not necessary. the html code could be anywhere, for example 3rd-party ad code uploaded to an ad network using a stolen credit card. talk about casting a wide net.
But I would have to be browsing the site with the HTML in the page. But if you can convince me to browse to a dodgy website, you can do plenty of damage just using Javascript, you do not need a flash object.
This is like me saying there is a vulnerability in HTML as it is insecure if a site allows me to include arbitrary HTML including script tags in their pages.
I have just read the article. The problem seems to be with sites who allow flash object to be uploaded, then served to other people using the site. Of course, this is just stupid anyway. If I allow you to upload a flash object to my site, I should sanitise it before I allow my server to give it to anyone. The example they give is an animated avatar, but that is poor example as they should be restricted to animated gifs anyway.
This is just more FUD. ActionScript is a very powerful language, and so server admins should only allow flash files they trust to be served up form websites they maintain. To my mind that is just common sense. The only alternative would be for Adobe to cripple Flash beyond belief so it was only useful for a small percentage of what it is currently used for.
Now, if Google, took HIS work, extended it and called it their own, then they have a problem.
What if they took his work, extended it, then released it as an open source product? Sure that is just a fork of someone else's project and that happens in the open source world all the time.
I am also a little curious as to how common place the original language called "Go" was. i had never heard of it, and a quick search on google (ignoring all results that contain Google obviously) does not yield very much releated. Most of it seems to revolve around the efforts to write an AI capable of playing Go.
Or maybe that is just the results my mind gravitates too as I am a reasonably bad go player.
You're totally wrong, there are tons of ads on the Google search engine, just not on the landing page.
Maybe I should have made clear I was only referring to the Google landing page, but I thought most people would have figured that out.
That's because untargeted ads aren't worth much.
Are untargeted adverts always worth very little? Surely there are some adverts that have universal appeal so do not need to be targeted at a particular market or demographic.
Why clutter up the page (which turns off users) and waste impressions (which turns off advertisers) by showing irrelevant ads (which also turns off users), before you know what the user is searching for?
It is worth remembering that if google wanted to they could load their home page adverts that were targeted at things I had bought or searched for in the past. This would work since most of us search for very similar things over and over again. In my case I would currently be bombarded with adverts for computer components and mobile phones like I am everywhere else.
Bear in mind that almost every advert you see on the web nowadays has been automatically shortlisted as something you would be interested in. I never see any adverts for cars for instance I have almost never searched for them, and never browsed any car related websites (I do not drive). I do see a shedload of adverts for elearning though as this is the field I work in so I have been tracked visiting a large number of elearning websites. I know adblock would stop this in many cases, but I actually do not mind seeing adverts I might be interested in.
When I ran adblock I found I almost always saw work (elearning) related adverts as I was still tracked by websidestory on our main clients site that we run. I had to allow this stuff so I could check it was in the source of the correct pages to track people through the site.
The point of this is that there is almost always a way to know how to target adverts at you even without looking at your actual history of searches, and guess what Google can do that too.
Actually he is right according "The Google Story" by David A Vise. Their original plan was to licence the underlying search technology to other search companies. It was only after they were stonewalled by every other search company who wanted to be able to skew results in favour of their best customers that they released their own search engine to the masses and started moving to an advertising based model.
Even now they are very ambivalent with regard to advertising. The have the most high value piece of internet real estate in existence (http://www.google.co.uk/) and it does not contain a single advert.
I know many people here may have bought into the current MS and AT&T sponsored "Google is Evil" campaign, but lets not forget they were shunned by every other search engine of the time as they were to interested in giving their users the most relevant results, not the results that made them the most money. Until this changes it will always be my home page as I wonder whether Bing and Yahoo would go to revenue based results at the drop if a hat if Google were out of the picture.
If anyone responsible for machine that is crucial to keep someone alive lets the PC get infected with malware they are so inept I do not even want to think about it. This is just not a realistic situation apart from in a 1 in a million corner case of the utmost stupidity.
The problem is that if he went to wall street or venture capitalists to get funding they would have just done everything they could to shaft him, so he tried to shaft as many other people as possible so he could avoid contact with them until he was a little bit stronger. Google did the same or though they did it in a more responsible manner as they had a better (more profitable) idea.
