An assault on law enforcement has different symbolism that an assault (perhaps the same assault) on an individual. Law enforcement is part of socieity, and I'd argue an essential part of society (and too frequently, its deeply screwed-up). Thus attacking a policeman conveys a disrespect for society, at least on the surface.
OK, so it conveys a disrespect for society. Explain why that should be restricted? (note:I need a reason that won't result in me telling you to go live in communist china if you're so scarred by messages you don't like to hear, thanks.)
Probably the law should be extended to all public servents, including fire fighters and social workers. As another poster commented, though, there is a perception issue with police. I don't think anyone thinks that shooting fire fighters could be part of a good game, and it's a bit pathetic that shooting police officers is considered part of a good game.
And if shooting police officers in games isn't an important part of those games, then perhaps game designers can leave such stupidity out of their games. For the Matrix games, for instance, I'd guess there would be many creative ways to avoid shooting police officers.
Why? Because you told them to? I hate to break this to you, but the games which include killing cops are primarily games ABOUT BEING A CRIMINAL. Maybe in your little fantasy world, social workers and fire fighters shoot at criminals while saying stuff like "freeze, or I'll shoot!" after you commit a crime, but here in the good old real world, and by extention, in games which seek to mimic this world for entertainment purposes, police do these things. In fact, I don't even think most firefighters or social workers carry guns....maybe in texas.
You know, manhattan airport was the default location in Flight Simulator 4. I've crashed into the twin towers, intentionally, more than a few times. I was dissapointed -- I was hoping for a cool explosion or somethign -- no, just "Crashed." at the bottom of the screen.
Of course, this was back in 1993, so it wasn't evil or "doubleplus unPolitically Correct" back then, but still...
/me considers making a game like that(obviously not for distribution!!!)...naw. How the hell would I make a fun game about hijacking planes with box cutters? At least with a gun I could make a cool overhead game based on paranoia where you have to make sure nobody is trying to sneak up on you, where being in the line of sight with people would make everyone scramble back to where they were, and shooting people would gradually increase the chances of someone trying to sneak past you to attack you, but with a box cutter...that just wouldn't be fun. basically, you have to be sure everyone is a total coward, or it wouldn't be possible to win without throwing meaningful gameplay mechanics out the window...
If a cop lets his emotions get the better of him (during the course of an extremely emotional job) for even an instant, he faces the loss of his job, or even faces jail time.
Yeah.....as opposed to a regular person, who just faces jailtime.....
Here we are, placing restrictions on something based on what it expresses, but it's TOTALLY NOT CENSORSHIP! I mean, we're not placing restrictions on it because we don't want the message spread, it's just that we're afraid of the message and what it means when it shows how lazy and incompetant we all are as parents and school administrators! Erm.... forget that last part -- I mean, you have to remember that last school shooting that was done by a person with a stable, caring familiy and wasn't driven to suicide's grizzly alternative by incessant psychological torture by kids at school.... right?
right?
OK, well, do you remember that cop killer on the news a couple weeks ago that wasn't primarily motivated by socioeconomic facto--oh wait.
Why can't we get laws to censor ignorant rednecks who think that playing a video game will magically cause more than a statistically insignificant number of crimes(no, 3 crimes in the past decade isn't statistically significant not even if they were "really bad crimes")? Get a life and piss off. There's no legitimate reason to restrict the sales of video games to minors. If there was, there would be obvious statistical factors, rather than a bunch of chronically ignorant soccer moms and politicians who want their votes who are afraid of anything that might shake up their pathetic existance. the murder rate would have shown significant increases, especially in the ABOVE 18 demographic, seeing as a recent study showed that 99% of game buyers are in that demographic.
Jesus H. Christ, can't the lot of you just go live in the forest, get malaria from mosquitos, and pray to buhda instead of taking pennicilin instead? That way the intellitent members of the population could get back to something more intelligent than (and look for the video game reference here) looking for "The Ultimate Evil, which lies just outside of the range of our most advanced scanners".
You must not be patriotic if you're talking like that! And if you're not with us, you're against us(resident idiot George W. Bush told us so!), so if you think that the facts are nessessary....you are supporting and comforting Saddam in Iraq!!!!!!
