Bah. It's already happened. The DOJ had a roadshow where they went around teaching regional offices how to apply the US PATRIOT act to regular criminals. See the incompetent in California who got charged with terrorism (as opposed to attempted murder) for blowing off his own hand with a pipe-bomb that he was intending to use to kill someone. Or the meth dealer in the midwest who got charged with possession of a WMD, ie. a checmical weapon, ie. meth.
You are missing the point. While you may have learned something about computers from being a cheat and sociopath, the rest of the world didn't play Diablo 2 so that "Deanalator" could learn about computers. They chose Diablo 2 as their game of choice because it fit their needs and expectations. Everything from the storyline to the game mecahnics made it fun for them. None of the people figured that it would be really great fun to have some putz in the game using a modified client and/or proxy.
The way I see it, everything generally is open, enjoyable, economical, and efficient, then some fuckwad comes along and sees that by stepping out of the accepted modes of use he can increase his personal satisfaction. Most everything that people dislike about life can be traced to some dumbass willing to trade general good for personal gain.
People who are cheating are playing a different game. They may be having fun, but they are not playing the same game as the rest of the players.
They want to be bully's and the only way the can bully people is to use a "tool" to get over whatever is preventing them from bullying without the "tool".
Why do you make stuff up? Not only that but all of the evidence suggests that the judge did exactly as appropriate.
It's like there's a scale in your head and you weigh your opinions on it and until the needle points at "Me! For! The! Win!" you keep adding stuff. Adding whatever it takes until your argument seems heavy enough.
But would you let them tap your phone for no reason at all? What if their reason for tapping the phone was to listen to your calls to 'see' if you were saying anything dodgy, or worse, just for their own low-paid-middle-managment-government-employee entertainment? You OK with that? You OK with some government perv 'getting off' on your wife talking to her friend?
You want to know what's going to happen? "They" will have a new hire and while they are training him, to demonstrate the systems capabilities, they'll tap the phone line of someone famous, or pull up a recording of a phone call of someone famous. Then the new guy will be on duty late one night, bored out of his mind reading the newspaper and come across some story that piques his interest and will tap the phone line of the subject of the story. A few months later he'll be at a barbecue with his neighbors and just as a matter of gossip he'll mention the kinds of capabilities they have without getting into any real details. Six months down the line the neighbor will come over and say that she thinks her husband is cheating on her, and so late the next night he pulls up the guys phone records and sets up an autorecord on the guys phone. Then he gets to wondering about that bitch who dumped him in college and starts recording her calls.
Sometime later a different new guy comes along and is sticking to the rules, only monitoring appropriate calls (whatever "appropriate" means in this sense), one of which is listening in on an investment bank who's name came up while listening to an arabic sounding fellow. During one session he hears about some plans the bank is putting togther for buying up a competitor and gets to thinking that if he just bought a bunch of shares in that bank he'll make a killing in the market.
It's all just human nature. The laws should be in place to ensure that both sides of the equation are sticking to the moral high ground. Which is a point the founders were able to recognize. Too bad dumb asses like Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty don't have the strength of character to stick to a true social and moral high ground.
Infact every flag ship product that is minting money for MSFT started out as a pale copy of some other better program. WordPerfect, QuattroPro/Lotus, Harvard Presentation Graphics, Dbase/Foxbase etc.
Kind of like WordPerfect was an imitation of WordStar. 1-2-3 was an imitation of VisiCalc. Etc. The reality is, is that while Microsoft's products are far from perfect, in many cases they really are better. Over time Microsoft really does get shit done. It's the advantage of having operating capital and being able to take the time to build good products.
Here are the guiding principles I use re. CDs->MP3s, DVDs->AVIs, etc:
1) If buy a CD then I have the right to listen to that CD. I have the right to play that CD while hanging out with my friends. I have the right to loan the CD to my friend. I have the right to convert that CD to an MP3. Essentially I believe that I have the right to listen to one form of playback of that piece at a particular maximum quality (that is, the original quality on the CD and any transformation of that CD that I personally make.)
