Given the amount of patents granted nowadays and their scope, I think it's almost certain that any product infringes on at least some of them, the only question being which ones specifically. This rises some interesting questions about the viability of the patent system itself, as we approach singularity and technological progress goes ever faster.
Referring to Greenpeace for a report about nuclear power is a bit like asking Richard Dawkins about religion or the pope about atheism: there just might be a teeeeny bit of bias there.
Dunno why they are against nuclear power, since it's the least enviromentally damaging per kilowatt hour way of producing power we currently have. You'd think they'd be ecstatic about a power plant who's waste is buried deep into bedrock rather than being spewed into the atmosphere...
My point is that if individuals want to preserve their way of life, they can usually find a way of doing that without having more government control. And it's best if they pay for it, not the people who figured out that their current homes would be under water in a few years and moved.
Well, since the problem is caused by carbon dioxide emissions, how about simply taxing said emissions enough to pay for the cleanup? I mean, if you driving my SUV is causing my house to be covered by waves, shouldn't you pay me damages?
If you live in the US, look at your paycheck every month to see just how much it's costing us to solve other people's problems.
Feel free to move to Somalia to experience the glory of anarchy firsthand, if it bothers you so much that civil society needs maintenance and that needs to be paid for. You libertarians always go on about the evils of government and the power of individual, yet you do not use your individual power to relocate to be rid of that evil, and instead demand that the rest of us - who you usually refer to as "sheep" - bend over backwards and rearrange our way of living to accomodate your desires.
It's a pity, really; if libertarians actually stood for freedom rather than Social Darwinism, I might consider backing them. As is, I rate having social safety nets above being able to smoke pot in importance, so I regretfully can't do so.
You're lucky to make it to the end of the warranty period with noname crap from newegg or Frys.
If it breaks before the warranty period expires, you get a new one. If you make it to the end of the warranty period before it breaks, you have to buy a new one. So you may wish to rethink that statement;).
Given the indifference of Ubuntu management to release quality Ubuntu won't be useful much longer. The beauty of Linux is that there are and will remain many alternatives.
It's been a while since I've last used a distro, rather than used metaphorical duct tape to keep patching my old system. What's the least-grief choice nowadays?
I should maybe inform you that during the times of Shakespeare, when copyright was pretty much nonexistant, the lengths people like him went to to keep their plays secret were pretty insane from a modern point of view.
Especially when you remember that it was all a wasted effort since the play was performed before an audience who could simply memorize it. A bit like pre-computer DRM, and just as futile.
Imagine you have your scripts locked away in a safe, and every actor gets his copy from you personally and is under total supervision for as long as he has this copy in his hands (literally, every single one of them had a "copy guard" hovering around them all the time), just to make sure no copy gets out early.
I can easily imagine that, living in a world where DVDs have CSS, audio CDs have malware, and computer games have Starforce. All for nothing, of course.
Rehearsals were closely guarded secrets, not to make the actors not look foolish when they couldn't remember their lines, but to make sure nobody could note their lines down and leak the play.
And then they went and performed it in public. I guess modern copyright holders aren't the only ones with holes in their brains.
Unless copying is blatantly commercial in nature it should be permitted.
Well then you can say goodbye to alot of creative endeavors. Why write a book when it will only sell a single copy before being copied all over the internet? I can't make a living off the time spent writing when sales drop. Can't be a very successful band without some form of digital media, whether you're signed or produce it yourself. That won't turn a profit once its all across the web.
Not only is that untrue - since almost all books anyone would care to read are already easy to download using any P2P program yet they are still being published and the same goes for music and movies - but, even if it were true, would anything of value be lost? The Internet is full of both original and derived fiction, art, music, and increasingly even movies, all of which were created without profit motive and uploaded by their authors to be read for free. If you can't be bothered to write unless you're paid enough to live off it, then, frankly, that's less of a loss for our society than having our technology crippled by DRM and our legal system perverted to disproportionate retribution for copyright violations just to ensure that you get paid.
No, this is like telling drinkers that they cannot use a device that duplicates the beverage to give to their friends.
Yes, it would. It would be exactly like trying to force the continuation of scarcity economy despite unlimited personal manufacturing capabilities being at everyone's reach just to enrich a few brewery/factory owners. You hit the nail straight on the head, and by doing so demonstrated the sheer absurdity of your own position.
That's just it -- human nature never changes. The general can order genocide but it's up to the soldiers to carry it out. The My Lai Massacre was stopped by a helicopter pilot who put his bird between the civilians and "told his crew that if the U.S. soldiers shot at the Vietnamese while he was trying to get them out of the bunker that they were to open fire at these soldiers."