The day I define "successful capitalist" as one who tries to commit acts of cyberterrorism on a massive scale, sue their customers just because they can, and play a game of deception that has artists cursing their own fans is the day I commit seppuku.
For what again? If it's for being against the war in Iraq, everybody can and will go to hell. You don't have to be liberal(as everybody seems to be accusing to that effect) to see that GWB spent his entire spin campaign literally lying to the american public(as opposed to half-truths, like every other politician -- The fact is, a lot of the "reports" he used to convince people were verified as false) and changing his story with a frequency that would make a kid with ADD proud. Just because a bunch of braindead idiots actually BOUGHT that pathetic, insultingly transparant 11th hour liberation excuse (ooh! look at us! We just replaced a dictator who ruled under a thin veil of democracy with a...foreign dictator who rules under a thin veil of democracy......) doesn't magically mean that the people that were opposing the war for legitimate, non-hippy reasons ("war is, like...bad, man!" -- actual quote from anti-war protestor) are all evil, freedom hating bastards. Personally, I think going to war with every country that doesn't succumb to our wrath is a good way to get some more American landmarks taken out. Considering that 9/11 was caused by idiocy in that regard(If you pick sides, don't bitch like a little girl when someone decides you chose wrong and flies a plane into a skyscraper), I wouldn't be suprised to see a rise in terrorism in a couple years(because contrary to popular opinion, these things take years to plan and execute -- or were you sleeping when they described the years of training, planning and preperation that went into 9/11?).
The thing you have to realize, is that the entire music industry is exceptionally evil. Not plain run of the mill "kicking small children with steel toe boots" evil, no, a much more special and exceptional evil -- pitting artists against their own fans, and screwing both on a massive scale. This includes lawsuits brought against college students, state sanctioned cyberterrorism on a massive scale, hypocritical moral indignation, paying artists next to nothing for music that earns the companies millions of dollars net, and actions like this, which take a practice which wouldn't be illegal anywhere else(scrawl down the lyrics to your favourite song, and hand out a bunch of copies. No court in the country would touch the case with a 500ft pole) and call it something different because "it's digital", bribing(through the more ambiguous "softmoney contribution), and other evil things (though I'm sure they do get out their small child kicking boots once in a while for concerts).
In this case, evil on a massive scale is it's own justification.
200 dollars!? Well, for that they can ask him to retire!:P
(You're really making a mountain out of an anthill here. Just because you didn't like his vaguely entertaining segues, he should step down? Isn't that just the tinyist bit silly?)
I hate to break this to you, but Slashdot has no credibility. zip. zilch. nada. hasn't in all the years I've been reading it. the forums are basically one giant flamewar, which the articles seem specifically designed to fuel. No executive has ever gone "wait, this AC post off of slashdot is absolutely right! M1cro$0ft i5 teh 5uxxorz!". Between Soviet russia, Goatse.cx, Natalie Portman, hot grits, and all the other silliness on this site, anyone who thinks there's any iota of credibility is deluding themselves.
If you think that market share has anything at all to do with quality, you haven't been looking for the past 15 years. Microsoft has consistently had the worst applications, Operating systems, and platforms in the market, and have consistently dominated the markets they enter nonetheless thanks to a variety of factors. It's only extremely recently that Microsoft products have begun to catch up with the various now-dead OSes and applications they have displaced.
For the moment I'll ignore tha fact that I believe the existance of Linux as the only threat to Windows on the x86 desktop represents a worst-case scenario come to life and an example of a broken market (Linux exists because no other commercial OS has been able to survive. When programmers all around the world get together and build a platform from scratch for free, it's NOT an example of good health in the market -- especially when there's only one other major platform!), gaining any headway in such a market is a major victory. Naturally the OS isn't going to start off with a 51% "winning" marketshare, but every year that Linux gains more users on the Desktop, it is a victory, and if you don't look too hard at the lopsided market share, it could be said that Linux could be winning the tug of war on the market in a sense(a very limited sense, mind you, but it's there).