2) What I do not have a right to: make an MP3 and share that with all and sundry via P2P or sneakernet. If I buy a DVD I do not have a right to the CD. If I buy the studio version of an album I do not have the right to the live version of the same songs. If I buy a DVD and at some point they come out with the HD-DVD I do not have the right to that new version. If I buy a CD and rip it to MP3 then sell the CD, I do not have any rights to the MP3.
Just because you hire a firm known to have pulled dirty tricks for dirty companies like Exxon and Microsoft doesn't mean that they'll necessarily pull dirty stuff on behalf of all their clients.
So even though I was a partner with Pablo Escobar in a used car lot, as long as our used car business dealings are legit I'm in a good place ethically? Sorry, homey don't play that game.
...comply with accessibility standards when readily achievable.
I am curious about this. What is Target's responsibility to a blind person who walks in their front door? Do they have to provide an escort for that person who will describe in precise detail every item in every aisle? Or is it assumed that a blind person would provide their own "seeing eye person" for this task? I don't think too many businesses can actually staff a handful of "seeing eye people" on the chance the a busload of blind folks happen to walk in their front door. In a similar sense, you have to provide wheel chair access but you don't have to provide someone to push the chair.
Which makes me wonder... is it Target's fault that their website, presumedly, doesn't work with a particular screen reader (or with any screen reader) or is it the screen reader developers fault for not building a better screen reader. Prior to computers it wasn't the responsibility of every publisher to provide their books, magazines, newspapers, etc. in braille. Nor does every business have to hire a person to stand at the entrance to their store calling out the name of the business and the type of service to every person who walks past.
What I am hearing from all the people who say "it's not expensive/hard" is that site developers have a choice: make simple websites with very basic layout and functionality, or make two websites. One of them simple and the other rich. Maintaining two parallel sites is going to cost more and making a simple, limited site only, is going to drive customers away. I think those making such claims are just thinking about this issue in a very shallow fashion.
Those suing are trying to get something that they never had before. They are effectively saying that ever advertising circular that arrives in their (physical) mailbox must be structured such that it can be mechanically translated to braille. It should be up to the screen reader developers to solve this problem and not Target.
Safari Mail iChat AV Help Viewer Dashboard Dictionary Sherlock Software Update
Look's like it's not as casual a thing as you want to make it out to be. Then there's a list of several dozen known add-on applications from apple and third parties. The reality is, if you pull WebKit you will not have what people consider a working mac.
The OS providing a HTTP, JavaScript, and HTML subsystems is good for the consumer even if it's bad for Netscape Corp.
I guess that all depends on what you mean by "uninstalling IE". Do you mean deleting iexplore.exe? That'll not break anything except software that has hardcoded the web browser as iexplore.exe. If you mean removing every bit of code that executes while browsing the web with IE, then yeah, it'll probably break stuff.
When you uninstall Safari are you going to remove WebKit as well? WebKit is the core HTML & JavaScript engine that Safari uses. Uninstalling it is going to kill Dashboard and Mail as well.
So I guess it all depends on how you look at it and where you draw the line about which library is application and which is OS.
Besides, Apple isn't exactly a paragon of openness seeing as they have a closed hardware platform.
You do realize, don't you, that Firefox consumes that much because so much is available, right? There seems to be a general confusion out there about adaptive software that makes use of riches of memory.
What a stupid thing to say. Applications don't have the capability to do proper memory handling in these circumstances. Your OS can look at the system and say "gosh, there's a good 900 meg sitting there unused, I'll use it for file cache" and then when an application comes along and requests some memory the OS easily dumps the cache to disk and give the app the memory. Firefox thinking "gosh, there's a good 900 meg sitting there unused, I'll use it for porn cache" is just stupid because there is absolutely no mechanism for the system to say "hey, that memory isn't *unused*."
Any web browser developer who thinks that making "adaptive" use of gobs if memory is a good idea is a complete moron. Any kind of substantial RAM based web cache is just a bad fucking idea.
