Ubuntu completely screwed up my X configuration after an apt-get upgrade that took two hours (6.x to 7.4) and I just shut the thing down. While that sucks, you do understand that an entire system upgrade like that is almost certain to have problems no matter what the OS? Any chance it was an nvidia card? Their damn closed drivers have fucked me over a handful of times too.
in their hearts they know it's an important source of information to prevent bad things from happening, but their psyches can't get wrapped around the idea that someone may be watching them. I sure hope not. The reason so many people buy into the, "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" BS is precisely because so many people have nothing to hide. What they should be worried about is people who do have something legitimate to hide.
Like a business that competes with one of the megalocorps that make up the military-industrial-complex - they don't need their proprietary information being 'leaked' to the competition, but if the competition is a DHS contractor doing the spying then what's to stop the leak? Or a politician challenging the status quo, he's got political strategy that gets 'overheard' and now used against him, making him ineffective and preserving the power of the people running the system.
1) Linux is free, why would it need anti-piracy measures? It isn't that they do or don't need 'anti-piracy measures', after all plenty of non-free software have no 'anti-piracy systems' either. It is about the pain in the ass that 'anti-piracy measures' bring with them.
2) Microsoft does not monitor what you're listening to, unless you choose to allow them. Played DVDs lately? Yes, VLC plays them just fine thank you. It's only in the USA where software patents mean anything (ok Japan has software patents too). The rest of the world has no legal issue with DVD playback using Free software. And do you know how terribly hard it is to get VLC in the USA? It's easier than getting official DVD software for MS Windows which costs extra. Just download it from the VLC webpage in France the same way you would download it for MS Windows.
3) The DRM is not intrusive, driver support is the widest available, Windows was built for backward compatibility and Microsoft Update / WUS is leading industry. DRM, by its very nature is intrusive, it is a restriction after all, isn't it? But DRM's intrusion even goes above and beyond that, or perhaps you missed this recent example?
Driver support being the 'widest available' is arguable. Sure, everyone and his brother targets MS windows. But once the product is end-of-lifed, the drivers don't keep up with new versions of windows. They do with linux. So plenty of old hardware won't work on vista but will work with the latest linux kernels.
As for "Microsoft Update" leading the industry? WTF? Leading them to hell perhaps? MS Update reports back all kinds of information about each system that is unnecessary. The various updaters for Ubuntu, Suse and Redhat all do the same job without the same loss of privacy.
6) Prove they spy on China? And prove that Linux doesnt Not just China, everyone. See NSAKEY. As for proving that linux doesn't, that's easy enough since anyone who cares has full access to the source code which they can then compile themselves in full confidence. The BEST MS will do is let you look at some, incomplete, source code, under very restrictive NDA licensing and they sure won't let you compile it and use the end result.
10 months is hardly tremendous by any standard... 10 months is extreme for negligble impact, that's certainly one possible standard. You seem to know what the impact was, "considering the financial impact that he had..." so, what was it?
He pled guilty... Badunkadunk. Enforcement completed.
Quantifiable numbers do not exist for every possible situation, therefore it is within the courts power to determine it on a case by case basis. Lol, quantifiable numbers are irrelevant to this trial. Just one dumb poster grandiosely waving his hands about tremendous financial losses justifying anything he personally wants them to is all. The court didn't make that claim, so the poster making that claim is just being an ass.
Don't be an ass. This topic has nothing to "enforcement of laws" only about sentencing. No one, besides yourself, has even hinted that the guy's crime should be ignored.
Besides I think 10 months of total time served is not a huge amount considering the financial impact that he had... And what exactly is that financial impact, what quantifiable numbers are you referring to? The movie's profits were entirely inline with expectations.
I don't understand why this is categorized as humor when it deals with someone's pain and anguish. I challenge you to find one story in all of the world funnier than a knock-knock joke that does not involve someone suffering. Good luck.
The development of something like a kernel NEEDS a dictator Perhaps it doesn't need to be quite so extreme. Instead of DICTATOR, how about just a Colonel?
Yep. Roughly 3M HD and BD discs have been sold since the first one went on market like a year and a half ago or so. Last year over 1B, that's B as in Billion, DVDs were sold. This whole HD vs BD spat is but a tiny drop in the bucket. A drop that may just as easily evaporate into thin air as become a torrential rainstorm.
If there is any sort of cap, the "free" tuition will just go to the people who would have paid anyways. If you assume that people who are engineering students are so because they like the field, they are probably the best qualified to be in the field. So if these scholarships are at all merit-based, chances are the same kids would get them. If they are not merit based, then you'll get poorly-qualified people signing up just to take advantage, crowding out the few who are qualified but are too poor.
So either the scholarships need to be available to anyone who meets the simple criteria of graduating and working in the field, or they probably won't have the intended effect of increasing the quantity and maintaining or improving the quality of engineering graduates. They'll just end up being a hand-out to the people who don't need handouts.
Honestly, I think the USA's best bet is brain-drain. We need to tear-down a lot of the post 9/11 every-foreign-student-is-a-potential-terrorist rules, and kill H1B, replacing it with a fast-track to citizen-ship visa (I say go so far as to make citizen-ship a requirement after 3 years on this theoretical visa) so that we attract and then keep all the smart people from the rest of the world.
