Look, I am not a chip fabrication expert. I am merely a sideline observer. But based on my observations, Intel will probably not make it to 65nm in 2005.
My position is based on nothing more than simple counting:
Intel achieved 250nm process technology (deschutes) in January 1998
... 180nm (coppermine) in October 1999, although availability was scarce until January.
... 90nm (prescott) is not out yet, although it is supposed to be out in fourth quarter 2003. I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict January 2004.
Their track record is clear: the average time between circuit size improvements is two years. Based on their history, 2005 would be a stretch, with the most likely release date falling somewhere in early 2006.
I agree with most of what you just said, but no part of it supports the original assertion that we have no right of privacy.
I don't agree at all that privacy rights in the 18th century were nonexistent. Back then any two people could walk out into the middle of any open field at any time and converse in total privacy. The equivalent act cannot be performed today because of long range microphones, remotely operating bugs, etc.
It's not necessary to consider the context of the Constitution's era.
This statement, I think, is too idealistic to be realistic. I don't think it is appropriate to ignore history when interpreting the constitution. After all, there's a reason why high school students learn about the constitution in history class. If nothing else, the meaning of certain words (like "militia") has changed between then and now, and it is unreasonable to expect that the modern meanings are what the authors intended.
The Bill of Rights does not specifically enumerate a right to privacy.
True.
there is no right of privacy
False.
You are repeating the same mistake that brought on all those "knee-jerk" responses. You claim that the lack of a specific enumeration of a right to privacy means that "there is no right of privacy". The 9th amendment undermines your claim: it specifically dictates that there may exist rights which are not enumerated in the constitution. In the view of many people here (including myself, after much deliberation), privacy is one of those rights.
I think that in the context of 18th century america, our founding fathers expected a certain level of privacy from monitoring and didn't bother writing it down because they couldn't imagine how it could be taken away.
There is no way that our founding fathers could have imagined technologies such as GPS satellite tracking or thermal imaging of home interiors. The context of our constitution's formative years must be taken into consideration when making a judgment about whether or not the government should be bound to respect peoples' privacy.
How many hard working American programmers have been put out of work, their families going hungry, thanks to the "good will" of the open source community?
I hate to break it to you, but if you can't make a product better than volunteer competition then your product does not deserve a viable place in the market anyway.
Sometimes we get so worked up about failures that we can't stop to think whether the venture was worthwhile in the first place. If your product adds so little value that it gets smoked by free competition, then I'd have to say it's not a very valuable product at all.
You are correct that the preceding sentence is the one with legal meaning. However, the preceding sentence does not require sublicensing. The sentence merely states that there must exist a distribution method compatible with the GPL. It does not require that this method be attained via sublicensing. In fact, it does almost the complete opposite: it leaves you free to use any compatible method that is feasible.
I cited the GPL's patent example instead of the sentence with legal force because the patent example is actually relevant here. Nowhere in the patent example in the GPL or in the sentence preceding the example does the GPL state that you personally must have the right to sublicense any relevant patents.
GPL 7 requires the right to sublicence
patent rights to the people who obtain a GPL program from you.
Not true. Section 7 of the GPL requires that patent rights be publicly available, but it does not require that you personally sublicense those patent rights.
Specifically, GPL section 7 says:
... if a patent
license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by
all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then
the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to
refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
Since the Microsoft patent license does permit royalty-free redistribution, it does not contradict the GPL in this regard (although it may have other incompatibilities; I have not looked at the whole thing thoroughly yet).
Actually, there is a legitimate point here which you seem to have missed: the scaled SAT scores were renormalized in 1996 in order to raise the average SAT score in each section back up to 500. This renormalizing means that post-1996 scores are about 50 points higher on average than what the equivalent raw test performance would have earned on a pre-1996 instance of the exam.
I'm not going to comment about whether or not 1220 is a "good" score, but it is definitely a better score back in the day than it is now.
I realize full well that you are unhappy with the DRM that Microsoft is "shov[ing] down your throat."
Believe me I have the same concerns that you do.
But, be honest with yourself: what are you doing about it?
Pardon me (and please correct me) if I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell, all you're doing about it is bitching on slashdot. Whereas I on the other hand am working very hard right smack in the eye of the DRM storm trying to make sure that what Microsoft does with the DRM technology is the right thing.
