While I appreciate the pun in saying Westinghouse is a powerhouse company, it should be noted that in the present situation, they're actually a very small company. Westinghouse (the giant company) sell its trademarked name for other companies to use. So the TV maker Westinghouse's only relationship to Westinghouse Electric Company is the logo.
It seems like it's time for a video version of ASCAP. For those who don't know, ASCAP is an association of music writers. When your local bar plays a song, it is legally obligated to pay the writer of that song. It would of course be impossible for every bar, restaurant, night club to get permission from every songwriter they want to play. Thus comes ASCAP. Songwriters join ASCAP, bars pay a fee to ASCAP, and ASCAP distributes money to its members according to ASCAP's measure of what music is being played. (They sample.) This is an obvious, very big efficiency (which is why the government has let ASCAP and BMI bypass antitrust laws).
This hasn't been so much of an issue with respect to television. The number of outlets providing video feeds is, relatively speaking, quite small, and what they play is sufficiently uniform (or self-created) that a bureaucracy like ASCAP is unnecessary. But this changes with GooTube. Under the current model, YouTube does not have control over what gets uploaded to the site. This means they either have to police the site to be sure copyrighted content stays off -- which is difficult if not impossible, and not what the viewers want in any event -- or they have to slog through the myriad possible copyright owners who could end up on YouTube.
An ASCAP like organization solves this conflict, and it benefits both YouTube and copyright holders. By banding together in this type of organization, the copyright holders can leverage their collective value to extract money from YouTube (and everyone else). That is, all copyright holders acting together will get far more money from YouTube than acting alone. On the flip side, YouTube gets to avoid the significant expense of acquiring licenses (as TFA says), and insure against the always-real possibility of a lawsuit for copyright infringement.
It's a model that has worked in music for many decades, and it's what we need to look for in video.
It's sillier than that. The money that would have paid for all the popcorn and ushers doesn't disappear; it just doesn't go into the entertainment industry. Consider the extreme case: everyone pirates all movies. Here, the entertainment industry will disappear, but the video game industry (or tourism, or books, or whatever you want to put here) *grows*. These "ripple effects" are straw men designed to get society to think it impacts them. There would be a negligible impact on GDP or taxes.
The more technical detail: it's the difference between a partial equilibrium and a general equilibrium model of the economy. In the partial model (the supply and demand curves we all know and love), you assume that you've completely modeled all relevant aspects of the economy, or rather, you assume nothing else matters. It's an incredibly useful approximation in many cases, but an approximation all the same. In general equilibrium, everything (theoretically) gets modeled--all the goods remotely related to entertainment, income, where income changes get spent, and so on.
The idiocy of these "ripple effect" arguments is that they're using partial equilibrium to derive general equilibria effects! In other words, they're using a model that assumes nothing else matters to draw conclusions about the very things the model says doesn't matter.
It's odd to me that Vonage decided to go public right now. I received the notice that I was invited to the IPO, and there was a moment of excitement. But then I remembered that my service has been pretty poor over the last 6 weeks. Dropped calls, garbled calls, and the most mysterious problem: it won't stop calling me. That is, a friend calls, we talk, we hangup, and then I get ghost ringing from the friend for the next eight hours.
Anyway, my point wasn't really to grouse about Vonage problems. My point is that a lot of customers have been having service problems over the last few weeks. That seems to make this a very bad time to go public.
No, Judge Jackson absolutely uses per-processor pricing in the Findings of Fact. The case may have officially been about the tying of Explorer, but then the Monica Lewinsky affair was officially about Whitewater. The issue in the case was whether MS showed a systematic abuse of monopoly power, even beyond anything to do with Netscape. (My personal favorite was learning how, when IBM decided to ship computers with Word Perfect instead of Office, MS pulled their Windows license.)
It was precisely the far reaching, systematic abuses that led Jackson to say the company should be divided into three units, OS, Office, and everything else. You can't get that from a case that's *only* about Netscape.
The facts stand. The appeals court turned around and said Jackson did not show either (A) that such a remedy would be successful, or (B) that it was necessary. Then we changed administrations and the DOJ was told to settle, which they did with coupons for MS products that would only increase the market power of MS, mostly at the expensive of Apple in education. Even when MS loses, they win.
But state courts are also very powerful in antitrust law, so let's see what happens when Iowa gets the trial rolling in a few months.
