... showing why he is the #2 man in the Linux Kernel.
I.e. He knows the right things to do in order to help move the community forward. He is a worthy successor to Linus. Which is kind of tricky since I think he actually seams older. ( Alan how old are you really ? )
As for this DVD thing. The sound bytes from LinuxWorld hint at VALinux getting involved. This makes perfect sense in light of how *I* ( and perhaps a very few others ) see this this thing going. I.e. Get an injunction against a well hated bogeyman like 2600.com then use it to keep serious Linux companies and Hardware manufacturers out of the DVD business.
Picture a DVD player that lets you do absolutely anything you want with the film including; cut and past to compare the holes on Neo's shirt when he is "dying" to the ones when he is "resurrected" ( Do they line up ? ).
This can be done with an OSS software player and DVD watching geeks sending code in. It won't happen with what exists now commercially. This scares the devil out of the existing licensees.
For one thing they promised to release Linux for IA64 on the day the chip ships. titanium isn't even out yet and these goys are shipping code. Frankly I think it's upsetting.
What ever happened to code delays, late shipping and all those other things we have come to expect from software producers ?
Actually I think this was probably just tossed out so Linus and Alan could look at it and asses how they go about merging all that code *before* 2.4.0 hits the road.
Isn't this the day that's supposed to keep repeating until you go mad ?
For those who don't "GroundHog Day" was also a movie.
On a more serious note dose anyone want to recalibrate the calendar ? After all it seams to be running 7 years behind of it's proper time and Christ was apparently born in 7BC. This is an unacceptable situation since it would mean we celebrated the 3nd millennium at the wrong time last year and will have an equally incorrect celebration this year.
I say that in 2002 we reset the calendar to 2000 so we can do the millennium thing properly then we recalibrate it to the actual date in the following year ( 2010 ). Of course the calendar finally working properly should also be cause for celebration on a scale unheard of before.
somewhere in there we will restart the count from 0 2000 years in the past so all those who called january, 1 2000 the dawn of a new millennium would become correct.
Considering the kind of human you normally encounter on IRC wouldn't it be more convincing to create artificial stupidity ?
Let the bot enter #linux and yell "HELLO ROOM" then proceed to ask complex and interesting questions in #windows95 ( after being kicked from #linux ). "The window on my car is stuck and some dolt at the shop says it's because I spilled glue in there. Could he be right ?"
Who knows this bot could even get opp status and monitor a few channels. oppbot* on Windows "HaXoR25 was kicked for straying off topic. 'Uptime' is not an allowed word here".
Wow. We have a robot off exploring somewhere that's a little dangerous and which actively discourage human visitors.
So what exactly is new here ? Maybe it's that this baby runs by itself and doesn't need some human twiddling it's remote control joystick. Maybe it's because this Robot has some built in intelligence and actually tries to "think" it's way around.
One thing though is that if this baby breaks down it is possible for some Homosapien to go out and drag it back unlike other explorer robots that go to places that humans have never visited before. Even the moon and orbiter robots went before people could get the spacesuits to work properly ( I.e. trust the gear ).
The government side will always apoint it's own members to every ministry regardless of competence.
Besides the Oposition leader in question dosn't take kindly to playing second fidle. He was prime minister in the 80s and did better than curent one by a wide margin.
Do you want to work for a boss you thing is a whole lot dumber than you ?
Congressmen are on average a whole lot older than your typical email slinging geak. The apparent backwardness of congress is in reality only a reflection of the age of it's members. How many 50+ year olds do you know who want to use this new technology ?
In contrast every University tries it's damnedest to by wired. After all it's made up mostly of late teen and early twenties students. This is the generation that remembers growing up as abandoning Atari for Nintendo then drooping Mario for DOOM.
Around these parts ( Jamaica ) when the Minister of Technology and Commerce (If ever there was an EComerce ministry this is it:) went into parliament to make a speech his use of a laptop actually caused an objection from the floor. ( Denied by the Speaker of the House ).
