The local govment provides the franchise. The local govment can modify the terms of that franchise. It is theirs, *not* the cable cos.
Can local municipalities modify "national" building codes? They sure can and do. Can local municipalities have stricter laws than state or federal? Sure can.
Cable monopolies are bad, and it's time open access happened. Let's open access the _TV_ side also... I'd like the see LittleJoe Cable compete with TCI and charge half as much for more channels. TCI adds tons of shopping channels but can't add real channels due to 'lack of space' HA. It's not physically possible to do this. They add the shopping channels because they get good money for it FROM the shopping channels. You cannot get around the impossibility of sending two different signals down the same pipe.
My parents live where TCI is *finally* upgrading the plant from 37 channels. No more silly rationalizing dropping The Weather Channel by saying that there is enough "local" (i.e., Bellingham) coverage from Seattle & Vancouver TV stations and radio. The one quasi-local Bellingham station, KVOS-12, blows.
It allows stupid things like Trinity Broadcast Network from putting in a low-power UHF transmitter at the fringes of a broadcast area ostensibly to "serve" that small footprint area, but with the real, but unstated, intent to take advantage of the law that forces cable cos to transmit their signal on cable *without* the local broadcaster having to pay for that access (another double-edged sword). So, in the Seattle area, TBN gets away with paying for a low-cost low-power UHF license (compared to what the other broadcast stations pay), low-power equipment, and on cable TV from Federal Way to Edmonds! I'm sure that's the way it is in other areas (but not here in San Diego... They're only on cable 5 hrs a day, at night (good thing...don't want my kids watching that CRAP. I don't care that it's Xtian. It's that it is *so* BAD and CHEEZY!))
what would happen if anyone who provides telephony or data over cable tv networks to "open up" their networks? The obverse also has to happen.
Say AOL wants access to @Home users as part of a "choice". Fine, @Home feels screwed over. But, AOL has a big network of dialup access points. @Home then needs to figure out how to use AOL's private stuff for their own advantage.
If I had a laptop, and wanted to check my @Home e-mail from some remote location, it would be way cool to have the list of AOL dialup access points for me to call into for the cost of a local phone call, or ATT GlobalNet, or whatever...
Everyone is seeing it as a one-way street against @Home (@Home is not owned by AT&T, btw. AT&T, by way of purchasing Comcast & TCI, now has a good share of @Home stock, but so do several other cable companies...). The Common Carrier law isn't supposed to be a one-way street, right? We'll see how this one will play out.
It does force @Home, etc., as content providers, to now stand on their own two legs...
Are us cable Net customers paying subsidized prices for our network connections via cable?
Wouldn't it work the same way it currently works with multiple local telco service providers, where you still get a bill from the local telco monopoly to pay for your connection (or that local connection cost is included as a line item on your local telco provider's bill)?
Fine, I (foolishly) subscribe to AOL via my cable modem. I still pay Cox (or TCI or whatever) the cost for the network hookup and probably modem rental. What is that cost going to be? Will that cost be the same whether I subscribe to cable or not?
Will this aid other xDSL providers besides the local Bells, like Covad and Northwave, who usually have to have you pay to have another phone line activated to your home because the local telco won't configure your existing POTS line for xDSL since you're not going with their xDSL service?
...then there's the "underengineering" factor as well.
Honda coming out with a 9000RPM redline engine in the S2000? Can you get that out of a US-made 4cyl engine, say, a Quad-4? Or out of a pushrod V-8?
engineering for performance reduces reliability and costs more money in R&D, better manufacturing techniques (building to higher tolerances), etc., that could be hard to recoup in a commodity market on their sheer talents alone.
Look at Corvettes. They come out with cool stuff. Just as soon as they do, the same thing, albeit maybe made out of steel instead of aluminum, shows up in Z28s, because GM can recoup the development costs on the higher sales of the F-bodies, and they sell 10 times more of the cheaper part that justifies making it in the first place.
Or Chrysler with the Viper engine. In the Viper, it's an aluminum block, aluminum head engine. But they're selling more of the V-10s as truck engines, cast iron through-and-through. The development of the engine for the Viper was subsidized by being able to use it in trucks...
