Back in the day, artsd was usually responsible for behavior you've described. Though I think artsd is long gone now; maybe there's something else locking up sound channels, running as a KDE daemon?
Yeah - back with my old KDE3 desktop, that was one of the first things I disabled. I was poking around looking for something similar this time around but didn't find anything of note. I suspect there's something KDE related that collides with Wine for ALSA. But maybe its even something KDE is doing that takes up enough cycles to throw off Wine? Maybe some time I'll play around with renicing things and see if that helps.
Enter Sun who buy MySQL and suddenly the community isn't happy and it's fork fork fork. Only one of those forks needs to be any good and all of a sudden Suns not bought very much at all. If a company plays nice with the open source community forks are fairly easy but rare. The problem is they hang like a knife (or maybe that should be fork) over the company and if they are unfortunate enough to annoy the community they could eaisly lose control of their product.
My current employer has heavily invested their infrastructure in Sun and Oracle. However, Oracle licensing represents an inordinately large cost to our budget. And frankly, there are a lot of projects that just don't need to use Oracle so the value of those licenses are getting a lot of scrutiny. There are discussions about moving some of those projects to MySQL which would do a lot to relieve our budget. And a part of those discussions involve taking the money saved on Oracle licensing and purchasing MySQL support from Sun. We know Sun. We have existing support contracts with them. And we're pretty happy with that arrangement. Adding in MySQL support is almost a given.
That's what Sun gets. As long as Sun doesn't abandon MySQL or otherwise break it, it is unlikely our folks will consider going with another fork and purchasing support from an unknown entity. Right now, Sun is considered the go-to folks for MySQL. And they're Sun. We're all but rushing to give them money for this.
It should also be noted that having options other than Sun for MySQL has it's own attraction. Today we're keen to get Sun support. But we know that tomorrow we might decide that Sun's MySQL support isn't a good value once we've tried it. Other options means that investing in Sun and MySQL today isn't a dead end; it isn't more of the same we get with Oracle. So we're much more open to making that investment today. And that means Sun gets sales even if it means they risk those sales tomorrow.
I've been toying around with KDE 4.2 and I've ended up with mixed feelings about it. It seems like a usable environment - far better than the 4.x version that Ubuntu infamously shipped earlier. And there's certainly a nice sheen of polish and flash. But I also get a feeling of "clunkiness" with this new release that wasn't there on my olde KDE 3.x environment. And I can't say that I'm a fan of the direction the Konqueror filemanager has taken (seems like Nautilus for KDE).
What ultimately had me going back to Gnome (and Compiz) was playing WoW. For some reason, WoW (and Ventrilo) will lock up with a repeating loud sound at seemingly random intervals. This happened on KDE3.5 on very rare occasions in the past - I suspect when I had Flash running in another desktop. But with KDE4.2 it happens a lot more often. No clue why. But it's not happening in Gnome.
KDE is going in an interesting direction. I'm a fan of flash and change so this has some appeal to me (otherwise I'd use one of these minimalist windows managers that keep getting mentioned in these types of stories). But it strikes me that the KDE folks are taking one of those bold steps that tends to risk everything. I hope it works out.
I'd definitely recommend people give it a try; see if it works for them. Unless you have a KDE3.x desktop that you're really happy with and cringe at Gnome's apparent design philosophy.
What kind of connection do you need to have to get away with several terabytes of data before someone notices? Users on my network get pissy when someone downloads a few dozen megs.
I have no insight on this particular incident but I have been involved in similar incidents. One in particular comes to mind. There were a couple factors involved.
The network in question was certainly large enough that, at the least, nobody would notice someone downloading "a few dozen megs." In fact, fairly large transfers of data were commonplace within intra-agency links and links with various contractors. Most of that involved direct links with the entities involved. So not all of that went out to the Internet but a lot did.
