and the last 8 years of the War on Terror have not helped.
The silly thing about the War on Terror is that I'm currently more terrified about what my own government is doing than what the terrorists are doing. And I feel equally helpless to stop it.
No, it's to protect all of our Allies whom have the luxury of investing in massive social safety nets because they don't have to pay the true cost of their own national defense.
I'm of the opinion that we wouldn't need to defend ourselves against most of the people we currently defend ourselves against if we weren't allied with the US (and therefore catching shit every time the US pisses someone off). Of course, if we weren't allied with the US we may be needing to defend ourselves against the US...
Thanks for proving my point. You don't have dual-head support. You have two monitors, which you drag windows kicking-and-screaming between. You've become a Human Window Manager.
No, I have fully working dual-head support. But if someone uses Javascript to ask my machine for the total desktop dimensions (i.e. across all the heads), and then resize the browser window to match those dimensions, what the hell do you expect it to do? The problem here isn't my system, it's the web designer thinking that resizing a browser window to match the total desktop size is ever a good idea.
Did I say thanks for proving my point? I other OS's it's about as complicated as "Do I have more than one video output? Yes? Let's go, then."
Yes, because vendors *never* release totally broken drivers for other OSes that completely ignore the existing infrastructure provided by the system. Oh no, drivers for other OSes are totally perfect all the time.
If you're using the standard drivers then Xorg works just as you describe. the nVidia drivers are not, nor have they ever been "standard". They are proprietary binary drivers that reimplement big chunks of standard functionality in nonstandard ways.
I'm not prepared to accept any sort of fudging around turning things off and back on again just because none of the dozen different display toolkits can agree on how dual-head is going to work.
Nor am I. I haven't had any such problems. The only "fudging around" I've only done with dual-head support was implementing the Xinerama window placement algorithms in Sawfish (many many years ago when Sawfish was the standard window manager for Gnome and Xinerama had only just appeared). I wouldn't really consider this "fudging around" so much as being the first person to implement the missing functionality - someone has to be that person, after all.
When I first did Xinerama, I was using the enlightenment window manager
Hold on... you're basing your opinion of Linux multi-head support off an experience with a window manager that has never made it out of development-release status? Don't get me wrong, I like Enlightenment, but it is missing more features than you can shake a stick at (not just multi-head). If you can't put up with missing or broken features then what the hell are you doing using development release software? The mainstream window managers _do_ support Xinerama very well. I imagine that if you replaced Windows' window manager with a half-implemented third party alpha-release then you might have problems too.
the colossal waste of space
This is one area where I think Linux really wins over Windows. Desktop space management is so much easier in decent Linux window managers, allowing you to make much better use of limited desktop space. Simple stuff like the complete lack of MDI in Linux is a god-send (I've never seen anything waste screen space as badly as MDI - whoever thought it was a good idea surely must have been firmly in the "only use one application at a time" camp). Sloppy focus is a big deal too - being able to interact with windows that aren't at the top of the stack means I need much less desktop space. Also shadeable windows are a big space saver.
What really made me lose hope was all the folks like yourself, and the devs, that genuinely can't see anything wrong with it all.
You're totally wrong there. I can see stuff wrong all over the place. The reason why I put up with stuff being wrong is because there is no alternative - when I look at the alternative OSes, I see *more* stuff wrong in much more fundamental and unworkaroundable ways. Picking which bit of software to use usually comes down to picking the lesser of the evils, because all software is buggy shit, it just happens that some is more buggy than others.
Well, the more people enter the Sex Offender Registry the more diluted it becomes. For example, I wouldn't consider it evidence of anything.
The problem isn't really whether or not you consider it evidence of anything, it is that the law seems to consider it as such.
For example, consider a teacher - some kid with an axe to grind accuses the teacher of kiddy-fiddling and the police investigate and fail to find any evidence. The teacher interviews for a job at another school (or pretty much any activity that involves "vulnerable people", which may be a spare-time activity such as helping out with the local Scout troop). Here in the UK, the school they are interviewing for are required to run a criminal records check on the teacher. The criminal records check will show that the teacher was once accused of kiddy-fiddling (doesn't matter that they weren't found guilty). There is *no way* tat teacher will get the job with that on their record - even if the law doesn't explicitly prevent it (I'm not entirely clear on the legal position on this point), no one is going to take the chance because in the very very unlikely event that this teacher *is* a kiddy fiddler and something happens in the future, the fact that the school knew that there was some history (even though no proof of guilt) will land them in deep shit.
The whole child protection thing has gone way too excessive, to the detriment of almost all children. As an example, the local mountaineering club used to have a junior section (the people who ran it had gone through all the mandatory checks, etc.), but due to falling numbers of kids attending, the junior section disbanded. There are a few kids left who still want to carry on doing stuff with the club, but not enough to make up a dedicated junior section. The sensible thing to do in this instance is to allow the few kids who are left to attend the adult meets, but of course we can't do that because none of the people at the adult meets are checked. So because of the almost non-existent chance of a kid being abused, these kids can no longer do the activities they are interested in doing. And people wonder why kids are bored (and hence get up to no good) these days... (Also bear in mind that the vast majority of child abuse is done by family members, so it is crazy to require strangers to be police checked whilst not having similar requirements for the child's family).
