Interesting to note about the proliant's, I may end up getting the much beefier ones when I upgrade the primary filesevers next year.
As far the ML110's go, all we wanted (or wanted to pay for) was a glorified pc. A couple of them are replacing ancient 533Mhz pc's that are serving the same internal network segment firewall roles, and there's simply no point putting a well-specced box in for what is a trivial role load-wise. I would have gone for a hardware firewall or smoothwall corporate box, but they need some odd-ball customizations for our setup so I'm using gentoo.
I've just bought a batch of HP Proliant Ml110 + ML310 small servers for firewall/proxy and file server duties, and no windows pre-installed. Pretty cheap too, though I'm adding hardware raid cards and the extra drives myself.
They're nothing wonderful, but they're better than a cheap desktop - as they have PCI-X - for basic server duty in isolated areas, especially if you're putting linux on them.
I was looking at this very recently. First, most of the tests are single threaded, so the dual core is of limited use. Secondly, and more importantly, the individual cores run slower on the X2 processors than the single core does. For example, the AMD64-3800+ runs at 2.4GHz; the X2-3800 runs two at 2Ghz. For single threaded apps, like current games or benchmarks, the single core chip will beat the dual core hands down. The AMD64 3800+ is cheaper too.
For general heavy use on a non-gaming rig, you're still better off with an X2, as the dual core really comes into it's own as one core can concentrate on say, rendering or encoding, while the other core is available for other high-CPU apps.
YMMV as usual. I have a freeview box, so watch digital TV. My downstairs elderly neighbour hadn't switched, and was still watching analog tv. She was always having trouble with snowy reception in storms and bad weather (which we get quite a lot of, unsurprisingly) while my system was fine. I finally convinced her to switch, helped her set it up, and now she's very happy with the clarity of BBC and the extra channels on terrestial digital.
You're right about satellite though; my dad's dish unavoidably pointed through some moderate distant trees, and he was always getting a weak signal/cutoff in wet weather. Finally we moved it elsewhere after some building work, and he gets a much better signal.
I saw a number of posts by people having trouble with the nvidia-glx package when I did a few minutes research, but I'll happily take your word for it; I'm not an ubuntu user.
If you transcode to mp3 (you can use hymn if you don't want to waste a CD) you decrease the sound quality and introduce artifacts. If you transcode to a lossless codec, you waste a lot of space, a big problem on a portable player. Neither solution is good.
Depends what you're trying to do. If you only want the PCI geforce working, your best bet is simply to disable the onboard graphics in the BIOS.
If you wanted both onboard and PCI graphics card to work (in some form of xinerama setup), set the PCI card to be the default display device in the BIOS, as opposed to AGP (most onboard video chips are classed as AGP devices in the BIOS). A number of PCI graphics cards aren't happy unless they're the first video device to be initialised.
Once you've got the card running, you can use either the opensource nv driver that ships as part of Xorg, or you can use the closed source drivers from nvidia that are custom compiled for your distro. You need the closed-source licenced drivers to do 3D-acceleration properly, but for basic 2D work the nv drivers are fine. Depends on your distro how best to do this - ubuntu does have support for the closed-source drivers, but I believe it's a bit of a pain to get working.
As part of the wider picture though, I've always been amazed by the hardware-detection and support on linux LiveCDs (or indeed, the H2). Given the lack of co-operation from hardware manufacturers, the amount of machines that work perfectly well 'out of the box' (i.e. without manually installing drivers) is much higher than windows XP; sata drive support, for example.
Using coal to generate electricity to get hydrogen from water is indeed an insane and wasteful idea, not least given the shear amounts of crap that coal burning generates besides the CO2.
For hydrogen to be eco-friendly, the electricity would have to come from non-fossil fuel sources. Currently, the only practical possibility is nuclear fission plants, but solar, wind and geothermal power will become increasing more practical options as the costs of fossil fuels continue to rise, and the technology improves.
Water vapour is a contributor to global warming, it's just not one we understand in detail yet, and the concentration of it hasn't been going up significantly. If anything, it's an accelerator of the warming caused by greenhouse gases which we're pumping out in large quantities, rather than a cause of global warming in and of itself.
None. AAC is moderately open (only patents) but nobody uses it except apple. At least with WMA you have a choice of players, even if the DRM is usually harsh for purchased tracks.
Apple's fairplay DRM restricts their DRM'd AAC files from iTMS to iPods only, and they have no intention of licensing it, so if you've bought much through iTunes, your only choice is an iPod of some description.
