You must be an american. The number of movies produced in the rest of the world is GREATER then the number of movies produced in the US, or even if you start calling every country that has english as a main language being clubbed together (wonder how the french part of canada feels about it).
This is only logical, while english is a very common language and a great many people speak it as their second, third language, it is not the most common language.
In europe, most tv-stations, even the commercial ones are man-dated by law to provide a certain amount of "native" broadcasting. That is why the station RTL4 which was clearly aimed at dutch audience spend money on a luxemburg program block in the early hours to satisfy the law (they were based there using a loophole).
Childerens tv in holland has had a strong EU only feel to it in my youth, simply because US programs did not meet EU regs against advertising to childeren.
As for how it is affected, it is not even clear yet how copyright infringement affects hollywood, how it affects local cinema in the rest of the world is anyones guess. We certainly are not going to get the truth about it from the media, they after all have a rather direct intrest in the matter.
So far however it seems to matter little, Remember non-hollywood movies tend not to pay quit as much to their stars. This matters a lot, to pay those idiotic salaries a Tom Hanks gets you need to make massive profits. Pay them a more modest wage and you have a lot more room.
Also what you claim about english content being more easily accepted in the rest of the world helps. I can far more easily find a seeded torrent of a US show then say a belgium program even if said program in the country itself is more popular.
US politics to an outsider look hopelessly fragmented, this despite that fact that on the surface they are ALL rightwing capatalists compared to most of the rest of the world.
Odd as it may seem, there is more difference amongst american rightwingers then between right and left wing in europe.
That is because very few in europe support the abolision of goverment itself, we know goverment is big and cumbersome and a blackhole for money, but more or less we accept this as the way it has always been.
Only in the US it seems some people passionalty believe that a different method is possible. I think it is a leftover from their early days as a country, a sign these people have not realised the US is no longer and CAN no longer be that nation of the founding fathers.
You see them talk on and on about the constitution, a document written by supporters of slavery, etnic cleansing and voting rights based on gender, religion and income. The US was created in a worldview where it was perfectly alright to slaughter the natives, keep people as property and women were second rank citizens. It was perfectly alright back then to just claim a piece of land as your own and cultivate it.
This no longer works, the real problem is that the US is no longer the Wild West or a frontier nation, it is just another country, just the same as all the ancient ones on eurasian continent and it can no longer be run as an experiment.
While movies are rarely a good indicator of anything, some "cowboy" movies showed this when the cowboy from the wild west enters one of large cities. The difference between the lone gunman whose law comes from a bullet and the almost european like cities.
There exist a simple cartoon, young boy seen going to school with a rifle "1800: Everything is alright, Jimmy got his gun" "1980: Look out! Jimmy got his GUN!".
The US has had to grow up and this is never popular. Once you could build your ranch whereever you wanted and your nearest neighbour was a state away. Now your house is next to dozens of others, cost a fortune and you don't want its value to decline because your neightbour decides to open a leatherworks in his backyard. This means big goverment, lots of regulations and an end to liberty.
In europe we know this, we know there have to lots and lots of rules to allow us to live so close together. Americans still hope that it can be like the glory days and that just is no longer possible.
Ron Paul's message was that he could turn the clock back, that was appealing to a lot of people, who carefully avoided asking themselves what it would all mean in the end.
Take his isolationist policies. Currently a lot of US goods come from abroad, with the US no longer protecting world peace, what might happen to those traderoutes?
Pull out of korea? Would save a lot of money to be sure. But would China not extend its control in the region? What would you do with the soldiers? Fire them? Where would they get new jobs? Defence may cost a lot, but it also supplies a lot of people with wage packages they then spend fueling the economy.
Say korea and such nations had to fund for defence themselves, they would have to raise the price of exports, not a good thing either.
The US floats on foreign oil, the US has a continues fleet presence to try and stop the constant sinking of tankers by Iraq/Iran in the past, why risk that mess again by pulling the fleets out.
What do you do with the fleets if they are not out there, mothball them? What if war does happen, how quickly can you get your military up? Japan had the run around at the start of US involvement precisly because of Ron Paul like sentiments. How many americans died for the believe that the US could stay out of a WW?
The simple fact is that Ron Paul and his supporters have a vision of the world that no longer is accurate, they want the US to become something it no longer can be, and are unable to answer how they would overcome any of the problems they would create.
Furthermore, one of the partners in Sony BMG makes the PLAYSTATION 3 video game console that is designed to run GNU/Linux.
Not exactly, Sony BMG is a joint-venture between Sony Music Entertainment and BMG. SME is a daughter of Sony. But Sony itself, is NOT a partner is this joint venture anymore then your dad is a partner in your marriage (assuming offcourse you are not from the deep south).
Futher more the PS3 is a product of Sony Computer Entertainment another daughter of Sony.
That took the piss out of Jesus Christ, how many people were killed over it? How many embassies attacked?
In most countries we have moved on, religion is considered something that some may choose to follow, a bit, when it is convenient, but it is no longer allowed to rule everyones life.
And then the world changes, it has become a lot smaller and we are finding that large parts of the world don't exactly agree with our way of dealing with religion. Worse, these people are no longer staying put, but increasingly moving to those more liberal countries only to then go ultra-conservative.
In the series Fawlty Towers, you see some people claim that Manuel is a slur on italians. They forget that Basil is a far greater slur on brits themselves. If Italy has no pride in having everyone see Italians as being Manuel, the brits probably don't want to be seen as the rest of the cast.
In the "western" countries we know we all forced to leave together and have had to accept that precious little is holy anymore. Now all of sudden we have to deal with a religion that has come in close contact with us, whose followers are not always in agreement with the western worlds view of "life and let life".
The problem isn't with the muslim religion itself, other religions have had similar extremes in the past. The problem is that the view nolonger fits in the western world. It would be fine if fundementalist muslims and westeners were segregated but that is no longer the case.
Just as a anti-abortion person must learn to accept that if he wants to life in the west then abortion is mostly legal, so religious people will have accept that not they can no longer enforce their world views on the rest of the world.
And it ain't just muslims, Israel has orthodox jews who go around enforcing the sabbat in areas they control. In my home town in the Netherlands you got some raised eyebrows if you washed the car on sunday, and they succesfully blocked the showing of movies in the local theather on christian significant days and tried multple times to limit the opening ours of the city pool.
I have seen the fight in holland about sunday openings for shops and slowly the christians have had to accept that they cannot tell the rest how to live their lives. It then comes at a bit of a shock to find you suddenly have to deal with a "new" religion in your culture who thinks not just that they have a right to dictate their views on everyone else but that violence is the way to do it.
Simple put, our western culture no longer expects this, we find it hard to re-act to it. I am not a christian, find the whole point of religion stupid BUT I will keep my mouth shut if dining with christians during they talking to a non-existant beard in the sky.
Note that this is very complex social behaviour on BOTH sides. I do not interfere with something I think is silly. They do not object to my not taking part in their religion. We each accept we are different and adjust to be able to live together. Similarly, if I want to wash my car on a sunday, so be it.
It may not be perfect but it prevents holy wars. We can all to easily see what happens if people don't follow this basic rules. They are still mopping up the pieces in Northern Ireland, Basken land has been in the news for decades.
As a world we have seen what happens when you allow a relgion (or dogma) to rule, no thanks, never again. It ain't anything special against Islam, ALL religions have had to adjust and keep learn to keep to themselves. Few have problems with Amish rather strict codes because they don't even think of enforcing them on anyone else and life their lifes as part of the country they have chosen as their home.
The US and China use the exact same method of execution. Just that China is more honest and kills all its people who commit crimes, not just blacks.
