not even for people in the narrow segment you describe (who, incidentally, also have to be listening on Windows-driven PCs).
Play it on your PC. Now take it on a road trip and play it on your laptop. Guess what, you now have to pay per use for a disc of music you already own (not rent). I don't consider that reasonable.
My library has different levels of access for different patrons, controlled by 'smart' library cards which you have to plug into the computer to run them. Adults have full access. Children have, at their parent's option, either no access, full access, or filtered access.
If a parent chooses filtered access then they have to sign a disclaimer acknowledging that such software is inherently inaccurate and absolving the library of responsibility for under- or over-filtering.
If a parent 1 (correctly) doesn't trust the software to provide only appropriate information to the child, and 2 doesn't want to either assume the burden him or her self or 3 trust their child enough to give them full access, then 4 the kid doesn't get any access at all.
This system seems to me to work really well, because it puts the responsibility for choosing squarely on the parent's shoulders where it belongs.
So how about taking some of the energy you put into escapist fantasies and focus those gigantic brains of yours on improving what we've got, instead of running away from our problems, huh?
Gigantic brains improving what we've got is what brings the Singularity on!
In my rage and torment I went back to the site I bought my soon-to-be-delivered SL-5500 from, and it has gone UP in price by US$100! I checked other sites and while few had gone up that much, most had raised their prices, usually by about $40-50 compared to my printouts from last week. WTF?
What kind of sense does that make? Demand's liable to plummet with a new model announced, so they (several different retailers) raise the price of the older model? I'm confused! Can anybody offer me a rational (or even a marketing) explanation for this?
And I ordered my ZL-5500 this frigging weekend! You bastards!!
You and me both, I haven't even recieved the damn thing yet. @#$%^&*(13)!!!!
ON the other hand, I won't wait a month or two more, I won't pay $200 more, I'm bound to find some way to rationalize why the 5500's architecture is better than the 5600's, and there's still a quarter bottle of fine Irish whiskey left in the kitchen...
The last 5 times I flipped past the show they were excitedly discussing 1)digital cameras, 2) digital cameras, 3) digital cameras, 4) digital cameras and 5) digital cameras.
"Big Thinkers" just jumped the shark too, the last big thinker they had on was Scott Adams for crying out loud... come on, Dilbert is funny as hell by times but it's not because of Adams' deep intellect.
is show it on English TV. No one would ever complain about the license fee again, once they'd seen what a crap channel it becomes when they try to be a commercial station. Endless reruns of stupid home decorating and gardening shows, Parkinson and Graham Norton. The occasional reruns of Monty and Coupling don't even begin to make up for it, and even the good shows are interrupted by barrages of inane advertising.
Grief, you're this far down in the thread and you still haven't read the judgement, yet you have the nerve to value your question at two whole cents?
You don't work in Microsoft's pricing department by any chance, do you? That would go a long way toward explaining your valuation, and that of,say, Windows XP.
Don't be too quick to call this a total MS victory. In an ideal world where Microsoft was just a nice hardworking business, it would be. In the real world, the judge has just singled out some of their most effective (and illegal under antitrust law) weapons, and forced them to deal with the world they way they claim to.
So the judge said that they can't do things which are illegal anyway, and tasked Microsoft board members with making sure they don't.
The problem is that "our familiar friend" ICANN is not behaving in any consensus-driven way, nor are the policies it promulgates in the public interest of most Internet users. The problem wouldn't arise if they were the omnibenevolent organization you seem to feel they are.
So what's the worst that could happen if one or more of the alternative roots gained significant mindshare from ICANN and there was a forking of the Internet? Some method might have to be worked out whereby you specified which root you patronize.
That would be inconvenient, certainly, and it would certainly be better if that could be avoided (which ICANN could easily accomplish, were they at all genuinely interested in doing so), but accomplishing it would not be all that difficult. It certainly doesn't rise to the level of threatening the entire ball of wax.
In short, no, OpenNIC is not a serious threat to the future survivability of the Internet. To the extent that it threatens to inconvenience Internet users, the blame lies squarely on ICANN's doorstep for failing to meet the needs of its constituency.
So start your own company, sans PHBs, geeks only; then your true skill will be appreciated. The question then will be whether the customer appreciates (with spendable applause) the skill you put into your product; if they do, then you can outcompete the PHB-laden competition and the Age of Managers will truly die.
If not, then you'll have an even better scapegoat;a nation of clueless customers who don't appreciate the difference between quality code crafted by skilled professionals, and cheap code by ex-dirt farmers that performs the same functions!
Why would MSFT be concerned about a transition to Bush and Ashcroft? Bush hasn't exactly set himself up as the defender of the poor against those nasty ol' rich folk, has he?
