It's not there to force people to give away GPL software for nothing; it's there so that when you buy software, you are always entitled to get a copy of the source code if you want to modify it (or pay someone to modify it) to meet your specific needs.
The parts about derivative works remaining GPL is so that a GPL'd work cannot be taken 'closed source' again by a particular vendor adding useful features. In fact, that's exactly what's happening here. Linksys released the original source under the GPL because they'd based it off other people's GPL'd work; Sveasoft have to release their source to purchasers of their firmware, who have the right to distribute it under the GPL.
The fact that all this has the side effect of making almost all GPL software free of cost for end users is just that; a side effect.
The benchmarks for lower hardware are coming later. From the final page:
If you would have told me a year ago that I could play DOOM 3 on a GeForce 3 64MB video card and 1.8GHz AthlonXP and have a good gaming experience, I would have called you crazy, but that is exactly what we are seeing. Certainly we will have much more information on this in the coming weeks with the DOOM 3 [H]ardware Guide. At that time we will take a look at a much wider array of CPUs, Video Cards, and Motherboards and what overall gaming experience they can deliver.
2004/ convicted murders go to jail for life 2005/ convicted burglers go to jail for life 2006/ convicted speeders go to jail for life 2007/ anybody who looks funny at a policemen goes to jail for life 1984/ freedom is slavery
It is possible to agree that something is bad and should be dealt with, without also accepting that it will lead to all other sorts of nasties.
Fair use also allows recording off the radio and TV, having had court cases on it. Getting copies off p2p is very legally grey; being the person sharing is much clearer cut as illegal.
It's also worth point out that the route by which copyrighted works enter the public domain has been getting longer and longer, and looks like it is now functionally eliminated. (It will just keep getting retroactively extended every time Mickey comes up for entry).
Since copyright holders aren't holding up their end of the bargain with regards the public domain, and with draconian enforcement of marginal cases, and DRM being used to remove or limit what fair use rights we have left, is it any wonder that many people no longer have any respect at all for copyright?
Copyright is not a property right, it's a government granted limited monopoly on distribution based on the idea that that will increase the amount of work created, and finally entering the public domain. It was designed to protect publishers from having their work poached and resold by other publishers. It is a broken model now that distribution is essentially free, and needs reworking in the modern age. In every other case I can think of where advances in technology came up against an old law, the old law was changed to allow the advance. Why should copyright be any different?
So let's see... I can go to my friend's place and listen to his CDs. That's legal, right ? YES And what if I'm not at my friend's place, but he puts the telephone near the speaker so I can hear ? Is it legal or is it a crime ? IT'S A CRIME, PROBABLY And what if we use something like skype instead of a telephone ? Is is legal ? NOT REALLY And what if put his CD in his computer, and then make skype record every sound from his computer (instead of only his computer's microphone) so I can hear the CD ? Is it legal ? NO And what if, instead of skype, he use a streaming program ? Is it legal ? I mean the only difference is the transfer protocol, right ? IT'S STILL ILLEGAL And what if, instead of a stream, he send the file with ftp ? Is it legal ? NOPE And what if we use a p2p program to transfer the file ? Is it legal ? NOPE And what if I don't know the guy that well ? Is it legal ? STILL NOPE
Here's the rub. Playing music for your friends who are physically there is legal. Making copies for distribution, or broadcasting it to others (by radio, phone, itunes) is illegal without permission - if it's classified as a 'public performance'. That's why playing a VCR tape on a bus full of people is technically illegal, and why it's in the warning at the front of the tape.
Now, 'limited' broadcasting, such as playing it down the phone to your friend, or sharing your playlist via itunes to a handful of people is sufficient in the grey area, that you'll likely never be prosecuted for it (In a sane world, it'd be never, but with the RIAA, you just can't tell these days). Making a permanent copy of a non-authorised broadcast is definitely illegal tho, but obviously not likely to be enforced. Recording a stream off a legal internet radio? Probably covered by fair use, same as normal radio, but not explicitly defined.
Retail EULA's aren't worth the paper they're printed on, outside of the handful of UCITA-passed states. First sale doctrine says that copyright holders cannot apply additional restrictions over and above that of copyright, after sale.
