First, stop trying to think about it as 'rights' and 'compensation'. If you strip out the propaganda, it's basically a privately held, government enforced taxation right on copying. The fact that we're not seeing it in the state budged doesn't mean the cost to the economy isn't there.
Once you realize it's just another taxation system in an odd form it's much easier to create a rational political discussion around it; what does this cost the taxpayers today? What do they get from it? Are we maximizing the creative wealth funded by this tax? Perhaps the money same money could be paying more artists and creative people? At what point is the public interest no longer served by handing more money to one creator, but rather putting a ceiling on the state-sponsored payouts and handing it downwards the long tail?
Second; forget trying to check for or control the copying. It doesn't matter what the Swedish state does in the end; the pressure has been strong enough for long enough that darknets are unavoidable. There are a few years left during which traffic will be monitorable at all, beyond that everything will be encrypted friend-to-friend-to-friend automated distributed searches and transfers. You'll never see anything but your closest friends, so everyone is protected against everyone else. Thanks for screwing the efficiency of the network for the next generation, but there we go.
Third, if you want to apply a fee, apply it where it's appropriate. Adding a fee to a broadband connection isnt appropriate; if you do, I want to get paid for commenting on slashdot. The place to tax is simply the one making money from the copy. Let anyone make copies and then tax ads on Pirate bay and hand the money to the creator of the copied material. Put a salestax on copied media in stores and let the stores themselves copy the material. Allow print-as-you-go bookstores, write-your-own-CD kiosks, etc, but hand the proceeds of a sales tax to the creators.
Oh, and like all transfer systems, the actual management of collection and payouts should be under state control, not in the hands of private interests like IFPI or the MPAA/RIAA corps. State-protected taxation rights in the hands of private corporations is the worst of two worlds; the private sector should always operate in unprotected competition, otherwise it can exceed even governments in waste.
Mmm, no. They'd prefer to buy internet with speed appropriate for their desired price range.
For the ISP it's much easier to compete by marketing bullshit speeds they have neither capability nor intention to actually deliver. Competing on price would be much more of a pain, not to mention that the big guys lose the advantage of wider throttling gains than the smaller ISPs can achieve.
without pushing contention to 10~20, prices would be beyond the average consumer
It's not a question of contention, it's a question of labels. It would be entirely possible to sell exactly the same service as today, with the exact same infrastructure as today but with an accurate label. If the connection is throttled, fine, sell the connection as whatever the throttling is at. Consumers don't want that? Then let them go to the more expensive competitor that actually upgrades its infrastructure.
The summary is much improved if you shorten it a bit:
"Over the years of IE's dominance as the leading browser, designers regularly tweaked their sites to get the best possible accuracy in rendering pages in IE"... "That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."
*shrug* I guess the whole 'standards' thing is something every generation has to learn on its own. Those of us who've been in the industry for 20 years know that proprietary means you do it again, and again, and again...
Why even bother with executing them? I can imagine a whole host of marketing people thinking this is a great way to obtain prime advertisement real-estate.
Getting an icon on a users desktop is something some companies pay a lot of money for. In fact, the ability to spam any download folder is probably something they regard as worthwhile.
I think mostly what they are doing, is buying 3 of something cheaper, instead of one of something greater.
From what it looks like they're doing exactly what I do for myself; skip the extraneous crap and simply rack motherboards as they are.
In that case we're not talking 3 of something cheaper; you could probably get up towards 5-10 of something cheaper. Then consider that best price/performance is not generally what is bought, and the difference is even wider.
Of course, it's not going to happen in the average corporation, where most involved parties prefer covering their ass by buying conventional branded products. Point out to your average corporate purchaser or technical director that you could reduce CPU cycle costs to 1/25 th, and that you could provide storage at 1/100th of the current per gigabyte cost and they'll whine 'but we're an _enterprise_, we cant buy consumer grade stuff or build it ourselves'.
Ten years ago people brought obsolete junk from work home to play with. These days I'm considering bringing obsolete stuff from home to work because the stuff I throw out is often better than low-prioritized things at work.
It's all about being able to define what goes where, and preferably having software take care of that for you.
Yep. Like RAM caches.
