Google is a public company, not the CIA, which means it's a lot more leaky. They also have a privacy policy that specifically says they won't track the DNS requests (actually something like delete records after several days, if I remember correctly). So it would be a huge risk for them to track it anyway (legal and PR ramifications) and a ton of people would have to know about it and keep it secret anyway (the conspiracy theory litmus test).
Just because you can post a screenshot of a Linux machine running multi-head, doesn't rebut at all the fact that it's a pain in the ass to set up,
Plug in monitor.
Click System/Preferences/Display.
Click X-Server Display Configuration.
Click Detect Displays.
Select Twinview from the combo selector.
Click Apply.
Close the dialog box.
You'd have to be a real mouth-breather to find that difficult.
And you'd have to be a complete moron to think that always works. I have one of the older ATI cards at work and up until the latest version of ubuntu (with newish open source drivers) I'd routinely get graphics corruption. On my newer ATI card at home, there are no decent open source drivers and driving two screens with the propietary drivers is a real pain. Like when notifications suddenly start appearing partway off screen. Not to mention when I use compiz, video playback is dog slow, and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to fix that.
There are enough horror stories out there to get that it's still not quite there yet. xrandr is nice, but it's taken the propietary vendors a bit to catch up. Yes, it would be nice if they open sourced everything. Not going to happen though, so it might be a good idea to have a stable API for once, so it doesn't end up breaking every 6 months.
Yes, because there being 2,111 pipes is so much better than there being 2,111 apps. I didn't distinguish between the two in my post, nor did I feel a reason to. Either way, the caching is not good enough, as anyone who's had pipes hit their servers, HARD, could tell you. I'm not saying that any of this is the fault of the developers or the end users, I'm just saying using pipes is going to turn out a lose-lose proposition because of the reasons above.
How bout you read my post a couple of hundred times before you post again, and then we'll talk.
Actually, gnome has this too. It's about as useless, mostly fluff. I'm not saying it's not useful for some people. Just that it's not very many of them, and of those only a few actually use it.
TFS states explicitly that they were "one of 2,111 using Craigslist as a data source". So even if they were nice enough to cache everything, that doesn't mean all the Yahoo pipes users where. From the perspective of Craigslist there is probably no way to distinguish between them, so it only takes one malicious (or more likely, stupid) scraper to ruin it for everybody.
I think Yahoo pipes is, in retrospect, not such a great idea really.
1) Did you bother to test the new release at any point during its 6-month development cycle? The alpha and beta builds are available as a Live CD well ahead of the final release, it's a trivial matter to burn a copy, stick it in your machine, and give it a test run.
2) If stability is important to you (and I assume it is by the use of the word "stung"), why did you upgrade anyway? If I'm not mistaken, Karmic is not even an LTS release.
From the point of view of someone that noticed a lot of annoying bugs in the new release. No, I did not run the alpha/beta but I did run the previous version and reported a bunch of bugs that didn't get fixed. Second, when I went to launchpad to report the bugs (mostly regressions, mind you, which is what annoys me) in this version, they were already reported, from before release. So it's not like nobody noticed, they just decided to roll with it.
I think karmic will be one of those releases that ends up being fixed a lot after the fact. I just saw a whole load of bug fixes in empathy hit the repos for instance (empathy can't hold a candle next to pidgin, btw). Some bugs are more annoying, like the GDK changes that developers must have known would break many apps (including flash). So yeah, I am starting to question this 6 month release cycle thing.
And don't get me started on gnome 2.28. I personally think that's moving in way the wrong direction. But that's a flamewar for another story.:-)
To provide a counter-example, I have 5 machines under my control that have been running Ubuntu for years. Out of those, NONE have ever had a problem upgrading to any version of Ubuntu, even Karmic.
I didn't think we were talking about problems with the upgrade process itself. Rather, it's the build quality that is a bit off this time.
And don't see "developer resources", that's just a cop-out and you all know it.
