Its a faux democracy, just like the all the african dicatorships that call themselves 'democratic republic of foobaristan', those ones where armed militia force citizens to 'vote' at gunpoint. And the suburbs with voters belonging to the opposition parties mysteriously catch fire on polling day.
In the last week George Bush had both houses pass laws giving him the authority to order the abduction and torture of american citizens indefinately, based on his word alone. He also had laws passed that retroactively exempt him from being charged with war crimes and terrorist offenses from 2001 onward.
When any citizen can be abducted by the state and tortured to death 'legally', then that state is a defacto dictatorship regardless of how elections are held, or if they're even held at all. In 5 years America has gone from a democratic state in which liberties are treasured and upheld, to a state teetering on the brink of a facist, fundamentalist and terrorist run nightmare nation of despots and villians. Whats it going to be like 5 years from now?
Perhaps these 'songs' were recordings of the Plaintiff saying 'Bite my shiny metal ass' ?
Using a screenshot which may easily faked showing names of songs that may never have been RIAA property is about as legally compelling as sworn testimony from an alcoholic wifebeater who claims that his TV talks to him and tells him to molest small animals.
The RIAA should have their asses handed back to them on a plate with a heft fine for wasting the courts time.
Crackpot backwards laws (such as whatever dumbass law this judge was ruling on that seems to help criminals and make firewalls & filters illegal) in foreign countries are things that ought be be ignored. Why should one idiot regime in some wretched craphole be able to threaten the rest of the world with awful laws? Do you see bikini models in the US meekly travelling to Saudi Arabia and submitting to Sharia law? Its asinine that you could even conceive of such a thing.
What amazes me is the 1.7 _billion_ transistor count! Thats over 1000 80486 cpus worth of transistor, or over 500 pentiums. The power ( flops, mips ) of the Itanic is pretty poor by comparison. Hell, even a single 100 MHz 486 DX4 is still decent enough in this day and age to do useful work.
I estimate that approx 100% of felons have consumed a dangerous pharmaceutical chemical known as Dihydrogen Monoxide shortly before committing crimes. Indeed, this lethal poison is widespread, able to be purhased at many stores without ID, even commonly sold to minors! It contaminates lakes and high concentrations can even be found in the breast milk of mothers who go on to pass the deadly substance onto their newborns.
Re:They are fighting a losing battle
on
Death By DMCA
·
· Score: 1
Then they give me this excuse "everybody at school is doing it".
That sounds suspiciously like a democratic consensus. I hope you beat the wretch and did your best to indoctrinate him with selfishness, greed, slavish devotion to authority figures, and the basic tenets of fascism. No America, you cant have democracy!!
/Not yours
Re:more proof the RIAA/MPAA are insane
on
Death By DMCA
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I wouldnt call RIAA tactics a legislative ( with the implication of lawfulness and law-abiding behaviour ) process, it is more of a criminal process. If I decide overnight I am entitled to million of dollars, then set about 'recovering' the 'valuable funds' that were 'stolen' from me by society at large, then am I permitted to kick down the doors of families and rob them at knifepoint?
The RIAA does precisely this, albeit with the threat of lawsuits instead. There is no doubt at all that these actions are criminal, its an indictment on the corruption of politicians and the law-enforcement community that these felons can operate with impunity as they are currently doing. Leveraged with bribes in the form of campaign donations. Its one of the few truly black-and-white issues in government, they sure as hell arent acting in the interests of their consituents, and the conflict-of-interest position that govt members are in makes corruption a certainty rather than a mere possibility.
What is a well-meaning citizen to do? Sitting idly by and becoming another victim of the RIAA and their pet senators and congressmen is not an option. Its a war against slavery in a way, and the battle is against a group of powerful people who believe they have a right to own and control you, and everything you see and hear.
We sometimes forget just how amazing the developments in computing have been over the last three decades.
Not really, its just that said computing developments are overshadowed by the capacity of commercial software to consume all available system resources and deliver performance that is orders of magnitude slower with each successive generation.
Put a Windows Vista install on the latest cray, and you too can marvel at how quickly a multi-million dollar piece of computing quickly becomes a slow, unstable pile of junk.
