At least, before you could be sure, when you where able to circumvent the Great Firewall of China, (which I've heard from Chinese students is not all that complicated) that you had unrestricted access to the internet.
Yes. The results are removed from the localized Chinese search for convenience. If you are planning to access restricted content then you can bypass the Chinese Firewall, in which case, you can also use the US or other national search engine front ends. If you are not, then there's little point in returning results you cannot access.
I've tried really, really hard to perceive this as "evil", but I can't. Sorry. If you're going to claim that merely doing business under local laws is evil because your own culture disagrees with it (ever talked to a Chinese person about their government?).... well then you can claim Apple are evil because they manufacture iPods in China, and follow local laws.
I agree that it wouldn't be surprising if the "plot" turned out, in the end, to be extremely weak and not worth the massive counter-reaction to it. However your cited sources don't convince me. The TATP article seems sound but it's published in the Register, not known for accurate or quality journalism. It's also possible that in fact the accused were completely naive as to basic chemistry and thought they could do it.
But really it's the first thing you cite that concerns me. That article is written by somebody who was, once, a diplomat and is now just Joe Random blogger with an axe to grind. He no longer has access to government information. It's also written in a hysterical style, and who in only one sentence accuses John Reid of being a hardened Stalinist, a violent thug AND he implies corruption! What? This is news to me, and I'm sure the national dailies would be all over it if there was evidence that a government minister was once a violent communist. There's no mention of it on Wikipedia and he doesn't cite any sources to back up the allegation. It comes off as a ridiculously amateurish character assassination.
I'd also really like to know where the claim that the suspects had no passports came from. Googling for it shows up a few blogs that quote him and not much else.
A good place to start is this article, which does a good job of explaining the history behind how this system evolved. An interesting quote for Americans:
If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied. The issuing power of money should be taken from the banks and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs. I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies.
NOTE: everyones deposits are only 11% guranteed by govt law, so in the event of a total dollar/currency/depression-II , you only get 11% . The rest, "Sorry, its gone!"
I don't know what the banking regulations in the US are, however the required reserve ratio in the UK is basically zero. Technically it's agreed in private between the Bank of England and the big commercial banks; due to heavy lobbying over time the reserve ratio was reduced again and again until it reached so close to zero that it makes no odds.
Ignore it, that's just a moronic habit of Windows developers who feel that because "professional" software has a click-thru license agreement, their installers should as well. In fact you don't have to accept or even read the GPL in order to use GPLd software, and on Linux, you never have to agree to a EULA when you install software for that exact reason.
Companies have agendas. Apple makes a great deal of money out of hardware, you expect them to suddenly gain a saints halo and rewrite os x to work on an PC?
They already did rewrite it to work on a PC, or did you not notice that the new Intel Macs are basically PCs in a white box instead of a beige box?
And no I would not expect them to gain a halo but I would expect government to force them to respect the free market; what Apple are doing with MacOS X is locking it to the hardware for no valid technical reason. If they were a monopoly it'd be called product tying and it would, in fact, be illegal.
Er, yes, Mark Shuttlework used to be a Debian developer back in the early 90s, before he made his millions. Why do you think he chose to base Ubuntu off Debian in the first place?
DVD succeeded because of it's advantages over the existing media of the day. I.e. Video Tape.
Right, but so does internet based video-on-demand. Choose from a large catalogue and have it there very quickly (if you stream it). It's more convenient than messing around with easily scratched disks. It's the same argument as online music store vs CDs. Whether Amazon actually give you all the advantages I don't know. But the potential is there.
The light amount of copy protect on the DVD wasn't enough to prevent the market moving across to it, because of the benefits.
Light?!? DVDs were armor plated! Not only heavily encrypted but also region protected and the specs were entirely secret and had to be reverse engineered. It took several years before CSS was broken, and even then, it was broken by exploiting a minor mistake in the key generation algorithm. If CSS had been just a little bit stronger it would have lasted far, far longer. Perhaps not even being broken today. People like to make out that the DVD protections were easy to break, but really, it involved a lot of luck. DVDs didn't start taking off when backup software came along. They were popular before that.
