You cannot derive the work, nor can you use it commercially. Bang go freedoms 0 1 and 2. The work is still copyrighted, like a photograph licensed online, our only freedom is to look at it.
'Redistribution' doesn't mean anything online. Redistribution of a mars bar or a patented camera would mean building the product yourself using the original design. With anything digital rather than physical redistribution can't exist. Everything is a copy, there is no 'master', copies are made whenever you view content on the web, as the same data is send over the internet protocol. There's no difference between 'view' and 'download', whether the data is saved to your home, your cache, or even not stored except in RAM. You are being 'given' the identical digital data. It's ridiculous to suppose that once you posess this data you cannot share it, and that the first server still controls the data because it perceives itself different. This is like writing a book, but not selling it and insisting everyone but come round your house to read the typeset.
Videos are of course avaliable to view for free a million places on the webs so certainly redistribution == distribution. Take a 30 meg quicktime video you can download. http://www.chrismilk.com/audioslave/ Now if you send that file to your friend or if they download it from that same site, how can you distinguish?
The internet was creating to freely and openly share data, why are we trying to close it back up? If you want to hold your work forever, DO NOT UPLOAD IT. So Pearl Jam, this is nothing but an empty publicity stunt. And Creative Commons, if someone unticks all the boxes 'allow commerical use', 'allow deriatives', if you really have principles, then display a message, 'the license you have chosen is "enforced copyright" you IP-fascist'.
The world is not black and white. There are many problems in our world, and the solution to one can be a cause of another. You can't divide everyone there is into the two groups 1) those with a conscience (activists) and 2) those who don't care (politicians).
Here are some of the world's undisputed problems: war, poverty, that hole in the ozone layer, famine, HIV/AIDS, drought, the arms trade, the destruction of habitats, extinction, loss of biodiversity, nuclear proliferation, lawlessness, discrimination, deforestation, exploitation of resources, unsustainable development, urbanisation, malaria, malnutrition, dictatorships, censorship, the energy crisis, exploitation of workers, climate change, natural disasters, unfair trade. Prioritise them. It's tough. Were you selfish? Did you choose those that affect you? How would you explain to a mother of five that the money that should feed her children is being spent on reducing emissions of a gas she can't even see.
If you're a politician things you dreamed of changing are pushed to the back of your filing cabinet as soon as any problem arises locally. So a politician who has a window on the world and chooses to address even one issue should be respected.
Renewable energy CO2. Wind farms kill birds. Dams flood villages and deplete asgadghadhadh
The current implementation is useless, because you don't know *if* there is an alternate stylesheet avaliable, because there's no visible icon. No-one goes to habitually look in view/page style to see.
it's the notification section. gnome 2.14 has a sexy new notification box at last. there's a message saying updates are avaliable. and then it says 'a restart is required' what's that about. when do you ever need to do that in linux? obviously if you want to boot into a newer kernel, but i wouldn't recommend rebooting JUST for that. wait till you next turn on tomorrow. any other application is the new version when you run it, and you can restart X without rebooting. madness...
also they should real help us by aclling it rebooting. not restarting. that doesn't mean anything.
Hah maybe I sell out in trying to be controversial. But no I do have some real opinions on Firefox that usually get modded out of side. Here they arel, following my story.
In 2003 , back when I used Windows, and wasn't that geeky at all, I installed an 'alternative' browser at hte recommendation of my brother. This was Firebird 0.7. I liked it. It was faster than IE. He showed me how to use the tabs (using TBE) and how it blocked ads (adblock). I was impressed by the good many geeky features that made it useful - find as you type, style sheet changing, the search bar, clever bookmarks, easy restoring of tabs.
I thought this was a brilliant browser for geeks. And each version was an improvement, despite change in name.
I got caught up in the excitement. How Firefox 1.0 was going to be amazing and everyone would use it. Then around the 1.0 prerelease (sep 2004) things start to go wrong. I think this is explained best in the stylesheet changer issue. If you remember the old Firebird, down in the bottom right there was a button on websites to change stylesheets for those that had alternate ones avaliable. This is almost forgotten now as a result.
But that wasn't true. 1.0 shipped without the stylesheet changer, but they got away with it, becauuse we were caught up in the hysteria. The decision to target IE users over their old userbase had been made. I don't know if you've used an out-the-box Firefox, but it's not much fun. It acts like IE. No single-window mode, (tabs + windows is ridiculously confusing), find as you type disabled, giant IE like buttons, links underline etc...