Since they both use the same method your logic kinda falls apart to link this with any ID card system.
As for them roaming the country side, no they are just used to avoid having the cost of building facilities at all locations, they are no different from the US system where apparently the state has found the money to introduce them in its facilities. The vans are just a method, they could just as easily perhaps have chosen to make one central facility to which all condemned are transported. A death factory, not sure what would cause more of an outcry.
So you have two countries, both of which execute people in a highly contested way, often with a lot of questions about the legallity of the trial. Is it a coindence that the majority of convicts in the US is black and/or poor?
If anything I think the Chinese method is to be preffered, how many millionairs has the US executed? If you are going to have the death penalty, then I prefer to have the implementation that has all walks of life walking to their death, not just those to poor to defend themselves.
As for political prisoners, you mean the ones China calls terrrorists? When are we going to get a look at what really happens in Quatonmo? Where the US houses its political prisoners?
Pot, meet kettle. My aren't you two black.
Also note that most EU countries have a national ID card, and NO death penalty and far better records on the subject of human rights then both the US and China.
IF virtual worlds become important (they are not yet) then they MIGHT become a breeding ground for terrorism. Second life is mentioned, which is a "popular" and often discussed virtual world.
I say "popular" because while a great number of people have downloaded, and far more have heard of it, the actual number of active "players" is rather low.
As you get older, you start to see more and more that everything old is new again. I seem to remember similar story about BBS systems. Remember when everyone had to have a homepage? Now everybody has to have a social website page. Blogs were all new despite the fact that they seemed a lot like those homepage that were suddenly old or for that matter mailing lists.
One of the things I find really odd about this article is that they seem to suggest that the virtual worlds themselves might be the target rather then just a place for meeting and discussing terrorism. Right... bit of a case of wishfull thinking I think. Second Life isn't big enough for anyone to give a shit about. Break its economy? Too late and who the fuck cares.
World of Warcraft would be a better target, wipe out all accounts and millions of teenage boys will cry out from their mothers basement. I still rather doubt wether the world at large will notice.
I can understand some of the reasoning behind it, but I think this is mostly one giant ego trip. Ooh the CIA took a look at us, we are the next battleground, aren't we important!
It is rather like those protestors who imagine that every action of them is watched by secret agents and that the goverment has a huge file on them, while in reality the goverment doesn't care in the least and that birdlike spy plane is in fact just a bird.
The anonimity? That works both ways, you don't know who I am, but I don't know who you are either. How do I know I am not talking to an agent or do they think terrorists are as stupid as those pedo's on to catch a predator?
Does that mean Florida is offline? No it just means you cannot communicate with one of their routers.
Close, it means that the internettrafficreport can't communicate with on of their routers.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the ravenous internetrafficrepport of america is so stupid, that it thinks that if it can see it, you can't see it.
It is a common problem with "amateur" websites for gaming clans, person A "I can't load the site" person B "you are an idiot, works fine for me".
Is that router really down? Hard to say, other articles have already explained why the itr.com site methods are flawed, they are too reliant on a single paths to determine what works and what does not. All you know from their site is how THEY can communicate with the rest of the world, not how the rest of the world can communicate with them.
Like so many you obviously never employed anyone. This is NOT just a case of paying minimum wage for ONE person.
The robot for the stated amount of money will work 24/7 365 days a year. Never sick, never late, never rude. He makes no demands, has no ambitions to better himself, doesn't demand promotions, doesn't get a higher wage as he gets older. Remmeber this is a DUTCH story, we actually give minimum wage workers a minimum wage they can live on.
The robot doesn't demand overtime, has no holidays.
The robot doesn't need a toilet, a break room, no breaks.
To replace the robot you would need not ONE person but a minimum of THREE people at least to have the station manned 24/7 and that still leaves a lot of times during breaks when there is no service.
There are even more complex things to consider, a lot of gas stations are on highways, minimum driving age in europe is 18. This means the cheapest kind of employee can't reach the place and any 18 year old who can afford a car in holland is going to want enough money to pay for it.
I also seriously wonder about what you call minimum wage in your country. The robot costs 111.000 dollars (75.000) euro. Now I am not that familiar with minimum wage for 16 years old in my country, but it still costs a bit more for the employer in salary and taxesthen 7.500 euro. Offcourse that is only during the day. Nights shifts are not allowed for 16yr olds. Want somebody a bit more mature? Up goes minimum wage, provided offcourse you can get someone for that salary.
Yet another thing you forget, recruitement costs, or do you think that same person is going to work 10 years for the same wage? Not in holland mate, just based on the law alone the wage more then doubles just because you get older.
Offcourse that means you got to replace that person constantly, every 6 months or so (longer contract and in holland people can't be fired just because they have gotten older and get a higher minimum wage), that is expensive, and how many motivated people who are any good will want to work for a company that knows is threating them like throw away employees? Hint, supermarkets do this (Albert Heijn) and they are slowly learning that it has giventhem such a bad rep that they can't find anyone motivated anymore. They got plenty of shelf-fillers who know they are going to be fired once their balls drop, but it means there is nobody who qualifies to stay with the company and fill the higher positions. You can use temps, but the agency is going to want payment on top of the salary.
No, there is a reason robots are used so often. They work, are cheap and you can get rid of messy employees who demand things.
Before the solution for gas stations was to introduce self-serve. Someday in the future robots may bring back the service we once had.
Not that I think it is going to happen anytime soon, this story has a habit of repeating itself.
our economy is in a great state. He could have been sarcastic, oh wait, he is american.
Iraq has WMD.English time, Iraq has A WMD. One weapon. They probably did. The kurds did not gas themselves.
Iran almost has the bomb. and we are almost capable of travelling to mars. ALMOST is a nice word.
the deficit was never balanced when I came in, and it is almost balanced now. Well the first is most likely true, balance would mean equel spending and income, most likely their was a deficit or surplus of some kind. The second bit, well there is that word ALMOST again.
America has plenty of oil, and gas. We have no need for nuculear or alternative power.Plenty for what? For the next year? Probably. Since the US seems to be pretty well suplied with electricity, there is no need to look at other sources, not in the timespan politicians worry about anyway.
Our broadband policy is working great! Might be true, if the average slashdotters policy is to never have sex with a girl, then their policy works GREAT! Say that the broadband policy is to make the telecoms and such super rich without having to invest and avoiding making it even easier to infringe on copyrights, then US policy is working.
I am not just being pedantic, this is the problem with soundbite politics. It doesn't leave room to properly qualify statements. Take bush senior "no more taxes" or something to that effect. If you read up on it, it is just possible that he spoke the truth, as far as I can judge from europe, he just raised existing one, not created any new ones. On the other hand everyone should have known he was lying because the sentence also means he was promising the complete eradication of ALL taxes. "No more slavery" doesn't mean "no increase in the number of slaves" but the abolition of slavery entirely.
Soundbite politics, a great evil that is slowly destroying democracy.
Lets face it, robotic mowers exist. Garbage chutes exist. But dildo's have been around for millenia and they never replaced us yet.
Mind you, it is murder on the hips but a man got to do, what a man got to do. I will bravely sacrifice myself so that the rest of slashdot can live a pure life! Yes I am that noble.
But it is important to remember that Apple did NOT do a re-write as this author proposes. They simply added to an existing code base, a code base that is older then windows.
There is a suggestion that windows sucks because it has so many old parts, this is not the case, it sucks, because it is just plain crap, old/new it is all crap.Even the bits that work have so much tacked on for all sorts of reasons it becomes a bloated impossible to maintain mess.
But age itself has nothing to do with it.
