Definitely not time to rehash a format war, so I'll just concede right here: Windows sucks.
But I did want to bring up one pet peeve about Mac. If my Windows mouse goes out I can do an awful lot with just the keyboard. I can even shut the thing down. On a Mac you're limited to the shortcuts, and only those you've memorized.
Funny. Just today I was working with an iMac whose mouse stopped responding a few minutes after I started. (I was just web browsing; I was checking my mail at a friend's house.)
We played with it, checking connections and such, couldn't get it to work, and rebooted it. A hard reboot, since the mouse was dead and we didn't know any keyboard shortcut for shutting down. It worked fine after that.
I realize that this is anecdotal and proves squat. It's just coincidence that the first Mac I touch in ages immediately develops a problem that only a reboot could cure. It could be anything: a flaky printer cable, a rare Mac virus, a glitch in the memory.
Oh, one other thing: I have owned exactly one Mac in the last 10 years. A Powerbook 5300 CS. Many people tell me it was the worst thing Apple ever made.
So like I said, it's probably just coincidence, but I'm going to have to take your "there is no real reason to ever shut down a Mac" with a grain of salt.
With the server already grinding to a halt and the "dome" left unexplained in the summary (is it some sort of euphemism?), I'll spoil the ending:
His wife got ticked off, so to apologize he built her a ceiling dome (a recessed dome built into the ceiling, with a light fixture suspended from the peak). It looks nice.
The idea of brute force is extremely old, but the fact that somebody is out there actually doing them is important. The use of strong passwords is no longer just a theoretical "it would be a good idea" policy, but now somebody actually is looking to get through.
Other Slashdot readers are reporting the same effect: a recent rise in brute-force, scripted attacks, possibly by compromised boxes.
Most accounts of all sorts remain secure simply because they're obscure, and it's tempting to be lulled by past successes. We always knew that this was possible, but the fact that somebody is actually doing it is news.
That's the thing. I'm kind of an objective observer (or, alternatively, an utterly biased observer) because I don't buy music, DRMed or otherwise. I prefer talk, and I listen to a lot of recorded books (legally, from the library).
I'd love to see the presence of DRM drive people to music sources other than the RIAA. I won't be pushing it one direction or the other, myself, but the RIAA have been such creeps about this that I'd love to see them lose.
(Legally or not, they've been right bastards about the process, using the law where they can and lobbying to make it where they can't, trying to preserve a business model that must change. There are technological solutions to some of the problems they face, DRM being one, but having them say it makes the one-sidedness of the contract they've been implicitly pushing more obvious.)
Fair enough. And actually I agree with nearly every word. I've been waiting for them to kill CDs and replace them with a DRM-only model for quite some time.
In fact, I think one of their biggest mistakes (from their own POV) is that they waited so long to support something like iTunes. The biggest hole in iTunes (again, from their POV) is the CD hole. I keep waiting for them to start pushing plug-your-iPod-into-your-car stereos so they can stop including CD players.
Are the people stupid for accepting it? Possibly, but what's their alternative? Switch out of the mainstream, which would be great. Or suck it up, which is more likely.
Man, how come I never have mod points when I want them? This is an angle I hadn't realized. It's not just Plame who was outed, but everybody at "Brewster Jennings".
Yes. It means that it's possible to break into your account without knowing your password, just one of the hash collisions.
But that doesn't help the hacker, because the number of collisions is small compared to the size of the space to explore. So the hacker might come up with a working-but-incorrect password by brute force, but brute force is too expensive to be practical.
Even if they steal the file, they still have to brute-force it (or come up with some clever algorithm, of which none is publicly known or we wouldn't still be using this encryption). So the one-way hash (or trap-door hash, or irreversible hash; I've never heard "irrevocable hash" and neither has Google) protects you when other protection measures fail.
Stealing the password file means that they can brute-force it in the privacy of their own homes, as opposed to asking your server a gazillion guesses, but at the very least you've bought the time to detect the intrusion and ask everybody to change their passwords.
(And even if you just re-encrypt the passwords with new "salt" (a little random flavoring to make brute force even harder), they'd have to get the right password, not just a hash collision for the password, because the new salt will put it in a different hash bucket.)
That could well be. I'm not in a position to say for sure. I'll just trot out the tired old "If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?"
I'm going to assume that MS will make smart business decisions (which they don't always do, not by a long shot) and try to understand what they're trying to do. Pointing and saying "You're so stupid, of course you should do what I'm telling you to do" seems unproductive until I at least understand what they think they're accomplishing.