PC chips are no different. It's been well known (and reasonable, I guess) that Intel labels chip speeds primarily based on how lots of chips perform. Take 10 chips out of a 1000 chip manufacturing lot. Run them at 100% speed, see how many fail. If enough fail, then run a larger batch at a lower speed, and see how may fail. If enough pass the highest speed test, they get the premium speed and price, otherwise they're rated and tagged as needed.
No mystery there.
Except now Intel is getting wise to the situation, and making it harder to do this. No different than cars. If it's not lack of knowledge for your particular car you want to hotrod (and thus, finding hotrod parts for it), it's things like living in California where any part modifications have to be CARB-approved if you don't want to be working on your car every year swapping out the hotrod parts for the stock ones, just to pass emissions...
...all it would take is for Microsoft or whoever to get the countries to adopt similar laws.
China would be the first, and probably easiest one (sorry about that). And especially if MS cut a deal with China to make a new software plant to make and package (not program...) the China-specific software, which would of course be distributed by most of the current pirate shops, thus legitimizing them...
So, is this just a small taste of what it is like to live in a totalitarian state, where even conflicting laws can be applied arbitrarily to weed out the Undesirables and keep everyone in line?
Adobe got it from Aldus. PageMaker has been this way since PageMaker 4, both on networked Macs and Netwared PCs.
With SPSS software, you have to enter a new code annually.
At the UW, it used to happen a lot with SPSS and SAS on the mainframes... someone forgot to send in the license renewal,didn't open the letter they got back with the new code, or entered the code incorrectly or just didn't enter it on time, and the mainframe-based version of the software would just not work after such-and-such a date, and it was usually a multi-day fix after the deadline date...
Really ruffed the feathers of a few profs, especially those running multi-day jobs...
Anyways.
The software industry has been allowed to create its own niche. On one hand, they claim copyright protection on their software. Last time I checked, when I've bought a copyrighted item, it had no license agreement on it. But wait, software isn't "bought" (it certainly is), it's "licensed". Someone got let out of their padded room and restraints a long time ago, and look where we're at now.
The UCITA stuff is complete, utter BS, a complete end-around.
AS much as I loathe them, why haven't the Pat Buchanan-types picked up on this loss of the way they keep batting NAFTA, the UN and the WTO as evil plots? Maybe they own too much Microsoft stock... Oh well.
But what if the rumored "WinBoard" PC that Nick Petreley posted about as an April Fools' joke came to be, and the PC as we know it, and all the stuff that works with it (USB, PCI cards, etc.), is not financially feasible to buy, much less produce? Think that Microsoft couldn't sell them at a loss for a couple of years to wipe out the existing pipeline of systems?
Then UCITA would apply to those systems. You would only be able to buy Microsoft-approved hardware. You would only be able to buy Microsoft-approved (WinBoard logo, of course) software. You wouldn't be able to RE the software easily, if at all, because there would be no point in doing it, because the Reverse Engineered stuff wouldn't be usable on any other system.
Sure, there are a lot of midnight engineers and programmers. But...
OSS works now because there is a large source of commodity hardware and platforms to use it on. It will shrivel if the systems become completely proprietary at the hardare level.
Sure, Linux on HP/UX or SparcStations. OK, maybe for old ones. But that market would suddenly shrivel as the newer machines become totally closed. So a black market begins in old, open machines. Can only go on for so long.
ISPs no longer to allow unfettered access to the network. Easy, as someone could argue that the network is as much a software (so UCITA applies) as it is hardware (but the ROM stuff could be argued to be software, too), but hardware is useless iwthout software...
1) A much more agreeable license. If a license is Open Source, no one will ever try to repossess your software.
Look around yourself sometime and watch what happens when something becomes mainstream and popular. The lawyers swarm all over it. The OpenSource(tm) model has yet to be tested in a big way in court. It hasn't become mainstream enough that anybody cares. It will become an issue when it does become mainstream. You can count on it.
Yes, the GPL has yet to be seriously wacked on in court.
2) No warrantee, but if you're using a package and something breaks, you can at least fix it yourself in the worst case.
"Fix it yourself?" Companies will not be enthusiastic about having to hire programmers to fix their problems. Companies will be even LESS enthusiastic about paying programmers to fix the problems in OTHER companies. And lastly, companies will not want to pay programmers to sit on Usenet watching for problems to fix.
