You only think that 'cause you read the KJV, which, even if it came from the most direct and accurate sources (it doesn't) is written in language that you, no offense, probably don't even understand. If you look in the NIV you'll see clear as day that you're actually supposed to get stoned with your waitress on Sunday.
I've been to a few random churches. They all used hymnals.
I guess you might need a video screen if you had one of those "praise bands" playing. But on the other hand, their lyrics are so predictable you don't really need to look. Pure veg-out music. At least some of the songs in the hymnals actually bother to discuss the ideas of the faith. But that's getting off topic.
Hymnals are better, anyway, they can convey more information (not just the lyrics, but four-part harmony). And if you're a musician (or even just marginally intelligent) you can do
Professors perform "independent" research standing on the shoulders of giants, and with lots of smart people around them to quickly point out oversights. It is true that some engineers (term used broadly enough to encompass mere computer programmers like myself) know how to make stuff explode, but most of that knowledge doesn't come from the few semesters of physics we took in college, it comes from practical experience. I did well in my physics courses but off the top of my head I wouldn't know where to start building a bomb.
One thing I would at least know, however, is my limitations; as I have no experience in bomb-making, I wouldn't start drawing up plans, I'd look up practical materials on bombs, case-studies. Draw from people that do have that experience. I'd look at bombs that worked and bombs that failed, and trust research that over my ability to grasp the physics of combustion. However, someone that follows one idealistic thread of logic to extremism, keeping out of mind all the examples of society-building suggesting that his ideal society probably wouldn't survive very well, might not have the greatest facility for that kind of critical thought.
Meanwhile, there are people in the "Enlightened West" that have designed consumer-level network gateways whose passwords can be reset through an http request requiring no authentication. Anyone with one of these routers could browse to a website with some dodgy Javascript (Myspace had a vulnerability allowing people to inject Javascript onto other people's pages not long ago) and get their router autopwned. All because some programmer only thought, "How is my plan going to work?", instead of, "How is my plan going to fail?" Because he failed to draw on the years of practical experience implementing HTTP authentication schemes. Other people surely reviewed the code and failed similarly. As programmers they can only write complex programs because other people have developed frameworks to make it simple; if they were terrorists and had no bomb-making framework to follow their bombs would fizzle.
You're missing the point. It may be in Apple's interest to try to restrict what systems OS X runs on. But only DRM keeps other people from acting in their own interests and using OS X on systems of their choice.
GP's statement that OS X is locked down by DRM is a fact no matter whose interest that lock-down serves. Even if it was better for everyone involved and for the world community as a whole that OS X was locked to Apple hardware, it is as a matter of plain fact locked down.
My brother and I used to joke that the correct behavior of man for any argument is to print "I don't need no damn instructions!" and quit. You'd instead use the program "woman" to get the manpage. It is, of course, very easy to set this up for your account and amuse your friends and co-workers.
When you tap the winkey and the menu comes up, tap the winkey again and you'll get focus back where you want it.
The temptation to hit escape is great. As it is when you tap alt and wind up in the menu bar. Especially for a vi user. But you must resist, and in both cases, walk out the same way you walked in.
The Windows UI is fairly discoverable, and I think it's pretty consistent. I have a few gripes, but probably fewer than most people would have if they sat down in front of my wack custom FVWM job. The winkey is good because it allows Windows to add keyboard shortcuts without conflicting with other programs. The only OS-level shortcut I can think of that uses alt or ctrl is alt-tab. Compare to MacOS, where the same primary modifier is used for apps and for the OS, and every time Apple wants to add a shortcut they clobber existing programs.
Hydrogen is not an energy source, it's a way to store energy. It is not and will never be a solution to any energy crisis, it just pushes that energy crisis up to the level of mass electricity generation. It may be useful for alleviating pollution problems in dense urban areas because, similar to a battery, it doesn't pollute where it's consumed. Hydrogen isn't competing against ethanol, solar, water, wind, coal and nuclear power plants for power generation, it's competing against electric batteries for use in cars (I think the advantage over batteries is that they're better suited to long-range driving, which people are accustomed to in gas cars, but I'm no expert).
Ethanol, on the other hand, takes much of its energy input from the sun. It could thus contribute to solving the energy crisis. It can also do so on the quick and on the cheap, since we have lots of experience utilizing the energy stored in it. Its use creates pollution where it's consumed, which is unfortunate for people like me that live in major cities.
