I don't like the secrecy involved, but as some have pointed out it is a necessary (or rather accepted) part of international treaty negotiation procedure.
Also remember that in the US once a treaty has been negotiated, it still must be ratified by the Senate* (in some cases. Just because a treaty has been successfully negotiated it does not guarantee ratification by the Senate as ratification requires a 2/3 majority- Kyoto treaty anyone. When the treaty becomes public (and it should) - if you disagree with it, give your senator a call.
*This is a simplification of course, the president does have the authority to ratify executive agreements without input from the Senate; but this is done when the president is acting alone in negotiating the treaty (sole executive agreements) or to "fill in" gaps in treaties. For treaties that require additional legislation to implement domestically, the treaty requires the advice and 2/3 majority of the Senate to be ratified (standard treaty process). A president may also choose to pursue a congressional-executive treaty (requiring majority approval in both houses of Congress) to gain support for it in Congress - especially important when the treaty will require new/complex legislation or funding appropriation to implement.
I remember when I was younger, my mom was given a ticket in Arizona for going 56 in a 55, which seemed ridiculous, but maybe Arizona is one of those states without the officer's discretion.
An officer can always use his discretion. I suspect that in this case the ticketing officer either had a quota that he needed to meet or was being an a$$^$#@.
I think that Sony has placed the PS3 a Catch-22 situation:
Sony is betting that people will buy the PS3 as a console and once they have it will say to themselves: "We got this thing that plays Blue-Ray movies, why not buy some?" This will then spur the adoption of the BR format.
But here's the problem: you come to the store to get a next gen console; you see the Wii for $200-300, the 360 for $300-400, and the PS3 for $500-600. Which one will you get? Most likely it won't be the PS3. Yes the PS3 appears to be a better value, but only if BR is the format of choice.
So basically, for the PS3 to be a good value and get good sales, BR has to win the HD format war. For BR to win the format war, the PS3 needs to have strong sales as it will beat the next cheapest BR player by 50% price wise. By trying to push the BR format and the PS3 as a gaming console Sony is basically fighting a war on two fronts, never a good position to be in. Time will tell if they win.
You could apply the exact same argument to say the GPLv2 is not the place to fight copyright.
I do not see the GPLv2 as fighting copyright. If I write a piece of software and release it under the GPLv2 it is still my intellectual property, I can copyright it. By releasing it under the GPLv2 I allow you, the user, to change and modify my copyrighted software as you see fit; but require you to release your modifications to the community in the same way that I released my original software to you. Note I have not given you my copyright or intellectual property, I have licensed it to you under a low restriction license. In the same way, any software you create using my software is your intellectual property and yours to copyright, but since you agreed to my license (the GPL) when you used my code you are required to license your software under the GPL.
This is similar to what Microsoft is doing (or rather being forced to do); they are releasing the source code to Windows, but under a restrictive license of their own manufacture. They are retaining the copyrights to the code, you are just given a license to use their code to create your own. So the GPL is not fighting copyrights, it is making a way to have copyrighted code available be freely available to a community of developers and make sure that these same developers contribute back to the community; ie no freeloaders. I agree that copyright as we have it now in the US is a problem, and Stallman realized this. What he created with the GPL was not a way to fight copyright, but a way around the hassles of copyright.
I'm not sure what your point is with that comment, Apple's emulation of the PPC architecture (Rosetta) is all done in software, which doesn't run at native speed. As I recall, the Itanium had software emulation of x86 at first, then they added I guess they added hardware emulation. Now to cut costs and chip real estate they are taking out hardware emulation and reverting to software emulation. I'm missing the irony in this particular situation. How is this ironic?
Microsoft own the rights to the chips so they can be simplified over time etc.
Not necessarily simplified, what this means is that they can shop around for cheaper fabricators. With the graphics chipset and processor of the original Xbox the chip designs were owned by Nvidia and Intel respectively; which means that Microsoft had to buy their chips from Nvidia and Intel at the prices that they set. Microsoft could not shop around for cheaper parts, they were effectively locked in to using Nvidia and Intel as their suppliers. With Xbox 360 Microsoft did things a little differently, as the parent mentioned they own the rights to the chips; so if one supplier/fabricator starts to get greedy, Microsoft can take their chip design and business elsewhere.
