John Siracusa, a programmer who has written reviews of Mac OS X for Ars Technica, said that while the new system is more powerful, no one uses the Mac for technical reasons, they use it because of the interface.
It may be true that no one uses MacOS 8/9 for technical reasons, except graphics designers. If so, it's also true that nobody uses Windows for any good reason, except that everyone else does.:-)
From a technical standpoint, Mac OS X is on par with or superior to Linux in many ways. Take a look at IOKit or Quartz or the capability for stackable file systems. Cocoa is also a sweet framework, and Project Builder is a very nice IDE, with all the standard unix tools (gcc, gdb...) in the backend. Why do I say it's technically superior in some ways? Because BSD is technically superior to Linux in some ways, and MacOS X inherits from BSD. Apple has also added some nice extras, as I mentioned earlier.
Linux zealots: yes, go ahead and flame. "There's no way Apple could ever match the holy power of the Penguin," yada yada... Keep in mind OS X isn't the dark side any more--a lot of it is Open Source. Hell, you should even be able to run Linux binaries...
Canada is the centre of development for OpenBSD. With the state of encryption, patent, and copyright laws in many places, do you think there are many other countries in which something like OpenBSD could have been developed?
What legal trends do you see as particularly threatening to OpenBSD or similar projects?
I hear Fernie isn't too bad, either, if you don't want to drive too far from Alberta. Don't bother Theo with questions that could be answered by any Canadian.
...just submit form KY-23 and the Ministry of Health and Records will let you know!
Don't you mean the Ministry of Love (1984 reference for those who Don't Get It)?
This is a great combination. They log everything. If you encrypt it, they kick down your door and take you to a secret court where you are forced to reveal your private keys. Who wants to bet that the next step is to "license" strong crypto or force key escrow?
Britain is dangerously close to becoming a police state.
A man with XXY could be a tetrachromat. This is similar to calico cats--normally, only female cats can be calico, but the occasional rare XXY male can also be calico.
I guess we need to burn the Whitehouse again to get some attention.:-)
Politics are, in some small way, news for nerds. The reason the EFF is fighting such an uphill battle, and the reason the US has DMCA, UCITA, etc., is because geeks don't care enough about the evil that is politics. Slashdot has a civic responsibility to change that, and that responsibility isn't just limited to the US.
OK, this is blatantly off-topic, but then, so is Dave Barry.
Slashdot refused my original idea to mention the Canadian elections, and then rejected my submission last night which declared the winner of the election (Canadian national elections were Nov 27). Now, I know that most people on/. are from the US, but you'd think they'd at least want to know who was leading the country they share the longest unguarded border in the world with (it's Jean Chretien of the Liberals again, with an historic third consecutive majority government).
Instead, we get stories about Dave Barry, or the endless series of US elections stories.
The rest of the world has this impression that most Americans don't have a clue what goes on beyond their borders. Stuff like this doesn't help.
Do you know anythin about OS X? Once you fire up the terminal, you have a standard Unix shell (csh, bash, you pick). OS X is basically BSD + Mach kernel plus some cool extras (XML property lists, etc).
Learning OS X CLI is as much qualification to be a Unix sys-admin as playing with Linux. In fact, for the technical nit-pickers out there, OS X is more of a Unix than Linux (because of BSD).
I did a research project on sleep deprivation (titled "The effects of sleep deprivation on academic performance", and no, I wasn't the test subject), so I know a bit about the field.
First of all, there are many different opinions, and little, if any, consensus about even basic things. Experts disagree about many things, and I've seen studies that completely contradicted the findings of this one.
Here are some highlights of my research
A study of surgical house staff and medical students found no effect of cumulative partial sleep deprivation on learning and long-term recall. Browne, B. J., T. Van Susteren, D. R. Onsager, D. Simpson, B. Salaymeh, and R. E. Condon. "Influence of sleep deprivation on learning among surgical house staff and medical students." Surgery 115.5 (1994): 604-610).
A meta-analysis of 19 other studies found that partial sleep deprivation (less than 5 hours in a night) is actually worse than total sleep deprivation. Pilcher, J. J., and A. I. Huffcutt. "Effects of sleep deprivation on performance: a meta-analysis." Sleep 19.4 (1996): 318-326.