They can't, they don't want to, it would kill them
on
Time for a Vista Do-Over?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"Do an Apple and start with new code. Forget about supporting every piece of hardware and software ever written. For people with major compatibility issues, keep Vista Premium around. You'll be surprised at how many people simply want to move forward."
MS is not Apple. Its software is used far more widely and people depend on it. MS already faces the nightmare of having to support several versions of its OS because if a critical security hole is found in an old windows version MS has to fix or face millions of hijacked PC's and another smear on its reputation.
Vista is in fact the move by MS to go to ONE base, no longer the 9X/NT seperation, one kernel to rule them all! They already broke plenty of legacy applications with it and getting lots of flak because of it. Yes, it might sound smart to just start over but MS really can't do it, because there would be a side effect. IF MS broke backwards support, then when people would finally be forced to move their legacy app from a now unsupported OS, they might CHOOSE a different OS!
By keeping old apps running on their latest OS, they make surepeople have no real incentive to switch their old apps to a different OS. See the recent IE7 and IE8 debate where companies who build their intranet apps for IE6 are faced with having to alter them. Why if you have to pay developer anyway, why not make the app browser neutral and avoid having to do the same for IE9? Force people to chance and they might chance in a direction you do not like.
Anyway, what did Apple really do? They switched their OS9 for one of the oldest OS'es still around? Apple did NOT write new code, they used existing code, existing ANCIENT code.
"Stop trying to make Windows all things to all people. Build it for three core tasks: e-mail, Web browsing, and document creation (which would cover 75 percent or more of the computing world's needs). Sell the OS for $19.99. Then build a dozen or so add-ons that users can bolt on to create the task-oriented OS they want: writing, music, video creation, art work, accounting and business, and so on."
Isn't this exactly what people been bitching about, that MS has to many different versions of its OS? It is already hard enough to get people to cough up once for software, constant upgrades are really going to upset them. It is already a support nightmare because what user really knows which OS version they run let alone what upgrades they installed? BAD IDEA!
"Create a universal interface table for all applications that can be written to by current software manufacturers. It should be small and light, and when you run the new OS, it should automatically collect what it needs from the Microsoft site or the primary vendor site. It would put most of the processing work on the original application and leave the OS safe to act as traffic cop without getting bogged down.
Does this guy even know MS? MS doesn't want third party developers to have an easy time, MS is well known for introducing unpublished API's that its own apps use to make them seem better then third party apps. This idea would totally go against MS business practices. Give a third party an even chance, and why, people might just use that product instead of your own.
"Stop tooting your own horn!"
MS lives by the fact that to a lot of people Computers == Microsoft. It has to toot its own horn very hard to make sure it drowns out anyone who might claim otherwise. They also toot a lot about what their NEXT piece of software is going to do, hoping nobody will be able to hear the spoil sports who point out the software that already does what MS is saying MIGHT happen.
Check up on the history of MS vs OS/2. MS not tooting its own horn would run counter to the way the company has competed.
As for Apple, show me an apple product that does NOT display its logo rather clearly. Everyone knows what an iPod looks like. Apple is just better at making their tooting seem subtle.
How do you arrive at 60 dollars? You failed math or something? 5 dollars per month for music does NOT mean 60 dollars in extra taxes my friend unless you are very naive.
Because the movie industry will want the same deal, and the TV industry, and the software industry and the games industry and the news agencies and anyone else who has ever claimed that their content is being shared against their will via the internet.
This tax would open the flood gates.
I don't know what a base internet connection cost in canada but 5 dollar would seem like a massive increase for basic connections. Not everyone has 60 dollars to spend.
Would this 60 dollars also "buy" you all the music in the world or just canadian music?
What if I don't listen to music because I am deaf? Do I still need to pay this tax?
There was a story about the new linux kernel, and that was a point upgrade.
You also get patches/upgrades from MS outside service packs.
So this is in a way like a Linux distro that announces a new point release, which ARE reported on slashdot.
Hate vista or love it. Use it or leave it, but it is a news worthy item when it receives an upgrade. For better or worse this is going to affect a lot of people who read this site.
Oh and OSX has had nothing but point upgrades since it release back in the dark ages, each one of those point releases has been discussed to death.
I don't use vista yet, but am a PC gamer so sooner or later I might have to take the plunge, news on Vista therefor intrests me, if this SP1 is really good, it might hasten the move to Vista and make game companies more inclined to make directx10 only games. Or not, but I want to know when I should start to look into pirating Vista (Pay for MS software? What an odd concept.)
The answer to the three questions were, MS, Sony, BOTH!
It wasn't really all that difficult to figure out. MS is a convicted monopolist, Sony (Well Sony/BMG) put a rootkit with their product and BOTH have always tried to force their own products instead of standards.
So do you hate BluRay because of some irrational hatred of Sony? I personally like BluRay because it comes free with a PS3 and the lack of have handed tactics by MS (such as buying support) used to try and force us all to convert. One of us. One of us. One of us.
Frankly if you want to look at the sides involved you could at most choose the lesser of two evils, lets see who is the convicted monopolist again? Who is the rootkit company again? Who insist on ignoring standards and enforcing their own inferior solutions on the public?
Sorry, this format war was about the difference between Jack Johnson and John Jackson. If the parties involved had been smart they would simply have merged their products and saved everyone a lot of trouble.
Oh and I don't hate MS, I just don't trust them, they got a very long history of lying to serve their own goals. Sony does the same, but I have never ever been forced to use a Sony product that was riddled with bugs. Can you say the same for MS?
The nazi's had your approach, they believed that killing people if it might save others was a good idea, especially if the people were being killed were less worthy anyway. Who is going to be the subject of your medical experiments? There is an awfull lot of research that would go a lot faster if only we had human trials with less restrictions.
To this day a lot of the research from that era is still the ONLY research available because nobody else allows us to kill people to really see what kills them. All modern hypothermia research for instance can only guess at what the limits are, because it is not acceptable to truly freeze a person to death.
There are plenty of examples even in modern times of ethics going wrong. Google for "medical research foster childeren new york" and you will find a case where somebody without ethics decided that people should be volunteered for medical research. Nazi germany or trying to save others, others of more value then foster childeren?
Who is going to volunteer your father? Himself, a person with reduced mental capacity? You? The facility that takes care of him?
And what part of medical research? Part of experiments to find new medicines involve giving otherwise perfectly healthy subjects a disease so you can be sure that you are ONLY working on that disease and nothing else. Would you volunteer your father to have his back broken to research potential cures for spinal injuries?
Sadly the current system does let people die who could have benefitted from drugs in development, but the alternative is just to horrible to contemplate. We need very strict ethics when it comes to experimenting on human beings (and for that matter on animals) because if we don't, we are no longer human.
I rather die from some disease then live in a society where people are experimented on at the whim of drugs companies.
Also remember this, your father is dying, he is not death yet. Where there is live their is hope. But if some researcher of on wild goose chase injects something nasty to see what happens, then he will very death indeed.
I understand your pain, but for the sake of one human being we cannot loose our humanity.
Also your post seems naive, are you really willing to kill your father to save someone else? Because you end the sentence with "my father will never get benefit of this." Sorry, you father would be a lab rat, society benefits, the lab rat doesn't.
Even if the medicine your father would get would really work, the only way to be certain is dissection, your father would have to be killed after the experimental drugs were administred to be certain it was the drugs that cured him and not something else. Those lab rats that get cured from the disease they were infected with don't life much longer then the control group. All end up on the dissection table.
Sorry, your idea is horrible, if human beings were a better type of person we might be able to do it, but humans are just to inclined to pure evil for it to not lead to horrible abuses.
