By now, he's had time to think about those particular pictures, and he knows that non-sexually-explicit photos do not constitute child pornography, so what is he doing? He claims that the girls in their bras were posed "provocatively", but that's not the same as sexual explicitness, and he hasn't even made that claim about the towel picture, so unless there's some bombshell piece of information about the photos that he's still keeping secret (and why would he?), there's no excuse for him not to drop the threats of prosecution right away.
I have a hunch that this DA is angling for Attorney General and beyond-- power and money does give people an insatiable urge for greater ambitions. If as a prosecutor he drops the charges against the girls, it makes him seem weak to the law enforcement community, which in turn weakens his chances of that coveted AG election victory. Erect the false image of a crime fighter with a perfect record of protecting the community's kids, and he is often a shoe-in, despite the fact that taking a chainsaw to civil liberties like this endangers him and everyone else in the country.
Or he's a jackass who's defending himself despite the fact that people are pointing out the weaknesses in parts of his case. These are easily correctable weaknesses, which the defense attorney will no doubt exploit as the prosecutor with an axe to grind and rounding up kids whose only offense is doing stupid things. Unfortunately, many prosecutors in such cases sway the jury by invoking moral arguments based on tradition or some other means of ignoring the glaring legal errors-- it's a game of smoke and mirrors to cloak away the reasonable doubt.
Either way, he is exploiting an increasing hysteria of "save the children" that IMO is rooted in religious circles, particularly ones whose statements of belief encourage or order their followers to ignore the Constitutional restriction on the US government against legislating religious values. I'm beginning to think that Bush was the tipping point here-- if he didn't care about the laws that may have forbidden him to do what he believed to be right, why should the religious groups who so overwhelmingly aligned themselves to him?
This zeal to do what they think is right gives them a myopia that prevents them from predicting the consequences of their goals. Even when hundreds of soldiers were falling in Iraq, even when the allegations of warrantless wiretapping surfaced, even when the conservative-oriented government allowed parts of our infrastructure to fail catastrophically, even when FEMA bungled the aftermath of Katrina, I had Christian friends who believed Bush was a great leader despite the fact that they primarily voted for him because he promised to kill Roe v. Wade. That is myopia to the point of blindness, and that is why they should never have allowed politics to enter their churches in the first place.
Unfortunately, the PRS would probably still demand license fees because someone did perform the music with the expectation of being paid royalties. At least, the recording industry cartel in the USA would demand this.
What we need is a digital archive of public-domain or CC-licensed freely distributable musical recordings. At this rate, the best we can do outside of chamber music is all the classical works composed prior to World War I (composers' copyrights expired), "recorded" on a personal computer with advanced digital instruments (no performers' license rights)-- think Kontakt, Pro Tools, Logic, or the like-- and distribute the resulting mp3s far and wide, with the license terms in the comments section of the ID3 tags (no producers/labels' copyrights). I think this would have the additional advantage of giving music schools everywhere a reference to listen to and critique along with acoustic recordings that they are permitted to use-- it would give them a reference, period, if they do not have such fair use/dealing protections.
I do think, however, that even if the "broadcaster" in this case has the permission and legal standing to tell the media corporation lackeys to kindly go fuck themselves, the RIAA and their equivalents would take the bullying to the courts and squeeze the little guys for all they're worth. When will our governments understand that this is not about the copyright infringement, but about an entire industry willing to sacrifice customers in order to maintain a business paradigm that allows them complete control over every aspect of music production, and thus, stamp out any would-be competitors?
The tinfoil hat part of me says that the ISP may be looking to have BitTorrent classified as unauthorized traffic by defending it in such a piss-poor manner...
"Damn fast" can mean anything. Faster than what? XP on the same machine without the appropriate drivers? Faster than a Babbage machine trying to do SIMD?
I'll wager that with the proper drivers and BIOS settings*, XP on the same machine will still fly circles around Vista. And any free OS under the same conditions will leave either in the dust.
I'm also guessing the Vista setup was Home Basic or Premium without the Aero effects. Besides, they cleaned up the lion's share of performance problems in SP1, so I'm not surprised that it felt a lot more responsive than in XP.
* Because my company requires downgrades (Vista is unauthorized), I attempted to start an XP installation on a Toshiba Satellite. It blue-screened just before the first setup screen, and I figured out that the CPU auto-throttling was responsible.
Don't be so sure. A talented (read: weaselly) lawyer can convince a judge or regulator that there are antitrust stuff going on. And deals are worked out all the time between competitors-- I wouldn't be surprised if nVidia went to broker a deal with AMD, Via, or any other aspiring chip maker looking to shave some market share from Intel. It'll be a lot tighter of a market for nVidia, but it's not like they only make chipsets for Macs.
