Yeah, I'm one of those who runs a productive OS that has a range of decent software by wonderful companies like Adobe and Macromedia. I am a Mozilla-head though, so I can be forgiven.. but that RTF seemed to load IE back up for some reason.
Today I got a porn spam entitled 'Illegal in the USA!' and inside it had a list of what 'illegal' stuff they had on their site. The list went like this:
Doh, thanks for that. I actually had to edit out all of the stupid tabs so Slashdot's lameness filter didn't stop it. That's probably why 50 people didn't post this at once..
I can't stand those morons who have to requote entire pages because they think they'll be Slashdotted. However, this is different. They linked to a RTF file, and I didn't notice, forcing IE and Word to load. Erk!
So, for all of the people who can't/don't want to read a RTF file.. here is the text of the first link:
(WARNING: It's really boring)
-- starts here --
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK Appellate Division, Fourth Judicial Department
PRESENT: PIGOTT, JR., P. J., GREEN, WISNER, SCUDDER, AND KEHOE, J. MonsterHut, INC., PLAINTIFF-RESPONDENT, MEMORANDUM AND ORDER
PaeTec COMMUNICATIONS, INC., DEFENDANT-APPELLANT.
BOND, SCHOENECK & KING, LLP, SYRACUSE (ROBERT KIRCHNER OF COUNSEL), FOR DEFENDANT-APPELLANT. ALFONSO MARRA BAX, LEWISTON, FOR PLAINTIFF-RESPONDENT.
Appeal from an order of Supreme Court, Niagara County (Lane, J.), entered August 27, 2001, which, inter alia, denied defendant's cross motion for summary judgment.
It is hereby ORDERED that the order so appealed from be and the same hereby is unanimously modified on the law by denying plaintiff's motion, granting defendant's cross motion and granting judgment in favor of defendant as follows:
It is ADJUDGED and DECLARED that defendant is not in violation of the agreement and may terminate the agreement in response to plaintiff's sending of unsolicited, mass, commercial e-mail in breach of the agreement and as modified the order is affirmed without costs.
Memorandum: Plaintiff, a marketing company that uses the Internet for advertising, entered into an agreement with defendant, an Internet service provider, to obtain Internet access services. The agreement incorporates defendant's Acceptable Use Policy, which provides that a subscriber, here, plaintiff, is in violation of the agreement if it engages in "spamming," defined as "[u]nsolicited, commercial mass e-mailing." Shortly after defendant began providing Internet access services to plaintiff, it notified plaintiff of its intention to terminate the agreement based upon plaintiff's spamming. Plaintiff commenced the instant action seeking declaratory relief and an injunction preventing defendant from terminating the agreement.
Supreme Court erred in granting plaintiff's motion for a preliminary injunction. Plaintiff failed to establish a likelihood of success on the merits (see Technology for Measurement v Briggs, ___ AD2d ___ [decided Feb. 1, 2002]; Talley v Baker, 207 AD2d 967), irreparable harm if the preliminary injunction is not granted (see Technology for Measurement, ___ AD2d ___) or lack of an adequate remedy at law (see Matter of Camp Scatico v Columbia County Dept. of Health, 277 AD2d 689, 690). Contrary to defendant's contention, however, the court did not improvidently exercise its discretion in fixing the amount of the undertaking. The amount of the undertaking is reasonably related to the amount of damages defendant established that it might suffer "by reason of the injunction" (CPLR 6312 [b]; see Blueberries Gourmet v Aris Realty Corp., 255 AD2d 348, 350).
We further conclude that the court erred in denying defendant's cross motion for summary judgment seeking declaratory relief. Defendant established as a matter of law that the agreement prohibits spamming and that neither the two percent complaint limit contained in Addendum 1A, paragraphs 1.4 and 1.5 nor the 30-day notice and cure provision of paragraph 3 applies to spamming. Defendant further established as a matter of law that plaintiff had breached the agreement by engaging in spamming. Plaintiff failed to raise a triable issue of fact. Its submissions in opposition to the cross motion amount to nothing more than "mere conclusions, expressions of hope or unsubstantiated allegations or assertions" that it will be able to prove that it did not engage in spamming (Zuckerman v City of New York, 49 NY2d 557, 562).
