Ok the way I read it, this proposal is a revision of the industry self regulation rules already in place, not a proposal for an actual law. Therefor these regs only apply to IDSA members, so what's to stop, say id, from pulling out and marketing Quake [1+n] however the hell they want? Sure not being a member of the IDSA could hurt them in the retail channel, but I imagine that smaller niche developers could survive off of web orders (I'd love to be able to download the offical ISO of some spiffy new game, saves a trip to the store, saves massivly on packaging and waste too) and for the larger studios (id, Blizzard etc) what store would be stupid enough to to NOT stock say Diablo III when it comes out? Sure CompUSA may not stock it because of corporate policy but even the national niche stores like babbages won't be able to ignore such a major revenue stream. As far as local shops go, if customers are straining at the bit, ala Diablo 2, for some game that is on the IDSA's verbotten list, do you think they'll care?
The IDSA would have to basically forbid member studios from distributing games to non-compliant stores (ie ones that defy the IDSA and sell non-member games) like the MPAA has done to shut unrated indy films out of all the large theater chains. I don't think such a scheme would work in this case as showing movies requires a major capital investment, whereas setting up a software store is no more exspenive than running any other mom & pop sized retail shop. Too many little operations to audit for compliance, sure they could demmand distribution lists from members but the rouge developers wouldn't have to disclose who they sell what to. And the only way they could find out if a smaller store was stocking verbotten games would be to physically go to the store and browse the shelves. (sure they could call and ask the clerk "Hi I'm from the IDSA, are you stocking any verbotten games next to our sanctioned ones?", "Nope", "Thanks, hey your not lying are you?", "Of course not", "Ok thanks, bye", customer: "Hey you got Quake 5?" "Yea, aisle 3 next to barney's family time sing along", "Cool thanks!" ) Which is just too damned expsenseive.
Like any cartel it just takes one major member to pull out before the whole thing starts to unravel. Now I'm not saying that the defecting publishers should start handing out UT flyers to grade school kids, but continue to market to their audience in a sane, targetted manner. Which means marketing to gamers, on gamer websites and mags. Even if John Doe 13yr old sees an ad that's for an M rated game it's not like he can buy it on his own (at least in theory stores are supposed to enforce the ESRB ratings) and has to get his parents to get it for him. If he gets parental consent for the game then the games rating becomes moot as parental consent always trumps any industry rating standard and federal regs. What everyone of course fears is actual regulation by the government, and it is a valid fear what with all the furor to protect the children. However provided that we don't start seeing Quake ads during Sesame Street or other such foolishneess there won't be enough of an uproar over the marketing of games to motivate congress to do something really stupid (OK OK I know they don't really need much motivation to do something stupid) If the IDSA wants to do something to appease the FTC they should work with stores and get them to start enforcing the ratings system already in place. As myopic and useless as that system is, it doesn't burden producers or consumers too much and still allows for sane advertising.
I work in my uni's library and as far as I know we don't duplicate any books in whole for ILL purposes. If we have one copy of the book and someone makes an ILL request for that book we physically send them the damn thing. Electronic duplication is used when people request an article from a journal or single chapter from a book, where fair use comes in to play.
For example we are the largest (i believe) medical library in the state of Alaska. Alaska has a lot of small bush communities with only a few thousand (or few hundred) residents, not nearly large enough to afford every journal that may contain crucial medical information. But they do have dialup 'net access. So they will either search our holdings or put in a search request for our people to do the research (for a fee, but free typically free to patients or others who can't pay) the relevant articles are then scanned and distributed over the 'net as PDFs via a perl script that only allows a limited number of downloads (for copyright reasons.)
While I have seen some PDF's generated by ILL reach 60+ pages we by no means duplicate and distribute the latest harry potter book this way (or any other novel.) Having said all that we also don't do electronic dupes of materail we hold for local patrons, they have to wait their turn to get their hands on the printed version.
Perhaps we need a certifying organization like many other industries out there?
NO NO NO NO! I think this would be a very very bad idea, both for customers and for computer geek consultant types in general. Why you ask? I'll tell you.
At first glance such an organization seems like a good idea, and a good way to ensure that customers can tell they are getting ethical, professional service because their consultant is Slashdot Uber-Geek Certified (tm) And at first it would probably work that way, as a professional organization that only gives it's seal of approval to honest, professional consultants (who also happen to be dues paying members). But it's all too easy for an org like that to morph into something like the AMA or the Bar Assocation. For those of you that don't know, the AMA has (a long time ago) successfully lobbied to make it illegal for non-members to practice medicine, the Bar assoc has done the same thing to legal services.
Well in the interests in ensuring that customers get the highest possible quality of service they have also made the barriers to entry in either field incredibily high, making the services very scarce and therefor very expensive.