I personally am not into conspiracy theories, but I am concerned about the potential negative effects of this technology. From what I understand the HAARP heats the ionosphere allowing the scientists to manipulate it. My biggest concern is how this meddling impacts the global (not just local) ionosphere. Also what will be the effect on the global biosphere? The ionosphere protects the organisms of Earth from the harmful radiation of the sun; the life of planet earth is adapted to the current ionosphere, do we really want to carry out experiments on the ionosphere when we cannot even imagine how they will affect life on the planet? I am not against research or progress, but blazing blind into something that has the potential to produce huge global problems is not something I would recommend or support. If we degrade or destroy the ionosphere (without understanding the full consequences of our experiments), how will we recreate or fix it?
I couldn't agree more. I was listening to a Russian comedian and he was lambasting the American government. One of the points that he brought up was that America was a nation ruled by lawyers where people sue each other for the heck of it. My first reaction was one of anger, but then I stopped anf thought about it. In what other country do we see people suing fast food placed because of their won obesity? Or a child suing his parents for discipling him/her? We have gotten to the point where we no longer have the rule of law, but lawyers and judges reinterpret the law as they see fit. We are now the laughing stock of the world.
Actually I think it was simply your greed in not wanting to pay the sales tax that prevented you from finding the car you wanted not any rules and regulations. You said you found several but didn't want to pay the extra money.
I'm sorry but wanting to save a couple of hundred bucks is not greed, it is actually a wise thing to do. The whole basis of our economy is based on the fact that customers want the highest quality product possible at the lowest price possible. The point of the grandparent was that the various hoops that a person or company has to jump through in interstate commerce raises the cost of doing business to where smaller companies and poorer people are not able to participate. In our Internet Age, many small businesses are finding it easier and even necessary to do business in serveral states; why not make it easier for the small guys to join the party? If privacy regulations were nationally standardized, I believe it would benifit the comsumers as well, not just corporations. It would actually be easier for consumers to find out exactly how the law protects them and to get advice. Less legal confusion is generally a good thing. One last point, someone mentioned that privacy laws should be decided by each state as they are better aware of the needs of their population. While I generally agree with this theory I fail to see how the privacy needs can vary so significantly between a person living in the state of New York and someone living in Washington state./p?
While you make some very valid points about pointing fingers and spreading blame, there are a few lapses in your logic. First of all, I agree with your point that blaming Native Africans, African-Americans, gays, or promiscuous men/women for the spread of AIDS does not solve the problem. You may also be correct that blaming each other hinders our efforts to find a cure, but this does not mean that we cannot blame some types of behavior for the rapid spread of AIDS. I think everyone would agree that it has been conclusively proven that AIDS mainly spreads through sexual contact; yes there are other ways to get infected but it is most commonly transmitted sexually.
circletimessquare, you rage against those propose abstinence or monogamy (or any morality whatsoever) as a method of preventing and fighting AIDS as hypocrites; and you have a point. Those three examples that you mention are valid cases of times when people do not practice what they preach, but how are these examples relevant to the proposition that a person who has a monogamous relationship and is not promiscuous has a much smaller chance of getting infected with AIDS? There is no need to invoke morality at all, it is common sense. Also if more people more monogamous and not promiscuous, AIDS would not spread as fast as it is currently spreading. Consider this scenario: A man is somehow infected with AIDS. If he is monogamous he will only pass on the disease to his partner (and to his children, if any, born after he is infected). Now if the man's partner and children are monogamous and not promiscuous then the disease will be confined to a certain family/clan and may even die out. Now consider the situation in which the man, his partner, and his children are promiscuous. Do you see that the rapid spread of AIDS is virtually guaranteed with this type of behavior? I am not aware of anyone or any group that is advocating giving up all sex (practically impossible); most advocate limiting yourself to one partner, which seems to be a fair compromise.
