I think the Justice Department should have better things to occupy their time than civil lawsuits.
The federal justice system exists to insure the uniform enforcement of federal civil and criminal law.
You might want to think long and hard about the alternative. The NRA and the NAACP certainly have.
Personally, I've never believed that the law should be used to make examples out of people, no matter how distasteful their crimes. That simply breeds more disrespect for the law, which is something the RIAA is apparently unable to understand
There is nothing simple about it.
The public trial - and in the old days, the public execution - legitimized the process and set an example backed by the moral force of an entire community.
You listened and you learned.
When a Jammie Thomas goes before a jury, she gets hammered into the ground.
That always comes as a surprise hereabouts - and it exposes how little real understanding and connection the geek has to "the outer galaxies" - the world beyond Slashdot.
But ATI did use the space from those two slots quite nicely by including dual DVI ports AND a HDMI AND a DisplayPort connector meaning you have all the different types of digital display connectors available on a single card, which would be a first, I think.
I would like to see multiple HDMI outputs. The one cable - one connector - solution for audio and video.
I wouldn't be surprised if you were all Microsoft-paid trolls and marketers that are placing your twisted spin on things and making people continue to believe in your garbage.
The hardware manufacturer talks to Microsoft. Microsoft talks to the hardware manufacturer.
This - surprisingly enough - turns out to be mutually beneficial.
I fail to see how some "researcher" no doubt with a worthless degree in "Ancient Medievil History" or the like is more qualified that some who's, gasp, actually been in the field?
Would the DMCA have breezed through the congress quite so easily if there were two million votes on the line...?
The number itself means nothing.
What matters is where your votes are.
Each Congressman, for example, represents about 650,000 people.
But to be effective your party needs to be very strong in states like California (53 seats), Texas (32), New York (29) and Florida (23).
States in which corporate finance, foreign trade and the entertainment industry loom very large.
For the voter living in Seattle, the 45,000 jobs and $60 billion in revenues generated by Microsoft every year is something he isn't going to cast away lightly.
3 Madden NFL 10 XBox 4 Madden NFL 10 PS3 16 EA Sports Active Wii 18 The Sims 3 Windows 58 Madden NFL 10 Wii 60 Dragon Age Origins XBox 64 NCAA Football 10 XBox 68 Madden NFL 10 PS2 70 Beatles Rock Band XBox
The Amazon list ranks bestsellers in hardware and software. With the exception of The Sims, all titles are pre-orders.
It should be obvious at a glance that fans of Madden and the Sims are loyal.
Microsoft has been cannibalizing their own business for profits. They don't have the ability to innovate and they have been resorting to forcing upgrades on their customers to maintain revenue. they could have taken over business software
Slashdot and reality are perilously close to a permanent disconnect:
"SharePoint is saving Microsoft's Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in," said Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco, which makes an open-source content management system. "It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping."Microsoft's SharePoint Thrives in the Recession, Slow down, cowboy
With the next version of Office, Microsoft is trying to expand* its desktop hold on the productivity market into one that spans the PC, Web, and phone, and the Nokia deal is seen as a significant move in that last category. The software maker has already said that, with the next version of Office, it plans to offer browser-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. Those programs will be able to run inside Safari and Firefox in addition to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. That means that Office, for the first time, will run on Linux-based machines. Although Nokia and Microsoft have long been rivals in the phone business, the two have also struck deals at times. Nokia already has a license that allows its phones to connect to Exchange Servers using Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol. In 2007, Microsoft also struck a deal with Nokia to have Windows Live services run on the Finnish company's phones.Microsoft, Nokia plan mobile Office deal
A thoughtful person who travels outside of his or her country would certainly take that into account when thinking of which encryption system to use
I would begin by asking why I was taking a sensitive file or folder across the border.
"Any port in a storm."
Nothing is guaranteed to go the way you planned.
You are navigating a legal no man's land where the power and authority of the customs agent, secret service, police and military are least likely to be questioned.
Five months as the guest of Kim Jong II makes all things negotiable. Including that key you've held back for so long.
If he had downloaded said tax records for just a laugh, he would be free.
I've heard this argument on Slashdot before.
Like every time a geek is sentenced to do hard time after being caught poking his nose into somewhere it didn't belong.