In the computer industry right now any smart kid who knows his/her way around a PC can break into the consultanting business in a small way to earn extra cash, and use the simple jobs (help me setup my new PC on the 'net, or hey build me a system kinda jobs) as learning experiances and move into more complex forms of support, and use the money to help get a CS degree etc... Now imagine the Slashdot Uber-Geek certification board has lobbied to make it illegal for non-members to practice the craft. And the membership reqs are very high, very pricey and you also have to go to a certified school, and earn an 8 year degree, in order to qualify. Sure the average quality of consultant would probably go up, but so would the price, and you can be the overall quality (and level) of consultanting service in the industry would go down, because no one could afford to use certified consultants etc...
Now I'm not saying that this would happen as a matter of course, but it's all to easy for benign professional organizations to twist into a political force and start looking out for their (current) members pocket books more than their customers needs or the professional ethics they claim to cherish.
I was given a copy of EQ as a gag gift this xmas (I don't game much and have no interest in spending months of my life building a character) It took me a while to find a name that the filters would accept and I was very surprised that they allowed, Cunnilingus, who is a female, half-elf ranger or something. I'm looking forward to coming across gm with a large enough vocabulary to spot me;->
How many times has Taco stated that he posts what he finds to be interesting, nothing less, nothing more. For the most part that happens to be "news for nerds, stuff that matters" but not always. Taco doesn't use windows so M$ having dns problems isn't important to him.
Keep in mind also that this site isn't meant to be a news portal for IT professionals but a news site for Linux using geek-types in general about things that interest us outside of our professional lives (ignore for a minute that for most geek types there is a fair bit of crossover between work stuff and personal stuff.) With that in mind, I agree with Taco, that one company that makes software I don't use having dns problems is not worthy of a headline on the front page of/.
Another person that's missed the point of source rpms?
Source RPM's are useful but aren't always available, wheras tarballs always are, plus I'm too lazy to learn the full rpm command set (for dealing with source rpms)
That's a damn good point, beyound installation software and included packages there really isn't much that distingushes the distros. For example technically one of my servers is a RH 6.1 install, but I don't think a single package currently running is from the RH CD anymore, hell for the most part I don't even bother with RPM's on any new services I add, preferring to use tarballs so I can take advantage of any compile time optimazation etc...
Though I suppose there are some people that use their distro's default userfriendly utilities to manage their systems as opposed to playing with the config files by hand (hell there may even be someone that doesn't hate kudzu) and simply run the CD updates every time a new point release comes out (debian users excluded of course who can apt-get -U;->) Anyway the point of the above ramble is that people running Linux as a workstation, not a server, would be more inclined to use the stuff that makes SuSE, SuSE or Redhat, Redhat etc... and of course workstation users are the staroffice target and therefore the target of the Czech localization. So I can sorta see why SuSE would want to promote their brand name with this effort, but that still doesn't explain the bizarre license attached to it.
As for whether or not your linux install still qualifies as SuSE I'd wager that if it was originally as SuSE install then it probably satisfies the bizarre and otherworldy requirements of this license.
Did it ever occur to you that natural gas is a scarce non-renewable energy source? Just because government fixes the price so everyone can afford to use (waste) as much as they want does not translate into an unlimited supply, it just looks like it to consumers. If not for short cited price fixing then maybe the slowly increasing prices would have motivated consumers to seek other energy sources before the situation hit a crisis point.
You and people like you are fucking hypocrites and are just as greedy and selfish as you accuse the Big Evil Power Companies (tm) of being. YOU want cheap energy, YOU want it so badly YOU elect a government that makes it illegal for businesses to raise/lower prices to adjust to a changing economic and enviromental situation. YOU wanted cheap energy regardless of what a fixed price would do to the long term viability of the resource or the effect such regulation would have on the developement of alternitive engery sources. Like the fools in Cali I laugh at your (expected) $600 dollar gas bills, and as far as people freezing to death, call it natural selection, maybe the survivors won't be so fucking stupid in the future.
And some of the other brands to avoid you listed? I'm just curious because the opinions I hear about Bose in particular range from pretty good to utter crap but I've never heard anyone back up their negative opinion with much more than "they just suck ok" (not that their defenders say much more than "they sound good to me") but since you seem to know what you're talking about for home theater I was wondering if you could explain just what is so bad about Bose?
Your forgetting the one simple fact that people are selfish. They will act with their own best interests in mind, not the best interests of society as a whole. People who say they are acting for the common good are dangerous and should be shot on sight. All this "common good" crap leads to is what is known as the "tyranny of the masses" that is the majority (50% +1) of the people advancing their own interests, regardless of how it affects the rest of society.
For example in this country (well the US) it was once thought that slavery was a good and necessary thing for the "common good", after that it was believed by a majority of people (in the South) that segregation was needed to protect the "common good" I mean after all the majority of people who made up the government at the time thought these were good things, and after all the government is of the people, by the people and for the people so they must of been right.
