Because you are apparently incapable of seeing the dots that were connected to arrive at those conclusions?
No, because those conclusions have been stated *without any supporting evidence*. Hence, they are an example of "Proof by assertion".
Some examples of things that might be considered "evidence":
* An examination of major medical discoveries pertaining to cures and treatments of disabling sicknesses and injuries over the last ~200 years or so, showing that for-profit private industry has been the only significant contributor.
* Proof that culturally significant contributions in art, music and literature have only commenced since the invention of copyright.
* Data demonstrating people who do not purchase their first copy of a particular instance music subseuqently never purchase a copy.
* Data demonstrating people who download movies subsequently never see those movies in the cinema or purchase them on DVDs, or other personal media.
Independent, scientific, peer-reviewed studies demonstrating these sorts of things would go a long way towards supporting the argument that "Intellectual Property" - both as a concept and *especially* as practiced today - is "essential" to the existence of modern society.
If IP isn't respected, it won't be profittable for corporations to spend multi-millions discovering new drugs, or making big budget movies, or writing hugely complicated commercial software.
These are the assertions that are lacking evidence. Waving your hand and saying "because they will", is not evidence.
hmmm, i didnt think it was neccesaru to spell out the obvious but apparently it is.
Waving your hand and calling it "obvious" does not make it fact.
drugs companies will not invest ten million dollars in a new drug if that drug is trivially copied the next day by a rival who spends zero on development. To do so, would be to effectivly just cripple you own competitiveness, and drive yourself out of business by increased relative costs. This is not rocket science.
Drugs are not successfully reverse-engineered, tested, approved and mass-produced in "a day" (or even "a year" for that matter). Your assumption is broken.
the concept of IP is absolutely necesary because it is the ONLY viable way of ensuring that research and development costs of a product can be recouped by those who front up the cash.
More proof by assertion. Sure is popular when it comes to riding the IP gravy train !
99% of people with even a basic grasp of economics understand this.
I was under the impression economists dealt with facts and figures, not hand-wavy assertions.
I look forward to you explaining to me how drugs companies will invest money in a product in a situation where IP rights did not exist.
Same way they do now.
I won't hold my breath though, seeing as though it appears that all the major drugs companies investing money in research are firm defenders of their IP. SOme might suggest that the need for IP is flipping obvious, others could point to the fact that those doing the investment defend their IP (and conclude quite logically that they would not invest without a gurantee that their ip is defended).
Of course. Who wouldn't defend a situation that gives you a government sanctioned and enforced monopoly ?
I'm sure you find this post 'worthless' and 'flamebait' because it doesnt justify you illegally copying music.
I find it worthless because, well, it's worthless. It's nothing more than rhetorical, unsupported assertions.
From a more philosophical perspective, it's morally repugnant because it considers greater corporate profitability a more important goal than treatment of illness.
I guess it doesnt matter if we dont get new pharmaceutical research, as long as your ipod hard disk is full huh?
This argument would carry slightly more weight if you could demonstrate how the only useful pharmaceutical research in the last, say, two hundred years has originated from for-profit private enterprise.
You want to see the Enron exec go to jail. Fine. But don't start whining when the smaller fry have to serve their time as well.
There is a vast, vast gulf of difference between premediated corporate fraud causing direct and demonstrable loss, and casual, non-profit copyright infringement. So vast a gulf, in fact, that it's difficult to see how the two can even be considered vaguely similar.
I strongly disagree that prison poses any sort of meaningful deterrent. Prison inmates are almost completely made up of people who:
a) Knew they were breaking the law and would end up in prison if caught, but didn't care.
b) Knew they were breaking the law and would end up in prison if caught, but were prepared to accept that risk and/or consequence.
c) Didn't know they were breaking the law (possibly due to "temporary insanity" - ie: "crimes of passion") and/or didn't believe that incarceration would be a consequence of being caught.
On a more opionated level, I don't think prison should be viewed or treated as "punishment". It should only be used to a) segregate sociopaths from the rest of society and b) offer the possibility for rehabilitation to occur.
As extortionate and ridiculous as the MPAA/RIAA are, at the beginning, middle and end of the day the crime is mass-distributing stolen goods, and that's all there is to it.
Copyright infringement is not theft. Legally, morally, ethically, practically, hypothetically, or any other *ally you care to think of.
What? You think that because the crime was committed on computers, he should spend five months without a computer? Be serious.