I don't always succeed 100 percent, but I am trying, and I am impacting Microsoft a lot more than you are. So please work with me instead of against me. If you can't even do that, please at least try not to actively antagonize the few people like me inside this company that might actually be sympathetic to your views.
In my book flac does not count as a portable format. It is too big.
However, even if we were to accept flac as a portable format, the ipod still loses, because it doesn't support flac, while other players like the Karma do support flac (and ogg too).
I don't understand the mindset of DRM workers like you who treat their potential customers as criminals.
Feel free to browse my previous slashdot posts to learn more about my mindset. I think you will be surprised at what you find.
One thing I can say for sure is that if I were to leave Microsoft I can guarantee you my replacement at Microsoft would be worse to you from a consumer rights perspective.
If you want to support OGG, vote with your money and buy the players that do support it- If they sell well, other manufacturers are sure to take notice.
I already do. Which is why (getting back on topic) I did not buy an ipod. I have a neuros already and I'm just waiting for the 40GB version to come out before I buy the Rio Karma.
All of your arguments are correct, but they are completely inapplicable to someone (like me) who does not already have an ipod.
I have already stated many times that I agree apple made the right decision in choosing WMA over ogg. But I do not agree that being forced to choose only one format is a good, or even neutral, feature of a music player.
I know that you don't consider ogg support important. In fact I even know that most consumers do not consider ogg support important. But for the few of us (like me) that do, it makes a lot of sense to choose a player other than the ipod.
Like every single other reason in the Cnet article, the lack of ogg support is a relatively "picky" shortcoming of the ipod that only applies to a small niche of the market. You will note that every single alternative player listed in the Cnet article has to make other tradeoffs against the ipod in order to fill its niche. I know that you are not in this small niche. But believe me it matters a lot to those of us who are in that small niche.
What I read, and no doubt what he meant, is that more people (ie, customers) will use Word's format than Open Office's format, therefore his product will support the format that more people wish to use.
You're missing the entire point if you think that supporting only one format is a positively desirable feature.
I am not by any means arguing that apple should drop WMA support for ogg support. I realize that apple is in a position where they can only support one format. They made the right decision in choosing the popular format.
BUT the fact that apple's ipod supports so few formats is a good reason not to buy the ipod! May I remind you that the topic of this article is reasons not to buy an ipod. We are not talking about whether the ogg format is better than the WMA format. Instead we are talking about whether other music players are better than the ipod. I would certainly prefer, say, the Rio Karma over the ipod based on the Karma's ability to support more formats.
They are not and should not support EVERY single file format out there, right?
I think it is reasonable to support, say, four formats. For example the Rio Karma supports mp3, wma, ogg, and flac at about the same price point as the ipod.
Popularity is a good one, IMO.
I challenge you to find four portable file formats more popular than ogg.
Plus we need to settle on a stable file format one day or another, and MP3 seems pretty good for that purpose
I have never at any point suggested removing MP3 or WMA support. In fact my entire position is that a portable player should be expected to support more formats than the ipod does, not less.
I'll start by saying that I work for Microsoft, in the DRM group, so I am certainly not biased against WMA in any way.
most people do not use [ogg]. Full stop, end of story... more people use Word than OpenOffice and if I want to appeal to more people that is the way to go.
Your analogy is stupid. People share (legally) Word files a lot more often than they legally share music files. Unless you are somehow actively advocating the illegal sharing of music files, I don't see why popularity base has anything to do with your choice of music format.
Another problem with your reasoning is that while Word and OpenOffice are (usually) exclusive, the same is not true of WMA and OGG support (see next paragraph).
[the ipod] can only fit a limited number of formats in its memory.
To be honest, this is an inadequacy of the ipod much more than it is an inadequacy of the ogg format. I agree that this is a great reason to omit ogg support from the ipod, but it is not a great reason to avoid ogg support in other players. It is also not a great reason to avoid players that support ogg.
Moore's law has just about caught up to portable players to the point where they can reasonably be expected to support additional file formats for almost no marginal cost. Any modern player should support all of the formats. And that is a reason not to buy the ipod.
Windows I can play a DVD with any number of easily installable and functioning programs.
You must not get out of the country very much.
