Most countries have a Sale of Goods Act which predates the advent of EULAs and which an EULA would quite clearly contravene. An EULA is a purported agreement between you and the vendor, but hardware is sold, not licenced; and even if you lied to the vendor about what you were going to do with it after you bought it in order to be allowed to buy it, the transaction still stands. Also, in most countries, your statutory rights are sacrosanct and cannot be diminished, only extended, by any agreement between vendor and purchaser. Therefore, the portions of an EULA that conflict with existing legislation are unenforceable -- and in some jurisdictions, the entire agreement would be null and void, not just the conflicting portions.
Nature already passed a law against anyone copy-protecting CDs or any form of storage media, unless they are also playback-protected. Why should the New Zealand government bother?
How could there ever be a law anywhere against unlocking your own DVD player? If it's your own property, you can do what the hell you like with it after you've bought and paid for it with money you earned by your own graft. Well..... maybe in some kind of totalitarian state with no concept of private property, where the Government claims all ultimate rights on everything and merely deigns to falsely delegate them to its subjects..... or if it was on hire purchase it might be reasonable to expect you not to mutilate it for the term of the loan, in case they need to repossess it and it should be fit to resell to someone else..... but in the free world, a sale is a sale and the vendor waives all rights over the goods when payment is made in full.
Well, excuse the french, but f**k what the content owner wants. I should not have to look at advertisements if I do not want to -- and it makes no difference to them. They are just being childish.
It's only going to hurt advertisers, and advertisers are scumsuckers -- to be frustrated without compunction. These people make a living out of annoying you. Now, on Google it's marginally less annoying because you get shown adverts for products that you are searching for; nonetheless, I avoid advertisements -- and the products they advertise -- fastidiously. After all, when you pay for an advertised product, you're paying for all the advertisements.....
Point is, as a fan of the BBC, I think I'd rather pay for high quality content on the Internet than sit through adverts.
Every country in the world except the USA uses ISO standard A4 paper, which is 210 * 297. The USA is alone (TTBOMK) in using non-standard "US Letter" paper, which is 216 * 279.
On that basis one would expect that a piece of software labelled "not for sale in the USA" would be set to default to using A4 paper.
The paper size issue alone has caused untold trouble with printers around the world. At least it's shorter, so whatever will fit on US letter paper will fit on A4; it is a little bit wider, but as most printers have only a 200mm. printable width anyway, the width is less of an issue.
Don't see the advertisement and don't buy the product
?
Except that in case (1) I have wasted several precious kilobits of bandwidth downloading an advertisement for a product I neither want nor need, and the advertiser has wasted money showing an advert to someone who wasn't interested.
The solution is obvious. Outlook, and Outlook Express, are nasty pieces of shit, and writing them was tantamount to aiding and abetting malware writers.
Let's take a mail client such as KMail for example. By default, HTML rendering is turned off, and you even have to turn on the option to render content that was not attached to the message. This thwarts "web bugs" {i.e. links to a CGI script which dispenses an image or some text or whatever, but also logs the fact that you visited}. And fair enough -- most of the time this behaviour works. Except when some mailing list administrator is saving bandwidth by sending you a HTML e-mail with a link to an image; even then, it's just a few clicks or keystrokes, and the Next Version probably will give you the option to permit HTML stuff on a per-sender basis.
But the really cool feature of KMail is that when it is offered an attachment of some type it doesn't know how to deal with, the default action is to save it to disk -- as opposed to trying to execute it.
Well, that and the fact that it prompts you if you use the word "attached" in your message and don't actually attach a file.....
Advertisements are an inconvenience I would rather do without. If I can do without them, so much the better. I am not going to listen to the message even if I am forced to hear it. If I see an advert in a magazines, I turn the page without taking any notice. When I see adverts on the TV, I get up and light the kettle for a cup of tea. My favourite radio station is the BBC. Now the Internet gives me the technology to block adverts at source, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Why should I shop at Sainsbury's when I know that some small portion of their takings is being spent paying Jamie Oliver to ponce around on the telly?. Nobody has a right to expect anyone to buy their products -- or listen to advertisements for them. Advertising costs us all money in the end, and IMHO the sooner the advertisers realise this, the better
The earliest form of electronic communication was the telegraph. A person wishing to send a message would go to the telegraph office and dictate it to a telegraph clerk. The message would be sent by Morse code, one letter at a time, and decoded and written out at the far end. It would then be delivered by a boy on a bicycle.
