I can't be the only one who first read that as TOR Publishing. I almost had a heart attack. I mean, I can deal with boycotting eBay, MPAA, RIAA, for their IP idiocy, but TOR? Do not play so cruelly with my fragile nerdy heart.
Seriously, I have never heard any one abbreviate Tim O'Reilly TOR.
This issue isn't restricted to OSS. If I buy a copy of Windows at Best Buy, should BB be held accountable for the bugs in Windows? If I resell my copy of autocad to a student, can I be held responsible for the bugs?
I think it becomes clear that it doesn't make sense make the retailer responsible for the mechantability of the products they sell, with the exception of false advertizing.
So if you sell copies of LaTeX, with the claim of it being withought flaw seen or unseen, only to have someone eventally find a bug, then you are liable for false advertizing. But otherwise you are fine.
The point is well taken, but I still don't think it will help. Anyone who was willing to overstay their visa, and become illegals is going to be getting forged documents to due so, and taking on a fair bit of risk as well. A small procedure to remove an chip isn't much of an obstacle.
What it comes down to is this - lack of a tag proves nothing. If you were to tag all US citizens and require the tags for any employment/social services/school/whatever, then lack of a tag would mean something. But if it comes to that, a lot of people are going to start putting the fourth amendment to use.
I agree with you. I think the only problem is that we don't allow nearly enough legal immigrants. Having illegals is a problem, because it creates a large population of fugitives who know they can't turn to the law for anything so they operate below it. They can be easily exploited, by corrupt employers who pay them below minumum wage, and don't report their taxes. Worse, fugitives can be blackmailed into illegal behavior. This is exasperated by the fact that they are often treated as social outcasts. The solution is setting up a much more relaxed work visa program with Mexico, and a somewhat relaxed citizenship process.
All this does is allow you to differentiate between legal immigrants and everyone else. If someone is lacking a chip they could be an illegal alien or they could be a US citizen. How can you tell? It is just as easy to fake SSN and Drivers License as it is to fake a green card. Furthermore, this implant only a small step up in forgability from any of those.
There is nothing that this implant can solve that a green card can't. I don't know what the current worker reporting requirements are, but if employers are required to report all employees with work visas, and the INS knows the id numbers of all the legal immigrants, then all they have to do is check and see if any number is being used twice (or not at all if a job is a condition of the visa), and if so investigate. Whether this ID comes from a chip or a card is irrelevent, it can still be checked to see if it is valid and unique.
Isn't the problem with immigration that we have today due to those who enter our country illegally? How does this solve that problem? Only those legally immigrating would be tagged. It may even make the problem worse by motivating more people to risk entering the country illegally rather than be tagged if they enter legally.
Obscene violation of human rights: Check Increased power given to government: Check Does not help solve any real problem: Check
Sounds like another winner from the people that brought you the Real ID Card and Airline Profiling.
You mean the same democratic party that voted for the Patriot Act, and the DMCA. Who has no qualms waving the child preditor flag, and passing unconstitional ex post facto laws against those who have committed "sex crimes" in their own states. Who led the cause for eminant domain laws. Whose previous presidental candidate, while recognizing that our rights are being infringed upon by the Patriot Act, continues to vote for it, because "the security concerns are greater". Whose main front-lady constantly beats the drum of the evils of video games and music, and pushing for them to be self-censored, else the governement will step in.
Both Progressives and the Neocons are more than willing to throw our rights aside in order to achieve thier goals. For the Neocons this means use of military dominance to secure US economic and strategic interests around the world. For the Progressives it means creating a perfect sheltered suburban/urban existance. For both it means increasing their power, and paying back their corporate constituents.
I could do without either. I don't need the Progressives constanly passing laws because they know what's better for me. I don't need the Religious Right legislating their beliefs down my throat. I don't need our intrests defended to the point of propping up dictators, and fueling hatred for our country. I don't need my streets free of criminals, if it means we are all treated like criminals. I will happily live with the inperfections in our world if it means that I won't loose anymore rights.
