I think the bigger point is why in the name of god do the OLPC laptops have this surveillance method implemented.
My laptop doesn't have a remote kill switch put into it to prevent "theft", it doesn't tie a unique identifier to my internet transactions(my ISP does, but that's not my laptop). There's no reason for any of this stuff to be on the laptop for some geeky kid to need to get around.
The US could always stop being idiotic and make election day a federal public holiday, or make it illegal to fire someone for missing work on an election day(the way it's already illegal to fire someone for getting called up into the reserves.
They could also fund elections properly at the state or federal level so that everyone got a vote.
This isn't a problem with e-voting(most voting uses machines of some sort anyway, and there have been long lines in poorer urban areas for longer than there's been e-voting) it has to do with a US system which doesn't really want certain types of people to vote in the first place, e-voting or otherwise, and which is in general poorly funded and regulated.
For that matter election fraud didn't just appear with e-voting, it's something that happens. Mind you it's only really effective in elections where the results are pretty close. The 2000 election may have involved voter fraud, it certainly involved the tragedy of the electoral college, but it mostly involved the fact that Al Gore, despite all his new environmental passion and personality, was a terrible candidate. Yet another of the long line of left wing candidates who believe that folks like Bill Clinton got elected because they were centrist and had no real policy as opposed to the fact that they were folks like Bill Clinton.
And neither Linux nor OSX would protect against this.
This attack is going to be going after your data, not your OS. They don't need to get administrator or root access on your box, so the fact that you're running as a regular user doesn't matter. They don't need the escalation, because you already have access to what they want. Neither linux nor OSX protect against a user who runs something that's infected, or gets done in by XSS, or most of the other things that actually result in real infections. All it does is protect the OS, which considering I can reinstall even my gentoo box from scratch in less than a day, isn't anything much compared to your data.
If you want third party candidates in the states, you need to get run off voting working. You still end up with a candidate from one of the two major parties, but it's easier to change which parties are major(though not easy) and the two major parties don't get to ignore everyone else.
It's not as bad as it used to be, and to be honest it was really only bad because it was one of the first serious attempts at cross platform code.
Sun should have just built the JVM's smart enough to handle all the abstraction of file writes and reads and buffers and all that rot in the first place.
Instead they went for a simplified VM and a complex programming structure. Personally I think a lot of this had to do with the fact that in the early days Java was slow and making the JVM any more complicated was probably counter productive. I think this was probably the wrong way to go as no one in their right minds liked all that IOStream and Buffer nonsense even if some of us understood why they did it.
And the abuse of the social contract began way before you were a kid. Likely well before anyone alive was a kid, but certainly before anyone who grew up with recordable media was.
Yes it being easier to copy means more copying is going on, but if prices were lower and copyright was more fair a lot of the people would stop copying. True there'd still be a few "I download it because I"m cheap" deadbeats, but those people wouldn't pay for it anyway and so are outside the equation.
In that case you're probably right, specifically since, at least to my understanding, knowing what the old testament would cover a largish chunk of two religions.
The Mona Lisa does indeed have value, as does all art, it has value as art. That's why we have copyright in the first place, not to guarantee some schmuck an income but because art and in more general terms creativity has value in and of itself.
The more people who see a painting they love, or listen to music they love, or see a play/movie that moves them, or see how things work and can build off that work to create something new the better off we are as a society. This is what they mean by information wanting to be free.
Copyright is a compromise/social contract between the needs of society to have more and more beautiful things and the needs of artists to be able to create beautiful things without starving to death. Society knows that information has no intrinsic monetary value because it has an infinite supply, but it also realizes that information has an incredible non monetary value and so it's production needs to be encouraged.
I agree with you that the fact that the youth of today are becoming more and more anti-copyright is a tragedy. I've already said that I believe a world without the creative works that are possible because of copyright would be a poorer place to live.
On the other hand I believe that today's youth being anti-copyright comes more from the fact that the copyright holders have abused their side of the deal than from anything else. They take as much value as they can and give nothing back.
Your issues with Mickey Mouse and the Windows Logo are more issues of trademark than copyright which is a different sort of situation(and particularly complex in situations like Mickey Mouse where copyright and trademark overlap), but even on that grounds I think that it would be better to have everyone who wants to watch Steam Boat Willy or Snow White or even some of the more recent Disney productions than for Disney to be able to control and profit from them after all these years.
