The compatibility with both USB and MMC slots means most users won't need
separate card readers anymore. MMC cards fit most consumer electronics, while
USB connections are built into a wide range of IT hardware...'" Initial cards
will hold 8 GB; the maximum the standard supports is 2,048 GB.
...Of course, since most older MMC card devices can't read anything over 4GB,
you'll still need to upgrade either your storage or your devices (or both).
I applaud the direct USB compatibility and the increased capacity, but don't kid
us with claims of backward compatibility. Everyone already has 2-4GB MMC/CF/SD/XD
cards in all their devices nowadays, and the industry needs to find an artificial
reason to upgrade. Nothing more, nothing less.
The "DownloadHelper" extension for Firefox already does this
Not a bad little extension!
However, it unfortunately only rips videos that most geeks could already have
gotten to (though it certainly saves the time of going through the cache,
finding what you want, and manually grabbing that!).
I'd really like to find something that can rip videos from the
"hard" sites that stream-only, like video.msn.com, that don't actually
send the video as a proper file. Although StreamRipper used to work
for those, it fails on more and more of them these days; So far the only
100% solution I've found requires actually using a screen-capture util
such as CamStudio for those - And that does not count as a
satisfactory solution.
gets a network connection up and running and i can get the drivers
to install the rest of the cards
Exactly - You missed the parent's point - It does NOT "just work"
after a clean XP install. In your case, you got lucky and the single most
annoying part to get working, the network, happened to come up okay. But
all those other drivers that allows you to download, don't
work OOB.
Eventually what I had to do was remove all the PCI cards
from my box, install 4 different pci wifi cards
When Dell builds you a PC, they use all parts that either Microsoft
(or their own testing) has certified as functioning under XP. If you
checked for Linux compatibility BEFORE buying, you wouldn't need to
randomly try four different cards.
Now, that doesn't excuse the fact that four cards
simply didn't work well (or at all) under Linux - But
literally thousands of people would jump at the opportunity
to write those very drivers, if the manufacturers didn't make it as
difficult as possible to get the necessary info.
I agree, that sounds totally different than what they say in their
TOS - But I mean totally different. Like it doesn't even seem to apply
to the same site.
It sounds more like they intended the site as some sort of massively
collaborative text-based "game", with the game flow controlled by people
falling somewhere between "moderator" and "dungeon master" in their role.
As for what they hoped to actually sell with that brochure, and to whom,
ya got me there.
Perhaps that brochure came from an earlier incarnation of the site (which would
explain its vanishing from anywhere but the Google cache)?
I suspect an awful lot of the negative reaction comes from three factors: 1. Membership in the site would
certainly have a "We own your postings." clause in the Terms of Service.
"At FanLib, we expect you to post the content you create ("Your Content") on the website. You keep any
and all rights to Your Content. FanLib does not own any rights to Your Content."
2. *And* a "We reserve the right to censor anything you post we don't like." clause.
"FanLib encourages and supports active and open publication of fan fiction in a lawful and civil
manner. We do not monitor the FanLib Website for inappropriate content or conduct"
(The only "we reserve the right to remove..." they give as part of that applies to outright illegal content).
3. An unwritten consequence of (1) would be: "If it's really good, we'll use it to make
money. Thanks suckers." clause.
"You authorize FanLib to make, reproduce, distribute, and display these summaries or descriptions
on FanLib.com or through its services but not for any other purpose unrelated to FanLib.com. If
you mark any of Your Content private, we will not promote and/or showcase Your Content."
I consider myself about as anti-corporate as they come, but I really can't see the fuss over
FanLib's TOS. It pretty much addresses every concern you raised.
If you need more than 1-3 TB, you can't use generic components
Why not?
Sure, a 16-channel SATA controller with RAID 0/1/5 will cost you $400.
But that will handle, using 750GB drives that have recently entered the
"affordable" range, a total of 12TB (or more practically, a 10.5TB RAID5
with one hot spare). Find an OEM that can set you up with that for under
$5000 total.
Now, that uses a PC chassis and wouldn't look "nice" in a rack. So what?