<cynical> Perhaps you are right - perhaps the problem with the democratic party isn't that they are corrupt, but that they are spineless, and will happily bow to the pressures of the ISP's once the pressure of the republicans are off their backs. </cynical>
I want to like last.fm, but the player hardly works for me. Half the time it can't connect to the server, if it does it crashes within an hour. Maybe it's just the Mac version, or something particular to my computer, but it is completely unusable for me.
In addition, the fact that you are required to install software, as opposed to Pandora which uses flash, creates an obstacle for many people who would like to use it at work, but need prior approval before installing applications.
I imagine it would be a little more frustrating as you can see your freedom but are kept from it by a mere sheet of glass. People would be walking by looking at you trapped, other customers would be happily walking up and down the stairs, while you have to sit there on display feeling silly. That and wishing you had put on sunscreen before entering the elevator of doom. Or something.
Ah, the feeling of helplessness caused by something so minor, this has all the makings of a british comedy.
This is really late, but here is an article at NASA, that explains the expected heliosphere much better than the CNN one. They do expect it to tail off - however, the points measured by the two voyagers don't match the model that they have.
Hemos, Where did you get this "Biggest Obstacle" from? The researcher didn't claim it in the article, and it isn't true. IANANP, but from what I've heard, the biggest obstacle to nuclear fusion is maintaining the reaction for long periods of time, and doing so with relativly low energy input.
This is a cool development, but unless I read incorrectly it doesn't solve those problems.
No, the ODF code is in Koffice not Konquerer, so porting it to Safari wouldn't help. Besides, if they were going to port the code it would be better to put a viewer in Preview, and import/export in iPages, rather than Safari (I don't know if ODF would work well as the native file format as iPages is a cross between Word Processing and Desktop Publishing).
The good news is that KDE 4.0 will run natively on OS X, which means that all the KDE applications, like K Office, will run natively.
Well, I'm wasn't confusing those things. I never complained about complex concepts, nor did the original GP post:
Folks, the writers who created the literary canon of the 19th century and before weren't trying to show off their distinctive prose style.
Now, I haven't read Norrell, but people whose judgement I trust have told me that it's exactly the kind of pretentious crap that has ruined mainstream writing and is now invading SF, thickly layered language games that distract the reader from any virtues the story itself might have. In contrast, Haldeman's prose is always elegant and concise.
We were both complaining merely about complex language from the start. I agree with you about challenging stories, and I imagine Daniel might as well.
FIRST design the system, and make sure the algorithms and architecture are sufficiently straightforward and efficient.
No amount of optimizing will save you if your system is slow by design, and there is no place where this was more true than in the early microkernals. That is why the microkernel architecture was rejected by linux and windows kernel developers.
The Mach kernal has some fundamental effeciency issues, and while it has been improved since it's introduction, there are limits to how fast it can get. As such, Darwin is slower at many things compared to some monolithic kernels, and will continue to be slower unless they do some major revamping (ie redesign and rewrite the kernel) under the hood, not just tweeking.
In the end it is about trade-offs. The "make it right, then make it fast" approach depends on your idea of right. If you really want an example of "doing it right" with regards to security and stability, look to QNX or OpenBSD. None of the desktop OSes compare to those, because they all made compromises. Windows NT and Linux both decided that the loss of efficency was not worth the gains in stability / security that you get from having a microkernel. And honestly, this particular decision hasn't greatly harmed the stability / security of those systems as a whole.
Re:I wonder about the Nebulas
on
2006 Nebula Awards
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No, he's not.
I certainly plan on reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell after the recomendations here, and can't speak for it in particular, but I agree with Daniel's sentiment. The foundation of good writing is suspension of disbelief, and anything that detracts from becoming absorbed in a work harms its effectiveness. I don't expect authors to write to a grade-school level, and I don't mind having to look up a word every now and then. But when I am constantly having to reread sentences or passages because they simply don't parse the first time through, then the author is being too clever in his wording.
"But pretty much everything that's hard to do is crap, because if you have to struggle to do it, then its other qualities just don't matter."
