Nero is to K3B arguably what OSX is to Linux
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Nero Burning for Linux
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It is one thing to just do most of the same things, but how you do them is the real issue. In that respect, Nero is still much farther ahead than K3B. That isn't to say that K3B is a bad product, in fact for most of my needs it is great. Nero for Windows is a very aggressively designed and updated product. It supports basically every burner out there, every type of media, burns any type of disk (VCD, SVCD, DVD movie, data, music, etc) and is just... solid and slick in how it does stuff.
Again, it's not that K3B isn't competitive. It certainly is, but it's not there yet. Nero for Linux appears to be identical in its UI to the Windows version so it's another great way to bridge Linux and Windows. The bottom line is that it is very good, many people have it because it comes with many burners and having it on Linux will be another program that people who are wont to not learn how to use their computer will be able to say, "oh I know that program" that is part of their semi-daily use.
Most of the smaller labels out there don't seem to particularly care about file sharing. Century Media, which isn't that small, but isn't RIAA affiliated to the best of my knowledge doesn't do these kinds of suits. I guess it's because they're not so big that most of the people are just swiping free MP3s that they have no intention of buying. I have frequently downloaded metal MP3s and I go out and buy the real CD when I can find it.
I guess it comes down to, what is the average file sharer's excuse other than "I want it, I want it now and I want it for free?" Most of the file sharing I have seen among other college students isn't obscure stuff, but top 40s type stuff. It's stuff that if you go to buy it online you can find a ton of bargains on. Not only that, but the "poor college student" excuse is bullshit. The most prolific abusers of file sharing I have seen were people that could afford to **buy** most of what they downloaded.
I'm glad that the RIAA has cut down on its lobbying and started doing its job. The RIAA is supposed to protect artists and labels, and that's what they are doing now. New laws don't mean a damn thing unless they are so draconian that enforcement is trivial. These lawsuits are not even in the same league, let alone as some of the laws that people like Fritz Hollings have tried to foist on people.
And you know what's amusing? This is precisely the type of copyright defense that was originally intended in America by our founders. So stop your bitching, you could be arrested by the FBI and sent to a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. People like Fritz and Orrin Hatch would love to send file sharers to prison, but the RIAA is happy with a few thousand dollars in civil liabilities which sure beats the fines you would pay in criminal court. In fact, these mass lawsuits are a drop in the bucket compared to what you could face.
Btw, if anyone wants to shop for cheap metal, I have found http:///www.theendrecords.com to have a great online store for distributing popular and obscure stuff. It's even got free shipping in the U.S.
They don't like it when people Google bomb and if they do it themselves, they'll just be hypocrites. It doesn't matter that they own their search service, no one likes a hypocrite who lectures "do as I say, not as I do."
People just naturally grow contemptuous of rules that are made by someone who says that they don't apply to them. The government has found that out the hard way when it exempts itself from the Constitution of all things when going after such "vermin" as drug dealers.
Fat chance of that! They are still getting used to that "VHS and DVD thang." They hire actors and actresses for as much as $20,000,000 then whine that their movies cannot make a profit at $52,000,000 in average revenue. You don't have to be an accountant to realize that there are few thespians who are worth that much money to the public. Most of the time when people react to previews of cool looking movies, the actors and actresses are only one of many variables.
I'd like to make a bet with the CEOs of every major studio. Make only 10% of your "serious" movies each year with the big names and then do everything else with people that look really good coming out of acting school who have a passion for the job. Cut those movie tickets 50% in cost, and put just as much money into script writing, directing and special effects as the other 10%.
I bet that within a few years, those 90% will be significantly more profitable because people will be able to not only see a cool movie, but see it for as little as $2.50 for senior citizens and not even $4.00 for mattinee in most small to medium sized towns. People under 25, who are a major part of the market, have lots of disposable income and little responsibility right now, would be able to afford to easily go see several movies a week.
People are more likely to blow $3.00-$4.00 on a movie ticket on a whim than $8.00 which is what I pay in a town of not even $60,000 25% of which are college students. It'd give the movie studios an edge over illegal downloading because most people under 25, especially guys, wouldn't think any big deal of spending $6.00-$8.00 a few times a week on a date, but when it's say... $16-$20 before the food is factored in. My God. At that rate, a diamond is looking like a bargain by comparison...
And lastly, where is the direct purchasing online of cheap new DVDs? Why can't I go online to a studio's website and buy a few of their new, "non-special" releases for $10.00 each before shipping and handling? It costs them $1.00 tops to make the damn thing. Why aren't they biting at the chance to scoop up $9.00 of revenue, much of which will be pure profit and will go toward making customers like buying from them? That's the solution to piracy right there. $10.00 or under on all new regular releases and you'll sell a lot thanks to an economy of scale effect.
But then again, that'd require their CEOs to take a step outside of the ivory tower of corporate lobbying and grandstanding and want to do their jobs. Heaven forbid that they actually be really... daring. Heaven forbid they take a real risk that hurt the company badly, but that could finally end their piracy woes entirely.
When this news hit, I took the position that Apple was actually correct. Freedom of the press is about a general right to publish your speech. To that end it is a corollary to the freedom of speech to keep the government from passing laws that say you can say whatever you want, provided that it never leaves your house and gets disseminated. It is far more important than letting some reporter find the latest story, it and the second amendment are the two things that guard your right to speak and be heard.
The issue here is that Apple finally had enough of Think Secret and sued them. This was a long time coming and TS knew they were violating the law. I don't think they should get press shield protection because of the fact that the people of California voted for their press shield constitutional clause in a popular referendum. If you want to change it, convince the people of California, but I as a Virginian am not concerned by this. I'd fight such a thing in my own state, but I certainly would not begrudge the right of the people of California to decide who should get extra protection.
Correct me if I am wrong, but there are already whistleblower laws that protect people brining evidence of wrongdoing forward, and those are at least federal if not in most state laws. If that be the case, then private citizens don't need shield law protection because there are already laws out there that protect them. The NY Times is getting hit hard for not revealing the identities of the people who revealed Valerie Plame. They violated national security for nothing and are now paying the price. As they should. Press shield laws are only good when they protect honest sources who are scared of retribution for brining a crime public.
Most of the people who actively seek it are elitists. They are not concerned with violent crime that doesn't apply to them, what they want is to be able to regulate you with impunity. Sarah Brady for example said that we will never have socialism in America until we ban guns.
Human nature being what it is, cops too will start to lose respect for the people when they cannot fight back. If you think the police brutality rate is bad now, imagine what it will be like when any bad cop knows that if he wants to "have some fun" with a perp that only the hardened criminal is likely to have a gun. That perp could be you, and your crime could be effectively nothing as happens today.
Ken Lay was a criminal, like almost all of the executives at Enron. He wasn't a fraud, he was a genuine criminal who didn't even try to run a real business. Raise your hands, everyone who thinks that the Enron executives ran the company the way they did with any intention of it lasting more than another 5-10 years if they could keep it together?
