The BSA has ZERO (extenuating/special) legal force behind them.
And YES I am specifically talking about in the US.
They basically are a business offering to audit you. They fact that they're making their offers with intentionally intimidating letters written in the best of legalspeak is neither here nor there.
They have ZERO legal rights for search-and-seizure or any such like (until, of course, they can prove to a judge "probable cause" or other similar evidence just like anyone else who wants to request a search warrant).
These anti-music/movie-piracy moguls , on the other hand, have had several particularly nasty laws passed which give them FULL LEGAL SANCTION to act more like a police force than any other business in the pursuit of evidence and/or prosecution.
So basically no, the BSA is *not* operating in a similar way. The BSA just TALK BIG and hope to scare you. The *AAs of the US are businesses with powers significantly similar to The Police Force.
Microsoft didn't NEED to dump NVIDIA. This is purely a marketing and profit making exercise which includes their typical "we're in the business of raping our customers for cash" practices.
OK, to paraphrase - Microsoft violated the terms of their contract with NVIDIA so that they could make XBOX2 non-backwards compatible (by leveraging ATI instead of NVIDIA) which leads to GREATER profit for Microsoft because
gamers MUST have the latest hardware
Microsoft profits from the sales of the software, not the hardware
The fact that this royally screws the gamers themselves is merely the icing on the cake to Microsoft.
Microsoft makes zero profit off the XBOX hardware.
Microsoft makes ALL its XBOX profit from the games.
Therefore the likelihood that XBOX2 will force you to buy NEW games is 100%.
This is not a technology issue, Microsoft didn't NEED to dump NVIDIA. This is purely a marketing and profit making exercise which includes their typical "we're in the business of raping our customers for cash" practices.
"You can sterilize a robot. But you cannot do the same to an astronaut. Inevitably a human will introduce microbes to the planet... and contaminate it."
Not quite correct. In practice it IS possible to totally disinfect an astronaut.
Of course, with the caveat that said process of sterilization will (due to the processes and procedures involved) necessarily kill the austronaut and thusly render said person useless for anything other than dead-weight (pun intended).
What he should have said was "You can sterilize an astronaut with only slightly more effort than sterilizing a robot. Of course, after all is said and done, only the robot has any chance of functioning, let alone functioning normally." or "You cannot totally sterilize an astronaut while keeping them alive. For a robot this not a problem."
So being a good/.ian (/.izen ?) I didn't bother reading the article, and only vaguely glanced at the newsblurb.
Typical Slashdot Response #1 = Take bets on the winning score
Typical Slashdot Response #2 = "all of us/.ians are (by definition) 'Beaver Challenged' every day of our lives"
Typical Slashdot Response #3 = Being/.ians means the winning score will be 0 *ie none of you will get ANY beavers* (those few born with one are naturally excluded from the competition, as they've automatically scored 1 even before the competition starts, which by the letter of the rules means they cheated)
Typical Slashdot Response #4 - Anyhow, they prefer to be called Vagina Squirrels
Every contestant should obtain a Challenge Card from the Beaver Challenge organiser at
the Information Tent.
Visit as many bases as possible. A map of all registered bases will be on display at the
Information Tent.
Once you have completed a Beaver Challenge base, the base will stamp your card only
once at the next numbered block. You may only present one card for stamping at the base.
Go to another Beaver Challenge base.
Contestants are only allowed to visit a Beaver Challenge base a second time
however this can only be done after you have visited at least two other bases.
Once your Challenge Card has been completed return the card to the Beaver Challenge
organiser at the Information Tent where you will need to fill in your choice of the 5 best
bases.
The first 100 (hundred) contestants to submit their Cards completed and filled-in as per the
rules will receive a Special Badge.
Should you wish to visit some more Beaver Challenge bases then you can ask for another
card at the Information Tent.
Yet again Microsoft is doing their best to prostitute something which is currently "free" into something which they can use to screw their customer for unreasonable amounts of cash.
Today they're trying to "embrace and extend" email.
A Microsoft backed solution will lead to proprietary enhancements, patent litigation, prosecution and the general demise of email other than through Microsoft Proprietary Commercial Products.
Oh and you can forget about sending email from any *NIX like OS, absolutely not from any GPL or otherwise OpenSource OS.
I am not predicting the future, these things have already occurred In other areas of computing, just not email (yet).
HTML my Aunt FANNYs ass! That "HTML" link is just the entire document converted into Macromedia FLASH and embedded in a webpage.
DUMBASSES! What about people who don't have a graphical browser? Clicking on that HTML link is just a waste of their time.
