And if he's that broke, how the hell does afford a lawyer. Maybe some no win no fee ambulance chaser took it. Anyway you don't actually need a lawyer to sue someone......................
IIRC gifts in the UK are tax free provided they are made more than a certain period before death (I could be wrong on this though, I'm a uk citizen but i'm not an accountant, lawyer or millionair so I dunno what the situation is regarding huge sums of money). If they are made too close to death they are counted as part of the estate for inheritance tax purposes.
Inheritance tax doesn't kick in until you get to much higher figures (arround £300,000 iirc), so unless he has signifianct other assests (like a house in a high value area) it wouldn't have been an issue for him.
charitable donations get some tax incentives (the charity can claim back the income tax you paid on them) but the article made out that theese gifts were to friends and family anyway not to charity.
Firefox already isn't called like that in my OS for over a year anymore, it's "Gran Paradisio", and firefox 2 was something else that I already forgot (and don't care what it was again either). Maybe you don't care but using the release codename which changes with every major release is going to cause confusion. Maybe it's ok for gentoo but not for a distro that aims at a more general audiance. And as you say the icon isn't exactly brilliant either.
Debian decided (rightly imo) that given that they couldn't get the firefox name and logos under acceptable terms and given the difficiancy of using mozillas nightly/alpha branding mentioned above to use a completely new name and icons.
I mean, what does mozilla do so different that they have this trademark problem and the others don't? They are controlled by a corporation that is paranoid about maintaining an iron fisted grip on the firefox brand in a way that goes totally against the spirit of free software.
Or the people who are content to do the electronic equivalent of signing a contract that they haven't read. Which afaict means the majority of computer users:/
There are two seperate issues with the "awsomebar", presentation and alogorithm.
The presentation is imo horrible, rather than a list of urls I can look through for the one I want I get information overload. Fortunately I can change the presentation back with an extension.
The second is the algorithm, the new bar uses a learning algorithm and in my experiance works very well once trained. However it tends to act in a rather unpredictable and perplexing manner for a while before it learns what you want.
mmm, tbh I haven't seen much propietry software for linux full stop (which is IMO a bad thing since I belive there are certain categories of software that are unlikely to be filled by open source) but lets take a look through some of the stuff i'm aware of that is still active.
flash: gtk opera: qt acrobat reader: gtk matlab: not sure but I belive it uses java awt which can be built to use either a motif variant or use X directly. google earth: not sure, I thought it was wine but it doesn't appear to be using that anymore, neither does it appear to be using either of qt or gtk.
no but you need a terminal server client access license for each machine and of course a terminal server license for the terminal server itself. Will that really work out much cheaper than having a windows license (which you often get thrown in with the hardware whether you want it or not anyway) for each machine.
Things have progressed somewhat further than the GP suggests, there is now a read/write driver (not using the windows driver code) and a resize tool which are considered pretty safe (nothing is completely safe, especially with desktop hard drives that often have unsafe cache implementations).
If the tech is there to do a resize tool the tech is there to do a defrag tool both are essentially moving stuff arround on the disk and updating the structures pointing to it (with resizing you also at the end change the volume size information and partition table).
I suspect the real reason you don't see them is risk perceptions. Users irrationally perceive defragmenting to be low risk and partition resizing to be high risk (the reality is that both are very similar operations with much the same risks).
Given those risk perceptions I would not want to ship a defragmenting tool that had been developed using information derived from reverse engineering the filesystem.
There is also the licensing issue, if you want to develop a propietry (or even opensource but not GPL compatible) application then you can't use QT unless you pay trolltech a load of money.
in Vista, all drivers apart from a component of the graphics driver are supposed to run in userspace. Bullshit.
A couple of driver types got major changes (most notablly display drivers which got the DX10 related stuff and printer drivers which were pushed into user mode) but by and large the driver model didn't really change significantly from XP to vista (despite this MS for some reason didn't allow XP drivers to install on vista, in most cases this can be worked arround by editing the inf file).
MS did introduce a framework for allowing some types of drivers to be developed in user mode but there are many that have to be done in kernel mode (anything that has kernel mode clients, anything that uses a memory mapped bus, anything that handles interrups) and many more that are still kernel mode because that makes the driver portable to more windows versions.
