You know, I never thought about it before... but why is it necessary to compare "rape" and "murder" and decide which of the two are worse? We're not comparing "rape" and "murder" here. We're comparing "pictures of rape" with "organized mass-killing campaigns". The notion that they are in any way equivalent is retarded.
I'm not prepared to agree that killing N people is better or worse than raping N people,... Hard to call that one, I tell you. Dead people are fucking dead. Raped people are INJURED. You are saying you'd rather be KILLED than INJURED. Frankly, you're just lying about this. The only people that would rather be killed than raped are extremely religious people (Muslims in particular) who believe that the rape "soils" the soul somehow. This belief is stupid, but believers often commit suicide rather than risk rape.
First, let's clarify that this is not a legal issue (worried about prosecution for having child porn on the PC) but a moral issue about not wanting to (in theory) contribute to the distribution of pornography.
I would argue that most people accept these kinds of moral compromises all the time (and I acknowledge it is a moral compromise). I'm sure, in theory, all sorts of "objectionable" content like child pornography, white power rhetoric, jihadi videos, Chinese propaganda, etc. are distributed through Freenet and so may or may not touch your node and reside on your computer. This is a basic part of how Freenet works and is unavoidable.
But I'd argue that you're special casing Freenet. I'd draw an analogy to taxes. You might not agree with all of the ways your tax dollars are spent, but you wouldn't say that it's MORALLY WRONG to pay your taxes would you? That's because your taxes are also used to pay for services and programs you agree with.
Or how about cable tv? You might object to some of the content on your cable operator, but not ALL of it. Do you refuse to pay your cable bill or use cable TV because you object to some of the content and paying your bill supports that?
Or how about the postal service? I'm sure child porn is sent through the USPS. Should you refuse to us the USPS because of that? What about email?
You can extend this argument to ANY media because some percentage of content is "bad" in some people's eyes. There are still book burnings.
What you're doing is called "throwing out the baby with the bathwater".
Right, ever heard of Ambrosia Software? No, but I looked at their website ad it looks like they make a handful of shareware games, most of which are old Windows ports. Pretty much exactly what I said.
Let me guess, you don't even have a Mac? I had an iBook for a while. I did not use it for games.
The Mac isn't meant to be a gaming platform... I certainly don't see how that'd prove anything about their capability to make a handheld console. Apple's inability to court game developers, which is the most important factor in selling any console, has been proven repeatedly. As I said, unless Apple is willing to throw millions at game developers they won't be doing anything for the iPhone. The only games announced for the iPhone are ports of "standard" cellphone games. The SDK they released does not have many game-specific features, and I've heard nothing about Apple running game developer events and bribing developers with cash and hardware (which is EXPECTED at this level).
Frankly, the whole idea of an iPhone as games console is retarded. The iPhone is very expensive and the markets are totally different. Kids are not going to be playing Pokemon on the iPhone. Games never took off on the N-Gage and Nokia spent a lot more effort courting developers.
Many developers have being developing for the Mac for years and show no sign of letting up. The sales figures tell a different story. Virtually no original games are made for the Mac, they get a handful of ports from the PC that sell poorly. I have friends that work at Aspyr and I can assure you that none of them would say that Mac gaming is "thriving". The only game in the past 5 years that has sold really well on MacOS is World of Warcraft.
"Success" means a judgment that says you don't have to pay the rest of your service. Is that what you want?
One thing that doesn't seem to be clear is that cable and phone companies are REGULATED, and those regulations basically require them to provide service to anyone. The only really valid reason to cut a phone or cable line is refusal to pay.
So your claim would be that they are violating anti-discrimination regulations covering public utilities and that they HAVE to provide you service if you are willing to pay. Since I know for a fact spammers have won cases like this, I believe it would work.
This seems very unlikely given the stated 30% figure for any other commercial application, you figure there's no way a large company would give up more than that percentage nor would Apple try and force that out of someone like EA. I'm unsure as to the exact percentage, it very well might have been 30%. According to my friend EA considered that figure excessive for a mobile phone game. The iPhone version is the same as every other mobile phone version with additional features.
We'll see in June. Are you talking about Spore or the character creator? Spore isn't coming out until September.
