... I can assure you that, whilst the British were once "subjects" of His/Her/Its (delete as applicable) Majesty, we now enjoy the status of citizens, both of the United Kingdom (since the British Nationality Act of 1981) and of the European Union.
Hypothetically, if I already own the relevant Police or Led Zep album, can I get a discount on one of Puff Daddy's rip-offs^W^W^W re-workings since I already paid for half the content?
No? What?!
I think that the way it works for the record companies is what is know as "heads I win, tails you lose". Which is what makes it all the sweeter to stick it to them legally by sampling it on your cellphone.
Not really. For USD/EUR 50 you can pick up an 11b access point. Add about 30-60 more a month for ADSL, and you've got a pretty sweet hotspot service. In addition, if your business already has a broadband connection - pretty common these days - then offering a hotspot is almost free.
What does cost money is implementing the whole charging model - that's complicated. If they can replace that with one centrally-administered ad service, then I don't see why it wouldn't be profitable.
As for how much T-mobile is charging for access... well, they are charging that because they can. Some people - perhaps very few - need the service enough to pay their rather high charges. Mobile phone companies are the same folks who brought us SMSes for 15 cents per measly 160 characters. I can easily call another country for under 10 cents/minute, and yet if I make use of GSM roaming, I am charged about EUR 1.50. I find it very hard to believe that what they charge has any relation to its actual cost.
I don't know why I'm bothering to reply to this (I have a low opinion of people who can't be bothered to employ the shift key or type even a three-letter word like you in full), but:
I've been wondering recently whether it isn't actually good for the UK's economy to pirate some software.
Let's take Microsoft Windows XP for an example. This is a foreign product: there is to the best of my knowledge no "British English" version, and therefore no significant local development effort. Although there is some local profit and tax revenue to be made, it seems that the net result must be an outflow of cash from the UK to the US.
Is it therefore a patriotic duty to make unauthorised copies of Windows? I'd be interested if anyone with a more robust grasp of economics can elaborate.
I don't particularly like the heavy-handed use of the law to protect "intellectual property", but the reality is that most of us live in places where legal frameworks apply. And I guess that Israel is - most of the time - one of those nations.
Even when a nation is under great pressure, regular law enforcement doesn't suddenly stop. In fact, it often becomes more stringent - looters have frequently been shot, for example, in many countries during wartime.
If only the most heinous crimes were targeted for enforcement, the rule of law would quickly break down. I'm sure that very few people would be content if the police refused to stop muggers or burglars on the basis that "there are more important crimes to worry about."
I also dispute your characterisation of those being busted as "warez kiddies" - it looks to me like they are going after the big guys.
Does preview nag you to buy Acrobat? No. Does Mail suggest that you'd like to buy a different package every time you start it up? No.
You have - perhaps intentionally - missed my point. I have no complaint with QuickTime Basic supporting fewer features than Pro, but the nag screen is an unwanted extra feature that makes the application "broken".
QuickTime is an advertised feature of OS X. The nag screen is something akin to bait-and-switch.
Now, if I had known about the date workaround, I'd have used that instead. I didn't know, so I found another solution. At no point was I "whining", as you characterise it. In fact, I was a satisfied customer after removing the nag screen.
4+? What kind of primitive counting scheme is that?
Let's see, I've got one goat, and another goat; that makes two; and another makes three. If I get yet another goat, then I've got four-plus! Add another; I've now got four-plus!
I just downloaded a "crackz" registration code off the internet. I don't have any interest in the "Pro" features - I just wanted to get rid of that annoying box that assailed me every time I used Quicktime.
Is that illegal? Quite frankly, I don't care. I'm just fixing my operating system, which I paid for. The advertised Quicktime support was broken, and I fixed it.
The European Coal and Steel Community was founded in 1951 by Belgium, West Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. It evolved into the European Economic Community, then the European Community, and finally the European Union.
The United Kingdom joined the EEC (as it then was) in 1973.
"The" is an article, not a preposition. (Those would be words like "on", "to", "with", etc.)
Sorting "a" with diaresis (umlaut if you prefer) along with "a" is not correct for Swedish, but the rules differ for each particular language. German is not the same as Swedish, for example; as for Finnish, I don't know. But for English, sorting it as an "a" is correct, since accents are, to monolingual anglophones, essentially invisible, or just decoration at best.
As several people have pointed out, you can press Ctrl-Alt-Del with one hand - but this is only true on keyboards that have a right-hand Alt key. Most European layouts have AltGr to the right of the space bar instead to help with typing accented letters and so on. Even the UK keyboard has AltGr, although I think that it only works on one key (the one to the left of number 1) to type a useless hook-shaped mark.
It's often useful to be able to do things with one hand, even if you have two (this applies to work as well as browsing pr0n) and given how often Windows historically needed rebooting, it's a damned inconvenience to put them so far apart.