There is no/. crowd. Get this stupid idea out of your head, you got Bill Gates lovers and Steve Jobs fanboys. You got MSCE's and real engineers. You got Window monkeys, linux users and BSD weido's.
There is everything here from rocket scientists to people who clean toilets for a living. Age varies from almost dead to just old enough to sit upright.
We even have rumors of women visiting this place.
So how can you have a/. crowd?
Answer you don't. Sure there are some trends, there are probably a few more MS haters here and a few more Jobs lovers then in society as a whole, but read any article on Apple/MS and you will find people who go against the flow.
The reason I point this out is that it is VERY dangerous to think that all people from a certain part of society are the same.
And it is very relevant in this discussion. SOME kids using myspace are stupid enough to send private information on a public network, therefore YOU seem to conclude ALL kids using myspace are stupid enough to send private information on a public network.
This leads to nanny state rules, where because 1% of the populatin is unfit to live 99% has their freedoms restricted.
Myspace is a tool some people will get it wrong, though shit. This has nothing to do with generations or whatever, there have ALWAYS been stupid people who do stupid things, society survives.
How soon we forget. Oh you might point out that the CD was a dutch invention put onto the market by Philips together with Sony, but then so is BluRay.
BetaMax? The industry standard for ages in profesional video.
And for a failed format minidiscs sure managed to stick around for a long only dying out now MP3 players have taken over but before being the portable player for those who thought a CD player was to big and a cassete player was to old fashioned.
As for the memory stick, it allows sony to control the market for add on memory on its products while the other electronic giants loose those sales to third parties, oh yeah, that is failure alright.
I understand you are joking, but your comment was in the post often made deadly serious and modded up as insightfull. Says a lot that now the same comment is funny. To many people discounted sony because they wanted to see them fail (and some named the rootkit as their reason, which is why they threw their support behind an MS backed product, from the frying pan into the fire anyone?) and just made up their own reality.
Lets just hope the PS3 doesn't become a success after all, crow is not part of a healthy diet.
We had a story about it just a little while ago "MS ties charity to the use of Windows". I have absolutly no doubt that Bill Gates would LOVE to help the poor, with "free" MS software.
No not because he is an evil self-serving asshole. Lets be brutally honest here, MS software is the best in the world, and Bill Gates is the living proof of it. If MS software isn't the best in the world, why does everyone use it making Bill Gates one of the richest man on earth?
Because lets undestand this very clearly, compared to all the other very rich men on earth, Bill Gates got that way by basically selling a SINGLE product, later expanding that to a massive TWO. (Okay not exactly, but compare this to other giant companies like IBM, HP or the japanese giants and MS product catalog seems awfully thin).
I think their is something very subtle corrupt about PRIVATE donations, when even a Morning Musume sketch knows it, you have to wonder why any sane society allows it.
In a sketch some childeren have an argument, one is rich, the others aren't. Rich kid complains to parents, parents talk to the schoolteacher and threathen to cut their donations.
A more classic example is religious charity, you can have our cash, but you got to listen to our sermon and if your religion ain't right, well we might not even give you anything at all.
I think charity should firmly be in the hands of a goverment, they are not the best but at least they can be voted out. If I want to donate a million dollars I shouldn't really be able to attach any restrictions to it. If you allow that you essentially allow the rich to dictate the live of the poor. Schools only get Bill Gates money if the schools only windows, can this even be called charity anymore? What next, schools that don't expell kids who pirate MS windows will get no funding?
No, I think Bill Gates is the last person I want in control of society, not just because he is ammoral business man, but because he also had that amorallity work for him all his life. Do you want a human being telling the poor how to life who has never ever been poor? Who with his monthly income condems countless others to poverty.
This has to do with the concept of average income. If the average income is 1000 dollars and one person make 10.000 then 9 people earn nothing at all
If he is truly that worried about society, the answer is simple, PAY MORE TAXES. MS has made it an art to find way to dodge paying taxes over its gigantic earnings. But that offcourse won't happen, wether tax money is wasted or not is not the issue, Bill Gates has little to say on how taxes are spend, why it might even go to the NSA on projects to improve Linux. Schools could decide themselves what software to use. The end of the world!
There are some fans of Bill Gates who point out his charity work, but frankly for a man that is that rich, it is pathetic and a lot of it can be traced back to ways of forcing the use of windows.
Also there is this to consider, if I make 1000 dollars and donate 100, that is a huge amount. If I make a million dollars and donate 100.000. The amount is far greater but the impact on me is far smaller. If I have billions, then I could donate 95% of my wealth and still life the life of the filthy rich. Gates don't donate 95% of his wealth, not even 10 percent. Important thing to consider.
More controll by business over our society, yeah thanks DO NOT WANT!
Where are you drivers in linux? Where do you download them? Why you don't, they are IN THE KERNEL!
So Linux "The kernel" does a lot more then MS does with its core OS because MS still asks you to download a ton of drivers. This is part of their strategy, it allows them to shift blame to the driver instead of their OS. If you really got a problem with MS software and actually have some support (check your MS license, you pay for the software, there is no support) then your first job will be to convince them the bug lies with them and not some combo of drivers that you had to install.
That is why these MS reports are so silly, you really can't compare the two "distro's". MS Vista does far less then a Linux based distro like Ubuntu BUT they don't have a bare kernel they distribute but even if it did it does far less then the linux kernel.
So what are you comparing?
Also not that security bugs in Vista affect EVERY vista user because all the installs are the same. A linux distro bug in PHP affects only those who use PHP on their linux distro. MS funded research has in the past made lists of security bugs in linux where they counted the same bug multiple times for each distro it was in. That is kinda like saying "Just look at our competitors cars, they made 1 million of them and 1000 of them had the same fault. Meanwhile our 1 model has just one fault, the brakes don't work. We are BEST!"
Until WoW SOE was the big (western) MMORPG company and seemed to have the market in its grasp. People tought that the half a million or so subscribers to EQ at one point was the maximum market.
And then Blizzard came along and didn't so much raise the bar as send it into orbit.
Currently SOE has a lousy reputation, which makes me extremely reluctant to try any new MMO from them, Pirates of the Burning Seas is the latest and altough it was developed outside SOE, well so was Vanguard.
I on the other hand would have little trouble in putting in a pre-order for the next Blizzard MMO title (Sorry, never was much of a RTS fan).
Rep matters and the suits know it. Why do you think suit run companies change their name constantly and have huge marketing campaigns? Because when all else sucks you hope you can bluff your way into having a good rep.
But not in the way the BSA would have you believe, the simple fact was that like you, people like me couldn't get their hands on OS/2 through copyright infringement. For the record I stayed with DOS for far longer and later W95 (wasn't till the early parts of W2K that I learned about unix and later linux) but the simple fact is that MS has had a simple advantage, its software is available to those who for what ever reason don't buy their software in boxes.
I did have my hands on a trial of OS/2 Warp, but I never managed to install it on my PC. Another advantage to W95 which was buggy as hell and often had problem during install BUT did eventually run.
A similar problem is happening right now with Vista, hard to pirate, so I haven't tried it.
So what you ask? Well like many here I am the IT support guy in my social circle and I can't support Vista because I don't know it. How are you going to answer a call asking how to change a setting when you have no idea what is where? I am not going to claim that people I know stay with XP because they can't get support from me otherwise but it is a simple choice, learn windows Vista when you never learned/wanted to learn Windows in the first place, or stay with XP I will be happy to hand you a copy off.
QUESTION:I don't know why OS/2 failed.
ANSWER:Fact is that many people liked it but didn't manage to get a copy.
