No, you misunderstand Sony's motives - the rootkit is showing their support for Linux!
You see, the rootkit only infects Microsoft Windows, and the "DRM" only stops Microsoft Windows from playing or ripping the music - Linux is splendidly unaffected by the code, and can play (and rip) the music effortlessly.
So, what Sony is doing is giving people more reasons to NOT run Windows but instead run Linux.
So, the actions of the two groups are in harmony - they are both supporting Linux at the expense of Microsoft.
You all just don't understand the deeper strategy of Sony.
(NOTE for clueless/mods - the above was humor, and should not be taken as literal support for Sony, nor as an actual suggestion that the Sony rootkit was done in support of anything other than Sony's perceived bottom line.)
Many stores, including to an extent WalMart, will offer that guarantee. However, while on the face of it the offer is good, the reality is that the offer is meaningless, as they have a trick to get around it.
Example:
You go into Z-Mart, and you see a Ricaroni 5 CD changer for $15. You pick up a Z-Mart flier showing the price.
You now head over to Q-Mart, and locate what initially appears to be the same Ricaroni 5 CD changer for $20. Since Q-Mart offers a "200% price difference" offer, you figure you are going to get the CD player for $10.
But wait! When you go to claim your offer, the friendly Q-Mart manager points out that the Z-Mart flier is offering a Ricaroni model #5551212-a player, and Q-Mart's is a Ricaroni model #5551212-b - a different model number. He then points out that their offer only applies to "the same model", and since this is NOT the same model number, it is not covered under their vaunted "200% price difference" offer.
Now, if you were able to check, you would find out that the only folks who have the model #5551212-a are Z-Mart, and the only folks who have the #5551212-b are Q-Mart. Moreover, if you could go to the Ricaroni manufacturing plant, you would see that the only difference between the model numbers is the model number sticker - they are otherwise the same unit.
Then why the model number difference? Because both Q-Mart and Z-Mart insist upon the model numbers they sell being unique - so that their "200% price guarantee" trick can work.
I've changed the names to protect the guilty, and obviously this trick isn't played on every item sold in every store, but it is played enough to allow the stores to offer tricks like this. And before you ask why the manufacturers go along with this - because when you are dealing with customers with the buying power of WalMart, BestBuy, and so on, you do what they want, or you don't sell product.
Except that even the cards with the 192kSample/sec DACs won't reproduce much above 20 kHz. Remember, in a proper design you have to follow the DAC with a reconstruction filter as your signal will have spectral aliases every Fs. The idea of running a 192 kSample/second rate is to allow the reconstruction filter to gradually roll off from 20kHz to the Nyquist frequency of 96kHz, rather than the rather sharp roll-off from 20kHz to 22.05 kHz you see in 44.1kSample/sec gear. You also avoid the sin(x)/x roll-off in the reconstructed audio, as the roll-off in a 96kHz Nyquist frequency system is still pretty flat at 20kHz.
However, if you wanted to experiment with this, you could try to find an old (and I do mean old) Zenith remote control from the 1970's - they used ultrasound rather than IR as modern gear does, at about a 30kHz frequency. You could then drive that speaker from a DAC on the printer port, possibly with a simple timer chip to create the sample clock so that the computer "thinks" it is seeing a normal printer on the interface (that way you can avoid a great deal of the latency issues, especially if you use a printer port with a hardware FIFO.) You could eliminate the reconstruction filter as the transducer will do most of your filtering for you. Failing that, here are some transducers that will Git 'R Done.
The Anti-defamation League of Practitioners of the Magickal Arts (note: they are old school and demand the old spelling of "Magickal") threatened to sue over that scene, saying "It is hate speech. It encourages violence against our membership, and is emotionally painful our many members who have lost friends and loved ones to the deprivations of wandering, improperly supervised small children."
When the MPAA and studio initially refused to comply, the ADLPotMA representative turned the MPAA lawyer into a newt - a change many felt was for the better.
Both the PS3 and the Xbox360 have had questions raised about their backwards computability with the previous machines in their lineage.
This raises an question in my mind. As I understand it, the OS within the Xbox is a stripped down Windows environment, and the games are written to that environment, which is basically DirectX.
I've not seen anybody trying to hack Wine to provide that environment as a target, and I do not know if that is even possible. However, I do know that Wine has a DirectX layer that maps DirectX to APIs available under Linux.
The PS3 will run Linux.
So the question is, would it be possible to combine a modified Wine and a JIT x86 to Power compiler to allow the PS3 to run XBox games?