A more modern example would be the anti-smoking facism sweeping the country now. It's true that most Americans are non-smokers now, and of those a small percentage are the type of anti-smoking nazis that wants to outlaw it everywhere. The anti-smoking facists manage to get a motion on the ballots that would outlaw smoking in all sorts of places, all the non-smokers vote for it because it doesn't really impact them. It starts in resteraunts, then bars, and pretty soon the state is making it illegal to smoke in your car and even your own home (which I believe is the case in certian parts of California) Again the tyranny of the masses, led by some self rightous jackasses claiming to be acting for the "common good".
What you and a lot of other people fail to realize is that there is no such thing as the "common good" People all have different ideas, different needs and different goals in life (all good things BTW!) and the only way to help advance everyone's interests is too simply provide people with as much personal freedom as possible, short of allowing them to knowlingly and directly cause others harm. In fact that should be a governments only job, to protect the freedom and liberty of it's citizens. As soon as you start legislating for the "common good" you just begin eroding peoples freedoms and liberty and pretty soon no one has any freedoms left because they've all been legislated away for the "common good".
Well where I work our CIO mostly makes bad technology decisions, ignores the input of his employees, sets unreasonable timetables for good ideas so they end up being executed poorly, and has generally done his best to ruin the reputation of the campus wide IT deptartment.
A few months ago it was decided that campus wide DHCP would be a good thing, so he told the sysadmins to do it. However he also forbade them from telling anyone else about the plan (ie the two dozen other admins on campus that don't report to the CIO) ya see most every department at my university has it's own small IT dept, mainly because when we started to computerize many many moons ago the campus wide IT dept was unwilling/unable to provide any type of support for all these new PC's popping up. Anyway our CIO didn't allow his people to communicate with the other admins around campus about what was going on so they didn't know about the 6 other DHCP servers running around campus. Nor did they realize that most of the online databases the library subsribes to authenticate based on IP, and that for some of those the license only applies to the computers physically in the library so when our public workstations started getting random IP's databases broke. Same thing with our networked circulation database, each of the book processors account it linked to the machines IP address, you can only use your account from your workstation. So naturally that broke in a big damn hurry. This was the first big project campus wide IT had tackled since the uni hired a CIO. The point of us creating the CIO position was to improve communications in the campus IT communities and improve central control, so far it's backfired. Communications suck worse than ever because of his policies, and the smaller IT depts around campus are nearly in revolt. We solved our IP auth problems by IP masqing all our workstations through one of our linux servers and giving our vendors it's IP for auth purposes, we do our own DNS and mail along with moving all the library's online resources to our own webserver (also a linux box) pretty much all we use campus IT for is our WAN link to the outside world. Our CIO sucks. We don't have a CTO, but if we did I'm sure he'd suck too.
What's next, millionare vacations on the ISS? Oh, wait...
And just what's wrong with this? As far as I'm concerned space as a been a private playground for a government chosen elite for far too long. Someday I want to be able to take a vacation in space, opening up the ISS to anyone who can afford the trip is a good thing IMO, because it's paving the way for the rest of us to get up there.
This has the blessing of the FCC, the backing of all the major
broadcastors, and all the major electronics producers.
Wrong, on point three. The Consumer Electronics Association (ie the major
consumer electronics producers) are fighting this idea, they are afraid that
consumers will think these copy protection schemes are completely daft and
won't buy into it, thus preventing CEA members from selling any of this new
expensive new digital kit. If you read the article you'd also kmow that the
CEA is considering taking legal action to prevent this proposal from
happening, based on the 1984 Supreme Court Betamax decision that gave the
smack-down to the MPAA/broadcasters over fair use, it was the decision that
confirmed that consumers have the right to time and media shift content for
personal use all they want. IMO if the CEA gets this to the SC the MPAA will
get handed another beating, as the controls they are seeking with this
scheme go far beyound the bounds of legal copyright protection.
On a side note I can't help but wonder if Sony's internal politics are
nearing a point of civil war, as a both a major consumer electronics
manufactorer and a major "content" publisher the two factions must be near
blows over this issue. Executive meetings must be getting pretty heated,
with electronics VP's and content VP's at each others throats. I for one
would love to hear from a Sony insider about how the company's culture is
dealing with this particular schizophrenia...
That's a little too cynical even for me to swallow, and isn't entirely true either, we have managed to produce a few leaders in this country that held fast to their beliefs, Lincoln springs to mind as an example. He refused to compromise on the issue of slavery and still won the election, despite having all of the South against him (granted his electin led to civil war but it still proves my point that a real leader with strong views can still win) Teddy Roosevelt is another good example, no one can accuse him of pandering or being vague. Again he was a strong leader and had great popular appeal without watering down his views. I'd put FDR in the same category of being a leader even though he basically lied about his stand on entering the war in order to get elected, which was a good thing in his case.