I'm not defending ignorance, but we both have to face the fact that it exists. No amount of wishing that it didn't or pretending that it doesn't will change that. Besides that, you seem to be confusing the issues here. The original poster is absolutely correct -- MSN gets hits largely because A)Microsoft sets it to be the main page by default, allegedly changing it back when certain updates are installed, and B) by using their MSN search when when a server isn't found(which is rather counterintuitive, since most people intuitively use that box to write the correct address in). Just because it's possible to change these settings doesn't mean that everyone does, so MSN undoubtedly does indeed get a large amount of hits that way.
Stop thinking of it as an accusation, it's just a fact. When millions of people, especially unskilled people who have problems with basic computing skills, use your software, and it's set up to go to MSN in many places by default, some significant percentage of those people who for whatever reason won't disable the MSN affilliation(and I wouldn't be suprised to see the number of people who don't turn off the MSN search feature reaches 80-90%), and that percentage will be providing hits constantly to Microsofts site.
As for this...
I stand by what I said. I don't tolerate people who keep themselv's ignorant on purpose. Your response shows me you are one of the affore mentioned people. Have a nice day.
Your own accusation paints you with the same brush. In trying to characterize a complex individual into a single massive and simplistic group based soley on the contents of a single post, you prove that you are truly ignorant about the man who calls himself SJ Zero. I'll tell you what -- check out my site, Powerusrs Gaming. Perhaps you can cure your own ignorance about me. You can't simply wish it away, as you seem to think. Perhaps you will find a kindred spirit who loathes the cult of ignorance our society is so enamoured with. Perhaps you will find a person who has dedicated his entire life to understanding the world outside his immediate surroundings. But then, perhaps you will find the worshipper of ignorance you accuse me of being.
To that end, if you wish to continue this discussion, please do it on the Powerusrss Gaming forums, where we can more easily converse without the logistics of Slashdot getting in the way.
I'm glad you like that word "fud". It's obviously very dear to you, but here's the thing -- he's absolutely right in many respects. Automatic updates are on by default, IIRC. I don't believe that upgrading IE will change your homepage, but it's possible. Finally, just because you found the option to search for missing URLs doesn't mean that Microsoft is magically not hijacking 404s all over the place. Default behaviour is the key phrase here. Just like unpatched Outlook Express can be set up to not be the most insecure piece of trash on the internet, but that doesn't change the fact that millions were affected one way or another by outlook viruses.
I don't really see why any of those cases would be any different than a quality laptop, except for the first case, in which you're just replacing simplicity with complexity for no real reason. I mean -- at 4k per bed, is it *REALLY* that nessessary to replace a perfectly good clipboard?
Listen. If you want a quiet PC, buy a quiet PC. You can get a VIA C3 that'll run without any active cooling if you wish, or a Dell Optiplex system for a pentium 4 system cooled by a single large, low RPM fan which will runs quite silently. There's no reason I can think of to swing the entire industry to bear on such a non-existant issue -- if you want a silent machine, you'll have to compromise, and that's all there is to it. There's no magic trick that's going to make a cutting edge processor suddenly require significantly less cooling while allowing prices and speeds to remain where they are. So go out and buy a system with whatever compromises you need to make, and quit acting like it's a terrible injustice that a machine with a billion times more processing power than the entire world in 1955 needs a little fan.
If you hate popups, you probably don't get them, unless you're too dense to try out a mozilla-based browser, an ad-blocking proxy, the kazaa lite HOSTS file, or one of a bunch of other ways to get rid of them.
In short, anyone who truly hates popups doesn't get them, so this whole story is rather redundant.
The extra step of saving the file to disk isn't ultimately making anything safer.
It most certainly does. Just remember that for the longest time, everyone KNEW that viruses couldn't be spread by looking at e-mails. nowadays, just looking at it in the preview pane is enough to infect your system and send it to everyone on your list if you haven't patched and secured Outlook Express.
The behaviour you're describing is a result of idiocy. Outlook viruses make it so non-idiots can infect their systems my doing something mundane and not paticularly stupid at all (reading an e-mail isn't stupid. Opening foreign executables can be.)
First, keep in mind that slashdot, as usual, isn't a collective hive mind. There can be conflicting opinions without being some great paradox.
