Agree completely. But on the flip side: as a developer, I'm not being paid to care about those things, I'm being paid to get my work done. When IT policies make it nigh impossible to do my work, and my choices are 1) spend months trying to cut through red tape, instead of doing my job, just to do things that I'd be able to do if there were no IT department at all in place, or 2) bypass some policies and do the things that actually make money for the company, #2 starts to look damn attractive.
A lot of this depends on the company. I've seen the other side of the fence, and understand that point of view. Even at companies with well-run, reasonable, flexible IT departments, there's always gonna be a few know-it-all clowns that want to bypass IT and do stupid things, because they think they're smarter than they are.
But some IT departments are so rigid and inefficient, so narrow-mindedly set on enforcing policies that only work for general office workers (who can do their work just fine with a very limited number of tools), that working around them is the only practical solution for some employees. If that's not how your IT department is, then I applaud you. But don't assume that everyone who bypasses their IT department's policies is simply "arrogant", "self centered", or "some prissy dev".
Wow, thanks for this. I'm adding a 2nd TV in my bedroom right now, and looking for a cheap box that will stream from my existing NAS setup, and this kind of list is precisely what I needed (and couldn't find).
Lolol - I just googled this to find more info, and got this article. It makes me cringe even more than the original comment, by trying to explain why it's stupid:
Like other islands, Guam is attached to the sea floor, which makes it extremely unlikely that it will tip over, even if there are lots and lots of people on it.
I know this is Slashdot and all, but how did this get modded 5 - Insightful? Pointing out that the wealth gap in the US is absurd and suggesting that we should work to shrink it or just restrain its growth is not the same as advocating communist-style wealth redistribution (which I assume is the indended comparison).
One can easily imagine a scenario in which extreme lack of oversight/regulation results in a wealth gap that grows until the disparity between rich & poor yields undesirable living conditions and possibly even social collapse (perhaps where the US is headed), while too much oversight/regulation and "wealth redistribution" (shrinking the class gap too much, down to near across-the-board equality) stifles competition and financial incentives for improvements in efficiency (i.e. your envisioned communist scenario). Trying to strike a balance in between that maintains most of the capitalist incentive structures without promoting an ever-widening class gap is a rational middle ground. The US is probably leaning more toward the "ultra-captialist" end of the spectrum than that ideal middle ground at the moment, as demonstrated by statistics showing that the class gap growing at an alarming rate, and is substantially wider than historical levels. A more progressive income tax rate is one possible way to counter-balance that growth without unduly harming overall productivity.
SELinux might actually hurt in this situation, since this is a NULL pointer exploit. The LWN article Fun with NULL pointers from a few weeks back has an interesting explanation.
Yes, but the reason that health care costs are so high in America is that we have the best quality of health care in the world.
America may have some of the best care in the world for those that can afford it. But the median level of care is most certainly not the best in the world, and the overall level of care we receive per dollar spent is event worse.
I think that at least part of the reason many Libertarians are "pro property rights" is really that they're for reduced government control. In the case of real-world [physical] property, governments can usurp individual property rights by eminent domain, which Libertarians are often opposed to. Thus in those examples, "pro property rights" is really synonymous with "reduced government power".
Point being, I'd think that among Libertarians there would actually be strong opposition to strict pro-IP laws, as they increase the power of the government at the cost of a reduction of individual freedom. That reduction is [in theory] a trade-off for increased production of creative works. But with other issues Libertarians tend to require a much larger benefit to society in order to outweigh the cost of individual freedoms (think about the extremes to which this is sometimes taken, like those that are against the National Park Service). So I'd expect the same would apply here.
I don't think you get the error - Firefox isn't warning you because the signing cert (/CA) is unrecognized, it's warning you because it sees two certificates supposedly signed with the same cert (/CA) but which share the same serial number.
Since any two Linksys devices are unrelated, there's no way for one to know which serial numbers are valid for it to use that the other hasn't already taken. Multiply this by the number of Linksys devices out there.