So you see, the blame for the spread of AIDS does not rest on a particular group of people; but can be blamed on certain behaviors. I recall a recent article on BBC about how one African country drastically reduced the rate at which AIDS spread in their country by promoting abstinence and monogamy. I do not understand circletimessquare's argument that we need to blame the disease rather than people's behavior. How is the disease at fault? AIDS is a virus, by definition a non-living protein. How do you assign blame to it? Does it force a person to have unprotected sex with multiple partners? No, that is the person's decision. Someone has already pointed out that AIDS is very different from the flu or the common cold where your probability of infection does not really depend on factors that you can control. This sort of mentality of "blame the disease" is actually a hindrance to finding a cure. Imagine if Joseph Lister (the father of antisepsis) had just blamed the deaths of surgery patients on "the disease" instead of trying to discover what processes and behaviors led to their deaths. If Lister would have blamed the disease (he was aware of the germ theory of diseases) would he have realized that people were dying because the surgical tools were not being sterilized? When a behavior contributes to the spread of a disease, discovering the behavior and modifying it can be a cure in and of itself.
Reinstall a clean Windows, fine, but where do you get Windows from ?
It is very simple, you can get any version of Windows (or Linux) on Bit Torrent. Since you get a legal and valid CD key with the purchace of a new PC, it is all legal. It isn't like I'm pirating, I have a legal license for it.
I don't think that too many people will switch back to IE when IE7 comes out. Firefox is not all about tabs, it is first and foremost about security. I do spyware cleanup for people and I have switched over quite a bit of people by telling them that Firefox will reduce the occurace of spyware. I remember one spyware clean I did, the spyware was so bad that I had to reinstall Windows. So I installed Firefox, got rid of all visible icons of IE, and told them to use Firefox to avoid popups. I myself have gone from doing several spyware scans a week to one every couple of months after switching to Firefox. And even then the scans find mostly cookies that I haven't deleted yet. Another reason that I think users won't switch is beccause IE7 butchers the classic IE interface. Firefox enhances and extends the IE interface and is more intuitive while the IE7 interface just sucks.
It seems that people have forgotten the purpose of copyright. The copyright is not a God-given or constitutional right, it was created to encourage authors and artists to create works of art by allowing them to profit from it for a while, with the assumption that the work would later be released into the public domain. Copyright was supposed to increase the amount of works in the public s\domain by giving the author or artist a temporary monopoly on the distribution of his work. A copyright was the incentitive to create new works (again for the public domain); without a copyright very few people would invest the time and enery to create new works.
In our selfish, me-first society this ideal has been corrupted. The author or artist is no longer creating something for the public, but for himself. He sees the copyright as a restriction on his right of ownership; instead of what it really is, a special privilage. Our culture of idea ownership has lead to the obsurdity of several hundred year old works, such as the Bible and church hymns, being copyrighted. What next, copyrighting the Constitution?
Through out history, anytime an author or artist released a work to the public, it becomes part of the public domain. They had no legal ownership of their work. It has been suggested that Shakespear (along with many other famous authors) committed what would now be considered plagerism but was fine back then. Also, the authors of the first three books of the New Testament are thought to have based their books on one older manuscript. Some parts of the Gosples of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are almost identicle to each other. Yet no one accuses them of plagerism. Back then, if an artist wanted to protect his work, he just did not release it to the public. Hence the idea of a copyright to encourage artists to release their work to the public but still retain control of it for a while, I think 15 years was the original period. Over the years publishers, authors, artists, the RIAA, and the MPAA have been brainwashing the public that they have full ownership rights and the copyright laws restrict them. We need to return to the original ideaology that says that all released works are part of the public domain and a copyright restricts the rights of the public for the benifit of the authors and artists.
Seattle badly needs a train system. They have busses, but a good train would help a lot.
I wouldn't exactly say that Seattle needs a train system or that it would "help a lot". The reason for this is convience, or lack of. To be successfull, a public transportation system needs to have a good coverage of the area that it is serving. This means that there need to be stops within a few blocks of the places that people want or need to go. If the buses/trains routes cover a good area, then ridership will increase; provided that the fares are reasonable. But for the transit authority to increase coverage area, it needs to have high ridership. So public transit is stuck in a catch-22 situation: they need more routes/stops to increase ridership, but to add more routes/stops they need more public transportation users. Another problem that public transportation faces here in the western US is sprawl. Cities are for the most part decentralized and spread all over the place. It is very hard to create routes (especially for a train system) when the population keeps shifting from one suburb to another.
