There's one sure-fire way which is absolutely guaranteed to completely eliminate email spam - and that is to make illegal and block all email. Surely those of us who hate spam will support this approach.
Oh, but you say that this approach infringes on free speech. Well then all of us who support free speech should be against any measures to restrict email.
But, but... surely there's a way to eliminate spam and not infringe free speech (of course not including kiddie porn and drug dealing and criminal conspiracies and child molesters and illegal immigrants and red-light runners and satan-worshippers and communists and nazis and music pirates and terrorists and catholics and unpatriotic americans and open-source software).
When you figure it all out, please inform the EFF where they've gone wrong.
of this news is that VFAT drivers will be dropped from the Linux kernel tree, at least for USA-based distros. No Linux publisher will want to take the risk of losing a lawsuit for _intentional_ patent infringement.
Look how quickly GIF and MP3 support were dropped from apps included in mainline distros once patent claims were asserted.
Google connects you to the advertiser and you get the usual recorded announcement: "Please hold for the next available operator. Due to the high volume of calls this may take some time. For faster service please visit our website."
You're saying it isn't "carved into stone" when all you need to do is buy another stone.:-)
It certainly is carved into stone for the user who buys hardware version A and doesn't have the ready cash to later buy hardware version B and yet again later hardware version C.
And more complexity in the hardware means a higher probability of a hardware bug, which can get pretty expensive in terms of warranty service if it can't be fixed with a firmware or driver upgrade.
And finally (but probably most important) there's the issue of the higher cost of hardware solutions. It certainly isn't a Microsoft conspiracy that pre-assembled PC systems are almost invariably outfitted with cheap "winmodems" rather than hardware modems. Especially when the operation of the winmodem is perfectly satisfactory for the average (Windows) user.
It makes no difference that the driver interface may not have changed for a few iterations of the kernel. Without assurance that it _hasn't_ changed, the driver developer has to at least test his driver against every kernel version. And if changes/improvements are made to the driver, then run the testing all over again.
You argue against "carving into stone" for the Linux driver interface, but then argue that device manufacturers should put all their innovations into the hardware, which is _really_ "carving into stone" (as well as being considerably more expensive).
I think if Linux captured 25-30% of the market, device manufacturers would sit up and take notice. But for a measly 5% - poof, who cares. Don't get me wrong. I run almost exclusively under Linux and write FOSS software exclusively under Linux, but I can understand the device manufacturers' perspectives.
As I pointed out earlier in this thread, there have been 44 minor releases to date in the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels alone. And there's no assurance the driver interface hasn't changed between any one of them and the next. Once a driver makes it into the kernel source tree it's normally upgraded by the kernel developers along with the kernel, but it's a never-ending responsibility for third-party driver developers.
As far as I'm concerned, Sony is Sony and all divisions thereof are tarred with the same brush. I refuse to buy Sony CDs or anything else with the Sony name on it until they come to their senses. For one thing, who knows what malware may be concealed in the firmware of any of their hardware products.
With Windows you might be faced with maintaining 4 or 5 versions of a driver as opposed to a substantially greater number for Linux.
You're right that many manufacturers don't want to put the effort into Linux drivers. But they'd have to allocate resources for this, which costs money, and the potential return may be negative based on Linux's small share of the market.
Hardware/firmware designs continue to be improved as well. It's not the easiest thing in the world to insure the "integrity, reliability, performance, and security" of a hardware-plus-driver product when you have to test it and possibly customize it with a zillion different versions of the kernel. I count 44 minor releases for the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels alone - thusfar!. (See http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel).
Don't forget there are a lot of installations that have have been running reliably with older kernels for years, where the SysOps don't want to mess with a good thing. But hardware components do wear out and have to be replaced from time to time.
A major problem faced by Detroit some years ago (and maybe even today) was that with the wide variety of optional features available on automobiles the number of interacting combinations of things that could go wrong was enormous, and it was literally _impossible_ to insure a quality product.
Hardware manufacturers face a similar problem with Linux, and many decide to just ignore that market entirely.
I've given up on quite a few seemingly worthwhile software packages because the kernel driver was incompatible with my version of the kernel, often by just a minor release number.