Use an FDE disk with a TPM... if you want to burn the data on the drive, just reset the TPM key - poof, all that data is now 100% unreadable. Unless they have a backdoor into AES-256.
And you promptly go to jail for failing to hand over the encryption key that you no longer have. Great. (And yes, this has happened)
Linux is a desktop OS. it just has some rough edges for installation and a couple of ease of use problems.
So, the same as every other OS then?
I'm tired of people making out that Linux isn't "ready for the desktop" because of a few minor problems, as if all the OSes they think are "ready for the desktop" are perfect. News flash: every OS has its problems, sure you may think that another OS is "better" than Linux because you have already learnt to live with its problems, but that's pretty much missing the point. From my perspective (having been using Linux as a desktop OS for around 12 years, and pretty much exclusively for the last 7), the likes of Windows and OS X are far less "ready for the desktop" than Linux, probably mostly because they present a whole new set of problems that I have to deal with.
One thing about Linux is important to me though - if a problem is a big enough deal to me then I _can_ fix it myself, whereas under many other OSes this simply isn't an option.
the maximaize window bug
What "maximize window bug"? I'll admit that I don't have a lot of use for maximizing windows, but on the odd occasion that I do it seems to work perfectly.
For example, the terminal velocity of the human body is 120 MPH. This means that if you go skydiving, you will never fall faster than 120 MPH.
This is untrue. You can massively exceed 190Km/h by adjusting your body's attitude. The commonly quoted 190Km/h terminal velocity is based on a human body in a horizontal position with all limbs out-stretched.
Thats how gnome works too last time i've used it (which was few weeks ago).
This has nothing to do with the desktop environment (whether that be KDE or Gnome), it is down to your window manager. Metashitty is... well... shitty is most regards, Compiz Fusion does exactly what you want under Gnome.
In short, your productivity on a Linux box is inversely proportional to the number of monitors you've got hanging off it, the very opposite of the point of having them.
Umm, I've been running Xorg with 2 monitors on my main workstation for around 7 years (and intermittently used them prior to that). I find it a very productive setup. My only real problems with it are:
1. Some games are really stupid and don't understand the idea of multiple monitors at all. 2. If I forget to turn off Javascript window resizing in FireFox then it seems some web designers are morons and want to full-screen my browser when I visit their website. This invariably means they look at my desktop dimensions and adjust the window to fill it (splatting the browser across all the screens).
Of course, if you're using an nVidia card then things get a bit more complicated because nVidia decided to reimplement their own Xinerama extensions in their drivers.
Linux is not a desktop operating environment,
I will respectfully disagree with that - I've been running Linux as my *only* desktop OS since 2002, when I realised that pretty much everything I used Windows had been doable at least as well by Linux for a couple of years. If Linux isn't a "desktop OS" then clearly Windows and OS X aren't either since Linux works better as a desktop OS for me than either of those.
My sister has this incredibly small Mac boxen and it appeared to have some Mac web browser installed on it. I would assume that it came with the OS?? (or does it? I never actually used one myself, but I've seen people do)
It isn't the job of MS to improve customer awareness. That falls under advertising and marketing.
This would be true except for one very very important factor: by making IE a "standard" part of the Windows install, Microsoft has leveraged their monopoly position to "advertise" and "market" IE. What better way is there to advertise your product than to have it preinstalled on almost every PC sold? No one except Microsoft can do this, and that's what makes it illegal.
Lets be clear on this: leveraging one market in order to increase your share in another is not illegal; leveraging a market in which you have a monoply in order to increase your share in another is illegal, and that's what this is about.
If it was Safari that was the default and if some other company was suing for having a browser ballot you'd be screaming bloody murder.
Why? I know I'm not the poster you replied to, but I think that shipping any one browser with Windows is a terrible idea because it puts the browser vendor in a position so powerful that they can dictate what everyone else is doing. For the record, I have never used Safari because I don't own a system that can run it.
Other browsers have failed to convince OEMs to include their browsers.
But would the same have been true given a level playing field? If IE had never been bundled with Windows and vendors had always had a choice over what browser to install as standard, would Microsoft have succeeded in convincing the OEMs to include IE in such a large proportion of installs? I can certainly remember vendors bundling Netscape with machines instead of IE before IE became bundled. The truth of the matter is that the playing field is _not_ level - there is very little reason for vendors to go to extra effort to give their customers another browser (whether or not it is better), and that's exactly what it is, extra effort, purely because IE is bundled and other browsers are not.
Personally, I support the idea of banning Microsoft from bundling *any* browser with OEM copies of Windows so that there is no "lazy path" for the vendors to take; but even if this happened, IE has been bundled for so long that it would take a long time for it to be displaced since too many end-users associate the IE icon with "the web" instead of "a way to access the web".
OEMs don't give a shit about other browsers.
I think that statement needs refining a bit - as explained above, OEMs don't give a shit about what browser they give their customers, so they pick the easiest option - the one that is bundled with Windows. No one except Microsoft can provide an "easiest option", and that's why it is a problem. There are only two possible solutions to this problem; either you bundle multiple browsers, making them all equally easy, or you bundle no browser, making them all equally hard.
