And since Microsoft is probably the most hated software company on the planet, I want nothing to do with any of their products. With a Windows phone, users can expect to be locked out when they attempt to modify it, locked in when it comes to their data, vulnerable when it comes to security threats and spied upon whenever a telco may find it convenient.
My opinion in this is, of course, my own and it may sound paranoid and/or overly opinionated to some, but after several decades of experience I've comes to expect the worst from this company. Clearly, profit has always been far more important to them than customer satisfaction, i.e. their stockholders way more important than their stakeholders. Microsoft's secret to success has always been strongly dependent on its ability to limit consumer choice to its products only -- not its ability to make better products. Luckily, nowadays we do have a choice, so as long as that's the case I will do my best to avoid all of their products.
Actually, I run Debian 6 with KDE 4.4 on my workstation. In fact, I've been running nothing but KDE on my workstation for over a decade, so I guess you could say that it's my all-time favorite desktop environment. I even prefer using Konqueror as my web browser!
However, when I was asked to install a Linux workstations in an office environment a few years ago, I ended up going with Xfce despite my relative lack of experience with it. The reason I selected it is because Xfce is not nearly as resource-hungry as KDE and runs very well on old hardware -- even on 8-year-old machines with less than 1 GB of RAM. It doesn't look too bad either.
There are some other questions I could ask of myself, like Why didn't I switch to Gnome when things got so rough with the new KDE4 in 2009? Pure habit. I survived that period by using the KDE version of Linux Mint for a year, before going back to Debian. Or, Why did I start using KDE in the first place (in 2001)? I think simply because to me it looked more like Windows (which I used for a total of almost exactly 10 years before that) than Gnome.
In conclusion, my feeling is that a person's desktop preference is largely a question of taste and habit, so it will likely always be an uphill battle for the KDE developers to get, say, long-time Gnome users to switch to KDE even if the latter is superior. However, I think that more people would indeed consider KDE if it could also be made to run with a lot less memory and processing power than it currently requires.
Indeed: what's in it for the end users? It sounds both creepy and obnoxious, so if all they can expect in return for further lost privacy is targeted adds, what's to stop them from simply taping over the camera lens? Or, will the TV then give an error if it decides that the user has done just that?
Ok, I see these creation vs. evolution stories all the time, and we always assume the creationists are wrong, but what if they aren't? And why is it OK to have multiple points of view in the scientific community, unless you think that the world was created (by a higher power or other means).
I'll just let just Carl Sagan explain to you the difference between science and pseudoscience (in this case creationism):
Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science. Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so that they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers towards improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypotheses is disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise.
Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are often defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudo-scientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced.
From his book, The Demon-Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996).
Your response is that none of the services are good enough....
That's right. I'm getting tired of having to pay more money than ever for more channels and programs than ever, even though I'm only interested in seeing a few programs on a few channels. Right now, most of my cable subscription fee ends up paying for programs and channels in which I will never have any interest, and even for a few of that are downright obnoxious.
I think this tends to illustrate my point. If what you want is something as good as Bittorrent then nothing is good enough, and nothing ever can be.
Not true. The best deal possible is the one Radiohead offered: free to download and pay whatever you want. People thought the band had gone nuts, but it actually worked out far better than anyone expected, with most fans paying them the average price of an album. This just goes to show that if you trust people to be fair and do the right thing, most of them will.
Incidentally Star Trek is already available through Amazon Instant Video,...
Star Trek what? The original series, a new series, a new movie?
... and one suspects that watching it means Paramount get a cut of Amazon's fee.
Of course.
I wonder, though: if we tested your theory by comparing the number of Star Trek fans who pirate the shows with the number who watch them through Amazon, would you really find that regular viewers opt to pay?
It's difficult to say. If you mean a new series that they release simultaneously on TV and make available via Amazon Instant Video at a reasonable price, then it's quite possible that many would be willing to pay for that. The Radiohead strategy, however, would probably get them the best results.
I would call it a Corporatocracy. Also, the fact that you cannot directly vote seriously hinders any chance of democracy. The indirect voting system makes sure that only one or two parties will have any chance at all. And those will not be the parties that dare to change.
A "corporatocracy" -- I like that. Sounds like it's perhaps an even better description.
As for the American two-party winner-takes-all system, I would agree that it is hardly the most democratic solution out there and may be more vulnerable to corruption than others. However, if enough outside money and influence is entered into the equation, I think even the most idealistic system of democracy can be made hopelessly corrupt and ineffective. Therefore, campaign finance reform should still be the top priority in America. After that I'd love to see more improvements, such as proportional representation.