Carly was and is a fraud, and yes she probably was an affirmative action selection. That doesn't mean that she is blame for being put in the position because that blame falls squarely on the lap of the board of directors who were more concerned with being politically correct than taking care of the company (which happens to be their legal obligation). What she is to blame for, are the things she did once she got the position. She tore the R&D lab apart, cut corners to be penny wise, pound foolish and made a merger that really didn't do a damn thing for the company. Let's face it, she's no Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer or Sam Palmisano.
Why is it so hard for people like you to admit that she was pulled into the position for an obviously specious reason and was clearly not cut out for it? This has nothing to do with her being a woman. This has everything to do with the politically correct disease that permeates America's elites and that causes them to consider her gender a qualification for a gender neutral job. Women can make damn good CEOs, just look at Martha Stewart. That woman is incredibly business savy (her insider trading notwithstanding...) Blame the men who put her there because in the scheme of things, they deserve the blame when there were more qualified men and women for the job.
And they laughed at me for saying that Middle Earth didn't exist.... soon any day now they will find Orc fossils and roaving bands of Uruk-hai will crush the bones of obese Americans...
Dammit get those pills and that straight jacket away from me!!!
If I come up with a flash ad in favor of the next Libertarian and send it out to other libertarian bloggers to post on their blogs, then we are running unsupported ads for a candidate under the law. If I blog in favor of them and link to statements that they make on their blogs, I can get in trouble. Finally, this isn't about regulating the candidate's blog, but about regulating outsiders who come in to support them through media help from ads to commentary in their favor.
This wouldn't bust Dean for his blog, this would bust the blogger who linked to Dean's campaign blog and posted pro-Dean, anti-Kerry ads. Oh and btw, once again you are completely wrong. The FEC jurisdiction does include cable tv ads.
We need to stop trying to make it something it isn't in order to appeal to women. We don't try to make daycare, social working, teaching and other female-dominated areas more enticing for men precisely because the jobs fit women better than men as a general rule. These can be great, highly respectable jobs that do a lot of good. They may not be as glamorous as IT is in some circles, but they are necesssary and hard.
From what I have seen watching freshmen girls in CS now that I am a senior is that a lot of them really aren't interested in computers. Most of them really aren't at all. At my university we have a female CS professor who is very incompetent and tries to recruit girls because they are girls. Then she turns around and gets on their cases in her classes when they screw up, in part because they're "making girls in CS look bad." This isn't healthy and at its core, this is what specifically seeking out girls for CS does. It makes them a statistic and ignores what they might actually be good at and enjoy.
Women should be encouraged to try things for the sake of the liberal arts experience, not because "we need more women in IT." Frankly we don't need a hell of a lot more IT workers. We are already training lots of people who suck, are apathetic toward it and/or would be happier elsewhere. That last part is the most critical part. These feminazi recruiters don't care what might make that girl happy, they want to see their quota of estrogen for IT filled, even if the girl ends up in a field she hates with a degree that is worthless for what she ends up wanting to do.
This is the natural result of the "group rights" bullshit popular on the left. You see the forest, but you don't see the trees. You are so damned concerned with gender politics to realize that, regardless of what the Vagina Monologues say, a woman is not defined by her vagina anymore than a man is by his penis. A woman's destiny, is not in her gender, but in herself and God's plan for her. Oh wait, did I just say God's plan for her? Another strike for political incorrectness.
I think anyone with some interest should be encouraged to take an entry level CS/CIS/IT class to see what's involved. Just stop pushing girls to do more than that. Let them make their own decisions and stop telling them that their choice isn't good enough. If she wants to be an IT worker, that's her choice. If she wants to be an artist, that's her choice. If she wants to work on cars for a living, that's her choice. If she wants to be a housewife, that's her choice. It is no one's right to tell her that because she was born female that any of those choices are invalid for her. Her career choice, as long as it is legal, is her choice. If she wants to get married and stay at home to raise her kids, that's her right and choice.
So repeat after me: let the girls make the choice and then respect it. The fucking elitists, most of whom are feminists, have no right to criticize a woman for pursuing the occupational path that makes her happy. Social justice is about people being free to live as individuals and to pursue happiness, not about stuffing individuals into a faceless quota. The irony is that feminism has accomplished nothing for women. Coercing them into professions is no different than coercing them into being "barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen." It is not liberation to chastise her until she feels unhappy and without self-realization outside a 9-5. It is nothing more than a different manifestation of the same alleged patriarchical drive that "forced women to stay home" the only difference being is that the feminists tend to want to force them into the work place. If the goal of feminism is freedom for women it should place a huge sample plate of life options before them and let them choose and then be proud that they are happy regardless of which one they choose.
If you have only 20,000 employees your $5,000,000 loss of productivty will net you a whopping $100,000 from Microsoft! Why that's a whole 2% of the money your business lost. That should be just enough money to add a "free tuition at Yale for 3 years" deal for the CEO's kid as part of the CEO's golden parachute when the company goes under after losing all of its data!
If Apple continues to make MacOS X Server more and more robust, and if they could reduce the price on the XServes, then for many environments why not run MacOS X? From looking through guides to OSX Server, it seems really straight forward to setup and maintain compared to even most Linux distributions and looks like it just might be something that if marketed correctly could at least clobber Windows Server for many small business server needs.
I remember taking a networking class a year and a half ago where we did Red Hat 9 and Windows 2000. Even though I already was comfortable with Linux, it just seemed to be a lot easier to configure than Windows. In fact, I was actually quite amazed at how much harder it was to get Windows to do something server-related through all of the GUIs than it was to do it on Linux. Combine the fact that OSX is a UNIX clone at its core and that it's GUI is well-designed and terribly slick, I just can't imagine why most companies don't even look at it. If kept safely behind a good firewall it should be easy as hell for non-geeks to keep running for basic things like file/printer sharing.
So what you're realling saying is that you object to the ideals of the U.S. Constitution being considered universal rights. How dare one of the most liberal countries, in a representative body composed mostly of dictatorships and banana republics, not want to turn over control of part of the Internet to that body where it'll only be abused?
My God, people in Africa might actually start thinking that a trial by jury is a human right not luxury of the state and people in Europe might start thinking that they actually do have a right to speak their minds without being attacked by the politically correct police.
Always some bureaucrat whining about private initiative by American industry. What Google is doing here could be an invaluable resource for any country, but because Google started the work in the country it was founded in, they're evil. Google should afterall have gone to France first because everyone is just dying to read French literature in French, a language most people around the world don't understand.
So what are you going to do about it, huh? Are you going to help Google go through your library and digitalize it? Are you indexing the volumes you can start legally digitalizing now so that if Google's efforts pan out with the 5 U.S. universities that you can help them get started with a French version of the service? Why not go ahead and digitalize the volumes yourselves and then send copies of the data to Google so that they can quickly build a French-language section if it means so much to you.
