None of the links provided in this article explain exactly what the deal is with IPIX in regards to Helmut Dersch. Specifically what legal precedents or laws are they using to attack him and also more importantly what is he doing that leaves him open to these attacks. If he is infringing on IPIX patents or copyrights then that is one thing. However if he is not infringing on them, but IPIX is attacking him because he is small and cannot defend himself then that is another thing altogether. This kind of thing happens all the time, a big company goes after someone they consider a threat, trying to intimidate them with threats of legal action when the person is doing nothing wrong or illegal. If that is what is happening here then I think we should all get involved and see to it that the work that Mr Dersch has done does not disappear. Surely the information that IPIX scared him into removing exists someplace. Mirror it. Put it up on your own website along with copies of the free tools Mr. Dersch created. Let IPIX's lawyers charge them $150 an hour while they try to stamp out the rebels. Better yet take the work he has done and improve up on it. Make tools that IPIX wishes it had created. The better the tools the bigger the stink IPIX will make about it and in the end the worse it will make them look. Don't let companies harrass others because you could be next in line.
There is not even anything wrong with having that as your primary goal. The problems arise when making that money is the only goal and especially when making money is the only consideration. I know several people where I work who don't want money. They think it is evil somehow. One girl once tried to get a job where she got paid by barter believe it or not. A few months went by an she realized she couldn't live and got a job that paid her money. In any physical system there is energy present performing work. In our economic system that energy is money. The process of making money is simply the action of controlling a portion of that energy. Now you can control it in such a way that good things are created by it, or you can control it in such a way that bad things, or useless things are created by it. Microsoft is simply a case where one man controls huge ammount of energy and fights to keep anyone else from controlling any. This is known as greed and past a certain point it becomes very harmful. Not so much for the effects that Gates has caused as for the ones he prevented others from creating. Now he's putting his effort into stopping linux because it threatens his ability to continue gaining more and more money. I don't personally believe that there is anything he can do to truly stop it. Not because I'm a linux user and therfore biased and myopic, but because of the lessons that history teaches us. Anytime power is consolidated in the hands of a few, and that power is misused, the many will take the necessary steps to remedy the situation. Linux represents only one facet of an emerging phenomenon which I call the Fuck Microsoft phenomenon. This is the same thing that once happened to IBM. There was a time when everyone bought IBM as a matter of course, to choose a product from another company was in some cases to risk your job. IBM obtained that power through unethical practices much like the ones that Microsoft uses now, where do you thing Microsoft learned them from? But then came a time when the tide turned because people began to hate IBM. There were those who would not buy a product if it was from IBM, even if it was the best available. IBM slowly learned from this lesson and with some new blood became the company it is today, a sleeping giant. Unfortunately Microsoft is unable to make this kind of change as long as Gates is at the helm, which basically means for many years to come unless he gets hit by a bus. But that will not stop the revolution which is only now beginning to show itself. Microsoft's position is dependent on its customers and I believe that more and more of its customers are going to choose something else. Linux isn't exactly (l)user friendly and yet it is making progress against windows which tries to be as point and drool as possible. Were Microsoft a good company this would not be happening. If linux ever evolves to the point where your average computer phobic office employee can make good use of it, Microsoft's choke hold on the software industry will be broken and we will all be given the "freedom to innovate."
The government's claim that key escrow is needed to intercept communications between criminals isn't even plausible on the surface. Basically what they are talking about is organized crime. The people running these organizations are not stupid, otherwise it wouldn't take something like the Rico Act to put a serious crimp in their style. The mob is not going to use encryption schemes that have a backdoor that the feds can get through. Neither would any other criminal organization that had a lick of sense period. The key escrow business is intended to listen in on innocent citizens like you and me, and industries as well it would seem. The people in power who are pushing this are not serving the public from whom they derive their authority, they are serving their own interests and the interests of those with enough money to buy them. When some politician starts pushing key escrow it is nothing short of a violation of their oath of office. Some claim that they are pushing key escrow because that is what law enforcement agencies want. Well that simply shows that those agencies need to be investigated themselves. Lets not forget either that our representatives were elected to represent us, not a federal agency. The whole business is a crock and is just one more example of how messed up our country has become. Government of the people by the people for the people is in grave danger mostly because the people are complacent. Don't let government officials shove crap like this down our throats, they aren't in charge, we are. They are there because we elected them, we put them there, and there are more than a few we should yank right out. This is a free country based on the principle that the rights of the individual are more valuable to good government than the powers of the state. Someone take this soap box away from me already.....