No, its the closed-source model - and for pragmatic reasons rather than simple FOSS ideology.
The (L|U)i?n(i|u)x OS kernels and X window system are in perpetual development and lack stable binary APIs. The best way of supporting that is to release the source so that the FOSS community and distro producers can share the responsibility for maintaining it and building binaries. Trying to support numerous distros and multiple kernel and X versions via a binary release is a hugely inefficient way of supporting what is currently a minority market, c.f. a massive Windows market with only a couple of "active" major OS versions - with 5-year shelf-lives - to support. Frankly, I'm surprised that they bother.
That's a great theory, except for the pesky problem of explaining why the intel drivers keep breaking.
Has rendering speed ever been an issue with X11? If I had to criticize X11, I'd point at "responsiveness" to clicks and drags (making the desktop feel a bit "clunky" c.f. Windows/Mac), rather than any problem with how fast it could render a window - it only takes a small lag or a badly chosen movement threshold to destroy the illusion of dragging tangible things around a destop.
There's definitely some problems with some graphics cards with some drivers in some configurations. Usually the proprietary ones when they fail to implement the correct subset of the fancy API du jour. This is traditionally blamed on the graphics card companies (ATI, Nvidia, Intel,...) but there comes a point where you have to wonder why they all seem to be struggling to put out something halfway decent. And don't see "developer resources", that's just a cop-out and you all know it.
If X isn't crap for you that's nice. But it's failing for a lot of other people and has been for a long time. It's good to see it's improved in certain places (i.e. configuration) but I can't believe people are claiming it's better than anything the competition has. It hardly inches any of them out.
Social mobility cuts both ways (i.e. person in developed country gets job, x amount of workers lose their jobs in USA/Canada, Europe).
That doesn't quite follow. Average welfare is still going up, it just needs to go up fast enough to compensate. Oh, and the rich need to be getting richer slower than the poor people, but they don't necessarily have to get poorer.
Maybe the designers of the Mayan calendar were all like "Yeah, as if our empire will still be standing in a 1000 years". It's only a bug if you're wrong.;-)
They claim Math was designed by men, for men, to exclude women by making it unappealing to them. This always strikes me as a horribly sexist opinion, but what do I know, with my primitive male brain.
I think a recent article on the situation in philosophy explains it well (quite a few parallels between math and philosophy at the postgrad level): http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=615
I've seen first-hand how women in IT are treated, and I saw the worst of objectification and discrimination. A woman entering an IT department has to be twice as good just to be considered a peer, and them she has to deal with a bunch of immature, socially-retarded little boys. If they don't show interest in dating one of these sticky, overweight odor-bombs, she's called a lesbian.
I'd like to see affirmative action in IT departments, if only to get the rest of the staff to start taking regular showers.
Yeah, insult your audience, that'll work. Replacing one stereotype by another is simply not okay. Whatever problem IT might have with respect to women, spreading this kind of bullshit is not gonna make it any better.
But there's no reason to harp on FOSS developers in particular unless there's evidence that the FOSS community is more sexist than the rest of the world (which I, at least, haven't seen). If that evidence isn't there, then keep on fighting the good fight against sexist pigs in general, wherever you find them.
It's hard to be sure if it's a one-on-one correlation but there are a lot less women in FOSS than there are in the general programmer population. Not to mention a lot of women in FOSS seem to have the impression that there's a problem. Them having first hand experience I think we can take their word for it (anecdote vs. data of course, but I just gave you the data).
I have to disagree with you here. The influence of sexism is not just about discrimination. You don't have to actively discriminate against women to drive them out of FOSS. When there's a 99% male population (not uncommon on many projects) every single comment is enough to make a woman feel unwelcome. More importantly, with that many men around, you'll always find plenty who just don't see the problem. So it happens that in a lot of instances like this, the guy in question doesn't get called out by others. The end result is that it seems to any casual observer to be okay to hate on women in general and on their technical skills in particular.
