Since when was it the government's job to protect corporate profits?
Well, you just might want to read up on the origins of copyright laws. Because in the beginning, they were the governments way of protecting their free speech by denying it to others.
Somehow I don't see things changed that much, apart from the shift from absolutist nobility to multinational corporations. And there is no ethical reason for any artist (or wannabe artist) to put a middleman in the way of their career, not in this day and age, be it an old-fashioned record company or Jay Z.
Being put right through to second level wastes valuable time for that second level person that a first level person could have avoided. Simple collection of who are you, what is your IP, are you at your computer right now, what kind of connection do you have and what is the actual problem. First tier usually also has means of tying that information to the information we have about you, so that phase can be short and sweet like just mentioning a customer number, but more often it's not. Yes, most of the scripts are stupid, so I'd agree most of those can be skipped, not the data collection part though.
You may succeed in bullying first level into contacting second level directly, but with what I do at work (second and third level support) all I'd do was send you right back to first level to get that data collected. I can't help you unless I even have the slightest idea what your problem is, where you are, or if it's something stupid (like you canceled, believe me, it happens) and I don't intend to use part of my work time to provide first level support. So don't waste my time, or the only thing you accomplish is that we can see your "I want to speak to your manager" haircut through the phone.
Let me add that my "told you so" might hurt a bit more than a first level "Ah, so it works now? Great!":)
PS: as for non-managed routers, there are reasons for us not doing that (being in a security-sensitive environment with non-computer-savvy customers is one), but I can't see why eg. Comcast isn't doing it. My home ISP gives me an ethernet port in the fiber box where I can connect any old box that speaks DHCP, so maybe I'm privileged. On the other hand I still don't get native IPv6 at home, so probably not:P
This is known as the change process in ITIL, and it does have a remedy. The remedy is pre-approved changes (standard changes), which should include patching the OS with patches approved by the vendor. It's meant for exactly this situation, and if your change process doesn't have them it's just a paper wall. The ITIL change process is all about reducing risk. If there is a risk with patching your OS (there is, especially since you mention Windows, it's not that unheard of that a Windows patch makes your whole network inoperative) you have to weigh it against the risk of not patching it (meaning you leave known security holes in). So, my advice is to get OS patches for your OSes pre-approved by the CAB, that is, when a vendor releases a set of patches you are allowed to patch your systems in the way and the order of that pre-approved change. Of course it's paper-pushing, but use it to your advantage and push some paper yourself. If a server gets compromised and you have the papers (changelog) to prove that you followed procedure, blame will be placed somewhere else. And things will be done differently from there on, since it has been proven that the procedure didn't work, and everybody wins. Or you could go find another job (like some other posters recommended) where you are the sole *cowboy*-admin and nothing gets done properly. Your choice really.
OpenOffice derivatives (nobody uses the original from that stupid database company anymore, right? RIGHT?) nowadays have quite evolved compared to the ancient version they were using in Freiburg. No wonder they wanted to replace it, because at the time of 3.2.1 it really wasn't that compatible. Nowadays I can even open Visio files quite fine in LibreOffice Draw. The real culprit though is the evil file format from hell which got through the standardization process like George W. Bush got through his elections - not by being better but by heavy lobbying and in some cases in court. In some countries (like mine) the standardization committee mostly worked after the "agree with the (MS-cult) committee leader or leave the committee" principle. That never works out right, at least not for the users. Hell, they got a passus in there where they can insert binary blobs of (proprietary) old Word stuff that nobody who only knows the standards document even can *try* to render. The ones who suffer under decisions like these are the users. They are the ones who have to learn a totally new user interface every other year, they have to battle incompatibilities that Microsoft in their infinite wisdom forced on them with no way back, they have to do the old print-retype-routine just because Word doesn't want to have anything to do with Word from two years ago. And why does Microsoft change their user interface so often? I guess it's a mixture of "because we can" and "ooh, flashing lights". It certainly doesn't help the user *at all*. Wonder why eg. doorknobs all look and work about the same? Why shouldn't the way you set the font in your document be like that? And still following that analogy, whoever heard of doorknobs that move about the surface of the door just because some program decides it would fit better in another position? Or a door that doesn't open sideways at the hinge but now, in the new version, falls flat on the floor (and good luck to you if you happen to stand in front of it)? Yes, that's how Office is degrading from version to version, and I *mean* degrading.