The EULA is not given to you to 'sign' until after you've bought the product, and thus is not legal with regards the original sale. They try and get round this by claiming it's a) a licence, not a sale b) by copying into memory or onto a harddrive, you're making an additional copy, which requires permission - which you only get by agreeing to the EULA.
Both of these are legally flaky. If you go into a shop, give a man some money, and he gives you a box with something in it, that's a sale. Contract law would apply if you had to sign the EULA at the till, or as part of an ongoing service relationship (such as with ISP's), but since they only try and apply them post-sale, they're on very shaky ground.
Assuming a court accepts the extra copies argument (most world copyright law explicitly allows for such 'working' copies without extra permission, but you never know) you're still butting up against that EULA's aren't valid contracts. They're not an exchange of value, i.e. only one party gains something. They're not terms negotiated between both parties, but dictated by one side; and the signature can hardly be classed as legally binding. What if my cat walks across the keyboard and triggers the 'OK' while I'm reading the small print? Did my cat 'accept' the licence? What if someone too young to be bound by contracts installs windows?
EULA's have never been tested in a court, and with good reason; they would likely be tossed as invalid.
Note however that corporate EULA's attached to a particular corporate sale contract with a negotated price, real signatures, lawyers etc are usually valid.
55-62c is a little hot, but within tolerance. If it was hitting 80, you should worry. Still, you should be able to get it cooler.
I presume you've upgraded your heatsink fan, as you say you have a nice one; did you put thermal gunk on it - and did you only put a thin film, or did you ladle it? (much better to have a little than a lot). Might be worth taking it off, cleaning it carefully, and putting it back. You never know, you might just be getting poor thermal contact with the heatsink.
Also, it's generally better to have your case fans blowing hot air out the back/side, and either a fan sucking in cool air at the front, or just rely on partial pressure. Getting the hot air out is more important though. Definitely don't have the ones at the back blowing air into the case.
You could upgrade the fans on your case, if you have them blowing the right way; I've seen some cases come with really anemic fans. Make sure they're not undervolted, and running slow.
Don't forget your PSU either; you can get a decent powered PSU with an internal extract fan as well as it's external fan; I've seen that extra fan knock nearly 10 degrees off one hot case.
Finally, consider airflow again. You want cool air coming in at the front, and hot air out the sides, top, and especially the back. Make sure your cables (especially ide) are tied up neatly out the way, and aren't impeding airflow. If your fans are half decent, and your airflow unimpeded, then having the side on will actually improve airflow, and keep it cooler. You might want to drill extra holes in the sides/back though, to help hot air escape. Avoid holes on the top, they're a killer for dust.
Finally, you could always just upgrade to a better case. Two 80mm fans is entry level these days, and you can get a nice quiet case with more, or bigger fans for very little cash.
Nope, the phones themselves have a unique identifier, the IMEI code, which are quite trackable. Once you know who's using which IMEI, you can listen to them pretty easily even when they're using a prepaid account.
Which is why you should buy a pre-pay phone in cash at a busy shop without suveillance cameras.
Of course, they could use the signal towers to triangulate your phone's position if they REALLY want to find you.
I'm sorry, but if these data handling functions are business critical, then you need a proper database (sql, basically) combined with proper data in/out.
The number of cases of huge excel/macro combinations dieing messily, or corrupting the data is legion. I'm no database specialist (network admin myself), but the guy I work with who is, has several stories of companies that regretted relying on access or excel/vb for critical data processing, and one of them nearly went under when they found one of their (many) linked spreadsheets had been corrupted and had been feeding bad data into their conclusions for months.
Seriously, PLEASE don't rely on a cheap and cheerful desktop products (which is what ms office and openoffice are) to manage your company dataflow. Get a proper system on the backend. Use excel to munge a bit on the front end, do the graphs etc, fine - but put your data-storage and processing into a proper database system. It'll cost you more, but it just ain't worth the risk.
As I understand it, OpenVPN needs software at both ends, so is basically a userspace implementation. Which is fine if you're going desktop to server, but not so suitable if you're doing hardware router/router for network-network encrypted tunnels.