Now there are projects that are particularly welcome to newcomers and projects that are not. But when women can't find any projects where they can feel welcome, we have a problem. When they feel compelled to start their own women's groups because they feel slighted against in the main population, there is a problem. All the flamebait in this thread and the summary notwhitstanding, this is a real problem that goes beyond simple discrimination.
BTW, I agree with the above poster that Mark Shuttleworth's comments had nothing to do with sexism as such. They were just taken out of context and then misinterpreted. But if you don't see anything wrong with the RoR presentation, then I think some introspection really is in order. Martin fowler did a great post exploring the issues surrounding it and explains it a lot better than I can, as usual.
No, I don't think anyone said that. Though, you know, it would be nice if people realized that it is generally a bad thing for people to be able to make death threats against women without being called on it. Because these things escalate.
As stated in this thread before, he has been called on it and banned from several mailing lists as a result. Not to mention several people must have called the cops on him by now.
If you wanna comment about problems with sexism, try to focus on the actual sexism and not the antics of some verifiably crazy person trolling some mailing lists.
Two summers ago (2008) I took a train from Brussels into the UK... I had a pellet gun in my bag I won at some street game in Venice and had been carrying around for weeks. There was no problem getting in... but then when I left the UK to catch the flight back home from amsterdam (again via brussels), Belgium border security made a huge deal about it and I had to eventually just give them the gun so I wouldnt miss the train. By the way, whats the right word to describe people from Belgium? Belgians?
I think you have it backwards. As far as I remember the Belgian police only do passport checks on the way back from London to Brussels. I had a similar experience with a colleague who got a knife (type you'd peel an apple with) through security in Brussels just fine, but got stopped on the way back by UK border security. Who proceeded to make a big stink about it, of course.
Doesn't matter how many times you say it; it's not true.
Same goes for your old tired bullshit. h.264 *is* available for free. On Windows. On Mac OS X. On Linux. And on just about any OS that has the capability to run C programs.
The fact that h.264 is available doesn't mean it's legal. By the same argument, just about every software program known to man under whatever licensing is available for free.
Your argument of "yeah we'd be breaking the law, but so is everyone else" is not the sort of thing all software developers will ascribe to. And it's definitely a problem for many of their users as well. Suppose someone sues the federal government for using firefox browsers that include a h.264 codec without licensing, what are they going to do? If they use IE or chrome on the other hand, they can rely on microsoft and google to license the codecs for them. This is the basic problem of h.264 for open source implementers.
In the US south confederate flags are flown often. In other parts of the world swastikas are common decoration, even decorating holy temples.
Regardless about what you might think about the right to fly either flag, you can't seriously be comparing the nazi flag to a confederate one. The confederate flag doesn't begin to compare in terms of the evil perpetrated by those that used to march under it.
I realise this might sound like "my historical evil is more evil than yours so meh" but it's really jarring how little people these days seem to know about the stuff that went on in WWII and the absolute horror of the aftermath when soldiers started discovering death camp after death camp after death camp...
I may sound like a jerkwad here, but why waste all that battery power watching a dvd when you could watch the divx version off local storage?
I don't think the OP ever tried to watch a DVD though, he seems to be reporting numbers of plain leaving the laptop running. I don't think xp could make 3 hours with the optical drive running.
I think the GP poster had it correct, it _is_ a patent about metadata.
And my six-year-old thinks that the Tooth Fairy leaves quarters under pillows. That doesn't make it true.
Except I'm making a verifiable claim, that you still have to even try to refute. When all you have is hand waving and people call bullshit on that, more hand waving is not the solution.
But whatever, just throw in some more ad hominems to prove your point then.
So your point is "omg patents are hard to read". I think the GP poster had it correct, it _is_ a patent about metadata. Microsoft just knew they didn't have a chance of getting it invalidated on the obviousness claim. If you want to make a specific argument about the claims then do so, but saying we're all too stupid to understand them is a bit much.