The BSA are essentially a marketing department of Microsoft. Instead of the traditional way that marketers operate ( ooh, look how shiny and desirable our new product is! ), they operate in a way akin to the mafia ( buy our product or else we will break your knees and throw you in prison ).
Its all lies and spin, just as with any other marketing exercise. Where is the evidence that shows Microsofts losses ( funny how they dont claim this 'loss' on their financial statements huh? ), or the spread of 'pirated' software throughout the world? It doesnt exist, and you will never see it.
And in other news, Microsoft claims windows vista installations offers 35% more stablity, security, user friendliness, value to the end user!
How does the encryption on DVDs and so-called 'copy protected' CDs figure into this? Should we expect the local RIAA and MPAA equivalents to be arrested and jailed? Microsoft and Sony have a lot of hardware code-signing crypto stuff in their consoles, better arrest them all too.
Or are we going to see draconian police thuggery against ordinary people while criminal corporations get ignored or even encouraged by the government? I guess if laws there were being upheld then Tony Blair, Jack Straw, and lots of other government officials would be behind bars right now, so I cant see any way that this will end well.
Try telling a cop/judge that you have the right to break the law when it suits you to do so, and threaten the cop/judge with abduction, torture, and death ( aka, arrest, interogation as a suspected terrorist, and a secret tribunal followed by a firing squad ) if he tries to stop you, claim that you are doing it in the name of national security.
Doesnt seem too plausible, does it? Nor should it be plausibe when done by the Executive branch. Even declaring the intent to do the above is basically conspiracy to commit treason ( if not terrorism as well ), when done by a government official.
Yet despite all this, another day passes, no arrests on these criminals and traitors are made, and the America we once knew dies a little more.
How is posting sections of a service manual fair use?
Is that a serious question? Posting an image from a manual is permitted by Fair Use under the doctrine of Comment and Criticism ( rather than say, Parody or Satire ) in the same way that posting a quotation from a book or a soundbite from a piece of audio is. Apple arent above the law, Fair Use is an obligation on them that they are bound to accept. If they dont, then they are ultimately not even entitled to copyright. Game over.
As far as signed agreements for manuals go, whether this is true or not is irrelevant to the case at hand - the threatening letter was issued on the basis of perceived cpoyright infringment rather than a dispute over anything contractual.
SGIs craylink worked this way - plug two identical systems together via a thick cable, boot each, and you suddenly have a single-system-image box with twice the cpu/ram/IO of any individual component system. Granted no-one other than SGI used it, so as SGIs business fades ( assuming the downward trend of the last few years continues ), it will be a dead technology.
Remaking the concept via an open standard is the first step to getting this sort of specialised technology to filter down to the commodity x86 world. The linux kernel itself is already able to utilise NUMA-workalike archs thanks to the experience with SGI, so getting an optimised and well performing OS on this new hardware should be relatively easy.
Re:Symphathy for Apple
on
Apple vs Bloggers
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
They need to be able to project an image that they will not tolerate people releasing their trade secrets
They can project images all they want, but the legal reality is they have no authority to demand takedowns or threaten anyone. Patents are how they protect interfaces and devices from people that may clone them ( and then they have to be sufficiently unique and ingenious before the device in question is eligable for patent ), not Trade Secrets.
The bottom line is, Apple are the ones behaving in a criminal fashion by going through with these threats, not the people reporting news. Apple have no right to make money. They also have no right to be the sole creator of headphones or any other accessories, with the exception of when patents must be licensed from them to do this.
What exception to the First Amendment exists that gives any company the right to silence reporters of news? None involving Trade Secrets. If the reporters have not signed NDAs and the like, Apple should be told to go piss up a rope. If they dont cease their illegal harassment of the reporters in question, its entirely appropriate to begin criminal proceedings against them.
So you advocate that the intelligent people should all abstain from having offspring, presumably leaving only the stupid ones to reproduce and litter the world with increasingly large numbers of stupid offspring?
Thats not a solution, thats the crux of the problem!
Good call, and its worth pointing out that this is not a security concept limited to Windows and Microsoft software specifically either. Its the reason why an increasingly large number of *nix server daemons are set to run in a chrooted or jailed environment - Apache, many of the OpenBSD-affiliated projects like OpenSSH, OpenNTP, etc all can run this way.