I know it's asking a lot expecting Journalistic Integrity on Slashdot, but EDITORS PLEASE don't link to a bazillion pages of bandwidth hogging useless for anything worthwhile FLASH and then call it HTML.
But don't you have video-surveillance (and possibly even security guards, presumably out of sight) in large department stores?
Yeah it's a shame they had to pass a local odrinance but there things aren't taken lightly.
Obviously there's been MAJOR ISSUES and equally as obviously the owners of the CyberCafes apparently weren't doing enough to deal with the issue.
READ THE PDF people, criminal activity, gang activity, a guy was MURDERED, and schoolies were goofing off on the web during school hours. At a minimum, the last shows a dereliction of duty on the part of the operator of said CyberCafe.
The only thing I see *really* wrong in this is where the comment was made "Polisar also reported that
patrol officers were finding school aged children at these establishments during school
hours, and he expressed concern about minors being able to access inappropriate and
dangerous web sites"
Are you expecting all CyberCafes to censor the internet for you?
Government mandated censorship is always, absolutely and unconditionally a bad thing.
The information is collected by states and forwarded to a database in Florida, where a private company, Seisint Inc., builds and manages the database.
Now that we know that Seisint is compiling a database of all relevant information on *everyone* living in Utah, how long do we think it'll be before one of the many hackers/crackers (possibly sponsored by organized crime, then again equally likely to be doing it just for the kudos) breaks through their corporate security (cough smoke-and-mirrors, if they're like most other companies) and steals the identity of an entire state at once?
Of course " Utah was one of 13 states that hopped on board the pilot program last June -- funded with $12 million in federal grants. But since then, several states have pulled out of the project, citing privacy and financial concerns."
So we're not even talking about just one single state !
C'mon people - fame and fortune, kudos from the slashdot crowd, and your very own entry in the Guinness Book of Records.
I can just see it now Worlds Largest Simultaneous Identity Theft
Also the judge ruled that Lindows must ensure that internet users from the Benelux [BElgium NEtherlands LUXembourg] can no longer access the site www.lindows.com.
They should chanre tha name in that region to (wait for it) BENE LinUX.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's imnportant to note that:
The BSA has ZERO (extenuating/special) legal force behind them.
And YES I am specifically talking about in the US.
They basically are a business offering to audit you. They fact that they're making their offers with intentionally intimidating letters written in the best of legalspeak is neither here nor there.
They have ZERO legal rights for search-and-seizure or any such like (until, of course, they can prove to a judge "probable cause" or other similar evidence just like anyone else who wants to request a search warrant).
These anti-music/movie-piracy moguls , on the other hand, have had several particularly nasty laws passed which give them FULL LEGAL SANCTION to act more like a police force than any other business in the pursuit of evidence and/or prosecution.
So basically no, the BSA is *not* operating in a similar way. The BSA just TALK BIG and hope to scare you. The *AAs of the US are businesses with powers significantly similar to The Police Force.
OK, to paraphrase - Microsoft violated the terms of their contract with NVIDIA so that they could make XBOX2 non-backwards compatible (by leveraging ATI instead of NVIDIA) which leads to GREATER profit for Microsoft because
The fact that this royally screws the gamers themselves is merely the icing on the cake to Microsoft.
I had NO idea that you could sterilize an non-sterile living mass and make it a sterile lifeless mass...
Glad I could help.
Microsoft makes zero profit off the XBOX hardware.
Microsoft makes ALL its XBOX profit from the games.
Therefore the likelihood that XBOX2 will force you to buy NEW games is 100%.
This is not a technology issue, Microsoft didn't NEED to dump NVIDIA. This is purely a marketing and profit making exercise which includes their typical "we're in the business of raping our customers for cash" practices.
At least their stockholders will be happy.
Most likely of electric sheep.(apparently)
"You can sterilize a robot. But you cannot do the same to an astronaut. Inevitably a human will introduce microbes to the planet ... and contaminate it."
Not quite correct. In practice it IS possible to totally disinfect an astronaut.
Of course, with the caveat that said process of sterilization will (due to the processes and procedures involved) necessarily kill the austronaut and thusly render said person useless for anything other than dead-weight (pun intended).
What he should have said was "You can sterilize an astronaut with only slightly more effort than sterilizing a robot. Of course, after all is said and done, only the robot has any chance of functioning, let alone functioning normally." or "You cannot totally sterilize an astronaut while keeping them alive. For a robot this not a problem."
Anyway apparently it worked! (ie not a cluster in that sense either)
If it WAS implemented on the clustering technology we-all-know-and-love as Beowulf, would that make it a Beowulf-Squared?
And, of course, we have to ask the (obvious) question(s)
Crazy editors can't even spell-check Lycoris.