What do you think are the flaws inherent in ethanol that make it a necessarily bad energy solution? The worst things I've heard is that (when made from corn) it struggles to yield net-positive energy, and that it pollutes at point of use. To me, if the problem of efficiency is solved ethanol seems that it could be a source of power for cars in a generation.
The other power sources you mention, wind, solar and nuclear, are (along with coal and oil) currently sources for electricity generation. They're competing for something totally different. I am not really an expert on this, but I'd guess based on this that gasoline and ethanol aren't as efficient for mass electricity generation; if this is true, then yes, the true energy solution is to centralize generation in big, efficient power plants and use electricity and fuel cells at point of use.
I think it's a great idea in principle. I think that lots of people would hate (like jury duty). I think that makes me like it even more.
Having such a large and diverse group of people could lead to really unpredictable group dynamics, so there'd need to more formal processes than just brainstorming to generate questions. At the same time any professional moderators would have to be sure not to color the proceedings with their opinions. It would be hard.
Yeah, not only are Windows keys supported in X, it's my opinion that they're better, since in X they act purely as modifier keys (unless you have a DE or WM that fucks it all up... wouldn't be surprised if Gnome or KDE did). The most annoying part of the Windows key on Windows is getting the Start menu every time you tap it (similarly I find it annoying to accidentally hit Alt and go into the menu bar, and most X apps don't do that, they just let you use Alt-F for File menu, etc.)
It's natural that X supports Windows keys; Unix workstations have had various modifiers other than Ctrl and Alt for many years; the Windows key typically corresponds to some "Meta" or "Super" key that would have some funny vendor-specific symbol on Unix keyboards; on my Sun keyboard it's marked with a diamond. The real benefit of these keys is that they allow you to define keybindings for your window manager or desktop environment that won't conflict with your apps.
I basically agree with you; the problem of transporting you and your boat to the lake is very different from the problem of transporting you, without your boat, to work. And even that varies a lot depending on what kind of area you live in.
The main problem that shared-vehicle individual transportation systems solve is parking congestion, not traffic congestion. If everyone's getting in their own vehicles there are no fewer cars on the road. So if you use your own car to tow your boat to the lake, and park it on your property (or some other paid-for spot) there's nothing really gained by forcing you into a system like this.
If you work in a dense urban core there might be something gained by banning you from leaving your car parked in that dense urban core all day. However, I'm not sure that kind of ban is even necessary in many dense cities; in downtown Chicago where I work, at least, parking spots are scarce and thus expensive, which pushes many daily commuters onto trains and buses. Rush hour traffic is still very heavy in the loop and on the major freeways, but automated personal transit systems wouldn't fix that unless they were fundamentally more space-efficient than current cars.
I'll tell you how Silverlight is Not Great, and I've never used it in the slightest. And it's not because it's by Microsoft, or because it's not free.
It's Not Great for the same reason Flash is Not Great: it almost always results in a worse user interface than using normal/x?html/.
For the developer the site is The Thing. It's important that the site has clean code, looks cool, and is easy to maintain. Maybe Silverlight makes that possible.
For the user the site is likely just one stop on a journey tied together by a web search. It's important that the site behaves similarly to all others in certain respects: that the browser's navigation facilities work, that the browser's text search works, that input behavior for these are the same as on all other pages (keeping in mind that key bindings, mouse bindings, context menus, etc. vary from browser to browser and user to user). Flash breaks this, and if Silverlight doesn't do the same I'll be shocked.
For the developer it's tempting to think the site is a book to be read from start to finish. But users are more likely to look in the index, tear out a few pages, and glue them into collages of their own creation. The developer can use the introductory chapters to lay out unusual notational conventions that will apply throughout the text but the user, not having read from the beginning, is only confused to see them used in the middle. If you're tempted to cry and bitch about this as a developer, get over yourself: users have more important things to do in life than figure out this super cool new interface to your web site.
A big part of the reason the web took off is that its limited facilities for UI design forced sites to mostly follow the same conventions. If you want to do something better, more complicated, something that people have to learn, then write a damn desktop app.
