Another view is that big companies patent lots of things, and then by the implicit threat of suing the "small guy", prevent innovation from moving forward. In practice this is harder than it sounds, since the damage to the image of the company can be considerable if it tried to sue a small target - that's why you rarely see it happen.
In the mind of everyone who would learn about and understand such an action, Microsoft's image has already been damaged. For most of their customers, however, such an attack by Microsoft would slip under the radar... which is probably why Microsoft apparantly has no moral objections to making such threats against small targets and why people like this blogger can talk about that situation as if it were a hypothetical "view" rather than a recent occurance.
It also means you have no right to download it seeing as downloading a file technically copies it (and yes, that technicality matters until a court rules otherwise).
Assuming the server you're downloading from has the right to publish, anyway. When you download something from the web and stream it, you're doing the same thing with your computer and the website that people regularly do with their television and cable company: you request that the publisher send you something, they do, and your electronics displays the result. When you download something from the web and save or cache a local copy, you're doing the same thing with your computer and the website that courts have said is okay to do with VCRs: you're being legitimately sent copyrighted material, and you're saving it to look at again later, and you should be legally in the clear as long as you don't redistribute any of these copies to others.
Now, IANAL, and we've got lots of nice new "digital is different somehow!" laws which may apply, but I'd like to see which ones before I become scared to visit a URL.
It's just plain sloppy to put a file up for download with no license.
Yes, it is, and in the past letting your creations fly about without attached copyright or licensing information (like AT&T did with Unix) was a good way to lose your copyright protection. Today, though, you can pretty much expect copyright restrictions to apply unless the publisher explicitly says otherwise and expect fair use (including time shifting) exceptions to apply unless the consumer explicitly agrees to waive them.
The only grey area I've seen with downloading is when you download from someone who doesn't have the legal right to redistribute copies of what they send you. I'd certainly expect this to be illegal (at least if you request the download with foreknowledge that the uploader will have to violate a copyright in order to satisfy your request), but I can't find which clause in copyright law would make it illegal. So far even the RIAA has only been filing suit against uploaders and not downloaders, so perhaps their lawyers can't find such a clause either, (or perhaps they're just playing it safe by trying to go after the most blatant infringers first).
This assumes that consciousness is based solely on computation. Not proven yet.
Not quite. It assumes that a limit on computation implies a limit on consciousness.
Taking the contrapositive, this is the same that assuming that unlimited consciousness would allow unlimited computation. In other words, the assumption is not that being conscious is solely based on being able to compute things, the assumption is merely that being conscious includes the ability to compute things.
And no, I can't prove that, but any conception of consciousness without computational ability is fairly unsatisfying. How conscious are you if you can no longer tell me what 2 + 1 is? Even babies' behaviors are strongly (if not deterministically) dependant on what they sense around them.
That having been said, I think that genetically engineered crops are inevitable, and mostly beneficial. When this becomes a tried-and-true technology instead of an experimental one, the fuss should die down.
Right. After a few decades of use, I'm sure genetically engineered crops will be as uncontroversial in the future as nuclear energy is today.;-)
There's no need to crack the encryption, when it's so easy to just break into the whole computer. Instead of just trying to make a billion copies of itself and giving back doors to spammers and DDOS vandals, why couldn't a worm install a transparent proxying web server (along with all the fake encryption keys necessary to make everything appear to the user to be appropriately signed) and then perform a man-in-the-middle attack on your vote? The false vote can then be sent out your modem to the voting server in an ultra-secure encrypted message, while the real vote never makes it past your monitor.
The government did demand it, they were promised it, and Diebold lied about it.
Perhaps the government claimed they demanded a quality product, that doesn't mean they really did. If they had, then as soon as they discover the evidence to the contrary they will at least stop doing business with Diebold and at most sue Diebold for failing to live up to their claims and/or contracts. Have you ever bought a grossly faulty product and then continued to patronize the same company regularly afterward? The government does, all the time, and unless hell has frozen over they're going to continue doing so with the Diebold machines which will be filling voting booths in November.