It's not that the other qualities don't matter, it's that these exercises in verbal complexity don't add any value to the story. Sure a book may be good in spite of the language games, but if so, how much better then would it be without them?
Thank you. I'd also like to add that this wouldn't even be a case of natural selection, as his genes have already been passed on baby. In addition, even though the baby would be less likely to be successful growing up in that environment, it wouldn't be less likely to pass on it's genes when it gets older - in fact in our society it would be more likely to do so.
This post should be moderated down, or Funny, bit it isn't the least bit insightful.
The point about parents not having the same technical level as thier kids is a valid point, but the rest doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
If the parents don't have time to keep track of the few kids that they are responsible for, how is a website supposed to protect thousands of them? However few resources the parents have per child, the website/ISP has less.
Secondly the responsibilities that politicians and parents would like to push onto the website operators almost never help fix the problem. Mandating that people be over 18, will just cause kids to lie, or go somewhere else. Mandating that they censor inappropriate images, just covers up the problem or lets the offender know they are being watched. the Mandating that they monitor they're site better is futile given their resources. ISP's and websites have one responsibilities when it comes to protecting from child abuse - inform the authorities when they become aware of an offense, and to cooperate with them in any investigation.
The "govern more" argument is good for people who want all the problems in the world fixed, and think the government has magical abilities to do so, but it has no logical stopping point. Should the ISP's have enough staff to visit every website every week to make sure no bad behavior is occuring? Should they have police 24 hours at every place that a kid could meet up with a preditor?
The truth is there is no one solution to the problem. The most productive defense against online child abuse is to first allocate more resources for cops to track them down - some one specialized in online child abuse who can track people's activities across websites is going to be more useful than a lackey hired by the website because they are required to. And second to educate the parents and children about how to manage the risks of these new technologies.
I love VLC. I use it mainly on my Mac, but have also run it in Linux and Windows. The interface is very clean and straight forward, and it has played every file I have thrown at it. The only problem I have had with it is reading DVDs from the drive (if I copy the files to disk it seem to work fine). Don't know if this is specific to the Mac.
You may reverse-engineer Fairplay for purposes of interoperability. It even says so in the DMCA.
That is true, I can definately develop and use software to circumvent a copyright protection mechanism for interoperability reasons. However, the DCMA strictly prohibits me from distributing any such tools that enable circumvention even if I intend them merely for the exempted reasons. The jury is still out on whether that clause will stand, or more accurately in what specific circumstances that clause will hold up in court.
Even if distribution is allowed, the DCMA is not the only law that stands in the way. In particular, there are several patents on Fairplay standard, and without a license, it is not possible to write, distribute, and use this patented technology. There are exceptions that allow you to do some of those three some of the time, but never all three at the same time. For example, patent law does allow for implementation and distribution for educational purposes, but then anyone who used my software for non-educational purposes (even personal use) would run afoul of the law. This is the approach that LAME takes in it's license, which protects the developers but pushes liability onto the users.
I am legally prevented from writing, distributing or using Free Software that can play music encoded with Apple's Fairplay DRM.
To clarify I meant that "I can't do all these three", not "I can't do any of these three". There are three things that make Free Software Free - the freedom to modify, the freedom to distribute, and the freedom to use. If any one of these things are prohibited in a piece of software then it is not Free Software.
I am legally prevented from writing, distributing or using Free Software that can play music encoded with Apple's Fairplay DRM. Therefore it is a Free Software issue. It may be one that you don't care about, but it is one. That said, Free Software and DRM Software are inherently incompatible as DRM is an encryption scheme that requires you to both widely distribute the key and keep it secret at the same time. The only way to do this is by obscuring the key in software or hardware. Therefore, the only way to implement DRM as Free Software and follow the letter of the law, is if the keys are in hardware, and there is no way to do so while following the spirit of the law. So the only solution to the Free Software issue is no DRM.