IPSec is an open standard, so implementations are available from many different vendors in many different setups, including hardware.
One other advantage if you're supporting windows roadwarriors, is that L2TP/IPSec is built into dialup networking on windows 2K/XP, so with a bit of minor jiggery pokery you can have L2TP support on a linux gateway (authing directly, or to a windows server) without having to install any additional software on their remote box; just give em an autoinstaller DUN connection, and you're away, with a user-familiar interface.
To sum up, having played with both (we went with https webDAV and webmail in the end) openVPN is a lot easier to setup, but IPSec is a lot more flexible. (there are further technical differences, but I won't go into those as others already have)
I agree, the drive size does seem a bit wimpy even for a music player, let alone something that does video.
The thing with a bigger screen is, you'd suck up more power and it'd be a heavier, you might as well get a laptop. Considering the compression ratio you'd have to do to get much to fit on the anemic hard drive, you wouldn't want it much larger cos of artifacts;)
Thinking of that, it's not much smaller than the size of the screens in the back of seats in cars or planes. I can just see someone with an MPV giving a couple of these to the kids in the back rather than fitting an in-car system. Give em headphones, and you won't get fights over what they're going to watch or listen to...
People who travel a lot on planes, trains or coaches?
I know several people that use laptops for DVD playing on the move, but they're heavy and the battery life sucks. If you have the cash, this sounds like a good place to rip music and films for travel, holidays, anywhere you want media without having to carry a ton of stuff.
It's also got a preview setup for digital cameras, which means you could use it again as a laptop lite to dump your memory cards to and check quality in the field on a bigger screen than on the camera.
Hell, I can even see a use for it in place of a tablet PC. Carry around network diagrams or cabling routes for when out digging up the road or fault tracing in big cable runs. Bigger display than a PDA, lighter, cheaper and simpler than a tablet.
If you know a way to get mozilla working with mandatory roaming profiles, rather than trying, and failing, to create a new user-specific profile directory every time, I'm all ears.
I've set IE to store it's student-specific files (favourites, cookies etc) in an internet folder in their homespace (rather than the profile), but I've yet to find a reliable way to repeat the feat in mozilla.
First, this is about Britain, not the US. Rightly or wrongly, the UK has no free speech guarantee; and there is quite strong censorship of film, radio and TV already by various regulatory bodies. It hasn't caused the collapse of british society yet, so I think the slippery slope argument is a little over the top.
Child pornography is very much reviled in the UK; sometimes hysterically so. This is just another variant of someone saying 'won't they think of the children? Your child is only three clicks away from a pedophile online...' This hysteria has not, yet, translated to any other additional areas such as politics, abortion, other pornographic topics or cracking/warez. It is a hotbutton topic all on it's own.
Finally, BT, though the largest ISP, is hardly the only one. BT the phone company has some separation from BT the ISP, so this shouldn't affect anybody except BT Openworld customers.
Since anywhere that can get BT ADSL can get any other UK ADSL provider, and there are lots, or could switch to cable, this is of little impact if you want an unfiltered connection. After all, it's not the government mandating all ISP's must block this stuff; it's one large ISP (bit like AOL) saying that they will block child porn for their customers.
Given they're a 'family-friendly' ISP, their primary goal no doubt is to comfort families who are worried they will stumble across this stuff by accident, and have been alarmed by all the trashy tabloid coverage, and sensationalist documentaries.
Well, they have climate data that goes back a lot longer than the last 100 years.
You have the geological record (rock material), artic/antartic ice cores, gasses embedded in other buried substances, fossils, all sorts of material that gives climate information going back thousands, or even millions or years (depending upon your source)
And yes, climate change does happen on the earth, we know that - especially the periodic glaciation interglacial periods etc.
The thing is, the earth will survive a massive problem like the shutting down of the gulf stream, and humanity as a whole probably will; but our way of life would be destroyed. Imagine if western europe and the eastern US turned into Alaska/siberia. Imagine if the desert region around the equater expanded heavily, imagine if the tropical rainfall region shifted by several thousand miles. Imagine if sea levels rose by several meters. All over the course of a few years.