(Yes, there are useful and good things that can be done by embedding Flash/Java in web pages. Nifty videos and games, no-install VNC and ssh clients... as long as they stay self-contained and aren't part of the page's navigation or textual information presentation, knock yourself out).
Ah, you're using a hacked-up version called VIM with even more cheats added, and you're stuck in turbo-button record mode (which lets you record attack sequences so you can unleash them with inhuman speed on your opponent... it's totally cheap, only lamers do it). To get out of that hit q, and *then* do the:wq thing (or:q! if you're not a cheater).
When I say, "even more cheats," what I mean is relative to ed, the true original version. vi is like wallhacking.
That doesn't make sense at all as an analogy. This idea assumes that all Microsoft-signed binaries are clean and that any virus signatures found in those files should be ignored. It's not an extra layer of security, it's a way to prevent the annoyance of false-positives in an existing layer. I can't think of a direct analogy involving DRM; it would have to involve exempting files meeting certain criteria from restriction.
If an AV scanner decides to let all MS-signed binaries go, they might also consider letting through binaries signed by other reputable vendors. But they should be sure not to open the door too wide (the story of Apple shipping iPods with Windows viruses on them comes to mind).
How do we fix this? That depends on who exactly you mean be "we". We slashdot readers can talk about laws we'd like to see passed, but lawmakers are more likely to listen to companies whose lawyers draft long EULAs than us.
One thing that I do routinely is actually read contracts put in front of me. Especially if someone is waiting on me. People waiting sometimes get annoyed or impatient, but I explain that I like to know precisely what I'm agreeing to when I sign my name.
I've never actually walked out without signing a contract because I found its terms unreasonable, even when I thought some of them were stupid. My dad did once, though. He was buying a car, and the guy in the office was putting papers down in front of him, one after the other. One was an arbitration agreement. Most people wouldn't know what it meant or its significance, but as a lawyer he did. It meant something like agreeing to take any complaint against the dealer to arbitration rather than court, and of course the arbiter would belong to a group appointed by businesses and not consumers (I think there's a fair case that something must be done to cut down the cost of lawsuits, but impartiality is necessary; this isn't a topic I'm personally an expert on, and it's just a tangent). When the dealer wouldn't let him buy the car without signing he walked straight out.
Google caches pages, modifies them (puts a header at the top and highlights search terms within the pages) and distributes them to users. They also do language translations. I don't think Google wants to encourage the idea that this kind of activity requires permission.
Although you're marked as a troll, you're stating the honest opinion of lots of people and the opinion that shapes policy of many companies. So I'll bite. I think your characterization of BitTorrent users, looked at by the numbers, is probably true. While there are people using torrents to distribute content that's both legal and non-commercial (Free Software, for example), it probably makes for a pretty small percentage of the total. But that doesn't matter. The Internet is a network of peers. That's how it was designed, and I believe that's how it ought to stay. The more rights to communicate are gated by money and elitist policies the fewer voices contribute. You need to pay big bucks to get a fat pipe, but you shouldn't need to pay big bucks to get all the protocols. That's what the Internet means on a technical level. If you're not selling me that, you're not selling me Internet access, you're selling me "Web and Email access". If you want to offer that as a product, go ahead. But it's *not* true Internet access.
If the library was offered by its authors only under a commercial license and Sony did what we're accusing them of here (distributing it without a proper license), the exact same options would be available between Sony and the library's authors. They'd have to negotiate a deal, or the authors could try to sue Sony for damages.
Copyright law by itself disallows unauthorized reproduction and distribution, so what most commercial EULAs do is impose restrictions on top of copyright law. Restrictions on copying that might otherwise be deemed "fair use" or similar, restrictions on reverse-engineering, stuff like that. The GPL only gives a user (whether a developer or end user) rights above what copyright law does by default: the right to see the source code, and limited rights of modification and distribution. The GPL can't be more restrictive than such a EULA. If Sony was going to use a library in their game they wouldn't agree to a EULA, they'd agree to some other type of commercial license. Such a license would probably give them the source code and rights of modification and distribution less restrictive than the GPL per-copy (probably not even requiring attribution), but probably in limited number. It's probably fair to call such a license "less restrictive" than the GPL, though if it was limited in number it might be more accurate to call it "differently restrictive".