We therefore modify the order by denying plaintiff's motion, granting defendant's cross motion and granting judgment in favor of defendant declaring that defendant is not in violation of the agreement and may terminate the agreement in response to plaintiff's sending of unsolicited, mass, commercial e-mail in breach of the agreement.
Entered: May 3, 2002 CARL M. DARNALL Clerk of the Court
This story disgusts me. It's wrong for Nike and Adidas to enslave living organisms in countries such as Africa and Bangkok but it's okay for American scientists to do it? Hell, Nike and Adidas even pay their living organisms 50 cents an hour.
I say that we should negotiate labor rights with these creatures, let them have a 15 minutes 'osmosis break' every 4 hours, give them a good pay, and treat them with the respect they deserve!
In fact I was waiting for Doom III to buy _the right_ 3D card for it. Now the time has come.. wich one is it?
Don't get too excited, my friend. Don't expect to see Doom III for quite some time. No dates have been mentioned yet, and it might not even be out by Christmas.
That said, Carmack has said a good GeForce 3 will run the game at a 'playable' frame rate.. but that might only be at 800x600. A super top-of-the-range GeForce 4 should see you okay.
However, since you don't want to play games, and Doom III won't be out for ages anyway, why not just wait until a few weeks before its out and then buy whatever you can afford? You'll probably want to get up into Athlon 1400+ territory too, and some DDR memory wouldn't hurt either;-).. it's gunna need some serious memory bandwidth.
My own music purchasing has declined substantially since napster went away and getting music got "harder" - limewire and the rest are ok, but nowhere near as convenient as napster was.
Have you tried Kazaa? It's got a bad rep because of the security stuff, but I find that there's a WAY bigger selection than there ever was on Napster, and with multi-user downloads and automatic resume, it's way more reliable too. As I speak, 373 million files from 1 million users are indexed and live.
In Europe we have a system called GPRS which is an enhancement to the existing GSM networks. GPRS gets about 56kbps, although some systems do up to 128kbps I hear (in an ISDN style dual-channel arrangement). In the US though, I hear that GPRS is limited to 19.2kbps-28kbps, which sounds nuts.
Is 3G also limited in the US? The theroetical maximum speed for 3G in Europe and Japan is 384kbps downlink and 64kbps uplink.. which makes 144Kbps mentioned here sounds kinda pathetic. If I were in the US, I'd stick with GPRS, which is pretty cheap and as fast as logging on with my 56.6kbps modem indoors!
He didn't want to load the font authoring software, then load each font in turn, and uncheck a box on a properties dialog before saving them again. He'd have to do this laborious process for each of dozens of fonts he had authored himself. It was much easier to write a simple utility to make the change to a batch of fonts at one time.
Once I went to work and desperately needed to tell someone a password for an FTP server. However, I had forgotten the password and it was only written down at home. Rather than cause myself inconvenience, I quickly wrote a program that cracked the password scheme in WS_FTP so I could extract my password. It worked, and the job was done.
If I'd released that program onto the Web, I could rightfully claim it was a tool I wrote to get myself out of a bind.. however, from a legal point of view the software's primary use is to illegally crack a security system!
My whole point throughout this thread is that the DMCA is not interested in legal uses of software. If *a* primary function of the system is to crack or circumvent a form of copy protection, you're going to fall foul of it whether you wrote the software for good or bad reasons.
Ditto for the Russian guy who wrote the program that cracked e-books. He might have made an e-book, and forgotten the password, hence the cracker.. however, that's hardly going to stand up in court. It's as legal as much as those illegal MP3 sites that say 'This is legal if you delete the files within 24 hours!'
Maybe you should give that some thought, it will help avoid the "Memento" effect you seem to be suffering from.