DIVX disks played on ordinary DVD players, were time-limited, and cost less than straight DVDs. And failed.
But DVDs which were protected from being "backed up" *rolls eyes* didn't fail. So, I don't see the causation you're trying to imply from correlation.
Amazon Unbox WON'T play on DVD player... Mac.... portable player
Many people already watch TV or movies on a computer, Mac is still an insignificant part of the market (sorry, that's what the figures say...), and who wants to watch a movie on a device with a tiny screen anyway?
More expensive than other legal methods (just buying the dvd used): well, it's not more expensive than buying on Amazon itself as it calculates the savings for you and displays them. Yes you could buy the DVD used but so what, the convenience is worth it for some - I don't plan evenings when I feel tired and want to watch some TV weeks in advance, it just happens. And when it does I want to watch some episodes of 24 right there and then, if I can. I'm willing to pay more than getting a used DVD off eBay for that convenience.
With more limitations (can't backup, can't play in normal dvd players) - can't backup.... and? You couldn't backup DVDs for the first few years of their life either due to DRM and that didn't stop them taking over the world. I hypothesise that most people don't care; I know I never backed up any of my DVDs and I wouldn't care about backing up these movies either. I'd probably rent them instead. Don't play in normal DVD players... yes this will have an impact and stop some people using the service. But lots of people already watch TV on their computers, it's no big deal.
I can't understand why it won't do well!? - video on demand probably will do well. Will it be Amazon Unbox? I do not know, and I don't care to predict based on the feelings of Slashdotters which is basically "doesn't work on a Mac/Linux, must suck". It might succeed, it might fail, but apart from being restricted to the US (moving there soon anyway) I haven't seen anything that'd stop me using it.
Now it may fail for other reasons... too hard to use, poor quality, too slow or whatever. But I don't think the masses care about DRM. For many years you couldn't copy CDs; the CD-R and MP3 was not yet invented. Yet CDs did very well and didn't die. iTunes music store is doing very well despite being ridden with DRM and locking you in to Apple (one software player, one hardware player, one store, one company) far more than Windows Media does.
Because a protest has a much more obvious and immediate effect on a small company (accountable to the market), than a protest has on an government that acts as if it's accountable to no-one.
You're ignoring that Google can't index Facebook profiles, and Facebooks own search engine obeys the privacy controls.
In a way it's silly yes, but the fact that so many people felt so strongly does indicate that the way people treat and perceive networks is a more subtle thing than anybody thought. There is, in fact, a difference between broadcast and accessible in a few situations, and Facebook is one of them. It's the difference between telling everybody something and telling only those who ask. It's not amazing people prefer the latter, though how Facebook could have predicted this is anybodies guess.... social software is just hard.
It does no good - when a breach occurs the music/video files are re-encrypted so they only play on the patched versions. All you are doing by turning automatic updates off is making it more likely you'll forget to apply them and get cracked, so flooding our inboxes with more spam.
I know this goes against the Slashdot groupthink but yeah, real customers (as in people) do get hurt by this kind of thing.
My brother used to subscribe to the Napster "all you can eat" music service, in which you basically rent music - you pay a fixed amount each month and just listen to however much you like. If you stop subscribing you lose access to the music. He liked this business model, because it suited the way he listens to music. I'm the same. There isn't any way to implement this without DRM, and if DRM is not robust, that business model will die. And then the silent section of the populace who doesn't read Slashdot, and doesn't really give a crap about DRM, will just get pissed off.
You've gotta love how one sided DRM debates here always are... the artists and non-technical users are sort of presumed to not exist, or not be important.