The idea of course being that a remote compromise will only gain access to the chroot environment rather than your juicy and tender/etc files,/sbin binaries, and anything else that can be used to compromise the system further. The same justification of IE browsing via a VMware environment that is either locked down, or easily restored back to a known-good state.
Its simply good security practice regardless of the OS.
Idle CMOS transistor groupings dont contribute to heat though, as they dont consume power, at least in the case of the field effect transistors used in most ICs ( basically a digital on/off switch, rather than the amplifying bipolar junction type you might be more familiar with ). Each state change consumes power while the logic 1 is transitioning to a logic 0, and vice versa. The speed at which the state can change ( aka how high a frequency you can clock the thing before states are being incorrectly stored and/or detected ) is governed by the gate size ( and hence the process size of the chip itself ), which is also correlated with how much power the CMOS transistors will consume during the transition.
So idle transistors arent quite the devil they are made out to be. They take up chip real-estate sure, but dont contribute to heat and power problems. SRAM-type caches on the other hand tend to really suck power and generate heat, due to lots of closely packed transistors all of which change state frequently as the cache is refreshed. Its why the xeons/ppro were crazily power hungry and hot compared to the rest of the cpus at the time. The core itself is a far more efficient piece of circuitry.
That said, the trend with multicores on one chip seems to really be racing and changing at a pace thats given the big CPU makers another lease on life, there was really no way they could keep on increasing the clock speed of the core indefinately as consumers have been led to expect.
Unless the gameguide author is a signatory to Blizzards exclusive deals, then they have no authority over him. And if he did sign some stuff, then he could only be in violation of that contract, a tort - not copyright or trademarks which are an entirely different kettle of fish.
It looks like all Blizzards claims made to eBay regarding the gameguides are false. As others have explained, there is no given example of any copyright violation or trademark violation that has taken place. Not one single case.
Making false claims to eBay is one thing - using the DMCA to do so makes things much worse for Blizzard, as the DMCA explicitly authorises perjury charges to be bought against the claimant if said claims are demonstrably false.
So Blizzard arent just in the wrong, they are now open to criminal prosecution. Given a long and well documented history of criminal wrongdoing by Blizzard ( vis a vis the Freecraft and bnetd debacles ), they are long overdue for one hell of a beating.
Thats the main reason I like and use Courier. Its so easy, yet is without the limitations of other simple-to-configure mail software, like inability to support maildir, failure to perform well under high load, etc.
Sendmail on the other hand is a pretty notious MTA in lots of ways. Besides having a config file that only the clinically insane can comprehend, its also a resource hog and has a fairly poor security record by *nix MTA standards. The new SendmailX which is a complete rewrite of the venerable sendmail codebase is a step in the right direction, but will take a while before its sufficiently feature-complete and trusted for general purpose use.
In the meanwhile there are other alteratives that are as good, or arguably better. Its definately one area in which there is a surfeit of alternatives, which is great!
Wouldnt you regard this as a big issue? It essentially re-introduces slavery, where you have to tithe your income and other assets to corporations for the use of your own DNA. I'd say thats a significant issue. What if you dont pay, are they entitled to repossess their 'valuable IP' if it kills you in the process? Thats dystopian madness.
This mess all come about because some fool company tried to patent facts ( Which are explicitly unable to be patented for very obvious reasons ), the fool USPTO went along with this pretense, as did a federal circuit court. The correct course of action to take would be to charge all of the above with patent fraud, as they are most certainly all in violation - either as direct infringers, or as a party to the crime.
If a federal judge rules that rape or arson is ok in some particular case this does not change the law, which designates rape and arson as both being crimes.
The best RPGs have multiple endings.. lets say you enter the Black Gate, returning to your homeworld and leaving the Guardian to enter Brittania, ravaging the helpless, defenseless population - your former friends and allies abandoned in the hour of their greatest need!!
Or maybe you decide to cast Armageddon, thats always fun! Ha ha Guardian, what use is this world to you now its a lifeless husk, its entire population slain? Except for those pesky offworlders.. now where did I put that blackrock sword?