Gamers who cared enough to want to do well on Xbox consoles learned that they need to soup-up their systems. It was just another level of gaming. It was easy to do and the rewards were there
Well if souping up there systems make no difference then why did they do it. If it did make a difference I am glad they have been booted off live so I do not have to play against someone online who has an advantage over me.
Microsoft's solution to the situation is disordered. Microsoft is punishing their own customers for taking advantage of Microsoft's mistakes.
Err, yes. If I left my wallet on the table in front of my while I eat, and then I catch you trying to steal it, I am going to jump on you. I will then meat out whatever punishment I feel approriate before handing you to the cops. I know it is a mistake to leave my wallet on display, but it is still a criminal act to try and pinch it. I am not saying modding an xbox is criminal, I am saying that you can be punished for exploiting other peoples mistakes.
You knew the product you bought came with restrictions, so you tried to bypass them. Microsoft caught you, and decided to bypass you instead since they cannot be sure they will generate any more revenure from a player who has the option of paying a pittance for a product that normally costs $60 or whatever.
If I were running Microsoft, I would fire the person who is doing this and replace them with someone who can come up with a win-win for their most clever customers.
Why does modding an xbox make you clever? Surely any old cretin pay someone to do it for them, or just solder the chip or whatever in place themselves. Don't get me wrong, I admire people who are good at soldering, I have done it a few times and i suck at it compared to at least one of my mates. But it is not a sign of intelligence, it is an art of manual dexterity more then mantal acuity.
Ok, so things have changed and now they probably can make a profit on the hardware, but who wants to buy one new anyway. There are millions kicking around secondhand you can pick up for a pittance the throw a hard disk in (I just did to use as a DVD / media player in my lounge). This means that the games is where all the profit is, and they do not want alot of freeloaders playing their Christmas run of titles without them seeing a nickel. This will probably be the last Christmas they actually sell any titles for it in any quantity anyway as it must be due for a revamp in the next year or so.
If you were in Steve Ballmers position, you would probably do everything you could to stop someone else being able to give your products away for free without paying you for them. If you did not, you would not be running the company for very long I assure you. The shareholders would remove you with a vote of no confidence.
Remember, companies do no want clever customers: They want profitable ones and that is not always the same thing.
It'd be a great project, though you do want to be careful, some of these viri are designed to do harm if disabled improperly, and some of these computers could be in situations where their failure could cause the loss of lives.
Well then hopefully harm will be done, and users whos machines have been sending me spem for the past three years will lose a shitload of data and learn to implement better security in future. Sorry, but I really do thing the only way people learn to adopt a more responsible attitude to IT security is when it is thumped into them why they should.
OTOH with DRM bookd and music "sold" for download you are indeed just buying a fairly draconian license. You can't put it on devices the vendor doesn't approve of, you can't put it on any device bought/activated after the vendors activation servers dissapear and so on. Combine this with the unreliability of consumer electronics and such a "purchase" becomes effectively a rental of indeterminate length.
Quite right, its a con. So do not enter into contracts you do not like, try and get a better contract somewhere else. You might have to pay a little bit more for terms you like, but not necessarily. You might also find that you are unable to get certain products without agreeing to draconian terms, but that is the person who owns the copyrights choice and there is nothing you can do about it.
That alone would be bad enough but worse is that DRM works by allowing the users devices to have decryption keys that the user isn't allowed to have. This means working DRM and FOSS are pretty much diametrically opposed.
Maybe, I have not spent enough time trying to solve all these issues. But I acknowledge that the copyright holders have a legitimate worry in the digital age and that both consumers and providers need to work together to try and solve it. If we cannot do this there are 3 alternatives to my mind:
1) Everything that can be represented as information becomes free. The people who publish that information in any form have to have another source of income. Sometimes this may be viable, in some cases it may not. Are we happy to lose the things that currently involve many years of full time practice to produce if the creator can not find a way of supporting themselves during said practice and creation. I know most of Hollywood's film output is drivel, but the fact that piracy is an issue to them shows how popular it currently is. If we are happy to lose it this is not an issue but plainly a large part of the population is not.
2) We carry on under the current system where some of use pay more for things to subsidise the people who do not wish to pay. You might think that by downloading something and not paying the creator you are only ripping them off, but they will just pass the cost on to other people who are willing to pay. If nobody is willing to pay we move to point one and the creator goes off to do something else to earn a living. We unfortunately know from history that there will always be people who refuse to pay for something just because nobody can force them to. I say we know this from history because theft of physical objects or money has been around for almost as long as money itself.