While I agree with you that knowing something about other peoples religions is a useful thing to know, and while I might even agree with you that given that lapsed Christianity is the most prevalent religion in most western societies, knowing the exact contents of the bible, let alone the order of the books is really rather pointless.
Technically speaking you could be one of those folks who believe that every word in the bible is true and memorize every word in the bible so that you know what you believe and you still wouldn't actually have to know the order of the books(though unless someone cut up your bible and gave it back to you in random order as an experiment you probably would). Since even a devout follower doesn't actually need to know what book comes after Genesis, I doubt that someone of another faith(or lack thereof) should need to know that kind of detail.
If they really wanted to test cultural or historical knowledge of the bible they could have asked a whole lot more applicable questions.
Actually Blu-Ray is failing to fly off the shelf because it's not value for money. DRM has very little to do with it.
It's not value for money because you need a relatively large, modern HD, TV(expensive) to notice the quality difference, an expensive player to play them and on average at least here in Australia they're about 60% more expensive.
When large HD TV's become common place, Blu-Ray players are around $100-150, and blu-ray discs are priced at a point that consumers think they're worth the money then(presuming anyone still buys physical media discs by then) blu-ray will be ubiquitous. If they can provide a visible increase in quality to old dvd's they might even resell some of their back catalog though of course probably not on the same level as the analog to digital conversion of the 90's.
The problem with sales has very little to do with piracy and very little to do with draconian DRM(at least beyond the type that inconveniences users), and a lot to do with competition for increasingly scarce luxury dollars.
Media companies can just never get it through their heads that they sell luxury goods, and that they need to provide people with something that is worth paying for because people can live without it.
If gaming becomes prohibitively difficult or prohibitively expensive people will stop, they'll go outdoors, or read books or do any of the things they did before gaming came along. People buy entertainment to be entertained and the moment you're no longer providing entertainment people will stop buying your product.
Copyright is a social contract, the entire principle behind it is to add an artificial value to something which in the free market is essentially valueless. It does this on the basis that while the replication of a creative idea is free, the creation of it is not and while creative people can always make a living in other ways and even continue their art, it'd be better for society if the ones who created good works could have a revenue stream to continue creating them.
The problem in the modern era is not that the marginal cost has come down(it was never all that high), but that the copyright holders have breached their side of the contract. The length of copyright is such that a copyright holder can sometimes ensure that one or two pieces of work can provide an income not only for themselves but for their descendants. While wise investment of the profits from a successful creative work has always had this capability, it is only fairly recently that the creative work itself could do this.
This not only means that creative individuals(and the children of creative individuals who might have otherwise been creative themselves) are, contrary to the intention of the social contract not encouraged to create, but that their works do not reenter the public domain and provide value to society in general.
Copyright law cannot be enforced because the majority of people do not believe they are doing anything wrong when they break it. The reason(IMO) for this is that they feel consciously or not, that the other side broke the deal first. Unless copyright returns to it's original intent, or the social contract is successfully redefined(a difficult proposition for all those reeducation classes they want to give students since it's hard to convince someone that they shouldn't want a fair deal), copyright will die. If copyright dies, a great number of ideas and creations that might otherwise benefit society may never be created and industries and creative individuals will be forced to conceal their ideas in order to protect their value.
This would not be a good thing, so for the good of society hopefully we can find a compromise where artists and inventors get to make a living(though not forever) and society gets free access to creativity(though not right away).
Because it's not indistinguishable from ftp. Ftp is a two server protocol which is designed to transfer files. E-mail is a service which can go through any number of servers all but two of which will be outside your control and which was designed to send small amounts of text. Even attachments in SMTP is a bit of a nasty kludge as much as we've been doing it. It's not the right solution to the problem.
The difference is really very simple, it's an issue of the number of copies.
If you play a movie for 50 people, you only need 1 copy. If you want to rent a movie to 50 people simultaneously you need 50 copies.
Public performance metaphorically creates a copy of the item for every viewer, if you profit by this or do it for too many people you don't get fair use coverage any more and it's illegal.