The private sector doesn't work because private companies are miraculously more industrious and efficient than public agencies, it works because there are usually redundant companies supplying the same service, so selfish consumers avoid the companies who do a poor job of it, so selfish companies try to do a good enough job to keep some customers. If companies discover a big stupid customer with deep pockets who will be happy no matter what, how do you expect them to behave?
Remove the "Configurations with loops are not valid!" warning, and instead handle configurations with loops. It shouldn't be hard; if you're worried about someone setting up an "invalid" loop (like a NOR gate with its output hooked up to one of its inputs) then just make sure that the output of your blocks is lagged one timestep from the input.
Did Civilization II use DirectX? No. Did it write directly to your video card or ethernet card? No.
I meant to write "video card or sound card" here; when a later CivII version added network play IIRC they did use DirectPlay to do it. I'll get the best oral surgeons working on that foot extraction operation right away.
It says before DirectX, developers had to write directly to "individual hardware components."
This is 100% true.
You're wrong. (By the way, note that I'm using the contraction for "you are" in the correct sense, not in your ironic, "you're uninformed post" sense)
Did Civilization II use DirectX? No. Did it write directly to your video card or ethernet card? No.
How about CivNET? Did it use DirectPlay? No. Did it write directly to your ethernet card? No.
Feel free to continue to accuse everyone who disagrees with you of bias and comprehension problems, though. Trying to put words in our mouths like "you didn't know, but DirectX is more than just a graphics library" and "they won't even admit that most Windows developers use DirectX, and few use OpenGL" is good too; that's much easier than answering the claims people actually make. Plus, as long as you're concerned about mod points, perhaps you'll get lucky and encounter moderators who have never heard of "ad hominem attacks" and "straw men arguments" before.
You probably won't, though. After all, if you're 100% right and you keep getting refuted and modded down anyway, it must be because everyone here is wearing blinders!
"All he said was that Microsoft provided a platform for Windows."
What he said:
"Before the arrival of DirectX, developers had to program their software titles to take advantage of features found in individual hardware components."
He didn't just say that Microsoft provided a platform for Windows, he said that before Microsoft provided their platform, developers had to write directly to the graphics drivers. This is untrue: although some programmers did write directly to hardware-specific interfaces like 3dfx's glide, they didn't have to. The availability of OpenGL for Windows predates DirectX, and the availability of OpenGL in general (remember, he said "developers", not "Windows developers") predates DirectX by years.
For a quick reference, check out this Byte article, which discusses both the already existing OpenGL, "available on Unix, Windows NT and 95, and the Mac", and the soon-to-be-released Direct3D, "scheduled to ship in the second quarter".
Or more specifically, what's the point of the "I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice unless you're paying me" disclaimers that I've seen? I had always assumed that such disclaimers were necessary because there was some law that could make lawyers liable for giving bad legal advice otherwise, but if that is the case why hasn't anybody used such a law to counterattack one of these "Your parody is illegal" C&D letters?
I mean, if lawyers can put grossly inaccurate legal threats in writing and get away with it, why would lawyers giving out accidentally inaccurate advice have anything to fear?
I think Bill Gates himself has proven that it only takes someone in a garage with a damn good idea...
So why has Microsoft hasn't been brought to it's knees yet? Are they the only remaining source of good software ideas, or is there a severe garage shortage?
It's neither. Microsoft hasn't been brought to it's knees because it's profit comes from only two big ideas: "If our operating system has enough market share, people will write device drivers and application programs for us, and there will be many items of hardware and software which we didn't develop but which people will have to give us money before using anyway!" and "If our office programs have enough market share, people will distribute files in our formats, and there will be many documents which we didn't write but which people will have to give us money before reading anyway!" These are of course good ideas only from the perspective of a company which has overwhelming preloaded market share to apply them, which is one reason why all the other companies with the same ideas haven't had much luck with them. Standards like POSIX and HTML aren't popular because companies hate Microsoft's evil attempts at lock-in; companies love lock-in but are aware they can't pull it off without monopoly (or "90+% marketshare, bundled with all new computers", if you don't like the m-word) status.