No matter what accommodations are made they just don't seem to be enough for the more vehement rabble-rousers in Flanders.
And of course, Flanders was dependent on Wallonia in the past, they just have a really short memory now that the economic shoe has shifted.
You would do well not to speak in such general terms. It's this kind of us vs them mentality which perpetuates the age-old problems. Flanders and Wallonia still have a lot in common, including a tendency to point the finger at others for their own problems.
I especially like how we managed to regionalize certain federal responsibilities, only to turn around and complain when the other region enacts policies we don't like. Human nature at work.
In any case, to get slightly more on-topic, it's not "Belgium" that is suing yahoo. That would mean the Belgian government would be somehow involved. Rather, this is a single court case in a single court. Yahoo probably has to deal with hundreds of court cases like this. It's techdirt, can safely be ignored, really.
For instance, the only reason they're thinking about universal health care now is because the corporations have started to realize that employer-provided health benefits put them at a disadvantage to companies in countries where they don't have to pay those costs. Notice that the insurance companies won't be out of the loop; more likely we'll still have health insurance, only it'll be mandatory and the employer won't be forced to provide it.
This is not how it works. Institutionalised healthcare is still payed for by the companies, they just pay it as an extra tax on employee pay. In fact, I think it's actually the other way around, since american companies can often get away with a much worse coverage than the universal system provides and thus end up paying comparatively less (while companies that offer higher payscales have to pay comparatively more). On the whole it is a lot more efficient to centralise, but it's not gonna work out cheaper for a lot of companies. The money still has to come from somewhere.
Please, by all means, tell me what you still don't understand and maybe I can draw you a picture. Or perhaps you have another idea of how business works and would like to share it. My observation is just that, observations, Intel and AMD are making more chips for less money then in 1998 but the chips are costing a lot more, MS has increased the costs of it's new products even thought their development costs are almost completely covered within the first year or so. Look at all the other businesses to charge what people will pay instead of what little they can based around costs. Hell, look at the reputations of the cheapest places of business in most cities, the bars with the cheapest drinks are dives that very few people want to patronize.
Well your point seems to be that capitalism can't possibly work, ever, as people will never try to compete each other out of business. The fact of the matter is, there's plenty of factors that can distort the very simple view economists tend to take. In the end, though, we're looking for a net effect and the tax is being imposed on businesses (mostly in manufacturing) where competition traditionally is high. Yes, if you happen to run a company in some niche that nobody really challenges you in you can charge whatever you want to. Unless the cost to entry is extroardinally large (requiring more, not less government regulation) you'll be in a word of pain as soon as a leaner and meaner competitor comes around though.
As to your examples, Intel and AMD form a duopoly on the desktop market but they're definitely not milking the market on the low end. It's also not entirely fair to look at prices of new technology. Find out what the CPU in an embedded system like a simple cellphone costs, you'll see the price has gone down considerably since 1998. I'm also not entirely convinced that prices for CPUs have gone up when adjusted for inflation. I seem to recall them being slightly more expensive in '98. Microsoft as well is just a great example of a company that's managed to lock-in their customers to their product, making it easy to keep prices high as they're selling "interoperability" to those that haven't yet upgraded, i.e. Microsoft has managed to make their products simply the cost of doing business in many sectors. This is not necessarily a permanent situation, prices for windows are relatively lower where competition is higher (e.g. in the datacenter).
The example with bars is simpler. Bars sell more than beer, they sell atmosphere, entertainment, etc. The drinks are priced accordingly. Beer isn't a real commodity like milk anyway, so it falls a bit flat when you try to compare different beers with each other. It's completely possible that consumers are willing to pay more money for what they see as better quality (even tho that quality might be completely derived from marketing).