Personally, at home, my current need for fast, low latency disk is in the range of maybe 4-8 GB; the commonly used os and swap areas for 3 systems. The rest is bulk storage; latency doesn't really matter and the speed of any disk made in the last decade is good enough.
As I've stuck my physical disks in a couple of servers and share them out over gigabit iSCSI, increasing performance is as simple as dumping more RAM in the servers and/or striping the performance demanding parts. I find the SSD's available today completely uninteresting as they offer neither the performance of RAM or the price/performance of disk.
it has distinct advantages as a lifestyle, and is not so different from our own.
That may very well be true. On the other hand, if we go by our own history and the social development of some isolated groups, the lifestyle may be very different, and have distinct advantages only for the leaders (well, maybe that isn't much different, but you get the drift).
Besides medicine and food, what about civil liberties? Equality? Age of consent? Is consent even a concept?
To be blunt, human tribal lifestyles have ranged from the idealized idyllic to Austrian cellar style.
In the end, how would you yourself rather be treated in that situation? Left alone to 'enrich human culture' like some culture fair exhibit, a zoo specimen? Or be responsibly contacted and left to decide for yourself? Do you want to know all you can know, or do you want to be kept in an invisible cage, left to the whims of your leaders?
Personally I know what I would want (heck, occasionally I'd prefer the customary daily ass-probe of any presumptive galactic overlords culture than be stuck on the backwater of Earth with hooman culture).
They're human beings. They should be given chance to assess their situation and make their own informed choices as they want. They're not an exhibit for our enjoyment, nor should they have to suffer penitence for our guilty consciences about our forefathers handling of such situations. Keeping them isolated is as arrogant as deciding they should be modernized. There is a middle way of lesser evil to tread perhaps.
Whatever. I expect them to be overrun, poisoned, shot, and assimilated, then held up as an example of the superiority of civilization.
Yah. We could use some contact with a more evolved species ourselves.
Why is everyone so blinkered they always assume Microsoft employees are evil and anti-OSS?
Why is everyone so _experienced_ you mean.
See, that's the trouble with consistent bad behavior over a long period of time; eventually you run out of doubt to benefit from. With the company's history, it would take something like a check for a years salary payable to the FSF for a person to earn some doubt back.
If you want to slam the guy for this statement, compare with proprietary software from a company that goes under.
I can barely recall any FOSS software that's gone 'unmaintained' on me. The few there are still work fine, but for various reasons have been surpassed by other apps.
Proprietary software tho... the stuff that doesn't get killed in companies going under, companies merging and discontinuing product lines or simply killed off as unprofitable gets deliberately obsoleted.
I mean, "Currently there are perfectly good projects that have been abandoned by their developers despite being used by large corporations." is rather rich coming from a company with the current XP/Vista situation.
You can listen to a song as many times as you want.
Would that be 'as many times as you want', or 'as many times as they want, until they change their business model, want to get paid again, or go out of business'?
While the DRM-free part is nice (but expensive compared to emusic), one should be clear with what one gets. If you don't have control over the media in question it will, inevitably, become unplayable.
if you true them enough to download and run their app
Mmm, no. Even less after actually going to their site and being met with "Unforuntely it requires javascript similar to most major websites on the internet.". Apart from the very creative spelling, outright lies like that (or utter ignorance) coupled with that attitude does not exactly inspire trust.
These sorts of hyper-reductionist arguments are stupid.
Some hyper-reductionist arguments are stupid, but that one certainly isn't; it's essential to understanding the difference between 'ownership' and 'intellectual monopoly'.
Owning a piece of property is vastly different from having the right to prevent everyone else from doing something with their own property, wether it be making a new chair just like the one you'd bought or copying a film on a disk.
both ownership and copyright are meaningful terms
Meaningful terms, but not necessarily relevant to eachother. It's copyright 'holder', not copyright 'owner' and in many languages it's not even called 'intellectual property', but rather 'immaterial rights' or something like that.
Copyright itself has structurally more in common with feudal-style delegated taxation rights than with actual property; the state delegates the right to exact taxes for certain things to private interests. As a general rule that's been regarded as a bad idea, but in this field the concept remains fertile.
