Well hell - let's outlaw all them nasty weapons then. Forget the army, national defense, the police - they can use rubber billy clubs, or maybe stern warnings. Yeah, that's the ticket, and just the thing to deal with recalcitrant criminals.
This is very amusing. Why would anyone pay to download a song when they can get it for free on Morpheus, Gnutella, KaaZaa or Grokster?
I did. So did all of my friends. But then we're professionals, not college students looking to fill gig after gig with stolen songs.
Why? Because we wanted the better-quality tracks available on the CD, and we felt like supporting groups that we like.
Why did we use the services in the first place? To see if a CD was actually worth purchasing, or if it was typical RIAA schlock with one or two good songs interspersed with 12 losers. Amazing how much money you can save when you can preview the CD first and NOT BUY SHIT. Guess the RIAA really hates that, eh? Destroys their "fuck the consumer" business model.
BOTTOM LINE: For artists to make money from online music, free music services must disappear.
What utter nonsense. Free music services still exist and there's not a single shred of proof that any musician has been hurt by it. I know of a few bands that got my business precisely because I saw one of their songs on the net and decided to see what it was like out of curiosity. The A-Teens, for instance, which I would never have touched with a ten-foot pole if I hadn't previewed a song and found out that they were doing excellent remakes of old ABBA songs (so I like ABBA. Do an RIAA and sue me.)
I would also point out that musicians have been making money for thousands of years prior to the advent of the internet. Maybe not insane bucketloads of cash like Britney or N'Sync, but who says they should be millionaires? I sure as hell don't see a reason.
Oh yes...a representative that isn't a complete scumbag. Pray tell, did you see our choices during the last presidential election? And don't tell me Nader was a great alternative; the guy's a fanatic and just as dangerous as the bought-and-paid-for whores that run on party platforms.
Unfortunately that's the way it breaks down for almost all Congressional races as well. Your only choices are losers who'd sell their soul for a bottle of bourbon, a hooker, and a junket to the Bahamas.
Damned hard to have a *representative* democracy when those in power make it almost impossible for anyone *representative* to have an actual shot of taking office.
Fortunately your view on privacy isn't law. Would you like it to be so? Great - then use the amendment process to alter the Constitution to remove the right to privacy. And while you're at it, remove the right to self-incrimination as well.
You can do this, if you're serious. The Constitution has been amended numerous times in the past. Hell, alcohol was once outlawed - privacy has *got* to be easier than that!
But until you put up, rather than indirectly accusing folks of wanting to hide a predilection for child porn if they don't happily acquiesce to government spying, you don't have a legal leg to stand on. Or a moral one. Or an ethical one.
I want my right to privacy because neither you nor the government have any business poking into my life. At all. Unless I demonstrate a clear intent to commit a crime, so clear that a judge will issue a warrant. Getting 'logged' without that warrant is a violation of my Constitutional rights - it doesn't matter what I'm doing or if *you* think that the only people who don't want to be spied on collect child porn.
I love Farscape - it's made more of an impression on me than any SF show since I first saw ST:TOS. Great characters, actors that can actually act, interesting plots, continuing story arcs (no Trek reset button), no inconsistent gaping tech holes, and, of course,
BABES
Claudia Black. Gigi Edgly. Oh my.
I can't think of any other show I've seen where my favorite character is the *ship* and my second is a puppet (Pilot). Or where the women kick such ass, or the main character screws things up as often as he saves the day.
Trek you can predict in the first two minutes of any ep. In Farscape you never know what's going to happen. Except, of course, that there'll be at least one or two hilarious moments, and that someone is bound to act like an asshole in a most unheroic - but most human - way.
- If you don't want to cycle through 5-6 cds picking and choosing your software (which I love, btw - I can install arcane-but-useful items that no one else cares about w/out having to hunt them down on the net) you can choose the standard install. You did know there's more than one install option, didn't you?
- You only need to cycle through the cds if you went through the custom install piece-by-piece. Choose the standard install and you don't have to. You did know there's more than one install option, didn't you?
- The installer is fine. Not sure what you're bitching about here. And you can modify it to your hearts content if something about it annoys you.