You know why they won't do this? This has nothing to do with an earnest effort to promote French culture, but rather whiny, childish name-calling and attacks because Google is an American company and the French are being left out-like the Germans, Italians, Spanish, Dutch, Russians, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and every other country where English isn't an official language.
If you reall do care about seeing a French version of this site, digitalize the stuff you can now and send it to Google. I'm sure they'd love to receive your French-language materials if you sent them the data in a format they can use for adding your books to their databases. Just stop bitching because Google chose to start with materials written in a language that at least 25% of the world's population can understand, especially when probably not even 4% of the world speaks yours anymore.
Sheesh. I have never been a "French-basher," but this whiny rubbish just annoys me to no end. Your language lost the influence it had on global trade, English might suffer the same fate, but it hasn't yet. You have no right to complain about Google targetting 1.5B people over probably not even 200M people.
I got sick and tired of having to pay so much for cartridges because I am still a college student and printing out even 50 pages worth of lecture notes and slides can take out around 1/8 of many of those carts. So I paid $150 for a Brother laser printer and it took me 1.5 school years to go through 1 single toner cartridge. Amazing isn't it?
The scary part is that I tell people about this, how all they have to do is sacrifice color and they can go at least 1 school year without paying $20-$30 per cartridge. For my HL-1440, not exactly a high end piece of equipment, a new toner cart costs only $70.00. Even if it were $100.00 it would still be worth the cost. What does it say about America that these college kids, many of whom do in fact have to pay for their own supplies can't be bothered to put down $140-$200 now for a new laser printer so that they can save 3-5x that in at least 1 fulltime school year of printing?
Having had this now for going on 2 years and it still works well, I just don't understand why people who don't NEED color printers opt for the much more expensive inkjet. Most printing is black and white and you can save hundreds of dollars, enough to buy your laser printer several times over, if you get the right model because the toner cartridge it comes with can do at least a few thousand pages. I know I got at around 4,000-5,000 pages out of my first toner cartridge.
Being nice to someone and smiling when you can. It tends to brighten up a lot of people either genuinely or making them feel awkward for being rude toward you because others will look down on them. That's why the Bible tells you to love your enemies: the love will either help God make a good person out of them or show to the world the evil in the person and the righteousness in the believer and God who love them.
That I am very judgemental towards parents that don't do their jobs, and don't even try to most of the time. I am such a bad person because I see bad parenting and then actually have the audacity to say that the people foisting it on the rest of us are not good parents. Heavens, whatever shall I do lest I be concerned mean-spirited?
Why being judgemental is like, soooo evil. I mean who am I to actually call something the way I see and not immediately apologize if it took a chunk out of someone's self esteem?
Gotta wonder if Jack Thompson has his greedy claws in this. He's almost singlehandedly made shifting the blame for violence among youth to video games an art form. What kind of society do we live in when a judge won't tell a lawyer to basically shut the hell up for arguing that a video game can cause insanity? I am desensitized to violence, very much so even, yet I recognize that murder is clearly wrong and still take a moral position against it and for its consistent and tough punishment. Desensitizing kids to violence does not lead the vast majority of them to violence, but when was the last time in America the minority were held responsible for doing wrong?
I agree though that violent games should be by default kept out of kids' hands, since parents won't do their jobs anymore. I'm fucking sick of these whiny parents who say they have no time to watch their kids. I have known families making less than $25,000 a year that work hard and that actually have a parent home to watch their kids and take care of them. It's called sacrificing, it means that you can't have it all, it means you have to actually prioritize and if your kids don't come before yourself then don't have them and get a cat. Yes, get a cat because cats are the only pets that tend to remain emotionally functional and happy when left alone 90% of the time. Such people couldn't even handle a dog well.
Here's an even better legal idea, though. Let's make the parents liable for what their kids do with those games. Why aren't Harris and Klebold's parents in prison for not taking the time to notice that their kids were storing pipe bombs in their rooms and garage? Oh look at our little boy, ain't his stockpile of explosives just swell? Then these parents turn around and want sympathy points because they have to "balance a career and a family." You know what, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. You aren't balancing a family, you are keeping pets and calling them children and you wonder why they turn into nutcases when they get picked on at school. They have no foundation at home to rely on in the face of adversity.
It doesn't even end there. One of my friends used to be a manager at KB Toys. I can't count the number of times both of us wanted to grab a lot of those kids by the seat of the pants and literally throw them face first out of the store for being roudy little brats that caused the workers no end of grief. All because the parents, who are often there, can't be bothered to tell their kid to stop being a brat or they'll regret the consequences. Spare the spoiling and apply the rod copiously and maybe your kids will behave. You don't negotiate with the little brats, you tell them what is what and make them realize that they are accountable for what they do.
What pisses me off about all of this is that so much crime committed by middle and upper class kids is because of this. One of my friends told me just the other night that a kid who used to play with her little sister just got arrested for armed robbery. His mother always bribed him into behaving well, never disciplined him, even when he was a real monster. Never at any time did his parents lay down the law with him and make sure that he knew that he was well within the same rules as everyone else in society and that there are painful consequences for breaking the rules. The result? In his mind, it's ok for him to go to a store with a friend and pull a gun on two clerks and rob the store.
If parents would do their jobs then a lot of these things would never happen. The reason that I could put up with terribly abusive academic environments and why I never identified with violent games is that my parents were actually there for me. As importantly, I rarely got away with anything. From the time I was 2 years old I knew the rules applied to me and my parents wouldn't hesitate to remind me that I am not special, that if I do bad, I have to be punished.
The one time I took my powerbook into the local one I found that it was slow as hell and that it erred overwhelmingly on the side of caution in terms of filtering. My blog got hit as "mature-adult" even though there is nothing pornographic about it. Not that I care, but it's sorta funny when I can even post blog entries because it doesn't discriminate between the Movable Type panel and my actual published pages.
Personally, I prefer the starbucks cafe that is practically next door to our Panera. It is $4.00 for two hours but basically is good enough to be like my Adelphia service at home. I haven't tried the local Daily Grind's (Virginia's Starbucks competitor chain) but they have free WiFi and knowing them I bet that it's at least decent.
In the end you get what you pay for. If I am going to be actually staying at a place for longer than to check my email, then I want something reliably usable. At Panera, I am paying indirectly because they factor the cost of the cheap WiFi into their food. At starbucks in our Barnes & Nobles, I don't even have to buy anything other than the access. Not only that, I like Starbucks coffee more than Panera's.
It's one of the great things about living in a growing college town. 25% of our population are college students and that means that local businesses can easily afford to provide these services cheaply or for free. All of our laptops are configured with WiFi cards now because the school has I think between 30 and 50 WiFi points at least now. Though ironically those stuck on campus cannot have WiFi in their dorms, even if they use 128bit WAP and restrict IP addresses.