Yes. On the other hand, the reason that My Lai happened in the first place is that people had been under constant stress and simply snapped. Had the entire war been fought with robotic soldiers, and instead of body bags only scrap metal had been sent back home, would the general had ordered a genocide? I doubt it, for there would have been no emotional involvement, and no stress and bottled-up hatred.
Finally, if you're a soldier patrolling a conquered city, and you see someone seemingly unarmed running towards you, it could be a suicide bomber about to blow you up, or it could simply be someone running. You risk killing an innocent or you risk getting killed. On the other hand, if the patrol is robotic, it can simply wait; if the robot is blown up, no big deal, the factory has already built three new ones to replace it by the time the last pieces hit the ground, so you can err on the side of not shooting unless it's really obvious it's an enemy.
Robot infantry removes human emotions from the war, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
In the early morning of December 7, 2041, one million mechanized soldiers arise from the receding tide and onto the shores of China. The robots march relentlessly westward, killing all Chinese soldiers in their path. The final destination is Tibet.
What Chinese soldiers? China is a superpower now, still rising, and an offshoring target of more and more manufacturing; do you think that they wouldn't have their own Terminator army to sent to the fray?
And why would anyone send a million-machine army to Tibet?
Fortunately, the Chinese have had state sponsored hackers for decades now. It was a simple matter for these hardened pros to return the bots to their creators, with orders to kill.
Yes, because whoever sent the bots didn't test them beforehand with their own hackers. Right.
Stop treating Independence Day as a documentary, will you?
Encrypting all traffic is actually a great way to ensure net neutrality.
Unfortunately no, because the attacker can still see where the packet originated and where it's going. You'd need to combine encryption with onion routing to prevent that. Mind you, using encryption whenever it's available is still a good idea in this age where Lidless Eye seems to be everywhere...
But we knew this was coming (and hopefully Nixon did too). Can't have all the benefits of capitalism without losing some of the "benefits" of totalitarianism. You can have some of one and lots of the other (like most Western democracies), but not lots of both.
Sure you can. Just make the government a right-wing dictatorship rather than a left-wing one. In fact, if you play your cards right, you can have the owning class singing your praises for keeping the rabble in their place. Heck, all you need for totalitarianism to work is some ideology to be totalitarian about, and hard-line capitalism works just as fine as hard-line communism.
Besides that, web browsers have a lot of useful RAM caching they can do (your history, uncompressed images etc) - it hardly makes sense to keep browser usage below 174MB when even netbooks come with 1-2GB and that RAM can be used effectively to speed up the browser.
You know those awful Office/Java/whatever preloaders? Those things that load the program in question when the computer starts, so that when you attempt to start the program, the already-running instance just opens a new window? The ones that end up increasing the start time to minutes when they're all fighting over RAM, and make the computer swap constantly even when there's seemingly just one lousy text editor running?
Those preloaders were thought up by someone who had your attitude.
With comics it's different. Reboots happen after a franchise has run its course and there isn't anywhere sensible left to go.
Or when someone decides to resolve his mommy issues by writing himself a happy ending in comics, for values of happy that people who don't share your problems might consider less than so.
Did you also think that food stores pay off the stealing users from their own pockets, and don't increase prices to get it back from users?
A food store, like any other store, sets the price of the food it sells to the point that brings it the most profit. Rising the price will decrease, not increase, profits. So yes, it pays for any stolen items out of its own pockets, since it has no other options.
I wish people stopped perpetuating the PR-invented myth that companies are somehow impervious to fines because they can simply get more money from their customers to cover it. They can't, because if they could, they'd already be doing so. Any company blaming a price increase to fines, theft or anything like that is flat out lying.
I'm not sure any of us can do that for anything we do.
And it doesn't even matter if we could. The submitter can be sued for infringing whether he's actually breaking any law or not, and since he can't afford a lawyer and a long court battle, he'll lose.
In all fairness, (not trying to troll, honest) unions aren't for educated workers who can make rational decisions. Unions were invented to protect unsuspecting workers from manipulative business owners, when the education gap was huge. Now, you probably have a very comparable education to your boss, and probably to his boss and most of the rest of the organization. You are smart, start making your own decisions.
Unions were not invented to protect stupid people from smart. Unions were formed to protect poor people from the rich. Specifically, they were meant to protect the employee from being blackmailed into a bad deal by an employer in the situation of surplus workforce.
You know what else would prevent you from having to take work calls after hours? Stand up, tell your boss you won't give up your personal time anymore, and let him fix the situation or fire you. Presto, no more late nights!
And no more wages, in all likelihood. On the other hand, if you're part of a union, the union can say "we're not giving our personal time anymore, fix this problem or go bankrupt".
