How is that different from anything else in HD? I'm not going to miss any action in a football game on a regular cable broadcast, but if I'm to believe the ads for comcast HD I see everyday, I ASBOLUTELY MUST GET HD so I can REALLY appreciate the game. If you think you can see too much of a porn star on HD, why the hell would I want to watch a game populated by 350 pound linemen in HD?
It's a cool theory, but it can't be the only affect, because it doesn't explain how different enantiomers of the same molecule could smell different. Carvone for example, smells like caraway or spearmint depending on which of two mirror image forms it's in. Each of these forms has the identical vibrations (both in terms of frequency, atomic displacement, and transition dipole), but would "lock in" differently with biological molecules, almost all of which are chiral (and pure enantiomers). The "shape specificity" hypothesis fits better with this observation. Of course it could still be a combination of the two. Once lodged on the surface of the receptor, the vibrations of the enantiomers are perturbed differently by the interactions with the enantiomeric receptor, leading to a separation of the vibational frequencies, but at that point I think you'd still have to argue that the shape is important.
"The entire problem with these systems is they represent a gross distrust of alot of innocent students. If 25% or thereabouts cheat, it means 75% do not. And that 75% are entirely entitled to be pissed off at there essays being kept in some stupid anti-student database."
Okay, but conversely, the 25% who are cheating are actively hurting the honest 75%. If the grades are curved (as they generally are in college courses...maybe not so much in high school) then the cheaters are lowering the grades of the honest students. If the grades are not curved, then the artificial over-abundance of well-written essays simply leads to grade inflation, lowering the value of the grades of the honest students, if not the grades themselves. And before you point out that students should care more about learning than about grades, let's at least honestly admit that grades matter. They matter for college admissions, for job applications, for scholarships. Most athletes are required to maintain a minimum GPA. So measures to prevent cheating are genuinely advantageous to honest students, not merely neutral, and just about any active anti-cheating measure requires an assumption that students will cheat. Did you ever have a teacher who asked the students to spread out to every other desk during an exam, or insist that programmable calculators are either not allowed or must be cleared before and exam? Heck, I had professors in college insist I take tests in pen...I guess because students would erase mistakes and submit for regrades.
That said I don't mean to defend this particular practice. I think students do have a genuine complaint that their intellectual property is being handed over to a third party company without their permission, and this company is using that I.P. to make a profit by turning around and charging schools for the privelage of searching through the database they've helped build. Those costs get distributed back to the students themselves either by cutting other expenses (in the case of public schools) or increased tuition (for private schools), so in a sense students are paying twice for the privelige of helping "turnitin.com" make a profit.
Why can't there be legal format conversions? Why can't MS (and other DRM happy companies) release a tool that converts "old" DRMed media to "new" DRMed media...still locked to the same computer. (I realize there are other complicated permuations of DRM like getting data off of a DVD in any manner, but in terms of online purchased, DRMed media...) Wouldn't it only be "circumventing" if it stripped the DRM? I realize media companies have no incentive to do that willingly, but if MS and other compatibility challenged hardware manufacturers are serious about marketing the Zune et al., actually solving this problem for their customers would seem like an obvious step.
"The comment should be marked down to zero for a total lack of insight."
You should talk.
Your argument has two gigantic holes in it. In your 3 possible solutions you left out by far the most obvious solution:
4. Give up on uncapped accounts for end users and charge them for how much they use. If ISPs are losing money because they came up with pricing schemes (all limiting download speed, but not total downloads per month) before streaming video was popular, they can (and will) change their deals. Your ISP is under no legal obligation to keep offering you a fixed rate, unlimited downloads account (beyond whatever initial time period they may have guaranteed when you signed up) if it's not profitable. I know this sounds horrible, but it's the proper way to let the market set the value of bandwidth, and video downloads in particular. If it costs $1 worth of fair market bandwidth value to download the latest viral video on Google, then it's up to each consumer to decide if that video is really worth $1 to him or her. If it isn't that cost shouldn't be shunted off to Google or anybody else...it just shouldn't be paid anymore than any other overpriced good or service. And there's no reason the pricing scheme couldn't be tiered to charge more at peak hours: much like current long distance and cell phone services. If end users have a monetary incentive to download at non-peak hours, bandwidth usage will naturally spread more evenly across the hours of a day.
