Absolutely ridiculous. Your position makes the assumptions that choice is always a good thing, and that the free market is always the best mechanism to provide that choice. This is the fundamental flaw in libertarianism. The free market has no inherent quality that makes it more or less "correct" than anything else. It is not a natural order, it is not a universal truth or force. Applying it to health care would give people a choice between paying for care (which will likely very in quality depending on how much they can pay), and not paying. That's not a choice you should give someone. What about people who choose not to get insurance, or can't afford it? Those people deserve care just as much as you or I. Some things are just not meant to be run as a business, health care is at the top of that list. Profit maximization and all the practices that make business work are diametrically opposed to providing quality care for sick people. The two interests cannot be met at the same time.
The real question is this: is health care a business or a public service? Neither is fundamentally more right than the other, but they do lead to very different outcomes. I know what world I want to live in.
How would uninstalling Vista improve my transfer speeds between XP and Ubuntu? Or is Vista so bad it can affect the quality of other operating systems just by it's proximity?
One concession I will make is this, I used retail installation media of Vista Ultimate. So you can torrent that if you want:P
I'm guessing a great deal of these problems are from the OEM crap that gets added on top of the default installation. I saw a similar thing with XP computers when it first was released, one Gateway machine I fixed for a family member was nearly unusable after first boot! It ended up getting Win2000 installed.
Over half of those are patently false. Plain and simple, they're lies. I've been using vista for a while now and not experienced most of those. And this isn't on a beast of a machine either, it's an old P4 Dell. The rest are wildly exaggerated and repeated on this site. In fact, the only one I can confirm to have any truth is the slow file copy bug, XP does do that faster. You could maybe get away with saying DRM is a problem, but I don't use any DRM encumbered files so magically it's not an issue for me. All the hidef content I get from BT and mp3s work absolutely fine and always will. DRM is mostly a boogie man, it only effects people who buy content protected by it. The subsystems are there to support DRM, but guess what? They're also there in XP. Imagine that.
A related issue about slow file copy: there's a curious discrepancy I found with Linux copying files over a network with windows PCs. Copying from XP to Vista took less than 1/4 the time to copy files from XP to Ubuntu or Vista to Ubuntu (which was even slower). Ubuntu also became incredibly slow and unresponsive during the copying, so much so that I gave up trying to do anything with the machine during the time it took (some 3 hours). I can't figure out why it would take over four times longer to do with Linux than with windows. Has anyone noticed a similar problem and found a way to correct it?
At least the checks and balances are working, for now anyway. The idea of making certain drawings illegal is completely asinine. The flaws in the reasoning to make such pictures illegal should be apparent to even the school age kids the naive and misguided idiots (law makers) think they're protecting.
What if I was held in a room and not allowed to go and urinate? The definition of torture is anything cruel, humiliating, or degrading. Doing that to a suspect to coerce a confession certainly falls under at least one of those.
It's a very specific graphics chipset that has issues: the integrated 200M also called the Xpress 1100. There's been improvements for nearly all other ATI hardware, but that one still fails miserably under Linux and the talk I hear says not to expect it to ever work properly. So windows is the only option I have if I want that machine to be functional.
Unless they've done some huge improvements in the last few days, no, nothing has changed. I tried it out just last week, I have Ubuntu dual booted on that laptop and there are still all the same problems.
It's always been graphics that fall short for desktop/laptop use for me. I use mostly ATI, their linux support just isn't good enough. The problems are more basic than just not having compiz, even 2d stuff is horrible. Tearing and lag for basic things like scrolling a damn web page, just not acceptable. OK, admittedly that's the worst single example computer I have, a laptop with integrated ATI graphics.
Lack of graphics support isn't a problem for servers (neither is wireless) so that's where I'm most likely to be utilizing Linux at the moment. I keep checking in with Ubuntu's progress, when it works I really like it and it's always getting better.