I worked as a contractor for the Air Force for a while. They had a real strong policy in place on the Windows domain with the appropriate DLLs that would disallow "weak" passwords. Weak passwords being anything less than six letters; must have three of: upper case, lower case, numbers, symbols; must be substantially different than previous passwords; must not include words in it. Except that their dictionary includes two and three letter words. So you could have a password such as '1xIf%at$3' and it would be invalid since it has two two-letter words 'if' and 'at'. When deciding to implement draconian enforcement of your policies make sure your enforcement processes aren't stupid.
You cannot report bugs to the kernel team if your kernel includes third party code. Source or binary it doesn't matter. Watch them laugh when you say "Hey, I've got an oops here... I'm running the stock kernel plus these other fifty thousand lines of code..."
Additionally you just took the argument from the driver needs to be open source to the driver being licensed under the linux variant of the GPL.
Even stupider. If the code isn't open, you know the code hasn't been independantly audited at all. Also, multiple companies, millitary / intelligence institutions, finance companies / code quality software companies have audited (and continue to audit) the linux kernel.
The binary blobs will not get that public audit - the intel/unichrome drivers will.
It is an absolute fallacy that open source automatically means it is being audited by Jesus, Mohammed, and Joseph Smith. That closed source will not be independantly audited. And that even in the instances where there are audits that the findings will be contributed back.
You rattled off a short list of organizations who will audit the linux kernel. But even ignoring the fact that several of which would never do such things, you have gone back to saying "someone" audited the code. Unless you personally did the audit you don't know that it's been audited.
The openness or closedness of code has no bearing on the capacity for an audit. There are more closed source products that have undergone detailed audits than there are open source projects that have undergone the same level of scrutiny. You don't believe me? You might want to check into medical equipment, financial service providers, and airplane automation for a few examples of industries that "give a shit". Anyone sane will have a lot more confidence in those kinds of peer reviews than "it is open source, it must have been audited."
The vast majority of linux code is not audited, it's tested. That is someone gets a patch from someone that they have established a working relationship with. They apply this patch to their own copy of the kernel. They built the kernel and the patch seems to do what it says it does. It seems fairly stable. Pass it up the line so some more people can test it. That's not auditing.
Ultimately what you are saying is you trust someone because you agree with their politics. I trust that nVidia is first and foremost a video card manufacturer, and that their desire to be profitable, their desire to have a good reputation, and their desire to make a quality product will result in a highly performant, featureful, stable driver. Comparably Intel and Via are primarily CPU and chipset manufactuers, video subsystems are not their core competency, are not their main line of revenue, and they have already acknowledged that they do not have an interest in competing with nVidia, and to a lesser extent ATI. They basically have thrown their drivers into the wild to rely upon the altruism of open source developers to support their product.
Go ahead and let your politics consign you to "Dunno what to tell you. Works for me. Maybe you should go download this random patch and try that." And I'll stick with the current best video card and driver combination available for Unix and Unix look-alikes.
...you can't report (linux) bugs to the kernel team,...
No more than you can report kernel bugs for any kernel issue where you have some random hunk of code involved, regardless of whether you have the source available to you or not. The kernel developers aren't going to help you unless they feel like you are only running their code and their code only.
you're allowing an unaudited binary blob to run in kernelland,
Unless you, personally, have audited the code you don't know if it has been audited or not. If you have kids you'll know what I mean ("I thought Linus was going to do it?" "I thought Theo was going to do it." "I thought Jordan was going to do it.") So the only real argument in that statement is "binary" and that's circular.
I think you are really confused about how computers work. First there is no good reason to go the H264 (mp4) and then to MPEG-2. You might as well go straight to MPEG-2. Secondly, instead of hoping for a $300 video card that'll do that for you, just go buy a $79.00 Hauppage PVR-150 that will encode straight from NTSC/PAL -> MPEG-2 in realtime. Thirdly, I think you are very confused as to "who can help the consumers" since just because it's "video" doesn't mean it has anything at all to do with a "video card". Changing data from one format to another is the balliwick of the CPU and/or a dedicated co-processor.
Yes they do. Or at least enough that the idea is a totally valid way to make judgements. Sure there might be one or two in ten thousand who have been hit with enough shit that they're completely without resources. But everybody else is just not making smart choices.
