The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers
Ah, spoken like a true 8 year-old.
How about next time you be original and quote something like Ren and Stimpy? Wouldn't being original defeat the purpose of using another person's quote to make your point? Furthermore, "good poets borrow, great poets steal."
My appologies I should proofread more. It's GGP, and from this thread's perspective, GGGP. Not to mention the various grammatical and spelling mistakes.
Of course it is possible that the argument is true. In our case, yes, it would be better to deal with using closed source drm'd software than it would be work forced labor 14 hours/day. But what we should strive for is valid arguments that are also true. It's the classic truth and validity logic test. Is it valid? Yes? Is it true? And so we listen to the argument or not. But: Is it valid? NO! Then we don't bother to ask the second question. We need a means of arriving at which is the correct answer. If we run around accepting these appeals to emotion (a fallacy the GP's post also exhibited) that do nothing to discredit the original argument (as they are not valid logical statements with premises and conclusion), then all that happens is we feel better about ignoring the right answer.
Last I checked, ignoring the right answer did not lead to good things.
Case in point: the OP should have dealt with the postulation that closed source DRM software/media is bad, not with some fictional what-if scenario that has absolutely no bearing on the original argument.
If you've ever wanted to know how we get these "won't you please think of the children" bogus legislations, this line (heh or lack thereof [from premises to conclusion]) of thinking is it. Are the arguments good? No. But they are very, very powerful, and that is why you have to be watching out for them, because if you're not, soon you no longer control your computer, your grandmother is put in prison for the pictures of your new 2 year old twins in the tub, and life generally sucks.
If the OP just can't get over using his fallacy, perhaps he should recite this one: "I'm no fan of developing and using a correct logical thought process, but doing so wouldn't be nearly as bad as reaping the consequences if I DIDN'T.";)
Well you're right, there was nothing unpublic about using cash, everyone in the supermarket could see what you were buying. Watching somebody's purchases took a great deal of effort, planning, and money. The benefit to self would have to have been immense ("we're sure this guy is a terrorist") and the actions would have to produce result for them to not raise suspicion.
Now you can track everybody's purchases very quickly and cheaply, and the actions performed in the searching will not bring attention to themselves. Thus it will be very easy for someone who could stand to benefit from your information to abuse the system.
Most likely not much will come of it now. Fortunately for us, 1984 is a bit unrealistic. To control something that grand would take far too much competence for the government to pull it off, IMO. It'll take far too many people coordinating to notice odd purchasing behavior, and far too few people to abuse the system. Eventually somebody would slip up, but not before doing the damage, and herein resides our fear. It will be abused, just like most other government powers are, and it will bring its own downfall, just like other governments that were in absolute control were.
I'm completely fine with anybody in the government checking out my purchasing activities. You have nothing to hide, so why should you be concerned with this? It's not like government has a history of abusing power, and if they did abuse it, there's no way it would hurt me or you.
There, now it's out of the way, and we can mod down anybody else that says it. It's been explained so many times on/. why this is a bad idea that there's no excuse anymore to see it as anything short of troll.
I'm no fan of Forced Labor, but comparing the inability to have leisure and spend the time as you see fit to the plight of being tortured to death, is offbase.
As a matter of fact:
I'm no fan of _______, but comparing the inability to _________________, is offbase.
Isn't it fun? We can sidestep the whole argument at hand as long as we say "well at least it's not as bad as Hitler". I wonder if this could be something Godwin was hinting at.
But seriously, if DRM infects Linux, then we give up the very thing that started the GNU/Linux movement(*), namely an interest in free (as in freedom) software. DRM will not exist in an open source form (I don't know if it even could myself) because the media companies will have their cake and eat it too, or they'll die trying to. They're a lot like terrorists-- you can't expect them to make what we could call rational decisions--70 virgins if you blow yourself up, wtf--so they only option is complete truncation of anything and everything they influence. Anything but only hurts more than it benefits.
