Players are one thing. There are plenty of GPL'd playerrs.
Encoders are another matter entirely. Thanks to one particularly gluttonous company by the name of Fraunhoefer (did I spell that right?) you cannot make any encoder without paying them truly obscene amounts of money.
LAME is NOT an encoder, and for a very good reason. It would have to pay these royalties to Fraunhoefer if it were. It gets by because it's a patch to the ISO reference code.
Frankly, this is a major problem with ISO. It shouldn't be accepting patent-encumbered stuff as standards. If it's to be an international standard, it shouldn't be something that can be controlled by any one entity, as MP3 is due to our scumbag racketeer friends. Something really ought to be done about that. The whole point of ISO is that these standards are supposed to be open, when corporations would love to make them anything but.
Overall, Freenet is a Good Thing. I'm saddened to see the outright hypocrisy shown by many Slashdotters, who claim to value free speech yet attack Freenet simply because it will enable just that.
But the idea does need a bit more work. A few things that would make it even more valuable.
Signatures. I know this one's being worked on; perhaps the Freenet folks should look into GPG integration for this one. The idea is that you still get the true anonymity which Freenet makes possible, but you can also get the reverse: absolute verification. The reason I think this should be integrated into Freenet is because then it could be possible to see, say, if an article was signed before actually downloading it (think of it as a "Verified" flag). The other advantage is the future possibility of being able to update data that you've injected.
The only way this is going to work well, however, is if they get real integration with encryption. Enough that you can basically sign something with one click (and whatever passwords are needed, of course). That's one of the main reasons encryption isn't as ubiquitous as it should be; it's unnecessarily difficult to use. I'm hoping this will start to change once the RSA patent expires, so that more people can start building encryption functions into their software (OpenPGP standard, anyone?)
Searches. This one's certainly going to be harder to do, seeing as you'd be searching on a distributed system. However, you can't rely on guessable keys, which the current system uses. That simply won't work forever, particularly since the keys need to be unique.
More/better documentation. The reason for this is so that OS-native clients can be developed. Java is a good place to start, and it does allow for platforms with no OS-native client to run Freenet servers/clients, but the memory and performance gains from an OS-native client cannot be denied. It also allows clients and servers to be made which better fit the OS on which they're run in terms of interface. What I would suggest is that the Java client become the "reference release" of Freenet. Since it's Open-Source, other clients can then be brought up to date with the Java client without too much trouble. The choice then becomes down to using the Java client to stay bleeding-edge, or OS-native for the performance gains.
Some way to manage firewall support. I would be operating a Freenet node right now, but the security of my machine is important to me, so I have a personal firewall set up. My guess is that this will come in time, just as signatures will.
The idea of Freenet is a great one. As it is, it needs a bit of work, but that's to be expected of a first release. As it is even now, though, it shows a great deal of promise.
Oh, a quick bit about the "concerns" some Slashdotters seem to have about this.
First, that terrorists might use it. That's just plain crap. Why would a terrorist want to use Freenet? You can't use it to plan attacks, due to its public nature (sure, they might not know who you are, but if they know to expect an attack then you're still not going to be able to do it). And claiming responsibility for an attack anonymously sort of defeats the purpose of claiming responsibility. So you can't plan attacks, and you can't boast about them.
Warez/MP3. Not in Freenet's current state. As it gets easier to use, maybe. Regardless, it won't be different from any other platform. The Web gets used for warez too. So do FTP, Hotline, IRC, ICQ, AOL, and any number of network services. And even before these were around, there was still a warez trade. One more forum isn't going to make that much of a difference.
Kiddie porn, rape/torture/snuff films, and the like. Again, it'll happen. And it's a shame, too; I wouldn't mind seeing it all mysteriously vanish in one big system crash. But free speech is working at its best when it protects the speech we hate. You cannot silence any voice -any voice- without jeopardizing every voice. It's a sad fact that as long as there are sickos who want this sort of thing, there'll be even sicker freaks who actually make it. These people are already very good at keeping their stuff from being traceable; Freenet's anonymity won't be doing them any favors. In fact, it could hinder them; as anonymity emboldens these monsters, they'll get sloppier, counting on Freenet's anonymity to save them. A very costly mistake indeed, for while the films may be free speech, the techniques used in making them (a snuff film, for example, by definition requires that someone be murdered to make the film) are not protected. A third factor needs to be considered here: the "re-inventing the wheel" phenomenon. Kiddie porn is comparatively easy to get, but rape/snuff films are, understandably, exceedingly difficult to find. Usually they have to be custom-made for one person, since they're obviously hard to sell (think about it: would you sell tapes of yourself committing various felonies?) There is always the chance that, because some sicko got his fix from something off the Freenet, he won't commission a film and one less person will suffer. Is that not worth it?
Will Freenet be misused? Certainly; anything that can be misused inevitably is. Does that mean it shouldn't be allowed to exist? Certainly not. Even in the most hideous abuses of this, there is potential for some good to come of it. And the potential for good from proper uses of this is staggering.
One final note, and an interesting possibility: might it eventually be possible, via a browser plugin (to give one example) to integrate a Freenet client into a Web browser? Putting a Web interface on top of Freenet would certainly make it much easier to use, and could speed its adoption greatly. Who knows; there may be a time when a "Freeweb" comes into being, where entire sites (rather than files) are sent through the network. Some of the underlying principles of Freenet (particularly the moving of data to where it is most needed) would benefit the Web greatly. Any thoughts on something like that?
Here's what another article had to say about that same quote. It looks to me as though George himself wasn't the one who talked about the privacy rules. Looks more to me like he was advocating Big Brother. He says "information needs to be collected... if justified," never mind that the FBI would like to justify any "information gathering" it can get away with, as evidenced by many of its recent technology-related actiona and proposals. Recently, to give one example, it tried to persuade Congress to give it the ability to wiretap anyone, at will, without a warrant to do so.
And yeah, the CIA can't legally spy on US citizens. So what? The US government and the various pieces thereof do illegal things every day. I very much doubt the CIA is any different; they're just better at hiding it.
I'm no patriot. There are a lot of things the US has done that I don't approve of. Hell, in recent years I don't approve opf most of the stuff the US government has done.
But every once in a while a truly insipid diatribe comes out, blindly attacking the US without knowing a damn thing. This is one of them.
I'm sick of them trying to make macho posturings about their military on the world stage, whilst not commiting a single soldier in Kosovo.
Strange; I see more than a few soldiers there.
I'm sick of their "moral" centre, whilst at the same time their Red Cross "missionaries" disrupt the lifestyles of villages across SE Asia which had been happy for hundreds of years.
Um... the Red Cross doesn't do that. It isn't even a religious organization; it's a medical one. You're thinking of that other kind of cross. I'm sick of those myself, but at least I have some idea of what I'm talking about.
I'm sick of the US and it's stupid lawsuits - the latest being the woman suing Nike for tripping over her shoelaces.
I haven't heard about this one yet. But I have to agree; the frivolous lawsuits here are way out of control.
I'm sick of the US way of spelling things, and then trying to claim that it's England that are spelling it wrong.
Well, guess what. I'm sick of the British way of spelling things, and then trying to claim it's the US that spells it wrong. They're two different dialects, and within themselves, they're both right. Deal with it.
I'm sick of the US claiming it is the greatest nation on Earth, when any number of other countries could in reality nuke the fuck out of it.
Do you really think a nation's greatness can be measured by its nuclear arsenal? I should add that any arsenal large enough to "nuke the fuck out of the US" would very likely destroy the rest of the world in the process. What, pray tell, is so great about that?
And I'm fucking sick of the US proclaiming that they are the only nation who are "free", when they know nothing about any other country in the world, and precious little about their own.
Here, it depends on your point of view. In one way, the US is actually right in this regard. Read the laws of most nations. To give you one example, take the European Convention of Human Rights, Article 10. It says all people have the right to free speech. The Canadian Charter on is another example, and says, again, that Canadian citizens have the right to free speech. Look, though, at the US Constitution. It doesn't say this. Rather, it says that the government is forbidden to take away the right to free speech. The difference is extremely important; a law can be repealed, thus revoking the right to free speech, but if the government's forbidden to take away free speech then there's nothing it can do. That's the difference; other governments grant freedoms; the US Constitution guarantees them. And there is a school of thought, one with which I happen to agree, that freedom which is not guaranteed is not freedom at all.
And yes, I know the government has been ignoring a good deal of the Constitution in recent years. Eventually that will catch up to it; even the US government can't run from responsibility forever. I don't know how it'll happen, but eventially it will. I certainly hope it comes in the form of something as peaceful as a major legal smackdown from the Supreme Court (the only US court whose job is to actually do justice, rather than simply interpret existing law), simply because that way causes the least suffering for people.
Just a quick note before I start, it's interesting how only one person who is accusing me of trolling isn't an AC. Makes me wonder who should be accusing whom.
No, that post isn't a troll. Or at least, it wasn't intended as such. And I stick by my claims. The author does state that maintaining a Website with the source would be "too much trouble." Right. Consider: embedded devices tend to be static in nature. There isn't much in the way of upgradability, particularly not in terms of the operating system. This means that things like CVS aren't that necessary; the OS as used by the company isn't going to change much if at all.
Oh, and then there's CD-ROM distribution. How difficult is it to burn a CD with source on it? Not very hard at all, actually, seeing as you're only including the source for one thing (when you're including the source to many things, as is done with a Linux distro, that's another subject). Plus, there's this little thing called volume. This is not Linux we're talking about. Who's going to want the source for the OS on a wristwatch? Some will, certainly, but I'd be shocked if any company taking this route got more than five orders a month for source CD's, if that many. Is five CD's a month any kind of a burden? The costs alone are lower than the margin of error in the account books of many corporations. I'll grant that distributing a CD with every device would be troublesome indeed. But that's not what we're talking about anyway.