Unions exist to balance the power between employers and employees, and thus give them an equal negotiation position.
My wife has pretty much the entire animated Disney collection from before 2004 on VHS. A lot of good they do us seeing as we no longer own a working VCR. If we want our kids to see these movies we'll have to re-buy them on the popular format of the day when our kids are old enough to watch them.
Now, I don't suggest that you download this torrent, as taking steps to keep watching movies you've already bought would clearly be illegal. I'm simply saying that you don't have to rebuy them to keep watching them.
It's such a horrible temptation to not be good little citizen and keep paying a company over and over and over again for the same content, isn't it? I mean, they paid good money to get copyright extended ad infinitum and make form-shifting illegal, no? So you'd be eeeevil to not fork over cash to them again for things you've already bought, no?
Convenience and ease of use are the name of the game for your average person.
In other words, your average person would be best served by the Pirate Bay.
Disinfected - by which I mean that the DRM has been stripped away - downloads are superior in all ways to store-bought DVDs. Why keep around and insert "original disks" when you can just get the torrent, install the crack, and just launch the game/movie/whatever forever afterwards? Or, for that matter, why hunt for the Blu-Ray disk when high-def rips take a few gigabytes, can be stored on hard drive for easy searching, and don't show unskippable "FBI warnings" or advertizing?
Seriously, the pirated version is superior to the store-bought one nowadays. Has been for a long time now, and it's all thanks to DRM.
The age of our sun is a blink of an eye in the cosmological time scale. It's like tiny little lightbulbs going on and off and on and off. We might not reach an "on" one before ours turns "off", the destination is simply not turned on yet. It's a very lonely picture, but highly probable.
Seeing how the development of life in general, and our technology in particular, seems to follow an exponential curve, I don't think that Sun dying really has much to do with that probability, unless it's going to die next millenia or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the amount of patents granted nowadays and their scope, I think it's almost certain that any product infringes on at least some of them, the only question being which ones specifically. This rises some interesting questions about the viability of the patent system itself, as we approach singularity and technological progress goes ever faster.
Referring to Greenpeace for a report about nuclear power is a bit like asking Richard Dawkins about religion or the pope about atheism: there just might be a teeeeny bit of bias there.
Dunno why they are against nuclear power, since it's the least enviromentally damaging per kilowatt hour way of producing power we currently have. You'd think they'd be ecstatic about a power plant who's waste is buried deep into bedrock rather than being spewed into the atmosphere...
Well, since the problem is caused by carbon dioxide emissions, how about simply taxing said emissions enough to pay for the cleanup? I mean, if you driving my SUV is causing my house to be covered by waves, shouldn't you pay me damages?
Feel free to move to Somalia to experience the glory of anarchy firsthand, if it bothers you so much that civil society needs maintenance and that needs to be paid for. You libertarians always go on about the evils of government and the power of individual, yet you do not use your individual power to relocate to be rid of that evil, and instead demand that the rest of us - who you usually refer to as "sheep" - bend over backwards and rearrange our way of living to accomodate your desires.
It's a pity, really; if libertarians actually stood for freedom rather than Social Darwinism, I might consider backing them. As is, I rate having social safety nets above being able to smoke pot in importance, so I regretfully can't do so.
Yes, but the "soul-sucking" part of your job is done by a succubus ;).
The kind that wants to sell $500 cables to be used with it?
Just because you can't measure it doesn't mean that an audiophile can't hear it.
If it breaks before the warranty period expires, you get a new one. If you make it to the end of the warranty period before it breaks, you have to buy a new one. So you may wish to rethink that statement ;).
It's been a while since I've last used a distro, rather than used metaphorical duct tape to keep patching my old system. What's the least-grief choice nowadays?
Especially when you remember that it was all a wasted effort since the play was performed before an audience who could simply memorize it. A bit like pre-computer DRM, and just as futile.
I can easily imagine that, living in a world where DVDs have CSS, audio CDs have malware, and computer games have Starforce. All for nothing, of course.
And then they went and performed it in public. I guess modern copyright holders aren't the only ones with holes in their brains.
Not only is that untrue - since almost all books anyone would care to read are already easy to download using any P2P program yet they are still being published and the same goes for music and movies - but, even if it were true, would anything of value be lost? The Internet is full of both original and derived fiction, art, music, and increasingly even movies, all of which were created without profit motive and uploaded by their authors to be read for free. If you can't be bothered to write unless you're paid enough to live off it, then, frankly, that's less of a loss for our society than having our technology crippled by DRM and our legal system perverted to disproportionate retribution for copyright violations just to ensure that you get paid.