All that is totally moot to what Sony is accused of here. If they violated the library's copyright the authors may attempt to stop further distribution (probably already moot) and recover damages (I'm not a lawyer, but I bet if they have no history of selling commercial licenses of that library they would have a hard time getting money from Sony; I have a feeling, not based on anything other than intuition, that a court wouldn't make Sony GPL ICO completely). Same thing would happen if they illegally distributed Microsoft's or IBM's code.
Counterpoint: are you likely in real life to encounter situations in real life where the best solution is similar to the solution that pornography or violent media shows as successful? Such media tends (I'll certainly grant exceptions, particularly in pornography, which is extremely diverse... much of it is overtly demeaning, though) to show success coming from aggressive behavior, through defeating an opposing force or subjecting a sexual partner through some form of domination for one's own satisfaction. How often in reality is any problem you face going to be solved by reverting to vigilante-ism? And how often will a healthy sex life be based on what's seen in mainstream pornography? Not very often. Especially not when dealing with people in a society.
Moreover, much of our media is focused on victory or closure, as the culmination of a struggle. Killing the final boss in a video game, the orgasm in pornography, sure. But many films and novels end with a victory as well, a victory as earned reward for overcoming some conflict. Or grades in school: solve some canned problems without making too many mistakes, get an A. This really isn't a realistic depiction of how our lives work. The important events in determining Iraq's future happened after the President declared victory. The most important parts of a relationship happen after the wedding. When you do a project in real life, it is important to do something with feedback received from your boss or people that use it, and not just "accept your grade". Victories and defeats are ongoing. And this is often poorly represented in our media (though certainly there are exceptions).
So I'd say you can play lots of games, read books, watch films, with any subject matter you'd like, and not get an ounce of reality. How about that?
So what's more important to you as a person: being regarded as a professional, or safeguarding your personal time? Making your boss happy or making yourself happy?
One of these things, to you, is pretty abstract. If your boss isn't happy about you having limited availability on nights and weekends that might have an affect on future income levels, or it might not. And this might matter to you, or it might not. On the other hand, you know for sure that when you leave for vacation you can actually relax, since you'll only get called if it's really important.
The bottom line is: you have talents and you've spent a significant amount of time and effort cultivating them into useful and marketable skills. Why should you suffer for this by working longer hours than anyone else, and by being on call all the time? When you are the best person for a job you have bargaining power, and every right to use it; or you could sacrifice now in hopes to improve things in the future. I would just say to make sure that you will eventually benefit, personally, in a way that's truly important to you for all those extra hours. If you're working on a project you really believe in the success of the project could be one of those ways. Most people, at any given time, are not, and are working because someone else is going to benefit financially from the work they do. They're just getting part of the cut.
The specific field I work in doesn't usually require much on-call time outside of normal hours. The specific job I have only rarely requires working long days, weekends or holidays (and there isn't a company culture that expects them either). I don't own a cell phone. My commute is a 35-minute bike ride. My co-workers are cool people. I live in a great city (and, moreover, it's the city I want to live in). None of this is an accident. I have plenty of friends that make more money than me, have more desk/office space, work on cooler technology. I wouldn't trade my situation with any of theirs. Not because their situations are bad (they all seem to be doing OK, even the ones doing consulting or working for investment houses with ridiculous work schedules), but because mine is a result of actively working for what's important to me. Always making a few mistakes, never quite perfect, but always taking note of what makes me happy, what I really care about. Career for its own sake is just not one of those things.
This isn't some kind of super hard technical problem, is it? The resource was available, now it isn't. Restore it!
For everyone affected by this: DRM of this sort means that users have to trust providers to maintain a system as long as they want to use the content. If the users only pay once for the content, the only way that users have to put economic pressure on providers to properly maintain their DRM systems is through refund demands backed by lawsuits. Users shouldn't bear with MLB. That is absurd. If users accept a DRM solution of this nature they should demand 100% service. Maintaining old solutions for a very long time is part of deploying a DRM system. If companies aren't willing to do that they shouldn't use DRM. And if the only way consumers have to enforce that it stays up is threat of refunds and lawsuits, then they have to use those methods.
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You only think that 'cause you read the KJV, which, even if it came from the most direct and accurate sources (it doesn't) is written in language that you, no offense, probably don't even understand. If you look in the NIV you'll see clear as day that you're actually supposed to get stoned with your waitress on Sunday.