Personal and verbatim, non commercial copy should be allowed.
And commercial copying should simply be taxed and the revenues handed to the creator of the copied work (to the extent with which such creative works need to be funded and monetized beyond other incentives). The whole monopoly aspect is what prevents and hampers the creation of wealth and flow of information. It needs to go.
It's annoying that many politicians in capitalistic countries can see the economic market damage created by state-run monopolies, but somehow fail to acknowledge the same damage caused when you hand out state-sponsored monopolies to private interests.
You have to see it in the light of the US judicial system. The US has the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world, 7 times higher than, for example, the EU average.
As I doubt Americans are seven times as much in need of locking up (I'm sure some would disagree), one can only conclude that for some reason the US political and judicial system is geared towards providing large prison populations, regardless of social impact, efficiency or justice.
So, better things to do? Not if the goal is to lock up as many as possible. I guess it makes sense from some point of view; it's probably profitable for the private run prisons, and as, unlike in many other countries, convicted felons cannot vote in many places, it's not like it's a politically risky business (in fact, removing voting rights from as many as possible may be a good political strategy for some parties).
Fingerprints are a 'unique identifier' in the same way postit notes with your password on that you leave on anything you touch. Except worse, as with postit notes you could actually change the password you're leaving everywhere.
Eventually, without a doubt. Although by that time SSD may have little to do with what we regard as SSD today.
How it plays out depends on how the hard disk manufacturers deal with it; personally I'd prefer they play their strength and simply forget about speed and concentrate on their forte; storing lots of bits.
I already have all the fast storage I need (if I wanted more I could stripe over more disks). Bulk storage, however, is something I'm permanently short of; I could easily use up to the petabyte range if it were cheap enough (think permanent video archives with mythtv recording anything and everything on any DTV multiplex...)
So quit trying to make it fast and small, go for huge instead. Using larger platters I'd bet 5TB drives would be easily possible today.
For this type of installation it might be simpler and cheaper just getting two smartswitches with mini-gbic or built-in 1000base-LX port. Cheap, consumer-grade stuff with trivial configuration, good for 5km, and using fibre you avoid any possible grounding issues between the houses.
Personally I have it deactivated through noscript (for a whole host of other reasons besides energy saving, altho the fact that a newssite I used to watch actually consistently caused my office PC to spin up its CPU fan is one of them). There are times when it's perfectly appropriate to use Flash. Running continous advertising loops on an unwatched display isn't it.
Nor does that change the fact that there's a whole lot of environmental complaints about computer power consumption, and a whole lot of powersaving features available in most modern hardware. Most of which is made useless the instance users park their browser on animated sites; even minor usage like Greenpeaces needless animation consumes more power than things like 'standby' on consumer electronics, another common environmental complaint.
Obviously, someone running Linux or other F/OSS OS doesn't need a game to understand the advantages of cooperation or peaceful conflict resolution. Kernel, license or editor conflicts almost never devolve into physical violence.
How fun would an appropriate game be?
"Mark doesn't agree with your indentation style. What do you do?"
a) Create my own fork b) Develop software that will display the code in the viewers indent style c) I demonstrate my indentation preference by indenting Marks face with my fist d) I write my own new software with a new license allowing only derivative works with the same indentation style
if a copyright holder wanted to specify that their software should only be distributed in a green envelope
No, it was if a copyright holder wanted to specify that to _copy_ the software, that copy should only be distributed in a green envelope by the person making the copy. If Skype wants to _make copies_ they have to abide by the GPL.
Once the copy is actually made and sold, first sale doctrine applies to that copy; the copyright holder has limited influence over what is done with it. As long as it isn't copied.
In this case, unless I misunderstand it, they've actually purchased valid copies, at which point first sales doctrine would have it they could set them on fire, sell them second-hand or use them as wheels on a series of small bicycles.
Of course, then we come to the old EULA argument on wether installing or running a computer program is to be considered creating a copy, etc etc. So we're back to the old the EULA may or may not be fully enforceable, and if it is, the degree to which it is will probably vary by jurisdiction.
Propaganda is not useless, and this particular propaganda is definitely not useless.
Interestingly enough, not only can propaganda be useful, it can also be power-consuming.