There is a relationship between sleep quality and mood. Pilcher, J. J., D. R. Ginter, and B. Sadowsky. "Sleep quality versus sleep quantity: relationships between sleep and measures of health, well-being and sleepiness in college students." Journal of Psychosomatic Research 42.6 (1997): 583-596.
The effects of sleep deprivation are cumulative, but can be reversed by two nights of "recovery" sleep (10 hours a night). Dinges, D.F., F. Pack, K. Williams, K. A. Gillen, J. W. Powell, G. E. Ott, C. Aptowicz, and A. I. Pack. "Cumulative sleepiness, mood disturbance, and psychomotor vigilance performance decrements during a week of sleep restricted to 4-5 hours per night." Sleep 20.4 (April 1997): 267-277.
There, I've refuted the main claims of the new study, namely that sleep deprivation affects memory, that you can't make up for sleep deprivation by sleeping more on following days, and that a little sleep is better than none. Unlike most Slashdot posts, I've even included my sources.
Here's the lesson for the day, as master Yoda might say it:
One study does not a fact make.
Also, note that bit about partial sleep deprivation being worse than total sleep deprivation--that came from a meta-analysis of 19 studies, and was a very strong correlation. Perhaps pulling the occasional all-nighter is better than staying up a few hours late every night...
Let's face it, if you didn't have the US on your border driving down prices through ruthless competition, you'd still be going ga-ga over the pushbutton phone.
Let's face it, if you didn't have Canadians around, you wouldn't have telephones, period. Ever heard of Alexander Graham Bell (Bell as in Bell Telephone), the guy who invented the phone? He was Canadian.
That said, I'm against government regulation in most cases. Currently, to get ADSL in BC (a province in Canada) takes months. If Telus was allowed to charge whatever they wanted, it would be more expensive, but there would be much less waiting... Those who were willing to pay more would get the service first. Later, the cost would come down and everyone would be onboard.
When the US and Britain were communicating about Enigma-related matters, they used their Enigma clones to encrypt the traffic. The Germans never guessed...
Look up the inverse-square law, fool. Unless you're hugging them, you have nothing to worry about. The phone is a centimetre from their brain, and a metre from yours. That means you're getting one ten-thousandth of the radiation they're getting.
How, exactly, do you propose tagging the refugee camp and everything in it?
I don't. First of all, why would you be shooting at something that looked anything like a refugee camp (military camps would have lots of metal munitions and weapons, which refugee camps would presumably lack)? That's what radar signatures are for... Tanks look different than starving people on radar...
remove the human, and the first really major f*ckup will cause a huge uproar
Exactly. Even if the machines are more accurate than people, there will be an outcry the first time they screw up.
Ever heard of IFF (Interogate Friendly or Foe)? It's a transponder system used by all sorts of NATO vehicles and aircraft to avoid friendly fire. Also, the F-22 can apparently identify the specific type of vehicles (both friendly and enemy) with 99% accuracy by radar signature. With newer technology, we should be able to do even better.
The humans-must-pull-trigger rule is just a feel-good safeguard to avoid Terminator 2 scenarios. I imagine computers will soon surpass humans in accuracy in making those kinds of decisions (if they haven't already), but it will take much longer before people will be comfortable with the idea of machines that have the sole discression of using deadly force.
I seem to remember reading that the "Golden Ears" test for the SDMI challenge simply required the "hacked" songs to sound better than a 64-bit MP3. That seems like a pretty reasonable standard to me. I'm not too picky, but anything under 128-bit sounds like crap.
All you people screaming at the RIAA for their supposedly bogus Golden Ears test should calm down and take a few breaths:-)
Granted, I don't see the point of watermarking, period. If watermarking is used to control playback, you can always convert to a non-controlled format like Ogg or MP3 (through analog, if necessary). If watermarking is used to trace whoever first "steals" music, someone will just buy the music with fake ID, post in on Napster/Gnutella/Freenet, and then the RIAA will have no recourse.
Can somebody explain to me how watermarking is actually supposed to stop piracy (even if it isn't broken)?