The difference is, the source of the fuel. Fossil fuels are releasing carbon into the air that's been stored out of the way for millions of years. Hydrogen is made from water already in the ecosystem, so you're just moving water from one place to another in an active system, rather than adding a ton of carbon from 'outside' the system.
Admittedly, the water used for hydrogen production isn't already vapor, but as you say, it wouldn't be that hard to put some kind of condenser system as part of the car exhaust, and use the condensed water for say, coolant and screenwash, and have a tank for the remaining waste water that has to be drained periodically. Maybe you could use it to water your plants or somesuch.
It's also worth pointing out that carbon dioxide isn't the only or even most potent form of greenhouse gas you get from burning fossil fuel; it's just the most potent. You also get water vapor from car engines, which is what makes the white clouds from car exhausts on cold days.
We could probably argue this back and forth repeatedly. Still, sales of copyrighted works are at an all time high at the moment, despite the large amount of infringement going on at P2P services. iTMS is doing pretty well considering the infringement. Plus there was that study that showed that people 'trying before buying' might actually increase sales.
In the end of the day though, the DRM only makes the product worth LESS than the illegal copies, and does nothing to prevent infringement. If they managed to make a completely transparent system that actually stops illegal copying but not legal copying, they'd be onto something, but I don't see how such a thing is possible.
It is irritating though that when I boycott Sony for example because of their latest rootkit, they'll treat that boycott as justification to make an even worse rootkit. Which is where we came in, I think...
I'd like a car full of ice cream, but it won't happen unless I go out and buy the ice cream. Call or write to your legislator yet?
Heh. Actually, I have. Repeatedly. The UK office of fair trading don't care, and the home office work on the principle that anything that big business wants is automatically a good thing. My local MP doesn't really understand the problem, and just refers me to both of the above. Such is life alas.
Just a slight correction; the GPL v2 does not kick in when you modify the code - you already have that right, as copyright law has little to nothing to say about modification (the DMCA does, but that only applies to copy prevention mechanisms) - the GPL is not a EULA. You may or may not have the right to make local copies for personal use only without needing the GPL, but that depends upon your particular fair use rights in your area.
The GPL v2 only definitely kicks in when you want to distribute copies of the GPL software, which is otherwise illegal under copyright law. The terms are that you can distribute copies, as long as the new copies are also covered by the GPL, to whit, make available the source as well as the binaries. This defacto means if you want to sell or give away modified GPL software, you have to give them the modifications too. But only if you're distributing copies. You keep the modifications in-house, you don't need to give anyone anything, as the GPL is not needed to defend a case of copyright infringement; as you're not infringing copyright.
Since you already have the right of modification, this ruling won't affect existing GPL v2 software, as the ruling doesn't address reselling copies of modified software.
It's difficult to see how the GPL v3 is going to address the output of modified GPL software being used for network services; the GPL gains its strength from allowing more than copyright does, but at the price of sharing the source. Copyright law doesn't cover the output of programs, as it's not a derivative work. About the only way something like say, apache, could easily be covered is to force all web pages to include a copyrighted piece of GPL code, which then requires that the rest of the GPL software that generated that output to be made available as part of that 'bundling'.
Still, assuming they did find some legal trick, like modifying the output, or the legal 'hack' of saying extra copies into memory or locally on hard-drives count as copyright infringement (works in some places, but not others), and thus compliance with the GPL needed to do so; then the ability to modify software without needing to comply with the GPL would indeed make this court case a possible road block for the GPL team.
Note, IANAL, but this is my understanding based on discussions with people who are.
Doesn't do any good. I buy the product, I have to live with increasingly onerous DRM that imposes artificial restrictions on what I can do with the product, and doesn't slow down infringers in the slightest.
I don't buy the product, sales go down, and that's used to claim 'our sales have dropped - it must be pirates stealing it!' and they get laws which add even greater weight to DRM measures, thus making any products I do buy even more onerous to use.
Just for once, I'd like a lobby that supports the customers position get laws written for our benefit, or products made better instead of worse.
I have no beef with solar energy, wind power or other non-fossil fuel based alternative energy sources. Personally, I think 'alternative energy' is a more descriptive and less confusing term than free energy, as as you point out, the energy is merely being moved from one place to another, or from one form to another and is not 'free'. Fossil fuel proponents are notorious for ignoring the external costs of their use, such as the mining requirements or the pollution generated.
However geothermal, wind, solar and biodiesel are scientically proven available sources of energy from a known external, be it the sun, or the heat trapped in the earth since its formation.