...Taking that away from a child, especially one that is physically distanced from his/her friends... could easily be placing them in a state of confinement, especially if internet priviledges and so forth are also revoked.
If you start seeing it from this sense, you realize that you're essentially putting the child into digital solitary confinement. It might only be during the evenings, after school... but at that age the child is so dependent on the presence and company of friends, even when they're all doing absolutely nothing, it might very well seem like torture.
W.T.F.?
If you are raising your child so dependant on a small group of friends that not being able to call them at any random moment on a cell phone is torture, then in that case perhaps your child should be taken away and placed in therapy so that they don't continue to grow with such dependancy issues.
For thousands of years of civilization people have managed to grow up without cell phones. They learned to make new friends or even pass the time with strangers.
But the Linux kernel has a license and that license doesn't allow you to swap in a different license. The typical "fork" of someone who is dissatisfied coming along and just taking the source and going their own way to make themselves happy isn't possible.
And the difficulity in tracking down and getting permission from every rights holder in the Linux kernel precludes the approach of getting everybody's "aye".
There will be no upgrade of the Linux kernel to a different license.
I can't say about ATI, but what buggyness persists in the nVidia driver? It seems to get fixed faster than, say, the assed up USB stack was fixed. It took over a year for the USB maintainers to get off their asses and stop acting righteous about their particular method of initializing a device and declaring the device "broken" instead of making one little change to how their initialization process and suddenly a whole assload of USB devices start working.
Fixes in the main kernel basically work like this: if the device that is broken is some major component of the system, ie. scsi driver, ide driver, then it gets fixed quickly. If it is some device that for some reason a developer doesn't like, then not only will it take a while to get fixed, but once the fix is in place, it will be removed repeatedly (see neomagic 256 support.) If the device is just something that isn't mainline and the breakage only affects a few users then it can be several kernel releases before a fix is rolled in.
And, no, downloading a patch from some URL supplied in some random IRC channel is not a fix. Fixed is included in the mainline kernel or the standard packages/releases from your distro of choice.
Fork what kernel? The Linux kernel? You can go ahead and fork it all you like, but you won't be able to relicense it since it already has a license and that license does not include a clause that allows you to change that license...
Why should the USA care what people in Jamaica, Australia, or anywhere else do?
Because, inevitably, the people who grow ganja in their front yard in Jamaica get to thinking "gosh, it'd be nice to have a big fat bundle of American dollars instead of these worthless Jamaican pesos." Then they get to planning how to break our laws.
The amazing thing to me is that everybody wants to bitch about America's drug laws when the US isn't even close to the "worst" when it comes to draconian drug regulation. Try Iran or Indonesia sometime you stupid gits.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah. It's already happened. The DOJ had a roadshow where they went around teaching regional offices how to apply the US PATRIOT act to regular criminals. See the incompetent in California who got charged with terrorism (as opposed to attempted murder) for blowing off his own hand with a pipe-bomb that he was intending to use to kill someone. Or the meth dealer in the midwest who got charged with possession of a WMD, ie. a checmical weapon, ie. meth.
You are missing the point. While you may have learned something about computers from being a cheat and sociopath, the rest of the world didn't play Diablo 2 so that "Deanalator" could learn about computers. They chose Diablo 2 as their game of choice because it fit their needs and expectations. Everything from the storyline to the game mecahnics made it fun for them. None of the people figured that it would be really great fun to have some putz in the game using a modified client and/or proxy.
The way I see it, everything generally is open, enjoyable, economical, and efficient, then some fuckwad comes along and sees that by stepping out of the accepted modes of use he can increase his personal satisfaction. Most everything that people dislike about life can be traced to some dumbass willing to trade general good for personal gain.
People who are cheating are playing a different game. They may be having fun, but they are not playing the same game as the rest of the players.
They want to be bully's and the only way the can bully people is to use a "tool" to get over whatever is preventing them from bullying without the "tool".
Why do you make stuff up? Not only that but all of the evidence suggests that the judge did exactly as appropriate.