Classifying source code as speech in relation to the first amendment has nothing to do with any other function it performs. Obviously source code isn't a language that people write novels or political opinions in, but that does not mean it is not a form of expression. Source code is more than just speech but for the purpose of protecting our rights to share it, classifying it as speech will do just fine.
When the powers that be try to trample over freedom, the easiest way to let them win is to conform to what they demand. I wish I had developed some cryptography algorithms because the very first thing I would do is post them and any source code using them as far and as wide as I could. The Clinton administration does not have the constitutional power to dictate what I can and cannot say. Furthermore _I_ say they can't dictate to me. They may think they can do it, but that is only true for those who lay down and do what they are told. The price of freedom after all, is eternal vigilance.
IBM has fabs and engineers to make Intel and Motorola drool. IBM has come in already and helped out AMD on their.25 fab and even talked about buying the company at one point. This is exactly what I think IBM will do if AMD gets into too much trouble. If IBM took the K7 design and let their engineers loose on it and converted it to their.18u copper process, Intel would be dead in the water.
Spin doctors never cease to disgust me. If Microsoft were to be broken up, it would not be for the purpose of creating multiple versions of windows. Rather windows itself would be the product of one division, while products like Office would be made by other divisions. Other possible divisions are easy to imagine such as one for development tools such as Visual C++. This is nothing but an attempt by Microsoft to create the impression that breaking them up means breaking windows up. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact that they would resort to this kind of spin doctoring, which any child in middle school can see through, shows that they are afraid. Fud is the tools of those who have no better options.
Back in the days of extreme unix in-fighting, computers were scarce. They were not something that the average person used or had in their home, at least not systems capable of running unix. Companies used unix and would generally choose one flavor and stick with it. But today there are so many computers out there that competition is a real thing. The best situation would be one where no company was in a position to be able to use one product to lock a consumer into using another product from that same company. This is what you have right now with Microsoft. The company also stifles competition by buying out or simply assasinating other companies that try to compete. Competing standards could persist in the unix world because of its scale and because it was not only software but hardware which differed. But in the PC world multiple standards can only persist if they co-exist because eventually the majority of users are going to choose one standard or another and the others will die out if they are mutually exclusive. Everyone has compatible hardware as well, making it very easy to switch from one standard to another. Breaking up Microsoft would be a very good thing overall because the company's policies and practices hurt consumers. Forcing Microsoft to compete with itself is the first step towards increasing competition and innovation in the industry as a whole.
Maybe I just have a really sick sense of humor, but I think what this guy wrote is a perfectly legitimate piece of satire. Our world is just about at the point where you might actually see an ad like that.
The people you mention threatened minorities who held power over the majority. People who think for themselves are the architects of our civilization because they are the ones who pull the rest of us, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the future. People who think for themselves are dangerous to the people who are dangerous to the rest of us. They are examples of the virtue because they are true to themselves.