It seems to me that you've hit upon the reasons as to why the number of CDs shipped has detoriated. Not because of piracy, terrorism, global warming, or any other typical reason given as justification for most pitiful hand-wringing 'oh woe I'm such a victim' rants, but for the simple reason that CDs have stopped being made.
Selling bits of plastic that look like CDs but arent is a popular choice with RIAA cartel members these days. And they wonder why people resort to the only way they have left to get music - downloading it online.
Lets have a big round of applause for the RIAA for doing the audio equivalent of burning down an art gallery!
My experience with windows swapping ( not recent, but circa NT4 & Win2k ) is that as well as slowing down the system significantly, it also contributes to instability. Why this is I dont know, I have never seen any other OS be lock-up and crash-prone when they use swap heavily, but it seems to be a certainty under windows.
Monitor your physmem and swap usages if you can and see if there is a correlation. Or if you cant do this, try and get some extra RAM from somewhere ( modules that you know are 100% fault free ), run with it for a while, and see if it makes a difference.
I believe that the elections were sufficiently rigged to disqualify them from any validity, hence you still cant blame the American people for all post-2004 actions. There was a huge amount of evidence that Diebold were gearing up to commit electoral fraud in cohorts with the GOP before the vote was cast. Post-electoral 'discrepancies' that have been uncovered are statistically impossible to have occured in a random, non-controlled way - think throwing a six-sided die one million times and getting a 6 each time.
Hussein had elections too you may recall, ones in which he routinely won 99% of the vote. Vote rigging is a sign of a dictatorship, as are any laws giving said dictator the power to kill, imprison or torture their citizens on a whim, or as a result of 'evidence' that is subjective and easily fabricated. The Patriot Act could have been recycled and copied word-for-word from the legal machinations of Pinochet, the Ba'ath party, or the NKVD.
Treason the likes of which would have seen previous political figures torn apart by a mob, put up against a stake and shot, or dangling at the end of a rope are now 'patriotic initiatives'. The Reichstag has been burned, and history seems to be repeating itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Its a faux democracy, just like the all the african dicatorships that call themselves 'democratic republic of foobaristan', those ones where armed militia force citizens to 'vote' at gunpoint. And the suburbs with voters belonging to the opposition parties mysteriously catch fire on polling day.
In the last week George Bush had both houses pass laws giving him the authority to order the abduction and torture of american citizens indefinately, based on his word alone. He also had laws passed that retroactively exempt him from being charged with war crimes and terrorist offenses from 2001 onward.
When any citizen can be abducted by the state and tortured to death 'legally', then that state is a defacto dictatorship regardless of how elections are held, or if they're even held at all. In 5 years America has gone from a democratic state in which liberties are treasured and upheld, to a state teetering on the brink of a facist, fundamentalist and terrorist run nightmare nation of despots and villians. Whats it going to be like 5 years from now?
Perhaps these 'songs' were recordings of the Plaintiff saying 'Bite my shiny metal ass' ?
Using a screenshot which may easily faked showing names of songs that may never have been RIAA property is about as legally compelling as sworn testimony from an alcoholic wifebeater who claims that his TV talks to him and tells him to molest small animals.
The RIAA should have their asses handed back to them on a plate with a heft fine for wasting the courts time.
Shame on them from not coming to fight it
Crackpot backwards laws (such as whatever dumbass law this judge was ruling on that seems to help criminals and make firewalls & filters illegal) in foreign countries are things that ought be be ignored. Why should one idiot regime in some wretched craphole be able to threaten the rest of the world with awful laws? Do you see bikini models in the US meekly travelling to Saudi Arabia and submitting to Sharia law? Its asinine that you could even conceive of such a thing.
Now that SCO is taking its last gasps I guess /. needs its regular inflamatory tabloid filler lunatic rants from somewhere.
Who'd a thunk it, ESR actually *is* useful for something! We need never fear slow news days ever again!
What amazes me is the 1.7 _billion_ transistor count! Thats over 1000 80486 cpus worth of transistor, or over 500 pentiums. The power ( flops, mips ) of the Itanic is pretty poor by comparison. Hell, even a single 100 MHz 486 DX4 is still decent enough in this day and age to do useful work.
