It sounds funny, but for geeks like us, running Arch, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Redhat, Slackware, Linspire, and Debian all in the course of a 6-12 month period is not an unheard or scenario.
Of course that's why I root for distros like Ubuntu, which take the best of fork "x" and really start to approach a single distro that's accessable to the non-tech user.
But as for a Firefox fork, meh. Many won't use it. Just like Flock, or Firefox's predecesor Mozilla - often one "fork" will become dominant and the others will remain on the fring. It doesn't make the fringe bad, mind you - niche markets will always exist - it just means that I don't see IceWeasle hurting Firefox's marketshare by any significant degree.
...especially one that was originally developed by rival Ericsson, who is the #1 seller of Bluetooth chipsets?
If the new tech is compatable with bluetooth radios and antennas, how does this rage against the Ericsson machine?
Further, I wonder if it's simply a matter of a software change on the hardware - which would make manufacturing of this stuff a no-brainer, and bluetooth receivers could quickly become dual-mode receivers.
ANYTHING can be either used, or abused. And one way to ensure something is not abused, is to not have it around.
I have a feeling Amazon was less worried about "abuse" of its retained data by authorities than it was profits. I have a feeling they thought the data they were retaining could be mined for profit - when they found out storing the data was more costly than the money they could make from it, they dropped it.
One way to make sure extra storage isn't costing money is to not have it around.
I'm a Norwegian, and I have had my home (also my girlfriend's and her son's home) raided by two policemen (every room, every cupboard...). They had gotten a warrant from the local court on the SINGLE GROUNDS OF ONE WITNESS SEEING ME SMOKING A JOINT! ONCE! They found nothing, but unfortunately for me they also had gotten a warrant for "my body", which meant they had the right to force me to piss in a cup... This of course resulted in a fine, and a criminal record.
It's true, but your argument puts it as exactly that - a technicality, where one law is rendered virtually unenforcable by another. In this case, privacy wins, and it would make sense for Sweden to simply remove the law from the books, since it's unenforcable clutter at this point in time.
It's not for the government to make their decision for them.
Not to mention, WTF does it have to do with a defense bill?
Nothing related to Congress and our current govn't offends me more than the unchallenged ability to "tack on" legislation for topic X that has piss-all to do with the main topic of the bill at hand.
Congressman A: Here's a bill allocating $50m for breast cancer research!
Congressman B: Great! I'd like to add a rider that allocates $10m in federal funding for building a bridge somewhere in my state - oh, and my brother-in-law like totally has a construction company!
Would you be willing to pay big tax on your truck?
Actually, I already do - in NJ/PA anyway - I forget which one, I just moved. Point is, because it was classified as an SUV, my registration costs went up. So I'm already paying extra for the privledge, and although I fumed about it for a few seconds - mostly, of course, because I guarantee that extra wasn't going to go towards alternative-fuel research - I paid it, and will continue to pay it, because I use my SUV and the extra space to transport goods (own a small business).
Although, it's not like SUVs couldn't be more conservative themselves... gotta close that "work truck" loophole in fuel economy requirements.
Which makes this more like Apple then the RIAA. Apple sued various rumor sites to try to fish out a leak in their own organization. MS wants to sue to figure out how their information was broken.
Although it's not like MS and Apple aren't, the RIAA is simply interested in money and control, not information. This isn't RIAA style extortion so much as Apple style ass-backwards investigatory tactics.
as long as someone else can be made to pay for it.
We should all pay for it. Somehow, this world has become so short-sighted, in-the-moment, materialistic, and irresponsible, that we have this aversion to making some sacrifices that benefit humankind as a whole.
Yeah yeah, communism blah blah, capitalism blah blah. What the hell is wrong with getting rid of oil? BEGONE! What's wrong with investing - heavily, I might add - in cleaner fuels?
Even if - and this "if" is pretty weak - there is no global warming, there is certainly high mercury levels in our oceans, polution in our oceans, rivers and wells, toxic chemicals in our computers, drinking water, meat, vegetables, etc. Being "green" seems to have taken on the conotation of only being about global warming - but it's so very much more.