God forbid that there be protections that don't expose a company's entire operation to public scrutiny. Look at the companies they listed and tell me which one really gipped the public. None of them. If you're a smoker then you have only yourself to blame for your health problems, especially if you are under 30 years old. If you are too cheap to buy a Mac or learn Linux then your usage of Windows is your own damn problem. I remember when BeOS was around, you could buy the upgrades for what, $25.00 yet how many of these professional whiners supported Be? They'd rather force Microsoft to behave like Be than actually support Be.
What I am personally sick of are the professional litigator-activists who lose in the court of public opinion so they then take out their failure on the democratic process by going to the courts.
Ok first we're forced to buy fuel efficient cars, and I can understand that and support that as it protects private and public property rights in land investments (acid rain, toxic runoff from pig farms, etc) and it helps with public health. Now they want to punish Californians for obeying the first set of regulations? This is why I am no longer a leftist, you cannot reconcile the pet causes of the left with one another. When it's not the environment, it's the poor, but what what happens when the poor have to be blatantly shafted to protect the environment through higher taxes and immediate costs that they might not be able to afford?
You know what, if the big government politicians and media personalities want to force this on tax payers, let's add a constitutional amendment saying that they have to give up all of their assets to pay for the tax payers' cost of compliance. That means we go through Hollywood and Sacramento like a barbarian horde nationalizing assets to pay for the common man's compliance with these elitist, utopian schemes.
I have to give a big round of applause to the politicians though because they prove libertarians right at every step of the way. We get called nutcases today and five years later vindicated by public policy. The only way out of this is to vote for a minor party because that's the only way to kick out these professional morons. That's really all they are, people who get paid to defy common sense and to avoid anything that can be construed as brain use beyond their brain stem.
Part me almost thinks that the illegal immigration wave in California will be a blessing because introducing new, fresh blood into California might actually bring some sanity back to the state. Funny how my state, Virginia, is getting hit hard over its "underwear exposure law," but that wonderful bastion of progress, the People's Republik of Kalifornia is now debating putting big brother in their tax payer's back seats. No doubt that once it's proven modestly enforcable, it'll be latched onto some federal mandate and we Virginians will go to an annual auto inspection only to find out we need to spend several hundred dollars to help our government spy on us to be in compliance with a federal law that we never supported.
For a long time my biggest problem with American politics is the fetish most American political pundits have with analogies, regardless of whether they fit. Analogies are easy because they allow someone to be a complete and total sophist, but do a fine job of concealing that point. Case in point: comparing cars to computers. They are different industries and have different needs. What works beyond the base level of "tends to work" for all industries is usually very different. For example: modern IT is built on near total interoperability. We need the ability for example to take a Windows file server and give file services to non-Windows clients or vice versa. With a car, unless you know what you're doing, there is absolutely no reason to mix and match car parts from several different vendors.
Protocols and file formats should belong to the customer, not the company that makes them. Instead of Microsoft having legal control over the Word format, I as a paying customer who has data in the format, should have total legal control over how I use the format. If I want to pay Sun to support OpenOffice to create a filter capable of moving my data around, Microsoft should have no legal say in this. File formats and network protocols are not products, they are amorphous ideas that define how we send and receive information from one computer or part of a computer to another.
And to be fair, yes I believe that if Microsoft wishes to they should have a legal right to reimplement the entire Flash file format for Windows Longhorn. My gripe isn't so much with Microsoft, but with the legal system that has effectively introduced and then systematically reinforced aggressive, nigh sociopathic behavior in corporations.
Let's face it, if Ballmer wanted to open up all of Microsoft's protocols and file formats, Microsoft would easily face a shareholder lawsuit. Why does the system give standing to a lawsuit over something so petty? The system should not only zap all control corporations have over their file formats and protocols, but shield them from shareholder lawsuits when the company freely lets others compete based on merit, not litigation-dodging finess. I am sick of these lawsuits where some pipsqueek sues a company under such pretenses. Do you own even a percentage point of the stock? I own stock in Wal Mart, but I don't lord that over the greeters.
It has generally been my experience that those who support software patents are willfully ignorant about the differences between software development and most other industries. They want to have it both ways, get to hold up the fast pace of innovation as a sign that capitalism works (and it does), but then they want to impose a legal regime that they know runs counter to the nature of that industry. Software patents would work if we weren't held by our balls by WIPO and had to give such large, "fair" patent durations to every industry, but instead could give them out based on the nature of the industry. And people wonder why I think the Senate needs an enema, the 17th amendment revoked and the every treaty (and the treaty ratification power itself) in the last 20 years revisited. More than 3 years for a software patent is a guaranteed way to make sure that the only innovators are lawyers whose rhetorical innovations keep the courts flooded with useless drivel and every would-be small company founder sleepless at night worrying that several years of hard work could get stolen by several months of frivolous (but well-financed) patent litigation.
Judging the AI work of 50-100 years from now by today's standards of the state of the art makes as much as judging firearms by the standards of 1700 today. What I am worried about isn't what we deal with today, but what someone might make in 50-100 years from now.
The only sentience that humans have experience with is our own, and I think it is safe to conclude that most scientists working on AI projects would try to replicate human sentience either intentionally or unintentially. Human beings have a very, very robust survival instinct and are extremely destructive when threatened. Do we really want to take the risk that we will create an AI that has our suvival instinct as well as a human-style thought process?
I have caught flak for it in the past, but I have argued for a constitutional amendment banning the U.S. military from employing robotic combat units as anything more than a small minority of our combat forces. The last thing we need is either a weak AI or strong AI being used as the basis for taking over our military and then taking over our country. That's always seemed to be Hollywood's greatest feare. He who controls the AI controls the nation. From Terminator to the Matrix, the dark side of AI has been presented, but how many people don't take it seriously because it's "just a movie?"
I have no problem with limited AI research, but I'll be the first to admit that I am something of a technophobe when it comes to AI. It's simply because of the fact that what we are doing is a playing God with a type of intelligence that is quite suitable for quickly taking total control over our civilization. It makes as much sense to me as putting our worst enemy in charge of our national defense in exchange for a nice chunk of change every month.
This is the classical arrogance. We think that we can control another intelligent being. If we can't control a third world nation that can't possibly wage a real war against us without being obliterated from the face of God's creation within literally a few days if we tried hard, then how can we control a mechanical intelligence that can adapt and grow and potentially learn how to control everything from Wall Street to our strategic defense?
The reason that T3 was so scary to me was that it was the ultimate combination of a rogue AI and grid computing. The only way to stop that new version of skynet would be a scorched Earth policy on our entire electrical grid to power off every node.
And lastly, how on Earth do we expect to negotiate with a hostile AI? What could we possibly offer it except absolute fealty? It has no sensual desires, no use for wealth, only perhaps power over other intellects.