For example, take a look at Greenpeace's webpage. It contains many flash animated sequences, some of which are permanently repeated. On the computer I'm at right now, viewing their site loads my CPU to about 20%; enough to actually have it step up in frequency and voltage, leading to a power draw increase of several watts. (well, it does if I actually allow scripts and flash through, which I normally don't, but you get the point).
(advertising/marketing) that runs practically unchecked.
Unchecked and quite often very animated. Even more so than Greenpeace's website.
As a matter of fact, I'd forgive some of Greenpeace's missteps, if they'd launch a campaign against the power consumption caused by excessive animation and Flash usage. I can name some sites that could easily cause a 40W power draw increase on any decent power-saving computer browsing them from only the ads. Multiply that by some 100K users and soon you're talking powerplants being built to keep ads animated.
If this had existed by now, Mozilla would have known when to aim for a Firefox 3 release
And instead of distributions including beta 5 we'd have Firefox beta 5 under the name of Release instead. Political pressure to adopt release schedules doesn't necessary mean the actual software gets finished any faster.
It's not proprietary software we're talking about; there isn't a seven year release cycle with massive changes between each revision. For the 6-9-month dists, who really cares if a certain version of something makes release or not? The next release isn't exactly far away, and in many cases a staggered release allows more bugs to be reported by early adopters and fixed before everyone rolls onto the release in question.
For the long term releases it might make more sense to synchronize some things like kernel versions and support libraries, but mostly because it'd make it easier for proprietary software makers to target more similar versions. But then again, I'm not sure it's in the best interest of free software vendors to bend over backwards to make it simpler for proprietary vendors; had it been up to the proprietary vendors everyone would be stuck at a release years ago and progress would slow to a crawl. So perhaps it's better to just move forward and force everyone to develop and implement methods to keep up with a permanently changing target.
Yep, exactly right. They really were everywhere; it went so far I even got a bunch of replacement caps and recapped a couple of boards and some PSU's. Really annoying failure modes also; mostly the affected equipment would just develop tendencies to lock up or crash when spiking in power usage (games, number crunching, etc), until one day it would fail to start (usually after 18-36 months, at which point warranty returns might be more trouble than it's worth).
Apart from geeks actually tearing the equipment apart and noticing the suave way the capacitors were slobbering I expect most people ended up retiring the equipment early. I can barely imagine how much frustration and lost work the problem has caused worldwide.
It depends on the board. Some MSI boards are flashable with the metod you mention; for the K9N Neo-F I can't even get a bios file to download from MSI. You apparently _have_ to use Live Update to update it.
Had it supported the method you mention, that would have been perfectly acceptable (I went through the whole read-manual-'Ok, no load from USB disk, well, I'll just use a CD... oh, no CD, I'll write a bootable floppy, uh, where's the download link for the BIOS... uh... there isn't a download link for the BIOS. I have to use _WHAT_? An ActiveX control or a XP program??);
That not even DOS based updates are possible is what had me quite appalled, the very idea of making a motherboard that cannot be updated without being up and running in a full copy of windows had previously struck me as unthinkable.
I've had no problems with MSI boards otherwise, and as long as you do your research to avoid the Live-Update only boards you're probably fine. For me, however, the mindset that produces products with that kind of issues leaves me with a bad taste.
I have to agree. I've made some forays into MSI (a relationship that was abruptly and permanently terminated when I discovered I had to have XP to upgrade the BIOS), EPoX and AOpen.
But after that MSI foray I'll be sticking to ASUS for the foreseeable future; I have yet to purchase an ASUS board that I haven't been perfectly happy with throughout its lifecycle (well, I had one or two die of the bad capacitor issue a few years ago, but that was only 30% of my ASUS boards while 100% of the other branded boards died from it).
I find the irony palpable. The comment is like straight out of 1984; Mr Leis apparently seems to think there's some difference between 'Big Brother' and 'a device that connects you to a buddy who wants to keep you safe and help you graduate'.
To quote the end of 1984: He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Slashdot Mirror
First, stop trying to think about it as 'rights' and 'compensation'. If you strip out the propaganda, it's basically a privately held, government enforced taxation right on copying. The fact that we're not seeing it in the state budged doesn't mean the cost to the economy isn't there.