I estimate that approx 100% of felons have consumed a dangerous pharmaceutical chemical known as Dihydrogen Monoxide shortly before committing crimes. Indeed, this lethal poison is widespread, able to be purhased at many stores without ID, even commonly sold to minors! It contaminates lakes and high concentrations can even be found in the breast milk of mothers who go on to pass the deadly substance onto their newborns.
This evil must be stopped!
http://www.dhmo.org/
Then they give me this excuse "everybody at school is doing it".
/Not yours
That sounds suspiciously like a democratic consensus. I hope you beat the wretch and did your best to indoctrinate him with selfishness, greed, slavish devotion to authority figures, and the basic tenets of fascism. No America, you cant have democracy!!
I wouldnt call RIAA tactics a legislative ( with the implication of lawfulness and law-abiding behaviour ) process, it is more of a criminal process. If I decide overnight I am entitled to million of dollars, then set about 'recovering' the 'valuable funds' that were 'stolen' from me by society at large, then am I permitted to kick down the doors of families and rob them at knifepoint?
The RIAA does precisely this, albeit with the threat of lawsuits instead. There is no doubt at all that these actions are criminal, its an indictment on the corruption of politicians and the law-enforcement community that these felons can operate with impunity as they are currently doing. Leveraged with bribes in the form of campaign donations. Its one of the few truly black-and-white issues in government, they sure as hell arent acting in the interests of their consituents, and the conflict-of-interest position that govt members are in makes corruption a certainty rather than a mere possibility.
What is a well-meaning citizen to do? Sitting idly by and becoming another victim of the RIAA and their pet senators and congressmen is not an option. Its a war against slavery in a way, and the battle is against a group of powerful people who believe they have a right to own and control you, and everything you see and hear.
We sometimes forget just how amazing the developments in computing have been over the last three decades.
Not really, its just that said computing developments are overshadowed by the capacity of commercial software to consume all available system resources and deliver performance that is orders of magnitude slower with each successive generation.
Put a Windows Vista install on the latest cray, and you too can marvel at how quickly a multi-million dollar piece of computing quickly becomes a slow, unstable pile of junk.
The BSA are essentially a marketing department of Microsoft. Instead of the traditional way that marketers operate ( ooh, look how shiny and desirable our new product is! ), they operate in a way akin to the mafia ( buy our product or else we will break your knees and throw you in prison ).
Its all lies and spin, just as with any other marketing exercise. Where is the evidence that shows Microsofts losses ( funny how they dont claim this 'loss' on their financial statements huh? ), or the spread of 'pirated' software throughout the world? It doesnt exist, and you will never see it.
And in other news, Microsoft claims windows vista installations offers 35% more stablity, security, user friendliness, value to the end user!
How does the encryption on DVDs and so-called 'copy protected' CDs figure into this? Should we expect the local RIAA and MPAA equivalents to be arrested and jailed? Microsoft and Sony have a lot of hardware code-signing crypto stuff in their consoles, better arrest them all too.
Or are we going to see draconian police thuggery against ordinary people while criminal corporations get ignored or even encouraged by the government? I guess if laws there were being upheld then Tony Blair, Jack Straw, and lots of other government officials would be behind bars right now, so I cant see any way that this will end well.
Try telling a cop/judge that you have the right to break the law when it suits you to do so, and threaten the cop/judge with abduction, torture, and death ( aka, arrest, interogation as a suspected terrorist, and a secret tribunal followed by a firing squad ) if he tries to stop you, claim that you are doing it in the name of national security.
Doesnt seem too plausible, does it? Nor should it be plausibe when done by the Executive branch. Even declaring the intent to do the above is basically conspiracy to commit treason ( if not terrorism as well ), when done by a government official.
Yet despite all this, another day passes, no arrests on these criminals and traitors are made, and the America we once knew dies a little more.
How is posting sections of a service manual fair use?
Is that a serious question? Posting an image from a manual is permitted by Fair Use under the doctrine of Comment and Criticism ( rather than say, Parody or Satire ) in the same way that posting a quotation from a book or a soundbite from a piece of audio is. Apple arent above the law, Fair Use is an obligation on them that they are bound to accept. If they dont, then they are ultimately not even entitled to copyright. Game over.