3) We ditch the concept of monetary exchange for everything. This is different from point two because in that instance we are only ignoring the odd freeloader, in this we actively saying there is no such thing and letting everyone contribute to society however they please. Are we as a species really ready for this yet? I actually think point two could be a transitionary stage along the road to this ultimate goal, but many of us are clearly not ready for even that yet. This might be my idea of a utopia, but I have real clue how we would get here or even if it is ever possible.
On a complete tangent i have actually been trapped in a datacenter. We did not expect a repair to take as long as it did and our access expired at midnight. We tried to take a break and discover we were locked in until someone could come and open the door to renew our access cards. Only took half an hour for an engineer to attend (called out at about 1am) but was quite amusing when we joked about it after the system was up and running again.
Certainly not a night I want to repeat in a hurry, but I had only worked for my employers for a few months so was a good way to show willing by letting my boss go home and get an early night while I supervised some engineers from a partner company who we rented space in our cabinet too.
News organizations actually have a lot of experience in collecting and collating data. This is where their real value lies, IMHO. Bloggers can be relied on to add opinions to the data. That work has little or no value and should only happen if it can be supported by advertising.
If you read any Murdoch's newspapers you would realise there is no shortage of opinion in there too.
Under the old system there were only 8 million citizens (key word) that were not already covered by existing government programs (medicare, schip) or private insurance (typically provided by the employer).
The problem is that medicare is becoming far to expensive so something has to be done to change it. The republicans would have preferred to increase the 8 million to more like 20 in order to save the necessary amount of cash.
The 42 million number that keeps getting cited is pure propaganda, includes ten million illegal non-citizens, was derived from a mail-in postcard, and therefore highly inaccurate.
The 8 million figure you quote is probably also not accurate. However scientifically it was derived, if the people doing the deriving had an agenda, they would have skewed the figure in the direction they wanted. The real number is probably somewhere in the middle of the two.
Remember: There's lies, damned lies and then there's statistics.
Re:Why complain about choice?
on
Lulu Introduces DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You mean using DRM is not unethical? gee...
Not neccessarily.
Lets look at what it stands for: Digital Rights Management. It it is attempt to digitaly enforce the rights you buy when you enter into a contract. Whenever you buy a copyrighted work you are usually buying a single user licence to that work, sometimes it is transferable to another person, sometimes not.
Personally I have no problem with a licence being non-transferable if that is made clear to me at the start. If I have willingly accepted a non-transferable licence I have no issue with DRM being used to enforce that.
DRM does become annoying though when you extend it to try and enforce other things under the guise of stopping piracy. It is frequently used to restrict me to a single device (or a limited number of devices). I have at least 3 PC's (Office, Home, Second Home), a smart phone and a laptop: I want to be able to pick which of these is right for me to use at anyone time.
The biggest problem with DRM is that the really hard technogical problems like how I can buy a single user licence but still use it on a multitude of devices seems to have been ignored. Instead most implementations have tried to force me to buy the same copyrighted works several times for different platforms, sometimes I have caved in and done so for simplicities sake, but whenever I do I harbour a little more resentment for the company that forces me to do this, that does not make me a satisfied customer in the long run.
So the real point of my post, is that DRM could be great if it actually was used to impart some rights I am entitled to by contract in my direction as well as enforcing the purveyor of the copyrighted works rights. Currently though all the systems are designed to appeal to the copyright holder so maybe a open source DRM system designed to run on any platform would not be such a bad thing. A system designed as a cooperative effort between the copyright holders and the end user would hopefully be more balanced.
Please note that I have tried to keep this post away from mentioning any particular medium or format for a reason. We have now reached a technological stage where books, music and film can all be converted to data and shared around the globe. However we still live in a capitalist society where people require money in order to survive so there has to be a method of rewarding the creator of a work financially for the time they expended on producing said work.
Disclaimer - I am a rampant socialist who thinks a long term solution is changing society to move away from its current capitalist nature, but I acknowledge that will not happen overnight so until it does I have no problem with earning money, which I do.