It was the change of target chosen by Mozilla from the powered user to the convert IE users on Windows. That doesn't mean you have to reproduce IE in everyway. Disabling find as you type, tabs by default. Even rearranging the buttons. IE users aren't dumb. They can cope with change.
The evangelical thing gets to me. Spreadfirefox preaches only to the converted. It's not about the freedom of choice GNU but about destroying competition. They'd promote Firefox over any other alternate browser, encouraging sites to support Firefox, not to support standards.
And even though I really hadn't got into Linux then. I see another sell out here. Mozilla was about Linux. It came as the default suite on many a distro. Then windows bugs became a priority - 1.0 for linux was a mess.
Do you know animal farm? Or the russian revolution. How we're promised everything, only for values to be sold out, to arrive at hypocrisy, and perhaps no better than what we had before.
To comparing Ubuntu to say Fedora Core, you have to look behind the sticky smiley usable faces and compare the old clockwork beneath of Debian against Red Hat. I think the biggest answers here are a) speed and b).deb package management. I use Fedora Core, and it is officially a beast, and managing.rpm's through yum isn't perfect.
But the real differences aren't in the software. It's the attitude and community. Ubuntu loves you. Ubuntu is your friend. It smiles when you see it on the street. Those behind Ubuntu hav the right attitude, although sometimes a little patronising, it is one that *will* make *something* happen. This great, I think we can trust Ubuntu not to become hypocritically evangelical and sell out like Firefox.
AOB: Hell! My easter egg's dissapeared from within foil. Tell me I didn't just eat it...
First there's the hypocrisy in running free software on Windows.
But also remember Linux is it's community. I might not write the software I use, but those who to are in my reach and willing to discuss. If I feel there is a problem, I can make others aware of that problem, leading to a solution. Microsoft doesn't have a community, there's no dialogue between consumer and producer. The backlash of Linux users against Windows users is a reaction against Microsoft not playing fair.
Microsoft purposely make their products difficult to be compatible with. They don't conform to purposeful neutral standards set out by the W3C etc, but use their own secret ways.. Office documents are notoriously difficult to read. Internet Explorer won't render perfect HTML/CSS but encourages malformed HTML. A specification for the MSN protocol has never been made avaliable. They play foul, they are a parasite burrowing deeper into their hosts. Microsoft never and aren't even expected to meet Linux half way in being able to read.odt, but of course all Linux software is expected to be 100% compatible with Windows, or else it's dismissed as C.R.A.P. Every linux office worker will receive.doc files from their colleagues, who just *expect* them to own the £100 suite. But I would never post them.odt. Mozilla has to render crappy sites bodged to work in IE, but I'm not allowed to use transparent pngs when I design a site. None of my Windows friends will talk to me on Jabber, so I have to talk to them in MSN.
I was just going some snidey comment about how only six minutes after the story was posted the site was down.. I was going to poke fun at Microsoft IIS - that piece of crap. I check and of course the site is running on Apache 1.3!! OS unknown.
Okay let's talk about 'Windows software'. That's software specifically developed for Windows rather than multiplatform software. So we're talking proprietary software rather GPL software that has been posted in Red Cross boxes from over the border. There are few exceptions (eMule) but Windows is a land of prop. software, and it's sillypocrisy to run all the OSS on Windows (OpenOffice, Gaim, Firefox, Thunderbird etc) to make it as Linux like as possible. Because then you shouldn't be using Windows.
So. It's expensive. Very expensive (excluding software piracy, an ugly thing). For example, Adobe Photoshop costs £60 from Amazon. Isn't that ridiculous? Excluding my monitor, I scrounged the hardware in my system for less than that. But it comes on CD in a fancy box, you don't download it. Because of this you can get by with a slow or non-permenant net connection And a box is good. You'll never lose it. You can reinstall it on your new system or lend it to your friends . Note that older versions of software are much cheaper, so long as you can obtain then (for they soon go out of production). Quite often recent versions of software will suffice.
Next it comes with megalomaniac installers and will quickly spam up your system if you don't do custom installs.
When people discuss the costs of *retraining* to use linux they're implying they've already trained their staff once before to use Windows. In many cases this isn't true - most users can't use Windows in the sense one can use Linux. Most windows users never add hardware, uninstall software, change the registry, edit a config file, update a package, etc... basic system tasks, but just click blindly in front them towards the light, or else they wouldn't shout "i've deleted the internet" , or get infected with malware by clicking "hot pics!!!!, downloading, install? , yes."
of course, the poor it department burdered with fixing their mess, a power windows users. but why? certainly all their jobs - adding scheduled tasks, performing a system upgrade, fixing the server are much easier in linux.