Absolutely correct. And it should be noted that in the antitrust trial, the findings of fact said that one of the ways in which MS abused its monopoly power was by charging OEMs per processor, not per copy of Windows shipped. Telling them not to ship without Windows at all is dangerously close to the same thing, and I can't imagine it wouldn't be considered an abuse of monopoly power as well.
Before anyone tries to complain about the findings of fact, remember that the appeals court never disagreed with the facts Judge Jackson found, only the remedies he demanded. So that the original practice was an abuse of monopoly power still stands. As would the present case of strong-arming people into always including Windows.
Boy, talk about the long arm of coincidence. This just happened to me *last night* with my Replay TV. It wasn't showing any life whatsoever, but I checked other devices in the same outlet and they were getting power. So I figured the Replay TV was cooked.
I pulled it out, and thinking I might try and fix it (i.e., kick the damn thing a few times) I plugged it into a different outlet and it worked just fine. I took it back to the original outlet, and it works just fine.
This hardly answers your question, but another data point never hurts.
I purchased the box version of 10.0 and it does come with a DVD for install. So I started it and just let it run, leaving me uniterrupted to remember all the things I should have backed up first but didn't.
You're not doing me a favor by clicking. I was doing you (generic you) a favor by giving information that might be helpful. I get nothing back from you if you click on that link. And as long as *I'm* the one spending my time to offer information some people may find useful, I'll use a method I like for linking, Tinyurl.
And how on earth does a tinyurl insult your intelligence? Exactly what game are you hep to?
I really wish this had been posted on the main page. IT or not, far too many people refuse to recognize depression as a problem that's treatable. Myself included. I had gone for 15 years with depression I never thought was serious. My girlfriend (no ex-girlfriend, she left me because of depression) forced me into treatment, and the Pdoc was shocked that I was still alive. All that time, being mostly unhappy, and it didn't need to be that way. I was too stubborn to admit it.
Anyway, some resources. If you are taking/thinking about taking meds, I highly recommend http://www.crazymeds.org/ The site isn't run by a doctor, but having checked his information from a number of different sources, he definitely seems to get the information right. Plus, the site is irreverant, which I appreciate.
The first course of therapy for depression is cognitive behavioral therapy. There is a standard book that explains these techniques. Feeling Good, by David Burns. Amazon link here: http://tinyurl.com/7dxos
I've read a lot of books on depression over the past 18 months, and the best, the most informative, I found was The Noonday Demon, by Andrew Solomon. Amazon again: http://tinyurl.com/99neh
Finally, the links in the post were good, and a good start, but I definitely disagree with some of his advice. Everybody is different, so take the time to hear different viewpoints on diagnoses, symptoms, and cures.
If you're wondering, treatment has made me better than I was, but I still have room for improvement. This is important. Depression may never (or it may) be "cured" for you, but in nearly all cases, treatment will decrease its severity. But not necessarily right away. Treatment is a process, and it takes some time to get there. Be patient.
Paul Krugman, now known as a NYT columnist (and one I dislike) became a famous economist by demonstrating situation in which protectionism can actually be beneficial to the country. One of these models had to do with increasing returns to scale, i.e., industries where the more you produce, the cheaper it is to produce each unit.
In these situations (and software is obviously such a situation), only one company, one country, wins the race. And the winner doesn't necessarily match up with the country that had the classical comparative advantage. It matches up with the country that, at a given point in time, happened to be producing more than the other.
If in fact a country does have the classical comparative advantage, then it can improve their welfare (indeed, world welfare) if they close their borders, allowing that industry to grow. Once the industry has grown, capitalizing on the increasing returns to scale, you can open up your markets and take down the producers in the other country.
So there's an argument for doing it. But, it should be noted that even though Krugman pioneered justifications for protectionism, he remains an ardent supporter of free trade. There are a number of reasons for that, but in this context, the biggest problem is that a country doesn't know, and can't know, if in fact it has a classical comparative advantage in this product. In other words, it doesn't know that there will ever be a time when it can successfully open its borders. In this case, the country (and the world) are worse off.
Further, the act of closing your borders, even if good in the long run, still has costs in the short run. Not only do you need to be sure that you can ultimately take over the market, but you need to be sure that the long run gains are sufficiently high to warrant the short run costs. In the end, protectionist policies simply aren't worth the risk.
