Actually, apps will just install MSIE first if they need to. No bloat, but the end result is that MSIE appears on every computer anyway, even if MS unbundles it, so there's no point in unbundling it, right?
Actually, no. Apps might not have chosen MSIE to code around if MSIE wasn't available on all desktops. Instead, developers would have chosen whichever browser they thought was the best, the one that met their criteria from a technical standpoint. Or, *gasp* some might have even written to an abstraction layer which allows use of several popular browsers.
In fact, this is where the original strength of Windows lied. MSWindows enabled programs that ran on top of it to use any set of video card or printer. They continued on to do the same for sound cards, 3d graphics, etc. Surely some groups in Microsoft have the skill to create a good abstract browser API. They choose not to use these skills, but perhaps if Microsoft were split up and forced to compete against itself, such a thing would be born.
What MS is doing is bad, but not quite as evil as you suggest. Institutions have the option of purchsing a separate permanent license for each computer rather than this "yearly fee for all your computers, even if you add some". So it's not like they're saying "pay us lots of money, or don't use MS software".
Generally, Outlook is targetted because it's so widely used. So if you use an email client other than Outlook, and which doesn't use some of the same libraries (and thus the same bugs) that Outlook does (eg. using MSIE to display html email), then you'll be safer.
If some other email client becomes popular, then this same argument would apply to that. Although, often a program is popular for a reason, so personal preferences may make this argument moot.
Arbitron's patented audio-encoding technology was developed as part of its Portable People Meter (PPM) system, a pager-size audience measurement system that tracks radio listening
as well as television, cable and satellite television viewing.
"Full free speech protection for one side and strict liability for the other will hardly promote vigorous and meaningful debate."
Exactly. When Nike said those things, they weren't directly describing a product they were selling. It was more of a debate.
One could argue that such things may be black and white, so no debate is needed. But such issues never are. Sometimes issues can't be reduced to a simple one sentance soundbite. We've all seen news articles where a quote is taken out of context, allowing it mean sometime more sinister than the situation actually is, even though the brief statement may be literally true. In these cases, the accused should be able to elaborate on some of the details.
However, if this ruling stands, special interest groups will be able to express any complaint they wish, and corporations will be more likely to just say "we can't confirm or deny that accusation" no matter how truthful or baseless the accusation is. This will make corporate secrecy even worse.
The 9/11 terrorists HAD legal id. Having their DNS sequence on the card would not have stopped them.
Your argument is somewhat flawed.
What happened on September 11th was a first of its kind. It was the first time a plane had intentionally been flown into a building, and it was the first time that foreign terrorists had been so successful in the US (we were used to it only happening over there).
Being thinking humans, we can generalize a bit, and see that the US isn't as invulnerable as we thought. This wasn't the only way that terrorists could have attacked us, and in fact, they probably won't attack us in the same way again because they know we'll specifically be looking for those patterns. America was very suprised, and the logical reaction is to protect various avenues that terrorism could be carried out.
However, we almost certainly are going to overreact and clamp down more than we need to because emotions are high right now. In time, it's possible that more logic and less emotion will be used to make these decisions. On the other hand, these are politicians we're talking about.
I don't know that it's the US mobile phone industry that's screwing up. If so, then Docomo should be able to spread its standards over here (wait, they are) and the Japanese manufacturers should be able to crush Nokia, Motorola, etc. That isn't happening yet, which would indicate that the japanese don't mind paying upwards of $600 for such a toy, but americans do. Or some similar social difference between Japanese consumers and American consumers.
Do 100 megabit networks ever run at that speed? No, there's TCP overhead. Do 802.11 networks ever run at 11mbps? No, especially when you stick some trees or windows in the way. Same thing.
Re:Might cause more problems than it's worth
on
Is Verizon Up to Speed?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Actually... one of the underhyped aspects of 3G (and probably its most important benefit) is that it uses the radio spectrum more effeciently due to the way signals are encoded at the physical layer. It may be two steps back and one step forward, but it won't be quite as bad as you suggest. If users stick to plain normal voice calling, it will be much better.
This is one of the reasons that 3G is good in Tokya. People there are so densely packed that they were having severe availability problems. 3G is helping with that.