Because you don't get rich by losing money, and for all their (copious) fault's they're certianly rich. That only means that they WERE smart, or at least lucky, at some point in the past, but that's as good a data point as any to start from.
Not as I understand it. I'm not an antitrust lawyer, but to be "anticompetetive behavior" you have to be trying to drive competition away. The existence of other file formats, and their built-in support under Windows Media Player, keeps this from being monoplistic behavior, at least on the surface.
There could be anticompetetive behavior going on underneath. They could be selling below market price for the OS, trying to drive Apple out of business, for example. But their OS market is profitable.
The existence of Windows Media Player is a much more likely candidate for anticompetetive behavior: they're giving away for free what others would like to charge, with the intention of tying it to other things. (Tying is another monopolistic behavior.) The EU is trying to punish them for that.
But as I said, I'm not a monopolies lawyer, so this is all guesswork. But if they're in trouble for this, they're in trouble for a lot of other stuff.
I'm not stupid enough to buy it... the problem is that most people are.
To which I want to know, how much are you depriving yourself? Is there content you genuinely wish to see, but you deprive yourself because you object to the model by which it's sold to you?
If you're of the opinion that "The RIAA makes crappy music" and "The MPAA makes crappy movies", then it's a bit disingenuous for you to declare as "stupid" those people who live with the restrictions to see the content they want to see/hear.
They want what they want, and they pay the price they're willing to pay to get it. They're tastes may be barbaric, but in aggregate they're smart enough to get what they want. And they seem to be able to continue to get what they want: they're not choking off non-DRM choices so much as the non-DRM producers aren't producing what they want.
That's precisely the question, and we'll just have to see.
Generally, when one asks "Will it run ____?" the blank is filled in with some commercial piece of software, usually a game or a productivity app. And the answer will always be yes: Photoshop, MS Office, Half Life 83, etc. will all run beautifully on this. Probably even the old versions will, since they're not video players. The same will apply to all of the most common media players; in fact, Windows Media Player will run right there.
The most obvious question from the slightly more insightful user is, "Will it play my existing DVDs?", and that's the biggest question mark. If the answer turns out to be "No", if somebody upgrades their laptop and discovers the next time that they board an airplane that they have to read the in-flight magazine rather than watch Tomb Raider 9 3/4, then you're going to see some serious, serious backlash.
I'm going to assume that MS knows that, and so existing DVD formats will probably play exactly as they do now (which does have various protections anyway, though they're easily bypassed.)
Instead, I expect that this will apply primarily to new content (or rather, newly-coded content). For that, question would be "But will it run NFF (New Fangled Format)?" and the answer is "Yes". The flip side, "Will NFF run on my existing box" will be "No", but I think that user backlash on that is smaller than you might expect. They could take it as an opportunity to switch to Linux/OS X/PDP 11, but as long as they're buying a new computer, they could buy one with Longhorn, which will run NFF along with all of their old programs.
The user is kept on the upgrade treadmill because at each step the logical choice will be "forward" rather than "right" or "left". That's partly because they expect that a side-step will just put them on a different treadmill, which is a whole different debate.
So I don't expect this to cause a mass defection from Windows, at least not by itself. Other factors (cheaper Macs, improved Linux, the stunning revival of the Timex Sinclair) will make it hard to tease out whether I'm right or wrong, so maybe all this is moot, but, well, it's Slashdot and I get to shoot my mouth off anyway.
While it's true that the basics of a kernel are easy to grasp, a really advanced one isn't. SCO isn't suing over the thing Linus banged out in the first place. They were suing over...
Well, it turns out that they were suing over squat. But these days the Linux kernel contains lots of fancy stuff, like the non-uniform memory access (NUMA) and spiffy process-scheduling features that, realistically, aren't built by just one guy. Linus had plenty of help.
What he didn't get was help from anything that SCO owns. It's hard, but it's not so hard that you have to steal it. Anything that can be written can be rewritten, usually more simply. Which is exactly what Linus et al. did a lot of the time.
Dude, you're too focused on ends. Enjoy the process.
Each day brings a new humilation to Darl McBride. Treasure this moment, because all too soon the case will be thrown out of court and then you won't have Darl to kick around any more.
So just relax and enoy, and don't be so focused on the final result. (No, your girlfriend didn't pay me to say that.)
