We will be providing a link to your site in about 30 minutes, after which it will recieve hundreds of thousands of hits. If you're not equipped to handle that, you may wish to consider having your site mirrored. OSDN is a leading provider of low-cost quick-turnaround web hosting services.
This sounds like sane advice -- much better than I thought he'd get.
I mean, asking for time management advice from people blowing time reading Slashdot?:-)
Synergistic enterprise-class workflow integration
on
Deploying Open Office?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Of course, given that "enterprise" is a mostly meaningless buzzword and is overused by vendors trying to hype their products anyway...heck, if he wants to use it to make this sound more exciting, works for me.
I think KDE and Gnome shoudl go in totally different, incompatible directions.
Bullshit.
Different != incompatible.
There's nothing wrong with the two interoperating. The entire point of the two is that there are two different schools of UI going on, and that gives people choice. Reimplementing, say, antialiasing is just plain stupid.
For example, pango, the rendering library that gtk2/gnome2 relies on, has its sample app written in KDE. Now Ximian writes a.NET implementation that KDE is using. Sharing foundation code is good -- it means that stuff gets moving faster, gets better dested, and gets better performance. You can expose the functionality through different APIs if you want, but ignoring good code for ideological reasons is just stupid.
Hmm...ignoring good code for ideological reasons is just stupid. This says something about Stallman.:-)
you don't want the internet to become windows as well, now do you?
I'd suspected that that was Sun's motive in producing Javascript all along.;-)
I've seen exactly two sites in which I feel that the use of Javascript was justified. First, in Yahoo Mail, which also functions without Javascript, you can select all messages for deletion using Javascript.
The second site was demoing a new MP3 player with a name that escapes me for the minute...I think it was Creative's. It literally demoed the UI of the player and let you interact with it to determine whether you liked it.
Other than that, I've pretty much found Javascript to be a nuisance.
* Scrollers/mouseover animated sidebars/bits of characters moving around the screen are Javascript. Any sort of animation on web pages is really annoying to me.
* Javascript gets used for opening a new window. First, I can decide whether I want to open a new window very well by myself, thank you -- that's what the middle button is for. Second, you can do this with plain ol' HTML as well and not inconvenience people that don't use Javascript. Third, I can have *multiple* preview windows, not just get stuck with one.
* Javascript gets used for all sorts of annoying ads. I don't need to name them all -- you've seen them.
*shrug* I understand that this sounds loony, but I assure you that most P2P coders (well, at least *I* would:-) ) would love nothing better than the ability to use centralized, stable, trusted servers. It'd make their life *much* easier to make solid, easy-to-use (remember the get-a-host game played on Gnutella?), efficient apps.
Gnutella and friends only came about because Napster was under attack by the RIAA. The only way for file sharing to survive was to mutate and scatter, go not just P2P, but fully distributed, with *no* central points of failure.
The RIAA has unhesitatingly attacked any P2P services that have a central server. Given the environment, P2P evolved to be much more distributed.
And in doing so, became less efficient.
Things will probably pick up eventually -- P2P research is under full steam, and is a popular thesis subject now. As P2P and scalable, distributed and untrusted storage becomes a better understood problem, efficiency will improve. At the moment, however, file sharing has been pushed into a raw area of research. And yes, I do blame the RIAA for this.
Incidently, it may turn out to be a good thing in the long term -- distributed, failsafe, untrusted networks have a lot of potential for the future, and it's unlikely that they would have been popularized nearly as soon without the RIAA.
Conflict brings evolution -- World War II brought us atomic power and the programmable computer, and it looks like the RIAA is heading to bring us into the next era of worldwide telecommunications.
The only group with which I'm in serious conflict are the optimists, who seem to think a non-TCPA-enabled platform (e.g., Linux) is going to run trouble-free on a TCPA-enabled hardware platform *and* that a non-TCPA-enabled platform (e.g., Linux) will interoperate with TCPA/Palladium-based Internet services.
