is supposed to mean (but might not, we'll have to see what the details are) that the open source community will be able to use code that infringes on the patents without risking being sued. That is, if you are producing code licensed under a license approved by the OSI, you need not fear patent lawsuits from CA.
While open source (and free software) makes up a large proportion of software, it is by no means the total of it. So this isn't terminating a patent right, because the patents will still be enforced against, for example, proprietary software.
With a bit of luck. Symantec will abuse it. This'll mean:
1. Software patents will become more and more discredited.
2. Users of operating systems with severe security issues will become more and more handicapped, making security a bigger priority for OS vendors and, perhaps even, promoting alternative systems and discouraging the current monoculture mentality.
The regionless DVD player is around because of two factors - the fact that the only thing forcing DVD players to have region locking in the first place were licenses, and the fact that in many juristictions, region locking is a legal gray area, probably violating competition laws.
The DMCA gives content producers the right to attach "access control mechanisms" to their content and prevent unauthorized parties from producing equipment to access that content. Patent law also prevents manufacturers from implementing certain technologies without a license. Region locking works in that framework indirectly: an ACM, called CSS, is attached to the majority of DVDs. A group called the DVD-CCA licenses CSS ACMs on behalf of content producers who use it. They also license a package of rights to use patented technologies incorporated into DVD players. In order to obtain a license from the DVD-CCA, you have to agree to a contract that includes a provision that you must implement region encoding. If you don't agree to that license, your ability to implement DVD readers without risking a patent lawsuit becomes difficult, and, more importantly, you are breaking US law, criminally, if you produce a DVD player that can play DVDs "protected" with CSS.
Regionless DVD players are produced by people who have a license to produce DVD players that support CSS. They essentially break their contracts, which makes the entire matter civil. Once the DVD-CCA finds out, they can sue for breach and revoke the license of the offending company, but any DVD players produced before the license is revoked are, essentially, legal.
What does this mean in this context? Well, the situation is entirely different.
Instead of DVD manufacturers obtaining licenses under contracts that they then breach, they're bound by the FCC's rulemaking from day 1. This means that if they breach the FCC's rules, they're in trouble, in a sense, immediately. They can't just produce TVs that violate the law until the FCC wakes them up and revokes a license, as they would with DVD players and the DVD-CCA, the moment the FCC finds out they're producing "illegal" TVs, they can be fined for each one.
So, if the High Court upholds the right of the FCC to enforce a broadcast flag, don't hold out hope that there'll be little hidden hacks sneaked in by TV manufacturers to disable it. It will not happen. TV manufacturers will, by and large, have to obey this rule.
(Does it matter this is a dupe? I mean, you already know what the comments are going to be:)
THis is just more evidence that the MPAA and Micro$oft are just out to screw the consumer vis they want us to pay more and more for their so-called "music" which is all Bri[tt]ney $Pears rubbish which they play over and over again on their network of Clearchannel radio stations thanks to payola IE LEGALIZED BRIBERY forcing everyone to download the music from the Internet using services like Kazaa and Morpheus anyway, whereas if the music industry eg the MPAA would just give music away on DRM-less MP3s at 384kbps (the MINIMUM I will accept, 314kbps AAC is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE, you can really hear the difference on top-end Sony equipment) and if they'd make the music actually WORTH LISTENING TO then they would be "getting it" and working in the new economy not the old economy. This is why personally I download all my music from dodgymp3s.ru where you pay a penny a megabyte which is much fairer because the money goes to the artists according to the website, well the bit left over after taxes and expenses and protection racket fees, rather than to the money grabbing record industry execs who spend all their money on cocaine and DVDs.
Are you all with me? Yeah! Fight the fat cat record execs!
Given the amount of stuff that passes for "patentable" these days, it wouldn't surprise me. It's not FUD to acknowledge the patent system is seriously broken, and that the vast majority of software patents patent the obvious.
That said, the patentability of the majority of the technologies used by the Linux kernel itself strikes me as difficult, given the fundamental design is based upon techniques, systems, and even languages that are mostly more than twenty years old (18-20 being about the valid length of a patent.) In practical terms, it's easy to see a potential violation being dealt with by removing code, I doubt that anything that's so integral to the kernel it would cause problems if removed is patented.