Making tech more available, perhaps
on
3D Face Cameras
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· Score: 1
I'm guessing (reading between the lines) that they've made a less-expensive, relatively portable, easy-to-use 3D face camera. That's not the whole biometric problem or even the hardest part, but the idea is to improve the quality of that database.
The database full of faces we have already is 2D. If you're trying to match a face in a crowd against the database, you'll need to consider every angle, which is easier if you have a 3D picture in the database.
The crucial piece of the technology then is the one that quickly and accurately looks up a picture from a security camera against the database.
It may be useful even before we get that, if it's able to match people more accurately between mugshots. That is, if you catch somebody whose ID is false, and your high-quality 3D mugshot does a better job of matching against the national database for determining his true ID, then you've got something.
I'd guess they're hoping for a government grant to put lots of these into the hands of the 99.999% of cop shops who can't afford it. Presumably it's cheaper and easier to use than the existing ones. I'll let the civil-libertarians and tinfoil-hatters worry about the personal liberties aspects, but this could be one piece of an overall biometric recongizer. Not the hard part, but a part. The wins aren't always the new tech, but the way to make an older tech more available.
Re:Um... the end of that press release....
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3D Face Cameras
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· Score: 1
The way I read it, it's not interesting enough to be vaporware. What it does is not particularly novel; it's just new and perhaps more convenient packaging of something law enforcement departments do regularly. Or should be doing regularly.
It's not a solution of any sort in and of itself. It's one piece of a larger biometric catch-the-bad-guys sort of database.
So it's probably not vaporware. The press release is so badly written mostly because it's not all that interesting. That is, it's not really big news, so all we get is a crappy company press release rather than a snappily-written review.
Re:Um... the end of that press release....
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3D Face Cameras
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· Score: 1
It's a pretty standard disclaimer. They're afraid of the following scenario:
1. They issue a press release about a forthcoming product 2. A bunch of people, figuring they're the first ones to hear about it, buy up the stock 3. For some reason (good or ill) the product doesn't materialize, or doesn't sell well 4. The investors sue the bejeezus out of them.
(Yeah, yeah, I know "... profit". You're such a card.)
What's the difference between this and vaporware? Arguably nothing, except that "vaporware" implies bad faith. These guys could be operating in the best of faith, trying to raise awareness of their ideas in hopes of attracting interest (nothing makes a marketing plan look good like a million emails asking "where can I buy one?").
So yeah, it could be vaporware. But this disclaimer appears on nearly everything which talks about an incomplete project.
I'm speaking from an American perspective, so feel free to differ, but I'll quote a much better man than I on the purpose of government:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
If you'd like to lump "facilitate the near-free distribution of valuable works by long-dead people that can benefit the public at large" into "the general Welfare", I can't disagree, except that I'm sorry to see trained musicians put out of work. Their welfare gets kinda screwed. Me, I prefer to limit the government's ability to screw somebody for my benefit, but I guess that's just a matter of taste.
There's a big difference between the government giving something away, and a private citizen. The private citizen is spending his own money; the government is spending taxpayer dollars.
Governments are put in place to do the things that private citizens and corporations can't do on their own: enforce order, build roads, provide for the common defense, etc.
Wouldn't it suck to be in competition with somebody who's giving it away, and isn't even spending their own money to do it?
If you're printing documents at work that's kinda cheating, especially if you're talking about your personal stuff. I'm not saying that your office should crack down on printing; do not bind the mouths of the kine that tread the grain. But the grandparent to your post suggested that nobody cared about printers; clearly you do, even if you don't own your own.
There are still reasons to have a printer in your house. I print recipes off the Internet; I wouldn't want to go down to Kinko's for that. And I print directions from Google maps. There are technological alternatives (get a computer in the kitchen and another in the car), but suffice it to say that I still keep a printer around.
Except that people use printers diffrently now than they used to.
The biggest change is that you really can print photos at home now. Ten years ago that wasn't practical. People like having physical copies of their photos for an album, and you just can't replicate that with a screen. There are services that let you do it online, but a lot of people like the control that they get from having it right there: they can choose the paper and do a lot of tweaking right at home.
In addition, new kinds of paper have opened up new opportunities to use your printer: bumper stickers, tee shirts, even tattoos. You can't get those at Kinko's.
So I'd hardly say that nobody cares. In fact with the digital cameras many people care more than ever. (Not to mention that most schools still won't accept your homework on a CD-ROM.)
Slashdot Mirror
Definitely not time to rehash a format war, so I'll just concede right here: Windows sucks.