I write firmware for an embedded device, and we have this same problem. Our solution was simply to generate a random signing certificate for each device the very first time it boots, and use that to sign a new certificate any time the IP changes. It's a bit more of a hassle for the user (who now has to add the root cert for each device to his browser's trusted list), but it avoids the nasty error messages. It's also more resistant to a wide-area attack - in theory someone could crack just one Linksys router to get the private part of its root cert, then use that to forge any other router's certificate. It might even be extractable directly from the firmware image.
Except that the audio takes up very little space compared to the video, and the encoding formats have changed to codecs that are way more efficient (many times smaller for similar quality). Early Blu-ray releases were still in MPEG2, but about 2/3 of the BR discs out there now use H.264 or VC-1, and that number's only going to get larger. Almost none of the HD-DVD discs use MPEG2.
Disable overcommit by echo 2 >/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory. No more OOM killer killing some random unrelated process. Memory allocations will fail and programs will be able to handle that correctly.
FYI, I used to do this on an embedded system - until the first time I had to run a multi-threaded app on it. Per-thread stacks are allocated in advance (so that they're spaced far enough apart to allow for expansion without stepping on each other), which causes any multi-threaded process to allocate lots of memory that it doesn't really need. The situation is better on a desktop than on an embedded system just due to the available memory, but you'll still run into issues if you turn off overcommit and run any apps that use lots of threads.
Re:Silly rabits, x86 has been RISC core since PPro
on
Why Do We Use x86 CPUs?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
And with the current generation of processors, we are leaving that behind for "x64" also known as EM64T, IA-32e or IA-64 in its various iterations.
Just to clarify, IA-64 was implemented only in Itanium processors, and is unrelated to x86-64. Intel themselves tried to break away from the x86 line, and the market wasn't very receptive, which is part of what drove the creation of x86-64 instead by AMD.
Most evolutionists from what I've seen will dispute my argument here pulling out dates and timelines. But if I'm not mistaken, these timelines were created with carbon dating, which has been shown to yield inaccurate results.
This is not true. Dates are obtained using different radiometric and non-radiometric methods, and cross-checking the dates with each other for verification wherever possible. Carbon dating is only one method, and it's only accurate during relatively recent (in geological terms) time periods. See the talk.origins General Radiometric Dating and Isochron Dating articles for information.
The reason you hear 14C brought up so often when discussing things that are millions/billions of years old (far outside the scope of its accuracy) is because it's an easy target to attack. Usually someone shows a couple of cases where 14C fails, then makes an unjustified leap and says, "something is wrong with the core assumptions behind radiometric dating!", then makes another unjustified leap and says "the geological timeline doesn't have a leg to stand on!"
This just isn't true. I've switched to digital as well, but the resolution of 35mm film is roughly 24 megapixels. This is still 3x the resolution of the best consumer digicams.
First of all, we're talking about DSLRs, not digicams. Canon's 1Ds MkII is over 16MP, and it's over a year old.
Second, most calculations of 35mm film's resolution, like that one you quote, are purely theoretical. Lots of assumptions have to be made when comparing the grain on film to the sensor sites on a chip, but what really matters is how the final image looks. And for several years now, DSLRs have surpassed 35mm film in image quality and resolution. For example, see this Luminous Landscape article comparing the original Canon 1Ds to the Canon 1V and Pentax 645. The DSLR yields an obviously superior image to film, regardless of the theoretical extra information the film may contain.
Note that the 1Ds is several years old, and has since been surpassed by the second-generation 1Ds-MkII. Even my own camera, the 5D, is pretty far beyond the reach of a 35mm film camera in terms of image quality. (Note: I use Canon equipment so that's all I've referenced, but similarly Nikon's D2X outperforms 35mm film cameras).
