Or, better yet, it would be nice if there were some lawyer out there who would just donate a few hours his time and settle it for us. It's funny how the reputation of lawyers has fallen so low that it doesn't even cross our mind to ask them to do something charitable anymore (the extremely small minority of social justice lawyers excepted -- Ann Beeson, I love you.) Whether this is justified, I don't know. But there's no profession I frown on more, and goodness knows I won't be going to law school anytime soon.
And I'm a newspaper reporter:)
Re:Render Engine is nice, but modelers?
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POV-Ray 3.5 Rendered
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· Score: 3, Funny
I cordially invite you to join my "Slashdot Nerd Get a Sense of Humor" support group, which I will be opening on Yahoo! Groups later today.
For Unix, don't fuss with ntpdate, cron, rdist, or anything use. Use xntp. Trust me on this one. You will gain a newfound appreciation of the complexities of network time synchronization after spending a good hour trying to figure out how to get this daemon to do the simplest of tasks, e.g. automatically keep your clock in sync. It's obvious from the docs and code that someone has spent way, way more time thinking about all this than you'll ever want to. XWindows, Linux, Sendmail, Apache, and xntp always come to mind when I think of free software projects that just freak me out because of how well done they are.
For Windows you can get ntp daemons but I find that, if something new appears in their system tray, users will fiddle with and break it every time. I use Samba and MS Windows networking built-in time sync, put in a startup script so it syncs on every boot. Clock drift on any modern computer is going to be negligible even if you're only syncing once every day or two.
Smaller cables aren't just decorative. Those huge ribbon cables that connect your floppies, CDROMs, and hard drives restrict airflow immensely, raising the temperature inside your case by probably as much as 20-30 degrees Fahrenheit. High case temperatures, in turn, slowly kill all that fancy silicon you've got in there, and also take years off the life of your shiny new hard drive. It doesn't surprise me that the newest, fanciest hard drives are moving to smaller cables. Aside from the processor, they are probably the biggest producers of heat. So if you want high RPMs, you've gotta do something to cut down on heat.
It's a safe bet that the majority of American consumers will always be ignorant of what's under the hood as far their OS is concerned. But that doesn't imply that they are ignorant of what their OS does for them. My Dad, who would be none the wiser if computers "under the hood" were constructed of gelatin and plywood, is nevertheless completely enamoured with his ability to download MP3s off of Kazaa (Lite, of course), rip CDs, and send cool songs to all his loving children. Right now I'm teaching him all about DivX. Take that away from him and he's going to be pissed, and, knowing my dad, you can be damned sure he's going to vote with his dollars for the non-DRM product. I'd say most novice users are the same way; in fact, I'd even go so far as to say that non-techie users are going to raise a lot more hell when MS takes away all their fun. I find that many of my nerd friends are rather apathetic when it comes to these control measures, since by and large they are easily circumvented if you know where to look. We all screamed bloody murder when XP "Product Activation" was introduced. But rather than boycotting the product, I have a feeling a lot of us just found out how to crack it (or, worse, caved in a activated), and went about our merry way.
There's nothing like a little adversity to foster innovation. Of course there are gaping holes in the current suite of P2P apps. The upshot to RIAA or the record companies trying to disrupt service is that it will force people to sit down and actually think about these weaknesses, and fix them. End result: much more secure, robust P2P networks. Just off the top of my head, adding PGP-style "webs of trust" on top of any of the current P2P networks would seem like a good way to circumvent this sort of attack. Someone sends you white noise in place of your Black Sabbath? Shitlist them. Similarly, clients that you repeatedly, successfully transact with become "trusted" in your eyes. And depending on how much you trust them, their "trustees" become trusted (and their shitlisteed, erm... shitted) to you, as well. Granted, it's 12:50AM and I'm babbling, but the beauty of this approach is that it harnesses the inherent power of the a distributed network. There's no single point of failure, so there's no way a rogue client could spoof these webs of trust. Every client speaks for itself. Get enough shithits (God, the lingo alone makes fleshing this system out worthwhile) on a certain client--for the sake of discussion, we'll call him "dmca.riaa.org"--and you just start ignoring it. And so does everyone that trusts you, etc. etc. etc. This type of system has I'm sure been worked out in much more detail and analyzed for potential weaknesses than I'm capable of doing at the moment. Anyways, moral of the story is that this sort of forced evolution, even though it usually gets painful and ugly in the short-term, is often be a good thing in the long-run. (If you haven't guessed yet, you're speaking to someone who treats capitalism as a religion and social Darwinism as God's gift to man:)
Now what would be really cool is if they could interleave the "data" and "picture" on the CD. I imagine the density of a typical CD-R (in terms of raw pits and lands) is probably several orders higher than 250/inch. If that's the case, then shouldn't it be possible to alternate data and picture sectors at some ratio, say 1:3, and still come up with a legible picture spanning over the whole CD? A space tradeoff of 1/3 isn't really that high, and who knows, perhaps it could be pushed even further. I realize this probably annihilates every standard for CD--data, audio, video, whatever--in the book, but this burner sound pretty souped up as it is. Perhaps it could me modified to support this?
