The parent has a very good (though slightly off topic) point. The primary carcinogens in tobacco (and marijuana) are those that manifest themselves as particulate carbon based compounds (the same kind of thing that is carcinogenic in many things that have been exposed to a flame: burned, charred, and blackened food included (yes, even that delicious blackened cajun catfish) and the posited (and confirmed) carginogenic properties of many modern nanotech manufacturing biproducts (and primary products, for that matter)). I personally am waiting for the time when both tobacco cigarettes and pot are sold in small, self-contained cigarette-like vaporizers (assuming the Rockefeller drug laws truly and officially fade into the sunset). Once that happens, the only health risk of cigarettes will be heart disease (from the nicotine), but that risk, statistically, will be no worse than a moderate coffee habit (caffeine can cardiac arythmia and other heart conditions, as can nicotine).
The real barrier to entry in this "health conscious" tobacco product market is the tech - at the moment, an effective vaporizer will cost you at least $200, and requires a 110V electric socket - I, being rather far removed from this kind of technology (i'm a CS guy), wonder what it would take to make portable, battery (or chemically) powered vaporizers possible.
As a tobacco smoker, I anticipate (and quite reasonably forsee) the invention of the cancer free cigarette. It's quite reasonable to assume that the tobacco companies are working on something, based on tobacco, that is addictive because of its nicotine, but because of its delivery method or chemical make-up, does not cause cancer....talk about a cash cow, and imagine the marketing campaign...("Cancer free Marlboro's - all the smooth flavor with none of the guilt")
As a pot smoker (and college student), I'm saving my money to buy a digitally controlled vaporizer (as anything else is essentially worthless, at least as far as reducing carcinogens is concerned).
Just to continue this thought, for all of those out there that are curious about the effects of man's second best friend, marijuana, (it's been used for various reasons in various cultures for at least as long as the domesticated dog), but are concerned about the carcinogenic effects of smoking it, the healthiest way to consume it is ingestion. Just cook up 1-2 grams of midgrade marijuana per 3 - 4 tablespoons of butter or vegetable oil or olive oil (depending upon what the recipe requires)i n a pan at low-medium heat, until the marjuana is a golden brown, filter out the solid remnants of the plant, and using the same volume of the remaining filtered butter/oil that any given recipe calls for (as long as it requires fatty substances such as oil or butter) for a deliciously intoxicating (and in no way carcinogencic - assuming you don't burn it) treat.
To wrap this comment up - and bring it back on topic, consider this to be a minor insight on how to improve upon (without negating the benefits of) an unhealthy practice which the human race has been doing for thousands of years, as opposed to softening the perception of the dangers of nanomaterials by citing the ubiquitous and unquestionably bad, uninformed practices of an ancient (and quite dead) civilization.
Right....but it was today, 15 years ago, that Linus told everyone about it...I suppose you could say that it's not really Linux's birthday, but more like the anniversary of the day that Linus Torvalds told everyone that he was pregnant with a beautiful baby androgynous operating system...
Also, what do you do when they send it out the window?:)
What about installing the electromagnet inside the machine (not turned on, of course), and hacking some sort of proximity based alarm system. So when the police/whoever move the machine outside the range of the (well hidden) transmitter, the electromagnet activates and wipes the drive. This would, of course, require a fairlylarge battery to be installed inside the case. One could, plausibly, say that you installed this security system in order to protect yourself from identity theft, in the event that your computer was stolen (and that in the stress of the police raid, the fact that the security system was active completely slipped your mind).
IANAL, so I don't know what the consequences of 'inadvertent' destruction of evidence are...
Saving sick people, or at least contributing to the solution seems like a legitimate and justifiable use of our (admittedly unrenewable) resources. At least, far more than driving a Ford Expedition to pick up milk and bread...