Besides, I'm still pissed that our government (no, I'm not from the US) had the chance when they decided official documents had to follow an open standard, and Microsoft's isn't. Then they fired the head of that department and put the two words "or OOXML" in all the appropriate places. Way to go wasting our tax money.
Fun fact: while I am typing this, on a Mac, that "Microsoft Updater" popped up totally ignoring all UI guidelines and Excel begins one of its swap eating frenzies. Had to abort both to be able to finish typing this:/ Before you ask, I am forced to use Excel because there are people at my place of work who use every little aspect of Excel and I am glad it even works in the Mac version ('cause often I have to use LibreOffice because Excel can't read Excel files, go figure). And I don't exit it at the end of the working day because it loads half of Windows (or something like that), it's monstrous even if it works. Of course this use of Excel is stupid, I have pointed it out to others, but the same people see LibreOffice (or any piece of open source software) as the spawn of evil and go pray to their Microsoft gods. Whenever I have to write some documents myself, from scratch, I use LibreOffice because it just works.
I'm a linguistically confused guy who grew up with a language with grammar (German) and moved to a country with a language where context is everything (Norwegian). Go ahead, criticize my English grammar (which btw. is borrowed/stolen from each and every one of the European languages... well, except finnish and hungarian).
Fun fact: for quite some versions, the Norwegian spellchecker in Microsoft products was written/maintained in Finland, and the quality was as you'd expect:)
I remember that my executable* (that didn't do that much, mostly a preference system and menu) was so big I had to use overlays to make it run on a particular machine with only 512k (my development machine was slower, but it had 640k, all the memory you'll ever need:D). Parts of it were a separate program written in Turbo Pascal which I exec'd directly from another overlay, and another Clipper program I had included a small text editor written in C and linked directly into the executable.
Yes, I am an old fart, do you really have to ask?
* first versions written with Summer 85, and I jumped off the Clipper train shortly before 5.0 came out. Read the gritty details about Clipper version confusion (Summer 87 released in December 87, whoa!) on wikipedia:)
Actually these disclaimers are worth exactly as much as the paper they are (not) written on. You can't make people correct your mistakes, simple as that. In my limited understanding of legalspeak you "don't have a contract" and as such are not obliged to do anything the sender of said email wants you to do.
Speaking of which, shrink-wrap licenses are illegal in most of the world outside the US (and maybe even there, what do I know), since you can't agree to a (one-sided) contract you haven't seen yet.
If they force you to comply you just send them a bill. Don't ask if they want to pay a bill, they didn't ask you if you want to delete mail not meant for you, right? Either they back out of the (non-)contract and you can post their misdirected email on any website you like, or they pay, acknowledging that they had a contract with you. Win-win:)
Anyway, I think the fun *really* starts with spam containing legal disclaimers.
I think I don't need to tell you that I am not a lawyer since it is so obvious, so at least you're getting away without *that* disclaimer:)
We have a 3G, not a 3Gs you insensitive clod! We can't upgrade to 4.3 because Steve said no.
Seriously, my 3G is at 4.2.1 and will stay there forever. iTunes (which I *do* use, because I have both music from CDs, podcasts and my calendar on that phone) upgraded my phone to 4.0 without asking much - well, ok, it threatened that I wouldn't get any security updates for it if I insisted on keeping on using 3.1.3.
So my iPhone 3G is now a Windows98 PC force-upgraded to XP, or have you seen any security fixes for 98 around lately? *That* is what those not having upgraded to 4.x are missing, mostly, because all the new-fangled stuff needs a 3Gs or 4, so you won't see much of that anyway. And, as I said, since 4.3 we don't even get those security updates. Actually I'd be very surprised if the 3G gets a Locationgate fix.
Which is exactly why my next phone will *not* be a fscking iPhone. Thanks for the (slightly rotten) fish and so on, but Android is looking better every day.
In other news, I hear Apple is making more than half its revenue with the iPhone and iPad product lines. If stuff like this isn't fixed I'd be very surprised if their rise continues.
What, you mean you don't measure in pints, pounds and furlongs? What are you, medieval? Here, have this fine open standard that includes the binary definitions of all Microsoft Word versions since 1.0 for MS-DOS. Hooray for free/open standards.
Actually (about that link of yours, which links to twitter's behaviour towards the term tweet) a fellow named Bobby Day might have a word or two to say about prior art. Well, except he's been dead for a while...
