Emacs is text-based. IMHO that's the worst thing about it. You can't use the mouse to navigate the menus! You can't have toolbars! You can't have images! Solely because of this, the majority of users *will* indeed find MS Word faster for their tasks than Emacs, until they learn all the necessary keyboard shortcuts for Emacs, which they shouldn't have to do.
Wrong. In the UK, they're a road tax AND a tool of police intimidation. 3 points on licence per speeding offence, 6 or 12 points on your lience and you are banned from driving. That wouldn't give you much chance to pay police fines.
Then you're a dickhead. What if The Motorists' Parts WAS in power. Are you saying you support Labour on every issue but the roads? If so, you can never expect to get MY vote.
Do you realise that the Data Protection Act doesn't apply to the government, police, or any government agency? It doesn't seem to anyway. They regularly take whatever data they want with no regard to the law, share it about, and do all sorts of stuff they like with it. All at the same time as prosecuting businesses who may have breached some subsection of the Act.
Imagine if everyone would get a ticket each time they exceeded the speed limit. Limits would have to be raised to reasonable levels nationwide, or people would riot in the streets.
You're forgetting, this is the UK (road camera central) we're talking about here. This has already happened. Speed cameras are *everywhere*. And they don't increase speed limits - the REDUCE them, so that more people will break them, have to pay the fine, and the police get more money. That motorists may very quickly get banned from driving unreasonably because of this is, at best, an afterthought and, at worst, actually desired by a government that is desperate to reduce congestion.
Do you live in the UK? In case not, I'll inform you that there is an extensive network of speed cameras in this country, widely considered to be ludircous profit making machines for the police on many roads. However, they don't just fine you for speeding, the put 3 points on your licence. This means that, for being caught going 5mph over the limit, twice, you could get *BANNED* from driving. Still think it's reasonable for the police to be able to track anyone who 'isn't 100% legal'?
The police in this country abuse the law, are effectively the government's hitmen, and they ought to have some fucking accountability. Instead of that, they just turn the roads into more of a frightening place for the average motorist each and every day.
Is it also true that in Germany you have passwords that you have to make an effort to remember? In America(tm), you just name your password after your mother or father and everything is fine.
Don't confuse the issue with p2p and all it's questionable aspects.
The issue that was first raised in the thread was that Kazaa was bad because of its spyware. I was relating it to that.
However, there are advantages to making the fee mandatory. A lot of stuff on the BBC is special interest, most of which I'm sure both of us are completely unaware of. BBC radio will play genres of music that purely commercial stations could not touch.
Like Radio 1. Most commercial stations wouldn't touch what they play, because it's shit. Plain and simple. The music is shit, and most of their DJs are utterly amateurish. It should be taken off the air, but instead we're forced to fund it!
Due to the numbers of people in the groups, there simply isn't profit to be made.
My view is that if that is the case, then it really IS questionable whether it should be being made. You're talking about media which is not just usually avoided by commercial channels, but which *doesn't appeal to many people*. Please explain to me why the masses should be forced to pay for its production? At least the NHS serves most people in the UK. Ditto the roads.
Commercial television caters for the "UKs greatest car crashes" market; where programmming can be enjoyed by a very wide viewing spectrum.
That's not so true anymore; with the advent of hundreds of digital channels, there are plenty of special interest channels out there. God channel, Discovery channel, History channel, music video channels, news channels, drama channels, cartoon channels, etc.
I'd rather live in a country where we have a massive choice of media available, made possible by the BBCs funding mechanism.
If anything, that mechanism reduces the choice of media available. It limits billions of pounds per year to the BBC's enterprises, when it could be being spent on companies that work more efficiently, and better serve people's interests.
Ever watched TV in the USA? Ouch, the volume and frequency of advertising is obscene, UK viewers would never stand for that in contrast to the commercial free BBC.
They wouldn't stand for it, so we don't need the BBC then do we?:-) Seriously, I think the amount of commercials in the USA has a lot more to do with US culture than commercial TV. I'm sure there are fewer commercials in other countries without public sector broadcasters, but people always choose the USA to compare against because it's a 'worst case' scenario.
And that's an excuse for us to capitulate to them, rather than trying to resist through civil disobedience? Wonderful attitude. "They'll win anyway, so let's play by their rules." No thanks. One day, they might just lose if enough people put up a fight.
I am not willing to give this level of trust to any company I don't know, let alone one that already does underhand things to get their software onto my machine.