The issue isn't the resolution - it's the DRM. I've heard nothing yet about Apple's plan to support HDCP - so, at the moment, getting a Mac won't help you. Hopefully, however, Apple's position in the media distribution market will give them the power not to roll over at the media companies' discretion. That, however, is probably just wishful thinking.
...the media companies are steering technological "innovation." How is this even remotely reasonable? The media distributors have resisted new technology since the advent of the recordable videotape, for precisely the same reason. My real question is - will Vista be able to play full HD content from media distributed by independent media companies (who choose not to use the HDCP garbage)? Furthermore, where the hell do the media companies get the idea that by limiting full HD content playback to signed drivers on 64 bit Vista, they'll prevent circumvention? It's only a matter of time until the so-called "malware" will catch up. Personally, I hope piracy does kill the current media empire, so they can stop meddling with my technology...
The grandparent made the point that "it [is] much less likely that viruses could be as damaging as on Windows."(emphasis mine) In recent history, this has indeed been the case. Nobody has said that it's impossible to crack *nix, or that Mac OS X is impenetrable, just that both are less penetrable than Windows.
Incidentally, the fetchmail OS X vulnerability you mentioned is cute - a default install of OS X doesn't use fetchmail for _anything_, which means that a remote exploit of the fetchmail hole (on either a stock client or server install) is impossible. Furthermore, the local exploit would be just that, a local exploit - admittedly a problem, but nevertheless a far less significant problem than the numberous exploits for windows that required no "social engineering" whatsoever.
In conclusion, the Microsoft bashing that's happening here isn't happening because it's cool (unfounded MS bashing is usually shot down pretty quickly here), it's happening because it's true. Tell me, if, for some fucked up life or death reason (this is strictly hypothetical), you had to crack a machine - what (modern) OS would you prefer it be running?
I think you're absolutely right, the insides of all the new machines, imac, mini, macbook, etc - are all completely different from their PowerPC brethren, and, in most cases, they're quite beautiful inside. I've no doubt that they'll be redesigning the outside, eventually..., but they've done a great job on the insides.
The outside of the case is almost the same as the G5 case...the inside is completely different, and has a pretty sweet setup for the drive bays, not to mention the 8 ram slots and room for a full length graphics card.
Personally, I'm rather tired of reading comment after comment pointing out that a given article is a dupe - I think the tagging system is sufficient to identify dupitude (hey, you're allowed to make up words in english). If the article's a dupe, don't read it, and by all means, don't comment - just ignore it like the articles that don't interest you.
I think it is a brilliant move to allow users to download songs they've purchased from iTunes
However, how is this even remotely feasible, from a fraud prevention point of view? Given that they're sure as hell not going to have access to Apple's iTMS records, they'll have to deal with it on the local system - and depending how it's implemented, I see nothing that could prevent someone from doctoring their iTunes Library (either the file or the store of files itself) and claim a great deal more music than they actually own.
A VoIP call is just another internet connection between two individuals, sending data back and forth
I agree - when it's a VoIP to VoIP call - however, there is a distinction when you bridge the ip traffic to the POTS network, as is the case with most of the VoIP calls I make: not a whole lot of people I'm calling have hopped on to the VoIP bandwagon. So - in that case, Vonage et. al. should be treated the same as any other phone provider, however, when/if that bridge doesn't need to be made, it should be treated as normal network traffic and *not* taxed. Perhaps the tax should only apply to VoIP -> POTS and vice versa...
let me know what company is charging for their drivers, so I can avoid them.
You very likely, however, paid for the device being driven, and you can be quite certain that some part of the price you paid went towards the development of the driver. I'm not disagreeing with you, just saying that drivers are not free - unless they're free and open source. As long as someone is getting paid to write them, the consumer is paying for them.