Linux may not have made it to the desktop, but isn't Linux on your phone (Android, Maemo) way cooler? Who ever thought of that in 1995, when Linux on the desktop was just around the corner! Linux on the phone was never just around the corner; it was just there when needed!
Yup, that is spot on. I have just bought myself a Hero and you can tell it runs the same interface they used to use running under Windows Mobile but it runs way smoother under android. I know it has its glitches, but it has achieved in version 1.4 what windows mobile has not managed in version 6.1.
I hope you do not think Richard Stallman actually encourages anyone to adopt open source? He drives people away from it with his complete lack of any personal hygiene and fanaticism. People like Torvalds and Perens do belong on such a list in my opinion as they are far more pragmatic and actually encourage its adoption.
Part of this encouragement in the case of Linus is his stance on kernel development. He is very reluctant to include changes that will adversely effect any subset of its current users. While Linux occasional non-responsiveness on the desktop has been annoying to me at times, the fact that behind the scenes processing running as root can take priority does make perfect sense when I have my server admin hat on.
Bruce Perens similarly has been an excellent proponent of Linux for many years while also maintaining a level headed approach. This is most evident by looking at the list of organisations that have paid to hear his point of view.
Nokia has neither created nor delivered this software and is therefore unable to guarantee that the software will not harm your device. Installation will be at your own risk. Continue anyway. Ok/Cancel
This seems abundantly clear to me: This will void your warranty for the hardware.
It only provides a warning that you may damage your device and does not mention breaking a warranty, EULA, TOS, etc...
Since no hardware running Maemo is currently available by retail it is a little hard to determine what will be in the warranty for said hardware when it is released. Lets check back when the Nokia N-whatever is actually released. Hopefully you will be right and it is a more open platform, but we cannot be sure until it hits the streets in a commercial configuration rather than a developer preview.
This is just a blog by someone unknown that is also very light on facts.
He seems of the opinion the Maemo owners will be better treated if the root their hardware because Nokia make it slightly easier to do. The problem is that we do not yet know what Nokia will make you agree to in order to install the gain root privileges application. In my opinion they will make you agree to voiding your warranty anyway so that will put you in the same boat as most android owners.
Even if Nokia do not then most carriers will, and the vast majority of phones are purchased through a carriers discount so the user does not end up paying full price for the handset.
Personally I do not care about a keyboard anymore, I just want a phone that fits in my jeans pocket comfortably when I am down the pub. I used to own a Kaiser and it seems the Moment is about the same size. I found on my Kaiser that I never actually got round to opening the keyboard and just used the on screen windows mobile keyboard. If I can make do with that for 2 years even though I have perfectly good keyboard a second away then a Hero is fine.
This for me is the nicest thing about the Hero: Although it is not actually that small, it feels small. I think a lot is down to the shape of the back making it feel much flatter while in your pocket. The first thing my mate said when he held it was how much smaller it was than his iphone. Then when you put them both side by side you realise it is actually slightly bigger.
The device lagging constantly would piss me off if it happened, but since I have never had this happen once I reckon this is just people believing their device lags because they read a review that said it lagged. I know that this may have been a problem in the early versions, but the latest firmware seems spot on, especially when you compare it side by side with Windows Mobile.
Anyway, all this is completely off topic since this discussion is about them finally releasing the source code. I am quite glad they have just to shut the RMS fanboys up, but it does not really make much difference to me as I generally do enough coding from 9 until whatever time I escape the office at night. Although I suppose it might help a few people get started on developing alternate interfaces for android.
The real question that I do find interesting though is whether they always planned to release the source code or whether this has happened as a result of the bad press. I have to admit I am leaning towards this always being planned anyway as if they had decided to be stubborn they probably would have held off until someone actually served them legal notice.
Does anyone who actually knows anything about law know if the GPL requires immediate release of the source code or if it can be done in a timely manner? I suppose even if it does require immediate release there are precious few companies who would push back a release date so they could get the source code to their product out at the same time as the product itself and be in full GPL compliance.
Slashdot Mirror
not necessary. the html code could be anywhere, for example 3rd-party ad code uploaded to an ad network using a stolen credit card. talk about casting a wide net.
But I would have to be browsing the site with the HTML in the page. But if you can convince me to browse to a dodgy website, you can do plenty of damage just using Javascript, you do not need a flash object.
This is like me saying there is a vulnerability in HTML as it is insecure if a site allows me to include arbitrary HTML including script tags in their pages.
