No, we should not attempt to foam pad the entire world so the precious little ones don't get hurt, but that doesn't mean we should just toss them out in the woods and let them fend for themselves either. Certain safety regulations are required for the functioning of an advanced society, many of which are created at least in part to keep children safe (school zones, crosswalks, etc).
Something very important to remember is that all humans have a prefered level of risk perception. Make someone feel "too safe" and they will instinctivly take risks to compensate. It's actually far better for someone feel less safe than they actually are than it is for someone to feel more safe than they actually are.
The debate should be about which regulations and safety precautions make sense,
Note that it is possible so a "safety precaution" to actually make people less safe. Either through "risk compensation" or because it results in too much attention to something trivial/uncommon meaning that something actually far more dangerous is overlooked.
It seems like this is all just an attempt to deal with the symptoms of the original cause, which is unqualified parents. We require licenses and tests to be able to drive or fly. Licenses to fish or check out library books, yet we allow any drone or sheep-person to enter into the commitment to raise and rear a human being for the next 18 years without so much as a second glance.
So long as those involved can manage to have a child on their own. If there is a requirment for medical help or people want to adopt an unwanted child there can be quite a bit of interest shown by the state. Especially if the potential parents are not a heterosexual married couple.
A more reasonable definition of terrorism is any group attempting political change through an attack on a civilian target. That includes governments or quasi-governmental groups.
A problem with this definition is that it is fairly common for attacks against non civilan targets, e.g. the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, to be described as "terrorism". Soldiers are most definitly not civilians, quite possibly police and politicans are not either. It's also the case that governments may support terrorism indirectly, even (or is that especially), when the targets are their own citizens.
Honestly, I think they need to make everything into a plugin (tabbed browsing, spell check, etc. and just include the most popular in the default install.
Spell check really shouldn't be anything other than a plugin, since you need one which is appropriate for the language you are using.
We origionally used firefox because it was a fast simple browser without all the overhead of Mozilla/Netscape. It seems like it is going back into that direction again. Why because once it got popular people began asking oh One more thing. The firefox team needs to learn to say NO to feature requests and Yes to fixing bugs and not finding excuses not to fix them.
In some ways extensions/add-ons are a good way to address the issue of someone's "must have" feature is someone elses "couldn't care less" or even "bloat". One thing I really wish they would fix is the handling of global plugins. Not only do you have to use an obscure command line to install them, but any later updates are likely to wind up installed per user.
"Weave
Weave extends the browser in the other direction: Not toward the desktop, but instead into the Internet. Mozilla wants an individual's browsing experience to stay with them no matter what machine they are on."
Which may well be the exact opposite of what is wanted in plenty of situations...
We love Apple hardware, but hate Apple business practices. There are many reasons for fanboydom, but limiting the abilities of a phone you've paid out the ass for is not one of them.
You'd actually expect that people would say they liked some things about a product and disliked other things about it, especially when the product in question was a multi-function tool or machine.
The WTO is stupid to belong to, it is not in the least bit useful, but no one, in the entire history of this country, actually thinks it's unconstitutional, especially not the IP protection parts of it.
The US Consitution has been altered several times, the "IP protection parts of it" are in the original version. The very first change made was to add "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." This would appear to place huge restrictions on copyright law, in the US. Most notably the "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" part, but also, considering the actions of the Church of Scientology, the "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". (Only the last part would not appear to have relevence to copyright.) AFAIK no later alterations to the US Constitution provide an exemption from this First Amendment for "Intellectual Property" laws.
The US has more trade agreements with Canada than any other country and in Canada's experience it is absolutely true.
Why dosn't the Canadian government "just say no" to any more such "agreements" with the US?
The US government's negotiators howl about DRM, our approach to health care, pharmacuticals, gay marriage, drug "leniency" etc, etcBR> How are most of these even remotely relevent to an international "trade agreement" in the first place.
I have no doubt that the US will recover from it's financial woes. The world economy is changing though, and competition for resources is increasing. The US's negotiating position is changing as well. Instead of being the one of a few major buyers of commodities, they are now among many. Ignoring multilateral trade rulings as a routine is going to end as a consequence. At least if the US government is smart about it.
It's more likely that a future US President will be a pig who previously worked for Boeing delivering planes:)
You could apply that to any product made in any foreign country. I would be very annoyed if my government banned the import of Bourbon because the mechanisms to ensure hygine can not be physically confirmed by government representatives.