Too bad all the anti-ms hate has screwed up your objective beliefs.
I'm not anti-MS; I'm against a single vendor getting enough power to influence the market as significantly as MS has. MS's lack of IE development and failure to embrace standards has seriously held back development of the web; this isn't really a comment on MS, it is a comment on their position - no vendor should be in a position to screw over the *whole* web as badly as MS has done.
This is also why I hope that Chrome doesn't gain a majority market share, because I don't think that it is a healthy thing for a single vendor to have complete control of a significant platform.
I can see the next Mac vs PC ad
The difference here, as has been stated numerous times, is that Microsoft is a monopoly, Apple isn't. However, Apple are indeed far more abusive of their position than Microsoft is, and being taken down a peg or two by similar rulings would do the consumers a lot of good in the long run (Apple can't be
Or how would you go about cost-effectively bringing enough content providers on board to make said chimera a useful product out of the box and avoid a Kindle-like fate for it?
I'm pretty sure that Jobs could crap in a shiny white box and the Apple fanboys would jump at the chance for buying said turd for £800 a pop...
Well that was stupid. Buying a new drive every 3years, doubling in size each time would have been cheaper and you'd have had no file loss.
Umm... I think your recollection of how much hard drives cost in 1997 is hazy. At $5/CD you're looking at 6-7 gig for $50, which is a lot cheaper than 1997 hard drives.
What most people fail to notice is that the thickness of those old CDs did allow one to skip them on the road and be able to put them back into the player and read correctly. They are thicker than today's CDs.
[citation needed]
Philips specify the thickness of a CD - if it doesn't match the spec then it isn't a CD and can't carry the CD logo.
In any case, the robustness of the polycarbonate is rarely the problem - the easiest way to damage a CD is by scratching the aluminium layer, since it is only protected by a thin lacquer. By contrast, DVDs have a much better design, sandwiching the aluminium between two polycarbonate discs.
Licences such as GPL, LGPL, BSD (if you want to give it away), Creative Commons,... etc
These things don't protect you from the things patents are _supposed_ to protect you from (namely, someone ripping off your _idea_, rather than your implementation).
Proprietary software. In other words don't publish your code.
This one will protect your idea, only if it is a hidden subsystem within your product - e.g. an algorithm which is orders of magnitude faster than existing methods of doing that job would be partly protected when integrated into proprietary software since it wouldn't be visible, but a "whole-product" idea such as Amazon's infamous one-click purchase system isn't protected because it is downright obvious how it could be implemented without needing to look at the code.
Of course, interested parties can still reverse engineer your code anyway.
I am sure this can easily be added to without resorting to stupid software patents, which IMHO don't contribute to innovation in developing software. The only people that stand to gain from software patents are the Lawyers and patent Trolls.
On this we certainly agree. IMHO the whole patent system is broken and rarely does anything beneficial to innovation.
In the US you wouldn't have the nonsense of paying a tax just to watch TV to begin with.
Yeah, taxing stuff so that the whole population can get a much better service is evil. Thank goodness your healthcare isn't paid for by taxes either...
Also, the vans used to detect violaters would be illegal also. We had a case that said using EM to detect inside your home something which would otherwise be private is an illegal search.
If you are broadcasting EM radiation from your antenna then it quite clearly isn't private.
How would you get me to pay tax on an income you can't even prove I received?
This is _exactly_ what is already happening, by your own admission. An income tax is legally imposed on the population even though there is often no way to prove how much someone should be paying, and the law abiding people pay it whilst the rest evade it.
With regards to DRM, I am unconvinced about their sanity.
The FreeSat HD specification mandates that HD content must be HDCP encrypted when the stream contains a "DRM flag" (which BBC HD regularly carries), but the DVB-S/S2 stream is broadcast in the clear. So they are basically saying that they are happy to broadcast a conveniently compressed stream 72,000Km in the clear, but the 1 metre long uncompressed link between the decoder and the TV must be encrypted.
What exactly does this achieve?
* It causes problems with older HD kit, either because it isn't digital (think: HD over component), or has a buggy HDCP implementation.
* It raises costs by requiring the HDCP hardware be present and licensed in each device.
* It devalues the official FreeSat hardware/platform since standard DVB-S/S2 decoders don't have this restriction and can be used instead.
* It doesn't reduce copyright infringement since no one sane would be capturing the raw HDMI stream anyway when there's a convenient MPEG4 stream available directly from the dish.
* It prohibits PVR manufacturers from implementing certain functionality, such as IP streaming.
They are going head to head with ITV (the biggest independent TV station in the UK) over the Saturday night prime slot with their own reality TV/talent show for example.
They want to broadcast popular shows but dont want content restriction to be used as leverage by the content providers.
ITV use the FreeView and FreeSat platforms too, so they are in exactly the same position as the BBC. Notably they haven't been calling for these platforms to accommodate DRM.
allowing BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Five, etc. to obtain the rights to show series and films that the rights holders will not allow them to show without content protection in the receiver.
