Most of the posts here are taking the "you can't blame rank and file people for who they work for" opinion so this may get the -1 treatment, but I must disagree.
I think anyone who is still working for SCO after six months of this nonsense have shown a complete lack of concern about the ethics or legality of what they are contributing to. To me, this would be a definite red flag if I were recruiting.
Imagine you are interviewing a developer, and he proudly shows you a portfolio of work he has done for the Klan, Al-Quada, and the Gambino crime family. When you make an offhand comment about his interesting clientele, he shrugs and says, "anything for a buck".
No, SCO's criminal activity isn't quite as blatant, but I would have to say it is evident enough to call into question the ethics and principles of anyone who continues to participate in it.
nobody likes spam, sure, but this whole scene is really about encouraging the government to regulate communication. i find it amazing that the slashdot crowd who are usually such virulent defenders of an unfettered internet are more than willing to give the government more control when it comes to penis-pill ads!
You make an interesting point, but I'm afraid I must disagree with you. The Slashdot crowd tend to advocate broad rights to communicate freely, but with such rights come responsiblity. The spammers completely shirk the responsiblity to use this freedom wisely, and must be dealt with appropriately, or the freedom Slashdotters cherish will be diminished for all.
To clarify what I am trying to say, suppose a motorist thinks the government should raise the speed limit along the highway. This would be less government fettering of his driving. But, he might also want stiffer penalties for drunk drivers, because without getting them off the road, drunks at the higher speed would get people killed.
Or, as another example, I am a firearms enthusiast, yet would argue for stiffer penalties for gun-related violent crimes than most people who are not gun-rights advocates. Why? Because dealing harshly with such criminals is the only way to avoid an across-the-board solution that would cost even non-criminals like myself a right that I cherish.
In short, the spammers are the bad apples that threaten to ruin unfettered Internet communication for everyone. I would much rather see a strong, narrowly-focused solution directed at those people who are blatantly abusing their communication freedom than to have everyone suffer from either spam or some blanket solution that costs everyone their freedom.
Sorry, I probably wasn't specific enough, but I was when I was lamenting the lack of Jawas and Gungans, I meant in terms of playable races, rather than as NPCs/MOBs/whatever. I think such races are much more recognizable parts of the Star Wars universe that players looking for a character to choose from than a "Bothian", "Zebrak", or "Trandoshan". I mean really, wouldn't a Jawa be more fun than those things? The short and cute appeal of EQ Gnomes, but with cloaks and glowing eyes...
SWG is a pretty expensive proposition for a game. $50 up front, plus $15 a month. So I for one wanted to do a little research before putting down the money. To do that, I went to the boards to see what the game experience sounded like from the people who actually play it.
I read about EQ-style time sinks, lots of walking. Content like lore and quests sounded rather sparse. Aside from humans and wookies, most of the races sounded like "random guy from the cantina" -- not gungans or jawas or things like that which would at least be recognizable as a Star Wars creature. No spaceships, though supposedly they're coming in a future expansion. Lots of going out to hunt random creatures to build up one's character.
It sounded like something that a lot of people were enjoying, but not really very "Star Wars"-ish in terms of the roleplay possibilities, and not something for me. By reading over the boards, I was able to determine before having to buy anything that I would be dissatisfied with this title, based on my own tastes and expectations.
You might look at this and think, "Sony lost a sale because you read the boards, closing them is a good move". But it's not. Sure, if I had bought the game and hated it, they might have made $50 more, but I would have been much more wary of buying anything from them in the future. After being burned, Sony would have a much higher burden of convincing me to buy their product next time around, and in the long run would lose much more money than they made.
A lot of people assume because Ashcroft is a conservative and the most vocal opponent of the Patriot Act in the mainstream press, the ACLU, is liberal, that the Patriot Act controversy falls along typical liberal vs. conservative lines. Actually it is much more a question of libertarian vs. authoritarian than liberal vs. conservative.
The real reaction to this act from conservatives is more interesting and diverse. Some share the views of Attorney General Ashcroft. Others oppose it just as strongly as the geek community -- many of the articles about the act on the conservative National Review site describe it with terms like the "so-called", "wrongly-termed" or "misnamed" Patriot Act. A director of the Cato Institute raised many interesting questions about the act, to which the Justice Department wrote up a reply.
Also worth looking at is the Justice Department's own Patriot Act Web site. From here you can view the text of the act itself as well as all the arguments for it and rhetoric used to justify it. A valuable resource for any of us trying to formulate counterarguments about why this act needs to go away.
I tend to be wary of "Corporations = Republicans = Evil" type rants, as they are often fairly knee-jerk and unfounded, so I poked around a bit. In this case there is a connection, albeit a pretty minor one.