I think one of the factors leading to the conflict was the communist Chinese giving a million rifles, ammo, and other weapons to the NVA free of charge, essentially a wink and a nod to "go get em". The French were fighting the NVA long before the US got officially involved. And WE (and the French) didn't give weapons to the puppet pro-Western government? The whole reason the US got involved is because the puppet SVA troops were unpopular, outnumbered, and ran at the first sign of trouble because their only loyalty was to the American dollar. The Vietcong/NVA enjoyed vastly more popular support. Hell, the VC got a lot of their weapons from the SVA who sold or gave them away.
You can argue that it was wrong for the US to install a democracy-friendly puppet government in south Viet-Nam, but you would be hypocritical to simultaneously ignore the communist-backed puppet government of north Viet-Nam. The puppet government of South Vietnam was not "democracy-friendly" it was a corrupt, US-appointed dictatorship with no popular support whatsoever. Like it or not, the north Vietnamese government DID have popular support. The Vietnamese broke with the Chinese communists because they wouldn't toe the line, remember?
My original point though, that the US was not war mongering and did not start the war, is still valid. The US encouraged the conflict by giving weapons to the losing side and then intervening with bombs and troops when that didn't work. If it wasn't for the US, the conflict would have been over in 1960 instead of 1975. Extending the conflict killed millions of Vietnamese but made millions for US arms manufacturers. If that's not "warmongering", I don't know what is.
What we've been saying for a long time is that the Exchange feature set is just plain wrong for most organizations. Most of those organizations disagree with you. IME, most organizations that have ripped out Exchange ended up going back. I while ago I consulted with MS' biggest competitor to bring Exchange back in after they switched to an in-house solution that didn't work. I'm switched other customers from solutions like OpenMail, Sun Messaging Server, to Exchange. Generally, the lack of seamless integration with Active Directory is what does it.
The fact is, I really haven't run into an organization that DOESN'T want Windows+Exchange. As far s I can tell, it's only the cost that drives anyone away. If Exchange were free there would basically be NO other groupware servers in most businesses. A few FOSS zealots might not use it, but that's it.
If you want, I can carry on about all the missing features in Citadel. Where is the BlackBerry plugin? Where is the IM plugin? Where are the anti-virus plugins? Where is the document collaboration? How do I use a real database? Where are the automated backup tools? How do I cluster Citadel? Which Winows desktop clients work absolutely perfectly with Citadel? and most importantly, Where can I hire a consultant that will do all this for me?
By the way, it would be reckless to claim that Citadel "depends on" IMAP. IMAP is merely one of the many protocols and services it offers. What mail protocols do you offer other than POP3 and IMAP? Let's assume for the moment that you rip out these protocols... what exactly can you do with the Citadel system now? I know you have the web client, but does that use HTTP to transfer mail?
Actually, can you see any reason why Apple shouldn't make a high-end $350-400 handheld console? Cause I can't, I just don't see how they could fail on this one. Game developers expect to have their hands held by the platform vendor. Apple has a long and terrible history of screwing developers, especially game developers. Apple will have to throw large sums of money at EA and the other big game vendors to get them to sign up after Apple's previous disasters.
This is exactly what Sony does. If Apple got into the market Nintendo and Sony WOULD pay the game vendors not to use Apple, so Apple's going to have to fork out huge sums of cash to compete. I don't see Steve Jobs going billions into the red on this. The shareholders would skin him alive.
According to my buddy at EA, Spore on the iPhone is dead. Basically, Apple told them they had to sell it through iTunes (and iTunes only) and wanted 1/2 the revenue. This is apparently going to be the "standard deal" for commercial apps on the iPhone. So no commercial apps, meaning no games on the iPhone.
Not sure where you are coming from on this but the Apple I know seeds development versions of OS X Not in the early days at least. I was in the Apple Developer Program and we weren't told shit about new OSX releases. This was back in 1999-2001.
And they issue release notes detailing exactly what has changed. Again, this must be new. Back in the day we got a list of bugs fixed, but no descriptions of those bugs or what was actually changed. Changes to Carbon were completely undocumented. I had to track down the developers in person and beg them for info.
I would also point out that we experienced the exact opposite from Microsoft. The developer program was cheap, everything was documented (and not filled with bugs), and we could actually get support for DirectX to the point that we got MS engineers to write bits of code for us.