Once you realize it's just another taxation system in an odd form it's much easier to create a rational political discussion around it; what does this cost the taxpayers today? What do they get from it? Are we maximizing the creative wealth funded by this tax? Perhaps the money same money could be paying more artists and creative people? At what point is the public interest no longer served by handing more money to one creator, but rather putting a ceiling on the state-sponsored payouts and handing it downwards the long tail?
Second; forget trying to check for or control the copying. It doesn't matter what the Swedish state does in the end; the pressure has been strong enough for long enough that darknets are unavoidable. There are a few years left during which traffic will be monitorable at all, beyond that everything will be encrypted friend-to-friend-to-friend automated distributed searches and transfers. You'll never see anything but your closest friends, so everyone is protected against everyone else. Thanks for screwing the efficiency of the network for the next generation, but there we go.
Third, if you want to apply a fee, apply it where it's appropriate. Adding a fee to a broadband connection isnt appropriate; if you do, I want to get paid for commenting on slashdot. The place to tax is simply the one making money from the copy. Let anyone make copies and then tax ads on Pirate bay and hand the money to the creator of the copied material. Put a salestax on copied media in stores and let the stores themselves copy the material. Allow print-as-you-go bookstores, write-your-own-CD kiosks, etc, but hand the proceeds of a sales tax to the creators.
Oh, and like all transfer systems, the actual management of collection and payouts should be under state control, not in the hands of private interests like IFPI or the MPAA/RIAA corps. State-protected taxation rights in the hands of private corporations is the worst of two worlds; the private sector should always operate in unprotected competition, otherwise it can exceed even governments in waste.
they would prefer not to buy internet at all.
Mmm, no. They'd prefer to buy internet with speed appropriate for their desired price range.
For the ISP it's much easier to compete by marketing bullshit speeds they have neither capability nor intention to actually deliver. Competing on price would be much more of a pain, not to mention that the big guys lose the advantage of wider throttling gains than the smaller ISPs can achieve.
without pushing contention to 10~20, prices would be beyond the average consumer
It's not a question of contention, it's a question of labels. It would be entirely possible to sell exactly the same service as today, with the exact same infrastructure as today but with an accurate label. If the connection is throttled, fine, sell the connection as whatever the throttling is at. Consumers don't want that? Then let them go to the more expensive competitor that actually upgrades its infrastructure.
The summary is much improved if you shorten it a bit:
... "That, unfortunately, will mean work for site administrators."
"Over the years of IE's dominance as the leading browser, designers regularly tweaked their sites to get the best possible accuracy in rendering pages in IE"
*shrug* I guess the whole 'standards' thing is something every generation has to learn on its own. Those of us who've been in the industry for 20 years know that proprietary means you do it again, and again, and again...
Why even bother with executing them? I can imagine a whole host of marketing people thinking this is a great way to obtain prime advertisement real-estate.
Getting an icon on a users desktop is something some companies pay a lot of money for. In fact, the ability to spam any download folder is probably something they regard as worthwhile.
I think mostly what they are doing, is buying 3 of something cheaper, instead of one of something greater.
From what it looks like they're doing exactly what I do for myself; skip the extraneous crap and simply rack motherboards as they are.
In that case we're not talking 3 of something cheaper; you could probably get up towards 5-10 of something cheaper. Then consider that best price/performance is not generally what is bought, and the difference is even wider.
Of course, it's not going to happen in the average corporation, where most involved parties prefer covering their ass by buying conventional branded products. Point out to your average corporate purchaser or technical director that you could reduce CPU cycle costs to 1/25 th, and that you could provide storage at 1/100th of the current per gigabyte cost and they'll whine 'but we're an _enterprise_, we cant buy consumer grade stuff or build it ourselves'.
Ten years ago people brought obsolete junk from work home to play with. These days I'm considering bringing obsolete stuff from home to work because the stuff I throw out is often better than low-prioritized things at work.
I see you're not fighting with the wife and kids over whose material gets to stay on the PVR...
It's all about being able to define what goes where, and preferably having software take care of that for you.
Yep. Like RAM caches.