Slashdot Mirror
Google is a public company, not the CIA, which means it's a lot more leaky. They also have a privacy policy that specifically says they won't track the DNS requests (actually something like delete records after several days, if I remember correctly). So it would be a huge risk for them to track it anyway (legal and PR ramifications) and a ton of people would have to know about it and keep it secret anyway (the conspiracy theory litmus test).
Tinfoil hats indeed. (is that one word or two?)
Just because you can post a screenshot of a Linux machine running multi-head, doesn't rebut at all the fact that it's a pain in the ass to set up,
Plug in monitor.
Click System/Preferences/Display.
Click X-Server Display Configuration.
Click Detect Displays.
Select Twinview from the combo selector.
Click Apply.
Close the dialog box.
You'd have to be a real mouth-breather to find that difficult.
And you'd have to be a complete moron to think that always works. I have one of the older ATI cards at work and up until the latest version of ubuntu (with newish open source drivers) I'd routinely get graphics corruption. On my newer ATI card at home, there are no decent open source drivers and driving two screens with the propietary drivers is a real pain. Like when notifications suddenly start appearing partway off screen. Not to mention when I use compiz, video playback is dog slow, and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to fix that.
There are enough horror stories out there to get that it's still not quite there yet. xrandr is nice, but it's taken the propietary vendors a bit to catch up. Yes, it would be nice if they open sourced everything. Not going to happen though, so it might be a good idea to have a stable API for once, so it doesn't end up breaking every 6 months.
Yes, because there being 2,111 pipes is so much better than there being 2,111 apps. I didn't distinguish between the two in my post, nor did I feel a reason to. Either way, the caching is not good enough, as anyone who's had pipes hit their servers, HARD, could tell you. I'm not saying that any of this is the fault of the developers or the end users, I'm just saying using pipes is going to turn out a lose-lose proposition because of the reasons above.
How bout you read my post a couple of hundred times before you post again, and then we'll talk.
Actually, gnome has this too. It's about as useless, mostly fluff. I'm not saying it's not useful for some people. Just that it's not very many of them, and of those only a few actually use it.
TFS states explicitly that they were "one of 2,111 using Craigslist as a data source". So even if they were nice enough to cache everything, that doesn't mean all the Yahoo pipes users where. From the perspective of Craigslist there is probably no way to distinguish between them, so it only takes one malicious (or more likely, stupid) scraper to ruin it for everybody.
I think Yahoo pipes is, in retrospect, not such a great idea really.
1) Did you bother to test the new release at any point during its 6-month development cycle? The alpha and beta builds are available as a Live CD well ahead of the final release, it's a trivial matter to burn a copy, stick it in your machine, and give it a test run.
2) If stability is important to you (and I assume it is by the use of the word "stung"), why did you upgrade anyway? If I'm not mistaken, Karmic is not even an LTS release.
From the point of view of someone that noticed a lot of annoying bugs in the new release. No, I did not run the alpha/beta but I did run the previous version and reported a bunch of bugs that didn't get fixed. Second, when I went to launchpad to report the bugs (mostly regressions, mind you, which is what annoys me) in this version, they were already reported, from before release. So it's not like nobody noticed, they just decided to roll with it.
I think karmic will be one of those releases that ends up being fixed a lot after the fact. I just saw a whole load of bug fixes in empathy hit the repos for instance (empathy can't hold a candle next to pidgin, btw). Some bugs are more annoying, like the GDK changes that developers must have known would break many apps (including flash). So yeah, I am starting to question this 6 month release cycle thing.
And don't get me started on gnome 2.28. I personally think that's moving in way the wrong direction. But that's a flamewar for another story. :-)
To provide a counter-example, I have 5 machines under my control that have been running Ubuntu for years. Out of those, NONE have ever had a problem upgrading to any version of Ubuntu, even Karmic.
I didn't think we were talking about problems with the upgrade process itself. Rather, it's the build quality that is a bit off this time.
And don't see "developer resources", that's just a cop-out and you all know it.