We know that a lot of what we do as a people pollutes the earth. Even if it doesn't cause global warming, the dense brown layer of air the airplane flies into coming into LA or NY or even Philadelphia airports are disgusting.
We can have almost everything we have now, and in a greener, cleaner fashion. But gross consumerism and selfishness has us so completely stuck in neutral that without shit like rising gas prices and crazy-ass California passing laws like this, we might never move forward of our own accord.
Now, admittedly, my condo doesn't have solar panels to drive the central AC I enjoy. While about 50% of the bulbs I have in my house are the low-energy florescents (sorry about my spelling - lets GO Firefox 2.0!) the other 50% are not - and some are halogens. I do take somewhat lengthy showers, and yes, I wash my truck. That's "truck", not "car".
So I'm not perfect. But small changes mean something. I pay an extra $15/month for PECO to deliver only wind-generated energy to my condo. I replace all dead bulbs with low-energy (and long lasting) florescents. I use public transportation to commute (because it's available to me). I'm a consumer, but I don't understand why I shouldn't be a somewhat responsible one too.
Having the technology to be nicer to this planet and not using it because of sheer complacency is unacceptable. IMHO.
Personally, I'd say it's just something they threw in there to get more support for rallying against net neutrality.
So is this:
Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem
By the way - "x is a solution in search of a problem" - particularly in this case, is an attempt to dismiss anything that's seriously forward-thinking. Like Gonzales trying to get ISPs to retain records for longer periods of time "only" for child pornography, anyone can see that although there are overtures of non-intrusion, such policies, allowed to florish, will undoubtedly be abused in the future.
There is no search for a problem - there is a realization by anyone that is any degree of forward thinking that given the opportunity to squash competition, a company will take it - and the consumer will lose.
Unfortunately, many people are "sheeple", and believe the last (or loudest) thing they heard. Although there have been people complaining that a lack of net neutrality will eventually negatively influence innovation and stifle competition, many in the world hear their favorite companies saying "there is no issue, NN is a good thing" and will make a judgement without introspection or reflection.
Many/.ers seem pretty forward thinking, whether I agree with their politics or not... Which is why net neutrality gets so much play here - because I, and many others here - can see the stupidly big handwriting on the wall.
The state would not fall into a deficit situation if they would stop giving money to special interest groups for projects that have nothing to do with basic govrnment services.
Brilliant.
I have a love-hate relationship with CA. Some of their regulations regarding emmissions, etc, help push the envelope forward, but then they forget to grandfather in any older vehicles. On the other hand, their desire to be so gigantically left brings about things like teaching Ebonics in schools (and I capitalize Ebonics with a bit of reservation).
But it's true - Cali, in its desire to be so progressive - wastes huge amounts of money on things not central to running a state, and then runs into huge state deficits just trying to run basic services.
So suing car manufacturers is a double-edged sword. If it's a combatant of the industry suing the state, then fine. If it's trying to extort money, it's stupid. You can't have standard A, which manufacturers meet, then later decide to enact standard B where B > A, and sue the manufacturers for meeting standard A for the years it was the standard.
I'm all for better fuel efficiency. Enacting stricter regulations? Good. Suing for meeting older regulations during the reign of those regulations? Ridiculous.
You want to pick the defining foundations of "Generation Y" and you come up with Web 2.0 content aggregation / YouTube home made videos put to alternate musical soundtracks.
I chose those as examples because they're relevant to TFA.
As "actually someone ostensibly in the film industry", you should appreciate the absurdity of having to pay tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to use a music clip here or there in your movie, and that movies shot on a shoestring budget of mere hundreds or a few thousands of dollars can't put an appropriate soundtrack in their movie - even in short samples - without increasing the required budget of the movie tenfold or more.