It's like there's a scale in your head and you weigh your opinions on it and until the needle points at "Me! For! The! Win!" you keep adding stuff. Adding whatever it takes until your argument seems heavy enough.
You want to know what's going to happen? "They" will have a new hire and while they are training him, to demonstrate the systems capabilities, they'll tap the phone line of someone famous, or pull up a recording of a phone call of someone famous. Then the new guy will be on duty late one night, bored out of his mind reading the newspaper and come across some story that piques his interest and will tap the phone line of the subject of the story. A few months later he'll be at a barbecue with his neighbors and just as a matter of gossip he'll mention the kinds of capabilities they have without getting into any real details. Six months down the line the neighbor will come over and say that she thinks her husband is cheating on her, and so late the next night he pulls up the guys phone records and sets up an autorecord on the guys phone. Then he gets to wondering about that bitch who dumped him in college and starts recording her calls.
Sometime later a different new guy comes along and is sticking to the rules, only monitoring appropriate calls (whatever "appropriate" means in this sense), one of which is listening in on an investment bank who's name came up while listening to an arabic sounding fellow. During one session he hears about some plans the bank is putting togther for buying up a competitor and gets to thinking that if he just bought a bunch of shares in that bank he'll make a killing in the market.
It's all just human nature. The laws should be in place to ensure that both sides of the equation are sticking to the moral high ground. Which is a point the founders were able to recognize. Too bad dumb asses like Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty don't have the strength of character to stick to a true social and moral high ground.
Ha ha. Funny you say that. Look into Alaskan Native Corporations then laugh if you can.
Kind of like WordPerfect was an imitation of WordStar. 1-2-3 was an imitation of VisiCalc. Etc. The reality is, is that while Microsoft's products are far from perfect, in many cases they really are better. Over time Microsoft really does get shit done. It's the advantage of having operating capital and being able to take the time to build good products.
Here are the guiding principles I use re. CDs->MP3s, DVDs->AVIs, etc:
1) If buy a CD then I have the right to listen to that CD. I have the right to play that CD while hanging out with my friends. I have the right to loan the CD to my friend. I have the right to convert that CD to an MP3. Essentially I believe that I have the right to listen to one form of playback of that piece at a particular maximum quality (that is, the original quality on the CD and any transformation of that CD that I personally make.)
2) What I do not have a right to: make an MP3 and share that with all and sundry via P2P or sneakernet. If I buy a DVD I do not have a right to the CD. If I buy the studio version of an album I do not have the right to the live version of the same songs. If I buy a DVD and at some point they come out with the HD-DVD I do not have the right to that new version. If I buy a CD and rip it to MP3 then sell the CD, I do not have any rights to the MP3.
So even though I was a partner with Pablo Escobar in a used car lot, as long as our used car business dealings are legit I'm in a good place ethically? Sorry, homey don't play that game.
I am curious about this. What is Target's responsibility to a blind person who walks in their front door? Do they have to provide an escort for that person who will describe in precise detail every item in every aisle? Or is it assumed that a blind person would provide their own "seeing eye person" for this task? I don't think too many businesses can actually staff a handful of "seeing eye people" on the chance the a busload of blind folks happen to walk in their front door. In a similar sense, you have to provide wheel chair access but you don't have to provide someone to push the chair.
Which makes me wonder... is it Target's fault that their website, presumedly, doesn't work with a particular screen reader (or with any screen reader) or is it the screen reader developers fault for not building a better screen reader. Prior to computers it wasn't the responsibility of every publisher to provide their books, magazines, newspapers, etc. in braille. Nor does every business have to hire a person to stand at the entrance to their store calling out the name of the business and the type of service to every person who walks past.
What I am hearing from all the people who say "it's not expensive/hard" is that site developers have a choice: make simple websites with very basic layout and functionality, or make two websites. One of them simple and the other rich. Maintaining two parallel sites is going to cost more and making a simple, limited site only, is going to drive customers away. I think those making such claims are just thinking about this issue in a very shallow fashion.