Fine, don't install Kazaa then. I was just making the point that comparing it to a virus is stupid, because at least Kazaa tells you what it is installing (don't read terms and conditions? Tough shit. Would you sign a contract without reading it?), and uninstalls it when you uninstall the program. Viruses, OTOH, don't tell you they're being installed, and don't like to be uninstalled.
You don't know me. How can you make jackass statements like that? I make more people aware of these issues that you ever have.
I can quite easily make jackass statements like that, because I know you haven't done enough to stop the legislation. Nobody has. It's not a criticism, it's just trying to put spyware into perspective, and the way I see it, it's very insignificant. You could find yourself emptying out the rowboat only to be destroyed by the 50 foot wave.
On the surface yes, I want to pay X less pounds on it each year. Then when you look at the standard of the BBC verses every other network in the world, including all it's TV, radio, web, community and educational content with no advertisments on any, then you realise that we are damn lucky to have it. Nothing comes close anywhere else.
Bollocks. The BBC sucks. I hate nearly every TV program they put out, and when I had Sky, watched nearly no BBC programmes and mostly other channels. That's the thing about programming - it's subjective, and some people will love what others hate. That's why you should be allowed to *choose* what you pay to watch. If the BBC's programmes are so fantastic, then logically huge numbers of people would pay to see them, no?
You sound like the kind of asshole admin that I'd love to put a hatchet through the head of. Seriously, why don't you stop using such unnecessarily draconian tactics as banning, and start using packet shaping? There's a fat, assholing admin like you at my college. We all hate him. You might get more popular with the staff if you changed your behaviour.
No, I googled around until I found the subnets of the main servers for the network. The system may be peer to peer, but they have to first call out to find out where everybody is.
Silly. Stuff like Gnutella doesn't even need that first phone call - you can just get the IPs of some machines currently running it from a web page. Why not disallow open internet access entirely, and force everything through an http proxy?
But keep this in perspective. See, what I can't understand about you types is that you get all defensive about not allowing spyware on your machine, software which gathers, as you say, marketing data on you - something which, in the end, is harmless, and perhaps even helpful in targetting ads at you (yes, yes I know, you block them, you freeloader).
And yet *nearly every major Western government* is, at this time, introducing new legislation that allows them to view *every packet you send and receive* in the laughable name of 'counter-terrorism', yet you do nothing to practically stop it, just wring your hands and say that it sucks. You really ought to be rebelling against the oppressive government, slaughtering them for NOT respecting your right to being democratically represented, be you American, British, Australian, any other European, whatever. I'm serious. But you'll probably just laugh at me, and wring your hands, as usual.
The problem with that argument is that even though the value of the CDs they are giving away may only be a few thousands, the FIRST CD cost several million (or more) dollars. They have to get that money back somehow (either from sales, or from tax credits by giving this stuff away).
[sarcasm]Yes, because Microsoft are in desperate need of cash.[/sarcasm]
Really, I could understand this argument for a new software company that was in debt to its bank/venture capital company. But does Microsoft honestly have the right to claim that they can't genuinely give away software, because they *need* to recoup the development cost? They've already done that many, many times over, and if they still have that attitude, they shouldn't be claiming to donate anything.
... whereas now that DALnet has been beaten to a blooody pulp, they are craking down on warez(ish) channels? I don't know because I no longer use it, but I think this fact helps to illustrate what is happening to IRC - this kind of stuff is, alas, disappearing from it. It wasn't written with the intention of being a file sharing medium, and it's not a very good one nowadays either.
Oh please, you are talking bollocks. Of course 'spyware' should NOT be labelled as a fucking virus - it ISN'T one. There's a big, big difference between something written to discreetely fuck up a user's system, and something written to gain information about the user, that *informs the user that it's being installed*. You seem like a troll to me, but I fear you may be genuine. Please, learn the difference between so-called 'spyware' and a virus.
I hate eMule. It seems to allow impartially downloaded files to be shared on the network, and even encourages this by showing you a bar for each file that illustrates which parts of the file the person has. When I tried to download a video from there, *nobody* had the whole thing, they all just had the same small snippets of it! What good is that? Any P2P client that encourages non-complete files to be shared is stupid, and should die.
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Emacs is text-based. IMHO that's the worst thing about it. You can't use the mouse to navigate the menus! You can't have toolbars! You can't have images! Solely because of this, the majority of users *will* indeed find MS Word faster for their tasks than Emacs, until they learn all the necessary keyboard shortcuts for Emacs, which they shouldn't have to do.
Online banking today cuts-out everyone with a browser which doesn't transmit "MSIE" in the user-agent.
Speak for your own shite bank. I just tried mine, and its online banking seems fine with Mozilla.