Personally, at home, my current need for fast, low latency disk is in the range of maybe 4-8 GB; the commonly used os and swap areas for 3 systems. The rest is bulk storage; latency doesn't really matter and the speed of any disk made in the last decade is good enough.
As I've stuck my physical disks in a couple of servers and share them out over gigabit iSCSI, increasing performance is as simple as dumping more RAM in the servers and/or striping the performance demanding parts. I find the SSD's available today completely uninteresting as they offer neither the performance of RAM or the price/performance of disk.
it has distinct advantages as a lifestyle, and is not so different from our own.
That may very well be true. On the other hand, if we go by our own history and the social development of some isolated groups, the lifestyle may be very different, and have distinct advantages only for the leaders (well, maybe that isn't much different, but you get the drift).
Besides medicine and food, what about civil liberties? Equality? Age of consent? Is consent even a concept?
To be blunt, human tribal lifestyles have ranged from the idealized idyllic to Austrian cellar style.
In the end, how would you yourself rather be treated in that situation? Left alone to 'enrich human culture' like some culture fair exhibit, a zoo specimen? Or be responsibly contacted and left to decide for yourself? Do you want to know all you can know, or do you want to be kept in an invisible cage, left to the whims of your leaders?
Personally I know what I would want (heck, occasionally I'd prefer the customary daily ass-probe of any presumptive galactic overlords culture than be stuck on the backwater of Earth with hooman culture).
They're human beings. They should be given chance to assess their situation and make their own informed choices as they want. They're not an exhibit for our enjoyment, nor should they have to suffer penitence for our guilty consciences about our forefathers handling of such situations. Keeping them isolated is as arrogant as deciding they should be modernized. There is a middle way of lesser evil to tread perhaps.
Whatever. I expect them to be overrun, poisoned, shot, and assimilated, then held up as an example of the superiority of civilization.
Yah. We could use some contact with a more evolved species ourselves.
Why is everyone so blinkered they always assume Microsoft employees are evil and anti-OSS?
Why is everyone so _experienced_ you mean.
See, that's the trouble with consistent bad behavior over a long period of time; eventually you run out of doubt to benefit from. With the company's history, it would take something like a check for a years salary payable to the FSF for a person to earn some doubt back.
If you want to slam the guy for this statement, compare with proprietary software from a company that goes under.
I can barely recall any FOSS software that's gone 'unmaintained' on me. The few there are still work fine, but for various reasons have been surpassed by other apps.
Proprietary software tho... the stuff that doesn't get killed in companies going under, companies merging and discontinuing product lines or simply killed off as unprofitable gets deliberately obsoleted.
I mean, "Currently there are perfectly good projects that have been abandoned by their developers despite being used by large corporations." is rather rich coming from a company with the current XP/Vista situation.
Talk about waste.
You can listen to a song as many times as you want.
Would that be 'as many times as you want', or 'as many times as they want, until they change their business model, want to get paid again, or go out of business'?
While the DRM-free part is nice (but expensive compared to emusic), one should be clear with what one gets. If you don't have control over the media in question it will, inevitably, become unplayable.
if you true them enough to download and run their app
Mmm, no. Even less after actually going to their site and being met with "Unforuntely it requires javascript similar to most major websites on the internet.". Apart from the very creative spelling, outright lies like that (or utter ignorance) coupled with that attitude does not exactly inspire trust.
These sorts of hyper-reductionist arguments are stupid.
Some hyper-reductionist arguments are stupid, but that one certainly isn't; it's essential to understanding the difference between 'ownership' and 'intellectual monopoly'.
Owning a piece of property is vastly different from having the right to prevent everyone else from doing something with their own property, wether it be making a new chair just like the one you'd bought or copying a film on a disk.
both ownership and copyright are meaningful terms
Meaningful terms, but not necessarily relevant to eachother. It's copyright 'holder', not copyright 'owner' and in many languages it's not even called 'intellectual property', but rather 'immaterial rights' or something like that.
Copyright itself has structurally more in common with feudal-style delegated taxation rights than with actual property; the state delegates the right to exact taxes for certain things to private interests. As a general rule that's been regarded as a bad idea, but in this field the concept remains fertile.