I guess you might need a video screen if you had one of those "praise bands" playing. But on the other hand, their lyrics are so predictable you don't really need to look. Pure veg-out music. At least some of the songs in the hymnals actually bother to discuss the ideas of the faith. But that's getting off topic.
Hymnals are better, anyway, they can convey more information (not just the lyrics, but four-part harmony). And if you're a musician (or even just marginally intelligent) you can do
instead of so you can do other stuff while you sing.That all said, I strongly prefer to
instead.Well, no big loss... it will just take Fred and Co. a bit longer to look up his soft-porn, football scores, and bible verses.
A trip to Redmond? Are you kidding me? From accounts I've heard of the place, you'd have to pay me *more* if you were giving me a trip to Redmond.
Professors perform "independent" research standing on the shoulders of giants, and with lots of smart people around them to quickly point out oversights. It is true that some engineers (term used broadly enough to encompass mere computer programmers like myself) know how to make stuff explode, but most of that knowledge doesn't come from the few semesters of physics we took in college, it comes from practical experience. I did well in my physics courses but off the top of my head I wouldn't know where to start building a bomb.
One thing I would at least know, however, is my limitations; as I have no experience in bomb-making, I wouldn't start drawing up plans, I'd look up practical materials on bombs, case-studies. Draw from people that do have that experience. I'd look at bombs that worked and bombs that failed, and trust research that over my ability to grasp the physics of combustion. However, someone that follows one idealistic thread of logic to extremism, keeping out of mind all the examples of society-building suggesting that his ideal society probably wouldn't survive very well, might not have the greatest facility for that kind of critical thought.
Meanwhile, there are people in the "Enlightened West" that have designed consumer-level network gateways whose passwords can be reset through an http request requiring no authentication. Anyone with one of these routers could browse to a website with some dodgy Javascript (Myspace had a vulnerability allowing people to inject Javascript onto other people's pages not long ago) and get their router autopwned. All because some programmer only thought, "How is my plan going to work?", instead of, "How is my plan going to fail?" Because he failed to draw on the years of practical experience implementing HTTP authentication schemes. Other people surely reviewed the code and failed similarly. As programmers they can only write complex programs because other people have developed frameworks to make it simple; if they were terrorists and had no bomb-making framework to follow their bombs would fizzle.
Source? TFA doesn't mention this, but then again TFA is fluffy crap.
You're missing the point. It may be in Apple's interest to try to restrict what systems OS X runs on. But only DRM keeps other people from acting in their own interests and using OS X on systems of their choice.
GP's statement that OS X is locked down by DRM is a fact no matter whose interest that lock-down serves. Even if it was better for everyone involved and for the world community as a whole that OS X was locked to Apple hardware, it is as a matter of plain fact locked down.
My brother and I used to joke that the correct behavior of man for any argument is to print "I don't need no damn instructions!" and quit. You'd instead use the program "woman" to get the manpage. It is, of course, very easy to set this up for your account and amuse your friends and co-workers.
When you tap the winkey and the menu comes up, tap the winkey again and you'll get focus back where you want it.
The temptation to hit escape is great. As it is when you tap alt and wind up in the menu bar. Especially for a vi user. But you must resist, and in both cases, walk out the same way you walked in.
The Windows UI is fairly discoverable, and I think it's pretty consistent. I have a few gripes, but probably fewer than most people would have if they sat down in front of my wack custom FVWM job. The winkey is good because it allows Windows to add keyboard shortcuts without conflicting with other programs. The only OS-level shortcut I can think of that uses alt or ctrl is alt-tab. Compare to MacOS, where the same primary modifier is used for apps and for the OS, and every time Apple wants to add a shortcut they clobber existing programs.
Hydrogen is not an energy source, it's a way to store energy. It is not and will never be a solution to any energy crisis, it just pushes that energy crisis up to the level of mass electricity generation. It may be useful for alleviating pollution problems in dense urban areas because, similar to a battery, it doesn't pollute where it's consumed. Hydrogen isn't competing against ethanol, solar, water, wind, coal and nuclear power plants for power generation, it's competing against electric batteries for use in cars (I think the advantage over batteries is that they're better suited to long-range driving, which people are accustomed to in gas cars, but I'm no expert).