No, its the closed-source model - and for pragmatic reasons rather than simple FOSS ideology.
The (L|U)i?n(i|u)x OS kernels and X window system are in perpetual development and lack stable binary APIs. The best way of supporting that is to release the source so that the FOSS community and distro producers can share the responsibility for maintaining it and building binaries. Trying to support numerous distros and multiple kernel and X versions via a binary release is a hugely inefficient way of supporting what is currently a minority market, c.f. a massive Windows market with only a couple of "active" major OS versions - with 5-year shelf-lives - to support. Frankly, I'm surprised that they bother.
That's a great theory, except for the pesky problem of explaining why the intel drivers keep breaking.
Has rendering speed ever been an issue with X11? If I had to criticize X11, I'd point at "responsiveness" to clicks and drags (making the desktop feel a bit "clunky" c.f. Windows/Mac), rather than any problem with how fast it could render a window - it only takes a small lag or a badly chosen movement threshold to destroy the illusion of dragging tangible things around a destop.
There's definitely some problems with some graphics cards with some drivers in some configurations. Usually the proprietary ones when they fail to implement the correct subset of the fancy API du jour. This is traditionally blamed on the graphics card companies (ATI, Nvidia, Intel,...) but there comes a point where you have to wonder why they all seem to be struggling to put out something halfway decent. And don't see "developer resources", that's just a cop-out and you all know it.
If X isn't crap for you that's nice. But it's failing for a lot of other people and has been for a long time. It's good to see it's improved in certain places (i.e. configuration) but I can't believe people are claiming it's better than anything the competition has. It hardly inches any of them out.
Social mobility cuts both ways (i.e. person in developed country gets job, x amount of workers lose their jobs in USA/Canada, Europe).
That doesn't quite follow. Average welfare is still going up, it just needs to go up fast enough to compensate. Oh, and the rich need to be getting richer slower than the poor people, but they don't necessarily have to get poorer.
Yup. It's the Mayan Y2K bug.
Maybe the designers of the Mayan calendar were all like "Yeah, as if our empire will still be standing in a 1000 years". It's only a bug if you're wrong. ;-)
They claim Math was designed by men, for men, to exclude women by making it unappealing to them. This always strikes me as a horribly sexist opinion, but what do I know, with my primitive male brain.
I think a recent article on the situation in philosophy explains it well (quite a few parallels between math and philosophy at the postgrad level): http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=615
I've seen first-hand how women in IT are treated, and I saw the worst of objectification and discrimination. A woman entering an IT department has to be twice as good just to be considered a peer, and them she has to deal with a bunch of immature, socially-retarded little boys. If they don't show interest in dating one of these sticky, overweight odor-bombs, she's called a lesbian.
I'd like to see affirmative action in IT departments, if only to get the rest of the staff to start taking regular showers.
Yeah, insult your audience, that'll work. Replacing one stereotype by another is simply not okay. Whatever problem IT might have with respect to women, spreading this kind of bullshit is not gonna make it any better.
But there's no reason to harp on FOSS developers in particular unless there's evidence that the FOSS community is more sexist than the rest of the world (which I, at least, haven't seen). If that evidence isn't there, then keep on fighting the good fight against sexist pigs in general, wherever you find them.
It's hard to be sure if it's a one-on-one correlation but there are a lot less women in FOSS than there are in the general programmer population. Not to mention a lot of women in FOSS seem to have the impression that there's a problem. Them having first hand experience I think we can take their word for it (anecdote vs. data of course, but I just gave you the data).
I have to disagree with you here. The influence of sexism is not just about discrimination. You don't have to actively discriminate against women to drive them out of FOSS. When there's a 99% male population (not uncommon on many projects) every single comment is enough to make a woman feel unwelcome. More importantly, with that many men around, you'll always find plenty who just don't see the problem. So it happens that in a lot of instances like this, the guy in question doesn't get called out by others. The end result is that it seems to any casual observer to be okay to hate on women in general and on their technical skills in particular.
