The EU is petty and small. This has nothing to do with M$ if it did they would have started fining them sooner, 2 years is a long time to just let them continue as usual in contempt of a decision.
This is about the EU trying to get even with America. They can't stand the fact that like Israel we will defend ourselves when attracted. They don't have the means to protect themselves from Islamic terrorism and they know it. Mostly they don't care because that terrorism is primarily directed at us and Israel. They don't like us defending ourselves though because it means their fuel costs go up, and yes they probably are more often victim of terrorism as the terrorists get desperate and decide they have to attack someone to stay relevant and realize that we are largely out of reach and Israel has learn to be a hard target. In the end though it comes down to follow the money and it leads to oil.
They don't like us destabilizing the middle east even if it is for our own good because these dictators are largely their cronies, cough* Fiance and Germany. They keep the oil flowing their direction and all they have to do is give a crazy person a nuclear reactor once every few decades, no problem their right? So they sit a bitch every bit us much as we do here in America about energy costs going up and blame us for it. Never mind the fact that WE have paid the premiums for stability in that region for thirty years, by keeping the place under control with a constant military presence. The memories of these Euro-LIBs is even shorter then that of people who subscribe to American liberalism. The street their gulps down the propaganda Kool-aid their socialist governments churn out.
Its easy for them to get everyone up in arms against some America company. These politicians get a champaign point, See See I did something about corporate abuse while not pissing any of their constituents off by hurting a company from their own economy, where unemployment is sky high compared to this country I might point out. At the same time the grab a little monetary pay-back by stealing revenue that would have gone to the US economy for goods produced here for export.
M$ owns the home user market sure, but they only care about it as it relates to their real bread and butter, large corporations. Microsoft likes owning the home and school markets only because it helps them control mind share and make sure when corporate decision makers look to alternatives they appear forigen and scary. M$ is all about sell expensive licenses for their backoffice products, and the Office products. Which is why the work so hard to obfuscate document formats and network protocols.
They get more value from keeping these hidden then the EU's fines take away. Office can be $300 per seat if you lack negotiating power.
They WILL PAY the fines until they can bribe their way out from under them for less.
They are not going to pull out of Europe because as I said the big corporations are the bread and butter those often happen to be MULTI-NATIONAL tell me, if Corporation X can't get windows and Office licenses for their plants in EU locations what are they likely to do. Run two different IT infrustuctures that interoperate poorly, M$ in the states ???? in the EU? I really doubt it they most likely will find away to either make ???? work accross the board, (HINT the last thing M$ wants) bribe M$ and the BSA to look the other way on license abuse. (M$ still gets something but maybe not as much).
They WILL NOT LEAVE the EU because neither of those options are going to be as good for them as simply paying the fines.
Nothing to worry about its not as if these things are done in some sorta crazy Microsoft closed source digital codec or something. These are analog recordings. While it might be costly it should always be resonably possible to build a new playback device even without any original players to look at. There are only so many ways to do analog video on magnetic tape after all, basically get the read heads over the right tracks and make get the timings right.
I am not a doctor nor have I really studied this in any way but if I were to simply speculate as a sort of informed lay person I would be it has to do with not being really frozen at all.
What they are doing here in the article is not freezing the patient just lowering their body temperature to the point where most biological process appear to stop. That is great if you are quickly bleeding to death from an arterial wound it would be nice if we could stop your heart for a while without you going brain dead, which you won't because the nerve cells should be stopped as well and not require oxygen or glucose which your heart would ordinarilly be needed to deliver.
This would be perfect if you could be frozen solid; but you can't because each cell in your body is filled with cytoplasum(I thik its called) which is mostly water and would expand if frozen. You would then run into the old soda can in the freezer problem, the walls would burst. My guess is you would die when thawed.
So now here you are not really frozen and also not biologically functioning either. Things pretty well need to be frozen solid or else they do rot, food goes bad even in the fridge after a while because certain things like bacteria(which is already in your body, so don't just say well put you in a vacum or somethig) is more hearty then us warm bloods, and will continue to do its thing. There are also some radio active elements in your body as well which might cause harm. Ordinarily as minor damage happens and a cell or two dies you would simply build new ones, but you can't because you are on ice. If kept frozen to long I would be enough damage would happen that there would be simply to much truma for you bodies normal repair devices to cope with when you warm again.
I can't get over the face that he got even one red sent. This complete and utter BS.
I don't know about you but when I have multi-million dollar digital assets I sure would not take the time to run a copy off to floppy or CD nope no way not with my busy schedule. This guy probably had jack or less then that.