I'm not an economics major so I don't know too much about this stuff. But I suspect in such a system the solution would be that corporations would end up sitting on the large sums of money, rather than individual people. Like any large corporation, there would be a committee of sorts that makes the important decisions of dire consequence like which office chairs to buy. This would be the group that chooses what and where to invest the money. Ideally many companies would end up with large sums of cash and nowhere near enough big pockets to legally stuff.
Some of the best inventions came from people who held, at the time, scientific ideas considered to be heresy to the science community. I'm sure there are many other similar ideas floating around today awaiting funding.
What would eventually happen is monopolies would become less important as day to day business operations would be cheaper and have a limited cost. Focus would shift to producing a good product rather than just releasing the newest beta code to push the stock price a few points higher. People would stop trying to horde loads of cash, because they couldn't, and would look to other things for enjoyment. Microsoft might get around to making a good operating system, businesses wouldn't have as large of an economic reason to not contribute to FOSS, etc. Focus would shift to the longterm benefit of the company and its partners (and look to creating new ones). Perhaps that would be the source of venture capital funds.
Not directly, but in the long run the larger the rich/poor gap, the worse off we all are. Notice all the countries with small gaps between rich/poor have much higher life expectancies (Japan is a prime example). I don't mean to be pulling Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc, but there maybe some greater correlation than coincidence and diet (pretty much every Japanese smokes all their life but they have a higher life expectancy. Wtf.). People criticize Japan for having a stagnant economy...but if everyone has more than enough to get by (even more than comfortably), does it matter?
No CEO is worth $53m. This is the problem with capitalism. The market encourages and rewards unrestrained greed. As history shows us this greed always ends with people getting hurt some way or another. In 197x, GE's CEO/President made some like 30x what the lowest paid GE employee earned. Today it is something like 3000x. Or look at the average salary of an American, adjusted for inflation, in 1980 vs. now. If capitalism is indeed the best economic plan, then shouldn't more of us be benefiting than not? In 1980 the average salary was something like (don't quote me on this) 32k. Now, adjusted for inflation, it is ~31k. So Americans, on average, are making ~1k less now than they were 30 years ago. Meanwhile education and most other necessities of life either cost the same (adjusted for inflation) or more than they used to. Now throw out the low and high values in the scale (look at the median) and you'll see the the drop in pay is even greater, closer to ~3k. We have a greater proportion of society taking home less and less money every year, and an increasingly smaller portion of society becoming exponentially more wealthy ($53m bonus for example). Is this kind of pay necessary? Of course not. Does it hurt others? You bet. Why not just give this CEO guy $3m and take the other $50m and give everyone else that works a bonus for sticking with the company? Some people fuss about Americans thinking they deserve a raise or a bonus, just because...but when a manager has 4 secretaries, they could all be working their tail off but only one of them will get the new job opening. I'm not saying reward mediocrity, but if people are generally doing their job well and working to improve, why would you withhold a bonus or raise from them if you can afford it (clearly GS can)?
Capitalism is good, but we need some way to remove the incentive to better yourself and your company at the detriment of others. In this case, the detriment of others is some moocher gets to sit on a fat $53m wallet. This money would be of much more use to a university wanting to fund graduate research.