Renting is not the same thing at all, you have one copy which you legally purchased, you loan the copy to someone else, only one person has that copy at any one time. As has previously been pointed out, even if you wanted to try and make it illegal the rental company could always just "sell" the copy to their customer with a promise to buy it back minus an amount per diem. They could even contractually agree up front to accept a certain amount of the price up front.
Renting isn't illegal because it's pointless to make it so. You can easily draw up a sales contract that simulates renting to the point where there's no practical difference. Therefor making it illegal just means more paperwork.
Public performance is a totally different beast as there's no way to simulate that with actions that are already legal, and it allows someone to meet demand artificially. If 50 people want this guy's video, and they want it now, then if the rental agency only has one copy the only way that the other 49 can get it is to go to the source(mind you at $80 they may not likely to do this and will probably just wait, but that's an issue of price point). If the company performs the video they could show it to the 50 people meeting demand while only purchasing one copy.
The rental agency isn't doing anything illegal so long as they're only renting out the copy(s) they legally purchased. If people are making their own copies of the video that's a copyright violation, but it's not the rental company's violation, but the renter's.
The only reason the closed source nvidia drivers have ever broken on me in the last 5 years were when the kernel changed, usually for no particularly good reason.
The reason why "future proofing" is a problem in the linux world is because the attitude of some open source developers is "I'm going to change it because I want to, if it breaks anything either it's open source and someone else will fix it or it's close source and evil so I don't care".
Yes, but when they release it on an ASIC it won't be any different than any other card out there, and you could buy a better card for hardware research for less money.
I don't care if my drivers are closed source or open source, I care if they work. The nvidia drivers work perfectly well on Linux(at least Intel/AMD linux), they've worked perfectly well(excluding times when the kernel devs screw up the existing drivers), for years.
If you really want totally open source drivers they'll be available for ATI cards in the not too distant future.
This graphics card when it finishes won't be "open source" because you won't be able to change it, it might have open specifications, and it might have a good relationship with the open source community, but the open source community is just as bad at maintaining a relationship with hardware vendors as hardware vendors are at maintaining a relationship with open source.
If you're willing to pay $1500 for your ideology that's your call, but I'd rather pay $500 and get a card that's substantially faster, and is actually programmed to do something other than diagnose itself and I don't really give a rats if the drivers are open or closed source.
Taxis don't compete with public transport, you get a taxi because you want to get where you want to go quickly and roughly on your own schedule without having to drive your own car. Generally they get their business through situations where parking is a problem or where the person using the taxi is going to be drinking.
Public transport competes with your own personal automobile which is comfortable, convenient and even with increased petrol prices, fairly cheap. For the individual there's pretty much no reason to take public transport if they can possible avoid it unless it's cheaper than driving their car.
For society however it's quite good for people to take public transport(less pollution, less wear and tear on roads, less need for large unproductive parking structures as opposed to businesses or god forbid green space, less traffic congestion and so less road rage, more time for people to be at home with their families or working or spending money or doing anything at all besides sitting in a car and pumping noxious crap into the air).
Public transport is also a very serious loss leader thing, no one takes public transport until it's convenient and it doesn't get convenient until you've got a whole lot of buses/trains running all over the place all the time.
The other point is of course that if the US didn't spend more on the military than every single other country in the world combined they could afford to do a lot of these things without having to increase taxes at all, not to mention that if your employer were to be able to pay the amount of money they pay for your insurance to you you'd probably make more money even after a tax increase.
Well e-mail isn't really a practical solution for a large volume data set, which presumably it is or there wouldn't be much point. So while PGP e-mail is quite a wonderful technique, it won't help much.
You've also got to remember that you only have control over the security of the data during transit. It's all you're legally responsible for and it's all you have any sort of effective control over. So you're really looking for the best solution based on the transmission type you choose. For anyone who wants to put all sorts of extra security on it remember the thing problem with copy protection you can't secure something and give people the access to view it at the same time, so if the recipient doesn't secure it properly in their system, no amount of PGP is going to help anyone.
If the data set is fairly small, then encrypted e-mail might be a valid solution. If it's small to middling in size or you need to do frequent transfers SFTP or FTPS would be viable(presuming you're not using keys generated in the last two years on a debian box).