Yea this should be beyond funny in a few years when we hear about all the weird degenerative conditions resulting from vibrating your jaw bone constantly.
I think for the most part spelling things with strict phonics(fonics for or simplified spellers) simply won't work. There is going to be to be a great deal of in fighting with various dictionary authorities and different groups over what things sound like and how they should therefore be spelled.
Spelling does not have to be perfect to be read easily we have seen that most readers slide right by even if you botch a few letters in the middle of the word. We should all try to do a reasonable job though so we have something which can be universally read and easily. Its not hard to figure out what the word was supposed to be when there are one or two mistakes in a sentence what is hard is when stuff is all spelled by sound and I don't don't speak like you. The article was almost impossible for me to read. What is even more painful is when stuff is not spelled consistantly the same way. Right now we have a fairly strong agreement on how things should be spelled. As soon as we start changing stuff its going to be hard to determine, again because of the likely in fighting, what is right.
It won't be long before you and the guy sitting next to you are forced to use your jugement more often since the dictionary is in flux and we will have years of documents where stuff is spelt all sorts of interesting ways. That is really hard to read. Have you ever tried to read stuff from before Johnson's 1755 Dictionary was published? It hurts, Geoffery Chaucer would spell words several different was in one manuscript. It makes it damn hard to read.
Also the article points out the information encoded in our prefixes and suffex characters, as well as root words, phonetic spelling would deprive us of this. I can in many cases as a,native speaker any way, make some pretty good guesses at the meaning of a word I have never seen before even with no sentence contense because I know some history of my langauge, where stuff comes from and a good collection of root meanings. The article cited dougnut as and example if you did not know what that was donut tells you nothing. You might know something about cooking and recongnize the dough and at least be able to undertand that this is something one might eat and obtain at a bakery, if you do things the way we do now. The trade off here is lessing the initial learning curve at the cost vauleble functionality for more accomplished users. It would be like swithing form BASH to command.com. It makes no sense.
Have you ever stopped to think that the people downloading stuff from places like AllOfMP3.com would never have purchased the material through the traditional distibution anyway? You talked about economics, well guess what in a capitalist society you don't have ANY right to make money at all from anything you sell. If people are not willing to pay the price you ask for something that you bring to market then you can't sell any. That aribitrary sum you mentioned well maybe the vaule of your art is elastic and their is nothing arbitrary about that value at all maybe that is the MARKET VALUE. Now you can argue that at that price their is no incentive for production and that is fine too, but that just means their is NO MARKET for it. Face it Art of this kind is not a need people have just a desire its UTILITY is pretty low compared with other goods they might buy. If you can't produce for less then in todays ecomonomy you might just not have a place. DEAL WITH IT!
To all you lusers out there that think dos has no value, you are way wrong. I know there are many industrial applications like CNC where it is still in very common use. From my own experience I can tell you that it is *THE* platform for scan guns and automatic inventory management used in wherehouses and large reatial shops. Chances are pretty good if you have ever purchased anything in a large reatil store chain, or that has spent time on a self in a wherehouse it was scanned with a handheld scanner runing you guessed it DOS\>
Becomeing an ISP might give them more standing for law suits on the net-neutrality frount. Small and local ISP have as much to loose from neutrality being taken away as google does but for different reasons. This might allow google anouther avenue for law suits against the big carriers and a seccond chance to stop all this BS in the courts, before congress gets a chance to really screw things up.
Its easy to change search engines today. It was easier yesterday and it will be harder next week, month, year etc. Seach used to be a website you visited and that was all. Now there is all sorts of browser integration, webservice calls from applications, and plenty of other attemps to create more secure lasting relationships with a particular search service then your bookmarks list. Google and others are doing exactly what MS did, embrace and extend.
Think about it this way. Once upon a time if you did not like MS then there were plenty of other DOSes out there. Chances were pretty good your application could be easily rebuilt for some UNIX variant as well. Gradually M$ started including all sorts of things the application developers would come to depend on. Once that happend you had much less choice in OS.
If swiching search engines actually breakes my web browser or means the integrated features in my window manager/shell are going to quit working I am much less likely to do it. See google Desktop, picasa, toolbar and so on.
Fact is most people don't understand DRM. I have talked to people who own and IPOD most of them never realized that their was no reason the device could not copy files back up to their computers. They don't understand the technology. When you exaplain to them that the device was crippled most are upset. Many even wish they'd selected something else.
