not to mention, if nobody is seeding it all you paid for is a headache!
This brings up an even more interesting point. So let me get this straight - WB will charge DVD prices for a less-than-DVD quality download crippled with DRM - and will use other people's computers to serve the bits.
Wow - lower quality, same price point, crippled DRM, and they don't even pick up the cost of hosting.
I'm sold - how do I get my computer to act as a server for them? Because I've always wanted my $45/m for internet to be used at the will of media companies to avoid the hosting fees associated with "allowing" users to download DRM crippled overly-expensive movie releases. Huzzah!
The thing is, this is what consumers should demand. This isn't something the governments of states or the Federal government of the United States has ANY business in.
Yeah, unfortunately, it does. I'm pretty libretarian in my views, but the American people as a whole care not for things like the environment. They want their SUVs. So, in order to get better fuel economy, one of two things must happen.
Govn't raises gas prices (tax?) to the level of true pain - $5, maybe $6/gallon where consumers are FORCED to demand better fuel economy or
Govn't raises MPG standards for all vehicles produced moving forward. Closing the SUV hole is a good start.
Consumers only care for themselves in general, and will hardly ever demand something that will inevitably cost them more money for the sake of another - like the environment, or people in third world contries (or any other household for that matter).
So unfortunately, in this case, the govn't does need to step up. I shudder to say it, but I do believe it.
No, this sucks, I respect the GPL and other open source licenses (BSD) as well as closed source licenses.
Agreed. Open source is a choice, and not chosing to OS a driver code package does not immediately or synonymously make a company evil. Most people want Linux to start playing in the same space as Windows (well, at least OSX) in terms of user numbers. This will never happen unless hardware vendors are allowed to create binary drivers for their products.
Look at the video card space - drivers can sometimes mean a 20% boost in performance. Allowing the competition to get a look at these drivers means that you don't have an awful lot of IP to keep the business profitable.
If anyone ever wants Linux to be more than a hobbyist desktop OS, it will have to allow for the use of binary drivers. It's too late to put it into a hardware lock-in cycle like OSX (which does allows binary drivers) - Linux on the desktop will have to run on comodity hardware, and so for anyone to ever consider it seriously, it will have to be allowed to play with whatever hardware I want to purchase - and in order to do that, it will have to play with binary drivers nicely.
My two cents (and parent poster's)... but pretty rooted in logic.
I understood about two words of that. Anyone else just not that impressed with Manga and Anime in general? I feel that I'm doing an injustice to my geek heritage, but I just don't appreciate it like some do.
I live in Philadelphia where there is also a city-wide wireless push. Again, costs are going to be higher than expected (around $15M) and it is plauged with problems - like WIFI probably won't reach past the fourth floor of most buildings.
With WiMAX and 802.11n around the corner, why not wait just a year or so?
Once privacy is outlawed, only criminals will have any.
You mean like guns? Regulations like this have never been about catching criminals. They've always been about legislating law-abiding citizens into submission.
Take away guns, now only the government has guns. Citizens can't rise up.
Take away privacy, only the government has privacy/secrecy. Government no longer by the people.
Denial of privacy - as in the illegalization of guns - is never to protect against the common criminal. It's to sieze power, hold dominion over the people, and remove every glimmer of hope that they have.
I hate it when history repeats itself and the sheep-like general populace refuses to see it.
Actually, what happens is the RIAA/MPAA state one number - $1B. Then they wait for the initial/. storm of calling "bullshit" to die down. "Hmm... they accepted $1b. Try... 3."
"WE'RE LOSING $3.1B/YEAR!"./ reacts - "bullshit"... but the common man and common money-grubbing campaign-contribution-accepting politician suddenly accept it.
"Wow... they accepted $3.1b. Idiots. Raise the bar, man." "WE'RE LOSING $6.2B/YEAR TO PIRACY!"
buy their own phone equipment which opened up huge businesses for a lot of companies.
Yes, but that was the government of old. You know, back when they used to break up monopolies, believe in individual rights, and bot have much of a lobbyist effort in Washington.