Your second mistake is treating upload/download as if they cancel each other out. Are you suggesting that people who mostly download (average web surfers) are somehow freeing up available bandwidth? That doesn't make any sense. Backbone providers should be compensated for the traffic they carry between Google and the end user, but the direction of information travel doesn't really make a difference.
Okay, I can't count. Your third mistake is your post office analogy. I don't pay for mail I didn't ask for, but if I buy something and have it delivered, I certainly end up paying for shipping, even if technically the money goes from me to the seller to the post office. Google should be charged for using up bandwidth by offering videos to download, I don't dispute that. But if I choose to download a video, I should pay some part of the transfer cost as well, don't you think?
None of these points are particularly relevent to the Net Neutrality debate. If there are broken models in how some internet companies do business, leaving the market to set the price of bandwidth is the best solution. Getting rid of Net Neutrality will only serve to give an already very consolidated industry (how many ISP choices do you have? Do you have any say in which backbone(s) your packets travel over?) a vertical monopoly.
Jeez...what's everyone so paranoid about? How could a hacker possibly get access to a voting machine for a minute or two with enough privacy to load malicious software? He'd need to find one that for some reason or another had a curtain around it and hope no one thinks it's suspicious that he'd be in there alone with the machine.
I've gotten a few phishing emails, and man...when they guess a bank/credit card I actually use, my heart just jumps. I mean...I'm aware of phishing, and I know how to safely confirm whether the email is legit or not if I can't tell by looking at it, but there's always that second or two of real panic when I read the part about "problem with my account" and worry that it could be real. Spam I can safely ignore: even if some spam offers are legitamately good deals, they're still mostly just trying to sell me things I don't need to buy. I can safely ignore a regular spam and not worry I'm going to regret it later. But I can't do that if the message says my bank account has a problem. I have to deal with it right then and there...even if dealing with it just means proving to myself the email is bogus. So putting myself in the shoes of a less internet savy type who may not have heard of "phishing", I'm not the least bit surprised phishing emails get more hits.
Assuming the green light is still delayed the same amount of time, and just the yellow light is on for a briefer period, this actually INCREASES safety, by discouraging people from running a yellow/red light, once people become accustomed to the shorter yellow light. The side effect you mentioned is true, more revenue for the city, unless people wise up.
Heh...they do this where I live (in Philadelphia) and I can tell you it does not make citizens safer drivers. What it does is train people to anticipate their green light early and go through while they still have a red. It's a horrible habit, especially combined with bad drivers from everywhere else in the country who will fly through and not quite make their yellow.
"I have a hard time believing you. What you've written (as an AC no less) sounds like a leftist fantasy or caricature of mainstream america. Unless you're going to George Wallace U. then what you've said here is either a lie or an extreme exaggeration."
Heh...I'll see your BS call on that guy's racist school claims and raise you this guy'sclaim a mere few posts previous that a professor actively pushes students to have homosexual relations as part of his class. It's funny how much more likely we are to let an exaggeration/statistical anomoly slide when it supports our own views, isn't it?
You should be careful not to be wrong when you call people wrong and stupid. The great-grandparent asked about the odometer reading. Assuming no slippage of the tires on the ramps, the number of rotations a wheel takes to cross the ramp won't depend on when the ramp depresses. A 100 mile flat trip will still read 100 miles on the odometer. It is true that the spatial distance a point on the car travels will longer because of the extra vertical component to the motion, but that won't register on the odometer and it isn't why the energy is sapped from the car's gas tank. The energy cost isn't the extra distance, it's the fact that a 100 mile flat trip will act on the car like a 100 mile uphill trip*. The car pays the energy cost to raise its mass to the height of the ramp (before it starts falling, that is) but doesn't get the energy back when the ramp falls like it would were coming downhill from one it climbed.
*After they dismantle these things when they realize how stupid they are, we can tell our spoiled grandkids not to complain about gas prices; we actually did have to drive uphill both ways!
Yeah sure. And the government doesn't employee people. And the government doesn't earn money by collecting taxes. And the government doesn't need to pay its debts to avoid going bankrupt (payments on bonds that it issues). And of course, to overcome the huge spending "deficit" (=loss), the government doesn't need to have "fiscal responsiblity" (=raise extra revenue or cut costs).