There are a bare handful of reasons why you could claim to be legally in possession of a someone else's tax records - and none of them are likely to involve a download over the P2P nets.
Maybe this is a new business opportunity for the Pirate Bay. In addition to the private VPN service, you could also get remote anonymous encrypted storage. If you only access the storage through the VPN, it could make it pretty difficult to track.
This also sounds like an opportunity for the NSA and the Russian Mafia.
For anyone, really, who has a clue to what use might be made of front organizations like Pirate Bay and billions of dollars to invest in traffic analysis and crypto.
The law is bullshit, there is a profound difference between telling a lie and withholding the truth, conscious effort is required to tell the lie but withholding the truth simply requires a lapse of memory
There is nothing quite like a 6x8 foot cinder block cell and a bunk mate named Big Mike to bring old memories into focus,
When most modern means of control are at least related to technology, perhaps the average person needs to question whether it is in their interests to leave such matters to "geek circles."
This just surrenders power to a self-described and self-appointed technological elite who claims to have all the answers.
My prediction is that by 2020 films & their ilk will have all but disappeared, like lithographs in the age of photographs, or 16mm in the age of video. etc. etc.
Wall-E is as technically advanced in its use of digital techniques as anything we have seen.
And yet Wall-E at it's core is a silent movie - and the silents were never projected in silence - but told their stories through music and expression alone. Wall-E is no less deeply rooted in the aesthetics of 35mm film and optics.
The end credits of "Presto" are a handsome and knowledgeable pastiche of the stone lithography of the American circus.
The motion picture and television industry is cyclical. Which is why you see so many remakes, clones and sequels. But it has been willing to embrace every popular fictional genre.
The premise of most online games tends to read like a "Mad-Lib" generated from the stock elements of D&D, Stars Wars and GTA.
The open world allows you to disconnect from the storyline - but then its back to same old grind.
Advancement in the game is measured by the body count. Smarts and skill count for less than the time you have to invest in the game.
- and in a game like GTA, your willingness to beat up a prostitute.
That's a little cynical, of course, but I'd argue that there is more than a little truth in these sterotypes.
This is what one of Microsoft's Open Source competitors had to say about SharePoint:
Microsoft has found a way to create ties between SharePoint and its more traditional products like Office and Exchange. Companies can tweak Office documents through SharePoint and receive information like whether a worker is online or not through tools in Exchange. These links have Microsoft carrying along its old-line software as it builds a more Internet-focused software line.
"SharePoint is saving Microsoft's Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in," said Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco, which makes an open-source content management system. "It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping."
Microsoft has managed to undercut even the open-source companies playing in the business software market by giving away a free basic license to SharePoint if they already have Windows Server. "It's a brilliant strategy that mimics open source in its viral, free distribution, but transcends open source in its ability to lock customers into a complete, not-free-at-all Microsoft stack - one for which they'll pay more and more the deeper they get into SharePoint," Mr. Asay said.Microsoft's SharePoint Thrives in the Recession [Aug 7]
SharePoint is the hottest selling server side product for Microsoft ever.
In its next iteration, SharePoint will have "stronger ties to the corporate search technology Microsoft acquired in the $1.2 billion purchase of Fast Search and Transfer. Best Buy uses the Fast technology today to provide on-the-fly pricing information to customers performing product searches on its Web site."
The Net Applications global market stats for July are out. The weakness of Linux and FOSS in these stats is startling - and if you were looking for evidence of a real "death spiral," this would be a good place to begin.
Two of the great innovations of our number system (positional representation, and the digit zero) were incredible aids to making numeracy less "out of reach" for ever larger segments of the population.
There are many people who can perform simple arithmetic.
The numbers grow progressively smaller as you advance through trigonometry, geometry, algebra and calculus.
The original proposition was this:
1 Don't like what the code is doing?
2 Extract the offending part. Rewrite, rebuild, and recompile.
3 Or pay someone else to do the job for you.
You cannot solve the problem if you are not a programmer. You cannot solve the problem if you cannot afford to hire a programmer.
The user may not even be able to see the problem at all.
The cost and complexity of a solution escalates rapidly if documentation is missing, the presence and function of the offending code is deliberated obscured or deeply entwined with the core functionality of the program as a whole.
The developer defines "software freedom" in terms of his own needs, values and resources - and expects the user to see things the same way.