It is also a free market issue - unlike most other media formats and DRM schemes (CSS, HDMI, WMA) which can be licensed by any party under RAND terms, Fairplay is not available for license. This is helping Apple to create a monopoly, by sheltering it from competition due to legal restrictions, rather than basing it's success solely on the merit of the product (which is does have).
Lastly Microsoft didn't get to be a monopoly (in it's OS) through illegal means. Like all other OSes at the time, they lived and died with the system it was written for. The IBM PC had the advantages of people wanting to use the same machine as at work and later of low costs due to commoditization. The other PC's couldn't compete with this, and thus died. Microsoft rose to dominance because the IBM PC rose to dominance. Everything else (even their very real illegal acts) is noise.
Frankly, I have always thought our antitrust laws were pretty stupid. We give companies huge amount of anti-competitive powers through "IP", and practically unrestricted mergers, and then wait until they inevitably become monopolies (or oligopolies) to enforce a bunch of hollow antitrust laws that do little more than waist time in court. Why wait until someone is a monopoly to start caring about promoting a free competitive market?
Lastly, and most importantly, it is a consumers rights issue. If I have legally obtained documents, I will view them as I please - whether the person trying to restrict me from doing so is a monopoly or not is of no consequence.
A while back I read a study reported on in the economist, that looked at what the effects of the legislative branch being controlled by one party and the executive branch by another. The only legislation that it curtailed were big controversial changes (say socialisation of health care). However, it was also noticed that pork spending increased dramatically, apparently because it was used as a bargaining chip to get one side to agree to the others legislation. I'll post a link to the study later if I can find it.
Furthermore, both parties are on the side of increasingly stringent "intellectual property" legisation. They are both in favor of continually increasing penalties in general, to appear "tough on crime", without concern for making the punishment match the crime, or the diminishing returns on decreasing crime. They both are in favor of throwing our rights away to "protect us from terrorism". They are both in favor of huge pork spending that benifits the industries in the area.
I am not saying that both parties are the same - they are vastly different in many of their views. But in the areas where they do differ, there is rarely enough support to bring those ideas to fruition, so the differences have less practical effect then you would think. It is the areas that they agree that have the biggest effects on our lives, and their views in those areas are frightening.
The answer is to get more third party candidates that have respect for our rights elected into congress. Speaking of which, Michael Badnarik is running for congress and has a decent chance of winning. Who is elected to congress effects us all, and he could certainly use some help letting the people of his district know what he stands for.
Now I'll be the first to tell you that I don't agree with the libertarians on everthing, and the idea of a government controlled entirely by libertarians is almost as frightening to me as the one we have now. But I also know that's not going to happen overnight. What matters in a candidate is not thier idea of the perfect government - what matters is what direction they are going to take us in over the next 4 years. I may not like the libertarian's final destination, but compared to the major parties, I love the direction they're going, and I have no problem riding that train till it's time to jump off.
From now on I'm voting for every third party candidate I can find that supports my rights, regardless of thier views on social spending, regulation or anything else, because if we loose our rights then none of that other stuff will matter.
I completely agree that language like that is nothing but detrimental. However, the vast majority of the time it is not the scientists that are grandstanding, but the PR department at their university, amplified by journalists who will sensationalize anything to increase their ratings. You should never assume that what the press publishes is an accurate indicator of the scientific merit of the study, nor an accurate reflection of those who did the work.
Screenshots are no substitute for using the browser. It doesn't tell you if your java script is working, it doesn't always tell you if your page triggers reflow bugs, and it doesn't tell you if the browsers interpretation of your CSS affects the usablility of your site, and not just the appearance. I've run into many problems on other sites where a div (like a floating ad) is extended over the body of the main div. It wasn't visible, but it prevented me from clicking the links in the text of the article, or worse by making the link in the floating ad apply to the entire page.
You need to check your page with all the modern browsers, so you need to have a copy of windows either on another machine or in something like VMware, to test with.
and I still don't really know what ifolder is. From what I read, it is a folder that I can access using a special client or a web interface. There is tons of software that does something along this line, from basic FTP / Apache folder view, to NFS or Coda to all the various HTTP webdrop applications.
