Take away extensions from Windows l-users and a *NIX SysAdmin noob and see who cries first.
The *NIX noob, but only cos he's a noob. The actual system would still run flawlessly assuming everything was compiled + linked appropriately, of course. Windows depends on.{exe,dll,vxd} however.
Oh man, a property rights nut. On that basis all children are slaves because they're derived from your genetic code. That system is inconsistent from the get-go, you can't just say property rights are the be all and end all - you end up with loads of mental results if you do that.
What the parliament has decided is that internet users have rights that can only be abridged by the judicial authorities. What that means is that you have fundamental rights with regards to your internet service in the same way you have fundamental warranty rights when you purchase something. Those rights exist because parliament just legislated to create them.
This isn't the government providing internet access.
In fact you could provide an argument that this is a protection of property rights (not that you actually provided any argument that this is an abridgement of them - it's not obvious that it is IMO) because it's protecting the internet service that you've paid for against third parties who wish to interrupt it to satisfy their agenda.
I'm not going to get into that, however, because howling about how the EU Parliament - a body that for all its faults consists of the elected representatives of everyone in Europe - has passed a bad law simply because it contradicts your pet rights theory is more than a bit mental. Everything the EU does is based on the same sort of ideology, after all.
Where the piracy potential is high, game developers don't want to take the risk to make high budget games.
Until this announcement (which hasn't been released yet) you had to use a special battery pack to mod your PSP and there was a chance of bricking it.
Compared to DS, where you can buy R4DS + other brand flash carts from newsagents, at least in the cities here in the UK, and I'd say pirating games on PSP is an order of magnitude harder on PSP than DS. DS still sells boatloads of games though, even though its install base is only double that of PSP.
Despite no longer being a teenager, I still enjoy teen trash. Watching those brats freak out on Super Sweet 16 is hilarious and also Pimp my Ride (I'd come up with a "yo dawg" line but I'm too drunk) is fun too.
That still doesn't detract from my point which is that MTV doesn't play as much music as it used to which I put down to the record labels wanting too much money.
i.e. You want to skip commercials in a home-video you made that you included advertisign in.
That's not a substantial use. I'd be surprised if you could find even a hundred people who do that, as a percentage of MythTV users it'd be tiny. The substantial use of the commercial skipping feature is, by your argument, infringing and MythTV should be forced to remove it.
MythTV doesn't contain code and rules to recognize specific advertisements in specific copyright programs.
I'm not aware of any law or case law that causes code that targets specific advertisements and causes those to be somehow infringing.
I think it's more constructive to look at the stated goal of Adblock Plus which is to block all adverts. It can only do that through lists of known advertisements but it's not trying to be preferential. In any case I'm not convinced that your legal argument holds water so that's irrelevant.
music videos that were recently yanked per Viacom's demands
Normally I don't have sympathy for firms like MTV but I was always amazed by how much money the record companies wanted from them. Music videos are adverts! How mental must the record industry be to expect people to pay to advertise their product for them?
No wonder MTV has been showing less actual music and more teen-focused trash over the past few years. Maybe that has something to do with the decline in sales?
What if I'm browsing in text mode? What if I don't happen to have flash installed so I can't see flash adverts?
In order for a webpage to be seen on screen it has to be modified and translated into an image in my computers' memory. You seem to be claiming that I'm violating copyright law by not processing those instructions in the correct way but I'm not aware of any case law that interprets copyright law like that. If website operators want me to view their page in a specific way perhaps they should furnish me with a standard, proprietary browser that would illegal to modify?
By that argument users of MythTV who use the commercial marking features are also in violation because they're using a programme to skip the ads rather than pressing fast-forward themselves.
A big part of the fun is the manner in which he lays it down though, sometimes his monologues are poetry.
Are you a fan of political satire in general? I'm not aware of anyone doing satire in the USA quite like Colbert, I've said it elsewhere today but I think he's as good as Rory Bremner during the Major year,s which were his prime - not necessarily because his work has declined in quality but because John Major had one of the most mediocre governments this country has ever seen.
Admittedly the Colbert persona is a little restrictive but I think he's generally insightful and funny.
I'm starting to wish I hadn't posted in this topic and used my points to correct the abuse in this thread.
I don't think anyone in this thread (bar an AC or two) is trolling or trying to incite a flame-war, people are just strongly expressing their views on humour which is, of course, a matter of personal taste.