"zero point energy, radiant energy, cold fusion, and magnet motors" are far more questionable sources at the moment, and although I don't dismiss them out of hand, I do not put them in the same category as other energy processes that have so far passed rigorous analysis.
To classify magnet motors or vacuum energy in the same category as say, solar power, is to do solar power a disservice at this time. When vacuum energy et al can be verified to the same standards of reproducibility as other more conventional alternative energy sources, I will be happy to give them credence. Currently though, such unconventional sources are the realm of fraudsters and unscientific proponents. I'm not disputing that there may exist forms of energy we have yet to tap; but I do expect proponents of such to provide concrete evidence of same that fits with other accepted theories of physics, or at least provides sold alternative theories that explain both existing evidence and the new reproducible evidence better than current theories - that stand up to scrutiny from better scientists than I.
The two desktops have different goals, different development platforms, and different markets. Both have their adherants. Some people prefer apple, some people prefer windows. Choice is good.
This is not good news. SuSE was one of the big beasts that helped develop and improve kde in a distro, and is one of the main reasons I used it in the past. I did get sick of RPMs in the end though.
Why is that so many people prefer kde over gnome, yet redhat, debian-based distros like ubuntu and now SuSE use gnome as their primary? What main distros will be left that uses kde in preference? I can only think of mandriva now.
I'm not criticising gnome, it's a fine project and a good desktop environment, but I really like the unified desktop, reusable kparts and configurability you get with kde. I'm far from alone, as the vibrancy of kde-look.org shows. How come gnome, which is not *that* much superior to kde (some would argue that it's inferior at the moment) is making all the headway?
For a start, this is on opensourceenergy.org, which also hosts a number of articles on electromagnetic over-unity devices, i.e. the 'free energy' crowd. Not good company to keep if you want to be taken seriously.
In addition, Eric Lerner is a believer in the plasma universe theory; he wrote a book on the matter called 'the Big Bang Never Happened', which apparently makes him popular with the evolution-denier crowd. Again, questionable associations.
He's also criticised the peer-review scientific process, calling it open to fraud. Just unfortunate that peer-review has not been kind to his own research, I imagine.
I'm no physicist, but it seems his process passes a short, extremely high current from a coffee-can sized copper electrode through a low-pressure hydrogen-boron mix.
The current's magnetic field forms a small hot ball of plasma, a plasmoid, (without external magnets) and when the current's magnetic field collapses it induces an electric field that heats the plasmoid so much, it ignites fusion reactions that create more electrons & ions, which can be converted back into electricity via an advanced transformer that converts an ion stream to electricity.
So basically, pass an electric current though low-density hydrogen-boron in a coffee can, and you get spontaneous fusion - so much so, you get over-unity? Somehow, it strikes me as a little too easy to be true.
Shockingly enough, Lerner has yet to demonstrate over-unity, but that's because the government is so in bed with the oil-companies, they won't give him any money. NASA gave him some money, looked at his results, and dropped him.
I won't call him a junk-scientist, but I think I'd like to see some peer-reviewed and repeated evidence of his results before I lend his theories much credence.
In addition to the recent change of mind over the.xxx gTLD, look into the redelegation of australia's ccTLD,.au. ICANN did a secret deal to hand control of it over to another company without listening to or even informing the previous registrar when it changed, and broke a number of it's own rules when it did so.
How about the two years it took Haiti to get it's ccTLD assigned to the registrar of it's choice?
How about the contract that ICANN makes countries sign in order to redelegate their domains, which basically states that that country recognises ICANN as the ultimate authority in domain name issues?
With regards the sitefinder business, ICANN did too little too slow. Verisign's actions broke many uses of DNS, and fundamentally altered the nature of the DNS system so they could profit by domain-squatting on all unregistered domains. ICANN should have been all over verisign to do it's job properly (ICANN's only legitimate role), and failed at even that.
It's long past time that ccTLD redelgation process was clear, transparent, fast, and at the command of the government involved, not unaccountable people at ICANN or the US department of Commerce. If ICANN can't do it's job properly, it should be given to someone else, like the ITU. They seem to have done a pretty uncontroversial job of running the international phone codes and standards, which is more than can be said of ICANN's handling of DNS.
1) Make sure every country code is managed only by that country, and give them control of all root servers for that country.
There's nothing wrong with that, in fact that's largely what the EU countries want to happen. What happens at the moment is that the US government tells ICANN who gets to be the registrar for a country's ccTLD if they want to, or ICANN gets around to it in it's own sweet time.