Secondly, cyber-terrorism is a crime far more serious than copyright infringement. A man guilty of the former can get life imprisonment. A man guilty of the latter can get some hefty fines and up to 5 years in prison(IIRC). For an organization this big to be willfully taking part in such a crime, especially on the massive scale they seem to indicate, is a major breach, and in my eyes, cause enough to have such a criminal organization, no matter how big, shut down.
Thirdly, considering the holier than thou attitude the RIAA is taking on copyright infringement, a voluntary mass crime spree isn't really what most would expect. It certainly shows that their halo is made of plastic. If these companies can't even control their own actions, what right do they have to sue college students for 100 billion dollars? None, in my eyes. These companies are playing russian roulette with their PR in the best case scenario, and setting themselves up for international incarceration at worst.
Meanwhile, personal copyright infringement is still a pitifully minor law, and hacking on a massive scale is a strangely major one. Odd...isn't it?
This isn't cyber-war, it's cyber terrorism. Attacking individuals machines en masse is no less cyber-terrorism than some 12 year old defacing a website.
And once you learn to use their own terminology against them, you realize that what the music industry wants to do is illegal for the same reasons I can't randomly delete files off their computers or commit resources to DDOSing them.
Personally, I think heads should roll if these measures are finalized and put into use. I think some executives should be held responsible in a criminal court for flagrantly disregarding the law on a massive scale. This goes beyond even corporate vigilanteeism into the realm of lawlessness.
If they follow through with this, they won't have to worry about losing money from *ME* to MP3s anymore(though admittedly, I have 64 files shared on kazaa, and they own exactly 0 -- I know because I wrote all of them myself), because I'll burn my music collection and make it my mission to never listen to an RIAA song again, for fear of lending mindshare to an organization so distasteful.
Slashdot Mirror
An assault on law enforcement has different symbolism that an assault (perhaps the same assault) on an individual. Law enforcement is part of socieity, and I'd argue an essential part of society (and too frequently, its deeply screwed-up). Thus attacking a policeman conveys a disrespect for society, at least on the surface.
OK, so it conveys a disrespect for society. Explain why that should be restricted? (note:I need a reason that won't result in me telling you to go live in communist china if you're so scarred by messages you don't like to hear, thanks.)
Probably the law should be extended to all public servents, including fire fighters and social workers. As another poster commented, though, there is a perception issue with police. I don't think anyone thinks that shooting fire fighters could be part of a good game, and it's a bit pathetic that shooting police officers is considered part of a good game.
And if shooting police officers in games isn't an important part of those games, then perhaps game designers can leave such stupidity out of their games. For the Matrix games, for instance, I'd guess there would be many creative ways to avoid shooting police officers.
Why? Because you told them to? I hate to break this to you, but the games which include killing cops are primarily games ABOUT BEING A CRIMINAL. Maybe in your little fantasy world, social workers and fire fighters shoot at criminals while saying stuff like "freeze, or I'll shoot!" after you commit a crime, but here in the good old real world, and by extention, in games which seek to mimic this world for entertainment purposes, police do these things. In fact, I don't even think most firefighters or social workers carry guns....maybe in texas.
You know, manhattan airport was the default location in Flight Simulator 4. I've crashed into the twin towers, intentionally, more than a few times. I was dissapointed -- I was hoping for a cool explosion or somethign -- no, just "Crashed." at the bottom of the screen.
/me considers making a game like that(obviously not for distribution!!!)...naw. How the hell would I make a fun game about hijacking planes with box cutters? At least with a gun I could make a cool overhead game based on paranoia where you have to make sure nobody is trying to sneak up on you, where being in the line of sight with people would make everyone scramble back to where they were, and shooting people would gradually increase the chances of someone trying to sneak past you to attack you, but with a box cutter...that just wouldn't be fun. basically, you have to be sure everyone is a total coward, or it wouldn't be possible to win without throwing meaningful gameplay mechanics out the window...
Of course, this was back in 1993, so it wasn't evil or "doubleplus unPolitically Correct" back then, but still...
If a cop lets his emotions get the better of him (during the course of an extremely emotional job) for even an instant, he faces the loss of his job, or even faces jail time.
Yeah.....as opposed to a regular person, who just faces jailtime.....