I'm from the UK and find Colbert hilarious. He's right up there with Bremner during the Major years as far as I'm concerned. You do need to be familiar with current events in the USA to get most of the stuff he's talking about though.
Supporters of the neo-con project, obviously. He got on stage next to President Bush and said "we all know reality has a liberal bias" and on a recent episode he savaged former Senator Ted Stevens for a statement he made after getting the bribery accusations against him dismissed.
Colbert may be conservative in certain senses (whatever that means in modern American politics) but he's clearly not a supporter of the neo-conservatives.
Indeed, I honestly had no idea that PDFs ran JS! Why is JS needed for PDFs anyway? I remember when PDF was just a glorified (already executed and semi-rendered) PostScript replacement...
You're misunderstanding what capitalism is. Unless you analyse it in terms of its class nature then you'll continue to miss the point.
Capitalism inherently leads to the corruption of any democratic process. This is because the capitalist class, those who control companies, push for legislation that favours them; rich people buy politicians.
In the event of a "minarchist" libertarian government there would be nothing to stop entrenched companies from acting anti-competitively, i.e. selling product at below cost whenever a new startup appeared. That fact alone would be enough to deter capital investment in any established market. Other behaviours would also emerge like if the owner of a firm didn't like gay people then they wouldn't employ them. For low wage workers in towns where that firm is the major employer that would be a death sentence and society would end up shaped completely according to the whims, prejudices and desires of those fortunate enough to be part of the capitalist class.
This is exactly what the UK used to be like during the industrial revolution and it's what poorly regulated emerging capitalist economies are like to live in around the world.
Some markets might produce an oligopoly instead of a monopoly but an oligopoly will, in the absence of strong government regulation (i.e. raids whenever there's the merest whiff of price fixing), function as a cartel.
This behaviour is a feature not of capitalism but of human nature. Whenever a group of people has power they naturally try to preserve that power and ultimately will back it up with the use of force. Transferring complete control of the economy to the private sector is a very bad idea because it completely removes power from the democratic process. Keeping power with the current liberal democratic institutions that currently exist is also a bad idea because you end up with the mess that currently exists.
We need a different solution. We need a political system that puts control of everything in the public sphere without a state in the form we have it today or, indeed, a form that's ever existed. The only way that will ever be achieved is through mass action amongst working people.
Whether or not Apple is currently suing is not the point, the point is they could sue. That's the same reason that people are wary of Mono: Microsoft won't make a promise that they won't ever sue over the patents that Mono infringes, the promise they have made is limited (I can't remember the details).
Mono is actually in a better position than FreeType because Mono has that limited covenant whereas Apple hasn't made a similar promise WRT FreeType.
I'd have thought most people who post here would be savvy enough to have NoScript installed. I appreciate that stuff like this is a pain for anyone who has to lock down Windows boxen in a company but that's what web filtering proxies are for, no?
Regular users have no hope but unfortunately that's been the case on so many fronts for so long that one extra Acrobat vulnerability isn't going to make things much worse.
If you were going to beam propaganda back into the past to make sure you're fascist galactic federation came into being, you wouldn't show the bad bits now would you?
Most likely all the undesirables have been purged by TOS and almost certainly by TNG.
Those variables aren't random. All CPUs operate within quite a thin thermal range (mine range from 30 to 55), even things like numbers of disk accesses, amount of data read by the system and other system variables can be predicted to a reasonable enough degree of certainty that they can start guessing within that range. It's just a matter of CPU horsepower their end and good enough models of various computer users - in my case they could build up a profile of what those values are for a linux user who leaves their machine on all the time and start guessing within that range.
Given how much money is being spent on computer hardware by our government to spy on us I think it's just best to assume that our government has enough power to defeat any such pseudo-random approach for a given person.
There is already a massive surveillance system in place in the UK. I'm not even talking about the police or intelligence services, all sorts of central and local government bodies have the power to undertake surveillance for such a wide variety of reasons, it's actually quite scary.
Often the reasons given are things like benefit fraud or failure to pay council tax but the point is that surveillance has already, to a large extend, been delegated from the police and secret intelligence services to other bodies. Of course the police and SIS also have access to that information.
The point is that most people won't take the effort to obfusticate their activity in such a manner and so simply doing that would be suspicious.