Diebold's SEC filings show their Chairman / President / CEO to be Mr. Walden W. O'Dell, who has donated $2000 this summer to Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican from Ohio (Diebold's home state). Diebold Inc.'s soft money donations also go to Republicans.
This does not demonstrate to me much evidence that Diebold is "after something other than money", it looks like routine political activity to me. But, while my quick research has neither managed to refute nor confirm your conspiracy theory, I'll pass it along anyway for whoever might be curious.
Why would OEMs buy something that would piss off their customers?
I'm sure they see it as all a matter of how they spin it. To home users, tout how $MARKETING_NAME_FOR_DRM Technology lets you "securely" watch movies, listen to music, download ebooks, and such. Once content-makers have final say over what goes on on your computer instead of you, new business models will emerge as companies try to use this to sell you stuff. This will be presented in terms of the services these business models make available rather than the loss of control required to implement them.
As far as business customers, you need only look as far as the recent article about Microsoft's spin on MS-Office DRM to hear how it will be presented as a new feature that lets companies disseminate documents while still controlling their spread and availablility, deciding when they expire, and so on.
I don't like DRM any more than most Slashdotters, but unless we can get a loud and articulate message out to the non-tech savvy people out there, it's definitely coming. To the masses, not having total, final control over everything your computer does (do they feel that they have that now?) is not a big loss to be able to use the new Acme internet movie rental service, or to send out your business document to people and not worry about them leaking it and spreading it to third parties.
Interesting how learning, communicating with others, access to government resources and medical information, etc., aren't part of your list. A little bias perhaps?
Perhaps a little bias, but mainly just the fact that these things aren't normally bandwidth intensive enough to be broadband's killer apps. "Communicating with others" usually takes the form of email / IM / chat room. Government resources are more often HTML or PDF files than they are streaming multimedia, and so on. I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with any kind of sites that having a slow connection to would cause mass oppression and a loss of fundamental human rights, as the original post claimed.
It's almost as if there's a virtual Third World of 'net access within our country - those oppressed by dial-up-only access. Is it in fact a governmental responsibility to bring it to everyone?
What good would it do for the government to give everyone broadband if it doesn't also give them all computers and free electricity to run them?
While they're giving out the free stuff, there are lots of things more pertinent to raising one's standard of living than snappy Web surfing (well, maybe not to Slashdotters): a car, a house, a phone, cable TV, and so on. Is it in fact a governmental responsibility to bring these to everyone also?
Broadband has several uses... online gaming, warez, MP3's, Webcams, internet telephony, downloading large files, porn... which of these is such a fundamental human right that people face Third World style oppression without the government bringing it to them?
For anyone curious about string theory, I would highly recommend Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory". He uses excellent writing style and plain, easy to follow examples to illustrate difficult concepts, and rather than going through lots of math and derivations, reserves that type of thing for the endnotes. It makes for a very approachable book that is particularly good for someone trying to learn new concepts rather than the struggle with the gory details of theoretical physics equations.
Actually the camera would probably benefit from the gyroscope in the camera as much or more than the user interface does. Some of Canon's better lenses use gyros built into the lenzes to act as Image Stabilizers, basically compensating for any motion and shaking of the camera during exposure to improve the picture quality.
I had never used MPlayer before, but got bored over the weekend and decided to check it out. Since we have an MPlayer topic, I'll provide a little review for others thinking of doing the same.
I did the install from the RPM's on the MPlayer site instead of doing my own build, they have lots of dependencies, some apparently circular, so installing everything from one rpm command seems to work best. The one library that I didn't already have on my system and wasn't in the RPM's was libfaad, which I quickly found with a little Googling.
The only other setup I had to do to get MPlayer working was that it expects the DVD drive to be/dev/dvd by default, so I made a symlink for that. MPlayer also lets you set the DVD drive via the settings menu or a command line switch, so this is not a big deal
The DVD I watched was Disney's "Beauty and the Beast". Yes, I know, evil company. Playing title 1, chapter 1 only showed a Walt Disney logo then playback stopped. I tried various other titles until finally discovering Title 17 was the movie itself. I didn't figure out how to bring up the main DVD menu, which would have hopefully made figuring out where on the disc the movie was trivial.
Playback was initially jerky and poor. Toggling a couple of the playback / frame dropping options fixed this and playback became flawless on my system.
I did experience some cryptic error messages and a couple crashes (application crashes, not lockups) so I would characterize MPlayer as very usable but not completely stable.
As far as user interface, it was good, and similar in layout to Windows Media Player and such. My main complain about the GUI was that many of the buttons are labelled only with a symbol, and hovering the mouse pointer over them did not bring up any kind of help bubble to explain them, so using the GUI involved more trial and error than it should have.