The thing is, we don't have concrete data. We only have indications (such as the massive drop in salinity around the polar regions, which would shut down the gulf stream, and is being caused by warming from ice melting) that we're heading for big trouble. We don't know how much of that warming is caused by us, but as the saying goes, when you're 6 feet down, you stop digging.
Global warming is happening. Our actions are accelerating it even if we're not solely responsible. It makes sense to stop or at least reduce them, because if we don't, and things carry along their current trends...
Well, put it this way. Billions of people displaced, some with nuclear weapons.
Well, let me see. I work as an network/systems administrator, so I need my phone on me all day so that people can contact me with problems, usually urgent, when I'm working on other parts of the site away from my main desk phone. Having them leave a message, i.e. my having to check it every 5 minutes to see if someones left one, is simply not practical.
Even when I'm at home, my friends and family usually call me on my mobile rather than my landline, as it's a lots cheaper. If I'm in another room, I need the ringer to know that someone wants to talk to me. If you think voicemail is the be all and end all, I suggest you try disabling the ringer on your landline for a while, and see how useful it is. Oh, and make sure your friends do too. Then you'll see how much fun voicemail tag is.
No, I do not need my phone when I'm at a film, or funeral. Therefore I turn it off or leave it at home.
Your irritation at people using their phones at inappropriate times does not override my need to use the ringer. (and yes it is a need. Vibrate does NOT provide sufficient functionality)
Buy yourself some earplugs, and wear them all day. That's about as practical a suggestion as disabling phone ringtones.
Yeah, cos when my phone is in the pocket of my jacket on the back of my chair, or sitting on charge the other side of the room, vibrate works so much better than a ring tone.
I took part in lobbying against the EUCD. Obviously, we failed. Now we still have a chance when the law is passed into UK legislation, as there is a certain amount of wiggle room in implementation.
Plus, there are national elections in both the US and the UK; and with the real possibility of the tories getting back in because of Iraq (the tories are rather anti-EU) there's still plenty of things to try before the EUCD becomes national law in my country, especially if the US will continue to demonstrate how anti-competitive the DMCA is.
We've got two years before the EUCD theoretically has to be passed into local law; and the law isn't passed at all yet.
Claim that the GPL is against the entire spirit of capitalism and copyright law, and that by putting the code out for everyone to see and use, GPL code has been effectively put into the public domain; and thus, copying has no copyright infringement case to answer.
It's not exactly a sane defence, but it is a third option other than accept the GPL or cough guilty to copyright infringement.
Blimey. That's even worse than I was told (by a declared lawyer, no less). Rather glad I'm not american now!
Anyway, thanks for the heads up, I'll avoid making that mistake in future.
Re:Off thread but needing help figuring out distro
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Fedora Core 2 Review
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· Score: 1
If you're prepared to cough up the cash, SuSE is the strongest office desktop distro, no question. Everything configured out the box, ready to roll.
If you're looking for something free, as in beer, then based on recent personal testing, mandrake community is better than fedora. Does require a bit of tweaking post install, due to the patent issues etc, but not as bad as fedora.
Personally, I'm a gentooist, but that's definitely a distro for the fiddler, as are debian and slackware.
Of course, the above only applies when you're use is non-infringing.
Were you to remove the DRM in order to say, put it onto a P2P network, you'd get nailed under copyright law AND the DMCA. but that's not what we're discussing, right?
I like the way you don't quote the following section, specifically
`(B) The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that particular class of works under this title, as determined under subparagraph (C).
If the use is noninfringing (i.e. would be covered by an existing fair use defence), then A does not apply, i.e. circumventing the protection is NOT restricted. Transcoding a work for the purposes of interoperability is a fair use right, ergo removing the DRM is not illegal.
The DMCRA is needed because the tools are illegal to write, distribute or tell others about under the DMCA, even if the tool itself has substantial noninfringing uses.
The DMCA does not ban using crowbars, it just bans anyone making one, giving or selling you one, or telling anyone how to make or use a crowbar. The DMCRA would address those issues, which do need addressing.
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I think you've missed the purpose behind the GPL.
It's not there to force people to give away GPL software for nothing; it's there so that when you buy software, you are always entitled to get a copy of the source code if you want to modify it (or pay someone to modify it) to meet your specific needs.