The proper solution is to get the government - or any entity with a monopoly on force - out of the market. Then economic power will cease to have its political connotation.
No, then economic power will be the only power worth having. That would quickly precipitate a revolution because the only option for the "Average Joe", who just wants to turn up to work and do a basic days work (lets be clear: There's nothing wrong with that, without such people society would fall apart and they deserve decent pay & conditions), would be to organise in revolutionary parties based on the ideas of armed revolution. That basic understanding is one of the foundations of modern capitalist democracy.
Those in power accept the basic logic of Marxism hence such patently ludicrous ideas like the "natural rate of unemployment", aka "the reserve army of labour".
Capitalist plus democracy naturally tends towards the UKUSA model. The capitalist elite works to erode any lawful protection for workers that may exist due to previous historical factors, hence the emergence of people like Sarkozy in France.
Also, capitalism tends towards monopoly. Unabridged free market capitalism would naturally produce massive private {mono,oligo}polies, in the latter case there would be strong incentive to operate as a cartel. In such a situation revolution would be the only option for people to regain control of their lives.
As I pointed out, people in power understand this. That's why you see the current mish-mash of not quite capitalism, not quite socialism, not quite democracy. It's a compromise to keep society stable and the people in power, in power.
The same people who I see make this mistake also equivocate on the word "power" - economic power (success) is seen as equivalent to political power
That's because it is. Thus it has always been and thus it will always be; there's a reason this topic has historically been labelled "Political Economy". You can try to deny basic human nature but the fact is that economic power == political power and when someone has unchecked political power they will abuse it to feather their own nest at the expense of others, often at the expense of other peoples' lives. The market has no capacity to regulate that.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought they were the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSADAP...!
Take away extensions from Windows l-users and a *NIX SysAdmin noob and see who cries first.
The *NIX noob, but only cos he's a noob. The actual system would still run flawlessly assuming everything was compiled + linked appropriately, of course. Windows depends on .{exe,dll,vxd} however.
Oh man, a property rights nut. On that basis all children are slaves because they're derived from your genetic code. That system is inconsistent from the get-go, you can't just say property rights are the be all and end all - you end up with loads of mental results if you do that.
What the parliament has decided is that internet users have rights that can only be abridged by the judicial authorities. What that means is that you have fundamental rights with regards to your internet service in the same way you have fundamental warranty rights when you purchase something. Those rights exist because parliament just legislated to create them.
This isn't the government providing internet access.
In fact you could provide an argument that this is a protection of property rights (not that you actually provided any argument that this is an abridgement of them - it's not obvious that it is IMO) because it's protecting the internet service that you've paid for against third parties who wish to interrupt it to satisfy their agenda.
I'm not going to get into that, however, because howling about how the EU Parliament - a body that for all its faults consists of the elected representatives of everyone in Europe - has passed a bad law simply because it contradicts your pet rights theory is more than a bit mental. Everything the EU does is based on the same sort of ideology, after all.
This isn't the time or the place.
There is no "right" to internet access
Er...
restrictions to the fundamental rights and freedoms of Internet users can only be put in place after a decision by judicial authorities.
Fail at reading comprehension much?
Where the piracy potential is high, game developers don't want to take the risk to make high budget games.
Until this announcement (which hasn't been released yet) you had to use a special battery pack to mod your PSP and there was a chance of bricking it.
Compared to DS, where you can buy R4DS + other brand flash carts from newsagents, at least in the cities here in the UK, and I'd say pirating games on PSP is an order of magnitude harder on PSP than DS. DS still sells boatloads of games though, even though its install base is only double that of PSP.
OK, so combined sales of next-gen is almost 100m. Still, not too far out...
More like 50m.
I was surprised when I saw that number a few months ago too but it's true, PSP has 1/3 the handheld market.
That raises the question, why aren't there any killer games for the PSP? 50m is still bigger than all the next-gen (PSWii60) consoles combined.
Despite no longer being a teenager, I still enjoy teen trash. Watching those brats freak out on Super Sweet 16 is hilarious and also Pimp my Ride (I'd come up with a "yo dawg" line but I'm too drunk) is fun too.
That still doesn't detract from my point which is that MTV doesn't play as much music as it used to which I put down to the record labels wanting too much money.
i.e. You want to skip commercials in a home-video you made that you included advertisign in.