The attackers were reasonably subtle. They didn't shotgun exploits or perform noisy scans. The data they transferred out of the network was a fairly large overall sum. However, they prepped that data by creating multi-part compressed and encrypted archives. They were conservative about their schedule to download these individual chunks. Their heist made up a series of "a few dozen megs" over a period of time that didn't make the procedure stand out of the normal day-to-day noise.
The attackers were discovered due to the diligence of a sysadmin for one of the systems affected. He noticed behavior that was uncharacteristic of that particular system. Once we knew there was something odd, we were able to identify the attack, profile behavior, and track that behavior back through the network and other hosts involved (to include intra-agency and partner networks). At no point did the amount of data being transferred provide any particular insight (other than verifying how many slices were moved around).
Part of the reason is because teens will download the games which says they want them and the dev is on the right track. They just need to stop them from thieving and then they'll buy their game over the competitions.
Your proof that the "try before you buy" excuse is a lie is the fact that they have more content than they could possibly afford. Then you say that there is some content that they could afford. Somewhere there's a disconnect in this proof.
And the idea that teens downloading games they can't afford is any kind of incentive to devs to continue feeding that market seems a little odd as well. Are you implying that devs are chasing the elusive "pirate" market? Wouldn't they be paying attention to their sales and then feeding whatever market it is that generates sales?
I think the pro-piracy movement should learn more about economics. They seem to assume that people either would be willing to buy a game or would not. In the real world, people make decisions at the margin. Maybe you're not willing to pay $50 to play the game now but, in two years' time, when it costs $10, you'd be willing to buy it. Is it a lost sale or not? Perhaps not at current prices (thus, "I'd never have bought it anyway"), but a lost sale indeed at a lower price.
Back when I was a voracious little warez monkey, I had hundreds of software tittles all squirreled away and cataloged on external media. Most of it never saw my machine after it was moved to media. Why? It's because I was a packrat obsessed with HAVING illicit data. And to some extent I was curious as to what stuff did / looked like. I knew many others in the warez scene that were like that as well. I don't see this being reflected in your rational economic analysis. It's probably too irrational.
The whole try before you buy thing is a load of shit. You won't buy a game you've completed for free and quite often it's teenagers using this excuse. Do they expect me to believe they can actually afford the ass load of music, movies and games they steal without a decent paying job if they even have a job?
So wait a minute. They have more content than they could possibly afford? Am I assuming this is some sort of support for the argument that "piracy" is a direct correlation to lost sales?
So, if Stardock doesn't think the problem was piracy, why are so many people here using this opportunity to bash people who tried warez versions of the game?
There's a meme that shows up quite often whenever we discuss copyright reform, DRM, or other related topics. It goes along the lines of when so many/. readers make their livings from "intellectual property", how could we possibly support any concept that challenges it? Now before we get caught up in the debate of the meme, keep in mind that the fact that it surfaces shows that there are (trolls aside) people who do believe in the idea. There are undoubtedly those who see these issues as linchpins to their industry and livelihood.
Obviously it's a good time to make that security products purchase you've been putting off. You probably want something effective... say a software suite that's been able to block more than 245 million attempted malicious code attacks across the globe each month.
Can you imagine if a Congressman was legally required to read every piece of correspondence and listen to every speaker? You could paralyze a government by hiring enough speakers / writers to take up every available moment of the Congressman's time (and then still file a lawsuit because your hired army never got their time due to waiting in line behind all the other hired armies).
Spam is commercial email. This is email about a pending legislative action, and thus Jack Thompson has the right to send it because he has a right to free speech.
Just to clarify...
Spam is not always commercial email. However, I believe the CAN-SPAM act is only concerned with unsolicited commercial email. So in that sense, you're probably right that the CAN-SPAM act doesn't apply to this case.
As for filters - that's what spammers say. I don't buy the argument. At some point, the harasser will attempt to bypass filters and you end up inducing a cost to keep ahead of the filtering arms race.
First off, I acknowledge he's rambling and nearly incoherent, and is not familiar with the technology. However, I can look past that and get at what he's saying, and he clearly understands the basic principles, and the argument he makes is sane.