Because if the PS3 were to be more compatible with old XBox games than the XBox360 I would have to have my ass reattached after I laughed it off.
Gads. People are worried over the CO2 emmisions from fuel cells running on methanol and ethanol. Of course, we ignore that the methanol and ethanol were created by growing things that consumed CO2, so it is a net zero carbon cycle.
OK, folks - if you are going to obsess over CO2 emissions, here are some other CO2 producing items you should be worried about:
What/. could use is a new icon for stories like this. I propose this (suitably cropped)./. also could use a new section for stories like this - may I suggest "sqrt_minus_bs_squared.slashdot.org" - for "imaginarybullshit".
So, this guy is concerned about users being too computer-illiterate to configure their wireless cards with the proper WEP key, and for a replacement, you are suggesting that the users be asked to SSH to the firewall prior to going out.
"But it still seems like you're replacing a rather inexpensive part ($1-$5 DSP or $3-$10 FPGA) with a God-awefully expensive CPU ($20-$50)."
Oh, that was FUNNNEEEEEYYYY! Tell me another one, please!
The 400 MHz version of the C6x runs about US$21 in 1K quantity.
There is no price advantage, no real performance advantage, no real board real-estate advantage, no real power advantage to DSPs. They are harder to do REAL work with than general purpose CPUs. The flat SUCK at context switching or interrupt service.
Like I said - I do this for a living - have been for over a decade. I am not just some/bot wanking off in his parents' basement spouting off on subjects he read about on Wikipedia. I've designed several pieces of gear, some of which have flown on the Shuttle, and which have sold many tens of millions of dollars worth of gear. I work with prototype silicon from TI, IBM, Xilinx, Altera, and other vendors.
Because the difference between a DSP and a normal CPU is very small now-a-days.
It used to be that only DSPs had multiply and accumulate instructions - now many CPUs do (the Power being among them).
It used to be that only DSPs had the register count to do an FFT without having to spill to memory during the butterflys - the Power also has enough registers to avoid having to spill to memory in the innermost butterflys.
It used to be that only DSPs had the fast barrel shifters for single-cycle shifts of more than one bit position - now most CPUs have them.
I can go on and on - but simply put, the only real difference between a DSP and a modern CPU is that very few DSPs are clocked at 2GHz, while many CPUs are.
The really fast DSPs are the ones like the TI C6X family - which get their "speed" from being very long instruction word processors, much like the Itanium. They don't have a very high clock speed - the fastest C6x is running about 1GHz. They are benchmark queens - the will do a 4096 point FFT blindingly fast. Oh, you wanted to do something ELSE with the data after you did the FFT? Sorry, but now you are going to lose most of that speed as the code falls out of cache, and as you run out of vectorizable code and stall most of the cores. Besides, you can get just as much speed-up using the vector instructions of a modern CPU (Altivec/SSE etc.) as you do from the C6X processor.
They also suck when you are doing protocol as opposed to signal processing - DSPs *hate* jump instructions, and don't EVEN think of asking them to do a context switch - they are like a drag racer, they go fast until you ask them to TURN.
In short, the days of the DSP as the king of signal processing are past - you can do more with a general purpose processor and an FPGA than you can with DSPs for the same amount of board real-estate, bill of materials cost, and power consumption.
Sorry, but since this is actually what I do for a living, I know from first-hand experience that DSPs really aren't all they are cracked up to be with respect to regular processors now-a-days.
Actually, YES, the embedded market that needs 2GHz chips - folks like me doing signal processing for communications, among other things. Do you have any idea how many operations per second it takes to do an echo canceler for a phone, or to do GSM or CDMA decoding in software (if you want a system that can adapt to new protocols - a software defined radio or SDR - you need to use a more general purpose part than the dedicated ICs for this), or to do the latest 802.11 protocols, or to do video decompression, or....
Yes, Virginia, there is a market for 2GHz processors in the embedded space.
Considering Macromedia's reticence to release a Shockwave (*NOT FLASH*) player for anything other than Windows or MacOS, why would they release a 64 bit version of ANYTHING?
(For the clueless/bots - there is a BIG difference between Flash and Shockwave - Shockwave is a superset of Flash).
I'm not suggesting that the current moderation threshold be removed - far from it.
However, sometimes you get a story at +3, and find there is a larger number of comments than you'd like to wade through, so you want to raise your threshold - that's where I'd envision the use of the CSS to further increase the filtering.
Rob - you are right that "navel gazing" is bad. But looking down and saying "Dayum - I need to lay off the beer and do some sit-ups" is not.