Now the money spent on lobbying Washington is astronomical, bills and laws are drafted by for-profit enterprises, individual rights are considered a thorn in the side of money-making industries, and government has gone from regulating my car to regulating my home theater.
"...computers are ubiquitous -- and as a result, so is software authorship...Thus, a patent on a drug creates potential liability for those companies in the pharmaceutical business, while a software patent creates potential liability for any company with its own website or software customizations, regardless of its business."
No offence, but you sound like a user, not someone who actually knows much about operating systems.
While not a kernel hacker, I do know a good deal about operating systems, having studied them relatively instensly in college.
The reason that you find UNIX zealots is because the UNIXes were written so many years ago and still represent the best in OS design and development. Plan9 was also an incredibly solid OS, although the laptops it ran on were a ton if they were a pound.
My point was in relation to the parent of my original post, who insisted that Windows ability to be hacked was because it was a piece of shit. On the contrary, for the amount of third party drivers, software, and backward compatability in Windows XP and 2000, the Windows OS is indeed quite an achievement. Would I like to see MS concentrate more on security? Sure. But one of the reasons that OSX may be more secure is that they own a lock on driver interaction, hardware compatability, and have several times shunned backward compatability in the OS.
My point was simply that there is still a lot of improvement to the security model that all OSes could use. Windows is hardly alone in the world of insecure OSes.
If it isn't sarcasm, what in the hell are you talking about mang?
A parody of the current administration I can only assume...
That said, (some) colleges are actually becoming quite notorious for having plenty of "laws" on campus that abridge or ammend what many consider to be their inalienable freedom of speech. Sure, this goes back to the argument of Congress shall make no law, not "college campuses" or the like, but still...
Check out FIRE for an all-you-can-eat look at how colleges are indeed becoming politically correct havens of modified free-speech rules, inequity in education based on race, class, and sex, and the like.
Supply full GPL/BSD licensed source code to the X.org and kernel.org for inclusion in mainline. That will trigger a lot of positive support.
That will trigger a lot of positive support in the Slashdot community. A good portion of the gaming community could give two shits, since the hardest core gamers own Windows boxes, and the general public has no idea what GPL/BSD is.
Honestly, "a lot of positive support" is not actually really "a lot" save from people like you and me.
Windows is the only OS with viruses in the wild because it's a poorly designed, bug ridden piece of shit.
Well, this gets my vote for "Most Uninformed Statement of the Year".
Every OS is buggy. Every OS is vunerable. Windows has a dominating market share, so Windows is targeted. UNIX systems, Linux systems, OSX systems, Windows systems - all have been hacked, cracked, broken, virused up, exploited, and brought to its knees.
I'm a happy OSX home user and Windows programmer (work). I don't like Windows as much as OSX, but I've never seen such uninformed, sheep-like MS hating. It's really a shame.
A being so intelligent that it ran the retina nerves in front of the retina, and then programmed complex compensation systems to make the shadows that the nerves cast on the retina disappear from perception. Somebody thinking about it would have just run the nerves over the back of the retina instead. If you saw something like this in a software system, you'd say WTF.
Well, as far as I'm aware, natural selection and evolution also favor survival of the fittest. Better genes survive generations. Opposable thumbs better - they're in.
So if the eye is so overly complex, so crazy in its execution, how is it that evolution selected complexity as a model for more fit for continuation down the gene lines? Seems to me that this complexity isn't something that would randomly occur as the rest of evolution was favoring improvements to the model.
Writing legislation about things you don't understand seldom helps problems - it just sometimes shifts the balance of power by doing favors for your friends in return for future favors.
True that - let's give the FCC - the ultimate censors themselves - the right to regulate what's "fair" on the internet. I mean, I know the FCC is the defacto "communications" government agency, but couldn't they put the net neutrality monitoring responsibilities on someone else?
Not that it matters, since more money was handed out against net neutrality.
Tell that to the thousands of scientists who believe in God. Tell that to all of the evolutionists that believe in God. Believing in God doesn't mean believing in ID or creationism.
Belief that you are better than everyone else because you are an aethist = sophmoric self-aggrandizing hubris.
Slashdot Mirror
This brings up an even more interesting point. So let me get this straight - WB will charge DVD prices for a less-than-DVD quality download crippled with DRM - and will use other people's computers to serve the bits.