The parts about derivative works remaining GPL is so that a GPL'd work cannot be taken 'closed source' again by a particular vendor adding useful features. In fact, that's exactly what's happening here. Linksys released the original source under the GPL because they'd based it off other people's GPL'd work; Sveasoft have to release their source to purchasers of their firmware, who have the right to distribute it under the GPL.
The fact that all this has the side effect of making almost all GPL software free of cost for end users is just that; a side effect.
The benchmarks for lower hardware are coming later. From the final page:
If you would have told me a year ago that I could play DOOM 3 on a GeForce 3 64MB video card and 1.8GHz AthlonXP and have a good gaming experience, I would have called you crazy, but that is exactly what we are seeing. Certainly we will have much more information on this in the coming weeks with the DOOM 3 [H]ardware Guide. At that time we will take a look at a much wider array of CPUs, Video Cards, and Motherboards and what overall gaming experience they can deliver.
You know, I just don't buy this slippery slope.
2004/ convicted murders go to jail for life
2005/ convicted burglers go to jail for life
2006/ convicted speeders go to jail for life
2007/ anybody who looks funny at a policemen goes to jail for life
1984/ freedom is slavery
It is possible to agree that something is bad and should be dealt with, without also accepting that it will lead to all other sorts of nasties.
Fair use also allows recording off the radio and TV, having had court cases on it. Getting copies off p2p is very legally grey; being the person sharing is much clearer cut as illegal.
It's also worth point out that the route by which copyrighted works enter the public domain has been getting longer and longer, and looks like it is now functionally eliminated. (It will just keep getting retroactively extended every time Mickey comes up for entry).
Since copyright holders aren't holding up their end of the bargain with regards the public domain, and with draconian enforcement of marginal cases, and DRM being used to remove or limit what fair use rights we have left, is it any wonder that many people no longer have any respect at all for copyright?
Copyright is not a property right, it's a government granted limited monopoly on distribution based on the idea that that will increase the amount of work created, and finally entering the public domain. It was designed to protect publishers from having their work poached and resold by other publishers. It is a broken model now that distribution is essentially free, and needs reworking in the modern age. In every other case I can think of where advances in technology came up against an old law, the old
law was changed to allow the advance. Why should copyright be any different?
So let's see... I can go to my friend's place and listen to his CDs. That's legal, right ? YES
And what if I'm not at my friend's place, but he puts the telephone near the speaker so I can hear ? Is it legal or is it a crime ? IT'S A CRIME, PROBABLY
And what if we use something like skype instead of a telephone ? Is is legal ? NOT REALLY
And what if put his CD in his computer, and then make skype record every sound from his computer (instead of only his computer's microphone) so I can hear the CD ? Is it legal ? NO
And what if, instead of skype, he use a streaming program ? Is it legal ? I mean the only difference is the transfer protocol, right ? IT'S STILL ILLEGAL
And what if, instead of a stream, he send the file with ftp ? Is it legal ? NOPE
And what if we use a p2p program to transfer the file ? Is it legal ? NOPE
And what if I don't know the guy that well ? Is it legal ? STILL NOPE
Here's the rub. Playing music for your friends who are physically there is legal. Making copies for distribution, or broadcasting it to others (by radio, phone, itunes) is illegal without permission - if it's classified as a 'public performance'. That's why playing a VCR tape on a bus full of people is technically illegal, and why it's in the warning at the front of the tape.
Now, 'limited' broadcasting, such as playing it down the phone to your friend, or sharing your playlist via itunes to a handful of people is sufficient in the grey area, that you'll likely never be prosecuted for it (In a sane world, it'd be never, but with the RIAA, you just can't tell these days). Making a permanent copy of a non-authorised broadcast is definitely illegal tho, but obviously not likely to be enforced. Recording a stream off a legal internet radio? Probably covered by fair use, same as normal radio, but not explicitly defined.
Retail EULA's aren't worth the paper they're printed on, outside of the handful of UCITA-passed states. First sale doctrine says that copyright holders cannot apply additional restrictions over and above that of copyright, after sale.