The problems with our schools aren't centered around geeks or goths or any other stereotyped subculture. Rather than look to the schools to do something for geeks and to change, we would be far better off to simply bypass the schools to the greatest extent possible. This is part of what people who are involved in home schooling are doing. Most educators detest home schooling and it's not because the home schooled kids are not learning, but because they are. Warm bodies in chairs represents money to every school system in the country. Whether that person's time is wasted in that chair is irrelevant to the school from an economic point of view. So teachers get upset when someone comes along and keeps their meal ticket at home. Schools are never going to improve as long as they enjoy a monopoly on the education of the young. Force them to improve by forcing them to compete. When I went to high school the teachers there worked to convince us that they had power over our lives and our future. The truth is that they are little more than glorified babysitters. I'll let everyone out there who is still in high school in on a little secret, your grades don't mean jack compared to your scores on the SAT. Of course if you are trying for MIT or another extremely competitive school your grades will be important because all the applicants have good grades. But if you're looking to go to the state university where you are from, you probably don't even have to graduate, a GED with good SAT scores will get you in the door no problem. At the very worst you would have to spend a semester or two at a junior college to prove yourself. Unless you're in an advanced/gifted program, the things you learn in class are no preparation for the SAT. Don't let the pitiful level that most subjects are taught at hold you back. Your future depends on you, what you know and how well you know it. There are many pieces of paper that will help get you in the door to a university or a job. But once you are there they mean exactly jack. What you do then and there will mean absolutely everything. If someone has an impressive degree, but they are incompetent, they will not be promoted and will eventually be fired. So don't let some teacher fool you into thinking that he or she has an important station in life and that your future depends on their good graces. Pursue your own interests and don't look to them to challenge you or teach you very much, that's not what they are paid for.
The codecs for the encoder portion is free in that they published and known. They are not free in the sense that they are in the public domain, the algorithms are patented. The decode portion is not patented from what I understand. Fraunhofer hasn't been terribly successful in stopping people from creating their own encoders, the RIAA would be even less so since anyone thinking of creating an encoder would be more motivated out of contempt for them.
People use their computers to program the RIO's as everyone knows. It should not be very hard to create programs to translate the crippled MP3's into standard format before loading them up. The crippled tracks can't be encrypted very strongly (if at all) because the stronger the encryption, the more processing power it takes to decrypt in real time and I doubt the rio has much in the way of horsepower. This reminds me of the Videocypher II system General Instruments created for scrambling satellite TV signals. It was cracked and stayed cracked for years. GI had to resort to modules that were replaced every month in the II+ to finally stop crackers. I think its really funny that congress passed a law making it illegal to circumvent anti-piracy mechanisms. I can't say I care whether anything is illegal, only whether it is wrong. Obviously someone pirating music and selling bootleg copies is wrong, but listening to MP3's downloaded off the net is not much different from listening to the radio if you ask me. Just wait, next they will go after Jukeboxes since they aren't getting a cut from the quarters you put in.
The historical ties between SCO and Microsoft go way back. This may in fact be Fud straight out of Redmond, but channeled to attack Linux from the unix world. If Michels were smart he would simply invest money into companies like Redhat, Caldera, or even Corel and make money off this so called religion.
Any ideology has its share of nuts and crackpots whose views are so extreme, even their fellows don't claim them. I could point out that Mao brought communism to china in an attempt to link him to the left wing, but I won't. Communism was a convenience to him. Tryants can easily arise from within any ideology because human nature is the common denominator.
Oh I knew very well that I was quoting him. Tyrants aren't ignorant of the power guns give a population. He knew it and so would anyone else with the intelligence and ruthlessness needed to secure ultimate power to themselves. The only people who don't seem to understand this are those who want to take guns away from people. Well they wouldn't be the ones getting shot if freedom ever fell, so why should they care anyway...
"We don't have a lot of nuclear weapons in private hands -- despite stringent controls on them. How could that be?! I thought that stringent controls made things proliferate, right?"
You can't exactly buy fissionable materials at the local K-Mart. Even if someone were to steal materials from a nuclear power plant, they would not be able to do anything with them because the concentration is far too low to reach critical mass. The two are not even close to the same thing. Guns can be made by a skilled machinist with the right grade of steel. If you wanted to create a nuclear device you'd have to kidnap a researcher from Oak Ridge and then manage to steal weapons grade uranium just to create a fission bomb which would be of very low yield by todays standards.
The middle part of what you wrote is very insightful and true, but the first part has almost nothing to do with it. I don't remember the term for this kind of argument but its basically a situation where you state the conclusion and then state a premise which while true, does not lead to the conclusion. Associating gun ownership and advocacy with "white trash" is an emotional argument rather than a rational one. No one wants to be seen as trailer trash or a potential Jerry Springer guest, but guns have nothing to do with that. Anecdotes about how so and so is white trash and he likes guns would be the next thing you'd probably resort to.