I've done a lot of programming in C, but debugging kernel drivers is not one of my goals in life. And I think it's asking a lot of a developer, whether open source or proprietary, to maintain a version of the driver for every kernel release which comes down the pike.
How does this differ from extortion?
on
RIAA Sues a Child
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· Score: 1
It would appear that the RIAA is legally entitled to bring a lawsuit against an alleged infringer of their copyrights. So be it.
But when the RIAA demands a payoff in advance to avert a lawsuit, how does that differ from criminal extortion?
Even a person who is totally innocent of any infringement (or contributory infringement) could easily decide to pay their demands rather than run the risk of paying substantially higher legal fees for a defense, regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit.
I've yet to see the film rendition of any horror story which comes even close to imparting the same feelings of dread and chills down the spine as occurs when reading the story in print. I'll probably buy the DVD but can't imagine it will do justice to Lovecraft's masterful descriptions.
Back in my college dorm days one of the guys in the next room asked to borrow the paperback copy of Lovecraft which I was just finishing. Later that night, some time after midnight, there came a blood-curdling scream from his room. It seems the borrower had become totally engrossed in the book and was at his desk long past his normal bedtime. His roommate, awakened by the light, padded barefoot over to see what was keeping him up and happened to touch him on the shoulder.
To the extent that DRM and the Law succeed in eliminating "Piracy", we are without question in for a Cultural Dark Age.
Although some maintain we will always have books and libraries, improvements in e-book readers and general acceptance of them, plus the increasing cost of hardcopy publications, will in all liklihood lead to most literary works being released only in electronic form.
How much money can we expect publishers to spend transferring works to current-technology media when 97% or more of these works lose their market value after just a few years, despite the fact that some of that 97% will many years later be recognized as classics. Or would be if someone had the ability to read them at that later time. But with DRM that hasn't been cracked, most scholars won't have the chance.
when Microsoft develops (or rather "acquires the technology to") such an implant. And Bill figures a personal demonstration is necessary for MS to catch up in a market projected at 100 billion dollars/year in sales.
"Imagine a society where an orchestra couldn't play any classical music without acquiring the rights to that performance from a copyright holder that has been passed down through the centuries by inane copyright law and they end up paying a large amount of money for you to enjoy their performance."
Guess what... this is OUR society!!!
Orchestras don't play classical music "by ear", they play from sheet music which is copyrighted by the publisher. They have to pay royalties to the publisher for every public performance, even for works by Beethoven and Bach.
How come?... because each printing is a new "arrangement", eligible for copyright even if only a few notes are modified. And the royalty is the same for these old compositions as it would be for an original work by a modern composer.
Sure, the orchestra could play from sheet music published in the USA before 1923, if such could be found. But little of this old sheet music has been preserved that long.
do you think a film would have in this contest were the topic to be incorporation of GPL-licensed code into a closed-source commercial product? Or even the incorporation of BSD-licensed code into a commercial product after stripping out the author's copyright notice.
One problem with your story: Grog STEALS one of the burning branches from Gork's fire and thereby deprives Gork of some probably significant amount of heat from the firewood Gork has laboreously collected.
Now it would be different if Grog merely ignited a twig of his own from Gork's fire and used that to start his own fire.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the long term. As the capability for filtering becomes universal in DVD players, I expect Hollywood to begin supplying their own filters.
Then there will be no limit to the amount of pornography and violence in the average film. Unfiltered it will be XXX. Push the appropriate button to tone it down to X, R, PG-13, G - whatever you want.
Have you used it with the "verify" option enabled? I'm getting verify errors after writing a CD-R. I tried it on two different drives on one PC and a drive on another PC, running FC2 and RH9 respectively. (I get no errors when running either K3b or gToaster on these drives.)
Nah. The prude view is that everyone has to be filtered - god forbid their child should visit an unfiltered friend and be exposed to the likes of, say, Slashdot.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
There's one sure-fire way which is absolutely guaranteed to completely eliminate email spam - and that is to make illegal and block all email. Surely those of us who hate spam will support this approach.