The simplest solution would be to encrypt the data, put it on a CD/DVD/Portable HD, and send it by courier or deliver it yourself(ideally in a sealed envelope). You get a signature to verify you sent it, you get a signature to verify who picked it up, you've got proof it wasn't tampered with and if someone steals it along the way it's not worth anything.
If it were me I'd also ensure that your contract with the recipient includes liability for any security breaches within their system including appropriate financial penalties. Any of those solutions will ensure it gets to the recipient without someone else stealing it and that's all you can do.
Capitalism isn't evil, neither is money. The fundamental problem with capitalism and in particular US capitalism is a problem of human nature. Capitalism doesn't value money above all, it values "my" money over all.
Most of the "socialist" things that western governments do are profitable for private business.
Public schools and cheap/free higher education, if properly used, increase the educated work force and allow for greater productivity and profit.
Public health care, if properly used, increases the overall health and productive lifespan of the population allowing for more productivity and greater profit.
Public transport reduces the wear and tear on roads, decreases the consumption of oil(and therefor both the environmental impact and the actual cost of petrol), provides cleaner air(see benefits of public health care), reduces traffic congestion and therefor commute time, requirements for businesses to build parking structures, cost of expansion of roads, and a number of other things.
These sorts of things benefit everyone, including businesses, however no one wants to pay for them because that would involve a reduction in "my" money.
The same thing goes for the long term costs of things. A CEO is interested in increasing his or her own personal wealth above all other things(that's how capitalism works), but the system has been put in place such that the only thing that matters to his or her own personal wealth is the short term results of his or her actions combined with luck. Any CEO with half a brain will trade a profit today resulting in a massive loss 5 years down the road for a small loss today resulting in a massive profit 5 years down the road.
This means that things like environmental pollution, outsourcing, and other forms of exploitation are rewarded for their short term benefits as opposed to punished for their long term consequences.
The problem with all of this is that in order to force companies to recognize long term costs and to organize the creation of and management of services which in and of themselves may never be profitable but which reduce costs and increase profits over the whole of society, we need a government, because populist and short sighted though they may be they're still better than private enterprise at certain things.
Yeah, but the reason the community faded was because they left azeroth to rot, not because of the badges.
In the old days folks hit 60, they raided some, they ground rep some, and they alted some, there were always people around at every level, you could find groups for most instances without too much difficulty. There was some tedium, yes, and some of the content was never seen by any but the most hard core of raiders, but there was a constant cycle from 1-60 over and over again.
TBC was a bunch of really great content, they made the raids smaller and a lot of them shorter, the introduced tiered instances so you could run something new in a couple of hours as opposed to the 3-4 some of the old instances used to take if you didn't have a perfect group. The new abilities were great, the zones were beautiful, the quests were more interesting, etc. But they left azeroth a wasteland, the new starting zones are quite fun, but they'll only take you to 20 and you end up with 40 levels of week quests and pain before you get to outland. People don't alt as much anymore, and when they do they're pretty much so focused on leveling they won't bother to stop for other people or their folks like me who don't have the time to group much and so are pretty much anti-social.
They've increased the rate of leveling(at least through quests) so that people can get to level 60 faster so that there are more tanks and healers and the like, and presumably so that people stay playing, but it doesn't foster any sort of community at any level beyond raiding 70, which is sad really.
They didn't misuse the term. Intuitive is not the same as easy. Generally speaking intuitive and hard tends to sell a little better than non intuitive and easy and both do better than non intuitive and hard(unless they're FOSS).
A hammer is a very intuitive device, as previously indicated it's got a handle and a smashy end, and while if you presented a hammer and a nail to someone who had never seen either before they might not work out how to use it(though if you gave someone a hammer and told them to go out and kill someone with it, which was probably where the hammer evolved from they'd have no trouble with that), anyone who knows that what they want to do is stick a nail in a board would be able to work out how to do it with a hammer.
Hammers are even fairly easy to use, even I can hit a nail with a hammer and put it into wood. That said though using something and using it really well are two totally different things, and you're unlike to replicated in a few days something that probably took your shop teacher decades of practice and which tbh isn't really all that useful a skill for anything other than impressing students, so you're pretty much just wrong.