BTW : Since the majority of these elderly congressmen ( most would have been forced into retirement in other professions ) are using the tech you americans should count yourselves lucky. Around here the leader of the opposition doesn't admit in public that he repairs the PCs in his office himself. It would make him look weird to the rest of Parliament:)
Bloat in the Government isn't feeding the hungry or finding shelter for the homeless. It isn't even putting computers into ghetto Schools or removing graffiti.
Bloat is when founds are sought and allocated for those things but don't get there. Bloat is when you have a $50,000,000 "Urban renewal" project for downtown and this project establishes offices on the other, more affluent side of town. Then manages to run up $17,000,000 in "Administrative Expenses" before any actual work gets done on replacing the condemned buildings downtown.
Bloat is when constructing an office building costs a private business $3 Million and a smaller, simpler, less durable building costs the Government $8 Million.
In short bloat is not about what is done with our money but rather when *nothing* is done.
"It's like prohibition in the 1920s. That's not going to work. It's not even a holding action, it's just... dumb."
This is not strictly true. You see there is a method to the madness and I can explain. Let's forget DVD copying ( you are right ). This is about players. So what we have here is prosecution by proxy.
I.e. The real defendants are not in the courtroom and only one of the real plaintiffs is there too. What these people want is for a court somewhere ( any court, anywhere ) to say that DeCSS is an illegal piece of code and should not be allowed to exist.
What do they get from such a ruling ? They have a president that can then be used to bludgeon Diamond or RedHat into not writing, building or distributing players that use the new code. That's why the central people in the case are the people most likely to have a ruling entered against them.
People like www.2600.com which after crying "free Kevin" for 5 years is roundly hated by every judge on the bench, or that little boy who after you bash his computer and harass both him and his dad for a whole day ( 7 hours straight ) you tell the mother that "look, if he signs this thing to the effect that DeCSS was illegally created we will leave you all alone ).
Effectively what they are trying to do is Retroactively create a patent for DVD encryption. "It's out there. You can look at it but you can't use it". A court might just buy that crap too.
So yep, It's the MPAA in court but Sony and Panasonic who are the real plaintiffs. It's a bunch of websites and a few little boys on trial but they really care about corporate defendants who are nowhere near the courtroom. Frankly I would tell LI to bankroll the defense and file a counter-suite of some kind.
I have said it before and I will say it again. This hasn't got squat to do with weather you or I have LiViD. It's actually about making sure Diamond Multimedia can't use it. It's so RedHot and Mandrake can't distribute it to the next generation of Linux users.
What's the deference between us and them ? They have money, wide distribution channels, deep pockets and the will to sell DVD players ( software and hardware ) for less than they cost now.
The aim of this lawsuit is to get a court to rule that DeCSS is outlawed. This is why http://www.2600.com was one of the defendants in each and every case. They have been protesting about Kevin M. for like 5 years. They have a bad rep to judges and the like ( "how dare you say he is being held unjustly" ).
Once such a ruling exists DeCSS and LiViD will remain things a technically savvy user downloads and installs on his own to play DVDs. Without the ruling it becomes something smaller electronics companies use to avoid forking over a few bucks for ever DVD player they ship. The big companies ( Sony ) will follow suite and the DVD-CCA will seas to exist.
So the fact is distributing it far and wide doesn't mean squat. What we need now is to win in court. We need to make a *Judge* say that these people are talking out of there asses and the stuff was revers engineered fair and square.
This is also why they went after that kid so brutally. They don't so much want him to stop distributing it since he did that months ago when they asked the 1st time. They want to pressure him into signing an Affidavit to the effect that "I stole this data illegally and apologize for letting it get out."
That last point explains why his father was also taken. It's all an attempt to scare his mother into making him "confess". Some of the Linux hackers in Norway need to be at that family's house today. Comfort them, tell them you care and most importantly be prepared to fight for them as much as possible. That way you keep the kid in the fight and we can't afford to have him quit. Ever.