Piracy has been a critical element in MS rise to fame. With Vista they are taking a gamble, has their lockin become powerfull enough they can now survive without it? Personally I think it has, but you never know. MS might soon face a real nightmare, being beaten NOT by a competitor they can out advertise or EVEN outperform, but beaten by their own product.
Or not, Vista ain't a ME yet and ME never threathened their business model.
Slashdot Mirror
This is only logical, while english is a very common language and a great many people speak it as their second, third language, it is not the most common language.
In europe, most tv-stations, even the commercial ones are man-dated by law to provide a certain amount of "native" broadcasting. That is why the station RTL4 which was clearly aimed at dutch audience spend money on a luxemburg program block in the early hours to satisfy the law (they were based there using a loophole).
Childerens tv in holland has had a strong EU only feel to it in my youth, simply because US programs did not meet EU regs against advertising to childeren.
As for how it is affected, it is not even clear yet how copyright infringement affects hollywood, how it affects local cinema in the rest of the world is anyones guess. We certainly are not going to get the truth about it from the media, they after all have a rather direct intrest in the matter.
So far however it seems to matter little, Remember non-hollywood movies tend not to pay quit as much to their stars. This matters a lot, to pay those idiotic salaries a Tom Hanks gets you need to make massive profits. Pay them a more modest wage and you have a lot more room.
Also what you claim about english content being more easily accepted in the rest of the world helps. I can far more easily find a seeded torrent of a US show then say a belgium program even if said program in the country itself is more popular.
US politics to an outsider look hopelessly fragmented, this despite that fact that on the surface they are ALL rightwing capatalists compared to most of the rest of the world.
Odd as it may seem, there is more difference amongst american rightwingers then between right and left wing in europe.
That is because very few in europe support the abolision of goverment itself, we know goverment is big and cumbersome and a blackhole for money, but more or less we accept this as the way it has always been.
Only in the US it seems some people passionalty believe that a different method is possible. I think it is a leftover from their early days as a country, a sign these people have not realised the US is no longer and CAN no longer be that nation of the founding fathers.
You see them talk on and on about the constitution, a document written by supporters of slavery, etnic cleansing and voting rights based on gender, religion and income. The US was created in a worldview where it was perfectly alright to slaughter the natives, keep people as property and women were second rank citizens. It was perfectly alright back then to just claim a piece of land as your own and cultivate it.
This no longer works, the real problem is that the US is no longer the Wild West or a frontier nation, it is just another country, just the same as all the ancient ones on eurasian continent and it can no longer be run as an experiment.
While movies are rarely a good indicator of anything, some "cowboy" movies showed this when the cowboy from the wild west enters one of large cities. The difference between the lone gunman whose law comes from a bullet and the almost european like cities.
There exist a simple cartoon, young boy seen going to school with a rifle "1800: Everything is alright, Jimmy got his gun" "1980: Look out! Jimmy got his GUN!".
The US has had to grow up and this is never popular. Once you could build your ranch whereever you wanted and your nearest neighbour was a state away. Now your house is next to dozens of others, cost a fortune and you don't want its value to decline because your neightbour decides to open a leatherworks in his backyard. This means big goverment, lots of regulations and an end to liberty.
In europe we know this, we know there have to lots and lots of rules to allow us to live so close together. Americans still hope that it can be like the glory days and that just is no longer possible.
Ron Paul's message was that he could turn the clock back, that was appealing to a lot of people, who carefully avoided asking themselves what it would all mean in the end.
Take his isolationist policies. Currently a lot of US goods come from abroad, with the US no longer protecting world peace, what might happen to those traderoutes?
Pull out of korea? Would save a lot of money to be sure. But would China not extend its control in the region? What would you do with the soldiers? Fire them? Where would they get new jobs? Defence may cost a lot, but it also supplies a lot of people with wage packages they then spend fueling the economy.
Say korea and such nations had to fund for defence themselves, they would have to raise the price of exports, not a good thing either.
The US floats on foreign oil, the US has a continues fleet presence to try and stop the constant sinking of tankers by Iraq/Iran in the past, why risk that mess again by pulling the fleets out.
What do you do with the fleets if they are not out there, mothball them? What if war does happen, how quickly can you get your military up? Japan had the run around at the start of US involvement precisly because of Ron Paul like sentiments. How many americans died for the believe that the US could stay out of a WW?
The simple fact is that Ron Paul and his supporters have a vision of the world that no longer is accurate, they want the US to become something it no longer can be, and are unable to answer how they would overcome any of the problems they would create.
Furthermore, one of the partners in Sony BMG makes the PLAYSTATION 3 video game console that is designed to run GNU/Linux.
Not exactly, Sony BMG is a joint-venture between Sony Music Entertainment and BMG. SME is a daughter of Sony. But Sony itself, is NOT a partner is this joint venture anymore then your dad is a partner in your marriage (assuming offcourse you are not from the deep south).
Futher more the PS3 is a product of Sony Computer Entertainment another daughter of Sony.
That took the piss out of Jesus Christ, how many people were killed over it? How many embassies attacked?
In most countries we have moved on, religion is considered something that some may choose to follow, a bit, when it is convenient, but it is no longer allowed to rule everyones life.
And then the world changes, it has become a lot smaller and we are finding that large parts of the world don't exactly agree with our way of dealing with religion. Worse, these people are no longer staying put, but increasingly moving to those more liberal countries only to then go ultra-conservative.
In the series Fawlty Towers, you see some people claim that Manuel is a slur on italians. They forget that Basil is a far greater slur on brits themselves. If Italy has no pride in having everyone see Italians as being Manuel, the brits probably don't want to be seen as the rest of the cast.
In the "western" countries we know we all forced to leave together and have had to accept that precious little is holy anymore. Now all of sudden we have to deal with a religion that has come in close contact with us, whose followers are not always in agreement with the western worlds view of "life and let life".
The problem isn't with the muslim religion itself, other religions have had similar extremes in the past. The problem is that the view nolonger fits in the western world. It would be fine if fundementalist muslims and westeners were segregated but that is no longer the case.
Just as a anti-abortion person must learn to accept that if he wants to life in the west then abortion is mostly legal, so religious people will have accept that not they can no longer enforce their world views on the rest of the world.
And it ain't just muslims, Israel has orthodox jews who go around enforcing the sabbat in areas they control. In my home town in the Netherlands you got some raised eyebrows if you washed the car on sunday, and they succesfully blocked the showing of movies in the local theather on christian significant days and tried multple times to limit the opening ours of the city pool.
I have seen the fight in holland about sunday openings for shops and slowly the christians have had to accept that they cannot tell the rest how to live their lives. It then comes at a bit of a shock to find you suddenly have to deal with a "new" religion in your culture who thinks not just that they have a right to dictate their views on everyone else but that violence is the way to do it.
Simple put, our western culture no longer expects this, we find it hard to re-act to it. I am not a christian, find the whole point of religion stupid BUT I will keep my mouth shut if dining with christians during they talking to a non-existant beard in the sky.
Note that this is very complex social behaviour on BOTH sides. I do not interfere with something I think is silly. They do not object to my not taking part in their religion. We each accept we are different and adjust to be able to live together. Similarly, if I want to wash my car on a sunday, so be it.
It may not be perfect but it prevents holy wars. We can all to easily see what happens if people don't follow this basic rules. They are still mopping up the pieces in Northern Ireland, Basken land has been in the news for decades.
As a world we have seen what happens when you allow a relgion (or dogma) to rule, no thanks, never again. It ain't anything special against Islam, ALL religions have had to adjust and keep learn to keep to themselves. Few have problems with Amish rather strict codes because they don't even think of enforcing them on anyone else and life their lifes as part of the country they have chosen as their home.