Oh, BTW, one country's trade policies, even a country like China, doesn't have that much to do with the trade deficit. If China stopped exporting to us entirely, the trade deficit might drop initially, but it would come back up as we increase imports from other countries. Ultimately, the trade deficit is driven by our national savings rate.
If you think there's a chance that at some point in the future, you might want to do something other than IT, then you're way better off with a 4-year degree. A lot of jobs out there may not be that concerned what your university degree was in, but you have to have one. And with a 4 year degree, if you need to retrain yourself in something else, you can go in to a Master's program--a far better prospect for changing careers.
Also, don't forget that the older you get, the harder it is to go to school.
It may be worth noting that in the U.S., car drivers were driving on the right side of the road well before the government required they do so.
But then again, there was no private organization that benefitted from which side of the road people used. If Ford made money from the left side, and GM from the the right, then we can well imagine there would be a battle for which side of the road we drove on, and which side would probably vary from location to location. ("Hey New York, I'll give you a million bucks if you require people to drive on the left!")
Take away the private interests, and people will naturally organize themselves to one format or another. And, in most cases, consumers will be better off for it. The only reason they may be worse off is if people rally around an inferior standard, but that's probably more likely to happen with private interests.
Moving on to my opinion....the answer isn't to have the government force one standard or another on us. The answer is to have the government force the private interests to allow us to choose a standard with a minimum of baggage that comes with it. e.g., Don't force everyone to use.DOC, simply make it so that if you choose to use.DOC, you can use it with Word, OpenOffice, or whatever.
YOU already has fixes to the kdemultimediapackage that corrects the MP3 problems. I don't know why they'd cripple MP3 support to begin with, but it's nice they fixed things so quickly.
As of today, Google's market capitalization is 50 billion dollars. That's 25 times the size of Novell, 20% of the size of MSFT, 3.5 times the size of Sun, a bit bigger than Yahoo, 3 times the size of GM, about the size of Honda, and a tad smaller than Disney (which, remember, owns ABC).
If you think advertising revenue from search/adwords/etc justifies this stock price, you're crazy. (Same goes for Yahoo.) Of course, the market can always be wrong, but clearly the market *believes* that Google has some giant plants up its sleeve. I can't think of much that would fit the bill unless it was some form of application serving over the Net.
And, unless those Google employees have been dumping stock left and right, they must believe Google has something big up their sleeve as well.
I've long battled depression, and have tried to committ suicide. I can tell you that the information I found on the Internet made me feel far more comfortable with the prospects of killing myself. I knew enough to know that a gun to the head could leave you alive and a vegetable. I knew that slitting your wrists was very difficult, with a good chance that you'd slice tendons and ruin your hand. I knew that OTC medicines are very difficult--you throw up or fall asleep long before you can ingest a lethal dose.
What I didn't know is what methods would assuredly kill me. Or, if they wouldn't necessarily kill me, leave me without lasting harm. The Internet told me. There are all kinds of websites out there talking about the various suicide methods, with recommendations. You can easily order Final Exit, or even find the text online.
Moreover, the Internet provides knowledge for where to obtain lethal substances, and substances that put you in a state making it easier to kill yourself.
I am quite confident that I would never have attempted suicide if I didn't have access to the Internet. The method I chose would not have even occurred to me if I hadn't read about it online. Indeed, it was the most recommended method on the net, and I wouldn't have thought it.
So I think it's obvious that the Internet lowers the bar to committing suicide.
But that said, it's ridiculous to consider sensoring this information. There are the obvious free speech issues which I'm sure other people here will discuss. What I want to note, however, is that for me, research suicide options was also therapeutic. People think how terrible it is that someone would contemplate suicide, but they don't realize how much thinking about it can relieve the pain that you're in. I could lose all control of my thought processes, spiarling downward, but when I started imagining shooting myself, I felt *better*. In this way, the research I did on suicide was also soothing. Instead of curling up in a ball on the floor, I could focus my mind on this subject, and this subject alone, and I would calm down and feel relief.
So it's a two-edged sword. The knowledge I gained on the Internet did enable my attempt. But being able to research that material made me feel better, better than I would have otherwise.
Final disclaimer: All happy people are more or less the same, but all depressed people are depressed in their own way. So this is my experience only. (Yes, I've been doing well for some time--thanks for asking!)
This is exactly what I was going to say. IANAL, but I work with them, and we regularly get WP files from our lawyer clients.