But the biggest problem facing public transportation is that people just don't like it. Oh sure, they use it if they have to, but given the choice they prefere cars to trains or buses. This trend is true even in Europe where there is a highly developed public transportation system and prohibitive gas and car taxes. When they can afford it, people buy and use cars. It is that simple. Cars provide unequaled personal freedom and choice. On the way home from work in a car you can stop to pick up dinner, pick up the kids from daycare, or do several other chores. Try doing that on a bus or train. First of all, the bus/train may not have a route near the store you need to stop at, or you may have to transfere buses several times. This all adds to your total time wasted in transit. Next, say you're done shopping and you come out of the store just in time to see the bus/train pull away. Now in Seattle the buses come every 15 minutes; but where I live they run every 30 minutes at peak time or every hour off-peak. So now you're stuck waiting for the next bus or train. A study was done several years ago that compared the average travel times of those using public transportation to those using cars; public transportation travel time was almost double that of car travel time. For a more detailed critique of public transportation see the July 1997 issue of Commentary.
Now I do not want to say that public transportation is unecessary or junk, I myself use the local bus system to get to my university. But, I probably would not be using it if the price of gas wasn't so high or if I had to pay for its use. My university has a deal with the local transit autority that allows students and faculty to ride the buses for free. So, public transportation has its place, but cars are more convient and people will continue to choose cars over buses or trains. This is the problem facing Seattle, they will spend $5+ billion on a system that will be ignore by the vast majority of the population. Then, it too will need to be subsidized by the taxpayers. It is interesting that of all the public transportation systems of the major cities of the world; only Osaka, Japan covers its own expenses.
Does it have the new OOo 2.0 GUI? No? I'm not interested then, I'll wait for 2.0 to come out. From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use.
By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.
So Opera is free now. Wow, who cares? Opera lost me as a customer and user long ago. The only reason I tried Opera was because IE in the lab computers that I managed was quiting unexpectedly (crappy Gateways and Windows 98 do not mix). So I installed Opera and used that instead, I didn't like it for several reasons. First, the UI was very different from IE. That is a bad thing because I taught computer classes for dummies and if the UI is radically different from IE, people get confused. The whole point of the classes was to teach people how to use the computers they have at home. So if they use Opera in class, they wouldn't be able to figure out how to use IE at home. (Seriously, I was surprised at how stupid some of the people were when it came to computers.) Second, use of tabs was manitory in Opera. Not good. Firefox offers way more flexibility; I always have several windows open in Firefox, each with several tabs: one for Slashdot, one for hardware, etc. In Opera this wasn't as intuitive (atleast not for me). Lastly, it was not free and the banners were annoying. I was on a very tight budget and did not have $30 to spend for each computer. I mean, I barely got approval to buy anti-virus software - and even that took a year to get.
"But it's free now", some may say. So what? It doesn't change the other two gripes that I had against it. The biggest problem I had with Opera was that it tried to reinvent the browser UI. Big no no. I was used to IE and could never really get comfortable with Opera. Firefox on the other hand is an enhancement of IE's UI; so when I tried Firefox, I never looked back. I have the same gripe against IE 7, it butchers the UI that I'm used to; so I'm sticking with Firefox.
Why is a Christian band that encourages fans to by-pass copy protection so humorous? Many people seem to think that Christian theology states that Christians must obey all laws, this is not true. It states that Christians are obligated to obey all laws that are not contrary to the higher law of God. That is why Martin Luther King Jr (while a minister) advocated civil disobediance during the civil rights movement and why Christians in the communist states of the former Soviet Union broke the law by holding secret church services. I do not know why Switchfoot took a stand against copy protection, but I have talked on the subject with several conservative Christians. The views they expressed are not universally held, but they are very interesting. They view a musicians, singers, artists, etc talents as a gift from God. An artist has the right to sell his/her work, but he/she cannot claim ownership of it (by copyrighting it for example) because the gift is not his/hers, rather it was given to him/her not for personal gain, but for the enjoyment of the people around him/her.