First of >$1000 does not mean high end it means expensive. Yes many Expensive PC's are also high end PC's, but that's not always the case. You wouldn't call a macbook Air high end, whatever else it may have going for it. Even defining a high end computer is a bit of a difficulty, are we talking performance, features, or just the extreme end of a particular market(such as the Air).
Second $US 1000 buys you an awful lot of computer(at least in the US) these days, nearly anyone who needs something more powerful than that is likely to either build it themselves or get it built by someone whose sales won't be included in this survey. I don't see anywhere where they're counting consumer grade CPU sales from AMD and Intel or the like, or anything else.
If you want to use this data to argue that Mac is the only large bulk premium grade computer retailer left in the united states, and that they have the largest percentage of that market, then go right ahead. This is of course patently obvious to anyone as the decrease in the cost of PC components coupled with the move away from pre-built PC's as well as the major PC retailers move towards low cost PC's should make thsi pretty obvious.
The fact that Mac can exist in a market that has pretty much died for PC's is an interesting idea and perhaps one which might be worthy of some discussion, but meaningless statistics like this are really rather pointless. A bit like claiming that if Intel or AMD chip sales were higher than the sales of SPARC processors that Sun was failing in the server market.
Wikipedia is a perfectly reliable source of information for anything which isn't remotely controversial and which is relatively technical(so that the experts use computers a lot).
No one is going to bribe Jimmy to change the entry on T-rays, and you're not going to find some fringe group gaming the system either(at least as far AFAIK), so it's probably pretty reliable.
Wikipedia has its uses, it's just pretty useless for anything where there's any sort of argument or vested interest.
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My laptop doesn't have a remote kill switch put into it to prevent "theft", it doesn't tie a unique identifier to my internet transactions(my ISP does, but that's not my laptop). There's no reason for any of this stuff to be on the laptop for some geeky kid to need to get around.
They could also fund elections properly at the state or federal level so that everyone got a vote.
This isn't a problem with e-voting(most voting uses machines of some sort anyway, and there have been long lines in poorer urban areas for longer than there's been e-voting) it has to do with a US system which doesn't really want certain types of people to vote in the first place, e-voting or otherwise, and which is in general poorly funded and regulated.
For that matter election fraud didn't just appear with e-voting, it's something that happens. Mind you it's only really effective in elections where the results are pretty close. The 2000 election may have involved voter fraud, it certainly involved the tragedy of the electoral college, but it mostly involved the fact that Al Gore, despite all his new environmental passion and personality, was a terrible candidate. Yet another of the long line of left wing candidates who believe that folks like Bill Clinton got elected because they were centrist and had no real policy as opposed to the fact that they were folks like Bill Clinton.
This attack is going to be going after your data, not your OS. They don't need to get administrator or root access on your box, so the fact that you're running as a regular user doesn't matter. They don't need the escalation, because you already have access to what they want. Neither linux nor OSX protect against a user who runs something that's infected, or gets done in by XSS, or most of the other things that actually result in real infections. All it does is protect the OS, which considering I can reinstall even my gentoo box from scratch in less than a day, isn't anything much compared to your data.
If you want third party candidates in the states, you need to get run off voting working. You still end up with a candidate from one of the two major parties, but it's easier to change which parties are major(though not easy) and the two major parties don't get to ignore everyone else.
Sun should have just built the JVM's smart enough to handle all the abstraction of file writes and reads and buffers and all that rot in the first place.
Instead they went for a simplified VM and a complex programming structure. Personally I think a lot of this had to do with the fact that in the early days Java was slow and making the JVM any more complicated was probably counter productive. I think this was probably the wrong way to go as no one in their right minds liked all that IOStream and Buffer nonsense even if some of us understood why they did it.
Yes it being easier to copy means more copying is going on, but if prices were lower and copyright was more fair a lot of the people would stop copying. True there'd still be a few "I download it because I"m cheap" deadbeats, but those people wouldn't pay for it anyway and so are outside the equation.
In that case you're probably right, specifically since, at least to my understanding, knowing what the old testament would cover a largish chunk of two religions.
The more people who see a painting they love, or listen to music they love, or see a play/movie that moves them, or see how things work and can build off that work to create something new the better off we are as a society. This is what they mean by information wanting to be free.