Perhaps you should take some lessons in wit. After all, you seem to be stuck on the bottom rung: sarcasm.
Thanks for your nice comments, I hope my heart is in the right place. It helps with blood circulation and all;-)
You said:
For an alleged circumvention device to violate the DMCA, it must lack any substantial non-infringing uses.
Perhaps I misunderstood what the embed tool is for. It's to change a bit that affects the way the font can be embedded. I don't create fonts myself, but surely you can set this information in the program you use to make the fonts. As far as I can tell, this program is specifically designed to circumvent licencing controls built into the font format, since the legal owner of the font could just make their own embeddable versions in their 'font creation' software. No?
So, sure, you might be able to use the software for legal uses.. but really its not for that. Napster proved that one. Sure, it could be used for legal purposes.. but was it? No way.
All of your post is informative and useful, except this:
Right now in you car I'm betting you have at the very least 10 gallons of it,
Huh? My car holds a TOTAL of 12 US gallons, so why would you assume that's a 'very least' amount anyone would have? Currently my car has about 3-4 litres in the tank.. which works out as 1 of your gallons.
'Since the enactment of the DMCA, I have only ever run embed on fonts for which I own the copyright.'
That puts him in the clear when it comes to traditional copyright laws.. kinda like making a copy of a game for backup purposes only. However, he is freely distributing his prorgam which can be used to circumvent licencing control. This is covered by the DMCA. Just because he is using the system legally doesn't mean others will, and since it's available for the public to use, he's technically in the wrong.
However, I back him because the DMCA is ridiculous, but he IS breaking its conditions and this case is valid.
There is NOTHING that can reach the speed of C/C++ code.
Wow, yet another display of total ignorance about compilers. Just because something is written in a variant of C doesn't magically mean it'll compile down to a tighter program. C encourages you to program in a tighter fashion, but it's all down to the compiler at the end of the day. A good Pascal compiler could easily beat down a mediocre C compiler any day.
And to your point.. yes, assembly language can match the speed of a compiled C or C++ program, so yeah, you're wrong.
If you're French and you catch a train to the UK via the Channel Tunnel, what London station do you arrive at? Yeah. Waterloo! Funny thing is, no-one has really commented on it yet.
I paid 450$ (cdn, thus 300$ US) for a Geforce2 exactly two years ago
[snip]
Right now my video card is selling for less than half the price
You ARE joking, right? I bought my GeForce 2 (GTS version - equivalent to 'Pro' now) quite soon after it came out for £250 ($375 US).. You can now buy the same card second hand for £30! Almost a TENTH of the price. If you can still sell your second hand Geforce 2 in the US for $150, you have some dumbass buyers:)
Sure, but there are also good arguments for curfews.
If it was made illegal to be outside between the hours of 10pm and 6am, crime at night would plummet! However, who wants to live in a shitty world like that? The government is all too ready to take away our freedoms, let's not give any of them away by choice.. even if it does save some spam.
I'd rather run the risk of receiving anthrax than to have someone open all of my mail to 'see what's inside'.. if you disagree, then whoa, I hope you don't vote.
Maybe ISPs could utilize a system that could scan outgoing email for mailing list joins and then add those addresses to the "white" list for a specific user.
That could probably go down as the most stupid idea I've heard so far this year. All this 'monitoring' is sounding way too authoritarian to me.
In the majority of cases, it should be the individual's responsibility to sort mail, not the ISPs. Would you like it if USPS decided to go through your mail throwing away whatever it thought was 'unsolicited'? You bet your ass you wouldn't. How about if they suggested 'looking through your outgoing mail' to find out what you were expecting to receive? If people like you were taken seriously, it'd be like the Third Reich.
I do not want anyone reading or filtering my mail except myself! If you want to be nannied, that's your choice, and you can go use AOL or whatever, but we don't want the majority of ISPs controlling mail delivery in this way. Even if their intentions are good, 'proper' e-mail could easily get thrown away, and worse.. if laws were passed that allowed governments to control ISPs in some way, they'd have a system already in place to 'control' mail delivery. No thanks!