While I agree that this lawsuit is extremely hypocritical of Microsoft, they have done much worse, but they did cover their asses with non-compete. So while their lawsuit may not be ethical or moral, it is legal. Lee did accept and sign the non-compete contract so he should not be surprised by the lawsuit. Whether the non-compete is valid is another story altogether, which is what the judge is supposed to decide.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't like the secrecy involved, but as some have pointed out it is a necessary (or rather accepted) part of international treaty negotiation procedure. Also remember that in the US once a treaty has been negotiated, it still must be ratified by the Senate* (in some cases. Just because a treaty has been successfully negotiated it does not guarantee ratification by the Senate as ratification requires a 2/3 majority- Kyoto treaty anyone. When the treaty becomes public (and it should) - if you disagree with it, give your senator a call. *This is a simplification of course, the president does have the authority to ratify executive agreements without input from the Senate; but this is done when the president is acting alone in negotiating the treaty (sole executive agreements) or to "fill in" gaps in treaties. For treaties that require additional legislation to implement domestically, the treaty requires the advice and 2/3 majority of the Senate to be ratified (standard treaty process). A president may also choose to pursue a congressional-executive treaty (requiring majority approval in both houses of Congress) to gain support for it in Congress - especially important when the treaty will require new/complex legislation or funding appropriation to implement.
I remember when I was younger, my mom was given a ticket in Arizona for going 56 in a 55, which seemed ridiculous, but maybe Arizona is one of those states without the officer's discretion.
An officer can always use his discretion. I suspect that in this case the ticketing officer either had a quota that he needed to meet or was being an a$$^$#@.
But here's the problem: you come to the store to get a next gen console; you see the Wii for $200-300, the 360 for $300-400, and the PS3 for $500-600. Which one will you get? Most likely it won't be the PS3. Yes the PS3 appears to be a better value, but only if BR is the format of choice .
So basically, for the PS3 to be a good value and get good sales, BR has to win the HD format war. For BR to win the format war, the PS3 needs to have strong sales as it will beat the next cheapest BR player by 50% price wise. By trying to push the BR format and the PS3 as a gaming console Sony is basically fighting a war on two fronts, never a good position to be in. Time will tell if they win.
This conclusively proves that the patent system is broken and needs to be completely rewritten. I mean, patenting Buy It Now.
I do not see the GPLv2 as fighting copyright. If I write a piece of software and release it under the GPLv2 it is still my intellectual property, I can copyright it. By releasing it under the GPLv2 I allow you, the user, to change and modify my copyrighted software as you see fit; but require you to release your modifications to the community in the same way that I released my original software to you. Note I have not given you my copyright or intellectual property, I have licensed it to you under a low restriction license. In the same way, any software you create using my software is your intellectual property and yours to copyright, but since you agreed to my license (the GPL) when you used my code you are required to license your software under the GPL.
This is similar to what Microsoft is doing (or rather being forced to do); they are releasing the source code to Windows, but under a restrictive license of their own manufacture. They are retaining the copyrights to the code, you are just given a license to use their code to create your own. So the GPL is not fighting copyrights, it is making a way to have copyrighted code available be freely available to a community of developers and make sure that these same developers contribute back to the community; ie no freeloaders. I agree that copyright as we have it now in the US is a problem, and Stallman realized this. What he created with the GPL was not a way to fight copyright, but a way around the hassles of copyright.
I'm not sure what your point is with that comment, Apple's emulation of the PPC architecture (Rosetta) is all done in software, which doesn't run at native speed. As I recall, the Itanium had software emulation of x86 at first, then they added I guess they added hardware emulation. Now to cut costs and chip real estate they are taking out hardware emulation and reverting to software emulation. I'm missing the irony in this particular situation. How is this ironic?
On the contrary, sounds like he's a regular. :)
I personally am not into conspiracy theories, but I am concerned about the potential negative effects of this technology. From what I understand the HAARP heats the ionosphere allowing the scientists to manipulate it. My biggest concern is how this meddling impacts the global (not just local) ionosphere. Also what will be the effect on the global biosphere? The ionosphere protects the organisms of Earth from the harmful radiation of the sun; the life of planet earth is adapted to the current ionosphere, do we really want to carry out experiments on the ionosphere when we cannot even imagine how they will affect life on the planet? I am not against research or progress, but blazing blind into something that has the potential to produce huge global problems is not something I would recommend or support. If we degrade or destroy the ionosphere (without understanding the full consequences of our experiments), how will we recreate or fix it?