I think you missed my point, which was essentially what you are saying here. The OP suggested that the government would simply ignore the patent if it wanted to keep it's blackberries. My point was that the government might just as easily choose to pay for the royalties (whether bailing out RIM or waiting for NTP to license the technology and paying their license fee) and pass the costs on to us, in the form of either increased taxes, cutting other programs, or deficit increase. Any of those three is a win for govt. Blackberry users and NTP and a lose for the average taxpayer.
Suuuure the government is not a corporation.
Of course it's not a corportation. You may have misinterpreted that statement as my implying that corporations are evil and the government isn't. What I meant is that corporations have much more incentive to take for free things they might otherwise pay for if they think they can, because their existences (and therefore the employees' jobs) relies on their ability to make a profit (or at least the perception that they could make a profit). This simply isn't true for the government. Government job security sometimes coincides with running things efficiently spending wisely, but not always.
"Some sports TV networks have expressed interest in filming NFL games in 3D. To shoot in 3D, TV networks would need to install expensive 3D cameras and image processing hardware. "
My (admitedly simplistic) understanding is you could get the 3D persepective simply by fixing two cameras at approximately the same separation as human eyes. It can't be that hard to sync the frames, especially with digital technology. Maybe zoom is more complicated, but it still seems like that could be accomplished by varying the camera separation simultaneously with adjusting the zoom lens(es). Perhaps a bit of an engineering challenge, but wouldn't it be a fixed ratio? I can't believe that would be particularly expensive compared to the cost of production quality cameras. And then what image processing? This 3D TV, like all others, works by showing the slightly different perspectives to the left and right eyes...but these perspectives are precisely what is recorded to by cameras at slightly different positions.
Now broadcasting I can see being a bottleneck. I'm guessing you can't just hook up a new 3D TV to a regular cable box and expect to be able to transmit two video frame channels where you used to have one.
That seems a little simplistic. The government does actually rule against itself all the time. Even if you have the most cynical, Machiavellian view of the motivations and can't accept that anyone in government would do what's right just because it's the right thing to do, doesn't mean it's always in their interest to take for free what they should pay for. After all, the government is not a coorporation, and doesn't need to make a profit to survive. The outcome that worries me more here is that the feds will simply say "this is an essential service for our employees" and buy the patent rights or licence fee that the patent holder is demanding, thus ignoring the growing problem of submarine patents and rewarding the patent holder. Not that I really know that's the case here, but at least if some senators had their precious Blackberries screwed up by a licensing fiasco they might pay a little more attention to a problem that right now only techies seem to be aware of.
Okay...so none of the companies funding this crap wants to take responsibility:
"There's plausible deniability at each tier," said Chris King, product marketing manager at anti-spyware vendor Blue Coat Systems Inc.
If they hire subcontracts to spend their advertising budget and don't want to know how the money is being spent, they deserve to get ripped off. I hope some of these guys just pocket the money with nothing more than a "Oh...yea...the ad's going out all over the internet...but..you don't REALLY want to know the details, right?"
Say you cut a person's head off and then want the right to display that head publicly in a store window. The ACS is saying,"You know... you really shouldn't have done that in the first place."
That has to the worst analogy ever. Are you seriously comparing government funding of research to cutting people's heads off? Besides the over-the-top nature of your example, the basic point is flawed because the ACS most certainly does NOT oppose government funding of research. ACS Journals are also a large revenue stream for the ACS, and most of the content comes from universities and national labs, paid for mostly by government funding.
No mod points, but I think you hit the nail on the head. I'm not really opposed to targetted advertising: It obviously helps the advertiser but I can see how it benefits me as well. The problem is I not only can't pick and choose what information is shared about me, but I don't even have a good idea what information is shared. Cookies seem to rarely come from the site in my location bar these days, but I don't know if that just means it's some central server with my preferences or yet another data miner. You know, sure, if I'm in the market for a new wireless router, I'd rather see ads for computer equipment sites or even wireless routers specifically than a random ad. But if I'm in the market for books on dealing with leukemia, maybe I'm not so comfortable with that information getting around. Cookies seem almost specifically designed to keep the control/information/decisions out of the hands of the users.
Am I missing the humor here or do you actually believe shredded paper can't be recycled? You do know that recycled paper isn't whole, intact sheets of used paper washed clean of the ink, right?