I herd there was this company who makes like drawing programs and stuff like that porting it all to Linux. Could that have something to do with everybody playing follow the Copeland ?
Ohh and Oracle brought everybody to the server:).
Yes. A periodic roundup of "These people joined the bandwagon over the past month" would be nice. Also list "these old timers have put down deeper roots". IBM isn't the only company pushing more into Linux each day you know:).
A subsection for "Slashdot PR" would be nice too. Just like we have an "Ask Slashdot". You may well need an editor for handling just the PR chores ( I volunteer. A small salary and a few stock options is payment enough:). Trust me on this one. It's gona be wild over the next 12 months.
This particular implementation ( using reflected signals from idle phones ) has only been around for a couple years. Older than that is the simple tracking of an active phone which so stale as to make it into a book about catching Kevin ( how much of "takedown" was made up anyway ? ) and "Independence Day" ( the Will Smith movie ).
Actually what's really new about this is the use in "traffic mapping" rather than simple "person tracking" which was the original purpose.
It doesn't list the pre patches with authority because frankly nobody can be sure. There have been cases of as many as 3 official patches in a single day but pre patches are much more frequent ( usually 3 to 7 per official patch ).
At that rate it's theoretically possible to have over a dozen pre patches in a day. Worse yet there are people other than Linus putting pre patches out, then there are the AC patches.
Where I come from game magazines gather dust on the shelves more often than not. Where I come from people play games that they have *never* sean adds for. What game adds do is draw attention to particular games but not to gaming as a whole. That's like I said an early childhood or genetic thing.
As to the authors claim that 50% of gamers are female. Where ? Not around these parts. The girls at my nice-in-law's school are really sisterly. They share everything; Romance novels, makeup kits, oddly shaped combs etc...
Video games don't ever seam to come up, except as something we are doing instead of what they want.
Video games appeal to boys more and men more than girls and women.
This has little to do with the adds since most of us start playing games long before we know they have adds for them. The real difference happens either very early in childhood or is hardwired into the geans. I suspect the former based mostly on a child I know ( 12 now ) who would spend hours before the mirror fighting her hair and "simulating" makeup but would also "repair" small appliances. The latter probably has more to do with walking through my "lab" every day.
While there are females who find video games ( even Quake ) appealing and some exist who like to tinker with machines the fact is when it comes to high tech these ladies are the exception rather than the rule. This is part of the problem that makes silicon valley "the largest concentration of millionaire bachelors". It's why your typical tech startup will have 20 boys, 2 girls and 3 old men. Both the girls will likely be in marketing or accounts too.
So my point ? Game producers see no point in targeting the female market since
1. It's extremely tiny to begin with and
2. Those few members will be attracted by most of what catches the eyes of boys.
BTW : Before anyone starts mouthing off about women being offended by pictures of scantily clad females take a look through a few "Women's magazines" sometime. All those lingerie adds are "interesting" and why do you need a nude model to sell lipstick ?
I won't get into the discussion of what is legal and isn't ( the Judge should tell us all in a few hours ) here.
Rather I'm hitting on the "why dose the DVD-CCA want to sue ?" question.
1st the danger ( to them ) posed by DeCSS and it's children ( like LiViD ). Once this software is fully functional and optimized it will be a full free player for every operating system on the market. That means no more player licensing for computer users.
However that's just the beginning. As the owner of any portable MP3 player can tell you it's just a small leap of faith from working source code to a special purpose device that's essentially a single purpose PC. In other words there will likely be players on the market based on this code. Those players could and in all likelihood will be at the very low end of the price scale because they don't pay the license and most of the work involves piecing together well defined components.
Those players however could offer more features than the official ones because it's still a PC under the hood.
Of course those who already pay for CSS could just stop paying and switch to the free code. ( This isn't a desktop OS with lots of tie-ins after all ). In this scenario the licensing body has no source of income left.
So while I am rooting for the EFF since they are fighting for *my* rights, I have some sympathy for the DVD-CCA since they are fighting for survival. Too bad we won't morn if the organization falls in this economy. All the staff should be employable.