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It is one thing to just do most of the same things, but how you do them is the real issue. In that respect, Nero is still much farther ahead than K3B. That isn't to say that K3B is a bad product, in fact for most of my needs it is great. Nero for Windows is a very aggressively designed and updated product. It supports basically every burner out there, every type of media, burns any type of disk (VCD, SVCD, DVD movie, data, music, etc) and is just... solid and slick in how it does stuff.
Again, it's not that K3B isn't competitive. It certainly is, but it's not there yet. Nero for Linux appears to be identical in its UI to the Windows version so it's another great way to bridge Linux and Windows. The bottom line is that it is very good, many people have it because it comes with many burners and having it on Linux will be another program that people who are wont to not learn how to use their computer will be able to say, "oh I know that program" that is part of their semi-daily use.
Most of the smaller labels out there don't seem to particularly care about file sharing. Century Media, which isn't that small, but isn't RIAA affiliated to the best of my knowledge doesn't do these kinds of suits. I guess it's because they're not so big that most of the people are just swiping free MP3s that they have no intention of buying. I have frequently downloaded metal MP3s and I go out and buy the real CD when I can find it.
I guess it comes down to, what is the average file sharer's excuse other than "I want it, I want it now and I want it for free?" Most of the file sharing I have seen among other college students isn't obscure stuff, but top 40s type stuff. It's stuff that if you go to buy it online you can find a ton of bargains on. Not only that, but the "poor college student" excuse is bullshit. The most prolific abusers of file sharing I have seen were people that could afford to **buy** most of what they downloaded.
I'm glad that the RIAA has cut down on its lobbying and started doing its job. The RIAA is supposed to protect artists and labels, and that's what they are doing now. New laws don't mean a damn thing unless they are so draconian that enforcement is trivial. These lawsuits are not even in the same league, let alone as some of the laws that people like Fritz Hollings have tried to foist on people.
And you know what's amusing? This is precisely the type of copyright defense that was originally intended in America by our founders. So stop your bitching, you could be arrested by the FBI and sent to a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. People like Fritz and Orrin Hatch would love to send file sharers to prison, but the RIAA is happy with a few thousand dollars in civil liabilities which sure beats the fines you would pay in criminal court. In fact, these mass lawsuits are a drop in the bucket compared to what you could face.
Btw, if anyone wants to shop for cheap metal, I have found http:///www.theendrecords.com to have a great online store for distributing popular and obscure stuff. It's even got free shipping in the U.S.
They don't like it when people Google bomb and if they do it themselves, they'll just be hypocrites. It doesn't matter that they own their search service, no one likes a hypocrite who lectures "do as I say, not as I do."
People just naturally grow contemptuous of rules that are made by someone who says that they don't apply to them. The government has found that out the hard way when it exempts itself from the Constitution of all things when going after such "vermin" as drug dealers.
Leading by example is the only way to lead.
Fat chance of that! They are still getting used to that "VHS and DVD thang." They hire actors and actresses for as much as $20,000,000 then whine that their movies cannot make a profit at $52,000,000 in average revenue. You don't have to be an accountant to realize that there are few thespians who are worth that much money to the public. Most of the time when people react to previews of cool looking movies, the actors and actresses are only one of many variables.
I'd like to make a bet with the CEOs of every major studio. Make only 10% of your "serious" movies each year with the big names and then do everything else with people that look really good coming out of acting school who have a passion for the job. Cut those movie tickets 50% in cost, and put just as much money into script writing, directing and special effects as the other 10%.
I bet that within a few years, those 90% will be significantly more profitable because people will be able to not only see a cool movie, but see it for as little as $2.50 for senior citizens and not even $4.00 for mattinee in most small to medium sized towns. People under 25, who are a major part of the market, have lots of disposable income and little responsibility right now, would be able to afford to easily go see several movies a week.
People are more likely to blow $3.00-$4.00 on a movie ticket on a whim than $8.00 which is what I pay in a town of not even $60,000 25% of which are college students. It'd give the movie studios an edge over illegal downloading because most people under 25, especially guys, wouldn't think any big deal of spending $6.00-$8.00 a few times a week on a date, but when it's say... $16-$20 before the food is factored in. My God. At that rate, a diamond is looking like a bargain by comparison...
And lastly, where is the direct purchasing online of cheap new DVDs? Why can't I go online to a studio's website and buy a few of their new, "non-special" releases for $10.00 each before shipping and handling? It costs them $1.00 tops to make the damn thing. Why aren't they biting at the chance to scoop up $9.00 of revenue, much of which will be pure profit and will go toward making customers like buying from them? That's the solution to piracy right there. $10.00 or under on all new regular releases and you'll sell a lot thanks to an economy of scale effect.
But then again, that'd require their CEOs to take a step outside of the ivory tower of corporate lobbying and grandstanding and want to do their jobs. Heaven forbid that they actually be really... daring. Heaven forbid they take a real risk that hurt the company badly, but that could finally end their piracy woes entirely.
When this news hit, I took the position that Apple was actually correct. Freedom of the press is about a general right to publish your speech. To that end it is a corollary to the freedom of speech to keep the government from passing laws that say you can say whatever you want, provided that it never leaves your house and gets disseminated. It is far more important than letting some reporter find the latest story, it and the second amendment are the two things that guard your right to speak and be heard.
The issue here is that Apple finally had enough of Think Secret and sued them. This was a long time coming and TS knew they were violating the law. I don't think they should get press shield protection because of the fact that the people of California voted for their press shield constitutional clause in a popular referendum. If you want to change it, convince the people of California, but I as a Virginian am not concerned by this. I'd fight such a thing in my own state, but I certainly would not begrudge the right of the people of California to decide who should get extra protection.
Correct me if I am wrong, but there are already whistleblower laws that protect people brining evidence of wrongdoing forward, and those are at least federal if not in most state laws. If that be the case, then private citizens don't need shield law protection because there are already laws out there that protect them. The NY Times is getting hit hard for not revealing the identities of the people who revealed Valerie Plame. They violated national security for nothing and are now paying the price. As they should. Press shield laws are only good when they protect honest sources who are scared of retribution for brining a crime public.
Most of the people who actively seek it are elitists. They are not concerned with violent crime that doesn't apply to them, what they want is to be able to regulate you with impunity. Sarah Brady for example said that we will never have socialism in America until we ban guns.
Human nature being what it is, cops too will start to lose respect for the people when they cannot fight back. If you think the police brutality rate is bad now, imagine what it will be like when any bad cop knows that if he wants to "have some fun" with a perp that only the hardened criminal is likely to have a gun. That perp could be you, and your crime could be effectively nothing as happens today.
Resume, eh? You're not from Canada by any chance, eh?
Ken Lay was a criminal, like almost all of the executives at Enron. He wasn't a fraud, he was a genuine criminal who didn't even try to run a real business. Raise your hands, everyone who thinks that the Enron executives ran the company the way they did with any intention of it lasting more than another 5-10 years if they could keep it together?