The police spend most of their time working after the crime has been committed, not preventing it. The only way to prevent a criminal attack is to make it in the criminal's best interest not to attack you. The ability to defend yourself is the only way to do this and guns are the most efficient method of defense. The ability to threaten or kill others is not the role that guns play in a democracy, although that is an unfortunate side effect. You mention free speech and the right to live, far more important than either is the ability to protect both. Freedom is not the natural state of human affairs, it is rare and precious and must be defended. Guns simply represent the most effective defense. Freedom is an individual right and it must be protected by the individuals who enjoy it.
The mac suffers from slow bus speed. The examples you pointed out were small loops which would probably fit into the cache, minimizing the effect the bus speed has. This guy is just a mac zombie. Apple could release computers 5 years out of date and he'd still think them better.
I'm sure that you've heard how fast photoshop is on the mac, well that is due in part to the fact that the apple long ago put in special calls that photoshop uses. These calls don't exist on the pc side however. The powerpc chip itself is faster clock for clock than anything on the x86 side, however the boxes created from it suffer from an obsolete operating system and poor motherboard design. Take a powerpc chip and put it on a good motherboard and put something like Linux or BeOS on it and you've got a very impressive machine. These aren't the machines that apple is selling however.
The newest versions of glide have not been ported to linux yet, therefore neither the voodoo banshee nor the two versions of the voodoo 3 will work under it yet. Check out
http://glide.xxedgexx.com/status.html
for more information on how the port of Glide is coming. Right now there is a decent X server available there for the banshee which also works with the Voodoo 3. Support for 3d under the newer 3dfx chipsets should be ready within a few months.
Which card you go with to me would depend on which one has the best support. I don't know what Nvidia has planned and I don't trust them not to try something intended to lock people into using their products. Maybe they will do it right though, I'm not saying that they won't, just that I'm uncertain of their intentions.
Typical... When you find something that you can download, don't wait! It might not be there when you come back. I would think that this server would still be available through other channels, which means it is more difficult to get. Really lame of them to do that.
The only thing simple here is you.
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· Score: 1
It's easy to take guns away from the people you don't have to worry about misusing them. Make them illegal, they'll turn theirs in. But the criminals and psychopaths will not. Instead they will be the only ones with guns. Making drugs illegal has not done much to keep them out of anyone's hands. The only people who don't have drugs are those who don't do them. Timothy McVeigh killed over a hundred people and he didn't use even one bullet. Guns are best defense against the criminal element because they are a deterrant. If a crim thinks that you might have a gun, he will think twice about breaking into your house. Here in Arizona we have a concealed carry law. After it went into effect the violent crime rate went down. The same thing happened in Florida after they enacted their concealed carry law. There will always be those who misuse guns, and people will die because of it. But this is unavoidable as long as guns exist because you cannot keep them out of the hands of the wrong people. It's better that honest good people have the ability to protect themselves. Just look at Washington DC, where guns are basically illegal. It's one of the most violent places in the country and at one point was being called the "murder capital." If taking guns away led to a decrease in violent crime, DC should be the safest place in the country. Of course the news media will not print a story based on this, instead they try to blame guns for the crime in DC, the same way that the media in Florida tried to blame guns for the increase of crime against foreign tourists. The criminals there knew that the local residents were a risky target, so they went after foreigners who they knew were not packing. It was the absence of a gun, not its presence that led to that. Baseball caps with "NRA" on the front are big sellers in airline terminals down there. Guns are a source of violence and death. But it is not possible to un-invent the gun, and it is not possible to remove them from the hands of those who should not have them. Therfore the best solution it to make sure that every honest law abiding adult has the right to own one as well, evening the odds and protecting thier homes, their families, and themselves.
Why can't we see this type of article more often?
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· Score: 1
Becuause it does not spread paranoia. The media is like a circus. More and more often people don't have the time or the inclination to follow current events, so the media resorts to reporting things designed to frighten and shock becuase more people will tend to pay attention. Those guys didn't do what they did because of quake or the internet or the music they listen to. There was something at work within their own minds that led them to it. But that fact doesn't sell newspapers..