Why should I? Based on your thinking why should I be nice to anyone unless it serves my own self-interest. Why should I follow the rule of law, etc? Why shouldn't I just become a totally self-centered anarchist--kill or be killed? Survival of the fittest and all that, right? Where in evolutionary theory does it tell me that I have to or even necessarily should be 'nice' to anyone? Just because you want me to and it might make your life better?
This is the same kind of thinking that many Christians have about things they don't agree with, and I'm not sure why. For instance, many won't even admit the possibility that, had they been born in a Muslim country, they would have adopted Islam. And at church when I was younger I constantly heard things like, "Man, if I hadn't become a Christian, I'd be dead/in jail/drugged out/etc by now." Over half the Christians I knew seriously believed those things, yet curiously the death/incarceration rate of atheists is nowhere near as high as it should be.
It's easy to think that you'd act in some absurd or extreme manner when you're not in a position to do so. If your ideals guide your behavior, great. But don't think that, if your current ideals went away, your behavior would become "unguided" and unethical. Rather, you'd adopt new ideals on a different basis and act according to those instead. Atheism is a lack of a belief in God, not a lack of all ideals and morality. Just because you may view God as the basis of morality (I'm assuming so for the sake of argument), that doesn't mean that others have to.
So, when the next vulnerability is found in a commonly used Unix library, will we be in any better position?
Yes, we will be. With source comes flexibility, such as the ability to use PIE / SSP when building code. Even if no major distros like RedHat pick up such technologies, individuals still have the choice to use them if they wish.
Such things aren't perfect by any means, but they greatly raise the bar for potential intruders. Combine that with the relatively low payoff of compromising a particular flavor/version/build of Linux software (there's far more diversity in the Linux world, thus a far fewer percentage of users that any one exploit applies to), and it's unlikely that anyone will even bother trying to target you anyway.
You make good points otherwise - on most desktops, a user-level compromise can be just as deadly as a system-level compromise, and we shouldn't think that *nix is immune from attack or that these things won't affect us. But there is an inherent difference between the options available to security-conscious users on Linux vs. Windows.
So, talk about the technical issues between ID and evolution all you want. The issue is much larger than that one, and it is really about active oppresion of religious views under the guise of "tolerance". The only constitutionally valid stance is to make no laws at all regarding religious practices...
A very good point, and I happen to agree with your examples such as the Ten Commandments (although calling atheism a "religion" is misleading at best). However, I fail to see how that applies to this case. If ID is necessarily based in religion, then it should be taught in religion/theology class rather than science class. That's not a violation of the establishment clause - if it were, I could propose any wild conjecture I wanted, base it in religion, then cry foul because it doesn't get taught in science classes. If ID can stand on its own as a scientific theory, however, then the issues you state don't apply anyway. The judge ruled that the former applied rather than the latter.
I think he was trying to say that you'll get better pictures with a $700 camera and $100 software than you will with a $300 camera and $500 software. Which is probably the case, though we never know what the OP's situation is (maybe he needs a discrete camera, but processes thousands of photos and needs an efficient software package). Your latter point is valid, though that the $500 price tag is justified if it saves you lots of time (which would apply mainly to professionals). Although I don't know any serious professionals who process thousands of shots from their A95, personally.
A similar argument applies to alot of people who buy a DSLR without doing much research. I've seriously seen people spend nearly $5000 on a Canon 1D, because they have the money and they hear it's a great camera, then they'll buy an el-cheapo lens like the 55-200mm to go along with it. They could have obtained far superior photos for a fraction of the cost by getting a 20D (or even Rebel XT) with something like the 70-200mm. In computer terms, these guys are buying a $5000 server and throwing in a single Maxtor ATA drive.
Insisting that device manufacturers need to have on-staff kernel hackers in order to keep ahead of a frequently-changing kernel makes it that much harder for manufacturers to support Linux as a viable alternative.