FWIW, Sun was basically the same as Apple in terms of support.
Hating Jews might be religious, but hating the children and relatives of Jews is racial, even if Jews aren't a tidy race. Sorry, it's not. It's religious. If you believe that religion is "genetically transmitted" and you discriminate against the children of Jews on that basis you're not a racist, you're just an idiot. What would you say if I killed someone because his father was a Mormon? Would you call that "racial" reasons?
And you don't understand my key point: NOBODY can tell if someone is Jewish unless they ACT Jewish. If the children you describe do not in any way act Jewish it's difficult for me to believe that anyone would actually discriminate against them as Jews because the anti-Jew people CAN'T TELL. There have been a number of "racially" Jewish Nazis and neo-Nazis because their fellows (and sometimes, they themselves) were not aware that they were "Jewish".
Right up until the point when you plugged in a USB device. MacOS 9 didn't have a native USB stack, so you had to install a separate extension for each peripheral, and they often conflicted with each other.
For example, On my brand new iMac I plugged in a MacAlly 2-button mouse and a MacAlly USB floppy drive, loaded the extensions, and now had a system that wouldn't boot because of an extension conflict. From that point on, literally every USB device I plugged into the iMac caused an extension conflict. The exact same situation occurred with the iBook. I don't know what Apple's tech support had to say about this because they refused to talk to me about it, even when I showed up in person with an appointment (that was for "developer support" and apparently the fact USB didn't work wasn't a "developer support" problem).
The shockingly bad tech support my company got from Apple, even though we were down the street from the HQ and we paid thousands of dollars for support, has terribly burned me on Apple. They completely fucked us on the OSX transition, refusing to give us ANY support on OSX until it launched and demanding separate money for developer support and SDK access. When we coughed up the money they gave us access to the "documentation" and the SDK, but no actual support whatsoever. We worked with Carbon for about 3 months and then gave up.
The ad can say whatever it wants to say. Read your contract and tell us what it says Which, as you pointed out, is exactly the wrong approach.
There is almost nothing a consumer can do in court to seek damages from this contract because the only things the company can do that constitute breach are (1.) fail to take your payment or (2.) fail to deliver a valuable subscription. Pretty much correct, which is why as a plaintiff you ignore the contract completely and make a claim of "deceptive advertising" or even better, "discrimination". Say they cut you off because you're black/a woman/gay/Mormon/whatever. You're MUCH more likely to succeed on these grounds.
My state has a "Doctrine of Reasonable Expectations" which would allow a jury to consider what constitutes a reasonable subscription to a cable / internet service. Good luck seating a jury who thinks 250GB isn't a reasonable cap at the present time. Good luck finding a jury that has any idea what a "250GB monthly cap" means. But I bet they understand the meaning of "Unlimited". Of course, a case like this will NEVER get before a jury, unless the plaintiff has $10,000 in fees and unlimited free time to piss away on it.
Here Comcast is (possibly) going to announce a change in their service plan so it does not say unlimited -exactly what you seem to want. No, that's NOT what they're proposing. The are proposing to add caps to all customers on a service they previously advertised, and will continue to advertise, as unlimited.
There is also a massive anti-trust violation going on here. The reason they want to impose caps is not "music piracy" or whatever other bullshit reason they've come up with. It's because video distributed over the Internet (YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, etc.) has become a MAJOR competitor to their video services (especially Pay-Per-View) and they don't want the competition. You might notice that the phone companies aren't pulling this same shit because THEY DON'T SELL VIDEO. Of course, the phone companies DO want QoS for their IP phone services, which just about every thinks is reasonable.
This is also probably a violation of their contracts to provide service with cities. That's a big reason they're pushing to have these contracts national, it's a lot easier to control Congress than hundreds of city councils.
Feel lucky. Almost ISPs now have clauses in their contract that allows them to terminate service on a whim, and there is no law that requires them to provide you with service. This isn't true, at least in the US.
It's complicated, but cable and phone companies are required to provide "nondiscriminatory" access to their services. You can sue them for cutting you off for ANY reason other than lack of payment. A number of spammers have done this successfully.