The other feature I tried out was MP3 playback. It sounded good, but when I associated MP3's in Nautilis with MPlayer and clicked on a second MP3 while the first was playing, it didn't switch songs or enqueue, but rather started up a second instance of MPlayer playing a different song at the same time, which sounded terrible. I'm sure there's a way to fix this (if nothing else, a shell script wrapper would work), but compared to WinAmp doing things right from the start, it still came as a disappointment.
I haven't tried the other features out (skins, encoding, etc.) but all in all, I was impressed with what I have seen so far. For people looking to play DVD's and other types of media under Linux, MPlayer is well worth downloading.
RTFA, this is not a normal Windows EULA, but something in the BIOS. The computer would not so much as boot from a CD to install Linux until he had agreed to a license Dell hadn't even given him an opportunity to read.
Try to position your monitor so that it can only be seen from within the cubicle as opposed to from the surrounding walkway. You strike me as the sort who visits Slashdot instead of working. Remember things like Alt-Space,N and Win-D and you will go far.
Avoid being annoyingly noisy. Music should be with headphones, use of a speakerphone should be minimal, avoid obnoxious cell phone ring tones or WAVs on your PC. I even had to pass up a chance to swap my keyboard for one of those wonderful old IBM's because the clicking would have driven everyone crazy.
Don't stink. Poor hygene, eating pungent foods at your desk, bad cologne, reeking of cigarettes, etc. are much more noticable than when you're in a different room.
Learn to tolerate others. I've worked with a couple people who expect absolute silence in their workplace so they can enter some kind of deep contemplative state. Doesn't work well in cubeland. If you can tune out variations in noise level, temperature, etc. you keep your sanity a lot longer.
Keep it light. Get along well with others. Use your whiteboard for inside jokes that develop camaraderie with your co-workers, but bear in mind what is appropriate. Posting a relevant Dilbert strip is always good.
Projectiles are great! Rubber bands, nerf darts, etc. Learn who likes to play and who doesn't and avoid hitting innocent bystanders.
Have a sense of proximity. Phoning the next cubicle over is silly, shouting across the whole floor obnoxious. Never underestimate just walking over to the person's cube.
Privacy comes in small doses. During the next office shuffle, try for a cube away from the main walkway. A cube wall extention or strategically placed bookshelf or filing cabinet near your cube entrance can act as a doorway.
Traditional analog radio stations have some established royalty rates that they pay to ASCAP/BMI for writing the song, but nothing to the label because the radio play makes them promoters of the music.
When it comes to Internet radio, however, the RIAA "contends that Net radio services are different -- since there are ways for listeners to digitally reproduce the music -- and should therefore pay the sound recording fees" (Cnet, 7/20/02) The RIAA (in the guise of SoundExchange) charge per-listener fees that add up to much more than traditional analog stations would pay.
Now my question is, is this fee schedule for digital radio specific to Internet radio, or do non-Internet based digital radio sources (XM sattelite radio, DirecTV music channels, Digital Music Express, etc.) pay it too? If not, are their royalties more akin to Webcasters' or to analog broadcasters? While I realize these services subscription rates could much more easily cover royalties than could a small Internet radio site, I am curious as to what approach the RIAA takes towards these services and how consistent it is with their rhetoric about broadcasting digital music.
"In order to beat Windows, which all Linux users think sucks, they should try to make it more like Windows."
Windows does most of its sucking in areas like security, stability, openness, licensing conditions, standards adherence, and so on. Even the most rabit Microsoft opponent would have trouble arguing that GUI ease of use for newbies, which much of this discussion has focused on, is Windows' big weakness. I think a more appropriate phrasing of the plan is to be more like Windows in areas where Windows is ahead, while retaining Linux's superiority in the areas where Windows does in fact suck.
I've sometimes wondered about this. Not so much from the console aspect, but as it pertains to computer gaming in general.
On the one hand, developers these days have far more resources available to them. Unlike the old days where you had to write games in assembly because the machines couldn't handle the overhead of an interpreter, now developers have high level languages and can structure their code with OOP. They have extensive API's they can make use of, libraries to build upon, existing 3D engines to work with, and can rely on the OS and device drivers to provide functionality that once required reinvinting a lot of wheels.
On the other hand, customer expectations are higher. A LOT higher. While at one time, a little side scrolling and a few sprite graphics could be the mechanism for a successful game, now nobody would play it except on their cell phone. People these days expect immersive environments, theatrical quality soundtracks and voice acting, beautifully rendered graphical models, a slick interface, full network support, and so on.