It's because judges in the US are old and really have absolutely no idea what they are judging on when they make judgements on technology. If they're as informed as Ted "Tubes" Stevens, well, it shouldn't come as any surprise that US courts are as insane as US lawmakers.
Is Gmail primitive in appearance by comparison? Sure, but it works, and it is significantly faster. Usefully faster. I won't be switching back.
I wouldn't mind a nicer Gmail interface - but for me it's the threaded conversations that make it so stupidly useful (although tagging vs folders is also nice). I moved my small business mail over to hosted Google Mail for those two features alone.
On another note:
including mashups with Yahoo! Maps
Can a company actually "mash-up" with itself? Because if so, taking product integration through well-written APIs and calling it a "mashup" inside of the same company has been around since computers were born.
Because people are sheep, and vote for who they're told to. Most of the country looks for that (D) or (R) next to a politician's name at the booth (the what... 10% that actually vote these days?)
So money means more media means more telling people who to vote for. Unless you live in Florida, in which case money can actually literally PURCHASE votes. Espcially from dead people. Not blacks, though. Florida receives money to make sure they don't vote. So... dead people voting, black people not allowed to... hmm... seems like it all balances out...
Where's the frontier where one can escape the thumb of large business and large government?
Buy an island. Or maybe move to SeaLand.
As long as there is money, there will be greed and corruption. As long as there are humans, there will be a desire for power and control. Since the human race currently reigns the planet, and international cooperation is almost entirely based on money, all four (greed, corruption, power, and control) exist.
They also all feed off of eachother. Greed breeds a desire for power and money. Greedy desire for money breeds corruption. Corrupt people with reems of money can buy control and power.
What's interesting is that despite greed, and the desire for ultimate control, said corrupt greedy controling individuals DO ban together - if pushing forward the collective enhances the individual. So as corruption grows inside of a large group, it's bound to effect (often in a positive money sense) the individual seeking said money and power. As a group becomes more powerful, the individual gains more power inside the group, which gives the group and individual more control.
It's vicious, rampant, and all-too-difficult to keep in check.
So the idealism held by a few true blue men (the founding fathers) was bound to fail, as is any new government set up today. (Although, I should point out, or at least not pretend to deny, that almost all the important founding fathers were all men who held positions of power and control in said new government, and were all pretty well off financially too. Best way to gain control of a country? Make one up.)
It's the crux of why all governments fail - and the crux of why, despite how perfect it looks on paper, communism is a dismal failure as well.
The democracy... sorry... republic... in which we live (US) is, to many, the best that we have come up with as a species thus far. To which side it leans can be debated forever, and whether or not more socialism is a good thing is also debatable. But we're far from a perfect society, and I dare say that we won't see one... ever.
Or, at least not as long as greed, power, corruption, and money are in the equation.
My guess is that the copyright holders don't want to. Suing is more profitable.
I don't have a lot of hope for YouTube's future.
We (us below 30 people, and yes, some of you above 30) are a generation built on mashups, personalized media, and borrowing from the acheivments of the past to further our own pursuits.
Those sitting on the bench won't get that a suit against YouTube (especially if it's on the grounds of lipsync videos or peronal video soundtracks) is really stifiling millions of young filmmakers - no matter how horrible their films may be.
Creativity - or creativity tools - has in 10-20 years grown in accessability seemingly exponentially. YouTube provides an outlet for the creative mind that many young people have never had. If Numa Numa is on a soundtrack to a 90 second clip of two kids dancing in their parent's basement, is it really necessary to expect that YouTube owes millions of dollars for providing an outlet for these kids to share their creativity with the world?
The reason I mentioned the generational thing above is because it will take another 20 years before people that truely understand the technology and creativity revolution that is in full swing now are sitting on legal benches across the nation. Right now we have people with very, very old thoughts on capitalism, copyright, patents, etc. that hand down judgements and rulings. It isn't until my 3 year old is an adult that his peers will finally have access to make decisions that actually benefit this country, and cease these ridiculous assaults on creativity and expression.