If you need 10TB and don't want to blow $50k on it, you don't have a lot
of choices... So if you insist on all racked equipment, buy a rack shelf
kit and lay it on its side (and hide it with blanks if you care that
much);-)
Interesting idea if it does what I think, at least. Would have
figured a sandbox for a plugin was rather intensive processor wise.
You can already run your browser (and email, if not Outlook) in a very
effective sandbox with virtually no CPU overhead - Run them as a separate
user with only guest privilages.
That does have a down-side, of course (most notably, it takes a herculean
effort to print from such a session, at least under XP), but works
very well at preventing malicious sites and plugins from doing
anything more than crashing your browser.
Sometimes giving your children the illusion of trust so
they can build confidence and so you can have confidence in
their abilities requires stealthly watching your children
for a time.
Abilities? Confidence?
This has nothing to do with either of those. If the topic
dealt with riding a bike, with building a model, with something
even vaguely skill based you could claim that. But social
networking?
This counts as a privacy issue, and the term "spying" seems the most
appropriate, precisely because parents want to know what their kids
do online while kids very much do not want the same. Thus,
spying. Not even close to the much-less-offensive "right to
supervise", and anyone that deludes themselves into conflating the
two will end up having children that resent them (if not worse).
Personally, I not only object to such behavior by parents (it might
make them feel better, but completely destroys any semblance of
trust in the other direction), I also consider it largely ineffective
anyway. This might not apply so much to the Slashdot crowd, but most
kids today have so much better understanding of computers that
the parents depend on their kids to explain it to them.
For user-specified (or multiple fallback) repositories, you need nothing more complex than reading your
base path(s) from a config file. Prepend that address to every file you download, and it will all go
well.
For the bigger project, basically you just need a set of per-package install/uninstall scripts that check for dependancies
(or no-longer-needed dependancies on uninstall), do their thing, and write themselves to a standardized catalog
of installed software. Whether or not you can adapt Windows' list of such software, and the MSI interface in
general, to your needs, I can't say offhand. I would think you can at least list the package therein,
but I don't think that handles dependancy information quite as elegantly as you would want.
I see the biggest problem you'll have as coming from the poor regression testing done for Windows ports
of FOSS - You may well need multiple (version-specific) instances of some dependancies installed at the
same time, for different packages that use "working until version 2.8.10.4" features (or more of a
nightmare, "working until KB935356").
Overall, I wish you luck with this. I think the Windows world has needed something like apt-get (with a
mind-numbingly simple GUI) for a loooooong time.
This museum represents a direct attack on science.
Disney has several theme parks around the world that feature furries and
princesses. Do you feel that those threaten science as well?
Don't take this the wrong way - I completely agree with you. But don't
take the cause as the effect. The real threat here involves the idiots
poisoning their children with this particular set of ignorant and dangerous
misinformation, not the means by which they do it.
A theme park, IMO, at least puts this set of beliefs into a suitable
context - One of fantasy and humor... "Pikachu, watch out! Jehova has
immunity to lightning! Wait until he morphs into Jesus-form and
then target his metal hand-spikes!".
In a broad sense, yes. That doesn't make every point contained therein false - DDT does
thin eggshells resulting in a much lower rate of successful hatching, for example. More
importantly - It does kill mosquitos and countless other base-of-the-food-chain
insects! That doesn't just mean "lower incidence of malaria", as much as you might try to
paint it as such.
I would agree, though, that Carson did more of a disservice than promotion for ecology.
Baby and Bathwater, though.
dead brown people are unimportant relative to the teachings of the sacred scrolls of the Cult of Gaia.
Not quite - dead brown (and yellow, and yes, even white!) people do not so much matter compared
with the danger of removing one of the lower levels of the food chain. No matter how much of a
nuissance, even danger, Mosquitos pose to humans, that means nothing compared to the up-chain
consequences of making them all dissapear.
If you can get my mom to understand that sentence, I will pay you $500.
"Dear user: Insert the CD. Type make all; make install. Press return and go for
coffee."
Like this, they aren't hiding that they're kind of copying what Java does.
Except, this doesn't just copy Java - You could more accurately say it copies
Bochs (though I don't claim it as an
actual ripoff, just conceptually). Rather than giving the programmer a
"toy" VM with special hooks for multimedia functionality as Java does, this
sounds more like it gives the use a "real" emulated machine to work with,
letting the programmer use whatever tools they already feel comfortable
with rather than forcing a remarkably "C++ but not"-like language on the
developer.