Just because it hasn't happened in a while doesn't mean that it's impossible to win in the country without being a spineless watered down dipshit, I just don't think it can happen within the current political structure. Whomever breaks the parties lock on the electoral system won't do it from within, it will be somebody that rises in the public eye outside of the political landscape who then makes a move into politics (or is essentially forced that way)
The problems with this country stem from the fact that we havn't had a real leader in office for quite some time. A leader would veto crap legislation, would stand up to those that seek to circumvent the constitution and would tell the campaign financers to shove off, becuase s/he won't need their support and advertising dollars because s/he will have captured the hearts and minds of the American people and help to give this country a sense of itself again.
The R's and the D's will never again produce a leader. This much was made clear to me in the 2000 primaries, McCaine really was the only leader running, and he nearly took the nomination despite the fact the he had something like 1/4 the funds of Bush, and the entire Republican machine was working agianst him. The system will not produce a leader from within because a good and just person cannot rise in the current system, it won't permit it. There are too many compromises to make, to many promises to break and too much money at stake (ugh didn't mean to rhyme there)
I however, have no doubts that another leader will emerge, a true reformer who really is for the people, but s/he will NOT come from inside the system. No this great reformer will rise from outside the policital proccess. A real grassroots candidate that really has the support of the people and who is beholden to no group other than the people. Their support will grow slowly at first, but as soon as they gain national attention we'll see a type of revolution begin in the system. And when the election comes s/he will be there on the ballots, and his supporters will be running for Congress and winning. It will happen, we just have to be prepared to vote the right way when s/he shows up.
Don't loose hope in the USA just yet as a nation we have a pretty good track record of producing leaders when we need them the most, and I think after this last election the people are starting to realize that we need one again, that we need direction and that we are starting to forget who we are. Don't forget that the US was the first republic to rise since the Caesers destroyed the old Roman Republic, and we are still by far the most idealistic of any modern one. We really are still an experiment, Rome was republican for over 400 years before giving over to tyranny, when we beat their record maybe then we'll no longer be an experiment. I happen to believe that we will manage it, with our rights and our ideals in place.
No it didn't. No one's vote was worth a damn in the general presedential election this year, because both candidates were utter crap. It was only so close because neither one was worth voting for, had a clear message or direction or was able to demonstrate that they believed in anything. The candidates that should've made it into the general election were killed off in the primaries (McCaine and Bradly) becuase they had strong beliefs but almost no money. And "the money" wants people with flexiable belief structures that can change their minds when told to.
Yes cheap teleportation would spell the end of civilization as we know it. National borders would vanish, artificial scarcities created by tariffs and embargos would go away. Opressive regimes could no longer terrorize and repress their populations, every human on the planet would have near complete freedom of travel. Smuggeling simply wouldn't exist, not as we know it. When teleportation makes it just as easy/cheap to move the consumers to the goods instead of vice-versa it doesn't matter if my favorite vice happens to be illegal where I live, I'll just teleport to Cuba for a cigar or over to Amsterdamn to smoke a bowl etc... Soceity and law would adapt to fit the new conditions created by this new technology. Teleportation would also solve the problems of cheap spaceflight, space stations, satelites etc... could be beamed directly into their proper orbit no need for expsenive rocket launches
And a side benefit of discovering teleportation technology would almost certainly mean the ability to create goods Star Trek style out of thin air (well out of bulk matter.) Recycling becomes perfectly effient, as we can transform any type of matter into any other type of matter. Cheap teleportation and related technologies would truely be revolutionary, and would probably be the single most important technology ever developed in human history.
What's scary is the idea of expensive, hard to use teleportation technology that can only be operated by governments or very large corporations. Thats what would lead to the end of privacy, and huge increases in crime and smuggeling (as organized crime would likely have the resources to operate teleportation devices for drug running, breaking and entering etc...) police would become all powerful and private citizens freedoms would be restricted even further in order to protect us all from the dangers of illegal teleportation.
this does not mean that the Church is trying to 'wash them of their
evil non-Christian beliefs by assmiliating them through our indoctrination'
How do you think the catholic church got started in the Phillipenes? They were a Spanish colony, and like all Spanish colonies of the day the locals were presented with two options: Become a catholic or we'll kill you, burn and plunder and rape your village in the name of our merciful god. The holy mother church has already assimalated them this filtered ISP deal is just another ploy to keep the sheep safely in the flock (and their dollars in the collection plate, and the political clout a large docile following gives them.) And considering that catholics aren't allowed to have so much as impure thoughts you can bet that the good church is using the "Draconian" setting in it's filter package, which probably includes anti-catholic web sites and sites about "competing" religons in the block file. However they permit violent gaming, but I guess that's understandable as people will need some outlet to redirect all of their repressed sexual desires, plus Half-Life probably makes good training for "slaughtering the infidels"
And I wonder if the church is paying any taxes on the profits made from this business.
And on a side note the person that coined the term "e-vangelization" needs to be beaten about the head and shoulders with something heavy and unpleasent.
Actually I'd love to meet this pair in a dark alley, but then again I'm one of those "kids" (22yo) with guns;-> However I wouldn't want to meet them in a well lit court room.