Copyright is a compromise/social contract between the needs of society to have more and more beautiful things and the needs of artists to be able to create beautiful things without starving to death. Society knows that information has no intrinsic monetary value because it has an infinite supply, but it also realizes that information has an incredible non monetary value and so it's production needs to be encouraged.
I agree with you that the fact that the youth of today are becoming more and more anti-copyright is a tragedy. I've already said that I believe a world without the creative works that are possible because of copyright would be a poorer place to live.
On the other hand I believe that today's youth being anti-copyright comes more from the fact that the copyright holders have abused their side of the deal than from anything else. They take as much value as they can and give nothing back.
Your issues with Mickey Mouse and the Windows Logo are more issues of trademark than copyright which is a different sort of situation(and particularly complex in situations like Mickey Mouse where copyright and trademark overlap), but even on that grounds I think that it would be better to have everyone who wants to watch Steam Boat Willy or Snow White or even some of the more recent Disney productions than for Disney to be able to control and profit from them after all these years.
Technically speaking you could be one of those folks who believe that every word in the bible is true and memorize every word in the bible so that you know what you believe and you still wouldn't actually have to know the order of the books(though unless someone cut up your bible and gave it back to you in random order as an experiment you probably would). Since even a devout follower doesn't actually need to know what book comes after Genesis, I doubt that someone of another faith(or lack thereof) should need to know that kind of detail.
If they really wanted to test cultural or historical knowledge of the bible they could have asked a whole lot more applicable questions.
It's not value for money because you need a relatively large, modern HD, TV(expensive) to notice the quality difference, an expensive player to play them and on average at least here in Australia they're about 60% more expensive.
When large HD TV's become common place, Blu-Ray players are around $100-150, and blu-ray discs are priced at a point that consumers think they're worth the money then(presuming anyone still buys physical media discs by then) blu-ray will be ubiquitous. If they can provide a visible increase in quality to old dvd's they might even resell some of their back catalog though of course probably not on the same level as the analog to digital conversion of the 90's.
The problem with sales has very little to do with piracy and very little to do with draconian DRM(at least beyond the type that inconveniences users), and a lot to do with competition for increasingly scarce luxury dollars.
Media companies can just never get it through their heads that they sell luxury goods, and that they need to provide people with something that is worth paying for because people can live without it.
If gaming becomes prohibitively difficult or prohibitively expensive people will stop, they'll go outdoors, or read books or do any of the things they did before gaming came along. People buy entertainment to be entertained and the moment you're no longer providing entertainment people will stop buying your product.
The problem in the modern era is not that the marginal cost has come down(it was never all that high), but that the copyright holders have breached their side of the contract. The length of copyright is such that a copyright holder can sometimes ensure that one or two pieces of work can provide an income not only for themselves but for their descendants. While wise investment of the profits from a successful creative work has always had this capability, it is only fairly recently that the creative work itself could do this.
This not only means that creative individuals(and the children of creative individuals who might have otherwise been creative themselves) are, contrary to the intention of the social contract not encouraged to create, but that their works do not reenter the public domain and provide value to society in general.
Copyright law cannot be enforced because the majority of people do not believe they are doing anything wrong when they break it. The reason(IMO) for this is that they feel consciously or not, that the other side broke the deal first. Unless copyright returns to it's original intent, or the social contract is successfully redefined(a difficult proposition for all those reeducation classes they want to give students since it's hard to convince someone that they shouldn't want a fair deal), copyright will die. If copyright dies, a great number of ideas and creations that might otherwise benefit society may never be created and industries and creative individuals will be forced to conceal their ideas in order to protect their value.
This would not be a good thing, so for the good of society hopefully we can find a compromise where artists and inventors get to make a living(though not forever) and society gets free access to creativity(though not right away).
Because it's not indistinguishable from ftp. Ftp is a two server protocol which is designed to transfer files. E-mail is a service which can go through any number of servers all but two of which will be outside your control and which was designed to send small amounts of text. Even attachments in SMTP is a bit of a nasty kludge as much as we've been doing it. It's not the right solution to the problem.
It's not silliness you see, because it's simply a variation on something you can already do, that's the point.
If you play a movie for 50 people, you only need 1 copy. If you want to rent a movie to 50 people simultaneously you need 50 copies.
Public performance metaphorically creates a copy of the item for every viewer, if you profit by this or do it for too many people you don't get fair use coverage any more and it's illegal.