Additionally, while Java will always require the use of an emulated JVM
(yeah, Sun's plan to have JVM coprocessors in every machine really panned
out, eh?), targetting an idealized x86 Linux machine means this could
finally address one of my peeves about calling it a "VM" - It could actually
run under virtualization rather than emulation.
Oh, and am I the only one who's tired of the old, "I'm a
gamer and I'm not violent so obviously games don't contribute
to violence," gem being busted out time and time again, as if
its actual proof?
When dealing in absolutes, yes, it does constitute a valid (dis)proof.
To prove causation, you must show the precondition as both necessary
and sufficient. If I play violent games and haven't killed someone,
you can't say that playing violent games cause murders (without any
qualifiers).
Now, that doesn't disprove the idea that playing violent games
may apply another CCW turn to some people's screws. But that
means a whole world of difference, putting "violent games" in
the same ballpark as "pain", "alcohol" (or other drugs), "a good scare",
"isolation", "Military experience", and "divorce".
You can either keep what you save in some sort of logical
arrangement, or trust your handy desktop search engine to
find it for you later (though that seems to reduce the problem
back to finding the info in the first place, though at least
you don't need to worry about the content going offline at some
future date.
Furthermore, storing images on a computer encourages the habit of
retaining hundreds or thousands of poor photographs (as there is
effectively no cost for doing so) and thereby reduces the amount of
time spent considering each photograph in detail and deciding which
ones are worth looking at and enjoying.
You mean "worth forcing our family and coworkers to pretend to enjoy".
I take pictures as a sort of documentary of my life. I usually look at
them when I upload them to the computer, remove the really really bad
ones (by which I mean blurry or otherwise unrecognizeable), sort them
away into directories by date and location, and then...
I never look at them again!
(Unless I want to consult them for
information - for example I've found that, having a poor memory for
faces, if I take group pictures at a party or other social event and
tag names to them ASAP, by consulting those pics before visiting with
the same group of people, I have at least some chance of
remembering a few people).
Very, very few of us have any artistic skill whatsoever. Pretending
that people want to see 200 pics of our cats/kids/yards/vacations amounts
to the basest of conceits. Put simply, your life does not interest me
(hell, my own rarely interests me;-) !).
So, the medium of presentation really doesn't seem to matter, except so
far as efficiency goes - And if I really want to look through old pictures,
it takes a whole lot less time to do it as a slideshow of digital
pictures on a monitor than to dig out the right box, suffer at the massive
dust build-up, and then find out that the brand of paper Fuji used 35
years ago turned out to have a fatal flaw leaving all my pics blank. And
that presumes the fire/water/rats/bugs didn't get to them first.
She called the thing an "iGasm"! If you don't see the
parody there, consider yourself officially humor-impaired.
If she is taking Apple's "sillhouette ads" and copying
them to advertise her "device", it is copyright infringement,
pure and simple.
True. But she didn't just take Apple's ads and copy
them - She took the style of Apple's ads (remember Apple
losing that suit 15 years ago to Microsoft?) and
parodied it, albeit for the purpose of promoting her own
product.
Until there's enough spare processor cycles that it really doesn't matter
how much CPU time you use, or a managed language gets as good at optimizing
as a good C compiler/programmer combo (unlikely) I don't think C is going
anywhere.
Don't forget how well all those "Web" languages works as firmware - Oh, wait,
they all depend on plain ol' C to actually bring the hardware up to a
level of functionality where all the C-killer languages can make their pretty
GUIs.
And on a general note, I'm not sure why people think
it is wrong to tax internet commerce, but it is OK to tax
traditional commerce.
I wouldn't say I consider it Okay, but the key difference
here comes from the word "interstate". States simply do not have the
legal authority to regulate interstate commerce, which includes taxing
it. Many try to get around that with a "use" tax on their own citizens,
but currently no one actually declares their use tax, making it
something of a joke.
FWIW, you don't have to pay sales tax on mail-order, either... Though
the internet all but killed the traditional catalogue-based form of
that.