... surely there's a way to eliminate spam and not infringe free speech (of course not including kiddie porn and drug dealing and criminal conspiracies and child molesters and illegal immigrants and red-light runners and satan-worshippers and communists and nazis and music pirates and terrorists and catholics and unpatriotic americans and open-source software).
Oh, but you say that this approach infringes on free speech. Well then all of us who support free speech should be against any measures to restrict email.
But, but
When you figure it all out, please inform the EFF where they've gone wrong.
of this news is that VFAT drivers will be dropped from the Linux kernel tree, at least for USA-based distros. No Linux publisher will want to take the risk of losing a lawsuit for _intentional_ patent infringement.
Look how quickly GIF and MP3 support were dropped from apps included in mainline distros once patent claims were asserted.
It all boils down to whether it's a Malware author or Microsoft who can first make a legitimate claim to: "ALL your PC are belong to us".
(Presuming that there are actually differences between those two entities.)
"The study even claims potential global gains of '2.4 million new jobs..."
Yeah, and 2.3 million of these new jobs will be for lawyers.
Google connects you to the advertiser and you get the usual recorded announcement: "Please hold for the next available operator. Due to the high volume of calls this may take some time. For faster service please visit our website."
You're saying it isn't "carved into stone" when all you need to do is buy another stone. :-)
It certainly is carved into stone for the user who buys hardware version A and doesn't have the ready cash to later buy hardware version B and yet again later hardware version C.
And more complexity in the hardware means a higher probability of a hardware bug, which can get pretty expensive in terms of warranty service if it can't be fixed with a firmware or driver upgrade.
And finally (but probably most important) there's the issue of the higher cost of hardware solutions. It certainly isn't a Microsoft conspiracy that pre-assembled PC systems are almost invariably outfitted with cheap "winmodems" rather than hardware modems. Especially when the operation of the winmodem is perfectly satisfactory for the average (Windows) user.
It makes no difference that the driver interface may not have changed for a few iterations of the kernel. Without assurance that it _hasn't_ changed, the driver developer has to at least test his driver against every kernel version. And if changes/improvements are made to the driver, then run the testing all over again.
You argue against "carving into stone" for the Linux driver interface, but then argue that device manufacturers should put all their innovations into the hardware, which is _really_ "carving into stone" (as well as being considerably more expensive).
I think if Linux captured 25-30% of the market, device manufacturers would sit up and take notice. But for a measly 5% - poof, who cares. Don't get me wrong. I run almost exclusively under Linux and write FOSS software exclusively under Linux, but I can understand the device manufacturers' perspectives.
As I pointed out earlier in this thread, there have been 44 minor releases to date in the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels alone. And there's no assurance the driver interface hasn't changed between any one of them and the next. Once a driver makes it into the kernel source tree it's normally upgraded by the kernel developers along with the kernel, but it's a never-ending responsibility for third-party driver developers.
As far as I'm concerned, Sony is Sony and all divisions thereof are tarred with the same brush. I refuse to buy Sony CDs or anything else with the Sony name on it until they come to their senses. For one thing, who knows what malware may be concealed in the firmware of any of their hardware products.
With Windows you might be faced with maintaining 4 or 5 versions of a driver as opposed to a substantially greater number for Linux.
You're right that many manufacturers don't want to put the effort into Linux drivers. But they'd have to allocate resources for this, which costs money, and the potential return may be negative based on Linux's small share of the market.
Hardware/firmware designs continue to be improved as well. It's not the easiest thing in the world to insure the "integrity, reliability, performance, and security" of a hardware-plus-driver product when you have to test it and possibly customize it with a zillion different versions of the kernel. I count 44 minor releases for the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels alone - thusfar!. (See http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel).
Don't forget there are a lot of installations that have have been running reliably with older kernels for years, where the SysOps don't want to mess with a good thing. But hardware components do wear out and have to be replaced from time to time.
A major problem faced by Detroit some years ago (and maybe even today) was that with the wide variety of optional features available on automobiles the number of interacting combinations of things that could go wrong was enormous, and it was literally _impossible_ to insure a quality product.
Hardware manufacturers face a similar problem with Linux, and many decide to just ignore that market entirely.
I've given up on quite a few seemingly worthwhile software packages because the kernel driver was incompatible with my version of the kernel, often by just a minor release number.