One option I've read about that interests me would be to make the highest salary you're allowed to take home with you some multiple of the minimum wage. Anything else would be taxed. The tax most people would pay would be whatever multiple of the minimum wage they're earning. If you were making 3x minimum wage, you'd only pay 3% in taxes. None of this funny business over income tax and estate tax and sales tax. If you work the numbers for last year, you'll find if the tax system had worked this way, 99% of America would have paid less in taxes. The other 1% would have paid [substantially] more. How would this not be best for everyone? If the people in the top bracket wanted to earn more, they'd have to increase the minimum wage. The goal here would be to eliminate wealth (your money works for you), but not eliminate incentive to work hard[er]. You'd still be able to save money, earn interest, and buy stocks, but anything you earn in interest beyond 10x (or 20x or whatever we choose) the minimum wage would we taxed. Sounds pretty nasty, but when you consider it, 100k is plenty for anybody. If it isn't then you lobby for raising the minimum wage. This would accomplish two important things: -Eliminate Wealth (unneeded strain on the working class) while saving work ethic (work hard get rewarded) -Remove the incentive for corporate rape of the environment, employees, and other
This would certainly be a good thing. How exactly would a government get its people to believe that sharing copyrighted files is worth killing over? This would be too much; I think it would shock people back to at least an ounce of reality where they realize "this is stupid".
But aside from that I think the money would be much better spent on other things. How about we spend it on developing better DHT technology to the extent that a whole website (PirateBay) can become a DHT site shared among peers? How about improving Bittorrent's non-existent privacy (improve anonymity)? How about launching satellites (when it's cheaper to do so of course) that do the torrent serving? If they are *not* in geosynchronous orbit then how would somebody like the **AA take them down (IE they can't say "it's over the US so since the Supreme Court ruled this illegal we can do what we like with it", not that that would stop them anyways).
There are plenty of options that would take the money further than buying an island. Many of these options would have numerous indirect benefits to humanity. Imagine if torrents were completely anonymous, a reporter in some nation wouldn't have any fear in filming and distributing what he knows the world needs to see. Imagine if torrent traffic was anonymized so that ISPs couldn't throttle it without distrupting other corporate interests? The **AA wouldn't be able to pressure them into doing anything about it. . . because they wouldn't be able to even if they wanted to.
Technical hurdles are far easier to overcome than international ones. My guess is any nation connecting to the PB island would get kicked out of the WTO or something. Nobody would connect to it, and the 500m would be wasted. They should spend the money on other things, like overcoming these technical hurdles.
Fortunately this won't continue forever. Unless we continue exporting intellectual property (which if you look at the state of education in the public and collegiate school system, is probably not going to happen), there will come a time when the money we have to buy the world's stuff runs out. Somewhere around that time Russia and China and anybody else pissed off at the US will tell them to go screw themselves and their WTO, because they don't want any part of it. This will probably happen later rather than sooner, but it will happen, and we'll finally get to do what we want with our media once again.
I'm not sure why but everyone on/. seems to think libertarian must be 100% free market. The libertarian view is that government should get only get involved when the free market cannot regulate itself. Last I checked, the telecoms aren't interested in playing fair. This means we need the government to get involved.
The public highway system is most definitely better than not. The USPS is fine for most peoples' needs. Corporations can't fund an army.
The above government controlled systems are working pretty well. There's nothing wrong with the government legislating fair play. We need net neutrality.
Why is a secret security patch a problem? Why broadcast security problems(which only invites people to try to exploit the problems)? Why does a security patch need to be kept secret? Why hide security problems (which have been patched)?
The least they could do is say "we patched two security holes, but we won't tell you what they are". Doing anything more secret looks immediately suspicious.
would be a HUGE strain on cell phone networks. Awww...those poor cell phone companies. I feel so bad for them.
They might actually have to upgrade their networks to something capable of giving me sound quality comparable to a simple 32kbps MP3. It might eat into their profits. Oh no! The sky is falling!
Seriously, they're using the same digital technology for the last 8 or so years. Given how far we've come, it's not unreasonable to expect your cellphone to be able to switch cell towers every 30 seconds. If it can't, then they need to change the network protocol and give me a free cell phone upgrade.
When you've just gotten into an accident, and spilled the cofee all over yourself, and it has spilled onto your jeans, what are you supposed to do to remove it?
Point is McD's coffee was sold ~190F. ALL other resteraunts and fast foods server theirs ~140F. What's more, studies showed most people who buy their coffee like to drink it NOW, not after it's cooled down 50F.