Intel's new graphics line may be an improvement over past generations, but they still don't hold a candle to ATI/nVidia. They know that the complex math processing capabilities of GPUs will be a lot more of a determinant in high-to-mid-performance computing, so this is most likely Intel trying to leverage a better deal out of nVidia and other partners. Only this time, nVidia isn't buying it.
Hogwash. You're cherry-picking the least efficient biofuel (corn ethanol) and using that as a description of the entire industry.
If you raised that argument with our own Secretary of Energy, he would call you either misinformed or an idiot, and he would be right. Does Brazil use tons of fertilizer to grow their own ethanol? Rum distillers would laugh you out of the building.
If we get cellulosic off the drawing board, your argument sounds even more ridiculous, as it opens up things like wood scraps and agricultural waste.
If we get a viable, engineered process for algal fuels, we don't even need land or fresh water-- grow the damned fuels offshore for nigh-free.
I'd amend the "thousand-front war" to "shooting fish in a barrel". Few of the RIAA driftnet targets have the time or resources to mount a defense, let alone proceed with a trial.
I thought the idea of "clean coal" was finding a way to store the CO2 to prevent it from screwing with the climate. This "coal-to-gas" does nothing towards this goal, so I don't see how one would call it "clean coal" other than the obvious lack of sulfur or mercury.
My ID bag is in its third year of use, and has yet to even show any hint of wear. I've carried 3+ kilograms of mass on this thing, in a trip to Japan involving two 15" laptops on top of all the stuff one may chuck into a carry-on. Ordinarily, a shoulder strap or its support structure would fail or at least weaken under that sort of weight-- I've seen lighter violin cases fail more quickly-- but this thing didn't even flinch.
My shoulders/back/knees, however, were another story altogether, especially after 2 hours of carrying that insanely heavy bag.
I very much doubt you would be disappointed in the durability of these bags, especially since you'll be toting a netbook.
This is precisely why I stick with GPL software in Windows. Every utility and application under the sun has its own auto-update function, every one designed in-house, and the companies that made these apps would rather give up their left testicles* before they let their application be registered with a third-party app maintainer, or worse, Microsoft. What they did to WordPerfect back in the day probably scared a lot of companies into paranoia. The GPL apps have this thing called "user control" and let me choose if I want to allow them to auto-update. Now if they'd get a unified local application database of some sort for Windows, and convince the OSS herd of cats to use it...
My only exception is games.
* The execs and sales/marketing monkeys would, anyway. Don't know about the engineers.
This blog post does nothing but reference itself. There are no formal statements from MS and no proof of any kind given. Show me the proof, then I'll side with you. New tag: proveit
Reminds me of this line from Lewis Black: "[Iran has] access to nuclear materials, which they convert into a bomb and place it into a missle, and 500 Iranians will throw it at us." (He made that joke a few years before they launched their satellite)
I don't know if anyone mentioned this yet, but courts have ruled ports and border connections as areas where the government may freely detain people and potentially search them, Bill of Rights be damned. In fact, there's a 100-mile zone all around the country's edges where border agents may have latitude (at least, according to the ACLU):
Such policies, which began as a way to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, has expanded to precursors for porn and drug busts. I don't think the judge said "hand over the unencrypted files because you had no 4th amendment protections to begin with", but it's damned close.
And yes, it would be 4th amendment, because he allowed law enforcement to search him. Taking the 5th after the fact is silly.
You click on some of them and get an immediate "no uninstaller found" or even more cryptic messages, and no way to remove these useless entries.
You mean, there's no way to easily and safely remove these entries. It is possible, but one would need to use a utility like TweakUI (unsupported, download required), or manually mess with the registry (can kill your system).
...they don't opperate like a consumer hardware company.
Maybe not the whole company, but there are at least two products that count as consumer hardware: Xbox and Zune. Assuming, of course, keyboards and mice don't count.
Perhaps there are lessons for Microsoft to be learned from the products that have healthy demand?
Irrelevant, MS is not charged with having a monopoly. Having a monopoly is legal.
Precisely, and this is where so many people miss the point. Microsoft was never convicted of having a monopoly-- they were convicted of using their highly advantageous position in the operating systems market to prevent competitors (Netscape, Novell, IBM, WordPerfect, etc.) from entering the market and having a reasonable chance at survival, let alone success.