Okay, I've looked at the sites there, and I'm wondering what your point is... I have no doubt that the Japanese committed many, many atrocities during WWII and I'll even stipulate that there's a good likelihood that these included unjustified bombings.
However, the links you provide here are far from a convincing indictment of "terrorism" as defined in the root of this thread. I'll remind you again: It was the targeting of civilian targets with the intention of demoralizing the population. Now, that doesn't mean that any attack which frightens or even harms civilians is a terrorist attack; it means that the primary purpose is directed against the civilian populace and not toward reducing the enemy's capability to wage and win war, which are considered legitimate military objectives.
So the Japanese attacked a significant manufacturing city which also formed a major tranportation junction with railway, waterport and land route access, the "secondary capital of China at the time"? Dude, what the hell do you want before a target is considered a bona fide military objective?
Now if you want to argue that the Japanese attack was unjustified aggression, I'm with you 100%, it absolutely was. If you want to say the Japanese waged war in a ruthless and even brutal way, again I won't argue with that; they did.
But were the bombings at either Pearl Harbor or Congqing City terrorism? No, they were not; terrorism is a different monster, and that's the point that the parent poster and I were making. To be a terrorist act, it is not sufficient that the act be violent, nor that civilians are hurt in it; terrorism is the use of violence to terrify and demoralize the civilian populace as a primary objective, irrespective of actual military advantage.
It's only semantics; you know, the science of precise communication, so that we all can understand each other. Admittedly, speaking precisely is a sometime thing on Slashdot!;-)
Trusting the bank != trusting Microsoft.
A bank that takes customer privacy seriously and switches away from using Microsoft products has a better chance of getting my business. Pity my account is so small...:(
I'm sure he wouldn't appreciate it if I collected his assorted writings and published them without recompense to him
Actually he has gone out of his way to ensure that you can do exactly that. In his interview yesterday on "The Screen Savers" he was asked precisely that question ABOUT HIS BOOK OF COLLECTED ESSAYS, and answered unambiguously that "Yes, not only can you photocopy it, but you are welcome to republish it." That's unusual, granted, but it's not all that extreme; his primary purpose in writing is to disseminate his ideas, not to make money, so it would be silly to view the process through the profit glasses. In that same interview he also pointed out that he doesn't believe that utility software need necessarily have the exact same protection mechanisms as a novel or a painting.
As for his eating, he does get some return from sales of official copies of his writings (even though you can get them free, to some people it's worth the convenience), and if you have a software problem you need cracked you can hire him to do it (and by anybody's measure he's one hell of a software genius).
If you want to distribute it afterward you will have to release the source code, but if you really need the solution and don't intend to profit from shrink-wrapped sales of it that won't be a problem, will it? If your business requires that you keep the workings of the code secret, then you may not distribute it. You're also free to alter his code to better suit your needs, but you can't then sell the modified result except under the same conditions (this is where GPL differs from BSD licensing).
It's not at all as extreme a position as you make it out to be. The GPL only disables those business models predicated on distributing binaries while maintaining secrecy of source code; they're not the only ways of feeding the kids, and RMS considers them unethical.
It's no more extreme of him to refuse to engage in those business models than for the owner of Chick-Fil-A to refuse to vend his goods on the Sabbath. In either case, it is simply a matter of a business person having other concerns besides the hunt for the almighty dollar, and in both cases these men are pretty well off despite not trying to screw every last dime out of their customers/public.
A similar question hinges on how Palladium will deal with minor program corruption.
If I understand correctly, Palladium checks the integrity of a program "down to a single bit" and will not allow the program to run if a single bit is different from what it expects.
What happens if a sector on the hard drive becomes corrupted? Whereas most programs will presently continue to run with a small amount of corruption (at least well enough to retrieve data), under Palladium would it not fail to load entirely? In other words, the most minor data corruptions become catastrophic failures.
Would it be necessary to reinstall the software entirely in order to run it under Palladium?
This reply makes your point clearer, it wasn't clear from your original post (at least not to me). I think you're overly optimistic, though; the system doesn't always work well, it is subject to manipulation by special interests.
I suspect that DRM legislation has a better chance of being passed than you think, especially if it is *not* met with great outrage and uproar every time it raises its ugly head.
The Senate currently considering a bill which would require all personal computers to have DRM built in and Microsoft holds the patent on DRM Operating Systems.
I grew up in Louisiana. When I was a teenager, the state legislature considered a bill that would make marriages between first cousins legal.
How are these two even remotely connected? The former is a bill restricting what you're allowed to do, in what is in today's technological society a pretty fundamental way. The latter is "allowing" something which, even if you consider it ill-advised, isn't properly the business of the state at all.