Carly was and is a fraud, and yes she probably was an affirmative action selection. That doesn't mean that she is blame for being put in the position because that blame falls squarely on the lap of the board of directors who were more concerned with being politically correct than taking care of the company (which happens to be their legal obligation). What she is to blame for, are the things she did once she got the position. She tore the R&D lab apart, cut corners to be penny wise, pound foolish and made a merger that really didn't do a damn thing for the company. Let's face it, she's no Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer or Sam Palmisano.
Why is it so hard for people like you to admit that she was pulled into the position for an obviously specious reason and was clearly not cut out for it? This has nothing to do with her being a woman. This has everything to do with the politically correct disease that permeates America's elites and that causes them to consider her gender a qualification for a gender neutral job. Women can make damn good CEOs, just look at Martha Stewart. That woman is incredibly business savy (her insider trading notwithstanding...) Blame the men who put her there because in the scheme of things, they deserve the blame when there were more qualified men and women for the job.
And they laughed at me for saying that Middle Earth didn't exist.... soon any day now they will find Orc fossils and roaving bands of Uruk-hai will crush the bones of obese Americans...
Dammit get those pills and that straight jacket away from me!!!
If I come up with a flash ad in favor of the next Libertarian and send it out to other libertarian bloggers to post on their blogs, then we are running unsupported ads for a candidate under the law. If I blog in favor of them and link to statements that they make on their blogs, I can get in trouble. Finally, this isn't about regulating the candidate's blog, but about regulating outsiders who come in to support them through media help from ads to commentary in their favor.
This wouldn't bust Dean for his blog, this would bust the blogger who linked to Dean's campaign blog and posted pro-Dean, anti-Kerry ads. Oh and btw, once again you are completely wrong. The FEC jurisdiction does include cable tv ads.
We need to stop trying to make it something it isn't in order to appeal to women. We don't try to make daycare, social working, teaching and other female-dominated areas more enticing for men precisely because the jobs fit women better than men as a general rule. These can be great, highly respectable jobs that do a lot of good. They may not be as glamorous as IT is in some circles, but they are necesssary and hard.
From what I have seen watching freshmen girls in CS now that I am a senior is that a lot of them really aren't interested in computers. Most of them really aren't at all. At my university we have a female CS professor who is very incompetent and tries to recruit girls because they are girls. Then she turns around and gets on their cases in her classes when they screw up, in part because they're "making girls in CS look bad." This isn't healthy and at its core, this is what specifically seeking out girls for CS does. It makes them a statistic and ignores what they might actually be good at and enjoy.
Women should be encouraged to try things for the sake of the liberal arts experience, not because "we need more women in IT." Frankly we don't need a hell of a lot more IT workers. We are already training lots of people who suck, are apathetic toward it and/or would be happier elsewhere. That last part is the most critical part. These feminazi recruiters don't care what might make that girl happy, they want to see their quota of estrogen for IT filled, even if the girl ends up in a field she hates with a degree that is worthless for what she ends up wanting to do.
This is the natural result of the "group rights" bullshit popular on the left. You see the forest, but you don't see the trees. You are so damned concerned with gender politics to realize that, regardless of what the Vagina Monologues say, a woman is not defined by her vagina anymore than a man is by his penis. A woman's destiny, is not in her gender, but in herself and God's plan for her. Oh wait, did I just say God's plan for her? Another strike for political incorrectness.
I think anyone with some interest should be encouraged to take an entry level CS/CIS/IT class to see what's involved. Just stop pushing girls to do more than that. Let them make their own decisions and stop telling them that their choice isn't good enough. If she wants to be an IT worker, that's her choice. If she wants to be an artist, that's her choice. If she wants to work on cars for a living, that's her choice. If she wants to be a housewife, that's her choice. It is no one's right to tell her that because she was born female that any of those choices are invalid for her. Her career choice, as long as it is legal, is her choice. If she wants to get married and stay at home to raise her kids, that's her right and choice.
So repeat after me: let the girls make the choice and then respect it. The fucking elitists, most of whom are feminists, have no right to criticize a woman for pursuing the occupational path that makes her happy. Social justice is about people being free to live as individuals and to pursue happiness, not about stuffing individuals into a faceless quota. The irony is that feminism has accomplished nothing for women. Coercing them into professions is no different than coercing them into being "barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen." It is not liberation to chastise her until she feels unhappy and without self-realization outside a 9-5. It is nothing more than a different manifestation of the same alleged patriarchical drive that "forced women to stay home" the only difference being is that the feminists tend to want to force them into the work place. If the goal of feminism is freedom for women it should place a huge sample plate of life options before them and let them choose and then be proud that they are happy regardless of which one they choose.
If you have only 20,000 employees your $5,000,000 loss of productivty will net you a whopping $100,000 from Microsoft! Why that's a whole 2% of the money your business lost. That should be just enough money to add a "free tuition at Yale for 3 years" deal for the CEO's kid as part of the CEO's golden parachute when the company goes under after losing all of its data!
If Apple continues to make MacOS X Server more and more robust, and if they could reduce the price on the XServes, then for many environments why not run MacOS X? From looking through guides to OSX Server, it seems really straight forward to setup and maintain compared to even most Linux distributions and looks like it just might be something that if marketed correctly could at least clobber Windows Server for many small business server needs.
I remember taking a networking class a year and a half ago where we did Red Hat 9 and Windows 2000. Even though I already was comfortable with Linux, it just seemed to be a lot easier to configure than Windows. In fact, I was actually quite amazed at how much harder it was to get Windows to do something server-related through all of the GUIs than it was to do it on Linux. Combine the fact that OSX is a UNIX clone at its core and that it's GUI is well-designed and terribly slick, I just can't imagine why most companies don't even look at it. If kept safely behind a good firewall it should be easy as hell for non-geeks to keep running for basic things like file/printer sharing.
So what you're realling saying is that you object to the ideals of the U.S. Constitution being considered universal rights. How dare one of the most liberal countries, in a representative body composed mostly of dictatorships and banana republics, not want to turn over control of part of the Internet to that body where it'll only be abused?
My God, people in Africa might actually start thinking that a trial by jury is a human right not luxury of the state and people in Europe might start thinking that they actually do have a right to speak their minds without being attacked by the politically correct police.
Always some bureaucrat whining about private initiative by American industry. What Google is doing here could be an invaluable resource for any country, but because Google started the work in the country it was founded in, they're evil. Google should afterall have gone to France first because everyone is just dying to read French literature in French, a language most people around the world don't understand.
So what are you going to do about it, huh? Are you going to help Google go through your library and digitalize it? Are you indexing the volumes you can start legally digitalizing now so that if Google's efforts pan out with the 5 U.S. universities that you can help them get started with a French version of the service? Why not go ahead and digitalize the volumes yourselves and then send copies of the data to Google so that they can quickly build a French-language section if it means so much to you.