I didn't intend to troll (sorry to disappoint the trolls out there; I have no intention of joining your ranks), and if anyone was offended by this post then I'm sorry you feel that way. I had no intention of offending anyone. But I do stick by my claims.
I'll respect this guy's choice of a BSD-like license over the GPL. But the reason he chose it shows an obvious lack of understanding of the GPL.
For those who haven't read the post, he believes that a person releasing something under the GPL must include the source code with every copy. Since Minix is intended for embedded purposes, he figures companies would have to include the source with the device (rather impractical for a wristwatch).
What he doesn't get is that you do not have to include the source code with the binaries. All the GPL says is that if anyone wants the source, you have to make it available for no more than the cost of actually getting the source to them. Since distributing the source over the Net is basically free, authors have almost always distributed the source with the app, but that's not the only way to do it. An embedded device maker could, for example, include a mail-in card for a source CD with the device, for the cost of shipping and handling. A neat, tidy way for people who want the source to get it, without having to include the source with every single device. This is not unlike the way it was done before the Net took off.
This guy's the author of Minix, and he can put it under any license he wants, I suppose. But he could at least have based his choice off of informed reasoning. If the trouble of including a CD-ROM with a wristwatch was the only concern, then there was no reason at all to choose BSD over GPL (or vice-versa).
Someone else has said that you're proposing, essentially, to treat the Internet as one big state for tax purposes. An interesting idea, but there are severe problems with it.
Who do you give the taxes to? The physical state the buyer's in, or the one the seller's in, or perhaps the federal government? You can't give it back to the Net itself; there's no governing body to give it to. Giving it to the states raises unbelieveably complex questions about verification, distribution of the proceeds to the appropriate states, and such.
Let's assume you give it to the federal government (which you no doubt want to do). What about sales between people who are outside the U.S. government's borders? If you're treating the Net as one big stste, these people should be taxed. But since neither party is physically located within the US, it's not fair to tax them (I think it might even be construed as demanding tribute in some places; that's an act of war). In other words, you have to discriminate by physical location. That's hardly fair.
Let's assume you're lunatic enough to try and tax every single transaction. What currency do you use? The US dollar is certainly fine for US citizens, but what about other places which don't use that currency? You have to start dealing with exchange rates. These fluctuate wildly enough that there's no reasonable way to keep up.
Exactly what gets taxed and what doesn't? Different states have different laws about what can and cannot be taxed (many states, for example, do not tax medicines).
That last point brings up another problem: do you tax delivery of products? For now it's impossible to e-mail, say, a toaster to someone, so physical delivery is still a necessity. Do you tax this?
This is a lot of why the Net should not be taxed. One, it's impossible to do in a fair manner. Two, it makes buying and selling products much, much more complex, thereby discouraging its use. Three, Wal-Mat and Target don't give a damn about the taxes; they just want to artificially inflate their e-commerce prices and blame it on taxes. Because e-commerce is so popular, they think people will stand for it (that's why regional encoding on DVD's works, incidentally; people don't realize that it's used to artificially inflate prices so they keep paying more than they have to).
So in the end, the Net is basically untaxable. Is this good? No. Is it bad? No. It's simply the Net's nature.
The First Amendment gives all Americans the right to free speech. However, implicit in the right to speak is the right to not speak. Furthermore, it should be noted that the guidelines mentioned here don't appear to be laws; officers are still free to break the guidelines if they desire.
I'll grant, the withholding of information of police activity is suspicoius. If nothing else, someone should be able to invoke FOIA (or does that only apply to the Feds?) and get the information that way. However, is it censorship? I'm not certain of that. There is a difference between choosing not to speak and not allowing something to be said.
You see the problem. The problem with most governments is that they become far too idealistic to hold to their ideals, if that makes any sense.
It's like the U.S. The FBI seems to be more and more a lunatic fringe in and of itself. The goal is admirable: to prevent all crime. But first, that's not their job (the job is to catch criminals, not prevent crime), and second it's impossible. The only sure-fire way a governing body can stop crime is to have total control over the population, and the only people over which one can have total control are slaves. The cure is far, far worse than the disease.
That's always been the problem. There are very few dictators who rule over their countries for the sake of evil, at least as first. But as they stay in power, one of two things happen: either they become so corrupt that they go bad, or they become such zealots that in the cause of their ideals, they throw those ideals away. Look at, for example, the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik Revolution had good intentions; they truly believed in Marx's ideals. And their first leader tried to hold to them. Then Stalin came along, and in the cause of freeing the proletariat he enslaved them (if you look at the numbers, he actually killed more of his own people than Hitler did). In Cuba, Castro overthrew the previous government in an attempt to end his people's suffering. But decades later his people still suffer, as much as if not more than ever before, and the ideals to which he clung as a revolutionary have been cast away; he clings to his power now.
Even the Framers of the Constitution had extremely high ideals. Second to none, really, and before you go spouting off about the ideals of some other nation, note that I said "second to none"; this does allow for ties. But look at the mess were's in now; somewhere in the nation, almost every amendment to the Constitution is violated on a daily basis. The dreams of the Framers are still dreams; we may be closer to them than many, but we still have so far to go, and we've only lost ground over the decades.
The US was founded on the idea of government by the people, of the peole, and for the people. To some extent we've held to this. But the people forgot to watch their government, and so it's been able to sneak around behind our backs and do things the people wouldn't want (sometimes truly horrid things). Who watches the watchmen? We're supposed to. But we didn't, and now they've set up systems in which we can't watch them now (NSA, anyone?). This has to change somehow. Or the downward slide of the government can only become worse over time. We still have some freedom left; law enforcement would distract us from guarding that, as it hinders the zealots who think their job is to prevent crime rather than enforce the law, but we can't allow this.
Your logic is so massively flawed it barely merits refuting.
You are correct that increased availability of something does make it easier to get a hold of. That's the only statement with even the slightest sense of logic. As for the others...
The deadlier the weapon, the more deaths it will cause (by definition).
Only if it is used. I could build a nuclear weapon, set it on the ground somewhere with all the codes locked safely away, and then just turn around and walk away. Certainly a deadly weapon, but a completely harmless one, because it cannot be used.
So if more guns are available, more deaths will occur, and if less guns are available, less deaths will occur.
While your conclusion does theoretically make some sense, it is drawn from flawed logic. A weapon does not become more or less deadly simply because there are more instances thereof. If I have a gun, that gun is certainly a deadly weapon. If I have two guns, neither is any deadlier than it would be if it were the only gun I had. If I have ten thousand guns, none of them is any deadlier than it would be if I only had one.
If more guns are available, more deaths will occur, but only if the guns are misused. Likewise, if fewer guns are available, fewer deaths would occur only if the guns removed were ones that would have been misused.
We can debate the makeup of the victims (ratio of "criminals" v's "the law abiding") - but how can anyone say that greater access to weapons makes a society safer?
The only safe playing field is one that is level. If you're willing and able to do what it takes, that doesn't necessarily mean that you need a gun. I don't have a gun; I have other means of defending myself and those I love. But those means are very rare, and to be effective they require a far greater expenditure of money, time, and resources than any gun does. So for most, a gun is the only way to level the playing field between themselves and those who would do them harm. No, it doesn't make society a safe place if everyone is armed. But an armed person is in far less danger against an armed opponent than an unarmed person is.
Criminals today are almost invariably armed. In this day and age it's the only way most people can pose any real threat, and posing a threat is the stock in trade of a criminal. You can take the guns out of the hands of the law-abiding, but you can't get them away from the criminals. They already get their guns by illegal means because legal ones are too easy to track, so gun laws change nothing for them.
Now, some gun laws do make sense. Trigger locks, for example. They won't do a damn thing to decrease gun violence, but they will do a great deal to reduce gun accidents. They don't reduce the effectiveness of a gun, because there is no law stating that the locks must be used, only that they must be made available.
Smart guns: iffy. They would certainly help reduce gun accidents and even short-term gun theft. But smart guns rely on technology, and any technology can be cracked given the time and resources to figure out the trick. The best you can do is make it really, really hard to crack. This rules out any remote device like rings or watches which the owner must wear for the gun to go off; "dummy" devices wouldn't be too hard to make (and besides, anything which can be worn can be stolen along with the gun). You'd have to go with something like handprint-sensing technology, coupled with thermal detection so that you couldn't simply chop someone's hand off and use it with the gun. And no backdoors. This is the ideal case, but the gun could still be modchipped. The modchipping takes time; certainly the gun couldn't be used at the place where it was stolen. But no criminal with half a brain does that anyway; they steal guns from locales farther off from the intendeed scene of the crime, to throw investigations off track.
Obviously if that was true, the US would be the safest place in the world, which it clearly isn't
Depends. You're speaking of only one statistic: gun deaths. And indeed, the chances of dying by a gun are greater here than most other places. However, there are far more ways to die than by being shot. Take Mozambique's current situation, for instance. Very, very few people own guns there. But right now, I'd say it's pretty damned dangerous to live there. Then take drug overdoses. I don't know the ststistics here or in other parts of the world. But if drugs are easier to get then it's also easier to die from them (this is the difference between drugs and guns: drugs are bought specifically to be used, whereas most guns are bought in the hope that they never will be). And drugs are certainly easier to get in some parts of Europe, particularly the Netherlands but other places as well. So by your logic, these nations should be as dangerous as the US. The point is that you cannot take one example and draw generalities. It's like seeing one black swan and deciding based only on that observation that all swans are black.
Also, I love this idea of "universal disarmament." It would be great if that were what you really wanted. But it's not, of course; you'd still rather that the government and the police have guns, just not the average citizen. You thus allow a government which could become oppressive at any time to step all over the rights of its people, who no longer have the means to end the problems. And before you start on nonviolent means to getting rid of an oppressive government, I should remind you that a government which is truly oppressive is not going to be ousted by peaceful means. Part of the very definition of an oppressive government is that there is no legal (meaning peaceful) way to oust it. That's how it stays oppressive. And any government, except perhaps a true democracy, has the capability to become oppressive (and true democracy has problems of its own which make it unworkable for anything as large as even a small nation).