Slashdot Mirror
None of the links provided in this article explain
exactly what the deal is with IPIX in regards to Helmut Dersch. Specifically what legal precedents or laws are they using to attack him and also more importantly what is he doing that leaves him open to these attacks. If he is infringing on IPIX patents or copyrights then that is one thing. However if he is not infringing on them, but IPIX is attacking him because he is small and cannot defend himself then that is another thing altogether. This kind of thing happens all the time, a big company goes after someone they consider a threat, trying to intimidate them with threats of legal action when the person is doing nothing wrong or illegal. If that is what is happening here then I think we should all get involved and see to it that the work that Mr Dersch has done does not disappear. Surely the information that IPIX scared him into removing exists someplace. Mirror it. Put it up on your own website along with copies of the free tools Mr. Dersch created. Let IPIX's lawyers charge them $150 an hour while they try to stamp out the rebels. Better yet take the work he has done and improve up on it. Make tools that IPIX wishes it had created. The better the tools the bigger the stink IPIX will make about it and in the end the worse it will make them look. Don't let companies harrass others because you could be next in line.
Lee
There is not even anything wrong with having that as your primary goal. The problems arise when making that money is the only goal and especially when making money is the only consideration. I know several people where I work who don't want money. They think it is evil somehow. One girl once tried to get a job where she got paid by barter believe it or not. A few months went by an she realized she couldn't live and got a job that paid her money. In any physical system there is energy present performing work. In our economic system that energy is money. The process of making money is simply the action of controlling a portion of that energy. Now you can control it in such a way that good things are created by it, or you can control it in such a way that bad things, or useless things are created by it. Microsoft is simply a case where one man controls huge ammount of energy and fights to keep anyone else from controlling any. This is known as greed and past a certain point it becomes very harmful. Not so much for the effects that Gates has caused as for the ones he prevented others from creating. Now he's putting his effort into stopping linux because it threatens his ability to continue gaining more and more money. I don't personally believe that there is anything he can do to truly stop it. Not because I'm a linux user and therfore biased and myopic, but because of the lessons that history teaches us. Anytime power is consolidated in the hands of a few, and that power is misused, the many will take the necessary steps to remedy the situation. Linux represents only one facet of an emerging phenomenon which I call the Fuck Microsoft phenomenon. This is the same thing that once happened to IBM. There was a time when everyone bought IBM as a matter of course, to choose a product from another company was in some cases to risk your job. IBM obtained that power through unethical practices much like the ones that Microsoft uses now, where do you thing Microsoft learned them from? But then came a time when the tide turned because people began to hate IBM. There were those who would not buy a product if it was from IBM, even if it was the best available. IBM slowly learned from this lesson and with some new blood became the company it is today, a sleeping giant. Unfortunately Microsoft is unable to make this kind of change as long as Gates is at the helm, which basically means for many years to come unless he gets hit by a bus. But that will not stop the revolution which is only now beginning to show itself. Microsoft's position is dependent on its customers and I believe that more and more of its customers are going to choose something else. Linux isn't exactly (l)user friendly and yet it is making progress against windows which tries to be as point and drool as possible. Were Microsoft a good company this would not be happening. If linux ever evolves to the point where your average computer phobic office employee can make good use of it, Microsoft's choke hold on the software industry will be broken and we will all be given the "freedom to innovate."
The government's claim that key escrow is needed to intercept communications between criminals isn't even plausible on the surface. Basically what they are talking about is organized crime. The people running these organizations are not stupid, otherwise it wouldn't take something like the Rico Act to put a serious crimp in their style. The mob is not going to use encryption schemes that have a backdoor that the feds can get through. Neither would any other criminal organization that had a lick of sense period. The key escrow business is intended to listen in on innocent citizens like you and me, and industries as well it would seem. The people in power who are pushing this are not serving the public from whom they derive their authority, they are serving their own interests and the interests of those with enough money to buy them. When some politician starts pushing key escrow it is nothing short of a violation of their oath of office. Some claim that they are pushing key escrow because that is what law enforcement agencies want. Well that simply shows that those agencies need to be investigated themselves. Lets not forget either that our representatives were elected to represent us, not a federal agency. The whole business is a crock and is just one more example of how messed up our country has become. Government of the people by the people for the people is in grave danger mostly because the people are complacent. Don't let government officials shove crap like this down our throats, they aren't in charge, we are. They are there because we elected them, we put them there, and there are more than a few we should yank right out. This is a free country based on the principle that the rights of the individual are more valuable to good government than the powers of the state. Someone take this soap box away from me already.....