I was just thinking this - imagine a nice profit share where a student records a lecture, deposits in a central repository, and anyone who buys pays the person kind enough to record the lecture (minus a small percentage to help pay for said central repository.
I can only imagine the uproar.
BTW - can I, an average citizen who did not pay for tuition, see the lectures for $2.50/piece?
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds funny, but for geeks like us, running Arch, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Redhat, Slackware, Linspire, and Debian all in the course of a 6-12 month period is not an unheard or scenario.
Of course that's why I root for distros like Ubuntu, which take the best of fork "x" and really start to approach a single distro that's accessable to the non-tech user.
But as for a Firefox fork, meh. Many won't use it. Just like Flock, or Firefox's predecesor Mozilla - often one "fork" will become dominant and the others will remain on the fring. It doesn't make the fringe bad, mind you - niche markets will always exist - it just means that I don't see IceWeasle hurting Firefox's marketshare by any significant degree.
Plausable deniability? There's no way that the data leak was OUR fault. Even though we were spineless and gave it to the US to begin with...
If the new tech is compatable with bluetooth radios and antennas, how does this rage against the Ericsson machine?
Further, I wonder if it's simply a matter of a software change on the hardware - which would make manufacturing of this stuff a no-brainer, and bluetooth receivers could quickly become dual-mode receivers.
I have a feeling Amazon was less worried about "abuse" of its retained data by authorities than it was profits. I have a feeling they thought the data they were retaining could be mined for profit - when they found out storing the data was more costly than the money they could make from it, they dropped it.
One way to make sure extra storage isn't costing money is to not have it around.
Wow... remind me not to move to Norwegia...
It's true, but your argument puts it as exactly that - a technicality, where one law is rendered virtually unenforcable by another. In this case, privacy wins, and it would make sense for Sweden to simply remove the law from the books, since it's unenforcable clutter at this point in time.
Not to mention, WTF does it have to do with a defense bill?
Nothing related to Congress and our current govn't offends me more than the unchallenged ability to "tack on" legislation for topic X that has piss-all to do with the main topic of the bill at hand.
Congressman A: Here's a bill allocating $50m for breast cancer research!
Congressman B: Great! I'd like to add a rider that allocates $10m in federal funding for building a bridge somewhere in my state - oh, and my brother-in-law like totally has a construction company!
Actually, I already do - in NJ/PA anyway - I forget which one, I just moved. Point is, because it was classified as an SUV, my registration costs went up. So I'm already paying extra for the privledge, and although I fumed about it for a few seconds - mostly, of course, because I guarantee that extra wasn't going to go towards alternative-fuel research - I paid it, and will continue to pay it, because I use my SUV and the extra space to transport goods (own a small business).
Although, it's not like SUVs couldn't be more conservative themselves... gotta close that "work truck" loophole in fuel economy requirements.
Which makes this more like Apple then the RIAA. Apple sued various rumor sites to try to fish out a leak in their own organization. MS wants to sue to figure out how their information was broken.
Although it's not like MS and Apple aren't, the RIAA is simply interested in money and control, not information. This isn't RIAA style extortion so much as Apple style ass-backwards investigatory tactics.
We should all pay for it. Somehow, this world has become so short-sighted, in-the-moment, materialistic, and irresponsible, that we have this aversion to making some sacrifices that benefit humankind as a whole.
Yeah yeah, communism blah blah, capitalism blah blah. What the hell is wrong with getting rid of oil? BEGONE! What's wrong with investing - heavily, I might add - in cleaner fuels?
Even if - and this "if" is pretty weak - there is no global warming, there is certainly high mercury levels in our oceans, polution in our oceans, rivers and wells, toxic chemicals in our computers, drinking water, meat, vegetables, etc. Being "green" seems to have taken on the conotation of only being about global warming - but it's so very much more.
We know that a lot of what we do as a people pollutes the earth. Even if it doesn't cause global warming, the dense brown layer of air the airplane flies into coming into LA or NY or even Philadelphia airports are disgusting.