That's not a substantial use. I'd be surprised if you could find even a hundred people who do that, as a percentage of MythTV users it'd be tiny. The substantial use of the commercial skipping feature is, by your argument, infringing and MythTV should be forced to remove it.
MythTV doesn't contain code and rules to recognize specific advertisements in specific copyright programs.
I'm not aware of any law or case law that causes code that targets specific advertisements and causes those to be somehow infringing.
I think it's more constructive to look at the stated goal of Adblock Plus which is to block all adverts. It can only do that through lists of known advertisements but it's not trying to be preferential. In any case I'm not convinced that your legal argument holds water so that's irrelevant.
music videos that were recently yanked per Viacom's demands
Normally I don't have sympathy for firms like MTV but I was always amazed by how much money the record companies wanted from them. Music videos are adverts! How mental must the record industry be to expect people to pay to advertise their product for them?
No wonder MTV has been showing less actual music and more teen-focused trash over the past few years. Maybe that has something to do with the decline in sales?
Yea, it just pisses me off that any time someone posts something that someone might construe as being a bit offensive it gets whacked down to -1.
Considering all the people like to blow their own trumpet when it comes to being libertarian I find it quite ironic!
What if I'm browsing in text mode? What if I don't happen to have flash installed so I can't see flash adverts?
In order for a webpage to be seen on screen it has to be modified and translated into an image in my computers' memory. You seem to be claiming that I'm violating copyright law by not processing those instructions in the correct way but I'm not aware of any case law that interprets copyright law like that. If website operators want me to view their page in a specific way perhaps they should furnish me with a standard, proprietary browser that would illegal to modify?
By that argument users of MythTV who use the commercial marking features are also in violation because they're using a programme to skip the ads rather than pressing fast-forward themselves.
A big part of the fun is the manner in which he lays it down though, sometimes his monologues are poetry.
Are you a fan of political satire in general? I'm not aware of anyone doing satire in the USA quite like Colbert, I've said it elsewhere today but I think he's as good as Rory Bremner during the Major year,s which were his prime - not necessarily because his work has declined in quality but because John Major had one of the most mediocre governments this country has ever seen.
Admittedly the Colbert persona is a little restrictive but I think he's generally insightful and funny.
I'm starting to wish I hadn't posted in this topic and used my points to correct the abuse in this thread.
I don't think anyone in this thread (bar an AC or two) is trolling or trying to incite a flame-war, people are just strongly expressing their views on humour which is, of course, a matter of personal taste.
I'm from the UK and find Colbert hilarious. He's right up there with Bremner during the Major years as far as I'm concerned. You do need to be familiar with current events in the USA to get most of the stuff he's talking about though.
Supporters of the neo-con project, obviously. He got on stage next to President Bush and said "we all know reality has a liberal bias" and on a recent episode he savaged former Senator Ted Stevens for a statement he made after getting the bribery accusations against him dismissed.
Colbert may be conservative in certain senses (whatever that means in modern American politics) but he's clearly not a supporter of the neo-conservatives.
Indeed, I honestly had no idea that PDFs ran JS! Why is JS needed for PDFs anyway? I remember when PDF was just a glorified (already executed and semi-rendered) PostScript replacement...
You're misunderstanding what capitalism is. Unless you analyse it in terms of its class nature then you'll continue to miss the point.
Capitalism inherently leads to the corruption of any democratic process. This is because the capitalist class, those who control companies, push for legislation that favours them; rich people buy politicians.
In the event of a "minarchist" libertarian government there would be nothing to stop entrenched companies from acting anti-competitively, i.e. selling product at below cost whenever a new startup appeared. That fact alone would be enough to deter capital investment in any established market. Other behaviours would also emerge like if the owner of a firm didn't like gay people then they wouldn't employ them. For low wage workers in towns where that firm is the major employer that would be a death sentence and society would end up shaped completely according to the whims, prejudices and desires of those fortunate enough to be part of the capitalist class.
This is exactly what the UK used to be like during the industrial revolution and it's what poorly regulated emerging capitalist economies are like to live in around the world.
Some markets might produce an oligopoly instead of a monopoly but an oligopoly will, in the absence of strong government regulation (i.e. raids whenever there's the merest whiff of price fixing), function as a cartel.