However a local company making a similar product might be very pleased. Of course in the case of many products what really matters is the state of the product itself. These generally can be examined to ensure they are what they claim to be and meet relevent local standards. More interesting would be if a government were to apply such a ban and reasoning to "intellectual property", e.g. binary proprietary software.
Online gambling across state lines is illegal period. I'm sure if Congress had the power to do so, local gambling would also be outlawed. [In case someone asks, US Congress cannot regulate commerce and therefore gambling within a single state. That is the job of the state legislatures.]
Considering that there are plenty of creative interpretations of "Interstate Commerce" it probably wouldn't be difficult to do so if they (or their lobbiests) really wanted to.
Weren't the trade sanctions against Cuba put there and don't they remain there in part because of Cuban human rights abuses?
Were the US to be even handed over trade sanctions in response to human rights abuses it would be imposing such sanctions against most of the planet (including itself).
I'm just arguing against hypocrisy. If we don't want to be bound by WTO rulings, then we should back out of those treaties and stop using the WTO against other countries. In or out, none of this wavering where we pick and choose the WTO rulings that we want to acknowledge.
Possibly extend this to all similar types of treaty. If you must have "pick and choose" it generally works out best if different parties perform the "pick" and the "choose" parts. Either "you pick, I choose" or "I pick, you choose".
I agree about the radio royalties. It's absurd that I can listen to my radio for free, and you can listen to your radio for free, and all of our friends can listen to their radios for free, but then if we all meet up together and listen to the same radio, suddenly someone has to get paid for it.
Just as daft as having different rules about people watching a sporting event on a television depending on the physical size of the screen. Silly laws can be found all over the place, possibly they are a side effect of having statute law in the first place.
I understand that you're afraid, this is just a person difference between you and me. In this case, however, I have to ask, what good is money if you've sold your principles?
This is also something of a false dicotomy anyway. It's perfectly possible to end up with neither.
Have you thought of the possibility that if you settle you're making yourself a target for the next entity that wants to sue you? "Hey, he's paid once, maybe we can get him to pay us as well."
Even more likely would be "next time" from the same entity. Since they are the ones who know exactly how hard or easy it was to get money out of people. It's also going to be less easy for a defendant to fight second and subsequent attempts since the plaintiff can always spin the first time as being an admission of guilt.
You forgot a couple things, like the fact there is no way a CD jewel case costs 80 cents each when mass produced, or 90 cents each to ship.
Especially if the buyer dosn't deal in anything smaller than shipping containers. Splitting container loads, to different buyers is actually likely to cost money.
And since when do Musicians need to be in a union? Last I checked they aren't disposable workers and 17 cents a CD is ridiculously high union fees.
They probably need a union to protect them from the record companies, though that may not be the union they get.
Adding retail overhead doesn't make sense either, $3.89 cents a CD to stick it in a slot and let it sit there gathering dust?
"Retail overhead" simply dosn't exist until the thing has passed to a retailer, at that point it's entirely up to that retailer to work out that figure. Since CDs are non perishable goods which are cuboid shaped their actual "retail overhead" is likely to considerably lower than a box of fruit (perishable, requires special handling and storage) or an individual fruit (all the issue of a box of fruit plus tends to come in awkward shapes). How much will Walmart charge you for an apple? If would be no suprise if their "retail overhead" on an apple is 10 or more times that on a CD...
I've installed Windows XP on a couple of Toshibas and I'll be damned if WindowsUpdate didn't have a driver for every device.
You first need to be able to connect to Windows Update though.
Conversely, I tried to put XP Pro on a Vaio a couple years ago and found Sony's site was decidedly unfriendly in that regard. WindowsUpdate was no help either. Perhaps that situation has improved, but at this point I don't trust Sony to support their equipment properly. Recently I installed XP Pro on an older IBM ThinkPad R40 (pre-Lenovo) and IBM's site had every driver ever released for it there for the taking. Just the way it should be.
You need to know which drivers apply to the hardware you have. Dell can be a little odd in that they will tend to offer all the drivers for that model, even if given the service tag for a specific machine.
Unfortunately even Apple's own applications aren't usually self-contained within their.app icon package like you suggest. If you drag a program like Garageband or iPhoto to the Trash, you're only removing part of the program. For example, the Garageband icon in/Applications is ~86 megabytes, but there are nearly 2 gigabytes of sound loops and such in/Library/Application Support that would be left behind, not to mention individual user preferences and caches in ~/Library.
User preferences arn't part of the application in the first place. Also the sound loops could be usable by any audio application.
In my opinion Windows is actually ahead of OS X here, by providing a central location (the Add/Remove Programs control panel) to completely remove (well-behaved) applications.