Why do I want the BBC to be spending my licence fee on: 1. Development or licensing of DRM systems. 2. Broadcast of content which I cannot receive without buying a proprietary receiver (and thus paying another licence fee for the DRM system whilst giving me very limited choice on what equipment I use and which parts of my legal rights I can actually exercise). 3. "Premium" content you could get elsewhere anyway.
They should be investing this money in production of their own content, which wouldn't require crazy DRM anyway.
This would things like the HD versions of Hollywood films which the MPAA doesn't want people getting good digital copies of for free.
Those would be the films of which blueray rips were available for download months or years before the BBC show them anyway?
I find it strange that the BBC has been picked on for this, it is a condition imposed by the content rights holders and the BBC is only one of several companies involved in defining the broadcast platform specifications.
Not only does the BBC have a reasonable amount of bidding power (the BBC dropping out of the bidding wars would significantly reduce the profits made by the content producers selling to the UK), but they also have a mandate to make content available to as wide an audience as possible. As far as I can see, saying "you can only receive this content with this proprietary device" is in direct contradiction to that mandate. The broadcast content paid for by the licence fee has always been available at full quality through openly specified protocols/standards(*), there is no reason for this to change.
(* It is true that for some time the BBC's DVB-S transmissions were encrypted using VideoGuard due to territorial licensing issues. This hasn't been true for years since the move onto the restricted-footprint Astra 2D transponders, and that content was always available through other official means).
I don't know UK law, but if the US had a TV license tax I'm sure a judge would issue a warrant based on the fact that there's a dish or antenna on the roof.
Then I'm pretty glad I don't live in the US - having an antenna or dish does not constitute probable cause since there is no legal expectation that you remove a disused antenna.
They have a fleet of vans to catch people that might be doing just what you're suggesting
No, they have a few vans, many of which probably don't have any actual equipment in them.
in the US being paid under the table is very common.
The original post can be summarised by "you can't tax something when you can't prove how much tax someone should be paying". My response can be summarised as basically "yes you can, there are many many examples of such taxes" and I cited income tax as an example. The fact that you have just stated that evading income tax is very common does nothing but re-enforce my original point.
All DRM will do is stop "casual piracy", that is people making copies for their friends,
Won't even do that - If people can't record their own TV they will simply download it from the Internet (illegally, if necessary).
or recording to view later etc...
Not only does copyright has absolutely nothing to do with piracy, time shifting has nothing to do with copyright infringement (or any other illegal activity).
On a related note, the BBC employ a DRM system on satellite for their HD channel which demonstrates the utterly crazy way these people's minds work: They send a free to air DVB stream 72,000Km in the clear, and then mandate that the 1 metre long cable carrying the raw uncompressed HDTV data from the decoder to the TV must be encrypted. So what does this do for anyone? It makes the lives of the consumers harder (e.g. it effectively outlaws the use of HD over component, so early adopters have to replace their equipment with something that can do HDCP), but at the same time does nothing to stop copyright infringement (someone who wants to record a programme won't be capturing the raw uncompressed data anyway, they will instead be capturing the much more convenient already-compressed unencrypted DVB stream). It also devalues the official hardware, since standard DVB receivers (i.e. those not sporting the FreeSat logo) play the content just fine without this restriction.
One particular fellow doesn't even seem to put two and two together (or spell correctly) and realize that his exact situation is just what they intend to block:
Personally third party content is of little importance to me, certainly not worth the risk of losing my ability to watch television on my computer via my DVB capture card; I use an open source operating system which will be highly unlikely to obtain a licence for the BBC's proprietary compression tables.
Why would they want to block this? Note that he said watch TV on a computer - if he had said that he wanted to keep the ability to illegally copy it then you might have a point, but that's not what he said at all.
It amazes me that none of these responses addresses the basic needs or the fact that the BBC may be faced with losing some premium content providers if this doesn't go into effect.
Why should I (the licence fee payer) be legally required to financially support something controversial like DRM, that I fundamentally disagree with? If the content producers don't want the BBC to have their content then that's fine by me, but it will reduce their profits (by immediately excluding the BBC from the bidding process, they are automatically reducing the value of their content since less bidders means a lower winning bid (on average)).
It's bad alright but what's your suggested solution to this (perceived) problem?
Perceived problems don't need solutions. Real problems need solutions.
That's why it will be eventually put into place if you don't proffer an alternative.
The alternative is to continue doing as they have been doing for decades - allowing licence payers to use the content to the full extent allowed by the law (and yes, this includes building your own receiver). Its worked up till now, why do they need to change?
Fundamentally, DRM is the only other alternative the market has to offer right now.
DRM doesn't actually do anything to reduce copyright infringement. If anything, it increases copyright infringement by reducing the number of people who can get at the content by legitimate means. The choice is going to come down to: * Replace my whole A/V system with a new system that has extremely limited functionality compared to what I already have. * Illegally download the content off the internet. Guess which choice I'm more likely to pick?
Slashdot Mirror
and the last 8 years of the War on Terror have not helped.
The silly thing about the War on Terror is that I'm currently more terrified about what my own government is doing than what the terrorists are doing. And I feel equally helpless to stop it.