If you, however, have an idea which is so much better than these, you can try developing it, but don't expect it to remain your idea for long. Microsoft's m...arket share prevents you from borrowing their ideas, but nothing prevents them from borrowing yours. If you're lucky the borrowing will be in the form of a buy out; if you're unlucky or if your company starts outgrowing that garage and looking like a threat, the borrowing will just be Microsoft's release of a competing product for zero price and eventually bundled with their OS, to "cut off your air supply".
So what if all the brick-and-mortar businesses go out of business?
So then all the local governments that have been earning their revenue from sales taxes will either have to switch to another (e.g. income or property) tax type, or they'll have to start enforcing these use taxes.
Either way, a huge disadvantage of brick-and-mortar businesses will have been eliminated, and so they will start to come back, putting some of the internet sellers out of business in turn. It may all work out alright in the end, but if we try to eliminate inequitable taxes in the first place perhaps we can make the process of approaching that end less unpleasant.
If what we get sucks and enough people agree that it sucks, we'll start asking for something different and it will be provided by the market.
Being able to dodge taxes isn't a market efficiency, it's an externalized cost. Governments which depend on sales tax aren't just going to close up shop when those revenues go down, they're going to get their money somewhere else instead.
Re:WinFS WILL be in the next version, just no netw
on
Microsoft Clips Longhorn
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Some people work in industries where music and videos ARE the business, and they ARE the data. And those businesses need DRM in order to make their business viable in the digital age.
Anyone with good sound cards and a second computer can use it to record what they play back on their first, which after a single analog step gives them a digital copy with better quality than most of the (128kbps) MP3s on the net. There is no technological way to prevent this: if it can be heard or seen, it can be recorded digitally, and once one person records it in an unencrypted digital format it's just as easy to spread around as if it had never been in an encumbered format at all.
If your business model really requires impenetrable DRM to be viable, you probably ought to find a new one before spending too much money on snake oil.
No, this is where the ludicrous "you're only using Linux because you're a GNU/Zealot, you won't even admit it sucks" argument comes in. Don't you just love ignorance?
Well, there are certainly GNU/Zealots out there who behave that way, so it's not so much ignorance as prejudice or overgeneralization. Even many of the zealots out there will admit Linux sucks. I just use it because for what I do the alternatives usually suck more.
I was going to use font installation as an example "Linux sucks" of my own (because while Linux programs have always worked fine with the default fonts for me, installing new fonts even a few years ago was a pain), but that doesn't seem to be true anymore.
I can't imagine how easy this is to do on, say, RedHat, these days. I bet it all comes preinstalled by default.
I couldn't tell you what the default font installation is (except that it just seemed to work), but I just investigated what the current (KDE 3.2 on Fedora Core 1) situation for installing new fonts is:
You browse to the directory in Konqueror, and see an icon which previews a dozen small characters in the font. Clicking on the font once displays a larger character set and an "Install" button, clicking on the button asks if you want to install the font as a Personal font or System font (and explains what each means, including the need for a password for a "System" install), and clicking on "Personal" installs it to your.fonts directory and gets X using it immediately.
Stock install of just about any distribution with the 2.4 kernel. Gnome applications can't see all the necessary fonts. Most crash.
It's worse if KDE is the default desktop.
Why do people keep calling rants like this informative? Are there really moderators out there who believe that all the Linux distributors are shipping distributions in which most of the Gnome apps in the standard installation crash on every execution, and KDE is worse? And all the people like me who have been using Linux with Gnome and/or KDE for years are somehow failing to notice?
I seem to recall an exploit where you sent Internet Explorer a file with a non-executable MIME type (thus getting by it's "don't open untrusted executables" restrictions) but a.exe extension (thus getting the system to open it by executing it).
I wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing happen to Linux. The most Unixy way of determining what files are is to actually look in them for a binary magic number or for ASCII keywords (like the "file" command does), but that's so much slower (for large groups of files) than just checking extensions that applications behave both ways.
I use a system almost like the one you guys describe, except instead of a giant capacitor I have a spare set of batteries, and instead of using it to charge the drained batteries, I just take it out of the charger and put the drained set in its place. Voila, I have a new fully charged set of batteries in about ten seconds.