How many of these are actually "well behaved"? In some cases removing a program in Windows dosn't even delete the application directory. That's before you even consider the amount of junk which can be left in the Windows registry.
A nice feature of Macs is that any programs you don't want are easy to delete. Just drag them to the trash. No need for uninstallers. No registry cleaners or other crap removal problems. Why can't Windows be like that?
Probably because this isn't the "Microsoft way". Effectivly it's "against their religion". As for cleaning the Windows registry tools which really should come with bundled with the OS simply do not. e.g. removing registry keys which point to files which no longer exist, finding all keys which relate to a specific application.
Surely they should use example.com (Documented in RFCs to never be a real domain).
Or even simpler they could use an email address they own which feeds to/dev/null, e.g dont.reply@whatevertheircompanyiscalled.com
If they insist on using a email address in someone elses domain, even one which does not currently exist or does not currently accept email, they they are asking for this kind of trouble.
Actually, I find it much more likely that the poor bastard would end up with gajillions of people suing the hell out of him for most likely made up monetary damages,
In which cased he can counter sue for their using his domain without permission. Even without going the "copyright infringment" route (using RIAA/MPAA numbers).
That is... it doesn't matter to you, the profit-minded game publisher, how many people play your game. All that matters is how many people buy the game. If spending money on copy protection doesn't actually increase sales
It's very unlikely that it will increase sales. From the POV of the purchaser all it can possibly do is make it harder to play the game...
Additionally, for some reason everyone seems to assume that a lack of anti-piracy software means you are going to give your product away. This is not true, you can sell it just like you do at the moment, you just spend less money and effort trying to fuck your legitimate consumers
Note also that this money and effort isn't just in developing the software it also applies when your software generates a false positive.
and inadvertently developing a market for your pirated goods, which are now higher quality goods than the one you supplied.
Another part of the "law of unintended consequences" is that all your effort in "anti-piracy" may detract from whatever it is the software is ment to do in the first place. e.g. fixing bugs in the DRM being given a higher priority than fixing bugs in function. There also isn't a fixed relationship between how much effort you put into "protecting" vs how easy it might be for "them" to defeat this.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we should not attempt to foam pad the entire world so the precious little ones don't get hurt, but that doesn't mean we should just toss them out in the woods and let them fend for themselves either. Certain safety regulations are required for the functioning of an advanced society, many of which are created at least in part to keep children safe (school zones, crosswalks, etc).
Something very important to remember is that all humans have a prefered level of risk perception. Make someone feel "too safe" and they will instinctivly take risks to compensate. It's actually far better for someone feel less safe than they actually are than it is for someone to feel more safe than they actually are.
The debate should be about which regulations and safety precautions make sense,
Note that it is possible so a "safety precaution" to actually make people less safe. Either through "risk compensation" or because it results in too much attention to something trivial/uncommon meaning that something actually far more dangerous is overlooked.
It seems like this is all just an attempt to deal with the symptoms of the original cause, which is unqualified parents. We require licenses and tests to be able to drive or fly. Licenses to fish or check out library books, yet we allow any drone or sheep-person to enter into the commitment to raise and rear a human being for the next 18 years without so much as a second glance.
So long as those involved can manage to have a child on their own. If there is a requirment for medical help or people want to adopt an unwanted child there can be quite a bit of interest shown by the state. Especially if the potential parents are not a heterosexual married couple.
A more reasonable definition of terrorism is any group attempting political change through an attack on a civilian target. That includes governments or quasi-governmental groups.
A problem with this definition is that it is fairly common for attacks against non civilan targets, e.g. the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, to be described as "terrorism". Soldiers are most definitly not civilians, quite possibly police and politicans are not either.
It's also the case that governments may support terrorism indirectly, even (or is that especially), when the targets are their own citizens.
Why would a browser need to be a feature monster? Its becoming like the cellphones, too much unnecessary bloat.
I recall seeing a "review" of such a phone. They must have covered everything you could do with it except how well it worked as a telephone!
Honestly, I think they need to make everything into a plugin (tabbed browsing, spell check, etc. and just include the most popular in the default install.
Spell check really shouldn't be anything other than a plugin, since you need one which is appropriate for the language you are using.
We origionally used firefox because it was a fast simple browser without all the overhead of Mozilla/Netscape. It seems like it is going back into that direction again. Why because once it got popular people began asking oh One more thing. The firefox team needs to learn to say NO to feature requests and Yes to fixing bugs and not finding excuses not to fix them.