You know why they won't do this? This has nothing to do with an earnest effort to promote French culture, but rather whiny, childish name-calling and attacks because Google is an American company and the French are being left out-like the Germans, Italians, Spanish, Dutch, Russians, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and every other country where English isn't an official language.
If you reall do care about seeing a French version of this site, digitalize the stuff you can now and send it to Google. I'm sure they'd love to receive your French-language materials if you sent them the data in a format they can use for adding your books to their databases. Just stop bitching because Google chose to start with materials written in a language that at least 25% of the world's population can understand, especially when probably not even 4% of the world speaks yours anymore.
Sheesh. I have never been a "French-basher," but this whiny rubbish just annoys me to no end. Your language lost the influence it had on global trade, English might suffer the same fate, but it hasn't yet. You have no right to complain about Google targetting 1.5B people over probably not even 200M people.
I got sick and tired of having to pay so much for cartridges because I am still a college student and printing out even 50 pages worth of lecture notes and slides can take out around 1/8 of many of those carts. So I paid $150 for a Brother laser printer and it took me 1.5 school years to go through 1 single toner cartridge. Amazing isn't it?
The scary part is that I tell people about this, how all they have to do is sacrifice color and they can go at least 1 school year without paying $20-$30 per cartridge. For my HL-1440, not exactly a high end piece of equipment, a new toner cart costs only $70.00. Even if it were $100.00 it would still be worth the cost. What does it say about America that these college kids, many of whom do in fact have to pay for their own supplies can't be bothered to put down $140-$200 now for a new laser printer so that they can save 3-5x that in at least 1 fulltime school year of printing?
Having had this now for going on 2 years and it still works well, I just don't understand why people who don't NEED color printers opt for the much more expensive inkjet. Most printing is black and white and you can save hundreds of dollars, enough to buy your laser printer several times over, if you get the right model because the toner cartridge it comes with can do at least a few thousand pages. I know I got at around 4,000-5,000 pages out of my first toner cartridge.
Being nice to someone and smiling when you can. It tends to brighten up a lot of people either genuinely or making them feel awkward for being rude toward you because others will look down on them. That's why the Bible tells you to love your enemies: the love will either help God make a good person out of them or show to the world the evil in the person and the righteousness in the believer and God who love them.
That I am very judgemental towards parents that don't do their jobs, and don't even try to most of the time. I am such a bad person because I see bad parenting and then actually have the audacity to say that the people foisting it on the rest of us are not good parents. Heavens, whatever shall I do lest I be concerned mean-spirited?
Why being judgemental is like, soooo evil. I mean who am I to actually call something the way I see and not immediately apologize if it took a chunk out of someone's self esteem?
Gotta wonder if Jack Thompson has his greedy claws in this. He's almost singlehandedly made shifting the blame for violence among youth to video games an art form. What kind of society do we live in when a judge won't tell a lawyer to basically shut the hell up for arguing that a video game can cause insanity? I am desensitized to violence, very much so even, yet I recognize that murder is clearly wrong and still take a moral position against it and for its consistent and tough punishment. Desensitizing kids to violence does not lead the vast majority of them to violence, but when was the last time in America the minority were held responsible for doing wrong?
I agree though that violent games should be by default kept out of kids' hands, since parents won't do their jobs anymore. I'm fucking sick of these whiny parents who say they have no time to watch their kids. I have known families making less than $25,000 a year that work hard and that actually have a parent home to watch their kids and take care of them. It's called sacrificing, it means that you can't have it all, it means you have to actually prioritize and if your kids don't come before yourself then don't have them and get a cat. Yes, get a cat because cats are the only pets that tend to remain emotionally functional and happy when left alone 90% of the time. Such people couldn't even handle a dog well.
Here's an even better legal idea, though. Let's make the parents liable for what their kids do with those games. Why aren't Harris and Klebold's parents in prison for not taking the time to notice that their kids were storing pipe bombs in their rooms and garage? Oh look at our little boy, ain't his stockpile of explosives just swell? Then these parents turn around and want sympathy points because they have to "balance a career and a family." You know what, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. You aren't balancing a family, you are keeping pets and calling them children and you wonder why they turn into nutcases when they get picked on at school. They have no foundation at home to rely on in the face of adversity.
It doesn't even end there. One of my friends used to be a manager at KB Toys. I can't count the number of times both of us wanted to grab a lot of those kids by the seat of the pants and literally throw them face first out of the store for being roudy little brats that caused the workers no end of grief. All because the parents, who are often there, can't be bothered to tell their kid to stop being a brat or they'll regret the consequences. Spare the spoiling and apply the rod copiously and maybe your kids will behave. You don't negotiate with the little brats, you tell them what is what and make them realize that they are accountable for what they do.
What pisses me off about all of this is that so much crime committed by middle and upper class kids is because of this. One of my friends told me just the other night that a kid who used to play with her little sister just got arrested for armed robbery. His mother always bribed him into behaving well, never disciplined him, even when he was a real monster. Never at any time did his parents lay down the law with him and make sure that he knew that he was well within the same rules as everyone else in society and that there are painful consequences for breaking the rules. The result? In his mind, it's ok for him to go to a store with a friend and pull a gun on two clerks and rob the store.
If parents would do their jobs then a lot of these things would never happen. The reason that I could put up with terribly abusive academic environments and why I never identified with violent games is that my parents were actually there for me. As importantly, I rarely got away with anything. From the time I was 2 years old I knew the rules applied to me and my parents wouldn't hesitate to remind me that I am not special, that if I do bad, I have to be punished.
The one time I took my powerbook into the local one I found that it was slow as hell and that it erred overwhelmingly on the side of caution in terms of filtering. My blog got hit as "mature-adult" even though there is nothing pornographic about it. Not that I care, but it's sorta funny when I can even post blog entries because it doesn't discriminate between the Movable Type panel and my actual published pages.
Personally, I prefer the starbucks cafe that is practically next door to our Panera. It is $4.00 for two hours but basically is good enough to be like my Adelphia service at home. I haven't tried the local Daily Grind's (Virginia's Starbucks competitor chain) but they have free WiFi and knowing them I bet that it's at least decent.
In the end you get what you pay for. If I am going to be actually staying at a place for longer than to check my email, then I want something reliably usable. At Panera, I am paying indirectly because they factor the cost of the cheap WiFi into their food. At starbucks in our Barnes & Nobles, I don't even have to buy anything other than the access. Not only that, I like Starbucks coffee more than Panera's.
It's one of the great things about living in a growing college town. 25% of our population are college students and that means that local businesses can easily afford to provide these services cheaply or for free. All of our laptops are configured with WiFi cards now because the school has I think between 30 and 50 WiFi points at least now. Though ironically those stuck on campus cannot have WiFi in their dorms, even if they use 128bit WAP and restrict IP addresses.