(two or three links in a recommended section)
In my view of google they call them "sponsored links" and make the background pink, but hey maybe they change it depending on country or something.
I have just read the article. The problem seems to be with sites who allow flash object to be uploaded, then served to other people using the site. Of course, this is just stupid anyway. If I allow you to upload a flash object to my site, I should sanitise it before I allow my server to give it to anyone. The example they give is an animated avatar, but that is poor example as they should be restricted to animated gifs anyway.
This is just more FUD. ActionScript is a very powerful language, and so server admins should only allow flash files they trust to be served up form websites they maintain. To my mind that is just common sense. The only alternative would be for Adobe to cripple Flash beyond belief so it was only useful for a small percentage of what it is currently used for.
Now, if Google, took HIS work, extended it and called it their own, then they have a problem.
What if they took his work, extended it, then released it as an open source product? Sure that is just a fork of someone else's project and that happens in the open source world all the time.
I am also a little curious as to how common place the original language called "Go" was. i had never heard of it, and a quick search on google (ignoring all results that contain Google obviously) does not yield very much releated. Most of it seems to revolve around the efforts to write an AI capable of playing Go.
Or maybe that is just the results my mind gravitates too as I am a reasonably bad go player.
You're totally wrong, there are tons of ads on the Google search engine, just not on the landing page.
Maybe I should have made clear I was only referring to the Google landing page, but I thought most people would have figured that out.
That's because untargeted ads aren't worth much.
Are untargeted adverts always worth very little? Surely there are some adverts that have universal appeal so do not need to be targeted at a particular market or demographic.
Why clutter up the page (which turns off users) and waste impressions (which turns off advertisers) by showing irrelevant ads (which also turns off users), before you know what the user is searching for?
It is worth remembering that if google wanted to they could load their home page adverts that were targeted at things I had bought or searched for in the past. This would work since most of us search for very similar things over and over again. In my case I would currently be bombarded with adverts for computer components and mobile phones like I am everywhere else.
Bear in mind that almost every advert you see on the web nowadays has been automatically shortlisted as something you would be interested in. I never see any adverts for cars for instance I have almost never searched for them, and never browsed any car related websites (I do not drive). I do see a shedload of adverts for elearning though as this is the field I work in so I have been tracked visiting a large number of elearning websites. I know adblock would stop this in many cases, but I actually do not mind seeing adverts I might be interested in.
When I ran adblock I found I almost always saw work (elearning) related adverts as I was still tracked by websidestory on our main clients site that we run. I had to allow this stuff so I could check it was in the source of the correct pages to track people through the site.
The point of this is that there is almost always a way to know how to target adverts at you even without looking at your actual history of searches, and guess what Google can do that too.
Still think ANY internet adverts are untargeted?
Oops, I did go to google.com but did not notice it had redirected me to Google.co.uk.
Actually he is right according "The Google Story" by David A Vise. Their original plan was to licence the underlying search technology to other search companies. It was only after they were stonewalled by every other search company who wanted to be able to skew results in favour of their best customers that they released their own search engine to the masses and started moving to an advertising based model.
Even now they are very ambivalent with regard to advertising. The have the most high value piece of internet real estate in existence (http://www.google.co.uk/) and it does not contain a single advert.
I know many people here may have bought into the current MS and AT&T sponsored "Google is Evil" campaign, but lets not forget they were shunned by every other search engine of the time as they were to interested in giving their users the most relevant results, not the results that made them the most money. Until this changes it will always be my home page as I wonder whether Bing and Yahoo would go to revenue based results at the drop if a hat if Google were out of the picture.
If anyone responsible for machine that is crucial to keep someone alive lets the PC get infected with malware they are so inept I do not even want to think about it. This is just not a realistic situation apart from in a 1 in a million corner case of the utmost stupidity.
"I love the smell of commerce in the morning."
The problem is that if he went to wall street or venture capitalists to get funding they would have just done everything they could to shaft him, so he tried to shaft as many other people as possible so he could avoid contact with them until he was a little bit stronger. Google did the same or though they did it in a more responsible manner as they had a better (more profitable) idea.
Gamers who cared enough to want to do well on Xbox consoles learned that they need to soup-up their systems. It was just another level of gaming. It was easy to do and the rewards were there
Well if souping up there systems make no difference then why did they do it. If it did make a difference I am glad they have been booted off live so I do not have to play against someone online who has an advantage over me.