As far as signed agreements for manuals go, whether this is true or not is irrelevant to the case at hand - the threatening letter was issued on the basis of perceived cpoyright infringment rather than a dispute over anything contractual.
SGIs craylink worked this way - plug two identical systems together via a thick cable, boot each, and you suddenly have a single-system-image box with twice the cpu/ram/IO of any individual component system. Granted no-one other than SGI used it, so as SGIs business fades ( assuming the downward trend of the last few years continues ), it will be a dead technology.
Remaking the concept via an open standard is the first step to getting this sort of specialised technology to filter down to the commodity x86 world. The linux kernel itself is already able to utilise NUMA-workalike archs thanks to the experience with SGI, so getting an optimised and well performing OS on this new hardware should be relatively easy.
They need to be able to project an image that they will not tolerate people releasing their trade secrets
They can project images all they want, but the legal reality is they have no authority to demand takedowns or threaten anyone. Patents are how they protect interfaces and devices from people that may clone them ( and then they have to be sufficiently unique and ingenious before the device in question is eligable for patent ), not Trade Secrets.
The bottom line is, Apple are the ones behaving in a criminal fashion by going through with these threats, not the people reporting news. Apple have no right to make money. They also have no right to be the sole creator of headphones or any other accessories, with the exception of when patents must be licensed from them to do this.
What exception to the First Amendment exists that gives any company the right to silence reporters of news? None involving Trade Secrets. If the reporters have not signed NDAs and the like, Apple should be told to go piss up a rope. If they dont cease their illegal harassment of the reporters in question, its entirely appropriate to begin criminal proceedings against them.
So you advocate that the intelligent people should all abstain from having offspring, presumably leaving only the stupid ones to reproduce and litter the world with increasingly large numbers of stupid offspring?
Thats not a solution, thats the crux of the problem!
Good call, and its worth pointing out that this is not a security concept limited to Windows and Microsoft software specifically either. Its the reason why an increasingly large number of *nix server daemons are set to run in a chrooted or jailed environment - Apache, many of the OpenBSD-affiliated projects like OpenSSH, OpenNTP, etc all can run this way.
/etc files, /sbin binaries, and anything else that can be used to compromise the system further. The same justification of IE browsing via a VMware environment that is either locked down, or easily restored back to a known-good state.
The idea of course being that a remote compromise will only gain access to the chroot environment rather than your juicy and tender
Its simply good security practice regardless of the OS.
Idle CMOS transistor groupings dont contribute to heat though, as they dont consume power, at least in the case of the field effect transistors used in most ICs ( basically a digital on/off switch, rather than the amplifying bipolar junction type you might be more familiar with ). Each state change consumes power while the logic 1 is transitioning to a logic 0, and vice versa. The speed at which the state can change ( aka how high a frequency you can clock the thing before states are being incorrectly stored and/or detected ) is governed by the gate size ( and hence the process size of the chip itself ), which is also correlated with how much power the CMOS transistors will consume during the transition.
So idle transistors arent quite the devil they are made out to be. They take up chip real-estate sure, but dont contribute to heat and power problems. SRAM-type caches on the other hand tend to really suck power and generate heat, due to lots of closely packed transistors all of which change state frequently as the cache is refreshed. Its why the xeons/ppro were crazily power hungry and hot compared to the rest of the cpus at the time. The core itself is a far more efficient piece of circuitry.
That said, the trend with multicores on one chip seems to really be racing and changing at a pace thats given the big CPU makers another lease on life, there was really no way they could keep on increasing the clock speed of the core indefinately as consumers have been led to expect.
Unless the gameguide author is a signatory to Blizzards exclusive deals, then they have no authority over him. And if he did sign some stuff, then he could only be in violation of that contract, a tort - not copyright or trademarks which are an entirely different kettle of fish.
It looks like all Blizzards claims made to eBay regarding the gameguides are false. As others have explained, there is no given example of any copyright violation or trademark violation that has taken place. Not one single case.