How do you do it? Ignore any messages they send you about cutting off the service and keep sending in checks. They won't (immediately) send them back. Then file in small claims court claiming they're stealing from you (by taking your money and not giving you service) and "discriminating" against you based on some protected group (I'm black, I'm Mormon, I'm a woman, whatever). Be sure to tack on another $1000 for the company wasting your time.
9/10 the company won't bother to send anyone and you'll win a default judgment. You might not get your service turned back on, but you'll get some money. If they do send someone, you'll almost certainly lose as their lawyer will whip out the terms of service and claim you violated them and THAT'S why your service was cut (and since that's almost certainly true, he'll win).
Worst case scenario: You're out a $50 filing fee and some time.
Over the years, Apple has done everything short of spitting in the face of game developers.
Yes, there will be mobile games for the iPhone. I expect to see a Bejeweled port in short order. No, the iPhone will not be the next handheld gaming device a la Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, etc. It's capabilities will be similar to Windows Mobile, with fewer games. All development will be done by third parties who Apple will do nothing to encourage and whom Apple will end up screwing over (because they always screw over the developers). i.e. "We've just released the mandatory iPhone update X, which breaks all 3rd-party apps, and we didn't bother to tell developers this would happen, and no, we won't tell you what we changed to make it easy to fix your apps. We hate you."
No, that's not correct. It does "hurt the pirates" and for the good schemes it can be statistically proven to be true. The developers of, I think Heros, published some very interesting statistics on their experience with StarForce if you want to find the figures I'm thinking of, but I've seen similar stories repeated by other game devs. What the fuck is this BS? How do you even begin to gather statistics of the number of copies of a pirated game "in the wild"? What you're talking about is claims about how long it takes for cracks to appear "in the wild" for various games.
The success of a PC video game DRM system is the time-to-crack. For good schemes this can be measured in months. For bad schemes it can be measured in days, or even be negative. Which is bullshit. There is no DRM system that has lasted longer than 30 days for popular games. Most games are cracked in less than 3 and this number is going down, not up.
The only anti-piracy measure that works consistently is server logins for multiplayer games. And even then, players can use alternative servers. Bnetd has been mentioned, I'd also mention all the pirate World of Warcraft servers out there.
So if your DRM scheme holds up 6 months, that's 6 months with no piracy. Considering this DRM scheme does not exist and WILL NOT exist, this doesn't strike me as a good argument for DRM.
Do you really think they pay for expensive DRM systems over and over again if it loses them money? They're not expensive. Most DRM systems are made by fly-by-night Russian companies that charge a relative pittance because:
A) Their products do not work.
and
C) They are frequently stiffed by game companies BECAUSE their products don't work. The less the charge the less likely they're going to be stiffed.
It's well understood in the industry that DRM vendors are con artists.
It's well understood in the industry that the DRM cracking problem comes from people who just don't want to pay for the game. Very few are pure hearted people who conscientiously want to make backups of their disks. And they determine this HOW exactly? Psychic powers?
(I've read a game developer blog where they searched for torrents of their game for XBox 360 vs PC and the difference in number of torrents/downloaders was huge). And this proves what exactly? Most pirated copies of games are burned and sold on the street. The PS3 has the lowest level of piracy for this reason (Blu-Ray blanks are expensive). This is why the GameCube used a weird disc format. There are also a order of magnitude more PC users than 360 users worldwide. What you are saying might be true of the USA, but the US IS NOT THE BIG MARKET FOR PIRACY. Eastern Europe, India, and China are.
Epic and ID have both said publically that the reason they've moved towards cross-platform (console) gaming is that they have a serious piracy problem on the PC platform. Lies. The reason they're moving to the consoles is to increase sales and because development is easier on the consoles. Given the very high cost of game development, developers want to develop for as many platforms as practical to increase sales. Piracy has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Of these, which platform is the easiest to pirate? PC, Xbox 360, PS3, the Wii
Answer: The Wii. Perfectly working modchips were available at launch for $15, are easy to install, and work with online games. None of this was true with the 360 and PS3, and lots of PC games are online (like World of Warcraft) which makes cracking difficult. Despite this, the Wii is the best selling console and has the best selling games.