- Unprofessional prompts? *That's* a big beef? Jesus H. Christ, man, if you get this wigged over a screen that tells you to 'have fun' it's time to reduce the caffeine intake....
- Any computer that makes noise without my telling it to do so is annoying. I think the same thing about most people, too. Fortunately in the case of the computer I can tell it to shut up, and it will. So can you, if you like.
I love SuSe for the install, the easy GUI system controls, and the fact that the kitchen sink *is* on the cds. But I'm just old and lazy and not much into crack cocaine, so SuSe takes the cake over other distros for me any day of the week.
I just purchased my copy. Even though I'll have to wait another two weeks for it to be released. Even though I have versions 7.1 and 7.2. Why? Because I'm old and lazy and not much into crack cocaine, and it's worth the $80 not to have to track down the software upgrades on the net and burn them to cd. For me $80 is worth about two hours of my time and since I'm sure it'd take me longer than two hours to get what I'd want and burn it buying 7.3 makes more sense for me.
If the web is destined to be controlled and restricted through the patent process, why not produce an alternate technology licensed under the GPL? As many say the Web as we know it would become relatively worthless except to commercial interests (please, I'm trying to restrain my desire to insert sarcastic comments here) so why not 'abandon' it and turn to something else to fill the void?
I know the argument is that most people are so used to the Web as it is now that an alternate might not have a a very wide user base. So what? The web is so bloody clogged with crap right now would that be a bad thing? Linux doesn't exactly rule the desktop but that doesn't particularly concern most Linux users, who're happy to leave the masses to their Windows. And it doesn't make Linux any less useful to those who choose to use it over MS products.
If an alternative were developed and primarily employed by educational institutions (a big selling point: you could find interesting information without having to wade through tons of thoroughly useless stuff) then I, for one, would vastly prefer this FreeWeb, or PublicNet, or whatever you might want to call it, over the Web we have today.
Leave *that* web to the folks who just *have* to have the latest Quicktime trailer, or RealPlayer audio clip, or whatever it is so many people waste their time on. I wouldn't miss that at all. And I wouldn't have to miss anything since there's no law that states that if I use one Web I can't use the other.
(I realize this seems overly simplistic but I can't see any *technical* reason for why this couldn't be done. If anyone else can please enlighten me.)
When I was programming for large corporations as an independent contractor I would sometimes write code inefficiently like the example listed above.
Why? Because many of the in-house 'programmers' weren't actually programmers; they were power users of particular apps programmed by others and critical to the operation of the company. No one else in the company was qualified to make the distinction, or technical enough to see that all the 'code' these guys wrote they downloaded from the internet and tweaked for their company's specs, while removing all copyright information.
In other words, they didn't understand anything but the most basic of programming elements.
When I was hired by these corporations I was usually handed off to the IS department and they would tell me what they'd want. I'd write a nice, elegant piece of code, turn it in, and they'd tell me to rewrite it because it was 'unnecessarily complicated'. Translation: they couldn't read it because they weren't capable of doing any real programming themselves. So I would often end up 'dumbing it down' until the IS people could follow along as I explained (in copious documentation) how everything worked.
Sometimes it was incredibly embarrassing and I'd throw away the code rather than add it to my portfolio. The worst such moment came when I wrote a Perl app for one of North America's largest timber companies (which shall remain nameless) that I had to revise FIVE TIMES. The last iteration had no subroutines or function calls because *nobody in the IS department understood what a function or subroutine was*. So for the app I did everything with GOTO statements - because they understood GOTO.
Yep. GOTO. Each and every jump in the code. GOTO. Quite challenging, actually, not being able to use subroutines or function calls. But it was so ugly, so heinous, and so...juvenile...I never told anyone about that job. I didn't want anyone to know that I'd written that incredible dog.
Sometimes bad code is written by bad programmers. Sometimes bad code is written *for* bad programmers.
Given the enormous amount of political and economic power that energy companies have do you honestly think they're going to sit by and let anyone - ANYONE - destabilize the status quo? Power so cheap it's free means an enormous reduction in their ability to wield power, accumulate wealth, and in general force others to be miserable to satisfy the wanton craving of tin despots to make others do what they tell them to do.