Absolutely true. I bought my first Mac, a 12" iBook, a few months ago. Besides the fantastic operating system (Unix command line and tools as well as a beautiful, consistent UI and perfect hardware support), it is a genuinely portable computer. With 640MB of RAM, it hardly touches the hard drive, and I can use it for over five hours unwired.
One of the reasons that I chose the iBook over the 12" PowerBook was the longer battery life. The G3 is a sound choice for a mobile computer, and at 900MHz, it's not slow for anything I'm trying to do.
My old PC laptop lasted a few minutes on batteries, even when new, and had a constantly-running fan that screamed like a banshee having her fingers slammed in a car door. My iBook is silent unless I do some hardcore number-crunching. No longer do my ears ring when I'm trying to sleep!
In Thailand children are made by law to study the ancient martial arts of Judo and Placebo and school dinners consist of healthy national dishes such as sushi which are rich in vitamins and minerals.
Wow..you're pretty confused there. Sushi's Japanese, not Thai. Having spent several months working in Japanese schools, and eating their school dinners, I can assure you that, while they are nutritious, the pupils don't get to eat sushi at school. We did get deep-fried whale a few months ago, though. Healthy? Not really, and definitely not healthy for the whales.
Nature abhors a vacuum...and apparently, so do geeks.
Although copyright law will definitely come down on the publishers' side, I assume that these translators aren't doing all this hard work in order to thumb their nose at the rights holders. If there was already a definitive German/Czech/Crotobaltoslavonian translation available, then this activity would be unnecessary. However, as far as the official translators go, well, if they can't keep up with amateurs working for free, then they probably ought to be trying harder or reevaluating their processes. If you leave a vacuum, expect someone else to fill it.
My mobile phone in Japan about three years ago (a Panasonic on J-Phone for what it's worth) actually did crash while I was typing a message. It just froze.
The only way I could recover it was to remove the battery - but after replacing it, it had lost all its settings.
I'm sure that the software in that phone was a lot simpler - I'm sure that anything programmed by Microsoft is just a disaster waiting to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
... I can assure you that, whilst the British were once "subjects" of His/Her/Its (delete as applicable) Majesty, we now enjoy the status of citizens, both of the United Kingdom (since the British Nationality Act of 1981) and of the European Union.
The wording could be better, but they mean that they require contributors to assign their copyright to DSPAM. At least, that's my understanding.
That isn't making it public domain, and it isn't incompatible with the GPL. The DSPAM "governors" become the rights holder.
Alternatively, how about this:
Hypothetically, if I already own the relevant Police or Led Zep album, can I get a discount on one of Puff Daddy's rip-offs^W^W^W re-workings since I already paid for half the content?
No? What?!
I think that the way it works for the record companies is what is know as "heads I win, tails you lose". Which is what makes it all the sweeter to stick it to them legally by sampling it on your cellphone.
Not really. For USD/EUR 50 you can pick up an 11b access point. Add about 30-60 more a month for ADSL, and you've got a pretty sweet hotspot service. In addition, if your business already has a broadband connection - pretty common these days - then offering a hotspot is almost free.
What does cost money is implementing the whole charging model - that's complicated. If they can replace that with one centrally-administered ad service, then I don't see why it wouldn't be profitable.
As for how much T-mobile is charging for access... well, they are charging that because they can. Some people - perhaps very few - need the service enough to pay their rather high charges. Mobile phone companies are the same folks who brought us SMSes for 15 cents per measly 160 characters. I can easily call another country for under 10 cents/minute, and yet if I make use of GSM roaming, I am charged about EUR 1.50. I find it very hard to believe that what they charge has any relation to its actual cost.
I can't wait for Apple to add iPod support for this exciting new DRM format!
Come to think of it, four-channel audio wouldn't be much use on stereo headphones, either.
I don't know why I'm bothering to reply to this (I have a low opinion of people who can't be bothered to employ the shift key or type even a three-letter word like you in full), but:
I've been wondering recently whether it isn't actually good for the UK's economy to pirate some software.
Let's take Microsoft Windows XP for an example. This is a foreign product: there is to the best of my knowledge no "British English" version, and therefore no significant local development effort. Although there is some local profit and tax revenue to be made, it seems that the net result must be an outflow of cash from the UK to the US.
Is it therefore a patriotic duty to make unauthorised copies of Windows? I'd be interested if anyone with a more robust grasp of economics can elaborate.
I don't particularly like the heavy-handed use of the law to protect "intellectual property", but the reality is that most of us live in places where legal frameworks apply. And I guess that Israel is - most of the time - one of those nations.
Even when a nation is under great pressure, regular law enforcement doesn't suddenly stop. In fact, it often becomes more stringent - looters have frequently been shot, for example, in many countries during wartime.