I'd argue that piracy is actually helping the PC as a platform because it's encouraging game development in Eastern Europe (for various reasons PCs are more popular for gaming than consoles in much of Europe).
That wasn't the only evidence, but it is *damning*. That pretty much was the only evidence. Evidence that Hans was fighting with his wife wasn't "evidence" of anything.
The case was/is entirely circumstantial. Hans was doing things that "a guilty person would do" and he was unable to offer up a decent explanation of his actions.
The case is similar to the Scott Peterson case except in that case there was MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more evidence against Peterson.
I believe that Hans Reiser is probably guilty, and I probably would have voted to convict him, but the case against him was very weak. I would not be very surprised if his wife turned up in Russia.
He destroyed evidence that was named in a warrant. If he's not the killer, his actions have led to a killer going free. That alone deserves life in prison. This is nonsense. If he's not the killer, what would examining the interior of Hans' car have told them? The appropriate charge here is "destruction of evidence", not murder. It's just that STRATEGICALLY it's more useful to apply this argument as "proof" he was the killer.
As others have pointed out, ext4 offers undelete and online defrag, features users have wanted for many years. However, I think a better case can be made to move the the extremely stable XFS file system rather than mess with the buggy ext4. XFS has more features anyway. The only really credible competitor seems to be ZFS.
Once ext4 is more stable everyone should move to it (or, I would argue, XFS).
It's racial discrimination even if they can't tell, but would discriminate if they could. That's not "racial" discrimination, it's STUPIDITY. The point am trying to drive home is that the Nazis were simply wrong. There are no "racial" differences between German Christians and German Jews. Hating Jews for being Jews isn't racism, it's RELIGIOUS discrimination.
So sorry, but you're wrong. Try to use the standard meanings of words. I'm sorry, but Wikipedia is wrong. "Agnostic Jew" is a contradiction in terms, like "atheist Christian", or "Buddhist Satanist". It only makes sense if you accept "Jewish" as a "race", and Jews aren't a race.
Find another Zeppelin. Find another Hagar. Find another Pink Floyd. Find another Stones. Find another Chuck Berry. Find another Alice in Chains. Some of us are glad that we've moved on from hair metal and arena rock.
You're also forgetting about all the incredible shit that was released during the 1970's. Way more people bought Saturday Night Fever than any Floyd album.
The law schools have a chance to fight back and have the resources to put up a decent struggle. And many students attending law schools have parents with money and/or connections. Accept that they don't. Ever. No university has yet been willing to spend the money required to fight the RIAA. The record labels are willing to spend MILLIONS on such cases because (in the USA) the big labels are rapidly evolving into lawsuit engines because of "Pinto" calculations. Unless those parents are willing to put up $100K+ simply to prove a point, this isn't happening.
What are "Pinto" calculations? Ford famously calculated that the price of lawsuits over the exploding Pintos did not exceed the cost of fixing the exploding Pintos, therefore they did not fix the Pintos. The RIAA has calculated the cost of all the lawsuits against users (and it's a lot of money) does not exceed the losses they would suffer from switching to online music. As others have pointed out, out of the $15 you're charged for a full CD album about $12 is profit. Since most online buyers would only buy a few tracks (say 3) at $0.99 off a given album that would represent a massive loss of profits. That's why we don't have CD singles either.
So you're saying that during the 80's and 90's the music was just so good that people wouldn't steal it if they had the chance? Wrong, Record stores (back when such things existed) had very significant losses from theft. And you and everyone you've ever met has made analog copies of CDs. Mix tapes, etc. The moment CD recorders became widely available CD dupes started to appear everywhere. It would've happened much sooner but the RIAA killed consumer DAT for exactly this reason.
If the music is as bad as you say, why do people want to steal it? Because stealing pop music helps artists and hurts the big labels.
Itunes has proven that many people in fact will pay for todays music, ITunes has proven that if you make a very popular MP3 player that forces people to use a proprietary sandbox to handle your music that pushes you towards paid music downloads some small fraction of users will buy DRM-encumbered downloads. 80-90% of music on most iPods is pirated. Steve Jobs himself has said that paid downloads are extremely unpopular.
