On a typical day the amount that an average visitor "pays" $0.002 to view a bit of content by a certain percentage clicking on an ad. Through advertising, that bit of content has a value of $0.002.
True, but what has it to do with ad blocking? The typical AdBlock user never clicks on ads, that's a zero percentage, yielding an average $0.000 a day for viewing said bit of content. Unfair, you might say, but then, what do you want to do about it? Technically prevent "never clickers" from accessing your content? Impossible. Introduce a law that requires at least one click'n'purchase a month? Ridiculous (well, not necessarily, I can envision an RIAA-supported bill that requires every US citizen to buy at least one music CD a month).
Those users who do find your ads interesting, though, will not use AdBlock, or at least not configure it to block those ads that they DO find interesting.
Yes, I admit that's a shameless simplification regarding current ad blockers, which lack sensitivity. This problem could only be solved through cooperation between ad blocker developers and advertisers.
Of course, it seems like ever-more fierce confrontation is likelier than cooperation, and that's, unfortunately, human nature. Just consider the ongoing RIAA/MPAA madness. So my prediction is that, as ad blockers are used more often, advertisers will first increasingly try technical measures to circumvent them, i.e. deliberately reducing sensitivity, which will result in ad blocker developers finding ways to stop circumvention, and users blocking more ads than they actually would like to, meaning losses for advertisers, and thus reduced advertising revenues for content providers.
Should the advertisers start to see themselves in a losing battle, they'll increasingly use legal weaponry (and lobby legislators for more such weapons) such as copyright to target ad blocker developers and eventually also users (just like the RIAA). This will still be a losing battle, but it'll extort a heavy toll on both sides (just like the RIAA/MPAA war on P2P), with no end in sight.
All this insanity will cost a lot of money, further diminuishing ad revenues for content providers, and many will find advertisements no longer viable. By the way, the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) has recently tried to reduce the copyright holders' share in German CD prices, stating that they need these 2 or 3% of the total price to "combat Internet piracy". So, like every war, this will be a vicious circle, the longer it wages, the higher the stakes.
Long story short: It would be nice if we could all just get along. Unfortunately, it's not in our genetics. Let the games begin!
What do you think is a crime? You have no basis for judgement.
to submit = subjective opinion. With which I fully agree. A god that lets mortals suffer eternally cannot be benevolent, no matter what they've done (or haven't done - like believing in a person's divinity when there isn't even any historical evidence for his existence other than the New Testament).
That's my opinion, but I can also give you a bit of reasoning. I'd define evil as inflicting harm, pain and injustice on others (including animals) for lower reasons like greed, hate, sadism etc. Now an appropriate punishment, IMO, would have to be put in proportion to the suffering inflicted. But as the amount of suffering that a mortal can cause is necessarily finite, an infinite punishment is necessarily out of proportion for any crime. YMMV, but this is my conviction.
As a side-note, I am against any kind of punishment if no lasting good will come from it (tm). Punishment without a purpose is a manifestation of vengefulness and/or sadism. If you ignore the supernatural (if there is somesuch thing) for a moment, imagine a murderer lying on his death-bed. Then, a relative of the victim enters the room and causes him an incredibly painful death, but makes it look like he just died naturally (which he would, very likely, a short time thereafter) and never tells anyone about it.
Now would this help make the world a better place? The murderer is dead, therefore the punishment fails to change him into a better person. And no one saw it or even considered the deed, so it's useless as a deterrent (nevermind that the deterrence of the death penalty doesn't quite seem to work, but it would at least be a possibility). What or whom *does* the punishment serve? For one, "justice" (an eye for an eye), but I reject the infliction of a punishment that has no benefit to mankind or the world as retribution without purpose. Two wrongs don't make a right. So it only benefits the spite of the avenger.