I have noticed lately with stories of some importance to the Linux community that ACs decent on Slashdot and do there best to raise the signal to noise ratio.
Right now you will see only 19 comments if you brows at +1, 114 at -1 and 89 at 0.
To make matters worse the ACs have figured out that by nesting comments in a long deep tree it forces the browser to go wide. For people like me with 18 point text at 1024x768 resolution that means a lot of horizontal scrolling.
The alternative is of course to brows at +1 which removes _ALL_ the noise.
Suggestions for Rob and the rest. How about a setup where if you have more than 70% of the posts on a story by ACs all the moderators get 3 "bonus points" for use in that story alone.
Another option is to let moderating a 100 byte or less post from an AC down to -1 not cost a point. ( or at least not a whole point:).
Finally, I don't think this is a matter of fools flocking to a hot item. I think it's a deliberate and concerted effort by paid Astroturfers to disrupt discussion on serration issues. After all browsing at +1 will also cut out the occasional post from an insider hiding from his boss.
He was part of the inspiration for my handle. It is worth noting that when they hooked up the ship's computer to his visor they couldn't make sense of what he saw. When they asked how he could he responded "Practice".
A lot of my customers are blind so this wold probebly be nice. Except for the cost.
Harassment, Perverting the course of justice, creating a public nuisance ( I don't know if that is a charge in the US ). Basically filing a lot of lawsuits you can't win against people who can't afford to defend against all of them is a crime all by itself.
Or if not a crime, at least an abuse of the legal system. Never mind that these cases have perjury at the very core.
To clarify a bit. The big Linux distributors are the real targets but not in the way you may think.
1st you need to asses what the DVD-CCA and the MPAA etc... hope to achieve with these law-suites. The stated goal is to stop the spread of this software. However after something appears on a thousand FTP sites in a hundred jurisdictions actually making it disappear becomes a fantasy at best. So they have set the goal a little lower.
They accept that any savvy SlashDot reading netaholic will be able to find install and use this software on all "unsupported platforms". However that defeats the purpose of making money selling players. This lawsuit is looking farther ahead to the day when Linux box makers are shipping millions of PCs per month to home users. If each of those clueless users who can only make KDE run because it doesn't ever "break" was faced with the choice of a download and install from something other than a "name brand" site then another DVD player is sold.
You see this software is only a danger to Sony and the like if it's an option in the RedHat install and Mandrake updates lists the latest version. It doesn't matter if Sunsite, ftp.cdrom.com, Downloads.com and freashmeat.net all have to stay away to avoid the legal implications.
In that light the concept of getting a court somewhere to say that "the very existence of this software is a criminal offense" should make some kind of sense. Even if it's only banned in one small state the logistics of ensuring that your products with it don't officially go there costs too much.
I have been asking this since the case came up and I still havn't herd a response from anyone who shuld know.
These lawsuites are being filed in a maner which sugests they can't realy stand on merit and the idea is to spread the limited resorces of the defendants as thin as posible in order to get somebody "convicted" because they simply culdn't put up a defence.
That wold then become a precident to wave at RedHat and Caldera. The real targets of this lawsuite dispite all the bullS##t from everyone.
Now what if a lawsuite is filed on behalf of the many plaintifs with a stipulation of damages to be awarded as folows.
10,000,000 to be shared betwean the legal teams in all the suites on an eaven basis ( no negotiation or puling of rank ).
15,000,000 to be shared betwean the plaintifs on similar even terms.
100,000,000 to be kept in the EFF's kity and invested so we will have a war chest the next time something like this hapens.
Slashdot Mirror
... showing why he is the #2 man in the Linux Kernel.
I.e. He knows the right things to do in order to help move the community forward. He is a worthy successor to Linus. Which is kind of tricky since I think he actually seams older. ( Alan how old are you really ? )
As for this DVD thing. The sound bytes from LinuxWorld hint at VALinux getting involved. This makes perfect sense in light of how *I* ( and perhaps a very few others ) see this this thing going. I.e. Get an injunction against a well hated bogeyman like 2600.com then use it to keep serious Linux companies and Hardware manufacturers out of the DVD business.