Not sure there's a simple answer to that question. It would be nice to live in an ideal world where everyone's work is rewarded appropriately for how original/useful/innovative it is. But we don't, and the best answer I can give is that software patents make things worse, not better. Years of hard work can also be flushed down the toilet because you didn't know someone else held a key patent. Even if you can prove you came up with the innovation yourself with no knowledge of the patent that you're violating, that's no defense. Even if the patent holder knows you're violating their patent but waits until you've built up a customer base to spring the royalty request on you that is no defense. This is the fundamental problem with software patents.
But the fact is you can't explain it to the satisfaction of the mega-corporations because software patents give them an advantage over smaller businesses because the costs don't scale. It's the politicians who have to be convinced that not only is this bad for innovation but that they should actually do what's right instead of what's in the interest of their campaign contributors.
1. Don't confuse not happening now with won't ever happen. If most FOSS projects are not being bothered now it's because they're flying under the radar, with too small a market share to either be exploitable or worth suing for damages. When that is no longer true (i.e. Linux) expect to see lots of problems.
2. There are probably a number of stories out there with little to no confirmation. Perhaps many of them are real (and many are no doubt apocryphal) but RMS knows that specific examples that can be pointed to are more useful than a bunch of "I heard of a guy..." stories.
"Did you ever wonder what happened to force feedback, controllers that push your hands around so you can feel the action in the game as well as see it (we're talking real force feedback, not controllers that vibrate like pagers)? Somebody has a patent, that's what. "
Is this really true? I hadn't put much effort into finding a real feedback steering wheel for a driving game, but I had assumed they were available. Actually feeling the wheel loosen up when you start skidding makes racing games an order of magnitude more realistic. They have this in a variety of arcade games (Rush the Rock comes to mind, but I know I've played others)...are they really all only available from one patent holder?
Not that I think the switch to IPv6 isn't a worthwhile undertaking, but I'm surprised at the extent to which the article seemed to be bashing NAT. When I was shopping for a wireless router recently, I noticed all the models tout NAT as an effective security tool. Perhaps that's just marketting hogwash, but I did think (correct me if I'm wrong) that because I'm using NAT, my ISP doesn't know how many computers I have connected. They charge for extra IP addresses, and if they could specifically charge for extra computers, they probably would. I have no doubt they will continue charging for extra v6 addresses even if they justify the current charge by the scarcity of v4 addresses.
and as a matter of fact, yes, me and others like me are quite ready and prepared to be the first ones taken to the camps... We are already seeing the signs and are determined to not change our thoughts.
Oh get down from your cross. That's such a tired old line of crap. You're not living in ancient Rome being fed to lions...you're actually by far the most politically powerful religion in the U.S. Even fake reporters busted for running gay prostitution sites try that old line.
now, we'd be perfectly happy for you to hate Jesus and want to screw each other in the butt all day long if you'd just let us say we think its wrong.. but then, that would be hate speach, wouldn't it?
What a complete and utter lie! You do realize that not explicitly making gay marriage illegal won't result in YOU having to marry a gay guy, don't you? You're church can go on refusing to perform gay marriages. But when you want to make it illegal for everyone, that is far beyond merely wanting to "say we think it's wrong."
The link points to a law making it illegal to advocate genocide. A search of the page shows no hits for the words "bible" or "jesus". If you really think the bible advocates genocide...well...you're the one who has to sleep at night knowing that's your religion.
" webloggers continuously hammer on the idea that they want to be treated as "real journalists". and now they are."
"real journalists" are allowed to express political opinions without begin regulated by campaign finance laws. Every major newspaper in the country endorses candidates in elections.
Slashdot Mirror
How is that different from anything else in HD? I'm not going to miss any action in a football game on a regular cable broadcast, but if I'm to believe the ads for comcast HD I see everyday, I ASBOLUTELY MUST GET HD so I can REALLY appreciate the game. If you think you can see too much of a porn star on HD, why the hell would I want to watch a game populated by 350 pound linemen in HD?
It's a cool theory, but it can't be the only affect, because it doesn't explain how different enantiomers of the same molecule could smell different. Carvone for example, smells like caraway or spearmint depending on which of two mirror image forms it's in. Each of these forms has the identical vibrations (both in terms of frequency, atomic displacement, and transition dipole), but would "lock in" differently with biological molecules, almost all of which are chiral (and pure enantiomers). The "shape specificity" hypothesis fits better with this observation. Of course it could still be a combination of the two. Once lodged on the surface of the receptor, the vibrations of the enantiomers are perturbed differently by the interactions with the enantiomeric receptor, leading to a separation of the vibational frequencies, but at that point I think you'd still have to argue that the shape is important.