Well, Linux can run fine on a TCPA-enabled system. Part of the TCPA spec is that it be disableable. I'm certain (though I haven't checked for specifically this) that software requires no change to run on a TCPA-enabled system, so you can still run legacy MS-DOS or Linux or whatever floats your boat.
As for a non-TCPA OS interoperating with TCPA Internet services -- yes, this could be an issue. However, I'll stick to an earlier claim (maybe in another thread) that it's not really any worse than it was before. There are plenty of Internet services that have Windows-only clients...clients that effectively are locked to Windows, because decoding the protocol is prohibitively difficult. Maybe if you could get a bunch of developers going you could fix WINE up to work with it, but frankly (and this isn't intended to impugn the impressive WINE work), WINE is unlikely to work with the average propriatary Windows network media client. Getting that client working may not be exactly trivial, either, especially if it uses NT-kernel features -- WINE is still mostly a 9x emulation system. Effectively, a closed-source, propriatary client running on Windows with a closed protocol isn't any more available to Linux users than that same client running under a Palladium environment.
For example, the big propriatary network media app I can think of is RealPlayer. Real happened to implement their client for Linux (though only x86, and only for certain distros...there's a lot of people still out in the cold), but if they hadn't, do you really think that there'd be a reverse engineering of their rtsp protocol (there *was* some interest in this at one point, but IIRC it's dead now), their file formats, their video compression protocols, and then reimplement all their bugs and other junk floating around?
Look at SCUMMVM -- years of work, and it sort of works on some games (and almost perfectly on a game or two). It was a *much* simpler system to reverse engineer...yet it still stymied open source coders for ages.
Freenet has extremely high latency, yes. Request a file, and it might be a while before you get a response. Try browsing the Web-on-Freenet, and you'll get a less-than-optimal experience.
However, Freenet has efficient file transfers in terms of bandwidth usage, and avoids killing any single point on the network. Freenet is network friendly.
Freenet is more efficient than, say, the Web would be. Those DiVXes don't need to cross your ISPs downstream connection at all.
Gnutella is noisy, but that's not the fault of the creators. Blame the RIAA -- the first P2P applications were centralized. If you can give up the requirement that there be no single, trusted point of failure, it's much easier to make an efficient network. They attacked Napster, and now people have moved to mostly less efficient approaches.
You will loose this right with the adoption of technologies like palladium, because when the copyright protection ends, the DRM protection will continue....First, at least under current law (which I think is a bit silly), your argument doesn't have much point, as copyright is being extended faster than time is passing. The original creator of data was never under any obligation to assist in handing it to whoever wanted it post-copyright -- if I write a program and sell it, and copyright expires on it, there is no onus on me to hand out the source code. If you want to extract the data from the original, go for it. It may be more difficult, but at least in the case of media you can pull it off.
palladium probably won't stop people from pirating commercial software
You can't have it both ways. Either a given byte is protected by Palladium, or it isn't. You won't have "media protected, but software not protectable."
Soon you will be unable to purchase an Intel or AMD processor without supporting this technology.
I should have amended my statement -- I'm not actively making choices to support Palladium. I just think that the outcry over it is silly.
Oh, but you'll pay-per-view. You might not pay in cash, but you will pay. If you don't want to open your wallet, they'll be able to use palladium to force you to view advertisements.
I wish my real account still had mod points, that was excellent.
Good Lord, you're generous.
Purchasing an XBox would be supporting Microsoft whether they are losing money on them or not
Okay. I'll give you that it increases number of sold boxes, which some might consider making game manufacturers more interested, but I strongly suspect that they look at "units of earlier game releases sold", not "units in the field" simply because people might buy fewer games for the XBox on average. So you cost Microsoft some cash, but don't seem to help them much...how does this support them?
Oh, well. Hopefully you got the gist of it.
Yup, and I'm sorry -- I did, in fact, interpret the post as claiming that you were going to break the XBox encryption.