The US and China use the exact same method of execution. Just that China is more honest and kills all its people who commit crimes, not just blacks.
Since they both use the same method your logic kinda falls apart to link this with any ID card system.
As for them roaming the country side, no they are just used to avoid having the cost of building facilities at all locations, they are no different from the US system where apparently the state has found the money to introduce them in its facilities. The vans are just a method, they could just as easily perhaps have chosen to make one central facility to which all condemned are transported. A death factory, not sure what would cause more of an outcry.
So you have two countries, both of which execute people in a highly contested way, often with a lot of questions about the legallity of the trial. Is it a coindence that the majority of convicts in the US is black and/or poor?
If anything I think the Chinese method is to be preffered, how many millionairs has the US executed? If you are going to have the death penalty, then I prefer to have the implementation that has all walks of life walking to their death, not just those to poor to defend themselves.
As for political prisoners, you mean the ones China calls terrrorists? When are we going to get a look at what really happens in Quatonmo? Where the US houses its political prisoners?
Pot, meet kettle. My aren't you two black.
Also note that most EU countries have a national ID card, and NO death penalty and far better records on the subject of human rights then both the US and China.
IF virtual worlds become important (they are not yet) then they MIGHT become a breeding ground for terrorism. Second life is mentioned, which is a "popular" and often discussed virtual world.
I say "popular" because while a great number of people have downloaded, and far more have heard of it, the actual number of active "players" is rather low.
As you get older, you start to see more and more that everything old is new again. I seem to remember similar story about BBS systems. Remember when everyone had to have a homepage? Now everybody has to have a social website page. Blogs were all new despite the fact that they seemed a lot like those homepage that were suddenly old or for that matter mailing lists.
One of the things I find really odd about this article is that they seem to suggest that the virtual worlds themselves might be the target rather then just a place for meeting and discussing terrorism. Right... bit of a case of wishfull thinking I think. Second Life isn't big enough for anyone to give a shit about. Break its economy? Too late and who the fuck cares.
World of Warcraft would be a better target, wipe out all accounts and millions of teenage boys will cry out from their mothers basement. I still rather doubt wether the world at large will notice.
I can understand some of the reasoning behind it, but I think this is mostly one giant ego trip. Ooh the CIA took a look at us, we are the next battleground, aren't we important!
It is rather like those protestors who imagine that every action of them is watched by secret agents and that the goverment has a huge file on them, while in reality the goverment doesn't care in the least and that birdlike spy plane is in fact just a bird.
The anonimity? That works both ways, you don't know who I am, but I don't know who you are either. How do I know I am not talking to an agent or do they think terrorists are as stupid as those pedo's on to catch a predator?
Does that mean Florida is offline? No it just means you cannot communicate with one of their routers.
Close, it means that the internettrafficreport can't communicate with on of their routers.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the ravenous internetrafficrepport of america is so stupid, that it thinks that if it can see it, you can't see it.
It is a common problem with "amateur" websites for gaming clans, person A "I can't load the site" person B "you are an idiot, works fine for me".
Is that router really down? Hard to say, other articles have already explained why the itr.com site methods are flawed, they are too reliant on a single paths to determine what works and what does not. All you know from their site is how THEY can communicate with the rest of the world, not how the rest of the world can communicate with them.
Like so many you obviously never employed anyone. This is NOT just a case of paying minimum wage for ONE person.
The robot for the stated amount of money will work 24/7 365 days a year. Never sick, never late, never rude. He makes no demands, has no ambitions to better himself, doesn't demand promotions, doesn't get a higher wage as he gets older. Remmeber this is a DUTCH story, we actually give minimum wage workers a minimum wage they can live on.
The robot doesn't demand overtime, has no holidays.
The robot doesn't need a toilet, a break room, no breaks.
To replace the robot you would need not ONE person but a minimum of THREE people at least to have the station manned 24/7 and that still leaves a lot of times during breaks when there is no service.
There are even more complex things to consider, a lot of gas stations are on highways, minimum driving age in europe is 18. This means the cheapest kind of employee can't reach the place and any 18 year old who can afford a car in holland is going to want enough money to pay for it.
I also seriously wonder about what you call minimum wage in your country. The robot costs 111.000 dollars (75.000) euro. Now I am not that familiar with minimum wage for 16 years old in my country, but it still costs a bit more for the employer in salary and taxesthen 7.500 euro. Offcourse that is only during the day. Nights shifts are not allowed for 16yr olds. Want somebody a bit more mature? Up goes minimum wage, provided offcourse you can get someone for that salary.
Yet another thing you forget, recruitement costs, or do you think that same person is going to work 10 years for the same wage? Not in holland mate, just based on the law alone the wage more then doubles just because you get older.
Offcourse that means you got to replace that person constantly, every 6 months or so (longer contract and in holland people can't be fired just because they have gotten older and get a higher minimum wage), that is expensive, and how many motivated people who are any good will want to work for a company that knows is threating them like throw away employees? Hint, supermarkets do this (Albert Heijn) and they are slowly learning that it has giventhem such a bad rep that they can't find anyone motivated anymore. They got plenty of shelf-fillers who know they are going to be fired once their balls drop, but it means there is nobody who qualifies to stay with the company and fill the higher positions. You can use temps, but the agency is going to want payment on top of the salary.
No, there is a reason robots are used so often. They work, are cheap and you can get rid of messy employees who demand things.
Before the solution for gas stations was to introduce self-serve. Someday in the future robots may bring back the service we once had.
Not that I think it is going to happen anytime soon, this story has a habit of repeating itself.
I am not just being pedantic, this is the problem with soundbite politics. It doesn't leave room to properly qualify statements. Take bush senior "no more taxes" or something to that effect. If you read up on it, it is just possible that he spoke the truth, as far as I can judge from europe, he just raised existing one, not created any new ones. On the other hand everyone should have known he was lying because the sentence also means he was promising the complete eradication of ALL taxes. "No more slavery" doesn't mean "no increase in the number of slaves" but the abolition of slavery entirely.
Soundbite politics, a great evil that is slowly destroying democracy.
Lets face it, robotic mowers exist. Garbage chutes exist. But dildo's have been around for millenia and they never replaced us yet.
Mind you, it is murder on the hips but a man got to do, what a man got to do. I will bravely sacrifice myself so that the rest of slashdot can live a pure life! Yes I am that noble.
But it is important to remember that Apple did NOT do a re-write as this author proposes. They simply added to an existing code base, a code base that is older then windows.
There is a suggestion that windows sucks because it has so many old parts, this is not the case, it sucks, because it is just plain crap, old/new it is all crap.Even the bits that work have so much tacked on for all sorts of reasons it becomes a bloated impossible to maintain mess.
But age itself has nothing to do with it.
"Do an Apple and start with new code. Forget about supporting every piece of hardware and software ever written. For people with major compatibility issues, keep Vista Premium around. You'll be surprised at how many people simply want to move forward."
MS is not Apple. Its software is used far more widely and people depend on it. MS already faces the nightmare of having to support several versions of its OS because if a critical security hole is found in an old windows version MS has to fix or face millions of hijacked PC's and another smear on its reputation.
Vista is in fact the move by MS to go to ONE base, no longer the 9X/NT seperation, one kernel to rule them all! They already broke plenty of legacy applications with it and getting lots of flak because of it. Yes, it might sound smart to just start over but MS really can't do it, because there would be a side effect. IF MS broke backwards support, then when people would finally be forced to move their legacy app from a now unsupported OS, they might CHOOSE a different OS!