Windows DVD playing is fine for those like you who only play DVDs from one region, but if you need to play DVDs from multiple regions then the Linux programs (with built-in, possibly illegal, CSS decryption) are much more suited to the task than the Windows programs.
Yes you can go on about how easy it is to download and apply a firmware flash or install Joe's random shareware region-killing app but a regular user isn't going to figure out those extra steps any more than they are going to figure out how to run apt-get on linux.
While it's true that C/R doesn't fix this problem [spoofed from addresses], it also didn't create it.
I wouldn't mind C/R if it merely had no effect on the problem, but I do mind the fact that C/R makes the problem worse by sending me a boatload of challenges that I have no business receiving.
My using C/R would make the problem of spoofed from addresses worse for others. Therefore, in light of the principle to do unto others what you would like them to do unto you, I am really reluctant to use C/R unless there is absolutely no alternative.
I eventually stopped using SpamAssassin because it was too effective. It marked a couple of emails that were NOT spam as spam and I ended up losing some contacts.
If I got false positives from spamassassin then I admit I would consider C/R despite my misgivings above. However during my first month of spamassassin where I was watching it like a hawk I only ever got one borderline false positive, and it was a domain registration renewal notice that I was aware of anyway.
I might someday use TMDA in conjunction with an effective pre-filter like spamassassin, but never alone by itself because of the problems mentioned.
To date I have had no need of challenge-response systems because spamassassin already works so well, but even were that not the case, I would still not use challenge response. C-R as I see it has two major problems:
If a spam has a spoofed from address, then your C-R system will send a challenge to the spoofed from address. Since the spoofed from address did not actually send you any mail, your challenge simply contributes to the unwanted email problem. I have had spammers spoof my email address on their spam before. I really do not appreciate receiving challenges back.
If I reply to an email you sent using a different email account than the one that you sent your email to, then my other email account won't be on your whitelist and I'll receive a challenge. By itself this is merely annoying. However if we both do it then our challenges never get through.
You might think that problem 1 can be solved simply by challenging only non-spam emails, but then you have the problem of spam filtering all over again. Most people who use TMDA do so specifically because they think filtering is ineffective.
Spamming wikis isn't really all that effective because any reader can go in and wipe out the spam.
It's not like a blog where generally only the blog admin has the power to erase spams.
That doesn't mean spammers wouldn't do it, just that there are currently easier targets to spam.
If you repeat the same position on the board three times it is a draw.
Additionally, you don't really need to store all of the moves getting to a state in the game tree to determine if a given position is a win or a loss.
The first quote of yours above contradicts the second.
Without knowledge of the previous positions of a game, you have no idea whether a future position has been repeated before, and therefore no idea whether it would draw or not.
Maybe, in some hypothetical chess variant that did not require consideration of draws, it would be enough to store only the current position plus a few extra bits. But in real life chess, you do have to keep track of the previous positions, because those previous positions affect whether your future moves will lead to draws or not.
DVD-R can only play on about 5% more players than DVD+R (according to DVDRHelp.com)
5% of the number of player models on the market is not a very meaningful statistic at all. What matters is the number of units sold of each of those models. When you take into account how many units of each player model has been sold, DVD-R has a compatibility advantage far larger than 5%. The reason is that each of the older player models (the ones incompatible with DVD+R) has a far larger market share than each of the dozens of modern cheap $40 players that you tout. An older player model should not be weighed equally against a modern dime-a-dozen model, but that is exactly what you are doing with your 5% figure.
As to your assertion that DVD-R costs more, a quick check of actual selling prices reveals that DVD+R media is actually fractionally more expensive than DVD-R media. I'm not even going to bother checking drive prices because dual-format drives (both players and recorders) are already so cheap.
DVD+R can be a good solution for a private user of recordable DVDs, but if you plan to distribute DVDs to any large group of people you'd be crazy to use anything but DVD-R.
All of the CAGW's FUD arguments have already been addressed in spades by this Peruvian Congressman's letter regarding a similar open-source-only law which recently passed in Peru.
Some choice quotes which apply to the current Massachusetts law:
The Bill does not introduce any discrimination whatever, since it only establishes *how* the goods have to be provided (which is a state power) and not *who* has to provide them...