No one is suggesting that companies shoulder the additional burden of constantly updating their drivers - that is taken care of for them automatically once they submit the driver to mainline. This is only an issue if the manufacturer refuses to do so, e.g. for a binary driver, or for separately maintained source. The former is considered unacceptable by most kernel developers, and the latter doesn't seem to have any benefit to the company.
The only people who should be clamoring for a stable source-level API are the kernel developers themselves, since they're burdened with the work of updating drivers when an interface changes.
The one tiny good point Dvorak makes here is that the CC licenses should have a (purely informational) clause noting that "none of these limitations should be construed as eliminating any Fair Use rights granted by U.S. copyright law." That's a clarification to the license that is at least worth discussing.
Maybe something along the lines of "Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above."? Oh wait, that's *already* in bold on the human-readable Summary page
There seem to be a lot of people who think "copyright was fine when it was a pain for me to copy stuff, but now that it's easy to copy stuff, we should get rid of copyright". They seem to think that the purpose of copyright law was to tell people they couldn't do what they weren't going to do anyway.
This assumes that the sole purpose of copyright is to protect the author or their content; if so, it's a valid point. But falling distribution costs also mean that it's cheaper to acheive the same level of creation we had previously. Cheaper production means faster return on your initial 'investment', thus a shorter copyright period is required to secure that return [in the general case].
It's really an issue of whether you believe that technology will increase the ease with which material is 'pirated', or will decrease the cost of production. In reality both will occur, but it's unfair to assert that technology is so beneficial to the 'pirates', yet does nothing for the creators.
Even if you could argue that the level piracy is outstripping the dropping price of creation, there's still the question of whether it serves society as a whole to fund more and more creation. As our resources increase, our standard of living goes up, population increases, people have more free time to pursue the arts as a hobby, etc., you could argue that there is less and less need for paid production of creative material. This doesn't apply as much to the big-dollar Hollywood movies, but those will continue to earn money through box-office sales for a long time anyway.
Well, I'm a bit disappointed that native Reiser4 support wasn't included in this release. It's one of the features I'm greatly looking forward to...and I'm too noobish to compile a Reiser4 kernel module myself.
It's not clearly advertised for some reason, but Hans makes available patches that add Reiser4 support to the mainline kernel. This should probably be spelled out more clearly somehwere, since I know alot of people avoid trying Reiser4 because they don't want to run -mm.
At 1024X768 this "High Definition" television can not fully render neither of the two High-Def resolutions of 720p (1280x720) nor 1080i (1920x1080 interlaced).
I don't think there are ANY big-screen TVs that are native 1080i, except for maybe a few in the $20k range. And few are even 720; "quarter HD" is considered pretty high for most (960x540). Compared to most HDTV displays out there that are just barely higher than 480p, this is actually pretty good.
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Agree completely. But on the flip side: as a developer, I'm not being paid to care about those things, I'm being paid to get my work done. When IT policies make it nigh impossible to do my work, and my choices are 1) spend months trying to cut through red tape, instead of doing my job, just to do things that I'd be able to do if there were no IT department at all in place, or 2) bypass some policies and do the things that actually make money for the company, #2 starts to look damn attractive.
A lot of this depends on the company. I've seen the other side of the fence, and understand that point of view. Even at companies with well-run, reasonable, flexible IT departments, there's always gonna be a few know-it-all clowns that want to bypass IT and do stupid things, because they think they're smarter than they are.
But some IT departments are so rigid and inefficient, so narrow-mindedly set on enforcing policies that only work for general office workers (who can do their work just fine with a very limited number of tools), that working around them is the only practical solution for some employees. If that's not how your IT department is, then I applaud you. But don't assume that everyone who bypasses their IT department's policies is simply "arrogant", "self centered", or "some prissy dev".
Wow, thanks for this. I'm adding a 2nd TV in my bedroom right now, and looking for a cheap box that will stream from my existing NAS setup, and this kind of list is precisely what I needed (and couldn't find).