Look at what's happening to the iraq ccTLD now, or the two years it took haiti to get control of it's own top level domain from ICANN. The Register's take.
In fact, it is reasonable to assume that a government would have final say over who ran its domain names. They do represent the country and the government are the people that run the country. ICANN agrees. "In general." This is what the private company based in California reckons about the world having control of its own domains: "In general, [we] recognize that each government has the ultimate responsibility within its territory for its national public-policy objectives, but also that ICANN has the responsibility for ensuring that the Internet domain name system continues to provide an effective and interoperable global naming system."
The longer or shorter of it is that countries have been held to ransom by ICANN over their own domain names until they agree to ICANN's terms. And those terms are always that the government swears loyalty to ICANN. And signs a contract to that effect.
That's what the fight is about, mainly. The rest of world want guaranteed control of their own country code top level domains, but the US department of commerce and ICANN don't want to give them that; they want to keep their role as being more important than the elected government of the country in question, and being able to override that country's choice if they so decide.
There are other issues over the non-country specific TLD's, such as the US government's quashing of the.xxx TLD; other countries want more say in that process too, but it's of lesser importance than the country code domains.
Given the economic importance of having a fair ccTLD system, and the global nature of the system, it seems ludicrous in this day and age that the US government has decided that the DNS system is their fiefdom alone, and the rest of us only get to use it if we do what we're told. What's saddening is how many other slashdotters agree with this new imperialism every time this topic comes up.
Actually, it doesn't suprise me in the least. According to symantec in march, 25% of the world's PC zombies were in the UK. (strangely though, the UK has only a handful of the direct spammers)
Both the high zombie rate and the low firefox use shows that computer literacy in the UK is somewhat lacking, despite the high broadband uptake. I do a lot of work on people's computers privately, as well as being a sysadmin for my day job, and virtually all of them wouldn't know what firefox was if it bit them on the ass. If it didn't come installed on the computer when they bought it, with a thick manual, then they're not interested. They also tend to hang onto computers for a looong time. I was fixing a windows 95a machine only last week.
They regularly call internet explorer 'the internet' - as in, "it doesn't work when I click on 'the internet', it just says some message which I don't remember. Is it broken?" It's no surprise to me that most people haven't investigated firefox here, they don't even install a firewall, spyware or virus checker.
Thus, I hope people will understand that making sure that our games are purchased instead of stolen is very important to us. Frankly, I do not agree that requiring the CD to be in the drive "does not prevent copyright infringement," even though I understand that this is almost always true for the technically adept. This is a sensitive issue, but the future of game development depends on preventing piracy, so I hope people will have patience with the basic safety measures we have used.
I wonder how not making the game available in the UK for another week affects piracy. I see that copies are already available on P2P, yet I have to wait till Nov 4th for it to go on sale here. I've pre-ordered it (so I probably will get it even later than that), but at least I'm paying for it; if I hadn't, it'd be mighty tempting to download the cracked version instead. Hell, it's mighty tempting to get the cracked version now anyway, and just read the manual of my 'proper' copy when it turns up, so I don't have to worry about the CD check.
I mean even webpage search engines are opt-in. Your website doesn't get indexed unless you submit it
I've never submitted my website to google (or any other seach engine) yet its spiders index my site periodically. So do other search engines. This happens because other people have linked to my site. I can opt-out with a robots.txt file, but google web-search at least is definitely opt-out, not opt-in, so I can see why they'd argue their book search follows the same pattern.
The real reason that publishers have to pursue this, even if it is ascertained that the program IS legal, is that copyright can be reneged if you are not seen to be defending your rights. If that's true, then Australian copyright is very different to most countries. These days, as part of the Berne Convention, signatories automatically recognise any fixed work as copyrighted from the date of fixing, until the day the copyright expires. Defence of it is not required, nor is registration (though registration increases damages when prosecuting infringement, and can help in cases over who actually owns a work). I note that Australia is a signatory of the Berne Convention, so it strikes me as unlikely that this is true.
You may be thinking of trademarks, which do require defence from all infringement, or they become generic i.e. public domain. Copyrighted works on the other hand, do not become public domain from lack of prosecuting offenders. See the Happy Birthday song, for example - still copyrighted, even though its constantly infringed by the public.
I suspect Google have made it opt-out because its main index is opt-out, as are most indexing efforts. Switching to opt-in would cut most of the works out of the index (due to most people not bothering one way or the other, just accepting the default), and rather make it a pointless effort.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting to note about the proliant's, I may end up getting the much beefier ones when I upgrade the primary filesevers next year.
