I assume then, that you don't consider the New York Times or BBC to be real news outlets, either.
I can't talk for the NYTimes, but I'm confident that the BBC has never attempted to assert its right to distort stories or to transmit outright lies. Why don't you read my response and then respond again?
Let us see: Lenin, Stalin, Castro, a whole host of modernday American senators
I'm confused now. I've not read everything that Moore has written, but are you sure that he's been an apologist for Stalin? And once you've answered that, can you give an example of some "modernday American senators" who are in the same category as Stalin and Hitler? Or are you just writing nonsense for some reason?
At this point, I should say that I have no great sympathy for Michael Moore's approach to polemic, because I think he tends to preach to the converted somewhat. But it's still very odd to compare anything he does with Leni Riefenstahl. Remember, Riefenstahl made movies which glamourized much of the nonsense that Nazis wrote about themselves. Her reaction when Nazi Germany took over Paris was, "Your deeds exceed the power of human imagination. They are without equal in the history of mankind. How can we (the German people) ever thank you?".
It may be true that Moore is a polemicist, and Riefenstahl was a polemicist, but that's not the same as saying that their work is similar, in my opinion.
Why choose Riefenstahl of all people? There are loads of people who make polemic films about political issues. Why choose an apologist for one of the worst regimes of the 20th century? It shows a complete lack of understanding to compare Moore with Riefenstahl. It was just a cheap jibe.
Fox went to court over the issue of whether a news organization had the right to lie or distort news stories under the First Amendment. Fox won in the end, at the third or fourth attempt. This blew up over a reporter Jane Akre, who argued that her bosses at Fox had pressured her to change a story about the effect of some hormone treatment on cattle - her report was to say that milk from these cows was dangerous for humans. There is a link to the story here. This is why people say that Fox isn't about news.
Personally, I place Moore in the same category as Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.
Well, Riefenstahl made films that glorified Nazism. Among other things, Nazism was responsible for mass murder on an industrial scale and attacking most of Western Europe. I'd be interested to hear which group that Moore glorifies has done anything on that scale?
He was a great mathematician, to be sure, but he was also a great mathematician who committed suicide when he was convicted of engaging in homosexual activities and was forced to undergo treatment to "chemically castrate" him. He died at 42, so it's fair to assume that he would have achieved even more if he had lived. So I think his homosexuality is relevant, unfortunately.
In Manchester (in the UK) you can find a statue of Alan Turing. It is in Sackville Park in the city centre, right by the Gay Village. He is holding an apple, which is meant to represent the way he took his life. The first time I saw that statue was quite late in the evening and at first I thought there was somebody actually sitting there - it was a very spooky moment.
It would seem AMD solved the problem in their AMD64 line with MHz throttling, but I don't have first-hand experience, so I can't say if it too will require odd hacks. I certainly hope not.
My (ugly) Shuttle SN85G4 uses an AMD64 3200+. I use it mostly for working on and running my chess program. When I first bought it I was freaked out when I did: cat/proc/cpuinfo and saw that it was running at "796MHz". WTF?! 205GBP for an 800MHz CPU?? Then I remembered the "Cool and Quiet" feature. When I ran my chess program it immediately jumped up to 2000MHz. I was very surprised to find that it worked "out of the box" on Linux, but I think it's not an OS thing, but a BIOS thing. I may well be wrong about that, however...
If that is the only motivation, then why is it that M$, IBM & co. heavily lobby for the introduction of SW patents all over the world?
I didn't say or mean to imply that cross-licensing was the only motivation for building up a patent portfolio. The rest of what you said doesn't contradict anything that I said.
It's hard to argue against what Microsoft is doing, because the good guys (IBM, Sun, or choose your own definition of a good guy) do this too. These companies use patents to protect themselves from patents held by other companies. So instead of paying expensive licensing fees to use some technology, you enter into a "cross-licensing" agreement, whereby you pay for the right to use technology X by allowing your competitor to use technology Y. Our (meaning everyone who wants to use a desktop computer) problem is that the Free SW community cannot enter into such agreements and maintain the freedom which is so valuable to the rest of us. Open Source software has similar problems, because you can't redistribute somebody else's patented works.