No, I would think so because it wasn't a crime that in any way, shape or form deserves jail time.
Murderers, rapists, violent criminals. Those are the kinds of people who deserve to be in jail. Not someone who runs a web site showing _other people_ where *they* can break the law.
There is no elaboration. There is no evidence. There isn't even an argument. Merely a list of conclusions which are assumed to be true because the poster states they are true. A textbook example of Proof By Assertion.
Cliffski's post actually has reasons and examples for preserving IP. NOT a worthless post.
I am searching this post in vain for even the slightest shred of evidence to support:
so you werent planning on any drugs being discovered in future, any big budget movies being made, or any major pieces of commercial software ever being made ever again?
nice policy, pity it spells the total death of the worlds economy, and probably kicks 90% of slashdot readers out of work.
But there isn't any. Which is fairly standard from the "don't steal music" crowd, so it's to be expected, but I'm curious as to why you think there's something there apart from Chicken Little-esque alarmism.
I see. so you werent planning on any drugs being discovered in future, any big budget movies being made, or any major pieces of commercial software ever being made ever again?
The solution is regularly teaching business ethics to students. Perhaps even make it mandatory to earn a degree. Certainly mandatory for a graduate degree.
Teach ethics to anyone whose age has hit double digits is closing the door well after the horse has bolted.
...Then the battle is already lost. You may as well close up shop and go home.
Which is not to say there aren't unscrupulous people out there who will abuse positions of trust, but this is a HR issue, not a technical/security one (and is most certainly not one limited to the IT department).
In almost every case it comes down to visas and border controls that stop humans freely moving around their planet. On the surface it looks like a good idea, but it's absolutely ridiculous that a human shouldn't be able to freely roam the public spaces of their own planet!
No more ridiculous than you not being allowed to walk into someone's home, eat their food and sleep in their bed without their permission...
The collapse of residential computer security has meant that virtually nobody can keep their Windows machine secure anymore. Not even gurus. There are just way too many 0-day exploits for browsers and others out there, even for Firefox.
Whoa there, cowboy. It's not particularly difficult for knowledgable users (and especially "gurus") to keep a Windows install secure.
* Don't run as Administrator
* Don't use known buggy software
* Don't run unknown binaries
* Avoid the seedier side of the internet unless special precautions are taken (eg: running the browser in a dedicated account with extremely low privileges)
Or, basically, *exactly the same precautions you take on any platform*.
The problem is that they're plugging a Merom (Core 2 Duo) into motherboards using the chipset for the original Core Duo (they are forwards-compatible), which is how Mac Mini owners have been upgrading to Meroms for several months now). The Core Duo is 32-bit, while the Merom supports 64-bit. However, the old chipset on the motherboard only supports 32-bit, which means only 32-bit addressing for RAM, which means 4GB maximum. Now, the reason for the 3-4GB discrepancy is the way PCI-e interfaces directly with the memory bus. So video card VRAM etc. eats into that first 1GB.
But is it worth losing that ~750M to get dual-channel operation ?
What's more interesting to consider is whether or not localities where region coding has been deemed anti-competitive (eg: here in Australia), can you take your "broken" laptop back to the manufacturer after using up all your region changes and have them replace it (or the drive, at least) as a warranty claim ?
Apple's approach is that a user technically-minded enough to be remoting into a Windows machine will have purchased their own cheap two-button mouse or selected the Mighty Mouse option on order.
Which is great if you're in a situation where an external mouse is an option. On the road, it frequently isn't.
It will never end, because the two-button mouse is an artifact of bad GUI design that confuses the majority of computer users and leads to badly designed applications. Believe it or not, Apple has done user-testing on this, and Windows itself is a good example of what would happen due to the fact you needed a second button to get anything done in it when you remoted in.
There is nothing in Windows that _requires_ a right mouse button - it just makes a lot of things faster (which is what it's there for). The gross underuse of context menus in OS X for accelerating tasks is a failing of its UI.
On the laptops - *especially* the "Pro" ones - two buttons should be a BTO option.
It doesn't matter if these security measures are there if noone uses them.
It does when Microsoft are being criticised for "not fixing Windows's security". Microsoft can't *make* people run their computers securely.
Windows still ships with new user accounts being administrator by default.
An unfortunate, but understandable choice that has little impact in the real world. Elevated privileges are unnecessary for 99% of the things malicious software does. Plus, it's a configuration issue, not a technical deficiency.
The default group policy is very permissive, and acls do nothing versus the administrator user.