Anyone who currently wields more power than his neighbors has a firm investment in the status quo and will go to great lengths to make sure that things don't change. Something this big, even if it were to 'escape' into the public domain, would be so heavily regulated and restricted that your 'free' power would soon become expensive due to all the bought-and-paid-for government regulations. Putting the energy companies back on top again, as they'd end up being the only ones allowed to build, operate, and maintain the fusion plants.
You can see this in the internet right now. It managed to 'escape' because until the advent of the Mosaic project no one in power thought it was worth a damn. Then came the dot-com rush as companies tried to cash in, only to find that the standard business model simply doesn't cut it in a virtual world where information is infinitely reproduceable and thus not easily made scarce. When reality came crashing down we had the dot-bomb and a bunch of pissed off status-quo freaks who, failing to stake out a piece of the internet using old models, came to see the internet not as an opportunity but as a threat to their current business practices.
So what do we have? Any number of attempts to cripple the real power of the internet through IP laws, the DCMA, attempts to outlaw encryption, and so forth. Crippling combined with an attempt to make something easily obtained artificially scarce. The RIAA is a prime example of a consortium that can't adapt, won't experiment with a new model compatible with the internet, and that is using all of it's power to not just maintain a status quo but roll back the clock to the days of the LP.
Energy companies would do precisely the same thing if any sort of ultra-cheap power source came along. And these guys have the ability to get the U.S. to *start a war* when their interests are at stake - far, far more dangerous than the RIAA will ever be.
Fusion in the near future might be a possibility but it sure as hell won't be cheap. The energy companies will see to that.
Oh please. Unless your CPU fan fails (which hasn't happened on any one of the several thousand machines I've worked on in the last ten years) you have nothing to worry about.
And even if you're one of the one-in-a-million whose fan does fail (or you're one of the one-in-ten-thousand too stupid to screw it in properly) a 1.4 gig AMD processor goes for $149 right now. Far less than the Intel equivalent, I might add. You could afford to have two chips melt down, buy a third, and *still* not pay as much as you would for an Intel 1.7 gig chip *which the AMD 1.4 outperforms*.
This brand loyalty thing is silly, especially when it devolves to an ancient and almost useless feature.
Tritium isn't that radioactive. In fact, it's used in radioimmuno-assays in labs all over the world all the time without any sort of protection other than rubber gloves. It's common in microbiology and genetic work both commercially and in universities.
Granted, you don't want to drink a gallon of the stuff or use it to shower with, but even direct contact poses only the tiniest of health hazards (smoking a cigarette is more dangerous).
What comes out of a coal smoke stack is a thousand times worse than being dunked in pure tritium.
Amen brother. I got a cell and disconnected my land line. I only turn the cell on when I want to place a call.
Suddenly, no more telemarketers, assholes from work with stupid questions that "just can't wait", etc.
IM strikes me as yet another way to be bothered when I just don't want to be bothered. Unlike email, that I can wait to answer for days, weeks, or even just throw away. Maybe IM is a toy for the young and impatient, people who *want* constant stimulation in their lives.
Email - if I could ditch the phone altogether and just use email, I would.
Back in the early days it was called e-mail. Somewhere around 1990 it started turning into email.
I remember this because flamewars would erupt over the proper spelling of email (or e-mail). No doubt future slashdotters honing their skills in anticipation of the web.
A complete miscomprehension of the market also ignores the fact that true free markets don't exist in real life. That's why we have 'monopolies' and 'price fixing' and 'shitty products for high prices' - because companies that could compete under a strict free market model are snuffed out by more powerful competitors, *regardless of the quality of product*, on a regular basis.
Just because you're too fucking stupid to set up a viable workstation config for the secretary doesn't mean that I am, or that anyone else is. Fact is, I can and have done it on numerous occasions; it really isn't that difficult if you don't waste your time dreaming about having ol' Bill blow his wad in your mouth.
Linux really isn't that tough, especially for an experienced sysadmin doing the install and making it easy for his or her users. I've been using it since 1993 and really can't see how an IS department could have any difficulty putting together a desktop environment that's easy to use, simple to learn, and virtually unbreakable (it's infinitely more configurable than Windows). Unless, of course, it's stocked with a bunch of MCSE incompetents who can't find their ass with both hands.