Renting is not the same thing at all, you have one copy which you legally purchased, you loan the copy to someone else, only one person has that copy at any one time. As has previously been pointed out, even if you wanted to try and make it illegal the rental company could always just "sell" the copy to their customer with a promise to buy it back minus an amount per diem. They could even contractually agree up front to accept a certain amount of the price up front.
Renting isn't illegal because it's pointless to make it so. You can easily draw up a sales contract that simulates renting to the point where there's no practical difference. Therefor making it illegal just means more paperwork.
Public performance is a totally different beast as there's no way to simulate that with actions that are already legal, and it allows someone to meet demand artificially. If 50 people want this guy's video, and they want it now, then if the rental agency only has one copy the only way that the other 49 can get it is to go to the source(mind you at $80 they may not likely to do this and will probably just wait, but that's an issue of price point). If the company performs the video they could show it to the 50 people meeting demand while only purchasing one copy.
The rental agency isn't doing anything illegal so long as they're only renting out the copy(s) they legally purchased. If people are making their own copies of the video that's a copyright violation, but it's not the rental company's violation, but the renter's.
The reason why "future proofing" is a problem in the linux world is because the attitude of some open source developers is "I'm going to change it because I want to, if it breaks anything either it's open source and someone else will fix it or it's close source and evil so I don't care".
Yes, but when they release it on an ASIC it won't be any different than any other card out there, and you could buy a better card for hardware research for less money.
If you really want totally open source drivers they'll be available for ATI cards in the not too distant future.
This graphics card when it finishes won't be "open source" because you won't be able to change it, it might have open specifications, and it might have a good relationship with the open source community, but the open source community is just as bad at maintaining a relationship with hardware vendors as hardware vendors are at maintaining a relationship with open source.
If you're willing to pay $1500 for your ideology that's your call, but I'd rather pay $500 and get a card that's substantially faster, and is actually programmed to do something other than diagnose itself and I don't really give a rats if the drivers are open or closed source.
Public transport competes with your own personal automobile which is comfortable, convenient and even with increased petrol prices, fairly cheap. For the individual there's pretty much no reason to take public transport if they can possible avoid it unless it's cheaper than driving their car.
For society however it's quite good for people to take public transport(less pollution, less wear and tear on roads, less need for large unproductive parking structures as opposed to businesses or god forbid green space, less traffic congestion and so less road rage, more time for people to be at home with their families or working or spending money or doing anything at all besides sitting in a car and pumping noxious crap into the air).
Public transport is also a very serious loss leader thing, no one takes public transport until it's convenient and it doesn't get convenient until you've got a whole lot of buses/trains running all over the place all the time.
The other point is of course that if the US didn't spend more on the military than every single other country in the world combined they could afford to do a lot of these things without having to increase taxes at all, not to mention that if your employer were to be able to pay the amount of money they pay for your insurance to you you'd probably make more money even after a tax increase.
You've also got to remember that you only have control over the security of the data during transit. It's all you're legally responsible for and it's all you have any sort of effective control over. So you're really looking for the best solution based on the transmission type you choose. For anyone who wants to put all sorts of extra security on it remember the thing problem with copy protection you can't secure something and give people the access to view it at the same time, so if the recipient doesn't secure it properly in their system, no amount of PGP is going to help anyone.
If the data set is fairly small, then encrypted e-mail might be a valid solution. If it's small to middling in size or you need to do frequent transfers SFTP or FTPS would be viable(presuming you're not using keys generated in the last two years on a debian box).
The simplest solution would be to encrypt the data, put it on a CD/DVD/Portable HD, and send it by courier or deliver it yourself(ideally in a sealed envelope). You get a signature to verify you sent it, you get a signature to verify who picked it up, you've got proof it wasn't tampered with and if someone steals it along the way it's not worth anything.
If it were me I'd also ensure that your contract with the recipient includes liability for any security breaches within their system including appropriate financial penalties. Any of those solutions will ensure it gets to the recipient without someone else stealing it and that's all you can do.
Most of the "socialist" things that western governments do are profitable for private business.
- Public schools and cheap/free higher education, if properly used, increase the educated work force and allow for greater productivity and profit.