In some ways extensions/add-ons are a good way to address the issue of someone's "must have" feature is someone elses "couldn't care less" or even "bloat".
One thing I really wish they would fix is the handling of global plugins. Not only do you have to use an obscure command line to install them, but any later updates are likely to wind up installed per user.
"Weave Weave extends the browser in the other direction: Not toward the desktop, but instead into the Internet. Mozilla wants an individual's browsing experience to stay with them no matter what machine they are on."
Which may well be the exact opposite of what is wanted in plenty of situations...
We love Apple hardware, but hate Apple business practices. There are many reasons for fanboydom, but limiting the abilities of a phone you've paid out the ass for is not one of them.
You'd actually expect that people would say they liked some things about a product and disliked other things about it, especially when the product in question was a multi-function tool or machine.
The WTO is stupid to belong to, it is not in the least bit useful, but no one, in the entire history of this country, actually thinks it's unconstitutional, especially not the IP protection parts of it.
The US Consitution has been altered several times, the "IP protection parts of it" are in the original version. The very first change made was to add "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." This would appear to place huge restrictions on copyright law, in the US. Most notably the "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" part, but also, considering the actions of the Church of Scientology, the "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". (Only the last part would not appear to have relevence to copyright.) AFAIK no later alterations to the US Constitution provide an exemption from this First Amendment for "Intellectual Property" laws.
The US has more trade agreements with Canada than any other country and in Canada's experience it is absolutely true.
:)
Why dosn't the Canadian government "just say no" to any more such "agreements" with the US?
The US government's negotiators howl about DRM, our approach to health care, pharmacuticals, gay marriage, drug "leniency" etc, etcBR>
How are most of these even remotely relevent to an international "trade agreement" in the first place.
I have no doubt that the US will recover from it's financial woes. The world economy is changing though, and competition for resources is increasing. The US's negotiating position is changing as well. Instead of being the one of a few major buyers of commodities, they are now among many. Ignoring multilateral trade rulings as a routine is going to end as a consequence. At least if the US government is smart about it.
It's more likely that a future US President will be a pig who previously worked for Boeing delivering planes
You could apply that to any product made in any foreign country. I would be very annoyed if my government banned the import of Bourbon because the mechanisms to ensure hygine can not be physically confirmed by government representatives.
However a local company making a similar product might be very pleased. Of course in the case of many products what really matters is the state of the product itself. These generally can be examined to ensure they are what they claim to be and meet relevent local standards.
More interesting would be if a government were to apply such a ban and reasoning to "intellectual property", e.g. binary proprietary software.
Online gambling across state lines is illegal period. I'm sure if Congress had the power to do so, local gambling would also be outlawed. [In case someone asks, US Congress cannot regulate commerce and therefore gambling within a single state. That is the job of the state legislatures.]
Considering that there are plenty of creative interpretations of "Interstate Commerce" it probably wouldn't be difficult to do so if they (or their lobbiests) really wanted to.
Weren't the trade sanctions against Cuba put there and don't they remain there in part because of Cuban human rights abuses?
Were the US to be even handed over trade sanctions in response to human rights abuses it would be imposing such sanctions against most of the planet (including itself).
I'm just arguing against hypocrisy. If we don't want to be bound by WTO rulings, then we should back out of those treaties and stop using the WTO against other countries. In or out, none of this wavering where we pick and choose the WTO rulings that we want to acknowledge.
Possibly extend this to all similar types of treaty. If you must have "pick and choose" it generally works out best if different parties perform the "pick" and the "choose" parts. Either "you pick, I choose" or "I pick, you choose".
I agree about the radio royalties. It's absurd that I can listen to my radio for free, and you can listen to your radio for free, and all of our friends can listen to their radios for free, but then if we all meet up together and listen to the same radio, suddenly someone has to get paid for it.
Just as daft as having different rules about people watching a sporting event on a television depending on the physical size of the screen. Silly laws can be found all over the place, possibly they are a side effect of having statute law in the first place.
I understand that you're afraid, this is just a person difference between you and me. In this case, however, I have to ask, what good is money if you've sold your principles?
This is also something of a false dicotomy anyway. It's perfectly possible to end up with neither.
Have you thought of the possibility that if you settle you're making yourself a target for the next entity that wants to sue you? "Hey, he's paid once, maybe we can get him to pay us as well."
Even more likely would be "next time" from the same entity. Since they are the ones who know exactly how hard or easy it was to get money out of people. It's also going to be less easy for a defendant to fight second and subsequent attempts since the plaintiff can always spin the first time as being an admission of guilt.