Picture a DVD player that lets you do absolutely anything you want with the film including; cut and past to compare the holes on Neo's shirt when he is "dying" to the ones when he is "resurrected" ( Do they line up ? ).
This can be done with an OSS software player and DVD watching geeks sending code in. It won't happen with what exists now commercially. This scares the devil out of the existing licensees.
For one thing they promised to release Linux for IA64 on the day the chip ships. titanium isn't even out yet and these goys are shipping code. Frankly I think it's upsetting.
What ever happened to code delays, late shipping and all those other things we have come to expect from software producers ?
Actually I think this was probably just tossed out so Linus and Alan could look at it and asses how they go about merging all that code *before* 2.4.0 hits the road.
What's that dream system's specs now ?
Linux-2.4 - XF86-4.0 - KDE-2.0 - 4way-SMP-Itanium
Isn't this the day that's supposed to keep repeating until you go mad ?
For those who don't "GroundHog Day" was also a movie.
On a more serious note dose anyone want to recalibrate the calendar ? After all it seams to be running 7 years behind of it's proper time and Christ was apparently born in 7BC. This is an unacceptable situation since it would mean we celebrated the 3nd millennium at the wrong time last year and will have an equally incorrect celebration this year.
I say that in 2002 we reset the calendar to 2000 so we can do the millennium thing properly then we recalibrate it to the actual date in the following year ( 2010 ). Of course the calendar finally working properly should also be cause for celebration on a scale unheard of before.
somewhere in there we will restart the count from 0 2000 years in the past so all those who called january, 1 2000 the dawn of a new millennium would become correct.
Considering the kind of human you normally encounter on IRC wouldn't it be more convincing to create artificial stupidity ?
:)
Let the bot enter #linux and yell "HELLO ROOM" then proceed to ask complex and interesting questions in #windows95 ( after being kicked from #linux ). "The window on my car is stuck and some dolt at the shop says it's because I spilled glue in there. Could he be right ?"
Who knows this bot could even get opp status and monitor a few channels. oppbot* on Windows "HaXoR25 was kicked for straying off topic. 'Uptime' is not an allowed word here".
Do something fun for a change
Wow. We have a robot off exploring somewhere that's a little dangerous and which actively discourage human visitors.
So what exactly is new here ? Maybe it's that this baby runs by itself and doesn't need some human twiddling it's remote control joystick. Maybe it's because this Robot has some built in intelligence and actually tries to "think" it's way around.
One thing though is that if this baby breaks down it is possible for some Homosapien to go out and drag it back unlike other explorer robots that go to places that humans have never visited before. Even the moon and orbiter robots went before people could get the spacesuits to work properly ( I.e. trust the gear ).
note the word _Oposition_.
The government side will always apoint it's own members to every ministry regardless of competence.
Besides the Oposition leader in question dosn't take kindly to playing second fidle. He was prime minister in the 80s and did better than curent one by a wide margin.
Do you want to work for a boss you thing is a whole lot dumber than you ?
That's refreshing. Generaly we are way behind on everything. I.e. Our telecom monopoly is just getting ready to go to court.
You can't teach and old dog new tricks.
:) went into parliament to make a speech his use of a laptop actually caused an objection from the floor. ( Denied by the Speaker of the House ).
:)
Congressmen are on average a whole lot older than your typical email slinging geak. The apparent backwardness of congress is in reality only a reflection of the age of it's members. How many 50+ year olds do you know who want to use this new technology ?
In contrast every University tries it's damnedest to by wired. After all it's made up mostly of late teen and early twenties students. This is the generation that remembers growing up as abandoning Atari for Nintendo then drooping Mario for DOOM.