It is necessary to stress that there is no position more anti-competitive than that of the big software producers, which frequently abuse their dominant position... as the whole infrastructure is based on proprietary data formats, the user stays "trapped" in the need to continue using products from the same supplier, or to make the huge effort to change to another environment (probably also proprietary).
...the use of free software contributes significantly to reduce the remaining life-cycle costs. This reduction in the costs of installation, support etc. can be noted in several areas: in the first place, the competitive service model of free software, support and maintenance for which can be freely contracted out to a range of suppliers competing on the grounds of quality and low cost. This is true for installation, enabling, and support, and in large part for maintenance.
...the state archives, handles, and transmits information which does not belong to it, but which is entrusted to it by citizens, who have no alternative under the rule of law. As a counterpart to this legal requirement, the State must take extreme measures to safeguard the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of this information. The use of proprietary software raises serious doubts as to whether these requirements can be fulfilled, lacks conclusive evidence in this respect, and so is not suitable for use in the public sector.
Right now, not counting Linux-based PDAs and the like, the only shipping portable audio player that plays ogg vorbis files is the neuros. iRiver says their vorbis firmware will be released in October, but it is not available today. I hope that iRiver does finally actually keep to their stated release schedule this time, but the fact is that you still can't buy an iRiver today with ogg vorbis support.
The neuros has been available with vorbis support for several months. If you want something today, the neuros is pretty much your only choice. If you don't mind waiting it out, then by all means wait for iRiver or Rio.
Lots of people here at Slashdot keep asking themselves and others why Linux isn't very popular as a desktop OS.
I am certainly not one of those people. Mind you, I wouldn't go so far as to suggest popularity is undesirable, but I do question your assumption that popularity is desirable. Remember, Linux is not like other commercial OSes that need popularity.
Well, perhaps it's time to start writing software that users want instead of being "selfish" as you describe it?
I already said it once, and I'll say it again: What advantage does the volunteer community derive from catering to other peoples' software wants? None. Popularity among users doesn't increase development resources for Linux like it would for a commercial platform when money is involved.
There are other reasons to seek popularity (world domination, etc.), but survival is not one of them. The only thing Linux really needs for development is popularity among potential developers, and it already has that in spades. Everything else is gravy.
My point all along has been that people really need to get out of this hobbyist volunteer mindset and realize it's time to create actual results.
Linux has achieved tremendous actual results already. Your complaint is that these actual results are not the actual results you're looking for.
Well, I'm sorry, but Linux can't be everything to everybody at all times. I use Linux as my primary desktop and server OS, but unlike you I am not under any delusions that Linux will ever stop being a hobby OS. It is largely written by hobbyists, after all.
This so-called hobby OS of yours still beats windows hands down in areas like multiple virtual desktop support and basic features like including a C compiler. Even the third party virtual desktop managers available for windows (e.g. nvidia deskview, winxp powertoys) have much poorer performance than GNOME and KDE because of the limitations of the windows frame manager API.
That attitude right there is problem #1. I don't care if it's a volunteer effort, and neither do most users.
Frankly, I don't care about your attitude either. Volunteers write software for themselves. They don't write for other people. Let's suppose hypothetically for a moment that the volunteer community were to drop all of their work and concentrate on satisfying your expectations. What tangible benefit would that bring the volunteer community? Answer: nothing. In all likelihood the result would be worse than what we have now, because the motivation is just not there when you're scratching someone else's itch instead of your own.
We just care about what's sitting in front of us on our screen, the net output.
That, my friend, is exactly why volunteers write for their own sake instead of your sake. We're just as selfish as you. We want software that fits our needs, not your needs.
You may try to argue with me on the grounds that Linux somehow "needs" non-developer users like you in order to obtain a sustainable userbase, but what you don't understand is that Linux is not like other commercial operating systems. Because Linux is so volunteer driven, it does not need a large userbase or commercial support in order to thrive in its niche role. The fact that a broader audience might find Linux useful is certainly a nice bonus, but it is not so essential to platform survival that we should sacrifice the core hobbyist nature of Linux to attain it.
ssh tunneling in and of itself is not tcp over tcp, but the subsequent running of a VPN over the ssh tunnel does usually involve running tcp over tcp.
The whole point is that by running a tunnelled tcp connection on top of the ssh connection, where the latter is almost always implemented over tcp, you do end up running tcp over tcp.