Personal and verbatim, non commercial copy should be allowed.
And commercial copying should simply be taxed and the revenues handed to the creator of the copied work (to the extent with which such creative works need to be funded and monetized beyond other incentives). The whole monopoly aspect is what prevents and hampers the creation of wealth and flow of information. It needs to go.
It's annoying that many politicians in capitalistic countries can see the economic market damage created by state-run monopolies, but somehow fail to acknowledge the same damage caused when you hand out state-sponsored monopolies to private interests.
You have to see it in the light of the US judicial system. The US has the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world, 7 times higher than, for example, the EU average.
As I doubt Americans are seven times as much in need of locking up (I'm sure some would disagree), one can only conclude that for some reason the US political and judicial system is geared towards providing large prison populations, regardless of social impact, efficiency or justice.
So, better things to do? Not if the goal is to lock up as many as possible. I guess it makes sense from some point of view; it's probably profitable for the private run prisons, and as, unlike in many other countries, convicted felons cannot vote in many places, it's not like it's a politically risky business (in fact, removing voting rights from as many as possible may be a good political strategy for some parties).
Fingerprints are a 'unique identifier' in the same way postit notes with your password on that you leave on anything you touch. Except worse, as with postit notes you could actually change the password you're leaving everywhere.
Eventually, without a doubt. Although by that time SSD may have little to do with what we regard as SSD today.
How it plays out depends on how the hard disk manufacturers deal with it; personally I'd prefer they play their strength and simply forget about speed and concentrate on their forte; storing lots of bits.
I already have all the fast storage I need (if I wanted more I could stripe over more disks). Bulk storage, however, is something I'm permanently short of; I could easily use up to the petabyte range if it were cheap enough (think permanent video archives with mythtv recording anything and everything on any DTV multiplex...)
So quit trying to make it fast and small, go for huge instead. Using larger platters I'd bet 5TB drives would be easily possible today.
For this type of installation it might be simpler and cheaper just getting two smartswitches with mini-gbic or built-in 1000base-LX port. Cheap, consumer-grade stuff with trivial configuration, good for 5km, and using fibre you avoid any possible grounding issues between the houses.
Personally I have it deactivated through noscript (for a whole host of other reasons besides energy saving, altho the fact that a newssite I used to watch actually consistently caused my office PC to spin up its CPU fan is one of them). There are times when it's perfectly appropriate to use Flash. Running continous advertising loops on an unwatched display isn't it.
Nor does that change the fact that there's a whole lot of environmental complaints about computer power consumption, and a whole lot of powersaving features available in most modern hardware. Most of which is made useless the instance users park their browser on animated sites; even minor usage like Greenpeaces needless animation consumes more power than things like 'standby' on consumer electronics, another common environmental complaint.
this could be a real problem for Linux adoption
Obviously, someone running Linux or other F/OSS OS doesn't need a game to understand the advantages of cooperation or peaceful conflict resolution. Kernel, license or editor conflicts almost never devolve into physical violence.
How fun would an appropriate game be?
"Mark doesn't agree with your indentation style. What do you do?"
a) Create my own fork
b) Develop software that will display the code in the viewers indent style
c) I demonstrate my indentation preference by indenting Marks face with my fist
d) I write my own new software with a new license allowing only derivative works with the same indentation style
if a copyright holder wanted to specify that their software should only be distributed in a green envelope
No, it was if a copyright holder wanted to specify that to _copy_ the software, that copy should only be distributed in a green envelope by the person making the copy. If Skype wants to _make copies_ they have to abide by the GPL.
Once the copy is actually made and sold, first sale doctrine applies to that copy; the copyright holder has limited influence over what is done with it. As long as it isn't copied.
In this case, unless I misunderstand it, they've actually purchased valid copies, at which point first sales doctrine would have it they could set them on fire, sell them second-hand or use them as wheels on a series of small bicycles.
Of course, then we come to the old EULA argument on wether installing or running a computer program is to be considered creating a copy, etc etc. So we're back to the old the EULA may or may not be fully enforceable, and if it is, the degree to which it is will probably vary by jurisdiction.
Propaganda is not useless, and this particular propaganda is definitely not useless.