As far the ML110's go, all we wanted (or wanted to pay for) was a glorified pc. A couple of them are replacing ancient 533Mhz pc's that are serving the same internal network segment firewall roles, and there's simply no point putting a well-specced box in for what is a trivial role load-wise. I would have gone for a hardware firewall or smoothwall corporate box, but they need some odd-ball customizations for our setup so I'm using gentoo.
I've just bought a batch of HP Proliant Ml110 + ML310 small servers for firewall/proxy and file server duties, and no windows pre-installed. Pretty cheap too, though I'm adding hardware raid cards and the extra drives myself.
They're nothing wonderful, but they're better than a cheap desktop - as they have PCI-X - for basic server duty in isolated areas, especially if you're putting linux on them.
I was looking at this very recently. First, most of the tests are single threaded, so the dual core is of limited use. Secondly, and more importantly, the individual cores run slower on the X2 processors than the single core does. For example, the AMD64-3800+ runs at 2.4GHz; the X2-3800 runs two at 2Ghz. For single threaded apps, like current games or benchmarks, the single core chip will beat the dual core hands down. The AMD64 3800+ is cheaper too.
For general heavy use on a non-gaming rig, you're still better off with an X2, as the dual core really comes into it's own as one core can concentrate on say, rendering or encoding, while the other core is available for other high-CPU apps.
YMMV as usual. I have a freeview box, so watch digital TV. My downstairs elderly neighbour hadn't switched, and was still watching analog tv. She was always having trouble with snowy reception in storms and bad weather (which we get quite a lot of, unsurprisingly) while my system was fine. I finally convinced her to switch, helped her set it up, and now she's very happy with the clarity of BBC and the extra channels on terrestial digital.
You're right about satellite though; my dad's dish unavoidably pointed through some moderate distant trees, and he was always getting a weak signal/cutoff in wet weather. Finally we moved it elsewhere after some building work, and he gets a much better signal.
I saw a number of posts by people having trouble with the nvidia-glx package when I did a few minutes research, but I'll happily take your word for it; I'm not an ubuntu user.
If you transcode to mp3 (you can use hymn if you don't want to waste a CD) you decrease the sound quality and introduce artifacts. If you transcode to a lossless codec, you waste a lot of space, a big problem on a portable player. Neither solution is good.
True, but how many PII/400's do you have that boot USB media? :)
Depends what you're trying to do. If you only want the PCI geforce working, your best bet is simply to disable the onboard graphics in the BIOS.
If you wanted both onboard and PCI graphics card to work (in some form of xinerama setup), set the PCI card to be the default display device in the BIOS, as opposed to AGP (most onboard video chips are classed as AGP devices in the BIOS). A number of PCI graphics cards aren't happy unless they're the first video device to be initialised.
Once you've got the card running, you can use either the opensource nv driver that ships as part of Xorg, or you can use the closed source drivers from nvidia that are custom compiled for your distro. You need the closed-source licenced drivers to do 3D-acceleration properly, but for basic 2D work the nv drivers are fine. Depends on your distro how best to do this - ubuntu does have support for the closed-source drivers, but I believe it's a bit of a pain to get working.
As part of the wider picture though, I've always been amazed by the hardware-detection and support on linux LiveCDs (or indeed, the H2). Given the lack of co-operation from hardware manufacturers, the amount of machines that work perfectly well 'out of the box' (i.e. without manually installing drivers) is much higher than windows XP; sata drive support, for example.
Using coal to generate electricity to get hydrogen from water is indeed an insane and wasteful idea, not least given the shear amounts of crap that coal burning generates besides the CO2.
For hydrogen to be eco-friendly, the electricity would have to come from non-fossil fuel sources. Currently, the only practical possibility is nuclear fission plants, but solar, wind and geothermal power will become increasing more practical options as the costs of fossil fuels continue to rise, and the technology improves.
Water vapour is a contributor to global warming, it's just not one we understand in detail yet, and the concentration of it hasn't been going up significantly. If anything, it's an accelerator of the warming caused by greenhouse gases which we're pumping out in large quantities, rather than a cause of global warming in and of itself.
None. AAC is moderately open (only patents) but nobody uses it except apple. At least with WMA you have a choice of players, even if the DRM is usually harsh for purchased tracks.
Apple's fairplay DRM restricts their DRM'd AAC files from iTMS to iPods only, and they have no intention of licensing it, so if you've bought much through iTunes, your only choice is an iPod of some description.
Welcome to lock-in.