It's pretty common for government to screw over particle physicists. It happened here in British Columbia with the TRIUMF cyclotron (which is the largest of its kind in the world, I believe). There was a proposed upgrade called the KAON facility, and the government had agreed to match private donations to fund its construction.
A few weeks from the funding deadline, the fundraisers had raised almost all the necessary funds, and had a donor lined up and ready to give the remaining amount, when the government backed out, claiming that they hadn't made the deadline (even though it hadn't passed yet, and they were going to have sufficient funds). While TRIUMF is still in use, it can't reach the energies needed for most particle physics research nowadays, so it's been relegated to other tasks (materials science, muon spin rotation experiments, medical research...)
The Superconducting SuperCollider that got cancelled in the US is another example of government backing out of important research...
Nobody realizes that basic scientific research nearly always pays off in the long run, in spades... Everyone is too obsessed with the short term. Where would our CD players, our computers, our satellites, and our microwaves be without basic scientific research in fundamental physics?
Here's an email that's been circulating through the physics department at my university. It does a pretty good job of explaining what's up with LEP, and why it would be nice to keep it going for just a little while longer. The short of it is that they think they've found Higgs, but need a bit more data to be sure.
Anyway, here's the email:
-------------------
Hi,
Since we've been getting a lot of enquiries about the reports of a Higgs
Boson 'discovered' at LEP, I thought I'd give you more info.
There are 4 experimental groups taking data at the LEP electron-positron
collider. On Friday Nov.3, the each of the 4 experimental groups
presented our analyses to the LEPC (LEP Experimental Committee) i.e. the
Research Board, at CERN. And one analysis combining the results of all 4
expts was also presented.
The LEP experiments were all scheduled to stop data taking on Nov.1, after
over 11 years of experimental data taking -- probing & testing of the
Standard Model to unprecedented precision. Stopping and dismantling LEP is
necessary before the installation of the LHC accelerator and detectors may
begin, as LHC uses the LEP tunnels. (LHC is the Large Hadron proton-proton
Collider, which has discovering the Higgs Boson as a centerpiece of its
physics program)
LEP reached the highest energies ever this year, with 208.2 GeV as the
highest energy reach possible, (limited by the number of RF cavities) but
the accelerator is so unstable at this energy that less than 4% of this
year's data was taken up there. The bulk of this year's data was in the
205-207 GeV range.
Every experiment sees "Higgs candidates". These are events which look like
e+ e- --> Higgs ZBoson, with each the Higgs and ZBoson subsequently
decaying. For 3 of the 4 of the expts, the "candidates" seen are
absolutely and entirely consistent with what's expected from known
Standard Model processes i.e. background. ( 2 Z's, 2 W's, and other
processes which can look very similar to ZH)
3 of the 4 LEP groups have completed analyses which result in upper limits
on Standard Model Higgs masses. 1 (ALEPH) reports a 115 GeV Higgs with a
significance equivalent to a 3.4 sigma excess over background
expectations. When all 4 expts combine our data, this diminishes to a 2.9
sigma effect for a 115 GeV SM Higgs boson.
Our UBC group is a part of the OPAL experiment, one of the four expts.
OPAL rules out a Standard Model Higgs boson at masses under 208GeV at 95%
confidence level. Our OPAL bottom line can be seen in a talk by Arnulf
Quadt of OPAL, at the LEPC presentations:
http://www.physics.ubc.ca/~janis/arnulf.ps If we are to interpret our
results in terms of a Higgs Boson at 115 GeV, we have a 1.3 sigma excess
over background processes at this mass. We have a 2.6 sigma effect at 107
GeV. You give us a mass, we can tell you if we see an excess above, or
depletion below the background expectations. (the 2.6sigma at 207 GeV is
the largest deviation from expected background at high energies)
The combined 4 experiments talk at LEPC by Peter Igo-Kemenes, incidently
also an OPAL collaborator, (emailed to you by Douglas) may be seen at
http://lephiggs.web.cern.ch/LEPHIGGS/talks/pik_l epc_nov3_2000.ps
You can see the ALEPH LEPC talk at:
http://alephwww.cern.ch/ALPUB/seminar/lepc_nov00 .pdf
Judge it for yourself. I'd say we are in an interesting situation and it
woudl be shame to stop the LEP program now with these interesting hints
from ALEPH. With another year of data taking at LEP (and hence a year
delay in the LHC) we would be able to confirm or refute the existence of a
115 GeV Higgs at a honking 5 sigma level... what we usually refere to as
the "discovery level" It would be very exciting if we could indisputably
discover the Higgs Boson. But I would say we do not have a Higgs Boson at
this time.