Being so focused upon your navel that you DO NOTHING about it is bad. But stepping back once in a while and saying "now, how can I make things better - anybody have any good advice", then implementing that advice is the only way to improve.
For example - what if you added extra CSS classes to comments, reflecting the moderation adjectives applied and the moderation level - such as
Then, without a server fetch, I could change my displayed comment threshold just by changing my CSS. Think about how much savings the/. servers could see from that.
You could even add the zoo modifiers, then I could have my friends posts highlighted by changing the background, again, without a server fetch.
In short, Rob - if you put more of the information the back-end has into the generated HTML, then that would increase the amount of cool stuff WE can do at the browser end.
I wonder what the refractive index of this material is? For those of us who look through tank windshield all day (figuratively speaking), if this material can be reduced in price and has a refractive index significantly greater than 1.66, then it would make our lenses much thinner, as well as being much more scratch resistant than polycarbonate.
Given that sapphire has a refractive index over 1.75, this *could* be a great breakthrough - if Big Green starts to consume large quantities of this, then the amortized NRE will be greatly reduced.
Not standardized in the specifications of the language.
Not standardized in the character sets of most non-bitmapped displays.
Not standardized in HTML markup.
Gosh, I don't know!
Now, if you will excuse me, I need to create a local variable named <The Symbol for the Artist Formerly Known as "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince">
GConf has nothing to do with the ORB functions within Bonobo - in that way it is completely different than the Windows registry.
GConf only deals with the configuration of program parameters. The location of a CORBA object given its UID is handled by the ORB and that records its data in a different place.
Now, one can argue about the need for and wisdom of having a centralized configuration manager (GConf), but it has nothing to do with the Bonobo object system.
Installers exist in Windows due to the Component Object Model (COM). An application is *supposed* to be a collection of component objects that can be instantiated by requesting the GUID of the object, rather than explicitly calling an object constructor. You need a mapping between the GUIDs and the DLL embodying the object, and that mapping is stored within the Registry. Were programs truly self-contained directories, there would be no way for, say, Word to say "Hey, I need an Excel object here - give me one", as the system would have no way to locate the DLL and constructor which embodied the Excel object.
The Bonobo model Gnome uses has a similar problem - how does the Object Request Broker know what shared library to invoke to create an Bonobo object?
In both cases there has to be *some* centralized repository of UID to library mappings, and as I understand it, that was what the origins of the Windows Registry were.
However, programmers were encouraged to store other information beyond object mappings in the Registry - like program settings and such.
However, even were Microsoft to revert all non-"COM mapping" data out of the Registry, the system would still have the problem that if the Registry gets toasted, nobody can find the DLLs for their objects, and thus nothing works.
Why do they (the EU) care about the root servers? The root servers aren't where the real power lies - the TLD servers are!
OK, let up wave the magic wand and POOF! the EU is in control of the root servers. What power does that give them? The only "power" they get is the ability to add or remove top level domains.
So if I create a "www.theEUsucksbigtime.com" domain, they cannot block it - all they can do is block the.com domain.
Sure - they could hand ownership of.com over to some EU entity - and see that NOTHING really changes, because everybody will continue to use the current.com registrars, and the current.com servers.
EU residents, I beg for forgiveness for this, but it seems to me this is nothing but posturing by the EU politicians - cashing in on the zeitgeist of "America BAAAAD! EU GOOOD!".
I understand the average Slashbot all too well - witness the "Flamebait" moderation on my original post.
I expect several more "Overrateds" and at least one "Troll" before the day is out.
I have had the temerity to point out a logical inconsistency in the slashbot groupthink - this is thoughtcrime and double-plus-ungood and I must be rightmodded.
Government: We think we should count blogs as political contributions and regulate them under the existing election laws. Slashbots: BWAAAAAA! DON'T YOU REGULATE MY BLOGS!
News reporter: Political blogs are big money, and there may be a loophole that will allow massive donations to political parties in the form of Internet advertising that won't be regulated by the election laws. Slashbots: BWAAAAAA! Meaney politicians will flood the net with ads. THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD DOOOO SOMETHING!
Make up your minds, people. Either blogs are NOT regulated, and the People With Money And An Agenda will use them, or blogs get regulated. Sauce for the goose, good for the gander.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you misunderstand Sony's motives - the rootkit is showing their support for Linux!
/mods - the above was humor, and should not be taken as literal support for Sony, nor as an actual suggestion that the Sony rootkit was done in support of anything other than Sony's perceived bottom line.)