Umm, sorry, ignorance is not an acceptable excuse for
breaking the law. He either did or didn't.
Skipping the debate over when ignorance does count as
a good excuse (this seeming like a good example of it, when
everyone involved including the police doesn't understand
whether or not he broke a law)...
The "ignorance" here, though, extends beyond "of the law" itself.
How about the meaning of "authorization"? If the store offered free
WiFi, did they expressly limit it to customers only? From the
reaction of the store owner, I would suspect not. In which case,
the guy did have implicit authorization, by virtue of the
store offering unsecured free access.
Most people reading this article are assuming spatial dithering
You make a good point, but I'd go even further - If most people assume
this involves spatial dithering - So what? If we want to get really
picky, without spatial dithering, the panel in question can only
display 192 colors, and even a "true" 24-bit panel can only display 768
colors.
Color displays since before the dawn of color TV (keep in mind that
even color printing uses the same basic technique) have depended on
the fact that our eyes tend to see color as a sort of gaussian blur
over a small area and a small time window. If Apple lied here, then
so has every printer and monitor manufacturer who ever sold a color
reproduction device.
The teacher was in frame and the video was published
on the internet. Where's the model's release?
Considering the noncommercial nature of this, what would
the "model" sue for? Even if you spun this into some
sort of defamation issue, the student, not the teacher, makes
a fool of himself.
You can't really blame the ISP's as providing full bandwidth
to all would be overly costly and ridiculous
You and I understand that. The ISPs understand that. Grandma does not.
Joe Sixpack does not.
When ISPs offer unlimited service, the majority of people presume
that really means "unlimited". Thus, we most certainly can blame
the ISPs, for deceptively (if not outright "falsely") representing their
services.
3) They are supposed to be grossly racist and offensive, so any complaints about it should be ignored.
Bingo. XM hired these guys to do pretty much exactly what they did. XM's commercials
even bragged about how they their various celebrity shock-jocks could get away with saying
anything, unlike their broadcast-radio counterparts.
Incidentally, I felt the same way about the Imus scandal, though in that case at least the use of
publically broadcast radio made FCC intervention a possibility - XM doesn't even have that
thin of an excuse.
Slashdot Mirror
The compatibility with both USB and MMC slots means most users won't need separate card readers anymore. MMC cards fit most consumer electronics, while USB connections are built into a wide range of IT hardware...'" Initial cards will hold 8 GB; the maximum the standard supports is 2,048 GB.
...Of course, since most older MMC card devices can't read anything over 4GB,
you'll still need to upgrade either your storage or your devices (or both).
I applaud the direct USB compatibility and the increased capacity, but don't kid us with claims of backward compatibility. Everyone already has 2-4GB MMC/CF/SD/XD cards in all their devices nowadays, and the industry needs to find an artificial reason to upgrade. Nothing more, nothing less.
The "DownloadHelper" extension for Firefox already does this
Not a bad little extension!
However, it unfortunately only rips videos that most geeks could already have gotten to (though it certainly saves the time of going through the cache, finding what you want, and manually grabbing that!).
I'd really like to find something that can rip videos from the "hard" sites that stream-only, like video.msn.com, that don't actually send the video as a proper file. Although StreamRipper used to work for those, it fails on more and more of them these days; So far the only 100% solution I've found requires actually using a screen-capture util such as CamStudio for those - And that does not count as a satisfactory solution.
gets a network connection up and running and i can get the drivers to install the rest of the cards
Exactly - You missed the parent's point - It does NOT "just work" after a clean XP install. In your case, you got lucky and the single most annoying part to get working, the network, happened to come up okay. But all those other drivers that allows you to download, don't work OOB.
Eventually what I had to do was remove all the PCI cards from my box, install 4 different pci wifi cards
When Dell builds you a PC, they use all parts that either Microsoft (or their own testing) has certified as functioning under XP. If you checked for Linux compatibility BEFORE buying, you wouldn't need to randomly try four different cards.
Now, that doesn't excuse the fact that four cards simply didn't work well (or at all) under Linux - But literally thousands of people would jump at the opportunity to write those very drivers, if the manufacturers didn't make it as difficult as possible to get the necessary info.