You seem to have misunderstood the origins of copyright. It was never meant to give the creator compensation, what copyright was all about was censorship by control of distribution (therefore "copy", not "creation").
Pirating media is far worse because it deprives hardworking musicians and other artists of their well-deserved profits, which is far worse, really, than most felonies -- hardly a civil matter.
Hmm, do I have to point out the obvious mistake you made here? It's clearly not the musicians and other artists who deserve the profit, it's the record companies for their hard, hard work of making those little plastic discs and promoting hopeless no-sell artists like Rihanna, Take That and Britney Spears. Surely you don't want them to do that for free, like, well, make one of those newfangled websites everybody seems to think are so hip these days.
But infringing copyright through downloading songs off the net is basically stealing. That's akin to asking a corner shop owner to send a letter to a guy who pinched a packet of bubble gum to stop it.
Bzzt, wrong. It isn't stealing. It's copyright infringement (yes, there *is* a difference, and your use of the word "basically" doesn't help, either).
The corner shop owner is out a packet of bubble gum, the copyright owner of a song that has been downloaded lost nothing tangible at all. In fact, the file that was downloaded probably wasn't even made by the copyright owner, so in some way the original sharer has actually *added value* to that file (note that I didn't say "improved":) )
There are plenty of *other* reasons not to use Flash.
From what I've seen, Flash is only used to show the visitor that you a) don't care about him, b) don't care about his abilities/disabilities, c) think a user interface is something you eat or smear all over your behind.
I have the noflash plugin installed in my Firefox, and a page consisting of *only* a Flash "script" is silently skipped by me. Not to mention those pesky Flash advertisements that reload stuff without you doing anything, clogging up your internet connection ("because everybody has a 100mbit connection directly to the backbone").
Really, only idiots use Flash. A 64-bit version will not change that. Rant over.
Why do these terrorists (people who employ "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion" - see wikipedia article on Terrorism) still abuse the term piracy? Neither the United Nations, nor the International Maritime Bureau define piracy as the downloading of files (see wikipedia article on Piracy).
The legality/illegality aside, the way they are handling physical piracy sure makes me confident they'll succeed in removing internet "piracy" in no time (here, here, here and here - I bet you didn't even hear that is a problem in other businesses, maybe with the exception of fashion and software).
Here's something to think about, dear G8. All of these products being copied have artificially high prices. Could it be that those prices should be adjusted down to make it non-profitable to copy them instead of using lots of taxpayers' money (who do you think will fund these new action programs against "piracy"? You thought it was the businesses involved? Wrong!) to fight an uphill battle (War On Drugs anyone?).
Perheaps the BSD crowd should do some soul-searching and ponder why there are four forks, each maintained by a crew which appears to be violently hostile to all the others (not to mention all "outsiders" and "interlopers", such as those building other Unix-like operating systems, say, Linux).
Eh, sorry to call bullshit on this.
You seem to confuse OpenBSD with the other three recognized forks (I think you mean NetBSD, FreeBSD and DragonFly. No, MacOS X isn't a BSD). DragonFly is a fork of FreeBSD, but there is still a vivid exchange of code going on. The fact that three of those four use the same package system (pkgsrc) should also be an indication that they are not as diverse as you think. Oh, and the OpenBSD packet filter (which is not netfilter) has been ported to the other three.
As for the case at hand, Theo de Raadt (I don't know how many other OpenBSD developers are behind him on this) makes a basic mistake about his own license. The BSD license specifically states:
* Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions * are met: * 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. * 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the * documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. * 3. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors * may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software * without specific prior written permission.
IANAL but I think that taking parts of the code and relicensing it under the GPL is not colliding with any of these rules. They didn't remove the copyright note (1. above), the second passus doesn't fit because I'm looking at the source, and the GPL ensures there is a source... and the third, well, if just saying that it is a derived work from some distant UCB development is forbidden by #3, calling the "Berkeley sockets" just that is forbidden as well:) The only thing you can discuss is the word "alternatively". But since the alternative to following these rules is to follow more rules and make it even more free, well, what's the point of starting an argument at all? It's like saying "you're not allowed to borrow my lawnmower, but steal it and everything is ok". Now, if there was a clash of rights it would be that the GPL requires you to make the source available while the BSD license does not, and that makes the word "alternatively" difficult in connection with enforcing the GPL. From the BSD viewpoint however giving these alternatives looks perfectly correct.