I think that Microsoft is tacitly acknowledging that they can't keep up with the F/OSS communities any more. Even without being hit by Sasser at work, I'm hard pushed to think of anything that XP does better than the SUSE 9.0 distro I use at home, except interoperating with closed Microsoft products. The only advantage Windows has is in things that are opaque to F/OSS developers, so effectively making some key elements of Longhorn opaque is the only way they can hope to compete in the future.
Why should paying a license fee to the government be inherently better than paying Microsoft? Or, in general, any closed source company?
Companies need to satisfy their shareholders. Their shareholders want more money for their investment, and will constantly pressure management to achieve this. This means that the management will focus on the most popular shows, to the exclusion of less popular shows. Whether you think that ("most popular" == best) is a matter of opinion, I suppose. The BBC, with its licence fee, is not subject to the same pressures regarding the popularity of its programmes, although there is an element of this. And of course there are some British people who think as you do, who would love to get rid of the licence fee.
When I was in Europe, all I could say is "please god Please let me get back to my 500 channels of McDonalds, Wal-Marts, and pure-T drivel, because this shit I"m having to watch over here is BOR-ING."
Why didn't you get cable or a satellite dish? My cable box has > 50 channels, although it's a little while since I flicked all the way through them. There might even be more by now.
So in summary: as long as it's that hard to install programs as it currently is, Linux won't have a chance on the desktop, unfortunately. KDE 3.2 really rocks and I think GNOME is nice to use, too, but at the bells and whistle don't matter when Joe Dumpass is not able to install a new program.
There are two types of desktop. In business, it is exactly this difficulty that is attractive to management. To be brutally frank, the situation where Joe Dumbass can install software on his desktop PC at work is insane. No competent organization should allow that for their average employee. My guess is that many companies spend a significant proportion of their IT budgets dealing with exactly this characteristic. In business, management does not want Joe Dumbass installing software.
The home desktop is different of course, largely because of the issue of games. Once Windows has its firewall switched on by default, Joe Dumbass is welcome to use it at home for all I care.
It's hard to tell if you're joking. If you RTFA, you'll see that this is aimed at ICBMs - the article talks about shooting them down before their warheads separate etc.
Eh? I think it's supposed to stop nukes that are aimed at the US. If you RTFA it talks about hitting the missiles in their boost phase, ie before their warheads separate.
It's not bad news for SCO. BayStar said originally they wanted their money back, but didn't say why. People naturally assumed that BayStar had finally caught on to the fact that SCO are a bunch of crooks. Investors thought that if BayStar pulled out, the stock would be worthless. Now BayStar has clarified its position. It claims that it thinks SCO will win its court case (obviously they can't say anything else in public, to do so would be to throw away $20million) and that they just want some different executives, ones who are more used to fighting legal battles (ie ones who behave more like IBM's executives are behaving). On this "news", people who are not interested in the case have started buying again, thinking that SCO has a chance of winning its court cases. The behaviour of SCO's stock price isn't really an issue. SCO's chances of surviving are effectively zero.
I think you've talked around the real question here: Why is it a big deal that most Americans own and drive cars? We can so we do. Who cares?
These are the questions of course: To what extent will you be able to continue to afford gas? How long will this state of affairs last? Does anyone care?
Not to be rude, but much of what you say doesn't address the question of cause and effect:
1. The US is about personal freedom. The freedom to do what you want and go where you want to go. This cannot be over emphasized. Until the formation of the EU travel between countries wasn't that high.
Surely all citizens of democracies can go where they want? What relevance has this got?
2. Combine that with a very large UNIFIED country. We ARE free to travel where we want within the United States and even into Canada. It is not uncommon for relatives to live in very different parts of the countries yet still see each other on a yearly basis.
I don't understand the relevance of the size of the country. Wouldn't people fly if they were travelling a very long distance?
3. The US Highway systems is very large and connects all major cities. Many have multiple connections. These are subsidized by the GAS tax.
I'm from the UK and this is also true in the UK. I'm pretty certain it's true in Germany and France, and I suspect most EU countries too. I don't understand how that addresses why Americans are so keen on cars.
4. Low gasoline taxes. We still maintain one of the lowest per capita tax loads across the world. Still it is too high and only serves to be wasted on government pork and vote buying schemes.
This is clearly relevant, but doesn't address the cause-and-effect question.