The abuse of guns is a terrible thing; I agree with you on this. But the genie is out of the bottle. There are only two ways to prevent the abuse of guns. Only one of these is sure-fire (pardon the pun): the banning and destruction of every single gun on the planet. That simply isn't going to happen. The other one is to teach people respect, both for guns (to prevent accidents) and other people (to prevent misuse of a gun; simply put you don't shoot people you respect, nor do you give them any cause to shoot you).
Something must be done about gun violence. Banning guns is easy, but it's not a real solution, both because it won't be a complete ban (I'd love to see you convince the military and police to give up their weapons), and because it doesn't address why people shoot each other. So something else has to be done.
You claim that your findings on "early warning" and "imminent danger" signs come from exhaustive research. This is impossible, seeing as their have not been enough major incidences of school violence, nor has enough time passed during this current "generation" of violence, for any research to take place that could possibly be called exhaustive.
However, if you go back to the shooters themselves and analyze their motives, then with the exception of two (who were already known troublemakers) you will find many of the same things:
A peer environment which is outright abusive towards those who are different. The average intellectually-oriented student can expect to go through this type of abuse every day, some of which is of types that would land a parent in jail, or bring a dictator before a war tribunal for human rights abuses.
Administrations which simply look the other way from this abuse. Some actually encourage it, by way of, to give an all-too-commen example, sports coaches who manage to get star athletes leniency for the sake of something as trivial as a winning season.
Loss of school funding for programs which intellectially-oriented students benefit from, notably "gifted and talented" programs but also the arts.
In short, these shooters are not born mad: they are driven to madness by ineffective school environments which encourage the abuse of the intellect.
Given this, how do you justify creating a system which only allows intellectially-oriented students to be abused more than before (via the inevitable abuses of your system), rather than nipping the problem in the bud by attacking what drives these students mad? The latter, while more difficult, would certainly be far more effective. Once a person is traumatized, by peer abuse or by other means, that trauma can sometimes never be healed. But it could have been prevented. Clearly you have resources to at least lay the foundation for something like this. It isn't as easy as your current quick-fix, but it does work. You can take a sane person out of a madhouse, but the sane person remains sane, and the madhouse remains a madhouse. You haven't fixed the problem at all.
I'd almost think you were one of the lunatic fringee. But you're still an obvious fake; you're not capitalizing enough words. This has the effect that you don't sound arrogant enough.
In particular, you forgot to capitalize "Truth of God." Any real lunatic-zealot would have done that. "Pagan" would probably have been capitalized too.
You also forgot to mention Hell, that favorite subject of the Christian Right (don't ask me why; look through the entire Bible and you'll find that Hell isn't even mentioned once). Any decent lunatic zealot would have mentioned that in some way or another.
I should also point out that you seem to know little about Ultima. It does indeed promote its "Virtues," but it never mentions God, thus how can you know it promotes doing things in a "decent Christian way"? While most lunatic zealots do tend to misinterpret and overblow things, but they're a bit more careful than that.
Finally, you didn't outright advocate the banning of RPG's. Any self-respecting lunatic-zealot (if such a thing can be said to exist) would have dont that. For that matter, you aren't angry enough; the Christian Right is always angry about anything against which it rants.
Satirizing the Christian Right is a fun thing, and I wholeheartedly endorse it. I've done it myself, once or twice. You've shown no small talent in doing it, too; look at all the people you've fooled. But you still need a bit of practice. Unfortunately, the Church of the Mighty Lamb (the satirical site which brought us such gems as "Satan Trek," "Blasphemy 5," "Darth Pimp," "Pervert Pooh," and "My Little Pony is a WHORE!") appears to be gone, or I'd link to it. It's a great example of mocking the Christian Right; the long list of hate-mail shows you just how effective it is at fooling people. Certainly required reading for religious satirists.
You'd be right, but this is an obvious troll. Namely because it's basically impossible to confuse the Final Fantasy series with the Street Fighter series. Even the most clueless of the censors can pick that up. Particularly since the person knows enough about the game to know that Chun-Li does, in fact, practice kung fu (specifically, the wushu style). To actually know which art she practices and not know the name of the game is pretty much impossible.
So what we have here is an intentional troll, doing nothing but trying to stir up trouble. Granted the article should have been rated Troll instead of Flamebait, but I support whoever modded this one down.
WARNING: I'm playing Devil's Advocate in the first paragraph; I don't believe there's a reason for anyone to own, say, a nuclear missile. However, I do believe the banning of certain types of handguns and such is going too far.
Are you so certain? It is indeed true that these weapons did not exist when the Constitution was written. However, consider that at the time it was written, a citizen had full access to anything the military did. There was a reason for this. The Framers had just (well, not just, it had been several years) gotten away from a corrupt government. They saw how governments could get. The Second Amendment was another step in the "checks and balances" system, this one being that an armed citizenry and a military check each other. The Amendment guaranteed that the government would not have an easy time becoming oppressive, should it ever try to take that road, because the people had the means to defend themselves.
This is quite possibly the one thing the American government has of which it can really and truly be proud. Not the Second Amendment in particular, but the whole Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights. Look over its wording. It doesn't say what the government can do; it says what the government is forbidden from doing. The Bill of Rights doesn't grant people their Constitutional rights; it guarantees them (there is a vast difference from saying "you have this right" and "no one can take this right away from you"; this is why I still assert that at least thus far the US is the only nation which guarantees such things as free speech). It's an elegant document indeed; it has been in force for over two hundred years and has been amended surprisingly few times, and one of those amendments was written only to undo a previous one (Prohibition).
I do wish the government would follow it more closely these days, though...
Re:Everybody take a breather
on
Microsoft Loses
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· Score: 3
MANY people lost money, a lot MORE people will lose money VERY soon. When people start receiving their first and second quarter mutual fund reports, fund managers are going to have to say due to a sell off in technology i.e. Microsoft and every other tech company, we lost 10% of your money this quarter. This translates to anger against the government. Why is the DOJ ripping Microsoft and my stock. Call representatives in Congress and ask what the hell they are doing about this situation. Not a pretty picture.
You forget one thing: this was one day. A quarter is MUCH longer than one day. The 300-point drop can be expected to be temporary. Microsoft's stock is going to get hammered probably for the rest of this week, but then we will see it start to recover as the market hysteria dies down. In the meantime, I don't think it's at all unprobable that the stock from Microsoft's competitors is going to get a sizable boost. Still sucks if you've only invested in Microsoft, but frankly if you've pinned your entire portfolio into a simgle company, no matter what that company may be, you deserve a hammering. Even the most idiotic of investors knows better than to do that.
Also, you seem to get the idea that because Microsoft's stock nose-dived, all the other tech companies followed suit. Not true. Many stocks took a slight hit, but that may or may not be related to the case. The 300-point drop in the NASDAQ was due, mostly, to Microsoft alone.
Bad stock markets days like this make things VERY rough for Mr. Gore. Bush will be putting this on Gore for the rest of the campaign. You want an out of control DOJ that sues EVERY company (Smith & Wesson, the Tobacco industry, Microsoft, Glock) and puts your stocks in the toilet: Vote Al Gore. Not a very pleasant thought considering the majority of those who buy stock also vote.
So Gore has something to worry about. I wasn't planning on voting for him anyway.
Now, that we have thought about this rationally. Think about what would happen if Bill Gates said "Fine, if you don't want us to innovate then were going to shutdown Microsoft and return all value to the shareholders." Think about how many industries, businesses, individuals are affected by Microsoft financially both directly and indirectly. I would venture a guess that you would see a depression unlike any other since the 1930's. Believe it or not, a great deal of the expansion of the U.S. economy over the past 15 years can be attributed to Microsoft. Whether they did something bad or not doesn't change the fact that you, me, the businesses we work for, the schools we go to, and just about everything around us is effected by Microsoft.
One: That's just something M$ might say. Of course, it's a lie; they've never innovated anything at all. There is absolutely nothing they've ever done that someone else wasn't already doing. And usually better, at that. Two: Your depression bit is little more than an alarmist scare tactic. Three: Even if that bit is true, it only works against you. Should the entire U.S. economy really be so closely tied to one company? Think about that. A company which holds that much of a monopoly needs to be put into check. A DoJ ruling isn't the only thing that can cause a company to go sour, you know. It would be like the President dying with no system of succession in place (Vice President/Speaker of the House/Senate President pro tempore/Secretary of State/etc...)
And one final point. One which I'm sure people would find interesting. Look over the trial. You'll see a lot of things said. You'll see Microsoft claim that its software is innovative, competitive, and so forth. But you'll never once hear Microsoft claim that its software is the best. They knew exactly what they were doing: cramming mediocre software down people's throats, using dirty tricks to trip up competition, and so forth. At least, though, they didn't commit perjury by claiming superiority.
True under normal circumstances, but...
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One of the BIG things the DOJ wanted Microsoft to do, as part of the settlement, was to admit guilt. They wouldn't be prosecuted by the DOJ, but they'd still have to admit they'd broken the law.
That's why Microsoft didn't dare settle. And now they're in even more danger because of the lawsuits. I feel sorry for the innocent workers there; they were just doing their jobs, some of which will undoubtedly be lost in the aftermath of this decision. But the people who've put Microsoft's policies in place deserve one hell of a smackdown. They've been holding back the industry for well over a decade now. They've lied, cheated, stolen, betrayed... suffice to say they've done it all, just for the sake of The Almighty Buck. Success is one thing, and a good one, if obtained by honest, honorable means. But Microsoft didn't -probably couldn't- play by those rules.
You called the industry's tune, Microsoft, for years. Now the piper wants to collect. Will your money save you now? We'll all see...
This is among the worst types of theft: cultural theft.
Perhaps, but then the question becomes: whose culture? The machine was stolen from Britain, but the machine is German in origin. The machine was already stolen property when it was taken. Depending on who stole it, then your logic might even justify this theft as merely taking it back from the real thieves.