And through it all many of the things that make for a great game like a good plot, creativity, interesting game mechanics, appropriate difficulty balance, and so on remain more or less constants.
So how do these factors weigh out against one another? Do all the tools available to developers now, undreamed of by the programmers of yesterday, make producing a good product an easier task overall, or has the expectations bar been raised high enough that fulfilling those expectations becomes a daunting task, more akin to producing a movie than to a typical software project?
What the SCO license says is basically "we won't sue you for using any of our IP that is in Linux". This does not necessarily mean that there is any of their IP in Linux, just that if they find any, they won't sue you for using it.
As an analogy, for $20 I will sell you all my real estate. For another $20, I will sell you insurance that covers Martian invasions. When you discover that I own no land and that Mars is uninhabited, don't expect your $40 back because technically I gave you everything I promised.
SCO, however, don't just limit themselves to this. While in and of itself selling snake oil could be dismissed as "let the buyer beware", they use lies and FUD to make people think their worthless license has value. Contrast the grab-bag nature of my real estate example above to someone who actually presents themself as the legitimate owner of the Brooklyn Bridge in order to get people to accept the offer.
IANAL, but I would say, if you can get someone to pay you for something completely worthless that's good marketing, but if you engage in fraud, misrepresentation, and false advertising in order to sell it, that's where you should get the book thrown at you.
But you need DeCSS to access the content, which has nothing to do with copying (well, permenantly), only playing.
I'm glad someone else caught this. It's a bit disturbing when even the Slashdot posting describes DeCSS as "DVD-copying code". DeCSS would not be necessary to make exact copies, and while it could be useful for other types of copies (like downsampling), its main use is not for copying, but playback.
Obviously, this is not the way the RIAA wants people to think of DeCSS. It's much harder to demonize a DVD playing program than some kind of copying tool used by Nasty Evil Pirates. The fact that when DeCSS is mentioned the latter comes to mind, even for a Slashdot poster or tech journalist shows just how effective the RIAA's propaganda really is.
To win this battle, it has to be recast not as a fight for our right to bootleg movies, but put the focus on the legitimate questions that have nothing to do with copying anything.
How ARE users of Linux and other non-MS operating systems supposed to watch the movies they've paid for?
How common-knowledge can a process be and still enjoy "trade secret" legal status?
What gives the RIAA the right to effectively right their own international import/export laws through some ridiculous region encoding scheme and giving them the force of real laws?
Does (and should) watching a DVD you legitimately bought and own from Japan or England in the United States make you a criminal?
Modern metal alloys exist that are structurally strong, yet can also withstand the temperatures of re-entry directly without having ceramic tiles.
Keep in mind that most metal alloys are also heat conductors, whereas ceramic tiles, for all their other shortcomings, are remarkably good insulators. One side can be many hundreds of degrees, and the other cool enough to touch.
While keeping the hull of a space capsule from melting is obviously important, it is not enough if the inside of the capsule gets as hot as a kiln. This is particularly true for manned flights (which this one is not) but any craft would have to adequately protect its electronics, as these will be much more delicate than the heat shield.
This is a smart plan for a sattelite such as this where temperature is critical. I've been working on some thermal simulation code for the ISS program, and in addition to direct solar heating, heat radiating away from the Earth and albedo (sunlight reflected off the Earth) are big factors in heating. Unlike sunlight however, these other two depend directly on distance from the Earth. Move further away and you get less heat.
Of course, it also helps that this telescope is only intended to work for a few years. Unlike Hubble, people won't be able to go up and service it. After 30 years, the telescope will be on the opposite side of the sun, so even if it was still working, you would need other sattelites to relay the signal. And of course, after 60, it could come back around and burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.
I think part of it is backlash against the militant vegetarians who try to impose their beliefs on others. The non-vegetarians do not want want to hear all about "meat is murder", the conditions in a slaughterhouse, or the plight of the cow they ate for lunch. The vocal minority of vegetarians' self-righteous attitude and proselytizing causes them all to be viewed by suspicion by some people, much as some people react towards Christians.
Of course, there are other factors as well. In American society, men tend to eat a lot of red meat, whereas salads and vegetables, being more popular among female diets, are sometimes viewed as "chick food". While these are not a universal correlation (men eat some salads, women do eat hamburgers), the topic post's reference to males' dislike for vegan foods clearly plays to this tendency. Deviation from societal norms leads to occasional abrasiveness and ridicule, particularly when it comes to behavior that is deemed unmanly. If I showed up for work on Monday with a pink Hello Kitty t-shirt, the other guys at work would probably tease me.
You are completely correct. In all the talk about chads, punch-cards, and whether electronic voting is a panacea, the importance of openness often gets overlooked.