No, it's to protect all of our Allies whom have the luxury of investing in massive social safety nets because they don't have to pay the true cost of their own national defense.
I'm of the opinion that we wouldn't need to defend ourselves against most of the people we currently defend ourselves against if we weren't allied with the US (and therefore catching shit every time the US pisses someone off). Of course, if we weren't allied with the US we may be needing to defend ourselves against the US...
Thanks for proving my point. You don't have dual-head support. You have two monitors, which you drag windows kicking-and-screaming between. You've become a Human Window Manager.
No, I have fully working dual-head support. But if someone uses Javascript to ask my machine for the total desktop dimensions (i.e. across all the heads), and then resize the browser window to match those dimensions, what the hell do you expect it to do? The problem here isn't my system, it's the web designer thinking that resizing a browser window to match the total desktop size is ever a good idea.
Did I say thanks for proving my point? I other OS's it's about as complicated as "Do I have more than one video output? Yes? Let's go, then."
Yes, because vendors *never* release totally broken drivers for other OSes that completely ignore the existing infrastructure provided by the system. Oh no, drivers for other OSes are totally perfect all the time.
If you're using the standard drivers then Xorg works just as you describe. the nVidia drivers are not, nor have they ever been "standard". They are proprietary binary drivers that reimplement big chunks of standard functionality in nonstandard ways.
I'm not prepared to accept any sort of fudging around turning things off and back on again just because none of the dozen different display toolkits can agree on how dual-head is going to work.
Nor am I. I haven't had any such problems. The only "fudging around" I've only done with dual-head support was implementing the Xinerama window placement algorithms in Sawfish (many many years ago when Sawfish was the standard window manager for Gnome and Xinerama had only just appeared). I wouldn't really consider this "fudging around" so much as being the first person to implement the missing functionality - someone has to be that person, after all.
When I first did Xinerama, I was using the enlightenment window manager
Hold on... you're basing your opinion of Linux multi-head support off an experience with a window manager that has never made it out of development-release status? Don't get me wrong, I like Enlightenment, but it is missing more features than you can shake a stick at (not just multi-head). If you can't put up with missing or broken features then what the hell are you doing using development release software? The mainstream window managers _do_ support Xinerama very well. I imagine that if you replaced Windows' window manager with a half-implemented third party alpha-release then you might have problems too.
the colossal waste of space
This is one area where I think Linux really wins over Windows. Desktop space management is so much easier in decent Linux window managers, allowing you to make much better use of limited desktop space. Simple stuff like the complete lack of MDI in Linux is a god-send (I've never seen anything waste screen space as badly as MDI - whoever thought it was a good idea surely must have been firmly in the "only use one application at a time" camp). Sloppy focus is a big deal too - being able to interact with windows that aren't at the top of the stack means I need much less desktop space. Also shadeable windows are a big space saver.
What really made me lose hope was all the folks like yourself, and the devs, that genuinely can't see anything wrong with it all.
You're totally wrong there. I can see stuff wrong all over the place. The reason why I put up with stuff being wrong is because there is no alternative - when I look at the alternative OSes, I see *more* stuff wrong in much more fundamental and unworkaroundable ways. Picking which bit of software to use usually comes down to picking the lesser of the evils, because all software is buggy shit, it just happens that some is more buggy than others.
Well, the more people enter the Sex Offender Registry the more diluted it becomes. For example, I wouldn't consider it evidence of anything.
The problem isn't really whether or not you consider it evidence of anything, it is that the law seems to consider it as such.
For example, consider a teacher - some kid with an axe to grind accuses the teacher of kiddy-fiddling and the police investigate and fail to find any evidence. The teacher interviews for a job at another school (or pretty much any activity that involves "vulnerable people", which may be a spare-time activity such as helping out with the local Scout troop). Here in the UK, the school they are interviewing for are required to run a criminal records check on the teacher. The criminal records check will show that the teacher was once accused of kiddy-fiddling (doesn't matter that they weren't found guilty). There is *no way* tat teacher will get the job with that on their record - even if the law doesn't explicitly prevent it (I'm not entirely clear on the legal position on this point), no one is going to take the chance because in the very very unlikely event that this teacher *is* a kiddy fiddler and something happens in the future, the fact that the school knew that there was some history (even though no proof of guilt) will land them in deep shit.
The whole child protection thing has gone way too excessive, to the detriment of almost all children. As an example, the local mountaineering club used to have a junior section (the people who ran it had gone through all the mandatory checks, etc.), but due to falling numbers of kids attending, the junior section disbanded. There are a few kids left who still want to carry on doing stuff with the club, but not enough to make up a dedicated junior section. The sensible thing to do in this instance is to allow the few kids who are left to attend the adult meets, but of course we can't do that because none of the people at the adult meets are checked. So because of the almost non-existent chance of a kid being abused, these kids can no longer do the activities they are interested in doing. And people wonder why kids are bored (and hence get up to no good) these days... (Also bear in mind that the vast majority of child abuse is done by family members, so it is crazy to require strangers to be police checked whilst not having similar requirements for the child's family).
Use an FDE disk with a TPM... if you want to burn the data on the drive, just reset the TPM key - poof, all that data is now 100% unreadable. Unless they have a backdoor into AES-256.