Are they going to apply it to the countless terabytes of unencumbered mp3, FLAC, and avi files that get released constantly on bit torrent et al? Unless they find a way to retroactively apply DRM and convince everyone to start using it for everything there's no way their dream of a Vista requirement for media play back could ever be a reality. This is only going to apply to the--very small--group that buys music from stores that use this particular DRM. If it's really as bad as people make it out to be, then even those people wont be customers for long. MS can hide behind technobabble and buzz words but in the end when a customer just can't get his damn music to play how they want, they're going to move on to something that actually works.
Do people still not understand how Vista manages RAM? This is slashdot, of all places I'd expect the people here to understand pre-emptive caching. That 50% RAM usage isn't Vista, it's all kinds of stuff that you are constantly opening being kept in memory so that the next time you need it the program can open faster. It learns your habits and caches stuff it knows you frequently use. It's the reason why WMP11, firefox, or word opens nearly instantly when I click on it. You can even turn this feature off it bugs you so much, it's a service called superfetch.
There are legitimate reasons for disliking Vista, there's so many in fact that you don't need to be using this false one to pad your list of complaints. When you do, it weakens your argument and makes it look like you don't have any idea what you're talking about.
As long as the data isn't personally identifiable there shouldn't be a real privacy concern. The problem is you have no way of knowing for sure if it is personal data or not. For example, the number of files and folders on your hard drive isn't really sensitive personal information, I wouldn't care if MS or anyone knew that, but the names of the files and folders would be a concern to me. Same with e-mail and user accounts. How many e-mails I get a day, how long I have Thunderbird open, those aren't privacy issues but things like the sender, subject, and body of the e-mails would be. With so many skeptical eyes pointing at them, I doubt MS would try and sneak something in there that looks at more than it's supposed to, or more than they admit to in the agreement. They'd be risking a lot and not getting very much in return. Ultimately it's a question of whether or not you trust MS, personally I don't have any suspicions that they're collecting more than they say they are, but I don't blame anyone for not giving MS the benefit of the doubt.
I solved the problem by ignoring it. I prefer to simply rework my definition of "problem" and also maybe my definition of "success" so that the two may coexist without logical conflict.
It is unethical because if not for people like you, there would be no shortage, and everyone that legitimately wanted one for the actual purpose of playing it could buy one at the fair market price that Nintendo sells them at. The higher price is artificially created by the same group of people skimming their share off the top. A group of middlemen, such as yourself, step in and buys them all up, forcing people who actually want to buy one to play the damn thing to pay an even higher price so that you alone can benefit. Doing this created no value and contributed nothing to the market, and while it's not illegal, it is absolutely unethical. You are a scalper, justify it how you want, it's still wrong.
I plan on doing exactly that. This next election and presidential term are going to be a large factor in my decision to leave. There are good candidates on the Dem and Rep sides, and there is definitely the potential for some great change to happen after the next election. However, bringing the country back to it's former place in the world, and restoring America's moral force is a job that will last more than one presidency. The right president in 2008 would be a monumental and necessary first step, but that cannot fix eight years of internal mismanagement, and a blundering, near criminal foreign policy.
How is that different than our current situation? Maybe more automated and less false positives but they'd still have to go through the same process we have now.
I suppose you would need a clean copy then. Or maybe learning how the user data is stored could reveal how the watermark is embedded in the file and lead to a way to defeat it. But in practice just removing the user data is enough to keep p2p operating as normal, since there'd be no way to identify the original source of the file and hold them responsible for distributing it.
It's probably a bit trickier than rewriting some tags or metadata that is padding the file. If the watermark is made to personally identify the user it was sold to you could get two different copies from two different users and figure out what is different. The difference is the watermark. After that it's up to some ingenious coder to figure out the best way to remove or render the watermark unidentifiable. Probably as simple as merging/averaging the two.
I wish I could get away with sniping at people after quoting four or five words, completely ignoring the qualifications around said words. Unfortunately that wouldn't be very entertaining to read by anyone except people who already agree with me so I'd have to find a way to pad it out with some sort of filler...maybe I should join a political campaign. Any of them.