This is so because it is not theft from one or a few people, but from much of the world...
Point here. But that machine is still, I sumbit, more of a historical artifact than a cultural one.
similar to the American habit of destroying foreign culture and replacing it with our own (yes, I come from the USA and I say this).
OK, I want to hear a defense of this point. Are you traing to say that American culture has no right to exist? Or that it is somehow inferior to others? The way I see it, American culture has exactly as much a right to exist as any other culture; no more, true, but certainly no less either. If you're going to try and say which culture is superior and which isn't (and you certainly sound as though you are doing this), then I wonder where the hell you get off thinking you're in any position to do that. I know I'm not, and I very much doubt anyone here on Slashdot is, because guess what: no one is in that position. Least of all those who are so egotistical they actually think they are.
After all, there can be no serious attempt to justify a light sentence based on thieving to live or being unaware of committing a crime.
Strange; last I checked ignorance of the law is generally considered an extremely weak defense, and certainly wouldn't work in this case.
MILL LIKE WIERD POST. MILL AGREE, SHOULD STILL BE ABLE READ POST WITHOUT USE FISH PROGRAM. BUT USE PIG-TONGUE, SPEAK LIKE HAXOR, WHY CARE? MILL READ THOSE EASY. BUT STILL FUNNY. IS APRIL FOOL DAY. WHY NOT HAVE BIG FUN? THAT WHAT APRIL FOOL DAY FOR.
MILL SURPRISE YOU NOT KNOW WHY CALL APRIL FOOL DAY. HAVE TO DO WITH CALENDAR.
BIG TIME AGO, PEOPLE THINK SUN-TURN START APRIL. THEY SAY, NEW SUN-TURN DAY APRIL ONE. THEN POPE COME, MAKE NEW SUN-TURN. SAY NEW SUN-TURN DAY JANUARY ONE. MANY PEOPLE FOLLOW POPE. BUT SOME WANT NEW SUN-TURN STILL START APRIL ONE, CLOSE TO START WARMING-TIME. PEOPLE FOLLOW POPE, CALL OTHER PEOPLE APRIL FOOL. THAT WHY CALL APRIL FOOL DAY. MILL NOT KNOW WHEN JOKES START. BUT MILL LIKE JOKES.
MILL DO THINK MANY POST IN WIERD TALK GO TOO FAR. ONLY NEED ONE FOR GOOD JOKE. TWO POST STILL GOOD. MANY POST BAD IF TOO HARD READ POST.
MILL NOT LIKE WEB TRACK. NOT LIKE BE HUNTED LIKE ANIMAL. MILL PERSON. HAVE RIGHT HIDE WHEN WANT HIDE, NOT HIDE WHEN WANT NOT HIDE.
THAT WHY MILL NOT USE CACHE. MILL HAVE BIG COLLEGE PIPE. NOT NEED CACHE. MILL FEEL BAD PEOPLE HAVE SMALL PIPE NEED CACHE. MILL WANT BREAK HEAD PERSON FIND EXPLOIT. BUT MILL NOT KNOW WHAT DO ABOUT EXPLOIT.
CACHE GOOD. NOT CLOG PIPE IF NOT NEED CLOG. EXPLOIT CACHE BAD. USE FOR HUNTING PERSON. BUT SMALL PIPE NEED CACHE; TOO SLOW IF NOT HAVE. MILL SAY IF HAVE BIG PIPE, NO USE CACHE; NO NEED CACHE. BUT IF HAVE SMALL PIPE, LOOK WAY HIDE. MAYBE THERE WAY TOUCH CACHE WHEN FILE GO THERE, SO ALL FILE LOOK SAME TIME MODIFY. THEN CACHE HUNT NOT WORK.
Hey, if OOG_THE_CAVEMAN can swap personalities for a April Fool's, so can I...
Ummm... RealMedia and QuickTime are direct competitors. The chances of Real agreeing to licence their codec to Apple are somewhat less than zero. Out in the real world, competition exists and commercial organizations actually protect their intellectual property.
Don't be so sure about those odds. Already MS and Real have licensed each other's codecs for the next releases of their respective software. Why, then, would Apple's chances be any less?
MPEG playback in software has become possible with the hardware of the last six months or so. MPEG encode (to any decent quality) still really require dedicated hardware. I imagine this is one of the reasons Apple has not gone down this path yet.
Strange... I've been doing both of those just fine with a 2-year-old G3. QuickTime has supported software MPEG playback since version 2.5, which is at least three years old.
The people aren't parties to the "contract" of a copyright.
The government is nothing more than elected representatives of the people. Indeed, in criminal cases, you'll find that "the people" are listed as the plaintiff, with the accused as defendant. So the people are parties to the contract of a copyright.
Frankly, I don't necessarily see why there should be any defined expiration of the copyright.
As far as you or any individual is concerned, there is no expiration. Well technically there is, but the time limit only starts once the copyright holder dies. So as far as you are concerned copyrights expire, because a dead person neither knows nor cares about intellectual property.
Corporations are another matter. But I'll cover them later.
If I create something, I should be able to do what I will with it, for as long as I see fit.
Yep. And that's how it works for individuals. What do you care about what's done with it after you're dead, and it no longer benefits you?
And if you don't approve of the fact that I'm not willing to give it away, then you don't have to support me, by giving me money.
Boy, you really don't get it. The fact is, you don't own thought. No one owns thought; as a nontangible and infinitely reproducible thing it cannot, by definition, be owned. That's what copyrights are for. They give you the exclusive right to a given thought, as though you did own it. The price you pay for that is that the copyright eventually expires. But since that doesn't happen until long after your death, why do you care?
And the Ex Post Facto bit, is a red herring. At no time has it been suggested, that someone be prosecuted for a crime that wasn't illegal at the time of commission. It would have been illegal to copy the works in question before the law was passed, as the copyrights hadn't expired.
Ex post facto means any retroactive law. The phrase "ex post facto" in fact means "after the fact." In other words, a law can affect the present and future, but it cannot constitutionally affect actions done in the past, including the granting of copyrights. Someone really ought to take that to the Supreme Court...
I fail to see why everyone on this site seems to think that they have a god given right to take whatever they want, just because it's in an electronic form.
No one here has ever argued that (miscellaneous trolls notwithstanding). But the DMCA corrupts the copyright system beyond its original purpose. We might not have a God-given right to take whatever we want. But in a system where people have the right to sell, they also have the right to buy. And if they have the right to buy, they have the right to use the things they have bought for legitimate purposes. Many copyright protections, such as CSS, seek to curtail that right in a discriminatory manner. Take DVD playing software, for example. There is no good DVD playing software for any platform outside Windows (yes, there's MacOS software, but the quality of it is extremely poor; it can't even keep the audio and video synced). Thus CSS discriminates against those who don't own set-top boxes or Windows machines, but wish to play the DVD's they paid for legitimately and have already bought the necessary equipment to do so (namely, a computer and a DVD drive).
It really galls me to play the discrimination card, actually. So often it's used by the terminally paranoid to scam various things off of other people or corporations. In this day and age, legitimate cases are very rare, but every once in a while a legitimate case occurs. This is one. And while you may have the right to do what you want with your so-called "intellectual property," no one ever gave you the right to commit a crime with it.
QUICKTIME IS NOT A CODEC. QUICKTIME IS NOT A CODEC. QUICKTIME IS NOT A CODEC.
Go write that on the chalkboard five thousand times. If I see one more post mistaking QuickTime for a codec....
Now, what is QuickTime, since it's not a codec? The answer is that it's a media layer. Video is what it's famous for, but that's only one part of it. It also does sound, images, and a fair amount of other cool stuff.
Apple could Open-Source this with little trouble, actually. It actually has to a small extent; the open MPEG4 standard has a file format based on QuickTIme's. What gives QuickTime its "IP value" are the codecs involved. I'd like to see those Open-Sourced, but let's be realistic; Apple isn't do that. But they could still release these as binary plug-ins (they already do this with the Intel codecs on MacOS and Windows, so it's certainly possible and wouldn't even disrupt the current QuickTime structure). One would think they might be convinced to even Open-Source some of their older codecs, like the Animation and Video ones, though that isn't as certain.
An Open-Source QuickTime would be a Very Good Thing for Unix/Linux/whatever. It would provide the DE's (Gnome, KDE, and whatever else might come up in the future) with a very versatile and proven media layer. It would also help to create an open standard for such things.
Oh, and for those who gripe about the QT4 interface, three points...
Yes, the current interface does suck. Talk about form without function.
The OSX version is much-improved; check out this page for a screenshot of the OSX player (basically, QT4 minus the fluff and with the volume thumbwheel replaced by a slider again).
QuickTime is only an API; it's not hard to code a new player. If you use QuickTime's default controls, in fact, you have the old QT3 interface.
But anyway, that's enough of my rant. There are really only a few more things I'd like to see in QuickTime anyway...
MPEG2 and MPEG4 support. There's particularly no excuse not to have MPEG4, seeing as it's based off of QuickTime's file format for crying out loud.
RealMedia support. Real's servers use RTSP, which QuickTime already supports, so it's just a matter of licensing the codec.
MPEG (and hopefully MPEG2/MPEG4) export. As it is, the only reason I can think of for it not being in there would be if Astarte and HEURIS are paying Apple not to put it in, so they can keep charging obscene prices for their own encoders ($400 for Astarte's M.PACK). Still, there's always Movie2MPEG (an OSS encoder for MacOS). It's very slow but it gets the job done.
Those, plus the Open-Sourcing of at least the layer (if not the codecs) would just be icing on the cake.
Don't believe that Apple has changed it's tune. BeOS had to abandon Mac hardware PPC support because Apple refuses to release documentation on their hardware--even under NDA!
So Apple doesn't hand them the specs on a silver plate. Big deal; Be can get those specs whenever it wants.