...which is so silly because they hire contractors to tune their DBs, install their networking plant, deliver bottled water service, etc. Any company that has a motorpool either has a mechanics bay or contracts the service out to a company to deal with it. Etc.
So, the companies that don't want to have the staff to "fix" software problems themselves are fooling themselves, because they probably already do it anyways, i.e., either find/hire someone to do it inhouse or hire a contractor to do it on a one-time basis.
The building breaks? They're either big enough to have their own building maintenance types, call a company to do it, or get the building manager to get the service people out to fix the roof, repair the plumbing, etc...
Is it clear whether network providers could extend these UCITA laws to the networks? What about ISPs that "require" you to use their software to use their network services? If there are problems, then the ISP says it's with their software, and therefore not warranted. oh, and by the way, their software contract does not allow you to do this-and-that service, so we're shutting off your service anyways...
The web site for that person's travails with Comcast and @Home should be enough evidence to the contrary to shut up the "but it can't happen here" people.
It will. And once companies figure out they can make some good money by it, it'll spread like a bad case of Ebola.
It's sort of called the "grandfather" clause, although in the US there is a specific term for it, and it is essentially a Constitutional protection, so if MS did try to do this, say against StarOffice (which is a German company...good luck there), or the SAMBA team (again, good luck there because they're essentially all Aussie, no?), then even if MS prevails at some lower level it could be easily pushed to the Supreme Court...
Free Software has no restrictions on how you can use it....which would imply that my Free Software could impose restrictions on how YOU use it, or you could impose restrictions on how others use it from your download site, backed up by UCITA, no? After all, Internet Explorer is "free", too...
AOL is big into trying to get @Home et al. to open up their networks, either willingly or unwillingly (legislatively or judicially).
As an @Home user, I don't care now, but if the UCITA stuff goes through, I'll be worrying aplenty.
ISP choice? Maybe cool for now, but what about if MCIWorldNet starts cracking down on their end of the pipeline on things, spurred by UCITA? Shit flows downhill.
Like it or not, in corporateview, we "consumers" are just mushrooms.
...probably about as many people who have downloaded IE for HP/UX and Sloaris.
Do I worry? No, because I have no plans to install it. Like someone else said, about the best thing about IE over Netscape is using IE to read Slashdot, because it "backs" up discussion threads as one would think it should be implemented.
If you find it disturbing, know that those big NSA geostationary sigint satellites are partly pointed at the US, too. They pick up all sorts of fine stuff like Cell phones, microwave long distance trunks, etc.
Tom Clancy talks about how this stuff might actually be used in his books...
Certain pieces of info get tapped for further prying, either from the people involved in the transmission, from the location the message was sent to or recieved at, timing, and content.
there is just too much to watch every word, listen to every voice. But all one needs to do is filter some stuff for saving and further analysis.
Some of the SIGINT stuff is pretty amazing.
that the Cell phone companies can track your phone, if it's on, shouldn't be too amazing. Not so nefarious with regular analog cell phones, because the "cell" is such a big area. But with CDMA PCS, for sure with its smaller cell area, and the newer "microcell" stuff being proposed, it gets easier for the dudes with the vans with all the RF detection equipment to find you out...
So I don't see how they can stop anyone from ripping CD's a trading MP3. Illegal as it is, it is impossible to enforce. RIAA will somehow manage to add a tariff on HDs, tapes, floppy disks, RW CDs and MO media, etc. for copyright infringement "reimbursement", or increase the ones they have in place already. And you thought the Microsoft Tax was bad...
Get hold of and distribute illegal copies of music?
How about, not want to pay any RIAA taxes, gratuities, etc. on the software they choose to use to encode the music they might make?
RIAA wants to "Microsoft" things, i.e., add all sorts of transactional layers where they can pick a few pennies (dollars) here, a few pennies there, on each layer of the "internet music" system, RIAA fee wrapped into "approved" encoding software, "professional" versions of playback software and tools, CDs themselves, and "approved" on-line music distribution (sales) points.
...is anyone really sure that the problem is totally Netscape's, and not in some form or another a function of the XFree86 server/driver one is using for one's video card?
Since I paid for and installed Metro-X 4.3.1 (for my lame P200MMX, with ATI RageII), I have had 0 problems with Communicator 4.5, whereas before, it would lock up like a Mac...