I once met the CNN webmaster and he's so busy he doesn't have time to be reprimanded. He's apparently looking forward to a vacation he booked in 2007, where he'll be able to sleep for the first time in 9 years.
This all dates back to the cold war and research done by various scientists and archeologists. Back in 1982, the world was taken by surprise when Soviet archeologists called a press conference and reported they had found a massive grid of copper wires buried under Russia that had been carbon dated back to 1500AD. The Soviets said this was clear evidence the telephone had been invented in Russia, and that Russians had been using a sophisticated telephone network five hundred years previous.
American scientists did similar work and after a lot of research reported in a big press conference in 1983 that they found a large amount of buried fiber optic cable spanning the entire United States and linking to Western Europe. They carbon dated this back to 1200AD, making it clear evidence that the West had had a sophisticated packet-switching fiber-optic network 800 years previous.
The South Africans, then under Apartheid and desperate to shore up its worsening image with the rest of the world, then undertook its own research. For four years, South African archeologists excavated, passing soil samples to the best of their scientists. Finally, in 1987, they excitedly called a press conference. After all this digging, they had found absolutely nothing, there were no cables - copper, fiber-optic, or otherwise - under the ground at all.
Which could only mean one thing, their scientists reported breathlessly: back in 1005, South Africa had the best mobile telephone network the world had ever seen.
(This has been a message from Give an Old Joke a Home. Every year, millions of old jokes go homeless, existing barely on recycled scraps from Dennis Miller and Drew Carey. If you liked this joke, consider making it your own.)
The core of the article was that all engineers share, among other things, two basic disciplinary casts of mind - a respect for measurement and a horror of waste.
Java programmers need not apply then;)
(In case anyone thinks this is flamebait, I'm kind of finding that there's a lack of respect for efficiency and precision in modern computing across the board. I wonder if Chuck Moore would make a good CEO?)
This is easy to defeat: put the water mark on every frame (encoded differently each time, obviously. One way to do this is to add a random salt that changes on each frame and then encrypt the salt plus the identifier using something off the shelf like SHA. That way a mad hacking projectionist can't identify a fixed image to be removed from every frame.)
If the watermark is positioned at a random place on each frame too, and has very little apparent effect on the luminosity of the image, it'll probably not be noticed by the vast majority of cinemagoers. The more consistant quality of digital indeed may be enough to counter the loss of quality from the marks.
I stopped reading after about the fifth or sixth paragraph. Point by point rebuttal? If it's there, it's only reachable after wading through pages of plodding abuse.
FUD stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt", and is named after an IBM sales technique circa 1970 where IBM salespeople would undermine their competitors by promoting plausable arguments as to their competitor's long term viability (and hence ability to support their product) rather than competing on technical merits. In recent years, Microsoft has used FUD, amongst other strategies, against Free Software and Open Source, but some, unaware of the history of the term, have determined it means "anything that I disgree with that's been argued against something I believe in." Hence, if Microsoft argues that GNU/Linux has a higher TCO, Slashbots will leap upon the suggestion as "FUD", when in fact it's actually part of the usual process of arguing merits using frequently subjective criteria.
This guy decides he's going to use that definition, then plods on for paragraph after paragraph about the subject. It's become more important to him to believe that Britannica's argument is "FUD" than it is to address those issues. He insults the intelligence of most readers by creating silly composites of leading people who have said things he doesn't agree with (note - no IBM salespeople!) FUD is, apparently, the ultimate in sin, and by Jegnuses, he's found a sinner!
Meanwhile, those who know what FUD is will cringe while reading this, and those who don't will react with about as much shock and horror as a lesbian in Indonesia would on hearing that an employee of Burger King in Florida used the wrong form to procure a shipment of buns.
Why is it that those in favour of free information have such awful advocates at the moment?
Interestingly, until about a year ago, all Macs came with USB Full Speed (not High Speed), which is the slow variant that Jobs used to make fun of when demonstrating the firewire feature of the iPod.
So this particular decision is going to upset all but the most recent buyers of Macs. Updating their iPods is going to be like wading through syrup.
Pirating, in this context, is illegal copying. (For the benefit of idiots who insist pirating has one definition and one definition only, here's a definition.)
That said, it's still redundant. Copying by itself would have done, as pirating is a subset of copying.
