Actually the federal prison is the nice one(in most states), in general fedearal penitentiary's(minimum or otherwise) are substantially less unpleasant than their state run equivilants. Part of this has to do with states trying to save cash on prisons, but it's also got to do with the kind of things that put you there. Murderers and rapists, in fact nearly all violent criminals are prosecuted by the state and incarcerated by the state. Federal offenses tend to be things like embezzlement, and other white collar crime(there are exceptions of course, violent crimes commited in certain places or to certain people are federal jurisdiction). That's not to say I'd want to spend time there, and unless youre rich and/or famous and can get a slap on the wrist sentence, it's not going to be a good time, but given the choice between state and federal, most folks would choose federal.
Actually that 800 is KBps(or more likely actually kiloclusters since it tends to be a factor of 10) if you're getting it off most programs. Which is actually 8 Mbps give or take. So you're actually getting your full connection speed. IE and Firefox, and Mozilla, and pretty much every other application I've ever used have been reporting they're speed in KiloBytes(not bits) for as long as I can remember, and I've been on the net for more than a decade.
Why is it that on slashdot of all places there are still so many idiots. Haven't you noticed that your max download speeds have been 1/10th of your max connection speed for the last 15 years? Did you really think you just couldn't max out that dial up connection when you were connection to a major server? Did it not dawn on you that there had to be some other explanation for that?
It's not training, it's a fundamental flaw in the voting process in the US. In most other western countries you have a system of run-off voting whereby third parties can transfer their votes to the primary party which they consider the least unpleasant, or where the voters can determine their order of preference themselves. This allows people to vote for a third party who they actually like(assuming you can find one you actually like) in large numbers without guaranteeing that the major party they despise will be in power till the next election.
That's not the case in the US. If you vote green, or libertarian, or whatever the hell pat buchanan ran under, you're essentially shooting yourself in the foot. The parties know this, the conservatives ran pro-nader ads in 2000. You can't vote third party in the US without getting the opposite of what you actually want.
Outside of a few party line issues, both the democrats and the republicans might be centrist wankers(Bush is much to pro-corporate and pro-big government for a true conservative and Kerry was much to conservative for a true liberal), but until or unless they change the system(or we get some major event like the civil war which got the republicans in as the first ever third party president in the first place), they're the two we've got.
If you want an effective way to actually change American politics, vote in primaries for the candidates which most closely follow your view points. If other people agree with you, maybe in another 50 years your major party of choice might be closer to your belief system.
The one thing I will say about O'Reilly, is that, while he might be a right wing nut job, he's at least a semi-honest one. I do recall him promising that if there were no weapons of mass destruction that he would apologize and then about 8 months later him admiting it, publicly, waaaayyyy, before the administration ever did and apologizing.
As far as it goes, and under very specific provisions, the tubes abstraction is not actually all that bad. Nor is the highway one, or any other abstraction.
The problem is that while an abstraction can be a great way to explain a technical concept to someone non-technical, it isn't a complete understanding of the concept, and when non-technical people try to make decisions based on that metaphor they are often wrong.
The internet is, in some ways, like, a series of tubes, but it is not actually a series of tubes, and when you make decisions about the internet as if it were a series of tubes instead of what it actually is, most of the time you'll get it wrong. Most of our elected officials don't have a technical background so we have a bunch of people trying to make decisions based, at best, on abstractions, or on the advice of experts(who are usually bought and paid for by someone).
Probably the best solution to all of this is to start funding independent pools of experts on technical and scientific fields and then taking their advice, but those sorts of people don't tend to tell the politicians what they're being paid to want to hear, so that'll never happen.
Yes, an IT person can problem change the cartridge in a minute or so. The point is that an IT person has to stop what they were doing, come over to your printer, work out whether or not you actually ordered a spare cartridge(at my old job their cost centre, not ours), replace the cartridge, and then go back to the office, which is not only about as much time as it would take you to do it yourself, and if I had to do that I'd have to be doing it monthly for a hundred or so printers, which is a lot of time which could have been spent in ways which benefit the company more.
As for saying that monkeys can do my job(not that I do support any more), that only holds true if you think my job is to replace your printer cartridge. It isn't. My job is to make sure that you can connect to the network, that there's a network there to connect to, that the software you need can be deployed to your computer, to fix things when they go wrong, and about a billion other things that a monkey can't do.
Physical property is a fundamental right, at least in our society, intellectual property is not. I have a right of ownership over physical objects, and that right passes along with the physical object.