...
I understood what he was saying. He's talking about how the Internet is based on a "network of networks". He does mention the word "local". What he's saying is that one company streaming video across the network impacts the whole network it runs across, not just the endpoints. This is the basic argument of net neutrality. Should individual networks be allowed to manage traffic that flows across their network or not? I'm not going to get into the debate, but I'm sure Stevens understood all that I've laid out.
The problem I see is that he's using lots of words and phrases that one would use to make proper analogies and describe how the tech works at a general level. But he's not putting them together in a way that makes sense. We're having to interpret what he's saying, using our existing knowledge as a guideline. In my experience, people who use technical jargon in this manner are trying to sound like they know what they're saying - but don't. This isn't him making a mistake on the finer points of how a protocol works. This is him not being able to describe a general concept clearly.
I don't believe he understands the basic principles at all. I do believe he's working on legislation on someone else's behalf, attempting to use someone else's description as a reason why while not really understanding what he's doing beyond that it's what was asked for.
I concur that ultimate point is over who affects what. But there's so much confusion and misinformation going on in that speech that it's hard to pick it out, much less find anything that would support it.
The analogy fails in that the Internet isn't just a "series of tubes" but rather a mesh of tubes (or pipes). In those tubes are packets - chunks of the whole of whatever data is being sent through said tubes. It isn't a sequential system where one whole piece of data waits for another whole piece of data. And it is very unlikely Stevens' email was delayed for days due to someone's digital movie download.
Other parts of that speech of note is the commercial use of the Internet - ongoing for years and largely credited with it's expansion and adoption. That this commercial use doesn't serve the consumer. That the commercial interests aren't paying for their bandwidth use. And the implication that the networks involved are incapable of handling this amount of use. There is a lot mixed in to that confusion if you want to spend time interpreting it.
I agree that somebody with a firm grasp on the technology should be in charge, and clearly he isn't it, but the tubes vs pipes thing tends to show the ignorance of those who laugh loudest at him for that particular analogy. I think Jon Stewart would probably fall into this camp, and probably quite a few ignorant Slashdotters (though definitely not you).
The "series of tubes" meme is a short summarization of the whole situation. The danger to this is that some individuals might might not understand this and just latch on the sound bite. I suppose you could be right that far.
John Stewart's case may or may not be one of these. Stewart does make the point that Stevens should probably have a better grasp than he has shown (after a fair amount of shtick). And I suspect that's the reason the meme keeps surfacing on his show (you might even note some of these times also involve the Net Neutrality issue).
Look around you, my freind. Read the news. The status isn't so quo as you seem to believe.
You've heard of Wall Street, and Washington, I presume?
Oh - I'm well aware of it. But that doesn't mean everything boils down to Wall Street. Litigation is something these guys have done for decades. The point being that there is no indication to believe that this is a sign of the times any more than other times they've gone after "piracy."
(I am, however, being sarcastic with the status quo quip)
He understood the basic principles, though. Any network has limited capacity. It is ironic that he was mocked most for using a funny sounding phrase with the word "tubes" that captures the same meaning as the more common "pipes".
Count me as among those who mock him. The sound-bite makes it easy. But that's not why I mock him.
Go ahead and find a transcript of the infamous speech. He's been coached. Or he's been given a presentation. But I hardly believe he understands what he's saying much less making a sane argument.
Picking out an argument out of his speech is difficult as it requires no small number of assumptions and interpretations. But as near as I can tell, he blames a delayed email on digital movie distribution systems. He believes that there is a "personal Internet." And is shocked and abhorred that the Internet is being used for commercial purposes - suggesting said content delivery services should consider building their own Internet for those purposes. Thus, avoiding the cluttering of personal communications.
The peppering of analogies like trucks and tubes simply demonstrate that someone has tried to explain to the Senator how these things work. I would even hazard to guess that a telecon lobby working against Net Neutrality had a nice presentations using them. However, the Steven's use of them are misplaced and almost entirely nonsensical in this speech. Add on to the fact that my best attempts to interpret what he's saying has issues, and it's easy to see why he is mocked.