Around these parts ( Jamaica ) when the Minister of Technology and Commerce (If ever there was an EComerce ministry this is it
BTW : Since the majority of these elderly congressmen ( most would have been forced into retirement in other professions ) are using the tech you americans should count yourselves lucky. Around here the leader of the opposition doesn't admit in public that he repairs the PCs in his office himself. It would make him look weird to the rest of Parliament
No. No. No.
Bloat in the Government isn't feeding the hungry or finding shelter for the homeless. It isn't even putting computers into ghetto Schools or removing graffiti.
Bloat is when founds are sought and allocated for those things but don't get there. Bloat is when you have a $50,000,000 "Urban renewal" project for downtown and this project establishes offices on the other, more affluent side of town. Then manages to run up $17,000,000 in "Administrative Expenses" before any actual work gets done on replacing the condemned buildings downtown.
Bloat is when constructing an office building costs a private business $3 Million and a smaller, simpler, less durable building costs the Government $8 Million.
In short bloat is not about what is done with our money but rather when *nothing* is done.
"It's like prohibition in the 1920s. That's not going to work. It's not even a holding action, it's just... dumb."
This is not strictly true. You see there is a method to the madness and I can explain. Let's forget DVD copying ( you are right ). This is about players. So what we have here is prosecution by proxy.
I.e. The real defendants are not in the courtroom and only one of the real plaintiffs is there too. What these people want is for a court somewhere ( any court, anywhere ) to say that DeCSS is an illegal piece of code and should not be allowed to exist.
What do they get from such a ruling ? They have a president that can then be used to bludgeon Diamond or RedHat into not writing, building or distributing players that use the new code. That's why the central people in the case are the people most likely to have a ruling entered against them.
People like www.2600.com which after crying "free Kevin" for 5 years is roundly hated by every judge on the bench, or that little boy who after you bash his computer and harass both him and his dad for a whole day ( 7 hours straight ) you tell the mother that "look, if he signs this thing to the effect that DeCSS was illegally created we will leave you all alone ).
Effectively what they are trying to do is Retroactively create a patent for DVD encryption. "It's out there. You can look at it but you can't use it". A court might just buy that crap too.
So yep, It's the MPAA in court but Sony and Panasonic who are the real plaintiffs. It's a bunch of websites and a few little boys on trial but they really care about corporate defendants who are nowhere near the courtroom. Frankly I would tell LI to bankroll the defense and file a counter-suite of some kind.
It's called prosecution by proxy.
I have said it before and I will say it again. This hasn't got squat to do with weather you or I have LiViD. It's actually about making sure Diamond Multimedia can't use it. It's so RedHot and Mandrake can't distribute it to the next generation of Linux users.
What's the deference between us and them ? They have money, wide distribution channels, deep pockets and the will to sell DVD players ( software and hardware ) for less than they cost now.
The aim of this lawsuit is to get a court to rule that DeCSS is outlawed. This is why http://www.2600.com was one of the defendants in each and every case. They have been protesting about Kevin M. for like 5 years. They have a bad rep to judges and the like ( "how dare you say he is being held unjustly" ).
Once such a ruling exists DeCSS and LiViD will remain things a technically savvy user downloads and installs on his own to play DVDs. Without the ruling it becomes something smaller electronics companies use to avoid forking over a few bucks for ever DVD player they ship. The big companies ( Sony ) will follow suite and the DVD-CCA will seas to exist.
So the fact is distributing it far and wide doesn't mean squat. What we need now is to win in court. We need to make a *Judge* say that these people are talking out of there asses and the stuff was revers engineered fair and square.
This is also why they went after that kid so brutally. They don't so much want him to stop distributing it since he did that months ago when they asked the 1st time. They want to pressure him into signing an Affidavit to the effect that "I stole this data illegally and apologize for letting it get out."
That last point explains why his father was also taken. It's all an attempt to scare his mother into making him "confess". Some of the Linux hackers in Norway need to be at that family's house today. Comfort them, tell them you care and most importantly be prepared to fight for them as much as possible. That way you keep the kid in the fight and we can't afford to have him quit. Ever.
BTW : Somebody loan him a new PC for me.