There's simply no point in serving your coffee 50 degrees hotter than EVERYBODY else does, especially when that 50 degrees means a third degree burn.
There's no "moving" to digg if you have anything that nearly resembles what normal people call "a brain". I used to check it out, then removed it from my RSS feeds page. There's simply far too many stupid users and stupid articles. Routinely there are "technical breakdowns" of different products. The most recent on I read was a comparison between component and composite video cables for gaming. Not from a reputable website like anandtech, but some doofus blogger's page. Long story short, he said "component is obviously better because it breaks the video signal down into red, green, and blue signals." Not one mention of luminance and chrominance. Not a big deal at the end of the day, but I'm simply interested in technical accuracy. Repeat that sort of thing 2-3x per day, and you'll see why I say there's no moving to digg if you have a brain.
Tand BeOS hating my IDE chain (~80% CPU usage for 1.2 MB/sec). Make sure you've got the UDMA mode. I had that problem once...friend had forgotten to put them in the kernel or something, so I was running in PIO mode 1. Lol.
I've had fewer problems with my laptop since installing vista than I ever had with linux.
Pretty much everything worked 'out-the-box' -- including video (although I ultimately had to go download the vista drivers from ATI to get any kind of acceleration), sound, even suspend/sleep (although, microsoft renaming hibernate to sleep confused me at first).
There are plenty of places where microsoft seems to suck across the board.. but vista sleeping and waking up works just fine.
BTW - this sleeping is a feature that I never did get 100% working properly in linux -- and what I WAS able to get working right required I bounce around a few websites ultimatly doing my own research... whereas it seems to work now in vista just fine? Funny though, all the things you mention my XP does perfectly.
Just thought I should mention that upper management doesn't have a hand in the final production mastering, unless it is to deliberately make a recording sound poor.
All the licensed, mastered CDs I've heard have sounded better than an indie band's recording.
There's a reason some of the EQ settings on the soundboards have little plastic boxes cemented around the nob.
So technically speaking, the production quality is unparallel. But as we all know and can hear, that means nothing for content.
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Ah, spoken like a true 8 year-old.
How about next time you be original and quote something like Ren and Stimpy? Wouldn't being original defeat the purpose of using another person's quote to make your point? Furthermore, "good poets borrow, great poets steal."
My appologies I should proofread more. It's GGP, and from this thread's perspective, GGGP. Not to mention the various grammatical and spelling mistakes.
Of course it is possible that the argument is true. In our case, yes, it would be better to deal with using closed source drm'd software than it would be work forced labor 14 hours/day. But what we should strive for is valid arguments that are also true. It's the classic truth and validity logic test. Is it valid? Yes? Is it true? And so we listen to the argument or not. But: Is it valid? NO! Then we don't bother to ask the second question. We need a means of arriving at which is the correct answer. If we run around accepting these appeals to emotion (a fallacy the GP's post also exhibited) that do nothing to discredit the original argument (as they are not valid logical statements with premises and conclusion), then all that happens is we feel better about ignoring the right answer.
;)
Last I checked, ignoring the right answer did not lead to good things.
Case in point: the OP should have dealt with the postulation that closed source DRM software/media is bad, not with some fictional what-if scenario that has absolutely no bearing on the original argument.
If you've ever wanted to know how we get these "won't you please think of the children" bogus legislations, this line (heh or lack thereof [from premises to conclusion]) of thinking is it. Are the arguments good? No. But they are very, very powerful, and that is why you have to be watching out for them, because if you're not, soon you no longer control your computer, your grandmother is put in prison for the pictures of your new 2 year old twins in the tub, and life generally sucks.
If the OP just can't get over using his fallacy, perhaps he should recite this one: "I'm no fan of developing and using a correct logical thought process, but doing so wouldn't be nearly as bad as reaping the consequences if I DIDN'T."
I too would like to know if daily listerine can safely replace flossing.