Handy tip I learnt the hard way. I had a problem with FC3 (this should really be fixed by now - I did file a bug). The installer allowed me - unfamiliar with linux but confident and willing to learn to partition my system myself to install with / and/swap, WITHOUT a/boot partition. This I later learnt is quite important, and it's absence fucked stuff severely, most noticeably not running the first-boot stuff, meaning I didn't create a user. When I first turned it on and I could not login. I reinstalled.
Fedora Core itself is a *great* distro, imho one of the best, and in many ways *technically* better than Ubuntu 5 (I'm holding out for ubuntu 6 to be THE killer linux - fc5 will hold me tight until then). Unfortunately Fedora's real problems are not bugs on CD, but problems with the project and community. There is none. The official website says nothing, rarely updated more regularly but to quietly change a digit after a new release. Look today and you'd never know a cracking new version was released yesterday. Compare with the GNOME.org page!! That's what I like. Sell yourself! If Fedora Core 6 wants to take back some of the sprawling ground I forsee Ubuntu 6 will have stormed over (perhaps in an early firefox way), the project really needs to pull their socks up in this respect. These are the major gnome distributions equating to the old red hat v debian. Certainly anyone starting with Linux today would choose Ubuntu over Fedora Core. Their website is an friendly warm inviting smile not an empty cold wall. Yes there is fedoraforums and fedoranews and the project wiki, but I don't feel like I'm giving feedback or get any special kick from using this system. So yes I still love my perfect Fedora, but I want more!
To summarise: Books are perfect for what they are. A palmtop is no less portable, and much more fragile than the copy of the catcher in the rye in my bag. Yes I see the advantages in searching, but that's only of importance with relevance to say, an encyclopaedia, on a PET (personal electronic thing) but that's wikipedia, not an ebook. The things they call ebooks are in no way equivalent to a book. So innovate. There is a market for technologies that allows us to speedily consume information read wikipedia, maps, news without needing to interact with it, purely passively. This you wouldn't find in a book! So it does not an ebook make.
What's holding me back? Everything. That such a product exists is completely beyond me. The disadvantages above are just a few of an infinitely-long list of complete flaws. They really are a dumb idea, when there is *NOTHING* wrong with a book, which are just *PERFECT*. They are a proven and timeless form of communication that will *never* be obsoleted, just as we will never live on the moon, drive flying cars or have robotic teachers at our children's schools. Wake up. There is technology that improves our lives (iPods) and there is technology of uninspired science fantasy that not only would never actually function, but more importantly we will never need (keys fitted with an RFID tag - I am perfectly capable of finding my keys myself, the RFID tag could never tell me I left them at the coffee shop, but if I *was* worried about losing them I would use a code).
So answer my question: Why the asdf would I ever want an 'eBook'?
The fact is, many users are still in the 80s and don't appreciate our current situation. Even this week I read that "garage geeks are responsable for the viruses and trojans (known as malware) that brings multinational corporations down". Like that was ever true. Garage geeks are trying to save us from the current "cure pays better than prevention cycle" users are fed.
On h4x0ring to Ddos extorsion - equate to Banksy on "grafitti is not a crime. i am reminded of this by real criminals who find the idea of breaking into a secured building to take nothing but leave your name in ten foot high letters absolutely ludicrous".
Viruses and trojans are not graffitti, but an organised armed robbery masterminded by real criminals, not out of teenage angst, but for PROFIT without regards to anyone. The UK doesn't have a problem, we need tougher enforcement in Poland, Czech and Russia and to chase this abuse out.
Slashdot Mirror
It's this license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ the 'selfish unfree license with no permissions'.
You cannot derive the work, nor can you use it commercially. Bang go freedoms 0 1 and 2. The work is still copyrighted, like a photograph licensed online, our only freedom is to look at it.
'Redistribution' doesn't mean anything online. Redistribution of a mars bar or a patented camera would mean building the product yourself using the original design. With anything digital rather than physical redistribution can't exist. Everything is a copy, there is no 'master', copies are made whenever you view content on the web, as the same data is send over the internet protocol. There's no difference between 'view' and 'download', whether the data is saved to your home, your cache, or even not stored except in RAM. You are being 'given' the identical digital data. It's ridiculous to suppose that once you posess this data you cannot share it, and that the first server still controls the data because it perceives itself different. This is like writing a book, but not selling it and insisting everyone but come round your house to read the typeset.