The only way you could be connecting these proposals would be if you were saying that they are equally ridiculous. I suppose they are, but in diametrically opposite ways; 1) it is far from ridiculous that first cousins should be allowed to marry*, but a law allowing it is ridiculously unlikely to pass, and 2) it is ridiculous to mandate crippling the normal functions of computers in today's world, but the legislation required is very likely indeed to pass in one form or another. Some precursor legislation has already passed, viz. the DMCA.
*Yes, I know I'm open to flaming here, but the ban on 'incest' between first cousins is not based on any solid genetic ground; it's a taboo, pure and simple. Even if there were any significant increased risk to offspring it isn't the place of the state to determine these things, any more than they should mandate sterilization of women over 38, or men with a family history of testicular cancer, or people with poor eyesight.
Slashdot Mirror
Play it on your PC. Now take it on a road trip and play it on your laptop. Guess what, you now have to pay per use for a disc of music you already own (not rent). I don't consider that reasonable.
If a parent chooses filtered access then they have to sign a disclaimer acknowledging that such software is inherently inaccurate and absolving the library of responsibility for under- or over-filtering.
If a parent 1 (correctly) doesn't trust the software to provide only appropriate information to the child, and 2 doesn't want to either assume the burden him or her self or 3 trust their child enough to give them full access, then 4 the kid doesn't get any access at all.
This system seems to me to work really well, because it puts the responsibility for choosing squarely on the parent's shoulders where it belongs.
Gigantic brains improving what we've got is what brings the Singularity on!
-Microsoft refuses to kill itself.
how does this relate to: the story Microsoft on Security: We'll Break Your Apps
I find it interesting that this problem does not affect Windows XP...
What kind of sense does that make? Demand's liable to plummet with a new model announced, so they (several different retailers) raise the price of the older model? I'm confused! Can anybody offer me a rational (or even a marketing) explanation for this?
You and me both, I haven't even recieved the damn thing yet. @#$%^&*(13)!!!!
ON the other hand, I won't wait a month or two more, I won't pay $200 more, I'm bound to find some way to rationalize why the 5500's architecture is better than the 5600's, and there's still a quarter bottle of fine Irish whiskey left in the kitchen...
The last 5 times I flipped past the show they were excitedly discussing 1)digital cameras, 2) digital cameras, 3) digital cameras, 4) digital cameras and 5) digital cameras.
"Big Thinkers" just jumped the shark too, the last big thinker they had on was Scott Adams for crying out loud... come on, Dilbert is funny as hell by times but it's not because of Adams' deep intellect.
is show it on English TV. No one would ever complain about the license fee again, once they'd seen what a crap channel it becomes when they try to be a commercial station. Endless reruns of stupid home decorating and gardening shows, Parkinson and Graham Norton. The occasional reruns of Monty and Coupling don't even begin to make up for it, and even the good shows are interrupted by barrages of inane advertising.
I will *not* be voting for the incumbent junior Senator from South Carolina, Mr. Ernest 'Fritz' Hollings, be he ever so Democratic.
Grief, you're this far down in the thread and you still haven't read the judgement, yet you have the nerve to value your question at two whole cents?
You don't work in Microsoft's pricing department by any chance, do you? That would go a long way toward explaining your valuation, and that of,say, Windows XP.
So the judge said that they can't do things which are illegal anyway, and tasked Microsoft board members with making sure they don't.
!W00t!!!
No need to redo it, the original is still around.
My neighbor's uncle was there, and he assures me that Il Duce's train schedules bore the same relation to reality as Potempkin's villages.
So what's the worst that could happen if one or more of the alternative roots gained significant mindshare from ICANN and there was a forking of the Internet? Some method might have to be worked out whereby you specified which root you patronize.
That would be inconvenient, certainly, and it would certainly be better if that could be avoided (which ICANN could easily accomplish, were they at all genuinely interested in doing so), but accomplishing it would not be all that difficult. It certainly doesn't rise to the level of threatening the entire ball of wax.
In short, no, OpenNIC is not a serious threat to the future survivability of the Internet. To the extent that it threatens to inconvenience Internet users, the blame lies squarely on ICANN's doorstep for failing to meet the needs of its constituency.
If not, then you'll have an even better scapegoat;a nation of clueless customers who don't appreciate the difference between quality code crafted by skilled professionals, and cheap code by ex-dirt farmers that performs the same functions!
Nope, site says it comes in .pdf format. :)
Why would MSFT be concerned about a transition to Bush and Ashcroft? Bush hasn't exactly set himself up as the defender of the poor against those nasty ol' rich folk, has he?
However, the links you provide here are far from a convincing indictment of "terrorism" as defined in the root of this thread. I'll remind you again: It was the targeting of civilian targets with the intention of demoralizing the population. Now, that doesn't mean that any attack which frightens or even harms civilians is a terrorist attack; it means that the primary purpose is directed against the civilian populace and not toward reducing the enemy's capability to wage and win war, which are considered legitimate military objectives.