Speeding tickets really are just a "road tax."
Wrong. In the UK, they're a road tax AND a tool of police intimidation. 3 points on licence per speeding offence, 6 or 12 points on your lience and you are banned from driving. That wouldn't give you much chance to pay police fines.
Then you're a dickhead. What if The Motorists' Parts WAS in power. Are you saying you support Labour on every issue but the roads? If so, you can never expect to get MY vote.
Do you realise that the Data Protection Act doesn't apply to the government, police, or any government agency? It doesn't seem to anyway. They regularly take whatever data they want with no regard to the law, share it about, and do all sorts of stuff they like with it. All at the same time as prosecuting businesses who may have breached some subsection of the Act.
Imagine if everyone would get a ticket each time they exceeded the speed limit. Limits would have to be raised to reasonable levels nationwide, or people would riot in the streets.
You're forgetting, this is the UK (road camera central) we're talking about here. This has already happened. Speed cameras are *everywhere*. And they don't increase speed limits - the REDUCE them, so that more people will break them, have to pay the fine, and the police get more money. That motorists may very quickly get banned from driving unreasonably because of this is, at best, an afterthought and, at worst, actually desired by a government that is desperate to reduce congestion.
Do you live in the UK? In case not, I'll inform you that there is an extensive network of speed cameras in this country, widely considered to be ludircous profit making machines for the police on many roads. However, they don't just fine you for speeding, the put 3 points on your licence. This means that, for being caught going 5mph over the limit, twice, you could get *BANNED* from driving. Still think it's reasonable for the police to be able to track anyone who 'isn't 100% legal'?
The police in this country abuse the law, are effectively the government's hitmen, and they ought to have some fucking accountability. Instead of that, they just turn the roads into more of a frightening place for the average motorist each and every day.
Is it also true that in Germany you have passwords that you have to make an effort to remember? In America(tm), you just name your password after your mother or father and everything is fine.
Don't confuse the issue with p2p and all it's questionable aspects.
:-) Seriously, I think the amount of commercials in the USA has a lot more to do with US culture than commercial TV. I'm sure there are fewer commercials in other countries without public sector broadcasters, but people always choose the USA to compare against because it's a 'worst case' scenario.
The issue that was first raised in the thread was that Kazaa was bad because of its spyware. I was relating it to that.
However, there are advantages to making the fee mandatory. A lot of stuff on the BBC is special interest, most of which I'm sure both of us are completely unaware of. BBC radio will play genres of music that purely commercial stations could not touch.
Like Radio 1. Most commercial stations wouldn't touch what they play, because it's shit. Plain and simple. The music is shit, and most of their DJs are utterly amateurish. It should be taken off the air, but instead we're forced to fund it!
Due to the numbers of people in the groups, there simply isn't profit to be made.
My view is that if that is the case, then it really IS questionable whether it should be being made. You're talking about media which is not just usually avoided by commercial channels, but which *doesn't appeal to many people*. Please explain to me why the masses should be forced to pay for its production? At least the NHS serves most people in the UK. Ditto the roads.
Commercial television caters for the "UKs greatest car crashes" market; where programmming can be enjoyed by a very wide viewing spectrum.
That's not so true anymore; with the advent of hundreds of digital channels, there are plenty of special interest channels out there. God channel, Discovery channel, History channel, music video channels, news channels, drama channels, cartoon channels, etc.
I'd rather live in a country where we have a massive choice of media available, made possible by the BBCs funding mechanism.
If anything, that mechanism reduces the choice of media available. It limits billions of pounds per year to the BBC's enterprises, when it could be being spent on companies that work more efficiently, and better serve people's interests.
Ever watched TV in the USA? Ouch, the volume and frequency of advertising is obscene, UK viewers would never stand for that in contrast to the commercial free BBC.
They wouldn't stand for it, so we don't need the BBC then do we?
... maybe it's time they started charging students for clothing, and providing it for 'free'.
The RIAA get their money one way or the other.
And that's an excuse for us to capitulate to them, rather than trying to resist through civil disobedience? Wonderful attitude. "They'll win anyway, so let's play by their rules." No thanks. One day, they might just lose if enough people put up a fight.
I just gave you a near-perfect method to do it. Disallow internet access by default, then whitelist a local http proxy, and an e-mail server.
I am not willing to give this level of trust to any company I don't know, let alone one that already does underhand things to get their software onto my machine.