Liberals have never given Clinton a pass on this, but you'd have to so Republican you're swinging from the branches to [tt]hink the Clinton "Smoked but didn't inhale" thing is in the same ballpark as Bush's rampant drug abuse and his refusal to give an honest answer on the issue. What's remarkable is not that liberals consider Clinton's acts not impeachable, but that the same Repugs who claimed that they were give Bush a free pass when it comes to drinking and driving, pot, and cocaine abuse. Clinton never did anything bad enough to get convicted of anything.
Bush did, repeatedly, despite his high up connections.
T-Mobile is a large German company that bought a bunch of mobile operators across the world, including Voicestream (in the US, itself a merger of a bunch of GSM operators, the largest probably being Omnipoint) and one2one in the UK.
Interestingly, T-Mobile (.de) is rumoured to want to get out of the US market, which almost certainly means us poor T-Mobile customer saps are going to have to endure yet another change of name.
Slashdot Mirror
Usually this results in songs that take 5-10% less time to listen to. Excellent stuff!
It's actually because of the increase in obscenity on TV. As the number of off-colour jokes and swearing has increased, so has the murder rate declined. When Janet Jackson had her wardrobe malfunction last year, nobody assaulted or killed anyone for nearly six months.
It's truuuuuuuuue. I tell you.
Little lesson in reality: there are people making money from software right now, in countries without software patents, and who were doing so before software was patentable in countries that have them now. The United States saw the greatest growth in software development before the late eighties.
Arguably, we don't even need many of the incentives that exist today anyway. For example, software copyrights have been proven to be relatively unnecessary, as around 90% of commercial software development is in-house, and open source, with programmers employed by anyone from small groups that need to get something done to hardware manufacturers who need to shift useful boxes, has proven to be an excellent model for the remainder.
Like I said: In software, there already are incentives to create new things. There's no need for patents. To argue otherwise is to argue that programming is not, currently, a viable profession. Millions of employed programmers will tell you otherwise.
If you're not the first person to think of the idea, then you're fucked. It doesn't matter that you thought of the idea yourself, that you got no help from anyone, that you didn't know the idea had been invented and that it had been patented, you're lawsuit bait, and you're going to have to either stop selling whatever it was you were selling, change it radically at much expense to you (which might not be enough), or pay someone else for the privilege of using the work you did.
Patents suck. Patents exist only to create incentive to invent new things, but they come with a price in that they punish those who invent things that have already been invented - which means if something is an obvious solution to a problem, one group can hurt many innocent inventors. In software, there already are incentives to create new things, so there's no need for patents. None whatsoever. You ONLY get the bad side. We need software patents outlawed. We need those who approve of them out of power. Out of power in the US. Out of power in the EU. We need those who lobby for them excerting undue influence on politicians to get them passed jailed. And we need those who register software patents and try to enforce them pilloried and bankrupted as the fucked up opportunists they are.
Forth can be written to be easy to maintain, but only in the same way as C can. Use appropriate names, comment intelligently but not excessively, use standardized formatting and programming conventions. But, by itself, it's not that easy.
I've read the GP a few times, and while I hate to say it given my bias against the excessive use of inappropriate but politically-correct technologies at the moment ("Everything MUST be implemented Object Oriented", "Why use an array when an RDBMS will do the job just as well?" "Oh sure, this quick tool to process some text could be written in 30 minutes by a moderately skilled C programmer, but there's some Python library somewhere that wouldn't be exploited if we did. Much better to Google for half a day for documentation and then spend two hours experimenting with it until we get a program that doesn't actually do the job in a reasonable space of time!"), but I think he was trolling.
Caldera was previously best known for buying Novell/Digital Research's anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft for the numerous abuses Microsoft made against DRDOS. Once Caldera won that one, they spun off what was left of the DRDOS development team in the form of Lineo.
It's fair to say they are, for the most part, an IP litigation company. They've had some good people (good in the sense of not evil) people running them for the times they've been Caldera + Some Company With Something Real For Sale, but they keep returning to a theme, spinning off the companies that do the real work and keeping the lawsuit material.
I think, to be quite honest, it takes the cake to criticise a law you haven't read and have no reason to believe is overbroad for being overbroad or badly worded. Yeah, it might be. Likewise the law on murder might be so overbroad that you can be prosecuted under it for eating beef. But that's not the case, and there's no reason, at this stage, to believe the anti-phishing law is overbroad either. Criticise it when it's actually got something in it to criticise.