You see, the rootkit only infects Microsoft Windows, and the "DRM" only stops Microsoft Windows from playing or ripping the music - Linux is splendidly unaffected by the code, and can play (and rip) the music effortlessly.
So, what Sony is doing is giving people more reasons to NOT run Windows but instead run Linux.
So, the actions of the two groups are in harmony - they are both supporting Linux at the expense of Microsoft.
You all just don't understand the deeper strategy of Sony.
(NOTE for clueless
Shouldn't this whole thing be under the "From the Mysterious Future" department?
Many stores, including to an extent WalMart, will offer that guarantee. However, while on the face of it the offer is good, the reality is that the offer is meaningless, as they have a trick to get around it.
Example:
You go into Z-Mart, and you see a Ricaroni 5 CD changer for $15. You pick up a Z-Mart flier showing the price.
You now head over to Q-Mart, and locate what initially appears to be the same Ricaroni 5 CD changer for $20. Since Q-Mart offers a "200% price difference" offer, you figure you are going to get the CD player for $10.
But wait! When you go to claim your offer, the friendly Q-Mart manager points out that the Z-Mart flier is offering a Ricaroni model #5551212-a player, and Q-Mart's is a Ricaroni model #5551212-b - a different model number. He then points out that their offer only applies to "the same model", and since this is NOT the same model number, it is not covered under their vaunted "200% price difference" offer.
Now, if you were able to check, you would find out that the only folks who have the model #5551212-a are Z-Mart, and the only folks who have the #5551212-b are Q-Mart. Moreover, if you could go to the Ricaroni manufacturing plant, you would see that the only difference between the model numbers is the model number sticker - they are otherwise the same unit.
Then why the model number difference? Because both Q-Mart and Z-Mart insist upon the model numbers they sell being unique - so that their "200% price guarantee" trick can work.
I've changed the names to protect the guilty, and obviously this trick isn't played on every item sold in every store, but it is played enough to allow the stores to offer tricks like this. And before you ask why the manufacturers go along with this - because when you are dealing with customers with the buying power of WalMart, BestBuy, and so on, you do what they want, or you don't sell product.
Yes, but did they get Robert Picardo to record the voice for the doctor?
"Please state the nature of the emergency...."
Except that even the cards with the 192kSample/sec DACs won't reproduce much above 20 kHz. Remember, in a proper design you have to follow the DAC with a reconstruction filter as your signal will have spectral aliases every Fs. The idea of running a 192 kSample/second rate is to allow the reconstruction filter to gradually roll off from 20kHz to the Nyquist frequency of 96kHz, rather than the rather sharp roll-off from 20kHz to 22.05 kHz you see in 44.1kSample/sec gear. You also avoid the sin(x)/x roll-off in the reconstructed audio, as the roll-off in a 96kHz Nyquist frequency system is still pretty flat at 20kHz.
However, if you wanted to experiment with this, you could try to find an old (and I do mean old) Zenith remote control from the 1970's - they used ultrasound rather than IR as modern gear does, at about a 30kHz frequency. You could then drive that speaker from a DAC on the printer port, possibly with a simple timer chip to create the sample clock so that the computer "thinks" it is seeing a normal printer on the interface (that way you can avoid a great deal of the latency issues, especially if you use a printer port with a hardware FIFO.) You could eliminate the reconstruction filter as the transducer will do most of your filtering for you. Failing that, here are some transducers that will Git 'R Done.
But zombies as in undead corpses don't exist, while zombies as in pwnzr3d Windows machines DO exist.
So how is it that the undead are "real" and the Windows machines are not "real"?
No, he got worse - he ceased to be a newt.
The Anti-defamation League of Practitioners of the Magickal Arts (note: they are old school and demand the old spelling of "Magickal") threatened to sue over that scene, saying "It is hate speech. It encourages violence against our membership, and is emotionally painful our many members who have lost friends and loved ones to the deprivations of wandering, improperly supervised small children."
When the MPAA and studio initially refused to comply, the ADLPotMA representative turned the MPAA lawyer into a newt - a change many felt was for the better.
Both the PS3 and the Xbox360 have had questions raised about their backwards computability with the previous machines in their lineage.
This raises an question in my mind. As I understand it, the OS within the Xbox is a stripped down Windows environment, and the games are written to that environment, which is basically DirectX.
I've not seen anybody trying to hack Wine to provide that environment as a target, and I do not know if that is even possible. However, I do know that Wine has a DirectX layer that maps DirectX to APIs available under Linux.