It should also be noted that this speech was against Net Neutrality. And now I'm sure you can see why the/. crowd takes so much pleasure in mocking this guy.
As for the "basic principles," he doesn't even have that much going. He should be able to piece together a coherent analogy and he fails even that low a bar. But even worse is that he's supposed to be at least somewhat knowledgeable in this field as a chair for the committee that oversees the Government's involvement in it and an author of a bill that does just that.
My example has someone that has the "basic principles" down as well. It's easy to see how the user could identify the entire computer as a "hard drive" even though that's not technically true. And for the most part, the terminology worked for her. However, she was ultimately wrong in what she was saying. And if it wasn't for the attention of the helpdesk folks working with her and realizing what she was saying just wasn't right, she would probably have ended up with an external hard drive rather than the laptop that she wanted.
Sometimes those details are important. Even general ones.
Nobody was resolving differences. There were no differences to resolve. It was all about "harsh business practices" - Fact is; Saddam didn't want to sell access to oil fields to western companies. He wanted to hang onto it until AFTER global oil production peak passed - as it would be worth much more in the future. These companies made sure the right people were elected (in the US, the UK, Australia, and Italy, to be specific) to get the job done.
So Iraq rolling in to Kuwait was what - liberating more oil fields from Western influence?
Slashdot Mirror
How'd you get ethernet on a classic Newton?
Hey, I just spent $100 on a 3ft gold-wired Cat6 cable, and I can tell that my bits are coming in cleaner.
I hate to tell you, but the gold plated wire is doing nothing for you. The secret is in the directional indicator. That's where the magic happens.
Back in the day, artsd was usually responsible for behavior you've described. Though I think artsd is long gone now; maybe there's something else locking up sound channels, running as a KDE daemon?
Yeah - back with my old KDE3 desktop, that was one of the first things I disabled. I was poking around looking for something similar this time around but didn't find anything of note. I suspect there's something KDE related that collides with Wine for ALSA. But maybe its even something KDE is doing that takes up enough cycles to throw off Wine? Maybe some time I'll play around with renicing things and see if that helps.
Enter Sun who buy MySQL and suddenly the community isn't happy and it's fork fork fork. Only one of those forks needs to be any good and all of a sudden Suns not bought very much at all. If a company plays nice with the open source community forks are fairly easy but rare. The problem is they hang like a knife (or maybe that should be fork) over the company and if they are unfortunate enough to annoy the community they could eaisly lose control of their product.
My current employer has heavily invested their infrastructure in Sun and Oracle. However, Oracle licensing represents an inordinately large cost to our budget. And frankly, there are a lot of projects that just don't need to use Oracle so the value of those licenses are getting a lot of scrutiny. There are discussions about moving some of those projects to MySQL which would do a lot to relieve our budget. And a part of those discussions involve taking the money saved on Oracle licensing and purchasing MySQL support from Sun. We know Sun. We have existing support contracts with them. And we're pretty happy with that arrangement. Adding in MySQL support is almost a given.
That's what Sun gets. As long as Sun doesn't abandon MySQL or otherwise break it, it is unlikely our folks will consider going with another fork and purchasing support from an unknown entity. Right now, Sun is considered the go-to folks for MySQL. And they're Sun. We're all but rushing to give them money for this.
It should also be noted that having options other than Sun for MySQL has it's own attraction. Today we're keen to get Sun support. But we know that tomorrow we might decide that Sun's MySQL support isn't a good value once we've tried it. Other options means that investing in Sun and MySQL today isn't a dead end; it isn't more of the same we get with Oracle. So we're much more open to making that investment today. And that means Sun gets sales even if it means they risk those sales tomorrow.