The answer to this question is that any freedom loving citizen should be filtering their own mail and not relying on a nanny state to sort it out for them.
In the past, ATI's 'All In Wonder' cards have been pretty crappy compared to the other cards out at the same time. You wouldn't be running Quake1/2 at a decent res on those puppies with a good framerate.. whereas the TNT was far better but had far less 'features'.
Finally it seems video processing power has reached a level similar to that of CPU power. That is, the latest 'high-end' spec is overkill for 95% of applications, and very fast 'general use' products (such as the All-In-Wonder) are now actually pretty good.
This card will satisfy nearly all users except those who want to run Quake 3 at 1600x1200 in 32 bit color, and offers more 'user features' than regular nVidia based cards can currently bring to the table. However, unlike with past All-In-Wonder cards, this will actually be able to run most games at a decent speed in a decent resolution!
Cheap Xboxes are good, but the games are still mega expensive (about £42 each in the UK, AFAIR).. however, doesn't the Xbox have some sort of leet mp3 player built in?
It's cheaper than the iPod, and I heard you can put CDs of mp3s in, and it'll copy them to its hard drive.
The Xbox is nowhere near the size of the iPod, but for the amount of cool things it can do, it might become a useful toy in the future.. kinda like the Dreamcast.
I don't see the big deal here. Software tries to get onto your computer all the time. What about Macromedia Flash? That'll install within the browser. Or how about those lame Comet Cursors? Ditto. Do I want either? No.
It happens in the real world too. When you buy something at Circuit City, they'll ask you if you want this 'cover plan' or that 'insurance' blah blah.. and after standing in a lot of lines, I've noticed that people generally agree to these things without understanding what they are!
Once I stook behind a guy who agreed to everything, signed all the papers, and then the sales guy said.. okay, that's an extra $45 please. The customer didn't realize what was going on and said 'No thanks' and left.. after holding everyone up in the line for 5 minutes filling all the forms out!
So I don't really see a problem here. It's a form of idiot tax. It's harder to avoid all of the pitfalls today, but hey.. you gotta remain vigilent at all times.
As you can see by the hundreds of people rushing to post on this topic (not), we're not excited or really interested in this story.
Why? Because BT, Cable & Wireless, NTL, and all of the other British telcos have spewed bullsh*t like this in the past without actually delivering.
It's nice that BT is dropping the wholesale price of DSL, but that doesn't actually mean their installations will get any quicker, that the DSL will remain reliable, or even that large swathes of the country will ever get DSL.
In the mid 90's, we were told that cable modems were a 'year away'. Funnily, we were told this in 96, 97, 98, and 99, when the trials started to roll out. A similar thing occured with DSL.
But let's face it, BT is a lumbering giant, and not particularly interested in 'broadband for all'. Unlike Canada, our government won't fork in some $$ to help them out, so we're stuck with their patethetic inefficiency. The UK is a tiny country, but even places like Finland, Sweden, and Canada have better coverage than us.
Wi-Fi = Non Existant
To compound these problems, WiFi is not taking off in the UK at all. I know of a few trials around London, and they want to hook some stuff up in Wales, but as a whole, it's not available. Unlike in the US, we don't have any small local WiFi providers.. why not? Because in remote areas that would benefit from WiFi.. the ISP can't get the affordable bandwidth to hook all of the customers onto the Internet anyway!!
So, Broadband Britain is a sham, and I fear it will remain that way for some time. Move on from this story. Nothing to see here.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm one of those who runs a productive OS that has a range of decent software by wonderful companies like Adobe and Macromedia. I am a Mozilla-head though, so I can be forgiven.. but that RTF seemed to load IE back up for some reason.
Today I got a porn spam entitled 'Illegal in the USA!' and inside it had a list of what 'illegal' stuff they had on their site. The list went like this:
;-)
Animal sex!
Lolitas sucking
Extreme facials
12 inch+ cocks
I know American men aren't very well endowed, but are cocks over 12 inches long actually illegal in the US?