Here we are, placing restrictions on something based on what it expresses, but it's TOTALLY NOT CENSORSHIP! I mean, we're not placing restrictions on it because we don't want the message spread, it's just that we're afraid of the message and what it means when it shows how lazy and incompetant we all are as parents and school administrators! Erm.... forget that last part -- I mean, you have to remember that last school shooting that was done by a person with a stable, caring familiy and wasn't driven to suicide's grizzly alternative by incessant psychological torture by kids at school.... right?
right?
OK, well, do you remember that cop killer on the news a couple weeks ago that wasn't primarily motivated by socioeconomic facto--oh wait.
Why can't we get laws to censor ignorant rednecks who think that playing a video game will magically cause more than a statistically insignificant number of crimes(no, 3 crimes in the past decade isn't statistically significant not even if they were "really bad crimes")? Get a life and piss off. There's no legitimate reason to restrict the sales of video games to minors. If there was, there would be obvious statistical factors, rather than a bunch of chronically ignorant soccer moms and politicians who want their votes who are afraid of anything that might shake up their pathetic existance. the murder rate would have shown significant increases, especially in the ABOVE 18 demographic, seeing as a recent study showed that 99% of game buyers are in that demographic.
Jesus H. Christ, can't the lot of you just go live in the forest, get malaria from mosquitos, and pray to buhda instead of taking pennicilin instead? That way the intellitent members of the population could get back to something more intelligent than (and look for the video game reference here) looking for "The Ultimate Evil, which lies just outside of the range of our most advanced scanners".
your fingers don't count, nigga.
Speaking of which, learn to count, you freakin' poser.
?SN ERROR
READY.
HEY!!!
You must not be patriotic if you're talking like that! And if you're not with us, you're against us(resident idiot George W. Bush told us so!), so if you think that the facts are nessessary....you are supporting and comforting Saddam in Iraq!!!!!!
The day I define "successful capitalist" as one who tries to commit acts of cyberterrorism on a massive scale, sue their customers just because they can, and play a game of deception that has artists cursing their own fans is the day I commit seppuku.
just as their fans feel no need to forgive them.
For what again? If it's for being against the war in Iraq, everybody can and will go to hell. You don't have to be liberal(as everybody seems to be accusing to that effect) to see that GWB spent his entire spin campaign literally lying to the american public(as opposed to half-truths, like every other politician -- The fact is, a lot of the "reports" he used to convince people were verified as false) and changing his story with a frequency that would make a kid with ADD proud. Just because a bunch of braindead idiots actually BOUGHT that pathetic, insultingly transparant 11th hour liberation excuse (ooh! look at us! We just replaced a dictator who ruled under a thin veil of democracy with a...foreign dictator who rules under a thin veil of democracy......) doesn't magically mean that the people that were opposing the war for legitimate, non-hippy reasons ("war is, like...bad, man!" -- actual quote from anti-war protestor) are all evil, freedom hating bastards. Personally, I think going to war with every country that doesn't succumb to our wrath is a good way to get some more American landmarks taken out. Considering that 9/11 was caused by idiocy in that regard(If you pick sides, don't bitch like a little girl when someone decides you chose wrong and flies a plane into a skyscraper), I wouldn't be suprised to see a rise in terrorism in a couple years(because contrary to popular opinion, these things take years to plan and execute -- or were you sleeping when they described the years of training, planning and preperation that went into 9/11?).
Kind of ironic, isn't it? I mean, seeing as the people who did it died basically when the planes went up in smoke, didn't they?
The joke's on them though -- the Athiests were right all along! NO 50 VIRGINS FOR YOU! MWAHAHAHAHA!
The thing you have to realize, is that the entire music industry is exceptionally evil. Not plain run of the mill "kicking small children with steel toe boots" evil, no, a much more special and exceptional evil -- pitting artists against their own fans, and screwing both on a massive scale. This includes lawsuits brought against college students, state sanctioned cyberterrorism on a massive scale, hypocritical moral indignation, paying artists next to nothing for music that earns the companies millions of dollars net, and actions like this, which take a practice which wouldn't be illegal anywhere else(scrawl down the lyrics to your favourite song, and hand out a bunch of copies. No court in the country would touch the case with a 500ft pole) and call it something different because "it's digital", bribing(through the more ambiguous "softmoney contribution), and other evil things (though I'm sure they do get out their small child kicking boots once in a while for concerts).