5.
I don't think health/obesity can be tied to our fascination with cars. It has more to do with this "Information Age" where you no longer have to go anywhere to converse with people or find things out. Yet at the same time this lack of need to travel was not in conjunction with a change in diets.
I don't understand that at all.
I'm not posting this to be awkward, I really am interested in how the situation in the USA got to be how it is.
It doesn't matter if the private sector is superior, as long as the private sector is as capable of handling the situation as the government is.
This is just dogma. Why should the government not get involved? Before you answer, consider the situation with Windows' domination of the desktop. The private company which owns Windows is a convicted monopolist and its activities have reduced choice for millions of computer users. Now tell me again why the governments of Japan, Korea and China would want to allow this situation to continue.
Linux is an open system. How could it become a monopoly? In other words, if company X introduces a Linux-based solution, what is to stop company Y from emulating that, or producing products that interoperate with it? If they don't abide by the terms of the GPL, you might have a point, but why would they want to do that? The point is that they're not beholden to a gigantic foreign company - the GPL helps them there.
May I ask why you think that IT infrastructure is a sector that government should not touch? I mean, is there a real reason for believing that the private sector is superior in this area?
This is an insane assumption... and you would think that a billionaire would have a better grasp on basic economics.
It's not that insane, and remember that Gates is a billionaire in part because his company has been abusing its monopoly. To an extent, if he wants something to happen, he can make it happen. What he means by "free" is that users will "subscribe to" software and in doing so, receive a machine on which to run that software, effectively for nothing. This is what Microsoft wanted to accomplish by bullying retailers not to bundle other operating systems. My guess is that they will attempt to use "Trusted Computing" (or some technology just like it) to make their intention into a reality; if you want to run Microsoft's software you will have to run it on computers which only run Microsoft's software or software written by Microsoft's partners (in other words, companies which have bought the right to have their software run on MS's hardware). So they can make the cost of hardware approach zero, so long as they can be sure the hardware is only usable for purposes for which they can make some money. Of course, all of this depend on governments around the world letting MS get away from it.
Another way of looking at it is to say that times haven't changed at all. Back when IBM was the "enemy", they had an effective monopoly in minicomputers and mainframe computing. They would use this monopoly in HW to drive out competition from the market - their strategy was often to "pre-announce" new HW whenever a competitor was about to introduce a new machine. Eventually IBM were investigated for this behaviour, and this investigation let (indirectly maybe) to them making the specification of their new PC open. Anyone could introduce competing machines; anyone could create expansion cards. This has led to the very competitive market for PC hardware. Since that time, Microsoft has established an effective OS monopoly on the PC platform. And they have used their monopoly to drive out competition from the market. It's not Microsoft which is the enemy it is their monopoly.
So nothing has really changed; monopolies are the enemies of everyone who is involved in a market. Nowadays of course, we have rather better tools with which to fight monopolists. Balanced against that, unfortunately, is an unwillingness for governments to fight monopolies effectively.
Yes you can. The kit comes with pdf files which represent six of the seven manuals that a "real" development kit has. A real dev kit has more memory, however.
You can't create CDs which run in an ordinary PS2, so I think that you can only run games on PS2s which also have the dev kit. But in terms of the code you are writing, I think it is comparable. You should be aware that is is very difficult to get the best out of the PS2 architecture. My feeling is that if you want to impress a would-be employer you should write a complete game using some simpler tools, for example SDL.
It's not illegal to be a monopoly. You're just not allowed to create new monopolies using your existing one. There are differences between Wal-Mart and Microsoft, because of the different nature of the businesses they're in. Microsoft can easily use their OS monopoly to create new monopolies, say in word-processing software or music playback software - they do this by using secret file-formats or APIs. It's hard to see how WalMart could be said to be driving other companies out of business in this way; the fact that WalMart sells a particular product doesn't mean that some other retailer can't sell it or a similar product. Where they might get into trouble would be if they used their overwhelming size to prevent a wholesaler from selling a particular product to one of their competitors. They would also not be allowed (in principle at least) to open a store selling things at a loss in order to drive other retailers in a particular area out of business. However, I guess that these sorts of offences would be difficult to prove.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't talk for the NYTimes, but I'm confident that the BBC has never attempted to assert its right to distort stories or to transmit outright lies. Why don't you read my response and then respond again?
