Let me spell it out for you then, since you don't appear to understand what I wrote:
You have to *receive* the channels in the first place in order to decide whether or not you want to watch the shows, right? If you don't receive the channels, you can't be said to watch their shows. More people in Canada receive MuchMusic than MTV US, by probably a factor of 2, if not more.
As to your second point, congratulations. Learn to spell before casting insults. But I digress. Watching a music channel does not mean you are going to be programmed into downloading that music on MP3 services. It might make it more likely, because of more exposure to the product. Since you claim to have this connection down pat, how much greater is the probability?
MTV US is on satellite, usually DirecTV systems configured / pirated with zipcodes for the US. This is not surprising considering that 85% of the Canadian population lives within 200 miles of the US border. A lot of people have satellite dishes in Canada. (My father has one, for instance)
However, MuchMusic is on cable as a basic channel. Meaning if you get cable, you get MuchMusic. Canada is one of the most-cabled countries on Earth, if not *the* most, at something like 96, 97%. Which means that just about everyone gets Much.
As to your first point, how does downloading music relate to watching music videos on TV? I can't see the link.
Lowering the barriers to entry for the most part means a lot more mediocre material will get into ciruclation.
Well, it really can't get much worse in terms of its aesthetic quality, can it?
Not trying to take the piss, but there is already a lot of shitty music spewed out by the major labels. The independent music artists out there learning how to use this equipment will eventually make great stuff -- Radiohead, for example, played with this stuff to make some interesting and challenging records.
Again, I'm not saying I support Microsoft, at all, but they provided this as a service, free. If they decide to restrict it to the US, it's probably because they know the legal situation better there and can start there first. Over time, if they see that they can make a profit from it, they probably will roll it out to other territories.
It is an interesting question, and I for one am glad I don't have to answer it. The 11 September issue is probably the more interesting area that isn't addressed in the MSN propaganda, for obvious reasons. I do recall in the aftermath seeing various UK-based Saudis (opponents of the current regime, but not part of Al-Qaeda, for instance) communicating via the Internet using the various Messenger / Chat programs.
I don't think I buy into it, but have you an alternative?
Well, I avoid Microsoft as well, but we're not the targets of this kind of action.
My point is not that MS can stop this kind of thing from going on - as you rightly point out, people will always be able to find ways around this kind of limit. If that means that people leave, and take the spammers and pervs with them, so much the better for Microsoft, no?
If Microsoft discovers its services are being abused and finds that it can at least control or stop that abuse from continuing, don't you think they'd want to try it? And yes, I fully realise that this argument can easily be transmuted against Linux users or anyone else MS doesn't like. But in this case, again, I have to ask: what would you do?
Bugger [pun unintended] - submitted this as a story three minutes ago.
Guess I've been trolled, but you should lay off the 'Microsoft == evil' lines, they're getting really dull. This kind of comment is flippant, and actually pretty irresponsible. What would you do? What would you have them do? Give an answer of 'We're not people's censors' and leave it at that?
This is a perfectly understandable reaction on their part, and you will probably see similar reactions from other popular, unmonitored, visible chat providers. We can bitch about subscriber lock-in all we want, but the PR flack had an undeniable point -- subscriptions mean accountability for both the provider and recipient. When you provide a visible, accessible service like this, you have to decide if you want to allow this kind of crap on or not.
Hey, you want to see loads of junk, you can still go to IRC or read Usenet - it's your call.
If you look at the article no one appears willing to take the blame for it, from the bank itself to its two subcontractors tasked with verifying that data is indeed gone from hard drives.
I find it appalling that the 'computer security team' sent to this guy's house were told to 'seize' the drives when clearly he was doing them a favour. Though they thanked him later and gave him replacement (presumably blank) drives, fuckups like these should have proper ramifications. Along the lines of dismissals.
In Googling I came across this, which lists voluntary sector computing activities in Canada supported by the banks. Just think what interesting fundraising activities could have been made possible by this kind of donation...
It's not the installation that presents the problem, it's the configuration. Mandrake does this better straightaway, no question (I use Debian exclusively now, Mandrake before that, so I'm not just spouting out my hole).