Gah, I meant to say CO2 isn't the most potent, but it is the one you produce most of.
The difference is, the source of the fuel. Fossil fuels are releasing carbon into the air that's been stored out of the way for millions of years. Hydrogen is made from water already in the ecosystem, so you're just moving water from one place to another in an active system, rather than adding a ton of carbon from 'outside' the system.
Admittedly, the water used for hydrogen production isn't already vapor, but as you say, it wouldn't be that hard to put some kind of condenser system as part of the car exhaust, and use the condensed water for say, coolant and screenwash, and have a tank for the remaining waste water that has to be drained periodically. Maybe you could use it to water your plants or somesuch.
It's also worth pointing out that carbon dioxide isn't the only or even most potent form of greenhouse gas you get from burning fossil fuel; it's just the most potent. You also get water vapor from car engines, which is what makes the white clouds from car exhausts on cold days.
We could probably argue this back and forth repeatedly. Still, sales of copyrighted works are at an all time high at the moment, despite the large amount of infringement going on at P2P services. iTMS is doing pretty well considering the infringement. Plus there was that study that showed that people 'trying before buying' might actually increase sales.
In the end of the day though, the DRM only makes the product worth LESS than the illegal copies, and does nothing to prevent infringement. If they managed to make a completely transparent system that actually stops illegal copying but not legal copying, they'd be onto something, but I don't see how such a thing is possible.
It is irritating though that when I boycott Sony for example because of their latest rootkit, they'll treat that boycott as justification to make an even worse rootkit. Which is where we came in, I think...
I'd like a car full of ice cream, but it won't happen unless I go out and buy the ice cream. Call or write to your legislator yet?
Heh. Actually, I have. Repeatedly. The UK office of fair trading don't care, and the home office work on the principle that anything that big business wants is automatically a good thing. My local MP doesn't really understand the problem, and just refers me to both of the above. Such is life alas.
Just a slight correction; the GPL v2 does not kick in when you modify the code - you already have that right, as copyright law has little to nothing to say about modification (the DMCA does, but that only applies to copy prevention mechanisms) - the GPL is not a EULA. You may or may not have the right to make local copies for personal use only without needing the GPL, but that depends upon your particular fair use rights in your area.
The GPL v2 only definitely kicks in when you want to distribute copies of the GPL software, which is otherwise illegal under copyright law. The terms are that you can distribute copies, as long as the new copies are also covered by the GPL, to whit, make available the source as well as the binaries. This defacto means if you want to sell or give away modified GPL software, you have to give them the modifications too. But only if you're distributing copies. You keep the modifications in-house, you don't need to give anyone anything, as the GPL is not needed to defend a case of copyright infringement; as you're not infringing copyright.
Since you already have the right of modification, this ruling won't affect existing GPL v2 software, as the ruling doesn't address reselling copies of modified software.
It's difficult to see how the GPL v3 is going to address the output of modified GPL software being used for network services; the GPL gains its strength from allowing more than copyright does, but at the price of sharing the source. Copyright law doesn't cover the output of programs, as it's not a derivative work. About the only way something like say, apache, could easily be covered is to force all web pages to include a copyrighted piece of GPL code, which then requires that the rest of the GPL software that generated that output to be made available as part of that 'bundling'.
Still, assuming they did find some legal trick, like modifying the output, or the legal 'hack' of saying extra copies into memory or locally on hard-drives count as copyright infringement (works in some places, but not others), and thus compliance with the GPL needed to do so; then the ability to modify software without needing to comply with the GPL would indeed make this court case a possible road block for the GPL team.
Note, IANAL, but this is my understanding based on discussions with people who are.
Doesn't do any good. I buy the product, I have to live with increasingly onerous DRM that imposes artificial restrictions on what I can do with the product, and doesn't slow down infringers in the slightest.
I don't buy the product, sales go down, and that's used to claim 'our sales have dropped - it must be pirates stealing it!' and they get laws which add even greater weight to DRM measures, thus making any products I do buy even more onerous to use.
Just for once, I'd like a lobby that supports the customers position get laws written for our benefit, or products made better instead of worse.
I have no beef with solar energy, wind power or other non-fossil fuel based alternative energy sources. Personally, I think 'alternative energy' is a more descriptive and less confusing term than free energy, as as you point out, the energy is merely being moved from one place to another, or from one form to another and is not 'free'. Fossil fuel proponents are notorious for ignoring the external costs of their use, such as the mining requirements or the pollution generated.
However geothermal, wind, solar and biodiesel are scientically proven available sources of energy from a known external, be it the sun, or the heat trapped in the earth since its formation.