Well you're right, there was nothing unpublic about using cash, everyone in the supermarket could see what you were buying. Watching somebody's purchases took a great deal of effort, planning, and money. The benefit to self would have to have been immense ("we're sure this guy is a terrorist") and the actions would have to produce result for them to not raise suspicion.
Now you can track everybody's purchases very quickly and cheaply, and the actions performed in the searching will not bring attention to themselves. Thus it will be very easy for someone who could stand to benefit from your information to abuse the system.
Most likely not much will come of it now. Fortunately for us, 1984 is a bit unrealistic. To control something that grand would take far too much competence for the government to pull it off, IMO. It'll take far too many people coordinating to notice odd purchasing behavior, and far too few people to abuse the system. Eventually somebody would slip up, but not before doing the damage, and herein resides our fear. It will be abused, just like most other government powers are, and it will bring its own downfall, just like other governments that were in absolute control were.
I'm completely fine with anybody in the government checking out my purchasing activities. You have nothing to hide, so why should you be concerned with this? It's not like government has a history of abusing power, and if they did abuse it, there's no way it would hurt me or you.
/. why this is a bad idea that there's no excuse anymore to see it as anything short of troll.
There, now it's out of the way, and we can mod down anybody else that says it. It's been explained so many times on
Hey, nice red herring.
I'll play along:
I'm no fan of Forced Labor, but comparing the inability to have leisure and spend the time as you see fit to the plight of being tortured to death, is offbase.
As a matter of fact:
I'm no fan of _______, but comparing the inability to _________________, is offbase.
Isn't it fun? We can sidestep the whole argument at hand as long as we say "well at least it's not as bad as Hitler". I wonder if this could be something Godwin was hinting at.
But seriously, if DRM infects Linux, then we give up the very thing that started the GNU/Linux movement(*), namely an interest in free (as in freedom) software. DRM will not exist in an open source form (I don't know if it even could myself) because the media companies will have their cake and eat it too, or they'll die trying to. They're a lot like terrorists-- you can't expect them to make what we could call rational decisions--70 virgins if you blow yourself up, wtf--so they only option is complete truncation of anything and everything they influence. Anything but only hurts more than it benefits.
I'm not an economics major so I don't know too much about this stuff. But I suspect in such a system the solution would be that corporations would end up sitting on the large sums of money, rather than individual people. Like any large corporation, there would be a committee of sorts that makes the important decisions of dire consequence like which office chairs to buy. This would be the group that chooses what and where to invest the money. Ideally many companies would end up with large sums of cash and nowhere near enough big pockets to legally stuff.
Some of the best inventions came from people who held, at the time, scientific ideas considered to be heresy to the science community. I'm sure there are many other similar ideas floating around today awaiting funding.
What would eventually happen is monopolies would become less important as day to day business operations would be cheaper and have a limited cost. Focus would shift to producing a good product rather than just releasing the newest beta code to push the stock price a few points higher. People would stop trying to horde loads of cash, because they couldn't, and would look to other things for enjoyment. Microsoft might get around to making a good operating system, businesses wouldn't have as large of an economic reason to not contribute to FOSS, etc. Focus would shift to the longterm benefit of the company and its partners (and look to creating new ones). Perhaps that would be the source of venture capital funds.
Not directly, but in the long run the larger the rich/poor gap, the worse off we all are. Notice all the countries with small gaps between rich/poor have much higher life expectancies (Japan is a prime example). I don't mean to be pulling Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc, but there maybe some greater correlation than coincidence and diet (pretty much every Japanese smokes all their life but they have a higher life expectancy. Wtf.). People criticize Japan for having a stagnant economy...but if everyone has more than enough to get by (even more than comfortably), does it matter?
No CEO is worth $53m. This is the problem with capitalism. The market encourages and rewards unrestrained greed. As history shows us this greed always ends with people getting hurt some way or another.