As an aid in your investigation, pay attention to these unseemly feral cries of "Mine! Mine! Mine!" emanating from the land of the supposedly "most free" (to use by anyone for anything, even closed source projects!) license, brought on by this very incident.
Exactly. But remember, it's OpenBSD, I don't think the other BSD's developers would have made such a fuss. It's also worth noting that Theo has no problem with Microsoft (to pull a widely known example out of my ass^H^H^Hhat). Yes, people, the networking code that Microsoft uses since Windows 2000 is a nearly 1:1 copy of the FreeBSD networking code, and the firewall in Windows XP is derived from ipfw. And all of that (and who knows what more) has been relicensed under the Windows license. But I guess the reason Theo attacks Linux developers is that he thinks he can beat up RMS (or Linus), but can't compete with somebody who throws chairs:)
IMO, the only way to benefit from multiple drives is to have your OS and programs on a WD Raptor and your data on a larger and slower drive.
Well, what would you rather have, one 13-14k (there is an overhead, but it's small) terabyte drive (I know I know:) or what was it, a 10k 150 gigabyte (the "big" raptor) and a 7.2k 750 gigabyte drive at double the cost?
If you never heard of the performance benefits of RAID0 (or striping, as Windows calls it) you of course choose the second solution, despite it being more expensive, less flexible and slower. Actually, at that price a 1 terabyte RAID5 would have been possible, if current onboard SATA-RAID controllers would allow it (they don't because it uses much more processing power than the sector sorting RAID0 and RAID1 do, of course). Hell, considering the cost of the second solution described above, I found a RAID5-capable four port SATA2 controller within one minute of googling that fits the price range of being cheaper combined with three 500GB SATA2 disks. And that will give you redundancy, so when one of your (cheap) SATA drives throws a fit, the others still contain all of the data. Nice, eh?
So now you need third-party tools to get what was included in the previous version? Seriously, if that isn't a reason not to upgrade, I don't know what is. Well, apart from being the last person on earth running WinWord 2.0 that is:) If Word 2003 or Word XP works for you, keep it. Nobody forces you to upgrade (and companies who force the upgrade through should not be surprised that people need to be "upgraded" as well to work with those new products - or suffer some serious productivity loss. That's the price you pay for those new "features").
Note that I didn't mention anything about how well ribbons work, the new document formats (btw. there is a plugin for open document format that works in both Word 2007 and 2003/XP), Microsoft's inability to listen to their customers or how bugfree their software is on release day... but that isn't what this article is about anyway, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant!
Since when was it the government's job to protect corporate profits?
Well, you just might want to read up on the origins of copyright laws. Because in the beginning, they were the governments way of protecting their free speech by denying it to others.
Somehow I don't see things changed that much, apart from the shift from absolutist nobility to multinational corporations. And there is no ethical reason for any artist (or wannabe artist) to put a middleman in the way of their career, not in this day and age, be it an old-fashioned record company or Jay Z.
Being put right through to second level wastes valuable time for that second level person that a first level person could have avoided. Simple collection of who are you, what is your IP, are you at your computer right now, what kind of connection do you have and what is the actual problem. First tier usually also has means of tying that information to the information we have about you, so that phase can be short and sweet like just mentioning a customer number, but more often it's not. Yes, most of the scripts are stupid, so I'd agree most of those can be skipped, not the data collection part though.
You may succeed in bullying first level into contacting second level directly, but with what I do at work (second and third level support) all I'd do was send you right back to first level to get that data collected. I can't help you unless I even have the slightest idea what your problem is, where you are, or if it's something stupid (like you canceled, believe me, it happens) and I don't intend to use part of my work time to provide first level support. So don't waste my time, or the only thing you accomplish is that we can see your "I want to speak to your manager" haircut through the phone.
Let me add that my "told you so" might hurt a bit more than a first level "Ah, so it works now? Great!" :)
PS: as for non-managed routers, there are reasons for us not doing that (being in a security-sensitive environment with non-computer-savvy customers is one), but I can't see why eg. Comcast isn't doing it. My home ISP gives me an ethernet port in the fiber box where I can connect any old box that speaks DHCP, so maybe I'm privileged. On the other hand I still don't get native IPv6 at home, so probably not :P
This is known as the change process in ITIL, and it does have a remedy. The remedy is pre-approved changes (standard changes), which should include patching the OS with patches approved by the vendor. It's meant for exactly this situation, and if your change process doesn't have them it's just a paper wall.