This is actually an interesting point. I once had an issue with a certain member of the MPAA over my possesion (and "distribution") of a certain movie about hobbits. I was on a University network at the time using a public DC hub (stupid, i know...). At any rate, I got an email forwarded by some admin from the movie company, listing my mac address, ip, and the names of two files that I was sharing - they were - "The_Lord_of_the_Rings_two_towers[Xvid].part1.avi" and "The_Lord_of_the_Rings_two_towers[Xvid].part2.avi" (this was when the movie was still in theaters - and, I might add, I had already plunked down $11.50 to see the movie). Having never successfully downloaded the movie, I went to investigate, and saw that I was sharing two 1.5 MB files that, when played, showed 4 seconds of black screen each - and that was it. Nevertheless, they were threatening all sorts of legal action and whatnot, though it amounted to a cease and desist. So my question is - assuming those were the only files I was sharing;-) - was I breaking any law?
Well - the bottom line is that there are no free rides in the current system - everybody is already paying for their bandwidth - the difference is that the telcos want the content providers (and therefore the consumer) to pay more for poorly defined "premium service". Your confusion is justified - none of those questions have yet been answered, the telcos want the power to implement (via legislation) before they tell anyone how they're actually going to implement it.
I think what it really boils down to is what constitutes "fair amounts of bandwidth" based upon how the various local ISPs determine what constitutes "fast" (top tier), or "slow" bottom tier. If it's done purely by limiting the throughput (GB/s) from some non-paying host - then you're bound to get crappy site response times during load spikes regardless of what kind of data you're sending. It'll essentially amount to a localized DDoS - where the DoS is to the users, not the server. Imagine, 20,000 slashdot readers on Verizon DSL (faked the number, obviously) all click the link in the latest headline, that sends them some obscure blog that hasn't paid any protection money - we then get a localized Slashdot effect, visible only to the people on Verizon DSL network, and screwing the blog out of 20,000 eyeballs of ad revenue.
Beyond that, net neutrality seems to me to be a monstrously nasty business administration problem, especially for a company like Google. Not only will they have to pay hundreds, if not thousands of local ISP's for the privilege of serving their customers data, but they will have the added overhead of an entire department that will manage the relationships and accounting for all of these ISPs. Not to mention the enormous aggregate expense that will be incurred on the ISP side of things - the auditing and accounting of managing this multi-tiered idea will no doubt require a significant staff commitment in order to be up to date and accurate (after all, if you're Google, and you pay for something, you expect to have reliable proof that you're getting what you pay for).
Simple economics (and I mean first year intro macroeconomics class) allows one to demonstrate that the added cost to the content providers and ISPs will not be applied to the bottom line of said providers and ISPs, but be passed directly on to the consumer. All in all, net neutrality is unquestionably better for the consumer than any other alternative, and it will not bankrupt any ISPs, so there is no reason that it should not become law.
And what about the countless business people who have legitimate business calling international locations? My dad's an international environmental consultant - and he frequently calls China, India, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - from his office phone, home phone and cell phone. Since he's managing audits and cleanups and the like in conjunction with other domestic consultants, I could very much imagine numerous cases where "an international call followed by a flurry of domestic calls" describes my dad's telephone activity perfectly. To top it all off, he's a Canadian citizen living in the US (with permanent resident status) - so...I guess I should don my tinfoil hat and listen for heavy breathing the next time I use my home telephone...
You are quite correct - I had never heard of a sea bass that was not Chilean, but this Wikipedia disambiguation page has successfully disambiguated the issue for me:-P
Okay, so way, way O/T but don't try the sea bass - Chilean Sea Bass (formerly the Peruvian Toothfish, renamed to sound more delicious) is so tasty that it's being fished to extinction.
Itunes is basically an alarmingly poor piece of code that runs essentially like a virus or spyware.
Care to elaborate? I mean, I'll give you that iTunes is bloated and slow - but a virus or spyware? You can't make a claim like that without backing it up. So, let me help you out: iTunes has a feature (which you can disable) that provides links to the music store for songs in your library. It also has a mini-store browser (which you can also disable) that presents you with songs similar to those in your library. So - given that you can disable the "spyware" features of iTunes without running AdAware et al, I don't see how iTunes is "alarmingly" poor, or even remotely resembles viruses or spyware.