A car is used to provide a person with a means to get from point A to point B, and only really provides value to the person who possesses it. We have physical property rights in order to prevent someone from taking a thing away from someone. Ideas have more value the more people use them, so we have different laws and rights for them. Ideas and things are not the same, and should never be treated the same.
There's nothing wrong with people inheriting things. What is wrong is someone being continually paid(new money, not old) for something they didn't do.
And what good does a copyright do to a dead man anyway? Not sure whether I believe that the offspring of a man who created something ought to be rich just because one of their parents was very clever. Being related to someone who did something, doesn't really provide any value to society, and while it's all well and good for folks to take care of their children, kids don't have any sort of fundamental right to control things they didn't produce.
Actually this isn't a problem. Big Corporations don't do things like this because it's fun, or to further some sort of evil agenda, they do it for money, and if the licensing fee they're paying is so low that you can't use it to defend yourself in court(they have to prove your patent is invalid, not the other way around so your costs should be substantially less than theirs), they aren't going to bother.
In order for most companies to bother, I would guess the licensing fees would have to be >1 million dollars, which is more than enough money to hire a decent lawyer.
If hundreds of thousands of individuals spend hundreds of hours searching for bugs and only a very few find anything they can cash in, then Microsoft has already done it's job. Verisign just wants to make sure they have.
Actually I connected a freshly reinstalled XP box up to the internet(my disk is really old so it's pre SP1 and I didn't have a copy of SP2 lying around), without installing the firewall and AV software before I connected to the internet(I was tired and stupid at the time). On 8/1 ADSL my PC was pwned to the point that I couldn't download any files(including spyware scanners) that weren't corrupted before I could finish getting the windows updates. This was through a NAT router with no open ports. Without at least SP2 preinstalled NAT won't save you. A virus scanner and a reasonable software firewall plus NAT will, but not just NAT, and I'm far from ignorant about computers.
Might I point out that not everyone on the sex offenders registry is a pedophile or even what we might consider a "sex offender". Not terribly important, but a note.
Vegetarianism is just another rationalization. Vegans kill things just the same as regular people do, they just kill plants. Claiming that killing plants is morally superior to killing animals is at least as shakey as claiming that killing non sentient beings is morally superior to killing sentient ones, probably more so.
In order for you to live, something has to die, that's part of being a consumer in the ecosystem rather than a producer, get over it.
You also have to take a look at 2% of what? I would suggest that Warner records gross income is probably substantially larger than both Apple and Logitech combined. And so their 2% net might very well be more than the combined profits of all 3 other companies.
There's also the fact that Warner is actually under no real obligation or motivation to correctly attribute profits to it's music subsidiary, only to the group as a whole, as no one buys stock in just the music subgroup. It is perfectly legal to list the services required for one division(ie to Warner Records) and provided by another(ie a recording group), and mark it as a profit for one and a cost to the other, just so long as it all adds up in the end(ie not like enron).
Real irony is the fact that that the opinions of "that radical guy and his followers" have been coopted to justify opression, murder, and theft. After all "God" chose Dubya to be president.
Firstly, good progamming is a relatively difficult job(no knocking together software isn't, but knocking together something worth using is), and secondly, programming requires at least some degree of education and skill. That 35,000 might be being pulled up by the plutocrats, but it's also being held down by the masses of unskilled, uneducated, and very poorly paid workers. Just because someone who has no prospects and flipping burgers for a living is willing to work for 10 grand a year, doesn't mean I will.
As of a few months ago the US was passing laws to become a first to file nation, don't know what became of that, but it's likely that sometime in the not too distant future it won't be first to invent anymore(first to invent is way to expensive and difficult to administer).
If you're walking the path of Richard Stallman, you're walking the path alone.
RMS has a lot of really good ideas, but he is, to be perfectly honest, a raving nut job. He lives in an ideal world where there is no pragamatism, no compromise, where everyone can do what they love without having to worry about putting food on the table. He believes that because many people in the US are willing to work crap jobs for no money, that programmers should be willing to work for $35,000 a year(that's not an exaggeration).
This is the real world, and people are living real lives, people will use the best tool available for the job(best being a very subjective term), and if that tool isn't copylefted then they're still going to use it.
None of this really matters anyway, because you can't effectively criminalize an offense that the majority of your population doesn't think is wrong. You can arrest and fine people, but you can't stop people from doing something they don't find wrong without arresting a very large number of people which is impractical.
If you want to fight DRM, then you fight it by fighting the propaganda the RIAA and the MPAA are putting together, you fight convincing young people that it's wrong and it's never going to be effectively legistlated.