Wow - lower quality, same price point, crippled DRM, and they don't even pick up the cost of hosting.
I'm sold - how do I get my computer to act as a server for them? Because I've always wanted my $45/m for internet to be used at the will of media companies to avoid the hosting fees associated with "allowing" users to download DRM crippled overly-expensive movie releases. Huzzah!
Yeah, unfortunately, it does. I'm pretty libretarian in my views, but the American people as a whole care not for things like the environment. They want their SUVs. So, in order to get better fuel economy, one of two things must happen.
- Govn't raises gas prices (tax?) to the level of true pain - $5, maybe $6/gallon where consumers are FORCED to demand better fuel economy or
- Govn't raises MPG standards for all vehicles produced moving forward. Closing the SUV hole is a good start.
Consumers only care for themselves in general, and will hardly ever demand something that will inevitably cost them more money for the sake of another - like the environment, or people in third world contries (or any other household for that matter).So unfortunately, in this case, the govn't does need to step up. I shudder to say it, but I do believe it.
Agreed. Open source is a choice, and not chosing to OS a driver code package does not immediately or synonymously make a company evil. Most people want Linux to start playing in the same space as Windows (well, at least OSX) in terms of user numbers. This will never happen unless hardware vendors are allowed to create binary drivers for their products.
Look at the video card space - drivers can sometimes mean a 20% boost in performance. Allowing the competition to get a look at these drivers means that you don't have an awful lot of IP to keep the business profitable.
If anyone ever wants Linux to be more than a hobbyist desktop OS, it will have to allow for the use of binary drivers. It's too late to put it into a hardware lock-in cycle like OSX (which does allows binary drivers) - Linux on the desktop will have to run on comodity hardware, and so for anyone to ever consider it seriously, it will have to be allowed to play with whatever hardware I want to purchase - and in order to do that, it will have to play with binary drivers nicely.
My two cents (and parent poster's)... but pretty rooted in logic.
Not to mention Apple changing processors like 20 times, barely supporting backward compatability across OS iterations, etc.
Not a MS problem - a problem almost always synonymous with progress. Stop hating on MS.
Didn't Comcast do this years ago? When do I get to replace my POS Comcast DVR with a Tivo already?
Quoth Nick Thomas, first reply to James Robertson's post calling bullshit:
I thank my lucky stars every day that we have a news reporting medium where people who are spewing bullshit are swiftly called out on it.
Damn right.
You've got me... I was just looking for some solidarity ;)
I understood about two words of that. Anyone else just not that impressed with Manga and Anime in general? I feel that I'm doing an injustice to my geek heritage, but I just don't appreciate it like some do.
I live in Philadelphia where there is also a city-wide wireless push. Again, costs are going to be higher than expected (around $15M) and it is plauged with problems - like WIFI probably won't reach past the fourth floor of most buildings. With WiMAX and 802.11n around the corner, why not wait just a year or so?
Great. Fossil fuels. Tamiflu, now topping $3/gallon.
You mean like guns? Regulations like this have never been about catching criminals. They've always been about legislating law-abiding citizens into submission.
Take away guns, now only the government has guns. Citizens can't rise up.
Take away privacy, only the government has privacy/secrecy. Government no longer by the people.
Denial of privacy - as in the illegalization of guns - is never to protect against the common criminal. It's to sieze power, hold dominion over the people, and remove every glimmer of hope that they have.
I hate it when history repeats itself and the sheep-like general populace refuses to see it.
Actually, what happens is the RIAA/MPAA state one number - $1B. Then they wait for the initial /. storm of calling "bullshit" to die down. "Hmm... they accepted $1b. Try... 3."
./ reacts - "bullshit"... but the common man and common money-grubbing campaign-contribution-accepting politician suddenly accept it.
"WE'RE LOSING $3.1B/YEAR!"
"Wow... they accepted $3.1b. Idiots. Raise the bar, man."
"WE'RE LOSING $6.2B/YEAR TO PIRACY!"
Sheep-Idiot-Bob: "Wow, they're losing $6b/year..."