Now there are projects that are particularly welcome to newcomers and projects that are not. But when women can't find any projects where they can feel welcome, we have a problem. When they feel compelled to start their own women's groups because they feel slighted against in the main population, there is a problem. All the flamebait in this thread and the summary notwhitstanding, this is a real problem that goes beyond simple discrimination.
BTW, I agree with the above poster that Mark Shuttleworth's comments had nothing to do with sexism as such. They were just taken out of context and then misinterpreted. But if you don't see anything wrong with the RoR presentation, then I think some introspection really is in order. Martin fowler did a great post exploring the issues surrounding it and explains it a lot better than I can, as usual.
No, I don't think anyone said that. Though, you know, it would be nice if people realized that it is generally a bad thing for people to be able to make death threats against women without being called on it. Because these things escalate.
As stated in this thread before, he has been called on it and banned from several mailing lists as a result. Not to mention several people must have called the cops on him by now.
If you wanna comment about problems with sexism, try to focus on the actual sexism and not the antics of some verifiably crazy person trolling some mailing lists.
Two summers ago (2008) I took a train from Brussels into the UK... I had a pellet gun in my bag I won at some street game in Venice and had been carrying around for weeks. There was no problem getting in... but then when I left the UK to catch the flight back home from amsterdam (again via brussels), Belgium border security made a huge deal about it and I had to eventually just give them the gun so I wouldnt miss the train. By the way, whats the right word to describe people from Belgium? Belgians?
I think you have it backwards. As far as I remember the Belgian police only do passport checks on the way back from London to Brussels. I had a similar experience with a colleague who got a knife (type you'd peel an apple with) through security in Brussels just fine, but got stopped on the way back by UK border security. Who proceeded to make a big stink about it, of course.
It's Belgians, yes.
Doesn't matter how many times you say it; it's not true.
Same goes for your old tired bullshit. h.264 *is* available for free. On Windows. On Mac OS X. On Linux. And on just about any OS that has the capability to run C programs.
The fact that h.264 is available doesn't mean it's legal. By the same argument, just about every software program known to man under whatever licensing is available for free.
Your argument of "yeah we'd be breaking the law, but so is everyone else" is not the sort of thing all software developers will ascribe to. And it's definitely a problem for many of their users as well. Suppose someone sues the federal government for using firefox browsers that include a h.264 codec without licensing, what are they going to do? If they use IE or chrome on the other hand, they can rely on microsoft and google to license the codecs for them. This is the basic problem of h.264 for open source implementers.
In the US south confederate flags are flown often. In other parts of the world swastikas are common decoration, even decorating holy temples.
Regardless about what you might think about the right to fly either flag, you can't seriously be comparing the nazi flag to a confederate one. The confederate flag doesn't begin to compare in terms of the evil perpetrated by those that used to march under it.
I realise this might sound like "my historical evil is more evil than yours so meh" but it's really jarring how little people these days seem to know about the stuff that went on in WWII and the absolute horror of the aftermath when soldiers started discovering death camp after death camp after death camp...
I may sound like a jerkwad here, but why waste all that battery power watching a dvd when you could watch the divx version off local storage?
I don't think the OP ever tried to watch a DVD though, he seems to be reporting numbers of plain leaving the laptop running. I don't think xp could make 3 hours with the optical drive running.
I think the GP poster had it correct, it _is_ a patent about metadata.
And my six-year-old thinks that the Tooth Fairy leaves quarters under pillows. That doesn't make it true.
Except I'm making a verifiable claim, that you still have to even try to refute. When all you have is hand waving and people call bullshit on that, more hand waving is not the solution.
But whatever, just throw in some more ad hominems to prove your point then.
So your point is "omg patents are hard to read". I think the GP poster had it correct, it _is_ a patent about metadata. Microsoft just knew they didn't have a chance of getting it invalidated on the obviousness claim. If you want to make a specific argument about the claims then do so, but saying we're all too stupid to understand them is a bit much.