Tons of Open-Source operating systems already run on PPC hardware. Most notable among these are the BSD's, because they are under the BSD license. BSD's licensing weakness is a blessing for Be; they can rip that code off, stick it in their own OS, keep it closed, and all continues as before.
So why don't they provide more PPC support? Simple answer: they don't want to. I don't know why not. Perhaps it's the huge Intel investment. Perhaps they're just too damn lazy. Perhaps they're scared of something; I don't know what, but they are.
But since they're really so frightened, why not start a PowerPC Documentation Project? Use code from MkLinux, LinuxPPC, and the BSD's to write your own documentation of PowerPC hardware. It's certainly doable. It'll give Be what they want, it doesn't violate any of Apple's admittedly absurd hardware-licensing crap, and everyone's happy.
This is an outrage. It goes completely and totally against the principles under which Mozilla is being developed. While I can see where the idea comes from, it's the same shortsighted lunacy which affects most proprietary vendors today.
It is precisely because security holes in Linux are announced openly that it is so secure. There will always be security holes in software, so the race for most secure will go to the one with the fastest bugfix turnaround time. That will go to the one with the most eyes looking at the code. And that means the one which doesn't try to "hide" its flaws.
This does pose a potential problem, however, because you are dealing with Web browser users here. Most aren't savvy enough to upgrade the browser every time a new hole is found and patched. This is why Mozilla's modularity needs to be carried one step further, such that security updates can be found and fixed at the touch of a button. I envision something like this: an "Update" button on the toolbar. This button is normally inactive, but when some central repository (Mozilla.org perhaps?) finds and posts a bug, the button activates and glows (or undergoes some sort of obvious state change to alert the user that something is wrong). This button will take the user to the security site (wherever that might be), where the user is given an explanation of the bug, and the chance to automatically download and install the fix. This last process has to be made as transparent as possible; remember we're dealing with everyone from techno-gods to people who wonder why the cupholder on the front of their PC isn't working anymore after they set the huge drink on it.
But the fact is, security through obscurity for an open-source project is hypocrisy of a very high order. I seriously hope Mozilla doesn't take this path. The results would be disastrous for Mozilla and Open-Source in general (M$ in particular will jump on this as a precedent: "see, even Open-Source guys know openness doesn't work!")
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Players are one thing. There are plenty of GPL'd playerrs.
Encoders are another matter entirely. Thanks to one particularly gluttonous company by the name of Fraunhoefer (did I spell that right?) you cannot make any encoder without paying them truly obscene amounts of money.
LAME is NOT an encoder, and for a very good reason. It would have to pay these royalties to Fraunhoefer if it were. It gets by because it's a patch to the ISO reference code.
Frankly, this is a major problem with ISO. It shouldn't be accepting patent-encumbered stuff as standards. If it's to be an international standard, it shouldn't be something that can be controlled by any one entity, as MP3 is due to our scumbag racketeer friends. Something really ought to be done about that. The whole point of ISO is that these standards are supposed to be open, when corporations would love to make them anything but.
But the idea does need a bit more work. A few things that would make it even more valuable.
The only way this is going to work well, however, is if they get real integration with encryption. Enough that you can basically sign something with one click (and whatever passwords are needed, of course). That's one of the main reasons encryption isn't as ubiquitous as it should be; it's unnecessarily difficult to use. I'm hoping this will start to change once the RSA patent expires, so that more people can start building encryption functions into their software (OpenPGP standard, anyone?)
What I would suggest is that the Java client become the "reference release" of Freenet. Since it's Open-Source, other clients can then be brought up to date with the Java client without too much trouble. The choice then becomes down to using the Java client to stay bleeding-edge, or OS-native for the performance gains.
The idea of Freenet is a great one. As it is, it needs a bit of work, but that's to be expected of a first release. As it is even now, though, it shows a great deal of promise.
Oh, a quick bit about the "concerns" some Slashdotters seem to have about this.
A third factor needs to be considered here: the "re-inventing the wheel" phenomenon. Kiddie porn is comparatively easy to get, but rape/snuff films are, understandably, exceedingly difficult to find. Usually they have to be custom-made for one person, since they're obviously hard to sell (think about it: would you sell tapes of yourself committing various felonies?) There is always the chance that, because some sicko got his fix from something off the Freenet, he won't commission a film and one less person will suffer. Is that not worth it?
Will Freenet be misused? Certainly; anything that can be misused inevitably is. Does that mean it shouldn't be allowed to exist? Certainly not. Even in the most hideous abuses of this, there is potential for some good to come of it. And the potential for good from proper uses of this is staggering.
One final note, and an interesting possibility: might it eventually be possible, via a browser plugin (to give one example) to integrate a Freenet client into a Web browser? Putting a Web interface on top of Freenet would certainly make it much easier to use, and could speed its adoption greatly. Who knows; there may be a time when a "Freeweb" comes into being, where entire sites (rather than files) are sent through the network. Some of the underlying principles of Freenet (particularly the moving of data to where it is most needed) would benefit the Web greatly. Any thoughts on something like that?
Here's what another article had to say about that same quote. It looks to me as though George himself wasn't the one who talked about the privacy rules. Looks more to me like he was advocating Big Brother. He says "information needs to be collected... if justified," never mind that the FBI would like to justify any "information gathering" it can get away with, as evidenced by many of its recent technology-related actiona and proposals. Recently, to give one example, it tried to persuade Congress to give it the ability to wiretap anyone, at will, without a warrant to do so.
And yeah, the CIA can't legally spy on US citizens. So what? The US government and the various pieces thereof do illegal things every day. I very much doubt the CIA is any different; they're just better at hiding it.
I'm no patriot. There are a lot of things the US has done that I don't approve of. Hell, in recent years I don't approve opf most of the stuff the US government has done.
But every once in a while a truly insipid diatribe comes out, blindly attacking the US without knowing a damn thing. This is one of them.
I'm sick of them trying to make macho posturings about their military on the world stage, whilst not commiting a single soldier in Kosovo.
Strange; I see more than a few soldiers there.
I'm sick of their "moral" centre, whilst at the same time their Red Cross "missionaries" disrupt the lifestyles of villages across SE Asia which had been happy for hundreds of years.
Um... the Red Cross doesn't do that. It isn't even a religious organization; it's a medical one. You're thinking of that other kind of cross. I'm sick of those myself, but at least I have some idea of what I'm talking about.
I'm sick of the US and it's stupid lawsuits - the latest being the woman suing Nike for tripping over her shoelaces.
I haven't heard about this one yet. But I have to agree; the frivolous lawsuits here are way out of control.
I'm sick of the US way of spelling things, and then trying to claim that it's England that are spelling it wrong.
Well, guess what. I'm sick of the British way of spelling things, and then trying to claim it's the US that spells it wrong. They're two different dialects, and within themselves, they're both right. Deal with it.
I'm sick of the US claiming it is the greatest nation on Earth, when any number of other countries could in reality nuke the fuck out of it.
Do you really think a nation's greatness can be measured by its nuclear arsenal? I should add that any arsenal large enough to "nuke the fuck out of the US" would very likely destroy the rest of the world in the process. What, pray tell, is so great about that?
And I'm fucking sick of the US proclaiming that they are the only nation who are "free", when they know nothing about any other country in the world, and precious little about their own.
Here, it depends on your point of view. In one way, the US is actually right in this regard. Read the laws of most nations. To give you one example, take the European Convention of Human Rights, Article 10. It says all people have the right to free speech. The Canadian Charter on is another example, and says, again, that Canadian citizens have the right to free speech. Look, though, at the US Constitution. It doesn't say this. Rather, it says that the government is forbidden to take away the right to free speech. The difference is extremely important; a law can be repealed, thus revoking the right to free speech, but if the government's forbidden to take away free speech then there's nothing it can do. That's the difference; other governments grant freedoms; the US Constitution guarantees them. And there is a school of thought, one with which I happen to agree, that freedom which is not guaranteed is not freedom at all.
And yes, I know the government has been ignoring a good deal of the Constitution in recent years. Eventually that will catch up to it; even the US government can't run from responsibility forever. I don't know how it'll happen, but eventially it will. I certainly hope it comes in the form of something as peaceful as a major legal smackdown from the Supreme Court (the only US court whose job is to actually do justice, rather than simply interpret existing law), simply because that way causes the least suffering for people.
Just a quick note before I start, it's interesting how only one person who is accusing me of trolling isn't an AC. Makes me wonder who should be accusing whom.
No, that post isn't a troll. Or at least, it wasn't intended as such. And I stick by my claims. The author does state that maintaining a Website with the source would be "too much trouble." Right. Consider: embedded devices tend to be static in nature. There isn't much in the way of upgradability, particularly not in terms of the operating system. This means that things like CVS aren't that necessary; the OS as used by the company isn't going to change much if at all.
Oh, and then there's CD-ROM distribution. How difficult is it to burn a CD with source on it? Not very hard at all, actually, seeing as you're only including the source for one thing (when you're including the source to many things, as is done with a Linux distro, that's another subject). Plus, there's this little thing called volume. This is not Linux we're talking about. Who's going to want the source for the OS on a wristwatch? Some will, certainly, but I'd be shocked if any company taking this route got more than five orders a month for source CD's, if that many. Is five CD's a month any kind of a burden? The costs alone are lower than the margin of error in the account books of many corporations. I'll grant that distributing a CD with every device would be troublesome indeed. But that's not what we're talking about anyway.
I didn't intend to troll (sorry to disappoint the trolls out there; I have no intention of joining your ranks), and if anyone was offended by this post then I'm sorry you feel that way. I had no intention of offending anyone. But I do stick by my claims.
I'll respect this guy's choice of a BSD-like license over the GPL. But the reason he chose it shows an obvious lack of understanding of the GPL.
For those who haven't read the post, he believes that a person releasing something under the GPL must include the source code with every copy. Since Minix is intended for embedded purposes, he figures companies would have to include the source with the device (rather impractical for a wristwatch).