Videos are of course avaliable to view for free a million places on the webs so certainly redistribution == distribution. Take a 30 meg quicktime video you can download. http://www.chrismilk.com/audioslave/ Now if you send that file to your friend or if they download it from that same site, how can you distinguish?
The internet was creating to freely and openly share data, why are we trying to close it back up? If you want to hold your work forever, DO NOT UPLOAD IT. So Pearl Jam, this is nothing but an empty publicity stunt. And Creative Commons, if someone unticks all the boxes 'allow commerical use', 'allow deriatives', if you really have principles, then display a message, 'the license you have chosen is "enforced copyright" you IP-fascist'.
1. sparkly graphics
2. great gameplay
3. low budget
pick two.
I guess in this case it would be 'nothing to lose but your jobs'.
I love that chapter in Half-Life.
I'd be much more interested in the experience of desktop users.
The world is not black and white. There are many problems in our world, and the solution to one can be a cause of another. You can't divide everyone there is into the two groups 1) those with a conscience (activists) and 2) those who don't care (politicians).
Here are some of the world's undisputed problems: war, poverty, that hole in the ozone layer, famine, HIV/AIDS, drought, the arms trade, the destruction of habitats, extinction, loss of biodiversity, nuclear proliferation, lawlessness, discrimination, deforestation, exploitation of resources, unsustainable development, urbanisation, malaria, malnutrition, dictatorships, censorship, the energy crisis, exploitation of workers, climate change, natural disasters, unfair trade. Prioritise them. It's tough. Were you selfish? Did you choose those that affect you? How would you explain to a mother of five that the money that should feed her children is being spent on reducing emissions of a gas she can't even see.
If you're a politician things you dreamed of changing are pushed to the back of your filing cabinet as soon as any problem arises locally. So a politician who has a window on the world and chooses to address even one issue should be respected.
Renewable energy CO2. Wind farms kill birds. Dams flood villages and deplete asgadghadhadh
Firstly is there an extension?
/page style to see.
The current implementation is useless, because you don't know *if* there is an alternate stylesheet avaliable, because there's no visible icon. No-one goes to habitually look in view
look here (love the url)a 98f3cc839f858104f654c0f6900908721f73
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/dapperbeta#head-c56
it's the notification section. gnome 2.14 has a sexy new notification box at last. there's a message saying updates are avaliable. and then it says 'a restart is required' what's that about. when do you ever need to do that in linux? obviously if you want to boot into a newer kernel, but i wouldn't recommend rebooting JUST for that. wait till you next turn on tomorrow. any other application is the new version when you run it, and you can restart X without rebooting. madness...
also they should real help us by aclling it rebooting. not restarting. that doesn't mean anything.
Hah maybe I sell out in trying to be controversial. But no I do have some real opinions on Firefox that usually get modded out of side. Here they arel, following my story.
a lternate-stylesheet-switcher-in-firefox-10/ http://glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?2004/ 08/24/513-is-firefox-going-nuts-or-what and even asa (sensible firefox dev) was unhappy http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/006265 .html
e rnate-stylesheet-ui-is-back-in-firefox/ Other geeky things were kept we thought.
In 2003 , back when I used Windows, and wasn't that geeky at all, I installed an 'alternative' browser at hte recommendation of my brother. This was Firebird 0.7. I liked it. It was faster than IE. He showed me how to use the tabs (using TBE) and how it blocked ads (adblock). I was impressed by the good many geeky features that made it useful - find as you type, style sheet changing, the search bar, clever bookmarks, easy restoring of tabs.
I thought this was a brilliant browser for geeks. And each version was an improvement, despite change in name.
I got caught up in the excitement. How Firefox 1.0 was going to be amazing and everyone would use it. Then around the 1.0 prerelease (sep 2004) things start to go wrong. I think this is explained best in the stylesheet changer issue. If you remember the old Firebird, down in the bottom right there was a button on websites to change stylesheets for those that had alternate ones avaliable. This is almost forgotten now as a result.
What happende. The firefox devs proposed removnig geeky features - this switcher, work offline the javascript console and even view source to supposedly make it easier for IE users to switch. There was firefox user outrage read http://blog.codefront.net/archives/2004/08/25/no-
After extreme public outrage. They put the switcher back in. Between 1.0 PR and 1.0 See http://blog.codefront.net/archives/2004/09/11/alt
But that wasn't true. 1.0 shipped without the stylesheet changer, but they got away with it, becauuse we were caught up in the hysteria. The decision to target IE users over their old userbase had been made. I don't know if you've used an out-the-box Firefox, but it's not much fun. It acts like IE. No single-window mode, (tabs + windows is ridiculously confusing), find as you type disabled, giant IE like buttons, links underline etc...