... Even if you ban money contributions to campaigns etc., it will simply shift into the black market (outright corruption), or turn out to be some kind of post facto corruption, where the politicians reap their "rewards" later when they leave office (like Gerhard Schroeder in Germany e.g.).
Don't be so cynical; not all corruption is equal. To some degree corruption will always exist in every government, but once it has become institutionalized -- even legitimized -- then it's really time to do something about it. I don't think the level of political corruption in Germany can in any way be compared to that in the United States.
What's a reasonable cost? Netflix, Lovefilm and Amazon Video are all pretty cheap.
Not quite. The first two are subscription based, which does not allow people to be selective in what they pay for. That's too much like the typical TV network business model that gives consumers no other choice but to buy access to all kinds of things they don't want in order to gain access to the few things they do want. What's more, these two services are not available worldwide (and have have no support for Linux). Amazon Instant Video does not seem to have these problems, but offers a much more limited choice, and/or lag far behind on what they are being allowed to offer.
The problem I think is that they have to compete with what is essentially the ultimate competitor: someone offering high-quality downloads, with no restrictions, for free. There's simply no way they can compete with that - if you're used to downloading whatever you want for free then anything a media company can offer will be worse.
That's why I think these measures are necessary, and a good thing....
Now you sound like someone working for the industry. You make the assumption that all of the people downloading for free are just a bunch of cheapskates, but that's not true. When it comes to TV shows and movies, typically the only choice consumers are ever given is between overpriced and free. You can't draw your conclusion until you've tried giving consumers a more reasonable choice. For example, look at how Radiohead released their album In Rainbows in 2007: they let people download it for free and only said "pay what you want", but most people ended up paying the average album price anyway.
In the same way, I'm absolutely certain that if given the choice e.g. Star Trek fans would gladly pay Paramount Studios directly for being able to stream episodes of a new series of the venerable franchise. You'd probably see a lot of people watching episodes for free as well (perhaps just out of curiosity), but I think most regular viewers would end up paying a reasonable price to prevent the series from being cancelled. For viewers, paying directly would be the ultimate way to say to Paramount, "I like this show and want it to continue!". For Paramount, that would be the ultimate in viewer feedback.
Specifically, I hear that it's generally not a good idea to virtualize Asterisk servers that you expect will be handling more than 12-15 simultaneous connections. However, at the moment I've got three Asterisk servers that are shouldering lighter loads and running just fine on qemu-kvm virtual machines.
For me, UEFI is not a problem, because I'll just continue to do what I've been doing for almost two decades: building my own servers and workstations from individual components.
On the other hand, if at some point in the future a client asks me to migrate all of their existing workstations and servers from Windows to Linux, then UEFI may make that difficult. For that matter, it may also become difficult to install Linux on the average laptop.
Will the the EU stand idly by (as I'm sure Uncle Sam will), or will it stand up for consumers everywhere before it's too late?
Yet, the more restrictive and draconian our policies become, the more that the EU seems to protecting these rights.
My commiserations. Being Dutch, I felt proud today, because of both of the Dutch Government rejecting ACTA and Neelie Kroes (who is also Dutch) standing up for Net Neutrality. But, I'm also an American, so I find it depressing when I read about how badly the Internet is being treated in the country of its birth. The only things to cheer about are when really bad laws manage to be defeated at the last moment. Still, having spent the first 13 years of my life there, part of me will always want to believe that America is the #1 defender of freedom and democracy in the world.
Intellectually, however, I know that isn't really true anymore and hasn't been for quite some time. More than ever before, America now resembles a plutocracy. Sure, all Americans are equal, but the ones with lots of money are definitely more equal than the rest. Of course, it's still a democracy, so statistically this isn't always reflected in the guy who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but just take a look at Congress: the majority of those folks are there because they agreed to primarily to look after the financial interests of the few (in which case everything else comes a distant second).
Therefore, it's not really a surprise to see the Internet being treated poorly in the good ol' U.S. of A. -- too many Corporations are just not happy with it. They would agree with the Chinese that it affords the common man too much freedom; during arguments, they've even mentioned the Great Firewall of China as an example of how large-scale Internet censorship can also be made to work in America. So, what can we do about it?