This means that for servers and infrastructure, paid support is a fucking joke. This bodes poorly for the Open Source companies that want to make money from providing support, but that's just how it is. You seem to be dealing with the wrong companies. My company is willing to do custom development for customers if they're willing to pay for it and our support organization knows more about the product than any customer ever could. So our support is generally excellent. It's also fairly expensive. These things are closely connected.
The time has past when you can expect even marginally decent free technical support. If you want support in the enterprise you're going to have to pay through the nose for it. MS actually isn't too bad in this regard, at least compared to Sun, Oracle, Novell, and many Linux vendors.
We use Sharepoint 2007 at work for our websites, and the licensing ain't cheap. Over $50,000 for each internet-facing server, another $20k for SQL 2005, and a bit of change for Windows licenses to run the servers and AD (plus additional licensing for the authoring environment). But that money's just a drop in the bucket compared to the money spent on developers to customize it and training of staff. So stop pissing and moaning and make your own custom portal, a Wiki, use Remedy, Websphere, or one of the many other document management solutions/web portals out there. Of course, none of that has the features of Sharepoint. Personally, I wouldn't use Sharepoint as a customer-facing web solution (it shines mostly in an AD environment) but you might have a specific need.
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First, let's clarify that this is not a legal issue (worried about prosecution for having child porn on the PC) but a moral issue about not wanting to (in theory) contribute to the distribution of pornography.
I would argue that most people accept these kinds of moral compromises all the time (and I acknowledge it is a moral compromise). I'm sure, in theory, all sorts of "objectionable" content like child pornography, white power rhetoric, jihadi videos, Chinese propaganda, etc. are distributed through Freenet and so may or may not touch your node and reside on your computer. This is a basic part of how Freenet works and is unavoidable.
But I'd argue that you're special casing Freenet. I'd draw an analogy to taxes. You might not agree with all of the ways your tax dollars are spent, but you wouldn't say that it's MORALLY WRONG to pay your taxes would you? That's because your taxes are also used to pay for services and programs you agree with.
Or how about cable tv? You might object to some of the content on your cable operator, but not ALL of it. Do you refuse to pay your cable bill or use cable TV because you object to some of the content and paying your bill supports that?
Or how about the postal service? I'm sure child porn is sent through the USPS. Should you refuse to us the USPS because of that? What about email?
You can extend this argument to ANY media because some percentage of content is "bad" in some people's eyes. There are still book burnings.
What you're doing is called "throwing out the baby with the bathwater".
Frankly, the whole idea of an iPhone as games console is retarded. The iPhone is very expensive and the markets are totally different. Kids are not going to be playing Pokemon on the iPhone. Games never took off on the N-Gage and Nokia spent a lot more effort courting developers.
One thing that doesn't seem to be clear is that cable and phone companies are REGULATED, and those regulations basically require them to provide service to anyone. The only really valid reason to cut a phone or cable line is refusal to pay.
So your claim would be that they are violating anti-discrimination regulations covering public utilities and that they HAVE to provide you service if you are willing to pay. Since I know for a fact spammers have won cases like this, I believe it would work.
The fact is, I really haven't run into an organization that DOESN'T want Windows+Exchange. As far s I can tell, it's only the cost that drives anyone away. If Exchange were free there would basically be NO other groupware servers in most businesses. A few FOSS zealots might not use it, but that's it.
If you want, I can carry on about all the missing features in Citadel. Where is the BlackBerry plugin? Where is the IM plugin? Where are the anti-virus plugins? Where is the document collaboration? How do I use a real database? Where are the automated backup tools? How do I cluster Citadel? Which Winows desktop clients work absolutely perfectly with Citadel? and most importantly, Where can I hire a consultant that will do all this for me? By the way, it would be reckless to claim that Citadel "depends on" IMAP. IMAP is merely one of the many protocols and services it offers. What mail protocols do you offer other than POP3 and IMAP? Let's assume for the moment that you rip out these protocols... what exactly can you do with the Citadel system now? I know you have the web client, but does that use HTTP to transfer mail?
This is exactly what Sony does. If Apple got into the market Nintendo and Sony WOULD pay the game vendors not to use Apple, so Apple's going to have to fork out huge sums of cash to compete. I don't see Steve Jobs going billions into the red on this. The shareholders would skin him alive.