Lolol - I just googled this to find more info, and got this article. It makes me cringe even more than the original comment, by trying to explain why it's stupid:
What. The. Fuck.
I know this is Slashdot and all, but how did this get modded 5 - Insightful? Pointing out that the wealth gap in the US is absurd and suggesting that we should work to shrink it or just restrain its growth is not the same as advocating communist-style wealth redistribution (which I assume is the indended comparison).
One can easily imagine a scenario in which extreme lack of oversight/regulation results in a wealth gap that grows until the disparity between rich & poor yields undesirable living conditions and possibly even social collapse (perhaps where the US is headed), while too much oversight/regulation and "wealth redistribution" (shrinking the class gap too much, down to near across-the-board equality) stifles competition and financial incentives for improvements in efficiency (i.e. your envisioned communist scenario). Trying to strike a balance in between that maintains most of the capitalist incentive structures without promoting an ever-widening class gap is a rational middle ground. The US is probably leaning more toward the "ultra-captialist" end of the spectrum than that ideal middle ground at the moment, as demonstrated by statistics showing that the class gap growing at an alarming rate, and is substantially wider than historical levels. A more progressive income tax rate is one possible way to counter-balance that growth without unduly harming overall productivity.
SELinux might actually hurt in this situation, since this is a NULL pointer exploit. The LWN article Fun with NULL pointers from a few weeks back has an interesting explanation.
America may have some of the best care in the world for those that can afford it. But the median level of care is most certainly not the best in the world, and the overall level of care we receive per dollar spent is event worse.
Rather than continuing this thread's trend of anecdotes and ideology, here's a study which describes how and why the US's health care system is different than other countries.
I think that at least part of the reason many Libertarians are "pro property rights" is really that they're for reduced government control. In the case of real-world [physical] property, governments can usurp individual property rights by eminent domain, which Libertarians are often opposed to. Thus in those examples, "pro property rights" is really synonymous with "reduced government power".
Point being, I'd think that among Libertarians there would actually be strong opposition to strict pro-IP laws, as they increase the power of the government at the cost of a reduction of individual freedom. That reduction is [in theory] a trade-off for increased production of creative works. But with other issues Libertarians tend to require a much larger benefit to society in order to outweigh the cost of individual freedoms (think about the extremes to which this is sometimes taken, like those that are against the National Park Service). So I'd expect the same would apply here.
I don't think you get the error - Firefox isn't warning you because the signing cert (/CA) is unrecognized, it's warning you because it sees two certificates supposedly signed with the same cert (/CA) but which share the same serial number.
Since any two Linksys devices are unrelated, there's no way for one to know which serial numbers are valid for it to use that the other hasn't already taken. Multiply this by the number of Linksys devices out there.
I write firmware for an embedded device, and we have this same problem. Our solution was simply to generate a random signing certificate for each device the very first time it boots, and use that to sign a new certificate any time the IP changes. It's a bit more of a hassle for the user (who now has to add the root cert for each device to his browser's trusted list), but it avoids the nasty error messages. It's also more resistant to a wide-area attack - in theory someone could crack just one Linksys router to get the private part of its root cert, then use that to forge any other router's certificate. It might even be extractable directly from the firmware image.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but this "very small minority" is actually pretty large, at least in the US. Gallup polls estimate that something like 45% of Americans believe "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so". A similar percentage believes evolution is "probably" or "definitely" false.
Except that the audio takes up very little space compared to the video, and the encoding formats have changed to codecs that are way more efficient (many times smaller for similar quality). Early Blu-ray releases were still in MPEG2, but about 2/3 of the BR discs out there now use H.264 or VC-1, and that number's only going to get larger. Almost none of the HD-DVD discs use MPEG2.
Some sample numbers here.
Just to clarify, IA-64 was implemented only in Itanium processors, and is unrelated to x86-64. Intel themselves tried to break away from the x86 line, and the market wasn't very receptive, which is part of what drove the creation of x86-64 instead by AMD.