In this case, evil on a massive scale is it's own justification.
I get it!!
If Americans are free, the terrorists have already won! ^ ^
I like it.
200 dollars!? Well, for that they can ask him to retire! :P
(You're really making a mountain out of an anthill here. Just because you didn't like his vaguely entertaining segues, he should step down? Isn't that just the tinyist bit silly?)
The question becomes, why is it a problem?
I hate to break this to you, but Slashdot has no credibility. zip. zilch. nada. hasn't in all the years I've been reading it. the forums are basically one giant flamewar, which the articles seem specifically designed to fuel. No executive has ever gone "wait, this AC post off of slashdot is absolutely right! M1cro$0ft i5 teh 5uxxorz!". Between Soviet russia, Goatse.cx, Natalie Portman, hot grits, and all the other silliness on this site, anyone who thinks there's any iota of credibility is deluding themselves.
If you think that market share has anything at all to do with quality, you haven't been looking for the past 15 years. Microsoft has consistently had the worst applications, Operating systems, and platforms in the market, and have consistently dominated the markets they enter nonetheless thanks to a variety of factors. It's only extremely recently that Microsoft products have begun to catch up with the various now-dead OSes and applications they have displaced.
For the moment I'll ignore tha fact that I believe the existance of Linux as the only threat to Windows on the x86 desktop represents a worst-case scenario come to life and an example of a broken market (Linux exists because no other commercial OS has been able to survive. When programmers all around the world get together and build a platform from scratch for free, it's NOT an example of good health in the market -- especially when there's only one other major platform!), gaining any headway in such a market is a major victory. Naturally the OS isn't going to start off with a 51% "winning" marketshare, but every year that Linux gains more users on the Desktop, it is a victory, and if you don't look too hard at the lopsided market share, it could be said that Linux could be winning the tug of war on the market in a sense(a very limited sense, mind you, but it's there).
I'm not defending ignorance, but we both have to face the fact that it exists. No amount of wishing that it didn't or pretending that it doesn't will change that. Besides that, you seem to be confusing the issues here. The original poster is absolutely correct -- MSN gets hits largely because A)Microsoft sets it to be the main page by default, allegedly changing it back when certain updates are installed, and B) by using their MSN search when when a server isn't found(which is rather counterintuitive, since most people intuitively use that box to write the correct address in). Just because it's possible to change these settings doesn't mean that everyone does, so MSN undoubtedly does indeed get a large amount of hits that way.
Stop thinking of it as an accusation, it's just a fact. When millions of people, especially unskilled people who have problems with basic computing skills, use your software, and it's set up to go to MSN in many places by default, some significant percentage of those people who for whatever reason won't disable the MSN affilliation(and I wouldn't be suprised to see the number of people who don't turn off the MSN search feature reaches 80-90%), and that percentage will be providing hits constantly to Microsofts site.
As for this...
I stand by what I said. I don't tolerate people who keep themselv's ignorant on purpose. Your response shows me you are one of the affore mentioned people. Have a nice day.
Your own accusation paints you with the same brush. In trying to characterize a complex individual into a single massive and simplistic group based soley on the contents of a single post, you prove that you are truly ignorant about the man who calls himself SJ Zero. I'll tell you what -- check out my site, Powerusrs Gaming. Perhaps you can cure your own ignorance about me. You can't simply wish it away, as you seem to think. Perhaps you will find a kindred spirit who loathes the cult of ignorance our society is so enamoured with. Perhaps you will find a person who has dedicated his entire life to understanding the world outside his immediate surroundings. But then, perhaps you will find the worshipper of ignorance you accuse me of being.
To that end, if you wish to continue this discussion, please do it on the Powerusrss Gaming forums, where we can more easily converse without the logistics of Slashdot getting in the way.
Are you finished?