I've been toying around with KDE 4.2 and I've ended up with mixed feelings about it. It seems like a usable environment - far better than the 4.x version that Ubuntu infamously shipped earlier. And there's certainly a nice sheen of polish and flash. But I also get a feeling of "clunkiness" with this new release that wasn't there on my olde KDE 3.x environment. And I can't say that I'm a fan of the direction the Konqueror filemanager has taken (seems like Nautilus for KDE).
What ultimately had me going back to Gnome (and Compiz) was playing WoW. For some reason, WoW (and Ventrilo) will lock up with a repeating loud sound at seemingly random intervals. This happened on KDE3.5 on very rare occasions in the past - I suspect when I had Flash running in another desktop. But with KDE4.2 it happens a lot more often. No clue why. But it's not happening in Gnome.
KDE is going in an interesting direction. I'm a fan of flash and change so this has some appeal to me (otherwise I'd use one of these minimalist windows managers that keep getting mentioned in these types of stories). But it strikes me that the KDE folks are taking one of those bold steps that tends to risk everything. I hope it works out.
I'd definitely recommend people give it a try; see if it works for them. Unless you have a KDE3.x desktop that you're really happy with and cringe at Gnome's apparent design philosophy.
What kind of connection do you need to have to get away with several terabytes of data before someone notices? Users on my network get pissy when someone downloads a few dozen megs.
I have no insight on this particular incident but I have been involved in similar incidents. One in particular comes to mind. There were a couple factors involved.
The network in question was certainly large enough that, at the least, nobody would notice someone downloading "a few dozen megs." In fact, fairly large transfers of data were commonplace within intra-agency links and links with various contractors. Most of that involved direct links with the entities involved. So not all of that went out to the Internet but a lot did.
The attackers were reasonably subtle. They didn't shotgun exploits or perform noisy scans. The data they transferred out of the network was a fairly large overall sum. However, they prepped that data by creating multi-part compressed and encrypted archives. They were conservative about their schedule to download these individual chunks. Their heist made up a series of "a few dozen megs" over a period of time that didn't make the procedure stand out of the normal day-to-day noise.
The attackers were discovered due to the diligence of a sysadmin for one of the systems affected. He noticed behavior that was uncharacteristic of that particular system. Once we knew there was something odd, we were able to identify the attack, profile behavior, and track that behavior back through the network and other hosts involved (to include intra-agency and partner networks). At no point did the amount of data being transferred provide any particular insight (other than verifying how many slices were moved around).
By this point, it's old hat. We've heard about "Titan Rain" for awhile now. If you think this is something new, you haven't been paying attention.
(And yes - linking the Flight 655 incident to this is flamebait.)
It's IBM without... you know... the "IBM."
Part of the reason is because teens will download the games which says they want them and the dev is on the right track. They just need to stop them from thieving and then they'll buy their game over the competitions.
Your proof that the "try before you buy" excuse is a lie is the fact that they have more content than they could possibly afford. Then you say that there is some content that they could afford. Somewhere there's a disconnect in this proof.
And the idea that teens downloading games they can't afford is any kind of incentive to devs to continue feeding that market seems a little odd as well. Are you implying that devs are chasing the elusive "pirate" market? Wouldn't they be paying attention to their sales and then feeding whatever market it is that generates sales?
I think the pro-piracy movement should learn more about economics. They seem to assume that people either would be willing to buy a game or would not. In the real world, people make decisions at the margin. Maybe you're not willing to pay $50 to play the game now but, in two years' time, when it costs $10, you'd be willing to buy it. Is it a lost sale or not? Perhaps not at current prices (thus, "I'd never have bought it anyway"), but a lost sale indeed at a lower price.
Back when I was a voracious little warez monkey, I had hundreds of software tittles all squirreled away and cataloged on external media. Most of it never saw my machine after it was moved to media. Why? It's because I was a packrat obsessed with HAVING illicit data. And to some extent I was curious as to what stuff did / looked like. I knew many others in the warez scene that were like that as well. I don't see this being reflected in your rational economic analysis. It's probably too irrational.