Oh, I agree. The reason I mentioned file formats with Acrobat (and some others) is because by simply not publishing the file format, Adobe could essentially have the same effect as implementing Palladium support. I doubt PDF would have been reverse-engineered if Adobe really didn't want it to be done. This would put everyone in the situation of having only Acrobat Reader being able to read Acrobat-generated files. Using Palladium (or any other system -- such as convoluted file formats) to ensure that their software is the only piece of software that can read the file format is unlikely to be in their cards, for said reason.
There have been attempts in the past to produce widely used file formats that only the software from a single vendor could read. With the sole exception of Office's.doc, they haven't caught on very well. The typical user, I would say, uses html, gif, jpg, png, doc, and txt.
The presence of cryptographic hardware makes the problem difficult enough, but the assumed requirement that 'live' access to an internet 'service' to prove digital rights means that you may not be able to circumvent it. This is what so many fear -- myself among them
24-7 network connected auth schemes were going to happen anyway as more and more people have guaranteed Internet connections. Palladium doesn't change that -- you'd just make a few critical components of Photoshop (say...the chunk of software that does saving and calls the export functions) run on a remote Application Service Provider's system, and you'd have a very, very difficult to break network auth system w/o Palladium.
[clipped bit mentioning micropayments
As for micropayments -- yes, Palladium does provide an architecture for them. It's an option for companies, just as a single-time cost is an option. In general, USians have tended to like flat rate (or flat monthly rate) costs, however. All you can eat diners, flat local phone fees, DVD over DIVX, etc. I can't, off the top of my head, think of a system where metered payments won out over even remotely competitive flat fees, even if the flat fees would have cost more. You can try a micropayment system and see if Americans like it, but I suspect that it won't take off. There's evidently some part of the human psyche that says "ah, I know exactly how much I'm paying for that" that tends to be weighted a bit over-heavily.:-)
Please try to actually download and use a recent build before making uninformed statements, thank you.
I'm using dillo at the moment because Mozilla 1.1, the most recent release, is too slow.
It's open on another desktop, though.
Mozilla has gone from unusably slow to just unpleasantly sluggish, I will give it that.
I'll take gtk1 over Moz's buggy (try flipping desktops at just the wrong time when opening menus and you'll get a menu floating in air on another desktop) slow widgets any day.
He mentioned MS and Adobe -- that's the only reason I was using them....Acrobat Reader is the only reader that will process them.
Adobe put out an open PDF specification for a reason. They're interested in keeping PDF a standard and selling the best PDF tools out there, not in trying to milk it for short term value and then kill it.
No one on win32 using Acrobat Reader can read them
This would be the case if they simply hadn't bothered to publish a specification as well. Reverse engineering complex file formats is extremely difficult, and if the application vendor is actively trying to make things hard, it can be nearly impossible. Palladium doesn't make document interchange impossible in any cases where it wasn't already possible to do so.
How is this different from.doc? There's still no reliable method of decoding Office documents in Linux, despite a lot of corporate funding poured into exactly that problem and years spent working on it, and some half-assed solutions.
Orwell's Eloi will finally come into being, but it won't be "machinery underground" that draws the line between them and "us", the Morlocks, it'll be what's "under" the covers of the computers we use.
The only place Palladium is an issue keeping people from poking under the covers of their computers is in Windows. Windows already *has* this issue. Every tried reverse-engineering a Visual Basic program? It's impossible -- the format is far too convoluted.
There are these things called 'fair use rights' that you are allowed by law.
Correct. Fair use allows freedom from sufferin the penalties for copyright infringement in particular situations. However, it says nothing about legally requiring constraints on technical devices (like *not* having copy protection).
If you want to go after something in this arena, you should have gone after the DMCA, which *does* alter the legal bounds of copyright law, not Palladium.
This new technology gives copyright holders power that is not offered to them by copyright law.
Maybe not, but it doesn't violate what rights are granted you under copyright law either. Hell, copyright law doesn't give me the right to eat Cheddar cheese, but it doesn't prevent me from doing so.