If only the most heinous crimes were targeted for enforcement, the rule of law would quickly break down. I'm sure that very few people would be content if the police refused to stop muggers or burglars on the basis that "there are more important crimes to worry about."
I also dispute your characterisation of those being busted as "warez kiddies" - it looks to me like they are going after the big guys.
Does preview nag you to buy Acrobat? No. Does Mail suggest that you'd like to buy a different package every time you start it up? No.
You have - perhaps intentionally - missed my point. I have no complaint with QuickTime Basic supporting fewer features than Pro, but the nag screen is an unwanted extra feature that makes the application "broken". QuickTime is an advertised feature of OS X. The nag screen is something akin to bait-and-switch.
Now, if I had known about the date workaround, I'd have used that instead. I didn't know, so I found another solution. At no point was I "whining", as you characterise it. In fact, I was a satisfied customer after removing the nag screen.
4+? What kind of primitive counting scheme is that?
Let's see, I've got one goat, and another goat; that makes two; and another makes three. If I get yet another goat, then I've got four-plus! Add another; I've now got four-plus!
I just downloaded a "crackz" registration code off the internet. I don't have any interest in the "Pro" features - I just wanted to get rid of that annoying box that assailed me every time I used Quicktime.
Is that illegal? Quite frankly, I don't care. I'm just fixing my operating system, which I paid for. The advertised Quicktime support was broken, and I fixed it.
...or as he is even better known:
Dom Joly
You are completely incorrect.
The European Coal and Steel Community was founded in 1951 by Belgium, West Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. It evolved into the European Economic Community, then the European Community, and finally the European Union.
The United Kingdom joined the EEC (as it then was) in 1973.
I always wondered why my submarine sound gained a click of spurious noise at the end of the file.
Damn you, Adobe!
Incidentally, what did you use to make the "before and after" comparison?
"The" is an article, not a preposition. (Those would be words like "on", "to", "with", etc.)
Sorting "a" with diaresis (umlaut if you prefer) along with "a" is not correct for Swedish, but the rules differ for each particular language. German is not the same as Swedish, for example; as for Finnish, I don't know. But for English, sorting it as an "a" is correct, since accents are, to monolingual anglophones, essentially invisible, or just decoration at best.
Spelling impaired, more like...but I digress.
As several people have pointed out, you can press Ctrl-Alt-Del with one hand - but this is only true on keyboards that have a right-hand Alt key. Most European layouts have AltGr to the right of the space bar instead to help with typing accented letters and so on. Even the UK keyboard has AltGr, although I think that it only works on one key (the one to the left of number 1) to type a useless hook-shaped mark.
It's often useful to be able to do things with one hand, even if you have two (this applies to work as well as browsing pr0n) and given how often Windows historically needed rebooting, it's a damned inconvenience to put them so far apart.
Absolutely true. I bought my first Mac, a 12" iBook, a few months ago. Besides the fantastic operating system (Unix command line and tools as well as a beautiful, consistent UI and perfect hardware support), it is a genuinely portable computer. With 640MB of RAM, it hardly touches the hard drive, and I can use it for over five hours unwired.
One of the reasons that I chose the iBook over the 12" PowerBook was the longer battery life. The G3 is a sound choice for a mobile computer, and at 900MHz, it's not slow for anything I'm trying to do.
My old PC laptop lasted a few minutes on batteries, even when new, and had a constantly-running fan that screamed like a banshee having her fingers slammed in a car door. My iBook is silent unless I do some hardcore number-crunching. No longer do my ears ring when I'm trying to sleep!
Wow..you're pretty confused there. Sushi's Japanese, not Thai. Having spent several months working in Japanese schools, and eating their school dinners, I can assure you that, while they are nutritious, the pupils don't get to eat sushi at school. We did get deep-fried whale a few months ago, though. Healthy? Not really, and definitely not healthy for the whales.
Nature abhors a vacuum...and apparently, so do geeks.
Although copyright law will definitely come down on the publishers' side, I assume that these translators aren't doing all this hard work in order to thumb their nose at the rights holders. If there was already a definitive German/Czech/Crotobaltoslavonian translation available, then this activity would be unnecessary. However, as far as the official translators go, well, if they can't keep up with amateurs working for free, then they probably ought to be trying harder or reevaluating their processes. If you leave a vacuum, expect someone else to fill it.
My mobile phone in Japan about three years ago (a Panasonic on J-Phone for what it's worth) actually did crash while I was typing a message. It just froze.
The only way I could recover it was to remove the battery - but after replacing it, it had lost all its settings.
I'm sure that the software in that phone was a lot simpler - I'm sure that anything programmed by Microsoft is just a disaster waiting to happen.