ACLs do a lot more "versus the Administrator user" than any unix permissions do "versus" a superuser.
If windows had decent sudo capabilities (yes I have used runas and credentials storing in shortcuts), which make it painful for the average user to run as anything other than Administrator.
This is certainly something that can be improved, but it's a UI issue, not a capabilities deficiency.
Poor security by default is the real issue. Corporate entities can afford to create group policy and run users as non admins and have things like standard images if systems do get infected. A home user does not have the resources. Security needs to be on by default.
A home user does not have the resources on any platform.
Take a look at the reports from the MIT spam conferences. The claim of "security capabilities" of Windows versus those of most other operating systems is nonsense for anyone with experience in the field.
It's not nonsense for anyone who knows about the internals of those systems, however.
But it was 25 percent *more* (at least compared the $1999 MacBook). And you *still* have to waste your time reinstalling Windows to get rid of all the circus-ware that comes on the Dell.
Do Dell even have an equivalent ? I've been waiting for these new Macs to start shopping for a new laptop (work's paying), but a quick look on Dell's (and other's for that matter) Australia site would suggest that the only way to get a Core *2* baed machine is to get an _Inspiron_. Having dealt with Dell's crappy consumer notebook line[0] before, I have no interest in buying another.
Who else sells "business" laptops in a similar form factor using Core 2 ?
[0] The "Latitude" and "Precision" business-oriented lines are, IME, completely different animals.
Slashdot Mirror
Because you are apparently incapable of seeing the dots that were connected to arrive at those conclusions?
No, because those conclusions have been stated *without any supporting evidence*. Hence, they are an example of "Proof by assertion".
Some examples of things that might be considered "evidence":
* An examination of major medical discoveries pertaining to cures and treatments of disabling sicknesses and injuries over the last ~200 years or so, showing that for-profit private industry has been the only significant contributor.
* Proof that culturally significant contributions in art, music and literature have only commenced since the invention of copyright.
* Data demonstrating people who do not purchase their first copy of a particular instance music subseuqently never purchase a copy.
* Data demonstrating people who download movies subsequently never see those movies in the cinema or purchase them on DVDs, or other personal media.
Independent, scientific, peer-reviewed studies demonstrating these sorts of things would go a long way towards supporting the argument that "Intellectual Property" - both as a concept and *especially* as practiced today - is "essential" to the existence of modern society.
If IP isn't respected, it won't be profittable for corporations to spend multi-millions discovering new drugs, or making big budget movies, or writing hugely complicated commercial software.
These are the assertions that are lacking evidence. Waving your hand and saying "because they will", is not evidence.
hmmm, i didnt think it was neccesaru to spell out the obvious but apparently it is.
Waving your hand and calling it "obvious" does not make it fact.
drugs companies will not invest ten million dollars in a new drug if that drug is trivially copied the next day by a rival who spends zero on development. To do so, would be to effectivly just cripple you own competitiveness, and drive yourself out of business by increased relative costs. This is not rocket science.
Drugs are not successfully reverse-engineered, tested, approved and mass-produced in "a day" (or even "a year" for that matter). Your assumption is broken.
the concept of IP is absolutely necesary because it is the ONLY viable way of ensuring that research and development costs of a product can be recouped by those who front up the cash.
More proof by assertion. Sure is popular when it comes to riding the IP gravy train !
99% of people with even a basic grasp of economics understand this.
I was under the impression economists dealt with facts and figures, not hand-wavy assertions.
I look forward to you explaining to me how drugs companies will invest money in a product in a situation where IP rights did not exist.
Same way they do now.
I won't hold my breath though, seeing as though it appears that all the major drugs companies investing money in research are firm defenders of their IP. SOme might suggest that the need for IP is flipping obvious, others could point to the fact that those doing the investment defend their IP (and conclude quite logically that they would not invest without a gurantee that their ip is defended).
Of course. Who wouldn't defend a situation that gives you a government sanctioned and enforced monopoly ?
I'm sure you find this post 'worthless' and 'flamebait' because it doesnt justify you illegally copying music.
I find it worthless because, well, it's worthless. It's nothing more than rhetorical, unsupported assertions.
From a more philosophical perspective, it's morally repugnant because it considers greater corporate profitability a more important goal than treatment of illness.
I guess it doesnt matter if we dont get new pharmaceutical research, as long as your ipod hard disk is full huh?