Unfortunately they don't give the personal rates right now because it's unlimited minutes for the first month. You can expect business rates to be higher than personal rates because business users expect higher reliability. So cut the rate in half. Or a third. Are you willing to pay even that much?
The rate may be similar to other wireless services, but users learn to use those services sparingly because they're so damn expensive. I just don't see how a higher throughput is preferable when nobody will want to use even a fraction of it.
Perhaps it will get cheaper (eg. actually useful) down then road, I dunno...
In Japan, video phones are available. Other similar applications that are possible are streaming video (eg. TV) and streaming audio (eg. radio). And since the better 3G phones have a camera on them, you can capture images (eg. digital camera), video (eg. sorta digital videorecorder), and audio (eg. digital tape recorder) as well. These captured multimedia files can easily be emailed to your friends. And all this fits in your pocket.
Now ask when the USians are going to get this cool stuff. And then ask how much it costs.:)
144kbps theoretical max. Wonderful stuff, you can even watch streaming movies. At 10 megabytes for $35, that's $3.69 a minute for that streaming movie. Still interested?
There are already exceptions to the "I can listen to anything on the public airwaves I want" notion. It's illegal to 1) listen to other's cellular phone conversations, or 2) import or manufacture a device that allows one to do that. 10 years ago, the idea of such a law would have been laughable, because there's unencrypted stuff passing through your body, right? Now it's law. Today, a law that states that you can't listen to the television airwaves without using a certified TV would be laughable. 10 years from now, it may be ancient history, simply accepted by the lemmings^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hconsumers.
DMCA covers distribution as well as creation of circumvention devices. So you're right-- he can't be charged with violating the DMCA based on creating the program, but he can be charged for post-1998 distrubution violations.
If there are a number of such programs (not designed primarily for circumvention, but nonetheless contain "circumvention" features as a small part of their total feature set), then those bits don't "effectively control access to a work". So neither set of programs should be ruled illegal.
... is that the people hiring, in most cases, don't want to pay tech support people an engineer's salary. If the person can do much more than read from a script, they're overqualified, and won't be happy with the job or the salary.
1) Even if you have DHCP, you can still set up DNS via one of these guys. Many of them will update names you "own" like rainbarrel.net, not just free names like interiot.dyndns.org.
2) @Home, ATTBI, etc... don't want you running servers. They aren't too strict, but if they see you sucking up much bandwidth, it's perfectly legal for them to ask you to shut down your server or be disconnected. This pretty much rules this solution out due to the "don't have to answer to anyone" requirement.
Why the hell should taxpayers pay so private corporations can arrest them? It's their legal battle, if they want to fight this they should do it with their own damn money
The RIAA and the Government are in similar situations: they wouldn't have their money if it weren't for consumers/citizens. In both instances, they're using our money against us.
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Actually, no. Apps might not have chosen MSIE to code around if MSIE wasn't available on all desktops. Instead, developers would have chosen whichever browser they thought was the best, the one that met their criteria from a technical standpoint. Or, *gasp* some might have even written to an abstraction layer which allows use of several popular browsers.
In fact, this is where the original strength of Windows lied. MSWindows enabled programs that ran on top of it to use any set of video card or printer. They continued on to do the same for sound cards, 3d graphics, etc. Surely some groups in Microsoft have the skill to create a good abstract browser API. They choose not to use these skills, but perhaps if Microsoft were split up and forced to compete against itself, such a thing would be born.
What MS is doing is bad, but not quite as evil as you suggest. Institutions have the option of purchsing a separate permanent license for each computer rather than this "yearly fee for all your computers, even if you add some". So it's not like they're saying "pay us lots of money, or don't use MS software".
If some other email client becomes popular, then this same argument would apply to that. Although, often a program is popular for a reason, so personal preferences may make this argument moot.
For instance:
Exactly. When Nike said those things, they weren't directly describing a product they were selling. It was more of a debate.
One could argue that such things may be black and white, so no debate is needed. But such issues never are. Sometimes issues can't be reduced to a simple one sentance soundbite. We've all seen news articles where a quote is taken out of context, allowing it mean sometime more sinister than the situation actually is, even though the brief statement may be literally true. In these cases, the accused should be able to elaborate on some of the details.