Finally, it's rather amusing that my i.d. number is of some importance to you. Clearly, if slashdot account age is something you find of value then perhaps you should look into getting a life.
This is precisely what I meant. If they leave the CD label on the CD, that's false labeling and they're subject to lawsuits; if they don't put a CD label on the CD, then the onus is on *you* to make sure it works with your equipment.
I don't agree with any of this and I think the SOBs are greedy little sacks of ****, but legally that's how it would play out in a court of law.
Therein lies the rub. If they *deliberately* mislead the consumer with false labeling, that's one thing; but if your cd doesn't work because you have an 'old, outdated' cd player, that's just progress (or so they'd have you believe).
The debunking is self-evident to anyone who has any idea of what he's talking about. Thompson could create his mythical situation because he had complete control over both the input and output (compiler, code, and result).
THIS ISN'T POSSIBLE IN LINUX.
Please, if you don't know what you're yammering about, stop making noise.
No it isn't. It does work. Not their fault you didn't want to spring for a proper player.
If the product works a store has no obligation to take it back just because it won't work on *your* equipment. As a consumer it's up to you to make sure you have all the goods, not the store. The store is only legally responsible for damaged or defective goods, and these cds aren't damaged or defective.
You don't have a legal leg to stand on. You can moan all you like but your threat of a lawsuit won't get off the ground.
Which digital pirates are we talking about? The ones who downloaded mp3s from Napster or the ones in the business suits who've been ripping us off for years.
An amazing tale. I can't believe that your IS department is so incompetent that you managed to misconfigure your workstations to the point where they'd crash on a regular basis and that "would take half their filesystem with it". No matter what stupid users have done on the systems I've administered, I've never seen anything like this, not even close.
Really, your IS department should get a Darwin award or something. Only the terminally brain-dead could break Linux like this - repeatedly!
In the most recent conversion I was a part of, it took a large office all of two days to make the switch from Windows to KDE. KDE Office is so close to Office 97 that virtually no training is required; all the 'intuitive' stuff works the same. The IS department was competent and took out anything which wasn't of use in the workstation installs, preventing the curious user from causing problems. The only 'problem' was that the base install games weren't removed and the office staff thought that the 'kill the Bill Gates before he infects your machine' game was hilarious and spent many a work hour amusing themselves with it. So I suppose there was some lost initial productivity due to game playing....
Do they really think those people would pay for things in the first place?
Yeah, sometimes they are. I have about sixty mp3s I downloaded where I don't have the accompanying CD. Why? Because each one of them is a 'one-hit-wonder' kind of song where that's the only good song on the entire cd. Now, I've bought enough CDs like this before the days of mp3s that I no longer feel obligated to pay $16 for 12 shitty songs and 1 or 2 good ones; now the suits owe me.
And those sixty songs are what I choose to claim as payment.
On the other hand I have CDs I never would've heard of, much less purchased, because I downloaded the mp3s to check them out. Hell, I have A Teens CDs because they chose to remake the songs of one of my favorite bands, Abba - and they did a better job of it than Abba did. I have a number of little-known Celtic music CDs for the same reason: heard the mp3 on the internet.
So sometimes the people who do 'steal' mp3s also buy CDs, if they're pissed off enough about all the times they've been ripped off by the record industry and want a little payback....
It seems to me that the clueless "X-Files" freaks are out in force, no doubt scanning the skies for human-kidnapping alien spacecraft, black helicopters, and the infamous NSA, er, I mean "men in black".
Only the completely wigged "I need to wear an aluminum foil hat to keep out the mind control rays" sorts of folks would assert with complete conviction that the product MUST have a backdoor because it was written by the NSA, despite the fact that the entire thing is OPEN SOURCE.
Jesus H. Christ. Paranoia is good, folks, but only if it's RATIONAL. The NSA aren't *stupid*; there's no return on putting a backdoor into open source that'll invariably be discovered by some bored hacker with a text editor.
As the original poster said, it's nice to see a gov't intelligence agency actually working FOR us for a change, spending tax dollars in a sensible fashion.
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Well hell - let's outlaw all them nasty weapons then. Forget the army, national defense, the police - they can use rubber billy clubs, or maybe stern warnings. Yeah, that's the ticket, and just the thing to deal with recalcitrant criminals.