While I agree that the nude body is nothing to be ashamed of or censor, and I understand that you didn't say you think I should turn to a public channel and be able to see a gang-bang in progress, I think we must draw the line somewhere as a society. Why? Drawing a line is such an difficult and imperfect process, how about we just decide that changing the channel to another one is sufficient?
Just because extreme-porn is there doesn't mean you or anyone else must watch it. After all, its been about a decade since the introduction of the v-chip, it isn't like the tools to avoid extreme-porn are some theoretical voodoo magic, almost ever tv in use today has got the tools built in.
Then again, the Ninth Circuit Court is the most overturned court, so we don't have to worry about this decision sticking. The ninth circuit court's jurisdiction is roughly 20% of the US population. The only reason they have more overturned decisions than any of the other circuit courts is because they try way more cases than any other circuit court.
Actually, only bad tech is distinguishable as "tech" -- good tech should be entirely intuitive based on typical skills that people already have, even old people.
From the article:
"For terrorists, travel documents are like weapons," Chertoff said
But, Walsh said, "any state that's refusing to implement this key recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, and whose state driver's licenses are as a result used in another terrorist attack, should be held responsible." What a fucking fear-mongerer!
So, if the next terrorists have one of these internal passports, what are the consequences for the people promoting the Real-ID program? Will they be held responsible? Another 9/11 and will the people running DHS be convicted of manslaughter? Can't have it both ways Cheeseoff!
Again, that's all well and good, but there isn't even a hint of any of that in the 2nd amendment. If you want your own personal arbitrary distinction, great, but don't suggest that it is somehow the line when it is really just your line.
Do you think you wouldn't be breaking an NDA if you published confidential PDFs on a website absent proof that anyone downloaded? Would you think that your right to privacy was violated if someone posted your home address, social security number, mother's maiden name, and date of birth in a file even though there was no proof it was downloaded either? Do you realize just how insanely great it would be for corps if trade secrets covered by NDA's had copyright protection too? And what a major boon for personal privacy if all those personal facts were subject to copyright law. Too bad it doesn't work that way, eh?
Ask yourself why people use P2P and not webservers. If they aren't breaking the law they should be happy to post these files on their home pages next to their names and email addresses, right? Because most people cant figure out how to put a 5MB file, or really a file of any size, on a webserver, but they can download and install napster/edonkey/utorrent/etc with minimal hassle?
This would seem to make libraries illegal. Hell, it would seem to make rentals and sales of CDs and probably DVDs illegal too since they are so easily copied. After all there is no difference in the end result between selling, renting or lending you a CD which you make a bunch of copies of and freely lending or giving you a CD which you make a bunch of copies of.
Your assumption that a "well regulated militia" means an armed force under the control of the current government rather than an armed force dedicated to maintaining a free state is a poor one.
The line is basically at the point where your arms become ordinance; in other words, too big to serve as a personal defense against armed individuals. I'm fine with you owning a.50 cal browning, but I have an issue with mortars and heavy artillery. Seems like arbitrary semantics to me. We didn't have a "nuclear ordnance race" during the cold war and the 2nd amendment doesn't restrict anything to "personal" (or "defense" for that matter).
Fortunately regular copyright law does not prevent people from making and using tools to create derivative works, unlike the DMCA which outlaws such tools for removing access controls.
Not true, I'm afraid. Pretty much all BBC content contains something that someone else owns the rights to, whether that's music, performers rights, imagery or whatever. A licence for UK-only distribution is generally a lot cheaper than worldwide rights. That's putting the cart before the horse. Just because business was done a certain way before the internet does not mean it needs to continue in that fashion now. I suspect that the majority of said "rights" are indeed performer's right, aka royalties which are entirely negotiable up front.
Certainly some shows do incorporate other content that is not so negotiable - e.g. Life on Mars including a lot of David Bowie material (which ironically would be in the public domain if copyright extensions had not gotten out of control) - but it is also entirely possible for the producers to deliberately reduce their show's dependency on such material if need be.
Bandwidth costs come into it too, as does the cost of purchasing and maintaining a farm of servers with enough capacity to stream broadband to the whole world. Yeah, I kinda hit that one out of the part in my original post.
In my opinion, this company has already been punished for their mistake. They exist no more. The employees who made the mistake have already lost their jobs. What would be the purpose of suing? Revenge? I tend to agree with you, especially since the problem didn't kill anyone. But, some questions remain - we don't know how much influence that primary investor had over operations. What are the chances that he will just open up shop again under a different corporate charter and continue the same sort of poor practices that got his first company in trouble?
I think corporate death like this is a good thing if it results in the rest of the industry internalizing the consequences of poor practices. But if the problems remain, than the mere dissolution of the corporation is not sufficient.
Slashdot Mirror
Like a business that competes with one of the megalocorps that make up the military-industrial-complex - they don't need their proprietary information being 'leaked' to the competition, but if the competition is a DHS contractor doing the spying then what's to stop the leak? Or a politician challenging the status quo, he's got political strategy that gets 'overheard' and now used against him, making him ineffective and preserving the power of the people running the system.