I would also point out that we experienced the exact opposite from Microsoft. The developer program was cheap, everything was documented (and not filled with bugs), and we could actually get support for DirectX to the point that we got MS engineers to write bits of code for us.
FWIW, Sun was basically the same as Apple in terms of support.
What would you say if I killed someone because his father was a Mormon? Would you call that "racial" reasons?
And you don't understand my key point: NOBODY can tell if someone is Jewish unless they ACT Jewish. If the children you describe do not in any way act Jewish it's difficult for me to believe that anyone would actually discriminate against them as Jews because the anti-Jew people CAN'T TELL. There have been a number of "racially" Jewish Nazis and neo-Nazis because their fellows (and sometimes, they themselves) were not aware that they were "Jewish".
Right up until the point when you plugged in a USB device. MacOS 9 didn't have a native USB stack, so you had to install a separate extension for each peripheral, and they often conflicted with each other.
For example, On my brand new iMac I plugged in a MacAlly 2-button mouse and a MacAlly USB floppy drive, loaded the extensions, and now had a system that wouldn't boot because of an extension conflict. From that point on, literally every USB device I plugged into the iMac caused an extension conflict. The exact same situation occurred with the iBook. I don't know what Apple's tech support had to say about this because they refused to talk to me about it, even when I showed up in person with an appointment (that was for "developer support" and apparently the fact USB didn't work wasn't a "developer support" problem).
The shockingly bad tech support my company got from Apple, even though we were down the street from the HQ and we paid thousands of dollars for support, has terribly burned me on Apple. They completely fucked us on the OSX transition, refusing to give us ANY support on OSX until it launched and demanding separate money for developer support and SDK access. When we coughed up the money they gave us access to the "documentation" and the SDK, but no actual support whatsoever. We worked with Carbon for about 3 months and then gave up.
There is also a massive anti-trust violation going on here. The reason they want to impose caps is not "music piracy" or whatever other bullshit reason they've come up with. It's because video distributed over the Internet (YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, etc.) has become a MAJOR competitor to their video services (especially Pay-Per-View) and they don't want the competition. You might notice that the phone companies aren't pulling this same shit because THEY DON'T SELL VIDEO. Of course, the phone companies DO want QoS for their IP phone services, which just about every thinks is reasonable.
This is also probably a violation of their contracts to provide service with cities. That's a big reason they're pushing to have these contracts national, it's a lot easier to control Congress than hundreds of city councils.
It's complicated, but cable and phone companies are required to provide "nondiscriminatory" access to their services. You can sue them for cutting you off for ANY reason other than lack of payment. A number of spammers have done this successfully.
How do you do it? Ignore any messages they send you about cutting off the service and keep sending in checks. They won't (immediately) send them back. Then file in small claims court claiming they're stealing from you (by taking your money and not giving you service) and "discriminating" against you based on some protected group (I'm black, I'm Mormon, I'm a woman, whatever). Be sure to tack on another $1000 for the company wasting your time.
9/10 the company won't bother to send anyone and you'll win a default judgment. You might not get your service turned back on, but you'll get some money. If they do send someone, you'll almost certainly lose as their lawyer will whip out the terms of service and claim you violated them and THAT'S why your service was cut (and since that's almost certainly true, he'll win).
Worst case scenario: You're out a $50 filing fee and some time.
Over the years, Apple has done everything short of spitting in the face of game developers.
Yes, there will be mobile games for the iPhone. I expect to see a Bejeweled port in short order. No, the iPhone will not be the next handheld gaming device a la Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, etc. It's capabilities will be similar to Windows Mobile, with fewer games. All development will be done by third parties who Apple will do nothing to encourage and whom Apple will end up screwing over (because they always screw over the developers). i.e. "We've just released the mandatory iPhone update X, which breaks all 3rd-party apps, and we didn't bother to tell developers this would happen, and no, we won't tell you what we changed to make it easy to fix your apps. We hate you."
The only anti-piracy measure that works consistently is server logins for multiplayer games. And even then, players can use alternative servers. Bnetd has been mentioned, I'd also mention all the pirate World of Warcraft servers out there. So if your DRM scheme holds up 6 months, that's 6 months with no piracy. Considering this DRM scheme does not exist and WILL NOT exist, this doesn't strike me as a good argument for DRM. Do you really think they pay for expensive DRM systems over and over again if it loses them money? They're not expensive. Most DRM systems are made by fly-by-night Russian companies that charge a relative pittance because:
A) Their products do not work.
and
C) They are frequently stiffed by game companies BECAUSE their products don't work. The less the charge the less likely they're going to be stiffed.