I herd there was this company who makes like drawing programs and stuff like that porting it all to Linux. Could that have something to do with everybody playing follow the Copeland ?
:).
:).
:). Trust me on this one. It's gona be wild over the next 12 months.
Ohh and Oracle brought everybody to the server
Yes. A periodic roundup of "These people joined the bandwagon over the past month" would be nice. Also list "these old timers have put down deeper roots". IBM isn't the only company pushing more into Linux each day you know
A subsection for "Slashdot PR" would be nice too. Just like we have an "Ask Slashdot". You may well need an editor for handling just the PR chores ( I volunteer. A small salary and a few stock options is payment enough
But with a modern twist.
This particular implementation ( using reflected signals from idle phones ) has only been around for a couple years. Older than that is the simple tracking of an active phone which so stale as to make it into a book about catching Kevin ( how much of "takedown" was made up anyway ? ) and "Independence Day" ( the Will Smith movie ).
Actually what's really new about this is the use in "traffic mapping" rather than simple "person tracking" which was the original purpose.
It doesn't list the pre patches with authority because frankly nobody can be sure. There have been cases of as many as 3 official patches in a single day but pre patches are much more frequent ( usually 3 to 7 per official patch ).
At that rate it's theoretically possible to have over a dozen pre patches in a day. Worse yet there are people other than Linus putting pre patches out, then there are the AC patches.
That might be a good read. I figured it's something you learn early on but I didn't know where or how.
Let me be more specific.
Where I come from game magazines gather dust on the shelves more often than not. Where I come from people play games that they have *never* sean adds for. What game adds do is draw attention to particular games but not to gaming as a whole. That's like I said an early childhood or genetic thing.
As to the authors claim that 50% of gamers are female. Where ? Not around these parts. The girls at my nice-in-law's school are really sisterly. They share everything; Romance novels, makeup kits, oddly shaped combs etc...
Video games don't ever seam to come up, except as something we are doing instead of what they want.
Video games appeal to boys more and men more than girls and women.
This has little to do with the adds since most of us start playing games long before we know they have adds for them. The real difference happens either very early in childhood or is hardwired into the geans. I suspect the former based mostly on a child I know ( 12 now ) who would spend hours before the mirror fighting her hair and "simulating" makeup but would also "repair" small appliances. The latter probably has more to do with walking through my "lab" every day.
While there are females who find video games ( even Quake ) appealing and some exist who like to tinker with machines the fact is when it comes to high tech these ladies are the exception rather than the rule. This is part of the problem that makes silicon valley "the largest concentration of millionaire bachelors". It's why your typical tech startup will have 20 boys, 2 girls and 3 old men. Both the girls will likely be in marketing or accounts too.
So my point ? Game producers see no point in targeting the female market since
1. It's extremely tiny to begin with and
2. Those few members will be attracted by most of what catches the eyes of boys.
BTW : Before anyone starts mouthing off about women being offended by pictures of scantily clad females take a look through a few "Women's magazines" sometime. All those lingerie adds are "interesting" and why do you need a nude model to sell lipstick ?
... understand how big DeCSS is ?
I won't get into the discussion of what is legal and isn't ( the Judge should tell us all in a few hours ) here.
Rather I'm hitting on the "why dose the DVD-CCA want to sue ?" question.
1st the danger ( to them ) posed by DeCSS and it's children ( like LiViD ). Once this software is fully functional and optimized it will be a full free player for every operating system on the market. That means no more player licensing for computer users.
However that's just the beginning. As the owner of any portable MP3 player can tell you it's just a small leap of faith from working source code to a special purpose device that's essentially a single purpose PC. In other words there will likely be players on the market based on this code. Those players could and in all likelihood will be at the very low end of the price scale because they don't pay the license and most of the work involves piecing together well defined components.
Those players however could offer more features than the official ones because it's still a PC under the hood.
Of course those who already pay for CSS could just stop paying and switch to the free code. ( This isn't a desktop OS with lots of tie-ins after all ). In this scenario the licensing body has no source of income left.