The only real solution that I can think of is to tackle the root the problem: to get money out of politics. Take a look at this book. That's one set of solutions; it may not be the best, but nothing less than real campaign finance reform is what Americans should aim for. If successful, I think we can expect American politicians to become rather different animals: ones that will actually be capable of rational thought, finding common ground with their opponents, compromising when necessary and otherwise just plain capable of making good decisions.
I wonder if they have IPV6 support, unfortunately searches on "the pirate bay" are blocked here at work. If tey do they could add billions of IP addresses!
That was my thought as well. Keep in mind that IPv6 addresses are often allocated in/64 and/48 subnets, so it's possible that's how the anti-piracy groups will be seeking to block them. Still, even if they attempt to block by the/48, that still leaves thousands of billions of these address ranges in which to hide. But, even with IPv4 it sounds like the TPB has address space to burn.
It's stupid, really. IMO, all that's necessary to end this ridiculous cat and mouse game is for the entertainment industry to offer streaming services to the masses at reasonable prices (per movie/show/series/episode/album/song) and all this bad behavior will be unnecessary on both sides.
Why? Are you too far in the middle of nowhere to get it over the air?
Over the air? Wow, do you mean like, with an antenna? I should have mentioned: I live in the Netherlands and for us that option completely disappeared in December 2006. All that's left now are the local cable companies, each of which is a monopolist in its own area. In my city, a basic cable package currently costs $21.61 a month.
To make matters more expensive, some of my favorite programs are only on Comedy Central (part of an extra package that costs $16.34 month) and HBO (another $18.77 a month), which adds up to a total of $56.72 a month. This is almost as much as I pay for my monthly 8/1 Mbps ADSL broadband Internet access ($44,34) and my cheap-o mobile phone subscription ($12.81) combined.
But, maybe whether you think that's cheap or not depends how many hours of TV you watch. At 40 hours a month, that means the privilege of watching my favorite shows legally (including several news programs) costs me $1.42 an hour. That doesn't sound too bad, right?
Perhaps. But my point is that I'm not being offered much choice in this matter either. The local cable company has maneuvered me into paying for their most expensive product package. This about six times as much as we used to pay two decades ago and gets us access to 119 channels with probably thousands of different programs.
However, I'm only interested in maybe 25 programs on 10 different channels over the course of an entire year. Why can't I just buy access to those shows only, and then be allowed to watch them whenever I want? If done properly, this should not have to cost me $1.42 an hour either.
Yet, this scenario seems to have about as much in common with reality as world peace: many of us find it all too easy to imagine, but those in power appear to be dead set against it. Of course, with the Internet in place and all of this being just information, it's no wonder that piracy is so commonplace.
Of course, I'm not the only one who feels this way. It looks like the current TV business model has changed little over the past century (since the dawn of commercial radio), with consumers now being asked to buy packages from their local cable TV providers that are more expensive than ever despite the prevalence of broadband Internet connectivity.
What it comes down to is money and monopoly power. All I want to see probably adds up to a maximum of 10 hours a week, including the news, some sporting events and one or two TV series. Yet, the only way for me to gain access to that specific content legally is to buy a cable subscription, along with one or two supplemental packages, that include dozens of other channels, and hundreds of other program items that I have no interest in. Yet, my only choice is all or nothing, and on top of that those few shows that I am interested in are regularly interrupted by advertisements, which makes the experience a lot less enjoyable.
On the other hand, many people would be more than happy to pay to watch just those shows they want to see via their broadband Internet connections -- and without any advertising. That way also, more of the money would go to the show's producers, who in turn would have a much better idea of how many people were actually watching their show every week. We know consumers want this, because of the huge scale on which TV shows are being pirated and distributed via the Internet. Nevertheless, the only things that consumers can expect to receive directly from the studios today are personal lawsuits regarding their involvement in file sharing networks.
Perhaps getting what we want as consumers will depend on the success of sites like fora.tv, although the prices they ask for access to their content can be pretty steep (e.g. $5 to $25 to watch a single program) -- hardly a strategy likely to make much of a dent in the numbers of people watching Game of Thrones illegally. It seems to me that if an entire season of that series costs $60 million to produce, that HBO could double their money if, at 10 episodes season, 10 million Internet viewers would be willing to pay $1.20 per episode to see it. However, none of the big U.S. studios seem willing to even entertain the idea of giving consumers a choice like that. How come?
... There is no such thing as free usable energy. Solar energy is definitely free, but to convert it into usable energy definitely is not.