Slashdot Mirror
My position is based on nothing more than simple counting:
- Intel achieved 250nm process technology (deschutes) in January 1998
- ... 180nm (coppermine) in October 1999, although availability was scarce until January.
- ... 130nm (northwood) in January 2002
- ... 90nm (prescott) is not out yet, although it is supposed to be out in fourth quarter 2003. I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict January 2004.
Their track record is clear: the average time between circuit size improvements is two years. Based on their history, 2005 would be a stretch, with the most likely release date falling somewhere in early 2006.I don't agree at all that privacy rights in the 18th century were nonexistent. Back then any two people could walk out into the middle of any open field at any time and converse in total privacy. The equivalent act cannot be performed today because of long range microphones, remotely operating bugs, etc.
It's not necessary to consider the context of the Constitution's era.
This statement, I think, is too idealistic to be realistic. I don't think it is appropriate to ignore history when interpreting the constitution. After all, there's a reason why high school students learn about the constitution in history class. If nothing else, the meaning of certain words (like "militia") has changed between then and now, and it is unreasonable to expect that the modern meanings are what the authors intended.
True.
there is no right of privacy
False.
You are repeating the same mistake that brought on all those "knee-jerk" responses. You claim that the lack of a specific enumeration of a right to privacy means that "there is no right of privacy". The 9th amendment undermines your claim: it specifically dictates that there may exist rights which are not enumerated in the constitution. In the view of many people here (including myself, after much deliberation), privacy is one of those rights.
I think that in the context of 18th century america, our founding fathers expected a certain level of privacy from monitoring and didn't bother writing it down because they couldn't imagine how it could be taken away.
There is no way that our founding fathers could have imagined technologies such as GPS satellite tracking or thermal imaging of home interiors. The context of our constitution's formative years must be taken into consideration when making a judgment about whether or not the government should be bound to respect peoples' privacy.
I hate to break it to you, but if you can't make a product better than volunteer competition then your product does not deserve a viable place in the market anyway.
Sometimes we get so worked up about failures that we can't stop to think whether the venture was worthwhile in the first place. If your product adds so little value that it gets smoked by free competition, then I'd have to say it's not a very valuable product at all.
I cited the GPL's patent example instead of the sentence with legal force because the patent example is actually relevant here. Nowhere in the patent example in the GPL or in the sentence preceding the example does the GPL state that you personally must have the right to sublicense any relevant patents.
Not true. Section 7 of the GPL requires that patent rights be publicly available, but it does not require that you personally sublicense those patent rights.
Specifically, GPL section 7 says:
Since the Microsoft patent license does permit royalty-free redistribution, it does not contradict the GPL in this regard (although it may have other incompatibilities; I have not looked at the whole thing thoroughly yet).I'm not going to comment about whether or not 1220 is a "good" score, but it is definitely a better score back in the day than it is now.
Believe me I have the same concerns that you do.
But, be honest with yourself: what are you doing about it?
Pardon me (and please correct me) if I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell, all you're doing about it is bitching on slashdot. Whereas I on the other hand am working very hard right smack in the eye of the DRM storm trying to make sure that what Microsoft does with the DRM technology is the right thing.
I don't always succeed 100 percent, but I am trying, and I am impacting Microsoft a lot more than you are. So please work with me instead of against me. If you can't even do that, please at least try not to actively antagonize the few people like me inside this company that might actually be sympathetic to your views.
However, even if we were to accept flac as a portable format, the ipod still loses, because it doesn't support flac, while other players like the Karma do support flac (and ogg too).
Feel free to browse my previous slashdot posts to learn more about my mindset. I think you will be surprised at what you find.
One thing I can say for sure is that if I were to leave Microsoft I can guarantee you my replacement at Microsoft would be worse to you from a consumer rights perspective.
If you want to support OGG, vote with your money and buy the players that do support it- If they sell well, other manufacturers are sure to take notice.
I already do. Which is why (getting back on topic) I did not buy an ipod. I have a neuros already and I'm just waiting for the 40GB version to come out before I buy the Rio Karma.
I have already stated many times that I agree apple made the right decision in choosing WMA over ogg. But I do not agree that being forced to choose only one format is a good, or even neutral, feature of a music player.
I know that you don't consider ogg support important. In fact I even know that most consumers do not consider ogg support important. But for the few of us (like me) that do, it makes a lot of sense to choose a player other than the ipod.