So while I am rooting for the EFF since they are fighting for *my* rights, I have some sympathy for the DVD-CCA since they are fighting for survival. Too bad we won't morn if the organization falls in this economy. All the staff should be employable.
I have noticed lately with stories of some importance to the Linux community that ACs decent on Slashdot and do there best to raise the signal to noise ratio.
:).
Right now you will see only 19 comments if you brows at +1, 114 at -1 and 89 at 0.
To make matters worse the ACs have figured out that by nesting comments in a long deep tree it forces the browser to go wide. For people like me with 18 point text at 1024x768 resolution that means a lot of horizontal scrolling.
The alternative is of course to brows at +1 which removes _ALL_ the noise.
Suggestions for Rob and the rest. How about a setup where if you have more than 70% of the posts on a story by ACs all the moderators get 3 "bonus points" for use in that story alone.
Another option is to let moderating a 100 byte or less post from an AC down to -1 not cost a point. ( or at least not a whole point
Finally, I don't think this is a matter of fools flocking to a hot item. I think it's a deliberate and concerted effort by paid Astroturfers to disrupt discussion on serration issues. After all browsing at +1 will also cut out the occasional post from an insider hiding from his boss.
He was part of the inspiration for my handle. It is worth noting that when they hooked up the ship's computer to his visor they couldn't make sense of what he saw. When they asked how he could he responded "Practice".
A lot of my customers are blind so this wold probebly be nice. Except for the cost.
Harassment, Perverting the course of justice, creating a public nuisance ( I don't know if that is a charge in the US ). Basically filing a lot of lawsuits you can't win against people who can't afford to defend against all of them is a crime all by itself.
Or if not a crime, at least an abuse of the legal system. Never mind that these cases have perjury at the very core.
To clarify a bit. The big Linux distributors are the real targets but not in the way you may think.
1st you need to asses what the DVD-CCA and the MPAA etc... hope to achieve with these law-suites. The stated goal is to stop the spread of this software. However after something appears on a thousand FTP sites in a hundred jurisdictions actually making it disappear becomes a fantasy at best. So they have set the goal a little lower.
They accept that any savvy SlashDot reading netaholic will be able to find install and use this software on all "unsupported platforms". However that defeats the purpose of making money selling players. This lawsuit is looking farther ahead to the day when Linux box makers are shipping millions of PCs per month to home users. If each of those clueless users who can only make KDE run because it doesn't ever "break" was faced with the choice of a download and install from something other than a "name brand" site then another DVD player is sold.
You see this software is only a danger to Sony and the like if it's an option in the RedHat install and Mandrake updates lists the latest version. It doesn't matter if Sunsite, ftp.cdrom.com, Downloads.com and freashmeat.net all have to stay away to avoid the legal implications.
In that light the concept of getting a court somewhere to say that "the very existence of this software is a criminal offense" should make some kind of sense. Even if it's only banned in one small state the logistics of ensuring that your products with it don't officially go there costs too much.
I have been asking this since the case came up and I still havn't herd a response from anyone who shuld know.
These lawsuites are being filed in a maner which sugests they can't realy stand on merit and the idea is to spread the limited resorces of the defendants as thin as posible in order to get somebody "convicted" because they simply culdn't put up a defence.
That wold then become a precident to wave at RedHat and Caldera. The real targets of this lawsuite dispite all the bullS##t from everyone.
Now what if a lawsuite is filed on behalf of the many plaintifs with a stipulation of damages to be awarded as folows.
10,000,000 to be shared betwean the legal teams in all the suites on an eaven basis ( no negotiation or puling of rank ).
15,000,000 to be shared betwean the plaintifs on similar even terms.
100,000,000 to be kept in the EFF's kity and invested so we will have a war chest the next time something like this hapens.
After 7 hours on the University's line and :(
20 minutes to write the CD. 7.0 is out before
I have instaled the BETA
Why dose it cost more per test than MCP ?
Dose MS use software sales to susidise exams ?