In the interest of full disclosure - I've been a Mac fan since I was six years old (1989), but I still think the best music player out there is Winamp 5 - no other program has even approached the things you can do with the winamp visualization system (as far as media players go - I'm not talking about performance quality MIDI visualizers).
Slashdot Mirror
The parent has a very good (though slightly off topic) point. The primary carcinogens in tobacco (and marijuana) are those that manifest themselves as particulate carbon based compounds (the same kind of thing that is carcinogenic in many things that have been exposed to a flame: burned, charred, and blackened food included (yes, even that delicious blackened cajun catfish) and the posited (and confirmed) carginogenic properties of many modern nanotech manufacturing biproducts (and primary products, for that matter)). I personally am waiting for the time when both tobacco cigarettes and pot are sold in small, self-contained cigarette-like vaporizers (assuming the Rockefeller drug laws truly and officially fade into the sunset). Once that happens, the only health risk of cigarettes will be heart disease (from the nicotine), but that risk, statistically, will be no worse than a moderate coffee habit (caffeine can cardiac arythmia and other heart conditions, as can nicotine).
The real barrier to entry in this "health conscious" tobacco product market is the tech - at the moment, an effective vaporizer will cost you at least $200, and requires a 110V electric socket - I, being rather far removed from this kind of technology (i'm a CS guy), wonder what it would take to make portable, battery (or chemically) powered vaporizers possible.
As a tobacco smoker, I anticipate (and quite reasonably forsee) the invention of the cancer free cigarette. It's quite reasonable to assume that the tobacco companies are working on something, based on tobacco, that is addictive because of its nicotine, but because of its delivery method or chemical make-up, does not cause cancer....talk about a cash cow, and imagine the marketing campaign...("Cancer free Marlboro's - all the smooth flavor with none of the guilt")
As a pot smoker (and college student), I'm saving my money to buy a digitally controlled vaporizer (as anything else is essentially worthless, at least as far as reducing carcinogens is concerned).
Just to continue this thought, for all of those out there that are curious about the effects of man's second best friend, marijuana, (it's been used for various reasons in various cultures for at least as long as the domesticated dog), but are concerned about the carcinogenic effects of smoking it, the healthiest way to consume it is ingestion. Just cook up 1-2 grams of midgrade marijuana per 3 - 4 tablespoons of butter or vegetable oil or olive oil (depending upon what the recipe requires)i n a pan at low-medium heat, until the marjuana is a golden brown, filter out the solid remnants of the plant, and using the same volume of the remaining filtered butter/oil that any given recipe calls for (as long as it requires fatty substances such as oil or butter) for a deliciously intoxicating (and in no way carcinogencic - assuming you don't burn it) treat.
To wrap this comment up - and bring it back on topic, consider this to be a minor insight on how to improve upon (without negating the benefits of) an unhealthy practice which the human race has been doing for thousands of years, as opposed to softening the perception of the dangers of nanomaterials by citing the ubiquitous and unquestionably bad, uninformed practices of an ancient (and quite dead) civilization.
Right....but it was today, 15 years ago, that Linus told everyone about it...I suppose you could say that it's not really Linux's birthday, but more like the anniversary of the day that Linus Torvalds told everyone that he was pregnant with a beautiful baby androgynous operating system...
Also, what do you do when they send it out the window? :)
What about installing the electromagnet inside the machine (not turned on, of course), and hacking some sort of proximity based alarm system. So when the police/whoever move the machine outside the range of the (well hidden) transmitter, the electromagnet activates and wipes the drive. This would, of course, require a fairlylarge battery to be installed inside the case. One could, plausibly, say that you installed this security system in order to protect yourself from identity theft, in the event that your computer was stolen (and that in the stress of the police raid, the fact that the security system was active completely slipped your mind).