CERN has not issued any press releases on this matter (as of Saturday
evening). Only the LA Times has. Even NY Times has not.
According to ABCNews, Bush wins Florida, giving him 271 electoral college votes, for a win in the presidential election. Looking at the voter breakdown for Florida, we see that if all those Nader voters had voted Gore instead, Gore would have won Florida.
Nader cost Gore the election
Say what you will about Bush and Gore, but Nader is a fool. Guess this is karma for Perot losing the GOP that election....
Check out FairTunes for an example of how some Canadians are rewarding artists without stifling the free music scene.
I can't say the response in Canada to MP3s has been too much different in nature than the US, although it's probably less heavy-handed.
At the University of British Columbia (yes, that's in Canada, in Vancouver), Napster is officially persona non grata, but it's not actually blocked, and they don't seem to care unless you're pigging bandwidth. The University of Victoria has been less lenient, and has forced some students to uninstall Napster while campus security watched, with the threat of suspension if caught using Napster again. I'm not too sure about other universities in Canada, but I suspect they're somewhere between UBC and UVic.
Remember, Canada doesn't have the DMCA, or UCITA, and the MPAA and RIAA aren't based here. That's got to count for something, too:-)
Note that the article says that Napster will develop a membership-based service, not that they will end their free service.
They may do both in parallel, shutting down the free service only if they are legally required to. Or, they may just cripple the free service in some way... In any case, people are just going to jump ship to Scour, MX, Gnutella...
This is actually a stupid move on the part of the music industry, since, without a legal precedent, they'll have to jump through all the hoops again to bring down those other services. If they'd just stuck with their guns and brought down Napster, they'd have much more clout to threaten those other services.
What great timing--I'm in the midst of an argument with a friend as to why encryption is important to the average user. The funny thing is, he's a serious warez pirate, yet he doesn't see how anyone would care about what he does...
Anyway, this just goes to show that we should all encrypt everything...
Which reminds me: What about Jim Crow Laws? If we stuck to the libertarian philosophy, those uppity niggers would still be sitting at the back of the bus and pissing in seperate stalls.
You totally don't understand the libertarian philosophy. The heart of the libertarian philosophy is personal freedom. Blacks would never have been discriminated against if everyone was libertarian. You seem to be confusing libertarianism with anarchism.
Here's the deal: Government is a player in the economy. Since there have been goverments, they have been players in the economy. Governments will ALWAYS be players in the economy.
Yes, government has a role in the economy, but it's a small one. Government should ensure that there are no monopolies, that trade is honest, and that there are no externalities in markets (or that, if there are, they are compensated for). Externalities are when someone other than the buyer and seller are affected by trade, i.e. kids breathing in lead from leaded gas. In cases such as that, government should impose economic penalties equal to the cost of cleaning up the pollution (and actually clean it up). Personal and corporate responsibilty are keystones of the libertarian philosophy.
Read up more on libertarianism before you bash it. Yes, there are extremists. Ignore them. Every ideology has them...
You could always use PostGreSQL, not watch movies (did anyone die from not watching movies?), avoid going on cruises...
You also have a choice when it comes to CPUs. Think AMD is less evil than Intel? Buy an Athlon. Intel and AMD will get the message, and change their ways, if enough people care. Not all corporations are inherently evil.
The only time you really have no choice is if one company has a monopoly for an essential product or service (sound like government to you?)
Slashdot Mirror
John Siracusa, a programmer who has written reviews of Mac OS X for Ars Technica, said that while the new system is more powerful, no one uses the Mac for technical reasons, they use it because of the interface.
:-)
It may be true that no one uses MacOS 8/9 for technical reasons, except graphics designers. If so, it's also true that nobody uses Windows for any good reason, except that everyone else does.