Kindly post a link, excerpt, or anecdote where anyone affiliated with this site has made it out to be an objective and unbiased source of news. Thanks.
Sure thing. Only problem is, they're currently being sued by every major network for providing the capabilities that they do. This is instructive, for there's a fundamental rift in the philosophies of TiVo and SonicBlue--TiVo seems more than willing to work with the TV companies, while SonicBlue is content to ignore them (to a point). Which is why the ReplayTV 4000 has the following feature, which can only be described as heretical in the eyes of your average network TV exec:
Play back recorded shows with Commercial Advance® and you'll enjoy commercial-free TV. You'll still have the choice to watch recorded shows with the commercial, if you really want to, and you can still use QuickSkip(TM) to manually jump over them in 30-second increments
It will also offload perfect MPEG2 copies of your recorded programs over its Ethernet connection. Why not just drop the pretense and bundle a Java VM and LimeWire with it?:)
Commercial skipping, recall, is exactly the thing that TiVo has resisted for the past four years, even though the technology is obviously readily available to do it.(SONICblue claims 96% effectiveness in blowing away all commercials whatsoever, automatically--no 30 second skipping, nada). It's also what SonicBlue is getting sued over. Don't forget that SONICblue is fundamentally the same company that brought you the first Rio PMP300 over the loud protests of RIAA. That's the mentality over there.
TiVo, on the other hand, seems to be striving much harder to finding some middle ground between pleasing the consumer and pacifying the behind-the-times TV companies. So you get innovative little deals like this. Admit it--no matter your ethical reservations, it's a pretty smart way to make some extra cash, which by all accounts they're in need of right now. But in the end it's clear that the ReplayTV-style DVRs will win out. We're learning time and again that this type of technology just doesn't go away. It didn't with the VCR, it didn't with personal MP3 players, it didn't with CD burners, it didn't with DeCSS, and it won't with felt-tip pens (ahem). You can already buy the ReplayTV 4000 now, and it's increasingly likely that the networks' "you must spy on your consumers" edict isn't going to stand either. The cat isn't going back in the bag.
I think that's pretty obvious. The more enterprises, governments, schools, and businesses you get to jump on the bandwagon, the greater the chance that an enterprise, government, school, or business will sponsor your efforts and allow you to buy some honest-to-goodness capital goods in return for your hard work. (I know this is something of an anomaly, even heresy, in the free software world, but I assure you--it does happen.) It also means that the quality of the software itself will increase, with faster bugfixes, more features, and higher quality code in general. Call me old fashioned, but I'll trade a press release worth of MBAdoublespeak in return for that any day of the week.
I wouldn't call this "all bad". Fundamentally, the idea seems pretty smart: move all the things that necessitate expensive chips over to the CPU, and lower the price of the finished product. Granted, when you make this proprietary to one OS, it sucks. But the kind of computing power available to the masses today is just ridiculous overkill. This was the case a year ago, and it's even moreso the case now. Why reinvent the wheel for every peripheral you have when most of the processing can be offloaded to the CPU? I wonder how much money you could save if you could buy a WinGeForce3 (granted, this is a stretch, even with today's computing power), WinRAID controller (which is actually what the HPT series of IDE RAID controllers are, as I understand it,) WinSoundblaster Audigy, etc. (When I say "Win" I don't mean "runs in Windows," but rather "runs in software.")