I'm confused now. I've not read everything that Moore has written, but are you sure that he's been an apologist for Stalin? And once you've answered that, can you give an example of some "modernday American senators" who are in the same category as Stalin and Hitler? Or are you just writing nonsense for some reason?
At this point, I should say that I have no great sympathy for Michael Moore's approach to polemic, because I think he tends to preach to the converted somewhat. But it's still very odd to compare anything he does with Leni Riefenstahl. Remember, Riefenstahl made movies which glamourized much of the nonsense that Nazis wrote about themselves. Her reaction when Nazi Germany took over Paris was, "Your deeds exceed the power of human imagination. They are without equal in the history of mankind. How can we (the German people) ever thank you?".
It may be true that Moore is a polemicist, and Riefenstahl was a polemicist, but that's not the same as saying that their work is similar, in my opinion.
Why choose Riefenstahl of all people? There are loads of people who make polemic films about political issues. Why choose an apologist for one of the worst regimes of the 20th century? It shows a complete lack of understanding to compare Moore with Riefenstahl. It was just a cheap jibe.
Fox went to court over the issue of whether a news organization had the right to lie or distort news stories under the First Amendment. Fox won in the end, at the third or fourth attempt. This blew up over a reporter Jane Akre, who argued that her bosses at Fox had pressured her to change a story about the effect of some hormone treatment on cattle - her report was to say that milk from these cows was dangerous for humans. There is a link to the story here. This is why people say that Fox isn't about news.
Well, Riefenstahl made films that glorified Nazism. Among other things, Nazism was responsible for mass murder on an industrial scale and attacking most of Western Europe. I'd be interested to hear which group that Moore glorifies has done anything on that scale?
He was a great mathematician, to be sure, but he was also a great mathematician who committed suicide when he was convicted of engaging in homosexual activities and was forced to undergo treatment to "chemically castrate" him. He died at 42, so it's fair to assume that he would have achieved even more if he had lived. So I think his homosexuality is relevant, unfortunately.
In Manchester (in the UK) you can find a statue of Alan Turing. It is in Sackville Park in the city centre, right by the Gay Village. He is holding an apple, which is meant to represent the way he took his life. The first time I saw that statue was quite late in the evening and at first I thought there was somebody actually sitting there - it was a very spooky moment.
I think the "About SCO" bit was supplied by SCO or their PR people.
My (ugly) Shuttle SN85G4 uses an AMD64 3200+. I use it mostly for working on and running my chess program. When I first bought it I was freaked out when I did: cat
I didn't say or mean to imply that cross-licensing was the only motivation for building up a patent portfolio. The rest of what you said doesn't contradict anything that I said.
I think that Microsoft is tacitly acknowledging that they can't keep up with the F/OSS communities any more. Even without being hit by Sasser at work, I'm hard pushed to think of anything that XP does better than the SUSE 9.0 distro I use at home, except interoperating with closed Microsoft products. The only advantage Windows has is in things that are opaque to F/OSS developers, so effectively making some key elements of Longhorn opaque is the only way they can hope to compete in the future.
Companies need to satisfy their shareholders. Their shareholders want more money for their investment, and will constantly pressure management to achieve this. This means that the management will focus on the most popular shows, to the exclusion of less popular shows. Whether you think that ("most popular" == best) is a matter of opinion, I suppose. The BBC, with its licence fee, is not subject to the same pressures regarding the popularity of its programmes, although there is an element of this. And of course there are some British people who think as you do, who would love to get rid of the licence fee.
Why didn't you get cable or a satellite dish? My cable box has > 50 channels, although it's a little while since I flicked all the way through them. There might even be more by now.
There are two types of desktop. In business, it is exactly this difficulty that is attractive to management. To be brutally frank, the situation where Joe Dumbass can install software on his desktop PC at work is insane. No competent organization should allow that for their average employee. My guess is that many companies spend a significant proportion of their IT budgets dealing with exactly this characteristic. In business, management does not want Joe Dumbass installing software.
The home desktop is different of course, largely because of the issue of games. Once Windows has its firewall switched on by default, Joe Dumbass is welcome to use it at home for all I care.