Interestingly enough, not only can propaganda be useful, it can also be power-consuming.
For example, take a look at Greenpeace's webpage. It contains many flash animated sequences, some of which are permanently repeated. On the computer I'm at right now, viewing their site loads my CPU to about 20%; enough to actually have it step up in frequency and voltage, leading to a power draw increase of several watts. (well, it does if I actually allow scripts and flash through, which I normally don't, but you get the point).
(advertising/marketing) that runs practically unchecked.
Unchecked and quite often very animated. Even more so than Greenpeace's website.
As a matter of fact, I'd forgive some of Greenpeace's missteps, if they'd launch a campaign against the power consumption caused by excessive animation and Flash usage. I can name some sites that could easily cause a 40W power draw increase on any decent power-saving computer browsing them from only the ads. Multiply that by some 100K users and soon you're talking powerplants being built to keep ads animated.
If this had existed by now, Mozilla would have known when to aim for a Firefox 3 release
And instead of distributions including beta 5 we'd have Firefox beta 5 under the name of Release instead. Political pressure to adopt release schedules doesn't necessary mean the actual software gets finished any faster.
It's not proprietary software we're talking about; there isn't a seven year release cycle with massive changes between each revision. For the 6-9-month dists, who really cares if a certain version of something makes release or not? The next release isn't exactly far away, and in many cases a staggered release allows more bugs to be reported by early adopters and fixed before everyone rolls onto the release in question.
For the long term releases it might make more sense to synchronize some things like kernel versions and support libraries, but mostly because it'd make it easier for proprietary software makers to target more similar versions. But then again, I'm not sure it's in the best interest of free software vendors to bend over backwards to make it simpler for proprietary vendors; had it been up to the proprietary vendors everyone would be stuck at a release years ago and progress would slow to a crawl. So perhaps it's better to just move forward and force everyone to develop and implement methods to keep up with a permanently changing target.
Yep, exactly right. They really were everywhere; it went so far I even got a bunch of replacement caps and recapped a couple of boards and some PSU's. Really annoying failure modes also; mostly the affected equipment would just develop tendencies to lock up or crash when spiking in power usage (games, number crunching, etc), until one day it would fail to start (usually after 18-36 months, at which point warranty returns might be more trouble than it's worth).
Apart from geeks actually tearing the equipment apart and noticing the suave way the capacitors were slobbering I expect most people ended up retiring the equipment early. I can barely imagine how much frustration and lost work the problem has caused worldwide.
It depends on the board. Some MSI boards are flashable with the metod you mention; for the K9N Neo-F I can't even get a bios file to download from MSI. You apparently _have_ to use Live Update to update it.
Had it supported the method you mention, that would have been perfectly acceptable (I went through the whole read-manual-'Ok, no load from USB disk, well, I'll just use a CD... oh, no CD, I'll write a bootable floppy, uh, where's the download link for the BIOS... uh... there isn't a download link for the BIOS. I have to use _WHAT_? An ActiveX control or a XP program??);
That not even DOS based updates are possible is what had me quite appalled, the very idea of making a motherboard that cannot be updated without being up and running in a full copy of windows had previously struck me as unthinkable.
I've had no problems with MSI boards otherwise, and as long as you do your research to avoid the Live-Update only boards you're probably fine. For me, however, the mindset that produces products with that kind of issues leaves me with a bad taste.
they make good boards
I have to agree. I've made some forays into MSI (a relationship that was abruptly and permanently terminated when I discovered I had to have XP to upgrade the BIOS), EPoX and AOpen.
But after that MSI foray I'll be sticking to ASUS for the foreseeable future; I have yet to purchase an ASUS board that I haven't been perfectly happy with throughout its lifecycle (well, I had one or two die of the bad capacitor issue a few years ago, but that was only 30% of my ASUS boards while 100% of the other branded boards died from it).
I find the irony palpable. The comment is like straight out of 1984; Mr Leis apparently seems to think there's some difference between 'Big Brother' and 'a device that connects you to a buddy who wants to keep you safe and help you graduate'.
To quote the end of 1984:
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn
what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless
misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast!
Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all
right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won
the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.