Ahem.. this is not illegal. It takes a high-school CS student to ignore the EULA, in this day and age. God knows what you will find in there. At the risk of being redundant, you really short get informed before you go off ranting about illegality.
Let's not forget that "unemployed dot-commers" aren't necessarily the segment of the industry that Katz was referring to. Very few of the former dot-com employees I know of are proficient in the hard sciences. Knowing MySQL/PHP/ASP isn't going to help win the war on terrorism, and those people will remain unemployed. On the other hard I thing we're already seeing a hiring upswing for computer scientists; I base this both on the anecdotal evidence my of Berkeley CS grad friends, who were all unemployed last year and seem to be finding jobs nowadays, and on whatever rumors seem to be circulating around.
I wouldn't sweat this too much. This tariff will result in the creation of huge black markets, and in a few short months no one will be paying these fees except the people that have too much money to care. The only people who should really be worried are Canadian vendors, who are about to lose a significant amount of business. You'll be able to easily find some seller on EBay who is selling for the (US) market price. You'll probably be able to find a lot of small vendors who are unscrupulous enough to sell you the goods regardless of the tariff. The only added costs here will be those due to inefficiency, e.g. the extra price you have to pay to get things shipped in from the US. And of course it will make regular citizens criminals. This scenario occurs like virtual clockwork whenever the government tries to excise tax/prohibit a good or service that enjoys widespread social acceptance. Look at our present war on drugs or the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s. Looks like some stupid Canadian bureaucrat forgot the most important rule of them all: you don't fuck with the law of demand.
I'm the original poster and IANAL either, by far -- I'm a full time college student and a part-time reporter. So take what follows with a brick of salt.
You can get hit for what you call "libel by proxy." How else do you think newspapers ever get sued for libel/slander in the first place? All of our information comes from sources. Here's the relevant paragraph, ripped straight out of our reporter's handbook:
Re-publication is not a defense for libel. Printing something libelous that was uttered or written by someone else leaves the paper open to libel just as much as the person who uttered or wrote it originally. Even stories that comes off the AP wire are not guaranteed to be libel free; if [we choose] to run stories from our wire service, we are completely liable for the content of those stores--even though we didn't right them.
There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. Reading that for the first time really shocked me.
I might add that that paragraph really doesn't even apply in this case, where there was clearly not even a good-faith effort made to verify the details, as evidenced by the 20-some readers who posted a link to the source within 10 minutes of the story being posted. At the point where a simple phone call--or, my god, even easier, a scant minute of web-browsing--would have sufficiently refuted everything that they posted, I think that the case for reporterial negligence is pretty clear-cut and strong. Let's face it: Slashdot has the journalistic mores of a middle-school gossip rag, at best; CmrdTaco, Jamie, et al are lousy reporters. If you want to pay money for that, fine, but I'm gonna keep sending my checks to wsj.com.
Fear not, good friend, and let our legal system work its magic.
I just got out of a libel workshop on Friday for the newspaper I write for with our libel lawyer and... let me tell you.../. is going to get absolutely nailed sooner or later if they continue to print what are essentially lies accusing other entities of breaking the law.
Next time you are reading the newspaper or watching television news, take notice of how criminals are described. No one ever committed a crime, he was "alleged to have..." If a man is convicted, sentenced to die, and executed, he did not "murder his wife," he "was convicted of murdering his wife" (actually, for dead people the rules are much more lax, but you get the point.) You never state as fact something which is not absolutely, completely, 100% provable; if you do, you've just opened yourself up to huge liability. And printing a correction/"Update: 03/03 05:10 GMT by T:" does emphatically not get you out of the doghouse. This is basic knowledge of libel law that every journalist should know and/. apparently does not. BTW tabloids are in no way exempt from this law, so don't say/. is acting like a tabloid. All the stories that tabloids are running are more or less factual if they are being written about other people. The art of gossip tabloid writing, actually, is in really pushing the edge of the law without actually being libelous/slanderous. They are very good at it. Also, you get a little more leeway when it comes to public figures, politicians, rock stars, etc. You do not get more leeway when it comes to "Joe Blow, co-developer on the Morpheus project".