What he doesn't get is that you do not have to include the source code with the binaries. All the GPL says is that if anyone wants the source, you have to make it available for no more than the cost of actually getting the source to them. Since distributing the source over the Net is basically free, authors have almost always distributed the source with the app, but that's not the only way to do it. An embedded device maker could, for example, include a mail-in card for a source CD with the device, for the cost of shipping and handling. A neat, tidy way for people who want the source to get it, without having to include the source with every single device. This is not unlike the way it was done before the Net took off.
This guy's the author of Minix, and he can put it under any license he wants, I suppose. But he could at least have based his choice off of informed reasoning. If the trouble of including a CD-ROM with a wristwatch was the only concern, then there was no reason at all to choose BSD over GPL (or vice-versa).
This is a lot of why the Net should not be taxed. One, it's impossible to do in a fair manner. Two, it makes buying and selling products much, much more complex, thereby discouraging its use. Three, Wal-Mat and Target don't give a damn about the taxes; they just want to artificially inflate their e-commerce prices and blame it on taxes. Because e-commerce is so popular, they think people will stand for it (that's why regional encoding on DVD's works, incidentally; people don't realize that it's used to artificially inflate prices so they keep paying more than they have to).
So in the end, the Net is basically untaxable. Is this good? No. Is it bad? No. It's simply the Net's nature.
The First Amendment gives all Americans the right to free speech. However, implicit in the right to speak is the right to not speak. Furthermore, it should be noted that the guidelines mentioned here don't appear to be laws; officers are still free to break the guidelines if they desire.
I'll grant, the withholding of information of police activity is suspicoius. If nothing else, someone should be able to invoke FOIA (or does that only apply to the Feds?) and get the information that way. However, is it censorship? I'm not certain of that. There is a difference between choosing not to speak and not allowing something to be said.
You see the problem. The problem with most governments is that they become far too idealistic to hold to their ideals, if that makes any sense.
It's like the U.S. The FBI seems to be more and more a lunatic fringe in and of itself. The goal is admirable: to prevent all crime. But first, that's not their job (the job is to catch criminals, not prevent crime), and second it's impossible. The only sure-fire way a governing body can stop crime is to have total control over the population, and the only people over which one can have total control are slaves. The cure is far, far worse than the disease.
That's always been the problem. There are very few dictators who rule over their countries for the sake of evil, at least as first. But as they stay in power, one of two things happen: either they become so corrupt that they go bad, or they become such zealots that in the cause of their ideals, they throw those ideals away. Look at, for example, the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik Revolution had good intentions; they truly believed in Marx's ideals. And their first leader tried to hold to them. Then Stalin came along, and in the cause of freeing the proletariat he enslaved them (if you look at the numbers, he actually killed more of his own people than Hitler did). In Cuba, Castro overthrew the previous government in an attempt to end his people's suffering. But decades later his people still suffer, as much as if not more than ever before, and the ideals to which he clung as a revolutionary have been cast away; he clings to his power now.
Even the Framers of the Constitution had extremely high ideals. Second to none, really, and before you go spouting off about the ideals of some other nation, note that I said "second to none"; this does allow for ties. But look at the mess were's in now; somewhere in the nation, almost every amendment to the Constitution is violated on a daily basis. The dreams of the Framers are still dreams; we may be closer to them than many, but we still have so far to go, and we've only lost ground over the decades.
The US was founded on the idea of government by the people, of the peole, and for the people. To some extent we've held to this. But the people forgot to watch their government, and so it's been able to sneak around behind our backs and do things the people wouldn't want (sometimes truly horrid things). Who watches the watchmen? We're supposed to. But we didn't, and now they've set up systems in which we can't watch them now (NSA, anyone?). This has to change somehow. Or the downward slide of the government can only become worse over time. We still have some freedom left; law enforcement would distract us from guarding that, as it hinders the zealots who think their job is to prevent crime rather than enforce the law, but we can't allow this.
Your logic is so massively flawed it barely merits refuting.
You are correct that increased availability of something does make it easier to get a hold of. That's the only statement with even the slightest sense of logic. As for the others...
The deadlier the weapon, the more deaths it will cause (by definition).
Only if it is used. I could build a nuclear weapon, set it on the ground somewhere with all the codes locked safely away, and then just turn around and walk away. Certainly a deadly weapon, but a completely harmless one, because it cannot be used.
So if more guns are available, more deaths will occur, and if less guns are available, less deaths will occur.
While your conclusion does theoretically make some sense, it is drawn from flawed logic. A weapon does not become more or less deadly simply because there are more instances thereof. If I have a gun, that gun is certainly a deadly weapon. If I have two guns, neither is any deadlier than it would be if it were the only gun I had. If I have ten thousand guns, none of them is any deadlier than it would be if I only had one.
If more guns are available, more deaths will occur, but only if the guns are misused. Likewise, if fewer guns are available, fewer deaths would occur only if the guns removed were ones that would have been misused.
We can debate the makeup of the victims (ratio of "criminals" v's "the law abiding") - but how can anyone say that greater access to weapons makes a society safer?
The only safe playing field is one that is level. If you're willing and able to do what it takes, that doesn't necessarily mean that you need a gun. I don't have a gun; I have other means of defending myself and those I love. But those means are very rare, and to be effective they require a far greater expenditure of money, time, and resources than any gun does. So for most, a gun is the only way to level the playing field between themselves and those who would do them harm. No, it doesn't make society a safe place if everyone is armed. But an armed person is in far less danger against an armed opponent than an unarmed person is.
Criminals today are almost invariably armed. In this day and age it's the only way most people can pose any real threat, and posing a threat is the stock in trade of a criminal. You can take the guns out of the hands of the law-abiding, but you can't get them away from the criminals. They already get their guns by illegal means because legal ones are too easy to track, so gun laws change nothing for them.
Now, some gun laws do make sense. Trigger locks, for example. They won't do a damn thing to decrease gun violence, but they will do a great deal to reduce gun accidents. They don't reduce the effectiveness of a gun, because there is no law stating that the locks must be used, only that they must be made available.
Smart guns: iffy. They would certainly help reduce gun accidents and even short-term gun theft. But smart guns rely on technology, and any technology can be cracked given the time and resources to figure out the trick. The best you can do is make it really, really hard to crack. This rules out any remote device like rings or watches which the owner must wear for the gun to go off; "dummy" devices wouldn't be too hard to make (and besides, anything which can be worn can be stolen along with the gun). You'd have to go with something like handprint-sensing technology, coupled with thermal detection so that you couldn't simply chop someone's hand off and use it with the gun. And no backdoors. This is the ideal case, but the gun could still be modchipped. The modchipping takes time; certainly the gun couldn't be used at the place where it was stolen. But no criminal with half a brain does that anyway; they steal guns from locales farther off from the intendeed scene of the crime, to throw investigations off track.
Obviously if that was true, the US would be the safest place in the world, which it clearly isn't
Depends. You're speaking of only one statistic: gun deaths. And indeed, the chances of dying by a gun are greater here than most other places. However, there are far more ways to die than by being shot. Take Mozambique's current situation, for instance. Very, very few people own guns there. But right now, I'd say it's pretty damned dangerous to live there. Then take drug overdoses. I don't know the ststistics here or in other parts of the world. But if drugs are easier to get then it's also easier to die from them (this is the difference between drugs and guns: drugs are bought specifically to be used, whereas most guns are bought in the hope that they never will be). And drugs are certainly easier to get in some parts of Europe, particularly the Netherlands but other places as well. So by your logic, these nations should be as dangerous as the US. The point is that you cannot take one example and draw generalities. It's like seeing one black swan and deciding based only on that observation that all swans are black.
Also, I love this idea of "universal disarmament." It would be great if that were what you really wanted. But it's not, of course; you'd still rather that the government and the police have guns, just not the average citizen. You thus allow a government which could become oppressive at any time to step all over the rights of its people, who no longer have the means to end the problems. And before you start on nonviolent means to getting rid of an oppressive government, I should remind you that a government which is truly oppressive is not going to be ousted by peaceful means. Part of the very definition of an oppressive government is that there is no legal (meaning peaceful) way to oust it. That's how it stays oppressive. And any government, except perhaps a true democracy, has the capability to become oppressive (and true democracy has problems of its own which make it unworkable for anything as large as even a small nation).
The abuse of guns is a terrible thing; I agree with you on this. But the genie is out of the bottle. There are only two ways to prevent the abuse of guns. Only one of these is sure-fire (pardon the pun): the banning and destruction of every single gun on the planet. That simply isn't going to happen. The other one is to teach people respect, both for guns (to prevent accidents) and other people (to prevent misuse of a gun; simply put you don't shoot people you respect, nor do you give them any cause to shoot you).
Something must be done about gun violence. Banning guns is easy, but it's not a real solution, both because it won't be a complete ban (I'd love to see you convince the military and police to give up their weapons), and because it doesn't address why people shoot each other. So something else has to be done.
However, if you go back to the shooters themselves and analyze their motives, then with the exception of two (who were already known troublemakers) you will find many of the same things:
- A peer environment which is outright abusive towards those who are different. The average intellectually-oriented student can expect to go through this type of abuse every day, some of which is of types that would land a parent in jail, or bring a dictator before a war tribunal for human rights abuses.
- Administrations which simply look the other way from this abuse. Some actually encourage it, by way of, to give an all-too-commen example, sports coaches who manage to get star athletes leniency for the sake of something as trivial as a winning season.
- Loss of school funding for programs which intellectially-oriented students benefit from, notably "gifted and talented" programs but also the arts.
In short, these shooters are not born mad: they are driven to madness by ineffective school environments which encourage the abuse of the intellect.Given this, how do you justify creating a system which only allows intellectially-oriented students to be abused more than before (via the inevitable abuses of your system), rather than nipping the problem in the bud by attacking what drives these students mad? The latter, while more difficult, would certainly be far more effective. Once a person is traumatized, by peer abuse or by other means, that trauma can sometimes never be healed. But it could have been prevented. Clearly you have resources to at least lay the foundation for something like this. It isn't as easy as your current quick-fix, but it does work. You can take a sane person out of a madhouse, but the sane person remains sane, and the madhouse remains a madhouse. You haven't fixed the problem at all.