You loose freedom by the adoption of this technology.
Well, *I* don't lose any freedoms. If someone can't get Max Payne for free, no skin off my back, you know?
Whether or not you see this technology direct affecting you in the near future it should not be supported.
I'm not supporting it. I'm not going out of my way to help it, but neither am I going to fight it.
Perhaps it will upset you when they use the technology to make all future entertainment media pay-per-view/listen.
Maybe they will. They'll charge what the market can bear, and some people want pay per view. I don't -- I rarely watch TV, and wouldn't dream of getting, say, HBO. So, because there are markets of people that are willing to pay more than I am, there will always be goods that I will not have available in the media world. That's true right now.
But so what? If a media company starts charging $50 a view for the X-Files, they'll go out of business. Media companies will quickly find what the general public is comfortable with, and stop there. Going any higher would literally be suicidal.
If and when open source programs reach 1.0, they're generally pretty solid.
I'm using finger-0.17-9, pam-0.75-32, pan-0.12.1-1, yafc-0.7.10-1, and passwd-0.67-1, for instance. All of these are quite high-quality, production-level software packages.
Slashdot Mirror
Are we supposed to be impressed with the fact that your teacher managed to be more of a jackass than you were?
People like you two are pulling down people like Chris.
Dear site owner,
We will be providing a link to your site in about 30 minutes, after which it will recieve hundreds of thousands of hits. If you're not equipped to handle that, you may wish to consider having your site mirrored. OSDN is a leading provider of low-cost quick-turnaround web hosting services.
Sincerely,
C. Taco
Pretty amazing what people can do to computers in the middle of the information age
It's amazing what people can do in the middle of the information age, as opposed to say, the end or the beginning, yes.
This sounds like sane advice -- much better than I thought he'd get.
:-)
I mean, asking for time management advice from people blowing time reading Slashdot?
Of course, given that "enterprise" is a mostly meaningless buzzword and is overused by vendors trying to hype their products anyway...heck, if he wants to use it to make this sound more exciting, works for me.
I think KDE and Gnome shoudl go in totally different, incompatible directions.
.NET implementation that KDE is using. Sharing foundation code is good -- it means that stuff gets moving faster, gets better dested, and gets better performance. You can expose the functionality through different APIs if you want, but ignoring good code for ideological reasons is just stupid.
:-)
Bullshit.
Different != incompatible.
There's nothing wrong with the two interoperating. The entire point of the two is that there are two different schools of UI going on, and that gives people choice. Reimplementing, say, antialiasing is just plain stupid.
For example, pango, the rendering library that gtk2/gnome2 relies on, has its sample app written in KDE. Now Ximian writes a
Hmm...ignoring good code for ideological reasons is just stupid. This says something about Stallman.
Yes, I've noticed how the UK has never quite figured out beer.
</sarcasm>
you don't want the internet to become windows as well, now do you?
;-)
I'd suspected that that was Sun's motive in producing Javascript all along.
I've seen exactly two sites in which I feel that the use of Javascript was justified. First, in Yahoo Mail, which also functions without Javascript, you can select all messages for deletion using Javascript.
The second site was demoing a new MP3 player with a name that escapes me for the minute...I think it was Creative's. It literally demoed the UI of the player and let you interact with it to determine whether you liked it.
Other than that, I've pretty much found Javascript to be a nuisance.
* Scrollers/mouseover animated sidebars/bits of characters moving around the screen are Javascript. Any sort of animation on web pages is really annoying to me.
* Javascript gets used for opening a new window. First, I can decide whether I want to open a new window very well by myself, thank you -- that's what the middle button is for. Second, you can do this with plain ol' HTML as well and not inconvenience people that don't use Javascript. Third, I can have *multiple* preview windows, not just get stuck with one.
* Javascript gets used for all sorts of annoying ads. I don't need to name them all -- you've seen them.