Okay, but conversely, the 25% who are cheating are actively hurting the honest 75%. If the grades are curved (as they generally are in college courses...maybe not so much in high school) then the cheaters are lowering the grades of the honest students. If the grades are not curved, then the artificial over-abundance of well-written essays simply leads to grade inflation, lowering the value of the grades of the honest students, if not the grades themselves. And before you point out that students should care more about learning than about grades, let's at least honestly admit that grades matter. They matter for college admissions, for job applications, for scholarships. Most athletes are required to maintain a minimum GPA. So measures to prevent cheating are genuinely advantageous to honest students, not merely neutral, and just about any active anti-cheating measure requires an assumption that students will cheat. Did you ever have a teacher who asked the students to spread out to every other desk during an exam, or insist that programmable calculators are either not allowed or must be cleared before and exam? Heck, I had professors in college insist I take tests in pen...I guess because students would erase mistakes and submit for regrades.
That said I don't mean to defend this particular practice. I think students do have a genuine complaint that their intellectual property is being handed over to a third party company without their permission, and this company is using that I.P. to make a profit by turning around and charging schools for the privelage of searching through the database they've helped build. Those costs get distributed back to the students themselves either by cutting other expenses (in the case of public schools) or increased tuition (for private schools), so in a sense students are paying twice for the privelige of helping "turnitin.com" make a profit.
Why can't there be legal format conversions? Why can't MS (and other DRM happy companies) release a tool that converts "old" DRMed media to "new" DRMed media...still locked to the same computer. (I realize there are other complicated permuations of DRM like getting data off of a DVD in any manner, but in terms of online purchased, DRMed media...) Wouldn't it only be "circumventing" if it stripped the DRM? I realize media companies have no incentive to do that willingly, but if MS and other compatibility challenged hardware manufacturers are serious about marketing the Zune et al., actually solving this problem for their customers would seem like an obvious step.
Exactly. That simply violates the second law of thermodynamics instead of the first.
You should talk.
Your argument has two gigantic holes in it. In your 3 possible solutions you left out by far the most obvious solution:
4. Give up on uncapped accounts for end users and charge them for how much they use. If ISPs are losing money because they came up with pricing schemes (all limiting download speed, but not total downloads per month) before streaming video was popular, they can (and will) change their deals. Your ISP is under no legal obligation to keep offering you a fixed rate, unlimited downloads account (beyond whatever initial time period they may have guaranteed when you signed up) if it's not profitable. I know this sounds horrible, but it's the proper way to let the market set the value of bandwidth, and video downloads in particular. If it costs $1 worth of fair market bandwidth value to download the latest viral video on Google, then it's up to each consumer to decide if that video is really worth $1 to him or her. If it isn't that cost shouldn't be shunted off to Google or anybody else...it just shouldn't be paid anymore than any other overpriced good or service. And there's no reason the pricing scheme couldn't be tiered to charge more at peak hours: much like current long distance and cell phone services. If end users have a monetary incentive to download at non-peak hours, bandwidth usage will naturally spread more evenly across the hours of a day.
Your second mistake is treating upload/download as if they cancel each other out. Are you suggesting that people who mostly download (average web surfers) are somehow freeing up available bandwidth? That doesn't make any sense. Backbone providers should be compensated for the traffic they carry between Google and the end user, but the direction of information travel doesn't really make a difference.
Okay, I can't count. Your third mistake is your post office analogy. I don't pay for mail I didn't ask for, but if I buy something and have it delivered, I certainly end up paying for shipping, even if technically the money goes from me to the seller to the post office. Google should be charged for using up bandwidth by offering videos to download, I don't dispute that. But if I choose to download a video, I should pay some part of the transfer cost as well, don't you think?
None of these points are particularly relevent to the Net Neutrality debate. If there are broken models in how some internet companies do business, leaving the market to set the price of bandwidth is the best solution. Getting rid of Net Neutrality will only serve to give an already very consolidated industry (how many ISP choices do you have? Do you have any say in which backbone(s) your packets travel over?) a vertical monopoly.