...that's what VMWare (run Windows as a surrogate OS) or VNC (run a Windows desktop from another system on Linux desktop) are for...
VNC is free...
VMWare isn't, but running 4 other OSs at the same time? Yeah, that could be worth spending $300 (plus 64MB RAM for each surrogate OS to run...) to me, as it's cheaper than 4 other machines...
...as for "unthinking anti-Microsoft fanatics", Hmm... I'd agree with the anti-Microsoft, and possibly the fanatic part, but DO NOT assume that it is unthinking...
...as for "analysis group", if you look at some of the DoJ articles regarding the lawsuit, MS does not "analyze" for cooperative purposes. Their goal is to ultimately crush or assimilate whatever is being "analyzed".
Remember, Microsoft still likes to think that they "innovate". Integrate, maybe. But innovate?
Don't fall into the MSSpeak trap...
Yes, MS developing IE for Linux could be seen as a back-handed compliment. But I'm sure Eve thought the same thing when the snake said, "It's OK!"...
MS doesn't quite get it. They still think that Linux is something that can be derailed like DRDOS, etc. through their usual techniques. But Linux and the Linux Crowd are a totally different operating paradigm than the usual MS way of seeing things. Linux just will not go away. It may be that it'll only keep staying at the edges, poking little holes into the cheeseblock. But it'll never go away...and the more MS tries to make it go away the more permanence Linux will get...
Authors can't patent a particular passage, paragraph or novel. I believe software is more like a novel. It just happens to be written in a peculiar style with a rather limited vocabulary.
Aye. But they can Trademark particular passages, or say that the only use they grant for their copyrighted work is that it be used in whole, with the recognition left in of the creator, etc., too...
Slashdot Mirror
...have no fear.
Value of Serbian Economy to US economy...
Value of Australian Economy to US economy...
The US tends to not strike out against trading partners...
...which explains why we sit on our hands while Pakistan and India (with China in the wings) with WWIII, as we'll be sucked in one way or the other...
The local govment provides the franchise. The local govment can modify the terms of that franchise. It is theirs, *not* the cable cos.
Can local municipalities modify "national" building codes? They sure can and do. Can local municipalities have stricter laws than state or federal? Sure can.
Don't like it? Then vote them out.
My parents live where TCI is *finally* upgrading the plant from 37 channels. No more silly rationalizing dropping The Weather Channel by saying that there is enough "local" (i.e., Bellingham) coverage from Seattle & Vancouver TV stations and radio. The one quasi-local Bellingham station, KVOS-12, blows.
It allows stupid things like Trinity Broadcast Network from putting in a low-power UHF transmitter at the fringes of a broadcast area ostensibly to "serve" that small footprint area, but with the real, but unstated, intent to take advantage of the law that forces cable cos to transmit their signal on cable *without* the local broadcaster having to pay for that access (another double-edged sword). So, in the Seattle area, TBN gets away with paying for a low-cost low-power UHF license (compared to what the other broadcast stations pay), low-power equipment, and on cable TV from Federal Way to Edmonds! I'm sure that's the way it is in other areas (but not here in San Diego... They're only on cable 5 hrs a day, at night (good thing...don't want my kids watching that CRAP. I don't care that it's Xtian. It's that it is *so* BAD and CHEEZY!))
Hmm... on one hand, it looks bad. On the other...
what would happen if anyone who provides telephony or data over cable tv networks to "open up" their networks? The obverse also has to happen.
Say AOL wants access to @Home users as part of a "choice". Fine, @Home feels screwed over. But, AOL has a big network of dialup access points. @Home then needs to figure out how to use AOL's private stuff for their own advantage.
If I had a laptop, and wanted to check my @Home e-mail from some remote location, it would be way cool to have the list of AOL dialup access points for me to call into for the cost of a local phone call, or ATT GlobalNet, or whatever...
Everyone is seeing it as a one-way street against @Home (@Home is not owned by AT&T, btw. AT&T, by way of purchasing Comcast & TCI, now has a good share of @Home stock, but so do several other cable companies...). The Common Carrier law isn't supposed to be a one-way street, right? We'll see how this one will play out.
It does force @Home, etc., as content providers, to now stand on their own two legs...
Are us cable Net customers paying subsidized prices for our network connections via cable?