Regular death penalty is far more contentious, of course. It may be argued that it has beneficial effects on society in several ways, e.g. as a deterrent to other potential felons, and as a protection of society from the felon because the possibility of a later escape is reduced to, well, zero. It has been argued that not needing to support the felon's life would also take a small burden off society as well, but the tremendous costs of trial procedures (which are typically much higher if the crime is punishable by death), special prison tracts, and the execution itself, cost much more than lifetime imprisoment in a Western civilized country (sure, a quick trial without too much due process, plus a firing squad, are very cheap). US government studies concluded that lifetime imprisonment costs "only" about $500.000 per offender, while the costs of the death penalty vary between ca. 2 and 7 million dollars, depending on the state and the case in question. When you consider the required infrastructure as well, Florida actually paid 24 million $ per execution since 1976 (according to the Palm Beach Post). OTOH, you need most of the infrastructure for lifetime sentences anyway (prisons).
Likewise, limited prison sentences are expected to (although seldomly very proficient at it) educate the offender, and aid his (re-)integration into society, as a law-abiding citizen. At the very least, he cannot commit furher offences while he's doing his prison term...
Emulators will never be illegal, maybe the ROMs/ISOs but, not the emulators.
D'oh! And what do you think the PS2 trial was about? Mr. Kime personally making illegal copies (to RAM!) of games? On the contrary, with this kind of argumentation you can outlaw next to anything, from emulators over CD-burning software to FTP clients. The mere possibility that it may be used to make illegal copies (at the danger of repeating myself: even to RAM!!!) of works is enough justification.
It's obvious that Mr. Justice Laddie's view as expressed in point 15 of the judgement, is based on the letter and not the spirit of copyright law, which was devised to disallow unauthorized production of tradable replicas, and only the reproduction of such works, not merely providing the technology to do this (like, uh, typesetting machines). Mr. Laddie is not to blame, though, it's the legislators (who rarely even read the bills they pass) who are fully responsible for this kind of copyright insanity.
It takes more work these days for me to find an artist that I like but, when I do, it's a great discovery.
And how has the fact that good music has been ubiquitous and now a scarcity wrt to you hearing about it affected your CD buying frequency? I'll tell you how it affected mine: It dropped to zero.
In fact, being forced to "hunt" for music has allowed me to discover a ton of artists and genres that I would not otherwise be exposed to.
I guess we fundamentally differ here. I don't like being forced into anything, especially not by an incestuous oligopoly of corporations that:
Exactly. It's not. Only simple minds who can't deal with the complexities of copyright would call it thus, so they can understand. Well that, and people who want to deceive.
You're stealing.
I'm certainly not. I'm not even P2Ping music any more.
You're taking something for nothing that would otherwise be sold. If you could not steal it, you would buy it.
Wrong, very wrong. That's true in some cases. In other cases, music downloading causes people to buy more music due to P2P sampling. At the time that I was a heavy P2P user, I bought almost twice as many CDs per month than before, and that even though my previous No. 1 source for finding out about my kind of music (the German alternative music TV station "Viva 2") had been shut down for the sake of a more RIAA-friendly third mainstream channel. In last year's fall, the RIAA and others successfully lobbied to make file sharing of (most) music illegal in Germany (can't point out one time too often that it was legal before!). I stopped downloading music and haven't bought a single CD since then. A coincidence?
My hypothesis: There are at least three groups of P2P users:
The casual user: Makes up the majority of P2P users. Downloads some songs, buys some CDs, doesn't buy others. The net effect of P2P on this user's CD consumption is negligible.
The cadger: Uses P2P because it's free-as-in-beer and has 1000 excuses for not paying. P2P lets his CD consumption drop to zero. But then, most of these probably have always found a way to get free music. If it wasn't for P2P, they would just record songs from the radio, copy/lend it from friends and whatnot. They have never paid much for music and never will.
The fan (I would say I belong to this group): P2P and other non-RIAA-controlled distribution channels have been a boon for them. They could conveniently find out about gazillions of non-mainstream bands and sample their music in (cf.) high quality. If they found bands whose music they really like, they would go out and buy their CDs because fans show devotion for their idols. You can't call yourself a fan if all you have are burnt CDs. The net CD consumption of this group would increase (sometimes even greatly) because of P2P.
Now what does this boil down to? Blaming the casual user is ridiculous. They have been average customers wrt sales, and they stay average customers. What about the cadgers? Aren't they stealing? Yes, it's definitely not right what they do.