But I did want to bring up one pet peeve about Mac. If my Windows mouse goes out I can do an awful lot with just the keyboard. I can even shut the thing down. On a Mac you're limited to the shortcuts, and only those you've memorized.
To conclude: Windows sucks.
They're not impossible but then, it's not common for a naked maniac with a sword to rampage through a church in London but it did happen once ;-)
Yeah, whoops. Sorry about that.
Funny. Just today I was working with an iMac whose mouse stopped responding a few minutes after I started. (I was just web browsing; I was checking my mail at a friend's house.)
We played with it, checking connections and such, couldn't get it to work, and rebooted it. A hard reboot, since the mouse was dead and we didn't know any keyboard shortcut for shutting down. It worked fine after that.
I realize that this is anecdotal and proves squat. It's just coincidence that the first Mac I touch in ages immediately develops a problem that only a reboot could cure. It could be anything: a flaky printer cable, a rare Mac virus, a glitch in the memory.
Oh, one other thing: I have owned exactly one Mac in the last 10 years. A Powerbook 5300 CS. Many people tell me it was the worst thing Apple ever made.
So like I said, it's probably just coincidence, but I'm going to have to take your "there is no real reason to ever shut down a Mac" with a grain of salt.
With the server already grinding to a halt and the "dome" left unexplained in the summary (is it some sort of euphemism?), I'll spoil the ending:
His wife got ticked off, so to apologize he built her a ceiling dome (a recessed dome built into the ceiling, with a light fixture suspended from the peak). It looks nice.
I dunno for sure. All I've got is anecdotal evidence.
The idea of brute force is extremely old, but the fact that somebody is out there actually doing them is important. The use of strong passwords is no longer just a theoretical "it would be a good idea" policy, but now somebody actually is looking to get through.
Other Slashdot readers are reporting the same effect: a recent rise in brute-force, scripted attacks, possibly by compromised boxes.
Most accounts of all sorts remain secure simply because they're obscure, and it's tempting to be lulled by past successes. We always knew that this was possible, but the fact that somebody is actually doing it is news.
Why wait to cut yourself? You could make money selling the pictures on the internet.
That's the thing. I'm kind of an objective observer (or, alternatively, an utterly biased observer) because I don't buy music, DRMed or otherwise. I prefer talk, and I listen to a lot of recorded books (legally, from the library).
I'd love to see the presence of DRM drive people to music sources other than the RIAA. I won't be pushing it one direction or the other, myself, but the RIAA have been such creeps about this that I'd love to see them lose.
(Legally or not, they've been right bastards about the process, using the law where they can and lobbying to make it where they can't, trying to preserve a business model that must change. There are technological solutions to some of the problems they face, DRM being one, but having them say it makes the one-sidedness of the contract they've been implicitly pushing more obvious.)
Fair enough. And actually I agree with nearly every word. I've been waiting for them to kill CDs and replace them with a DRM-only model for quite some time.
In fact, I think one of their biggest mistakes (from their own POV) is that they waited so long to support something like iTunes. The biggest hole in iTunes (again, from their POV) is the CD hole. I keep waiting for them to start pushing plug-your-iPod-into-your-car stereos so they can stop including CD players.
Are the people stupid for accepting it? Possibly, but what's their alternative? Switch out of the mainstream, which would be great. Or suck it up, which is more likely.
Man, how come I never have mod points when I want them? This is an angle I hadn't realized. It's not just Plame who was outed, but everybody at "Brewster Jennings".
Yes. It means that it's possible to break into your account without knowing your password, just one of the hash collisions.
But that doesn't help the hacker, because the number of collisions is small compared to the size of the space to explore. So the hacker might come up with a working-but-incorrect password by brute force, but brute force is too expensive to be practical.
Even if they steal the file, they still have to brute-force it (or come up with some clever algorithm, of which none is publicly known or we wouldn't still be using this encryption). So the one-way hash (or trap-door hash, or irreversible hash; I've never heard "irrevocable hash" and neither has Google) protects you when other protection measures fail.
Stealing the password file means that they can brute-force it in the privacy of their own homes, as opposed to asking your server a gazillion guesses, but at the very least you've bought the time to detect the intrusion and ask everybody to change their passwords.
(And even if you just re-encrypt the passwords with new "salt" (a little random flavoring to make brute force even harder), they'd have to get the right password, not just a hash collision for the password, because the new salt will put it in a different hash bucket.)
Somehow, RTS just wasn't as funny. Neither was VMS. You are aware that it was a joke, right?