"zero point energy, radiant energy, cold fusion, and magnet motors" are far more questionable sources at the moment, and although I don't dismiss them out of hand, I do not put them in the same category as other energy processes that have so far passed rigorous analysis.
To classify magnet motors or vacuum energy in the same category as say, solar power, is to do solar power a disservice at this time. When vacuum energy et al can be verified to the same standards of reproducibility as other more conventional alternative energy sources, I will be happy to give them credence. Currently though, such unconventional sources are the realm of fraudsters and unscientific proponents. I'm not disputing that there may exist forms of energy we have yet to tap; but I do expect proponents of such to provide concrete evidence of same that fits with other accepted theories of physics, or at least provides sold alternative theories that explain both existing evidence and the new reproducible evidence better than current theories - that stand up to scrutiny from better scientists than I.
The two desktops have different goals, different development platforms, and different markets. Both have their adherants. Some people prefer apple, some people prefer windows. Choice is good.
This is not good news. SuSE was one of the big beasts that helped develop and improve kde in a distro, and is one of the main reasons I used it in the past. I did get sick of RPMs in the end though.
Why is that so many people prefer kde over gnome, yet redhat, debian-based distros like ubuntu and now SuSE use gnome as their primary? What main distros will be left that uses kde in preference? I can only think of mandriva now.
I'm not criticising gnome, it's a fine project and a good desktop environment, but I really like the unified desktop, reusable kparts and configurability you get with kde. I'm far from alone, as the vibrancy of kde-look.org shows. How come gnome, which is not *that* much superior to kde (some would argue that it's inferior at the moment) is making all the headway?
For a start, this is on opensourceenergy.org, which also hosts a number of articles on electromagnetic over-unity devices, i.e. the 'free energy' crowd. Not good company to keep if you want to be taken seriously.
In addition, Eric Lerner is a believer in the plasma universe theory; he wrote a book on the matter called 'the Big Bang Never Happened', which apparently makes him popular with the evolution-denier crowd. Again, questionable associations.
He's also criticised the peer-review scientific process, calling it open to fraud. Just unfortunate that peer-review has not been kind to his own research, I imagine.
I'm no physicist, but it seems his process passes a short, extremely high current from a coffee-can sized copper electrode through a low-pressure hydrogen-boron mix.
The current's magnetic field forms a small hot ball of plasma, a plasmoid, (without external magnets) and when the current's magnetic field collapses it induces an electric field that heats the plasmoid so much, it ignites fusion reactions that create more electrons & ions, which can be converted back into electricity via an advanced transformer that converts an ion stream to electricity.
So basically, pass an electric current though low-density hydrogen-boron in a coffee can, and you get spontaneous fusion - so much so, you get over-unity? Somehow, it strikes me as a little too easy to be true.
Shockingly enough, Lerner has yet to demonstrate over-unity, but that's because the government is so in bed with the oil-companies, they won't give him any money. NASA gave him some money, looked at his results, and dropped him.
I won't call him a junk-scientist, but I think I'd like to see some peer-reviewed and repeated evidence of his results before I lend his theories much credence.
In addition to the recent change of mind over the .xxx gTLD, look into the redelegation of australia's ccTLD, .au. ICANN did a secret deal to hand control of it over to another company without listening to or even informing the previous registrar when it changed, and broke a number of it's own rules when it did so.
How about the two years it took Haiti to get it's ccTLD assigned to the registrar of it's choice?
How about the contract that ICANN makes countries sign in order to redelegate their domains, which basically states that that country recognises ICANN as the ultimate authority in domain name issues?
With regards the sitefinder business, ICANN did too little too slow. Verisign's actions broke many uses of DNS, and fundamentally altered the nature of the DNS system so they could profit by domain-squatting on all unregistered domains. ICANN should have been all over verisign to do it's job properly (ICANN's only legitimate role), and failed at even that.
It's long past time that ccTLD redelgation process was clear, transparent, fast, and at the command of the government involved, not unaccountable people at ICANN or the US department of Commerce. If ICANN can't do it's job properly, it should be given to someone else, like the ITU. They seem to have done a pretty uncontroversial job of running the international phone codes and standards, which is more than can be said of ICANN's handling of DNS.
1) Make sure every country code is managed only by that country, and give them control of all root servers for that country.
.xxx TLD; other countries want more say in that process too, but it's of lesser importance than the country code domains.