We can have almost everything we have now, and in a greener, cleaner fashion. But gross consumerism and selfishness has us so completely stuck in neutral that without shit like rising gas prices and crazy-ass California passing laws like this, we might never move forward of our own accord.
Now, admittedly, my condo doesn't have solar panels to drive the central AC I enjoy. While about 50% of the bulbs I have in my house are the low-energy florescents (sorry about my spelling - lets GO Firefox 2.0!) the other 50% are not - and some are halogens. I do take somewhat lengthy showers, and yes, I wash my truck. That's "truck", not "car".
So I'm not perfect. But small changes mean something. I pay an extra $15/month for PECO to deliver only wind-generated energy to my condo. I replace all dead bulbs with low-energy (and long lasting) florescents. I use public transportation to commute (because it's available to me). I'm a consumer, but I don't understand why I shouldn't be a somewhat responsible one too.
Having the technology to be nicer to this planet and not using it because of sheer complacency is unacceptable. IMHO.
Then we'd elect it as president.
Except for when the elevator runs over said egg colony, or a bat or swallow is carried into the outter atmosphere and killed... ;)
You can't count the extreme cases - so I'm sure that the bathrooms along the NJ Turnpike weren't tested for this particular staistic.
Not to mention a flaw discovered on Nov. 25 and patched for the Dec. 1 release plays with the "1 month" curve a little.
So is this:
By the way - "x is a solution in search of a problem" - particularly in this case, is an attempt to dismiss anything that's seriously forward-thinking. Like Gonzales trying to get ISPs to retain records for longer periods of time "only" for child pornography, anyone can see that although there are overtures of non-intrusion, such policies, allowed to florish, will undoubtedly be abused in the future.
There is no search for a problem - there is a realization by anyone that is any degree of forward thinking that given the opportunity to squash competition, a company will take it - and the consumer will lose.
Unfortunately, many people are "sheeple", and believe the last (or loudest) thing they heard. Although there have been people complaining that a lack of net neutrality will eventually negatively influence innovation and stifle competition, many in the world hear their favorite companies saying "there is no issue, NN is a good thing" and will make a judgement without introspection or reflection.
Many /.ers seem pretty forward thinking, whether I agree with their politics or not... Which is why net neutrality gets so much play here - because I, and many others here - can see the stupidly big handwriting on the wall.
Brilliant.
I have a love-hate relationship with CA. Some of their regulations regarding emmissions, etc, help push the envelope forward, but then they forget to grandfather in any older vehicles. On the other hand, their desire to be so gigantically left brings about things like teaching Ebonics in schools (and I capitalize Ebonics with a bit of reservation).
But it's true - Cali, in its desire to be so progressive - wastes huge amounts of money on things not central to running a state, and then runs into huge state deficits just trying to run basic services.
So suing car manufacturers is a double-edged sword. If it's a combatant of the industry suing the state, then fine. If it's trying to extort money, it's stupid. You can't have standard A, which manufacturers meet, then later decide to enact standard B where B > A, and sue the manufacturers for meeting standard A for the years it was the standard.
I'm all for better fuel efficiency. Enacting stricter regulations? Good. Suing for meeting older regulations during the reign of those regulations? Ridiculous.
I chose those as examples because they're relevant to TFA.
As "actually someone ostensibly in the film industry", you should appreciate the absurdity of having to pay tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to use a music clip here or there in your movie, and that movies shot on a shoestring budget of mere hundreds or a few thousands of dollars can't put an appropriate soundtrack in their movie - even in short samples - without increasing the required budget of the movie tenfold or more.
It's because judges in the US are old and really have absolutely no idea what they are judging on when they make judgements on technology. If they're as informed as Ted "Tubes" Stevens, well, it shouldn't come as any surprise that US courts are as insane as US lawmakers.
I wouldn't mind a nicer Gmail interface - but for me it's the threaded conversations that make it so stupidly useful (although tagging vs folders is also nice). I moved my small business mail over to hosted Google Mail for those two features alone.