I couldn't agree more. I was listening to a Russian comedian and he was lambasting the American government. One of the points that he brought up was that America was a nation ruled by lawyers where people sue each other for the heck of it. My first reaction was one of anger, but then I stopped anf thought about it. In what other country do we see people suing fast food placed because of their won obesity? Or a child suing his parents for discipling him/her? We have gotten to the point where we no longer have the rule of law, but lawyers and judges reinterpret the law as they see fit. We are now the laughing stock of the world.
I'm sorry but wanting to save a couple of hundred bucks is not greed, it is actually a wise thing to do. The whole basis of our economy is based on the fact that customers want the highest quality product possible at the lowest price possible. The point of the grandparent was that the various hoops that a person or company has to jump through in interstate commerce raises the cost of doing business to where smaller companies and poorer people are not able to participate. In our Internet Age, many small businesses are finding it easier and even necessary to do business in serveral states; why not make it easier for the small guys to join the party? If privacy regulations were nationally standardized, I believe it would benifit the comsumers as well, not just corporations. It would actually be easier for consumers to find out exactly how the law protects them and to get advice. Less legal confusion is generally a good thing. One last point, someone mentioned that privacy laws should be decided by each state as they are better aware of the needs of their population. While I generally agree with this theory I fail to see how the privacy needs can vary so significantly between a person living in the state of New York and someone living in Washington state./p?
circletimessquare,
While you make some very valid points about pointing fingers and spreading blame, there are a few lapses in your logic. First of all, I agree with your point that blaming Native Africans, African-Americans, gays, or promiscuous men/women for the spread of AIDS does not solve the problem. You may also be correct that blaming each other hinders our efforts to find a cure, but this does not mean that we cannot blame some types of behavior for the rapid spread of AIDS. I think everyone would agree that it has been conclusively proven that AIDS mainly spreads through sexual contact; yes there are other ways to get infected but it is most commonly transmitted sexually.
circletimessquare, you rage against those propose abstinence or monogamy (or any morality whatsoever) as a method of preventing and fighting AIDS as hypocrites; and you have a point. Those three examples that you mention are valid cases of times when people do not practice what they preach, but how are these examples relevant to the proposition that a person who has a monogamous relationship and is not promiscuous has a much smaller chance of getting infected with AIDS? There is no need to invoke morality at all, it is common sense. Also if more people more monogamous and not promiscuous, AIDS would not spread as fast as it is currently spreading. Consider this scenario: A man is somehow infected with AIDS. If he is monogamous he will only pass on the disease to his partner (and to his children, if any, born after he is infected). Now if the man's partner and children are monogamous and not promiscuous then the disease will be confined to a certain family/clan and may even die out. Now consider the situation in which the man, his partner, and his children are promiscuous. Do you see that the rapid spread of AIDS is virtually guaranteed with this type of behavior? I am not aware of anyone or any group that is advocating giving up all sex (practically impossible); most advocate limiting yourself to one partner, which seems to be a fair compromise.
So you see, the blame for the spread of AIDS does not rest on a particular group of people; but can be blamed on certain behaviors. I recall a recent article on BBC about how one African country drastically reduced the rate at which AIDS spread in their country by promoting abstinence and monogamy. I do not understand circletimessquare's argument that we need to blame the disease rather than people's behavior. How is the disease at fault? AIDS is a virus, by definition a non-living protein. How do you assign blame to it? Does it force a person to have unprotected sex with multiple partners? No, that is the person's decision. Someone has already pointed out that AIDS is very different from the flu or the common cold where your probability of infection does not really depend on factors that you can control. This sort of mentality of "blame the disease" is actually a hindrance to finding a cure. Imagine if Joseph Lister (the father of antisepsis) had just blamed the deaths of surgery patients on "the disease" instead of trying to discover what processes and behaviors led to their deaths. If Lister would have blamed the disease (he was aware of the germ theory of diseases) would he have realized that people were dying because the surgical tools were not being sterilized? When a behavior contributes to the spread of a disease, discovering the behavior and modifying it can be a cure in and of itself.