Apart from using rather more sophisticated electronic devices than a simple telegraph key and sounder, what has really changed? Certainly if anyone was trying to patent this, there might be some prior art under the names of Cooke and Wheatstone.
In your view, why is your traffic, or traffic coming from people who share your views, valuable at all to InfoWeek? How does it benefit them?
I am not in the business of benefitting InfoWeek. I think you have it the wrong way around!
You can't make me feel guilty just because somebody paid money for an advertisement that means so little to me I did not even load it into my browser -- after all, I pay for bandwidth too, and I don't want it taken up with advertisements for products I probably am not going to buy.
I suppose I'm just not the Intended Recipient of the advertisements.
First, InfoWeek is probably losing money on the geek hits - how many LinuxToday readers aren't saavy enough to shelter themselves from ever seeing a graphical ad on the web?
I don't get this at all. How do they lose money just because I am blocking adverts? I was never going to buy the products anyway, advertisement or no advertisement.
It's like The Hunger Site. I never saw the point of that either. It's not as though I'm ever going to buy anything I see in an advertisement, so it's as though the sponsors are withholding money which they could have been giving to the needy just because I didn't visit their site.
But if it was in read-only memory, then at least it couldn't be modified without deliberate manual intervention..... whether that be setting a jumper to allow writes temporarily, or physically swapping out the chip.
Arthur C. Clarke used to make occasional references to a tenth planet in some of his writings; he always named it "Persephone" after the Greek Goddess of Spring. I always thought that was a nice enough name, even though it was from a different mythology.
Of course, it would be really cheesy to call it "Planet X".....
I have thought about this a few times, and I actually think the benefits in terms of keeping pr0n away from people who do not want to see it outweigh the risks in terms of keeping pr0n away from people who do want to see it. After all, where there's a will(y), there's a way.
However, I also think it's unlikely to happen. The UK and US governments seem to think that there is something wrong with sex -- especially the non-procreative varieties -- but prefer to deal with it by pretending it doesn't exist. Creating a special domain for pornography and then taking action to ensure it is used properly would mean having to admit that people do enjoy sex.
And that's something I really can't imagine the authorities ever agreeing to, given the way the USA reacted to a lady's chest being shown on TV, and the fact that until recently, you weren't even allowed to depict a hard-on in Britain. The only way it would ever gain any sort of approval would be if someone else started it off. But in countries where sex is seen as just being something people do, they probably would not see the need for a separate place on the Internet.
I could be wrong. I'd like to be wrong. But it's going to require a pretty major attitude shift somewhere.
Vinyl LPs are made from the same master tapes/discs as CDs. CD has a fixed sample rate of 44.1kHz, a fixed sample size of 16 bits/sample {which is not as poor as you think; Brownian motion of air molecules against a microphone shows up in the 14th-16th bits} and a fixed number of channels {2, one for each ear}. There is no good reason to use any other parameters for mastering, and a very good reason not to: digital distortion {caused by bodging one sample rate or bit length into another; not a trivial process in any case} sounds much worse than analogue distortion.
The upshot of which is, that although vinyl LPs have a theoretically broader bandwidth {no harsh Nyquist-limit cut-off at 22.05kHz, reckoned to be beyond the range of human hearing anyway} the digital mastering, with its own limitations, negates this theoretical advantage.
What annoys me is that CDs are sold at a higher price than Walkman cassettes, which cost nearly three times as much as a CD to manufacture.
Actually it's likely not to be PC manufacturers, but consumer electronics manufacturers, who decide on the eventual standard. PCs will follow what the consumer market does.
DVD Video recorders -- i.e., stand alone units that plug into TV sets -- seem to use the "plus" format, probably because they use Philips internals. At the moment, the "minus" discs are a few p cheaper per unit; it's also very possible that someone could bring out a new chipset based on DVD-RW. However, I think it most probable that future standalone units will go for all-disc compatibility..... a TV recorder need not exceed 1* read/write speed anyway, so high speed is a lower priority than all-disc compatibility. A Sun-reading telly addict is not going to know the difference between +RW and -RW; he is only bothered that the recordable discs he bought at the pound store don't work in his new DVD recorder that he paid full price for.
My Philips DVD+RW recorder <PLUG>Brilliant picture quality! Two SCARTs and front A/V/SV sockets!</PLUG> has an option to "attempt to make disc compatible with older players", so presumably this is setting the reported media type.