God forbid that there be protections that don't expose a company's entire operation to public scrutiny. Look at the companies they listed and tell me which one really gipped the public. None of them. If you're a smoker then you have only yourself to blame for your health problems, especially if you are under 30 years old. If you are too cheap to buy a Mac or learn Linux then your usage of Windows is your own damn problem. I remember when BeOS was around, you could buy the upgrades for what, $25.00 yet how many of these professional whiners supported Be? They'd rather force Microsoft to behave like Be than actually support Be.
What I am personally sick of are the professional litigator-activists who lose in the court of public opinion so they then take out their failure on the democratic process by going to the courts.
Ok first we're forced to buy fuel efficient cars, and I can understand that and support that as it protects private and public property rights in land investments (acid rain, toxic runoff from pig farms, etc) and it helps with public health. Now they want to punish Californians for obeying the first set of regulations? This is why I am no longer a leftist, you cannot reconcile the pet causes of the left with one another. When it's not the environment, it's the poor, but what what happens when the poor have to be blatantly shafted to protect the environment through higher taxes and immediate costs that they might not be able to afford? You know what, if the big government politicians and media personalities want to force this on tax payers, let's add a constitutional amendment saying that they have to give up all of their assets to pay for the tax payers' cost of compliance. That means we go through Hollywood and Sacramento like a barbarian horde nationalizing assets to pay for the common man's compliance with these elitist, utopian schemes. I have to give a big round of applause to the politicians though because they prove libertarians right at every step of the way. We get called nutcases today and five years later vindicated by public policy. The only way out of this is to vote for a minor party because that's the only way to kick out these professional morons. That's really all they are, people who get paid to defy common sense and to avoid anything that can be construed as brain use beyond their brain stem. Part me almost thinks that the illegal immigration wave in California will be a blessing because introducing new, fresh blood into California might actually bring some sanity back to the state. Funny how my state, Virginia, is getting hit hard over its "underwear exposure law," but that wonderful bastion of progress, the People's Republik of Kalifornia is now debating putting big brother in their tax payer's back seats. No doubt that once it's proven modestly enforcable, it'll be latched onto some federal mandate and we Virginians will go to an annual auto inspection only to find out we need to spend several hundred dollars to help our government spy on us to be in compliance with a federal law that we never supported.
For a long time my biggest problem with American politics is the fetish most American political pundits have with analogies, regardless of whether they fit. Analogies are easy because they allow someone to be a complete and total sophist, but do a fine job of concealing that point. Case in point: comparing cars to computers. They are different industries and have different needs. What works beyond the base level of "tends to work" for all industries is usually very different. For example: modern IT is built on near total interoperability. We need the ability for example to take a Windows file server and give file services to non-Windows clients or vice versa. With a car, unless you know what you're doing, there is absolutely no reason to mix and match car parts from several different vendors.
Protocols and file formats should belong to the customer, not the company that makes them. Instead of Microsoft having legal control over the Word format, I as a paying customer who has data in the format, should have total legal control over how I use the format. If I want to pay Sun to support OpenOffice to create a filter capable of moving my data around, Microsoft should have no legal say in this. File formats and network protocols are not products, they are amorphous ideas that define how we send and receive information from one computer or part of a computer to another.
And to be fair, yes I believe that if Microsoft wishes to they should have a legal right to reimplement the entire Flash file format for Windows Longhorn. My gripe isn't so much with Microsoft, but with the legal system that has effectively introduced and then systematically reinforced aggressive, nigh sociopathic behavior in corporations.
Let's face it, if Ballmer wanted to open up all of Microsoft's protocols and file formats, Microsoft would easily face a shareholder lawsuit. Why does the system give standing to a lawsuit over something so petty? The system should not only zap all control corporations have over their file formats and protocols, but shield them from shareholder lawsuits when the company freely lets others compete based on merit, not litigation-dodging finess. I am sick of these lawsuits where some pipsqueek sues a company under such pretenses. Do you own even a percentage point of the stock? I own stock in Wal Mart, but I don't lord that over the greeters.
It has generally been my experience that those who support software patents are willfully ignorant about the differences between software development and most other industries. They want to have it both ways, get to hold up the fast pace of innovation as a sign that capitalism works (and it does), but then they want to impose a legal regime that they know runs counter to the nature of that industry. Software patents would work if we weren't held by our balls by WIPO and had to give such large, "fair" patent durations to every industry, but instead could give them out based on the nature of the industry. And people wonder why I think the Senate needs an enema, the 17th amendment revoked and the every treaty (and the treaty ratification power itself) in the last 20 years revisited. More than 3 years for a software patent is a guaranteed way to make sure that the only innovators are lawyers whose rhetorical innovations keep the courts flooded with useless drivel and every would-be small company founder sleepless at night worrying that several years of hard work could get stolen by several months of frivolous (but well-financed) patent litigation.
Judging the AI work of 50-100 years from now by today's standards of the state of the art makes as much as judging firearms by the standards of 1700 today. What I am worried about isn't what we deal with today, but what someone might make in 50-100 years from now.
The only sentience that humans have experience with is our own, and I think it is safe to conclude that most scientists working on AI projects would try to replicate human sentience either intentionally or unintentially. Human beings have a very, very robust survival instinct and are extremely destructive when threatened. Do we really want to take the risk that we will create an AI that has our suvival instinct as well as a human-style thought process?
I have caught flak for it in the past, but I have argued for a constitutional amendment banning the U.S. military from employing robotic combat units as anything more than a small minority of our combat forces. The last thing we need is either a weak AI or strong AI being used as the basis for taking over our military and then taking over our country. That's always seemed to be Hollywood's greatest feare. He who controls the AI controls the nation. From Terminator to the Matrix, the dark side of AI has been presented, but how many people don't take it seriously because it's "just a movie?"
I have no problem with limited AI research, but I'll be the first to admit that I am something of a technophobe when it comes to AI. It's simply because of the fact that what we are doing is a playing God with a type of intelligence that is quite suitable for quickly taking total control over our civilization. It makes as much sense to me as putting our worst enemy in charge of our national defense in exchange for a nice chunk of change every month.
This is the classical arrogance. We think that we can control another intelligent being. If we can't control a third world nation that can't possibly wage a real war against us without being obliterated from the face of God's creation within literally a few days if we tried hard, then how can we control a mechanical intelligence that can adapt and grow and potentially learn how to control everything from Wall Street to our strategic defense?
The reason that T3 was so scary to me was that it was the ultimate combination of a rogue AI and grid computing. The only way to stop that new version of skynet would be a scorched Earth policy on our entire electrical grid to power off every node.
And lastly, how on Earth do we expect to negotiate with a hostile AI? What could we possibly offer it except absolute fealty? It has no sensual desires, no use for wealth, only perhaps power over other intellects.