Consider the most closed possible solution. People go to the polls, cast their votes, and later some guy declares a winner that may or may not have anything to do with the actual votes because the intervening steps are a complete black box.
What if not only the voting machines and tallying were closed, but other key elements of the voting process like the number of electoral votes for each state were kept secret? Suddenly "Gore had more votes, but Bush wins" would seem quite fishy. But because the algorithm for knowing who won based on which states they carried is publically known, any citizen can see that this is the outcome America's law calls for given the specified vote totals.
What if voters weren't told whether the winner would be determined by plurality, instant runoff, etc? That greatly affects aspects of voting such as whether voting for third party candidates siphons away votes from other candidates or not.
Because we know exactly how our voting system works, at the macroscopic level anyway, we can engage in public debate about topics like the electoral college, instant runoffs, Borda count alternatives, and so on. This strengthens our democracy, and I believe it should also hold for the minutiae. Publically post the source code for electronic voting software. Print the blueprints of voting machines, etc. Just as we can review and debate the high level issues of voting, there are citizens with expertise in the specific details that can offer insights into more detailed issues. Is the electronic voting tablet insecure? Is the tallying method valid? And so on. These questions must be answered in a public forum.
For citizens to truly participate in a democratic process, they must be privy to all aspects of that process.
I think the purpose of The Nameless is not so much to make parallels to a real-world religion as to create one that is internally consistent. In games such as EQ you find a mythos of lots of minor gods, but these aren't really omnipotent beings so much as superheroes/villians. They have lots of cool powers and a distinctive sphere of control (war, nature, justice, whatever), but they have serious limitations to their power and can eventually be defeated by player characters.
In short, they don't work very well as the ultimate beings in the universe. Their motives are all-too-human, and their power too limited for them to be the entities who created the universe. So some fictional settings combine this polytheistic approach with a sort of agnostic monotheism. They introduce a behind-the-scenes god who IS all powerful and who created everything, but doesn't get involved in the affairs of mortals. The Nameless in EverQuest is this type of entity, as is Ao in the Forgotten Realms, the Creator in the Wheel of Time, and so on. This two-tiered approach gives authors a convenient way to provide for battling gods / immortals / heroes / whatever while still resolving the big philosophical questions of their universe in a way that is analagous to the way many people answer them in real life.
As far as preaching on MMORPG's, I'd say unless you are doing so privately with your friends that you know well enough to discuss serious and personal topics with, keep it in character. It's good roleplay to say "You tree-hugging fool, forsake the worthless Tunare and follow the dark path of Innoruuk!" but running around starting arguments about real-life religions would not be.
Slashdot Mirror
I think anyone who is still working for SCO after six months of this nonsense have shown a complete lack of concern about the ethics or legality of what they are contributing to. To me, this would be a definite red flag if I were recruiting.
Imagine you are interviewing a developer, and he proudly shows you a portfolio of work he has done for the Klan, Al-Quada, and the Gambino crime family. When you make an offhand comment about his interesting clientele, he shrugs and says, "anything for a buck".
No, SCO's criminal activity isn't quite as blatant, but I would have to say it is evident enough to call into question the ethics and principles of anyone who continues to participate in it.
You make an interesting point, but I'm afraid I must disagree with you. The Slashdot crowd tend to advocate broad rights to communicate freely, but with such rights come responsiblity. The spammers completely shirk the responsiblity to use this freedom wisely, and must be dealt with appropriately, or the freedom Slashdotters cherish will be diminished for all.
To clarify what I am trying to say, suppose a motorist thinks the government should raise the speed limit along the highway. This would be less government fettering of his driving. But, he might also want stiffer penalties for drunk drivers, because without getting them off the road, drunks at the higher speed would get people killed.
Or, as another example, I am a firearms enthusiast, yet would argue for stiffer penalties for gun-related violent crimes than most people who are not gun-rights advocates. Why? Because dealing harshly with such criminals is the only way to avoid an across-the-board solution that would cost even non-criminals like myself a right that I cherish.
In short, the spammers are the bad apples that threaten to ruin unfettered Internet communication for everyone. I would much rather see a strong, narrowly-focused solution directed at those people who are blatantly abusing their communication freedom than to have everyone suffer from either spam or some blanket solution that costs everyone their freedom.
Sorry, I probably wasn't specific enough, but I was when I was lamenting the lack of Jawas and Gungans, I meant in terms of playable races, rather than as NPCs/MOBs/whatever. I think such races are much more recognizable parts of the Star Wars universe that players looking for a character to choose from than a "Bothian", "Zebrak", or "Trandoshan". I mean really, wouldn't a Jawa be more fun than those things? The short and cute appeal of EQ Gnomes, but with cloaks and glowing eyes...