Seems to be a bad business move to me.
That could well be. I'm not in a position to say for sure. I'll just trot out the tired old "If you're so smart, how come you ain't rich?"
I'm going to assume that MS will make smart business decisions (which they don't always do, not by a long shot) and try to understand what they're trying to do. Pointing and saying "You're so stupid, of course you should do what I'm telling you to do" seems unproductive until I at least understand what they think they're accomplishing.
Because you don't get rich by losing money, and for all their (copious) fault's they're certianly rich. That only means that they WERE smart, or at least lucky, at some point in the past, but that's as good a data point as any to start from.
Not as I understand it. I'm not an antitrust lawyer, but to be "anticompetetive behavior" you have to be trying to drive competition away. The existence of other file formats, and their built-in support under Windows Media Player, keeps this from being monoplistic behavior, at least on the surface.
There could be anticompetetive behavior going on underneath. They could be selling below market price for the OS, trying to drive Apple out of business, for example. But their OS market is profitable.
The existence of Windows Media Player is a much more likely candidate for anticompetetive behavior: they're giving away for free what others would like to charge, with the intention of tying it to other things. (Tying is another monopolistic behavior.) The EU is trying to punish them for that.
But as I said, I'm not a monopolies lawyer, so this is all guesswork. But if they're in trouble for this, they're in trouble for a lot of other stuff.
I'm not stupid enough to buy it... the problem is that most people are.
To which I want to know, how much are you depriving yourself? Is there content you genuinely wish to see, but you deprive yourself because you object to the model by which it's sold to you?
If you're of the opinion that "The RIAA makes crappy music" and "The MPAA makes crappy movies", then it's a bit disingenuous for you to declare as "stupid" those people who live with the restrictions to see the content they want to see/hear.
They want what they want, and they pay the price they're willing to pay to get it. They're tastes may be barbaric, but in aggregate they're smart enough to get what they want. And they seem to be able to continue to get what they want: they're not choking off non-DRM choices so much as the non-DRM producers aren't producing what they want.
That's precisely the question, and we'll just have to see.
Generally, when one asks "Will it run ____?" the blank is filled in with some commercial piece of software, usually a game or a productivity app. And the answer will always be yes: Photoshop, MS Office, Half Life 83, etc. will all run beautifully on this. Probably even the old versions will, since they're not video players. The same will apply to all of the most common media players; in fact, Windows Media Player will run right there.
The most obvious question from the slightly more insightful user is, "Will it play my existing DVDs?", and that's the biggest question mark. If the answer turns out to be "No", if somebody upgrades their laptop and discovers the next time that they board an airplane that they have to read the in-flight magazine rather than watch Tomb Raider 9 3/4, then you're going to see some serious, serious backlash.
I'm going to assume that MS knows that, and so existing DVD formats will probably play exactly as they do now (which does have various protections anyway, though they're easily bypassed.)
Instead, I expect that this will apply primarily to new content (or rather, newly-coded content). For that, question would be "But will it run NFF (New Fangled Format)?" and the answer is "Yes". The flip side, "Will NFF run on my existing box" will be "No", but I think that user backlash on that is smaller than you might expect. They could take it as an opportunity to switch to Linux/OS X/PDP 11, but as long as they're buying a new computer, they could buy one with Longhorn, which will run NFF along with all of their old programs.
The user is kept on the upgrade treadmill because at each step the logical choice will be "forward" rather than "right" or "left". That's partly because they expect that a side-step will just put them on a different treadmill, which is a whole different debate.
So I don't expect this to cause a mass defection from Windows, at least not by itself. Other factors (cheaper Macs, improved Linux, the stunning revival of the Timex Sinclair) will make it hard to tease out whether I'm right or wrong, so maybe all this is moot, but, well, it's Slashdot and I get to shoot my mouth off anyway.
While it's true that the basics of a kernel are easy to grasp, a really advanced one isn't. SCO isn't suing over the thing Linus banged out in the first place. They were suing over...
Well, it turns out that they were suing over squat. But these days the Linux kernel contains lots of fancy stuff, like the non-uniform memory access (NUMA) and spiffy process-scheduling features that, realistically, aren't built by just one guy. Linus had plenty of help.
What he didn't get was help from anything that SCO owns. It's hard, but it's not so hard that you have to steal it. Anything that can be written can be rewritten, usually more simply. Which is exactly what Linus et al. did a lot of the time.
Dude, you're too focused on ends. Enjoy the process.