They're said to have historical experience in crucifying the messenger. At least that's what my brother Tomas says - and he's been very active in this business back in the 1470s.
So, you're saying that instead of requesting those third party software developers/manufacturers to fix their broken products, you opt to run your box wide open (that is, everything under Administrator account).
No I don't. But that's the way most non-geeks do it.
I'm running my W2K system with restricted access. For those third party apps that are broken and I cannot live without, I run those with Superior SU so that only those pieces of software are run with administrative access. Admittedly, not perfect, but much better than running web browser/word processor/whatever with administrative rights. Currently my list of programs that I use and that need administrator access are:
That's fine, but the average user doesn't know how to do that, thus he/she just runs the machine as admin. After all, what's all the talk about Windows being easy to use worth if you have to set fine-grained application rights?
Under linux, there's absolute no reason to always run root. You can usually configure even hardware access via different groups so that you only need to add your user account to group that has access to hardware device you absolutely need.
Absolutely, and the best thing is that the defaults are ok for most non-geek users. It's also quite simple for distributors to make things more secure than they would typically be under Windows. E.g. if a user is a member of the "dialup" group, you can configure the system in a way that allows dialing of a set of exisiting ISP numbers, but doesn't allow dialing of arbitrary numbers (you need root privileges to add them). This would make it very hard for dialer programs even if they existed for Linux. It's not that these things were absolutely impossible to realize in Windows, but the status quo is a lot worse - unless you're an expert and know how to work around the limitations.
This is not a problem with restricted access; it's a problem with third-party app.s written without any consideration of MS Windows' security model or the fundamental requirements of a multiuser runtime environment. Those app.s "break" because they were broken as designed.
For one, you are right. But OTOH, it's a given that most users cannot run their Windows as non-admin because some apps don't know how to handle it. And you're absolutely wrong to call other people "open source zealots" for pointing this out. And it is, in fact, partly Microsoft's fault, at least for older applications, because they chose to dump multi-user capability at a time when it was already an industry standard (think how long Unix predates DOS) for simplicity. They didn't feel compelled to change that for a long time (until Windows NT), and they even actively promoted products that were flawed in this way until the year 2000 (Windows ME).
Even some relatively new MS apps display bugs that aren't experienced when you run them as admin. This is not so surprising, because: While Microsoft's internal coding standards certainly require multi-user compatibility, they also buy a lot of software from other companies (rsp. the companies themselves). E.g. both Internet Explorer and PowerPoint weren't original MS apps - neither were Age of Empires and MechWarrior, among countless other examples. So some of these third-party programmers learned from the best...
A web browser should never implement a protocol like this.
Mozilla doesn't implement it, it just reads a URI from a link, determines that it doesn't know the protocol, and passes it off to Windows' URI handler. Which then for some reason may think it's a good idea to run it as a shell command and deltree/y c:.
"If you were able to run Windows with real restricted user accounts, this wouldn't really be such a problem."
You can. The fact that your either not familiar enough with it or too FUD bound to mention it doesn't change anything.
As long as OSS zealots keep fighting their IMAGE of MS software instead of what is actually out there they will continue to look like morons.
Yadda yadda yadda... of course you can create a restricted account and play some Minesweeper or Windows Calculator in it. But then run some third-party games or apps and see what breaks. There's just too much software that can't handle restricted access.
Maybe because you don't want to carry around the 15 inch lcd and keyboard required to do actual work?
Maybe you wouldn't want to deal with these klunky peripherals any more. As for the video display, I could imagine a tiny laser that projects images directly onto your retina. Similar to a laser TV, but without the intermediate step via a fluorescent screen.
Sorry, I misquoted the study a bit. It says that 78.4% of the people questioned refuse prosecution of people who use illegal copies of software for private purposes. Exactly half of them were strongly opposed, the other half moderately opposed. 16.8% were moderately in favor, 4.8% were strongly in favor of criminal prosecution.
OTOH, 68.5% strongly agree that commercial usage (which I take to include piracy for profit) of pirated software should be prosecuted. 26.6% are moderately in favor, the remaining 4.8% are split between moderate and strong rejection.