Of course, those of you who find yourselves *seriously* challenged will be handed
Typical Slashdot Response #1 = Take bets on the winning score
Typical Slashdot Response #2 = "all of us
Typical Slashdot Response #3 = Being
(those few born with one are naturally excluded from the competition, as they've automatically scored 1 even before the competition starts, which by the letter of the rules means they cheated)
Typical Slashdot Response #4 - Anyhow, they prefer to be called Vagina Squirrels
I did a search on google, and found these rules for Beaver Challenge 2004 (PDF).
Yet again Microsoft is doing their best to prostitute something which is currently "free" into something which they can use to screw their customer for unreasonable amounts of cash.
Today they're trying to "embrace and extend" email.
A Microsoft backed solution will lead to proprietary enhancements, patent litigation, prosecution and the general demise of email other than through Microsoft Proprietary Commercial Products.
Oh and you can forget about sending email from any *NIX like OS, absolutely not from any GPL or otherwise OpenSource OS.
I am not predicting the future, these things have already occurred In other areas of computing, just not email (yet).
Just you thought you knew how deep the conspiracy went...
(c) All of the Above.
Nope. They converted the PDFs to FLASH, and then embedded the flash into a webpage.
I understand that "in a webpage" technically means that it's HTML , but for all in tents and purposes, zero content of the document is HTML.
It's all in this "must have some plugin" format guaranteed to piss people off when you claim it's a link to HTML.
From the HTML page of the PDFs
Stephen J. Hoffman, Editor
David L. Kaplan, Editor
Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center
Houston, Texas
July 1997
And this is NEWs how exactly?
HTML my Aunt FANNYs ass! That "HTML" link is just the entire document converted into Macromedia FLASH and embedded in a webpage.
DUMBASSES! What about people who don't have a graphical browser? Clicking on that HTML link is just a waste of their time.
I know it's asking a lot expecting Journalistic Integrity on Slashdot, but EDITORS PLEASE don't link to a bazillion pages of bandwidth hogging useless for anything worthwhile FLASH and then call it HTML.
But don't you have video-surveillance (and possibly even security guards, presumably out of sight) in large department stores?
Yeah it's a shame they had to pass a local odrinance but there things aren't taken lightly.
Obviously there's been MAJOR ISSUES and equally as obviously the owners of the CyberCafes apparently weren't doing enough to deal with the issue.
READ THE PDF people, criminal activity, gang activity, a guy was MURDERED, and schoolies were goofing off on the web during school hours. At a minimum, the last shows a dereliction of duty on the part of the operator of said CyberCafe.
The only thing I see *really* wrong in this is where the comment was made "Polisar also reported that patrol officers were finding school aged children at these establishments during school hours, and he expressed concern about minors being able to access inappropriate and dangerous web sites"
Are you expecting all CyberCafes to censor the internet for you?
Government mandated censorship is always, absolutely and unconditionally a bad thing.
OK people, if you're going to whine about someone else being wrong, then you should at least try to be accurate yourself.
Despite what you all think, the mormon religion does not condone plural marriage any longer.
That is , originally it was encouraged. Don't believe me, checkout The LDS/Mormon webpages on the subject
The information is collected by states and forwarded to a database in Florida, where a private company, Seisint Inc., builds and manages the database.
Now that we know that Seisint is compiling a database of all relevant information on *everyone* living in Utah, how long do we think it'll be before one of the many hackers/crackers (possibly sponsored by organized crime, then again equally likely to be doing it just for the kudos) breaks through their corporate security (cough smoke-and-mirrors, if they're like most other companies) and steals the identity of an entire state at once?
Of course " Utah was one of 13 states that hopped on board the pilot program last June -- funded with $12 million in federal grants. But since then, several states have pulled out of the project, citing privacy and financial concerns."
So we're not even talking about just one single state !
C'mon people - fame and fortune, kudos from the slashdot crowd, and your very own entry in the Guinness Book of Records.
I can just see it now Worlds Largest Simultaneous Identity Theft
We knew it would happen , eventually
Whitey?
Oddly enough, entirely appropriate for the entire Open Source Movement.
Take a hit, then pass it on. Man that's good shit.
What ever became of
"We are The Nation
That Lives by Litigation"
Why did this case and ruling not happen in the good old US of A?
(not that I like the result, I'm just confused why they beat US to it)
who throws a wooden shoe?
Saboteurs, perhaps?
Also the judge ruled that Lindows must ensure that internet users from the Benelux [BElgium NEtherlands LUXembourg] can no longer access the site www.lindows.com.
They should chanre tha name in that region to (wait for it) BENE LinUX.
Might even sell well in Italy.