Ethanol, on the other hand, takes much of its energy input from the sun. It could thus contribute to solving the energy crisis. It can also do so on the quick and on the cheap, since we have lots of experience utilizing the energy stored in it. Its use creates pollution where it's consumed, which is unfortunate for people like me that live in major cities.
What do you think are the flaws inherent in ethanol that make it a necessarily bad energy solution? The worst things I've heard is that (when made from corn) it struggles to yield net-positive energy, and that it pollutes at point of use. To me, if the problem of efficiency is solved ethanol seems that it could be a source of power for cars in a generation.
The other power sources you mention, wind, solar and nuclear, are (along with coal and oil) currently sources for electricity generation. They're competing for something totally different. I am not really an expert on this, but I'd guess based on this that gasoline and ethanol aren't as efficient for mass electricity generation; if this is true, then yes, the true energy solution is to centralize generation in big, efficient power plants and use electricity and fuel cells at point of use.
You fail it. Pi is the ratio of the circumference and diameter, not of the circumference and radius.
I think it's a great idea in principle. I think that lots of people would hate (like jury duty). I think that makes me like it even more.
Having such a large and diverse group of people could lead to really unpredictable group dynamics, so there'd need to more formal processes than just brainstorming to generate questions. At the same time any professional moderators would have to be sure not to color the proceedings with their opinions. It would be hard.
Yeah, not only are Windows keys supported in X, it's my opinion that they're better, since in X they act purely as modifier keys (unless you have a DE or WM that fucks it all up... wouldn't be surprised if Gnome or KDE did). The most annoying part of the Windows key on Windows is getting the Start menu every time you tap it (similarly I find it annoying to accidentally hit Alt and go into the menu bar, and most X apps don't do that, they just let you use Alt-F for File menu, etc.)
It's natural that X supports Windows keys; Unix workstations have had various modifiers other than Ctrl and Alt for many years; the Windows key typically corresponds to some "Meta" or "Super" key that would have some funny vendor-specific symbol on Unix keyboards; on my Sun keyboard it's marked with a diamond. The real benefit of these keys is that they allow you to define keybindings for your window manager or desktop environment that won't conflict with your apps.
Dude, my Spanish isn't all that great, but... your curse appears to be confused in areas of gender and address.
I basically agree with you; the problem of transporting you and your boat to the lake is very different from the problem of transporting you, without your boat, to work. And even that varies a lot depending on what kind of area you live in.
The main problem that shared-vehicle individual transportation systems solve is parking congestion, not traffic congestion. If everyone's getting in their own vehicles there are no fewer cars on the road. So if you use your own car to tow your boat to the lake, and park it on your property (or some other paid-for spot) there's nothing really gained by forcing you into a system like this.
If you work in a dense urban core there might be something gained by banning you from leaving your car parked in that dense urban core all day. However, I'm not sure that kind of ban is even necessary in many dense cities; in downtown Chicago where I work, at least, parking spots are scarce and thus expensive, which pushes many daily commuters onto trains and buses. Rush hour traffic is still very heavy in the loop and on the major freeways, but automated personal transit systems wouldn't fix that unless they were fundamentally more space-efficient than current cars.
I'll tell you how Silverlight is Not Great, and I've never used it in the slightest. And it's not because it's by Microsoft, or because it's not free.
/x?html/.
It's Not Great for the same reason Flash is Not Great: it almost always results in a worse user interface than using normal
For the developer the site is The Thing. It's important that the site has clean code, looks cool, and is easy to maintain. Maybe Silverlight makes that possible.
For the user the site is likely just one stop on a journey tied together by a web search. It's important that the site behaves similarly to all others in certain respects: that the browser's navigation facilities work, that the browser's text search works, that input behavior for these are the same as on all other pages (keeping in mind that key bindings, mouse bindings, context menus, etc. vary from browser to browser and user to user). Flash breaks this, and if Silverlight doesn't do the same I'll be shocked.
For the developer it's tempting to think the site is a book to be read from start to finish. But users are more likely to look in the index, tear out a few pages, and glue them into collages of their own creation. The developer can use the introductory chapters to lay out unusual notational conventions that will apply throughout the text but the user, not having read from the beginning, is only confused to see them used in the middle. If you're tempted to cry and bitch about this as a developer, get over yourself: users have more important things to do in life than figure out this super cool new interface to your web site.