Wouldn't it work the same way it currently works with multiple local telco service providers, where you still get a bill from the local telco monopoly to pay for your connection (or that local connection cost is included as a line item on your local telco provider's bill)?
Fine, I (foolishly) subscribe to AOL via my cable modem. I still pay Cox (or TCI or whatever) the cost for the network hookup and probably modem rental. What is that cost going to be? Will that cost be the same whether I subscribe to cable or not?
Will this aid other xDSL providers besides the local Bells, like Covad and Northwave, who usually have to have you pay to have another phone line activated to your home because the local telco won't configure your existing POTS line for xDSL since you're not going with their xDSL service?
...then there's the "underengineering" factor as well.
Honda coming out with a 9000RPM redline engine in the S2000? Can you get that out of a US-made 4cyl engine, say, a Quad-4? Or out of a pushrod V-8?
engineering for performance reduces reliability and costs more money in R&D, better manufacturing techniques (building to higher tolerances), etc., that could be hard to recoup in a commodity market on their sheer talents alone.
Look at Corvettes. They come out with cool stuff. Just as soon as they do, the same thing, albeit maybe made out of steel instead of aluminum, shows up in Z28s, because GM can recoup the development costs on the higher sales of the F-bodies, and they sell 10 times more of the cheaper part that justifies making it in the first place.
Or Chrysler with the Viper engine. In the Viper, it's an aluminum block, aluminum head engine. But they're selling more of the V-10s as truck engines, cast iron through-and-through. The development of the engine for the Viper was subsidized by being able to use it in trucks...
PC chips are no different. It's been well known (and reasonable, I guess) that Intel labels chip speeds primarily based on how lots of chips perform. Take 10 chips out of a 1000 chip manufacturing lot. Run them at 100% speed, see how many fail. If enough fail, then run a larger batch at a lower speed, and see how may fail. If enough pass the highest speed test, they get the premium speed and price, otherwise they're rated and tagged as needed.
No mystery there.
Except now Intel is getting wise to the situation, and making it harder to do this. No different than cars. If it's not lack of knowledge for your particular car you want to hotrod (and thus, finding hotrod parts for it), it's things like living in California where any part modifications have to be CARB-approved if you don't want to be working on your car every year swapping out the hotrod parts for the stock ones, just to pass emissions...
Grammar and spelling this bad can only be the result of one of two things:
1) An unwillingness to admit error by proofreading. Very bad attribute in a programmer.
2) A deepseated inability to communicate.
=================
People who flame only over poor grammar and/or spelling can only be the result of one of two things:
1) An unwillingness to accept anything different than their silly world view
2) A deep-seated constipation.
"Run it through a spell-checker!" Dude, spell checkers can suck. If you can't spell, you have to trust that the spell checker is right, no?
Some people can't type to save their lives. You are saying they're illiterate idiots because they can't type? Get a life.
Buying a house requires SCADS of signatures. There is too much to process, so it is easy to get screwed over at signing time...
I might get a real estate atty for our next house purchase...
No, not under the "no warranty" and lack of indemnification parts...
...it would become your burden to prove anyways...
...all it would take is for Microsoft or whoever to get the countries to adopt similar laws.
China would be the first, and probably easiest one (sorry about that). And especially if MS cut a deal with China to make a new software plant to make and package (not program...) the China-specific software, which would of course be distributed by most of the current pirate shops, thus legitimizing them...
So, is this just a small taste of what it is like to live in a totalitarian state, where even conflicting laws can be applied arbitrarily to weed out the Undesirables and keep everyone in line?
Adobe got it from Aldus. PageMaker has been this way since PageMaker 4, both on networked Macs and Netwared PCs.
With SPSS software, you have to enter a new code annually.
At the UW, it used to happen a lot with SPSS and SAS on the mainframes... someone forgot to send in the license renewal,didn't open the letter they got back with the new code, or entered the code incorrectly or just didn't enter it on time, and the mainframe-based version of the software would just not work after such-and-such a date, and it was usually a multi-day fix after the deadline date...
Really ruffed the feathers of a few profs, especially those running multi-day jobs...
Anyways.
The software industry has been allowed to create its own niche. On one hand, they claim copyright protection on their software. Last time I checked, when I've bought a copyrighted item, it had no license agreement on it. But wait, software isn't "bought" (it certainly is), it's "licensed". Someone got let out of their padded room and restraints a long time ago, and look where we're at now.