Microsoft's solution to the situation is disordered. Microsoft is punishing their own customers for taking advantage of Microsoft's mistakes.
Err, yes. If I left my wallet on the table in front of my while I eat, and then I catch you trying to steal it, I am going to jump on you. I will then meat out whatever punishment I feel approriate before handing you to the cops. I know it is a mistake to leave my wallet on display, but it is still a criminal act to try and pinch it. I am not saying modding an xbox is criminal, I am saying that you can be punished for exploiting other peoples mistakes.
You knew the product you bought came with restrictions, so you tried to bypass them. Microsoft caught you, and decided to bypass you instead since they cannot be sure they will generate any more revenure from a player who has the option of paying a pittance for a product that normally costs $60 or whatever.
If I were running Microsoft, I would fire the person who is doing this and replace them with someone who can come up with a win-win for their most clever customers.
Why does modding an xbox make you clever? Surely any old cretin pay someone to do it for them, or just solder the chip or whatever in place themselves. Don't get me wrong, I admire people who are good at soldering, I have done it a few times and i suck at it compared to at least one of my mates. But it is not a sign of intelligence, it is an art of manual dexterity more then mantal acuity.
On another note about running Microsoft, it is plaingly obvious you do not. The average Xbox360 was sold at launch for less than it cost to produce:
http://www.joystiq.com/2005/12/28/xbox-360-costs-715-to-make/
Ok, so things have changed and now they probably can make a profit on the hardware, but who wants to buy one new anyway. There are millions kicking around secondhand you can pick up for a pittance the throw a hard disk in (I just did to use as a DVD / media player in my lounge). This means that the games is where all the profit is, and they do not want alot of freeloaders playing their Christmas run of titles without them seeing a nickel. This will probably be the last Christmas they actually sell any titles for it in any quantity anyway as it must be due for a revamp in the next year or so.
If you were in Steve Ballmers position, you would probably do everything you could to stop someone else being able to give your products away for free without paying you for them. If you did not, you would not be running the company for very long I assure you. The shareholders would remove you with a vote of no confidence.
Remember, companies do no want clever customers: They want profitable ones and that is not always the same thing.
1. This is a website specifically aimed at US citizens.
No it isn't, it is aimed at English speaking nerds, that includes elements of the EU.
It'd be a great project, though you do want to be careful, some of these viri are designed to do harm if disabled improperly, and some of these computers could be in situations where their failure could cause the loss of lives.
Well then hopefully harm will be done, and users whos machines have been sending me spem for the past three years will lose a shitload of data and learn to implement better security in future. Sorry, but I really do thing the only way people learn to adopt a more responsible attitude to IT security is when it is thumped into them why they should.
Mod parent up, I'm tired of the /. eds assuming i know what every god damned acronym means.
If I posted this about the acronym "US" you can be damn sure I would mbe modded troll in a heartbeat.
OTOH with DRM bookd and music "sold" for download you are indeed just buying a fairly draconian license. You can't put it on devices the vendor doesn't approve of, you can't put it on any device bought/activated after the vendors activation servers dissapear and so on. Combine this with the unreliability of consumer electronics and such a "purchase" becomes effectively a rental of indeterminate length.
Quite right, its a con. So do not enter into contracts you do not like, try and get a better contract somewhere else. You might have to pay a little bit more for terms you like, but not necessarily. You might also find that you are unable to get certain products without agreeing to draconian terms, but that is the person who owns the copyrights choice and there is nothing you can do about it.
That alone would be bad enough but worse is that DRM works by allowing the users devices to have decryption keys that the user isn't allowed to have. This means working DRM and FOSS are pretty much diametrically opposed.
Maybe, I have not spent enough time trying to solve all these issues. But I acknowledge that the copyright holders have a legitimate worry in the digital age and that both consumers and providers need to work together to try and solve it. If we cannot do this there are 3 alternatives to my mind:
1) Everything that can be represented as information becomes free. The people who publish that information in any form have to have another source of income. Sometimes this may be viable, in some cases it may not. Are we happy to lose the things that currently involve many years of full time practice to produce if the creator can not find a way of supporting themselves during said practice and creation. I know most of Hollywood's film output is drivel, but the fact that piracy is an issue to them shows how popular it currently is. If we are happy to lose it this is not an issue but plainly a large part of the population is not.