True, but an electric car offers the only way to not be tied to any one energy source in particular. Fossil fuels, such as gasoline, will only become more expensive -- that is a certainty. But you can't say the same about electricity, because we will always be finding cheaper ways to generate it. Over the years, for example, the price of electricity from renewable sources, such as solar and wind, has only come down. Also, don't forget that a typical electric motor is far more efficient than even the most efficient internal combustion engine. As the current limitations associated with owning an electric vehicle disappear, so will most people's objections to buying them.
Yet another improvement on an outdated concept. The owners of cars with this type of engine will still be stuck in a the cycle of ever increasing gas prices. These days the only cars that impress me are the ones that offer an affordable escape out of this trap, even if the range is somewhat limited.
... The problem is that we do not have the technology to get stuff out of the Earth's gravity well with anything greater than 0.1% efficiency, and in the process of building that Enterprise-sized object we would destroy the Earth's atmosphere and ecosystem....
Not so fast. I'm not very optimistic about this project ever getting off of the ground either, but the issue that you raise is easily circumvented if most of the mass for the ship comes from a captured asteroid and the whole thing is manufactured and assembled in orbit.
How I am even supposed to begin to recommend Linux for the average user when there are 100 different distros, each with its own quirks and issues?...
You make the issue seem more confusing than it is.
Several years ago I started a project to set up a Linux environment at a veterinary practice in Amsterdam. It's only a little bit bigger than the Chester County Cat Hospital, but the interesting part is that it's spread out over three geographic locations. The idea was to tie it all together via some decent Internet connections, and have people's accounts and desktops follow them around from location to location while utilizing a distributed file system. I figured a system based on Kerberos, OpenLDAP and OpenAFS was really the only way to go.
Based on that requirement, I went looking for the best Desktop. I tried Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Debian. However, with the first two it soon became obvious that they had been developed primarily to function as SOHO systems for desktop and laptop machines. Yes, the Kerberos, OpenLDAP and OpenAFS packages were there, but it was difficult to get them to work. For example, Ubuntu and Mint alternatives for init, which allows them to start up faster, made things more difficult for me. The network manager was also a pain. Eventually I got it to go, but by that time I realized it wasn't going to be worth the effort.
That left plain old Debian stable (squeeze), which is also what the folks from the Kerberos and OpenAFS projects recommend. I installed Xfce on all of the workstations, so that support for older hardware would not be a problem, as well as a number of other applications, including two DICOM viewers, icedove, iceweasel, OpenOffice and three extra browsers. After the various printing problems had been addressed, everyone was quite happy with it all.
----------------
As for the main topic, I would say that one of the reasons why Linux for the desktop has not taken off is because not enough Linux admins are familiar with Kerberos, OpenLDAP and distributed file systems like OpenAFS. It's one thing to set up a server and a few workstations using NFS, but that doesn't scale well at all. A whole lot more can be achieved using the aforementioned "magic" trio, but it does require more of an effort.
Agreed. I was thinking about saying it, but decided to let someone else say it instead.
It took me a long time to understand (at least, I think I do now) what the founding fathers meant with the right to bear arms. They had just been through a revolution in which an armed populace had been instrumental in throwing out a tyrant. More to the point, it was very important to them that if necessary the same thing be possible again in the future. I think they would agree that the US reached that point some time ago.
Not that I'm arguing for another civil war (yuk!), but the US really does need a new form of government. The wealthy elite have clearly figured out how to rig the whole system (media included) in their favor so that increasingly it always serves them first. The two-party democracies of the US and the UK now have tag-team governments that have too much in common with a one-party system. The two parties claim to be nothing like one another, but they're really just two sides of the same coin.
Witness how in both of these countries, the same heinous policies can persist after multiple changes of power. It may not even always be the fault of the new guys, but what else can they do if, when take over the reins of power, they find themselves wearing yet another harness?
In both the UK and the US, money really needs to be separated from politics first. After that, anything else is possible.
With a succession of US governments willing only to lower tax rates and thus only being able to cut spending in order to cut their deficit, and being populated ever more frequently by anti-science religious nuts, obviously they're no hurry to invest in any more huge science projects, such as the SSH.... I mean the SSC.
My impression has been that the really difficult part to copy is the software; the drone will be useless without it, but it may be impossible for them to decrypt. Also, don't these things require a satellite network for flight control?
Slashdot Mirror
And since Microsoft is probably the most hated software company on the planet, I want nothing to do with any of their products. With a Windows phone, users can expect to be locked out when they attempt to modify it, locked in when it comes to their data, vulnerable when it comes to security threats and spied upon whenever a telco may find it convenient.