The ITIL change process is all about reducing risk. If there is a risk with patching your OS (there is, especially since you mention Windows, it's not that unheard of that a Windows patch makes your whole network inoperative) you have to weigh it against the risk of not patching it (meaning you leave known security holes in).
So, my advice is to get OS patches for your OSes pre-approved by the CAB, that is, when a vendor releases a set of patches you are allowed to patch your systems in the way and the order of that pre-approved change. Of course it's paper-pushing, but use it to your advantage and push some paper yourself. If a server gets compromised and you have the papers (changelog) to prove that you followed procedure, blame will be placed somewhere else. And things will be done differently from there on, since it has been proven that the procedure didn't work, and everybody wins.
Or you could go find another job (like some other posters recommended) where you are the sole *cowboy*-admin and nothing gets done properly. Your choice really.
OpenOffice derivatives (nobody uses the original from that stupid database company anymore, right? RIGHT?) nowadays have quite evolved compared to the ancient version they were using in Freiburg. No wonder they wanted to replace it, because at the time of 3.2.1 it really wasn't that compatible. Nowadays I can even open Visio files quite fine in LibreOffice Draw.
The real culprit though is the evil file format from hell which got through the standardization process like George W. Bush got through his elections - not by being better but by heavy lobbying and in some cases in court. In some countries (like mine) the standardization committee mostly worked after the "agree with the (MS-cult) committee leader or leave the committee" principle. That never works out right, at least not for the users. Hell, they got a passus in there where they can insert binary blobs of (proprietary) old Word stuff that nobody who only knows the standards document even can *try* to render.
The ones who suffer under decisions like these are the users. They are the ones who have to learn a totally new user interface every other year, they have to battle incompatibilities that Microsoft in their infinite wisdom forced on them with no way back, they have to do the old print-retype-routine just because Word doesn't want to have anything to do with Word from two years ago.
And why does Microsoft change their user interface so often? I guess it's a mixture of "because we can" and "ooh, flashing lights". It certainly doesn't help the user *at all*. Wonder why eg. doorknobs all look and work about the same? Why shouldn't the way you set the font in your document be like that? And still following that analogy, whoever heard of doorknobs that move about the surface of the door just because some program decides it would fit better in another position? Or a door that doesn't open sideways at the hinge but now, in the new version, falls flat on the floor (and good luck to you if you happen to stand in front of it)? Yes, that's how Office is degrading from version to version, and I *mean* degrading.
Besides, I'm still pissed that our government (no, I'm not from the US) had the chance when they decided official documents had to follow an open standard, and Microsoft's isn't. Then they fired the head of that department and put the two words "or OOXML" in all the appropriate places. Way to go wasting our tax money.
Fun fact: while I am typing this, on a Mac, that "Microsoft Updater" popped up totally ignoring all UI guidelines and Excel begins one of its swap eating frenzies. Had to abort both to be able to finish typing this :/ Before you ask, I am forced to use Excel because there are people at my place of work who use every little aspect of Excel and I am glad it even works in the Mac version ('cause often I have to use LibreOffice because Excel can't read Excel files, go figure). And I don't exit it at the end of the working day because it loads half of Windows (or something like that), it's monstrous even if it works.
Of course this use of Excel is stupid, I have pointed it out to others, but the same people see LibreOffice (or any piece of open source software) as the spawn of evil and go pray to their Microsoft gods. Whenever I have to write some documents myself, from scratch, I use LibreOffice because it just works.
I weren't no good at grammer and speling niether.
I'm a linguistically confused guy who grew up with a language with grammar (German) and moved to a country with a language where context is everything (Norwegian). Go ahead, criticize my English grammar (which btw. is borrowed/stolen from each and every one of the European languages... well, except finnish and hungarian).
Fun fact: for quite some versions, the Norwegian spellchecker in Microsoft products was written/maintained in Finland, and the quality was as you'd expect :)
Ewwwww, another Clipper survivor!
I remember that my executable* (that didn't do that much, mostly a preference system and menu) was so big I had to use overlays to make it run on a particular machine with only 512k (my development machine was slower, but it had 640k, all the memory you'll ever need :D). Parts of it were a separate program written in Turbo Pascal which I exec'd directly from another overlay, and another Clipper program I had included a small text editor written in C and linked directly into the executable.