Yes, but that was the government of old. You know, back when they used to break up monopolies, believe in individual rights, and bot have much of a lobbyist effort in Washington.
Now the money spent on lobbying Washington is astronomical, bills and laws are drafted by for-profit enterprises, individual rights are considered a thorn in the side of money-making industries, and government has gone from regulating my car to regulating my home theater.
It's a different time. Sucks to be us.
From FAS (and a submitted yet rejected post)... The FAS has obtained a CRS report titled Patent Reform: Issues in the Biomedical and Software Industries (PDF warning) which discusses some of the evil that is software patents. From TFPDF:
"...computers are ubiquitous -- and as a result, so is software authorship...Thus, a patent on a drug creates potential liability for those companies in the pharmaceutical business, while a software patent creates potential liability for any company with its own website or software customizations, regardless of its business."
While not a kernel hacker, I do know a good deal about operating systems, having studied them relatively instensly in college.
The reason that you find UNIX zealots is because the UNIXes were written so many years ago and still represent the best in OS design and development. Plan9 was also an incredibly solid OS, although the laptops it ran on were a ton if they were a pound.
My point was in relation to the parent of my original post, who insisted that Windows ability to be hacked was because it was a piece of shit. On the contrary, for the amount of third party drivers, software, and backward compatability in Windows XP and 2000, the Windows OS is indeed quite an achievement. Would I like to see MS concentrate more on security? Sure. But one of the reasons that OSX may be more secure is that they own a lock on driver interaction, hardware compatability, and have several times shunned backward compatability in the OS.
My point was simply that there is still a lot of improvement to the security model that all OSes could use. Windows is hardly alone in the world of insecure OSes.
Will ./ ever stop asking this question?
A parody of the current administration I can only assume...
That said, (some) colleges are actually becoming quite notorious for having plenty of "laws" on campus that abridge or ammend what many consider to be their inalienable freedom of speech. Sure, this goes back to the argument of Congress shall make no law, not "college campuses" or the like, but still...
Check out FIRE for an all-you-can-eat look at how colleges are indeed becoming politically correct havens of modified free-speech rules, inequity in education based on race, class, and sex, and the like.
That will trigger a lot of positive support in the Slashdot community. A good portion of the gaming community could give two shits, since the hardest core gamers own Windows boxes, and the general public has no idea what GPL/BSD is.
Honestly, "a lot of positive support" is not actually really "a lot" save from people like you and me.
Well, this gets my vote for "Most Uninformed Statement of the Year".
Every OS is buggy. Every OS is vunerable. Windows has a dominating market share, so Windows is targeted. UNIX systems, Linux systems, OSX systems, Windows systems - all have been hacked, cracked, broken, virused up, exploited, and brought to its knees.
I'm a happy OSX home user and Windows programmer (work). I don't like Windows as much as OSX, but I've never seen such uninformed, sheep-like MS hating. It's really a shame.
Well, as far as I'm aware, natural selection and evolution also favor survival of the fittest. Better genes survive generations. Opposable thumbs better - they're in.
So if the eye is so overly complex, so crazy in its execution, how is it that evolution selected complexity as a model for more fit for continuation down the gene lines? Seems to me that this complexity isn't something that would randomly occur as the rest of evolution was favoring improvements to the model.
But wouldn't load skyrocket at 3 am when energy is cheap, as all the batteries of these storage lockers started juicing up?
And where am I going to find a job that lets me work 2 days a week, 4 hours a day, and still pays me enough to cover the mortgage?
True that - let's give the FCC - the ultimate censors themselves - the right to regulate what's "fair" on the internet. I mean, I know the FCC is the defacto "communications" government agency, but couldn't they put the net neutrality monitoring responsibilities on someone else?
Not that it matters, since more money was handed out against net neutrality.
Tell that to the thousands of scientists who believe in God. Tell that to all of the evolutionists that believe in God. Believing in God doesn't mean believing in ID or creationism.
Belief that you are better than everyone else because you are an aethist = sophmoric self-aggrandizing hubris.
Not "GAWD", but an an intelligent being of some sort. Just like these eyes, created by (in my book, anyway) a team of seriously intelligent beings.