My opinion in this is, of course, my own and it may sound paranoid and/or overly opinionated to some, but after several decades of experience I've comes to expect the worst from this company. Clearly, profit has always been far more important to them than customer satisfaction, i.e. their stockholders way more important than their stakeholders. Microsoft's secret to success has always been strongly dependent on its ability to limit consumer choice to its products only -- not its ability to make better products. Luckily, nowadays we do have a choice, so as long as that's the case I will do my best to avoid all of their products.
Actually, I run Debian 6 with KDE 4.4 on my workstation. In fact, I've been running nothing but KDE on my workstation for over a decade, so I guess you could say that it's my all-time favorite desktop environment. I even prefer using Konqueror as my web browser!
However, when I was asked to install a Linux workstations in an office environment a few years ago, I ended up going with Xfce despite my relative lack of experience with it. The reason I selected it is because Xfce is not nearly as resource-hungry as KDE and runs very well on old hardware -- even on 8-year-old machines with less than 1 GB of RAM. It doesn't look too bad either.
There are some other questions I could ask of myself, like Why didn't I switch to Gnome when things got so rough with the new KDE4 in 2009? Pure habit. I survived that period by using the KDE version of Linux Mint for a year, before going back to Debian. Or, Why did I start using KDE in the first place (in 2001)? I think simply because to me it looked more like Windows (which I used for a total of almost exactly 10 years before that) than Gnome.
In conclusion, my feeling is that a person's desktop preference is largely a question of taste and habit, so it will likely always be an uphill battle for the KDE developers to get, say, long-time Gnome users to switch to KDE even if the latter is superior. However, I think that more people would indeed consider KDE if it could also be made to run with a lot less memory and processing power than it currently requires.
Indeed: what's in it for the end users? It sounds both creepy and obnoxious, so if all they can expect in return for further lost privacy is targeted adds, what's to stop them from simply taping over the camera lens? Or, will the TV then give an error if it decides that the user has done just that?
... bus.
Ok, I see these creation vs. evolution stories all the time, and we always assume the creationists are wrong, but what if they aren't? And why is it OK to have multiple points of view in the scientific community, unless you think that the world was created (by a higher power or other means).
I'll just let just Carl Sagan explain to you the difference between science and pseudoscience (in this case creationism):
Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science. Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so that they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers towards improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypotheses is disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise.
Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are often defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudo-scientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced.
From his book, The Demon-Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996).
"If you've ever looked at an Asus Transformer and wished that it was slightly bigger, had an x86 processor, and ran Windows, ..."
I always look look at this sort of equipment and wish that it didn't run Windows...
Your response is that none of the services are good enough. ...
That's right. I'm getting tired of having to pay more money than ever for more channels and programs than ever, even though I'm only interested in seeing a few programs on a few channels. Right now, most of my cable subscription fee ends up paying for programs and channels in which I will never have any interest, and even for a few of that are downright obnoxious.
I think this tends to illustrate my point. If what you want is something as good as Bittorrent then nothing is good enough, and nothing ever can be.
Not true. The best deal possible is the one Radiohead offered: free to download and pay whatever you want. People thought the band had gone nuts, but it actually worked out far better than anyone expected, with most fans paying them the average price of an album. This just goes to show that if you trust people to be fair and do the right thing, most of them will.
Incidentally Star Trek is already available through Amazon Instant Video, ...
Star Trek what? The original series, a new series, a new movie?
Of course.
I wonder, though: if we tested your theory by comparing the number of Star Trek fans who pirate the shows with the number who watch them through Amazon, would you really find that regular viewers opt to pay?
It's difficult to say. If you mean a new series that they release simultaneously on TV and make available via Amazon Instant Video at a reasonable price, then it's quite possible that many would be willing to pay for that. The Radiohead strategy, however, would probably get them the best results.
I would call it a Corporatocracy. Also, the fact that you cannot directly vote seriously hinders any chance of democracy. The indirect voting system makes sure that only one or two parties will have any chance at all. And those will not be the parties that dare to change.
A "corporatocracy" -- I like that. Sounds like it's perhaps an even better description.
As for the American two-party winner-takes-all system, I would agree that it is hardly the most democratic solution out there and may be more vulnerable to corruption than others. However, if enough outside money and influence is entered into the equation, I think even the most idealistic system of democracy can be made hopelessly corrupt and ineffective. Therefore, campaign finance reform should still be the top priority in America. After that I'd love to see more improvements, such as proportional representation.