With that in mind, I think a story entitled "MusicCity's Morpheus violating GPL" speaks for itself. I am surprised that the council for/.'s parent company really hasn't come down harder on them for these shenanigans, which appear to be occuring with increasing frequency.
/. eds say fuck you [slashdot.org] to the readers.
Actually, that comment seems to have disappeared. (What a shock.) I'm been trying to reconstruct exactly what the hell went on in this whole ordeal (I presume it's related to the whole moderator-holocaust supercomment thingy that appeared on K5 in early February). Surely someone must have a copy of the comment they could e-mail me or something?
On the other hand... it has been claimed that OBL et al were using good old PGP (probably version 2.6.2i) to encrypt their communications, and then sending them out over public forums and/or e-mail. Here we have an Al Qaida training manual with instructions for using PGP (unfortunately it must be fed through clumsy translator, but search the page for "PGP" and you'll get the gist.) It's well known that we were listening to Al Qaeda satellite phone conversations, spying on them with drones, etc., so I'd be more than willing to be that we were intercepting a fairly large portion of their e-mails, Usenet posts, and Yahoo! forums messages, or whatever else they were using. And I'd be more than willing to bet that said communications contained a least a few morsels about 9/11, and probably many many more.
Yet, by all accounts, this one caught the intelligence community completely by surprise. They literally had no idea that anything at all out of the ordinary was going on on September 10.
Let's get to the point: there's no way the NSA has the capacity to break strong crypto at will. Here was their golden opportunity, the situation for which the NSA was formed in the first place... and they blew it. I suppose the paranoid could argue that passed to opportunity up for fear of showing their hand. I doubt that; that really stretches the limits of plausibility for me. Let's face it: for a large enough keysize nobody is going to be decrypting your communications who isn't supposed to be. Of course, when the FBI can implant a hardware keylogger on your PC pretty much at will, I suppose that's kind of a moot point.
Correct premises, but a flawed conclusion. Assuming your idea ever became mainstream, let's be honest: someone would just find a way to circumvent the commercials all over again. Hell, I'd probably take a whack at it.
I think two scenarios (which aren't mutually exclusive) are much more plausible: first, moving to the HBO/PPV model. Given the quality of the shows on HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax right now versus the crap they're airing on the networks, this wouldn't be a bad idea. I don't watch enough TV to justify it, but I could easily see many of my friends paying a modest sum each month to cut the commercials (interesting corrolary to this idea: you now have to pay extra to view Super Bowl commercials!)
Option 2: make it impossible to separate the programming from the ads. The only way that I know of to do this is through product placement. I mean, if TiVo wanted to, they could hone a "commercial skip" feature to perfection (of course, since they're total sellouts to the big networks, they don't.) Imagine the possibilities: a giant, FreeDB-style public database of timing offsets for various programs. Thousands of users from all over who are watching the program live merely have to push a button on their remote and "mark" the start and end time of commercial breaks. Results are averaged and the data stored. Then your PVR downloads the data for the appropriate show and voila! Commercial breaks become scene changes. Anyways, I'm babbling. The point is that it's only going to get easier to snip ads out of recorded content as time progresses. So the only long-term viable solution is product placement. And to generate the kind of revenues that TV ads are generating now, you can bet that it will be blatant, frequent, shameless, vapid, awkward, and probably frequently insulting to the viewer's intelligence. In short, it will make network television even shittier now than it already is, which is no mean feat. For all the viewers at the margin (like me!), who are just barely tolerating network television as it stands, this will be one step too far; we'll stop watching altogether and turn our attention to the Sopranos and Sex and the City. The loss of viewers will depress ad rates, which will cause the networks to try to sell even more product placements at a lower price to maintain revenues. Which in turn will insult even more viewers and turn them off to network TV, which will further depress ad sales, etc. etc. etc. The cycle repeates in a vicious, downward spiral. So you see I have proven that
the TV industry will sort of asymptotically approach the HBO/PPV model:) Okay, not really, but I'm an econ major and this is what we do for kicks:)
Definitely not Moore's law in effect. Moore's law only specifies that transistor counts would double every 18 months. G4 has around 50 million transistors and the G3 had about 30 million, so you're off by roughly 33%.