Anyway, clearly there are people who get drunk/high at work, you may even have seen them before. People break laws all the time. And plenty of things that aren't strictly illegal get followed DESPITE a lack of laws forbidding them; so called "unwritten laws" or common courtesies. If you think you have the moral authority to get high at work go ahead, your boss has the moral authority (and probably the legal authority depending on your locale) to fire you. Even if it were legal to smoke marijuana at all I still wouldn't do it. The fact that it's illegal now isn't stopping me, I'm stopping me. I know a lot of people that ignore that law and smoke pot anyway, if it were suddenly legal they'd probably still do it. Unless it really is just teenage rebellion, which would be strange from men in their twenties.
When the laws differ to some great degree from the "moral compass" (and I HATE that term, it's a gross over simplification with zero nuance) of society at large, that's when the system breaks down. Downloading songs is illegal, people are still doing it en masse. Would that it were that the word of law always reflected the general morality of the country, the two often find themselves at odds, but we get it right on the most serious of matters. There's no where on Earth where unprovoked murder is legal--to my knowledge anyway, if there is such a place please let me know to cross it off my list of places to vacation. Same with theft of property, rape, kidnapping, etc. For those things, yes the individuals sense of right and wrong acts as the first and last necessary barrier from the crime being committed. Making murder a crime doesn't stop murder, it keeps murderers away from society by giving us legal authority to lock them up for an amount of time for them to be rehabilitated (in theory anyway). That is the utility of still having laws against those crimes.
Would you start murdering people tomorrow if congress said it was no longer a crime? I really hope I don't live in a country where people would answer yes to that. If that is the case then I have GROSSLY overestimated the compassion and general decency of my countrymen. I just don't believe I'm working, living, talking and laughing with people every single day who would slit my throat at their first possible chance were it not for the fact there's a law against it!
You might want some new friends if that is the case.
I've never played that game, or any of the Castlevania series for that matter, but I know of the "What is a man?" exchange because it's part of the 4chan meme-set.
So you're at least a notch above this gamer, who only learned those quotes by listening to other people without lives! Not that my head isn't a trap for a vast amount of equally useless knowledge; I could probably reproduce the scripts for whole scenes of House MD.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely ridiculous. Your position makes the assumptions that choice is always a good thing, and that the free market is always the best mechanism to provide that choice. This is the fundamental flaw in libertarianism. The free market has no inherent quality that makes it more or less "correct" than anything else. It is not a natural order, it is not a universal truth or force. Applying it to health care would give people a choice between paying for care (which will likely very in quality depending on how much they can pay), and not paying. That's not a choice you should give someone. What about people who choose not to get insurance, or can't afford it? Those people deserve care just as much as you or I. Some things are just not meant to be run as a business, health care is at the top of that list. Profit maximization and all the practices that make business work are diametrically opposed to providing quality care for sick people. The two interests cannot be met at the same time.
The real question is this: is health care a business or a public service? Neither is fundamentally more right than the other, but they do lead to very different outcomes. I know what world I want to live in.
How would uninstalling Vista improve my transfer speeds between XP and Ubuntu? Or is Vista so bad it can affect the quality of other operating systems just by it's proximity?
One concession I will make is this, I used retail installation media of Vista Ultimate. So you can torrent that if you want :P
I'm guessing a great deal of these problems are from the OEM crap that gets added on top of the default installation. I saw a similar thing with XP computers when it first was released, one Gateway machine I fixed for a family member was nearly unusable after first boot! It ended up getting Win2000 installed.
Over half of those are patently false. Plain and simple, they're lies. I've been using vista for a while now and not experienced most of those. And this isn't on a beast of a machine either, it's an old P4 Dell. The rest are wildly exaggerated and repeated on this site. In fact, the only one I can confirm to have any truth is the slow file copy bug, XP does do that faster. You could maybe get away with saying DRM is a problem, but I don't use any DRM encumbered files so magically it's not an issue for me. All the hidef content I get from BT and mp3s work absolutely fine and always will. DRM is mostly a boogie man, it only effects people who buy content protected by it. The subsystems are there to support DRM, but guess what? They're also there in XP. Imagine that.