... Even if you ban money contributions to campaigns etc., it will simply shift into the black market (outright corruption), or turn out to be some kind of post facto corruption, where the politicians reap their "rewards" later when they leave office (like Gerhard Schroeder in Germany e.g.).
Don't be so cynical; not all corruption is equal. To some degree corruption will always exist in every government, but once it has become institutionalized -- even legitimized -- then it's really time to do something about it. I don't think the level of political corruption in Germany can in any way be compared to that in the United States.
What's a reasonable cost? Netflix, Lovefilm and Amazon Video are all pretty cheap.
Not quite. The first two are subscription based, which does not allow people to be selective in what they pay for. That's too much like the typical TV network business model that gives consumers no other choice but to buy access to all kinds of things they don't want in order to gain access to the few things they do want. What's more, these two services are not available worldwide (and have have no support for Linux). Amazon Instant Video does not seem to have these problems, but offers a much more limited choice, and/or lag far behind on what they are being allowed to offer.
The problem I think is that they have to compete with what is essentially the ultimate competitor: someone offering high-quality downloads, with no restrictions, for free. There's simply no way they can compete with that - if you're used to downloading whatever you want for free then anything a media company can offer will be worse.
That's why I think these measures are necessary, and a good thing. ...
Now you sound like someone working for the industry. You make the assumption that all of the people downloading for free are just a bunch of cheapskates, but that's not true. When it comes to TV shows and movies, typically the only choice consumers are ever given is between overpriced and free. You can't draw your conclusion until you've tried giving consumers a more reasonable choice. For example, look at how Radiohead released their album In Rainbows in 2007: they let people download it for free and only said "pay what you want", but most people ended up paying the average album price anyway.
In the same way, I'm absolutely certain that if given the choice e.g. Star Trek fans would gladly pay Paramount Studios directly for being able to stream episodes of a new series of the venerable franchise. You'd probably see a lot of people watching episodes for free as well (perhaps just out of curiosity), but I think most regular viewers would end up paying a reasonable price to prevent the series from being cancelled. For viewers, paying directly would be the ultimate way to say to Paramount, "I like this show and want it to continue!". For Paramount, that would be the ultimate in viewer feedback.
Specifically, I hear that it's generally not a good idea to virtualize Asterisk servers that you expect will be handling more than 12-15 simultaneous connections. However, at the moment I've got three Asterisk servers that are shouldering lighter loads and running just fine on qemu-kvm virtual machines.
For me, UEFI is not a problem, because I'll just continue to do what I've been doing for almost two decades: building my own servers and workstations from individual components.
On the other hand, if at some point in the future a client asks me to migrate all of their existing workstations and servers from Windows to Linux, then UEFI may make that difficult. For that matter, it may also become difficult to install Linux on the average laptop.
Will the the EU stand idly by (as I'm sure Uncle Sam will), or will it stand up for consumers everywhere before it's too late?
Yet, the more restrictive and draconian our policies become, the more that the EU seems to protecting these rights.
My commiserations. Being Dutch, I felt proud today, because of both of the Dutch Government rejecting ACTA and Neelie Kroes (who is also Dutch) standing up for Net Neutrality. But, I'm also an American, so I find it depressing when I read about how badly the Internet is being treated in the country of its birth. The only things to cheer about are when really bad laws manage to be defeated at the last moment. Still, having spent the first 13 years of my life there, part of me will always want to believe that America is the #1 defender of freedom and democracy in the world.
Intellectually, however, I know that isn't really true anymore and hasn't been for quite some time. More than ever before, America now resembles a plutocracy. Sure, all Americans are equal, but the ones with lots of money are definitely more equal than the rest. Of course, it's still a democracy, so statistically this isn't always reflected in the guy who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but just take a look at Congress: the majority of those folks are there because they agreed to primarily to look after the financial interests of the few (in which case everything else comes a distant second).
Therefore, it's not really a surprise to see the Internet being treated poorly in the good ol' U.S. of A. -- too many Corporations are just not happy with it. They would agree with the Chinese that it affords the common man too much freedom; during arguments, they've even mentioned the Great Firewall of China as an example of how large-scale Internet censorship can also be made to work in America. So, what can we do about it?
The only real solution that I can think of is to tackle the root the problem: to get money out of politics. Take a look at this book. That's one set of solutions; it may not be the best, but nothing less than real campaign finance reform is what Americans should aim for. If successful, I think we can expect American politicians to become rather different animals: ones that will actually be capable of rational thought, finding common ground with their opponents, compromising when necessary and otherwise just plain capable of making good decisions.