All this does mean that drives which aren't all-disc-compatible may be useless a few years down the line; but, by then, the market will have stabilised {all those old VCRs will be replaced with DVD recorders} and newer drives will be cheaper.
Back In The Days, you would read a good detective story and it would go something like this.
The detective starts with a crime, collates evidence, and uses this to find a list of possible people who might have committed the crime. Through a process of observation, questioning and correlation of known facts, suspects are rejected one by one until only the guilty party remains.
Modern techniques have reversed the process. Today everyone is under almost constant surveillance. So now a detective can start with a person, and looks for evidence of a crime that person may have committed.
It won't be long before your DNA is routinely sampled at birth -- probably under the colour of "important medical tests" at first, until there is enough stored DNA to match up a suspect with a crime. And you can bet that the spin doctors will wait until a crime is found that is heinous enough to provoke irrational behaviour in News of the World readers before allowing the Authorities to go public on the method.
By that time it will be too late. We must take steps now to ensure that technology which could aid in the creation of a police state is never adopted. I would prefer to take my chances with the likes of the IRA, ALF, ETA, Al Qaeda, SMERSH &c. rather than have my movements scrutinised by the government.
We DO have a standard package management system across ALL Linux distros..... it's called ".tar.gz". Download foo.tar.gz and copy it to/usr/local/src. Then tar -xvzf foo.tar.gz to unpack, cd foo,./configure to auto-configure it, make to compile it. su and enter your root password to get root priviliges, make install to install system-wide.
Different people have tried different ways to simplify this process, which is why we have ended up with different distributions.
Plants are made [mainly] from carbon, which they get from CO2 in the atmosphere while they are growing. Once a carbon atom, always a carbon atom. Burning something made from plants just puts back exactly whatever the plants took out. That's O-level chemistry. Since the trees used to make paper are grown on private land which does not earn any money for its owner unless something useful is growing on it at all times, money is what keeps the cycle going.
Fossil fuels were formed millions of years ago and left undisturbed beneath the Earth's crust. CO2 levels stabilised since then, till we started pushing them up again by burning that stored carbon.
Natural gas and petroleum products may be chemically purer hydrocarbons than recently-deceased organic matter, but the fact remains that their contribution to the atmosphere is essentially foreign; whereas plant- and animal-derived fuels, although apparently less chemically pure, are only replacing something that was already there before they were grown.
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Most countries have a Sale of Goods Act which predates the advent of EULAs and which an EULA would quite clearly contravene. An EULA is a purported agreement between you and the vendor, but hardware is sold, not licenced; and even if you lied to the vendor about what you were going to do with it after you bought it in order to be allowed to buy it, the transaction still stands. Also, in most countries, your statutory rights are sacrosanct and cannot be diminished, only extended, by any agreement between vendor and purchaser. Therefore, the portions of an EULA that conflict with existing legislation are unenforceable -- and in some jurisdictions, the entire agreement would be null and void, not just the conflicting portions.
Nature already passed a law against anyone copy-protecting CDs or any form of storage media, unless they are also playback-protected. Why should the New Zealand government bother?
How could there ever be a law anywhere against unlocking your own DVD player? If it's your own property, you can do what the hell you like with it after you've bought and paid for it with money you earned by your own graft. Well ..... maybe in some kind of totalitarian state with no concept of private property, where the Government claims all ultimate rights on everything and merely deigns to falsely delegate them to its subjects ..... or if it was on hire purchase it might be reasonable to expect you not to mutilate it for the term of the loan, in case they need to repossess it and it should be fit to resell to someone else ..... but in the free world, a sale is a sale and the vendor waives all rights over the goods when payment is made in full.
Sheet music? You mean people are giving away the source code to their music now? Oh no!
Yes, even cheaper than walkman cassettes. So why do they cost more to buy than cassettes? This is a scam that has been going on too long IMHO.
Well, excuse the french, but f**k what the content owner wants. I should not have to look at advertisements if I do not want to -- and it makes no difference to them. They are just being childish.
It's only going to hurt advertisers, and advertisers are scumsuckers -- to be frustrated without compunction. These people make a living out of annoying you. Now, on Google it's marginally less annoying because you get shown adverts for products that you are searching for; nonetheless, I avoid advertisements -- and the products they advertise -- fastidiously. After all, when you pay for an advertised product, you're paying for all the advertisements .....
Point is, as a fan of the BBC, I think I'd rather pay for high quality content on the Internet than sit through adverts.