I'd almost think you were one of the lunatic fringee. But you're still an obvious fake; you're not capitalizing enough words. This has the effect that you don't sound arrogant enough.
In particular, you forgot to capitalize "Truth of God." Any real lunatic-zealot would have done that. "Pagan" would probably have been capitalized too.
You also forgot to mention Hell, that favorite subject of the Christian Right (don't ask me why; look through the entire Bible and you'll find that Hell isn't even mentioned once). Any decent lunatic zealot would have mentioned that in some way or another.
I should also point out that you seem to know little about Ultima. It does indeed promote its "Virtues," but it never mentions God, thus how can you know it promotes doing things in a "decent Christian way"? While most lunatic zealots do tend to misinterpret and overblow things, but they're a bit more careful than that.
Finally, you didn't outright advocate the banning of RPG's. Any self-respecting lunatic-zealot (if such a thing can be said to exist) would have dont that. For that matter, you aren't angry enough; the Christian Right is always angry about anything against which it rants.
Satirizing the Christian Right is a fun thing, and I wholeheartedly endorse it. I've done it myself, once or twice. You've shown no small talent in doing it, too; look at all the people you've fooled. But you still need a bit of practice. Unfortunately, the Church of the Mighty Lamb (the satirical site which brought us such gems as "Satan Trek," "Blasphemy 5," "Darth Pimp," "Pervert Pooh," and "My Little Pony is a WHORE!") appears to be gone, or I'd link to it. It's a great example of mocking the Christian Right; the long list of hate-mail shows you just how effective it is at fooling people. Certainly required reading for religious satirists.
You'd be right, but this is an obvious troll. Namely because it's basically impossible to confuse the Final Fantasy series with the Street Fighter series. Even the most clueless of the censors can pick that up. Particularly since the person knows enough about the game to know that Chun-Li does, in fact, practice kung fu (specifically, the wushu style). To actually know which art she practices and not know the name of the game is pretty much impossible.
So what we have here is an intentional troll, doing nothing but trying to stir up trouble. Granted the article should have been rated Troll instead of Flamebait, but I support whoever modded this one down.
WARNING: I'm playing Devil's Advocate in the first paragraph; I don't believe there's a reason for anyone to own, say, a nuclear missile. However, I do believe the banning of certain types of handguns and such is going too far.
Are you so certain? It is indeed true that these weapons did not exist when the Constitution was written. However, consider that at the time it was written, a citizen had full access to anything the military did. There was a reason for this. The Framers had just (well, not just, it had been several years) gotten away from a corrupt government. They saw how governments could get. The Second Amendment was another step in the "checks and balances" system, this one being that an armed citizenry and a military check each other. The Amendment guaranteed that the government would not have an easy time becoming oppressive, should it ever try to take that road, because the people had the means to defend themselves.
This is quite possibly the one thing the American government has of which it can really and truly be proud. Not the Second Amendment in particular, but the whole Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights. Look over its wording. It doesn't say what the government can do; it says what the government is forbidden from doing. The Bill of Rights doesn't grant people their Constitutional rights; it guarantees them (there is a vast difference from saying "you have this right" and "no one can take this right away from you"; this is why I still assert that at least thus far the US is the only nation which guarantees such things as free speech). It's an elegant document indeed; it has been in force for over two hundred years and has been amended surprisingly few times, and one of those amendments was written only to undo a previous one (Prohibition).
I do wish the government would follow it more closely these days, though...
MANY people lost money, a lot MORE people will lose money VERY soon. When people start receiving their first and second quarter mutual fund reports, fund managers are going to have to say due to a sell off in technology i.e. Microsoft and every other tech company, we lost 10% of your money this quarter. This translates to anger against the government. Why is the DOJ ripping Microsoft and my stock. Call representatives in Congress and ask what the hell they are doing about this situation. Not a pretty picture.
/Secretary of State/etc...)
You forget one thing: this was one day. A quarter is MUCH longer than one day. The 300-point drop can be expected to be temporary. Microsoft's stock is going to get hammered probably for the rest of this week, but then we will see it start to recover as the market hysteria dies down. In the meantime, I don't think it's at all unprobable that the stock from Microsoft's competitors is going to get a sizable boost. Still sucks if you've only invested in Microsoft, but frankly if you've pinned your entire portfolio into a simgle company, no matter what that company may be, you deserve a hammering. Even the most idiotic of investors knows better than to do that.
Also, you seem to get the idea that because Microsoft's stock nose-dived, all the other tech companies followed suit. Not true. Many stocks took a slight hit, but that may or may not be related to the case. The 300-point drop in the NASDAQ was due, mostly, to Microsoft alone.
Bad stock markets days like this make things VERY rough for Mr. Gore. Bush will be putting this on Gore for the rest of the campaign. You want an out of control DOJ that sues EVERY company (Smith & Wesson, the Tobacco industry, Microsoft, Glock) and puts your stocks in the toilet: Vote Al Gore. Not a very pleasant thought considering the majority of those who buy stock also vote.
So Gore has something to worry about. I wasn't planning on voting for him anyway.
Now, that we have thought about this rationally. Think about what would happen if Bill Gates said "Fine, if you don't want us to innovate then were going to shutdown Microsoft and return all value to the shareholders." Think about how many industries, businesses, individuals are affected by Microsoft financially both directly and indirectly. I would venture a guess that you would see a depression unlike any other since the 1930's. Believe it or not, a great deal of the expansion of the U.S. economy over the past 15 years can be attributed to Microsoft. Whether they did something bad or not doesn't change the fact that you, me, the businesses we work for, the schools we go to, and just about everything around us is effected by Microsoft.
One: That's just something M$ might say. Of course, it's a lie; they've never innovated anything at all. There is absolutely nothing they've ever done that someone else wasn't already doing. And usually better, at that.
Two: Your depression bit is little more than an alarmist scare tactic.
Three: Even if that bit is true, it only works against you. Should the entire U.S. economy really be so closely tied to one company? Think about that. A company which holds that much of a monopoly needs to be put into check. A DoJ ruling isn't the only thing that can cause a company to go sour, you know. It would be like the President dying with no system of succession in place (Vice President/Speaker of the House/Senate President pro tempore
And one final point. One which I'm sure people would find interesting. Look over the trial. You'll see a lot of things said. You'll see Microsoft claim that its software is innovative, competitive, and so forth. But you'll never once hear Microsoft claim that its software is the best. They knew exactly what they were doing: cramming mediocre software down people's throats, using dirty tricks to trip up competition, and so forth. At least, though, they didn't commit perjury by claiming superiority.
One of the BIG things the DOJ wanted Microsoft to do, as part of the settlement, was to admit guilt. They wouldn't be prosecuted by the DOJ, but they'd still have to admit they'd broken the law.
That's why Microsoft didn't dare settle. And now they're in even more danger because of the lawsuits. I feel sorry for the innocent workers there; they were just doing their jobs, some of which will undoubtedly be lost in the aftermath of this decision. But the people who've put Microsoft's policies in place deserve one hell of a smackdown. They've been holding back the industry for well over a decade now. They've lied, cheated, stolen, betrayed... suffice to say they've done it all, just for the sake of The Almighty Buck. Success is one thing, and a good one, if obtained by honest, honorable means. But Microsoft didn't -probably couldn't- play by those rules.
You called the industry's tune, Microsoft, for years. Now the piper wants to collect. Will your money save you now? We'll all see...
This is among the worst types of theft: cultural theft.
Perhaps, but then the question becomes: whose culture? The machine was stolen from Britain, but the machine is German in origin. The machine was already stolen property when it was taken. Depending on who stole it, then your logic might even justify this theft as merely taking it back from the real thieves.
This is so because it is not theft from one or a few people, but from much of the world...
Point here. But that machine is still, I sumbit, more of a historical artifact than a cultural one.
similar to the American habit of destroying foreign culture and replacing it with our own (yes, I come from the USA and I say this).
OK, I want to hear a defense of this point. Are you traing to say that American culture has no right to exist? Or that it is somehow inferior to others? The way I see it, American culture has exactly as much a right to exist as any other culture; no more, true, but certainly no less either. If you're going to try and say which culture is superior and which isn't (and you certainly sound as though you are doing this), then I wonder where the hell you get off thinking you're in any position to do that. I know I'm not, and I very much doubt anyone here on Slashdot is, because guess what: no one is in that position. Least of all those who are so egotistical they actually think they are.
After all, there can be no serious attempt to justify a light sentence based on thieving to live or being unaware of committing a crime.
Strange; last I checked ignorance of the law is generally considered an extremely weak defense, and certainly wouldn't work in this case.
MILL LIKE WIERD POST. MILL AGREE, SHOULD STILL BE ABLE READ POST WITHOUT USE FISH PROGRAM. BUT USE PIG-TONGUE, SPEAK LIKE HAXOR, WHY CARE? MILL READ THOSE EASY. BUT STILL FUNNY. IS APRIL FOOL DAY. WHY NOT HAVE BIG FUN? THAT WHAT APRIL FOOL DAY FOR.
MILL SURPRISE YOU NOT KNOW WHY CALL APRIL FOOL DAY. HAVE TO DO WITH CALENDAR.
BIG TIME AGO, PEOPLE THINK SUN-TURN START APRIL. THEY SAY, NEW SUN-TURN DAY APRIL ONE. THEN POPE COME, MAKE NEW SUN-TURN. SAY NEW SUN-TURN DAY JANUARY ONE. MANY PEOPLE FOLLOW POPE. BUT SOME WANT NEW SUN-TURN STILL START APRIL ONE, CLOSE TO START WARMING-TIME. PEOPLE FOLLOW POPE, CALL OTHER PEOPLE APRIL FOOL. THAT WHY CALL APRIL FOOL DAY. MILL NOT KNOW WHEN JOKES START. BUT MILL LIKE JOKES.