And you promptly go to jail for failing to hand over the encryption key that you no longer have. Great. (And yes, this has happened)
Linux is a desktop OS. it just has some rough edges for installation and a couple of ease of use problems.
So, the same as every other OS then?
I'm tired of people making out that Linux isn't "ready for the desktop" because of a few minor problems, as if all the OSes they think are "ready for the desktop" are perfect. News flash: every OS has its problems, sure you may think that another OS is "better" than Linux because you have already learnt to live with its problems, but that's pretty much missing the point. From my perspective (having been using Linux as a desktop OS for around 12 years, and pretty much exclusively for the last 7), the likes of Windows and OS X are far less "ready for the desktop" than Linux, probably mostly because they present a whole new set of problems that I have to deal with.
One thing about Linux is important to me though - if a problem is a big enough deal to me then I _can_ fix it myself, whereas under many other OSes this simply isn't an option.
the maximaize window bug
What "maximize window bug"? I'll admit that I don't have a lot of use for maximizing windows, but on the odd occasion that I do it seems to work perfectly.
For example, the terminal velocity of the human body is 120 MPH. This means that if you go skydiving, you will never fall faster than 120 MPH.
This is untrue. You can massively exceed 190Km/h by adjusting your body's attitude. The commonly quoted 190Km/h terminal velocity is based on a human body in a horizontal position with all limbs out-stretched.
Thats how gnome works too last time i've used it (which was few weeks ago).
This has nothing to do with the desktop environment (whether that be KDE or Gnome), it is down to your window manager. Metashitty is... well... shitty is most regards, Compiz Fusion does exactly what you want under Gnome.
In short, your productivity on a Linux box is inversely proportional to the number of monitors you've got hanging off it, the very opposite of the point of having them.
Umm, I've been running Xorg with 2 monitors on my main workstation for around 7 years (and intermittently used them prior to that). I find it a very productive setup. My only real problems with it are:
1. Some games are really stupid and don't understand the idea of multiple monitors at all.
2. If I forget to turn off Javascript window resizing in FireFox then it seems some web designers are morons and want to full-screen my browser when I visit their website. This invariably means they look at my desktop dimensions and adjust the window to fill it (splatting the browser across all the screens).
Of course, if you're using an nVidia card then things get a bit more complicated because nVidia decided to reimplement their own Xinerama extensions in their drivers.
Linux is not a desktop operating environment,
I will respectfully disagree with that - I've been running Linux as my *only* desktop OS since 2002, when I realised that pretty much everything I used Windows had been doable at least as well by Linux for a couple of years. If Linux isn't a "desktop OS" then clearly Windows and OS X aren't either since Linux works better as a desktop OS for me than either of those.
My sister has this incredibly small Mac boxen and it appeared to have some Mac web browser installed on it. I would assume that it came with the OS?? (or does it? I never actually used one myself, but I've seen people do)
Yes... what's your point?
It isn't the job of MS to improve customer awareness. That falls under advertising and marketing.
This would be true except for one very very important factor: by making IE a "standard" part of the Windows install, Microsoft has leveraged their monopoly position to "advertise" and "market" IE. What better way is there to advertise your product than to have it preinstalled on almost every PC sold? No one except Microsoft can do this, and that's what makes it illegal.
Lets be clear on this: leveraging one market in order to increase your share in another is not illegal; leveraging a market in which you have a monoply in order to increase your share in another is illegal, and that's what this is about.
If it was Safari that was the default and if some other company was suing for having a browser ballot you'd be screaming bloody murder.
Why? I know I'm not the poster you replied to, but I think that shipping any one browser with Windows is a terrible idea because it puts the browser vendor in a position so powerful that they can dictate what everyone else is doing. For the record, I have never used Safari because I don't own a system that can run it.
Other browsers have failed to convince OEMs to include their browsers.
But would the same have been true given a level playing field? If IE had never been bundled with Windows and vendors had always had a choice over what browser to install as standard, would Microsoft have succeeded in convincing the OEMs to include IE in such a large proportion of installs? I can certainly remember vendors bundling Netscape with machines instead of IE before IE became bundled. The truth of the matter is that the playing field is _not_ level - there is very little reason for vendors to go to extra effort to give their customers another browser (whether or not it is better), and that's exactly what it is, extra effort, purely because IE is bundled and other browsers are not.
Personally, I support the idea of banning Microsoft from bundling *any* browser with OEM copies of Windows so that there is no "lazy path" for the vendors to take; but even if this happened, IE has been bundled for so long that it would take a long time for it to be displaced since too many end-users associate the IE icon with "the web" instead of "a way to access the web".
OEMs don't give a shit about other browsers.
I think that statement needs refining a bit - as explained above, OEMs don't give a shit about what browser they give their customers, so they pick the easiest option - the one that is bundled with Windows. No one except Microsoft can provide an "easiest option", and that's why it is a problem. There are only two possible solutions to this problem; either you bundle multiple browsers, making them all equally easy, or you bundle no browser, making them all equally hard.
Too bad all the anti-ms hate has screwed up your objective beliefs.