It was the change of target chosen by Mozilla from the powered user to the convert IE users on Windows. That doesn't mean you have to reproduce IE in everyway. Disabling find as you type, tabs by default. Even rearranging the buttons. IE users aren't dumb. They can cope with change.
The evangelical thing gets to me. Spreadfirefox preaches only to the converted. It's not about the freedom of choice GNU but about destroying competition. They'd promote Firefox over any other alternate browser, encouraging sites to support Firefox, not to support standards.
And even though I really hadn't got into Linux then. I see another sell out here. Mozilla was about Linux. It came as the default suite on many a distro. Then windows bugs became a priority - 1.0 for linux was a mess.
Do you know animal farm? Or the russian revolution. How we're promised everything, only for values to be sold out, to arrive at hypocrisy, and perhaps no better than what we had before.
To comparing Ubuntu to say Fedora Core, you have to look behind the sticky smiley usable faces and compare the old clockwork beneath of Debian against Red Hat. I think the biggest answers here are a) speed and b) .deb package management. I use Fedora Core, and it is officially a beast, and managing .rpm's through yum isn't perfect.
But the real differences aren't in the software. It's the attitude and community. Ubuntu loves you. Ubuntu is your friend. It smiles when you see it on the street. Those behind Ubuntu hav the right attitude, although sometimes a little patronising, it is one that *will* make *something* happen. This great, I think we can trust Ubuntu not to become hypocritically evangelical and sell out like Firefox.
AOB: Hell! My easter egg's dissapeared from within foil. Tell me I didn't just eat it...
First there's the hypocrisy in running free software on Windows.
.odt, but of course all Linux software is expected to be 100% compatible with Windows, or else it's dismissed as C.R.A.P. Every linux office worker will receive .doc files from their colleagues, who just *expect* them to own the £100 suite. But I would never post them .odt. Mozilla has to render crappy sites bodged to work in IE, but I'm not allowed to use transparent pngs when I design a site. None of my Windows friends will talk to me on Jabber, so I have to talk to them in MSN.
But also remember Linux is it's community. I might not write the software I use, but those who to are in my reach and willing to discuss. If I feel there is a problem, I can make others aware of that problem, leading to a solution. Microsoft doesn't have a community, there's no dialogue between consumer and producer. The backlash of Linux users against Windows users is a reaction against Microsoft not playing fair.
Microsoft purposely make their products difficult to be compatible with. They don't conform to purposeful neutral standards set out by the W3C etc, but use their own secret ways.. Office documents are notoriously difficult to read. Internet Explorer won't render perfect HTML/CSS but encourages malformed HTML. A specification for the MSN protocol has never been made avaliable. They play foul, they are a parasite burrowing deeper into their hosts. Microsoft never and aren't even expected to meet Linux half way in being able to read
I was just going some snidey comment about how only six minutes after the story was posted the site was down.. I was going to poke fun at Microsoft IIS - that piece of crap. I check and of course the site is running on Apache 1.3!! OS unknown.
(yet apache 2 is king, the BBC runs that).
(Board room meeting)
Why are we spending so much money on whistles?
Okay let's talk about 'Windows software'. That's software specifically developed for Windows rather than multiplatform software. So we're talking proprietary software rather GPL software that has been posted in Red Cross boxes from over the border. There are few exceptions (eMule) but Windows is a land of prop. software, and it's sillypocrisy to run all the OSS on Windows (OpenOffice, Gaim, Firefox, Thunderbird etc) to make it as Linux like as possible. Because then you shouldn't be using Windows.
So.
It's expensive. Very expensive (excluding software piracy, an ugly thing). For example, Adobe Photoshop costs £60 from Amazon. Isn't that ridiculous? Excluding my monitor, I scrounged the hardware in my system for less than that. But it comes on CD in a fancy box, you don't download it. Because of this you can get by with a slow or non-permenant net connection And a box is good. You'll never lose it. You can reinstall it on your new system or lend it to your friends . Note that older versions of software are much cheaper, so long as you can obtain then (for they soon go out of production). Quite often recent versions of software will suffice.
Next it comes with megalomaniac installers and will quickly spam up your system if you don't do custom installs.
