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User: jimbosworldorg

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  1. Re:"Free is Bad," said Gates on Gates on Spam · · Score: 1

    What are you, retarded? The discussion at hand is about adding a cost-per-email-sent to the existing cost for internet access in order to combat spam. I made the statement that adding a charge-per-call to my exisiting phone costs doesn't seem like a good way to attempt to combat telemarketing. What about this don't you understand, and what point are you trying to make?

  2. your firewall-fu is not strong on Spyware on One in Twenty Computers? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You can configure a firewall to block the outgoing communication that spyware clients attempt to establish with their servers. You CANNOT configure a firewall to prevent users from clicking the shiny pop-up and infecting themselves with the spyware in the first place, and blocking the spyware communication does NOT mitigate the damage to the OS that the spyware generally does - in fact, it often makes it considerably worse, since many instances of spyware go absolutely bugfuck nuts when they can't contact home and may hold up vital processes waiting for that connection to be made, or send the computer into a semi-race condition trying over and over and over again to make that connection.

  3. Re:"Free is Bad," said Gates on Gates on Spam · · Score: 1

    No. I'm not. I pay $49 a month for my cell phone, in exchange for which I may make as many calls to as many people in the continental united states for as many minutes as I feel like doing.

  4. "Free is Bad," said Gates on Gates on Spam · · Score: 1
    If the U.S. Postal Service delivered mail for free, our mailboxes would surely runneth over with more credit-card offers, sweepstakes entries, and supermarket fliers. That's why we get so much junk e-mail: It's essentially free to send.

    You know, I get a lot of telemarketers bothering me too, but I certainly don't think that charging myself every time I want to make a phone call would constitute a "solution".

  5. No way! on Bloggers' Plagiarism Scientifically Proven · · Score: 4, Funny

    "And in related news, it's been discovered that a website called SlashDot links to stories run by other media outlets..."

  6. Re:Wrong Software To Port? on Macromedia to Port Flash MX to Linux? · · Score: 1
    Yeah; I realized they were talking strictly about the authoring after I posted. I'm still hoping they'll also take the linux plugin more seriously with their additional commitment to the authoring software though - I definitely have NOT found the linux plugin to be "perfectly good." I've found it inconsistent at best.

    Here's hoping they release a vanilla-BSD native version as well after they OSX plugin gains a little more maturity; it's a REAL pain in the ass getting Flash working right on a BSD system.

  7. Re:Wrong Software To Port? on Macromedia to Port Flash MX to Linux? · · Score: 1

    You're preaching to the choir. But if you think Joe and Jane Six-Pack are going to choose "platform purity" over "being able to access our online checking and look at teh funny cartoons", you're more than a little out of touch. And whether you like it or not (I'm pretty sure I don't), Joe and Jane Six-Pack are a very real driving force in the direction of tomorrow's technologies - that's how Windows got so prevalent in the first place.

  8. Re:Wrong Software To Port? on Macromedia to Port Flash MX to Linux? · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Because, whether you think it's generally a horrid abomination or not, more and more sites use Flash for essential navigation tools, and up until now, it's worked... inconsistently... at best under any platform but Win32.

    Native Flash rendering under *nix could be a very very big step forward towards getting mainstream acceptance for *nix as a mainstream desktop platform.

  9. Good job HardOCP on HardOCP Sues Infinium Over Legal Threats · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I'm glad HardOCP is putting their money right where their mouth is. I'm sick and tired of seeing people back fearfully away from any jackass with a lawyer.

    After all, failure to stand up to legal badgering is exactly WHY we're such a litigious society today - because of the payoff.

  10. Re:Possible bad things on China Plans Domestic Software Quotas · · Score: 1
    1. the article is discussing Chinese GOVERNMENT software purchases, not Chinese CITIZEN software purchases

    2. pirating everything is what they generally do anyway... they are, after all, one of the world's most infamous pirate havens.

  11. Re:what are the licensing terms? on Microsoft Code in Every HD-DVD Player · · Score: 1

    Huh. If they only charged a 25 cent royalty fee on top of actual media and distribution costs for Windows and Office, the open source community might be in trouble...

  12. Re:Hmm... on Microsoft Code in Every HD-DVD Player · · Score: 5, Informative
    I'm not quite sure how it gives them leverage to "toss in DRM", since the codec effectively became frozen as a standard when they submitted it to SMPTE.

    Microsoft will no longer be the ones to control revisions added to the codec if it's approved. SMPTE will be.

  13. Re:what are the licensing terms? on Microsoft Code in Every HD-DVD Player · · Score: 3, Informative
    Answering my own question, the codec itself is open and non-proprietary, but licensing and royalties ARE required for its use.

    In other words, it's EXACTLY deCSS all over again: the OSS community won't be allowed to play HD-DVDs legally, but somebody will hack together a perfectly functional driver as soon as the actual hardware hits the scene.

    Some things just never change. Sigh...

  14. what are the licensing terms? on Microsoft Code in Every HD-DVD Player · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What are the licensing terms for MS's VC-9 codec? Is it free, or is every HD-DVD player manufacturer going to be required to pay MS a licensing fee? I don't necessarily mind MS being the ones to author a commonly used codec, but I'm pretty violently opposed to them getting automatic royalties on every HD-DVD player manufactured, and getting stuck in the same position we were with decss regarding open source players.

  15. Re:Calif government is guilty on Jail Time for Misleading Domain Names · · Score: 1

    WHOA. You've got a point there...

  16. Re:Sounds like someone trying to by controversial. on Is Open Source Fertile Ground for Foul Play? · · Score: 1

    > A small and ever-decreasing percentage of users compile their own binaries,
    > let alone check the result.

    In the Linux world, you're quite right - but keep in mind that Linux isn't the entire Open Source world. The BSD world is *far* more source-centric, and makes it so trivially simple to compile from source using the ports tree that most BSD'ers I know only use pre-compiled packages for truly ENORMOUS projects like KDE.

    cvsup /usr/share/examples/ports-supfile ... you just synchronized links to fresh source tarballs for about 10,000 major applications.

    cd /usr/ports/www/apache13+mod_ssl && make install clean ... you just downloaded, configured, compiled, and installed Apache, OpenSSL, and all dependencies from source (takes about 5 minutes of completely unattended time on an Athlon 1700). If any of those source tarballs don't match the checksums, your port build will stop and warn you about it.

  17. Piracy: whys and wherefores on Questions for DoJ IP Attorneys Asked and Answered · · Score: 1

    There are a lot of people who only pirate that which they wouldn't buy even if they couldn't pirate it, usually due to unreasonably high prices.

    I know an awful lot of people that cheerfully pay for their $50 copy of Quake MCMXVII: the Bloodening, but just as cheerfully pirate the heck out of Adobe Photoshop. Would they pay the $750 for Photoshop if they couldn't find a pirated copy? Not bloody likely.