The issue here is that the media is driving DRM and the media also controls the dialog. DRM, what it means and what it does needs to be brought to peoples attention. The FSF is trying to do that, they are not all that successful but they are trying. What the author of the TFA does not seem to understand is the logical conclution of DRM is that he will lose his ablility to publish because he won't be able to sign his article with a thought police approved signature unless he hooks up with a big media house. The freedom the FSF is fighting for is the very one he is enjoying and he is useing to speak against them. Sure it is his right but it is pretty dumb.
This is why gun registration is such a bad thing. Most military people are going to obey orders because enough of the people they serve with will shoot them for not following orders if ordered to do so themselves. It will take regual citizens organizing an armed resistence of there own which is capeable of defeating the Military esablishment at least in gorilla combat operations. The more and more I look at what is happening in this country now and look back on history the more convinced I become this is where things are headed. Ironically it might be the Totalitarian hopeful militent Islamists, who demonstrate that a war can be one against the existing government. Their zelous effort to fight democracy might be what shows average Americans how to regain it.
You have a good point but we had alread taken steps to keep her alive artifically, and done so knowing she had suffered extensive injury. Maintianing that action constituted inaction, which is always preferable when no pressing need to act exists and its unclear what the results of action might be. Its the cautionary priciple. If you don't understand don't do it. We might have allowed someone who had the hope of recovery to die, when we should have waited and learned more. Treating her for the effects of her injury was already a path we had chosen to go down taking aditional steps to keep her beyond her natrual life would be an entirely new decision process and one where I might be very inclinded to take your view and let her go since she cant chose to be treated.
One more thing yes I do realize that those who decided to oppose the colonial system were infact a minority. So are we most likely. Remember thought the winners are the ones who get to write the history books. They key is to win.
Would a violent protest or coup really be unjust? I have been thinking on this subject for a long time. What does this type of activity do and who is really forcing it on us. Our nation is founded on the free exchange of ideas, DRM is more or less a plot to restrict the free exchange of information and by extension ideas. Our Revolutionary war was basically fought over taxation without representation and the right to express unpopular ideas. Both of these grievances were against the current government.
The sure the media conglomerates are the ones pushing DRM but it is government forcing it on us. How is the media cartel different from the aristocracy who cheated everyone else out of fair representation back then? We decided it was just to fight a war then why not now?
What is your point? The US Gov is finding for security reasons it might be objectionable to use hardware and software from an "Untrusted source" and opting ot get it from elsewhere. If you are a forigen entity and have reason not to trust or to fear the US then Windows and US manufactured PCs would both be bad choices. Shame on your security people for allowing them in the door. Shame or your whole system if you can't either make stuff yourself or source if form some power you do trust.
It is insane to let someone graduate that can't develop without an IDE. They are going to run into a situation where something won't link or the project file is damaged or whatever and need to know what really happens. They are going to need to work on a project that the wizards the IDE comes with don't provide a good start for at some point. Students MUST know how to program not just use an IDE.
That said it is equally insane for students to graduate without some familiarity with modern tools or the attitude that all those tools are bad. Most modern IDEs are really great tools and they have lots of boilerplate code and builtin framework stuffs that are great too. ave neat features for tracking things across modules and the like that are extreemly painful with just a text editor. In short they can help you be extreemly productive. They can also be a cruch and very limiting if you are trying to do anything new and different when all you know is the wizards.
Perhaps there should be a course or two in programing, where IDEs are not used and then a course or two in software development, where IDEs get used. Its a fine distinction I know but it could be useful in other aspects too. In school almost all of our assignments were completely independant. Which is fine for programing courses but in the real worls I work all the time on little pices of things where I can't change the interface with the other code and often don't even get to see the other code. I am just supposed to write a class that implents a list of methods I have been given and somebody else is gonna use it and they won't be allowed to chage it. This is the type of experience the software development course could provide.
Take is few steps beyond that; lets ban any sort of communication at all. We have to preven conspiracy some how. Not to mention communicating an shareing information is what allows all crimes to happen in the first place.
Hey you'd never have been able to steal my car if nobody went and told you how to drive one.
The only reason my credit card is vulnerable to theft is becase people can read the number. I am gonna sue the government for teaching literacy.
Hey kid drop back away from the printer we are taking you to jail. The only reason to have a printer is certainly for producing forged documents.
These laws are moronic can you just image if they were enforced as writen. Honestly I think we need to redesign the legislative process, (at least here in the States and from the looks of things the UK as well) to include imediate judicaial review with a stawman case or something to keep these foolish ideas from every really hitting the books.