Check out the face they present to the publishers
I agree, that sounds totally different than what they say in their TOS - But I mean totally different. Like it doesn't even seem to apply to the same site.
It sounds more like they intended the site as some sort of massively collaborative text-based "game", with the game flow controlled by people falling somewhere between "moderator" and "dungeon master" in their role.
As for what they hoped to actually sell with that brochure, and to whom, ya got me there.
Perhaps that brochure came from an earlier incarnation of the site (which would explain its vanishing from anywhere but the Google cache)?
I suspect an awful lot of the negative reaction comes from three factors: 1. Membership in the site would certainly have a "We own your postings." clause in the Terms of Service.
"At FanLib, we expect you to post the content you create ("Your Content") on the website. You keep any and all rights to Your Content. FanLib does not own any rights to Your Content."
2. *And* a "We reserve the right to censor anything you post we don't like." clause.
"FanLib encourages and supports active and open publication of fan fiction in a lawful and civil manner. We do not monitor the FanLib Website for inappropriate content or conduct"
(The only "we reserve the right to remove..." they give as part of that applies to outright illegal content).
3. An unwritten consequence of (1) would be: "If it's really good, we'll use it to make money. Thanks suckers." clause.
"You authorize FanLib to make, reproduce, distribute, and display these summaries or descriptions on FanLib.com or through its services but not for any other purpose unrelated to FanLib.com. If you mark any of Your Content private, we will not promote and/or showcase Your Content."
I consider myself about as anti-corporate as they come, but I really can't see the fuss over FanLib's TOS. It pretty much addresses every concern you raised.
If you need more than 1-3 TB, you can't use generic components
;-)
Why not?
Sure, a 16-channel SATA controller with RAID 0/1/5 will cost you $400. But that will handle, using 750GB drives that have recently entered the "affordable" range, a total of 12TB (or more practically, a 10.5TB RAID5 with one hot spare). Find an OEM that can set you up with that for under $5000 total.
Now, that uses a PC chassis and wouldn't look "nice" in a rack. So what? If you need 10TB and don't want to blow $50k on it, you don't have a lot of choices... So if you insist on all racked equipment, buy a rack shelf kit and lay it on its side (and hide it with blanks if you care that much)
Interesting idea if it does what I think, at least. Would have figured a sandbox for a plugin was rather intensive processor wise.
You can already run your browser (and email, if not Outlook) in a very effective sandbox with virtually no CPU overhead - Run them as a separate user with only guest privilages.
That does have a down-side, of course (most notably, it takes a herculean effort to print from such a session, at least under XP), but works very well at preventing malicious sites and plugins from doing anything more than crashing your browser.
Sometimes giving your children the illusion of trust so they can build confidence and so you can have confidence in their abilities requires stealthly watching your children for a time.
Abilities? Confidence?
This has nothing to do with either of those. If the topic dealt with riding a bike, with building a model, with something even vaguely skill based you could claim that. But social networking?
This counts as a privacy issue, and the term "spying" seems the most appropriate, precisely because parents want to know what their kids do online while kids very much do not want the same. Thus, spying. Not even close to the much-less-offensive "right to supervise", and anyone that deludes themselves into conflating the two will end up having children that resent them (if not worse).
Personally, I not only object to such behavior by parents (it might make them feel better, but completely destroys any semblance of trust in the other direction), I also consider it largely ineffective anyway. This might not apply so much to the Slashdot crowd, but most kids today have so much better understanding of computers that the parents depend on their kids to explain it to them.
For user-specified (or multiple fallback) repositories, you need nothing more complex than reading your base path(s) from a config file. Prepend that address to every file you download, and it will all go well.
For the bigger project, basically you just need a set of per-package install/uninstall scripts that check for dependancies (or no-longer-needed dependancies on uninstall), do their thing, and write themselves to a standardized catalog of installed software. Whether or not you can adapt Windows' list of such software, and the MSI interface in general, to your needs, I can't say offhand. I would think you can at least list the package therein, but I don't think that handles dependancy information quite as elegantly as you would want.
I see the biggest problem you'll have as coming from the poor regression testing done for Windows ports of FOSS - You may well need multiple (version-specific) instances of some dependancies installed at the same time, for different packages that use "working until version 2.8.10.4" features (or more of a nightmare, "working until KB935356").