The benefit of this seems contingent upon having multiple requests pending, which AFAIK is hard on linux as there's no non-blocking file IO.
What do you call it when you pass O_NONBLOCK to the read function, then? If you're thinking of asynchronous I/O, Linux has that too, although I don't know if it's as portable & standardized.
Why would existing laws on vandalism not cover this? On the physical level, the magnetic regions on one's fixed disc are altered in a manner not authorised by the owner and cause the system to not function correctly. I don't see this as differing (w.r.t. vandalism) from dropping a wrench in an engine or maladjusting the control knobs.
On the physical level, a computer virus author doesn't go anywhere near your hard disk. He just sends some signals to your computer, signals which if sent to perfectly-written software run by an informed user would do no damage whatsoever.
The reason the virus does damage is because there is no perfectly-written software and there are too few informed users; to stretch your analogy to its breaking point, it's as if in addition to owning my car's engine (the hard disk) I employed a mechanic (the operating system and networked software) to maintain it, and my mechanic was an idiot who could be convinced by an anonymous phone call to wreck the car.
Now, I'm sure there must be some law against tricking someone into destroying their own property, but I don't think vandalism will cover it.
Most hydrogen bombs have a yield breakdown of about 85% fission to 15% fusion (fission is a much better producer of blast and fire)
Do you have a reference for this? I thought the fusion part of the blast was the major difference between the tens of kilotons we used on Japan and the megaton-plus warheads we have now.
The PS2 costs about as much as the graphics card I would have to buy to get comperable performance out of my PC
I don't think this is true anymore, at least not if you're willing to turn your computer resolution down to the low levels your console displays. With Halo, for instance, it looks like you can get 640x480x50fps (i.e. approximately TV resolution with better-than-interlaced-TV framerate) with a GeforceFX 5200 ($55 on pricewatch) or with a Radeon 9200 ($40 on pricewatch). Oh, and you can get both those cards with TV Out at that price, so you can use your larger TV screen if you want.
Slashdot Mirror
Another view is that big companies patent lots of things, and then by the implicit threat of suing the "small guy", prevent innovation from moving forward. In practice this is harder than it sounds, since the damage to the image of the company can be considerable if it tried to sue a small target - that's why you rarely see it happen.
In the mind of everyone who would learn about and understand such an action, Microsoft's image has already been damaged. For most of their customers, however, such an attack by Microsoft would slip under the radar... which is probably why Microsoft apparantly has no moral objections to making such threats against small targets and why people like this blogger can talk about that situation as if it were a hypothetical "view" rather than a recent occurance.
It also means you have no right to download it seeing as downloading a file technically copies it (and yes, that technicality matters until a court rules otherwise).
Assuming the server you're downloading from has the right to publish, anyway. When you download something from the web and stream it, you're doing the same thing with your computer and the website that people regularly do with their television and cable company: you request that the publisher send you something, they do, and your electronics displays the result. When you download something from the web and save or cache a local copy, you're doing the same thing with your computer and the website that courts have said is okay to do with VCRs: you're being legitimately sent copyrighted material, and you're saving it to look at again later, and you should be legally in the clear as long as you don't redistribute any of these copies to others.
Now, IANAL, and we've got lots of nice new "digital is different somehow!" laws which may apply, but I'd like to see which ones before I become scared to visit a URL.
It's just plain sloppy to put a file up for download with no license.
Yes, it is, and in the past letting your creations fly about without attached copyright or licensing information (like AT&T did with Unix) was a good way to lose your copyright protection. Today, though, you can pretty much expect copyright restrictions to apply unless the publisher explicitly says otherwise and expect fair use (including time shifting) exceptions to apply unless the consumer explicitly agrees to waive them.
The only grey area I've seen with downloading is when you download from someone who doesn't have the legal right to redistribute copies of what they send you. I'd certainly expect this to be illegal (at least if you request the download with foreknowledge that the uploader will have to violate a copyright in order to satisfy your request), but I can't find which clause in copyright law would make it illegal. So far even the RIAA has only been filing suit against uploaders and not downloaders, so perhaps their lawyers can't find such a clause either, (or perhaps they're just playing it safe by trying to go after the most blatant infringers first).