The UCITA stuff is complete, utter BS, a complete end-around.
AS much as I loathe them, why haven't the Pat Buchanan-types picked up on this loss of the way they keep batting NAFTA, the UN and the WTO as evil plots? Maybe they own too much Microsoft stock...
Oh well.
Sure, it's great for OpenSource now.
But what if the rumored "WinBoard" PC that Nick Petreley posted about as an April Fools' joke came to be, and the PC as we know it, and all the stuff that works with it (USB, PCI cards, etc.), is not financially feasible to buy, much less produce? Think that Microsoft couldn't sell them at a loss for a couple of years to wipe out the existing pipeline of systems?
Then UCITA would apply to those systems. You would only be able to buy Microsoft-approved hardware. You would only be able to buy Microsoft-approved (WinBoard logo, of course) software. You wouldn't be able to RE the software easily, if at all, because there would be no point in doing it, because the Reverse Engineered stuff wouldn't be usable on any other system.
Sure, there are a lot of midnight engineers and programmers. But...
OSS works now because there is a large source of commodity hardware and platforms to use it on. It will shrivel if the systems become completely proprietary at the hardare level.
Sure, Linux on HP/UX or SparcStations. OK, maybe for old ones. But that market would suddenly shrivel as the newer machines become totally closed. So a black market begins in old, open machines. Can only go on for so long.
ISPs no longer to allow unfettered access to the network. Easy, as someone could argue that the network is as much a software (so UCITA applies) as it is hardware (but the ROM stuff could be argued to be software, too), but hardware is useless iwthout software...
Look around yourself sometime and watch what happens when something becomes mainstream and popular. The lawyers swarm all over it. The OpenSource(tm) model has yet to be tested in a big way in court. It hasn't become mainstream enough that anybody cares. It will become an issue when it does become mainstream. You can count on it.
Yes, the GPL has yet to be seriously wacked on in court.
2) No warrantee, but if you're using a package and something breaks, you can at least fix it yourself in the worst case.
"Fix it yourself?" Companies will not be enthusiastic about having to hire programmers to fix their problems. Companies will be even LESS enthusiastic about paying programmers to fix the problems in OTHER companies. And lastly, companies will not want to pay programmers to sit on Usenet watching for problems to fix.
...which is so silly because they hire contractors to tune their DBs, install their networking plant, deliver bottled water service, etc. Any company that has a motorpool either has a mechanics bay or contracts the service out to a company to deal with it. Etc.
So, the companies that don't want to have the staff to "fix" software problems themselves are fooling themselves, because they probably already do it anyways, i.e., either find/hire someone to do it inhouse or hire a contractor to do it on a one-time basis.
The building breaks? They're either big enough to have their own building maintenance types, call a company to do it, or get the building manager to get the service people out to fix the roof, repair the plumbing, etc...
It's all like a sad comedy anymore.
Is it clear whether network providers could extend these UCITA laws to the networks? What about ISPs that "require" you to use their software to use their network services? If there are problems, then the ISP says it's with their software, and therefore not warranted. oh, and by the way, their software contract does not allow you to do this-and-that service, so we're shutting off your service anyways...
The web site for that person's travails with Comcast and @Home should be enough evidence to the contrary to shut up the "but it can't happen here" people.
It will. And once companies figure out they can make some good money by it, it'll spread like a bad case of Ebola.
It's sort of called the "grandfather" clause, although in the US there is a specific term for it, and it is essentially a Constitutional protection, so if MS did try to do this, say against StarOffice (which is a German company...good luck there), or the SAMBA team (again, good luck there because they're essentially all Aussie, no?), then even if MS prevails at some lower level it could be easily pushed to the Supreme Court...
Free Software has no restrictions on how you can use it. ...which would imply that my Free Software could impose restrictions on how YOU use it, or you could impose restrictions on how others use it from your download site, backed up by UCITA, no? After all, Internet Explorer is "free", too...
AOL is big into trying to get @Home et al. to open up their networks, either willingly or unwillingly (legislatively or judicially).
As an @Home user, I don't care now, but if the UCITA stuff goes through, I'll be worrying aplenty.