It's hard to tell if you're joking. If you RTFA, you'll see that this is aimed at ICBMs - the article talks about shooting them down before their warheads separate etc.
Eh? I think it's supposed to stop nukes that are aimed at the US. If you RTFA it talks about hitting the missiles in their boost phase, ie before their warheads separate.
It's not bad news for SCO. BayStar said originally they wanted their money back, but didn't say why. People naturally assumed that BayStar had finally caught on to the fact that SCO are a bunch of crooks. Investors thought that if BayStar pulled out, the stock would be worthless. Now BayStar has clarified its position. It claims that it thinks SCO will win its court case (obviously they can't say anything else in public, to do so would be to throw away $20million) and that they just want some different executives, ones who are more used to fighting legal battles (ie ones who behave more like IBM's executives are behaving). On this "news", people who are not interested in the case have started buying again, thinking that SCO has a chance of winning its court cases. The behaviour of SCO's stock price isn't really an issue. SCO's chances of surviving are effectively zero.
These are the questions of course: To what extent will you be able to continue to afford gas? How long will this state of affairs last? Does anyone care?
Surely all citizens of democracies can go where they want? What relevance has this got?
I don't understand the relevance of the size of the country. Wouldn't people fly if they were travelling a very long distance?
I'm from the UK and this is also true in the UK. I'm pretty certain it's true in Germany and France, and I suspect most EU countries too. I don't understand how that addresses why Americans are so keen on cars.
This is clearly relevant, but doesn't address the cause-and-effect question.
I don't understand that at all.
I'm not posting this to be awkward, I really am interested in how the situation in the USA got to be how it is.
It doesn't matter if the private sector is superior, as long as the private sector is as capable of handling the situation as the government is.
This is just dogma. Why should the government not get involved? Before you answer, consider the situation with Windows' domination of the desktop. The private company which owns Windows is a convicted monopolist and its activities have reduced choice for millions of computer users. Now tell me again why the governments of Japan, Korea and China would want to allow this situation to continue.
May I ask why you think that IT infrastructure is a sector that government should not touch? I mean, is there a real reason for believing that the private sector is superior in this area?
Sorry. That should read:
It's not that insane, and remember that Gates is a billionaire in part because his company has been abusing its monopoly. To an extent, if he wants something to happen, he can make it happen. What he means by "free" is that users will "subscribe to" software and in doing so, receive a machine on which to run that software, effectively for nothing. This is what Microsoft wanted to accomplish by bullying retailers not to bundle other operating systems. My guess is that they will attempt to use "Trusted Computing" (or some technology just like it) to make their intention into a reality; if you want to run Microsoft's software you will have to run it on computers which only run Microsoft's software or software written by Microsoft's partners (in other words, companies which have bought the right to have their software run on MS's hardware). So they can make the cost of hardware approach zero, so long as they can be sure the hardware is only usable for purposes for which they can make some money. Of course, all of this depend on governments around the world letting MS get away from it.
So nothing has really changed; monopolies are the enemies of everyone who is involved in a market. Nowadays of course, we have rather better tools with which to fight monopolists. Balanced against that, unfortunately, is an unwillingness for governments to fight monopolies effectively.
You can't create CDs which run in an ordinary PS2, so I think that you can only run games on PS2s which also have the dev kit. But in terms of the code you are writing, I think it is comparable. You should be aware that is is very difficult to get the best out of the PS2 architecture. My feeling is that if you want to impress a would-be employer you should write a complete game using some simpler tools, for example SDL.
It's not illegal to be a monopoly. You're just not allowed to create new monopolies using your existing one. There are differences between Wal-Mart and Microsoft, because of the different nature of the businesses they're in. Microsoft can easily use their OS monopoly to create new monopolies, say in word-processing software or music playback software - they do this by using secret file-formats or APIs. It's hard to see how WalMart could be said to be driving other companies out of business in this way; the fact that WalMart sells a particular product doesn't mean that some other retailer can't sell it or a similar product. Where they might get into trouble would be if they used their overwhelming size to prevent a wholesaler from selling a particular product to one of their competitors. They would also not be allowed (in principle at least) to open a store selling things at a loss in order to drive other retailers in a particular area out of business. However, I guess that these sorts of offences would be difficult to prove.