I wonder if they have IPV6 support, unfortunately searches on "the pirate bay" are blocked here at work. If tey do they could add billions of IP addresses!
That was my thought as well. Keep in mind that IPv6 addresses are often allocated in /64 and /48 subnets, so it's possible that's how the anti-piracy groups will be seeking to block them. Still, even if they attempt to block by the /48, that still leaves thousands of billions of these address ranges in which to hide. But, even with IPv4 it sounds like the TPB has address space to burn.
It's stupid, really. IMO, all that's necessary to end this ridiculous cat and mouse game is for the entertainment industry to offer streaming services to the masses at reasonable prices (per movie/show/series/episode/album/song) and all this bad behavior will be unnecessary on both sides.
Why? Are you too far in the middle of nowhere to get it over the air?
Over the air? Wow, do you mean like, with an antenna? I should have mentioned: I live in the Netherlands and for us that option completely disappeared in December 2006. All that's left now are the local cable companies, each of which is a monopolist in its own area. In my city, a basic cable package currently costs $21.61 a month.
To make matters more expensive, some of my favorite programs are only on Comedy Central (part of an extra package that costs $16.34 month) and HBO (another $18.77 a month), which adds up to a total of $56.72 a month. This is almost as much as I pay for my monthly 8/1 Mbps ADSL broadband Internet access ($44,34) and my cheap-o mobile phone subscription ($12.81) combined.
But, maybe whether you think that's cheap or not depends how many hours of TV you watch. At 40 hours a month, that means the privilege of watching my favorite shows legally (including several news programs) costs me $1.42 an hour. That doesn't sound too bad, right?
Perhaps. But my point is that I'm not being offered much choice in this matter either. The local cable company has maneuvered me into paying for their most expensive product package. This about six times as much as we used to pay two decades ago and gets us access to 119 channels with probably thousands of different programs.
However, I'm only interested in maybe 25 programs on 10 different channels over the course of an entire year. Why can't I just buy access to those shows only, and then be allowed to watch them whenever I want? If done properly, this should not have to cost me $1.42 an hour either.
Yet, this scenario seems to have about as much in common with reality as world peace: many of us find it all too easy to imagine, but those in power appear to be dead set against it. Of course, with the Internet in place and all of this being just information, it's no wonder that piracy is so commonplace.
Of course, I'm not the only one who feels this way. It looks like the current TV business model has changed little over the past century (since the dawn of commercial radio), with consumers now being asked to buy packages from their local cable TV providers that are more expensive than ever despite the prevalence of broadband Internet connectivity.
What it comes down to is money and monopoly power. All I want to see probably adds up to a maximum of 10 hours a week, including the news, some sporting events and one or two TV series. Yet, the only way for me to gain access to that specific content legally is to buy a cable subscription, along with one or two supplemental packages, that include dozens of other channels, and hundreds of other program items that I have no interest in. Yet, my only choice is all or nothing, and on top of that those few shows that I am interested in are regularly interrupted by advertisements, which makes the experience a lot less enjoyable.
On the other hand, many people would be more than happy to pay to watch just those shows they want to see via their broadband Internet connections -- and without any advertising. That way also, more of the money would go to the show's producers, who in turn would have a much better idea of how many people were actually watching their show every week. We know consumers want this, because of the huge scale on which TV shows are being pirated and distributed via the Internet. Nevertheless, the only things that consumers can expect to receive directly from the studios today are personal lawsuits regarding their involvement in file sharing networks.
Perhaps getting what we want as consumers will depend on the success of sites like fora.tv, although the prices they ask for access to their content can be pretty steep (e.g. $5 to $25 to watch a single program) -- hardly a strategy likely to make much of a dent in the numbers of people watching Game of Thrones illegally. It seems to me that if an entire season of that series costs $60 million to produce, that HBO could double their money if, at 10 episodes season, 10 million Internet viewers would be willing to pay $1.20 per episode to see it. However, none of the big U.S. studios seem willing to even entertain the idea of giving consumers a choice like that. How come?
... There is no such thing as free usable energy. Solar energy is definitely free, but to convert it into usable energy definitely is not.