Knoppix doesn't get used because it doesn't stay in a stable configuration for very long. (New CDs every week? Nightmare.) This is not to say it doesn't or wouldn't work, but rather if HP is going to ship out CDs they will want to have a distro they know will be around for a month or two, if not much longer than that... [me ducks]
Also don't forget that Bruce Perens, who was tasked with helping HP out, no longer works for them. A small thing in terms of the bigger picture, and necessarily a political concern, but still worth keeping in mind.
Depends on what you mean. The taught/terminal Masters are perfectly valid as groundwork or preliminary studies towards a PhD, it's just that you have to be a bit careful about how the work in both degrees is actually done. If I am interpreting what you are saying correctly, study Masters in the UK are more like the booby prizes awarded in America (in that failed PhD candidates often get Masters as a consolation prize). I don't really think this is the case.
My taught Masters in London was explicitly oriented to getting candidates in the mindset of PhD students, and one of my tutors suggested I turn my dissertation into a full PhD. Not what I was into, so nothing happened,though I was grateful for the compliment.
No, not at all a dumb question. North American MBAs take two years on average.
Europe, on the other hand, offers a bucketload of one-year Master's programmes; it's not limited to just MBA programmes. (I did an MSc in London that was like this.) Generally 'taught' Masters are shorter than the 'research' Masters, the latter of which are considered the priming ground for PhD programmes (in both the UK and the US). Unlike the US, though, nonMBA Masters are considered pretty good in their own right.
Good luck to Cox, though. I'm looking into an MBA myself and it does not look nice. Pointy heads, here I come...
Yeah, I thought that was strange too. As a poster below noted, don't forget that the animation was a representative sample of only 5% of the total outages. Which doesn't go any further in explaining it, but it stands to reason that other nodes in Florida (or general vicinity) went out as well, though obviously not to the same extent as in the Northeast US.
I feel a bit weird commenting as a Debian user, 'passing judgement', as it were, on a developer's thoughts. Then again, I was a marketroid in a previous life.
But clearly, he's worried about marketing aspects of the distro. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's misplaced, in my view. Why?
Debian's Social Contract states that they're trying to release an OS for everyone. Part and parcel of that is the idea that a) it costs nothing and b) is free to modify as needed, which in fact is the more important of the two.
It runs on nearly everything, exceeded only by perhaps NetBSD. To do so it balances nicely the needs of server admins with desktop users, by having two baseline reference implementations (yes, I know there are more, but bear with me): stable for servers, testing or unstable for desktops.
It has numerous subprojects that try to cover a bunch of areas the commercial distros don't (at least, not together, anyway): Debian Jr., the Desktop Project, the Multimedia Distribution, PPC, and so on.
It has an open security policy and huge bug database. More packages than I know I'll ever install. Easy-to-use upgrader: and one point the apt-rpm guys don't seem to be aware of is the Policy aspect to Debian -- sure, using apt is usually pretty good, but have you ever tried to install RPMs from another distro on rpmfind.net ? Usually it works, but when it doesn't...
And the political debates on licensing is not just a bunch of wank. I get tired of them just as much as the next person, but developers worrying about them usually means that I don't have to.
Look, we (most of the posters here) might be on one side, and SCO on another, but they didn't sue Red Hat. They didn't sue SuSE. They sued IBM:
... because they worked with IBM on Monterey
... because IBM has deep pockets
As has been stated ad nauseam, IBM has also a big legal team, backed by the biggest share of patents in the US.
SCO management appears to have bitten off a bit more than they can reasonably chew. At this point, if they had a bit more sense, they would have either approached IBM calmly with ideas towards making Linux better in their own long-term interests (unlikely, but anything's possible), or attempted to reach some form of settlement.
Saying as they have done that IBM rebuffed them, and even threatened to eat their business, is to my mind just a lot of huff.
I think the Forbes writer may have had a point on first glance, but further examination pretty negates it totally. My 2 cents, anyway.
If the VAT is differentially charged by nation, it stands to reason that each country will get it. Minus a percentage remitted back to the Commission for setting this racket up in the first place.