There is a big difference between backing up your software / music and grabbing free music and software off the net / from friends, and you know it. Stop being silly, you only make a fool of yourself.
Yes, it's exactly the latter that the majority in the BSA study did not want to see prosecuted (WRT software, but I would assume music gets similar opinions). Downloading illegal copies or "schoolyard piracy", as long as you're not making money off 'em. I infer that since very likely most people want to see theft prosecuted, they do not equate illegal copying with theft. Tough luck for your argument.
If the tools were able to stay above the workspace...
Try a better window manager. There are some for MS Windows (at least emulators, which is ok for most purposes). Put GIMP on a separate virtual desktop, and configure the image window to stay behind the toolboxes. I know it can be inconvenient that GIMP requires you to use a more flexible WM, but OTOH I like this solution since it's way more configurable than Photoshop's MDI.
the FBI requires thieves to film themselves during burglaries. Seriously, though, it does make sense to crack down on TV indecency. Studies have shown that 90% of sexual offenders had seen nipples in their early infancy.
MySQL I thought was GPL'd... so you can use it for a busness without payment. If you want to adapt it and not release your source, sure, you need to pay money.
Only if you want to distribute your DB applications. For in-house use, you can keep the sources (and binaries) to yourself.
Trolltech QT is similar. They *almost* have it right. But they I think screwed up by not offering a GPL'd version, or at the very least the 3.x non-commercial edition (not bundled with a $50 book), of QT for Windows. This screws people who want to do hobbyish cross-platform stuff for Windows but can't afford the huge licence fees.
Yes, and then there isn't much of a point shelling out $1000 per developer if wxWidgets is free, and does essentially the same thing. It's LGPL'ed, so there is no need to release application source code.
We do not live in an Anarchy. If you do not feel that you have to abide by "societies" ethics, go live in the hills.
Funny that you say this, since the BSA study says that most (>75%) people think that private copying of software should not be persecuted. So why don't you go live in the hills if you don't like it? Do you want my help packing your bags?
I guess I was just raised a certain way. I actually work for and buy shit when I want it. I had to buy my own car growing up. When I wanted WarCraft II, I worked for and bought the fucking thing. Nowadays kids just pirate. A lot of the young generation these days have their cars bought for them. I think that's not just coincidence when you look at what else is freeloaded in today's society.
I used to have a C64, my brother had an Amiga 1000. My brother had several buddies who also had an Amiga and/or Commodore. Now guess what? There were pirated games all over the place. In fact, an original was a scarce phenomenon, and that was long long before P2P. So this is not new at all. And you can't tell me that people used to have more respect for "intellectual property" since that incorrect term for immaterial monopoly rights wasn't in widespread use until the 1974 inception of the WIPO. Most kids would not steal material things, it's just that they don't perceive copying software as stealing. To them, it's wrong, but a minor thing, like driving a few miles too fast. Almost everybody's doing it. If you get caught, you pay a small fine, (actually, penalties are much worse for piracy, but then nobody expects to get caught) and then continue to do it anyway. It simply isn't "real crime", and I doubt that previous generations would have seen it as such. You cannot deduce that they would've withstood the temptation from the fact that they weren't exposed to it.
A common rationalization not borne out by statistics or experience. As between the freeloader who wants to take software for free, and the software vendor who wants to sell software, I leave it to the latter to decide what is the best, most likely way for them to optimize the relationship.
I'll let Bill Gates speak for himself:
Although about three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
Man, you are just another drag on us all.
Could you explain this in more detail? Where did GP claim to illegaly copy software himself? What you don't get is that an uncopyable MS Office would be the death of Microsoft (unless they figured out a clever way to separate home use from business use while still keeping business prices up), so yes, some companies do profit a lot from software piracy. It's not that they wouldn't have taken hundreds of dollars if the student who infringes upon their copyright would have offered them to MS. But it's still way better for them if he copies their software, instead of going for the free OpenOffice. They know that bloody well, and this is why they do not enforce their copyrights towards private users. So in some situations, piracy may hurt the competition instead of the copyright holder.