2) We carry on under the current system where some of use pay more for things to subsidise the people who do not wish to pay. You might think that by downloading something and not paying the creator you are only ripping them off, but they will just pass the cost on to other people who are willing to pay. If nobody is willing to pay we move to point one and the creator goes off to do something else to earn a living. We unfortunately know from history that there will always be people who refuse to pay for something just because nobody can force them to. I say we know this from history because theft of physical objects or money has been around for almost as long as money itself.
3) We ditch the concept of monetary exchange for everything. This is different from point two because in that instance we are only ignoring the odd freeloader, in this we actively saying there is no such thing and letting everyone contribute to society however they please. Are we as a species really ready for this yet? I actually think point two could be a transitionary stage along the road to this ultimate goal, but many of us are clearly not ready for even that yet. This might be my idea of a utopia, but I have real clue how we would get here or even if it is ever possible.
On a complete tangent i have actually been trapped in a datacenter. We did not expect a repair to take as long as it did and our access expired at midnight. We tried to take a break and discover we were locked in until someone could come and open the door to renew our access cards. Only took half an hour for an engineer to attend (called out at about 1am) but was quite amusing when we joked about it after the system was up and running again.
Certainly not a night I want to repeat in a hurry, but I had only worked for my employers for a few months so was a good way to show willing by letting my boss go home and get an early night while I supervised some engineers from a partner company who we rented space in our cabinet too.
News organizations actually have a lot of experience in collecting and collating data. This is where their real value lies, IMHO. Bloggers can be relied on to add opinions to the data. That work has little or no value and should only happen if it can be supported by advertising.
If you read any Murdoch's newspapers you would realise there is no shortage of opinion in there too.
Under the old system there were only 8 million citizens (key word) that were not already covered by existing government programs (medicare, schip) or private insurance (typically provided by the employer).
The problem is that medicare is becoming far to expensive so something has to be done to change it. The republicans would have preferred to increase the 8 million to more like 20 in order to save the necessary amount of cash.
The 42 million number that keeps getting cited is pure propaganda, includes ten million illegal non-citizens, was derived from a mail-in postcard, and therefore highly inaccurate.
The 8 million figure you quote is probably also not accurate. However scientifically it was derived, if the people doing the deriving had an agenda, they would have skewed the figure in the direction they wanted. The real number is probably somewhere in the middle of the two.
Remember: There's lies, damned lies and then there's statistics.
You mean using DRM is not unethical? gee...
Not neccessarily.
Lets look at what it stands for: Digital Rights Management. It it is attempt to digitaly enforce the rights you buy when you enter into a contract. Whenever you buy a copyrighted work you are usually buying a single user licence to that work, sometimes it is transferable to another person, sometimes not.
Personally I have no problem with a licence being non-transferable if that is made clear to me at the start. If I have willingly accepted a non-transferable licence I have no issue with DRM being used to enforce that.
DRM does become annoying though when you extend it to try and enforce other things under the guise of stopping piracy. It is frequently used to restrict me to a single device (or a limited number of devices). I have at least 3 PC's (Office, Home, Second Home), a smart phone and a laptop: I want to be able to pick which of these is right for me to use at anyone time.
The biggest problem with DRM is that the really hard technogical problems like how I can buy a single user licence but still use it on a multitude of devices seems to have been ignored. Instead most implementations have tried to force me to buy the same copyrighted works several times for different platforms, sometimes I have caved in and done so for simplicities sake, but whenever I do I harbour a little more resentment for the company that forces me to do this, that does not make me a satisfied customer in the long run.
So the real point of my post, is that DRM could be great if it actually was used to impart some rights I am entitled to by contract in my direction as well as enforcing the purveyor of the copyrighted works rights. Currently though all the systems are designed to appeal to the copyright holder so maybe a open source DRM system designed to run on any platform would not be such a bad thing. A system designed as a cooperative effort between the copyright holders and the end user would hopefully be more balanced.
Please note that I have tried to keep this post away from mentioning any particular medium or format for a reason. We have now reached a technological stage where books, music and film can all be converted to data and shared around the globe. However we still live in a capitalist society where people require money in order to survive so there has to be a method of rewarding the creator of a work financially for the time they expended on producing said work.