That Moore postulated that performance would double every 18 months is a myth perpetuated ad infinitum by the clueless newsmedia. And certainly no one is claiming that clock frequency adheres to that law; as Intel has proven with the P4 it's rather easy to shamelessly inflate your MHz for marketing purposes without providing much of a performance boost at all.
Not to be to dismisive, but the Cato institute are single minded appologists for all things corperate [sic].
That's true, but this stems from a firm committment to libertarianism, not as an end unto itself. At least, that's what they tell everyone.
Arguments for this sort of extreme laissez-faire capitalism can be deceptively convincing (read "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" by Ayn Rand, with contributions from a guy named Greenspan--yes, that Greenspan--to see what I mean.) Do not be fooled. This body of thought is by and large discounted by serious economists today; they have for the most part stopped trying to argue that government regulation is not an important and indispensible tool in attaining economic health and focused instead on how best to use it. It's interesting that the two pre-eminent libertarian poster children of the 1990s--Enron and Argentina--crashed and burned within weeks of each other recently. Check out a great Paul Krugman column entitled "Laissez not fair" which discusses this in more detail.
At home I've quite enjoyed the "switch user" feature which allows for multiple logins (you know, the thing Unix has supported since, oh, the 1970s.) I don't remember that being in Win 2000. OTOH this doesn't seem very useful in most business environments, where the rule of thumb is "one person, one computer." Also Remote Assistance enjoys tighter integration with the OS and saves you $150 or so for PCAnywhere. Then again if you're the unfortunate yokel in the office who happens to know all about Windows, then your productivity just took a nosedive:)
Also there is no Windows XP server..NET server is slated for Q3.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, better yet, it would be nice if there were some lawyer out there who would just donate a few hours his time and settle it for us. It's funny how the reputation of lawyers has fallen so low that it doesn't even cross our mind to ask them to do something charitable anymore (the extremely small minority of social justice lawyers excepted -- Ann Beeson, I love you.) Whether this is justified, I don't know. But there's no profession I frown on more, and goodness knows I won't be going to law school anytime soon.
:)
And I'm a newspaper reporter
I cordially invite you to join my "Slashdot Nerd Get a Sense of Humor" support group, which I will be opening on Yahoo! Groups later today.
For Windows you can get ntp daemons but I find that, if something new appears in their system tray, users will fiddle with and break it every time. I use Samba and MS Windows networking built-in time sync, put in a startup script so it syncs on every boot. Clock drift on any modern computer is going to be negligible even if you're only syncing once every day or two.
Smaller cables aren't just decorative. Those huge ribbon cables that connect your floppies, CDROMs, and hard drives restrict airflow immensely, raising the temperature inside your case by probably as much as 20-30 degrees Fahrenheit. High case temperatures, in turn, slowly kill all that fancy silicon you've got in there, and also take years off the life of your shiny new hard drive. It doesn't surprise me that the newest, fanciest hard drives are moving to smaller cables. Aside from the processor, they are probably the biggest producers of heat. So if you want high RPMs, you've gotta do something to cut down on heat.
It's a safe bet that the majority of American consumers will always be ignorant of what's under the hood as far their OS is concerned. But that doesn't imply that they are ignorant of what their OS does for them. My Dad, who would be none the wiser if computers "under the hood" were constructed of gelatin and plywood, is nevertheless completely enamoured with his ability to download MP3s off of Kazaa (Lite, of course), rip CDs, and send cool songs to all his loving children. Right now I'm teaching him all about DivX. Take that away from him and he's going to be pissed, and, knowing my dad, you can be damned sure he's going to vote with his dollars for the non-DRM product. I'd say most novice users are the same way; in fact, I'd even go so far as to say that non-techie users are going to raise a lot more hell when MS takes away all their fun. I find that many of my nerd friends are rather apathetic when it comes to these control measures, since by and large they are easily circumvented if you know where to look. We all screamed bloody murder when XP "Product Activation" was introduced. But rather than boycotting the product, I have a feeling a lot of us just found out how to crack it (or, worse, caved in a activated), and went about our merry way.