Slashdot Mirror
On a typical day the amount that an average visitor "pays" $0.002 to view a bit of content by a certain percentage clicking on an ad. Through advertising, that bit of content has a value of $0.002.
True, but what has it to do with ad blocking? The typical AdBlock user never clicks on ads, that's a zero percentage, yielding an average $0.000 a day for viewing said bit of content. Unfair, you might say, but then, what do you want to do about it? Technically prevent "never clickers" from accessing your content? Impossible. Introduce a law that requires at least one click'n'purchase a month? Ridiculous (well, not necessarily, I can envision an RIAA-supported bill that requires every US citizen to buy at least one music CD a month).
Those users who do find your ads interesting, though, will not use AdBlock, or at least not configure it to block those ads that they DO find interesting.
Yes, I admit that's a shameless simplification regarding current ad blockers, which lack sensitivity. This problem could only be solved through cooperation between ad blocker developers and advertisers.
Of course, it seems like ever-more fierce confrontation is likelier than cooperation, and that's, unfortunately, human nature. Just consider the ongoing RIAA/MPAA madness. So my prediction is that, as ad blockers are used more often, advertisers will first increasingly try technical measures to circumvent them, i.e. deliberately reducing sensitivity, which will result in ad blocker developers finding ways to stop circumvention, and users blocking more ads than they actually would like to, meaning losses for advertisers, and thus reduced advertising revenues for content providers.
Should the advertisers start to see themselves in a losing battle, they'll increasingly use legal weaponry (and lobby legislators for more such weapons) such as copyright to target ad blocker developers and eventually also users (just like the RIAA). This will still be a losing battle, but it'll extort a heavy toll on both sides (just like the RIAA/MPAA war on P2P), with no end in sight.
All this insanity will cost a lot of money, further diminuishing ad revenues for content providers, and many will find advertisements no longer viable. By the way, the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) has recently tried to reduce the copyright holders' share in German CD prices, stating that they need these 2 or 3% of the total price to "combat Internet piracy". So, like every war, this will be a vicious circle, the longer it wages, the higher the stakes.
Long story short: It would be nice if we could all just get along. Unfortunately, it's not in our genetics. Let the games begin!
That would have to be a darned long nuclear winter before I'll start eating SPAM.
And what is your basis for this theory?
The word you're looking for is hypothesis.
What do you think is a crime? You have no basis for judgement.
to submit = subjective opinion. With which I fully agree. A god that lets mortals suffer eternally cannot be benevolent, no matter what they've done (or haven't done - like believing in a person's divinity when there isn't even any historical evidence for his existence other than the New Testament).
That's my opinion, but I can also give you a bit of reasoning. I'd define evil as inflicting harm, pain and injustice on others (including animals) for lower reasons like greed, hate, sadism etc. Now an appropriate punishment, IMO, would have to be put in proportion to the suffering inflicted. But as the amount of suffering that a mortal can cause is necessarily finite, an infinite punishment is necessarily out of proportion for any crime. YMMV, but this is my conviction.
As a side-note, I am against any kind of punishment if no lasting good will come from it (tm). Punishment without a purpose is a manifestation of vengefulness and/or sadism. If you ignore the supernatural (if there is somesuch thing) for a moment, imagine a murderer lying on his death-bed. Then, a relative of the victim enters the room and causes him an incredibly painful death, but makes it look like he just died naturally (which he would, very likely, a short time thereafter) and never tells anyone about it.