This is not true. Dates are obtained using different radiometric and non-radiometric methods, and cross-checking the dates with each other for verification wherever possible. Carbon dating is only one method, and it's only accurate during relatively recent (in geological terms) time periods. See the talk.origins General Radiometric Dating and Isochron Dating articles for information.
The reason you hear 14C brought up so often when discussing things that are millions/billions of years old (far outside the scope of its accuracy) is because it's an easy target to attack. Usually someone shows a couple of cases where 14C fails, then makes an unjustified leap and says, "something is wrong with the core assumptions behind radiometric dating!", then makes another unjustified leap and says "the geological timeline doesn't have a leg to stand on!"
First of all, we're talking about DSLRs, not digicams. Canon's 1Ds MkII is over 16MP, and it's over a year old.
Second, most calculations of 35mm film's resolution, like that one you quote, are purely theoretical. Lots of assumptions have to be made when comparing the grain on film to the sensor sites on a chip, but what really matters is how the final image looks. And for several years now, DSLRs have surpassed 35mm film in image quality and resolution. For example, see this Luminous Landscape article comparing the original Canon 1Ds to the Canon 1V and Pentax 645. The DSLR yields an obviously superior image to film, regardless of the theoretical extra information the film may contain.
Note that the 1Ds is several years old, and has since been surpassed by the second-generation 1Ds-MkII. Even my own camera, the 5D, is pretty far beyond the reach of a 35mm film camera in terms of image quality. (Note: I use Canon equipment so that's all I've referenced, but similarly Nikon's D2X outperforms 35mm film cameras).
This is the same kind of thinking that many Christians have about things they don't agree with, and I'm not sure why. For instance, many won't even admit the possibility that, had they been born in a Muslim country, they would have adopted Islam. And at church when I was younger I constantly heard things like, "Man, if I hadn't become a Christian, I'd be dead/in jail/drugged out/etc by now." Over half the Christians I knew seriously believed those things, yet curiously the death/incarceration rate of atheists is nowhere near as high as it should be.
It's easy to think that you'd act in some absurd or extreme manner when you're not in a position to do so. If your ideals guide your behavior, great. But don't think that, if your current ideals went away, your behavior would become "unguided" and unethical. Rather, you'd adopt new ideals on a different basis and act according to those instead. Atheism is a lack of a belief in God, not a lack of all ideals and morality. Just because you may view God as the basis of morality (I'm assuming so for the sake of argument), that doesn't mean that others have to.
Yes, we will be. With source comes flexibility, such as the ability to use PIE / SSP when building code. Even if no major distros like RedHat pick up such technologies, individuals still have the choice to use them if they wish.
Such things aren't perfect by any means, but they greatly raise the bar for potential intruders. Combine that with the relatively low payoff of compromising a particular flavor/version/build of Linux software (there's far more diversity in the Linux world, thus a far fewer percentage of users that any one exploit applies to), and it's unlikely that anyone will even bother trying to target you anyway.
You make good points otherwise - on most desktops, a user-level compromise can be just as deadly as a system-level compromise, and we shouldn't think that *nix is immune from attack or that these things won't affect us. But there is an inherent difference between the options available to security-conscious users on Linux vs. Windows.
A very good point, and I happen to agree with your examples such as the Ten Commandments (although calling atheism a "religion" is misleading at best). However, I fail to see how that applies to this case. If ID is necessarily based in religion, then it should be taught in religion/theology class rather than science class. That's not a violation of the establishment clause - if it were, I could propose any wild conjecture I wanted, base it in religion, then cry foul because it doesn't get taught in science classes. If ID can stand on its own as a scientific theory, however, then the issues you state don't apply anyway. The judge ruled that the former applied rather than the latter.