The PS3 will run Linux.
So the question is, would it be possible to combine a modified Wine and a JIT x86 to Power compiler to allow the PS3 to run XBox games?
Because if the PS3 were to be more compatible with old XBox games than the XBox360 I would have to have my ass reattached after I laughed it off.
OK, folks - if you are going to obsess over CO2 emissions, here are some other CO2 producing items you should be worried about:
And not the least of all:
Obviously, /. needs a new icon.
/. needs is editors who have some background in the scientific method.
/. really needs is editors .
/. could use is a new icon for stories like this. I propose this (suitably cropped). /. also could use a new section for stories like this - may I suggest "sqrt_minus_bs_squared.slashdot.org" - for "imaginary bullshit".
Well, what
Well, what
But I digress.
What
So, this guy is concerned about users being too computer-illiterate to configure their wireless cards with the proper WEP key, and for a replacement, you are suggesting that the users be asked to SSH to the firewall prior to going out.
"But it still seems like you're replacing a rather inexpensive part ($1-$5 DSP or $3-$10 FPGA) with a God-awefully expensive CPU ($20-$50)."
/bot wanking off in his parents' basement spouting off on subjects he read about on Wikipedia. I've designed several pieces of gear, some of which have flown on the Shuttle, and which have sold many tens of millions of dollars worth of gear. I work with prototype silicon from TI, IBM, Xilinx, Altera, and other vendors.
Oh, that was FUNNNEEEEEYYYY! Tell me another one, please!
The 400 MHz version of the C6x runs about US$21 in 1K quantity.
There is no price advantage, no real performance advantage, no real board real-estate advantage, no real power advantage to DSPs. They are harder to do REAL work with than general purpose CPUs. The flat SUCK at context switching or interrupt service.
Like I said - I do this for a living - have been for over a decade. I am not just some
Because the difference between a DSP and a normal CPU is very small now-a-days.
It used to be that only DSPs had multiply and accumulate instructions - now many CPUs do (the Power being among them).
It used to be that only DSPs had the register count to do an FFT without having to spill to memory during the butterflys - the Power also has enough registers to avoid having to spill to memory in the innermost butterflys.
It used to be that only DSPs had the fast barrel shifters for single-cycle shifts of more than one bit position - now most CPUs have them.
I can go on and on - but simply put, the only real difference between a DSP and a modern CPU is that very few DSPs are clocked at 2GHz, while many CPUs are.
The really fast DSPs are the ones like the TI C6X family - which get their "speed" from being very long instruction word processors, much like the Itanium. They don't have a very high clock speed - the fastest C6x is running about 1GHz. They are benchmark queens - the will do a 4096 point FFT blindingly fast. Oh, you wanted to do something ELSE with the data after you did the FFT? Sorry, but now you are going to lose most of that speed as the code falls out of cache, and as you run out of vectorizable code and stall most of the cores. Besides, you can get just as much speed-up using the vector instructions of a modern CPU (Altivec/SSE etc.) as you do from the C6X processor.
They also suck when you are doing protocol as opposed to signal processing - DSPs *hate* jump instructions, and don't EVEN think of asking them to do a context switch - they are like a drag racer, they go fast until you ask them to TURN.
In short, the days of the DSP as the king of signal processing are past - you can do more with a general purpose processor and an FPGA than you can with DSPs for the same amount of board real-estate, bill of materials cost, and power consumption.
Sorry, but since this is actually what I do for a living, I know from first-hand experience that DSPs really aren't all they are cracked up to be with respect to regular processors now-a-days.
Actually, YES, the embedded market that needs 2GHz chips - folks like me doing signal processing for communications, among other things. Do you have any idea how many operations per second it takes to do an echo canceler for a phone, or to do GSM or CDMA decoding in software (if you want a system that can adapt to new protocols - a software defined radio or SDR - you need to use a more general purpose part than the dedicated ICs for this), or to do the latest 802.11 protocols, or to do video decompression, or ....
Yes, Virginia, there is a market for 2GHz processors in the embedded space.
Considering Macromedia's reticence to release a Shockwave (*NOT FLASH*) player for anything other than Windows or MacOS, why would they release a 64 bit version of ANYTHING?
/bots - there is a BIG difference between Flash and Shockwave - Shockwave is a superset of Flash).
(For the clueless
I'm not suggesting that the current moderation threshold be removed - far from it.