You're making a faulty assumption that the gold price is static. It isn't, and never has been. In particular it tends to skyrocket in times of political or economic uncertaintly(ie after 9/11). There are a number of other reasons for the rise in gold price, but a doubling of the number of US dollars is not one of them. If that were the case the price of everything would have doubled, not just gold.
Personally I reckon we forget about whether global warming is good or bad and stop pumping toxic shit into the air because breathing it will kill us. We need to find a substitute for oil because we're going to run out of it. Whether and to what extent human beings are responsible for climate change is really rather immaterial when there are plenty of other good reasons to do something about it.
That said, to all of those who believe that the solution is to go back to a wonderful agrarian society where we don't have cars, or planes, or plastics, it's too late. If we stopped using the worst offenders, millions of people would starve to death. There is no going back to the 15th Century, and I for one don't particularly want to.
Kyoto is also not the answer because it'll simply mean that even more companies move their factories to the third world, all the same polution will continue to occur(probably even more so because the third world has even less stringent laws than we do), and jobs will be lost in the process.
Personally I reckon there's a pretty simple first step to be taken. The free market responds to money, that is cost and profit. Currently we fine people who pollute to much, but that tends to just send them to places which don't fine them. That means the better option is to reward(probably through tax breaks) companies which reduce their emmissions. If the reward is greater than the cost, companies will do it on their own.
Franklin's quote says that anyone who gives up essential liberty for temporary security deserves neither.
Driving drunk is not an essential liberty, and not having drunken idiots driving around all the time provides a hell of a lot more than temporary security. Since the liberty is not essential and the security is not temporary, Franklin's quote is not even partially applicable.
There are games other than opengl first person shooters in the world and most of them don't work(well) in linux. NWN also provided out of the box linux support(if you count having to copy files off a windows partition to extract them out of the box), but the vast majority of games don't work at all without Cedega, and don't work very well with it.
GIMP is a very nice program, I use it, last I checked it couldn't handle 32 bit colour very well, and the interface design is shocking, but otherwise it's not that bad. However, like Blender, industry standards are important. If your employees know photoshop and especially a more complicated program like 3d Studio Max you're looking at serious downtime and training costs to get them comfortable on the new system. Add to that the fact that the applications aren't quite as good as the originals and it's just not going to be worth it for most companies.
I like linux, but it's still not ready for prime time. The biggest problem with OSS has always been and will always be the user interface. Writing a good gui isn't exciting, and it's not something that can be created as an amalgum of code, it needs centralized design, and it needs people who actually know and care about what regular users think. It doesn't matter that the GIMP has 99% of the features of photoshop(plus a few photoshop doesn't have) and costs hundreds of dollars less, because it's totally horrible to use.
It's not about the safety of an area, it's about the perception of danger. I know lots of families who live in perfectly safe areas, areas where I(as admitedly a 6'2 adult male) would have no fear of being at any time of day. Areas where when I was young I would have been allowed to play without supervision. They still don't let their kids wander alone. It's not socially acceptable to do that anymore, it's considered bad parenting. Some lunatic might abduct them off the street. The fact that they're more likely to get hit by lightening than to have that happen is entirely beside the point. We live in a climate of fear and distrust and things aren't the same way they were when even I was growing up and I'm only 25.
The basic problem is that O isn't practical in today's society. Parents don't let their kids play outside in the street, or go anywhere without a parent with them. To do so is often considered bad parenting.
Add to that the limited amount of time you can practically remain outside in winter in most of the US or in summer here in Australia (I have friends who have had Child Protective Services called on them for letting their kids spend too much time in the sun), and you're talking about most of your socialization outside of school and school organized activities coming in the form of a small number of friends visiting while supervised by the parents.
We don't have big backyards here(housing prices), so you're essentially talking about socialization being indoor activities with a small group of friends.
Does it really matter what those indoor activities are?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the federal prison is the nice one(in most states), in general fedearal penitentiary's(minimum or otherwise) are substantially less unpleasant than their state run equivilants. Part of this has to do with states trying to save cash on prisons, but it's also got to do with the kind of things that put you there. Murderers and rapists, in fact nearly all violent criminals are prosecuted by the state and incarcerated by the state. Federal offenses tend to be things like embezzlement, and other white collar crime(there are exceptions of course, violent crimes commited in certain places or to certain people are federal jurisdiction). That's not to say I'd want to spend time there, and unless youre rich and/or famous and can get a slap on the wrist sentence, it's not going to be a good time, but given the choice between state and federal, most folks would choose federal.
I know, I know, but Slashdot doesn't allow you to edit your posts, and I was a bit tired.
