One of the tenets of the capitalist system is clear ownership of property. How can one invest if the ownership can be taken away.
Yet, the current patent system dies exactly this. The abuses that are possible under the current system allow for someone to develop a product and later, through the monopoly granted under the patent system, effectively have that intellectual property taken away.
The problems are many: submarine patents, the fact that the possible award of punitive damages discourages searches for pre-existing patents, the over-broad patents that may or may not apply. Uncertainty kills investment and the current patent system provides plenty of uncertainty.
Next they will be mandating the use of Windows because their trojan does not work on Macs and Linux. I can just imagine getting a letter: "Dear Suspect, in order to secretly monitor your computer use, we require..."
Oh really? Did they start a war for profit in the 80's? Did they abolish habeas corpus? Did they gut the 4th amendment? Iran-Contra? Abu-Ghraib? Rendition?
Please try to stop letting your idealogical position getting in the way of facts.
From the ACLU:
This program is commonly known as "extraordinary rendition."
The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton.
So now as a creationist all I need to do is take my least favorite scientific postings, twist their words to say what I want them to and viola they get retracted and denounced! Wow, why didn't I think of this before?
What you are missing is that the original author of the paper acknowledged significant errors in it. Also, where did the music ("viola") come from? I didn't see any reference to music in the original story.
With many of the UMPCs (that's Ultra Mobile...), one may not be able to buy that model, but what about the OQO? It claims to be "the smallest full featured pc" and for the masochists out there, it even runs Vista.
This means making things that JUST WORK and work the way they expect (Windows).
IMHO, it is a complete myth that Windows "just works". Recent example:
Plug camera into windows system. Needs to install drivers, oops, won't install. Need to log off an log on again as Administrator. IMHO, "Run As" only works in about 50% of cases.
Plug camer into Linux (Ubuntu) system. JUST WORKS. Photo application opens automatically. Did not need to find driver CD, install s/w etc.
Any airline that won't let you take an earlier flight is just stupid. The later flight may be full and they might have to bump people, or there might be an equipment problem, or a 100 other issues that would mean lost revenue. A passenger flying on an earlier flight is not only a happy customer, it is also revenue earned.
We'll sell you any box we provide. Do you really want to spend $1200 on an SA HD-DVR? Nobody else does, that's why we aren't selling them.
Are they worth $1200? Or to ask another way, is it possible that your cable company is inflating the price of the boxes when offered for sale to consumers?
and one of them goes down, I can change the TTL on my DNS records to, say 30 seconds
Changing the TTL when you need to change the records, won't make any difference. Those nameservers that already have cached the IP addresses of your machines will have cached the old TTL also. Those nameservers that need to look up the IP address will pick up the new IP address irrespective of the TTL.
It really only makes a difference if your domain's TTL is short before you need to make the change.
How is the music from this service going to be tied to the particular player that is paying for it,
It doesn't need to be tied to a particular player, as long as it it tied to a class of players, all of which include the royalty payment as part of the purchase. Thus, all that is required is an encryption or encoding format that is only licensed to those particular players. Additional measures could include proprietary communication formats between the player and the PC (and between the PC and the music store), combined with the requirement that a player is connected to the PC before the PC is allowed to download anything. The real question is: how long will it take DVD Jon to break the encryption?
The most important question is the one that the major labels always forget to ask: what value does this bring to consumers? With Amazon selling MP3s, why pay $100 extra for a player, which is designed to break in 18 months?
Am I not seeing some advantage that a pre-installed Ubuntu would bring? Maybe compatibility with newer hardware.
I think you answered your own question. How many hours are spent researching Linux compatibility before purchasing new computers? Buying a system with Ubuntu pre-installed gives one a guarantee that the hardware as a basic level of support in that distro.
Also, perhaps the PHBs who are used to buying computers with Windows pre-installed will feel more comfortable about buying (or rather, approving the purchase of) a server if the OS is pre-installed.
How hard would it be for a band to sign up directly with iTunes to sell their tracks for them?
Impossible, since the Apple Vs Apple settlement specifically prohibits Apple Inc. from acting as a record label in this way.
I see an opportunity here. Set up a "label" that does nothing but contract for the label's music to be available over iTunes. Sign up such bands on the basis of taking a very small fee for the small amount of work done. The contracts with the bands could be non-exclusive. Now iTunes does not have to act as a label.
One example: Microsoft stopped updating the MS anti-spyware for Windows 2000 machines at the end of 2006. On some machines, the fact that no further upgrades were coming was not obvious to the user.
Now how hard would it be for a band to set up their own "store" on the internet and sell their tracks directly?
How hard would it be for a band to sign up directly with iTunes to sell their tracks for them? Yes, there is still a middleman, but one that only takes a small bite of the revenue instead of most of it.
However Flash doesn't work in my browser because I'm running a 4 year old architecture - AMD64, and the creators of Flash haven't deigned to recompile the Linux version for 64-bits.
In fact, accessing the files on the TomTom itself is trivial under Linux. Just plug it in to a USB port and mount the filesystem (vfat).
I was recently moving all my TomTom data to a new (larger) flash card and the Windows application kept hanging, so I just plugged it into my Linux box, mounted it and used "cp -a" -- problem solved.
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One of the tenets of the capitalist system is clear ownership of property. How can one invest if the ownership can be taken away.
Yet, the current patent system dies exactly this. The abuses that are possible under the current system allow for someone to develop a product and later, through the monopoly granted under the patent system, effectively have that intellectual property taken away.
The problems are many: submarine patents, the fact that the possible award of punitive damages discourages searches for pre-existing patents, the over-broad patents that may or may not apply. Uncertainty kills investment and the current patent system provides plenty of uncertainty.
Next they will be mandating the use of Windows because their trojan does not work on Macs and Linux. I can just imagine getting a letter: "Dear Suspect, in order to secretly monitor your computer use, we require..."
With many of the UMPCs (that's Ultra Mobile ...), one may not be able to buy that model, but what about the OQO? It claims to be "the smallest full featured pc" and for the masochists out there, it even runs Vista.
Plug camera into windows system. Needs to install drivers, oops, won't install. Need to log off an log on again as Administrator. IMHO, "Run As" only works in about 50% of cases.
Plug camer into Linux (Ubuntu) system. JUST WORKS. Photo application opens automatically. Did not need to find driver CD, install s/w etc.
There are many such examples of this.
There was a report showing that Comcast was also interfering with Lotus Notes traffic.
Any airline that won't let you take an earlier flight is just stupid. The later flight may be full and they might have to bump people, or there might be an equipment problem, or a 100 other issues that would mean lost revenue. A passenger flying on an earlier flight is not only a happy customer, it is also revenue earned.
It really only makes a difference if your domain's TTL is short before you need to make the change.
The most important question is the one that the major labels always forget to ask: what value does this bring to consumers? With Amazon selling MP3s, why pay $100 extra for a player, which is designed to break in 18 months?
Also, perhaps the PHBs who are used to buying computers with Windows pre-installed will feel more comfortable about buying (or rather, approving the purchase of) a server if the OS is pre-installed.
One example: Microsoft stopped updating the MS anti-spyware for Windows 2000 machines at the end of 2006. On some machines, the fact that no further upgrades were coming was not obvious to the user.
In fact, accessing the files on the TomTom itself is trivial under Linux. Just plug it in to a USB port and mount the filesystem (vfat).
I was recently moving all my TomTom data to a new (larger) flash card and the Windows application kept hanging, so I just plugged it into my Linux box, mounted it and used "cp -a" -- problem solved.
What you are ignoring is that MS has created the financial ecosystem under which these craplets are delivered, thus MS is responsible for them.