Doh, thanks for that. I actually had to edit out all of the stupid tabs so Slashdot's lameness filter didn't stop it. That's probably why 50 people didn't post this at once..
I can't stand those morons who have to requote entire pages because they think they'll be Slashdotted. However, this is different. They linked to a RTF file, and I didn't notice, forcing IE and Word to load. Erk!
So, for all of the people who can't/don't want to read a RTF file.. here is the text of the first link:
(WARNING: It's really boring)
-- starts here --
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
Appellate Division, Fourth Judicial Department
PRESENT: PIGOTT, JR., P. J., GREEN, WISNER, SCUDDER, AND KEHOE, J. MonsterHut, INC., PLAINTIFF-RESPONDENT, MEMORANDUM AND ORDER
PaeTec COMMUNICATIONS, INC., DEFENDANT-APPELLANT.
BOND, SCHOENECK & KING, LLP, SYRACUSE (ROBERT KIRCHNER OF COUNSEL), FOR DEFENDANT-APPELLANT. ALFONSO MARRA BAX, LEWISTON, FOR PLAINTIFF-RESPONDENT.
Appeal from an order of Supreme Court, Niagara County (Lane, J.), entered August 27, 2001, which, inter alia, denied defendant's cross motion for summary judgment.
It is hereby ORDERED that the order so appealed from be and the same hereby is unanimously modified on the law by denying plaintiff's motion, granting defendant's cross motion and granting judgment in favor of defendant as follows:
It is ADJUDGED and DECLARED that defendant is not in violation of the agreement and may terminate the agreement in response to plaintiff's sending of unsolicited, mass, commercial e-mail in breach of the agreement and as modified the order is affirmed without costs.
Memorandum: Plaintiff, a marketing company that uses the Internet for advertising, entered into an agreement with defendant, an Internet service provider, to obtain Internet access services. The agreement incorporates defendant's Acceptable Use Policy, which provides that a subscriber, here, plaintiff, is in violation of the agreement if it engages in "spamming," defined as "[u]nsolicited, commercial mass e-mailing." Shortly after defendant began providing Internet access services to plaintiff, it notified plaintiff of its intention to terminate the agreement based upon plaintiff's spamming. Plaintiff commenced the instant action seeking declaratory relief and an injunction preventing defendant from terminating the agreement.
Supreme Court erred in granting plaintiff's motion for a preliminary injunction. Plaintiff failed to establish a likelihood of success on the merits (see Technology for Measurement v Briggs, ___ AD2d ___ [decided Feb. 1, 2002]; Talley v Baker, 207 AD2d 967), irreparable harm if the preliminary injunction is not granted (see Technology for Measurement, ___ AD2d ___) or lack of an adequate remedy at law (see Matter of Camp Scatico v Columbia County Dept. of Health, 277 AD2d 689, 690). Contrary to defendant's contention, however, the court did not improvidently exercise its discretion in fixing the amount of the undertaking. The amount of the undertaking is reasonably related to the amount of damages defendant established that it might suffer "by reason of the injunction" (CPLR 6312 [b]; see Blueberries Gourmet v Aris Realty Corp., 255 AD2d 348, 350).
We further conclude that the court erred in denying defendant's cross motion for summary judgment seeking declaratory relief. Defendant established as a matter of law that the agreement prohibits spamming and that neither the two percent complaint limit contained in Addendum 1A, paragraphs 1.4 and 1.5 nor the 30-day notice and cure provision of paragraph 3 applies to spamming. Defendant further established as a matter of law that plaintiff had breached the agreement by engaging in spamming. Plaintiff failed to raise a triable issue of fact. Its submissions in opposition to the cross motion amount to nothing more than "mere conclusions, expressions of hope or unsubstantiated allegations or assertions" that it will be able to prove that it did not engage in spamming (Zuckerman v City of New York, 49 NY2d 557, 562).