Max
This is very amusing. Why would anyone pay to download a song when they can get it for free on Morpheus, Gnutella, KaaZaa or Grokster?
I did. So did all of my friends. But then we're professionals, not college students looking to fill gig after gig with stolen songs.
Why? Because we wanted the better-quality tracks available on the CD, and we felt like supporting groups that we like.
Why did we use the services in the first place? To see if a CD was actually worth purchasing, or if it was typical RIAA schlock with one or two good songs interspersed with 12 losers. Amazing how much money you can save when you can preview the CD first and NOT BUY SHIT. Guess the RIAA really hates that, eh? Destroys their "fuck the consumer" business model.
BOTTOM LINE: For artists to make money from online music, free music services must disappear.
What utter nonsense. Free music services still exist and there's not a single shred of proof that any musician has been hurt by it. I know of a few bands that got my business precisely because I saw one of their songs on the net and decided to see what it was like out of curiosity. The A-Teens, for instance, which I would never have touched with a ten-foot pole if I hadn't previewed a song and found out that they were doing excellent remakes of old ABBA songs (so I like ABBA. Do an RIAA and sue me.)
I would also point out that musicians have been making money for thousands of years prior to the advent of the internet. Maybe not insane bucketloads of cash like Britney or N'Sync, but who says they should be millionaires? I sure as hell don't see a reason.
Max
Oh yes...a representative that isn't a complete scumbag. Pray tell, did you see our choices during the last presidential election? And don't tell me Nader was a great alternative; the guy's a fanatic and just as dangerous as the bought-and-paid-for whores that run on party platforms.
Unfortunately that's the way it breaks down for almost all Congressional races as well. Your only choices are losers who'd sell their soul for a bottle of bourbon, a hooker, and a junket to the Bahamas.
Damned hard to have a *representative* democracy when those in power make it almost impossible for anyone *representative* to have an actual shot of taking office.
Max
Fortunately your view on privacy isn't law. Would you like it to be so? Great - then use the amendment process to alter the Constitution to remove the right to privacy. And while you're at it, remove the right to self-incrimination as well.
You can do this, if you're serious. The Constitution has been amended numerous times in the past. Hell, alcohol was once outlawed - privacy has *got* to be easier than that!
But until you put up, rather than indirectly accusing folks of wanting to hide a predilection for child porn if they don't happily acquiesce to government spying, you don't have a legal leg to stand on. Or a moral one. Or an ethical one.
I want my right to privacy because neither you nor the government have any business poking into my life. At all. Unless I demonstrate a clear intent to commit a crime, so clear that a judge will issue a warrant. Getting 'logged' without that warrant is a violation of my Constitutional rights - it doesn't matter what I'm doing or if *you* think that the only people who don't want to be spied on collect child porn.
Max
I love Farscape - it's made more of an impression on me than any SF show since I first saw ST:TOS. Great characters, actors that can actually act, interesting plots, continuing story arcs (no Trek reset button), no inconsistent gaping tech holes, and, of course,
BABES
Claudia Black. Gigi Edgly. Oh my.
I can't think of any other show I've seen where my favorite character is the *ship* and my second is a puppet (Pilot). Or where the women kick such ass, or the main character screws things up as often as he saves the day.
Trek you can predict in the first two minutes of any ep. In Farscape you never know what's going to happen. Except, of course, that there'll be at least one or two hilarious moments, and that someone is bound to act like an asshole in a most unheroic - but most human - way.
Max
- If you don't want to cycle through 5-6 cds picking and choosing your software (which I love, btw - I can install arcane-but-useful items that no one else cares about w/out having to hunt them down on the net) you can choose the standard install. You did know there's more than one install option, didn't you?
- You only need to cycle through the cds if you went through the custom install piece-by-piece. Choose the standard install and you don't have to. You did know there's more than one install option, didn't you?
- The installer is fine. Not sure what you're bitching about here. And you can modify it to your hearts content if something about it annoys you.
- Unprofessional prompts? *That's* a big beef? Jesus H. Christ, man, if you get this wigged over a screen that tells you to 'have fun' it's time to reduce the caffeine intake....
- Any computer that makes noise without my telling it to do so is annoying. I think the same thing about most people, too. Fortunately in the case of the computer I can tell it to shut up, and it will. So can you, if you like.