They are not going to have the format though. M$ is going to win with HD-DVD. P3 won't out sell the 360 period. As such it won't be the deciding factor in the dvd war. I am skeptical that the games will be enough to really sway the dvd war one way or antoher anyway, and Sony is not even likely to have the biggest platform. Once M$ comes along with a chaep way for X-box owners to get an HD-DVD play and PS3 blue-ray impact will be more then offset. Lets face facts M$ ALLWAYS wins at the end of the day. Sony and Google are not going to stop them any more then Netscape, Novell or Digital could. Whatever Windows plays is gonna be the new DVD standard Sony is just going to get kicked in the ribs over this and probably for years to come.
Look at it this way when nobody invests in the equipment to make Blue-ray disks because HD-DVD ends up being the standward as I suspect it will. Only Sony is gonna be makeing games that use Blue-ray disks. The rest of PS3 games will be restricted to DVD media capacity just like the X-box and Nintendo's offerings. M$ and Nintendo can more then likely release their next gen systems sooner without angering the public as well thanks to the lower price points at which time they will be able to use the new media. PS3 versions of games will then suck by comparison with the counter offerings on the new systems, and Sony will be marginalized in the console industry every bit as much as Nintendo has been maybe more because unlike Nintendo Sony won't have a nitche. M$ WINS PERIOD.
True but MIXIX is a teaching OS and it is very effective as far as its ability to clearly show OS concepts. It is extreemly clean and easy to understand and start hacking on. I have to say working with MINIX was one of the most positive experiences in the Operating systems course I took when I was in school. It is not useful as a platform, mostly because of file system limitations, 64meg file size cap sorta sucks; but it is a great way to learn how things are done, and it is perhaps the ONLY true micro-kernel which can do anything more then boot on the hardware most people have access too.
Also removing that 64meg limit would be childs play. Removing that limit and keeping good performance would be an interesting project. It has perhaps already been done I have not looked at minix3 only prior versions.
I have to agree I would still be willing to pay $30 for say 4gigs of total transfer at 1.5mbits/sec or something. If you sell me the service as unlimited then I should get unlimited. Don't advertise something you can't deliver.
I am with you except for supporting the old API. When a new major relase comes out it should not be backward compatible at the driver level. If it is we will just end up with a bunch of unmaintained drivers sitting about; which will lead to problems. The other thing is all that backward compatibility would add tons of cruft to the driver layer which would eventally just slow down development. People can wait for the drivers they need to be ported to the next major version, before they upgrade.
The only problem with that is its not really going to happen until all the older harware fails in some un-repairable way. Why would I want to (apart from the fun of doing so) build a computer as a wire wrap job which will never run nearly as fast as the Athlon I have to day. DRM might prevent me from upgrading my current system. It might see me hacking PCBs togeter and inventing my own fixes for things when they break but I doubt I would want to use anything built from scrach as a general everyday platform anytime soon. Lets face it, depending on how far this DRM crap goes we are screwed. Certain things have to stabilize fast in a computer for it to be useful in todays world. These are memory and CPUs and they just gotta be ICs if we can't get those without DRM then we can't build a computer now or ever that will out perform the machine I am writing this post on right now. Now if we can get those things or even similar devices like microcontrollers we might be able to get creative enough with parallelization and other ideas to build useable DRM free machines. Even then though as a community we are going to have to agree on some architecture standards and conventions so we can get something done. I mean if we all have entirely customer hardware we can't then share software. Well we maybe could share highlevel stuff but where do I get that compiler for the CPU I designed on the bar-napkin last night and built today? After all my system is 32-bit but to let me clock the cpu faster I only put in 16-bit ALUs; to add registers loaded with full 32-bit values you gotta use mulitple 16-bit adds or push things out the address lines to the exgternal 32-bit ALU and then read the result back from a buffer how'd you say yours works again?
The future looks pretty bleak for most of use hobbists. We are gonna have to work more closely together then every or settle for returning to the 1970's from a computer technology stand point. I am ok with either really in the end but I think the OSS community is getting a little self dilluted with the "well well..Then I'll make my own... with with... black-jack and Hockers.." mentality. It just can't work that we sadly. Sure we have the talent to design things and maybe even the skills to execute them but we don't have the capital. I can't afford to build a IC fab plant can you? Software is one thing because once somebody built us a good C compiler for the commonly available computers the barriers to entry were effectively gone. There was that one big step and the GNU people took it. Everything just sort of falls into place from there as long as interest remains. Hardware well that is a problem because you can't just make copies for free. There are reproduction costs where with software there are basicly none.