We therefore modify the order by denying plaintiff's motion, granting defendant's cross motion and granting judgment in favor of defendant declaring that defendant is not in violation of the agreement and may terminate the agreement in response to plaintiff's sending of unsolicited, mass, commercial e-mail in breach of the agreement.
Entered: May 3, 2002 CARL M. DARNALL Clerk of the Court
This story disgusts me. It's wrong for Nike and Adidas to enslave living organisms in countries such as Africa and Bangkok but it's okay for American scientists to do it? Hell, Nike and Adidas even pay their living organisms 50 cents an hour.
I say that we should negotiate labor rights with these creatures, let them have a 15 minutes 'osmosis break' every 4 hours, give them a good pay, and treat them with the respect they deserve!
In fact I was waiting for Doom III to buy _the right_ 3D card for it. Now the time has come.. wich one is it?
;-).. it's gunna need some serious memory bandwidth.
Don't get too excited, my friend. Don't expect to see Doom III for quite some time. No dates have been mentioned yet, and it might not even be out by Christmas.
That said, Carmack has said a good GeForce 3 will run the game at a 'playable' frame rate.. but that might only be at 800x600. A super top-of-the-range GeForce 4 should see you okay.
However, since you don't want to play games, and Doom III won't be out for ages anyway, why not just wait until a few weeks before its out and then buy whatever you can afford? You'll probably want to get up into Athlon 1400+ territory too, and some DDR memory wouldn't hurt either
My own music purchasing has declined substantially since napster went away and getting music got "harder" - limewire and the rest are ok, but nowhere near as convenient as napster was.
Have you tried Kazaa? It's got a bad rep because of the security stuff, but I find that there's a WAY bigger selection than there ever was on Napster, and with multi-user downloads and automatic resume, it's way more reliable too. As I speak, 373 million files from 1 million users are indexed and live.
In Europe we have a system called GPRS which is an enhancement to the existing GSM networks. GPRS gets about 56kbps, although some systems do up to 128kbps I hear (in an ISDN style dual-channel arrangement). In the US though, I hear that GPRS is limited to 19.2kbps-28kbps, which sounds nuts.
Is 3G also limited in the US? The theroetical maximum speed for 3G in Europe and Japan is 384kbps downlink and 64kbps uplink.. which makes 144Kbps mentioned here sounds kinda pathetic. If I were in the US, I'd stick with GPRS, which is pretty cheap and as fast as logging on with my 56.6kbps modem indoors!
CNET has an article comparing cellphone data protocols, although it seems to be using the American data rates and lists GPRS as only able to do 28.8kbps!
He didn't want to load the font authoring software, then load each font in turn, and uncheck a box on a properties dialog before saving them again. He'd have to do this laborious process for each of dozens of fonts he had authored himself. It was much easier to write a simple utility to make the change to a batch of fonts at one time.
Once I went to work and desperately needed to tell someone a password for an FTP server. However, I had forgotten the password and it was only written down at home. Rather than cause myself inconvenience, I quickly wrote a program that cracked the password scheme in WS_FTP so I could extract my password. It worked, and the job was done.
If I'd released that program onto the Web, I could rightfully claim it was a tool I wrote to get myself out of a bind.. however, from a legal point of view the software's primary use is to illegally crack a security system!
My whole point throughout this thread is that the DMCA is not interested in legal uses of software. If *a* primary function of the system is to crack or circumvent a form of copy protection, you're going to fall foul of it whether you wrote the software for good or bad reasons.
Ditto for the Russian guy who wrote the program that cracked e-books. He might have made an e-book, and forgotten the password, hence the cracker.. however, that's hardly going to stand up in court. It's as legal as much as those illegal MP3 sites that say 'This is legal if you delete the files within 24 hours!'
Maybe you should give that some thought, it will help avoid the "Memento" effect you seem to be suffering from.
Perhaps you should take some lessons in wit. After all, you seem to be stuck on the bottom rung: sarcasm.
Thanks for your nice comments, I hope my heart is in the right place. It helps with blood circulation and all ;-)
You said:
For an alleged circumvention device to violate the DMCA, it must lack any substantial non-infringing uses.