A more usefull article would explain how it compares to other common software, not necisarily to declare a w1nnAr but to let me know what what situations it excels in, and if it would be usefull to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't be the only one who first read that as TOR Publishing. I almost had a heart attack. I mean, I can deal with boycotting eBay, MPAA, RIAA, for their IP idiocy, but TOR? Do not play so cruelly with my fragile nerdy heart.
Seriously, I have never heard any one abbreviate Tim O'Reilly TOR.
This issue isn't restricted to OSS. If I buy a copy of Windows at Best Buy, should BB be held accountable for the bugs in Windows? If I resell my copy of autocad to a student, can I be held responsible for the bugs?
I think it becomes clear that it doesn't make sense make the retailer responsible for the mechantability of the products they sell, with the exception of false advertizing.
So if you sell copies of LaTeX, with the claim of it being withought flaw seen or unseen, only to have someone eventally find a bug, then you are liable for false advertizing. But otherwise you are fine.
The point is well taken, but I still don't think it will help. Anyone who was willing to overstay their visa, and become illegals is going to be getting forged documents to due so, and taking on a fair bit of risk as well. A small procedure to remove an chip isn't much of an obstacle.
What it comes down to is this - lack of a tag proves nothing. If you were to tag all US citizens and require the tags for any employment/social services/school/whatever, then lack of a tag would mean something. But if it comes to that, a lot of people are going to start putting the fourth amendment to use.
I agree with you. I think the only problem is that we don't allow nearly enough legal immigrants. Having illegals is a problem, because it creates a large population of fugitives who know they can't turn to the law for anything so they operate below it. They can be easily exploited, by corrupt employers who pay them below minumum wage, and don't report their taxes. Worse, fugitives can be blackmailed into illegal behavior. This is exasperated by the fact that they are often treated as social outcasts. The solution is setting up a much more relaxed work visa program with Mexico, and a somewhat relaxed citizenship process.
All this does is allow you to differentiate between legal immigrants and everyone else. If someone is lacking a chip they could be an illegal alien or they could be a US citizen. How can you tell? It is just as easy to fake SSN and Drivers License as it is to fake a green card. Furthermore, this implant only a small step up in forgability from any of those.
There is nothing that this implant can solve that a green card can't. I don't know what the current worker reporting requirements are, but if employers are required to report all employees with work visas, and the INS knows the id numbers of all the legal immigrants, then all they have to do is check and see if any number is being used twice (or not at all if a job is a condition of the visa), and if so investigate. Whether this ID comes from a chip or a card is irrelevent, it can still be checked to see if it is valid and unique.
Isn't the problem with immigration that we have today due to those who enter our country illegally? How does this solve that problem? Only those legally immigrating would be tagged. It may even make the problem worse by motivating more people to risk entering the country illegally rather than be tagged if they enter legally.
Obscene violation of human rights: Check
Increased power given to government: Check
Does not help solve any real problem: Check
Sounds like another winner from the people that brought you the Real ID Card and Airline Profiling.
You mean the same democratic party that voted for the Patriot Act, and the DMCA. Who has no qualms waving the child preditor flag, and passing unconstitional ex post facto laws against those who have committed "sex crimes" in their own states. Who led the cause for eminant domain laws. Whose previous presidental candidate, while recognizing that our rights are being infringed upon by the Patriot Act, continues to vote for it, because "the security concerns are greater". Whose main front-lady constantly beats the drum of the evils of video games and music, and pushing for them to be self-censored, else the governement will step in.
Both Progressives and the Neocons are more than willing to throw our rights aside in order to achieve thier goals. For the Neocons this means use of military dominance to secure US economic and strategic interests around the world. For the Progressives it means creating a perfect sheltered suburban/urban existance. For both it means increasing their power, and paying back their corporate constituents.