Every country in the world except the USA uses ISO standard A4 paper, which is 210 * 297. The USA is alone (TTBOMK) in using non-standard "US Letter" paper, which is 216 * 279.
On that basis one would expect that a piece of software labelled "not for sale in the USA" would be set to default to using A4 paper.
The paper size issue alone has caused untold trouble with printers around the world. At least it's shorter, so whatever will fit on US letter paper will fit on A4; it is a little bit wider, but as most printers have only a 200mm. printable width anyway, the width is less of an issue.
- See the advertisement and don't buy the product
- Don't see the advertisement and don't buy the product
? Except that in case (1) I have wasted several precious kilobits of bandwidth downloading an advertisement for a product I neither want nor need, and the advertiser has wasted money showing an advert to someone who wasn't interested.The solution is obvious. Outlook, and Outlook Express, are nasty pieces of shit, and writing them was tantamount to aiding and abetting malware writers.
.....
Let's take a mail client such as KMail for example. By default, HTML rendering is turned off, and you even have to turn on the option to render content that was not attached to the message. This thwarts "web bugs" {i.e. links to a CGI script which dispenses an image or some text or whatever, but also logs the fact that you visited}. And fair enough -- most of the time this behaviour works. Except when some mailing list administrator is saving bandwidth by sending you a HTML e-mail with a link to an image; even then, it's just a few clicks or keystrokes, and the Next Version probably will give you the option to permit HTML stuff on a per-sender basis.
But the really cool feature of KMail is that when it is offered an attachment of some type it doesn't know how to deal with, the default action is to save it to disk -- as opposed to trying to execute it.
Well, that and the fact that it prompts you if you use the word "attached" in your message and don't actually attach a file
Advertisements are an inconvenience I would rather do without. If I can do without them, so much the better. I am not going to listen to the message even if I am forced to hear it. If I see an advert in a magazines, I turn the page without taking any notice. When I see adverts on the TV, I get up and light the kettle for a cup of tea. My favourite radio station is the BBC. Now the Internet gives me the technology to block adverts at source, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Why should I shop at Sainsbury's when I know that some small portion of their takings is being spent paying Jamie Oliver to ponce around on the telly?. Nobody has a right to expect anyone to buy their products -- or listen to advertisements for them. Advertising costs us all money in the end, and IMHO the sooner the advertisers realise this, the better
The earliest form of electronic communication was the telegraph. A person wishing to send a message would go to the telegraph office and dictate it to a telegraph clerk. The message would be sent by Morse code, one letter at a time, and decoded and written out at the far end. It would then be delivered by a boy on a bicycle.
Apart from using rather more sophisticated electronic devices than a simple telegraph key and sounder, what has really changed? Certainly if anyone was trying to patent this, there might be some prior art under the names of Cooke and Wheatstone.
You can't make me feel guilty just because somebody paid money for an advertisement that means so little to me I did not even load it into my browser -- after all, I pay for bandwidth too, and I don't want it taken up with advertisements for products I probably am not going to buy.
I suppose I'm just not the Intended Recipient of the advertisements.
It's like The Hunger Site. I never saw the point of that either. It's not as though I'm ever going to buy anything I see in an advertisement, so it's as though the sponsors are withholding money which they could have been giving to the needy just because I didn't visit their site.
But if it was in read-only memory, then at least it couldn't be modified without deliberate manual intervention ..... whether that be setting a jumper to allow writes temporarily, or physically swapping out the chip.
That was a figure of speech, you insensitive clod!
Arthur C. Clarke used to make occasional references to a tenth planet in some of his writings; he always named it "Persephone" after the Greek Goddess of Spring. I always thought that was a nice enough name, even though it was from a different mythology.
.....
Of course, it would be really cheesy to call it "Planet X"
I have thought about this a few times, and I actually think the benefits in terms of keeping pr0n away from people who do not want to see it outweigh the risks in terms of keeping pr0n away from people who do want to see it. After all, where there's a will(y), there's a way.
However, I also think it's unlikely to happen. The UK and US governments seem to think that there is something wrong with sex -- especially the non-procreative varieties -- but prefer to deal with it by pretending it doesn't exist. Creating a special domain for pornography and then taking action to ensure it is used properly would mean having to admit that people do enjoy sex.
And that's something I really can't imagine the authorities ever agreeing to, given the way the USA reacted to a lady's chest being shown on TV, and the fact that until recently, you weren't even allowed to depict a hard-on in Britain. The only way it would ever gain any sort of approval would be if someone else started it off. But in countries where sex is seen as just being something people do, they probably would not see the need for a separate place on the Internet.