Sun with Java(script)
Javascript isn't Sun technology. It's a Netscape creation, originally named Livescript but was renamed to javascript before release because of some type of marketing partnership with Sun. Aside from it's ability to control Java apps javascript has nothing to do with Java, they are completely seperate products.
What I've found very amusing is discovering that people I know now, used to hang out on the same BBS's as I did five years ago. You know you'll be hanging out with other geeks and someone will start talking about the good 'ole days and you'll start talking about all your favorite long dead BBS's and you'll discover that your current boss turned out to be that guy you played TW or BRE with many many moons ago.
I *loved* that game, used to play on a FIDONet BBS here in Anchorage called the Mailman, I loved playing there because those of us playing locally could launch attacks against other BRE boards, we had a great rivarly with another board in Seattle, it was the coolest thing.
Me and a couple of the other powerful players on our board ended up forming a strong aliance and began charging others a "protection" fee which we mostly used to fund attacks against Seattle. I'd love to play that game again.
IIRC that would be Demon Internet in the UK. I remember reading the web page of one of the last of the original "Bobs" from there about 3 years ago. Some trolling of tech support humor sites would probably dig up more info...
Give the quality of Mars movies released from hollywood lately any one of us (meaning/. readers) could easily do much better with a camcorder and a handful of red dirt!
So regulated, deregulated, I don't care - whatever gives me more choice is what I want!
All I can say is this, about 3 years ago the telco market in Anchorage was completely deregged, the local monopoly was revoked and within a month we had two new local providers. GCI (a LD provider, recently turned LEC) bought the cable company soon after and began rolling out broadband on the cable network within six months, for businesses and people out of cable range they began offering DSL. The established LEC, ATU (now ACS) started offering DSL real quick after GCI rolled out the first cable modems. Before deregulation it was an exercise in pain to try to get even so much as a ISDN connection for your home/business, way overpriced T1's were a cash cow for ATU and they saw no reason to compete with themselves. Of course your deregulation milage may very.;->
Slashdot Mirror
The IDSA would have to basically forbid member studios from distributing games to non-compliant stores (ie ones that defy the IDSA and sell non-member games) like the MPAA has done to shut unrated indy films out of all the large theater chains. I don't think such a scheme would work in this case as showing movies requires a major capital investment, whereas setting up a software store is no more exspenive than running any other mom & pop sized retail shop. Too many little operations to audit for compliance, sure they could demmand distribution lists from members but the rouge developers wouldn't have to disclose who they sell what to. And the only way they could find out if a smaller store was stocking verbotten games would be to physically go to the store and browse the shelves. (sure they could call and ask the clerk "Hi I'm from the IDSA, are you stocking any verbotten games next to our sanctioned ones?", "Nope", "Thanks, hey your not lying are you?", "Of course not", "Ok thanks, bye", customer: "Hey you got Quake 5?" "Yea, aisle 3 next to barney's family time sing along", "Cool thanks!" ) Which is just too damned expsenseive.
Like any cartel it just takes one major member to pull out before the whole thing starts to unravel. Now I'm not saying that the defecting publishers should start handing out UT flyers to grade school kids, but continue to market to their audience in a sane, targetted manner. Which means marketing to gamers, on gamer websites and mags. Even if John Doe 13yr old sees an ad that's for an M rated game it's not like he can buy it on his own (at least in theory stores are supposed to enforce the ESRB ratings) and has to get his parents to get it for him. If he gets parental consent for the game then the games rating becomes moot as parental consent always trumps any industry rating standard and federal regs. What everyone of course fears is actual regulation by the government, and it is a valid fear what with all the furor to protect the children. However provided that we don't start seeing Quake ads during Sesame Street or other such foolishneess there won't be enough of an uproar over the marketing of games to motivate congress to do something really stupid (OK OK I know they don't really need much motivation to do something stupid) If the IDSA wants to do something to appease the FTC they should work with stores and get them to start enforcing the ratings system already in place. As myopic and useless as that system is, it doesn't burden producers or consumers too much and still allows for sane advertising.
For example we are the largest (i believe) medical library in the state of Alaska. Alaska has a lot of small bush communities with only a few thousand (or few hundred) residents, not nearly large enough to afford every journal that may contain crucial medical information. But they do have dialup 'net access. So they will either search our holdings or put in a search request for our people to do the research (for a fee, but free typically free to patients or others who can't pay) the relevant articles are then scanned and distributed over the 'net as PDFs via a perl script that only allows a limited number of downloads (for copyright reasons.)
While I have seen some PDF's generated by ILL reach 60+ pages we by no means duplicate and distribute the latest harry potter book this way (or any other novel.) Having said all that we also don't do electronic dupes of materail we hold for local patrons, they have to wait their turn to get their hands on the printed version.
NO NO NO NO! I think this would be a very very bad idea, both for customers and for computer geek consultant types in general. Why you ask? I'll tell you.