Now would this help make the world a better place? The murderer is dead, therefore the punishment fails to change him into a better person. And no one saw it or even considered the deed, so it's useless as a deterrent (nevermind that the deterrence of the death penalty doesn't quite seem to work, but it would at least be a possibility). What or whom *does* the punishment serve? For one, "justice" (an eye for an eye), but I reject the infliction of a punishment that has no benefit to mankind or the world as retribution without purpose. Two wrongs don't make a right. So it only benefits the spite of the avenger. Regular death penalty is far more contentious, of course. It may be argued that it has beneficial effects on society in several ways, e.g. as a deterrent to other potential felons, and as a protection of society from the felon because the possibility of a later escape is reduced to, well, zero. It has been argued that not needing to support the felon's life would also take a small burden off society as well, but the tremendous costs of trial procedures (which are typically much higher if the crime is punishable by death), special prison tracts, and the execution itself, cost much more than lifetime imprisoment in a Western civilized country (sure, a quick trial without too much due process, plus a firing squad, are very cheap). US government studies concluded that lifetime imprisonment costs "only" about $500.000 per offender, while the costs of the death penalty vary between ca. 2 and 7 million dollars, depending on the state and the case in question. When you consider the required infrastructure as well, Florida actually paid 24 million $ per execution since 1976 (according to the Palm Beach Post). OTOH, you need most of the infrastructure for lifetime sentences anyway (prisons).
Likewise, limited prison sentences are expected to (although seldomly very proficient at it) educate the offender, and aid his (re-)integration into society, as a law-abiding citizen. At the very least, he cannot commit furher offences while he's doing his prison term...
Emulators will never be illegal, maybe the ROMs/ISOs but, not the emulators.
D'oh! And what do you think the PS2 trial was about? Mr. Kime personally making illegal copies (to RAM!) of games? On the contrary, with this kind of argumentation you can outlaw next to anything, from emulators over CD-burning software to FTP clients. The mere possibility that it may be used to make illegal copies (at the danger of repeating myself: even to RAM!!!) of works is enough justification.
It's obvious that Mr. Justice Laddie's view as expressed in point 15 of the judgement, is based on the letter and not the spirit of copyright law, which was devised to disallow unauthorized production of tradable replicas, and only the reproduction of such works, not merely providing the technology to do this (like, uh, typesetting machines). Mr. Laddie is not to blame, though, it's the legislators (who rarely even read the bills they pass) who are fully responsible for this kind of copyright insanity.
Government of the people, for the corporations, and by the corporations.
What's next? McDonald's pays people to eat their food?
Well, she might do well in porn as a flash-in-the-pan kind of way. But Aguilera or Shakira would still beat her at that, methinks.
*shudder* I'd rather watch a video of Michael Jackson doing his chimpanzee than a porn video starring Titney Sperms.
It takes more work these days for me to find an artist that I like but, when I do, it's a great discovery.
And how has the fact that good music has been ubiquitous and now a scarcity wrt to you hearing about it affected your CD buying frequency? I'll tell you how it affected mine: It dropped to zero.
In fact, being forced to "hunt" for music has allowed me to discover a ton of artists and genres that I would not otherwise be exposed to.
I guess we fundamentally differ here. I don't like being forced into anything, especially not by an incestuous oligopoly of corporations that:
save me the lecture on how it's not stealing
Exactly. It's not. Only simple minds who can't deal with the complexities of copyright would call it thus, so they can understand. Well that, and people who want to deceive.
You're stealing.
I'm certainly not. I'm not even P2Ping music any more.
You're taking something for nothing that would otherwise be sold. If you could not steal it, you would buy it.
Wrong, very wrong. That's true in some cases. In other cases, music downloading causes people to buy more music due to P2P sampling. At the time that I was a heavy P2P user, I bought almost twice as many CDs per month than before, and that even though my previous No. 1 source for finding out about my kind of music (the German alternative music TV station "Viva 2") had been shut down for the sake of a more RIAA-friendly third mainstream channel. In last year's fall, the RIAA and others successfully lobbied to make file sharing of (most) music illegal in Germany (can't point out one time too often that it was legal before!). I stopped downloading music and haven't bought a single CD since then. A coincidence?
My hypothesis: There are at least three groups of P2P users:
Now what does this boil down to? Blaming the casual user is ridiculous. They have been average customers wrt sales, and they stay average customers. What about the cadgers? Aren't they stealing? Yes, it's definitely not right what they do.
They're said to have historical experience in crucifying the messenger. At least that's what my brother Tomas says - and he's been very active in this business back in the 1470s.
So, you're saying that instead of requesting those third party software developers/manufacturers to fix their broken products, you opt to run your box wide open (that is, everything under Administrator account).