I could be wrong. I'd like to be wrong. But it's going to require a pretty major attitude shift somewhere.
Vinyl LPs are made from the same master tapes/discs as CDs. CD has a fixed sample rate of 44.1kHz, a fixed sample size of 16 bits/sample {which is not as poor as you think; Brownian motion of air molecules against a microphone shows up in the 14th-16th bits} and a fixed number of channels {2, one for each ear}. There is no good reason to use any other parameters for mastering, and a very good reason not to: digital distortion {caused by bodging one sample rate or bit length into another; not a trivial process in any case} sounds much worse than analogue distortion.
The upshot of which is, that although vinyl LPs have a theoretically broader bandwidth {no harsh Nyquist-limit cut-off at 22.05kHz, reckoned to be beyond the range of human hearing anyway} the digital mastering, with its own limitations, negates this theoretical advantage.
What annoys me is that CDs are sold at a higher price than Walkman cassettes, which cost nearly three times as much as a CD to manufacture.
Actually it's likely not to be PC manufacturers, but consumer electronics manufacturers, who decide on the eventual standard. PCs will follow what the consumer market does.
..... a TV recorder need not exceed 1* read/write speed anyway, so high speed is a lower priority than all-disc compatibility. A Sun-reading telly addict is not going to know the difference between +RW and -RW; he is only bothered that the recordable discs he bought at the pound store don't work in his new DVD recorder that he paid full price for.
DVD Video recorders -- i.e., stand alone units that plug into TV sets -- seem to use the "plus" format, probably because they use Philips internals. At the moment, the "minus" discs are a few p cheaper per unit; it's also very possible that someone could bring out a new chipset based on DVD-RW. However, I think it most probable that future standalone units will go for all-disc compatibility
My Philips DVD+RW recorder <PLUG>Brilliant picture quality! Two SCARTs and front A/V/SV sockets!</PLUG> has an option to "attempt to make disc compatible with older players", so presumably this is setting the reported media type.
All this does mean that drives which aren't all-disc-compatible may be useless a few years down the line; but, by then, the market will have stabilised {all those old VCRs will be replaced with DVD recorders} and newer drives will be cheaper.
Back In The Days, you would read a good detective story and it would go something like this.
The detective starts with a crime, collates evidence, and uses this to find a list of possible people who might have committed the crime. Through a process of observation, questioning and correlation of known facts, suspects are rejected one by one until only the guilty party remains.
Modern techniques have reversed the process. Today everyone is under almost constant surveillance. So now a detective can start with a person, and looks for evidence of a crime that person may have committed.
It won't be long before your DNA is routinely sampled at birth -- probably under the colour of "important medical tests" at first, until there is enough stored DNA to match up a suspect with a crime. And you can bet that the spin doctors will wait until a crime is found that is heinous enough to provoke irrational behaviour in News of the World readers before allowing the Authorities to go public on the method.
By that time it will be too late. We must take steps now to ensure that technology which could aid in the creation of a police state is never adopted. I would prefer to take my chances with the likes of the IRA, ALF, ETA, Al Qaeda, SMERSH &c. rather than have my movements scrutinised by the government.
In the absence of any attempt at an explanation, that remark will be ignored.
We DO have a standard package management system across ALL Linux distros ..... it's called ".tar.gz". Download foo.tar.gz and copy it to /usr/local/src. Then tar -xvzf foo.tar.gz to unpack, cd foo, ./configure to auto-configure it, make to compile it. su and enter your root password to get root priviliges, make install to install system-wide.
Different people have tried different ways to simplify this process, which is why we have ended up with different distributions.
Plants are made [mainly] from carbon, which they get from CO2 in the atmosphere while they are growing. Once a carbon atom, always a carbon atom. Burning something made from plants just puts back exactly whatever the plants took out. That's O-level chemistry. Since the trees used to make paper are grown on private land which does not earn any money for its owner unless something useful is growing on it at all times, money is what keeps the cycle going.
Fossil fuels were formed millions of years ago and left undisturbed beneath the Earth's crust. CO2 levels stabilised since then, till we started pushing them up again by burning that stored carbon.
Natural gas and petroleum products may be chemically purer hydrocarbons than recently-deceased organic matter, but the fact remains that their contribution to the atmosphere is essentially foreign; whereas plant- and animal-derived fuels, although apparently less chemically pure, are only replacing something that was already there before they were grown.