In 197x, GE's CEO/President made some like 30x what the lowest paid GE employee earned. Today it is something like 3000x. Or look at the average salary of an American, adjusted for inflation, in 1980 vs. now. If capitalism is indeed the best economic plan, then shouldn't more of us be benefiting than not? In 1980 the average salary was something like (don't quote me on this) 32k. Now, adjusted for inflation, it is ~31k. So Americans, on average, are making ~1k less now than they were 30 years ago. Meanwhile education and most other necessities of life either cost the same (adjusted for inflation) or more than they used to. Now throw out the low and high values in the scale (look at the median) and you'll see the the drop in pay is even greater, closer to ~3k. We have a greater proportion of society taking home less and less money every year, and an increasingly smaller portion of society becoming exponentially more wealthy ($53m bonus for example). Is this kind of pay necessary? Of course not. Does it hurt others? You bet. Why not just give this CEO guy $3m and take the other $50m and give everyone else that works a bonus for sticking with the company? Some people fuss about Americans thinking they deserve a raise or a bonus, just because...but when a manager has 4 secretaries, they could all be working their tail off but only one of them will get the new job opening. I'm not saying reward mediocrity, but if people are generally doing their job well and working to improve, why would you withhold a bonus or raise from them if you can afford it (clearly GS can)?
Capitalism is good, but we need some way to remove the incentive to better yourself and your company at the detriment of others. In this case, the detriment of others is some moocher gets to sit on a fat $53m wallet. This money would be of much more use to a university wanting to fund graduate research.
One option I've read about that interests me would be to make the highest salary you're allowed to take home with you some multiple of the minimum wage. Anything else would be taxed. The tax most people would pay would be whatever multiple of the minimum wage they're earning. If you were making 3x minimum wage, you'd only pay 3% in taxes. None of this funny business over income tax and estate tax and sales tax. If you work the numbers for last year, you'll find if the tax system had worked this way, 99% of America would have paid less in taxes. The other 1% would have paid [substantially] more. How would this not be best for everyone? If the people in the top bracket wanted to earn more, they'd have to increase the minimum wage. The goal here would be to eliminate wealth (your money works for you), but not eliminate incentive to work hard[er]. You'd still be able to save money, earn interest, and buy stocks, but anything you earn in interest beyond 10x (or 20x or whatever we choose) the minimum wage would we taxed. Sounds pretty nasty, but when you consider it, 100k is plenty for anybody. If it isn't then you lobby for raising the minimum wage. This would accomplish two important things:
-Eliminate Wealth (unneeded strain on the working class) while saving work ethic (work hard get rewarded)
-Remove the incentive for corporate rape of the environment, employees, and other
This would certainly be a good thing. How exactly would a government get its people to believe that sharing copyrighted files is worth killing over? This would be too much; I think it would shock people back to at least an ounce of reality where they realize "this is stupid".
But aside from that I think the money would be much better spent on other things. How about we spend it on developing better DHT technology to the extent that a whole website (PirateBay) can become a DHT site shared among peers? How about improving Bittorrent's non-existent privacy (improve anonymity)? How about launching satellites (when it's cheaper to do so of course) that do the torrent serving? If they are *not* in geosynchronous orbit then how would somebody like the **AA take them down (IE they can't say "it's over the US so since the Supreme Court ruled this illegal we can do what we like with it", not that that would stop them anyways).
There are plenty of options that would take the money further than buying an island. Many of these options would have numerous indirect benefits to humanity. Imagine if torrents were completely anonymous, a reporter in some nation wouldn't have any fear in filming and distributing what he knows the world needs to see. Imagine if torrent traffic was anonymized so that ISPs couldn't throttle it without distrupting other corporate interests? The **AA wouldn't be able to pressure them into doing anything about it. . . because they wouldn't be able to even if they wanted to.
Technical hurdles are far easier to overcome than international ones. My guess is any nation connecting to the PB island would get kicked out of the WTO or something. Nobody would connect to it, and the 500m would be wasted. They should spend the money on other things, like overcoming these technical hurdles.