A related issue about slow file copy: there's a curious discrepancy I found with Linux copying files over a network with windows PCs. Copying from XP to Vista took less than 1/4 the time to copy files from XP to Ubuntu or Vista to Ubuntu (which was even slower). Ubuntu also became incredibly slow and unresponsive during the copying, so much so that I gave up trying to do anything with the machine during the time it took (some 3 hours). I can't figure out why it would take over four times longer to do with Linux than with windows. Has anyone noticed a similar problem and found a way to correct it?
At least the checks and balances are working, for now anyway. The idea of making certain drawings illegal is completely asinine. The flaws in the reasoning to make such pictures illegal should be apparent to even the school age kids the naive and misguided idiots (law makers) think they're protecting.
Haven't you been watching the news lately? That's exactly what they'd do.
It's a very specific graphics chipset that has issues: the integrated 200M also called the Xpress 1100. There's been improvements for nearly all other ATI hardware, but that one still fails miserably under Linux and the talk I hear says not to expect it to ever work properly. So windows is the only option I have if I want that machine to be functional.
Unless they've done some huge improvements in the last few days, no, nothing has changed. I tried it out just last week, I have Ubuntu dual booted on that laptop and there are still all the same problems.
It's always been graphics that fall short for desktop/laptop use for me. I use mostly ATI, their linux support just isn't good enough. The problems are more basic than just not having compiz, even 2d stuff is horrible. Tearing and lag for basic things like scrolling a damn web page, just not acceptable. OK, admittedly that's the worst single example computer I have, a laptop with integrated ATI graphics.
Lack of graphics support isn't a problem for servers (neither is wireless) so that's where I'm most likely to be utilizing Linux at the moment. I keep checking in with Ubuntu's progress, when it works I really like it and it's always getting better.
oh come on, OSX isn't that bad.
Obviously by being so obscure no one bothers to code malware for it! When you start seeing malware, then it's time to move on :P
Are they going to apply it to the countless terabytes of unencumbered mp3, FLAC, and avi files that get released constantly on bit torrent et al? Unless they find a way to retroactively apply DRM and convince everyone to start using it for everything there's no way their dream of a Vista requirement for media play back could ever be a reality. This is only going to apply to the--very small--group that buys music from stores that use this particular DRM. If it's really as bad as people make it out to be, then even those people wont be customers for long. MS can hide behind technobabble and buzz words but in the end when a customer just can't get his damn music to play how they want, they're going to move on to something that actually works.
That is either shocking incompetence or hilarious parody. Did that really come from their privacy policy?
Do people still not understand how Vista manages RAM? This is slashdot, of all places I'd expect the people here to understand pre-emptive caching. That 50% RAM usage isn't Vista, it's all kinds of stuff that you are constantly opening being kept in memory so that the next time you need it the program can open faster. It learns your habits and caches stuff it knows you frequently use. It's the reason why WMP11, firefox, or word opens nearly instantly when I click on it. You can even turn this feature off it bugs you so much, it's a service called superfetch.
There are legitimate reasons for disliking Vista, there's so many in fact that you don't need to be using this false one to pad your list of complaints. When you do, it weakens your argument and makes it look like you don't have any idea what you're talking about.
As long as the data isn't personally identifiable there shouldn't be a real privacy concern. The problem is you have no way of knowing for sure if it is personal data or not. For example, the number of files and folders on your hard drive isn't really sensitive personal information, I wouldn't care if MS or anyone knew that, but the names of the files and folders would be a concern to me. Same with e-mail and user accounts. How many e-mails I get a day, how long I have Thunderbird open, those aren't privacy issues but things like the sender, subject, and body of the e-mails would be. With so many skeptical eyes pointing at them, I doubt MS would try and sneak something in there that looks at more than it's supposed to, or more than they admit to in the agreement. They'd be risking a lot and not getting very much in return. Ultimately it's a question of whether or not you trust MS, personally I don't have any suspicions that they're collecting more than they say they are, but I don't blame anyone for not giving MS the benefit of the doubt.
I solved the problem by ignoring it.
I prefer to simply rework my definition of "problem" and also maybe my definition of "success" so that the two may coexist without logical conflict.