Like every single other reason in the Cnet article, the lack of ogg support is a relatively "picky" shortcoming of the ipod that only applies to a small niche of the market. You will note that every single alternative player listed in the Cnet article has to make other tradeoffs against the ipod in order to fill its niche. I know that you are not in this small niche. But believe me it matters a lot to those of us who are in that small niche.
You're missing the entire point if you think that supporting only one format is a positively desirable feature.
I am not by any means arguing that apple should drop WMA support for ogg support. I realize that apple is in a position where they can only support one format. They made the right decision in choosing the popular format.
BUT the fact that apple's ipod supports so few formats is a good reason not to buy the ipod! May I remind you that the topic of this article is reasons not to buy an ipod. We are not talking about whether the ogg format is better than the WMA format. Instead we are talking about whether other music players are better than the ipod. I would certainly prefer, say, the Rio Karma over the ipod based on the Karma's ability to support more formats.
I think it is reasonable to support, say, four formats. For example the Rio Karma supports mp3, wma, ogg, and flac at about the same price point as the ipod.
Popularity is a good one, IMO.
I challenge you to find four portable file formats more popular than ogg.
Plus we need to settle on a stable file format one day or another, and MP3 seems pretty good for that purpose
I have never at any point suggested removing MP3 or WMA support. In fact my entire position is that a portable player should be expected to support more formats than the ipod does, not less.
most people do not use [ogg]. Full stop, end of story ... more people use Word than OpenOffice and if I want to appeal to more people that is the way to go.
Your analogy is stupid. People share (legally) Word files a lot more often than they legally share music files. Unless you are somehow actively advocating the illegal sharing of music files, I don't see why popularity base has anything to do with your choice of music format.
Another problem with your reasoning is that while Word and OpenOffice are (usually) exclusive, the same is not true of WMA and OGG support (see next paragraph).
[the ipod] can only fit a limited number of formats in its memory.
To be honest, this is an inadequacy of the ipod much more than it is an inadequacy of the ogg format. I agree that this is a great reason to omit ogg support from the ipod, but it is not a great reason to avoid ogg support in other players. It is also not a great reason to avoid players that support ogg.
Moore's law has just about caught up to portable players to the point where they can reasonably be expected to support additional file formats for almost no marginal cost. Any modern player should support all of the formats. And that is a reason not to buy the ipod.
You must not get out of the country very much.
Windows DVD playing is fine for those like you who only play DVDs from one region, but if you need to play DVDs from multiple regions then the Linux programs (with built-in, possibly illegal, CSS decryption) are much more suited to the task than the Windows programs.
Yes you can go on about how easy it is to download and apply a firmware flash or install Joe's random shareware region-killing app but a regular user isn't going to figure out those extra steps any more than they are going to figure out how to run apt-get on linux.
I wouldn't mind C/R if it merely had no effect on the problem, but I do mind the fact that C/R makes the problem worse by sending me a boatload of challenges that I have no business receiving.
My using C/R would make the problem of spoofed from addresses worse for others. Therefore, in light of the principle to do unto others what you would like them to do unto you, I am really reluctant to use C/R unless there is absolutely no alternative.
I eventually stopped using SpamAssassin because it was too effective. It marked a couple of emails that were NOT spam as spam and I ended up losing some contacts.
If I got false positives from spamassassin then I admit I would consider C/R despite my misgivings above. However during my first month of spamassassin where I was watching it like a hawk I only ever got one borderline false positive, and it was a domain registration renewal notice that I was aware of anyway.
I might someday use TMDA in conjunction with an effective pre-filter like spamassassin, but never alone by itself because of the problems mentioned.
- If a spam has a spoofed from address, then your C-R system will send a challenge to the spoofed from address. Since the spoofed from address did not actually send you any mail, your challenge simply contributes to the unwanted email problem. I have had spammers spoof my email address on their spam before. I really do not appreciate receiving challenges back.
- If I reply to an email you sent using a different email account than the one that you sent your email to, then my other email account won't be on your whitelist and I'll receive a challenge. By itself this is merely annoying. However if we both do it then our challenges never get through.