I read about EQ-style time sinks, lots of walking. Content like lore and quests sounded rather sparse. Aside from humans and wookies, most of the races sounded like "random guy from the cantina" -- not gungans or jawas or things like that which would at least be recognizable as a Star Wars creature. No spaceships, though supposedly they're coming in a future expansion. Lots of going out to hunt random creatures to build up one's character.
It sounded like something that a lot of people were enjoying, but not really very "Star Wars"-ish in terms of the roleplay possibilities, and not something for me. By reading over the boards, I was able to determine before having to buy anything that I would be dissatisfied with this title, based on my own tastes and expectations.
You might look at this and think, "Sony lost a sale because you read the boards, closing them is a good move". But it's not. Sure, if I had bought the game and hated it, they might have made $50 more, but I would have been much more wary of buying anything from them in the future. After being burned, Sony would have a much higher burden of convincing me to buy their product next time around, and in the long run would lose much more money than they made.
The real reaction to this act from conservatives is more interesting and diverse. Some share the views of Attorney General Ashcroft. Others oppose it just as strongly as the geek community -- many of the articles about the act on the conservative National Review site describe it with terms like the "so-called", "wrongly-termed" or "misnamed" Patriot Act. A director of the Cato Institute raised many interesting questions about the act, to which the Justice Department wrote up a reply.
Also worth looking at is the Justice Department's own Patriot Act Web site. From here you can view the text of the act itself as well as all the arguments for it and rhetoric used to justify it. A valuable resource for any of us trying to formulate counterarguments about why this act needs to go away.
Diebold's SEC filings show their Chairman / President / CEO to be Mr. Walden W. O'Dell, who has donated $2000 this summer to Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican from Ohio (Diebold's home state). Diebold Inc.'s soft money donations also go to Republicans.
This does not demonstrate to me much evidence that Diebold is "after something other than money", it looks like routine political activity to me. But, while my quick research has neither managed to refute nor confirm your conspiracy theory, I'll pass it along anyway for whoever might be curious.
I'm sure they see it as all a matter of how they spin it. To home users, tout how $MARKETING_NAME_FOR_DRM Technology lets you "securely" watch movies, listen to music, download ebooks, and such. Once content-makers have final say over what goes on on your computer instead of you, new business models will emerge as companies try to use this to sell you stuff. This will be presented in terms of the services these business models make available rather than the loss of control required to implement them.
As far as business customers, you need only look as far as the recent article about Microsoft's spin on MS-Office DRM to hear how it will be presented as a new feature that lets companies disseminate documents while still controlling their spread and availablility, deciding when they expire, and so on.
I don't like DRM any more than most Slashdotters, but unless we can get a loud and articulate message out to the non-tech savvy people out there, it's definitely coming. To the masses, not having total, final control over everything your computer does (do they feel that they have that now?) is not a big loss to be able to use the new Acme internet movie rental service, or to send out your business document to people and not worry about them leaking it and spreading it to third parties.
Perhaps a little bias, but mainly just the fact that these things aren't normally bandwidth intensive enough to be broadband's killer apps. "Communicating with others" usually takes the form of email / IM / chat room. Government resources are more often HTML or PDF files than they are streaming multimedia, and so on. I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with any kind of sites that having a slow connection to would cause mass oppression and a loss of fundamental human rights, as the original post claimed.
What good would it do for the government to give everyone broadband if it doesn't also give them all computers and free electricity to run them?
While they're giving out the free stuff, there are lots of things more pertinent to raising one's standard of living than snappy Web surfing (well, maybe not to Slashdotters): a car, a house, a phone, cable TV, and so on. Is it in fact a governmental responsibility to bring these to everyone also?
Broadband has several uses... online gaming, warez, MP3's, Webcams, internet telephony, downloading large files, porn... which of these is such a fundamental human right that people face Third World style oppression without the government bringing it to them?
For anyone curious about string theory, I would highly recommend Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory". He uses excellent writing style and plain, easy to follow examples to illustrate difficult concepts, and rather than going through lots of math and derivations, reserves that type of thing for the endnotes. It makes for a very approachable book that is particularly good for someone trying to learn new concepts rather than the struggle with the gory details of theoretical physics equations.
Actually the camera would probably benefit from the gyroscope in the camera as much or more than the user interface does. Some of Canon's better lenses use gyros built into the lenzes to act as Image Stabilizers, basically compensating for any motion and shaking of the camera during exposure to improve the picture quality.