Those suing are trying to get something that they never had before. They are effectively saying that ever advertising circular that arrives in their (physical) mailbox must be structured such that it can be mechanically translated to braille. It should be up to the screen reader developers to solve this problem and not Target.
web rendering and javascript library....
Here's a short list of "OS" apps that'll be dead:
Safari
Mail
iChat AV
Help Viewer
Dashboard
Dictionary
Sherlock
Software Update
Look's like it's not as casual a thing as you want to make it out to be. Then there's a list of several dozen known add-on applications from apple and third parties. The reality is, if you pull WebKit you will not have what people consider a working mac.
The OS providing a HTTP, JavaScript, and HTML subsystems is good for the consumer even if it's bad for Netscape Corp.
No it won't.
You don't believe me? Ok, try this: 1) don't install grub. 2) don't install hotplug. 3) don't install module-init-tools. 4) don't install mount, mkfs, fsck. 5) don't install any 'init'.
Let's see your "just an OS kernel" do something now.
If "will keep on working" means sit there and do nothing, then I guess you are totally correct.
I guess that all depends on what you mean by "uninstalling IE". Do you mean deleting iexplore.exe? That'll not break anything except software that has hardcoded the web browser as iexplore.exe. If you mean removing every bit of code that executes while browsing the web with IE, then yeah, it'll probably break stuff.
When you uninstall Safari are you going to remove WebKit as well? WebKit is the core HTML & JavaScript engine that Safari uses. Uninstalling it is going to kill Dashboard and Mail as well.
So I guess it all depends on how you look at it and where you draw the line about which library is application and which is OS.
Besides, Apple isn't exactly a paragon of openness seeing as they have a closed hardware platform.
What a stupid thing to say. Applications don't have the capability to do proper memory handling in these circumstances. Your OS can look at the system and say "gosh, there's a good 900 meg sitting there unused, I'll use it for file cache" and then when an application comes along and requests some memory the OS easily dumps the cache to disk and give the app the memory. Firefox thinking "gosh, there's a good 900 meg sitting there unused, I'll use it for porn cache" is just stupid because there is absolutely no mechanism for the system to say "hey, that memory isn't *unused*."
Any web browser developer who thinks that making "adaptive" use of gobs if memory is a good idea is a complete moron. Any kind of substantial RAM based web cache is just a bad fucking idea.
I worked as a contractor for the Air Force for a while. They had a real strong policy in place on the Windows domain with the appropriate DLLs that would disallow "weak" passwords. Weak passwords being anything less than six letters; must have three of: upper case, lower case, numbers, symbols; must be substantially different than previous passwords; must not include words in it. Except that their dictionary includes two and three letter words. So you could have a password such as '1xIf%at$3' and it would be invalid since it has two two-letter words 'if' and 'at'. When deciding to implement draconian enforcement of your policies make sure your enforcement processes aren't stupid.
Somebody mod parent up to +20.
Additionally you just took the argument from the driver needs to be open source to the driver being licensed under the linux variant of the GPL.
It is an absolute fallacy that open source automatically means it is being audited by Jesus, Mohammed, and Joseph Smith. That closed source will not be independantly audited. And that even in the instances where there are audits that the findings will be contributed back.
You rattled off a short list of organizations who will audit the linux kernel. But even ignoring the fact that several of which would never do such things, you have gone back to saying "someone" audited the code. Unless you personally did the audit you don't know that it's been audited.
The openness or closedness of code has no bearing on the capacity for an audit. There are more closed source products that have undergone detailed audits than there are open source projects that have undergone the same level of scrutiny. You don't believe me? You might want to check into medical equipment, financial service providers, and airplane automation for a few examples of industries that "give a shit". Anyone sane will have a lot more confidence in those kinds of peer reviews than "it is open source, it must have been audited."
The vast majority of linux code is not audited, it's tested. That is someone gets a patch from someone that they have established a working relationship with. They apply this patch to their own copy of the kernel. They built the kernel and the patch seems to do what it says it does. It seems fairly stable. Pass it up the line so some more people can test it. That's not auditing.