I am a supporter of further integration, but this is anti-competitive, pure and simple, with the costs being paid by consumers and businesses alike.
One thing that I dislike intensely about this is that the EU currently does not charge businesses VAT for components sold within the Union but outside the country of origin. So, I'm based in Germany, for argument's sake, and buy stuff for my company from Finland. I don't pay VAT. I buy the same stuff from America, comparable quality, comparable capabilities, comparable price; it looks like I pay VAT. The effect of all this is not to increase internal EU sales, but to increase domestic sales within the country of destination -- which means that it runs counter to the goal of assisting internal EU sales.
...just make sure you don't put these balloons near an airport
Yes, exactly. I have relatives who work in the airline industry, and have done the small prop thing more times than I want to remember. It might be okay, as you state, but me, I'm not so sure.
They'd have to be well away from flight paths, in rural areas, lit, marked... I don't know. I think for the initial expense and maintenance they'd probably do better to get some industrial-strength wireless/fibre-optic combination going -- having such a combo close to terra firma would be easier to upgrade at any rate.
You're a step ahead of me anyway, so credit to you.
it's like saying "you fool!" to those who obeyed the law in the first place, and this is the thing I can't tolerate in the first place
Not trying to be cheeky, but how do you (I/we/la società italiana) change it? Vote for La Lega, or l'Ulivo? Try to get the bureaucracy to change? I'm not trying to trivialise what you say, but you're pointing to civil society questions, and these are by definition not so easily resolved.
The trouble is, people don't have a real incentive to change, at least not quickly or overnight. If all the laws were changed at a stroke, doing so would not address the problem of enforcement.
As much as I can't stand Berlusconi, and think he's a crook, I don't have a pat answer to resolving things. Although in thinking about it, one thing that would help would be for the government to stop issuing retroactive amnesties for violators: penalising the law-abiding is, I agree, a shameful thing, and it's been ongoing for far too long in Italy.
Someone once suggested that la Mafia, la Camorra e la 'Ndrangheta were reasonable responses in a place where the law was not seen to work -- in other words, when civil society does not exist, and the rule of law weak, 'employing' private 'law enforcement' in order to ensure you got results was a natural response (unfortunately, I can't locate the specific person who said this).
Despite the pessimism -- which is understandable, I share it -- isn't it true that some progress has been made over the last few years?
Your suggestion of an amoral law-abiding social norm actually does exist already -- I've seen first-hand in Japan, and would guess it's probably also present in Singapore. I won't say it's perfect, or that I agree with every aspect (chewing gum's a crime?) in either place, but the norm/more exists -- and it works, for the most part.
I'm afraid you miss the point. Berlusconi owns the three major private networks here. As Prime Minister, he also controls the three public national networks.
While this might seem like a loss of consumer rights, in actual fact things are a bit more nuanced than that. Italy has since 1992 attempted to bring its policies more in line with those of other EU nations, basically because those other countries have for several decades looked askance at its high debt, rampant corruption, and woefully inefficient bureaucracy.
This is not to say that I like the idea, I don't. But the fact remains that Italy does these things not to gouge the customer so much as to slowly make the country a bit less wasteful and less beyond the rule of law. It's tortuously snail-like, mostly window-dressing, and frustrating, but you have to start somewhere. Nevertheless, the fact that it's Berlusconi, world-class fraud, behind this latest move, does not make it any less necessary.
Moreover, 'mass disapproval' is massively overstating things (forgive the pun). Highspeed Internet in my area is practically non-existent. The nearest library is over fifteen kilometres from here. Unlike most other parts of Europe, the South of Italy is patchy as to consumerist development. On the other hand, where I am, you can get first-run movies on DVD, usually within a day of official release. Pirated, of course, but no less quality. Everybody does it. I've only met one person in the last year who actually bought a CD at a store (not including me, that is, and that was on a trip to Milan), everything else music-wise is pirated. Hell, I was offered Visual Studio Enterprise (version 6, but still) for *5 Euro* not too long ago. At Christmas I was offered a copy of Oracle.