I seriously doubt 90% of what you've written to be honest. DOS differed significantly from CP/M - it was clearly influenced by CP/M, and was designed to be largely compatable, but structurally the operating system was different, right down to the process handling. (As an example, CP/M had space for one program in memory at a time, which meant that when you ran a program, the CLI was unloaded, and when the program quit, the CLI would be reloaded as a new program.)
I think Tim deserves a break. He wrote DOS. Every claim otherwise relies upon secret conspiracies between MS and DR that are beyond questionable, they're positively ludicrous.
I'd like to see ISPs obliged to either treat all traffic equally, not banning legal applications, limiting restrictions to actual nuisance causing by their customers (spam, "excessive usage" - with such usage clearly defined and advertised), or else cease to be able to use the word "Internet" in their advertising.
That seems fair to me. It'll probably upset the libertarians, but if someone's going to advertise access to the Internet, let them either provide it fully, or cease advertising that they do.
While open source (and free software) makes up a large proportion of software, it is by no means the total of it. So this isn't terminating a patent right, because the patents will still be enforced against, for example, proprietary software.
1. Software patents will become more and more discredited.
2. Users of operating systems with severe security issues will become more and more handicapped, making security a bigger priority for OS vendors and, perhaps even, promoting alternative systems and discouraging the current monoculture mentality.
I hope so.
The DMCA gives content producers the right to attach "access control mechanisms" to their content and prevent unauthorized parties from producing equipment to access that content. Patent law also prevents manufacturers from implementing certain technologies without a license. Region locking works in that framework indirectly: an ACM, called CSS, is attached to the majority of DVDs. A group called the DVD-CCA licenses CSS ACMs on behalf of content producers who use it. They also license a package of rights to use patented technologies incorporated into DVD players. In order to obtain a license from the DVD-CCA, you have to agree to a contract that includes a provision that you must implement region encoding. If you don't agree to that license, your ability to implement DVD readers without risking a patent lawsuit becomes difficult, and, more importantly, you are breaking US law, criminally, if you produce a DVD player that can play DVDs "protected" with CSS.
Regionless DVD players are produced by people who have a license to produce DVD players that support CSS. They essentially break their contracts, which makes the entire matter civil. Once the DVD-CCA finds out, they can sue for breach and revoke the license of the offending company, but any DVD players produced before the license is revoked are, essentially, legal.
What does this mean in this context? Well, the situation is entirely different.
Instead of DVD manufacturers obtaining licenses under contracts that they then breach, they're bound by the FCC's rulemaking from day 1. This means that if they breach the FCC's rules, they're in trouble, in a sense, immediately. They can't just produce TVs that violate the law until the FCC wakes them up and revokes a license, as they would with DVD players and the DVD-CCA, the moment the FCC finds out they're producing "illegal" TVs, they can be fined for each one.
So, if the High Court upholds the right of the FCC to enforce a broadcast flag, don't hold out hope that there'll be little hidden hacks sneaked in by TV manufacturers to disable it. It will not happen. TV manufacturers will, by and large, have to obey this rule.
THis is just more evidence that the MPAA and Micro$oft are just out to screw the consumer vis they want us to pay more and more for their so-called "music" which is all Bri[tt]ney $Pears rubbish which they play over and over again on their network of Clearchannel radio stations thanks to payola IE LEGALIZED BRIBERY forcing everyone to download the music from the Internet using services like Kazaa and Morpheus anyway, whereas if the music industry eg the MPAA would just give music away on DRM-less MP3s at 384kbps (the MINIMUM I will accept, 314kbps AAC is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE, you can really hear the difference on top-end Sony equipment) and if they'd make the music actually WORTH LISTENING TO then they would be "getting it" and working in the new economy not the old economy. This is why personally I download all my music from dodgymp3s.ru where you pay a penny a megabyte which is much fairer because the money goes to the artists according to the website, well the bit left over after taxes and expenses and protection racket fees, rather than to the money grabbing record industry execs who spend all their money on cocaine and DVDs.
Are you all with me? Yeah! Fight the fat cat record execs!
That said, the patentability of the majority of the technologies used by the Linux kernel itself strikes me as difficult, given the fundamental design is based upon techniques, systems, and even languages that are mostly more than twenty years old (18-20 being about the valid length of a patent.) In practical terms, it's easy to see a potential violation being dealt with by removing code, I doubt that anything that's so integral to the kernel it would cause problems if removed is patented.