I love SuSe for the install, the easy GUI system controls, and the fact that the kitchen sink *is* on the cds. But I'm just old and lazy and not much into crack cocaine, so SuSe takes the cake over other distros for me any day of the week.
I just purchased my copy. Even though I'll have to wait another two weeks for it to be released. Even though I have versions 7.1 and 7.2. Why? Because I'm old and lazy and not much into crack cocaine, and it's worth the $80 not to have to track down the software upgrades on the net and burn them to cd. For me $80 is worth about two hours of my time and since I'm sure it'd take me longer than two hours to get what I'd want and burn it buying 7.3 makes more sense for me.
Max
If the web is destined to be controlled and restricted through the patent process, why not produce an alternate technology licensed under the GPL? As many say the Web as we know it would become relatively worthless except to commercial interests (please, I'm trying to restrain my desire to insert sarcastic comments here) so why not 'abandon' it and turn to something else to fill the void?
I know the argument is that most people are so used to the Web as it is now that an alternate might not have a a very wide user base. So what? The web is so bloody clogged with crap right now would that be a bad thing? Linux doesn't exactly rule the desktop but that doesn't particularly concern most Linux users, who're happy to leave the masses to their Windows. And it doesn't make Linux any less useful to those who choose to use it over MS products.
If an alternative were developed and primarily employed by educational institutions (a big selling point: you could find interesting information without having to wade through tons of thoroughly useless stuff) then I, for one, would vastly prefer this FreeWeb, or PublicNet, or whatever you might want to call it, over the Web we have today.
Leave *that* web to the folks who just *have* to have the latest Quicktime trailer, or RealPlayer audio clip, or whatever it is so many people waste their time on. I wouldn't miss that at all. And I wouldn't have to miss anything since there's no law that states that if I use one Web I can't use the other.
(I realize this seems overly simplistic but I can't see any *technical* reason for why this couldn't be done. If anyone else can please enlighten me.)
Max
When I was programming for large corporations as an independent contractor I would sometimes write code inefficiently like the example listed above.
Why? Because many of the in-house 'programmers' weren't actually programmers; they were power users of particular apps programmed by others and critical to the operation of the company. No one else in the company was qualified to make the distinction, or technical enough to see that all the 'code' these guys wrote they downloaded from the internet and tweaked for their company's specs, while removing all copyright information.
In other words, they didn't understand anything but the most basic of programming elements.
When I was hired by these corporations I was usually handed off to the IS department and they would tell me what they'd want. I'd write a nice, elegant piece of code, turn it in, and they'd tell me to rewrite it because it was 'unnecessarily complicated'. Translation: they couldn't read it because they weren't capable of doing any real programming themselves. So I would often end up 'dumbing it down' until the IS people could follow along as I explained (in copious documentation) how everything worked.
Sometimes it was incredibly embarrassing and I'd throw away the code rather than add it to my portfolio. The worst such moment came when I wrote a Perl app for one of North America's largest timber companies (which shall remain nameless) that I had to revise FIVE TIMES. The last iteration had no subroutines or function calls because *nobody in the IS department understood what a function or subroutine was*. So for the app I did everything with GOTO statements - because they understood GOTO.
Yep. GOTO. Each and every jump in the code. GOTO. Quite challenging, actually, not being able to use subroutines or function calls. But it was so ugly, so heinous, and so...juvenile...I never told anyone about that job. I didn't want anyone to know that I'd written that incredible dog.
Sometimes bad code is written by bad programmers. Sometimes bad code is written *for* bad programmers.
Max
Given the enormous amount of political and economic power that energy companies have do you honestly think they're going to sit by and let anyone - ANYONE - destabilize the status quo? Power so cheap it's free means an enormous reduction in their ability to wield power, accumulate wealth, and in general force others to be miserable to satisfy the wanton craving of tin despots to make others do what they tell them to do.
Anyone who currently wields more power than his neighbors has a firm investment in the status quo and will go to great lengths to make sure that things don't change. Something this big, even if it were to 'escape' into the public domain, would be so heavily regulated and restricted that your 'free' power would soon become expensive due to all the bought-and-paid-for government regulations. Putting the energy companies back on top again, as they'd end up being the only ones allowed to build, operate, and maintain the fusion plants.