Better than a programmer disappearing off the face of the earth leaving code he wrote on a workstation backup in a closet somewhere, were it will never be able to be used by anybody else.
Not by much.
The documentation of said code - if it survives at at all - might as well be written in Mayan.
The code is hack work - that solved some oddball problem for Smith & Jones, Ltd. Suppliers of Stainless Steel Flatware To The Queen Since 1953.
But because Firefox/Iceweasel/whatever is free software, you are also Free to download the source code, rip out the data mining, and rebuild it, or to hire someone to do so for you.
Here, revealed in one sentence, is why "software freedom" remains utterly incomprehensible to anyone but a geek. The level of skill it implies, the time and the money, is out of reach of any ordinary user.
Maximum CPU usage is a terrible drain on environmental resources, and the extra heat generated by the CPU contributes to global climate change. So to encourage users to use less CPU power...Apple used a slightly underpowered power supply.
Tell me how - in the long run - spending more time on CPU-intensive tasks saves energy and reduces heat.
Mind you, the most logical reason for the user to be running a CPU intensive application is because he needs an answer quickly.
That also has implications for the environment: "The numbers look good. We can shut down the run."
Slashdot Mirror
I think the Justice Department should have better things to occupy their time than civil lawsuits.
The federal justice system exists to insure the uniform enforcement of federal civil and criminal law.
You might want to think long and hard about the alternative. The NRA and the NAACP certainly have.
Personally, I've never believed that the law should be used to make examples out of people, no matter how distasteful their crimes. That simply breeds more disrespect for the law, which is something the RIAA is apparently unable to understand
There is nothing simple about it.
The public trial - and in the old days, the public execution - legitimized the process and set an example backed by the moral force of an entire community.
You listened and you learned.
When a Jammie Thomas goes before a jury, she gets hammered into the ground.
That always comes as a surprise hereabouts - and it exposes how little real understanding and connection the geek has to "the outer galaxies" - the world beyond Slashdot.
What I want to see is convincing proof that iD can still deliver a game and not a tech demo.
But ATI did use the space from those two slots quite nicely by including dual DVI ports AND a HDMI AND a DisplayPort connector meaning you have all the different types of digital display connectors available on a single card, which would be a first, I think.
I would like to see multiple HDMI outputs. The one cable - one connector - solution for audio and video.
I wouldn't be surprised if you were all Microsoft-paid trolls and marketers that are placing your twisted spin on things and making people continue to believe in your garbage.
The hardware manufacturer talks to Microsoft. Microsoft talks to the hardware manufacturer.
This - surprisingly enough - turns out to be mutually beneficial.
I fail to see how some "researcher" no doubt with a worthless degree in "Ancient Medievil History" or the like is more qualified that some who's, gasp, actually been in the field?
To view the active list of Army Field Manuals - excluding engineering and medical: Doctrine and Training Publications
You won't be able to access the files.
But it might just buy you a clue to what an Army college is all about.
Here is a sampling of Army field manuals in the public domain: Army Field Manuals
Because while under many eyes, all bugs are shallow, that only works if the eyes are actually looking.
For eight long years no one was looking. Tell me again how the geek spins this story in a way that inspires confidence in Linux and FOSS?
Would the DMCA have breezed through the congress quite so easily if there were two million votes on the line...?
The number itself means nothing.
What matters is where your votes are.
Each Congressman, for example, represents about 650,000 people.
But to be effective your party needs to be very strong in states like California (53 seats), Texas (32), New York (29) and Florida (23).
States in which corporate finance, foreign trade and the entertainment industry loom very large.
For the voter living in Seattle, the 45,000 jobs and $60 billion in revenues generated by Microsoft every year is something he isn't going to cast away lightly.
They've been losing a lot of popularity for a reason.....
Bestsellers in Video Games
3 Madden NFL 10 XBox
4 Madden NFL 10 PS3
16 EA Sports Active Wii
18 The Sims 3 Windows
58 Madden NFL 10 Wii
60 Dragon Age Origins XBox
64 NCAA Football 10 XBox
68 Madden NFL 10 PS2
70 Beatles Rock Band XBox
The Amazon list ranks bestsellers in hardware and software. With the exception of The Sims, all titles are pre-orders.
It should be obvious at a glance that fans of Madden and the Sims are loyal.
Allow me to suggest spending more time outside the museum.