One interesting story. I work for an economic consulting firm, and we were working for Microsoft (don't kill me--I didn't have a choice!) on one of their class-action lawsuits that came about in the wake of the antitrust conviction. We were of course forced to use Word, and as we all know, one thing MS has *never* gotten right is their footnotes. Our deadline was less than 6 hours away for a major report, and all of the footnotes were FUBARed. The head lawyer called the guy at MS who was in charge of Office (I forget his name) and yelled, "Why can't you guys fix the fucking footnotes! Word Perfect has like three developers and they can get it right!" The MS guy hemmed and hawed, said they were working on it. That was 3-4 years ago, and MS still hasn't gotten the footnotes right.
The article really should have mentioned Garage Games. Marble Blast and Gish are two of the funnest games I've ever played. If a good game to you is based on eye-candy, then this isn't the place for you. But if a good game is based on game-play, these were the best $20 I've ever spent.
Why do we bother? Network externalities. For a number of reasons, I run Linux instead of Windows. I like (but don't love) gaming, and there's no question Windows is the place for that. However, if people don't use games on Linux, then there never will be any games for Linux. It's a chicken and egg problem that *somebody* has to step forward to try and solve. It'll be hard to convince game publishers to be the one to solve it, so that leaves Linux users.
Those of us who use Linux may need to boot Windows to play a particular game (if we have dual boot--I don't), but why not use Linux when a game is available? And why not let game publishers know that you would rather play, and be more likely to buy, if the game were released under Linux? It has to start somewhere, and that means us.
Is it legal to record conversations on POTS?
If not, is it legal on VoIP, since perhaps the Internet doesn't fall under regular wire-tapping laws?
Oh BTW, maybe reference back to the/. story a few days back about Google apparently starting a VoIP product (at least in the UK, which was the source of the article) in the near future. I think we can assume that if Google doing VoIP is true, they'll have a way to record coversations.
Slashdot Mirror
While I appreciate the pun in saying Westinghouse is a powerhouse company, it should be noted that in the present situation, they're actually a very small company. Westinghouse (the giant company) sell its trademarked name for other companies to use. So the TV maker Westinghouse's only relationship to Westinghouse Electric Company is the logo.
This hasn't been so much of an issue with respect to television. The number of outlets providing video feeds is, relatively speaking, quite small, and what they play is sufficiently uniform (or self-created) that a bureaucracy like ASCAP is unnecessary. But this changes with GooTube. Under the current model, YouTube does not have control over what gets uploaded to the site. This means they either have to police the site to be sure copyrighted content stays off -- which is difficult if not impossible, and not what the viewers want in any event -- or they have to slog through the myriad possible copyright owners who could end up on YouTube.
An ASCAP like organization solves this conflict, and it benefits both YouTube and copyright holders. By banding together in this type of organization, the copyright holders can leverage their collective value to extract money from YouTube (and everyone else). That is, all copyright holders acting together will get far more money from YouTube than acting alone. On the flip side, YouTube gets to avoid the significant expense of acquiring licenses (as TFA says), and insure against the always-real possibility of a lawsuit for copyright infringement.
It's a model that has worked in music for many decades, and it's what we need to look for in video.
The more technical detail: it's the difference between a partial equilibrium and a general equilibrium model of the economy. In the partial model (the supply and demand curves we all know and love), you assume that you've completely modeled all relevant aspects of the economy, or rather, you assume nothing else matters. It's an incredibly useful approximation in many cases, but an approximation all the same. In general equilibrium, everything (theoretically) gets modeled--all the goods remotely related to entertainment, income, where income changes get spent, and so on.
The idiocy of these "ripple effect" arguments is that they're using partial equilibrium to derive general equilibria effects! In other words, they're using a model that assumes nothing else matters to draw conclusions about the very things the model says doesn't matter.
It's odd to me that Vonage decided to go public right now. I received the notice that I was invited to the IPO, and there was a moment of excitement. But then I remembered that my service has been pretty poor over the last 6 weeks. Dropped calls, garbled calls, and the most mysterious problem: it won't stop calling me. That is, a friend calls, we talk, we hangup, and then I get ghost ringing from the friend for the next eight hours. Anyway, my point wasn't really to grouse about Vonage problems. My point is that a lot of customers have been having service problems over the last few weeks. That seems to make this a very bad time to go public.
It was precisely the far reaching, systematic abuses that led Jackson to say the company should be divided into three units, OS, Office, and everything else. You can't get that from a case that's *only* about Netscape.