This price increase will crimp budgets. Marginally. It will not stop piracy. At all.
Your comment itself is a duplicate - it's been posted at least 10 times for every duplicate the editors post. That's what's sad. ... And *still* the editors say nothing about improving the site to catch these kinds of errors. Despite all the complaints. Despite the repetitive nature of the complaints, even.
You might forgive the occasional duplicate; I would too. But as the parent poster pointed out, it's getting worse, not better, because the editorial board of Slashdot does not care.
Look, I'm not a geek. Or a nerd. I guess. Yes, Slashdot is still my favourite tech site, but only because there really isn't a decent alternative.
The trouble is, when even the editors act like it's jumped the shark, it's a little difficult to get enthused about it sometimes.
I suggested some time ago that the editors do something useful, like change the departmental listings to something informative, and that was ignored (not that I expected them to give a shit, really, but... you don't want to troll before at least contributing something useful).
The editors continue to hope that subscriptions will go up to make some money for OSDN - the problem is, if they can't be bothered to check the site for simple errors like these, how do they expect to win visitors' confidence?
Too right. I honestly believe that anyone who gets so worked up over this should seriously take a semantics course and move on to reading Joyce's Ulysses, some Guy Debord, and Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces, smoke a bowl or six, and learn to relax a bit.
That goes double for RMS. While I think he has a point, it's just a technology.
... Wasn't the L4 microkernel meant to be an alternative, future base for the HURD (currently based on a GNU implementation of Mach, IIRC)? Has Marcus or anyone else had the chance to look at this yet? If so, what do they think?
I dunno. I used to work for the Industries of Satan, I was a marketroid, a research analyst, in a media company. We used to need data mining done for us from time to time.
It was a pain in the ass. Even with computers doing all the work. Someone's got to model all the information in a GUIfied programme, but humans still have to interpret the data. Even when you have people doing the interpreting, it doesn't mean you'll follow their advice.
I think you have valid points about the bogus nature of using RFIDs, but I think it'd be more applicable to the *restriction of trade* than anything else. People wanting these things have no idea how bloody difficult it is to get anything useful from them.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me spell it out for you then, since you don't appear to understand what I wrote:
You have to *receive* the channels in the first place in order to decide whether or not you want to watch the shows, right? If you don't receive the channels, you can't be said to watch their shows. More people in Canada receive MuchMusic than MTV US, by probably a factor of 2, if not more.
As to your second point, congratulations. Learn to spell before casting insults. But I digress. Watching a music channel does not mean you are going to be programmed into downloading that music on MP3 services. It might make it more likely, because of more exposure to the product. Since you claim to have this connection down pat, how much greater is the probability?
Your latter point: Is wrong.
MTV US is on satellite, usually DirecTV systems configured / pirated with zipcodes for the US. This is not surprising considering that 85% of the Canadian population lives within 200 miles of the US border. A lot of people have satellite dishes in Canada. (My father has one, for instance)
However, MuchMusic is on cable as a basic channel. Meaning if you get cable, you get MuchMusic. Canada is one of the most-cabled countries on Earth, if not *the* most, at something like 96, 97%. Which means that just about everyone gets Much.
As to your first point, how does downloading music relate to watching music videos on TV? I can't see the link.
Lowering the barriers to entry for the most part means a lot more mediocre material will get into ciruclation.
Well, it really can't get much worse in terms of its aesthetic quality, can it?
Not trying to take the piss, but there is already a lot of shitty music spewed out by the major labels. The independent music artists out there learning how to use this equipment will eventually make great stuff -- Radiohead, for example, played with this stuff to make some interesting and challenging records.
It is an interesting question, and I for one am glad I don't have to answer it. The 11 September issue is probably the more interesting area that isn't addressed in the MSN propaganda, for obvious reasons. I do recall in the aftermath seeing various UK-based Saudis (opponents of the current regime, but not part of Al-Qaeda, for instance) communicating via the Internet using the various Messenger / Chat programs.
I don't think I buy into it, but have you an alternative?
My point is not that MS can stop this kind of thing from going on - as you rightly point out, people will always be able to find ways around this kind of limit. If that means that people leave, and take the spammers and pervs with them, so much the better for Microsoft, no?