It is unethical because if not for people like you, there would be no shortage, and everyone that legitimately wanted one for the actual purpose of playing it could buy one at the fair market price that Nintendo sells them at. The higher price is artificially created by the same group of people skimming their share off the top. A group of middlemen, such as yourself, step in and buys them all up, forcing people who actually want to buy one to play the damn thing to pay an even higher price so that you alone can benefit. Doing this created no value and contributed nothing to the market, and while it's not illegal, it is absolutely unethical. You are a scalper, justify it how you want, it's still wrong.
And I bet the memory stick gets taken out more often too.
I plan on doing exactly that. This next election and presidential term are going to be a large factor in my decision to leave. There are good candidates on the Dem and Rep sides, and there is definitely the potential for some great change to happen after the next election. However, bringing the country back to it's former place in the world, and restoring America's moral force is a job that will last more than one presidency. The right president in 2008 would be a monumental and necessary first step, but that cannot fix eight years of internal mismanagement, and a blundering, near criminal foreign policy.
How is that different than our current situation? Maybe more automated and less false positives but they'd still have to go through the same process we have now.
I suppose you would need a clean copy then. Or maybe learning how the user data is stored could reveal how the watermark is embedded in the file and lead to a way to defeat it. But in practice just removing the user data is enough to keep p2p operating as normal, since there'd be no way to identify the original source of the file and hold them responsible for distributing it.
It's probably a bit trickier than rewriting some tags or metadata that is padding the file. If the watermark is made to personally identify the user it was sold to you could get two different copies from two different users and figure out what is different. The difference is the watermark. After that it's up to some ingenious coder to figure out the best way to remove or render the watermark unidentifiable. Probably as simple as merging/averaging the two.
Maybe a golden one, even?
I wish I could get away with sniping at people after quoting four or five words, completely ignoring the qualifications around said words. Unfortunately that wouldn't be very entertaining to read by anyone except people who already agree with me so I'd have to find a way to pad it out with some sort of filler...maybe I should join a political campaign. Any of them.
Anyway, clearly there are people who get drunk/high at work, you may even have seen them before. People break laws all the time. And plenty of things that aren't strictly illegal get followed DESPITE a lack of laws forbidding them; so called "unwritten laws" or common courtesies. If you think you have the moral authority to get high at work go ahead, your boss has the moral authority (and probably the legal authority depending on your locale) to fire you. Even if it were legal to smoke marijuana at all I still wouldn't do it. The fact that it's illegal now isn't stopping me, I'm stopping me. I know a lot of people that ignore that law and smoke pot anyway, if it were suddenly legal they'd probably still do it. Unless it really is just teenage rebellion, which would be strange from men in their twenties.
When the laws differ to some great degree from the "moral compass" (and I HATE that term, it's a gross over simplification with zero nuance) of society at large, that's when the system breaks down. Downloading songs is illegal, people are still doing it en masse. Would that it were that the word of law always reflected the general morality of the country, the two often find themselves at odds, but we get it right on the most serious of matters. There's no where on Earth where unprovoked murder is legal--to my knowledge anyway, if there is such a place please let me know to cross it off my list of places to vacation. Same with theft of property, rape, kidnapping, etc. For those things, yes the individuals sense of right and wrong acts as the first and last necessary barrier from the crime being committed. Making murder a crime doesn't stop murder, it keeps murderers away from society by giving us legal authority to lock them up for an amount of time for them to be rehabilitated (in theory anyway). That is the utility of still having laws against those crimes.
Would you start murdering people tomorrow if congress said it was no longer a crime? I really hope I don't live in a country where people would answer yes to that. If that is the case then I have GROSSLY overestimated the compassion and general decency of my countrymen. I just don't believe I'm working, living, talking and laughing with people every single day who would slit my throat at their first possible chance were it not for the fact there's a law against it!
You might want some new friends if that is the case.
Die monster. You don't belong in this world.
I've never played that game, or any of the Castlevania series for that matter, but I know of the "What is a man?" exchange because it's part of the 4chan meme-set.
So you're at least a notch above this gamer, who only learned those quotes by listening to other people without lives! Not that my head isn't a trap for a vast amount of equally useless knowledge; I could probably reproduce the scripts for whole scenes of House MD.