Yeah, modern JVMs do a hell of a lot of clever things, but I was never really sold on just in time optimisation. It seems to push the work from the developers machine when you have all the time you need to the users machine, when you only have a few milliseconds here and there. Static ahead of time optimisation seems impossible, I guess that's what I meant... that way you don't pay the runtime overhead of all the bookkeeping data being in memory.
You can't avoid them entirely because objects are allowed to dispatch method invocations by doing arbitrary kinds of string operations, it's how transparent proxies are implemented. Which is a nice feature but when *every* object can do it, and there are no restrictions, it does slow things down.
Well, the links to the FAQ don't seem to work thanks to some kind of site move (I am asked to download the HTML instead of view it and... well... am too lazy tonight). But a few thoughts based on what is already there:
It says they are maybe 1.7 times faster than CPython, which is not that great, because CPython is incredibly slow and things like Psyco can give pretty big speedups (say 10 to 100 according to their website).
It seems fundamentally impossible to make a language like Python or Ruby fast. By their very nature everything has to be done at the last minute, based on string comparisons, and you can't do global optimizations really because at any moment the program might change itself and invalidate them. Consider the way every object can implement a fallback method that is called if somebody invokes "foo.bar" and bar does not exist in foo. It implies that every single method invocation must be identified by string not a number, and matched by string comparison.
If IronPython can't make Python fast.... seems like its only purpose is to give people who like Python and.NET some half way point between the two. But it's not quite Python, because you can't use its standard library, and it's not quite.NET so in a way you seem to get the worst of both worlds
You're both right, of course, people don't like it so they'll change it (likely... add filtering rather than eliminate it entirely). And it is completely irrational for people to dislike it as well.
All this incident really proves is that social software is really hard, because software is the epitome of rationality whereas social relationships aren't. Better luck next time Facebook... you're still better than the competition.
Question is how much feedback will it take for them to make changes.... given that people complain whenever stuff changes. IT's like the first law of software or something.
That sounds like a bug, because the site itself says explicitly that it's a full opt out.
There's no story here - people complain whenever the facebook guys change something. They complained when the wall was added, for heavens sake. The only thing that'll make them reconsider is a mass exodus away to a competitor and to be frank, I don't see that happening.
* Microsoft Outlook (because Entourage is 98% of the way there... and that's not 100%)
Specifically a lot of work has been done on the RPC layer so Outlook can fully connect to an Exchange server, with all the features. As far as I'm aware it's the only program that can do that...
The question is really, is Keychain integration and a 'lickable' skin worth the $800+ buying Mac Office Pro in the UK would cost you, if you already own the Windows equivalent? (yeah we really get screwed this side of the atlantic)
For die hard Apple lovers, maybe.
For most users who just want to use the software they got used to and already purchased, maybe not.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. The results are removed from the localized Chinese search for convenience. If you are planning to access restricted content then you can bypass the Chinese Firewall, in which case, you can also use the US or other national search engine front ends. If you are not, then there's little point in returning results you cannot access.
I've tried really, really hard to perceive this as "evil", but I can't. Sorry. If you're going to claim that merely doing business under local laws is evil because your own culture disagrees with it (ever talked to a Chinese person about their government?) .... well then you can claim Apple are evil because they manufacture iPods in China, and follow local laws.
I agree that it wouldn't be surprising if the "plot" turned out, in the end, to be extremely weak and not worth the massive counter-reaction to it. However your cited sources don't convince me. The TATP article seems sound but it's published in the Register, not known for accurate or quality journalism. It's also possible that in fact the accused were completely naive as to basic chemistry and thought they could do it.
But really it's the first thing you cite that concerns me. That article is written by somebody who was, once, a diplomat and is now just Joe Random blogger with an axe to grind. He no longer has access to government information. It's also written in a hysterical style, and who in only one sentence accuses John Reid of being a hardened Stalinist, a violent thug AND he implies corruption! What? This is news to me, and I'm sure the national dailies would be all over it if there was evidence that a government minister was once a violent communist. There's no mention of it on Wikipedia and he doesn't cite any sources to back up the allegation. It comes off as a ridiculously amateurish character assassination.