IANAL, so I don't know what the consequences of 'inadvertent' destruction of evidence are...
Saving sick people, or at least contributing to the solution seems like a legitimate and justifiable use of our (admittedly unrenewable) resources. At least, far more than driving a Ford Expedition to pick up milk and bread...
:-P
....What was the article about again?
The issue isn't the resolution - it's the DRM. I've heard nothing yet about Apple's plan to support HDCP - so, at the moment, getting a Mac won't help you. Hopefully, however, Apple's position in the media distribution market will give them the power not to roll over at the media companies' discretion. That, however, is probably just wishful thinking.
...the media companies are steering technological "innovation." How is this even remotely reasonable? The media distributors have resisted new technology since the advent of the recordable videotape, for precisely the same reason. My real question is - will Vista be able to play full HD content from media distributed by independent media companies (who choose not to use the HDCP garbage)? Furthermore, where the hell do the media companies get the idea that by limiting full HD content playback to signed drivers on 64 bit Vista, they'll prevent circumvention? It's only a matter of time until the so-called "malware" will catch up. Personally, I hope piracy does kill the current media empire, so they can stop meddling with my technology...
The grandparent made the point that "it [is] much less likely that viruses could be as damaging as on Windows."(emphasis mine) In recent history, this has indeed been the case. Nobody has said that it's impossible to crack *nix, or that Mac OS X is impenetrable, just that both are less penetrable than Windows.
Incidentally, the fetchmail OS X vulnerability you mentioned is cute - a default install of OS X doesn't use fetchmail for _anything_, which means that a remote exploit of the fetchmail hole (on either a stock client or server install) is impossible. Furthermore, the local exploit would be just that, a local exploit - admittedly a problem, but nevertheless a far less significant problem than the numberous exploits for windows that required no "social engineering" whatsoever.
In conclusion, the Microsoft bashing that's happening here isn't happening because it's cool (unfounded MS bashing is usually shot down pretty quickly here), it's happening because it's true. Tell me, if, for some fucked up life or death reason (this is strictly hypothetical), you had to crack a machine - what (modern) OS would you prefer it be running?
Nor do they make the components for Quicktime - those are produced by a company called Flip4Mac
I think you're absolutely right, the insides of all the new machines, imac, mini, macbook, etc - are all completely different from their PowerPC brethren, and, in most cases, they're quite beautiful inside. I've no doubt that they'll be redesigning the outside, eventually..., but they've done a great job on the insides.
The sweet cards are in the BTO - but they're damn hard on the bottom line...
The outside of the case is almost the same as the G5 case...the inside is completely different, and has a pretty sweet setup for the drive bays, not to mention the 8 ram slots and room for a full length graphics card.
An offtopic reply to an offtopic post:
Personally, I'm rather tired of reading comment after comment pointing out that a given article is a dupe - I think the tagging system is sufficient to identify dupitude (hey, you're allowed to make up words in english). If the article's a dupe, don't read it, and by all means, don't comment - just ignore it like the articles that don't interest you.
You very likely, however, paid for the device being driven, and you can be quite certain that some part of the price you paid went towards the development of the driver. I'm not disagreeing with you, just saying that drivers are not free - unless they're free and open source. As long as someone is getting paid to write them, the consumer is paying for them.
This is actually an interesting point. I once had an issue with a certain member of the MPAA over my possesion (and "distribution") of a certain movie about hobbits. I was on a University network at the time using a public DC hub (stupid, i know...). At any rate, I got an email forwarded by some admin from the movie company, listing my mac address, ip, and the names of two files that I was sharing - they were - "The_Lord_of_the_Rings_two_towers[Xvid].part1.avi" and "The_Lord_of_the_Rings_two_towers[Xvid].part2.avi" (this was when the movie was still in theaters - and, I might add, I had already plunked down $11.50 to see the movie). Having never successfully downloaded the movie, I went to investigate, and saw that I was sharing two 1.5 MB files that, when played, showed 4 seconds of black screen each - and that was it. Nevertheless, they were threatening all sorts of legal action and whatnot, though it amounted to a cease and desist. So my question is - assuming those were the only files I was sharing ;-) - was I breaking any law?