Disclaimer - I am a rampant socialist who thinks a long term solution is changing society to move away from its current capitalist nature, but I acknowledge that will not happen overnight so until it does I have no problem with earning money, which I do.
Linux may not have made it to the desktop, but isn't Linux on your phone (Android, Maemo) way cooler? Who ever thought of that in 1995, when Linux on the desktop was just around the corner! Linux on the phone was never just around the corner; it was just there when needed!
Yup, that is spot on. I have just bought myself a Hero and you can tell it runs the same interface they used to use running under Windows Mobile but it runs way smoother under android. I know it has its glitches, but it has achieved in version 1.4 what windows mobile has not managed in version 6.1.
I hope you do not think Richard Stallman actually encourages anyone to adopt open source? He drives people away from it with his complete lack of any personal hygiene and fanaticism. People like Torvalds and Perens do belong on such a list in my opinion as they are far more pragmatic and actually encourage its adoption.
Part of this encouragement in the case of Linus is his stance on kernel development. He is very reluctant to include changes that will adversely effect any subset of its current users. While Linux occasional non-responsiveness on the desktop has been annoying to me at times, the fact that behind the scenes processing running as root can take priority does make perfect sense when I have my server admin hat on.
Bruce Perens similarly has been an excellent proponent of Linux for many years while also maintaining a level headed approach. This is most evident by looking at the list of organisations that have paid to hear his point of view.
Nokia has neither created nor delivered this software and is therefore unable to guarantee that the software will not harm your device. Installation will be at your own risk. Continue anyway. Ok/Cancel
This seems abundantly clear to me: This will void your warranty for the hardware.
It only provides a warning that you may damage your device and does not mention breaking a warranty, EULA, TOS, etc...
Since no hardware running Maemo is currently available by retail it is a little hard to determine what will be in the warranty for said hardware when it is released. Lets check back when the Nokia N-whatever is actually released. Hopefully you will be right and it is a more open platform, but we cannot be sure until it hits the streets in a commercial configuration rather than a developer preview.
This is just a blog by someone unknown that is also very light on facts.
He seems of the opinion the Maemo owners will be better treated if the root their hardware because Nokia make it slightly easier to do. The problem is that we do not yet know what Nokia will make you agree to in order to install the gain root privileges application. In my opinion they will make you agree to voiding your warranty anyway so that will put you in the same boat as most android owners.
Even if Nokia do not then most carriers will, and the vast majority of phones are purchased through a carriers discount so the user does not end up paying full price for the handset.
There is a free one on the hero marketplace, I have it installed.
Personally I do not care about a keyboard anymore, I just want a phone that fits in my jeans pocket comfortably when I am down the pub. I used to own a Kaiser and it seems the Moment is about the same size. I found on my Kaiser that I never actually got round to opening the keyboard and just used the on screen windows mobile keyboard. If I can make do with that for 2 years even though I have perfectly good keyboard a second away then a Hero is fine.
This for me is the nicest thing about the Hero: Although it is not actually that small, it feels small. I think a lot is down to the shape of the back making it feel much flatter while in your pocket. The first thing my mate said when he held it was how much smaller it was than his iphone. Then when you put them both side by side you realise it is actually slightly bigger.
The device lagging constantly would piss me off if it happened, but since I have never had this happen once I reckon this is just people believing their device lags because they read a review that said it lagged. I know that this may have been a problem in the early versions, but the latest firmware seems spot on, especially when you compare it side by side with Windows Mobile.
Anyway, all this is completely off topic since this discussion is about them finally releasing the source code. I am quite glad they have just to shut the RMS fanboys up, but it does not really make much difference to me as I generally do enough coding from 9 until whatever time I escape the office at night. Although I suppose it might help a few people get started on developing alternate interfaces for android.
The real question that I do find interesting though is whether they always planned to release the source code or whether this has happened as a result of the bad press. I have to admit I am leaning towards this always being planned anyway as if they had decided to be stubborn they probably would have held off until someone actually served them legal notice.
Does anyone who actually knows anything about law know if the GPL requires immediate release of the source code or if it can be done in a timely manner? I suppose even if it does require immediate release there are precious few companies who would push back a release date so they could get the source code to their product out at the same time as the product itself and be in full GPL compliance.