*shrug* I understand that this sounds loony, but I assure you that most P2P coders (well, at least *I* would :-) ) would love nothing better than the ability to use centralized, stable, trusted servers. It'd make their life *much* easier to make solid, easy-to-use (remember the get-a-host game played on Gnutella?), efficient apps.
Gnutella and friends only came about because Napster was under attack by the RIAA. The only way for file sharing to survive was to mutate and scatter, go not just P2P, but fully distributed, with *no* central points of failure.
The RIAA has unhesitatingly attacked any P2P services that have a central server. Given the environment, P2P evolved to be much more distributed.
And in doing so, became less efficient.
Things will probably pick up eventually -- P2P research is under full steam, and is a popular thesis subject now. As P2P and scalable, distributed and untrusted storage becomes a better understood problem, efficiency will improve. At the moment, however, file sharing has been pushed into a raw area of research. And yes, I do blame the RIAA for this.
Incidently, it may turn out to be a good thing in the long term -- distributed, failsafe, untrusted networks have a lot of potential for the future, and it's unlikely that they would have been popularized nearly as soon without the RIAA.
Conflict brings evolution -- World War II brought us atomic power and the programmable computer, and it looks like the RIAA is heading to bring us into the next era of worldwide telecommunications.
The only group with which I'm in serious conflict are the optimists, who seem to think a non-TCPA-enabled platform (e.g., Linux) is going to run trouble-free on a TCPA-enabled hardware platform *and* that a non-TCPA-enabled platform (e.g., Linux) will interoperate with TCPA/Palladium-based Internet services.
Well, Linux can run fine on a TCPA-enabled system. Part of the TCPA spec is that it be disableable. I'm certain (though I haven't checked for specifically this) that software requires no change to run on a TCPA-enabled system, so you can still run legacy MS-DOS or Linux or whatever floats your boat.
As for a non-TCPA OS interoperating with TCPA Internet services -- yes, this could be an issue. However, I'll stick to an earlier claim (maybe in another thread) that it's not really any worse than it was before. There are plenty of Internet services that have Windows-only clients...clients that effectively are locked to Windows, because decoding the protocol is prohibitively difficult. Maybe if you could get a bunch of developers going you could fix WINE up to work with it, but frankly (and this isn't intended to impugn the impressive WINE work), WINE is unlikely to work with the average propriatary Windows network media client. Getting that client working may not be exactly trivial, either, especially if it uses NT-kernel features -- WINE is still mostly a 9x emulation system. Effectively, a closed-source, propriatary client running on Windows with a closed protocol isn't any more available to Linux users than that same client running under a Palladium environment.
For example, the big propriatary network media app I can think of is RealPlayer. Real happened to implement their client for Linux (though only x86, and only for certain distros...there's a lot of people still out in the cold), but if they hadn't, do you really think that there'd be a reverse engineering of their rtsp protocol (there *was* some interest in this at one point, but IIRC it's dead now), their file formats, their video compression protocols, and then reimplement all their bugs and other junk floating around?
Look at SCUMMVM -- years of work, and it sort of works on some games (and almost perfectly on a game or two). It was a *much* simpler system to reverse engineer...yet it still stymied open source coders for ages.
Nice talkin' atcha.
Same here.
Freenet has extremely high latency, yes. Request a file, and it might be a while before you get a response. Try browsing the Web-on-Freenet, and you'll get a less-than-optimal experience.
However, Freenet has efficient file transfers in terms of bandwidth usage, and avoids killing any single point on the network. Freenet is network friendly.
...to have a Slashdot story that has useful news but isn't also a rabble-rouser. :-)
Ah, well. I'm glad they didn't pull it completely because legal problems were a PITA.
Both Epson and the FSF did a good job here, I think.
This is a model for how future GPL violations should be handled...not tons of flames being sent to the violators (well, at least not at first }:-) )
Come on...did you really need to reproduce this complete thing?
Freenet is more efficient than, say, the Web would be. Those DiVXes don't need to cross your ISPs downstream connection at all.