Yes, I am an old fart, do you really have to ask?
* first versions written with Summer 85, and I jumped off the Clipper train shortly before 5.0 came out. Read the gritty details about Clipper version confusion (Summer 87 released in December 87, whoa!) on wikipedia :)
I bet with that number they're just "friends". As in facebook-friends.
"Nasty word" lists have, do and will never work. It's to easy to push new memes that look totally innocent - see subject :)
Actually these disclaimers are worth exactly as much as the paper they are (not) written on. You can't make people correct your mistakes, simple as that. In my limited understanding of legalspeak you "don't have a contract" and as such are not obliged to do anything the sender of said email wants you to do.
Speaking of which, shrink-wrap licenses are illegal in most of the world outside the US (and maybe even there, what do I know), since you can't agree to a (one-sided) contract you haven't seen yet.
If they force you to comply you just send them a bill. Don't ask if they want to pay a bill, they didn't ask you if you want to delete mail not meant for you, right? Either they back out of the (non-)contract and you can post their misdirected email on any website you like, or they pay, acknowledging that they had a contract with you. Win-win :)
Anyway, I think the fun *really* starts with spam containing legal disclaimers.
I think I don't need to tell you that I am not a lawyer since it is so obvious, so at least you're getting away without *that* disclaimer :)
We have a 3G, not a 3Gs you insensitive clod! We can't upgrade to 4.3 because Steve said no.
Seriously, my 3G is at 4.2.1 and will stay there forever. iTunes (which I *do* use, because I have both music from CDs, podcasts and my calendar on that phone) upgraded my phone to 4.0 without asking much - well, ok, it threatened that I wouldn't get any security updates for it if I insisted on keeping on using 3.1.3.
So my iPhone 3G is now a Windows98 PC force-upgraded to XP, or have you seen any security fixes for 98 around lately? *That* is what those not having upgraded to 4.x are missing, mostly, because all the new-fangled stuff needs a 3Gs or 4, so you won't see much of that anyway. And, as I said, since 4.3 we don't even get those security updates. Actually I'd be very surprised if the 3G gets a Locationgate fix.
Which is exactly why my next phone will *not* be a fscking iPhone. Thanks for the (slightly rotten) fish and so on, but Android is looking better every day.
In other news, I hear Apple is making more than half its revenue with the iPhone and iPad product lines. If stuff like this isn't fixed I'd be very surprised if their rise continues.
-1 troll
Ha!
:P)
Mama don't like no bass players playing... (so I wouldn't be too concerned about what Mama likes
What, you mean you don't measure in pints, pounds and furlongs? What are you, medieval? Here, have this fine open standard that includes the binary definitions of all Microsoft Word versions since 1.0 for MS-DOS. Hooray for free/open standards.
Actually (about that link of yours, which links to twitter's behaviour towards the term tweet) a fellow named Bobby Day might have a word or two to say about prior art. Well, except he's been dead for a while...
:P
Rockin' robin (tweet, tweet, tweet)
You seem to have misunderstood the origins of copyright. It was never meant to give the creator compensation, what copyright was all about was censorship by control of distribution (therefore "copy", not "creation").
:)
Just pointing out the obvious historicalities
Can't wait to tell my wife - "You know, they found out sitting down all day makes you die sooner - I think I'll lie down for the rest of the day".
No, seriously (or rather a bit more serious, but not really), life is lethal. Nobody has ever survived life. Think about it...
I'm sweating already
Pirating media is far worse because it deprives hardworking musicians and other artists of their well-deserved profits, which is far worse, really, than most felonies -- hardly a civil matter.
Hmm, do I have to point out the obvious mistake you made here? It's clearly not the musicians and other artists who deserve the profit, it's the record companies for their hard, hard work of making those little plastic discs and promoting hopeless no-sell artists like Rihanna, Take That and Britney Spears. Surely you don't want them to do that for free, like, well, make one of those newfangled websites everybody seems to think are so hip these days.
Interweb, bah!
But infringing copyright through downloading songs off the net is basically stealing. That's akin to asking a corner shop owner to send a letter to a guy who pinched a packet of bubble gum to stop it.
:) )
Bzzt, wrong. It isn't stealing. It's copyright infringement (yes, there *is* a difference, and your use of the word "basically" doesn't help, either).