....Vista would never, ever ship.
It was GTA San Andreas, and he was joking....to quote somebody else in the comments:
Whooooooosh
Well - the bottom line is that there are no free rides in the current system - everybody is already paying for their bandwidth - the difference is that the telcos want the content providers (and therefore the consumer) to pay more for poorly defined "premium service". Your confusion is justified - none of those questions have yet been answered, the telcos want the power to implement (via legislation) before they tell anyone how they're actually going to implement it.
I think what it really boils down to is what constitutes "fair amounts of bandwidth" based upon how the various local ISPs determine what constitutes "fast" (top tier), or "slow" bottom tier. If it's done purely by limiting the throughput (GB/s) from some non-paying host - then you're bound to get crappy site response times during load spikes regardless of what kind of data you're sending. It'll essentially amount to a localized DDoS - where the DoS is to the users, not the server. Imagine, 20,000 slashdot readers on Verizon DSL (faked the number, obviously) all click the link in the latest headline, that sends them some obscure blog that hasn't paid any protection money - we then get a localized Slashdot effect, visible only to the people on Verizon DSL network, and screwing the blog out of 20,000 eyeballs of ad revenue.
Beyond that, net neutrality seems to me to be a monstrously nasty business administration problem, especially for a company like Google. Not only will they have to pay hundreds, if not thousands of local ISP's for the privilege of serving their customers data, but they will have the added overhead of an entire department that will manage the relationships and accounting for all of these ISPs. Not to mention the enormous aggregate expense that will be incurred on the ISP side of things - the auditing and accounting of managing this multi-tiered idea will no doubt require a significant staff commitment in order to be up to date and accurate (after all, if you're Google, and you pay for something, you expect to have reliable proof that you're getting what you pay for).
Simple economics (and I mean first year intro macroeconomics class) allows one to demonstrate that the added cost to the content providers and ISPs will not be applied to the bottom line of said providers and ISPs, but be passed directly on to the consumer. All in all, net neutrality is unquestionably better for the consumer than any other alternative, and it will not bankrupt any ISPs, so there is no reason that it should not become law.
And what about the countless business people who have legitimate business calling international locations? My dad's an international environmental consultant - and he frequently calls China, India, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - from his office phone, home phone and cell phone. Since he's managing audits and cleanups and the like in conjunction with other domestic consultants, I could very much imagine numerous cases where "an international call followed by a flurry of domestic calls" describes my dad's telephone activity perfectly. To top it all off, he's a Canadian citizen living in the US (with permanent resident status) - so...I guess I should don my tinfoil hat and listen for heavy breathing the next time I use my home telephone...
You are quite correct - I had never heard of a sea bass that was not Chilean, but this Wikipedia disambiguation page has successfully disambiguated the issue for me :-P
And slightly more on-topic - you forgot one:
Resistance is futile!
Care to elaborate? I mean, I'll give you that iTunes is bloated and slow - but a virus or spyware? You can't make a claim like that without backing it up. So, let me help you out: iTunes has a feature (which you can disable) that provides links to the music store for songs in your library. It also has a mini-store browser (which you can also disable) that presents you with songs similar to those in your library. So - given that you can disable the "spyware" features of iTunes without running AdAware et al, I don't see how iTunes is "alarmingly" poor, or even remotely resembles viruses or spyware.
In the interest of full disclosure - I've been a Mac fan since I was six years old (1989), but I still think the best music player out there is Winamp 5 - no other program has even approached the things you can do with the winamp visualization system (as far as media players go - I'm not talking about performance quality MIDI visualizers).