- Public health care, if properly used, increases the overall health and productive lifespan of the population allowing for more productivity and greater profit.
- Public transport reduces the wear and tear on roads, decreases the consumption of oil(and therefor both the environmental impact and the actual cost of petrol), provides cleaner air(see benefits of public health care), reduces traffic congestion and therefor commute time, requirements for businesses to build parking structures, cost of expansion of roads, and a number of other things.
These sorts of things benefit everyone, including businesses, however no one wants to pay for them because that would involve a reduction in "my" money.The same thing goes for the long term costs of things. A CEO is interested in increasing his or her own personal wealth above all other things(that's how capitalism works), but the system has been put in place such that the only thing that matters to his or her own personal wealth is the short term results of his or her actions combined with luck. Any CEO with half a brain will trade a profit today resulting in a massive loss 5 years down the road for a small loss today resulting in a massive profit 5 years down the road.
This means that things like environmental pollution, outsourcing, and other forms of exploitation are rewarded for their short term benefits as opposed to punished for their long term consequences.
The problem with all of this is that in order to force companies to recognize long term costs and to organize the creation of and management of services which in and of themselves may never be profitable but which reduce costs and increase profits over the whole of society, we need a government, because populist and short sighted though they may be they're still better than private enterprise at certain things.
In the old days folks hit 60, they raided some, they ground rep some, and they alted some, there were always people around at every level, you could find groups for most instances without too much difficulty. There was some tedium, yes, and some of the content was never seen by any but the most hard core of raiders, but there was a constant cycle from 1-60 over and over again.
TBC was a bunch of really great content, they made the raids smaller and a lot of them shorter, the introduced tiered instances so you could run something new in a couple of hours as opposed to the 3-4 some of the old instances used to take if you didn't have a perfect group. The new abilities were great, the zones were beautiful, the quests were more interesting, etc. But they left azeroth a wasteland, the new starting zones are quite fun, but they'll only take you to 20 and you end up with 40 levels of week quests and pain before you get to outland. People don't alt as much anymore, and when they do they're pretty much so focused on leveling they won't bother to stop for other people or their folks like me who don't have the time to group much and so are pretty much anti-social.
They've increased the rate of leveling(at least through quests) so that people can get to level 60 faster so that there are more tanks and healers and the like, and presumably so that people stay playing, but it doesn't foster any sort of community at any level beyond raiding 70, which is sad really.
A hammer is a very intuitive device, as previously indicated it's got a handle and a smashy end, and while if you presented a hammer and a nail to someone who had never seen either before they might not work out how to use it(though if you gave someone a hammer and told them to go out and kill someone with it, which was probably where the hammer evolved from they'd have no trouble with that), anyone who knows that what they want to do is stick a nail in a board would be able to work out how to do it with a hammer.
Hammers are even fairly easy to use, even I can hit a nail with a hammer and put it into wood. That said though using something and using it really well are two totally different things, and you're unlike to replicated in a few days something that probably took your shop teacher decades of practice and which tbh isn't really all that useful a skill for anything other than impressing students, so you're pretty much just wrong.
Second $US 1000 buys you an awful lot of computer(at least in the US) these days, nearly anyone who needs something more powerful than that is likely to either build it themselves or get it built by someone whose sales won't be included in this survey. I don't see anywhere where they're counting consumer grade CPU sales from AMD and Intel or the like, or anything else.
If you want to use this data to argue that Mac is the only large bulk premium grade computer retailer left in the united states, and that they have the largest percentage of that market, then go right ahead. This is of course patently obvious to anyone as the decrease in the cost of PC components coupled with the move away from pre-built PC's as well as the major PC retailers move towards low cost PC's should make thsi pretty obvious.
The fact that Mac can exist in a market that has pretty much died for PC's is an interesting idea and perhaps one which might be worthy of some discussion, but meaningless statistics like this are really rather pointless. A bit like claiming that if Intel or AMD chip sales were higher than the sales of SPARC processors that Sun was failing in the server market.
No one is going to bribe Jimmy to change the entry on T-rays, and you're not going to find some fringe group gaming the system either(at least as far AFAIK), so it's probably pretty reliable.
Wikipedia has its uses, it's just pretty useless for anything where there's any sort of argument or vested interest.