Seriously, there are businesspeople who read the Wall Street Journal and think that just because they bought into Friedman supply-side economic doctrine, they're macroeconomists...
... but given Ruby's general organization (at least compared to PHP) and developer-friendliness, I wouldn't be surprised if they added such methods to the String class.
(That's one way to concatenate 2 strings in Ruby. The Perl-like way is either a dot or a plus sign. The variable substitution is usually "good enough for government work".)
Until recently, most music in iTunes was DRM-encumbered, which more than likely turned a good number of people off from the service, especially if you didn't own an iPod. I'm not sure whether or not iTunes works in Linux either, but the Windows version may be working through Wine. That's probably enough to turn most/. readers away.
Actually... if DRM is such a big hairy deal to a lot of people, I don't think that's reflected in the portable player market. Moreover, you could make the same argument for Safari or Quicktime on Linux-- they just don't bother because there's the mammoth Windows market and their own platform to code for. It might be simply a matter of scarce resources.
The only people that I know of who complain about iTunes DRM are those who either didn't want to pay the premium for an iPod or didn't like the idea that their music may become unplayable given certain unlikely circumstances-- in my experience the iTunes DRM has been largely unobtrusive and reasonable, and unless every iTunes user really struggled with either remembering their account password or authorizing too many computers, I'm sure the average user's experience is similar. If anything, most users seemed to shrug it off as a necessary evil to get the record labels on board.
It did appear to become a part of the labels' life support system, however. Perhaps the old Dr. Scratchandsniff therapy ("downloading is not bad. downloading vill not bite you und kick you in ze head...") is starting to sink in.
As for their "every song now DRM-free" announcement, that's probably because Amazon demonstrated with finality that one can have big sales of digital music without DRM. That's got more to do with Apple using this argument against the record labels than anything users demanded of them-- they've historically done stuff their way regardless of what we think, anyway.
Um... correct me if I'm wrong, but even on the cheapest mini, I have the hardest time trying to think up a scenario where a person would exhaust the system resources with casual use. I would think that the OS X kernel would know to not devote so many clock cycles to apps with nothing open and no active tasks.
To the larger point of "closing vs. quitting", there's a bit of ambiguity, especially with apps like System Preferences. The norm is "closing != quitting", but as far as I know, this app is the only one that breaks this convention. Given the power of most Macs, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't that big of a deal if an app is left open.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a hunch that this DA is angling for Attorney General and beyond-- power and money does give people an insatiable urge for greater ambitions. If as a prosecutor he drops the charges against the girls, it makes him seem weak to the law enforcement community, which in turn weakens his chances of that coveted AG election victory. Erect the false image of a crime fighter with a perfect record of protecting the community's kids, and he is often a shoe-in, despite the fact that taking a chainsaw to civil liberties like this endangers him and everyone else in the country.
Or he's a jackass who's defending himself despite the fact that people are pointing out the weaknesses in parts of his case. These are easily correctable weaknesses, which the defense attorney will no doubt exploit as the prosecutor with an axe to grind and rounding up kids whose only offense is doing stupid things. Unfortunately, many prosecutors in such cases sway the jury by invoking moral arguments based on tradition or some other means of ignoring the glaring legal errors-- it's a game of smoke and mirrors to cloak away the reasonable doubt.
Either way, he is exploiting an increasing hysteria of "save the children" that IMO is rooted in religious circles, particularly ones whose statements of belief encourage or order their followers to ignore the Constitutional restriction on the US government against legislating religious values. I'm beginning to think that Bush was the tipping point here-- if he didn't care about the laws that may have forbidden him to do what he believed to be right, why should the religious groups who so overwhelmingly aligned themselves to him?
This zeal to do what they think is right gives them a myopia that prevents them from predicting the consequences of their goals. Even when hundreds of soldiers were falling in Iraq, even when the allegations of warrantless wiretapping surfaced, even when the conservative-oriented government allowed parts of our infrastructure to fail catastrophically, even when FEMA bungled the aftermath of Katrina, I had Christian friends who believed Bush was a great leader despite the fact that they primarily voted for him because he promised to kill Roe v. Wade. That is myopia to the point of blindness, and that is why they should never have allowed politics to enter their churches in the first place.
Unfortunately, the PRS would probably still demand license fees because someone did perform the music with the expectation of being paid royalties. At least, the recording industry cartel in the USA would demand this.