The whole try before you buy thing is a load of shit. You won't buy a game you've completed for free and quite often it's teenagers using this excuse. Do they expect me to believe they can actually afford the ass load of music, movies and games they steal without a decent paying job if they even have a job?
So wait a minute. They have more content than they could possibly afford? Am I assuming this is some sort of support for the argument that "piracy" is a direct correlation to lost sales?
So, if Stardock doesn't think the problem was piracy, why are so many people here using this opportunity to bash people who tried warez versions of the game?
There's a meme that shows up quite often whenever we discuss copyright reform, DRM, or other related topics. It goes along the lines of when so many /. readers make their livings from "intellectual property", how could we possibly support any concept that challenges it? Now before we get caught up in the debate of the meme, keep in mind that the fact that it surfaces shows that there are (trolls aside) people who do believe in the idea. There are undoubtedly those who see these issues as linchpins to their industry and livelihood.
Obviously it's a good time to make that security products purchase you've been putting off. You probably want something effective... say a software suite that's been able to block more than 245 million attempted malicious code attacks across the globe each month.
Oh. Wait. I see.
Can you imagine if a Congressman was legally required to read every piece of correspondence and listen to every speaker? You could paralyze a government by hiring enough speakers / writers to take up every available moment of the Congressman's time (and then still file a lawsuit because your hired army never got their time due to waiting in line behind all the other hired armies).
Spam is commercial email. This is email about a pending legislative action, and thus Jack Thompson has the right to send it because he has a right to free speech.
Just to clarify...
Spam is not always commercial email. However, I believe the CAN-SPAM act is only concerned with unsolicited commercial email. So in that sense, you're probably right that the CAN-SPAM act doesn't apply to this case.
As for filters - that's what spammers say. I don't buy the argument. At some point, the harasser will attempt to bypass filters and you end up inducing a cost to keep ahead of the filtering arms race.
"Hello? Computer?"
This is a relatively well-known fact that you had to inquire about.
Ever go watch a Shakespear play? There's often some darned good performances going on; real artists. None of them wrote the material.
First off, I acknowledge he's rambling and nearly incoherent, and is not familiar with the technology. However, I can look past that and get at what he's saying, and he clearly understands the basic principles, and the argument he makes is sane.
I understood what he was saying. He's talking about how the Internet is based on a "network of networks". He does mention the word "local". What he's saying is that one company streaming video across the network impacts the whole network it runs across, not just the endpoints. This is the basic argument of net neutrality. Should individual networks be allowed to manage traffic that flows across their network or not? I'm not going to get into the debate, but I'm sure Stevens understood all that I've laid out.
The problem I see is that he's using lots of words and phrases that one would use to make proper analogies and describe how the tech works at a general level. But he's not putting them together in a way that makes sense. We're having to interpret what he's saying, using our existing knowledge as a guideline. In my experience, people who use technical jargon in this manner are trying to sound like they know what they're saying - but don't. This isn't him making a mistake on the finer points of how a protocol works. This is him not being able to describe a general concept clearly.
I don't believe he understands the basic principles at all. I do believe he's working on legislation on someone else's behalf, attempting to use someone else's description as a reason why while not really understanding what he's doing beyond that it's what was asked for.
I concur that ultimate point is over who affects what. But there's so much confusion and misinformation going on in that speech that it's hard to pick it out, much less find anything that would support it.
The analogy fails in that the Internet isn't just a "series of tubes" but rather a mesh of tubes (or pipes). In those tubes are packets - chunks of the whole of whatever data is being sent through said tubes. It isn't a sequential system where one whole piece of data waits for another whole piece of data. And it is very unlikely Stevens' email was delayed for days due to someone's digital movie download.
Other parts of that speech of note is the commercial use of the Internet - ongoing for years and largely credited with it's expansion and adoption. That this commercial use doesn't serve the consumer. That the commercial interests aren't paying for their bandwidth use. And the implication that the networks involved are incapable of handling this amount of use. There is a lot mixed in to that confusion if you want to spend time interpreting it.