The facts stand. The appeals court turned around and said Jackson did not show either (A) that such a remedy would be successful, or (B) that it was necessary. Then we changed administrations and the DOJ was told to settle, which they did with coupons for MS products that would only increase the market power of MS, mostly at the expensive of Apple in education. Even when MS loses, they win.
But state courts are also very powerful in antitrust law, so let's see what happens when Iowa gets the trial rolling in a few months.
Before anyone tries to complain about the findings of fact, remember that the appeals court never disagreed with the facts Judge Jackson found, only the remedies he demanded. So that the original practice was an abuse of monopoly power still stands. As would the present case of strong-arming people into always including Windows.
Boy, talk about the long arm of coincidence. This just happened to me *last night* with my Replay TV. It wasn't showing any life whatsoever, but I checked other devices in the same outlet and they were getting power. So I figured the Replay TV was cooked. I pulled it out, and thinking I might try and fix it (i.e., kick the damn thing a few times) I plugged it into a different outlet and it worked just fine. I took it back to the original outlet, and it works just fine. This hardly answers your question, but another data point never hurts.
Surely Drew Carey can get this patent rejected! Or, if not that, Mimi could scare them into giving it up.
I'm not sure I understand....my girlfriend says a hardware dongle always works.
I purchased the box version of 10.0 and it does come with a DVD for install. So I started it and just let it run, leaving me uniterrupted to remember all the things I should have backed up first but didn't.
"According to some senators, farmers complained that a two-month extension could adversely affect livestock"
+5 funny for CNN
Why isn't Apple sueing the WSJ and Business 2.0 for revealing information? Is it OK if Business 2.0 does it, but not if a website?
And how on earth does a tinyurl insult your intelligence? Exactly what game are you hep to?
Anyway, some resources. If you are taking/thinking about taking meds, I highly recommend http://www.crazymeds.org/ The site isn't run by a doctor, but having checked his information from a number of different sources, he definitely seems to get the information right. Plus, the site is irreverant, which I appreciate.
The first course of therapy for depression is cognitive behavioral therapy. There is a standard book that explains these techniques. Feeling Good, by David Burns. Amazon link here: http://tinyurl.com/7dxos
I've read a lot of books on depression over the past 18 months, and the best, the most informative, I found was The Noonday Demon, by Andrew Solomon. Amazon again: http://tinyurl.com/99neh
Finally, the links in the post were good, and a good start, but I definitely disagree with some of his advice. Everybody is different, so take the time to hear different viewpoints on diagnoses, symptoms, and cures.
If you're wondering, treatment has made me better than I was, but I still have room for improvement. This is important. Depression may never (or it may) be "cured" for you, but in nearly all cases, treatment will decrease its severity. But not necessarily right away. Treatment is a process, and it takes some time to get there. Be patient.
In these situations (and software is obviously such a situation), only one company, one country, wins the race. And the winner doesn't necessarily match up with the country that had the classical comparative advantage. It matches up with the country that, at a given point in time, happened to be producing more than the other.
If in fact a country does have the classical comparative advantage, then it can improve their welfare (indeed, world welfare) if they close their borders, allowing that industry to grow. Once the industry has grown, capitalizing on the increasing returns to scale, you can open up your markets and take down the producers in the other country.
So there's an argument for doing it. But, it should be noted that even though Krugman pioneered justifications for protectionism, he remains an ardent supporter of free trade. There are a number of reasons for that, but in this context, the biggest problem is that a country doesn't know, and can't know, if in fact it has a classical comparative advantage in this product. In other words, it doesn't know that there will ever be a time when it can successfully open its borders. In this case, the country (and the world) are worse off.
Further, the act of closing your borders, even if good in the long run, still has costs in the short run. Not only do you need to be sure that you can ultimately take over the market, but you need to be sure that the long run gains are sufficiently high to warrant the short run costs. In the end, protectionist policies simply aren't worth the risk.
Oh, BTW, one country's trade policies, even a country like China, doesn't have that much to do with the trade deficit. If China stopped exporting to us entirely, the trade deficit might drop initially, but it would come back up as we increase imports from other countries. Ultimately, the trade deficit is driven by our national savings rate.
Also, don't forget that the older you get, the harder it is to go to school.
But then again, there was no private organization that benefitted from which side of the road people used. If Ford made money from the left side, and GM from the the right, then we can well imagine there would be a battle for which side of the road we drove on, and which side would probably vary from location to location. ("Hey New York, I'll give you a million bucks if you require people to drive on the left!")