Perhaps I misunderstood what the embed tool is for. It's to change a bit that affects the way the font can be embedded. I don't create fonts myself, but surely you can set this information in the program you use to make the fonts. As far as I can tell, this program is specifically designed to circumvent licencing controls built into the font format, since the legal owner of the font could just make their own embeddable versions in their 'font creation' software. No?
So, sure, you might be able to use the software for legal uses.. but really its not for that. Napster proved that one. Sure, it could be used for legal purposes.. but was it? No way.
All of your post is informative and useful, except this:
Right now in you car I'm betting you have at the very least 10 gallons of it,
Huh? My car holds a TOTAL of 12 US gallons, so why would you assume that's a 'very least' amount anyone would have? Currently my car has about 3-4 litres in the tank.. which works out as 1 of your gallons.
His defense is just lousy.
'Since the enactment of the DMCA, I have only ever run embed on fonts for which I own the copyright.'
That puts him in the clear when it comes to traditional copyright laws.. kinda like making a copy of a game for backup purposes only. However, he is freely distributing his prorgam which can be used to circumvent licencing control. This is covered by the DMCA. Just because he is using the system legally doesn't mean others will, and since it's available for the public to use, he's technically in the wrong.
However, I back him because the DMCA is ridiculous, but he IS breaking its conditions and this case is valid.
However, one might also note that employment % and productivity are higher in the United States than in Europe.
You are wrong on the first point. Comparing a country to a continent isn't right either.. Europe has some truly awful countries in it (economy wise).
Current US unemployment is 5.7% and rising. Current UK unemployment is 5.1% and falling.
There is NOTHING that can reach the speed of C/C++ code.
Wow, yet another display of total ignorance about compilers. Just because something is written in a variant of C doesn't magically mean it'll compile down to a tighter program. C encourages you to program in a tighter fashion, but it's all down to the compiler at the end of the day. A good Pascal compiler could easily beat down a mediocre C compiler any day.
And to your point.. yes, assembly language can match the speed of a compiled C or C++ program, so yeah, you're wrong.
It's hardly 'sick' or 'disrespectful'.
If you're French and you catch a train to the UK via the Channel Tunnel, what London station do you arrive at? Yeah. Waterloo! Funny thing is, no-one has really commented on it yet.
I paid 450$ (cdn, thus 300$ US) for a Geforce2 exactly two years ago
:)
[snip]
Right now my video card is selling for less than half the price
You ARE joking, right? I bought my GeForce 2 (GTS version - equivalent to 'Pro' now) quite soon after it came out for £250 ($375 US).. You can now buy the same card second hand for £30! Almost a TENTH of the price. If you can still sell your second hand Geforce 2 in the US for $150, you have some dumbass buyers
Sure, but there are also good arguments for curfews.
If it was made illegal to be outside between the hours of 10pm and 6am, crime at night would plummet! However, who wants to live in a shitty world like that? The government is all too ready to take away our freedoms, let's not give any of them away by choice.. even if it does save some spam.
I'd rather run the risk of receiving anthrax than to have someone open all of my mail to 'see what's inside'.. if you disagree, then whoa, I hope you don't vote.
Maybe ISPs could utilize a system that could scan outgoing email for mailing list joins and then add those addresses to the "white" list for a specific user.
That could probably go down as the most stupid idea I've heard so far this year. All this 'monitoring' is sounding way too authoritarian to me.
In the majority of cases, it should be the individual's responsibility to sort mail, not the ISPs. Would you like it if USPS decided to go through your mail throwing away whatever it thought was 'unsolicited'? You bet your ass you wouldn't. How about if they suggested 'looking through your outgoing mail' to find out what you were expecting to receive? If people like you were taken seriously, it'd be like the Third Reich.