You can see this in the internet right now. It managed to 'escape' because until the advent of the Mosaic project no one in power thought it was worth a damn. Then came the dot-com rush as companies tried to cash in, only to find that the standard business model simply doesn't cut it in a virtual world where information is infinitely reproduceable and thus not easily made scarce. When reality came crashing down we had the dot-bomb and a bunch of pissed off status-quo freaks who, failing to stake out a piece of the internet using old models, came to see the internet not as an opportunity but as a threat to their current business practices.
So what do we have? Any number of attempts to cripple the real power of the internet through IP laws, the DCMA, attempts to outlaw encryption, and so forth. Crippling combined with an attempt to make something easily obtained artificially scarce. The RIAA is a prime example of a consortium that can't adapt, won't experiment with a new model compatible with the internet, and that is using all of it's power to not just maintain a status quo but roll back the clock to the days of the LP.
Energy companies would do precisely the same thing if any sort of ultra-cheap power source came along. And these guys have the ability to get the U.S. to *start a war* when their interests are at stake - far, far more dangerous than the RIAA will ever be.
Fusion in the near future might be a possibility but it sure as hell won't be cheap. The energy companies will see to that.
Max
Oh please. Unless your CPU fan fails (which hasn't happened on any one of the several thousand machines I've worked on in the last ten years) you have nothing to worry about.
And even if you're one of the one-in-a-million whose fan does fail (or you're one of the one-in-ten-thousand too stupid to screw it in properly) a 1.4 gig AMD processor goes for $149 right now. Far less than the Intel equivalent, I might add. You could afford to have two chips melt down, buy a third, and *still* not pay as much as you would for an Intel 1.7 gig chip *which the AMD 1.4 outperforms*.
This brand loyalty thing is silly, especially when it devolves to an ancient and almost useless feature.
Max
Tritium isn't that radioactive. In fact, it's used in radioimmuno-assays in labs all over the world all the time without any sort of protection other than rubber gloves. It's common in microbiology and genetic work both commercially and in universities.
Granted, you don't want to drink a gallon of the stuff or use it to shower with, but even direct contact poses only the tiniest of health hazards (smoking a cigarette is more dangerous).
What comes out of a coal smoke stack is a thousand times worse than being dunked in pure tritium.
Max
Amen brother. I got a cell and disconnected my land line. I only turn the cell on when I want to place a call.
Suddenly, no more telemarketers, assholes from work with stupid questions that "just can't wait", etc.
IM strikes me as yet another way to be bothered when I just don't want to be bothered. Unlike email, that I can wait to answer for days, weeks, or even just throw away. Maybe IM is a toy for the young and impatient, people who *want* constant stimulation in their lives.
Email - if I could ditch the phone altogether and just use email, I would.
Max
Back in the early days it was called e-mail. Somewhere around 1990 it started turning into email.
I remember this because flamewars would erupt over the proper spelling of email (or e-mail). No doubt future slashdotters honing their skills in anticipation of the web.
Max
A complete miscomprehension of the market also ignores the fact that true free markets don't exist in real life. That's why we have 'monopolies' and 'price fixing' and 'shitty products for high prices' - because companies that could compete under a strict free market model are snuffed out by more powerful competitors, *regardless of the quality of product*, on a regular basis.
Max
Just because you're too fucking stupid to set up a viable workstation config for the secretary doesn't mean that I am, or that anyone else is. Fact is, I can and have done it on numerous occasions; it really isn't that difficult if you don't waste your time dreaming about having ol' Bill blow his wad in your mouth.
Linux really isn't that tough, especially for an experienced sysadmin doing the install and making it easy for his or her users. I've been using it since 1993 and really can't see how an IS department could have any difficulty putting together a desktop environment that's easy to use, simple to learn, and virtually unbreakable (it's infinitely more configurable than Windows). Unless, of course, it's stocked with a bunch of MCSE incompetents who can't find their ass with both hands.
Finally, it's rather amusing that my i.d. number is of some importance to you. Clearly, if slashdot account age is something you find of value then perhaps you should look into getting a life.