By keeping old apps running on their latest OS, they make surepeople have no real incentive to switch their old apps to a different OS. See the recent IE7 and IE8 debate where companies who build their intranet apps for IE6 are faced with having to alter them. Why if you have to pay developer anyway, why not make the app browser neutral and avoid having to do the same for IE9? Force people to chance and they might chance in a direction you do not like.
Anyway, what did Apple really do? They switched their OS9 for one of the oldest OS'es still around? Apple did NOT write new code, they used existing code, existing ANCIENT code.
"Stop trying to make Windows all things to all people. Build it for three core tasks: e-mail, Web browsing, and document creation (which would cover 75 percent or more of the computing world's needs). Sell the OS for $19.99. Then build a dozen or so add-ons that users can bolt on to create the task-oriented OS they want: writing, music, video creation, art work, accounting and business, and so on."
Isn't this exactly what people been bitching about, that MS has to many different versions of its OS? It is already hard enough to get people to cough up once for software, constant upgrades are really going to upset them. It is already a support nightmare because what user really knows which OS version they run let alone what upgrades they installed? BAD IDEA!
"Create a universal interface table for all applications that can be written to by current software manufacturers. It should be small and light, and when you run the new OS, it should automatically collect what it needs from the Microsoft site or the primary vendor site. It would put most of the processing work on the original application and leave the OS safe to act as traffic cop without getting bogged down.
Does this guy even know MS? MS doesn't want third party developers to have an easy time, MS is well known for introducing unpublished API's that its own apps use to make them seem better then third party apps. This idea would totally go against MS business practices. Give a third party an even chance, and why, people might just use that product instead of your own.
"Stop tooting your own horn!"
MS lives by the fact that to a lot of people Computers == Microsoft. It has to toot its own horn very hard to make sure it drowns out anyone who might claim otherwise. They also toot a lot about what their NEXT piece of software is going to do, hoping nobody will be able to hear the spoil sports who point out the software that already does what MS is saying MIGHT happen.
Check up on the history of MS vs OS/2. MS not tooting its own horn would run counter to the way the company has competed.
As for Apple, show me an apple product that does NOT display its logo rather clearly. Everyone knows what an iPod looks like. Apple is just better at making their tooting seem subtle.
On the whole I think t
How do you arrive at 60 dollars? You failed math or something? 5 dollars per month for music does NOT mean 60 dollars in extra taxes my friend unless you are very naive.
Because the movie industry will want the same deal, and the TV industry, and the software industry and the games industry and the news agencies and anyone else who has ever claimed that their content is being shared against their will via the internet.
This tax would open the flood gates.
I don't know what a base internet connection cost in canada but 5 dollar would seem like a massive increase for basic connections. Not everyone has 60 dollars to spend.
Would this 60 dollars also "buy" you all the music in the world or just canadian music?
What if I don't listen to music because I am deaf? Do I still need to pay this tax?
No my friend, this is a bad idea.
There was a story about the new linux kernel, and that was a point upgrade.
You also get patches/upgrades from MS outside service packs.
So this is in a way like a Linux distro that announces a new point release, which ARE reported on slashdot.
Hate vista or love it. Use it or leave it, but it is a news worthy item when it receives an upgrade. For better or worse this is going to affect a lot of people who read this site.
Oh and OSX has had nothing but point upgrades since it release back in the dark ages, each one of those point releases has been discussed to death.
I don't use vista yet, but am a PC gamer so sooner or later I might have to take the plunge, news on Vista therefor intrests me, if this SP1 is really good, it might hasten the move to Vista and make game companies more inclined to make directx10 only games. Or not, but I want to know when I should start to look into pirating Vista (Pay for MS software? What an odd concept.)
The answer to the three questions were, MS, Sony, BOTH!
It wasn't really all that difficult to figure out. MS is a convicted monopolist, Sony (Well Sony/BMG) put a rootkit with their product and BOTH have always tried to force their own products instead of standards.
Learn to read.
For that matter a single WoW account could have multiple users.
Don't play loose and fast with statistics, the marketing people might bump you off for trespassing on their turf.
So do you hate BluRay because of some irrational hatred of Sony? I personally like BluRay because it comes free with a PS3 and the lack of have handed tactics by MS (such as buying support) used to try and force us all to convert. One of us. One of us. One of us.
Frankly if you want to look at the sides involved you could at most choose the lesser of two evils, lets see who is the convicted monopolist again? Who is the rootkit company again? Who insist on ignoring standards and enforcing their own inferior solutions on the public?
Sorry, this format war was about the difference between Jack Johnson and John Jackson. If the parties involved had been smart they would simply have merged their products and saved everyone a lot of trouble.
Oh and I don't hate MS, I just don't trust them, they got a very long history of lying to serve their own goals. Sony does the same, but I have never ever been forced to use a Sony product that was riddled with bugs. Can you say the same for MS?
Godwin freaks, piss off for a bit will you.
The nazi's had your approach, they believed that killing people if it might save others was a good idea, especially if the people were being killed were less worthy anyway. Who is going to be the subject of your medical experiments? There is an awfull lot of research that would go a lot faster if only we had human trials with less restrictions.
To this day a lot of the research from that era is still the ONLY research available because nobody else allows us to kill people to really see what kills them. All modern hypothermia research for instance can only guess at what the limits are, because it is not acceptable to truly freeze a person to death.
There are plenty of examples even in modern times of ethics going wrong. Google for "medical research foster childeren new york" and you will find a case where somebody without ethics decided that people should be volunteered for medical research. Nazi germany or trying to save others, others of more value then foster childeren?
Who is going to volunteer your father? Himself, a person with reduced mental capacity? You? The facility that takes care of him?
And what part of medical research? Part of experiments to find new medicines involve giving otherwise perfectly healthy subjects a disease so you can be sure that you are ONLY working on that disease and nothing else. Would you volunteer your father to have his back broken to research potential cures for spinal injuries?
Sadly the current system does let people die who could have benefitted from drugs in development, but the alternative is just to horrible to contemplate. We need very strict ethics when it comes to experimenting on human beings (and for that matter on animals) because if we don't, we are no longer human.
I rather die from some disease then live in a society where people are experimented on at the whim of drugs companies.
Also remember this, your father is dying, he is not death yet. Where there is live their is hope. But if some researcher of on wild goose chase injects something nasty to see what happens, then he will very death indeed.
I understand your pain, but for the sake of one human being we cannot loose our humanity.
Also your post seems naive, are you really willing to kill your father to save someone else? Because you end the sentence with "my father will never get benefit of this." Sorry, you father would be a lab rat, society benefits, the lab rat doesn't.
Even if the medicine your father would get would really work, the only way to be certain is dissection, your father would have to be killed after the experimental drugs were administred to be certain it was the drugs that cured him and not something else. Those lab rats that get cured from the disease they were infected with don't life much longer then the control group. All end up on the dissection table.
Sorry, your idea is horrible, if human beings were a better type of person we might be able to do it, but humans are just to inclined to pure evil for it to not lead to horrible abuses.
There is no /. crowd. Get this stupid idea out of your head, you got Bill Gates lovers and Steve Jobs fanboys. You got MSCE's and real engineers. You got Window monkeys, linux users and BSD weido's.
There is everything here from rocket scientists to people who clean toilets for a living. Age varies from almost dead to just old enough to sit upright.
We even have rumors of women visiting this place.
So how can you have a /. crowd?
Answer you don't. Sure there are some trends, there are probably a few more MS haters here and a few more Jobs lovers then in society as a whole, but read any article on Apple/MS and you will find people who go against the flow.