This assumes that consciousness is based solely on computation. Not proven yet.
Not quite. It assumes that a limit on computation implies a limit on consciousness.
Taking the contrapositive, this is the same that assuming that unlimited consciousness would allow unlimited computation. In other words, the assumption is not that being conscious is solely based on being able to compute things, the assumption is merely that being conscious includes the ability to compute things.
And no, I can't prove that, but any conception of consciousness without computational ability is fairly unsatisfying. How conscious are you if you can no longer tell me what 2 + 1 is? Even babies' behaviors are strongly (if not deterministically) dependant on what they sense around them.
That having been said, I think that genetically engineered crops are inevitable, and mostly beneficial. When this becomes a tried-and-true technology instead of an experimental one, the fuss should die down.
;-)
Right. After a few decades of use, I'm sure genetically engineered crops will be as uncontroversial in the future as nuclear energy is today.
Cracking of the encryption on the computers
There's no need to crack the encryption, when it's so easy to just break into the whole computer. Instead of just trying to make a billion copies of itself and giving back doors to spammers and DDOS vandals, why couldn't a worm install a transparent proxying web server (along with all the fake encryption keys necessary to make everything appear to the user to be appropriately signed) and then perform a man-in-the-middle attack on your vote? The false vote can then be sent out your modem to the voting server in an ultra-secure encrypted message, while the real vote never makes it past your monitor.
The government did demand it, they were promised it, and Diebold lied about it.
Perhaps the government claimed they demanded a quality product, that doesn't mean they really did. If they had, then as soon as they discover the evidence to the contrary they will at least stop doing business with Diebold and at most sue Diebold for failing to live up to their claims and/or contracts. Have you ever bought a grossly faulty product and then continued to patronize the same company regularly afterward? The government does, all the time, and unless hell has frozen over they're going to continue doing so with the Diebold machines which will be filling voting booths in November.
The private sector doesn't work because private companies are miraculously more industrious and efficient than public agencies, it works because there are usually redundant companies supplying the same service, so selfish consumers avoid the companies who do a poor job of it, so selfish companies try to do a good enough job to keep some customers. If companies discover a big stupid customer with deep pockets who will be happy no matter what, how do you expect them to behave?
Remove the "Configurations with loops are not valid!" warning, and instead handle configurations with loops. It shouldn't be hard; if you're worried about someone setting up an "invalid" loop (like a NOR gate with its output hooked up to one of its inputs) then just make sure that the output of your blocks is lagged one timestep from the input.
After they've stopped playing a song, each of the other songs on their play list has a 50% chance of being next.
Did Civilization II use DirectX? No. Did it write directly to your video card or ethernet card? No.
I meant to write "video card or sound card" here; when a later CivII version added network play IIRC they did use DirectPlay to do it. I'll get the best oral surgeons working on that foot extraction operation right away.
It says before DirectX, developers had to write directly to "individual hardware components."
This is 100% true.
You're wrong. (By the way, note that I'm using the contraction for "you are" in the correct sense, not in your ironic, "you're uninformed post" sense)
Did Civilization II use DirectX? No. Did it write directly to your video card or ethernet card? No.
How about CivNET? Did it use DirectPlay? No. Did it write directly to your ethernet card? No.
Feel free to continue to accuse everyone who disagrees with you of bias and comprehension problems, though. Trying to put words in our mouths like "you didn't know, but DirectX is more than just a graphics library" and "they won't even admit that most Windows developers use DirectX, and few use OpenGL" is good too; that's much easier than answering the claims people actually make. Plus, as long as you're concerned about mod points, perhaps you'll get lucky and encounter moderators who have never heard of "ad hominem attacks" and "straw men arguments" before.
You probably won't, though. After all, if you're 100% right and you keep getting refuted and modded down anyway, it must be because everyone here is wearing blinders!
What you claim he said:
"All he said was that Microsoft provided a platform for Windows."
What he said:
"Before the arrival of DirectX, developers had to program their software titles to take advantage of features found in individual hardware components."