If Microsoft discovers its services are being abused and finds that it can at least control or stop that abuse from continuing, don't you think they'd want to try it? And yes, I fully realise that this argument can easily be transmuted against Linux users or anyone else MS doesn't like. But in this case, again, I have to ask: what would you do?
Guess I've been trolled, but you should lay off the 'Microsoft == evil' lines, they're getting really dull. This kind of comment is flippant, and actually pretty irresponsible. What would you do? What would you have them do? Give an answer of 'We're not people's censors' and leave it at that?
This is a perfectly understandable reaction on their part, and you will probably see similar reactions from other popular, unmonitored, visible chat providers. We can bitch about subscriber lock-in all we want, but the PR flack had an undeniable point -- subscriptions mean accountability for both the provider and recipient. When you provide a visible, accessible service like this, you have to decide if you want to allow this kind of crap on or not.
Hey, you want to see loads of junk, you can still go to IRC or read Usenet - it's your call.
If you look at the article no one appears willing to take the blame for it, from the bank itself to its two subcontractors tasked with verifying that data is indeed gone from hard drives.
I find it appalling that the 'computer security team' sent to this guy's house were told to 'seize' the drives when clearly he was doing them a favour. Though they thanked him later and gave him replacement (presumably blank) drives, fuckups like these should have proper ramifications. Along the lines of dismissals.
Figures it was the Bank of Montreal. Those idiots can't do anything right, from paying their then-CEO too much to stupid online banking to hypocritical ad campaigns in 1996. Losers!
In Googling I came across this, which lists voluntary sector computing activities in Canada supported by the banks. Just think what interesting fundraising activities could have been made possible by this kind of donation...
It's not the installation that presents the problem, it's the configuration. Mandrake does this better straightaway, no question (I use Debian exclusively now, Mandrake before that, so I'm not just spouting out my hole).
Knoppix doesn't get used because it doesn't stay in a stable configuration for very long. (New CDs every week? Nightmare.) This is not to say it doesn't or wouldn't work, but rather if HP is going to ship out CDs they will want to have a distro they know will be around for a month or two, if not much longer than that... [me ducks]
Also don't forget that Bruce Perens, who was tasked with helping HP out, no longer works for them. A small thing in terms of the bigger picture, and necessarily a political concern, but still worth keeping in mind.
Depends on what you mean. The taught/terminal Masters are perfectly valid as groundwork or preliminary studies towards a PhD, it's just that you have to be a bit careful about how the work in both degrees is actually done. If I am interpreting what you are saying correctly, study Masters in the UK are more like the booby prizes awarded in America (in that failed PhD candidates often get Masters as a consolation prize). I don't really think this is the case.
My taught Masters in London was explicitly oriented to getting candidates in the mindset of PhD students, and one of my tutors suggested I turn my dissertation into a full PhD. Not what I was into, so nothing happened,though I was grateful for the compliment.
No, not at all a dumb question. North American MBAs take two years on average.
Europe, on the other hand, offers a bucketload of one-year Master's programmes; it's not limited to just MBA programmes. (I did an MSc in London that was like this.) Generally 'taught' Masters are shorter than the 'research' Masters, the latter of which are considered the priming ground for PhD programmes (in both the UK and the US). Unlike the US, though, nonMBA Masters are considered pretty good in their own right.
Good luck to Cox, though. I'm looking into an MBA myself and it does not look nice. Pointy heads, here I come...
Yeah, I thought that was strange too. As a poster below noted, don't forget that the animation was a representative sample of only 5% of the total outages. Which doesn't go any further in explaining it, but it stands to reason that other nodes in Florida (or general vicinity) went out as well, though obviously not to the same extent as in the Northeast US.
I feel a bit weird commenting as a Debian user, 'passing judgement', as it were, on a developer's thoughts. Then again, I was a marketroid in a previous life.
But clearly, he's worried about marketing aspects of the distro. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's misplaced, in my view. Why?