John White's fine essay The Power of Live Steam is the perfect introduction to our most authentic steam railroads.
No static exhibition is going to have quite the same impact as walking the yards of the East Broad Top.
The simplest of things can teach you so much: Walking the Brooklyn Bridge, The High Line
Microsoft has been cannibalizing their own business for profits. They don't have the ability to innovate and they have been resorting to forcing upgrades on their customers to maintain revenue.
they could have taken over business software
Slashdot and reality are perilously close to a permanent disconnect:
"SharePoint is saving Microsoft's Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in," said Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco, which makes an open-source content management system. "It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping." Microsoft's SharePoint Thrives in the Recession, Slow down, cowboy
With the next version of Office, Microsoft is trying to expand* its desktop hold on the productivity market into one that spans the PC, Web, and phone, and the Nokia deal is seen as a significant move in that last category.
The software maker has already said that, with the next version of Office, it plans to offer browser-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. Those programs will be able to run inside Safari and Firefox in addition to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. That means that Office, for the first time, will run on Linux-based machines.
Although Nokia and Microsoft have long been rivals in the phone business, the two have also struck deals at times. Nokia already has a license that allows its phones to connect to Exchange Servers using Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol. In 2007, Microsoft also struck a deal with Nokia to have Windows Live services run on the Finnish company's phones. Microsoft, Nokia plan mobile Office deal
*-emphasis added.
A thoughtful person who travels outside of his or her country would certainly take that into account when thinking of which encryption system to use
I would begin by asking why I was taking a sensitive file or folder across the border.
"Any port in a storm."
Nothing is guaranteed to go the way you planned.
You are navigating a legal no man's land where the power and authority of the customs agent, secret service, police and military are least likely to be questioned.
Five months as the guest of Kim Jong II makes all things negotiable. Including that key you've held back for so long.
If he had downloaded said tax records for just a laugh, he would be free.
I've heard this argument on Slashdot before.
Like every time a geek is sentenced to do hard time after being caught poking his nose into somewhere it didn't belong.
There are a bare handful of reasons why you could claim to be legally in possession of a someone else's tax records - and none of them are likely to involve a download over the P2P nets.
Maybe this is a new business opportunity for the Pirate Bay. In addition to the private VPN service, you could also get remote anonymous encrypted storage. If you only access the storage through the VPN, it could make it pretty difficult to track.
This also sounds like an opportunity for the NSA and the Russian Mafia.
For anyone, really, who has a clue to what use might be made of front organizations like Pirate Bay and billions of dollars to invest in traffic analysis and crypto.
The law is bullshit, there is a profound difference between telling a lie and withholding the truth, conscious effort is required to tell the lie but withholding the truth simply requires a lapse of memory
There is nothing quite like a 6x8 foot cinder block cell and a bunk mate named Big Mike to bring old memories into focus,
When most modern means of control are at least related to technology, perhaps the average person needs to question whether it is in their interests to leave such matters to "geek circles."
This just surrenders power to a self-described and self-appointed technological elite who claims to have all the answers.
Windows runs countless business, institutional and industrial apps that are unlikely to disappear or be ported anytime soon.
A lot of the web office apps are free, yet Office costs $99 for the student/home edition.
Three seat license.
With student ID and 0.5 credit hours MS Office 2007 Ultimate is yours for $60. The Ultimate Steal
If your employer participates in Microsoft's Home User programs Office is free for the price of S&H the disks.
If you can afford a printer, you can afford MS Office.
My prediction is that by 2020 films & their ilk will have all but disappeared, like lithographs in the age of photographs, or 16mm in the age of video. etc. etc.
Wall-E is as technically advanced in its use of digital techniques as anything we have seen.
And yet Wall-E at it's core is a silent movie - and the silents were never projected in silence - but told their stories through music and expression alone. Wall-E is no less deeply rooted in the aesthetics of 35mm film and optics.
The end credits of "Presto" are a handsome and knowledgeable pastiche of the stone lithography of the American circus.
The motion picture and television industry is cyclical. Which is why you see so many remakes, clones and sequels. But it has been willing to embrace every popular fictional genre.
The premise of most online games tends to read like a "Mad-Lib" generated from the stock elements of D&D, Stars Wars and GTA.
The open world allows you to disconnect from the storyline - but then its back to same old grind.