Lee
Classifying source code as speech in relation to the first amendment has nothing to do with any other function it performs. Obviously source code isn't a language that people write novels or political opinions in, but that does not mean it is not a form of expression. Source code is more than just speech but for the purpose of protecting our rights to share it, classifying it as speech will do just fine.
When the powers that be try to trample over freedom, the easiest way to let them win is to conform to what they demand. I wish I had developed some cryptography algorithms because the very first thing I would do is post them and any source code using them as far and as wide as I could. The Clinton administration does not have the constitutional power to dictate what I can and cannot say. Furthermore _I_ say they can't dictate to me. They may think they can do it, but that is only true for those who lay down and do what they are told. The price of freedom after all, is eternal vigilance.
IBM has fabs and engineers to make Intel and Motorola drool. IBM has come in already and helped out AMD on their .25 fab and even talked about buying the company at one point. This is exactly what I think IBM will do if AMD gets into too much trouble. If IBM took the K7 design and let their engineers loose on it and converted it to their .18u copper process, Intel would be dead in the water.
Spin doctors never cease to disgust me. If Microsoft were to be broken up, it would not be for the purpose of creating multiple versions of windows. Rather windows itself would be the product of one division, while products like Office would be made by other divisions. Other possible divisions are easy to imagine such as one for development tools such as Visual C++. This is nothing but an attempt by Microsoft to create the impression that breaking them up means breaking windows up. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact that they would resort to this kind of spin doctoring, which any child in middle school can see through, shows that they are afraid. Fud is the tools of those who have no better options.
Back in the days of extreme unix in-fighting, computers were scarce. They were not something that the average person used or had in their home, at least not systems capable of running unix. Companies used unix and would generally choose one flavor and stick with it. But today there are so many computers out there that competition is a real thing. The best situation would be one where no company was in a position to be able to use one product to lock a consumer into using another product from that same company. This is what you have right now with Microsoft. The company also stifles competition by buying out or simply assasinating other companies that try to compete. Competing standards could persist in the unix world because of its scale and because it was not only software but hardware which differed. But in the PC world multiple standards can only persist if they co-exist because eventually the majority of users are going to choose one standard or another and the others will die out if they are mutually exclusive. Everyone has compatible hardware as well, making it very easy to switch from one standard to another. Breaking up Microsoft would be a very good thing overall because the company's policies and practices hurt consumers. Forcing Microsoft to compete with itself is the first step towards increasing competition and innovation in the industry as a whole.
Maybe I just have a really sick sense of humor, but I think what this guy wrote is a perfectly legitimate piece of satire. Our world is just about at the point where you might actually see an ad like that.
The people you mention threatened minorities who held power over the majority. People who think for themselves are the architects of our civilization because they are the ones who pull the rest of us, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the future. People who think for themselves are dangerous to the people who are dangerous to the rest of us. They are examples of the virtue because they are true to themselves.