From a technical standpoint, Mac OS X is on par with or superior to Linux in many ways. Take a look at IOKit or Quartz or the capability for stackable file systems. Cocoa is also a sweet framework, and Project Builder is a very nice IDE, with all the standard unix tools (gcc, gdb...) in the backend. Why do I say it's technically superior in some ways? Because BSD is technically superior to Linux in some ways, and MacOS X inherits from BSD. Apple has also added some nice extras, as I mentioned earlier.
Linux zealots: yes, go ahead and flame. "There's no way Apple could ever match the holy power of the Penguin," yada yada... Keep in mind OS X isn't the dark side any more--a lot of it is Open Source. Hell, you should even be able to run Linux binaries...
Canada is the centre of development for OpenBSD. With the state of encryption, patent, and copyright laws in many places, do you think there are many other countries in which something like OpenBSD could have been developed?
What legal trends do you see as particularly threatening to OpenBSD or similar projects?
Whistler/Blackcomb.
I hear Fernie isn't too bad, either, if you don't want to drive too far from Alberta. Don't bother Theo with questions that could be answered by any Canadian.
...just submit form KY-23 and the Ministry of Health and Records will let you know!
Don't you mean the Ministry of Love (1984 reference for those who Don't Get It)?
This is a great combination. They log everything. If you encrypt it, they kick down your door and take you to a secret court where you are forced to reveal your private keys. Who wants to bet that the next step is to "license" strong crypto or force key escrow?
Britain is dangerously close to becoming a police state.
A man with XXY could be a tetrachromat. This is similar to calico cats--normally, only female cats can be calico, but the occasional rare XXY male can also be calico.
I guess we need to burn the Whitehouse again to get some attention. :-)
Politics are, in some small way, news for nerds. The reason the EFF is fighting such an uphill battle, and the reason the US has DMCA, UCITA, etc., is because geeks don't care enough about the evil that is politics. Slashdot has a civic responsibility to change that, and that responsibility isn't just limited to the US.
OK, this is blatantly off-topic, but then, so is Dave Barry.
/. are from the US, but you'd think they'd at least want to know who was leading the country they share the longest unguarded border in the world with (it's Jean Chretien of the Liberals again, with an historic third consecutive majority government).
Slashdot refused my original idea to mention the Canadian elections, and then rejected my submission last night which declared the winner of the election (Canadian national elections were Nov 27). Now, I know that most people on
Instead, we get stories about Dave Barry, or the endless series of US elections stories.
The rest of the world has this impression that most Americans don't have a clue what goes on beyond their borders. Stuff like this doesn't help.
One disgruntled Canuck
Do you know anythin about OS X? Once you fire up the terminal, you have a standard Unix shell (csh, bash, you pick). OS X is basically BSD + Mach kernel plus some cool extras (XML property lists, etc).
Learning OS X CLI is as much qualification to be a Unix sys-admin as playing with Linux. In fact, for the technical nit-pickers out there, OS X is more of a Unix than Linux (because of BSD).
There still are lots of BBSs out there. Try telnetting to xgames.dhs.org if you want to play classic door games like BRE and LORD...
I did a research project on sleep deprivation (titled "The effects of sleep deprivation on academic performance", and no, I wasn't the test subject), so I know a bit about the field.
First of all, there are many different opinions, and little, if any, consensus about even basic things. Experts disagree about many things, and I've seen studies that completely contradicted the findings of this one.
Here are some highlights of my research
A study of surgical house staff and medical students found no effect of cumulative partial sleep deprivation on learning and long-term recall.
Browne, B. J., T. Van Susteren, D. R. Onsager, D. Simpson, B. Salaymeh, and R. E. Condon. "Influence of sleep deprivation on learning among surgical house staff and medical students." Surgery 115.5 (1994): 604-610).
A meta-analysis of 19 other studies found that partial sleep deprivation (less than 5 hours in a night) is actually worse than total sleep deprivation.
Pilcher, J. J., and A. I. Huffcutt. "Effects of sleep deprivation on performance: a meta-analysis." Sleep 19.4 (1996): 318-326.
There is a relationship between sleep quality and mood.