A big part of the reason the web took off is that its limited facilities for UI design forced sites to mostly follow the same conventions. If you want to do something better, more complicated, something that people have to learn, then write a damn desktop app.
(Yes, there are useful and good things that can be done by embedding Flash/Java in web pages. Nifty videos and games, no-install VNC and ssh clients... as long as they stay self-contained and aren't part of the page's navigation or textual information presentation, knock yourself out).
Ah, you're using a hacked-up version called VIM with even more cheats added, and you're stuck in turbo-button record mode (which lets you record attack sequences so you can unleash them with inhuman speed on your opponent... it's totally cheap, only lamers do it). To get out of that hit q, and *then* do the :wq thing (or :q! if you're not a cheater).
When I say, "even more cheats," what I mean is relative to ed, the true original version. vi is like wallhacking.
That doesn't make sense at all as an analogy. This idea assumes that all Microsoft-signed binaries are clean and that any virus signatures found in those files should be ignored. It's not an extra layer of security, it's a way to prevent the annoyance of false-positives in an existing layer. I can't think of a direct analogy involving DRM; it would have to involve exempting files meeting certain criteria from restriction.
If an AV scanner decides to let all MS-signed binaries go, they might also consider letting through binaries signed by other reputable vendors. But they should be sure not to open the door too wide (the story of Apple shipping iPods with Windows viruses on them comes to mind).
How do we fix this? That depends on who exactly you mean be "we". We slashdot readers can talk about laws we'd like to see passed, but lawmakers are more likely to listen to companies whose lawyers draft long EULAs than us.
One thing that I do routinely is actually read contracts put in front of me. Especially if someone is waiting on me. People waiting sometimes get annoyed or impatient, but I explain that I like to know precisely what I'm agreeing to when I sign my name.
I've never actually walked out without signing a contract because I found its terms unreasonable, even when I thought some of them were stupid. My dad did once, though. He was buying a car, and the guy in the office was putting papers down in front of him, one after the other. One was an arbitration agreement. Most people wouldn't know what it meant or its significance, but as a lawyer he did. It meant something like agreeing to take any complaint against the dealer to arbitration rather than court, and of course the arbiter would belong to a group appointed by businesses and not consumers (I think there's a fair case that something must be done to cut down the cost of lawsuits, but impartiality is necessary; this isn't a topic I'm personally an expert on, and it's just a tangent). When the dealer wouldn't let him buy the car without signing he walked straight out.
Google caches pages, modifies them (puts a header at the top and highlights search terms within the pages) and distributes them to users. They also do language translations. I don't think Google wants to encourage the idea that this kind of activity requires permission.
Although you're marked as a troll, you're stating the honest opinion of lots of people and the opinion that shapes policy of many companies. So I'll bite. I think your characterization of BitTorrent users, looked at by the numbers, is probably true. While there are people using torrents to distribute content that's both legal and non-commercial (Free Software, for example), it probably makes for a pretty small percentage of the total. But that doesn't matter. The Internet is a network of peers. That's how it was designed, and I believe that's how it ought to stay. The more rights to communicate are gated by money and elitist policies the fewer voices contribute. You need to pay big bucks to get a fat pipe, but you shouldn't need to pay big bucks to get all the protocols. That's what the Internet means on a technical level. If you're not selling me that, you're not selling me Internet access, you're selling me "Web and Email access". If you want to offer that as a product, go ahead. But it's *not* true Internet access.
If the library was offered by its authors only under a commercial license and Sony did what we're accusing them of here (distributing it without a proper license), the exact same options would be available between Sony and the library's authors. They'd have to negotiate a deal, or the authors could try to sue Sony for damages.
Copyright law by itself disallows unauthorized reproduction and distribution, so what most commercial EULAs do is impose restrictions on top of copyright law. Restrictions on copying that might otherwise be deemed "fair use" or similar, restrictions on reverse-engineering, stuff like that. The GPL only gives a user (whether a developer or end user) rights above what copyright law does by default: the right to see the source code, and limited rights of modification and distribution. The GPL can't be more restrictive than such a EULA. If Sony was going to use a library in their game they wouldn't agree to a EULA, they'd agree to some other type of commercial license. Such a license would probably give them the source code and rights of modification and distribution less restrictive than the GPL per-copy (probably not even requiring attribution), but probably in limited number. It's probably fair to call such a license "less restrictive" than the GPL, though if it was limited in number it might be more accurate to call it "differently restrictive".