It is about the pain in the ass that 'anti-piracy measures' bring with them. 2) Microsoft does not monitor what you're listening to, unless you choose to allow them.
Played DVDs lately? Yes, VLC plays them just fine thank you. It's only in the USA where software patents mean anything (ok Japan has software patents too). The rest of the world has no legal issue with DVD playback using Free software. And do you know how terribly hard it is to get VLC in the USA? It's easier than getting official DVD software for MS Windows which costs extra. Just download it from the VLC webpage in France the same way you would download it for MS Windows. 3) The DRM is not intrusive, driver support is the widest available, Windows was built for backward compatibility and Microsoft Update / WUS is leading industry. DRM, by its very nature is intrusive, it is a restriction after all, isn't it? But DRM's intrusion even goes above and beyond that, or perhaps you missed this recent example?
Driver support being the 'widest available' is arguable. Sure, everyone and his brother targets MS windows. But once the product is end-of-lifed, the drivers don't keep up with new versions of windows. They do with linux. So plenty of old hardware won't work on vista but will work with the latest linux kernels.
As for "Microsoft Update" leading the industry? WTF? Leading them to hell perhaps? MS Update reports back all kinds of information about each system that is unnecessary. The various updaters for Ubuntu, Suse and Redhat all do the same job without the same loss of privacy. 6) Prove they spy on China? And prove that Linux doesnt Not just China, everyone. See NSAKEY. As for proving that linux doesn't, that's easy enough since anyone who cares has full access to the source code which they can then compile themselves in full confidence. The BEST MS will do is let you look at some, incomplete, source code, under very restrictive NDA licensing and they sure won't let you compile it and use the end result.
You seem to know what the impact was, "considering the financial impact that he had..." so, what was it?
The movie's profits were entirely inline with expectations.
Good luck.
Instead of DICTATOR, how about just a Colonel?
It's a $150M of free money to Paramount.
If there is any sort of cap, the "free" tuition will just go to the people who would have paid anyways. If you assume that people who are engineering students are so because they like the field, they are probably the best qualified to be in the field. So if these scholarships are at all merit-based, chances are the same kids would get them. If they are not merit based, then you'll get poorly-qualified people signing up just to take advantage, crowding out the few who are qualified but are too poor.
So either the scholarships need to be available to anyone who meets the simple criteria of graduating and working in the field, or they probably won't have the intended effect of increasing the quantity and maintaining or improving the quality of engineering graduates. They'll just end up being a hand-out to the people who don't need handouts.
Honestly, I think the USA's best bet is brain-drain. We need to tear-down a lot of the post 9/11 every-foreign-student-is-a-potential-terrorist rules, and kill H1B, replacing it with a fast-track to citizen-ship visa (I say go so far as to make citizen-ship a requirement after 3 years on this theoretical visa) so that we attract and then keep all the smart people from the rest of the world.
Just because extreme-porn is there doesn't mean you or anyone else must watch it. After all, its been about a decade since the introduction of the v-chip, it isn't like the tools to avoid extreme-porn are some theoretical voodoo magic, almost ever tv in use today has got the tools built in.
Actually, only bad tech is distinguishable as "tech" -- good tech should be entirely intuitive based on typical skills that people already have, even old people.
Low tech is handled by luddite.org.
But, Walsh said, "any state that's refusing to implement this key recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, and whose state driver's licenses are as a result used in another terrorist attack, should be held responsible." What a fucking fear-mongerer!
So, if the next terrorists have one of these internal passports, what are the consequences for the people promoting the Real-ID program? Will they be held responsible? Another 9/11 and will the people running DHS be convicted of manslaughter? Can't have it both ways Cheeseoff!
Dude, Terri Garr is getting rancid nowadays.
Hope that latex comes with a zip-lock.
Again, that's all well and good, but there isn't even a hint of any of that in the 2nd amendment.
If you want your own personal arbitrary distinction, great, but don't suggest that it is somehow the line when it is really just your line.
Your assumption that a "well regulated militia" means an armed force under the control of the current government rather than an armed force dedicated to maintaining a free state is a poor one.
We didn't have a "nuclear ordnance race" during the cold war and the 2nd amendment doesn't restrict anything to "personal" (or "defense" for that matter).
Fortunately regular copyright law does not prevent people from making and using tools to create derivative works, unlike the DMCA which outlaws such tools for removing access controls.
Certainly some shows do incorporate other content that is not so negotiable - e.g. Life on Mars including a lot of David Bowie material (which ironically would be in the public domain if copyright extensions had not gotten out of control) - but it is also entirely possible for the producers to deliberately reduce their show's dependency on such material if need be. Bandwidth costs come into it too, as does the cost of purchasing and maintaining a farm of servers with enough capacity to stream broadband to the whole world. Yeah, I kinda hit that one out of the part in my original post.
I think corporate death like this is a good thing if it results in the rest of the industry internalizing the consequences of poor practices. But if the problems remain, than the mere dissolution of the corporation is not sufficient.