China is just worried that internet surfers will be able to access sites that Yahoo hasn't blocked yet.
It is very simple, you can get any version of Windows (or Linux) on Bit Torrent. Since you get a legal and valid CD key with the purchace of a new PC, it is all legal. It isn't like I'm pirating, I have a legal license for it.
I couldn't agree more. The first thing I do if I buy a new computer is format the hard drive and reinstall Windows with the programs I need.
I don't think that too many people will switch back to IE when IE7 comes out. Firefox is not all about tabs, it is first and foremost about security. I do spyware cleanup for people and I have switched over quite a bit of people by telling them that Firefox will reduce the occurace of spyware. I remember one spyware clean I did, the spyware was so bad that I had to reinstall Windows. So I installed Firefox, got rid of all visible icons of IE, and told them to use Firefox to avoid popups. I myself have gone from doing several spyware scans a week to one every couple of months after switching to Firefox. And even then the scans find mostly cookies that I haven't deleted yet. Another reason that I think users won't switch is beccause IE7 butchers the classic IE interface. Firefox enhances and extends the IE interface and is more intuitive while the IE7 interface just sucks.
It seems that people have forgotten the purpose of copyright. The copyright is not a God-given or constitutional right, it was created to encourage authors and artists to create works of art by allowing them to profit from it for a while, with the assumption that the work would later be released into the public domain. Copyright was supposed to increase the amount of works in the public s\domain by giving the author or artist a temporary monopoly on the distribution of his work. A copyright was the incentitive to create new works (again for the public domain); without a copyright very few people would invest the time and enery to create new works.
In our selfish, me-first society this ideal has been corrupted. The author or artist is no longer creating something for the public, but for himself. He sees the copyright as a restriction on his right of ownership; instead of what it really is, a special privilage. Our culture of idea ownership has lead to the obsurdity of several hundred year old works, such as the Bible and church hymns, being copyrighted. What next, copyrighting the Constitution?
Through out history, anytime an author or artist released a work to the public, it becomes part of the public domain. They had no legal ownership of their work. It has been suggested that Shakespear (along with many other famous authors) committed what would now be considered plagerism but was fine back then. Also, the authors of the first three books of the New Testament are thought to have based their books on one older manuscript. Some parts of the Gosples of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are almost identicle to each other. Yet no one accuses them of plagerism. Back then, if an artist wanted to protect his work, he just did not release it to the public. Hence the idea of a copyright to encourage artists to release their work to the public but still retain control of it for a while, I think 15 years was the original period. Over the years publishers, authors, artists, the RIAA, and the MPAA have been brainwashing the public that they have full ownership rights and the copyright laws restrict them. We need to return to the original ideaology that says that all released works are part of the public domain and a copyright restricts the rights of the public for the benifit of the authors and artists.
Sorry, guess I misunderstood you.
I wouldn't exactly say that Seattle needs a train system or that it would "help a lot". The reason for this is convience, or lack of. To be successfull, a public transportation system needs to have a good coverage of the area that it is serving. This means that there need to be stops within a few blocks of the places that people want or need to go. If the buses/trains routes cover a good area, then ridership will increase; provided that the fares are reasonable. But for the transit authority to increase coverage area, it needs to have high ridership. So public transit is stuck in a catch-22 situation: they need more routes/stops to increase ridership, but to add more routes/stops they need more public transportation users. Another problem that public transportation faces here in the western US is sprawl. Cities are for the most part decentralized and spread all over the place. It is very hard to create routes (especially for a train system) when the population keeps shifting from one suburb to another.