Making false claims to eBay is one thing - using the DMCA to do so makes things much worse for Blizzard, as the DMCA explicitly authorises perjury charges to be bought against the claimant if said claims are demonstrably false.
So Blizzard arent just in the wrong, they are now open to criminal prosecution. Given a long and well documented history of criminal wrongdoing by Blizzard ( vis a vis the Freecraft and bnetd debacles ), they are long overdue for one hell of a beating.
Thats the main reason I like and use Courier. Its so easy, yet is without the limitations of other simple-to-configure mail software, like inability to support maildir, failure to perform well under high load, etc.
Sendmail on the other hand is a pretty notious MTA in lots of ways. Besides having a config file that only the clinically insane can comprehend, its also a resource hog and has a fairly poor security record by *nix MTA standards. The new SendmailX which is a complete rewrite of the venerable sendmail codebase is a step in the right direction, but will take a while before its sufficiently feature-complete and trusted for general purpose use.
In the meanwhile there are other alteratives that are as good, or arguably better. Its definately one area in which there is a surfeit of alternatives, which is great!
Wouldnt you regard this as a big issue? It essentially re-introduces slavery, where you have to tithe your income and other assets to corporations for the use of your own DNA. I'd say thats a significant issue. What if you dont pay, are they entitled to repossess their 'valuable IP' if it kills you in the process? Thats dystopian madness.
This mess all come about because some fool company tried to patent facts ( Which are explicitly unable to be patented for very obvious reasons ), the fool USPTO went along with this pretense, as did a federal circuit court. The correct course of action to take would be to charge all of the above with patent fraud, as they are most certainly all in violation - either as direct infringers, or as a party to the crime.
If a federal judge rules that rape or arson is ok in some particular case this does not change the law, which designates rape and arson as both being crimes.
The best RPGs have multiple endings.. lets say you enter the Black Gate, returning to your homeworld and leaving the Guardian to enter Brittania, ravaging the helpless, defenseless population - your former friends and allies abandoned in the hour of their greatest need!!
Or maybe you decide to cast Armageddon, thats always fun! Ha ha Guardian, what use is this world to you now its a lifeless husk, its entire population slain? Except for those pesky offworlders.. now where did I put that blackrock sword?
It seems to me that you've hit upon the reasons as to why the number of CDs shipped has detoriated. Not because of piracy, terrorism, global warming, or any other typical reason given as justification for most pitiful hand-wringing 'oh woe I'm such a victim' rants, but for the simple reason that CDs have stopped being made.
Selling bits of plastic that look like CDs but arent is a popular choice with RIAA cartel members these days. And they wonder why people resort to the only way they have left to get music - downloading it online.
Lets have a big round of applause for the RIAA for doing the audio equivalent of burning down an art gallery!
My experience with windows swapping ( not recent, but circa NT4 & Win2k ) is that as well as slowing down the system significantly, it also contributes to instability. Why this is I dont know, I have never seen any other OS be lock-up and crash-prone when they use swap heavily, but it seems to be a certainty under windows.
Monitor your physmem and swap usages if you can and see if there is a correlation. Or if you cant do this, try and get some extra RAM from somewhere ( modules that you know are 100% fault free ), run with it for a while, and see if it makes a difference.
I believe that the elections were sufficiently rigged to disqualify them from any validity, hence you still cant blame the American people for all post-2004 actions. There was a huge amount of evidence that Diebold were gearing up to commit electoral fraud in cohorts with the GOP before the vote was cast. Post-electoral 'discrepancies' that have been uncovered are statistically impossible to have occured in a random, non-controlled way - think throwing a six-sided die one million times and getting a 6 each time.
Hussein had elections too you may recall, ones in which he routinely won 99% of the vote. Vote rigging is a sign of a dictatorship, as are any laws giving said dictator the power to kill, imprison or torture their citizens on a whim, or as a result of 'evidence' that is subjective and easily fabricated. The Patriot Act could have been recycled and copied word-for-word from the legal machinations of Pinochet, the Ba'ath party, or the NKVD.
Treason the likes of which would have seen previous political figures torn apart by a mob, put up against a stake and shot, or dangling at the end of a rope are now 'patriotic initiatives'. The Reichstag has been burned, and history seems to be repeating itself.