On the other hand, a WRT54GL is not much use to most people in the UK unless you buy a separate ADSL modem, and you can get a combined ADSL modem and router for £50 or so. So you might as well buy that.
My house is down a side street. No-one ever goes past it. I'm going to send off for one of these: $5 sounds like a great price and there's no-one who is ever likely to want to share it.
I bet the router never arrives, though. These people are bound to go bankrupt in the next few days.
So how does preventing restaurant employees singing "happy birthday" help anyone?
Without the ASCIP, the copyright holder would have received no income when it was sung. But now, no-one ever sings it, so the copyright holder still receives no income, but has to pay the ASCIP for the privilege.
No, it's trickle-down economics in action. The banks recover the cost from their customers, who are mostly rich businessmen. So some of the wealth of those rich people ends up having trickled down to the poor robbers. Isn't that how things are supposed to work?
The rich people were probably just going to donate their spare wealth to charity to help the poor: robbery saves them the trouble of having to do that, too. It's a win-win situation!
I tried carrying a business-card CD of DSL round in my pocket. After a few days, it snapped in two. They are evidently quite fragile. I keep my credit cards in the same wallet and they have never come to any harm.
Nobody ever wants to buy Windows. It's just an operating system. It's completely useless on its own. All that people ever want to do is to run useful programs. Microsoft happen to have built up a near-monopoly position where you have to have Windows in order to run many other useful programs.
Yes, but for the sort of use that I described, that is irrelevent.
Actually, for commercial use, it is irrelevant also. I don't trust any of the people who have allegedly done this, and I've only got their word that they did any checking. Come to that, I don't trust Thawte or Verisign either.
True, but the acid test is whether it goes faster or not. From what I read, Pat tried it, and it didn't. Of course, your milage may vary.
I can imagine various possible reasons for this: for example
The 32-bit compiler is more mature, and produces better code.
64-bit variables use more memory, so the memory bandwidth is more of a bottleneck.
The hardware may be compensating for lack of registers by clever caching strategies
I've no idea whether these ideas are true or not, but my point is that the only way to find out is to try it.
If your "users" are joe public buying stuff from your web site, then you need a commercial certificate that will stop their browsers from displaying a pop-up warning. Any certificate that all (or most) browsers support will be OK, and all of the suppliers smell like a dead fish, so you might as well google for the cheapest.
If your "users" are in any way under your control (e.g. if the point of this is to let your colleages use your intranet web-mail from home, or something like that) then you might as well set yourself up as your own CA, and sign your own certificates. You give the users your master CA certificate and get them to install it in their browser, and you sign your own certificates with that. Have a look at the openssl manual to see how. This is all that cacert.org are doing, so why deal with them when you can do it yourself? Also, you are not going to be signing certificates for anyone else, so this way there's nothing that could cause your users to inadvertently trust someone else by mistake.
You could use Slamd64. But regular Slackware will work fine on an AMD64: I believe that Pat is using one as his development machine. He wrote somewhere that he tried compiling 64-bit versions of various things, but he didn't see any performance improvement from it, so he abandoned the experiment. Of course it would be a different matter on a high-end server with lots of memory, but that's not Slackware's target market.
It's going to be a long time before current copyrights expire. If the term is extended again, it may be hundreds of years. A law requiring someone to do something in a hundred years time is not likely to be effective.
Registering just one non-DRM copy is not likely to be much use either. If the copyright owners have any sense, they will choose the cheapest, nastiest brand of CDRW they can find. It will be unreadable after hundreds of years, even if CD technology still exists.
Where do you get your idea of what *should* happen? did someone tell it to you? Did you dream it up yourself? Did you read it in a book?
Why *should* it be that simple? Why should the rules be completely different for different people? Why shouldn't everyone get paid according to the work they do? If a company does well, why should a few people reap all the benefits?
Conversely, if the executives were responsible for all the debts of a failed company, no-one would ever want to be an executive. The potential risks would be so ruinous that no-one would ever start a company. Hence the bankruptcy laws.
So what? He chose to take the job, so he must have agreed to the salary.
If you work for a big company with thousands of employees, you can be pretty sure that the CEO is taking home millions, even if you and everyone else are earning a pittance. This is no different. It's how American capitalism is supposed to work.
That's by no means true. In classical times, many people sold themselves into slavery, as a way of paying off their debts.
Of course it was voluntary, because they had a choice (they could have committed suicide instead). It's the same with DRM: you will always have a choice: accept it or go without. So it will always be voluntary, won't it?
No, it's a colourful way of describing how the industry wants to sell a product that is "cheap" now because it is fairly open, but becomes "expensive" later when the restrictions are turned on, and you have to keep re-buying the same thing every time you want to use it in a different way.
Supply and demand doesn't work in the usual way in movie and music industries, because the supply is infinite: the goods can be replicated at zero cost. The only way of making the price higher than zero is to impose an artificial restriction on supply. The aim here is to trap people into having restrictions imposed in 2010 that they would not put up with now.
An organization called the "Internet Watch Foundation" has got a contract from BT to censor their customers' web access. They are lobbying the government for a law that would force every ISP in the country to use their censorship service (and, presumably, pay for it).
Of course no one would take them seriously if they said there are only 2 or 3 child porno sites on the web. So it is in their own interests to spread FUD about this subject by blocking as many sites as they can get away with. Given that most pornographers advertise pictures of "young girls" (who would want to look at pictures of old women?) it must be pretty easy to make up a list of sites to block, and no-one is likely to want to appear to support paedophiles by challenging them. In any case, like all good censors they keep their block list secret.