Why is it that on slashdot of all places there are still so many idiots. Haven't you noticed that your max download speeds have been 1/10th of your max connection speed for the last 15 years? Did you really think you just couldn't max out that dial up connection when you were connection to a major server? Did it not dawn on you that there had to be some other explanation for that?
That's not the case in the US. If you vote green, or libertarian, or whatever the hell pat buchanan ran under, you're essentially shooting yourself in the foot. The parties know this, the conservatives ran pro-nader ads in 2000. You can't vote third party in the US without getting the opposite of what you actually want.
Outside of a few party line issues, both the democrats and the republicans might be centrist wankers(Bush is much to pro-corporate and pro-big government for a true conservative and Kerry was much to conservative for a true liberal), but until or unless they change the system(or we get some major event like the civil war which got the republicans in as the first ever third party president in the first place), they're the two we've got.
If you want an effective way to actually change American politics, vote in primaries for the candidates which most closely follow your view points. If other people agree with you, maybe in another 50 years your major party of choice might be closer to your belief system.
The one thing I will say about O'Reilly, is that, while he might be a right wing nut job, he's at least a semi-honest one. I do recall him promising that if there were no weapons of mass destruction that he would apologize and then about 8 months later him admiting it, publicly, waaaayyyy, before the administration ever did and apologizing.
The problem is that while an abstraction can be a great way to explain a technical concept to someone non-technical, it isn't a complete understanding of the concept, and when non-technical people try to make decisions based on that metaphor they are often wrong.
The internet is, in some ways, like, a series of tubes, but it is not actually a series of tubes, and when you make decisions about the internet as if it were a series of tubes instead of what it actually is, most of the time you'll get it wrong. Most of our elected officials don't have a technical background so we have a bunch of people trying to make decisions based, at best, on abstractions, or on the advice of experts(who are usually bought and paid for by someone).
Probably the best solution to all of this is to start funding independent pools of experts on technical and scientific fields and then taking their advice, but those sorts of people don't tend to tell the politicians what they're being paid to want to hear, so that'll never happen.
As for saying that monkeys can do my job(not that I do support any more), that only holds true if you think my job is to replace your printer cartridge. It isn't. My job is to make sure that you can connect to the network, that there's a network there to connect to, that the software you need can be deployed to your computer, to fix things when they go wrong, and about a billion other things that a monkey can't do.
A car is used to provide a person with a means to get from point A to point B, and only really provides value to the person who possesses it. We have physical property rights in order to prevent someone from taking a thing away from someone. Ideas have more value the more people use them, so we have different laws and rights for them. Ideas and things are not the same, and should never be treated the same.
There's nothing wrong with people inheriting things. What is wrong is someone being continually paid(new money, not old) for something they didn't do.
And what good does a copyright do to a dead man anyway? Not sure whether I believe that the offspring of a man who created something ought to be rich just because one of their parents was very clever. Being related to someone who did something, doesn't really provide any value to society, and while it's all well and good for folks to take care of their children, kids don't have any sort of fundamental right to control things they didn't produce.
In order for most companies to bother, I would guess the licensing fees would have to be >1 million dollars, which is more than enough money to hire a decent lawyer.
If hundreds of thousands of individuals spend hundreds of hours searching for bugs and only a very few find anything they can cash in, then Microsoft has already done it's job. Verisign just wants to make sure they have.
Actually I connected a freshly reinstalled XP box up to the internet(my disk is really old so it's pre SP1 and I didn't have a copy of SP2 lying around), without installing the firewall and AV software before I connected to the internet(I was tired and stupid at the time). On 8/1 ADSL my PC was pwned to the point that I couldn't download any files(including spyware scanners) that weren't corrupted before I could finish getting the windows updates. This was through a NAT router with no open ports. Without at least SP2 preinstalled NAT won't save you. A virus scanner and a reasonable software firewall plus NAT will, but not just NAT, and I'm far from ignorant about computers.
Might I point out that not everyone on the sex offenders registry is a pedophile or even what we might consider a "sex offender". Not terribly important, but a note.
In order for you to live, something has to die, that's part of being a consumer in the ecosystem rather than a producer, get over it.
There's also the fact that Warner is actually under no real obligation or motivation to correctly attribute profits to it's music subsidiary, only to the group as a whole, as no one buys stock in just the music subgroup. It is perfectly legal to list the services required for one division(ie to Warner Records) and provided by another(ie a recording group), and mark it as a profit for one and a cost to the other, just so long as it all adds up in the end(ie not like enron).
Real irony is the fact that that the opinions of "that radical guy and his followers" have been coopted to justify opression, murder, and theft. After all "God" chose Dubya to be president.