All that is totally moot to what Sony is accused of here. If they violated the library's copyright the authors may attempt to stop further distribution (probably already moot) and recover damages (I'm not a lawyer, but I bet if they have no history of selling commercial licenses of that library they would have a hard time getting money from Sony; I have a feeling, not based on anything other than intuition, that a court wouldn't make Sony GPL ICO completely). Same thing would happen if they illegally distributed Microsoft's or IBM's code.
Counterpoint: are you likely in real life to encounter situations in real life where the best solution is similar to the solution that pornography or violent media shows as successful? Such media tends (I'll certainly grant exceptions, particularly in pornography, which is extremely diverse... much of it is overtly demeaning, though) to show success coming from aggressive behavior, through defeating an opposing force or subjecting a sexual partner through some form of domination for one's own satisfaction. How often in reality is any problem you face going to be solved by reverting to vigilante-ism? And how often will a healthy sex life be based on what's seen in mainstream pornography? Not very often. Especially not when dealing with people in a society.
Moreover, much of our media is focused on victory or closure, as the culmination of a struggle. Killing the final boss in a video game, the orgasm in pornography, sure. But many films and novels end with a victory as well, a victory as earned reward for overcoming some conflict. Or grades in school: solve some canned problems without making too many mistakes, get an A. This really isn't a realistic depiction of how our lives work. The important events in determining Iraq's future happened after the President declared victory. The most important parts of a relationship happen after the wedding. When you do a project in real life, it is important to do something with feedback received from your boss or people that use it, and not just "accept your grade". Victories and defeats are ongoing. And this is often poorly represented in our media (though certainly there are exceptions).
So I'd say you can play lots of games, read books, watch films, with any subject matter you'd like, and not get an ounce of reality. How about that?
So what's more important to you as a person: being regarded as a professional, or safeguarding your personal time? Making your boss happy or making yourself happy?
One of these things, to you, is pretty abstract. If your boss isn't happy about you having limited availability on nights and weekends that might have an affect on future income levels, or it might not. And this might matter to you, or it might not. On the other hand, you know for sure that when you leave for vacation you can actually relax, since you'll only get called if it's really important.
The bottom line is: you have talents and you've spent a significant amount of time and effort cultivating them into useful and marketable skills. Why should you suffer for this by working longer hours than anyone else, and by being on call all the time? When you are the best person for a job you have bargaining power, and every right to use it; or you could sacrifice now in hopes to improve things in the future. I would just say to make sure that you will eventually benefit, personally, in a way that's truly important to you for all those extra hours. If you're working on a project you really believe in the success of the project could be one of those ways. Most people, at any given time, are not, and are working because someone else is going to benefit financially from the work they do. They're just getting part of the cut.
The specific field I work in doesn't usually require much on-call time outside of normal hours. The specific job I have only rarely requires working long days, weekends or holidays (and there isn't a company culture that expects them either). I don't own a cell phone. My commute is a 35-minute bike ride. My co-workers are cool people. I live in a great city (and, moreover, it's the city I want to live in). None of this is an accident. I have plenty of friends that make more money than me, have more desk/office space, work on cooler technology. I wouldn't trade my situation with any of theirs. Not because their situations are bad (they all seem to be doing OK, even the ones doing consulting or working for investment houses with ridiculous work schedules), but because mine is a result of actively working for what's important to me. Always making a few mistakes, never quite perfect, but always taking note of what makes me happy, what I really care about. Career for its own sake is just not one of those things.
This isn't some kind of super hard technical problem, is it? The resource was available, now it isn't. Restore it!
For everyone affected by this: DRM of this sort means that users have to trust providers to maintain a system as long as they want to use the content. If the users only pay once for the content, the only way that users have to put economic pressure on providers to properly maintain their DRM systems is through refund demands backed by lawsuits. Users shouldn't bear with MLB. That is absurd. If users accept a DRM solution of this nature they should demand 100% service. Maintaining old solutions for a very long time is part of deploying a DRM system. If companies aren't willing to do that they shouldn't use DRM. And if the only way consumers have to enforce that it stays up is threat of refunds and lawsuits, then they have to use those methods.