At first glance such an organization seems like a good idea, and a good way to ensure that customers can tell they are getting ethical, professional service because their consultant is Slashdot Uber-Geek Certified (tm) And at first it would probably work that way, as a professional organization that only gives it's seal of approval to honest, professional consultants (who also happen to be dues paying members). But it's all too easy for an org like that to morph into something like the AMA or the Bar Assocation. For those of you that don't know, the AMA has (a long time ago) successfully lobbied to make it illegal for non-members to practice medicine, the Bar assoc has done the same thing to legal services.
Well in the interests in ensuring that customers get the highest possible quality of service they have also made the barriers to entry in either field incredibily high, making the services very scarce and therefor very expensive.
In the computer industry right now any smart kid who knows his/her way around a PC can break into the consultanting business in a small way to earn extra cash, and use the simple jobs (help me setup my new PC on the 'net, or hey build me a system kinda jobs) as learning experiances and move into more complex forms of support, and use the money to help get a CS degree etc... Now imagine the Slashdot Uber-Geek certification board has lobbied to make it illegal for non-members to practice the craft. And the membership reqs are very high, very pricey and you also have to go to a certified school, and earn an 8 year degree, in order to qualify. Sure the average quality of consultant would probably go up, but so would the price, and you can be the overall quality (and level) of consultanting service in the industry would go down, because no one could afford to use certified consultants etc...
Now I'm not saying that this would happen as a matter of course, but it's all to easy for benign professional organizations to twist into a political force and start looking out for their (current) members pocket books more than their customers needs or the professional ethics they claim to cherish.
I was given a copy of EQ as a gag gift this xmas (I don't game much and have no interest in spending months of my life building a character) It took me a while to find a name that the filters would accept and I was very surprised that they allowed, Cunnilingus, who is a female, half-elf ranger or something. I'm looking forward to coming across gm with a large enough vocabulary to spot me ;->
How many times has Taco stated that he posts what he finds to be interesting, nothing less, nothing more. For the most part that happens to be "news for nerds, stuff that matters" but not always. Taco doesn't use windows so M$ having dns problems isn't important to him.
/.
Keep in mind also that this site isn't meant to be a news portal for IT professionals but a news site for Linux using geek-types in general about things that interest us outside of our professional lives (ignore for a minute that for most geek types there is a fair bit of crossover between work stuff and personal stuff.) With that in mind, I agree with Taco, that one company that makes software I don't use having dns problems is not worthy of a headline on the front page of
Another person that's missed the point of source rpms?
Source RPM's are useful but aren't always available, wheras tarballs always are, plus I'm too lazy to learn the full rpm command set (for dealing with source rpms)
Though I suppose there are some people that use their distro's default userfriendly utilities to manage their systems as opposed to playing with the config files by hand (hell there may even be someone that doesn't hate kudzu) and simply run the CD updates every time a new point release comes out (debian users excluded of course who can apt-get -U
As for whether or not your linux install still qualifies as SuSE I'd wager that if it was originally as SuSE install then it probably satisfies the bizarre and otherworldy requirements of this license.
Did it ever occur to you that natural gas is a scarce non-renewable energy source? Just because government fixes the price so everyone can afford to use (waste) as much as they want does not translate into an unlimited supply, it just looks like it to consumers. If not for short cited price fixing then maybe the slowly increasing prices would have motivated consumers to seek other energy sources before the situation hit a crisis point.
You and people like you are fucking hypocrites and are just as greedy and selfish as you accuse the Big Evil Power Companies (tm) of being. YOU want cheap energy, YOU want it so badly YOU elect a government that makes it illegal for businesses to raise/lower prices to adjust to a changing economic and enviromental situation. YOU wanted cheap energy regardless of what a fixed price would do to the long term viability of the resource or the effect such regulation would have on the developement of alternitive engery sources. Like the fools in Cali I laugh at your (expected) $600 dollar gas bills, and as far as people freezing to death, call it natural selection, maybe the survivors won't be so fucking stupid in the future.
And some of the other brands to avoid you listed? I'm just curious because the opinions I hear about Bose in particular range from pretty good to utter crap but I've never heard anyone back up their negative opinion with much more than "they just suck ok" (not that their defenders say much more than "they sound good to me") but since you seem to know what you're talking about for home theater I was wondering if you could explain just what is so bad about Bose?
Your forgetting the one simple fact that people are selfish. They will act with their own best interests in mind, not the best interests of society as a whole. People who say they are acting for the common good are dangerous and should be shot on sight. All this "common good" crap leads to is what is known as the "tyranny of the masses" that is the majority (50% +1) of the people advancing their own interests, regardless of how it affects the rest of society.
For example in this country (well the US) it was once thought that slavery was a good and necessary thing for the "common good", after that it was believed by a majority of people (in the South) that segregation was needed to protect the "common good" I mean after all the majority of people who made up the government at the time thought these were good things, and after all the government is of the people, by the people and for the people so they must of been right.