I do not want anyone reading or filtering my mail except myself! If you want to be nannied, that's your choice, and you can go use AOL or whatever, but we don't want the majority of ISPs controlling mail delivery in this way. Even if their intentions are good, 'proper' e-mail could easily get thrown away, and worse.. if laws were passed that allowed governments to control ISPs in some way, they'd have a system already in place to 'control' mail delivery. No thanks!
The answer to this question is that any freedom loving citizen should be filtering their own mail and not relying on a nanny state to sort it out for them.
In the past, ATI's 'All In Wonder' cards have been pretty crappy compared to the other cards out at the same time. You wouldn't be running Quake1/2 at a decent res on those puppies with a good framerate.. whereas the TNT was far better but had far less 'features'.
Finally it seems video processing power has reached a level similar to that of CPU power. That is, the latest 'high-end' spec is overkill for 95% of applications, and very fast 'general use' products (such as the All-In-Wonder) are now actually pretty good.
This card will satisfy nearly all users except those who want to run Quake 3 at 1600x1200 in 32 bit color, and offers more 'user features' than regular nVidia based cards can currently bring to the table. However, unlike with past All-In-Wonder cards, this will actually be able to run most games at a decent speed in a decent resolution!
Good for ATI!
Cheap Xboxes are good, but the games are still mega expensive (about £42 each in the UK, AFAIR).. however, doesn't the Xbox have some sort of leet mp3 player built in?
It's cheaper than the iPod, and I heard you can put CDs of mp3s in, and it'll copy them to its hard drive.
The Xbox is nowhere near the size of the iPod, but for the amount of cool things it can do, it might become a useful toy in the future.. kinda like the Dreamcast.
I don't see the big deal here. Software tries to get onto your computer all the time. What about Macromedia Flash? That'll install within the browser. Or how about those lame Comet Cursors? Ditto. Do I want either? No.
It happens in the real world too. When you buy something at Circuit City, they'll ask you if you want this 'cover plan' or that 'insurance' blah blah.. and after standing in a lot of lines, I've noticed that people generally agree to these things without understanding what they are!
Once I stook behind a guy who agreed to everything, signed all the papers, and then the sales guy said.. okay, that's an extra $45 please. The customer didn't realize what was going on and said 'No thanks' and left.. after holding everyone up in the line for 5 minutes filling all the forms out!
So I don't really see a problem here. It's a form of idiot tax. It's harder to avoid all of the pitfalls today, but hey.. you gotta remain vigilent at all times.
I guess I should point out that Pro Plus *are* caffeine pills, but how many energy junkies really care about that?
Pro Plus
I know a few people who pop those things all the time. I can't see the point though.. they don't work for me. Red Bull all the way baby!
Google would rather you use their bandwidth and download their textads, than have a computer suck out the results with no branding. Easy.
As you can see by the hundreds of people rushing to post on this topic (not), we're not excited or really interested in this story.
Why? Because BT, Cable & Wireless, NTL, and all of the other British telcos have spewed bullsh*t like this in the past without actually delivering.
It's nice that BT is dropping the wholesale price of DSL, but that doesn't actually mean their installations will get any quicker, that the DSL will remain reliable, or even that large swathes of the country will ever get DSL.
In the mid 90's, we were told that cable modems were a 'year away'. Funnily, we were told this in 96, 97, 98, and 99, when the trials started to roll out. A similar thing occured with DSL.
But let's face it, BT is a lumbering giant, and not particularly interested in 'broadband for all'. Unlike Canada, our government won't fork in some $$ to help them out, so we're stuck with their patethetic inefficiency. The UK is a tiny country, but even places like Finland, Sweden, and Canada have better coverage than us.
Wi-Fi = Non Existant
To compound these problems, WiFi is not taking off in the UK at all. I know of a few trials around London, and they want to hook some stuff up in Wales, but as a whole, it's not available. Unlike in the US, we don't have any small local WiFi providers.. why not? Because in remote areas that would benefit from WiFi.. the ISP can't get the affordable bandwidth to hook all of the customers onto the Internet anyway!!
So, Broadband Britain is a sham, and I fear it will remain that way for some time. Move on from this story. Nothing to see here.