I'd also really like to know where the claim that the suspects had no passports came from. Googling for it shows up a few blogs that quote him and not much else.
Said by Thomas Jefferson.
I don't know what the banking regulations in the US are, however the required reserve ratio in the UK is basically zero. Technically it's agreed in private between the Bank of England and the big commercial banks; due to heavy lobbying over time the reserve ratio was reduced again and again until it reached so close to zero that it makes no odds.
Could have argued the same for IE, it was still illegal product tying - illegal because it artificially distorts the market.
Except Flash is accessible.
Ignore it, that's just a moronic habit of Windows developers who feel that because "professional" software has a click-thru license agreement, their installers should as well. In fact you don't have to accept or even read the GPL in order to use GPLd software, and on Linux, you never have to agree to a EULA when you install software for that exact reason.
They already did rewrite it to work on a PC, or did you not notice that the new Intel Macs are basically PCs in a white box instead of a beige box?
And no I would not expect them to gain a halo but I would expect government to force them to respect the free market; what Apple are doing with MacOS X is locking it to the hardware for no valid technical reason. If they were a monopoly it'd be called product tying and it would, in fact, be illegal.
Er, yes, Mark Shuttlework used to be a Debian developer back in the early 90s, before he made his millions. Why do you think he chose to base Ubuntu off Debian in the first place?
Right, but so does internet based video-on-demand. Choose from a large catalogue and have it there very quickly (if you stream it). It's more convenient than messing around with easily scratched disks. It's the same argument as online music store vs CDs. Whether Amazon actually give you all the advantages I don't know. But the potential is there.
Light?!? DVDs were armor plated! Not only heavily encrypted but also region protected and the specs were entirely secret and had to be reverse engineered. It took several years before CSS was broken, and even then, it was broken by exploiting a minor mistake in the key generation algorithm. If CSS had been just a little bit stronger it would have lasted far, far longer. Perhaps not even being broken today. People like to make out that the DVD protections were easy to break, but really, it involved a lot of luck. DVDs didn't start taking off when backup software came along. They were popular before that.
But DVDs which were protected from being "backed up" *rolls eyes* didn't fail. So, I don't see the causation you're trying to imply from correlation.
Many people already watch TV or movies on a computer, Mac is still an insignificant part of the market (sorry, that's what the figures say ...), and who wants to watch a movie on a device with a tiny screen anyway?
And the counter-argument:
More expensive than other legal methods (just buying the dvd used): well, it's not more expensive than buying on Amazon itself as it calculates the savings for you and displays them. Yes you could buy the DVD used but so what, the convenience is worth it for some - I don't plan evenings when I feel tired and want to watch some TV weeks in advance, it just happens. And when it does I want to watch some episodes of 24 right there and then, if I can. I'm willing to pay more than getting a used DVD off eBay for that convenience.
With more limitations (can't backup, can't play in normal dvd players) - can't backup .... and? You couldn't backup DVDs for the first few years of their life either due to DRM and that didn't stop them taking over the world. I hypothesise that most people don't care; I know I never backed up any of my DVDs and I wouldn't care about backing up these movies either. I'd probably rent them instead. Don't play in normal DVD players ... yes this will have an impact and stop some people using the service. But lots of people already watch TV on their computers, it's no big deal.
I can't understand why it won't do well!? - video on demand probably will do well. Will it be Amazon Unbox? I do not know, and I don't care to predict based on the feelings of Slashdotters which is basically "doesn't work on a Mac/Linux, must suck". It might succeed, it might fail, but apart from being restricted to the US (moving there soon anyway) I haven't seen anything that'd stop me using it.