Take away the private interests, and people will naturally organize themselves to one format or another. And, in most cases, consumers will be better off for it. The only reason they may be worse off is if people rally around an inferior standard, but that's probably more likely to happen with private interests.
Moving on to my opinion....the answer isn't to have the government force one standard or another on us. The answer is to have the government force the private interests to allow us to choose a standard with a minimum of baggage that comes with it. e.g., Don't force everyone to use .DOC, simply make it so that if you choose to use .DOC, you can use it with Word, OpenOffice, or whatever.
http://www.suseforums.net/index.php?showtopic=1308 6
YOU already has fixes to the kdemultimediapackage that corrects the MP3 problems. I don't know why they'd cripple MP3 support to begin with, but it's nice they fixed things so quickly.
I hope so!! Sadly, sadly, sadly, I own Novell stock......
If you think advertising revenue from search/adwords/etc justifies this stock price, you're crazy. (Same goes for Yahoo.) Of course, the market can always be wrong, but clearly the market *believes* that Google has some giant plants up its sleeve. I can't think of much that would fit the bill unless it was some form of application serving over the Net.
And, unless those Google employees have been dumping stock left and right, they must believe Google has something big up their sleeve as well.
What I didn't know is what methods would assuredly kill me. Or, if they wouldn't necessarily kill me, leave me without lasting harm. The Internet told me. There are all kinds of websites out there talking about the various suicide methods, with recommendations. You can easily order Final Exit, or even find the text online.
Moreover, the Internet provides knowledge for where to obtain lethal substances, and substances that put you in a state making it easier to kill yourself.
I am quite confident that I would never have attempted suicide if I didn't have access to the Internet. The method I chose would not have even occurred to me if I hadn't read about it online. Indeed, it was the most recommended method on the net, and I wouldn't have thought it.
So I think it's obvious that the Internet lowers the bar to committing suicide.
But that said, it's ridiculous to consider sensoring this information. There are the obvious free speech issues which I'm sure other people here will discuss. What I want to note, however, is that for me, research suicide options was also therapeutic. People think how terrible it is that someone would contemplate suicide, but they don't realize how much thinking about it can relieve the pain that you're in. I could lose all control of my thought processes, spiarling downward, but when I started imagining shooting myself, I felt *better*. In this way, the research I did on suicide was also soothing. Instead of curling up in a ball on the floor, I could focus my mind on this subject, and this subject alone, and I would calm down and feel relief.
So it's a two-edged sword. The knowledge I gained on the Internet did enable my attempt. But being able to research that material made me feel better, better than I would have otherwise.
Final disclaimer: All happy people are more or less the same, but all depressed people are depressed in their own way. So this is my experience only. (Yes, I've been doing well for some time--thanks for asking!)
One interesting story. I work for an economic consulting firm, and we were working for Microsoft (don't kill me--I didn't have a choice!) on one of their class-action lawsuits that came about in the wake of the antitrust conviction. We were of course forced to use Word, and as we all know, one thing MS has *never* gotten right is their footnotes. Our deadline was less than 6 hours away for a major report, and all of the footnotes were FUBARed. The head lawyer called the guy at MS who was in charge of Office (I forget his name) and yelled, "Why can't you guys fix the fucking footnotes! Word Perfect has like three developers and they can get it right!" The MS guy hemmed and hawed, said they were working on it. That was 3-4 years ago, and MS still hasn't gotten the footnotes right.
The article really should have mentioned Garage Games. Marble Blast and Gish are two of the funnest games I've ever played. If a good game to you is based on eye-candy, then this isn't the place for you. But if a good game is based on game-play, these were the best $20 I've ever spent.
Those of us who use Linux may need to boot Windows to play a particular game (if we have dual boot--I don't), but why not use Linux when a game is available? And why not let game publishers know that you would rather play, and be more likely to buy, if the game were released under Linux? It has to start somewhere, and that means us.
Is it legal to record conversations on POTS? If not, is it legal on VoIP, since perhaps the Internet doesn't fall under regular wire-tapping laws? Oh BTW, maybe reference back to the /. story a few days back about Google apparently starting a VoIP product (at least in the UK, which was the source of the article) in the near future. I think we can assume that if Google doing VoIP is true, they'll have a way to record coversations.