The problems with our schools aren't centered around geeks or goths or any other stereotyped subculture. Rather than look to the schools to do something for geeks and to change, we would be far better off to simply bypass the schools to the greatest extent possible. This is part of what people who are involved in home schooling are doing. Most educators detest home schooling and it's not because the home schooled kids are not learning, but because they are. Warm bodies in chairs represents money to every school system in the country. Whether that person's time is wasted in that chair is irrelevant to the school from an economic point of view. So teachers get upset when someone comes along and keeps their meal ticket at home. Schools are never going to improve as long as they enjoy a monopoly on the education of the young. Force them to improve by forcing them to compete. When I went to high school the teachers there worked to convince us that they had power over our lives and our future. The truth is that they are little more than glorified babysitters. I'll let everyone out there who is still in high school in on a little secret, your grades don't mean jack compared to your scores on the SAT. Of course if you are trying for MIT or another extremely competitive school your grades will be important because all the applicants have good grades. But if you're looking to go to the state university where you are from, you probably don't even have to graduate, a GED with good SAT scores will get you in the door no problem. At the very worst you would have to spend a semester or two at a junior college to prove yourself. Unless you're in an advanced/gifted program, the things you learn in class are no preparation for the SAT. Don't let the pitiful level that most subjects are taught at hold you back. Your future depends on you, what you know and how well you know it. There are many pieces of paper that will help get you in the door to a university or a job. But once you are there they mean exactly jack. What you do then and there will mean absolutely everything. If someone has an impressive degree, but they are incompetent, they will not be promoted and will eventually be fired. So don't let some teacher fool you into thinking that he or she has an important station in life and that your future depends on their good graces. Pursue your own interests and don't look to them to challenge you or teach you very much, that's not what they are paid for.
The codecs for the encoder portion is free in that they published and known. They are not free in the sense that they are in the public domain, the algorithms are patented. The decode portion is not patented from what I understand. Fraunhofer hasn't been terribly successful in stopping people from creating their own encoders, the RIAA would be even less so since anyone thinking of creating an encoder would be more motivated out of contempt for them.
People use their computers to program the RIO's as everyone knows. It should not be very hard to create programs to translate the crippled MP3's into standard format before loading them up. The crippled tracks can't be encrypted very strongly (if at all) because the stronger the encryption, the more processing power it takes to decrypt in real time and I doubt the rio has much in the way of horsepower. This reminds me of the Videocypher II system General Instruments created for scrambling satellite TV signals. It was cracked and stayed cracked for years. GI had to resort to modules that were replaced every month in the II+ to finally stop crackers. I think its really funny that congress passed a law making it illegal to circumvent anti-piracy mechanisms. I can't say I care whether anything is illegal, only whether it is wrong. Obviously someone pirating music and selling bootleg copies is wrong, but listening to MP3's downloaded off the net is not much different from listening to the radio if you ask me. Just wait, next they will go after Jukeboxes since they aren't getting a cut from the quarters you put in.
The historical ties between SCO and Microsoft go way back. This may in fact be Fud straight out of Redmond, but channeled to attack Linux from the unix world. If Michels were smart he would simply invest money into companies like Redhat, Caldera, or even Corel and make money off this so called religion.
Any ideology has its share of nuts and crackpots whose views are so extreme, even their fellows don't claim them. I could point out that Mao brought communism to china in an attempt to link him to the left wing, but I won't. Communism was a convenience to him. Tryants can easily arise from within any ideology because human nature is the common denominator.
Oh I knew very well that I was quoting him. Tyrants aren't ignorant of the power guns give a population. He knew it and so would anyone else with the intelligence and ruthlessness needed to secure ultimate power to themselves. The only people who don't seem to understand this are those who want to take guns away from people. Well they wouldn't be the ones getting shot if freedom ever fell, so why should they care anyway...
"We don't have a lot of nuclear weapons in private hands -- despite stringent controls on them. How could that be?! I thought that stringent controls made things proliferate, right?"
You can't exactly buy fissionable materials at the local K-Mart. Even if someone were to steal materials from a nuclear power plant, they would not be able to do anything with them because the concentration is far too low to reach critical mass. The two are not even close to the same thing. Guns can be made by a skilled machinist with the right grade of steel. If you wanted to create a nuclear device you'd have to kidnap a researcher from Oak Ridge and then manage to steal weapons grade uranium just to create a fission bomb which would be of very low yield by todays standards.
The middle part of what you wrote is very insightful and true, but the first part has almost nothing to do with it. I don't remember the term for this kind of argument but its basically a situation where you state the conclusion and then state a premise which while true, does not lead to the conclusion. Associating gun ownership and advocacy with "white trash" is an emotional argument rather than a rational one. No one wants to be seen as trailer trash or a potential Jerry Springer guest, but guns have nothing to do with that. Anecdotes about how so and so is white trash and he likes guns would be the next thing you'd probably resort to.