There's nothing wrong with that, in fact that's largely what the EU countries want to happen. What happens at the moment is that the US government tells ICANN who gets to be the registrar for a country's ccTLD if they want to, or ICANN gets around to it in it's own sweet time.
Look at what's happening to the iraq ccTLD now, or the two years it took haiti to get control of it's own top level domain from ICANN. The Register's take.
In fact, it is reasonable to assume that a government would have final say over who ran its domain names. They do represent the country and the government are the people that run the country. ICANN agrees. "In general." This is what the private company based in California reckons about the world having control of its own domains: "In general, [we] recognize that each government has the ultimate responsibility within its territory for its national public-policy objectives, but also that ICANN has the responsibility for ensuring that the Internet domain name system continues to provide an effective and interoperable global naming system."
The longer or shorter of it is that countries have been held to ransom by ICANN over their own domain names until they agree to ICANN's terms. And those terms are always that the government swears loyalty to ICANN. And signs a contract to that effect.
That's what the fight is about, mainly. The rest of world want guaranteed control of their own country code top level domains, but the US department of commerce and ICANN don't want to give them that; they want to keep their role as being more important than the elected government of the country in question, and being able to override that country's choice if they so decide.
There are other issues over the non-country specific TLD's, such as the US government's
quashing of the
Given the economic importance of having a fair ccTLD system, and the global nature of the system, it seems ludicrous in this day and age that the US government has decided that the DNS system is their fiefdom alone, and the rest of us only get to use it if we do what we're told. What's saddening is how many other slashdotters agree with this new imperialism every time this topic comes up.
Actually, it doesn't suprise me in the least. According to symantec in march, 25% of the world's PC zombies were in the UK. (strangely though, the UK has only a handful of the direct spammers)
Both the high zombie rate and the low firefox use shows that computer literacy in the UK is somewhat lacking, despite the high broadband uptake. I do a lot of work on people's computers privately, as well as being a sysadmin for my day job, and virtually all of them wouldn't know what firefox was if it bit them on the ass. If it didn't come installed on the computer when they bought it, with a thick manual, then they're not interested. They also tend to hang onto computers for a looong time. I was fixing a windows 95a machine only last week.
They regularly call internet explorer 'the internet' - as in, "it doesn't work when I click on 'the internet', it just says some message which I don't remember. Is it broken?" It's no surprise to me that most people haven't investigated firefox here, they don't even install a firewall, spyware or virus checker.
Thus, I hope people will understand that making sure that our games are purchased instead of stolen is very important to us. Frankly, I do not agree that requiring the CD to be in the drive "does not prevent copyright infringement," even though I understand that this is almost always true for the technically adept. This is a sensitive issue, but the future of game development depends on preventing piracy, so I hope people will have patience with the basic safety measures we have used.
I wonder how not making the game available in the UK for another week affects piracy. I see that copies are already available on P2P, yet I have to wait till Nov 4th for it to go on sale here. I've pre-ordered it (so I probably will get it even later than that), but at least I'm paying for it; if I hadn't, it'd be mighty tempting to download the cracked version instead. Hell, it's mighty tempting to get the cracked version now anyway, and just read the manual of my 'proper' copy when it turns up, so I don't have to worry about the CD check.
I mean even webpage search engines are opt-in. Your website doesn't get indexed unless you submit it
I've never submitted my website to google (or any other seach engine) yet its spiders index my site periodically. So do other search engines. This happens because other people have linked to my site. I can opt-out with a robots.txt file, but google web-search at least is definitely opt-out, not opt-in, so I can see why they'd argue their book search follows the same pattern.
The real reason that publishers have to pursue this, even if it is ascertained that the program IS legal, is that copyright can be reneged if you are not seen to be defending your rights. If that's true, then Australian copyright is very different to most countries. These days, as part of the Berne Convention, signatories automatically recognise any fixed work as copyrighted from the date of fixing, until the day the copyright expires. Defence of it is not required, nor is registration (though registration increases damages when prosecuting infringement, and can help in cases over who actually owns a work). I note that Australia is a signatory of the Berne Convention, so it strikes me as unlikely that this is true.
You may be thinking of trademarks, which do require defence from all infringement, or they become generic i.e. public domain. Copyrighted works on the other hand, do not become public domain from lack of prosecuting offenders. See the Happy Birthday song, for example - still copyrighted, even though its constantly infringed by the public.
I suspect Google have made it opt-out because its main index is opt-out, as are most indexing efforts. Switching to opt-in would cut most of the works out of the index (due to most people not bothering one way or the other, just accepting the default), and rather make it a pointless effort.