Fortunately this won't continue forever. Unless we continue exporting intellectual property (which if you look at the state of education in the public and collegiate school system, is probably not going to happen), there will come a time when the money we have to buy the world's stuff runs out. Somewhere around that time Russia and China and anybody else pissed off at the US will tell them to go screw themselves and their WTO, because they don't want any part of it. This will probably happen later rather than sooner, but it will happen, and we'll finally get to do what we want with our media once again.
I'm not sure why but everyone on /. seems to think libertarian must be 100% free market. The libertarian view is that government should get only get involved when the free market cannot regulate itself. Last I checked, the telecoms aren't interested in playing fair. This means we need the government to get involved.
The public highway system is most definitely better than not.
The USPS is fine for most peoples' needs.
Corporations can't fund an army.
The above government controlled systems are working pretty well. There's nothing wrong with the government legislating fair play. We need net neutrality.
Now would be a good time to short the SCO stock.
The least they could do is say "we patched two security holes, but we won't tell you what they are". Doing anything more secret looks immediately suspicious.
The issue is Microsoft. If they had chosen RedHat there would be no Microsoft involvement, and nobody would be crying foul.
They might actually have to upgrade their networks to something capable of giving me sound quality comparable to a simple 32kbps MP3. It might eat into their profits. Oh no! The sky is falling!
Seriously, they're using the same digital technology for the last 8 or so years. Given how far we've come, it's not unreasonable to expect your cellphone to be able to switch cell towers every 30 seconds. If it can't, then they need to change the network protocol and give me a free cell phone upgrade.
When you've just gotten into an accident, and spilled the cofee all over yourself, and it has spilled onto your jeans, what are you supposed to do to remove it?
Point is McD's coffee was sold ~190F. ALL other resteraunts and fast foods server theirs ~140F. What's more, studies showed most people who buy their coffee like to drink it NOW, not after it's cooled down 50F.
There's simply no point in serving your coffee 50 degrees hotter than EVERYBODY else does, especially when that 50 degrees means a third degree burn.
There's no "moving" to digg if you have anything that nearly resembles what normal people call "a brain". I used to check it out, then removed it from my RSS feeds page. There's simply far too many stupid users and stupid articles. Routinely there are "technical breakdowns" of different products. The most recent on I read was a comparison between component and composite video cables for gaming. Not from a reputable website like anandtech, but some doofus blogger's page. Long story short, he said "component is obviously better because it breaks the video signal down into red, green, and blue signals." Not one mention of luminance and chrominance. Not a big deal at the end of the day, but I'm simply interested in technical accuracy. Repeat that sort of thing 2-3x per day, and you'll see why I say there's no moving to digg if you have a brain.
Pretty much everything worked 'out-the-box' -- including video (although I ultimately had to go download the vista drivers from ATI to get any kind of acceleration), sound, even suspend/sleep (although, microsoft renaming hibernate to sleep confused me at first).
There are plenty of places where microsoft seems to suck across the board
BTW - this sleeping is a feature that I never did get 100% working properly in linux -- and what I WAS able to get working right required I bounce around a few websites ultimatly doing my own research
Just thought I should mention that upper management doesn't have a hand in the final production mastering, unless it is to deliberately make a recording sound poor.
All the licensed, mastered CDs I've heard have sounded better than an indie band's recording.
There's a reason some of the EQ settings on the soundboards have little plastic boxes cemented around the nob.
So technically speaking, the production quality is unparallel. But as we all know and can hear, that means nothing for content.
It costs them the power of distribution.
Controlling the flow of information can be a very powerful thing.
There are some things money just can't buy.
It could fight if it it had passive-radar.
No, really.
What revenue?
Sailing was never a big deal IMO. Why does nobody slam WoW for time spent travelling and flying? No difference there.