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This is about the EU trying to get even with America. They can't stand the fact that like Israel we will defend ourselves when attracted. They don't have the means to protect themselves from Islamic terrorism and they know it. Mostly they don't care because that terrorism is primarily directed at us and Israel. They don't like us defending ourselves though because it means their fuel costs go up, and yes they probably are more often victim of terrorism as the terrorists get desperate and decide they have to attack someone to stay relevant and realize that we are largely out of reach and Israel has learn to be a hard target. In the end though it comes down to follow the money and it leads to oil.
They don't like us destabilizing the middle east even if it is for our own good because these dictators are largely their cronies, cough* Fiance and Germany. They keep the oil flowing their direction and all they have to do is give a crazy person a nuclear reactor once every few decades, no problem their right? So they sit a bitch every bit us much as we do here in America about energy costs going up and blame us for it. Never mind the fact that WE have paid the premiums for stability in that region for thirty years, by keeping the place under control with a constant military presence. The memories of these Euro-LIBs is even shorter then that of people who subscribe to American liberalism. The street their gulps down the propaganda Kool-aid their socialist governments churn out.
Its easy for them to get everyone up in arms against some America company. These politicians get a champaign point, See See I did something about corporate abuse while not pissing any of their constituents off by hurting a company from their own economy, where unemployment is sky high compared to this country I might point out. At the same time the grab a little monetary pay-back by stealing revenue that would have gone to the US economy for goods produced here for export.
M$ owns the home user market sure, but they only care about it as it relates to their real bread and butter, large corporations. Microsoft likes owning the home and school markets only because it helps them control mind share and make sure when corporate decision makers look to alternatives they appear forigen and scary. M$ is all about sell expensive licenses for their backoffice products, and the Office products. Which is why the work so hard to obfuscate document formats and network protocols.
They get more value from keeping these hidden then the EU's fines take away. Office can be $300 per seat if you lack negotiating power.
They WILL PAY the fines until they can bribe their way out from under them for less.
They are not going to pull out of Europe because as I said the big corporations are the bread and butter those often happen to be MULTI-NATIONAL tell me, if Corporation X can't get windows and Office licenses for their plants in EU locations what are they likely to do. Run two different IT infrustuctures that interoperate poorly, M$ in the states ???? in the EU? I really doubt it they most likely will find away to either make ???? work accross the board, (HINT the last thing M$ wants) bribe M$ and the BSA to look the other way on license abuse. (M$ still gets something but maybe not as much).
They WILL NOT LEAVE the EU because neither of those options are going to be as good for them as simply paying the fines.
Nothing to worry about its not as if these things are done in some sorta crazy Microsoft closed source digital codec or something. These are analog recordings. While it might be costly it should always be resonably possible to build a new playback device even without any original players to look at. There are only so many ways to do analog video on magnetic tape after all, basically get the read heads over the right tracks and make get the timings right.
I am not a doctor nor have I really studied this in any way but if I were to simply speculate as a sort of informed lay person I would be it has to do with not being really frozen at all.
What they are doing here in the article is not freezing the patient just lowering their body temperature to the point where most biological process appear to stop. That is great if you are quickly bleeding to death from an arterial wound it would be nice if we could stop your heart for a while without you going brain dead, which you won't because the nerve cells should be stopped as well and not require oxygen or glucose which your heart would ordinarilly be needed to deliver.
This would be perfect if you could be frozen solid; but you can't because each cell in your body is filled with cytoplasum(I thik its called) which is mostly water and would expand if frozen. You would then run into the old soda can in the freezer problem, the walls would burst. My guess is you would die when thawed.
So now here you are not really frozen and also not biologically functioning either. Things pretty well need to be frozen solid or else they do rot, food goes bad even in the fridge after a while because certain things like bacteria(which is already in your body, so don't just say well put you in a vacum or somethig) is more hearty then us warm bloods, and will continue to do its thing. There are also some radio active elements in your body as well which might cause harm. Ordinarily as minor damage happens and a cell or two dies you would simply build new ones, but you can't because you are on ice. If kept frozen to long I would be enough damage would happen that there would be simply to much truma for you bodies normal repair devices to cope with when you warm again.
I can't get over the face that he got even one red sent. This complete and utter BS.
I don't know about you but when I have multi-million dollar digital assets I sure would not take the time to run a copy off to floppy or CD nope no way not with my busy schedule. This guy probably had jack or less then that.
Yea this should be beyond funny in a few years when we hear about all the weird degenerative conditions resulting from vibrating your jaw bone constantly.