Each day brings a new humilation to Darl McBride. Treasure this moment, because all too soon the case will be thrown out of court and then you won't have Darl to kick around any more.
So just relax and enoy, and don't be so focused on the final result. (No, your girlfriend didn't pay me to say that.)
I'm guessing (reading between the lines) that they've made a less-expensive, relatively portable, easy-to-use 3D face camera. That's not the whole biometric problem or even the hardest part, but the idea is to improve the quality of that database.
The database full of faces we have already is 2D. If you're trying to match a face in a crowd against the database, you'll need to consider every angle, which is easier if you have a 3D picture in the database.
The crucial piece of the technology then is the one that quickly and accurately looks up a picture from a security camera against the database.
It may be useful even before we get that, if it's able to match people more accurately between mugshots. That is, if you catch somebody whose ID is false, and your high-quality 3D mugshot does a better job of matching against the national database for determining his true ID, then you've got something.
I'd guess they're hoping for a government grant to put lots of these into the hands of the 99.999% of cop shops who can't afford it. Presumably it's cheaper and easier to use than the existing ones. I'll let the civil-libertarians and tinfoil-hatters worry about the personal liberties aspects, but this could be one piece of an overall biometric recongizer. Not the hard part, but a part. The wins aren't always the new tech, but the way to make an older tech more available.
The way I read it, it's not interesting enough to be vaporware. What it does is not particularly novel; it's just new and perhaps more convenient packaging of something law enforcement departments do regularly. Or should be doing regularly.
It's not a solution of any sort in and of itself. It's one piece of a larger biometric catch-the-bad-guys sort of database.
So it's probably not vaporware. The press release is so badly written mostly because it's not all that interesting. That is, it's not really big news, so all we get is a crappy company press release rather than a snappily-written review.
It's a pretty standard disclaimer. They're afraid of the following scenario:
1. They issue a press release about a forthcoming product
2. A bunch of people, figuring they're the first ones to hear about it, buy up the stock
3. For some reason (good or ill) the product doesn't materialize, or doesn't sell well
4. The investors sue the bejeezus out of them.
(Yeah, yeah, I know "... profit". You're such a card.)
What's the difference between this and vaporware? Arguably nothing, except that "vaporware" implies bad faith. These guys could be operating in the best of faith, trying to raise awareness of their ideas in hopes of attracting interest (nothing makes a marketing plan look good like a million emails asking "where can I buy one?").
So yeah, it could be vaporware. But this disclaimer appears on nearly everything which talks about an incomplete project.
I'm speaking from an American perspective, so feel free to differ, but I'll quote a much better man than I on the purpose of government:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
If you'd like to lump "facilitate the near-free distribution of valuable works by long-dead people that can benefit the public at large" into "the general Welfare", I can't disagree, except that I'm sorry to see trained musicians put out of work. Their welfare gets kinda screwed. Me, I prefer to limit the government's ability to screw somebody for my benefit, but I guess that's just a matter of taste.
There's a big difference between the government giving something away, and a private citizen. The private citizen is spending his own money; the government is spending taxpayer dollars.
Governments are put in place to do the things that private citizens and corporations can't do on their own: enforce order, build roads, provide for the common defense, etc.
Wouldn't it suck to be in competition with somebody who's giving it away, and isn't even spending their own money to do it?
If you're printing documents at work that's kinda cheating, especially if you're talking about your personal stuff. I'm not saying that your office should crack down on printing; do not bind the mouths of the kine that tread the grain. But the grandparent to your post suggested that nobody cared about printers; clearly you do, even if you don't own your own.
There are still reasons to have a printer in your house. I print recipes off the Internet; I wouldn't want to go down to Kinko's for that. And I print directions from Google maps. There are technological alternatives (get a computer in the kitchen and another in the car), but suffice it to say that I still keep a printer around.
Except that people use printers diffrently now than they used to.
The biggest change is that you really can print photos at home now. Ten years ago that wasn't practical. People like having physical copies of their photos for an album, and you just can't replicate that with a screen. There are services that let you do it online, but a lot of people like the control that they get from having it right there: they can choose the paper and do a lot of tweaking right at home.
In addition, new kinds of paper have opened up new opportunities to use your printer: bumper stickers, tee shirts, even tattoos. You can't get those at Kinko's.
So I'd hardly say that nobody cares. In fact with the digital cameras many people care more than ever. (Not to mention that most schools still won't accept your homework on a CD-ROM.)