What we need is a digital archive of public-domain or CC-licensed freely distributable musical recordings. At this rate, the best we can do outside of chamber music is all the classical works composed prior to World War I (composers' copyrights expired), "recorded" on a personal computer with advanced digital instruments (no performers' license rights)-- think Kontakt, Pro Tools, Logic, or the like-- and distribute the resulting mp3s far and wide, with the license terms in the comments section of the ID3 tags (no producers/labels' copyrights). I think this would have the additional advantage of giving music schools everywhere a reference to listen to and critique along with acoustic recordings that they are permitted to use-- it would give them a reference, period, if they do not have such fair use/dealing protections.
I do think, however, that even if the "broadcaster" in this case has the permission and legal standing to tell the media corporation lackeys to kindly go fuck themselves, the RIAA and their equivalents would take the bullying to the courts and squeeze the little guys for all they're worth. When will our governments understand that this is not about the copyright infringement, but about an entire industry willing to sacrifice customers in order to maintain a business paradigm that allows them complete control over every aspect of music production, and thus, stamp out any would-be competitors?
The tinfoil hat part of me says that the ISP may be looking to have BitTorrent classified as unauthorized traffic by defending it in such a piss-poor manner...
"Damn fast" can mean anything. Faster than what? XP on the same machine without the appropriate drivers?
Faster than a Babbage machine trying to do SIMD?
I'll wager that with the proper drivers and BIOS settings*, XP on the same machine will still fly circles around Vista. And any free OS under the same conditions will leave either in the dust.
I'm also guessing the Vista setup was Home Basic or Premium without the Aero effects. Besides, they cleaned up the lion's share of performance problems in SP1, so I'm not surprised that it felt a lot more responsive than in XP.
* Because my company requires downgrades (Vista is unauthorized), I attempted to start an XP installation on a Toshiba Satellite. It blue-screened just before the first setup screen, and I figured out that the CPU auto-throttling was responsible.
Don't be so sure. A talented (read: weaselly) lawyer can convince a judge or regulator that there are antitrust stuff going on. And deals are worked out all the time between competitors-- I wouldn't be surprised if nVidia went to broker a deal with AMD, Via, or any other aspiring chip maker looking to shave some market share from Intel. It'll be a lot tighter of a market for nVidia, but it's not like they only make chipsets for Macs.
Intel's new graphics line may be an improvement over past generations, but they still don't hold a candle to ATI/nVidia. They know that the complex math processing capabilities of GPUs will be a lot more of a determinant in high-to-mid-performance computing, so this is most likely Intel trying to leverage a better deal out of nVidia and other partners. Only this time, nVidia isn't buying it.
Hogwash. You're cherry-picking the least efficient biofuel (corn ethanol) and using that as a description of the entire industry.
If you raised that argument with our own Secretary of Energy, he would call you either misinformed or an idiot, and he would be right. Does Brazil use tons of fertilizer to grow their own ethanol? Rum distillers would laugh you out of the building.
If we get cellulosic off the drawing board, your argument sounds even more ridiculous, as it opens up things like wood scraps and agricultural waste.
If we get a viable, engineered process for algal fuels, we don't even need land or fresh water-- grow the damned fuels offshore for nigh-free.
I'm afraid a company full of PHBs beat you to the punch. Pity, too; they've monopolized my area.
I'd amend the "thousand-front war" to "shooting fish in a barrel". Few of the RIAA driftnet targets have the time or resources to mount a defense, let alone proceed with a trial.
I thought the idea of "clean coal" was finding a way to store the CO2 to prevent it from screwing with the climate. This "coal-to-gas" does nothing towards this goal, so I don't see how one would call it "clean coal" other than the obvious lack of sulfur or mercury.
My ID bag is in its third year of use, and has yet to even show any hint of wear. I've carried 3+ kilograms of mass on this thing, in a trip to Japan involving two 15" laptops on top of all the stuff one may chuck into a carry-on. Ordinarily, a shoulder strap or its support structure would fail or at least weaken under that sort of weight-- I've seen lighter violin cases fail more quickly-- but this thing didn't even flinch.
My shoulders/back/knees, however, were another story altogether, especially after 2 hours of carrying that insanely heavy bag.
I very much doubt you would be disappointed in the durability of these bags, especially since you'll be toting a netbook.
This is precisely why I stick with GPL software in Windows. Every utility and application under the sun has its own auto-update function, every one designed in-house, and the companies that made these apps would rather give up their left testicles* before they let their application be registered with a third-party app maintainer, or worse, Microsoft. What they did to WordPerfect back in the day probably scared a lot of companies into paranoia. The GPL apps have this thing called "user control" and let me choose if I want to allow them to auto-update. Now if they'd get a unified local application database of some sort for Windows, and convince the OSS herd of cats to use it...