So the Japanese attacked a significant manufacturing city which also formed a major tranportation junction with railway, waterport and land route access, the "secondary capital of China at the time"? Dude, what the hell do you want before a target is considered a bona fide military objective?
Now if you want to argue that the Japanese attack was unjustified aggression, I'm with you 100%, it absolutely was. If you want to say the Japanese waged war in a ruthless and even brutal way, again I won't argue with that; they did.
But were the bombings at either Pearl Harbor or Congqing City terrorism? No, they were not; terrorism is a different monster, and that's the point that the parent poster and I were making. To be a terrorist act, it is not sufficient that the act be violent, nor that civilians are hurt in it; terrorism is the use of violence to terrify and demoralize the civilian populace as a primary objective, irrespective of actual military advantage.
It's only semantics; you know, the science of precise communication, so that we all can understand each other. Admittedly, speaking precisely is a sometime thing on Slashdot! ;-)
funnily enough i can't think of any japanese cases of terrorbombing
I guess Pearl Harbour was just a pretty firework show then?
Pearl Harbour was a military base, remember?
Trusting the bank != trusting Microsoft. A bank that takes customer privacy seriously and switches away from using Microsoft products has a better chance of getting my business. Pity my account is so small... :(
Actually he has gone out of his way to ensure that you can do exactly that. In his interview yesterday on "The Screen Savers" he was asked precisely that question ABOUT HIS BOOK OF COLLECTED ESSAYS, and answered unambiguously that "Yes, not only can you photocopy it, but you are welcome to republish it." That's unusual, granted, but it's not all that extreme; his primary purpose in writing is to disseminate his ideas, not to make money, so it would be silly to view the process through the profit glasses. In that same interview he also pointed out that he doesn't believe that utility software need necessarily have the exact same protection mechanisms as a novel or a painting.
As for his eating, he does get some return from sales of official copies of his writings (even though you can get them free, to some people it's worth the convenience), and if you have a software problem you need cracked you can hire him to do it (and by anybody's measure he's one hell of a software genius).
If you want to distribute it afterward you will have to release the source code, but if you really need the solution and don't intend to profit from shrink-wrapped sales of it that won't be a problem, will it? If your business requires that you keep the workings of the code secret, then you may not distribute it. You're also free to alter his code to better suit your needs, but you can't then sell the modified result except under the same conditions (this is where GPL differs from BSD licensing).
It's not at all as extreme a position as you make it out to be. The GPL only disables those business models predicated on distributing binaries while maintaining secrecy of source code; they're not the only ways of feeding the kids, and RMS considers them unethical.
It's no more extreme of him to refuse to engage in those business models than for the owner of Chick-Fil-A to refuse to vend his goods on the Sabbath. In either case, it is simply a matter of a business person having other concerns besides the hunt for the almighty dollar, and in both cases these men are pretty well off despite not trying to screw every last dime out of their customers/public.
If I understand correctly, Palladium checks the integrity of a program "down to a single bit" and will not allow the program to run if a single bit is different from what it expects.
What happens if a sector on the hard drive becomes corrupted? Whereas most programs will presently continue to run with a small amount of corruption (at least well enough to retrieve data), under Palladium would it not fail to load entirely? In other words, the most minor data corruptions become catastrophic failures.
Would it be necessary to reinstall the software entirely in order to run it under Palladium?
I suspect that DRM legislation has a better chance of being passed than you think, especially if it is *not* met with great outrage and uproar every time it raises its ugly head.
I grew up in Louisiana. When I was a teenager, the state legislature considered a bill that would make marriages between first cousins legal.
How are these two even remotely connected? The former is a bill restricting what you're allowed to do, in what is in today's technological society a pretty fundamental way. The latter is "allowing" something which, even if you consider it ill-advised, isn't properly the business of the state at all.
The only way you could be connecting these proposals would be if you were saying that they are equally ridiculous. I suppose they are, but in diametrically opposite ways; 1) it is far from ridiculous that first cousins should be allowed to marry*, but a law allowing it is ridiculously unlikely to pass, and 2) it is ridiculous to mandate crippling the normal functions of computers in today's world, but the legislation required is very likely indeed to pass in one form or another. Some precursor legislation has already passed, viz. the DMCA.
*Yes, I know I'm open to flaming here, but the ban on 'incest' between first cousins is not based on any solid genetic ground; it's a taboo, pure and simple. Even if there were any significant increased risk to offspring it isn't the place of the state to determine these things, any more than they should mandate sterilization of women over 38, or men with a family history of testicular cancer, or people with poor eyesight.
No, no, he's in Half-Life!