I once met the CNN webmaster and he's so busy he doesn't have time to be reprimanded. He's apparently looking forward to a vacation he booked in 2007, where he'll be able to sleep for the first time in 9 years.
This all dates back to the cold war and research done by various scientists and archeologists. Back in 1982, the world was taken by surprise when Soviet archeologists called a press conference and reported they had found a massive grid of copper wires buried under Russia that had been carbon dated back to 1500AD. The Soviets said this was clear evidence the telephone had been invented in Russia, and that Russians had been using a sophisticated telephone network five hundred years previous.
American scientists did similar work and after a lot of research reported in a big press conference in 1983 that they found a large amount of buried fiber optic cable spanning the entire United States and linking to Western Europe. They carbon dated this back to 1200AD, making it clear evidence that the West had had a sophisticated packet-switching fiber-optic network 800 years previous.
The South Africans, then under Apartheid and desperate to shore up its worsening image with the rest of the world, then undertook its own research. For four years, South African archeologists excavated, passing soil samples to the best of their scientists. Finally, in 1987, they excitedly called a press conference. After all this digging, they had found absolutely nothing, there were no cables - copper, fiber-optic, or otherwise - under the ground at all.
Which could only mean one thing, their scientists reported breathlessly: back in 1005, South Africa had the best mobile telephone network the world had ever seen.
(This has been a message from Give an Old Joke a Home. Every year, millions of old jokes go homeless, existing barely on recycled scraps from Dennis Miller and Drew Carey. If you liked this joke, consider making it your own.)
(In case anyone thinks this is flamebait, I'm kind of finding that there's a lack of respect for efficiency and precision in modern computing across the board. I wonder if Chuck Moore would make a good CEO?)
If the watermark is positioned at a random place on each frame too, and has very little apparent effect on the luminosity of the image, it'll probably not be noticed by the vast majority of cinemagoers. The more consistant quality of digital indeed may be enough to counter the loss of quality from the marks.
FUD stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt", and is named after an IBM sales technique circa 1970 where IBM salespeople would undermine their competitors by promoting plausable arguments as to their competitor's long term viability (and hence ability to support their product) rather than competing on technical merits. In recent years, Microsoft has used FUD, amongst other strategies, against Free Software and Open Source, but some, unaware of the history of the term, have determined it means "anything that I disgree with that's been argued against something I believe in." Hence, if Microsoft argues that GNU/Linux has a higher TCO, Slashbots will leap upon the suggestion as "FUD", when in fact it's actually part of the usual process of arguing merits using frequently subjective criteria.
This guy decides he's going to use that definition, then plods on for paragraph after paragraph about the subject. It's become more important to him to believe that Britannica's argument is "FUD" than it is to address those issues. He insults the intelligence of most readers by creating silly composites of leading people who have said things he doesn't agree with (note - no IBM salespeople!) FUD is, apparently, the ultimate in sin, and by Jegnuses, he's found a sinner!
Meanwhile, those who know what FUD is will cringe while reading this, and those who don't will react with about as much shock and horror as a lesbian in Indonesia would on hearing that an employee of Burger King in Florida used the wrong form to procure a shipment of buns.
Why is it that those in favour of free information have such awful advocates at the moment?
So this particular decision is going to upset all but the most recent buyers of Macs. Updating their iPods is going to be like wading through syrup.
That said, it's still redundant. Copying by itself would have done, as pirating is a subset of copying.
Correct?
Liberals have never given Clinton a pass on this, but you'd have to so Republican you're swinging from the branches to [tt]hink the Clinton "Smoked but didn't inhale" thing is in the same ballpark as Bush's rampant drug abuse and his refusal to give an honest answer on the issue. What's remarkable is not that liberals consider Clinton's acts not impeachable, but that the same Repugs who claimed that they were give Bush a free pass when it comes to drinking and driving, pot, and cocaine abuse. Clinton never did anything bad enough to get convicted of anything.
Bush did, repeatedly, despite his high up connections.
Interestingly, T-Mobile (.de) is rumoured to want to get out of the US market, which almost certainly means us poor T-Mobile customer saps are going to have to endure yet another change of name.