I could do without either. I don't need the Progressives constanly passing laws because they know what's better for me. I don't need the Religious Right legislating their beliefs down my throat. I don't need our intrests defended to the point of propping up dictators, and fueling hatred for our country. I don't need my streets free of criminals, if it means we are all treated like criminals. I will happily live with the inperfections in our world if it means that I won't loose anymore rights.
<cynical>
Perhaps you are right - perhaps the problem with the democratic party isn't that they are corrupt, but that they are spineless, and will happily bow to the pressures of the ISP's once the pressure of the republicans are off their backs.
</cynical>
I want to like last.fm, but the player hardly works for me. Half the time it can't connect to the server, if it does it crashes within an hour. Maybe it's just the Mac version, or something particular to my computer, but it is completely unusable for me.
In addition, the fact that you are required to install software, as opposed to Pandora which uses flash, creates an obstacle for many people who would like to use it at work, but need prior approval before installing applications.
I imagine it would be a little more frustrating as you can see your freedom but are kept from it by a mere sheet of glass. People would be walking by looking at you trapped, other customers would be happily walking up and down the stairs, while you have to sit there on display feeling silly. That and wishing you had put on sunscreen before entering the elevator of doom. Or something.
Ah, the feeling of helplessness caused by something so minor, this has all the makings of a british comedy.
This is really late, but here is an article at NASA, that explains the expected heliosphere much better than the CNN one. They do expect it to tail off - however, the points measured by the two voyagers don't match the model that they have.
Hemos, Where did you get this "Biggest Obstacle" from? The researcher didn't claim it in the article, and it isn't true. IANANP, but from what I've heard, the biggest obstacle to nuclear fusion is maintaining the reaction for long periods of time, and doing so with relativly low energy input.
This is a cool development, but unless I read incorrectly it doesn't solve those problems.
No, the ODF code is in Koffice not Konquerer, so porting it to Safari wouldn't help. Besides, if they were going to port the code it would be better to put a viewer in Preview, and import/export in iPages, rather than Safari (I don't know if ODF would work well as the native file format as iPages is a cross between Word Processing and Desktop Publishing).
The good news is that KDE 4.0 will run natively on OS X, which means that all the KDE applications, like K Office, will run natively.
We were both complaining merely about complex language from the start. I agree with you about challenging stories, and I imagine Daniel might as well.
You left out the first step:
FIRST design the system, and make sure the algorithms and architecture are sufficiently straightforward and efficient.
No amount of optimizing will save you if your system is slow by design, and there is no place where this was more true than in the early microkernals. That is why the microkernel architecture was rejected by linux and windows kernel developers.
The Mach kernal has some fundamental effeciency issues, and while it has been improved since it's introduction, there are limits to how fast it can get. As such, Darwin is slower at many things compared to some monolithic kernels, and will continue to be slower unless they do some major revamping (ie redesign and rewrite the kernel) under the hood, not just tweeking.
In the end it is about trade-offs. The "make it right, then make it fast" approach depends on your idea of right. If you really want an example of "doing it right" with regards to security and stability, look to QNX or OpenBSD. None of the desktop OSes compare to those, because they all made compromises. Windows NT and Linux both decided that the loss of efficency was not worth the gains in stability / security that you get from having a microkernel. And honestly, this particular decision hasn't greatly harmed the stability / security of those systems as a whole.
No, he's not.
I certainly plan on reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell after the recomendations here, and can't speak for it in particular, but I agree with Daniel's sentiment. The foundation of good writing is suspension of disbelief, and anything that detracts from becoming absorbed in a work harms its effectiveness. I don't expect authors to write to a grade-school level, and I don't mind having to look up a word every now and then. But when I am constantly having to reread sentences or passages because they simply don't parse the first time through, then the author is being too clever in his wording.
"But pretty much everything that's hard to do is crap, because if you have to struggle to do it, then its other qualities just don't matter."
It's not that the other qualities don't matter, it's that these exercises in verbal complexity don't add any value to the story. Sure a book may be good in spite of the language games, but if so, how much better then would it be without them?