Gnutella is noisy, but that's not the fault of the creators. Blame the RIAA -- the first P2P applications were centralized. If you can give up the requirement that there be no single, trusted point of failure, it's much easier to make an efficient network. They attacked Napster, and now people have moved to mostly less efficient approaches.
You will loose this right with the adoption of technologies like palladium, because when the copyright protection ends, the DRM protection will continue. ...First, at least under current law (which I think is a bit silly), your argument doesn't have much point, as copyright is being extended faster than time is passing. The original creator of data was never under any obligation to assist in handing it to whoever wanted it post-copyright -- if I write a program and sell it, and copyright expires on it, there is no onus on me to hand out the source code. If you want to extract the data from the original, go for it. It may be more difficult, but at least in the case of media you can pull it off.
:-)
palladium probably won't stop people from pirating commercial software
You can't have it both ways. Either a given byte is protected by Palladium, or it isn't. You won't have "media protected, but software not protectable."
Soon you will be unable to purchase an Intel or AMD processor without supporting this technology.
I should have amended my statement -- I'm not actively making choices to support Palladium. I just think that the outcry over it is silly.
Oh, but you'll pay-per-view. You might not pay in cash, but you will pay. If you don't want to open your wallet, they'll be able to use palladium to force you to view advertisements.
Sorry -- I use Linux, not Windows.
I wish my real account still had mod points, that was excellent.
Good Lord, you're generous.
Purchasing an XBox would be supporting Microsoft whether they are losing money on them or not
Okay. I'll give you that it increases number of sold boxes, which some might consider making game manufacturers more interested, but I strongly suspect that they look at "units of earlier game releases sold", not "units in the field" simply because people might buy fewer games for the XBox on average. So you cost Microsoft some cash, but don't seem to help them much...how does this support them?
Oh, well. Hopefully you got the gist of it.
Yup, and I'm sorry -- I did, in fact, interpret the post as claiming that you were going to break the XBox encryption.
And thank *you* for responding. :-)
.doc, they haven't caught on very well. The typical user, I would say, uses html, gif, jpg, png, doc, and txt.
:-)
The problem is not file formats.
Oh, I agree. The reason I mentioned file formats with Acrobat (and some others) is because by simply not publishing the file format, Adobe could essentially have the same effect as implementing Palladium support. I doubt PDF would have been reverse-engineered if Adobe really didn't want it to be done. This would put everyone in the situation of having only Acrobat Reader being able to read Acrobat-generated files. Using Palladium (or any other system -- such as convoluted file formats) to ensure that their software is the only piece of software that can read the file format is unlikely to be in their cards, for said reason.
There have been attempts in the past to produce widely used file formats that only the software from a single vendor could read. With the sole exception of Office's
The presence of cryptographic hardware makes the problem difficult enough, but the assumed requirement that 'live' access to an internet 'service' to prove digital rights means that you may not be able to circumvent it. This is what so many fear -- myself among them
24-7 network connected auth schemes were going to happen anyway as more and more people have guaranteed Internet connections. Palladium doesn't change that -- you'd just make a few critical components of Photoshop (say...the chunk of software that does saving and calls the export functions) run on a remote Application Service Provider's system, and you'd have a very, very difficult to break network auth system w/o Palladium.
[clipped bit mentioning micropayments
As for micropayments -- yes, Palladium does provide an architecture for them. It's an option for companies, just as a single-time cost is an option. In general, USians have tended to like flat rate (or flat monthly rate) costs, however. All you can eat diners, flat local phone fees, DVD over DIVX, etc. I can't, off the top of my head, think of a system where metered payments won out over even remotely competitive flat fees, even if the flat fees would have cost more. You can try a micropayment system and see if Americans like it, but I suspect that it won't take off. There's evidently some part of the human psyche that says "ah, I know exactly how much I'm paying for that" that tends to be weighted a bit over-heavily.
Please try to actually download and use a recent build before making uninformed statements, thank you.