My only exception is games.
* The execs and sales/marketing monkeys would, anyway. Don't know about the engineers.
http://consumerist.com/5161145/microsofts-policy-regarding-identifying-sexual-orientation-on-xbox-live
Ask, and you shall receive. Something like that. Probably should've lurked at Joystiq.
Isn't their gamer tag "Macrohard"?
Even though Bush broke its heart and killed it, and tore it to pieces, and threw every piece into a fire...
(You had to have "still alive" as the first two words of your post? Now I've got GlaDOS stuck in my head. Again.)
Reminds me of this line from Lewis Black: "[Iran has] access to nuclear materials, which they convert into a bomb and place it into a missle, and 500 Iranians will throw it at us."
(He made that joke a few years before they launched their satellite)
Uh-huh. So they'll arbitrarily pad on 2 gigs to your pagefile and take up some of the perennially-pitiful upstream bandwidth for their own ends?
What are they going to do, serve up porn?
I don't know if anyone mentioned this yet, but courts have ruled ports and border connections as areas where the government may freely detain people and potentially search them, Bill of Rights be damned. In fact, there's a 100-mile zone all around the country's edges where border agents may have latitude (at least, according to the ACLU):
http://www.aclu.org/privacy/37293res20081022.html
Such policies, which began as a way to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, has expanded to precursors for porn and drug busts. I don't think the judge said "hand over the unencrypted files because you had no 4th amendment protections to begin with", but it's damned close.
And yes, it would be 4th amendment, because he allowed law enforcement to search him. Taking the 5th after the fact is silly.
You mean, there's no way to easily and safely remove these entries. It is possible, but one would need to use a utility like TweakUI (unsupported, download required), or manually mess with the registry (can kill your system).
Maybe not the whole company, but there are at least two products that count as consumer hardware: Xbox and Zune. Assuming, of course, keyboards and mice don't count.
Perhaps there are lessons for Microsoft to be learned from the products that have healthy demand?
Precisely, and this is where so many people miss the point. Microsoft was never convicted of having a monopoly-- they were convicted of using their highly advantageous position in the operating systems market to prevent competitors (Netscape, Novell, IBM, WordPerfect, etc.) from entering the market and having a reasonable chance at survival, let alone success.
Seriously, there are businesspeople who read the Wall Street Journal and think that just because they bought into Friedman supply-side economic doctrine, they're macroeconomists...
I don't know if they programmed in a manual override switch-- i.e., something like:
... but given Ruby's general organization (at least compared to PHP) and developer-friendliness, I wouldn't be surprised if they added such methods to the String class.
(That's one way to concatenate 2 strings in Ruby. The Perl-like way is either a dot or a plus sign. The variable substitution is usually "good enough for government work".)
Actually... if DRM is such a big hairy deal to a lot of people, I don't think that's reflected in the portable player market. Moreover, you could make the same argument for Safari or Quicktime on Linux-- they just don't bother because there's the mammoth Windows market and their own platform to code for. It might be simply a matter of scarce resources.
The only people that I know of who complain about iTunes DRM are those who either didn't want to pay the premium for an iPod or didn't like the idea that their music may become unplayable given certain unlikely circumstances-- in my experience the iTunes DRM has been largely unobtrusive and reasonable, and unless every iTunes user really struggled with either remembering their account password or authorizing too many computers, I'm sure the average user's experience is similar. If anything, most users seemed to shrug it off as a necessary evil to get the record labels on board.
It did appear to become a part of the labels' life support system, however. Perhaps the old Dr. Scratchandsniff therapy ("downloading is not bad. downloading vill not bite you und kick you in ze head...") is starting to sink in.
As for their "every song now DRM-free" announcement, that's probably because Amazon demonstrated with finality that one can have big sales of digital music without DRM. That's got more to do with Apple using this argument against the record labels than anything users demanded of them-- they've historically done stuff their way regardless of what we think, anyway.
Yes, particularly if you insult his "bairns" at a bar after he's had some scotch whiskey.
Some starship captains found that out the hard way.
Um... correct me if I'm wrong, but even on the cheapest mini, I have the hardest time trying to think up a scenario where a person would exhaust the system resources with casual use. I would think that the OS X kernel would know to not devote so many clock cycles to apps with nothing open and no active tasks.
To the larger point of "closing vs. quitting", there's a bit of ambiguity, especially with apps like System Preferences. The norm is "closing != quitting", but as far as I know, this app is the only one that breaks this convention. Given the power of most Macs, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't that big of a deal if an app is left open.