However, if this ruling stands, special interest groups will be able to express any complaint they wish, and corporations will be more likely to just say "we can't confirm or deny that accusation" no matter how truthful or baseless the accusation is. This will make corporate secrecy even worse.
hrm
The 9/11 terrorists HAD legal id. Having their DNS sequence on the card would not have stopped them.
Your argument is somewhat flawed.
What happened on September 11th was a first of its kind. It was the first time a plane had intentionally been flown into a building, and it was the first time that foreign terrorists had been so successful in the US (we were used to it only happening over there).
Being thinking humans, we can generalize a bit, and see that the US isn't as invulnerable as we thought. This wasn't the only way that terrorists could have attacked us, and in fact, they probably won't attack us in the same way again because they know we'll specifically be looking for those patterns. America was very suprised, and the logical reaction is to protect various avenues that terrorism could be carried out.
However, we almost certainly are going to overreact and clamp down more than we need to because emotions are high right now. In time, it's possible that more logic and less emotion will be used to make these decisions. On the other hand, these are politicians we're talking about.
I don't know that it's the US mobile phone industry that's screwing up. If so, then Docomo should be able to spread its standards over here (wait, they are) and the Japanese manufacturers should be able to crush Nokia, Motorola, etc. That isn't happening yet, which would indicate that the japanese don't mind paying upwards of $600 for such a toy, but americans do. Or some similar social difference between Japanese consumers and American consumers.
Most of those are 2G or 2.5G. This page lists various 2.5G and 3G standards.
Do 100 megabit networks ever run at that speed? No, there's TCP overhead. Do 802.11 networks ever run at 11mbps? No, especially when you stick some trees or windows in the way. Same thing.
ack. Tokya => Tokyo.
This is one of the reasons that 3G is good in Tokya. People there are so densely packed that they were having severe availability problems. 3G is helping with that.
The rate may be similar to other wireless services, but users learn to use those services sparingly because they're so damn expensive. I just don't see how a higher throughput is preferable when nobody will want to use even a fraction of it.
Perhaps it will get cheaper (eg. actually useful) down then road, I dunno...
Now ask when the USians are going to get this cool stuff. And then ask how much it costs. :)
144kbps theoretical max. Wonderful stuff, you can even watch streaming movies. At 10 megabytes for $35, that's $3.69 a minute for that streaming movie. Still interested?
yes, yes, no, sorta, and yes. I don't know who typed in all the text for the archives, but they're my hero.
There are already exceptions to the "I can listen to anything on the public airwaves I want" notion. It's illegal to 1) listen to other's cellular phone conversations, or 2) import or manufacture a device that allows one to do that. 10 years ago, the idea of such a law would have been laughable, because there's unencrypted stuff passing through your body, right? Now it's law. Today, a law that states that you can't listen to the television airwaves without using a certified TV would be laughable. 10 years from now, it may be ancient history, simply accepted by the lemmings^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hconsumers.
DMCA covers distribution as well as creation of circumvention devices. So you're right-- he can't be charged with violating the DMCA based on creating the program, but he can be charged for post-1998 distrubution violations.
If there are a number of such programs (not designed primarily for circumvention, but nonetheless contain "circumvention" features as a small part of their total feature set), then those bits don't "effectively control access to a work". So neither set of programs should be ruled illegal.
eg. You can't be reissued a fingerprint the way you can with credit cards.
Credit/Debit cards are no better. Once they trace your perfered form of payment to your SSN, it's all the same.
... is that the people hiring, in most cases, don't want to pay tech support people an engineer's salary. If the person can do much more than read from a script, they're overqualified, and won't be happy with the job or the salary.
Putting those resources online to let you solve your own problems really is the better solution.
Oooooh, don't say that, don't even whisper that. The only way for OSS to make money is via support, remember?
2) @Home, ATTBI, etc... don't want you running servers. They aren't too strict, but if they see you sucking up much bandwidth, it's perfectly legal for them to ask you to shut down your server or be disconnected. This pretty much rules this solution out due to the "don't have to answer to anyone" requirement.
Why the hell should taxpayers pay so private corporations can arrest them? It's their legal battle,
if they want to fight this they should do it with their own damn money
The RIAA and the Government are in similar situations: they wouldn't have their money if it weren't for consumers/citizens. In both instances, they're using our money against us.