True, but an electric car offers the only way to not be tied to any one energy source in particular. Fossil fuels, such as gasoline, will only become more expensive -- that is a certainty. But you can't say the same about electricity, because we will always be finding cheaper ways to generate it. Over the years, for example, the price of electricity from renewable sources, such as solar and wind, has only come down. Also, don't forget that a typical electric motor is far more efficient than even the most efficient internal combustion engine. As the current limitations associated with owning an electric vehicle disappear, so will most people's objections to buying them.
Yet another improvement on an outdated concept. The owners of cars with this type of engine will still be stuck in a the cycle of ever increasing gas prices. These days the only cars that impress me are the ones that offer an affordable escape out of this trap, even if the range is somewhat limited.
... The problem is that we do not have the technology to get stuff out of the Earth's gravity well with anything greater than 0.1% efficiency, and in the process of building that Enterprise-sized object we would destroy the Earth's atmosphere and ecosystem. ...
Not so fast. I'm not very optimistic about this project ever getting off of the ground either, but the issue that you raise is easily circumvented if most of the mass for the ship comes from a captured asteroid and the whole thing is manufactured and assembled in orbit.
So, when is Johnny Mnemonic going to run into trouble at the airport?
How I am even supposed to begin to recommend Linux for the average user when there are 100 different distros, each with its own quirks and issues? ...
You make the issue seem more confusing than it is.
Several years ago I started a project to set up a Linux environment at a veterinary practice in Amsterdam. It's only a little bit bigger than the Chester County Cat Hospital, but the interesting part is that it's spread out over three geographic locations. The idea was to tie it all together via some decent Internet connections, and have people's accounts and desktops follow them around from location to location while utilizing a distributed file system. I figured a system based on Kerberos, OpenLDAP and OpenAFS was really the only way to go.
Based on that requirement, I went looking for the best Desktop. I tried Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Debian. However, with the first two it soon became obvious that they had been developed primarily to function as SOHO systems for desktop and laptop machines. Yes, the Kerberos, OpenLDAP and OpenAFS packages were there, but it was difficult to get them to work. For example, Ubuntu and Mint alternatives for init, which allows them to start up faster, made things more difficult for me. The network manager was also a pain. Eventually I got it to go, but by that time I realized it wasn't going to be worth the effort.
That left plain old Debian stable (squeeze), which is also what the folks from the Kerberos and OpenAFS projects recommend. I installed Xfce on all of the workstations, so that support for older hardware would not be a problem, as well as a number of other applications, including two DICOM viewers, icedove, iceweasel, OpenOffice and three extra browsers. After the various printing problems had been addressed, everyone was quite happy with it all.
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As for the main topic, I would say that one of the reasons why Linux for the desktop has not taken off is because not enough Linux admins are familiar with Kerberos, OpenLDAP and distributed file systems like OpenAFS. It's one thing to set up a server and a few workstations using NFS, but that doesn't scale well at all. A whole lot more can be achieved using the aforementioned "magic" trio, but it does require more of an effort.
No one with any working braincells believes the world was created in 6 days , woman was created from a spare rib etc etc.
Try explaining that to Larry Wall.
Well, maybe he buy into all of that crap, but it seems he does subscribe to a good deal of it.
Agreed. I was thinking about saying it, but decided to let someone else say it instead.
It took me a long time to understand (at least, I think I do now) what the founding fathers meant with the right to bear arms. They had just been through a revolution in which an armed populace had been instrumental in throwing out a tyrant. More to the point, it was very important to them that if necessary the same thing be possible again in the future. I think they would agree that the US reached that point some time ago.
Not that I'm arguing for another civil war (yuk!), but the US really does need a new form of government. The wealthy elite have clearly figured out how to rig the whole system (media included) in their favor so that increasingly it always serves them first. The two-party democracies of the US and the UK now have tag-team governments that have too much in common with a one-party system. The two parties claim to be nothing like one another, but they're really just two sides of the same coin.
Witness how in both of these countries, the same heinous policies can persist after multiple changes of power. It may not even always be the fault of the new guys, but what else can they do if, when take over the reins of power, they find themselves wearing yet another harness?
In both the UK and the US, money really needs to be separated from politics first. After that, anything else is possible.
With a succession of US governments willing only to lower tax rates and thus only being able to cut spending in order to cut their deficit, and being populated ever more frequently by anti-science religious nuts, obviously they're no hurry to invest in any more huge science projects, such as the SSH.... I mean the SSC.
... Underestimating the enemy is dangerous.
My impression has been that the really difficult part to copy is the software; the drone will be useless without it, but it may be impossible for them to decrypt. Also, don't these things require a satellite network for flight control?