Ehm, doesn't SWIFT process international transactions by americans as well?
No matter what accommodations are made they just don't seem to be enough for the more vehement rabble-rousers in Flanders.
And of course, Flanders was dependent on Wallonia in the past, they just have a really short memory now that the economic shoe has shifted.
You would do well not to speak in such general terms. It's this kind of us vs them mentality which perpetuates the age-old problems. Flanders and Wallonia still have a lot in common, including a tendency to point the finger at others for their own problems.
I especially like how we managed to regionalize certain federal responsibilities, only to turn around and complain when the other region enacts policies we don't like. Human nature at work.
In any case, to get slightly more on-topic, it's not "Belgium" that is suing yahoo. That would mean the Belgian government would be somehow involved. Rather, this is a single court case in a single court. Yahoo probably has to deal with hundreds of court cases like this. It's techdirt, can safely be ignored, really.
For instance, the only reason they're thinking about universal health care now is because the corporations have started to realize that employer-provided health benefits put them at a disadvantage to companies in countries where they don't have to pay those costs. Notice that the insurance companies won't be out of the loop; more likely we'll still have health insurance, only it'll be mandatory and the employer won't be forced to provide it.
This is not how it works. Institutionalised healthcare is still payed for by the companies, they just pay it as an extra tax on employee pay. In fact, I think it's actually the other way around, since american companies can often get away with a much worse coverage than the universal system provides and thus end up paying comparatively less (while companies that offer higher payscales have to pay comparatively more). On the whole it is a lot more efficient to centralise, but it's not gonna work out cheaper for a lot of companies. The money still has to come from somewhere.
Please, by all means, tell me what you still don't understand and maybe I can draw you a picture. Or perhaps you have another idea of how business works and would like to share it. My observation is just that, observations, Intel and AMD are making more chips for less money then in 1998 but the chips are costing a lot more, MS has increased the costs of it's new products even thought their development costs are almost completely covered within the first year or so. Look at all the other businesses to charge what people will pay instead of what little they can based around costs. Hell, look at the reputations of the cheapest places of business in most cities, the bars with the cheapest drinks are dives that very few people want to patronize.
Well your point seems to be that capitalism can't possibly work, ever, as people will never try to compete each other out of business. The fact of the matter is, there's plenty of factors that can distort the very simple view economists tend to take. In the end, though, we're looking for a net effect and the tax is being imposed on businesses (mostly in manufacturing) where competition traditionally is high. Yes, if you happen to run a company in some niche that nobody really challenges you in you can charge whatever you want to. Unless the cost to entry is extroardinally large (requiring more, not less government regulation) you'll be in a word of pain as soon as a leaner and meaner competitor comes around though.
As to your examples, Intel and AMD form a duopoly on the desktop market but they're definitely not milking the market on the low end. It's also not entirely fair to look at prices of new technology. Find out what the CPU in an embedded system like a simple cellphone costs, you'll see the price has gone down considerably since 1998. I'm also not entirely convinced that prices for CPUs have gone up when adjusted for inflation. I seem to recall them being slightly more expensive in '98. Microsoft as well is just a great example of a company that's managed to lock-in their customers to their product, making it easy to keep prices high as they're selling "interoperability" to those that haven't yet upgraded, i.e. Microsoft has managed to make their products simply the cost of doing business in many sectors. This is not necessarily a permanent situation, prices for windows are relatively lower where competition is higher (e.g. in the datacenter).
The example with bars is simpler. Bars sell more than beer, they sell atmosphere, entertainment, etc. The drinks are priced accordingly. Beer isn't a real commodity like milk anyway, so it falls a bit flat when you try to compare different beers with each other. It's completely possible that consumers are willing to pay more money for what they see as better quality (even tho that quality might be completely derived from marketing).