Jeez...what's everyone so paranoid about? How could a hacker possibly get access to a voting machine for a minute or two with enough privacy to load malicious software? He'd need to find one that for some reason or another had a curtain around it and hope no one thinks it's suspicious that he'd be in there alone with the machine.
I've gotten a few phishing emails, and man...when they guess a bank/credit card I actually use, my heart just jumps. I mean...I'm aware of phishing, and I know how to safely confirm whether the email is legit or not if I can't tell by looking at it, but there's always that second or two of real panic when I read the part about "problem with my account" and worry that it could be real. Spam I can safely ignore: even if some spam offers are legitamately good deals, they're still mostly just trying to sell me things I don't need to buy. I can safely ignore a regular spam and not worry I'm going to regret it later. But I can't do that if the message says my bank account has a problem. I have to deal with it right then and there...even if dealing with it just means proving to myself the email is bogus. So putting myself in the shoes of a less internet savy type who may not have heard of "phishing", I'm not the least bit surprised phishing emails get more hits.
Heh...they do this where I live (in Philadelphia) and I can tell you it does not make citizens safer drivers. What it does is train people to anticipate their green light early and go through while they still have a red. It's a horrible habit, especially combined with bad drivers from everywhere else in the country who will fly through and not quite make their yellow.
Heh...I'll see your BS call on that guy's racist school claims and raise you this guy'sclaim a mere few posts previous that a professor actively pushes students to have homosexual relations as part of his class. It's funny how much more likely we are to let an exaggeration/statistical anomoly slide when it supports our own views, isn't it?
*After they dismantle these things when they realize how stupid they are, we can tell our spoiled grandkids not to complain about gas prices; we actually did have to drive uphill both ways!
I think you missed my point, which was essentially what you are saying here. The OP suggested that the government would simply ignore the patent if it wanted to keep it's blackberries. My point was that the government might just as easily choose to pay for the royalties (whether bailing out RIM or waiting for NTP to license the technology and paying their license fee) and pass the costs on to us, in the form of either increased taxes, cutting other programs, or deficit increase. Any of those three is a win for govt. Blackberry users and NTP and a lose for the average taxpayer.
Suuuure the government is not a corporation.
Of course it's not a corportation. You may have misinterpreted that statement as my implying that corporations are evil and the government isn't. What I meant is that corporations have much more incentive to take for free things they might otherwise pay for if they think they can, because their existences (and therefore the employees' jobs) relies on their ability to make a profit (or at least the perception that they could make a profit). This simply isn't true for the government. Government job security sometimes coincides with running things efficiently spending wisely, but not always.
"Some sports TV networks have expressed interest in filming NFL games in 3D. To shoot in 3D, TV networks would need to install expensive 3D cameras and image processing hardware. "
My (admitedly simplistic) understanding is you could get the 3D persepective simply by fixing two cameras at approximately the same separation as human eyes. It can't be that hard to sync the frames, especially with digital technology. Maybe zoom is more complicated, but it still seems like that could be accomplished by varying the camera separation simultaneously with adjusting the zoom lens(es). Perhaps a bit of an engineering challenge, but wouldn't it be a fixed ratio? I can't believe that would be particularly expensive compared to the cost of production quality cameras. And then what image processing? This 3D TV, like all others, works by showing the slightly different perspectives to the left and right eyes...but these perspectives are precisely what is recorded to by cameras at slightly different positions.
Now broadcasting I can see being a bottleneck. I'm guessing you can't just hook up a new 3D TV to a regular cable box and expect to be able to transmit two video frame channels where you used to have one.
That seems a little simplistic. The government does actually rule against itself all the time. Even if you have the most cynical, Machiavellian view of the motivations and can't accept that anyone in government would do what's right just because it's the right thing to do, doesn't mean it's always in their interest to take for free what they should pay for. After all, the government is not a coorporation, and doesn't need to make a profit to survive. The outcome that worries me more here is that the feds will simply say "this is an essential service for our employees" and buy the patent rights or licence fee that the patent holder is demanding, thus ignoring the growing problem of submarine patents and rewarding the patent holder. Not that I really know that's the case here, but at least if some senators had their precious Blackberries screwed up by a licensing fiasco they might pay a little more attention to a problem that right now only techies seem to be aware of.