Debian's Social Contract states that they're trying to release an OS for everyone. Part and parcel of that is the idea that a) it costs nothing and b) is free to modify as needed, which in fact is the more important of the two.
It runs on nearly everything, exceeded only by perhaps NetBSD. To do so it balances nicely the needs of server admins with desktop users, by having two baseline reference implementations (yes, I know there are more, but bear with me): stable for servers, testing or unstable for desktops.
It has numerous subprojects that try to cover a bunch of areas the commercial distros don't (at least, not together, anyway): Debian Jr., the Desktop Project, the Multimedia Distribution, PPC, and so on.
It has an open security policy and huge bug database. More packages than I know I'll ever install. Easy-to-use upgrader: and one point the apt-rpm guys don't seem to be aware of is the Policy aspect to Debian -- sure, using apt is usually pretty good, but have you ever tried to install RPMs from another distro on rpmfind.net ? Usually it works, but when it doesn't...
And the political debates on licensing is not just a bunch of wank. I get tired of them just as much as the next person, but developers worrying about them usually means that I don't have to .
As has been stated ad nauseam, IBM has also a big legal team, backed by the biggest share of patents in the US.
SCO management appears to have bitten off a bit more than they can reasonably chew. At this point, if they had a bit more sense, they would have either approached IBM calmly with ideas towards making Linux better in their own long-term interests (unlikely, but anything's possible), or attempted to reach some form of settlement.
Saying as they have done that IBM rebuffed them, and even threatened to eat their business, is to my mind just a lot of huff.
I think the Forbes writer may have had a point on first glance, but further examination pretty negates it totally. My 2 cents, anyway.
I agree, it sucks. Badly.
If the VAT is differentially charged by nation, it stands to reason that each country will get it. Minus a percentage remitted back to the Commission for setting this racket up in the first place.
I am a supporter of further integration, but this is anti-competitive, pure and simple, with the costs being paid by consumers and businesses alike.
One thing that I dislike intensely about this is that the EU currently does not charge businesses VAT for components sold within the Union but outside the country of origin. So, I'm based in Germany, for argument's sake, and buy stuff for my company from Finland. I don't pay VAT. I buy the same stuff from America, comparable quality, comparable capabilities, comparable price; it looks like I pay VAT. The effect of all this is not to increase internal EU sales, but to increase domestic sales within the country of destination -- which means that it runs counter to the goal of assisting internal EU sales.
Sometimes living in Europe blows.
...just make sure you don't put these balloons near an airport
... I don't know. I think for the initial expense and maintenance they'd probably do better to get some industrial-strength wireless/fibre-optic combination going -- having such a combo close to terra firma would be easier to upgrade at any rate.
Yes, exactly. I have relatives who work in the airline industry, and have done the small prop thing more times than I want to remember. It might be okay, as you state, but me, I'm not so sure.
They'd have to be well away from flight paths, in rural areas, lit, marked
You're a step ahead of me anyway, so credit to you.
And yes, this is meant seriously :)
One-word question:
Airplanes?
it's like saying "you fool!" to those who obeyed the law in the first place, and this is the thing I can't tolerate in the first place
Not trying to be cheeky, but how do you (I/we/la società italiana) change it? Vote for La Lega, or l'Ulivo? Try to get the bureaucracy to change? I'm not trying to trivialise what you say, but you're pointing to civil society questions, and these are by definition not so easily resolved.
The trouble is, people don't have a real incentive to change, at least not quickly or overnight. If all the laws were changed at a stroke, doing so would not address the problem of enforcement.
As much as I can't stand Berlusconi, and think he's a crook, I don't have a pat answer to resolving things. Although in thinking about it, one thing that would help would be for the government to stop issuing retroactive amnesties for violators: penalising the law-abiding is, I agree, a shameful thing, and it's been ongoing for far too long in Italy.
Someone once suggested that la Mafia, la Camorra e la 'Ndrangheta were reasonable responses in a place where the law was not seen to work -- in other words, when civil society does not exist, and the rule of law weak, 'employing' private 'law enforcement' in order to ensure you got results was a natural response (unfortunately, I can't locate the specific person who said this).