The EULA is not given to you to 'sign' until after you've bought the product, and thus is not legal with regards the original sale. They try and get round this by claiming it's
a) a licence, not a sale
b) by copying into memory or onto a harddrive, you're making an additional copy, which requires permission - which you only get by agreeing to the EULA.
Both of these are legally flaky. If you go into a shop, give a man some money, and he gives you a box with something in it, that's a sale. Contract law would apply if you had to sign the EULA at the till, or as part of an ongoing service relationship (such as with ISP's), but since they only try and apply them post-sale, they're on very shaky ground.
Assuming a court accepts the extra copies argument (most world copyright law explicitly allows for such 'working' copies without extra permission, but you never know) you're still butting up against that EULA's aren't valid contracts. They're not an exchange of value, i.e. only one party gains something. They're not terms negotiated between both parties, but dictated by one side; and the signature can hardly be classed as legally binding. What if my cat walks across the keyboard and triggers the 'OK' while I'm reading the small print? Did my cat 'accept' the licence? What if someone too young to be bound by contracts installs windows?
EULA's have never been tested in a court, and with good reason; they would likely be tossed as invalid.
Note however that corporate EULA's attached to a particular corporate sale contract with a negotated price, real signatures, lawyers etc are usually valid.
55-62c is a little hot, but within tolerance. If it was hitting 80, you should worry. Still, you should be able to get it cooler.
I presume you've upgraded your heatsink fan, as you say you have a nice one; did you put thermal gunk on it - and did you only put a thin film, or did you ladle it? (much better to have a little than a lot). Might be worth taking it off, cleaning it carefully, and putting it back. You never know, you might just be getting poor thermal contact with the heatsink.
Also, it's generally better to have your case fans blowing hot air out the back/side, and either a fan sucking in cool air at the front, or just rely on partial pressure. Getting the hot air out is more important though. Definitely don't have the ones at the back blowing air into the case.
You could upgrade the fans on your case, if you have them blowing the right way; I've seen some cases come with really anemic fans. Make sure they're not undervolted, and running slow.
Don't forget your PSU either; you can get a decent powered PSU with an internal extract fan as well as it's external fan; I've seen that extra fan knock nearly 10 degrees off one hot case.
Finally, consider airflow again. You want cool air coming in at the front, and hot air out the sides, top, and especially the back. Make sure your cables (especially ide) are tied up neatly out the way, and aren't impeding airflow. If your fans are half decent, and your airflow unimpeded, then having the side on will actually improve airflow, and keep it cooler. You might want to drill extra holes in the sides/back though, to help hot air escape. Avoid holes on the top, they're a killer for dust.
Finally, you could always just upgrade to a better case. Two 80mm fans is entry level these days, and you can get a nice quiet case with more, or bigger fans for very little cash.
Nope, the phones themselves have a unique identifier, the IMEI code, which are quite trackable. Once you know who's using which IMEI, you can listen to them pretty easily even when they're using a prepaid account. Which is why you should buy a pre-pay phone in cash at a busy shop without suveillance cameras. Of course, they could use the signal towers to triangulate your phone's position if they REALLY want to find you.
I'm sorry, but if these data handling functions are business critical, then you need a proper database (sql, basically) combined with proper data in/out.
The number of cases of huge excel/macro combinations dieing messily, or corrupting the data is legion. I'm no database specialist (network admin myself), but the guy I work with who is, has several stories of companies that regretted relying on access or excel/vb for critical data processing, and one of them nearly went under when they found one of their (many) linked spreadsheets had been corrupted and had been feeding bad data into their conclusions for months.
Seriously, PLEASE don't rely on a cheap and cheerful desktop products (which is what ms office and openoffice are) to manage your company dataflow. Get a proper system on the backend. Use excel to munge a bit on the front end, do the graphs etc, fine - but put your data-storage and processing into a proper database system. It'll cost you more, but it just ain't worth the risk.
And do it with a rabid wolverine in your underwear. And how did a rabid wolverine come to be wearing your underwear in the first place?
As I understand it, OpenVPN needs software at both ends, so is basically a userspace implementation. Which is fine if you're going desktop to server, but not so suitable if you're doing hardware router/router for network-network encrypted tunnels.