I agree that somebody with a firm grasp on the technology should be in charge, and clearly he isn't it, but the tubes vs pipes thing tends to show the ignorance of those who laugh loudest at him for that particular analogy. I think Jon Stewart would probably fall into this camp, and probably quite a few ignorant Slashdotters (though definitely not you).
The "series of tubes" meme is a short summarization of the whole situation. The danger to this is that some individuals might might not understand this and just latch on the sound bite. I suppose you could be right that far.
John Stewart's case may or may not be one of these. Stewart does make the point that Stevens should probably have a better grasp than he has shown (after a fair amount of shtick). And I suspect that's the reason the meme keeps surfacing on his show (you might even note some of these times also involve the Net Neutrality issue).
Firefly was a western.
So's Star Trek.
comfortable .... reassurance .... status quo ....
Look around you, my freind. Read the news. The status isn't so quo as you seem to believe.
You've heard of Wall Street, and Washington, I presume?
Oh - I'm well aware of it. But that doesn't mean everything boils down to Wall Street. Litigation is something these guys have done for decades. The point being that there is no indication to believe that this is a sign of the times any more than other times they've gone after "piracy."
(I am, however, being sarcastic with the status quo quip)
He understood the basic principles, though. Any network has limited capacity. It is ironic that he was mocked most for using a funny sounding phrase with the word "tubes" that captures the same meaning as the more common "pipes".
Count me as among those who mock him. The sound-bite makes it easy. But that's not why I mock him.
Go ahead and find a transcript of the infamous speech. He's been coached. Or he's been given a presentation. But I hardly believe he understands what he's saying much less making a sane argument.
Picking out an argument out of his speech is difficult as it requires no small number of assumptions and interpretations. But as near as I can tell, he blames a delayed email on digital movie distribution systems. He believes that there is a "personal Internet." And is shocked and abhorred that the Internet is being used for commercial purposes - suggesting said content delivery services should consider building their own Internet for those purposes. Thus, avoiding the cluttering of personal communications.
The peppering of analogies like trucks and tubes simply demonstrate that someone has tried to explain to the Senator how these things work. I would even hazard to guess that a telecon lobby working against Net Neutrality had a nice presentations using them. However, the Steven's use of them are misplaced and almost entirely nonsensical in this speech. Add on to the fact that my best attempts to interpret what he's saying has issues, and it's easy to see why he is mocked.
It should also be noted that this speech was against Net Neutrality. And now I'm sure you can see why the /. crowd takes so much pleasure in mocking this guy.
As for the "basic principles," he doesn't even have that much going. He should be able to piece together a coherent analogy and he fails even that low a bar. But even worse is that he's supposed to be at least somewhat knowledgeable in this field as a chair for the committee that oversees the Government's involvement in it and an author of a bill that does just that.
My example has someone that has the "basic principles" down as well. It's easy to see how the user could identify the entire computer as a "hard drive" even though that's not technically true. And for the most part, the terminology worked for her. However, she was ultimately wrong in what she was saying. And if it wasn't for the attention of the helpdesk folks working with her and realizing what she was saying just wasn't right, she would probably have ended up with an external hard drive rather than the laptop that she wanted.
Sometimes those details are important. Even general ones.
Could this be considered a sign that there is failure approaching when a company starts resorting to litigation for income?
No - this is comfortable re-assurance that the status quo is maintained. TSR / WoTC / Hasbro hasn't been shy with litigation in the past.
I don't watch HBO so your quip is lost on me. :P
Nobody was resolving differences. There were no differences to resolve. It was all about "harsh business practices" - Fact is; Saddam didn't want to sell access to oil fields to western companies. He wanted to hang onto it until AFTER global oil production peak passed - as it would be worth much more in the future. These companies made sure the right people were elected (in the US, the UK, Australia, and Italy, to be specific) to get the job done.
So Iraq rolling in to Kuwait was what - liberating more oil fields from Western influence?