I think for the most part spelling things with strict phonics(fonics for or simplified spellers) simply won't work. There is going to be to be a great deal of in fighting with various dictionary authorities and different groups over what things sound like and how they should therefore be spelled.
,native speaker any way, make some pretty good guesses at the meaning of a word I have never seen before even with no sentence contense because I know some history of my langauge, where stuff comes from and a good collection of root meanings. The article cited dougnut as and example if you did not know what that was donut tells you nothing. You might know something about cooking and recongnize the dough and at least be able to undertand that this is something one might eat and obtain at a bakery, if you do things the way we do now. The trade off here is lessing the initial learning curve at the cost vauleble functionality for more accomplished users. It would be like swithing form BASH to command.com. It makes no sense.
Spelling does not have to be perfect to be read easily we have seen that most readers slide right by even if you botch a few letters in the middle of the word. We should all try to do a reasonable job though so we have something which can be universally read and easily. Its not hard to figure out what the word was supposed to be when there are one or two mistakes in a sentence what is hard is when stuff is all spelled by sound and I don't don't speak like you. The article was almost impossible for me to read. What is even more painful is when stuff is not spelled consistantly the same way. Right now we have a fairly strong agreement on how things should be spelled. As soon as we start changing stuff its going to be hard to determine, again because of the likely in fighting, what is right.
It won't be long before you and the guy sitting next to you are forced to use your jugement more often since the dictionary is in flux and we will have years of documents where stuff is spelt all sorts of interesting ways. That is really hard to read. Have you ever tried to read stuff from before Johnson's 1755 Dictionary was published? It hurts, Geoffery Chaucer would spell words several different was in one manuscript. It makes it damn hard to read.
Also the article points out the information encoded in our prefixes and suffex characters, as well as root words, phonetic spelling would deprive us of this. I can in many cases as a
Have you ever stopped to think that the people downloading stuff from places like AllOfMP3.com would never have purchased the material through the traditional distibution anyway? You talked about economics, well guess what in a capitalist society you don't have ANY right to make money at all from anything you sell. If people are not willing to pay the price you ask for something that you bring to market then you can't sell any. That aribitrary sum you mentioned well maybe the vaule of your art is elastic and their is nothing arbitrary about that value at all maybe that is the MARKET VALUE. Now you can argue that at that price their is no incentive for production and that is fine too, but that just means their is NO MARKET for it. Face it Art of this kind is not a need people have just a desire its UTILITY is pretty low compared with other goods they might buy. If you can't produce for less then in todays ecomonomy you might just not have a place. DEAL WITH IT!
To all you lusers out there that think dos has no value, you are way wrong. I know there are many industrial applications like CNC where it is still in very common use. From my own experience I can tell you that it is *THE* platform for scan guns and automatic inventory management used in wherehouses and large reatial shops. Chances are pretty good if you have ever purchased anything in a large reatil store chain, or that has spent time on a self in a wherehouse it was scanned with a handheld scanner runing you guessed it DOS\>
Becomeing an ISP might give them more standing for law suits on the net-neutrality frount. Small and local ISP have as much to loose from neutrality being taken away as google does but for different reasons. This might allow google anouther avenue for law suits against the big carriers and a seccond chance to stop all this BS in the courts, before congress gets a chance to really screw things up.
Its easy to change search engines today. It was easier yesterday and it will be harder next week, month, year etc. Seach used to be a website you visited and that was all. Now there is all sorts of browser integration, webservice calls from applications, and plenty of other attemps to create more secure lasting relationships with a particular search service then your bookmarks list. Google and others are doing exactly what MS did, embrace and extend.
Think about it this way. Once upon a time if you did not like MS then there were plenty of other DOSes out there. Chances were pretty good your application could be easily rebuilt for some UNIX variant as well. Gradually M$ started including all sorts of things the application developers would come to depend on. Once that happend you had much less choice in OS.
If swiching search engines actually breakes my web browser or means the integrated features in my window manager/shell are going to quit working I am much less likely to do it. See google Desktop, picasa, toolbar and so on.
Fact is most people don't understand DRM. I have talked to people who own and IPOD most of them never realized that their was no reason the device could not copy files back up to their computers. They don't understand the technology. When you exaplain to them that the device was crippled most are upset. Many even wish they'd selected something else.