No I don't. But that's the way most non-geeks do it.
I'm running my W2K system with restricted access. For those third party apps that are broken and I cannot live without, I run those with Superior SU so that only those pieces of software are run with administrative access. Admittedly, not perfect, but much better than running web browser/word processor/whatever with administrative rights. Currently my list of programs that I use and that need administrator access are:
That's fine, but the average user doesn't know how to do that, thus he/she just runs the machine as admin. After all, what's all the talk about Windows being easy to use worth if you have to set fine-grained application rights?
Under linux, there's absolute no reason to always run root. You can usually configure even hardware access via different groups so that you only need to add your user account to group that has access to hardware device you absolutely need.
Absolutely, and the best thing is that the defaults are ok for most non-geek users. It's also quite simple for distributors to make things more secure than they would typically be under Windows. E.g. if a user is a member of the "dialup" group, you can configure the system in a way that allows dialing of a set of exisiting ISP numbers, but doesn't allow dialing of arbitrary numbers (you need root privileges to add them). This would make it very hard for dialer programs even if they existed for Linux. It's not that these things were absolutely impossible to realize in Windows, but the status quo is a lot worse - unless you're an expert and know how to work around the limitations.
This is not a problem with restricted access; it's a problem with third-party app.s written without any consideration of MS Windows' security model or the fundamental requirements of a multiuser runtime environment. Those app.s "break" because they were broken as designed.
For one, you are right. But OTOH, it's a given that most users cannot run their Windows as non-admin because some apps don't know how to handle it. And you're absolutely wrong to call other people "open source zealots" for pointing this out. And it is, in fact, partly Microsoft's fault, at least for older applications, because they chose to dump multi-user capability at a time when it was already an industry standard (think how long Unix predates DOS) for simplicity. They didn't feel compelled to change that for a long time (until Windows NT), and they even actively promoted products that were flawed in this way until the year 2000 (Windows ME).
Even some relatively new MS apps display bugs that aren't experienced when you run them as admin. This is not so surprising, because: While Microsoft's internal coding standards certainly require multi-user compatibility, they also buy a lot of software from other companies (rsp. the companies themselves). E.g. both Internet Explorer and PowerPoint weren't original MS apps - neither were Age of Empires and MechWarrior, among countless other examples. So some of these third-party programmers learned from the best...
A web browser should never implement a protocol like this.
Mozilla doesn't implement it, it just reads a URI from a link, determines that it doesn't know the protocol, and passes it off to Windows' URI handler. Which then for some reason may think it's a good idea to run it as a shell command and deltree/y c:.
"If you were able to run Windows with real restricted user accounts, this wouldn't really be such a problem."
You can. The fact that your either not familiar enough with it or too FUD bound to mention it doesn't change anything.
As long as OSS zealots keep fighting their IMAGE of MS software instead of what is actually out there they will continue to look like morons.
Yadda yadda yadda... of course you can create a restricted account and play some Minesweeper or Windows Calculator in it. But then run some third-party games or apps and see what breaks. There's just too much software that can't handle restricted access.
Only if 3rd button emulation is enabled in X.
Maybe because you don't want to carry around the 15 inch lcd and keyboard required to do actual work?
Maybe you wouldn't want to deal with these klunky peripherals any more. As for the video display, I could imagine a tiny laser that projects images directly onto your retina. Similar to a laser TV, but without the intermediate step via a fluorescent screen.
>> Does it have a good interface for blocking cookies?
> Yes, better than Mozilla's.
What exactly do you think it's better at?
Sorry, I misquoted the study a bit. It says that 78.4% of the people questioned refuse prosecution of people who use illegal copies of software for private purposes. Exactly half of them were strongly opposed, the other half moderately opposed. 16.8% were moderately in favor, 4.8% were strongly in favor of criminal prosecution.
OTOH, 68.5% strongly agree that commercial usage (which I take to include piracy for profit) of pirated software should be prosecuted. 26.6% are moderately in favor, the remaining 4.8% are split between moderate and strong rejection.
There is a big difference between backing up your software / music and grabbing free music and software off the net / from friends, and you know it. Stop being silly, you only make a fool of yourself.