This argument would carry slightly more weight if you could demonstrate how the only useful pharmaceutical research in the last, say, two hundred years has originated from for-profit private enterprise.
You want to see the Enron exec go to jail. Fine. But don't start whining when the smaller fry have to serve their time as well.
There is a vast, vast gulf of difference between premediated corporate fraud causing direct and demonstrable loss, and casual, non-profit copyright infringement. So vast a gulf, in fact, that it's difficult to see how the two can even be considered vaguely similar.
Prison is for:
I strongly disagree that prison poses any sort of meaningful deterrent. Prison inmates are almost completely made up of people who:
a) Knew they were breaking the law and would end up in prison if caught, but didn't care.
b) Knew they were breaking the law and would end up in prison if caught, but were prepared to accept that risk and/or consequence.
c) Didn't know they were breaking the law (possibly due to "temporary insanity" - ie: "crimes of passion") and/or didn't believe that incarceration would be a consequence of being caught.
On a more opionated level, I don't think prison should be viewed or treated as "punishment". It should only be used to a) segregate sociopaths from the rest of society and b) offer the possibility for rehabilitation to occur.
As extortionate and ridiculous as the MPAA/RIAA are, at the beginning, middle and end of the day the crime is mass-distributing stolen goods, and that's all there is to it.
Copyright infringement is not theft. Legally, morally, ethically, practically, hypothetically, or any other *ally you care to think of.
What? You think that because the crime was committed on computers, he should spend five months without a computer? Be serious.
No, I would think so because it wasn't a crime that in any way, shape or form deserves jail time.
Murderers, rapists, violent criminals. Those are the kinds of people who deserve to be in jail. Not someone who runs a web site showing _other people_ where *they* can break the law.
More like proof by elaboration.
There is no elaboration. There is no evidence. There isn't even an argument. Merely a list of conclusions which are assumed to be true because the poster states they are true. A textbook example of Proof By Assertion.
Cliffski's post actually has reasons and examples for preserving IP. NOT a worthless post.
I am searching this post in vain for even the slightest shred of evidence to support:
But there isn't any. Which is fairly standard from the "don't steal music" crowd, so it's to be expected, but I'm curious as to why you think there's something there apart from Chicken Little-esque alarmism.
I see. so you werent planning on any drugs being discovered in future, any big budget movies being made, or any major pieces of commercial software ever being made ever again?
Proof by Assertion is a logical fallacy.
Go on, mod me down because you want to find a way to justify taking other peoples hard work. Its the slashdot way.
You deserve to be modded down because your post is worthless.
Long story short, the Linux cluster cost around $20k while the Windows cluster cost around $42k.
Or, in other words, would have added 7% to the cost of the project (so far - the proportion shrinks every day).
Although I *am* curious how you managed to rack up _additional_ Windows licensing cost of twenty grand on the quote. Seems like an awful lot...
The solution is regularly teaching business ethics to students. Perhaps even make it mandatory to earn a degree. Certainly mandatory for a graduate degree.
Teach ethics to anyone whose age has hit double digits is closing the door well after the horse has bolted.
...Then the battle is already lost. You may as well close up shop and go home.
Which is not to say there aren't unscrupulous people out there who will abuse positions of trust, but this is a HR issue, not a technical/security one (and is most certainly not one limited to the IT department).
In almost every case it comes down to visas and border controls that stop humans freely moving around their planet. On the surface it looks like a good idea, but it's absolutely ridiculous that a human shouldn't be able to freely roam the public spaces of their own planet!
No more ridiculous than you not being allowed to walk into someone's home, eat their food and sleep in their bed without their permission...
Basically the 1st excludes Windows; The second excludes any non-open-source application. Shouldn't you just quit and go take a walk then?
Does your computer have an open source BIOS ? How about the various bits of firmware on the hardware - got the source code for that ?
There is only money to lose if they actually had a legitimate security model built-in from the kernel upward.
You are clueless.
In a micro-kernel, what you say would be right but NT and VISTA are NOT MICRO-KERNEL DESIGNS.
Actually, they are microkernel _designs_, they just aren't microkernel _implementations_.
The collapse of residential computer security has meant that virtually nobody can keep their Windows machine secure anymore. Not even gurus. There are just way too many 0-day exploits for browsers and others out there, even for Firefox.
Whoa there, cowboy. It's not particularly difficult for knowledgable users (and especially "gurus") to keep a Windows install secure.