MILL DO THINK MANY POST IN WIERD TALK GO TOO FAR. ONLY NEED ONE FOR GOOD JOKE. TWO POST STILL GOOD. MANY POST BAD IF TOO HARD READ POST.
MILL NOT LIKE WEB TRACK. NOT LIKE BE HUNTED LIKE ANIMAL. MILL PERSON. HAVE RIGHT HIDE WHEN WANT HIDE, NOT HIDE WHEN WANT NOT HIDE.
THAT WHY MILL NOT USE CACHE. MILL HAVE BIG COLLEGE PIPE. NOT NEED CACHE. MILL FEEL BAD PEOPLE HAVE SMALL PIPE NEED CACHE. MILL WANT BREAK HEAD PERSON FIND EXPLOIT. BUT MILL NOT KNOW WHAT DO ABOUT EXPLOIT.
CACHE GOOD. NOT CLOG PIPE IF NOT NEED CLOG. EXPLOIT CACHE BAD. USE FOR HUNTING PERSON. BUT SMALL PIPE NEED CACHE; TOO SLOW IF NOT HAVE. MILL SAY IF HAVE BIG PIPE, NO USE CACHE; NO NEED CACHE. BUT IF HAVE SMALL PIPE, LOOK WAY HIDE. MAYBE THERE WAY TOUCH CACHE WHEN FILE GO THERE, SO ALL FILE LOOK SAME TIME MODIFY. THEN CACHE HUNT NOT WORK.
Hey, if OOG_THE_CAVEMAN can swap personalities for a April Fool's, so can I...
Ummm... RealMedia and QuickTime are direct competitors. The chances of Real agreeing to licence their codec to Apple are somewhat less than zero. Out in the real world, competition exists and commercial organizations actually protect their intellectual property.
Don't be so sure about those odds. Already MS and Real have licensed each other's codecs for the next releases of their respective software. Why, then, would Apple's chances be any less?
MPEG playback in software has become possible with the hardware of the last six months or so. MPEG encode (to any decent quality) still really require dedicated hardware. I imagine this is one of the reasons Apple has not gone down this path yet.
Strange... I've been doing both of those just fine with a 2-year-old G3. QuickTime has supported software MPEG playback since version 2.5, which is at least three years old.
The people aren't parties to the "contract" of a copyright.
The government is nothing more than elected representatives of the people. Indeed, in criminal cases, you'll find that "the people" are listed as the plaintiff, with the accused as defendant. So the people are parties to the contract of a copyright.
Frankly, I don't necessarily see why there should be any defined expiration of the copyright.
As far as you or any individual is concerned, there is no expiration. Well technically there is, but the time limit only starts once the copyright holder dies. So as far as you are concerned copyrights expire, because a dead person neither knows nor cares about intellectual property.
Corporations are another matter. But I'll cover them later.
If I create something, I should be able to do what I will with it, for as long as I see fit.
Yep. And that's how it works for individuals. What do you care about what's done with it after you're dead, and it no longer benefits you?
And if you don't approve of the fact that I'm not willing to give it away, then you don't have to support me, by giving me money.
Boy, you really don't get it. The fact is, you don't own thought. No one owns thought; as a nontangible and infinitely reproducible thing it cannot, by definition, be owned. That's what copyrights are for. They give you the exclusive right to a given thought, as though you did own it. The price you pay for that is that the copyright eventually expires. But since that doesn't happen until long after your death, why do you care?
And the Ex Post Facto bit, is a red herring. At no time has it been suggested, that someone be prosecuted for a crime that wasn't illegal at the time of commission. It would have been illegal to copy the works in question before the law was passed, as the copyrights hadn't expired.
Ex post facto means any retroactive law. The phrase "ex post facto" in fact means "after the fact." In other words, a law can affect the present and future, but it cannot constitutionally affect actions done in the past, including the granting of copyrights. Someone really ought to take that to the Supreme Court...
I fail to see why everyone on this site seems to think that they have a god given right to take whatever they want, just because it's in an electronic form.
No one here has ever argued that (miscellaneous trolls notwithstanding). But the DMCA corrupts the copyright system beyond its original purpose. We might not have a God-given right to take whatever we want. But in a system where people have the right to sell, they also have the right to buy. And if they have the right to buy, they have the right to use the things they have bought for legitimate purposes. Many copyright protections, such as CSS, seek to curtail that right in a discriminatory manner. Take DVD playing software, for example. There is no good DVD playing software for any platform outside Windows (yes, there's MacOS software, but the quality of it is extremely poor; it can't even keep the audio and video synced). Thus CSS discriminates against those who don't own set-top boxes or Windows machines, but wish to play the DVD's they paid for legitimately and have already bought the necessary equipment to do so (namely, a computer and a DVD drive).
It really galls me to play the discrimination card, actually. So often it's used by the terminally paranoid to scam various things off of other people or corporations. In this day and age, legitimate cases are very rare, but every once in a while a legitimate case occurs. This is one. And while you may have the right to do what you want with your so-called "intellectual property," no one ever gave you the right to commit a crime with it.
QUICKTIME IS NOT A CODEC.
QUICKTIME IS NOT A CODEC.
Go write that on the chalkboard five thousand times. If I see one more post mistaking QuickTime for a codec....
Now, what is QuickTime, since it's not a codec? The answer is that it's a media layer. Video is what it's famous for, but that's only one part of it. It also does sound, images, and a fair amount of other cool stuff.
Apple could Open-Source this with little trouble, actually. It actually has to a small extent; the open MPEG4 standard has a file format based on QuickTIme's. What gives QuickTime its "IP value" are the codecs involved. I'd like to see those Open-Sourced, but let's be realistic; Apple isn't do that. But they could still release these as binary plug-ins (they already do this with the Intel codecs on MacOS and Windows, so it's certainly possible and wouldn't even disrupt the current QuickTime structure). One would think they might be convinced to even Open-Source some of their older codecs, like the Animation and Video ones, though that isn't as certain.
An Open-Source QuickTime would be a Very Good Thing for Unix/Linux/whatever. It would provide the DE's (Gnome, KDE, and whatever else might come up in the future) with a very versatile and proven media layer. It would also help to create an open standard for such things.
Oh, and for those who gripe about the QT4 interface, three points...
- Yes, the current interface does suck. Talk about form without function.
- The OSX version is much-improved; check out this page for a screenshot of the OSX player (basically, QT4 minus the fluff and with the volume thumbwheel replaced by a slider again).
- QuickTime is only an API; it's not hard to code a new player. If you use QuickTime's default controls, in fact, you have the old QT3 interface.
But anyway, that's enough of my rant. There are really only a few more things I'd like to see in QuickTime anyway...- MPEG2 and MPEG4 support. There's particularly no excuse not to have MPEG4, seeing as it's based off of QuickTime's file format for crying out loud.
- RealMedia support. Real's servers use RTSP, which QuickTime already supports, so it's just a matter of licensing the codec.
- MPEG (and hopefully MPEG2/MPEG4) export. As it is, the only reason I can think of for it not being in there would be if Astarte and HEURIS are paying Apple not to put it in, so they can keep charging obscene prices for their own encoders ($400 for Astarte's M.PACK). Still, there's always Movie2MPEG (an OSS encoder for MacOS). It's very slow but it gets the job done.
Those, plus the Open-Sourcing of at least the layer (if not the codecs) would just be icing on the cake.Don't believe that Apple has changed it's tune. BeOS had to abandon Mac hardware PPC support because Apple refuses to release documentation on their hardware--even under NDA!
So Apple doesn't hand them the specs on a silver plate. Big deal; Be can get those specs whenever it wants.
Tons of Open-Source operating systems already run on PPC hardware. Most notable among these are the BSD's, because they are under the BSD license. BSD's licensing weakness is a blessing for Be; they can rip that code off, stick it in their own OS, keep it closed, and all continues as before.
So why don't they provide more PPC support? Simple answer: they don't want to. I don't know why not. Perhaps it's the huge Intel investment. Perhaps they're just too damn lazy. Perhaps they're scared of something; I don't know what, but they are.
But since they're really so frightened, why not start a PowerPC Documentation Project? Use code from MkLinux, LinuxPPC, and the BSD's to write your own documentation of PowerPC hardware. It's certainly doable. It'll give Be what they want, it doesn't violate any of Apple's admittedly absurd hardware-licensing crap, and everyone's happy.
This is an outrage. It goes completely and totally against the principles under which Mozilla is being developed. While I can see where the idea comes from, it's the same shortsighted lunacy which affects most proprietary vendors today.
It is precisely because security holes in Linux are announced openly that it is so secure. There will always be security holes in software, so the race for most secure will go to the one with the fastest bugfix turnaround time. That will go to the one with the most eyes looking at the code. And that means the one which doesn't try to "hide" its flaws.
This does pose a potential problem, however, because you are dealing with Web browser users here. Most aren't savvy enough to upgrade the browser every time a new hole is found and patched. This is why Mozilla's modularity needs to be carried one step further, such that security updates can be found and fixed at the touch of a button. I envision something like this: an "Update" button on the toolbar. This button is normally inactive, but when some central repository (Mozilla.org perhaps?) finds and posts a bug, the button activates and glows (or undergoes some sort of obvious state change to alert the user that something is wrong). This button will take the user to the security site (wherever that might be), where the user is given an explanation of the bug, and the chance to automatically download and install the fix. This last process has to be made as transparent as possible; remember we're dealing with everyone from techno-gods to people who wonder why the cupholder on the front of their PC isn't working anymore after they set the huge drink on it.
But the fact is, security through obscurity for an open-source project is hypocrisy of a very high order. I seriously hope Mozilla doesn't take this path. The results would be disastrous for Mozilla and Open-Source in general (M$ in particular will jump on this as a precedent: "see, even Open-Source guys know openness doesn't work!")