ISP choice? Maybe cool for now, but what about if MCIWorldNet starts cracking down on their end of the pipeline on things, spurred by UCITA? Shit flows downhill.
Like it or not, in corporateview, we "consumers" are just mushrooms.
...probably about as many people who have downloaded IE for HP/UX and Sloaris.
Do I worry? No, because I have no plans to install it. Like someone else said, about the best thing about IE over Netscape is using IE to read Slashdot, because it "backs" up discussion threads as one would think it should be implemented.
But that's about it.
Disturbing? Hmm...I don't know.
If you find it disturbing, know that those big NSA geostationary sigint satellites are partly pointed at the US, too. They pick up all sorts of fine stuff like Cell phones, microwave long distance trunks, etc.
Tom Clancy talks about how this stuff might actually be used in his books...
Certain pieces of info get tapped for further prying, either from the people involved in the transmission, from the location the message was sent to or recieved at, timing, and content.
there is just too much to watch every word, listen to every voice. But all one needs to do is filter some stuff for saving and further analysis.
Some of the SIGINT stuff is pretty amazing.
that the Cell phone companies can track your phone, if it's on, shouldn't be too amazing. Not so nefarious with regular analog cell phones, because the "cell" is such a big area. But with CDMA PCS, for sure with its smaller cell area, and the newer "microcell" stuff being proposed, it gets easier for the dudes with the vans with all the RF detection equipment to find you out...
So I don't see how they can stop anyone from ripping CD's a trading MP3. Illegal as it is, it is impossible to enforce. RIAA will somehow manage to add a tariff on HDs, tapes, floppy disks, RW CDs and MO media, etc. for copyright infringement "reimbursement", or increase the ones they have in place already. And you thought the Microsoft Tax was bad...
Get hold of and distribute illegal copies of music?
How about, not want to pay any RIAA taxes, gratuities, etc. on the software they choose to use to encode the music they might make?
RIAA wants to "Microsoft" things, i.e., add all sorts of transactional layers where they can pick a few pennies (dollars) here, a few pennies there, on each layer of the "internet music" system, RIAA fee wrapped into "approved" encoding software, "professional" versions of playback software and tools, CDs themselves, and "approved" on-line music distribution (sales) points.
...is anyone really sure that the problem is totally Netscape's, and not in some form or another a function of the XFree86 server/driver one is using for one's video card?
Since I paid for and installed Metro-X 4.3.1 (for my lame P200MMX, with ATI RageII), I have had 0 problems with Communicator 4.5, whereas before, it would lock up like a Mac...
...that's what VMWare (run Windows as a surrogate OS) or VNC (run a Windows desktop from another system on Linux desktop) are for...
VNC is free...
VMWare isn't, but running 4 other OSs at the same time? Yeah, that could be worth spending $300 (plus 64MB RAM for each surrogate OS to run...) to me, as it's cheaper than 4 other machines...
...as for "unthinking anti-Microsoft fanatics", Hmm... I'd agree with the anti-Microsoft, and possibly the fanatic part, but DO NOT assume that it is unthinking...
...as for "analysis group", if you look at some of the DoJ articles regarding the lawsuit, MS does not "analyze" for cooperative purposes. Their goal is to ultimately crush or assimilate whatever is being "analyzed".
Remember, Microsoft still likes to think that they "innovate". Integrate, maybe. But innovate?
Don't fall into the MSSpeak trap...
Yes, MS developing IE for Linux could be seen as a back-handed compliment. But I'm sure Eve thought the same thing when the snake said, "It's OK!"...
MS doesn't quite get it. They still think that Linux is something that can be derailed like DRDOS, etc. through their usual techniques. But Linux and the Linux Crowd are a totally different operating paradigm than the usual MS way of seeing things. Linux just will not go away. It may be that it'll only keep staying at the edges, poking little holes into the cheeseblock. But it'll never go away...and the more MS tries to make it go away the more permanence Linux will get...
Authors can't patent a particular passage, paragraph or novel. I believe software is more like a novel. It just happens to be written in a peculiar style with a rather limited vocabulary.
Aye. But they can Trademark particular passages, or say that the only use they grant for their copyrighted work is that it be used in whole, with the recognition left in of the creator, etc., too...
Hmm... but where are the patents on WindowsNT/95/98?
Microsoft says they're copyrighted, but the source is a Trade Secret...