Overall, I wish you luck with this. I think the Windows world has needed something like apt-get (with a mind-numbingly simple GUI) for a loooooong time.
This museum represents a direct attack on science.
Disney has several theme parks around the world that feature furries and princesses. Do you feel that those threaten science as well?
Don't take this the wrong way - I completely agree with you. But don't take the cause as the effect. The real threat here involves the idiots poisoning their children with this particular set of ignorant and dangerous misinformation, not the means by which they do it.
A theme park, IMO, at least puts this set of beliefs into a suitable context - One of fantasy and humor... "Pikachu, watch out! Jehova has immunity to lightning! Wait until he morphs into Jesus-form and then target his metal hand-spikes!".
Let's see: Silent Spring has been debunked.
In a broad sense, yes. That doesn't make every point contained therein false - DDT does thin eggshells resulting in a much lower rate of successful hatching, for example. More importantly - It does kill mosquitos and countless other base-of-the-food-chain insects! That doesn't just mean "lower incidence of malaria", as much as you might try to paint it as such.
I would agree, though, that Carson did more of a disservice than promotion for ecology. Baby and Bathwater, though.
dead brown people are unimportant relative to the teachings of the sacred scrolls of the Cult of Gaia.
Not quite - dead brown (and yellow, and yes, even white!) people do not so much matter compared with the danger of removing one of the lower levels of the food chain. No matter how much of a nuissance, even danger, Mosquitos pose to humans, that means nothing compared to the up-chain consequences of making them all dissapear.
If you can get my mom to understand that sentence, I will pay you $500.
"Dear user: Insert the CD. Type make all; make install. Press return and go for coffee."
Like this, they aren't hiding that they're kind of copying what Java does.
Except, this doesn't just copy Java - You could more accurately say it copies Bochs (though I don't claim it as an actual ripoff, just conceptually). Rather than giving the programmer a "toy" VM with special hooks for multimedia functionality as Java does, this sounds more like it gives the use a "real" emulated machine to work with, letting the programmer use whatever tools they already feel comfortable with rather than forcing a remarkably "C++ but not"-like language on the developer.
Additionally, while Java will always require the use of an emulated JVM (yeah, Sun's plan to have JVM coprocessors in every machine really panned out, eh?), targetting an idealized x86 Linux machine means this could finally address one of my peeves about calling it a "VM" - It could actually run under virtualization rather than emulation.
How long until.. ..someone introduces a display that is as thin as three razors?
Hah! My LCD already has the thinness of fifty-eight razors!
Top that, Sony!
Oh, and am I the only one who's tired of the old, "I'm a gamer and I'm not violent so obviously games don't contribute to violence," gem being busted out time and time again, as if its actual proof?
When dealing in absolutes, yes, it does constitute a valid (dis)proof.
To prove causation, you must show the precondition as both necessary and sufficient. If I play violent games and haven't killed someone, you can't say that playing violent games cause murders (without any qualifiers).
Now, that doesn't disprove the idea that playing violent games may apply another CCW turn to some people's screws. But that means a whole world of difference, putting "violent games" in the same ballpark as "pain", "alcohol" (or other drugs), "a good scare", "isolation", "Military experience", and "divorce".
File -> "save page as" -> "web page, complete".
You can either keep what you save in some sort of logical arrangement, or trust your handy desktop search engine to find it for you later (though that seems to reduce the problem back to finding the info in the first place, though at least you don't need to worry about the content going offline at some future date.
Furthermore, storing images on a computer encourages the habit of retaining hundreds or thousands of poor photographs (as there is effectively no cost for doing so) and thereby reduces the amount of time spent considering each photograph in detail and deciding which ones are worth looking at and enjoying.
;-) !).
You mean "worth forcing our family and coworkers to pretend to enjoy".
I take pictures as a sort of documentary of my life. I usually look at them when I upload them to the computer, remove the really really bad ones (by which I mean blurry or otherwise unrecognizeable), sort them away into directories by date and location, and then...
I never look at them again!
(Unless I want to consult them for information - for example I've found that, having a poor memory for faces, if I take group pictures at a party or other social event and tag names to them ASAP, by consulting those pics before visiting with the same group of people, I have at least some chance of remembering a few people).