I did the install from the RPM's on the MPlayer site instead of doing my own build, they have lots of dependencies, some apparently circular, so installing everything from one rpm command seems to work best. The one library that I didn't already have on my system and wasn't in the RPM's was libfaad, which I quickly found with a little Googling.
The only other setup I had to do to get MPlayer working was that it expects the DVD drive to be /dev/dvd by default, so I made a symlink for that. MPlayer also lets you set the DVD drive via the settings menu or a command line switch, so this is not a big deal
The DVD I watched was Disney's "Beauty and the Beast". Yes, I know, evil company. Playing title 1, chapter 1 only showed a Walt Disney logo then playback stopped. I tried various other titles until finally discovering Title 17 was the movie itself. I didn't figure out how to bring up the main DVD menu, which would have hopefully made figuring out where on the disc the movie was trivial.
Playback was initially jerky and poor. Toggling a couple of the playback / frame dropping options fixed this and playback became flawless on my system.
I did experience some cryptic error messages and a couple crashes (application crashes, not lockups) so I would characterize MPlayer as very usable but not completely stable.
As far as user interface, it was good, and similar in layout to Windows Media Player and such. My main complain about the GUI was that many of the buttons are labelled only with a symbol, and hovering the mouse pointer over them did not bring up any kind of help bubble to explain them, so using the GUI involved more trial and error than it should have.
The other feature I tried out was MP3 playback. It sounded good, but when I associated MP3's in Nautilis with MPlayer and clicked on a second MP3 while the first was playing, it didn't switch songs or enqueue, but rather started up a second instance of MPlayer playing a different song at the same time, which sounded terrible. I'm sure there's a way to fix this (if nothing else, a shell script wrapper would work), but compared to WinAmp doing things right from the start, it still came as a disappointment.
I haven't tried the other features out (skins, encoding, etc.) but all in all, I was impressed with what I have seen so far. For people looking to play DVD's and other types of media under Linux, MPlayer is well worth downloading.
RTFA, this is not a normal Windows EULA, but something in the BIOS. The computer would not so much as boot from a CD to install Linux until he had agreed to a license Dell hadn't even given him an opportunity to read.
When it comes to Internet radio, however, the RIAA "contends that Net radio services are different -- since there are ways for listeners to digitally reproduce the music -- and should therefore pay the sound recording fees" (Cnet, 7/20/02) The RIAA (in the guise of SoundExchange) charge per-listener fees that add up to much more than traditional analog stations would pay.
Now my question is, is this fee schedule for digital radio specific to Internet radio, or do non-Internet based digital radio sources (XM sattelite radio, DirecTV music channels, Digital Music Express, etc.) pay it too? If not, are their royalties more akin to Webcasters' or to analog broadcasters? While I realize these services subscription rates could much more easily cover royalties than could a small Internet radio site, I am curious as to what approach the RIAA takes towards these services and how consistent it is with their rhetoric about broadcasting digital music.
Windows does most of its sucking in areas like security, stability, openness, licensing conditions, standards adherence, and so on. Even the most rabit Microsoft opponent would have trouble arguing that GUI ease of use for newbies, which much of this discussion has focused on, is Windows' big weakness. I think a more appropriate phrasing of the plan is to be more like Windows in areas where Windows is ahead, while retaining Linux's superiority in the areas where Windows does in fact suck.
On the one hand, developers these days have far more resources available to them. Unlike the old days where you had to write games in assembly because the machines couldn't handle the overhead of an interpreter, now developers have high level languages and can structure their code with OOP. They have extensive API's they can make use of, libraries to build upon, existing 3D engines to work with, and can rely on the OS and device drivers to provide functionality that once required reinvinting a lot of wheels.
On the other hand, customer expectations are higher. A LOT higher. While at one time, a little side scrolling and a few sprite graphics could be the mechanism for a successful game, now nobody would play it except on their cell phone. People these days expect immersive environments, theatrical quality soundtracks and voice acting, beautifully rendered graphical models, a slick interface, full network support, and so on.
And through it all many of the things that make for a great game like a good plot, creativity, interesting game mechanics, appropriate difficulty balance, and so on remain more or less constants.
So how do these factors weigh out against one another? Do all the tools available to developers now, undreamed of by the programmers of yesterday, make producing a good product an easier task overall, or has the expectations bar been raised high enough that fulfilling those expectations becomes a daunting task, more akin to producing a movie than to a typical software project?
As an analogy, for $20 I will sell you all my real estate. For another $20, I will sell you insurance that covers Martian invasions. When you discover that I own no land and that Mars is uninhabited, don't expect your $40 back because technically I gave you everything I promised.