You forgot a couple things, like the fact there is no way a CD jewel case costs 80 cents each when mass produced, or 90 cents each to ship.
Especially if the buyer dosn't deal in anything smaller than shipping containers. Splitting container loads, to different buyers is actually likely to cost money.
And since when do Musicians need to be in a union? Last I checked they aren't disposable workers and 17 cents a CD is ridiculously high union fees.
They probably need a union to protect them from the record companies, though that may not be the union they get.
Adding retail overhead doesn't make sense either, $3.89 cents a CD to stick it in a slot and let it sit there gathering dust?
"Retail overhead" simply dosn't exist until the thing has passed to a retailer, at that point it's entirely up to that retailer to work out that figure. Since CDs are non perishable goods which are cuboid shaped their actual "retail overhead" is likely to considerably lower than a box of fruit (perishable, requires special handling and storage) or an individual fruit (all the issue of a box of fruit plus tends to come in awkward shapes). How much will Walmart charge you for an apple? If would be no suprise if their "retail overhead" on an apple is 10 or more times that on a CD...
I've installed Windows XP on a couple of Toshibas and I'll be damned if WindowsUpdate didn't have a driver for every device.
You first need to be able to connect to Windows Update though.
Conversely, I tried to put XP Pro on a Vaio a couple years ago and found Sony's site was decidedly unfriendly in that regard. WindowsUpdate was no help either. Perhaps that situation has improved, but at this point I don't trust Sony to support their equipment properly. Recently I installed XP Pro on an older IBM ThinkPad R40 (pre-Lenovo) and IBM's site had every driver ever released for it there for the taking. Just the way it should be.
You need to know which drivers apply to the hardware you have. Dell can be a little odd in that they will tend to offer all the drivers for that model, even if given the service tag for a specific machine.
Unfortunately even Apple's own applications aren't usually self-contained within their .app icon package like you suggest. If you drag a program like Garageband or iPhoto to the Trash, you're only removing part of the program. For example, the Garageband icon in /Applications is ~86 megabytes, but there are nearly 2 gigabytes of sound loops and such in /Library/Application Support that would be left behind, not to mention individual user preferences and caches in ~/Library.
User preferences arn't part of the application in the first place. Also the sound loops could be usable by any audio application.
In my opinion Windows is actually ahead of OS X here, by providing a central location (the Add/Remove Programs control panel) to completely remove (well-behaved) applications.
How many of these are actually "well behaved"? In some cases removing a program in Windows dosn't even delete the application directory. That's before you even consider the amount of junk which can be left in the Windows registry.
A nice feature of Macs is that any programs you don't want are easy to delete. Just drag them to the trash. No need for uninstallers. No registry cleaners or other crap removal problems. Why can't Windows be like that?
Probably because this isn't the "Microsoft way". Effectivly it's "against their religion".
As for cleaning the Windows registry tools which really should come with bundled with the OS simply do not. e.g. removing registry keys which point to files which no longer exist, finding all keys which relate to a specific application.
Surely they should use example.com (Documented in RFCs to never be a real domain).
/dev/null, e.g dont.reply@whatevertheircompanyiscalled.com
If they insist on using a email address in someone elses domain, even one which does not currently exist or does not currently accept email, they they are asking for this kind of trouble.
Or even simpler they could use an email address they own which feeds to
Actually, I find it much more likely that the poor bastard would end up with gajillions of people suing the hell out of him for most likely made up monetary damages,
In which cased he can counter sue for their using his domain without permission. Even without going the "copyright infringment" route (using RIAA/MPAA numbers).
That is... it doesn't matter to you, the profit-minded game publisher, how many people play your game. All that matters is how many people buy the game. If spending money on copy protection doesn't actually increase sales
It's very unlikely that it will increase sales. From the POV of the purchaser all it can possibly do is make it harder to play the game...
Additionally, for some reason everyone seems to assume that a lack of anti-piracy software means you are going to give your product away. This is not true, you can sell it just like you do at the moment, you just spend less money and effort trying to fuck your legitimate consumers
Note also that this money and effort isn't just in developing the software it also applies when your software generates a false positive.
and inadvertently developing a market for your pirated goods, which are now higher quality goods than the one you supplied.
Another part of the "law of unintended consequences" is that all your effort in "anti-piracy" may detract from whatever it is the software is ment to do in the first place. e.g. fixing bugs in the DRM being given a higher priority than fixing bugs in function. There also isn't a fixed relationship between how much effort you put into "protecting" vs how easy it might be for "them" to defeat this.