Very, very few of us have any artistic skill whatsoever. Pretending that people want to see 200 pics of our cats/kids/yards/vacations amounts to the basest of conceits. Put simply, your life does not interest me (hell, my own rarely interests me
So, the medium of presentation really doesn't seem to matter, except so far as efficiency goes - And if I really want to look through old pictures, it takes a whole lot less time to do it as a slideshow of digital pictures on a monitor than to dig out the right box, suffer at the massive dust build-up, and then find out that the brand of paper Fuji used 35 years ago turned out to have a fatal flaw leaving all my pics blank. And that presumes the fire/water/rats/bugs didn't get to them first.
The ad is not a parody
She called the thing an "iGasm"! If you don't see the parody there, consider yourself officially humor-impaired.
If she is taking Apple's "sillhouette ads" and copying them to advertise her "device", it is copyright infringement, pure and simple.
True. But she didn't just take Apple's ads and copy them - She took the style of Apple's ads (remember Apple losing that suit 15 years ago to Microsoft?) and parodied it, albeit for the purpose of promoting her own product.
Until there's enough spare processor cycles that it really doesn't matter how much CPU time you use, or a managed language gets as good at optimizing as a good C compiler/programmer combo (unlikely) I don't think C is going anywhere.
Don't forget how well all those "Web" languages works as firmware - Oh, wait, they all depend on plain ol' C to actually bring the hardware up to a level of functionality where all the C-killer languages can make their pretty GUIs.
And on a general note, I'm not sure why people think it is wrong to tax internet commerce, but it is OK to tax traditional commerce.
I wouldn't say I consider it Okay, but the key difference here comes from the word "interstate". States simply do not have the legal authority to regulate interstate commerce, which includes taxing it. Many try to get around that with a "use" tax on their own citizens, but currently no one actually declares their use tax, making it something of a joke.
FWIW, you don't have to pay sales tax on mail-order, either... Though the internet all but killed the traditional catalogue-based form of that.
Umm, sorry, ignorance is not an acceptable excuse for breaking the law. He either did or didn't.
Skipping the debate over when ignorance does count as a good excuse (this seeming like a good example of it, when everyone involved including the police doesn't understand whether or not he broke a law)...
The "ignorance" here, though, extends beyond "of the law" itself.
How about the meaning of "authorization"? If the store offered free WiFi, did they expressly limit it to customers only? From the reaction of the store owner, I would suspect not. In which case, the guy did have implicit authorization, by virtue of the store offering unsecured free access.
Most people reading this article are assuming spatial dithering
You make a good point, but I'd go even further - If most people assume this involves spatial dithering - So what? If we want to get really picky, without spatial dithering, the panel in question can only display 192 colors, and even a "true" 24-bit panel can only display 768 colors.
Color displays since before the dawn of color TV (keep in mind that even color printing uses the same basic technique) have depended on the fact that our eyes tend to see color as a sort of gaussian blur over a small area and a small time window. If Apple lied here, then so has every printer and monitor manufacturer who ever sold a color reproduction device.
The teacher was in frame and the video was published on the internet. Where's the model's release?
Considering the noncommercial nature of this, what would the "model" sue for? Even if you spun this into some sort of defamation issue, the student, not the teacher, makes a fool of himself.
You can't really blame the ISP's as providing full bandwidth to all would be overly costly and ridiculous
You and I understand that. The ISPs understand that. Grandma does not. Joe Sixpack does not.
When ISPs offer unlimited service, the majority of people presume that really means "unlimited". Thus, we most certainly can blame the ISPs, for deceptively (if not outright "falsely") representing their services.
considering their biggest hits are from public domain stories.
Don't forget they've also ripped off plenty of anime as well...
3) They are supposed to be grossly racist and offensive, so any complaints about it should be ignored.
Bingo. XM hired these guys to do pretty much exactly what they did. XM's commercials even bragged about how they their various celebrity shock-jocks could get away with saying anything, unlike their broadcast-radio counterparts.
Incidentally, I felt the same way about the Imus scandal, though in that case at least the use of publically broadcast radio made FCC intervention a possibility - XM doesn't even have that thin of an excuse.