You might think that problem 1 can be solved simply by challenging only non-spam emails, but then you have the problem of spam filtering all over again. Most people who use TMDA do so specifically because they think filtering is ineffective.That doesn't mean spammers wouldn't do it, just that there are currently easier targets to spam.
Additionally, you don't really need to store all of the moves getting to a state in the game tree to determine if a given position is a win or a loss.
The first quote of yours above contradicts the second.
Without knowledge of the previous positions of a game, you have no idea whether a future position has been repeated before, and therefore no idea whether it would draw or not.
Maybe, in some hypothetical chess variant that did not require consideration of draws, it would be enough to store only the current position plus a few extra bits. But in real life chess, you do have to keep track of the previous positions, because those previous positions affect whether your future moves will lead to draws or not.
5% of the number of player models on the market is not a very meaningful statistic at all. What matters is the number of units sold of each of those models. When you take into account how many units of each player model has been sold, DVD-R has a compatibility advantage far larger than 5%. The reason is that each of the older player models (the ones incompatible with DVD+R) has a far larger market share than each of the dozens of modern cheap $40 players that you tout. An older player model should not be weighed equally against a modern dime-a-dozen model, but that is exactly what you are doing with your 5% figure.
As to your assertion that DVD-R costs more, a quick check of actual selling prices reveals that DVD+R media is actually fractionally more expensive than DVD-R media. I'm not even going to bother checking drive prices because dual-format drives (both players and recorders) are already so cheap.
DVD+R can be a good solution for a private user of recordable DVDs, but if you plan to distribute DVDs to any large group of people you'd be crazy to use anything but DVD-R.
Some choice quotes which apply to the current Massachusetts law:
The neuros has been available with vorbis support for several months. If you want something today, the neuros is pretty much your only choice. If you don't mind waiting it out, then by all means wait for iRiver or Rio.
I am certainly not one of those people. Mind you, I wouldn't go so far as to suggest popularity is undesirable, but I do question your assumption that popularity is desirable. Remember, Linux is not like other commercial OSes that need popularity.
Well, perhaps it's time to start writing software that users want instead of being "selfish" as you describe it?
I already said it once, and I'll say it again: What advantage does the volunteer community derive from catering to other peoples' software wants? None. Popularity among users doesn't increase development resources for Linux like it would for a commercial platform when money is involved.
There are other reasons to seek popularity (world domination, etc.), but survival is not one of them. The only thing Linux really needs for development is popularity among potential developers, and it already has that in spades. Everything else is gravy.
Linux has achieved tremendous actual results already. Your complaint is that these actual results are not the actual results you're looking for.
Well, I'm sorry, but Linux can't be everything to everybody at all times. I use Linux as my primary desktop and server OS, but unlike you I am not under any delusions that Linux will ever stop being a hobby OS. It is largely written by hobbyists, after all.
This so-called hobby OS of yours still beats windows hands down in areas like multiple virtual desktop support and basic features like including a C compiler. Even the third party virtual desktop managers available for windows (e.g. nvidia deskview, winxp powertoys) have much poorer performance than GNOME and KDE because of the limitations of the windows frame manager API.
That attitude right there is problem #1. I don't care if it's a volunteer effort, and neither do most users.
Frankly, I don't care about your attitude either. Volunteers write software for themselves. They don't write for other people. Let's suppose hypothetically for a moment that the volunteer community were to drop all of their work and concentrate on satisfying your expectations. What tangible benefit would that bring the volunteer community? Answer: nothing. In all likelihood the result would be worse than what we have now, because the motivation is just not there when you're scratching someone else's itch instead of your own.
We just care about what's sitting in front of us on our screen, the net output.
That, my friend, is exactly why volunteers write for their own sake instead of your sake. We're just as selfish as you. We want software that fits our needs, not your needs.
You may try to argue with me on the grounds that Linux somehow "needs" non-developer users like you in order to obtain a sustainable userbase, but what you don't understand is that Linux is not like other commercial operating systems. Because Linux is so volunteer driven, it does not need a large userbase or commercial support in order to thrive in its niche role. The fact that a broader audience might find Linux useful is certainly a nice bonus, but it is not so essential to platform survival that we should sacrifice the core hobbyist nature of Linux to attain it.
The whole point is that by running a tunnelled tcp connection on top of the ssh connection, where the latter is almost always implemented over tcp, you do end up running tcp over tcp.