Does the rootkit affect Linux? I naturally assumed this one of those "we only have to worry about Windows users" things.
"There's plausible deniability at each tier," said Chris King, product marketing manager at anti-spyware vendor Blue Coat Systems Inc.
If they hire subcontracts to spend their advertising budget and don't want to know how the money is being spent, they deserve to get ripped off. I hope some of these guys just pocket the money with nothing more than a "Oh...yea...the ad's going out all over the internet...but..you don't REALLY want to know the details, right?"
That has to the worst analogy ever. Are you seriously comparing government funding of research to cutting people's heads off? Besides the over-the-top nature of your example, the basic point is flawed because the ACS most certainly does NOT oppose government funding of research. ACS Journals are also a large revenue stream for the ACS, and most of the content comes from universities and national labs, paid for mostly by government funding.
No mod points, but I think you hit the nail on the head. I'm not really opposed to targetted advertising: It obviously helps the advertiser but I can see how it benefits me as well. The problem is I not only can't pick and choose what information is shared about me, but I don't even have a good idea what information is shared. Cookies seem to rarely come from the site in my location bar these days, but I don't know if that just means it's some central server with my preferences or yet another data miner. You know, sure, if I'm in the market for a new wireless router, I'd rather see ads for computer equipment sites or even wireless routers specifically than a random ad. But if I'm in the market for books on dealing with leukemia, maybe I'm not so comfortable with that information getting around. Cookies seem almost specifically designed to keep the control/information/decisions out of the hands of the users.
Am I missing the humor here or do you actually believe shredded paper can't be recycled? You do know that recycled paper isn't whole, intact sheets of used paper washed clean of the ink, right?
But the fact is you can't explain it to the satisfaction of the mega-corporations because software patents give them an advantage over smaller businesses because the costs don't scale. It's the politicians who have to be convinced that not only is this bad for innovation but that they should actually do what's right instead of what's in the interest of their campaign contributors.
1. Don't confuse not happening now with won't ever happen. If most FOSS projects are not being bothered now it's because they're flying under the radar, with too small a market share to either be exploitable or worth suing for damages. When that is no longer true (i.e. Linux) expect to see lots of problems.
2. There are probably a number of stories out there with little to no confirmation. Perhaps many of them are real (and many are no doubt apocryphal) but RMS knows that specific examples that can be pointed to are more useful than a bunch of "I heard of a guy..." stories.
Is this really true? I hadn't put much effort into finding a real feedback steering wheel for a driving game, but I had assumed they were available. Actually feeling the wheel loosen up when you start skidding makes racing games an order of magnitude more realistic. They have this in a variety of arcade games (Rush the Rock comes to mind, but I know I've played others)...are they really all only available from one patent holder?
Not that I think the switch to IPv6 isn't a worthwhile undertaking, but I'm surprised at the extent to which the article seemed to be bashing NAT. When I was shopping for a wireless router recently, I noticed all the models tout NAT as an effective security tool. Perhaps that's just marketting hogwash, but I did think (correct me if I'm wrong) that because I'm using NAT, my ISP doesn't know how many computers I have connected. They charge for extra IP addresses, and if they could specifically charge for extra computers, they probably would. I have no doubt they will continue charging for extra v6 addresses even if they justify the current charge by the scarcity of v4 addresses.
Oh get down from your cross. That's such a tired old line of crap. You're not living in ancient Rome being fed to lions...you're actually by far the most politically powerful religion in the U.S. Even fake reporters busted for running gay prostitution sites try that old line.
now, we'd be perfectly happy for you to hate Jesus and want to screw each other in the butt all day long if you'd just let us say we think its wrong.. but then, that would be hate speach, wouldn't it?
What a complete and utter lie! You do realize that not explicitly making gay marriage illegal won't result in YOU having to marry a gay guy, don't you? You're church can go on refusing to perform gay marriages. But when you want to make it illegal for everyone, that is far beyond merely wanting to "say we think it's wrong."
there is already legal precident in Canada stating that the Bible is hate speech...
The link points to a law making it illegal to advocate genocide. A search of the page shows no hits for the words "bible" or "jesus". If you really think the bible advocates genocide...well...you're the one who has to sleep at night knowing that's your religion.
"real journalists" are allowed to express political opinions without begin regulated by campaign finance laws. Every major newspaper in the country endorses candidates in elections.