However, sometimes you get a story at +3, and find there is a larger number of comments than you'd like to wade through, so you want to raise your threshold - that's where I'd envision the use of the CSS to further increase the filtering.
Rob - you are right that "navel gazing" is bad. But looking down and saying "Dayum - I need to lay off the beer and do some sit-ups" is not.
/. servers could see from that.
Being so focused upon your navel that you DO NOTHING about it is bad. But stepping back once in a while and saying "now, how can I make things better - anybody have any good advice", then implementing that advice is the only way to improve.
For example - what if you added extra CSS classes to comments, reflecting the moderation adjectives applied and the moderation level - such as
<li class="comment, level_5, karma_bonus, insightful, interesting, overrated">
Then, without a server fetch, I could change my displayed comment threshold just by changing my CSS. Think about how much savings the
You could even add the zoo modifiers, then I could have my friends posts highlighted by changing the background, again, without a server fetch.
In short, Rob - if you put more of the information the back-end has into the generated HTML, then that would increase the amount of cool stuff WE can do at the browser end.
I wonder what the refractive index of this material is? For those of us who look through tank windshield all day (figuratively speaking), if this material can be reduced in price and has a refractive index significantly greater than 1.66, then it would make our lenses much thinner, as well as being much more scratch resistant than polycarbonate.
Given that sapphire has a refractive index over 1.75, this *could* be a great breakthrough - if Big Green starts to consume large quantities of this, then the amortized NRE will be greatly reduced.
Gosh, I don't know!
Now, if you will excuse me, I need to create a local variable named <The Symbol for the Artist Formerly Known as "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince">
GConf has nothing to do with the ORB functions within Bonobo - in that way it is completely different than the Windows registry.
GConf only deals with the configuration of program parameters. The location of a CORBA object given its UID is handled by the ORB and that records its data in a different place.
Now, one can argue about the need for and wisdom of having a centralized configuration manager (GConf), but it has nothing to do with the Bonobo object system.
Installers exist in Windows due to the Component Object Model (COM). An application is *supposed* to be a collection of component objects that can be instantiated by requesting the GUID of the object, rather than explicitly calling an object constructor. You need a mapping between the GUIDs and the DLL embodying the object, and that mapping is stored within the Registry. Were programs truly self-contained directories, there would be no way for, say, Word to say "Hey, I need an Excel object here - give me one", as the system would have no way to locate the DLL and constructor which embodied the Excel object.
The Bonobo model Gnome uses has a similar problem - how does the Object Request Broker know what shared library to invoke to create an Bonobo object?
In both cases there has to be *some* centralized repository of UID to library mappings, and as I understand it, that was what the origins of the Windows Registry were.
However, programmers were encouraged to store other information beyond object mappings in the Registry - like program settings and such.
However, even were Microsoft to revert all non-"COM mapping" data out of the Registry, the system would still have the problem that if the Registry gets toasted, nobody can find the DLLs for their objects, and thus nothing works.
Why do they (the EU) care about the root servers? The root servers aren't where the real power lies - the TLD servers are!
.com domain.
.com over to some EU entity - and see that NOTHING really changes, because everybody will continue to use the current .com registrars, and the current .com servers.
OK, let up wave the magic wand and POOF! the EU is in control of the root servers. What power does that give them? The only "power" they get is the ability to add or remove top level domains.
So if I create a "www.theEUsucksbigtime.com" domain, they cannot block it - all they can do is block the
Sure - they could hand ownership of
EU residents, I beg for forgiveness for this, but it seems to me this is nothing but posturing by the EU politicians - cashing in on the zeitgeist of "America BAAAAD! EU GOOOD!".
I just don't see the motivation for this....
I understand the average Slashbot all too well - witness the "Flamebait" moderation on my original post.
I expect several more "Overrateds" and at least one "Troll" before the day is out.
I have had the temerity to point out a logical inconsistency in the slashbot groupthink - this is thoughtcrime and double-plus-ungood and I must be rightmodded.
Government: We think we should count blogs as political contributions and regulate them under the existing election laws.
Slashbots: BWAAAAAA! DON'T YOU REGULATE MY BLOGS!
News reporter: Political blogs are big money, and there may be a loophole that will allow massive donations to political parties in the form of Internet advertising that won't be regulated by the election laws.
Slashbots: BWAAAAAA! Meaney politicians will flood the net with ads. THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD DOOOO SOMETHING!
Make up your minds, people. Either blogs are NOT regulated, and the People With Money And An Agenda will use them, or blogs get regulated. Sauce for the goose, good for the gander.