Thank you. I'd also like to add that this wouldn't even be a case of natural selection, as his genes have already been passed on baby. In addition, even though the baby would be less likely to be successful growing up in that environment, it wouldn't be less likely to pass on it's genes when it gets older - in fact in our society it would be more likely to do so.
This post should be moderated down, or Funny, bit it isn't the least bit insightful.
The point about parents not having the same technical level as thier kids is a valid point, but the rest doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
If the parents don't have time to keep track of the few kids that they are responsible for, how is a website supposed to protect thousands of them? However few resources the parents have per child, the website/ISP has less.
Secondly the responsibilities that politicians and parents would like to push onto the website operators almost never help fix the problem. Mandating that people be over 18, will just cause kids to lie, or go somewhere else. Mandating that they censor inappropriate images, just covers up the problem or lets the offender know they are being watched. the Mandating that they monitor they're site better is futile given their resources. ISP's and websites have one responsibilities when it comes to protecting from child abuse - inform the authorities when they become aware of an offense, and to cooperate with them in any investigation.
The "govern more" argument is good for people who want all the problems in the world fixed, and think the government has magical abilities to do so, but it has no logical stopping point. Should the ISP's have enough staff to visit every website every week to make sure no bad behavior is occuring? Should they have police 24 hours at every place that a kid could meet up with a preditor?
The truth is there is no one solution to the problem. The most productive defense against online child abuse is to first allocate more resources for cops to track them down - some one specialized in online child abuse who can track people's activities across websites is going to be more useful than a lackey hired by the website because they are required to. And second to educate the parents and children about how to manage the risks of these new technologies.
I love VLC. I use it mainly on my Mac, but have also run it in Linux and Windows. The interface is very clean and straight forward, and it has played every file I have thrown at it. The only problem I have had with it is reading DVDs from the drive (if I copy the files to disk it seem to work fine). Don't know if this is specific to the Mac.
You may reverse-engineer Fairplay for purposes of interoperability. It even says so in the DMCA.
That is true, I can definately develop and use software to circumvent a copyright protection mechanism for interoperability reasons. However, the DCMA strictly prohibits me from distributing any such tools that enable circumvention even if I intend them merely for the exempted reasons. The jury is still out on whether that clause will stand, or more accurately in what specific circumstances that clause will hold up in court.
Even if distribution is allowed, the DCMA is not the only law that stands in the way. In particular, there are several patents on Fairplay standard, and without a license, it is not possible to write, distribute, and use this patented technology. There are exceptions that allow you to do some of those three some of the time, but never all three at the same time. For example, patent law does allow for implementation and distribution for educational purposes, but then anyone who used my software for non-educational purposes (even personal use) would run afoul of the law. This is the approach that LAME takes in it's license, which protects the developers but pushes liability onto the users.
I am legally prevented from writing, distributing or using Free Software that can play music encoded with Apple's Fairplay DRM.
To clarify I meant that "I can't do all these three", not "I can't do any of these three". There are three things that make Free Software Free - the freedom to modify, the freedom to distribute, and the freedom to use. If any one of these things are prohibited in a piece of software then it is not Free Software.
I am legally prevented from writing, distributing or using Free Software that can play music encoded with Apple's Fairplay DRM. Therefore it is a Free Software issue. It may be one that you don't care about, but it is one. That said, Free Software and DRM Software are inherently incompatible as DRM is an encryption scheme that requires you to both widely distribute the key and keep it secret at the same time. The only way to do this is by obscuring the key in software or hardware. Therefore, the only way to implement DRM as Free Software and follow the letter of the law, is if the keys are in hardware, and there is no way to do so while following the spirit of the law. So the only solution to the Free Software issue is no DRM.
:)
It is also a free market issue - unlike most other media formats and DRM schemes (CSS, HDMI, WMA) which can be licensed by any party under RAND terms, Fairplay is not available for license. This is helping Apple to create a monopoly, by sheltering it from competition due to legal restrictions, rather than basing it's success solely on the merit of the product (which is does have).