Fine, don't install Kazaa then. I was just making the point that comparing it to a virus is stupid, because at least Kazaa tells you what it is installing (don't read terms and conditions? Tough shit. Would you sign a contract without reading it?), and uninstalls it when you uninstall the program. Viruses, OTOH, don't tell you they're being installed, and don't like to be uninstalled.
You don't know me. How can you make jackass statements like that? I make more people aware of these issues that you ever have.
I can quite easily make jackass statements like that, because I know you haven't done enough to stop the legislation. Nobody has. It's not a criticism, it's just trying to put spyware into perspective, and the way I see it, it's very insignificant. You could find yourself emptying out the rowboat only to be destroyed by the 50 foot wave.
On the surface yes, I want to pay X less pounds on it each year. Then when you look at the standard of the BBC verses every other network in the world, including all it's TV, radio, web, community and educational content with no advertisments on any, then you realise that we are damn lucky to have it. Nothing comes close anywhere else.
Bollocks. The BBC sucks. I hate nearly every TV program they put out, and when I had Sky, watched nearly no BBC programmes and mostly other channels. That's the thing about programming - it's subjective, and some people will love what others hate. That's why you should be allowed to *choose* what you pay to watch. If the BBC's programmes are so fantastic, then logically huge numbers of people would pay to see them, no?
I hope you pay a _very_ low price for that, or live in .au or .nz, because those limits are apallingly low.
You sound like the kind of asshole admin that I'd love to put a hatchet through the head of. Seriously, why don't you stop using such unnecessarily draconian tactics as banning, and start using packet shaping? There's a fat, assholing admin like you at my college. We all hate him. You might get more popular with the staff if you changed your behaviour.
No, I googled around until I found the subnets of the main servers for the network. The system may be peer to peer, but they have to first call out to find out where everybody is.
Silly. Stuff like Gnutella doesn't even need that first phone call - you can just get the IPs of some machines currently running it from a web page. Why not disallow open internet access entirely, and force everything through an http proxy?
But keep this in perspective. See, what I can't understand about you types is that you get all defensive about not allowing spyware on your machine, software which gathers, as you say, marketing data on you - something which, in the end, is harmless, and perhaps even helpful in targetting ads at you (yes, yes I know, you block them, you freeloader).
And yet *nearly every major Western government* is, at this time, introducing new legislation that allows them to view *every packet you send and receive* in the laughable name of 'counter-terrorism', yet you do nothing to practically stop it, just wring your hands and say that it sucks. You really ought to be rebelling against the oppressive government, slaughtering them for NOT respecting your right to being democratically represented, be you American, British, Australian, any other European, whatever. I'm serious. But you'll probably just laugh at me, and wring your hands, as usual.
The problem with that argument is that even though the value of the CDs they are giving away may only be a few thousands, the FIRST CD cost several million (or more) dollars. They have to get that money back somehow (either from sales, or from tax credits by giving this stuff away).
[sarcasm]Yes, because Microsoft are in desperate need of cash.[/sarcasm]
Really, I could understand this argument for a new software company that was in debt to its bank/venture capital company. But does Microsoft honestly have the right to claim that they can't genuinely give away software, because they *need* to recoup the development cost? They've already done that many, many times over, and if they still have that attitude, they shouldn't be claiming to donate anything.
The office workers of 20 years ago managed; what makes you think the current crop are that much dumber!?
The fact that Bush is in the White House?
RTFS (read the fucking summary). It's the FREE SOFTWARE MOVEMENT they're claiming MS is undercutting, not 'open source alternatives'.
... whereas now that DALnet has been beaten to a blooody pulp, they are craking down on warez(ish) channels? I don't know because I no longer use it, but I think this fact helps to illustrate what is happening to IRC - this kind of stuff is, alas, disappearing from it. It wasn't written with the intention of being a file sharing medium, and it's not a very good one nowadays either.
Oh please, you are talking bollocks. Of course 'spyware' should NOT be labelled as a fucking virus - it ISN'T one. There's a big, big difference between something written to discreetely fuck up a user's system, and something written to gain information about the user, that *informs the user that it's being installed*. You seem like a troll to me, but I fear you may be genuine. Please, learn the difference between so-called 'spyware' and a virus.
What the hell is a Flash-enabled site? Don't you mean Flash-REQUIRING sites?
(according to C|Net Download.com)
That's Download.com.com to you.
I hate eMule. It seems to allow impartially downloaded files to be shared on the network, and even encourages this by showing you a bar for each file that illustrates which parts of the file the person has. When I tried to download a video from there, *nobody* had the whole thing, they all just had the same small snippets of it! What good is that? Any P2P client that encourages non-complete files to be shared is stupid, and should die.