Ultimately what you are saying is you trust someone because you agree with their politics. I trust that nVidia is first and foremost a video card manufacturer, and that their desire to be profitable, their desire to have a good reputation, and their desire to make a quality product will result in a highly performant, featureful, stable driver. Comparably Intel and Via are primarily CPU and chipset manufactuers, video subsystems are not their core competency, are not their main line of revenue, and they have already acknowledged that they do not have an interest in competing with nVidia, and to a lesser extent ATI. They basically have thrown their drivers into the wild to rely upon the altruism of open source developers to support their product.
Go ahead and let your politics consign you to "Dunno what to tell you. Works for me. Maybe you should go download this random patch and try that." And I'll stick with the current best video card and driver combination available for Unix and Unix look-alikes.
No more than you can report kernel bugs for any kernel issue where you have some random hunk of code involved, regardless of whether you have the source available to you or not. The kernel developers aren't going to help you unless they feel like you are only running their code and their code only.
Unless you, personally, have audited the code you don't know if it has been audited or not. If you have kids you'll know what I mean ("I thought Linus was going to do it?" "I thought Theo was going to do it." "I thought Jordan was going to do it.") So the only real argument in that statement is "binary" and that's circular.
I think you are really confused about how computers work. First there is no good reason to go the H264 (mp4) and then to MPEG-2. You might as well go straight to MPEG-2. Secondly, instead of hoping for a $300 video card that'll do that for you, just go buy a $79.00 Hauppage PVR-150 that will encode straight from NTSC/PAL -> MPEG-2 in realtime. Thirdly, I think you are very confused as to "who can help the consumers" since just because it's "video" doesn't mean it has anything at all to do with a "video card". Changing data from one format to another is the balliwick of the CPU and/or a dedicated co-processor.
Yes they do. Or at least enough that the idea is a totally valid way to make judgements. Sure there might be one or two in ten thousand who have been hit with enough shit that they're completely without resources. But everybody else is just not making smart choices.
W.T.F.?
If you are raising your child so dependant on a small group of friends that not being able to call them at any random moment on a cell phone is torture, then in that case perhaps your child should be taken away and placed in therapy so that they don't continue to grow with such dependancy issues.
For thousands of years of civilization people have managed to grow up without cell phones. They learned to make new friends or even pass the time with strangers.
But the Linux kernel has a license and that license doesn't allow you to swap in a different license. The typical "fork" of someone who is dissatisfied coming along and just taking the source and going their own way to make themselves happy isn't possible.
And the difficulity in tracking down and getting permission from every rights holder in the Linux kernel precludes the approach of getting everybody's "aye".
There will be no upgrade of the Linux kernel to a different license.
I can't say about ATI, but what buggyness persists in the nVidia driver? It seems to get fixed faster than, say, the assed up USB stack was fixed. It took over a year for the USB maintainers to get off their asses and stop acting righteous about their particular method of initializing a device and declaring the device "broken" instead of making one little change to how their initialization process and suddenly a whole assload of USB devices start working.
Fixes in the main kernel basically work like this: if the device that is broken is some major component of the system, ie. scsi driver, ide driver, then it gets fixed quickly. If it is some device that for some reason a developer doesn't like, then not only will it take a while to get fixed, but once the fix is in place, it will be removed repeatedly (see neomagic 256 support.) If the device is just something that isn't mainline and the breakage only affects a few users then it can be several kernel releases before a fix is rolled in.
And, no, downloading a patch from some URL supplied in some random IRC channel is not a fix. Fixed is included in the mainline kernel or the standard packages/releases from your distro of choice.
Fork what kernel? The Linux kernel? You can go ahead and fork it all you like, but you won't be able to relicense it since it already has a license and that license does not include a clause that allows you to change that license...
Because, inevitably, the people who grow ganja in their front yard in Jamaica get to thinking "gosh, it'd be nice to have a big fat bundle of American dollars instead of these worthless Jamaican pesos." Then they get to planning how to break our laws.
The amazing thing to me is that everybody wants to bitch about America's drug laws when the US isn't even close to the "worst" when it comes to draconian drug regulation. Try Iran or Indonesia sometime you stupid gits.