He didn't just say that Microsoft provided a platform for Windows, he said that before Microsoft provided their platform, developers had to write directly to the graphics drivers. This is untrue: although some programmers did write directly to hardware-specific interfaces like 3dfx's glide, they didn't have to. The availability of OpenGL for Windows predates DirectX, and the availability of OpenGL in general (remember, he said "developers", not "Windows developers") predates DirectX by years.
For a quick reference, check out this Byte article, which discusses both the already existing OpenGL, "available on Unix, Windows NT and 95, and the Mac", and the soon-to-be-released Direct3D, "scheduled to ship in the second quarter".
Or more specifically, what's the point of the "I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice unless you're paying me" disclaimers that I've seen? I had always assumed that such disclaimers were necessary because there was some law that could make lawyers liable for giving bad legal advice otherwise, but if that is the case why hasn't anybody used such a law to counterattack one of these "Your parody is illegal" C&D letters?
I mean, if lawyers can put grossly inaccurate legal threats in writing and get away with it, why would lawyers giving out accidentally inaccurate advice have anything to fear?
For your post to be persuasive, you're going to have to reexpress it as an image or series of images which conveys the same argument. Good luck.
I think Bill Gates himself has proven that it only takes someone in a garage with a damn good idea...
So why has Microsoft hasn't been brought to it's knees yet? Are they the only remaining source of good software ideas, or is there a severe garage shortage?
It's neither. Microsoft hasn't been brought to it's knees because it's profit comes from only two big ideas: "If our operating system has enough market share, people will write device drivers and application programs for us, and there will be many items of hardware and software which we didn't develop but which people will have to give us money before using anyway!" and "If our office programs have enough market share, people will distribute files in our formats, and there will be many documents which we didn't write but which people will have to give us money before reading anyway!" These are of course good ideas only from the perspective of a company which has overwhelming preloaded market share to apply them, which is one reason why all the other companies with the same ideas haven't had much luck with them. Standards like POSIX and HTML aren't popular because companies hate Microsoft's evil attempts at lock-in; companies love lock-in but are aware they can't pull it off without monopoly (or "90+% marketshare, bundled with all new computers", if you don't like the m-word) status.
If you, however, have an idea which is so much better than these, you can try developing it, but don't expect it to remain your idea for long. Microsoft's m...arket share prevents you from borrowing their ideas, but nothing prevents them from borrowing yours. If you're lucky the borrowing will be in the form of a buy out; if you're unlucky or if your company starts outgrowing that garage and looking like a threat, the borrowing will just be Microsoft's release of a competing product for zero price and eventually bundled with their OS, to "cut off your air supply".
So what if all the brick-and-mortar businesses go out of business?
So then all the local governments that have been earning their revenue from sales taxes will either have to switch to another (e.g. income or property) tax type, or they'll have to start enforcing these use taxes.
Either way, a huge disadvantage of brick-and-mortar businesses will have been eliminated, and so they will start to come back, putting some of the internet sellers out of business in turn. It may all work out alright in the end, but if we try to eliminate inequitable taxes in the first place perhaps we can make the process of approaching that end less unpleasant.
If what we get sucks and enough people agree that it sucks, we'll start asking for something different and it will be provided by the market.
Being able to dodge taxes isn't a market efficiency, it's an externalized cost. Governments which depend on sales tax aren't just going to close up shop when those revenues go down, they're going to get their money somewhere else instead.
Some people work in industries where music and videos ARE the business, and they ARE the data. And those businesses need DRM in order to make their business viable in the digital age.
Anyone with good sound cards and a second computer can use it to record what they play back on their first, which after a single analog step gives them a digital copy with better quality than most of the (128kbps) MP3s on the net. There is no technological way to prevent this: if it can be heard or seen, it can be recorded digitally, and once one person records it in an unencrypted digital format it's just as easy to spread around as if it had never been in an encumbered format at all.
If your business model really requires impenetrable DRM to be viable, you probably ought to find a new one before spending too much money on snake oil.
No, this is where the ludicrous "you're only using Linux because you're a GNU/Zealot, you won't even admit it sucks" argument comes in. Don't you just love ignorance?
.fonts directory and gets X using it immediately.