There's nothing like a little adversity to foster innovation. Of course there are gaping holes in the current suite of P2P apps. The upshot to RIAA or the record companies trying to disrupt service is that it will force people to sit down and actually think about these weaknesses, and fix them. End result: much more secure, robust P2P networks. Just off the top of my head, adding PGP-style "webs of trust" on top of any of the current P2P networks would seem like a good way to circumvent this sort of attack. Someone sends you white noise in place of your Black Sabbath? Shitlist them. Similarly, clients that you repeatedly, successfully transact with become "trusted" in your eyes. And depending on how much you trust them, their "trustees" become trusted (and their shitlisteed, erm... shitted) to you, as well. Granted, it's 12:50AM and I'm babbling, but the beauty of this approach is that it harnesses the inherent power of the a distributed network. There's no single point of failure, so there's no way a rogue client could spoof these webs of trust. Every client speaks for itself. Get enough shithits (God, the lingo alone makes fleshing this system out worthwhile) on a certain client--for the sake of discussion, we'll call him "dmca.riaa.org"--and you just start ignoring it. And so does everyone that trusts you, etc. etc. etc. This type of system has I'm sure been worked out in much more detail and analyzed for potential weaknesses than I'm capable of doing at the moment. Anyways, moral of the story is that this sort of forced evolution, even though it usually gets painful and ugly in the short-term, is often be a good thing in the long-run. (If you haven't guessed yet, you're speaking to someone who treats capitalism as a religion and social Darwinism as God's gift to man :)
Now what would be really cool is if they could interleave the "data" and "picture" on the CD. I imagine the density of a typical CD-R (in terms of raw pits and lands) is probably several orders higher than 250/inch. If that's the case, then shouldn't it be possible to alternate data and picture sectors at some ratio, say 1:3, and still come up with a legible picture spanning over the whole CD? A space tradeoff of 1/3 isn't really that high, and who knows, perhaps it could be pushed even further. I realize this probably annihilates every standard for CD--data, audio, video, whatever--in the book, but this burner sound pretty souped up as it is. Perhaps it could me modified to support this?
Kindly post a link, excerpt, or anecdote where anyone affiliated with this site has made it out to be an objective and unbiased source of news. Thanks.
TiVo, on the other hand, seems to be striving much harder to finding some middle ground between pleasing the consumer and pacifying the behind-the-times TV companies. So you get innovative little deals like this. Admit it--no matter your ethical reservations, it's a pretty smart way to make some extra cash, which by all accounts they're in need of right now. But in the end it's clear that the ReplayTV-style DVRs will win out. We're learning time and again that this type of technology just doesn't go away. It didn't with the VCR, it didn't with personal MP3 players, it didn't with CD burners, it didn't with DeCSS, and it won't with felt-tip pens (ahem). You can already buy the ReplayTV 4000 now, and it's increasingly likely that the networks' "you must spy on your consumers" edict isn't going to stand either. The cat isn't going back in the bag.
I think that's pretty obvious. The more enterprises, governments, schools, and businesses you get to jump on the bandwagon, the greater the chance that an enterprise, government, school, or business will sponsor your efforts and allow you to buy some honest-to-goodness capital goods in return for your hard work. (I know this is something of an anomaly, even heresy, in the free software world, but I assure you--it does happen.) It also means that the quality of the software itself will increase, with faster bugfixes, more features, and higher quality code in general. Call me old fashioned, but I'll trade a press release worth of MBAdoublespeak in return for that any day of the week.
I wouldn't call this "all bad". Fundamentally, the idea seems pretty smart: move all the things that necessitate expensive chips over to the CPU, and lower the price of the finished product. Granted, when you make this proprietary to one OS, it sucks. But the kind of computing power available to the masses today is just ridiculous overkill. This was the case a year ago, and it's even moreso the case now. Why reinvent the wheel for every peripheral you have when most of the processing can be offloaded to the CPU? I wonder how much money you could save if you could buy a WinGeForce3 (granted, this is a stretch, even with today's computing power), WinRAID controller (which is actually what the HPT series of IDE RAID controllers are, as I understand it,) WinSoundblaster Audigy, etc. (When I say "Win" I don't mean "runs in Windows," but rather "runs in software.")
Here's one!. Maybe a little long on design and short on implementation, but overall sounds like a good idea to me.