(karma to burn)
iPod nano? Tux has lost weight.
>"i've deleted the internet" Did they send you that by email?
Right now, all the traffic is going to the alexa society page. 3 slashdot effect.
When people discuss the costs of *retraining* to use linux they're implying they've already trained their staff once before to use Windows. In many cases this isn't true - most users can't use Windows in the sense one can use Linux. Most windows users never add hardware, uninstall software, change the registry, edit a config file, update a package, etc... basic system tasks, but just click blindly in front them towards the light, or else they wouldn't shout "i've deleted the internet" , or get infected with malware by clicking "hot pics!!!!, downloading, install? , yes."
of course, the poor it department burdered with fixing their mess, a power windows users. but why? certainly all their jobs - adding scheduled tasks, performing a system upgrade, fixing the server are much easier in linux.
Handy tip I learnt the hard way. I had a problem with FC3 (this should really be fixed by now - I did file a bug). The installer allowed me - unfamiliar with linux but confident and willing to learn to partition my system myself to install with / and /swap, WITHOUT a /boot partition. This I later learnt is quite important, and it's absence fucked stuff severely, most noticeably not running the first-boot stuff, meaning I didn't create a user. When I first turned it on and I could not login. I reinstalled.
Fedora Core itself is a *great* distro, imho one of the best, and in many ways *technically* better than Ubuntu 5 (I'm holding out for ubuntu 6 to be THE killer linux - fc5 will hold me tight until then). Unfortunately Fedora's real problems are not bugs on CD, but problems with the project and community. There is none. The official website says nothing, rarely updated more regularly but to quietly change a digit after a new release. Look today and you'd never know a cracking new version was released yesterday. Compare with the GNOME.org page!! That's what I like. Sell yourself! If Fedora Core 6 wants to take back some of the sprawling ground I forsee Ubuntu 6 will have stormed over (perhaps in an early firefox way), the project really needs to pull their socks up in this respect. These are the major gnome distributions equating to the old red hat v debian. Certainly anyone starting with Linux today would choose Ubuntu over Fedora Core. Their website is an friendly warm inviting smile not an empty cold wall. Yes there is fedoraforums and fedoranews and the project wiki, but I don't feel like I'm giving feedback or get any special kick from using this system. So yes I still love my perfect Fedora, but I want more!
>This poor little http server is on the front page of Slashdot and Digg simultaneously.
What is this server running on?
>We're up to *five* CD-ROMs now?
That's only half a DVD.
To summarise: Books are perfect for what they are. A palmtop is no less portable, and much more fragile than the copy of the catcher in the rye in my bag. Yes I see the advantages in searching, but that's only of importance with relevance to say, an encyclopaedia, on a PET (personal electronic thing) but that's wikipedia, not an ebook. The things they call ebooks are in no way equivalent to a book. So innovate. There is a market for technologies that allows us to speedily consume information read wikipedia, maps, news without needing to interact with it, purely passively. This you wouldn't find in a book! So it does not an ebook make.
What's holding me back? Everything. That such a product exists is completely beyond me. The disadvantages above are just a few of an infinitely-long list of complete flaws. They really are a dumb idea, when there is *NOTHING* wrong with a book, which are just *PERFECT*. They are a proven and timeless form of communication that will *never* be obsoleted, just as we will never live on the moon, drive flying cars or have robotic teachers at our children's schools. Wake up. There is technology that improves our lives (iPods) and there is technology of uninspired science fantasy that not only would never actually function, but more importantly we will never need (keys fitted with an RFID tag - I am perfectly capable of finding my keys myself, the RFID tag could never tell me I left them at the coffee shop, but if I *was* worried about losing them I would use a code).
So answer my question: Why the asdf would I ever want an 'eBook'?
The fact is, many users are still in the 80s and don't appreciate our current situation. Even this week I read that "garage geeks are responsable for the viruses and trojans (known as malware) that brings multinational corporations down". Like that was ever true. Garage geeks are trying to save us from the current "cure pays better than prevention cycle" users are fed.
On h4x0ring to Ddos extorsion - equate to Banksy on "grafitti is not a crime. i am reminded of this by real criminals who find the idea of breaking into a secured building to take nothing but leave your name in ten foot high letters absolutely ludicrous".
Viruses and trojans are not graffitti, but an organised armed robbery masterminded by real criminals, not out of teenage angst, but for PROFIT without regards to anyone. The UK doesn't have a problem, we need tougher enforcement in Poland, Czech and Russia and to chase this abuse out.