I'm not anti-MS; I'm against a single vendor getting enough power to influence the market as significantly as MS has. MS's lack of IE development and failure to embrace standards has seriously held back development of the web; this isn't really a comment on MS, it is a comment on their position - no vendor should be in a position to screw over the *whole* web as badly as MS has done.
This is also why I hope that Chrome doesn't gain a majority market share, because I don't think that it is a healthy thing for a single vendor to have complete control of a significant platform.
I can see the next Mac vs PC ad
The difference here, as has been stated numerous times, is that Microsoft is a monopoly, Apple isn't. However, Apple are indeed far more abusive of their position than Microsoft is, and being taken down a peg or two by similar rulings would do the consumers a lot of good in the long run (Apple can't be
The first human inter-stellar starship is not that bad of an additional unintended side effect...
Probably wipe out a lot of life on Earth in the process of course... we're pretty dependent on the tides.
Build the FBR on the moon.
I think we all know how that ends.
Or how would you go about cost-effectively bringing enough content providers on board to make said chimera a useful product out of the box and avoid a Kindle-like fate for it?
I'm pretty sure that Jobs could crap in a shiny white box and the Apple fanboys would jump at the chance for buying said turd for £800 a pop...
"I was paying as much as $5/each in 1997-2000."
Well that was stupid. Buying a new drive every 3years, doubling in size each time would have been cheaper and you'd have had no file loss.
Umm... I think your recollection of how much hard drives cost in 1997 is hazy. At $5/CD you're looking at 6-7 gig for $50, which is a lot cheaper than 1997 hard drives.
What most people fail to notice is that the thickness of those old CDs did allow one to skip them on the road and be able to put them back into the player and read correctly. They are thicker than today's CDs.
[citation needed]
Philips specify the thickness of a CD - if it doesn't match the spec then it isn't a CD and can't carry the CD logo.
In any case, the robustness of the polycarbonate is rarely the problem - the easiest way to damage a CD is by scratching the aluminium layer, since it is only protected by a thin lacquer. By contrast, DVDs have a much better design, sandwiching the aluminium between two polycarbonate discs.
These things don't protect you from the things patents are _supposed_ to protect you from (namely, someone ripping off your _idea_, rather than your implementation).
This one will protect your idea, only if it is a hidden subsystem within your product - e.g. an algorithm which is orders of magnitude faster than existing methods of doing that job would be partly protected when integrated into proprietary software since it wouldn't be visible, but a "whole-product" idea such as Amazon's infamous one-click purchase system isn't protected because it is downright obvious how it could be implemented without needing to look at the code.
Of course, interested parties can still reverse engineer your code anyway.
I am sure this can easily be added to without resorting to stupid software patents, which IMHO don't contribute to innovation in developing software. The only people that stand to gain from software patents are the Lawyers and patent Trolls.
On this we certainly agree. IMHO the whole patent system is broken and rarely does anything beneficial to innovation.
In the US you wouldn't have the nonsense of paying a tax just to watch TV to begin with.
Yeah, taxing stuff so that the whole population can get a much better service is evil. Thank goodness your healthcare isn't paid for by taxes either...
Also, the vans used to detect violaters would be illegal also. We had a case that said using EM to detect inside your home something which would otherwise be private is an illegal search.
If you are broadcasting EM radiation from your antenna then it quite clearly isn't private.
How would you get me to pay tax on an income you can't even prove I received?
This is _exactly_ what is already happening, by your own admission. An income tax is legally imposed on the population even though there is often no way to prove how much someone should be paying, and the law abiding people pay it whilst the rest evade it.
The BBC board are not stupid
With regards to DRM, I am unconvinced about their sanity.
The FreeSat HD specification mandates that HD content must be HDCP encrypted when the stream contains a "DRM flag" (which BBC HD regularly carries), but the DVB-S/S2 stream is broadcast in the clear. So they are basically saying that they are happy to broadcast a conveniently compressed stream 72,000Km in the clear, but the 1 metre long uncompressed link between the decoder and the TV must be encrypted.
What exactly does this achieve?
* It causes problems with older HD kit, either because it isn't digital (think: HD over component), or has a buggy HDCP implementation.
* It raises costs by requiring the HDCP hardware be present and licensed in each device.
* It devalues the official FreeSat hardware/platform since standard DVB-S/S2 decoders don't have this restriction and can be used instead.
* It doesn't reduce copyright infringement since no one sane would be capturing the raw HDMI stream anyway when there's a convenient MPEG4 stream available directly from the dish.
* It prohibits PVR manufacturers from implementing certain functionality, such as IP streaming.
They are going head to head with ITV (the biggest independent TV station in the UK) over the Saturday night prime slot with their own reality TV/talent show for example.
They want to broadcast popular shows but dont want content restriction to be used as leverage by the content providers.
ITV use the FreeView and FreeSat platforms too, so they are in exactly the same position as the BBC. Notably they haven't been calling for these platforms to accommodate DRM.
Which isn't an argument against DRM, it's an argument against having the British government that involved in broadcasting in the first place.
Not really.. On the whole it's worked quite well when compared to the biassed news reporting and utter drivel that comes out of the US networks...
Not all pirates are plain shit broke.