Lastly Microsoft didn't get to be a monopoly (in it's OS) through illegal means. Like all other OSes at the time, they lived and died with the system it was written for. The IBM PC had the advantages of people wanting to use the same machine as at work and later of low costs due to commoditization. The other PC's couldn't compete with this, and thus died. Microsoft rose to dominance because the IBM PC rose to dominance. Everything else (even their very real illegal acts) is noise.
Frankly, I have always thought our antitrust laws were pretty stupid. We give companies huge amount of anti-competitive powers through "IP", and practically unrestricted mergers, and then wait until they inevitably become monopolies (or oligopolies) to enforce a bunch of hollow antitrust laws that do little more than waist time in court. Why wait until someone is a monopoly to start caring about promoting a free competitive market?
Lastly, and most importantly, it is a consumers rights issue. If I have legally obtained documents, I will view them as I please - whether the person trying to restrict me from doing so is a monopoly or not is of no consequence.
</rant> (haven't had my cherios this morning
lose not loose. grr
A while back I read a study reported on in the economist, that looked at what the effects of the legislative branch being controlled by one party and the executive branch by another. The only legislation that it curtailed were big controversial changes (say socialisation of health care). However, it was also noticed that pork spending increased dramatically, apparently because it was used as a bargaining chip to get one side to agree to the others legislation. I'll post a link to the study later if I can find it.
Furthermore, both parties are on the side of increasingly stringent "intellectual property" legisation. They are both in favor of continually increasing penalties in general, to appear "tough on crime", without concern for making the punishment match the crime, or the diminishing returns on decreasing crime. They both are in favor of throwing our rights away to "protect us from terrorism". They are both in favor of huge pork spending that benifits the industries in the area.
I am not saying that both parties are the same - they are vastly different in many of their views. But in the areas where they do differ, there is rarely enough support to bring those ideas to fruition, so the differences have less practical effect then you would think. It is the areas that they agree that have the biggest effects on our lives, and their views in those areas are frightening.
The answer is to get more third party candidates that have respect for our rights elected into congress. Speaking of which, Michael Badnarik is running for congress and has a decent chance of winning. Who is elected to congress effects us all, and he could certainly use some help letting the people of his district know what he stands for.
Now I'll be the first to tell you that I don't agree with the libertarians on everthing, and the idea of a government controlled entirely by libertarians is almost as frightening to me as the one we have now. But I also know that's not going to happen overnight. What matters in a candidate is not thier idea of the perfect government - what matters is what direction they are going to take us in over the next 4 years. I may not like the libertarian's final destination, but compared to the major parties, I love the direction they're going, and I have no problem riding that train till it's time to jump off.
From now on I'm voting for every third party candidate I can find that supports my rights, regardless of thier views on social spending, regulation or anything else, because if we loose our rights then none of that other stuff will matter.
I completely agree that language like that is nothing but detrimental. However, the vast majority of the time it is not the scientists that are grandstanding, but the PR department at their university, amplified by journalists who will sensationalize anything to increase their ratings. You should never assume that what the press publishes is an accurate indicator of the scientific merit of the study, nor an accurate reflection of those who did the work.
Screenshots are no substitute for using the browser. It doesn't tell you if your java script is working, it doesn't always tell you if your page triggers reflow bugs, and it doesn't tell you if the browsers interpretation of your CSS affects the usablility of your site, and not just the appearance. I've run into many problems on other sites where a div (like a floating ad) is extended over the body of the main div. It wasn't visible, but it prevented me from clicking the links in the text of the article, or worse by making the link in the floating ad apply to the entire page.
You need to check your page with all the modern browsers, so you need to have a copy of windows either on another machine or in something like VMware, to test with.
and I still don't really know what ifolder is. From what I read, it is a folder that I can access using a special client or a web interface. There is tons of software that does something along this line, from basic FTP / Apache folder view, to NFS or Coda to all the various HTTP webdrop applications.
A more usefull article would explain how it compares to other common software, not necisarily to declare a w1nnAr but to let me know what what situations it excels in, and if it would be usefull to me.