Ahem.. this is not illegal. It takes a high-school CS student to ignore the EULA, in this day and age. God knows what you will find in there. At the risk of being redundant, you really short get informed before you go off ranting about illegality.
"Dissecting humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog dies."
-- E.B. White
Let's not forget that "unemployed dot-commers" aren't necessarily the segment of the industry that Katz was referring to. Very few of the former dot-com employees I know of are proficient in the hard sciences. Knowing MySQL/PHP/ASP isn't going to help win the war on terrorism, and those people will remain unemployed. On the other hard I thing we're already seeing a hiring upswing for computer scientists; I base this both on the anecdotal evidence my of Berkeley CS grad friends, who were all unemployed last year and seem to be finding jobs nowadays, and on whatever rumors seem to be circulating around.
I wouldn't sweat this too much. This tariff will result in the creation of huge black markets, and in a few short months no one will be paying these fees except the people that have too much money to care. The only people who should really be worried are Canadian vendors, who are about to lose a significant amount of business. You'll be able to easily find some seller on EBay who is selling for the (US) market price. You'll probably be able to find a lot of small vendors who are unscrupulous enough to sell you the goods regardless of the tariff. The only added costs here will be those due to inefficiency, e.g. the extra price you have to pay to get things shipped in from the US. And of course it will make regular citizens criminals. This scenario occurs like virtual clockwork whenever the government tries to excise tax/prohibit a good or service that enjoys widespread social acceptance. Look at our present war on drugs or the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s. Looks like some stupid Canadian bureaucrat forgot the most important rule of them all: you don't fuck with the law of demand.
You can get hit for what you call "libel by proxy." How else do you think newspapers ever get sued for libel/slander in the first place? All of our information comes from sources. Here's the relevant paragraph, ripped straight out of our reporter's handbook:
There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. Reading that for the first time really shocked me.I might add that that paragraph really doesn't even apply in this case, where there was clearly not even a good-faith effort made to verify the details, as evidenced by the 20-some readers who posted a link to the source within 10 minutes of the story being posted. At the point where a simple phone call--or, my god, even easier, a scant minute of web-browsing--would have sufficiently refuted everything that they posted, I think that the case for reporterial negligence is pretty clear-cut and strong. Let's face it: Slashdot has the journalistic mores of a middle-school gossip rag, at best; CmrdTaco, Jamie, et al are lousy reporters. If you want to pay money for that, fine, but I'm gonna keep sending my checks to wsj.com.
I just got out of a libel workshop on Friday for the newspaper I write for with our libel lawyer and ... let me tell you ... /. is going to get absolutely nailed sooner or later if they continue to print what are essentially lies accusing other entities of breaking the law.
Next time you are reading the newspaper or watching television news, take notice of how criminals are described. No one ever committed a crime, he was "alleged to have ..." If a man is convicted, sentenced to die, and executed, he did not "murder his wife," he "was convicted of murdering his wife" (actually, for dead people the rules are much more lax, but you get the point.) You never state as fact something which is not absolutely, completely, 100% provable; if you do, you've just opened yourself up to huge liability. And printing a correction/"Update: 03/03 05:10 GMT by T:" does emphatically not get you out of the doghouse. This is basic knowledge of libel law that every journalist should know and /. apparently does not. BTW tabloids are in no way exempt from this law, so don't say /. is acting like a tabloid. All the stories that tabloids are running are more or less factual if they are being written about other people. The art of gossip tabloid writing, actually, is in really pushing the edge of the law without actually being libelous/slanderous. They are very good at it. Also, you get a little more leeway when it comes to public figures, politicians, rock stars, etc. You do not get more leeway when it comes to "Joe Blow, co-developer on the Morpheus project".
With that in mind, I think a story entitled "MusicCity's Morpheus violating GPL" speaks for itself. I am surprised that the council for /.'s parent company really hasn't come down harder on them for these shenanigans, which appear to be occuring with increasing frequency.
Actually, that comment seems to have disappeared. (What a shock.) I'm been trying to reconstruct exactly what the hell went on in this whole ordeal (I presume it's related to the whole moderator-holocaust supercomment thingy that appeared on K5 in early February). Surely someone must have a copy of the comment they could e-mail me or something?