I'm glad you like that word "fud". It's obviously very dear to you, but here's the thing -- he's absolutely right in many respects. Automatic updates are on by default, IIRC. I don't believe that upgrading IE will change your homepage, but it's possible. Finally, just because you found the option to search for missing URLs doesn't mean that Microsoft is magically not hijacking 404s all over the place. Default behaviour is the key phrase here. Just like unpatched Outlook Express can be set up to not be the most insecure piece of trash on the internet, but that doesn't change the fact that millions were affected one way or another by outlook viruses.
FUD indeed.
I don't really see why any of those cases would be any different than a quality laptop, except for the first case, in which you're just replacing simplicity with complexity for no real reason. I mean -- at 4k per bed, is it *REALLY* that nessessary to replace a perfectly good clipboard?
Weren't most of the computers on that show permenantly mounted into a piece of stylish "furniture"?
Listen. If you want a quiet PC, buy a quiet PC. You can get a VIA C3 that'll run without any active cooling if you wish, or a Dell Optiplex system for a pentium 4 system cooled by a single large, low RPM fan which will runs quite silently. There's no reason I can think of to swing the entire industry to bear on such a non-existant issue -- if you want a silent machine, you'll have to compromise, and that's all there is to it. There's no magic trick that's going to make a cutting edge processor suddenly require significantly less cooling while allowing prices and speeds to remain where they are. So go out and buy a system with whatever compromises you need to make, and quit acting like it's a terrible injustice that a machine with a billion times more processing power than the entire world in 1955 needs a little fan.
This device looks so good that the RIAA might try to make it illegal.
That line sends chills down my spine.
Because it can happen.
If you hate popups, you probably don't get them, unless you're too dense to try out a mozilla-based browser, an ad-blocking proxy, the kazaa lite HOSTS file, or one of a bunch of other ways to get rid of them.
In short, anyone who truly hates popups doesn't get them, so this whole story is rather redundant.
Oh joy.
The extra step of saving the file to disk isn't ultimately making anything safer.
It most certainly does. Just remember that for the longest time, everyone KNEW that viruses couldn't be spread by looking at e-mails. nowadays, just looking at it in the preview pane is enough to infect your system and send it to everyone on your list if you haven't patched and secured Outlook Express.
The behaviour you're describing is a result of idiocy. Outlook viruses make it so non-idiots can infect their systems my doing something mundane and not paticularly stupid at all (reading an e-mail isn't stupid. Opening foreign executables can be.)
First, keep in mind that slashdot, as usual, isn't a collective hive mind. There can be conflicting opinions without being some great paradox.
Secondly, cyber-terrorism is a crime far more serious than copyright infringement. A man guilty of the former can get life imprisonment. A man guilty of the latter can get some hefty fines and up to 5 years in prison(IIRC). For an organization this big to be willfully taking part in such a crime, especially on the massive scale they seem to indicate, is a major breach, and in my eyes, cause enough to have such a criminal organization, no matter how big, shut down.
Thirdly, considering the holier than thou attitude the RIAA is taking on copyright infringement, a voluntary mass crime spree isn't really what most would expect. It certainly shows that their halo is made of plastic. If these companies can't even control their own actions, what right do they have to sue college students for 100 billion dollars? None, in my eyes. These companies are playing russian roulette with their PR in the best case scenario, and setting themselves up for international incarceration at worst.
Meanwhile, personal copyright infringement is still a pitifully minor law, and hacking on a massive scale is a strangely major one. Odd...isn't it?
This isn't cyber-war, it's cyber terrorism. Attacking individuals machines en masse is no less cyber-terrorism than some 12 year old defacing a website.
And once you learn to use their own terminology against them, you realize that what the music industry wants to do is illegal for the same reasons I can't randomly delete files off their computers or commit resources to DDOSing them.
Personally, I think heads should roll if these measures are finalized and put into use. I think some executives should be held responsible in a criminal court for flagrantly disregarding the law on a massive scale. This goes beyond even corporate vigilanteeism into the realm of lawlessness.
If they follow through with this, they won't have to worry about losing money from *ME* to MP3s anymore(though admittedly, I have 64 files shared on kazaa, and they own exactly 0 -- I know because I wrote all of them myself), because I'll burn my music collection and make it my mission to never listen to an RIAA song again, for fear of lending mindshare to an organization so distasteful.