A more modern example would be the anti-smoking facism sweeping the country now. It's true that most Americans are non-smokers now, and of those a small percentage are the type of anti-smoking nazis that wants to outlaw it everywhere. The anti-smoking facists manage to get a motion on the ballots that would outlaw smoking in all sorts of places, all the non-smokers vote for it because it doesn't really impact them. It starts in resteraunts, then bars, and pretty soon the state is making it illegal to smoke in your car and even your own home (which I believe is the case in certian parts of California) Again the tyranny of the masses, led by some self rightous jackasses claiming to be acting for the "common good".
What you and a lot of other people fail to realize is that there is no such thing as the "common good" People all have different ideas, different needs and different goals in life (all good things BTW!) and the only way to help advance everyone's interests is too simply provide people with as much personal freedom as possible, short of allowing them to knowlingly and directly cause others harm. In fact that should be a governments only job, to protect the freedom and liberty of it's citizens. As soon as you start legislating for the "common good" you just begin eroding peoples freedoms and liberty and pretty soon no one has any freedoms left because they've all been legislated away for the "common good".
Well where I work our CIO mostly makes bad technology decisions, ignores the input of his employees, sets unreasonable timetables for good ideas so they end up being executed poorly, and has generally done his best to ruin the reputation of the campus wide IT deptartment.
A few months ago it was decided that campus wide DHCP would be a good thing, so he told the sysadmins to do it. However he also forbade them from telling anyone else about the plan (ie the two dozen other admins on campus that don't report to the CIO) ya see most every department at my university has it's own small IT dept, mainly because when we started to computerize many many moons ago the campus wide IT dept was unwilling/unable to provide any type of support for all these new PC's popping up. Anyway our CIO didn't allow his people to communicate with the other admins around campus about what was going on so they didn't know about the 6 other DHCP servers running around campus. Nor did they realize that most of the online databases the library subsribes to authenticate based on IP, and that for some of those the license only applies to the computers physically in the library so when our public workstations started getting random IP's databases broke. Same thing with our networked circulation database, each of the book processors account it linked to the machines IP address, you can only use your account from your workstation. So naturally that broke in a big damn hurry. This was the first big project campus wide IT had tackled since the uni hired a CIO. The point of us creating the CIO position was to improve communications in the campus IT communities and improve central control, so far it's backfired. Communications suck worse than ever because of his policies, and the smaller IT depts around campus are nearly in revolt. We solved our IP auth problems by IP masqing all our workstations through one of our linux servers and giving our vendors it's IP for auth purposes, we do our own DNS and mail along with moving all the library's online resources to our own webserver (also a linux box) pretty much all we use campus IT for is our WAN link to the outside world. Our CIO sucks. We don't have a CTO, but if we did I'm sure he'd suck too.
What's next, millionare vacations on the ISS? Oh, wait...
And just what's wrong with this? As far as I'm concerned space as a been a private playground for a government chosen elite for far too long. Someday I want to be able to take a vacation in space, opening up the ISS to anyone who can afford the trip is a good thing IMO, because it's paving the way for the rest of us to get up there.
Wrong, on point three. The Consumer Electronics Association (ie the major consumer electronics producers) are fighting this idea, they are afraid that consumers will think these copy protection schemes are completely daft and won't buy into it, thus preventing CEA members from selling any of this new expensive new digital kit. If you read the article you'd also kmow that the CEA is considering taking legal action to prevent this proposal from happening, based on the 1984 Supreme Court Betamax decision that gave the smack-down to the MPAA/broadcasters over fair use, it was the decision that confirmed that consumers have the right to time and media shift content for personal use all they want. IMO if the CEA gets this to the SC the MPAA will get handed another beating, as the controls they are seeking with this scheme go far beyound the bounds of legal copyright protection.
On a side note I can't help but wonder if Sony's internal politics are nearing a point of civil war, as a both a major consumer electronics manufactorer and a major "content" publisher the two factions must be near blows over this issue. Executive meetings must be getting pretty heated, with electronics VP's and content VP's at each others throats. I for one would love to hear from a Sony insider about how the company's culture is dealing with this particular schizophrenia...
Just because it hasn't happened in a while doesn't mean that it's impossible to win in the country without being a spineless watered down dipshit, I just don't think it can happen within the current political structure. Whomever breaks the parties lock on the electoral system won't do it from within, it will be somebody that rises in the public eye outside of the political landscape who then makes a move into politics (or is essentially forced that way)
The R's and the D's will never again produce a leader. This much was made clear to me in the 2000 primaries, McCaine really was the only leader running, and he nearly took the nomination despite the fact the he had something like 1/4 the funds of Bush, and the entire Republican machine was working agianst him. The system will not produce a leader from within because a good and just person cannot rise in the current system, it won't permit it. There are too many compromises to make, to many promises to break and too much money at stake (ugh didn't mean to rhyme there)
I however, have no doubts that another leader will emerge, a true reformer who really is for the people, but s/he will NOT come from inside the system. No this great reformer will rise from outside the policital proccess. A real grassroots candidate that really has the support of the people and who is beholden to no group other than the people. Their support will grow slowly at first, but as soon as they gain national attention we'll see a type of revolution begin in the system. And when the election comes s/he will be there on the ballots, and his supporters will be running for Congress and winning. It will happen, we just have to be prepared to vote the right way when s/he shows up.