Yet, by all accounts, this one caught the intelligence community completely by surprise. They literally had no idea that anything at all out of the ordinary was going on on September 10.
Let's get to the point: there's no way the NSA has the capacity to break strong crypto at will. Here was their golden opportunity, the situation for which the NSA was formed in the first place ... and they blew it. I suppose the paranoid could argue that passed to opportunity up for fear of showing their hand. I doubt that; that really stretches the limits of plausibility for me. Let's face it: for a large enough keysize nobody is going to be decrypting your communications who isn't supposed to be. Of course, when the FBI can implant a hardware keylogger on your PC pretty much at will, I suppose that's kind of a moot point.
Try $0 for 622mbps. God bless Internet2.
I think two scenarios (which aren't mutually exclusive) are much more plausible: first, moving to the HBO/PPV model. Given the quality of the shows on HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax right now versus the crap they're airing on the networks, this wouldn't be a bad idea. I don't watch enough TV to justify it, but I could easily see many of my friends paying a modest sum each month to cut the commercials (interesting corrolary to this idea: you now have to pay extra to view Super Bowl commercials!)
Option 2: make it impossible to separate the programming from the ads. The only way that I know of to do this is through product placement. I mean, if TiVo wanted to, they could hone a "commercial skip" feature to perfection (of course, since they're total sellouts to the big networks, they don't.) Imagine the possibilities: a giant, FreeDB-style public database of timing offsets for various programs. Thousands of users from all over who are watching the program live merely have to push a button on their remote and "mark" the start and end time of commercial breaks. Results are averaged and the data stored. Then your PVR downloads the data for the appropriate show and voila! Commercial breaks become scene changes. Anyways, I'm babbling. The point is that it's only going to get easier to snip ads out of recorded content as time progresses. So the only long-term viable solution is product placement. And to generate the kind of revenues that TV ads are generating now, you can bet that it will be blatant, frequent, shameless, vapid, awkward, and probably frequently insulting to the viewer's intelligence. In short, it will make network television even shittier now than it already is, which is no mean feat. For all the viewers at the margin (like me!), who are just barely tolerating network television as it stands, this will be one step too far; we'll stop watching altogether and turn our attention to the Sopranos and Sex and the City. The loss of viewers will depress ad rates, which will cause the networks to try to sell even more product placements at a lower price to maintain revenues. Which in turn will insult even more viewers and turn them off to network TV, which will further depress ad sales, etc. etc. etc. The cycle repeates in a vicious, downward spiral. So you see I have proven that the TV industry will sort of asymptotically approach the HBO/PPV model :) Okay, not really, but I'm an econ major and this is what we do for kicks :)
That Moore postulated that performance would double every 18 months is a myth perpetuated ad infinitum by the clueless newsmedia. And certainly no one is claiming that clock frequency adheres to that law; as Intel has proven with the P4 it's rather easy to shamelessly inflate your MHz for marketing purposes without providing much of a performance boost at all.
That's true, but this stems from a firm committment to libertarianism, not as an end unto itself. At least, that's what they tell everyone.
Arguments for this sort of extreme laissez-faire capitalism can be deceptively convincing (read "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" by Ayn Rand, with contributions from a guy named Greenspan--yes, that Greenspan--to see what I mean.) Do not be fooled. This body of thought is by and large discounted by serious economists today; they have for the most part stopped trying to argue that government regulation is not an important and indispensible tool in attaining economic health and focused instead on how best to use it. It's interesting that the two pre-eminent libertarian poster children of the 1990s--Enron and Argentina--crashed and burned within weeks of each other recently. Check out a great Paul Krugman column entitled "Laissez not fair" which discusses this in more detail.
At home I've quite enjoyed the "switch user" feature which allows for multiple logins (you know, the thing Unix has supported since, oh, the 1970s.) I don't remember that being in Win 2000. OTOH this doesn't seem very useful in most business environments, where the rule of thumb is "one person, one computer." Also Remote Assistance enjoys tighter integration with the OS and saves you $150 or so for PCAnywhere. Then again if you're the unfortunate yokel in the office who happens to know all about Windows, then your productivity just took a nosedive :)
.NET server is slated for Q3.
Also there is no Windows XP server.