* Don't run as Administrator
* Don't use known buggy software
* Don't run unknown binaries
* Avoid the seedier side of the internet unless special precautions are taken (eg: running the browser in a dedicated account with extremely low privileges)
Or, basically, *exactly the same precautions you take on any platform*.
The problem is that they're plugging a Merom (Core 2 Duo) into motherboards using the chipset for the original Core Duo (they are forwards-compatible), which is how Mac Mini owners have been upgrading to Meroms for several months now). The Core Duo is 32-bit, while the Merom supports 64-bit. However, the old chipset on the motherboard only supports 32-bit, which means only 32-bit addressing for RAM, which means 4GB maximum. Now, the reason for the 3-4GB discrepancy is the way PCI-e interfaces directly with the memory bus. So video card VRAM etc. eats into that first 1GB.
But is it worth losing that ~750M to get dual-channel operation ?
What's more interesting to consider is whether or not localities where region coding has been deemed anti-competitive (eg: here in Australia), can you take your "broken" laptop back to the manufacturer after using up all your region changes and have them replace it (or the drive, at least) as a warranty claim ?
Apple's approach is that a user technically-minded enough to be remoting into a Windows machine will have purchased their own cheap two-button mouse or selected the Mighty Mouse option on order.
Which is great if you're in a situation where an external mouse is an option. On the road, it frequently isn't.
It will never end, because the two-button mouse is an artifact of bad GUI design that confuses the majority of computer users and leads to badly designed applications. Believe it or not, Apple has done user-testing on this, and Windows itself is a good example of what would happen due to the fact you needed a second button to get anything done in it when you remoted in.
There is nothing in Windows that _requires_ a right mouse button - it just makes a lot of things faster (which is what it's there for). The gross underuse of context menus in OS X for accelerating tasks is a failing of its UI.
On the laptops - *especially* the "Pro" ones - two buttons should be a BTO option.
If it will stop crapware like StarForce and the Sony rootkit from sneaking extra drivers in, bring on the kibosh.
Unlikely. Those developers will simply get their drivers signed so they are allowed to load.
It doesn't matter if these security measures are there if noone uses them.
It does when Microsoft are being criticised for "not fixing Windows's security". Microsoft can't *make* people run their computers securely.
Windows still ships with new user accounts being administrator by default.
An unfortunate, but understandable choice that has little impact in the real world. Elevated privileges are unnecessary for 99% of the things malicious software does. Plus, it's a configuration issue, not a technical deficiency.
The default group policy is very permissive, and acls do nothing versus the administrator user.
ACLs do a lot more "versus the Administrator user" than any unix permissions do "versus" a superuser.
If windows had decent sudo capabilities (yes I have used runas and credentials storing in shortcuts), which make it painful for the average user to run as anything other than Administrator.
This is certainly something that can be improved, but it's a UI issue, not a capabilities deficiency.
Poor security by default is the real issue. Corporate entities can afford to create group policy and run users as non admins and have things like standard images if systems do get infected. A home user does not have the resources. Security needs to be on by default.
A home user does not have the resources on any platform.
No, the spambots are almost entirely Windows.
Of course. 99% of PCs run Windows.
Take a look at the reports from the MIT spam conferences. The claim of "security capabilities" of Windows versus those of most other operating systems is nonsense for anyone with experience in the field.
It's not nonsense for anyone who knows about the internals of those systems, however.
IIS has less flaws than Apache? Rofl.
That's what Secunia (amongst others) say. Maybe you should complain to them ?
I'll go you one better. Try to find a Dell that has a firewire 800? Most people are I'm sure saying why would you need that? Two words, video editing.
eSATA is a better option if you need high disk throughput (admittedly, you'll need to get it out of an expansion card, however).
There is, just not in the largest disk sizes (since no one makes such a disk).
Nor on the 15" version :(.
But it was 25 percent *more* (at least compared the $1999 MacBook). And you *still* have to waste your time reinstalling Windows to get rid of all the circus-ware that comes on the Dell.
Do Dell even have an equivalent ? I've been waiting for these new Macs to start shopping for a new laptop (work's paying), but a quick look on Dell's (and other's for that matter) Australia site would suggest that the only way to get a Core *2* baed machine is to get an _Inspiron_. Having dealt with Dell's crappy consumer notebook line[0] before, I have no interest in buying another.
Who else sells "business" laptops in a similar form factor using Core 2 ?
[0] The "Latitude" and "Precision" business-oriented lines are, IME, completely different animals.