Despite the pessimism -- which is understandable, I share it -- isn't it true that some progress has been made over the last few years?
Your suggestion of an amoral law-abiding social norm actually does exist already -- I've seen first-hand in Japan, and would guess it's probably also present in Singapore. I won't say it's perfect, or that I agree with every aspect (chewing gum's a crime?) in either place, but the norm/more exists -- and it works, for the most part.
I'm afraid you miss the point.
Berlusconi owns the three major private networks here. As Prime Minister, he also controls the three public national networks.
While this might seem like a loss of consumer rights, in actual fact things are a bit more nuanced than that. Italy has since 1992 attempted to bring its policies more in line with those of other EU nations, basically because those other countries have for several decades looked askance at its high debt, rampant corruption, and woefully inefficient bureaucracy.
This is not to say that I like the idea, I don't. But the fact remains that Italy does these things not to gouge the customer so much as to slowly make the country a bit less wasteful and less beyond the rule of law. It's tortuously snail-like, mostly window-dressing, and frustrating, but you have to start somewhere. Nevertheless, the fact that it's Berlusconi, world-class fraud, behind this latest move, does not make it any less necessary.
Moreover, 'mass disapproval' is massively overstating things (forgive the pun). Highspeed Internet in my area is practically non-existent. The nearest library is over fifteen kilometres from here. Unlike most other parts of Europe, the South of Italy is patchy as to consumerist development. On the other hand, where I am, you can get first-run movies on DVD, usually within a day of official release. Pirated, of course, but no less quality. Everybody does it. I've only met one person in the last year who actually bought a CD at a store (not including me, that is, and that was on a trip to Milan), everything else music-wise is pirated. Hell, I was offered Visual Studio Enterprise (version 6, but still) for *5 Euro* not too long ago. At Christmas I was offered a copy of Oracle.
This price increase will crimp budgets. Marginally. It will not stop piracy. At all.
Your comment itself is a duplicate - it's been posted at least 10 times for every duplicate the editors post. That's what's sad.
... And *still* the editors say nothing about improving the site to catch these kinds of errors. Despite all the complaints. Despite the repetitive nature of the complaints, even.
You might forgive the occasional duplicate; I would too. But as the parent poster pointed out, it's getting worse, not better, because the editorial board of Slashdot does not care.
Look, I'm not a geek. Or a nerd. I guess. Yes, Slashdot is still my favourite tech site, but only because there really isn't a decent alternative.
The trouble is, when even the editors act like it's jumped the shark, it's a little difficult to get enthused about it sometimes.
Anecdotally, I think you're probably correct.
I suggested some time ago that the editors do something useful, like change the departmental listings to something informative, and that was ignored (not that I expected them to give a shit, really, but... you don't want to troll before at least contributing something useful).
The editors continue to hope that subscriptions will go up to make some money for OSDN - the problem is, if they can't be bothered to check the site for simple errors like these, how do they expect to win visitors' confidence?
However. Their site, they can do what they like.
Bit of a shame really.
Too right. I honestly believe that anyone who gets so worked up over this should seriously take a semantics course and move on to reading Joyce's Ulysses, some Guy Debord, and Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces, smoke a bowl or six, and learn to relax a bit.
That goes double for RMS. While I think he has a point, it's just a technology.
... Wasn't the L4 microkernel meant to be an alternative, future base for the HURD (currently based on a GNU implementation of Mach, IIRC)? Has Marcus or anyone else had the chance to look at this yet? If so, what do they think?
I dunno. I used to work for the Industries of Satan, I was a marketroid, a research analyst, in a media company. We used to need data mining done for us from time to time.
It was a pain in the ass. Even with computers doing all the work. Someone's got to model all the information in a GUIfied programme, but humans still have to interpret the data. Even when you have people doing the interpreting, it doesn't mean you'll follow their advice.
I think you have valid points about the bogus nature of using RFIDs, but I think it'd be more applicable to the *restriction of trade* than anything else. People wanting these things have no idea how bloody difficult it is to get anything useful from them.
Technically, you're right. However, he was prescient, remember? He did nothing to avoid it as such.