Pilcher, J. J., D. R. Ginter, and B. Sadowsky. "Sleep quality versus sleep quantity: relationships between sleep and measures of health, well-being and sleepiness in college students." Journal of Psychosomatic Research 42.6 (1997): 583-596.
The effects of sleep deprivation are cumulative, but can be reversed by two nights of "recovery" sleep (10 hours a night).
Dinges, D.F., F. Pack, K. Williams, K. A. Gillen, J. W. Powell, G. E. Ott, C. Aptowicz, and A. I. Pack. "Cumulative sleepiness, mood disturbance, and psychomotor vigilance performance decrements during a week of sleep restricted to 4-5 hours per night." Sleep 20.4 (April 1997): 267-277.
There, I've refuted the main claims of the new study, namely that sleep deprivation affects memory, that you can't make up for sleep deprivation by sleeping more on following days, and that a little sleep is better than none. Unlike most Slashdot posts, I've even included my sources.
Here's the lesson for the day, as master Yoda might say it:
One study does not a fact make.
Also, note that bit about partial sleep deprivation being worse than total sleep deprivation--that came from a meta-analysis of 19 studies, and was a very strong correlation. Perhaps pulling the occasional all-nighter is better than staying up a few hours late every night...
Let's face it, if you didn't have the US on your border driving down prices through ruthless competition, you'd still be going ga-ga over the pushbutton phone.
Let's face it, if you didn't have Canadians around, you wouldn't have telephones, period. Ever heard of Alexander Graham Bell (Bell as in Bell Telephone), the guy who invented the phone? He was Canadian.
That said, I'm against government regulation in most cases. Currently, to get ADSL in BC (a province in Canada) takes months. If Telus was allowed to charge whatever they wanted, it would be more expensive, but there would be much less waiting... Those who were willing to pay more would get the service first. Later, the cost would come down and everyone would be onboard.
When the US and Britain were communicating about Enigma-related matters, they used their Enigma clones to encrypt the traffic. The Germans never guessed...
Look up the inverse-square law, fool. Unless you're hugging them, you have nothing to worry about. The phone is a centimetre from their brain, and a metre from yours. That means you're getting one ten-thousandth of the radiation they're getting.
...is hosted on AOL.
Is anyone surprised?
How, exactly, do you propose tagging the refugee camp and everything in it?
I don't. First of all, why would you be shooting at something that looked anything like a refugee camp (military camps would have lots of metal munitions and weapons, which refugee camps would presumably lack)? That's what radar signatures are for... Tanks look different than starving people on radar...
remove the human, and the first really major f*ckup will cause a huge uproar
Exactly. Even if the machines are more accurate than people, there will be an outcry the first time they screw up.
Ever heard of IFF (Interogate Friendly or Foe)? It's a transponder system used by all sorts of NATO vehicles and aircraft to avoid friendly fire. Also, the F-22 can apparently identify the specific type of vehicles (both friendly and enemy) with 99% accuracy by radar signature. With newer technology, we should be able to do even better.
The humans-must-pull-trigger rule is just a feel-good safeguard to avoid Terminator 2 scenarios. I imagine computers will soon surpass humans in accuracy in making those kinds of decisions (if they haven't already), but it will take much longer before people will be comfortable with the idea of machines that have the sole discression of using deadly force.
I seem to remember reading that the "Golden Ears" test for the SDMI challenge simply required the "hacked" songs to sound better than a 64-bit MP3. That seems like a pretty reasonable standard to me. I'm not too picky, but anything under 128-bit sounds like crap.
:-)
All you people screaming at the RIAA for their supposedly bogus Golden Ears test should calm down and take a few breaths
Granted, I don't see the point of watermarking, period. If watermarking is used to control playback, you can always convert to a non-controlled format like Ogg or MP3 (through analog, if necessary). If watermarking is used to trace whoever first "steals" music, someone will just buy the music with fake ID, post in on Napster/Gnutella/Freenet, and then the RIAA will have no recourse.
Can somebody explain to me how watermarking is actually supposed to stop piracy (even if it isn't broken)?