Indeed, some of them just like to do a bit of violence on the high seas.
allowing BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Five, etc. to obtain the rights to show series and films that the rights holders will not allow them to show without content protection in the receiver.
Why do I want the BBC to be spending my licence fee on:
1. Development or licensing of DRM systems.
2. Broadcast of content which I cannot receive without buying a proprietary receiver (and thus paying another licence fee for the DRM system whilst giving me very limited choice on what equipment I use and which parts of my legal rights I can actually exercise).
3. "Premium" content you could get elsewhere anyway.
They should be investing this money in production of their own content, which wouldn't require crazy DRM anyway.
This would things like the HD versions of Hollywood films which the MPAA doesn't want people getting good digital copies of for free.
Those would be the films of which blueray rips were available for download months or years before the BBC show them anyway?
I find it strange that the BBC has been picked on for this, it is a condition imposed by the content rights holders and the BBC is only one of several companies involved in defining the broadcast platform specifications.
Not only does the BBC have a reasonable amount of bidding power (the BBC dropping out of the bidding wars would significantly reduce the profits made by the content producers selling to the UK), but they also have a mandate to make content available to as wide an audience as possible. As far as I can see, saying "you can only receive this content with this proprietary device" is in direct contradiction to that mandate. The broadcast content paid for by the licence fee has always been available at full quality through openly specified protocols/standards(*), there is no reason for this to change.
(* It is true that for some time the BBC's DVB-S transmissions were encrypted using VideoGuard due to territorial licensing issues. This hasn't been true for years since the move onto the restricted-footprint Astra 2D transponders, and that content was always available through other official means).
I don't know UK law, but if the US had a TV license tax I'm sure a judge would issue a warrant based on the fact that there's a dish or antenna on the roof.
Then I'm pretty glad I don't live in the US - having an antenna or dish does not constitute probable cause since there is no legal expectation that you remove a disused antenna.
They have a fleet of vans to catch people that might be doing just what you're suggesting
No, they have a few vans, many of which probably don't have any actual equipment in them.
in the US being paid under the table is very common.
The original post can be summarised by "you can't tax something when you can't prove how much tax someone should be paying". My response can be summarised as basically "yes you can, there are many many examples of such taxes" and I cited income tax as an example. The fact that you have just stated that evading income tax is very common does nothing but re-enforce my original point.
All DRM will do is stop "casual piracy", that is people making copies for their friends,
Won't even do that - If people can't record their own TV they will simply download it from the Internet (illegally, if necessary).
or recording to view later etc...
Not only does copyright has absolutely nothing to do with piracy, time shifting has nothing to do with copyright infringement (or any other illegal activity).
On a related note, the BBC employ a DRM system on satellite for their HD channel which demonstrates the utterly crazy way these people's minds work: They send a free to air DVB stream 72,000Km in the clear, and then mandate that the 1 metre long cable carrying the raw uncompressed HDTV data from the decoder to the TV must be encrypted. So what does this do for anyone? It makes the lives of the consumers harder (e.g. it effectively outlaws the use of HD over component, so early adopters have to replace their equipment with something that can do HDCP), but at the same time does nothing to stop copyright infringement (someone who wants to record a programme won't be capturing the raw uncompressed data anyway, they will instead be capturing the much more convenient already-compressed unencrypted DVB stream). It also devalues the official hardware, since standard DVB receivers (i.e. those not sporting the FreeSat logo) play the content just fine without this restriction.
One particular fellow doesn't even seem to put two and two together (or spell correctly) and realize that his exact situation is just what they intend to block:
Personally third party content is of little importance to me, certainly not worth the risk of losing my ability to watch television on my computer via my DVB capture card; I use an open source operating system which will be highly unlikely to obtain a licence for the BBC's proprietary compression tables.
Why would they want to block this? Note that he said watch TV on a computer - if he had said that he wanted to keep the ability to illegally copy it then you might have a point, but that's not what he said at all.
It amazes me that none of these responses addresses the basic needs or the fact that the BBC may be faced with losing some premium content providers if this doesn't go into effect.
Why should I (the licence fee payer) be legally required to financially support something controversial like DRM, that I fundamentally disagree with? If the content producers don't want the BBC to have their content then that's fine by me, but it will reduce their profits (by immediately excluding the BBC from the bidding process, they are automatically reducing the value of their content since less bidders means a lower winning bid (on average)).
It's bad alright but what's your suggested solution to this (perceived) problem?
Perceived problems don't need solutions. Real problems need solutions.
That's why it will be eventually put into place if you don't proffer an alternative.
The alternative is to continue doing as they have been doing for decades - allowing licence payers to use the content to the full extent allowed by the law (and yes, this includes building your own receiver). Its worked up till now, why do they need to change?
Fundamentally, DRM is the only other alternative the market has to offer right now.
DRM doesn't actually do anything to reduce copyright infringement. If anything, it increases copyright infringement by reducing the number of people who can get at the content by legitimate means. The choice is going to come down to:
* Replace my whole A/V system with a new system that has extremely limited functionality compared to what I already have.
* Illegally download the content off the internet.
Guess which choice I'm more likely to pick?