The issue here is that the media is driving DRM and the media also controls the dialog. DRM, what it means and what it does needs to be brought to peoples attention. The FSF is trying to do that, they are not all that successful but they are trying. What the author of the TFA does not seem to understand is the logical conclution of DRM is that he will lose his ablility to publish because he won't be able to sign his article with a thought police approved signature unless he hooks up with a big media house. The freedom the FSF is fighting for is the very one he is enjoying and he is useing to speak against them. Sure it is his right but it is pretty dumb.
This is why gun registration is such a bad thing. Most military people are going to obey orders because enough of the people they serve with will shoot them for not following orders if ordered to do so themselves. It will take regual citizens organizing an armed resistence of there own which is capeable of defeating the Military esablishment at least in gorilla combat operations. The more and more I look at what is happening in this country now and look back on history the more convinced I become this is where things are headed. Ironically it might be the Totalitarian hopeful militent Islamists, who demonstrate that a war can be one against the existing government. Their zelous effort to fight democracy might be what shows average Americans how to regain it.
You have a good point but we had alread taken steps to keep her alive artifically, and done so knowing she had suffered extensive injury. Maintianing that action constituted inaction, which is always preferable when no pressing need to act exists and its unclear what the results of action might be. Its the cautionary priciple. If you don't understand don't do it. We might have allowed someone who had the hope of recovery to die, when we should have waited and learned more. Treating her for the effects of her injury was already a path we had chosen to go down taking aditional steps to keep her beyond her natrual life would be an entirely new decision process and one where I might be very inclinded to take your view and let her go since she cant chose to be treated.
One more thing yes I do realize that those who decided to oppose the colonial system were infact a minority. So are we most likely. Remember thought the winners are the ones who get to write the history books. They key is to win.
Would a violent protest or coup really be unjust? I have been thinking on this subject for a long time. What does this type of activity do and who is really forcing it on us. Our nation is founded on the free exchange of ideas, DRM is more or less a plot to restrict the free exchange of information and by extension ideas. Our Revolutionary war was basically fought over taxation without representation and the right to express unpopular ideas. Both of these grievances were against the current government.
The sure the media conglomerates are the ones pushing DRM but it is government forcing it on us. How is the media cartel different from the aristocracy who cheated everyone else out of fair representation back then? We decided it was just to fight a war then why not now?
What is your point? The US Gov is finding for security reasons it might be objectionable to use hardware and software from an "Untrusted source" and opting ot get it from elsewhere. If you are a forigen entity and have reason not to trust or to fear the US then Windows and US manufactured PCs would both be bad choices. Shame on your security people for allowing them in the door. Shame or your whole system if you can't either make stuff yourself or source if form some power you do trust.
Well no... If you cite the source it is not plagiarism; so much as it simple copyright infringment.
It is insane to let someone graduate that can't develop without an IDE. They are going to run into a situation where something won't link or the project file is damaged or whatever and need to know what really happens. They are going to need to work on a project that the wizards the IDE comes with don't provide a good start for at some point. Students MUST know how to program not just use an IDE.
That said it is equally insane for students to graduate without some familiarity with modern tools or the attitude that all those tools are bad. Most modern IDEs are really great tools and they have lots of boilerplate code and builtin framework stuffs that are great too. ave neat features for tracking things across modules and the like that are extreemly painful with just a text editor. In short they can help you be extreemly productive. They can also be a cruch and very limiting if you are trying to do anything new and different when all you know is the wizards.
Perhaps there should be a course or two in programing, where IDEs are not used and then a course or two in software development, where IDEs get used. Its a fine distinction I know but it could be useful in other aspects too. In school almost all of our assignments were completely independant. Which is fine for programing courses but in the real worls I work all the time on little pices of things where I can't change the interface with the other code and often don't even get to see the other code. I am just supposed to write a class that implents a list of methods I have been given and somebody else is gonna use it and they won't be allowed to chage it. This is the type of experience the software development course could provide.
Take is few steps beyond that; lets ban any sort of communication at all. We have to preven conspiracy some how. Not to mention communicating an shareing information is what allows all crimes to happen in the first place.
Hey you'd never have been able to steal my car if nobody went and told you how to drive one.
The only reason my credit card is vulnerable to theft is becase people can read the number. I am gonna sue the government for teaching literacy.
Hey kid drop back away from the printer we are taking you to jail. The only reason to have a printer is certainly for producing forged documents.
These laws are moronic can you just image if they were enforced as writen. Honestly I think we need to redesign the legislative process, (at least here in the States and from the looks of things the UK as well) to include imediate judicaial review with a stawman case or something to keep these foolish ideas from every really hitting the books.