The police spend most of their time working after the crime has been committed, not preventing it. The only way to prevent a criminal attack is to make it in the criminal's best interest not to attack you. The ability to defend yourself is the only way to do this and guns are the most efficient method of defense. The ability to threaten or kill others is not the role that guns play in a democracy, although that is an unfortunate side effect. You mention free speech and the right to live, far more important than either is the ability to protect both. Freedom is not the natural state of human affairs, it is rare and precious and must be defended. Guns simply represent the most effective defense. Freedom is an individual right and it must be protected by the individuals who enjoy it.
The mac suffers from slow bus speed. The examples you pointed out were small loops which would probably fit into the cache, minimizing the effect the bus speed has. This guy is just a mac zombie. Apple could release computers 5 years out of date and he'd still think them better.
I'm sure that you've heard how fast photoshop is on the mac, well that is due in part to the fact that the apple long ago put in special calls that photoshop uses. These calls don't exist on the pc side however. The powerpc chip itself is faster clock for clock than anything on the x86 side, however the boxes created from it suffer from an obsolete operating system and poor motherboard design. Take a powerpc chip and put it on a good motherboard and put something like Linux or BeOS on it and you've got a very impressive machine. These aren't the machines that apple is selling however.
The newest versions of glide have not been ported to linux yet, therefore neither the voodoo banshee nor the two versions of the voodoo 3 will work under it yet. Check out
http://glide.xxedgexx.com/status.html
for more information on how the port of Glide is coming. Right now there is a decent X server available there for the banshee which also works with the Voodoo 3. Support for 3d under the newer 3dfx chipsets should be ready within a few months.
Which card you go with to me would depend on which one has the best support. I don't know what Nvidia has planned and I don't trust them not to try something intended to lock people into using their products. Maybe they will do it right though, I'm not saying that they won't, just that I'm uncertain of their intentions.
Typical... When you find something that you can download, don't wait! It might not be there when you come back. I would think that this server would still be available through other channels, which means it is more difficult to get. Really lame of them to do that.
It's easy to take guns away from the people you don't have to worry about misusing them. Make them illegal, they'll turn theirs in. But the criminals and psychopaths will not. Instead they will be the only ones with guns. Making drugs illegal has not done much to keep them out of anyone's hands. The only people who don't have drugs are those who don't do them. Timothy McVeigh killed over a hundred people and he didn't use even one bullet. Guns are best defense against the criminal element because they are a deterrant. If a crim thinks that you might have a gun, he will think twice about breaking into your house. Here in Arizona we have a concealed carry law. After it went into effect the violent crime rate went down. The same thing happened in Florida after they enacted their concealed carry law. There will always be those who misuse guns, and people will die because of it. But this is unavoidable as long as guns exist because you cannot keep them out of the hands of the wrong people. It's better that honest good people have the ability to protect themselves. Just look at Washington DC, where guns are basically illegal. It's one of the most violent places in the country and at one point was being called the "murder capital." If taking guns away led to a decrease in violent crime, DC should be the safest place in the country. Of course the news media will not print a story based on this, instead they try to blame guns for the crime in DC, the same way that the media in Florida tried to blame guns for the increase of crime against foreign tourists. The criminals there knew that the local residents were a risky target, so they went after foreigners who they knew were not packing. It was the absence of a gun, not its presence that led to that. Baseball caps with "NRA" on the front are big sellers in airline terminals down there. Guns are a source of violence and death. But it is not possible to un-invent the gun, and it is not possible to remove them from the hands of those who should not have them. Therfore the best solution it to make sure that every honest law abiding adult has the right to own one as well, evening the odds and protecting thier homes, their families, and themselves.
Becuause it does not spread paranoia. The media is like a circus. More and more often people don't have the time or the inclination to follow current events, so the media resorts to reporting things designed to frighten and shock becuase more people will tend to pay attention. Those guys didn't do what they did because of quake or the internet or the music they listen to. There was something at work within their own minds that led them to it. But that fact doesn't sell newspapers..