IPSec is an open standard, so implementations are available from many different vendors in many different setups, including hardware.
One other advantage if you're supporting windows roadwarriors, is that L2TP/IPSec is built into dialup networking on windows 2K/XP, so with a bit of minor jiggery pokery you can have L2TP support on a linux gateway (authing directly, or to a windows server) without having to install any additional software on their remote box; just give em an autoinstaller DUN connection, and you're away, with a user-familiar interface.
To sum up, having played with both (we went with https webDAV and webmail in the end) openVPN is a lot easier to setup, but IPSec is a lot more flexible. (there are further technical differences, but I won't go into those as others already have)
I agree, the drive size does seem a bit wimpy even for a music player, let alone something that does video.
;)
The thing with a bigger screen is, you'd suck up more power and it'd be a heavier, you might as well get a laptop. Considering the compression ratio you'd have to do to get much to fit on the anemic hard drive, you wouldn't want it much larger cos of artifacts
Thinking of that, it's not much smaller than the size of the screens in the back of seats in cars or planes. I can just see someone with an MPV giving a couple of these to the kids in the back rather than fitting an in-car system. Give em headphones, and you won't get fights over what they're going to watch or listen to...
Who's going to buy them?
People who travel a lot on planes, trains or coaches?
I know several people that use laptops for DVD playing on the move, but they're heavy and the battery life sucks. If you have the cash, this sounds like a good place to rip music and films for travel, holidays, anywhere you want media without having to carry a ton of stuff.
It's also got a preview setup for digital cameras, which means you could use it again as a laptop lite to dump your memory cards to and check quality in the field on a bigger screen than on the camera.
Hell, I can even see a use for it in place of a tablet PC. Carry around network diagrams or cabling routes for when out digging up the road or fault tracing in big cable runs. Bigger display than a PDA, lighter, cheaper and simpler than a tablet.
If you know a way to get mozilla working with mandatory roaming profiles, rather than trying, and failing, to create a new user-specific profile directory every time, I'm all ears.
I've set IE to store it's student-specific files (favourites, cookies etc) in an internet folder in their homespace (rather than the profile), but I've yet to find a reliable way to repeat the feat in mozilla.
First, this is about Britain, not the US. Rightly or wrongly, the UK has no free speech guarantee; and there is quite strong censorship of film, radio and TV already by various regulatory bodies. It hasn't caused the collapse of british society yet, so I think the slippery slope argument is a little over the top.
Child pornography is very much reviled in the UK; sometimes hysterically so. This is just another variant of someone saying 'won't they think of the children? Your child is only three clicks away from a pedophile online...' This hysteria has not, yet, translated to any other additional areas such as politics, abortion, other pornographic topics or cracking/warez. It is a hotbutton topic all on it's own.
Finally, BT, though the largest ISP, is hardly the only one. BT the phone company has some separation from BT the ISP, so this shouldn't affect anybody except BT Openworld customers.
Since anywhere that can get BT ADSL can get any other UK ADSL provider, and there are lots, or could switch to cable, this is of little impact if you want an unfiltered connection. After all, it's not the government mandating all ISP's must block this stuff; it's one large ISP (bit like AOL) saying that they will block child porn for their customers.
Given they're a 'family-friendly' ISP, their primary goal no doubt is to comfort families who are worried they will stumble across this stuff by accident, and have been alarmed by all the trashy tabloid coverage, and sensationalist documentaries.
Well, they have climate data that goes back a lot longer than the last 100 years.
You have the geological record (rock material), artic/antartic ice cores, gasses embedded in other buried substances, fossils, all sorts of material that gives climate information going back thousands, or even millions or years (depending upon your source)
And yes, climate change does happen on the earth, we know that - especially the periodic glaciation interglacial periods etc.
The thing is, the earth will survive a massive problem like the shutting down of the gulf stream, and humanity as a whole probably will; but our way of life would be destroyed. Imagine if western europe and the eastern US turned into Alaska/siberia. Imagine if the desert region around the equater expanded heavily, imagine if the tropical rainfall region shifted by several thousand miles. Imagine if sea levels rose by several meters. All over the course of a few years.