They are not going to have the format though. M$ is going to win with HD-DVD. P3 won't out sell the 360 period. As such it won't be the deciding factor in the dvd war. I am skeptical that the games will be enough to really sway the dvd war one way or antoher anyway, and Sony is not even likely to have the biggest platform. Once M$ comes along with a chaep way for X-box owners to get an HD-DVD play and PS3 blue-ray impact will be more then offset. Lets face facts M$ ALLWAYS wins at the end of the day. Sony and Google are not going to stop them any more then Netscape, Novell or Digital could. Whatever Windows plays is gonna be the new DVD standard Sony is just going to get kicked in the ribs over this and probably for years to come.
Look at it this way when nobody invests in the equipment to make Blue-ray disks because HD-DVD ends up being the standward as I suspect it will. Only Sony is gonna be makeing games that use Blue-ray disks. The rest of PS3 games will be restricted to DVD media capacity just like the X-box and Nintendo's offerings. M$ and Nintendo can more then likely release their next gen systems sooner without angering the public as well thanks to the lower price points at which time they will be able to use the new media. PS3 versions of games will then suck by comparison with the counter offerings on the new systems, and Sony will be marginalized in the console industry every bit as much as Nintendo has been maybe more because unlike Nintendo Sony won't have a nitche. M$ WINS PERIOD.
True but MIXIX is a teaching OS and it is very effective as far as its ability to clearly show OS concepts. It is extreemly clean and easy to understand and start hacking on. I have to say working with MINIX was one of the most positive experiences in the Operating systems course I took when I was in school. It is not useful as a platform, mostly because of file system limitations, 64meg file size cap sorta sucks; but it is a great way to learn how things are done, and it is perhaps the ONLY true micro-kernel which can do anything more then boot on the hardware most people have access too.
Also removing that 64meg limit would be childs play. Removing that limit and keeping good performance would be an interesting project. It has perhaps already been done I have not looked at minix3 only prior versions.
I have to agree I would still be willing to pay $30 for say 4gigs of total transfer at 1.5mbits/sec or something. If you sell me the service as unlimited then I should get unlimited. Don't advertise something you can't deliver.
I am with you except for supporting the old API. When a new major relase comes out it should not be backward compatible at the driver level. If it is we will just end up with a bunch of unmaintained drivers sitting about; which will lead to problems. The other thing is all that backward compatibility would add tons of cruft to the driver layer which would eventally just slow down development. People can wait for the drivers they need to be ported to the next major version, before they upgrade.
The only problem with that is its not really going to happen until all the older harware fails in some un-repairable way. Why would I want to (apart from the fun of doing so) build a computer as a wire wrap job which will never run nearly as fast as the Athlon I have to day. DRM might prevent me from upgrading my current system. It might see me hacking PCBs togeter and inventing my own fixes for things when they break but I doubt I would want to use anything built from scrach as a general everyday platform anytime soon. Lets face it, depending on how far this DRM crap goes we are screwed. Certain things have to stabilize fast in a computer for it to be useful in todays world. These are memory and CPUs and they just gotta be ICs if we can't get those without DRM then we can't build a computer now or ever that will out perform the machine I am writing this post on right now. Now if we can get those things or even similar devices like microcontrollers we might be able to get creative enough with parallelization and other ideas to build useable DRM free machines. Even then though as a community we are going to have to agree on some architecture standards and conventions so we can get something done. I mean if we all have entirely customer hardware we can't then share software. Well we maybe could share highlevel stuff but where do I get that compiler for the CPU I designed on the bar-napkin last night and built today? After all my system is 32-bit but to let me clock the cpu faster I only put in 16-bit ALUs; to add registers loaded with full 32-bit values you gotta use mulitple 16-bit adds or push things out the address lines to the exgternal 32-bit ALU and then read the result back from a buffer how'd you say yours works again?
... with with ... black-jack and Hockers .." mentality. It just can't work that we sadly. Sure we have the talent to design things and maybe even the skills to execute them but we don't have the capital. I can't afford to build a IC fab plant can you? Software is one thing because once somebody built us a good C compiler for the commonly available computers the barriers to entry were effectively gone. There was that one big step and the GNU people took it. Everything just sort of falls into place from there as long as interest remains. Hardware well that is a problem because you can't just make copies for free. There are reproduction costs where with software there are basicly none.
The future looks pretty bleak for most of use hobbists. We are gonna have to work more closely together then every or settle for returning to the 1970's from a computer technology stand point. I am ok with either really in the end but I think the OSS community is getting a little self dilluted with the "well well..Then I'll make my own