The corner shop owner is out a packet of bubble gum, the copyright owner of a song that has been downloaded lost nothing tangible at all. In fact, the file that was downloaded probably wasn't even made by the copyright owner, so in some way the original sharer has actually *added value* to that file (note that I didn't say "improved"
There are plenty of *other* reasons not to use Flash.
From what I've seen, Flash is only used to show the visitor that you a) don't care about him, b) don't care about his abilities/disabilities, c) think a user interface is something you eat or smear all over your behind.
I have the noflash plugin installed in my Firefox, and a page consisting of *only* a Flash "script" is silently skipped by me. Not to mention those pesky Flash advertisements that reload stuff without you doing anything, clogging up your internet connection ("because everybody has a 100mbit connection directly to the backbone").
Really, only idiots use Flash. A 64-bit version will not change that. Rant over.
Why do these terrorists (people who employ "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion" - see wikipedia article on Terrorism) still abuse the term piracy? Neither the United Nations, nor the International Maritime Bureau define piracy as the downloading of files (see wikipedia article on Piracy).
The legality/illegality aside, the way they are handling physical piracy sure makes me confident they'll succeed in removing internet "piracy" in no time (here, here, here and here - I bet you didn't even hear that is a problem in other businesses, maybe with the exception of fashion and software).
Here's something to think about, dear G8. All of these products being copied have artificially high prices. Could it be that those prices should be adjusted down to make it non-profitable to copy them instead of using lots of taxpayers' money (who do you think will fund these new action programs against "piracy"? You thought it was the businesses involved? Wrong!) to fight an uphill battle (War On Drugs anyone?).
You seem to confuse OpenBSD with the other three recognized forks (I think you mean NetBSD, FreeBSD and DragonFly. No, MacOS X isn't a BSD). DragonFly is a fork of FreeBSD, but there is still a vivid exchange of code going on. The fact that three of those four use the same package system (pkgsrc) should also be an indication that they are not as diverse as you think. Oh, and the OpenBSD packet filter (which is not netfilter) has been ported to the other three.
As for the case at hand, Theo de Raadt (I don't know how many other OpenBSD developers are behind him on this) makes a basic mistake about his own license. The BSD license specifically states: IANAL but I think that taking parts of the code and relicensing it under the GPL is not colliding with any of these rules. They didn't remove the copyright note (1. above), the second passus doesn't fit because I'm looking at the source, and the GPL ensures there is a source... and the third, well, if just saying that it is a derived work from some distant UCB development is forbidden by #3, calling the "Berkeley sockets" just that is forbidden as well
IMO, the only way to benefit from multiple drives is to have your OS and programs on a WD Raptor and your data on a larger and slower drive.
:) or what was it, a 10k 150 gigabyte (the "big" raptor) and a 7.2k 750 gigabyte drive at double the cost?
Well, what would you rather have, one 13-14k (there is an overhead, but it's small) terabyte drive (I know I know
If you never heard of the performance benefits of RAID0 (or striping, as Windows calls it) you of course choose the second solution, despite it being more expensive, less flexible and slower. Actually, at that price a 1 terabyte RAID5 would have been possible, if current onboard SATA-RAID controllers would allow it (they don't because it uses much more processing power than the sector sorting RAID0 and RAID1 do, of course). Hell, considering the cost of the second solution described above, I found a RAID5-capable four port SATA2 controller within one minute of googling that fits the price range of being cheaper combined with three 500GB SATA2 disks. And that will give you redundancy, so when one of your (cheap) SATA drives throws a fit, the others still contain all of the data. Nice, eh?
Google is your friend...
So now you need third-party tools to get what was included in the previous version? Seriously, if that isn't a reason not to upgrade, I don't know what is. Well, apart from being the last person on earth running WinWord 2.0 that is :) If Word 2003 or Word XP works for you, keep it. Nobody forces you to upgrade (and companies who force the upgrade through should not be surprised that people need to be "upgraded" as well to work with those new products - or suffer some serious productivity loss. That's the price you pay for those new "features").
Note that I didn't mention anything about how well ribbons work, the new document formats (btw. there is a plugin for open document format that works in both Word 2007 and 2003/XP), Microsoft's inability to listen to their customers or how bugfree their software is on release day... but that isn't what this article is about anyway, right?
(*goes back under his rock*)