Don't loose hope in the USA just yet as a nation we have a pretty good track record of producing leaders when we need them the most, and I think after this last election the people are starting to realize that we need one again, that we need direction and that we are starting to forget who we are. Don't forget that the US was the first republic to rise since the Caesers destroyed the old Roman Republic, and we are still by far the most idealistic of any modern one. We really are still an experiment, Rome was republican for over 400 years before giving over to tyranny, when we beat their record maybe then we'll no longer be an experiment. I happen to believe that we will manage it, with our rights and our ideals in place.
No it didn't. No one's vote was worth a damn in the general presedential election this year, because both candidates were utter crap. It was only so close because neither one was worth voting for, had a clear message or direction or was able to demonstrate that they believed in anything. The candidates that should've made it into the general election were killed off in the primaries (McCaine and Bradly) becuase they had strong beliefs but almost no money. And "the money" wants people with flexiable belief structures that can change their minds when told to.
And a side benefit of discovering teleportation technology would almost certainly mean the ability to create goods Star Trek style out of thin air (well out of bulk matter.) Recycling becomes perfectly effient, as we can transform any type of matter into any other type of matter. Cheap teleportation and related technologies would truely be revolutionary, and would probably be the single most important technology ever developed in human history.
What's scary is the idea of expensive, hard to use teleportation technology that can only be operated by governments or very large corporations. Thats what would lead to the end of privacy, and huge increases in crime and smuggeling (as organized crime would likely have the resources to operate teleportation devices for drug running, breaking and entering etc...) police would become all powerful and private citizens freedoms would be restricted even further in order to protect us all from the dangers of illegal teleportation.
How do you think the catholic church got started in the Phillipenes? They were a Spanish colony, and like all Spanish colonies of the day the locals were presented with two options: Become a catholic or we'll kill you, burn and plunder and rape your village in the name of our merciful god. The holy mother church has already assimalated them this filtered ISP deal is just another ploy to keep the sheep safely in the flock (and their dollars in the collection plate, and the political clout a large docile following gives them.) And considering that catholics aren't allowed to have so much as impure thoughts you can bet that the good church is using the "Draconian" setting in it's filter package, which probably includes anti-catholic web sites and sites about "competing" religons in the block file. However they permit violent gaming, but I guess that's understandable as people will need some outlet to redirect all of their repressed sexual desires, plus Half-Life probably makes good training for "slaughtering the infidels"
And I wonder if the church is paying any taxes on the profits made from this business.
And on a side note the person that coined the term "e-vangelization" needs to be beaten about the head and shoulders with something heavy and unpleasent.
Actually I'd love to meet this pair in a dark alley, but then again I'm one of those "kids" (22yo) with guns
Javascript isn't Sun technology. It's a Netscape creation, originally named Livescript but was renamed to javascript before release because of some type of marketing partnership with Sun. Aside from it's ability to control Java apps javascript has nothing to do with Java, they are completely seperate products.
What I've found very amusing is discovering that people I know now, used to hang out on the same BBS's as I did five years ago. You know you'll be hanging out with other geeks and someone will start talking about the good 'ole days and you'll start talking about all your favorite long dead BBS's and you'll discover that your current boss turned out to be that guy you played TW or BRE with many many moons ago.
I *loved* that game, used to play on a FIDONet BBS here in Anchorage called the Mailman, I loved playing there because those of us playing locally could launch attacks against other BRE boards, we had a great rivarly with another board in Seattle, it was the coolest thing.
Me and a couple of the other powerful players on our board ended up forming a strong aliance and began charging others a "protection" fee which we mostly used to fund attacks against Seattle. I'd love to play that game again.
IIRC that would be Demon Internet in the UK. I remember reading the web page of one of the last of the original "Bobs" from there about 3 years ago. Some trolling of tech support humor sites would probably dig up more info...
Give the quality of Mars movies released from hollywood lately any one of us (meaning /. readers) could easily do much better with a camcorder and a handful of red dirt!
So regulated, deregulated, I don't care - whatever gives me more choice is what I want!
;->
All I can say is this, about 3 years ago the telco market in Anchorage was completely deregged, the local monopoly was revoked and within a month we had two new local providers. GCI (a LD provider, recently turned LEC) bought the cable company soon after and began rolling out broadband on the cable network within six months, for businesses and people out of cable range they began offering DSL. The established LEC, ATU (now ACS) started offering DSL real quick after GCI rolled out the first cable modems. Before deregulation it was an exercise in pain to try to get even so much as a ISDN connection for your home/business, way overpriced T1's were a cash cow for ATU and they saw no reason to compete with themselves. Of course your deregulation milage may very.