Now it may fail for other reasons ... too hard to use, poor quality, too slow or whatever. But I don't think the masses care about DRM. For many years you couldn't copy CDs; the CD-R and MP3 was not yet invented. Yet CDs did very well and didn't die. iTunes music store is doing very well despite being ridden with DRM and locking you in to Apple (one software player, one hardware player, one store, one company) far more than Windows Media does.
Because a protest has a much more obvious and immediate effect on a small company (accountable to the market), than a protest has on an government that acts as if it's accountable to no-one.
You're ignoring that Google can't index Facebook profiles, and Facebooks own search engine obeys the privacy controls.
In a way it's silly yes, but the fact that so many people felt so strongly does indicate that the way people treat and perceive networks is a more subtle thing than anybody thought. There is, in fact, a difference between broadcast and accessible in a few situations, and Facebook is one of them. It's the difference between telling everybody something and telling only those who ask. It's not amazing people prefer the latter, though how Facebook could have predicted this is anybodies guess .... social software is just hard.
It does no good - when a breach occurs the music/video files are re-encrypted so they only play on the patched versions. All you are doing by turning automatic updates off is making it more likely you'll forget to apply them and get cracked, so flooding our inboxes with more spam.
I know this goes against the Slashdot groupthink but yeah, real customers (as in people) do get hurt by this kind of thing.
My brother used to subscribe to the Napster "all you can eat" music service, in which you basically rent music - you pay a fixed amount each month and just listen to however much you like. If you stop subscribing you lose access to the music. He liked this business model, because it suited the way he listens to music. I'm the same. There isn't any way to implement this without DRM, and if DRM is not robust, that business model will die. And then the silent section of the populace who doesn't read Slashdot, and doesn't really give a crap about DRM, will just get pissed off.
You've gotta love how one sided DRM debates here always are ... the artists and non-technical users are sort of presumed to not exist, or not be important.
Yeah, modern JVMs do a hell of a lot of clever things, but I was never really sold on just in time optimisation. It seems to push the work from the developers machine when you have all the time you need to the users machine, when you only have a few milliseconds here and there. Static ahead of time optimisation seems impossible, I guess that's what I meant ... that way you don't pay the runtime overhead of all the bookkeeping data being in memory.
You can't avoid them entirely because objects are allowed to dispatch method invocations by doing arbitrary kinds of string operations, it's how transparent proxies are implemented. Which is a nice feature but when *every* object can do it, and there are no restrictions, it does slow things down.
Sure, but that doesn't make fast or slow meaningless. It just means that for your specific applications performance isn't a big deal.
Mozilla is no more secure than IE anyway. Check it out. I reckon Ms Window will be able to use her experience to help them out quite a bit!
Well, the links to the FAQ don't seem to work thanks to some kind of site move (I am asked to download the HTML instead of view it and ... well ... am too lazy tonight). But a few thoughts based on what is already there:
I guess I just don't get it.
You're both right, of course, people don't like it so they'll change it (likely ... add filtering rather than eliminate it entirely). And it is completely irrational for people to dislike it as well.
All this incident really proves is that social software is really hard, because software is the epitome of rationality whereas social relationships aren't. Better luck next time Facebook ... you're still better than the competition.
Question is how much feedback will it take for them to make changes .... given that people complain whenever stuff changes. IT's like the first law of software or something.
That sounds like a bug, because the site itself says explicitly that it's a full opt out.
There's no story here - people complain whenever the facebook guys change something. They complained when the wall was added, for heavens sake. The only thing that'll make them reconsider is a mass exodus away to a competitor and to be frank, I don't see that happening.
Specifically a lot of work has been done on the RPC layer so Outlook can fully connect to an Exchange server, with all the features. As far as I'm aware it's the only program that can do that ...
The question is really, is Keychain integration and a 'lickable' skin worth the $800+ buying Mac Office Pro in the UK would cost you, if you already own the Windows equivalent? (yeah we really get screwed this side of the atlantic)
For die hard Apple lovers, maybe.
For most users who just want to use the software they got used to and already purchased, maybe not.