It's pretty common for government to screw over particle physicists. It happened here in British Columbia with the TRIUMF cyclotron (which is the largest of its kind in the world, I believe). There was a proposed upgrade called the KAON facility, and the government had agreed to match private donations to fund its construction.
A few weeks from the funding deadline, the fundraisers had raised almost all the necessary funds, and had a donor lined up and ready to give the remaining amount, when the government backed out, claiming that they hadn't made the deadline (even though it hadn't passed yet, and they were going to have sufficient funds). While TRIUMF is still in use, it can't reach the energies needed for most particle physics research nowadays, so it's been relegated to other tasks (materials science, muon spin rotation experiments, medical research...)
The Superconducting SuperCollider that got cancelled in the US is another example of government backing out of important research...
Nobody realizes that basic scientific research nearly always pays off in the long run, in spades... Everyone is too obsessed with the short term. Where would our CD players, our computers, our satellites, and our microwaves be without basic scientific research in fundamental physics?
Anyway, here's the email:
-------------------
According to ABCNews, Bush wins Florida, giving him 271 electoral college votes, for a win in the presidential election. Looking at the voter breakdown for Florida, we see that if all those Nader voters had voted Gore instead, Gore would have won Florida.
Nader cost Gore the election
Say what you will about Bush and Gore, but Nader is a fool. Guess this is karma for Perot losing the GOP that election....
Check out FairTunes for an example of how some Canadians are rewarding artists without stifling the free music scene.
:-)
I can't say the response in Canada to MP3s has been too much different in nature than the US, although it's probably less heavy-handed.
At the University of British Columbia (yes, that's in Canada, in Vancouver), Napster is officially persona non grata, but it's not actually blocked, and they don't seem to care unless you're pigging bandwidth. The University of Victoria has been less lenient, and has forced some students to uninstall Napster while campus security watched, with the threat of suspension if caught using Napster again. I'm not too sure about other universities in Canada, but I suspect they're somewhere between UBC and UVic.
Remember, Canada doesn't have the DMCA, or UCITA, and the MPAA and RIAA aren't based here. That's got to count for something, too
Note that the article says that Napster will develop a membership-based service, not that they will end their free service.
They may do both in parallel, shutting down the free service only if they are legally required to. Or, they may just cripple the free service in some way... In any case, people are just going to jump ship to Scour, MX, Gnutella...
This is actually a stupid move on the part of the music industry, since, without a legal precedent, they'll have to jump through all the hoops again to bring down those other services. If they'd just stuck with their guns and brought down Napster, they'd have much more clout to threaten those other services.
What great timing--I'm in the midst of an argument with a friend as to why encryption is important to the average user. The funny thing is, he's a serious warez pirate, yet he doesn't see how anyone would care about what he does...
Anyway, this just goes to show that we should all encrypt everything...
Which reminds me: What about Jim Crow Laws? If we stuck to the libertarian philosophy, those uppity niggers would still be sitting at the back of the bus and pissing in seperate stalls.
You totally don't understand the libertarian philosophy. The heart of the libertarian philosophy is personal freedom. Blacks would never have been discriminated against if everyone was libertarian. You seem to be confusing libertarianism with anarchism.
Here's the deal: Government is a player in the economy. Since there have been goverments, they have been players in the economy. Governments will ALWAYS be players in the economy.
Yes, government has a role in the economy, but it's a small one. Government should ensure that there are no monopolies, that trade is honest, and that there are no externalities in markets (or that, if there are, they are compensated for). Externalities are when someone other than the buyer and seller are affected by trade, i.e. kids breathing in lead from leaded gas. In cases such as that, government should impose economic penalties equal to the cost of cleaning up the pollution (and actually clean it up). Personal and corporate responsibilty are keystones of the libertarian philosophy.
Read up more on libertarianism before you bash it. Yes, there are extremists. Ignore them. Every ideology has them...
You could always use PostGreSQL, not watch movies (did anyone die from not watching movies?), avoid going on cruises...
You also have a choice when it comes to CPUs. Think AMD is less evil than Intel? Buy an Athlon. Intel and AMD will get the message, and change their ways, if enough people care. Not all corporations are inherently evil.
The only time you really have no choice is if one company has a monopoly for an essential product or service (sound like government to you?)