Advancement in the game is measured by the body count. Smarts and skill count for less than the time you have to invest in the game.
- and in a game like GTA, your willingness to beat up a prostitute.
That's a little cynical, of course, but I'd argue that there is more than a little truth in these sterotypes.
This is what one of Microsoft's Open Source competitors had to say about SharePoint:
Microsoft has found a way to create ties between SharePoint and its more traditional products like Office and Exchange. Companies can tweak Office documents through SharePoint and receive information like whether a worker is online or not through tools in Exchange. These links have Microsoft carrying along its old-line software as it builds a more Internet-focused software line.
"SharePoint is saving Microsoft's Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in," said Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco, which makes an open-source content management system. "It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping."
Microsoft has managed to undercut even the open-source companies playing in the business software market by giving away a free basic license to SharePoint if they already have Windows Server. "It's a brilliant strategy that mimics open source in its viral, free distribution, but transcends open source in its ability to lock customers into a complete, not-free-at-all Microsoft stack - one for which they'll pay more and more the deeper they get into SharePoint," Mr. Asay said. Microsoft's SharePoint Thrives in the Recession [Aug 7]
SharePoint is the hottest selling server side product for Microsoft ever.
In its next iteration, SharePoint will have "stronger ties to the corporate search technology Microsoft acquired in the $1.2 billion purchase of Fast Search and Transfer. Best Buy uses the Fast technology today to provide on-the-fly pricing information to customers performing product searches on its Web site."
The Net Applications global market stats for July are out. The weakness of Linux and FOSS in these stats is startling - and if you were looking for evidence of a real "death spiral," this would be a good place to begin.
Operating System Market Share [Rounded]
XP 73%
Vista 18%
OSX 10.5 3%
Linux 1%
OSX 10.4 1%
W2K 1%
Win 7 1%
Browser Version Market Share
IE 6 27%
IE 7 23%
FFOX 3 16%
IE 8 12%
FFOX 3.5 5%
Chrome 2%
Safari 2%
Country Level Weighting
Two of the great innovations of our number system (positional representation, and the digit zero) were incredible aids to making numeracy less "out of reach" for ever larger segments of the population.
There are many people who can perform simple arithmetic.
The numbers grow progressively smaller as you advance through trigonometry, geometry, algebra and calculus.
The original proposition was this:
1 Don't like what the code is doing?
2 Extract the offending part. Rewrite, rebuild, and recompile.
3 Or pay someone else to do the job for you.
You cannot solve the problem if you are not a programmer. You cannot solve the problem if you cannot afford to hire a programmer.
The user may not even be able to see the problem at all.
The cost and complexity of a solution escalates rapidly if documentation is missing, the presence and function of the offending code is deliberated obscured or deeply entwined with the core functionality of the program as a whole.
The developer defines "software freedom" in terms of his own needs, values and resources - and expects the user to see things the same way.
Better than a programmer disappearing off the face of the earth leaving code he wrote on a workstation backup in a closet somewhere, were it will never be able to be used by anybody else.
Not by much.
The documentation of said code - if it survives at at all - might as well be written in Mayan.
The code is hack work - that solved some oddball problem for Smith & Jones, Ltd. Suppliers of Stainless Steel Flatware To The Queen Since 1953.
But because Firefox/Iceweasel/whatever is free software, you are also Free to download the source code, rip out the data mining, and rebuild it, or to hire someone to do so for you.
Here, revealed in one sentence, is why "software freedom" remains utterly incomprehensible to anyone but a geek. The level of skill it implies, the time and the money, is out of reach of any ordinary user.
Microsoft probably did quite a bit of usability testing before launching Clippy...
How many users off the message boards do you suppose ever had any real objection to a touch of color and animation on the desktop?
I rather suspect that Clippy did more to encourage novices to use the online help system than the geek will ever be willing to admit.
Maximum CPU usage is a terrible drain on environmental resources, and the extra heat generated by the CPU contributes to global climate change. So to encourage users to use less CPU power...Apple used a slightly underpowered power supply.
Tell me how - in the long run - spending more time on CPU-intensive tasks saves energy and reduces heat.
Mind you, the most logical reason for the user to be running a CPU intensive application is because he needs an answer quickly.
That also has implications for the environment: "The numbers look good. We can shut down the run."