The thing is, we don't have concrete data. We only have indications (such as the massive drop in salinity around the polar regions, which would shut down the gulf stream, and is being caused by warming from ice melting) that we're heading for big trouble. We don't know how much of that warming is caused by us, but as the saying goes, when you're 6 feet down, you stop digging.
Global warming is happening. Our actions are accelerating it even if we're not solely responsible. It makes sense to stop or at least reduce them, because if we don't, and things carry along their current trends...
Well, put it this way. Billions of people displaced, some with nuclear weapons.
Don't make us come over there and liberate your asses!
*Has a mental image of a yank wandering around London randomly pulling down people's trousers*
*shudder*
Well, let me see. I work as an network/systems administrator, so I need my phone on me all day so that people can contact me with problems, usually urgent, when I'm working on other parts of the site away from my main desk phone. Having them leave a message, i.e. my having to check it every 5 minutes to see if someones left one, is simply not practical.
Even when I'm at home, my friends and family usually call me on my mobile rather than my landline, as it's a lots cheaper. If I'm in another room, I need the ringer to know that someone wants to talk to me. If you think voicemail is the be all and end all, I suggest you try disabling the ringer on your landline for a while, and see how useful it is. Oh, and make sure your friends do too. Then you'll see how much fun voicemail tag is.
No, I do not need my phone when I'm at a film, or funeral. Therefore I turn it off or leave it at home.
Your irritation at people using their phones at inappropriate times does not override my need to use the ringer. (and yes it is a need. Vibrate does NOT provide sufficient functionality)
Buy yourself some earplugs, and wear them all day. That's about as practical a suggestion as disabling phone ringtones.
Yeah, cos when my phone is in the pocket of my jacket on the back of my chair, or sitting on charge the other side of the room, vibrate works so much better than a ring tone.
I took part in lobbying against the EUCD. Obviously, we failed. Now we still have a chance when the law is passed into UK legislation, as there is a certain amount of wiggle room in implementation.
Plus, there are national elections in both the US and the UK; and with the real possibility of the tories getting back in because of Iraq (the tories are rather anti-EU) there's still plenty of things to try before the EUCD becomes national law in my country, especially if the US will continue to demonstrate how anti-competitive the DMCA is.
We've got two years before the EUCD theoretically has to be passed into local law; and the law isn't passed at all yet.
You're forgetting SCO's own tactic:
Claim that the GPL is against the entire spirit of capitalism and copyright law, and that by putting the code out for everyone to see and use, GPL code has been effectively put into the public domain; and thus, copying has no copyright infringement case to answer.
It's not exactly a sane defence, but it is a third option other than accept the GPL or cough guilty to copyright infringement.
Blimey. That's even worse than I was told (by a declared lawyer, no less). Rather glad I'm not american now!
Anyway, thanks for the heads up, I'll avoid making that mistake in future.
If you're prepared to cough up the cash, SuSE is the strongest office desktop distro, no question. Everything configured out the box, ready to roll.
If you're looking for something free, as in beer, then based on recent personal testing, mandrake community is better than fedora. Does require a bit of tweaking post install, due to the patent issues etc, but not as bad as fedora.
Personally, I'm a gentooist, but that's definitely a distro for the fiddler, as are debian and slackware.
Of course, the above only applies when you're use is non-infringing.
Were you to remove the DRM in order to say, put it onto a P2P network, you'd get nailed under copyright law AND the DMCA. but that's not what we're discussing, right?
I like the way you don't quote the following section, specifically
`(B) The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that particular class of works under this title, as determined under subparagraph (C).
If the use is noninfringing (i.e. would be covered by an existing fair use defence), then A does not apply, i.e. circumventing the protection is NOT restricted. Transcoding a work for the purposes of interoperability is a fair use right, ergo removing the DRM is not illegal.
The DMCRA is needed because the tools are illegal to write, distribute or tell others about under the DMCA, even if the tool itself has substantial noninfringing uses.
The DMCA does not ban using crowbars, it just bans anyone making one, giving or selling you one, or telling anyone how to make or use a crowbar. The DMCRA would address those issues, which do need addressing.