Ah, for a second I thought you were referring to this. :)
(Taken from the article located here)
I think he was trying to say that you'll get better pictures with a $700 camera and $100 software than you will with a $300 camera and $500 software. Which is probably the case, though we never know what the OP's situation is (maybe he needs a discrete camera, but processes thousands of photos and needs an efficient software package). Your latter point is valid, though that the $500 price tag is justified if it saves you lots of time (which would apply mainly to professionals). Although I don't know any serious professionals who process thousands of shots from their A95, personally.
A similar argument applies to alot of people who buy a DSLR without doing much research. I've seriously seen people spend nearly $5000 on a Canon 1D, because they have the money and they hear it's a great camera, then they'll buy an el-cheapo lens like the 55-200mm to go along with it. They could have obtained far superior photos for a fraction of the cost by getting a 20D (or even Rebel XT) with something like the 70-200mm. In computer terms, these guys are buying a $5000 server and throwing in a single Maxtor ATA drive.
Insisting that device manufacturers need to have on-staff kernel hackers in order to keep ahead of a frequently-changing kernel makes it that much harder for manufacturers to support Linux as a viable alternative.
No one is suggesting that companies shoulder the additional burden of constantly updating their drivers - that is taken care of for them automatically once they submit the driver to mainline. This is only an issue if the manufacturer refuses to do so, e.g. for a binary driver, or for separately maintained source. The former is considered unacceptable by most kernel developers, and the latter doesn't seem to have any benefit to the company.
The only people who should be clamoring for a stable source-level API are the kernel developers themselves, since they're burdened with the work of updating drivers when an interface changes.
The one tiny good point Dvorak makes here is that the CC licenses should have a (purely informational) clause noting that "none of these limitations should be construed as eliminating any Fair Use rights granted by U.S. copyright law." That's a clarification to the license that is at least worth discussing.
Maybe something along the lines of "Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above."? Oh wait, that's *already* in bold on the human-readable Summary page
There seem to be a lot of people who think "copyright was fine when it was a pain for me to copy stuff, but now that it's easy to copy stuff, we should get rid of copyright". They seem to think that the purpose of copyright law was to tell people they couldn't do what they weren't going to do anyway.
This assumes that the sole purpose of copyright is to protect the author or their content; if so, it's a valid point. But falling distribution costs also mean that it's cheaper to acheive the same level of creation we had previously. Cheaper production means faster return on your initial 'investment', thus a shorter copyright period is required to secure that return [in the general case].
It's really an issue of whether you believe that technology will increase the ease with which material is 'pirated', or will decrease the cost of production. In reality both will occur, but it's unfair to assert that technology is so beneficial to the 'pirates', yet does nothing for the creators.
Even if you could argue that the level piracy is outstripping the dropping price of creation, there's still the question of whether it serves society as a whole to fund more and more creation. As our resources increase, our standard of living goes up, population increases, people have more free time to pursue the arts as a hobby, etc., you could argue that there is less and less need for paid production of creative material. This doesn't apply as much to the big-dollar Hollywood movies, but those will continue to earn money through box-office sales for a long time anyway.
Well, I'm a bit disappointed that native Reiser4 support wasn't included in this release. It's one of the features I'm greatly looking forward to...and I'm too noobish to compile a Reiser4 kernel module myself.
It's not clearly advertised for some reason, but Hans makes available patches that add Reiser4 support to the mainline kernel. This should probably be spelled out more clearly somehwere, since I know alot of people avoid trying Reiser4 because they don't want to run -mm.
Ha - reminds me of this. :)
(And yes, I got the Big Lebowski reference)
At 1024X768 this "High Definition" television can not fully render neither of the two High-Def resolutions of 720p (1280x720) nor 1080i (1920x1080 interlaced).
I don't think there are ANY big-screen TVs that are native 1080i, except for maybe a few in the $20k range. And few are even 720; "quarter HD" is considered pretty high for most (960x540). Compared to most HDTV displays out there that are just barely higher than 480p, this is actually pretty good.