The government has got a strong motivation to go along with anyone who is calling for all ISPs to be forced to install censoring software, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear of these people going from strength to strength in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, a WRT54GL is not much use to most people in the UK unless you buy a separate ADSL modem, and you can get a combined ADSL modem and router for £50 or so. So you might as well buy that.
My house is down a side street. No-one ever goes past it. I'm going to send off for one of these: $5 sounds like a great price and there's no-one who is ever likely to want to share it.
I bet the router never arrives, though. These people are bound to go bankrupt in the next few days.
Without the ASCIP, the copyright holder would have received no income when it was sung. But now, no-one ever sings it, so the copyright holder still receives no income, but has to pay the ASCIP for the privilege.
The rich people were probably just going to donate their spare wealth to charity to help the poor: robbery saves them the trouble of having to do that, too. It's a win-win situation!
I tried carrying a business-card CD of DSL round in my pocket. After a few days, it snapped in two. They are evidently quite fragile. I keep my credit cards in the same wallet and they have never come to any harm.
As examples of this, you could have quoted Microsoft Office, which fits on two floppies, or Java, which is only a 100K download ...
oh, wait...
You're obviously not a fan of the show.
I'm sorry, I haven't a clue what you're talking about.
Nobody ever wants to buy Windows. It's just an operating system. It's completely useless on its own. All that people ever want to do is to run useful programs. Microsoft happen to have built up a near-monopoly position where you have to have Windows in order to run many other useful programs.
Actually, for commercial use, it is irrelevant also. I don't trust any of the people who have allegedly done this, and I've only got their word that they did any checking. Come to that, I don't trust Thawte or Verisign either.
I didn't know that. But libraries also tend to be short of money and resources to do that sort of thing.
I was thinking of their best-known product (Windows) and comparing its price with its best-known competitor (Linux).
I can imagine various possible reasons for this: for example
The 32-bit compiler is more mature, and produces better code.
64-bit variables use more memory, so the memory bandwidth is more of a bottleneck.
The hardware may be compensating for lack of registers by clever caching strategies
I've no idea whether these ideas are true or not, but my point is that the only way to find out is to try it.
If your "users" are in any way under your control (e.g. if the point of this is to let your colleages use your intranet web-mail from home, or something like that) then you might as well set yourself up as your own CA, and sign your own certificates. You give the users your master CA certificate and get them to install it in their browser, and you sign your own certificates with that. Have a look at the openssl manual to see how. This is all that cacert.org are doing, so why deal with them when you can do it yourself? Also, you are not going to be signing certificates for anyone else, so this way there's nothing that could cause your users to inadvertently trust someone else by mistake.
The difference is that Microsoft products aren't cheap. Especially when compared with the (zero) cost of some of the competing products.
You could use Slamd64. But regular Slackware will work fine on an AMD64: I believe that Pat is using one as his development machine. He wrote somewhere that he tried compiling 64-bit versions of various things, but he didn't see any performance improvement from it, so he abandoned the experiment. Of course it would be a different matter on a high-end server with lots of memory, but that's not Slackware's target market.
It's going to be a long time before current copyrights expire. If the term is extended again, it may be hundreds of years. A law requiring someone to do something in a hundred years time is not likely to be effective.
Registering just one non-DRM copy is not likely to be much use either. If the copyright owners have any sense, they will choose the cheapest, nastiest brand of CDRW they can find. It will be unreadable after hundreds of years, even if CD technology still exists.
Why *should* it be that simple? Why should the rules be completely different for different people? Why shouldn't everyone get paid according to the work they do? If a company does well, why should a few people reap all the benefits?
Conversely, if the executives were responsible for all the debts of a failed company, no-one would ever want to be an executive. The potential risks would be so ruinous that no-one would ever start a company. Hence the bankruptcy laws.
If you work for a big company with thousands of employees, you can be pretty sure that the CEO is taking home millions, even if you and everyone else are earning a pittance. This is no different. It's how American capitalism is supposed to work.
Of course it was voluntary, because they had a choice (they could have committed suicide instead). It's the same with DRM: you will always have a choice: accept it or go without. So it will always be voluntary, won't it?
Supply and demand doesn't work in the usual way in movie and music industries, because the supply is infinite: the goods can be replicated at zero cost. The only way of making the price higher than zero is to impose an artificial restriction on supply. The aim here is to trap people into having restrictions imposed in 2010 that they would not put up with now.
That's how the drug dealers round here work, and they're making good money. Should work for the movie industry too.
They'll be hoping that, by 2010, there won't be any of the old non-DRM hardware still in use.
Evidently the answer is "yes" in Norway and China, and will soon be "yes" in Britain too.
Don't take my remark so seriously. I'd been hoping to be moderated "funny".
An organization called the "Internet Watch Foundation" has got a contract from BT to censor their customers' web access. They are lobbying the government for a law that would force every ISP in the country to use their censorship service (and, presumably, pay for it).
Of course no one would take them seriously if they said there are only 2 or 3 child porno sites on the web. So it is in their own interests to spread FUD about this subject by blocking as many sites as they can get away with. Given that most pornographers advertise pictures of "young girls" (who would want to look at pictures of old women?) it must be pretty easy to make up a list of sites to block, and no-one is likely to want to appear to support paedophiles by challenging them. In any case, like all good censors they keep their block list secret.
The government has got a strong motivation to go along with anyone who is calling for all ISPs to be forced to install censoring software, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear of these people going from strength to strength in the future.