Yes, it's exactly the latter that the majority in the BSA study did not want to see prosecuted (WRT software, but I would assume music gets similar opinions). Downloading illegal copies or "schoolyard piracy", as long as you're not making money off 'em. I infer that since very likely most people want to see theft prosecuted, they do not equate illegal copying with theft. Tough luck for your argument.
If the tools were able to stay above the workspace...
Try a better window manager. There are some for MS Windows (at least emulators, which is ok for most purposes). Put GIMP on a separate virtual desktop, and configure the image window to stay behind the toolboxes. I know it can be inconvenient that GIMP requires you to use a more flexible WM, but OTOH I like this solution since it's way more configurable than Photoshop's MDI.
the FBI requires thieves to film themselves during burglaries. Seriously, though, it does make sense to crack down on TV indecency. Studies have shown that 90% of sexual offenders had seen nipples in their early infancy.
I guess he was confusing it with Outlook Express. Ximian Evolution and KDE Kontact come closer to OL.
MySQL I thought was GPL'd... so you can use it for a busness without payment. If you want to adapt it and not release your source, sure, you need to pay money.
Only if you want to distribute your DB applications. For in-house use, you can keep the sources (and binaries) to yourself.
Trolltech QT is similar. They *almost* have it right. But they I think screwed up by not offering a GPL'd version, or at the very least the 3.x non-commercial edition (not bundled with a $50 book), of QT for Windows. This screws people who want to do hobbyish cross-platform stuff for Windows but can't afford the huge licence fees.
Yes, and then there isn't much of a point shelling out $1000 per developer if wxWidgets is free, and does essentially the same thing. It's LGPL'ed, so there is no need to release application source code.
But no one claimed people were rational about their software choices. :-)
We do not live in an Anarchy. If you do not feel that you have to abide by "societies" ethics, go live in the hills.
Funny that you say this, since the BSA study says that most (>75%) people think that private copying of software should not be persecuted. So why don't you go live in the hills if you don't like it? Do you want my help packing your bags?
I guess I was just raised a certain way. I actually work for and buy shit when I want it. I had to buy my own car growing up. When I wanted WarCraft II, I worked for and bought the fucking thing. Nowadays kids just pirate. A lot of the young generation these days have their cars bought for them. I think that's not just coincidence when you look at what else is freeloaded in today's society.
I used to have a C64, my brother had an Amiga 1000. My brother had several buddies who also had an Amiga and/or Commodore. Now guess what? There were pirated games all over the place. In fact, an original was a scarce phenomenon, and that was long long before P2P. So this is not new at all. And you can't tell me that people used to have more respect for "intellectual property" since that incorrect term for immaterial monopoly rights wasn't in widespread use until the 1974 inception of the WIPO. Most kids would not steal material things, it's just that they don't perceive copying software as stealing. To them, it's wrong, but a minor thing, like driving a few miles too fast. Almost everybody's doing it. If you get caught, you pay a small fine, (actually, penalties are much worse for piracy, but then nobody expects to get caught) and then continue to do it anyway. It simply isn't "real crime", and I doubt that previous generations would have seen it as such. You cannot deduce that they would've withstood the temptation from the fact that they weren't exposed to it.
A common rationalization not borne out by statistics or experience. As between the freeloader who wants to take software for free, and the software vendor who wants to sell software, I leave it to the latter to decide what is the best, most likely way for them to optimize the relationship.
I'll let Bill Gates speak for himself:
Man, you are just another drag on us all.
Could you explain this in more detail? Where did GP claim to illegaly copy software himself? What you don't get is that an uncopyable MS Office would be the death of Microsoft (unless they figured out a clever way to separate home use from business use while still keeping business prices up), so yes, some companies do profit a lot from software piracy. It's not that they wouldn't have taken hundreds of dollars if the student who infringes upon their copyright would have offered them to MS. But it's still way better for them if he copies their software, instead of going for the free OpenOffice. They know that bloody well, and this is why they do not enforce their copyrights towards private users. So in some situations, piracy may hurt the competition instead of the copyright holder.