SCO, however, don't just limit themselves to this. While in and of itself selling snake oil could be dismissed as "let the buyer beware", they use lies and FUD to make people think their worthless license has value. Contrast the grab-bag nature of my real estate example above to someone who actually presents themself as the legitimate owner of the Brooklyn Bridge in order to get people to accept the offer.
IANAL, but I would say, if you can get someone to pay you for something completely worthless that's good marketing, but if you engage in fraud, misrepresentation, and false advertising in order to sell it, that's where you should get the book thrown at you.
I'm glad someone else caught this. It's a bit disturbing when even the Slashdot posting describes DeCSS as "DVD-copying code". DeCSS would not be necessary to make exact copies, and while it could be useful for other types of copies (like downsampling), its main use is not for copying, but playback.
Obviously, this is not the way the RIAA wants people to think of DeCSS. It's much harder to demonize a DVD playing program than some kind of copying tool used by Nasty Evil Pirates. The fact that when DeCSS is mentioned the latter comes to mind, even for a Slashdot poster or tech journalist shows just how effective the RIAA's propaganda really is.
To win this battle, it has to be recast not as a fight for our right to bootleg movies, but put the focus on the legitimate questions that have nothing to do with copying anything.
Keep in mind that most metal alloys are also heat conductors, whereas ceramic tiles, for all their other shortcomings, are remarkably good insulators. One side can be many hundreds of degrees, and the other cool enough to touch.
While keeping the hull of a space capsule from melting is obviously important, it is not enough if the inside of the capsule gets as hot as a kiln. This is particularly true for manned flights (which this one is not) but any craft would have to adequately protect its electronics, as these will be much more delicate than the heat shield.
Of course, it also helps that this telescope is only intended to work for a few years. Unlike Hubble, people won't be able to go up and service it. After 30 years, the telescope will be on the opposite side of the sun, so even if it was still working, you would need other sattelites to relay the signal. And of course, after 60, it could come back around and burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.
Of course, there are other factors as well. In American society, men tend to eat a lot of red meat, whereas salads and vegetables, being more popular among female diets, are sometimes viewed as "chick food". While these are not a universal correlation (men eat some salads, women do eat hamburgers), the topic post's reference to males' dislike for vegan foods clearly plays to this tendency. Deviation from societal norms leads to occasional abrasiveness and ridicule, particularly when it comes to behavior that is deemed unmanly. If I showed up for work on Monday with a pink Hello Kitty t-shirt, the other guys at work would probably tease me.
Consider the most closed possible solution. People go to the polls, cast their votes, and later some guy declares a winner that may or may not have anything to do with the actual votes because the intervening steps are a complete black box.
What if not only the voting machines and tallying were closed, but other key elements of the voting process like the number of electoral votes for each state were kept secret? Suddenly "Gore had more votes, but Bush wins" would seem quite fishy. But because the algorithm for knowing who won based on which states they carried is publically known, any citizen can see that this is the outcome America's law calls for given the specified vote totals.
What if voters weren't told whether the winner would be determined by plurality, instant runoff, etc? That greatly affects aspects of voting such as whether voting for third party candidates siphons away votes from other candidates or not.
Because we know exactly how our voting system works, at the macroscopic level anyway, we can engage in public debate about topics like the electoral college, instant runoffs, Borda count alternatives, and so on. This strengthens our democracy, and I believe it should also hold for the minutiae. Publically post the source code for electronic voting software. Print the blueprints of voting machines, etc. Just as we can review and debate the high level issues of voting, there are citizens with expertise in the specific details that can offer insights into more detailed issues. Is the electronic voting tablet insecure? Is the tallying method valid? And so on. These questions must be answered in a public forum.
For citizens to truly participate in a democratic process, they must be privy to all aspects of that process.
In short, they don't work very well as the ultimate beings in the universe. Their motives are all-too-human, and their power too limited for them to be the entities who created the universe. So some fictional settings combine this polytheistic approach with a sort of agnostic monotheism. They introduce a behind-the-scenes god who IS all powerful and who created everything, but doesn't get involved in the affairs of mortals. The Nameless in EverQuest is this type of entity, as is Ao in the Forgotten Realms, the Creator in the Wheel of Time, and so on. This two-tiered approach gives authors a convenient way to provide for battling gods / immortals / heroes / whatever while still resolving the big philosophical questions of their universe in a way that is analagous to the way many people answer them in real life.
As far as preaching on MMORPG's, I'd say unless you are doing so privately with your friends that you know well enough to discuss serious and personal topics with, keep it in character. It's good roleplay to say "You tree-hugging fool, forsake the worthless Tunare and follow the dark path of Innoruuk!" but running around starting arguments about real-life religions would not be.
I'd say if your decomposed skull turns up somewhere, you have bigger problems than remaining anonymous from the police.