Yes, it would. It would be exactly like trying to force the continuation of scarcity economy despite unlimited personal manufacturing capabilities being at everyone's reach just to enrich a few brewery/factory owners. You hit the nail straight on the head, and by doing so demonstrated the sheer absurdity of your own position.
Yes. On the other hand, the reason that My Lai happened in the first place is that people had been under constant stress and simply snapped. Had the entire war been fought with robotic soldiers, and instead of body bags only scrap metal had been sent back home, would the general had ordered a genocide? I doubt it, for there would have been no emotional involvement, and no stress and bottled-up hatred.
Finally, if you're a soldier patrolling a conquered city, and you see someone seemingly unarmed running towards you, it could be a suicide bomber about to blow you up, or it could simply be someone running. You risk killing an innocent or you risk getting killed. On the other hand, if the patrol is robotic, it can simply wait; if the robot is blown up, no big deal, the factory has already built three new ones to replace it by the time the last pieces hit the ground, so you can err on the side of not shooting unless it's really obvious it's an enemy.
Robot infantry removes human emotions from the war, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
What Chinese soldiers? China is a superpower now, still rising, and an offshoring target of more and more manufacturing; do you think that they wouldn't have their own Terminator army to sent to the fray?
And why would anyone send a million-machine army to Tibet?
Yes, because whoever sent the bots didn't test them beforehand with their own hackers. Right.
Stop treating Independence Day as a documentary, will you?
Unfortunately no, because the attacker can still see where the packet originated and where it's going. You'd need to combine encryption with onion routing to prevent that. Mind you, using encryption whenever it's available is still a good idea in this age where Lidless Eye seems to be everywhere...
Sure you can. Just make the government a right-wing dictatorship rather than a left-wing one. In fact, if you play your cards right, you can have the owning class singing your praises for keeping the rabble in their place. Heck, all you need for totalitarianism to work is some ideology to be totalitarian about, and hard-line capitalism works just as fine as hard-line communism.
You know those awful Office/Java/whatever preloaders? Those things that load the program in question when the computer starts, so that when you attempt to start the program, the already-running instance just opens a new window? The ones that end up increasing the start time to minutes when they're all fighting over RAM, and make the computer swap constantly even when there's seemingly just one lousy text editor running?
Those preloaders were thought up by someone who had your attitude.
Or when someone decides to resolve his mommy issues by writing himself a happy ending in comics, for values of happy that people who don't share your problems might consider less than so.
When has Marvel ever shied away from retcons?
A food store, like any other store, sets the price of the food it sells to the point that brings it the most profit. Rising the price will decrease, not increase, profits. So yes, it pays for any stolen items out of its own pockets, since it has no other options.
I wish people stopped perpetuating the PR-invented myth that companies are somehow impervious to fines because they can simply get more money from their customers to cover it. They can't, because if they could, they'd already be doing so. Any company blaming a price increase to fines, theft or anything like that is flat out lying.
And it doesn't even matter if we could. The submitter can be sued for infringing whether he's actually breaking any law or not, and since he can't afford a lawyer and a long court battle, he'll lose.
Unions were not invented to protect stupid people from smart. Unions were formed to protect poor people from the rich. Specifically, they were meant to protect the employee from being blackmailed into a bad deal by an employer in the situation of surplus workforce.
And no more wages, in all likelihood. On the other hand, if you're part of a union, the union can say "we're not giving our personal time anymore, fix this problem or go bankrupt".
Unions exist to balance the power between employers and employees, and thus give them an equal negotiation position.
Not true.
Now, I don't suggest that you download this torrent, as taking steps to keep watching movies you've already bought would clearly be illegal. I'm simply saying that you don't have to rebuy them to keep watching them.
It's such a horrible temptation to not be good little citizen and keep paying a company over and over and over again for the same content, isn't it? I mean, they paid good money to get copyright extended ad infinitum and make form-shifting illegal, no? So you'd be eeeevil to not fork over cash to them again for things you've already bought, no?
Flash player compatible files, no DRM.
In other words, your average person would be best served by the Pirate Bay.
Disinfected - by which I mean that the DRM has been stripped away - downloads are superior in all ways to store-bought DVDs. Why keep around and insert "original disks" when you can just get the torrent, install the crack, and just launch the game/movie/whatever forever afterwards? Or, for that matter, why hunt for the Blu-Ray disk when high-def rips take a few gigabytes, can be stored on hard drive for easy searching, and don't show unskippable "FBI warnings" or advertizing?
Seriously, the pirated version is superior to the store-bought one nowadays. Has been for a long time now, and it's all thanks to DRM.
Seeing how the development of life in general, and our technology in particular, seems to follow an exponential curve, I don't think that Sun dying really has much to do with that probability, unless it's going to die next millenia or so.
...I just realized how old I am :(.