On another note:
Can a company actually "mash-up" with itself? Because if so, taking product integration through well-written APIs and calling it a "mashup" inside of the same company has been around since computers were born.
Because people are sheep, and vote for who they're told to. Most of the country looks for that (D) or (R) next to a politician's name at the booth (the what... 10% that actually vote these days?)
So money means more media means more telling people who to vote for. Unless you live in Florida, in which case money can actually literally PURCHASE votes. Espcially from dead people. Not blacks, though. Florida receives money to make sure they don't vote. So... dead people voting, black people not allowed to... hmm... seems like it all balances out...
Buy an island. Or maybe move to SeaLand.
As long as there is money, there will be greed and corruption. As long as there are humans, there will be a desire for power and control. Since the human race currently reigns the planet, and international cooperation is almost entirely based on money, all four (greed, corruption, power, and control) exist.
They also all feed off of eachother. Greed breeds a desire for power and money. Greedy desire for money breeds corruption. Corrupt people with reems of money can buy control and power.
What's interesting is that despite greed, and the desire for ultimate control, said corrupt greedy controling individuals DO ban together - if pushing forward the collective enhances the individual. So as corruption grows inside of a large group, it's bound to effect (often in a positive money sense) the individual seeking said money and power. As a group becomes more powerful, the individual gains more power inside the group, which gives the group and individual more control.
It's vicious, rampant, and all-too-difficult to keep in check.
So the idealism held by a few true blue men (the founding fathers) was bound to fail, as is any new government set up today. (Although, I should point out, or at least not pretend to deny, that almost all the important founding fathers were all men who held positions of power and control in said new government, and were all pretty well off financially too. Best way to gain control of a country? Make one up.)
It's the crux of why all governments fail - and the crux of why, despite how perfect it looks on paper, communism is a dismal failure as well.
The democracy... sorry... republic... in which we live (US) is, to many, the best that we have come up with as a species thus far. To which side it leans can be debated forever, and whether or not more socialism is a good thing is also debatable. But we're far from a perfect society, and I dare say that we won't see one... ever.
Or, at least not as long as greed, power, corruption, and money are in the equation.
hitmark - I hope to God you're either a woman or gay. Because - and I'm trying - I can't see what about the body is disagreable...
hmm... I may have to stare at the pictures longer...
I don't have a lot of hope for YouTube's future.
We (us below 30 people, and yes, some of you above 30) are a generation built on mashups, personalized media, and borrowing from the acheivments of the past to further our own pursuits.
Those sitting on the bench won't get that a suit against YouTube (especially if it's on the grounds of lipsync videos or peronal video soundtracks) is really stifiling millions of young filmmakers - no matter how horrible their films may be.
Creativity - or creativity tools - has in 10-20 years grown in accessability seemingly exponentially. YouTube provides an outlet for the creative mind that many young people have never had. If Numa Numa is on a soundtrack to a 90 second clip of two kids dancing in their parent's basement, is it really necessary to expect that YouTube owes millions of dollars for providing an outlet for these kids to share their creativity with the world?
The reason I mentioned the generational thing above is because it will take another 20 years before people that truely understand the technology and creativity revolution that is in full swing now are sitting on legal benches across the nation. Right now we have people with very, very old thoughts on capitalism, copyright, patents, etc. that hand down judgements and rulings. It isn't until my 3 year old is an adult that his peers will finally have access to make decisions that actually benefit this country, and cease these ridiculous assaults on creativity and expression.
One of the funniest Futurama moments. I love Futurama for that shit - little jokes that people could easily miss.
I was just thinking this - imagine a nice profit share where a student records a lecture, deposits in a central repository, and anyone who buys pays the person kind enough to record the lecture (minus a small percentage to help pay for said central repository. I can only imagine the uproar. BTW - can I, an average citizen who did not pay for tuition, see the lectures for $2.50/piece?