Max
This is precisely what I meant. If they leave the CD label on the CD, that's false labeling and they're subject to lawsuits; if they don't put a CD label on the CD, then the onus is on *you* to make sure it works with your equipment.
I don't agree with any of this and I think the SOBs are greedy little sacks of ****, but legally that's how it would play out in a court of law.
Max
Therein lies the rub. If they *deliberately* mislead the consumer with false labeling, that's one thing; but if your cd doesn't work because you have an 'old, outdated' cd player, that's just progress (or so they'd have you believe).
Max
The debunking is self-evident to anyone who has any idea of what he's talking about. Thompson could create his mythical situation because he had complete control over both the input and output (compiler, code, and result).
THIS ISN'T POSSIBLE IN LINUX.
Please, if you don't know what you're yammering about, stop making noise.
Max
Somebody else already soundly debunked the Thompson article, which is unsupported,egotistical tripe any way you read it.
And if you're so convinced why don't you try going through the changes yourself? This isn't rocket science, you know.
Max
No it isn't. It does work. Not their fault you didn't want to spring for a proper player.
If the product works a store has no obligation to take it back just because it won't work on *your* equipment. As a consumer it's up to you to make sure you have all the goods, not the store. The store is only legally responsible for damaged or defective goods, and these cds aren't damaged or defective.
You don't have a legal leg to stand on. You can moan all you like but your threat of a lawsuit won't get off the ground.
You're screwed.
Max
Which digital pirates are we talking about? The ones who downloaded mp3s from Napster or the ones in the business suits who've been ripping us off for years.
Pot...kettle...black.
Max
An amazing tale. I can't believe that your IS department is so incompetent that you managed to misconfigure your workstations to the point where they'd crash on a regular basis and that "would take half their filesystem with it". No matter what stupid users have done on the systems I've administered, I've never seen anything like this, not even close.
Really, your IS department should get a Darwin award or something. Only the terminally brain-dead could break Linux like this - repeatedly!
In the most recent conversion I was a part of, it took a large office all of two days to make the switch from Windows to KDE. KDE Office is so close to Office 97 that virtually no training is required; all the 'intuitive' stuff works the same. The IS department was competent and took out anything which wasn't of use in the workstation installs, preventing the curious user from causing problems. The only 'problem' was that the base install games weren't removed and the office staff thought that the 'kill the Bill Gates before he infects your machine' game was hilarious and spent many a work hour amusing themselves with it. So I suppose there was some lost initial productivity due to game playing....
Max
Somebody mod this guy down as a troll.
Max
Do they really think those people would pay for things in the first place?
Yeah, sometimes they are. I have about sixty mp3s I downloaded where I don't have the accompanying CD. Why? Because each one of them is a 'one-hit-wonder' kind of song where that's the only good song on the entire cd. Now, I've bought enough CDs like this before the days of mp3s that I no longer feel obligated to pay $16 for 12 shitty songs and 1 or 2 good ones; now the suits owe me.
And those sixty songs are what I choose to claim as payment.
On the other hand I have CDs I never would've heard of, much less purchased, because I downloaded the mp3s to check them out. Hell, I have A Teens CDs because they chose to remake the songs of one of my favorite bands, Abba - and they did a better job of it than Abba did. I have a number of little-known Celtic music CDs for the same reason: heard the mp3 on the internet.
So sometimes the people who do 'steal' mp3s also buy CDs, if they're pissed off enough about all the times they've been ripped off by the record industry and want a little payback....
Max
It seems to me that the clueless "X-Files" freaks are out in force, no doubt scanning the skies for human-kidnapping alien spacecraft, black helicopters, and the infamous NSA, er, I mean "men in black".
Only the completely wigged "I need to wear an aluminum foil hat to keep out the mind control rays" sorts of folks would assert with complete conviction that the product MUST have a backdoor because it was written by the NSA, despite the fact that the entire thing is OPEN SOURCE.
Jesus H. Christ. Paranoia is good, folks, but only if it's RATIONAL. The NSA aren't *stupid*; there's no return on putting a backdoor into open source that'll invariably be discovered by some bored hacker with a text editor.
As the original poster said, it's nice to see a gov't intelligence agency actually working FOR us for a change, spending tax dollars in a sensible fashion.
Max