Firstly, good progamming is a relatively difficult job(no knocking together software isn't, but knocking together something worth using is), and secondly, programming requires at least some degree of education and skill. That 35,000 might be being pulled up by the plutocrats, but it's also being held down by the masses of unskilled, uneducated, and very poorly paid workers. Just because someone who has no prospects and flipping burgers for a living is willing to work for 10 grand a year, doesn't mean I will.
As of a few months ago the US was passing laws to become a first to file nation, don't know what became of that, but it's likely that sometime in the not too distant future it won't be first to invent anymore(first to invent is way to expensive and difficult to administer).
RMS has a lot of really good ideas, but he is, to be perfectly honest, a raving nut job. He lives in an ideal world where there is no pragamatism, no compromise, where everyone can do what they love without having to worry about putting food on the table. He believes that because many people in the US are willing to work crap jobs for no money, that programmers should be willing to work for $35,000 a year(that's not an exaggeration).
This is the real world, and people are living real lives, people will use the best tool available for the job(best being a very subjective term), and if that tool isn't copylefted then they're still going to use it.
None of this really matters anyway, because you can't effectively criminalize an offense that the majority of your population doesn't think is wrong. You can arrest and fine people, but you can't stop people from doing something they don't find wrong without arresting a very large number of people which is impractical.
If you want to fight DRM, then you fight it by fighting the propaganda the RIAA and the MPAA are putting together, you fight convincing young people that it's wrong and it's never going to be effectively legistlated.
You're making a faulty assumption that the gold price is static. It isn't, and never has been. In particular it tends to skyrocket in times of political or economic uncertaintly(ie after 9/11). There are a number of other reasons for the rise in gold price, but a doubling of the number of US dollars is not one of them. If that were the case the price of everything would have doubled, not just gold.
That said, to all of those who believe that the solution is to go back to a wonderful agrarian society where we don't have cars, or planes, or plastics, it's too late. If we stopped using the worst offenders, millions of people would starve to death. There is no going back to the 15th Century, and I for one don't particularly want to.
Kyoto is also not the answer because it'll simply mean that even more companies move their factories to the third world, all the same polution will continue to occur(probably even more so because the third world has even less stringent laws than we do), and jobs will be lost in the process.
Personally I reckon there's a pretty simple first step to be taken. The free market responds to money, that is cost and profit. Currently we fine people who pollute to much, but that tends to just send them to places which don't fine them. That means the better option is to reward(probably through tax breaks) companies which reduce their emmissions. If the reward is greater than the cost, companies will do it on their own.
Driving drunk is not an essential liberty, and not having drunken idiots driving around all the time provides a hell of a lot more than temporary security. Since the liberty is not essential and the security is not temporary, Franklin's quote is not even partially applicable.
GIMP is a very nice program, I use it, last I checked it couldn't handle 32 bit colour very well, and the interface design is shocking, but otherwise it's not that bad. However, like Blender, industry standards are important. If your employees know photoshop and especially a more complicated program like 3d Studio Max you're looking at serious downtime and training costs to get them comfortable on the new system. Add to that the fact that the applications aren't quite as good as the originals and it's just not going to be worth it for most companies.
I like linux, but it's still not ready for prime time. The biggest problem with OSS has always been and will always be the user interface. Writing a good gui isn't exciting, and it's not something that can be created as an amalgum of code, it needs centralized design, and it needs people who actually know and care about what regular users think. It doesn't matter that the GIMP has 99% of the features of photoshop(plus a few photoshop doesn't have) and costs hundreds of dollars less, because it's totally horrible to use.
It's not about the safety of an area, it's about the perception of danger. I know lots of families who live in perfectly safe areas, areas where I(as admitedly a 6'2 adult male) would have no fear of being at any time of day. Areas where when I was young I would have been allowed to play without supervision. They still don't let their kids wander alone. It's not socially acceptable to do that anymore, it's considered bad parenting. Some lunatic might abduct them off the street. The fact that they're more likely to get hit by lightening than to have that happen is entirely beside the point. We live in a climate of fear and distrust and things aren't the same way they were when even I was growing up and I'm only 25.
Add to that the limited amount of time you can practically remain outside in winter in most of the US or in summer here in Australia (I have friends who have had Child Protective Services called on them for letting their kids spend too much time in the sun), and you're talking about most of your socialization outside of school and school organized activities coming in the form of a small number of friends visiting while supervised by the parents.
We don't have big backyards here(housing prices), so you're essentially talking about socialization being indoor activities with a small group of friends.
Does it really matter what those indoor activities are?