It's well understood in the industry that DRM vendors are con artists. It's well understood in the industry that the DRM cracking problem comes from people who just don't want to pay for the game. Very few are pure hearted people who conscientiously want to make backups of their disks. And they determine this HOW exactly? Psychic powers? (I've read a game developer blog where they searched for torrents of their game for XBox 360 vs PC and the difference in number of torrents/downloaders was huge). And this proves what exactly? Most pirated copies of games are burned and sold on the street. The PS3 has the lowest level of piracy for this reason (Blu-Ray blanks are expensive). This is why the GameCube used a weird disc format. There are also a order of magnitude more PC users than 360 users worldwide. What you are saying might be true of the USA, but the US IS NOT THE BIG MARKET FOR PIRACY. Eastern Europe, India, and China are.
Of these, which platform is the easiest to pirate? PC, Xbox 360, PS3, the Wii
Answer: The Wii. Perfectly working modchips were available at launch for $15, are easy to install, and work with online games. None of this was true with the 360 and PS3, and lots of PC games are online (like World of Warcraft) which makes cracking difficult. Despite this, the Wii is the best selling console and has the best selling games.
I'd argue that piracy is actually helping the PC as a platform because it's encouraging game development in Eastern Europe (for various reasons PCs are more popular for gaming than consoles in much of Europe).
The case was/is entirely circumstantial. Hans was doing things that "a guilty person would do" and he was unable to offer up a decent explanation of his actions.
The case is similar to the Scott Peterson case except in that case there was MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more evidence against Peterson.
I believe that Hans Reiser is probably guilty, and I probably would have voted to convict him, but the case against him was very weak. I would not be very surprised if his wife turned up in Russia. He destroyed evidence that was named in a warrant. If he's not the killer,
his actions have led to a killer going free. That alone deserves life in prison. This is nonsense. If he's not the killer, what would examining the interior of Hans' car have told them? The appropriate charge here is "destruction of evidence", not murder. It's just that STRATEGICALLY it's more useful to apply this argument as "proof" he was the killer.
As others have pointed out, ext4 offers undelete and online defrag, features users have wanted for many years. However, I think a better case can be made to move the the extremely stable XFS file system rather than mess with the buggy ext4. XFS has more features anyway. The only really credible competitor seems to be ZFS.
Once ext4 is more stable everyone should move to it (or, I would argue, XFS).
You're also forgetting about all the incredible shit that was released during the 1970's. Way more people bought Saturday Night Fever than any Floyd album.
What are "Pinto" calculations? Ford famously calculated that the price of lawsuits over the exploding Pintos did not exceed the cost of fixing the exploding Pintos, therefore they did not fix the Pintos. The RIAA has calculated the cost of all the lawsuits against users (and it's a lot of money) does not exceed the losses they would suffer from switching to online music. As others have pointed out, out of the $15 you're charged for a full CD album about $12 is profit. Since most online buyers would only buy a few tracks (say 3) at $0.99 off a given album that would represent a massive loss of profits. That's why we don't have CD singles either.
The time has past when you can expect even marginally decent free technical support. If you want support in the enterprise you're going to have to pay through the nose for it. MS actually isn't too bad in this regard, at least compared to Sun, Oracle, Novell, and many Linux vendors. We use Sharepoint 2007 at work for our websites, and the licensing ain't cheap. Over $50,000 for each internet-facing server, another $20k for SQL 2005, and a bit of change for Windows licenses to run the servers and AD (plus additional licensing for the authoring environment). But that money's just a drop in the bucket compared to the money spent on developers to customize it and training of staff. So stop pissing and moaning and make your own custom portal, a Wiki, use Remedy, Websphere, or one of the many other document management solutions/web portals out there. Of course, none of that has the features of Sharepoint. Personally, I wouldn't use Sharepoint as a customer-facing web solution (it shines mostly in an AD environment) but you might have a specific need.