I've done a lot of programming in C, but debugging kernel drivers is not one of my goals in life. And I think it's asking a lot of a developer, whether open source or proprietary, to maintain a version of the driver for every kernel release which comes down the pike.
It would appear that the RIAA is legally entitled to bring a lawsuit against an alleged infringer of their copyrights. So be it.
But when the RIAA demands a payoff in advance to avert a lawsuit, how does that differ from criminal extortion?
Even a person who is totally innocent of any infringement (or contributory infringement) could easily decide to pay their demands rather than run the risk of paying substantially higher legal fees for a defense, regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit.
I've yet to see the film rendition of any horror story which comes even close to imparting the same feelings of dread and chills down the spine as occurs when reading the story in print. I'll probably buy the DVD but can't imagine it will do justice to Lovecraft's masterful descriptions.
Back in my college dorm days one of the guys in the next room asked to borrow the paperback copy of Lovecraft which I was just finishing. Later that night, some time after midnight, there came a blood-curdling scream from his room. It seems the borrower had become totally engrossed in the book and was at his desk long past his normal bedtime. His roommate, awakened by the light, padded barefoot over to see what was keeping him up and happened to touch him on the shoulder.
To the extent that DRM and the Law succeed in eliminating "Piracy", we are without question in for a Cultural Dark Age.
Although some maintain we will always have books and libraries, improvements in e-book readers and general acceptance of them, plus the increasing cost of hardcopy publications, will in all liklihood lead to most literary works being released only in electronic form.
How much money can we expect publishers to spend transferring works to current-technology media when 97% or more of these works lose their market value after just a few years, despite the fact that some of that 97% will many years later be recognized as classics. Or would be if someone had the ability to read them at that later time. But with DRM that hasn't been cracked, most scholars won't have the chance.
when Microsoft develops (or rather "acquires the technology to") such an implant. And Bill figures a personal demonstration is necessary for MS to catch up in a market projected at 100 billion dollars/year in sales.
"No one will ever need more than 256K of RAM"
"Imagine a society where an orchestra couldn't play any classical music without acquiring the rights to that performance from a copyright holder that has been passed down through the centuries by inane copyright law and they end up paying a large amount of money for you to enjoy their performance."
... this is OUR society!!!
... because each printing is a new "arrangement", eligible for copyright even if only a few notes are modified. And the royalty is the same for these old compositions as it would be for an original work by a modern composer.
Guess what
Orchestras don't play classical music "by ear", they play from sheet music which is copyrighted by the publisher. They have to pay royalties to the publisher for every public performance, even for works by Beethoven and Bach.
How come?
Sure, the orchestra could play from sheet music published in the USA before 1923, if such could be found. But little of this old sheet music has been preserved that long.
do you think a film would have in this contest were the topic to be incorporation of GPL-licensed code into a closed-source commercial product? Or even the incorporation of BSD-licensed code into a commercial product after stripping out the author's copyright notice.
One problem with your story: Grog STEALS one of the burning branches from Gork's fire and thereby deprives Gork of some probably significant amount of heat from the firewood Gork has laboreously collected.
Now it would be different if Grog merely ignited a twig of his own from Gork's fire and used that to start his own fire.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the long term. As the capability for filtering becomes universal in DVD players, I expect Hollywood to begin supplying their own filters.
Then there will be no limit to the amount of pornography and violence in the average film. Unfiltered it will be XXX. Push the appropriate button to tone it down to X, R, PG-13, G - whatever you want.
of this bill which legalizes technology for removing content which I find offensive, such as commercials and those violent FBI warnings.
Have you used it with the "verify" option enabled? I'm getting verify errors after writing a CD-R. I tried it on two different drives on one PC and a drive on another PC, running FC2 and RH9 respectively. (I get no errors when running either K3b or gToaster on these drives.)
Nah. The prude view is that everyone has to be filtered - god forbid their child should visit an unfiltered friend and be exposed to the likes of, say, Slashdot. :-)
Your city is either outside the USA or your library has chosen to forgo any Federal funding.
Assuming there is still a "pay channel" left which hasn't folded.