Well, there are certainly GNU/Zealots out there who behave that way, so it's not so much ignorance as prejudice or overgeneralization. Even many of the zealots out there will admit Linux sucks. I just use it because for what I do the alternatives usually suck more.
I was going to use font installation as an example "Linux sucks" of my own (because while Linux programs have always worked fine with the default fonts for me, installing new fonts even a few years ago was a pain), but that doesn't seem to be true anymore.
I can't imagine how easy this is to do on, say, RedHat, these days. I bet it all comes preinstalled by default.
I couldn't tell you what the default font installation is (except that it just seemed to work), but I just investigated what the current (KDE 3.2 on Fedora Core 1) situation for installing new fonts is:
You browse to the directory in Konqueror, and see an icon which previews a dozen small characters in the font. Clicking on the font once displays a larger character set and an "Install" button, clicking on the button asks if you want to install the font as a Personal font or System font (and explains what each means, including the need for a password for a "System" install), and clicking on "Personal" installs it to your
Stock install of just about any distribution with the 2.4 kernel. Gnome applications can't see all the necessary fonts. Most crash.
It's worse if KDE is the default desktop.
Why do people keep calling rants like this informative? Are there really moderators out there who believe that all the Linux distributors are shipping distributions in which most of the Gnome apps in the standard installation crash on every execution, and KDE is worse? And all the people like me who have been using Linux with Gnome and/or KDE for years are somehow failing to notice?
I seem to recall an exploit where you sent Internet Explorer a file with a non-executable MIME type (thus getting by it's "don't open untrusted executables" restrictions) but a .exe extension (thus getting the system to open it by executing it).
I wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing happen to Linux. The most Unixy way of determining what files are is to actually look in them for a binary magic number or for ASCII keywords (like the "file" command does), but that's so much slower (for large groups of files) than just checking extensions that applications behave both ways.
Why, Linux can be used for everything from palmtops to pissing on Heinlein's grave!
I use a system almost like the one you guys describe, except instead of a giant capacitor I have a spare set of batteries, and instead of using it to charge the drained batteries, I just take it out of the charger and put the drained set in its place. Voila, I have a new fully charged set of batteries in about ten seconds.
Man, I'm way ahead of the technology curve.
The benefit of this seems contingent upon having multiple requests pending, which AFAIK is hard on linux as there's no non-blocking file IO.
What do you call it when you pass O_NONBLOCK to the read function, then? If you're thinking of asynchronous I/O, Linux has that too, although I don't know if it's as portable & standardized.
Why would existing laws on vandalism not cover this?
On the physical level, the magnetic regions on one's fixed disc are altered in a manner not authorised by the owner and cause the system to not function correctly.
I don't see this as differing (w.r.t. vandalism) from dropping a wrench in an engine or maladjusting the control knobs.
On the physical level, a computer virus author doesn't go anywhere near your hard disk. He just sends some signals to your computer, signals which if sent to perfectly-written software run by an informed user would do no damage whatsoever.
The reason the virus does damage is because there is no perfectly-written software and there are too few informed users; to stretch your analogy to its breaking point, it's as if in addition to owning my car's engine (the hard disk) I employed a mechanic (the operating system and networked software) to maintain it, and my mechanic was an idiot who could be convinced by an anonymous phone call to wreck the car.
Now, I'm sure there must be some law against tricking someone into destroying their own property, but I don't think vandalism will cover it.
Most hydrogen bombs have a yield breakdown of about 85% fission to 15% fusion (fission is a much better producer of blast and fire)
Do you have a reference for this? I thought the fusion part of the blast was the major difference between the tens of kilotons we used on Japan and the megaton-plus warheads we have now.
The PS2 costs about as much as the graphics card I would have to buy to get comperable performance out of my PC
I don't think this is true anymore, at least not if you're willing to turn your computer resolution down to the low levels your console displays. With Halo, for instance, it looks like you can get 640x480x50fps (i.e. approximately TV resolution with better-than-interlaced-TV framerate) with a GeforceFX 5200 ($55 on pricewatch) or with a Radeon 9200 ($40 on pricewatch). Oh, and you can get both those cards with TV Out at that price, so you can use your larger TV screen if you want.