But the biggest problem facing public transportation is that people just don't like it. Oh sure, they use it if they have to, but given the choice they prefere cars to trains or buses. This trend is true even in Europe where there is a highly developed public transportation system and prohibitive gas and car taxes. When they can afford it, people buy and use cars. It is that simple. Cars provide unequaled personal freedom and choice. On the way home from work in a car you can stop to pick up dinner, pick up the kids from daycare, or do several other chores. Try doing that on a bus or train. First of all, the bus/train may not have a route near the store you need to stop at, or you may have to transfere buses several times. This all adds to your total time wasted in transit. Next, say you're done shopping and you come out of the store just in time to see the bus/train pull away. Now in Seattle the buses come every 15 minutes; but where I live they run every 30 minutes at peak time or every hour off-peak. So now you're stuck waiting for the next bus or train. A study was done several years ago that compared the average travel times of those using public transportation to those using cars; public transportation travel time was almost double that of car travel time. For a more detailed critique of public transportation see the July 1997 issue of Commentary.
Now I do not want to say that public transportation is unecessary or junk, I myself use the local bus system to get to my university. But, I probably would not be using it if the price of gas wasn't so high or if I had to pay for its use. My university has a deal with the local transit autority that allows students and faculty to ride the buses for free. So, public transportation has its place, but cars are more convient and people will continue to choose cars over buses or trains. This is the problem facing Seattle, they will spend $5+ billion on a system that will be ignore by the vast majority of the population. Then, it too will need to be subsidized by the taxpayers. It is interesting that of all the public transportation systems of the major cities of the world; only Osaka, Japan covers its own expenses.
Nope, I'm running 1.0.6, I'm gonna upgrade to 1.0.7 and see if that helps.
Well, actually the Audigy 2 ZS is THX certified. Check out the Audigy 2 ZS features page.
Does it have the new OOo 2.0 GUI? No? I'm not interested then, I'll wait for 2.0 to come out. From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use.
By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.
So Opera is free now. Wow, who cares? Opera lost me as a customer and user long ago. The only reason I tried Opera was because IE in the lab computers that I managed was quiting unexpectedly (crappy Gateways and Windows 98 do not mix). So I installed Opera and used that instead, I didn't like it for several reasons. First, the UI was very different from IE. That is a bad thing because I taught computer classes for dummies and if the UI is radically different from IE, people get confused. The whole point of the classes was to teach people how to use the computers they have at home. So if they use Opera in class, they wouldn't be able to figure out how to use IE at home. (Seriously, I was surprised at how stupid some of the people were when it came to computers.) Second, use of tabs was manitory in Opera. Not good. Firefox offers way more flexibility; I always have several windows open in Firefox, each with several tabs: one for Slashdot, one for hardware, etc. In Opera this wasn't as intuitive (atleast not for me). Lastly, it was not free and the banners were annoying. I was on a very tight budget and did not have $30 to spend for each computer. I mean, I barely got approval to buy anti-virus software - and even that took a year to get.
"But it's free now", some may say. So what? It doesn't change the other two gripes that I had against it. The biggest problem I had with Opera was that it tried to reinvent the browser UI. Big no no. I was used to IE and could never really get comfortable with Opera. Firefox on the other hand is an enhancement of IE's UI; so when I tried Firefox, I never looked back. I have the same gripe against IE 7, it butchers the UI that I'm used to; so I'm sticking with Firefox.
Why is a Christian band that encourages fans to by-pass copy protection so humorous? Many people seem to think that Christian theology states that Christians must obey all laws, this is not true. It states that Christians are obligated to obey all laws that are not contrary to the higher law of God. That is why Martin Luther King Jr (while a minister) advocated civil disobediance during the civil rights movement and why Christians in the communist states of the former Soviet Union broke the law by holding secret church services.
I do not know why Switchfoot took a stand against copy protection, but I have talked on the subject with several conservative Christians. The views they expressed are not universally held, but they are very interesting. They view a musicians, singers, artists, etc talents as a gift from God. An artist has the right to sell his/her work, but he/she cannot claim ownership of it (by copyrighting it for example) because the gift is not his/hers, rather it was given to him/her not for personal gain, but for the enjoyment of the people around him/her.
While I agree that this lawsuit is extremely hypocritical of Microsoft, they have done much worse, but they did cover their asses with non-compete. So while their lawsuit may not be ethical or moral, it is legal. Lee did accept and sign the non-compete contract so he should not be surprised by the lawsuit. Whether the non-compete is valid is another story altogether, which is what the judge is supposed to decide.