This behaviour is a feature not of capitalism but of human nature. Whenever a group of people has power they naturally try to preserve that power and ultimately will back it up with the use of force. Transferring complete control of the economy to the private sector is a very bad idea because it completely removes power from the democratic process. Keeping power with the current liberal democratic institutions that currently exist is also a bad idea because you end up with the mess that currently exists.
We need a different solution. We need a political system that puts control of everything in the public sphere without a state in the form we have it today or, indeed, a form that's ever existed. The only way that will ever be achieved is through mass action amongst working people.
Whether or not Apple is currently suing is not the point, the point is they could sue. That's the same reason that people are wary of Mono: Microsoft won't make a promise that they won't ever sue over the patents that Mono infringes, the promise they have made is limited (I can't remember the details).
Mono is actually in a better position than FreeType because Mono has that limited covenant whereas Apple hasn't made a similar promise WRT FreeType.
Remember GIF?
How shocking, that, whenever you have a permanent class that decides how money is allocated, that they should allocate it to themselves.
That fact is central to socialism; anyone who claims to be socialist in order to gain support for such policies is a liar and a hypocrite.
I'd have thought most people who post here would be savvy enough to have NoScript installed. I appreciate that stuff like this is a pain for anyone who has to lock down Windows boxen in a company but that's what web filtering proxies are for, no?
Regular users have no hope but unfortunately that's been the case on so many fronts for so long that one extra Acrobat vulnerability isn't going to make things much worse.
If you were going to beam propaganda back into the past to make sure you're fascist galactic federation came into being, you wouldn't show the bad bits now would you?
Most likely all the undesirables have been purged by TOS and almost certainly by TNG.
Those variables aren't random. All CPUs operate within quite a thin thermal range (mine range from 30 to 55), even things like numbers of disk accesses, amount of data read by the system and other system variables can be predicted to a reasonable enough degree of certainty that they can start guessing within that range. It's just a matter of CPU horsepower their end and good enough models of various computer users - in my case they could build up a profile of what those values are for a linux user who leaves their machine on all the time and start guessing within that range.
Given how much money is being spent on computer hardware by our government to spy on us I think it's just best to assume that our government has enough power to defeat any such pseudo-random approach for a given person.
There is already a massive surveillance system in place in the UK. I'm not even talking about the police or intelligence services, all sorts of central and local government bodies have the power to undertake surveillance for such a wide variety of reasons, it's actually quite scary.
Often the reasons given are things like benefit fraud or failure to pay council tax but the point is that surveillance has already, to a large extend, been delegated from the police and secret intelligence services to other bodies. Of course the police and SIS also have access to that information.
The point is that most people won't take the effort to obfusticate their activity in such a manner and so simply doing that would be suspicious.
The proper solution is to get the government - or any entity with a monopoly on force - out of the market. Then economic power will cease to have its political connotation.
No, then economic power will be the only power worth having. That would quickly precipitate a revolution because the only option for the "Average Joe", who just wants to turn up to work and do a basic days work (lets be clear: There's nothing wrong with that, without such people society would fall apart and they deserve decent pay & conditions), would be to organise in revolutionary parties based on the ideas of armed revolution. That basic understanding is one of the foundations of modern capitalist democracy.
Those in power accept the basic logic of Marxism hence such patently ludicrous ideas like the "natural rate of unemployment", aka "the reserve army of labour".
Capitalist plus democracy naturally tends towards the UKUSA model. The capitalist elite works to erode any lawful protection for workers that may exist due to previous historical factors, hence the emergence of people like Sarkozy in France.
Also, capitalism tends towards monopoly. Unabridged free market capitalism would naturally produce massive private {mono,oligo}polies, in the latter case there would be strong incentive to operate as a cartel. In such a situation revolution would be the only option for people to regain control of their lives.
As I pointed out, people in power understand this. That's why you see the current mish-mash of not quite capitalism, not quite socialism, not quite democracy. It's a compromise to keep society stable and the people in power, in power.
The same people who I see make this mistake also equivocate on the word "power" - economic power (success) is seen as equivalent to political power
That's because it is. Thus it has always been and thus it will always be; there's a reason this topic has historically been labelled "Political Economy". You can try to deny basic human nature but the fact is that economic power == political power and when someone has unchecked political power they will abuse it to feather their own nest at the expense of others, often at the expense of other peoples' lives. The market has no capacity to regulate that.