I'm using dillo at the moment because Mozilla 1.1, the most recent release, is too slow.
It's open on another desktop, though.
Mozilla has gone from unusably slow to just unpleasantly sluggish, I will give it that.
I'll take gtk1 over Moz's buggy (try flipping desktops at just the wrong time when opening menus and you'll get a menu floating in air on another desktop) slow widgets any day.
He's not ranting at Adobe
...Acrobat Reader is the only reader that will process them.
.doc? There's still no reliable method of decoding Office documents in Linux, despite a lot of corporate funding poured into exactly that problem and years spent working on it, and some half-assed solutions.
He mentioned MS and Adobe -- that's the only reason I was using them.
Adobe put out an open PDF specification for a reason. They're interested in keeping PDF a standard and selling the best PDF tools out there, not in trying to milk it for short term value and then kill it.
No one on win32 using Acrobat Reader can read them
This would be the case if they simply hadn't bothered to publish a specification as well. Reverse engineering complex file formats is extremely difficult, and if the application vendor is actively trying to make things hard, it can be nearly impossible. Palladium doesn't make document interchange impossible in any cases where it wasn't already possible to do so.
How is this different from
Orwell's Eloi will finally come into being, but it won't be "machinery underground" that draws the line between them and "us", the Morlocks, it'll be what's "under" the covers of the computers we use.
The only place Palladium is an issue keeping people from poking under the covers of their computers is in Windows. Windows already *has* this issue. Every tried reverse-engineering a Visual Basic program? It's impossible -- the format is far too convoluted.
Anything except LDAP.
When it comes to performance, LDAP is a bad protocol, and OpenLDAP is an even worse implementation.
There are these things called 'fair use rights' that you are allowed by law.
Correct. Fair use allows freedom from sufferin the penalties for copyright infringement in particular situations. However, it says nothing about legally requiring constraints on technical devices (like *not* having copy protection).
If you want to go after something in this arena, you should have gone after the DMCA, which *does* alter the legal bounds of copyright law, not Palladium.
This new technology gives copyright holders power that is not offered to them by copyright law.
Maybe not, but it doesn't violate what rights are granted you under copyright law either. Hell, copyright law doesn't give me the right to eat Cheddar cheese, but it doesn't prevent me from doing so.
You loose freedom by the adoption of this technology.
Well, *I* don't lose any freedoms. If someone can't get Max Payne for free, no skin off my back, you know?
Whether or not you see this technology direct affecting you in the near future it should not be supported.
I'm not supporting it. I'm not going out of my way to help it, but neither am I going to fight it.
Perhaps it will upset you when they use the technology to make all future entertainment media pay-per-view/listen.
Maybe they will. They'll charge what the market can bear, and some people want pay per view. I don't -- I rarely watch TV, and wouldn't dream of getting, say, HBO. So, because there are markets of people that are willing to pay more than I am, there will always be goods that I will not have available in the media world. That's true right now.
But so what? If a media company starts charging $50 a view for the X-Files, they'll go out of business. Media companies will quickly find what the general public is comfortable with, and stop there. Going any higher would literally be suicidal.
Yeah, but they make less for the medical industry.
I thought the finding that surgery "should be the first rather than the last option" was pretty egregious.
If and when open source programs reach 1.0, they're generally pretty solid.
I'm using finger-0.17-9, pam-0.75-32, pan-0.12.1-1, yafc-0.7.10-1, and passwd-0.67-1, for instance. All of these are quite high-quality, production-level software packages.
It also has to be capable of verifying tha tthe voter is valid, that the ballot is valid, and that it itself is valid
You honestly think whatever company got the contract actually did this, and did it properly?
I'm guessing this is a Visual Basic app plopped on a Windows kiosk.
Because bets are ten to one that anything for Mozilla will be terribly slow?
Don't get me wrong -- this is an interesting idea. But Mozilla makes the bloated, slow XP seem like a slender gazelle.