The reason I point this out is that it is VERY dangerous to think that all people from a certain part of society are the same.
And it is very relevant in this discussion. SOME kids using myspace are stupid enough to send private information on a public network, therefore YOU seem to conclude ALL kids using myspace are stupid enough to send private information on a public network.
This leads to nanny state rules, where because 1% of the populatin is unfit to live 99% has their freedoms restricted.
Myspace is a tool some people will get it wrong, though shit. This has nothing to do with generations or whatever, there have ALWAYS been stupid people who do stupid things, society survives.
How soon we forget. Oh you might point out that the CD was a dutch invention put onto the market by Philips together with Sony, but then so is BluRay.
BetaMax? The industry standard for ages in profesional video.
And for a failed format minidiscs sure managed to stick around for a long only dying out now MP3 players have taken over but before being the portable player for those who thought a CD player was to big and a cassete player was to old fashioned.
As for the memory stick, it allows sony to control the market for add on memory on its products while the other electronic giants loose those sales to third parties, oh yeah, that is failure alright.
I understand you are joking, but your comment was in the post often made deadly serious and modded up as insightfull. Says a lot that now the same comment is funny. To many people discounted sony because they wanted to see them fail (and some named the rootkit as their reason, which is why they threw their support behind an MS backed product, from the frying pan into the fire anyone?) and just made up their own reality.
Lets just hope the PS3 doesn't become a success after all, crow is not part of a healthy diet.
How about fluffy kittens? Aliens? Dolphins? How about the biosphere?
What about the use of linux in a somekind of euthanasia device or do you get to dictate how other people should life and die their own lives?
Offcourse your suggestion is silly and goes against the very spirit of opensource.
We had a story about it just a little while ago "MS ties charity to the use of Windows". I have absolutly no doubt that Bill Gates would LOVE to help the poor, with "free" MS software.
No not because he is an evil self-serving asshole. Lets be brutally honest here, MS software is the best in the world, and Bill Gates is the living proof of it. If MS software isn't the best in the world, why does everyone use it making Bill Gates one of the richest man on earth?
Because lets undestand this very clearly, compared to all the other very rich men on earth, Bill Gates got that way by basically selling a SINGLE product, later expanding that to a massive TWO. (Okay not exactly, but compare this to other giant companies like IBM, HP or the japanese giants and MS product catalog seems awfully thin).
I think their is something very subtle corrupt about PRIVATE donations, when even a Morning Musume sketch knows it, you have to wonder why any sane society allows it.
In a sketch some childeren have an argument, one is rich, the others aren't. Rich kid complains to parents, parents talk to the schoolteacher and threathen to cut their donations.
A more classic example is religious charity, you can have our cash, but you got to listen to our sermon and if your religion ain't right, well we might not even give you anything at all.
I think charity should firmly be in the hands of a goverment, they are not the best but at least they can be voted out. If I want to donate a million dollars I shouldn't really be able to attach any restrictions to it. If you allow that you essentially allow the rich to dictate the live of the poor. Schools only get Bill Gates money if the schools only windows, can this even be called charity anymore? What next, schools that don't expell kids who pirate MS windows will get no funding?
No, I think Bill Gates is the last person I want in control of society, not just because he is ammoral business man, but because he also had that amorallity work for him all his life. Do you want a human being telling the poor how to life who has never ever been poor? Who with his monthly income condems countless others to poverty.
This has to do with the concept of average income. If the average income is 1000 dollars and one person make 10.000 then 9 people earn nothing at all
If he is truly that worried about society, the answer is simple, PAY MORE TAXES. MS has made it an art to find way to dodge paying taxes over its gigantic earnings. But that offcourse won't happen, wether tax money is wasted or not is not the issue, Bill Gates has little to say on how taxes are spend, why it might even go to the NSA on projects to improve Linux. Schools could decide themselves what software to use. The end of the world!
There are some fans of Bill Gates who point out his charity work, but frankly for a man that is that rich, it is pathetic and a lot of it can be traced back to ways of forcing the use of windows.
Also there is this to consider, if I make 1000 dollars and donate 100, that is a huge amount. If I make a million dollars and donate 100.000. The amount is far greater but the impact on me is far smaller. If I have billions, then I could donate 95% of my wealth and still life the life of the filthy rich. Gates don't donate 95% of his wealth, not even 10 percent. Important thing to consider.
More controll by business over our society, yeah thanks DO NOT WANT!
Where are you drivers in linux? Where do you download them? Why you don't, they are IN THE KERNEL!
So Linux "The kernel" does a lot more then MS does with its core OS because MS still asks you to download a ton of drivers. This is part of their strategy, it allows them to shift blame to the driver instead of their OS. If you really got a problem with MS software and actually have some support (check your MS license, you pay for the software, there is no support) then your first job will be to convince them the bug lies with them and not some combo of drivers that you had to install.
That is why these MS reports are so silly, you really can't compare the two "distro's". MS Vista does far less then a Linux based distro like Ubuntu BUT they don't have a bare kernel they distribute but even if it did it does far less then the linux kernel.
So what are you comparing?
Also not that security bugs in Vista affect EVERY vista user because all the installs are the same. A linux distro bug in PHP affects only those who use PHP on their linux distro. MS funded research has in the past made lists of security bugs in linux where they counted the same bug multiple times for each distro it was in. That is kinda like saying "Just look at our competitors cars, they made 1 million of them and 1000 of them had the same fault. Meanwhile our 1 model has just one fault, the brakes don't work. We are BEST!"
MS, FUD at its best.
Until WoW SOE was the big (western) MMORPG company and seemed to have the market in its grasp. People tought that the half a million or so subscribers to EQ at one point was the maximum market.
And then Blizzard came along and didn't so much raise the bar as send it into orbit.
Currently SOE has a lousy reputation, which makes me extremely reluctant to try any new MMO from them, Pirates of the Burning Seas is the latest and altough it was developed outside SOE, well so was Vanguard.
I on the other hand would have little trouble in putting in a pre-order for the next Blizzard MMO title (Sorry, never was much of a RTS fan).
Rep matters and the suits know it. Why do you think suit run companies change their name constantly and have huge marketing campaigns? Because when all else sucks you hope you can bluff your way into having a good rep.
But not in the way the BSA would have you believe, the simple fact was that like you, people like me couldn't get their hands on OS/2 through copyright infringement. For the record I stayed with DOS for far longer and later W95 (wasn't till the early parts of W2K that I learned about unix and later linux) but the simple fact is that MS has had a simple advantage, its software is available to those who for what ever reason don't buy their software in boxes.
I did have my hands on a trial of OS/2 Warp, but I never managed to install it on my PC. Another advantage to W95 which was buggy as hell and often had problem during install BUT did eventually run.
A similar problem is happening right now with Vista, hard to pirate, so I haven't tried it.
So what you ask? Well like many here I am the IT support guy in my social circle and I can't support Vista because I don't know it. How are you going to answer a call asking how to change a setting when you have no idea what is where? I am not going to claim that people I know stay with XP because they can't get support from me otherwise but it is a simple choice, learn windows Vista when you never learned/wanted to learn Windows in the first place, or stay with XP I will be happy to hand you a copy off.
QUESTION: I don't know why OS/2 failed.
ANSWER: Fact is that many people liked it but didn't manage to get a copy.
Piracy has been a critical element in MS rise to fame. With Vista they are taking a gamble, has their lockin become powerfull enough they can now survive without it? Personally I think it has, but you never know. MS might soon face a real nightmare, being beaten NOT by a competitor they can out advertise or EVEN outperform, but beaten by their own product.
Or not, Vista ain't a ME yet and ME never threathened their business model.