It is only fairly recently that ordinary desktop and laptop chipsets started supporting more than 4GB of address space (and you need more than 4GB of address space to fully use 4GB of ram).
If you are a laptop user and want to go beyond 4GB things get even worse. Many suppliers still want silly money for 4GB sodimms (some are now offering them at more sane prices but many of those aren't in my country and/or are names i've never heared of) and afaict there is often no way to find out if 2x4GB modules will work in your laptop other than buying them and trying it.
and going 64 bit is not an option for many people due to compatability issues (made worse by ms REQUIRING driver signing for any venfors that ships a 64 bit driver).
and you also in many cases get the option of having it preinstalled with XP rather than vista, some are even nice enough to give you recovery media for both.
That's right -- the source of the story should be liable. I disagree, everyone knows that while news is usually right screwups are inevitable if you want fast news. Making providers of information liable for such mistakes will just mean that noone is prepared to supply information without a contract as to how you will use that information and potential liability incurred. I think that would be very detrimental to society as a whole.
The fact is if you are going to play the game of trying to move before everyone else does you are going to base some of your moves on bad information.
Remember to sell stuff you need a buyer, (similarly to buy stuff you need a seller but that isn't the issue at hand here).
what this means is that on real bad news there is a huge advantage in moving fast before other players know about it. That can make the difference between losing almost nothing and losing almost your entire investment.
Furthermore once a stock is going down a combination of fear and people who have stop loss orders with thier brokers is going to drive it down further.
Sure but IMO unless there is a serious medical reason not to such irreversable desicions should be left until the person is old enough to make an informed choice for themselves. Not be forced on a child by thier parents.
I highly doubt that such action would kill EA. The point is to try and make them regard this DRM as a failed experiment, not to kill them.
The trouble with a lot of copy protection is that it really inconviniances the legitimate customers while having next to no effect on the pirates (since patching out the check is probablly no harder than patching out a CD check or similar). It may help against casual copying but IMO a copy protected CD plus a CD check is a nicer way to handle that.
Afaict if that works it means either the DVD wasn't protected in the first place (not all publishers bother) or you had some driver installed that was trasparently decrypting the DVD as it was read.
My understanding is that water vapour in our upper atmosphere is pretty much at saturation. So any extra gets released just condenses out becoming clouds and then falling as rain snow or hail.
Slashdot Mirror
And if he's that broke, how the hell does afford a lawyer.
Maybe some no win no fee ambulance chaser took it. Anyway you don't actually need a lawyer to sue someone......................
IIRC gifts in the UK are tax free provided they are made more than a certain period before death (I could be wrong on this though, I'm a uk citizen but i'm not an accountant, lawyer or millionair so I dunno what the situation is regarding huge sums of money). If they are made too close to death they are counted as part of the estate for inheritance tax purposes.
Inheritance tax doesn't kick in until you get to much higher figures (arround £300,000 iirc), so unless he has signifianct other assests (like a house in a high value area) it wouldn't have been an issue for him.
charitable donations get some tax incentives (the charity can claim back the income tax you paid on them) but the article made out that theese gifts were to friends and family anyway not to charity.
Firefox already isn't called like that in my OS for over a year anymore, it's "Gran Paradisio", and firefox 2 was something else that I already forgot (and don't care what it was again either).
Maybe you don't care but using the release codename which changes with every major release is going to cause confusion. Maybe it's ok for gentoo but not for a distro that aims at a more general audiance. And as you say the icon isn't exactly brilliant either.
Debian decided (rightly imo) that given that they couldn't get the firefox name and logos under acceptable terms and given the difficiancy of using mozillas nightly/alpha branding mentioned above to use a completely new name and icons.
I mean, what does mozilla do so different that they have this trademark problem and the others don't?
They are controlled by a corporation that is paranoid about maintaining an iron fisted grip on the firefox brand in a way that goes totally against the spirit of free software.
Or the people who are content to do the electronic equivalent of signing a contract that they haven't read. :/
Which afaict means the majority of computer users
There are two seperate issues with the "awsomebar", presentation and alogorithm.
The presentation is imo horrible, rather than a list of urls I can look through for the one I want I get information overload. Fortunately I can change the presentation back with an extension.
The second is the algorithm, the new bar uses a learning algorithm and in my experiance works very well once trained. However it tends to act in a rather unpredictable and perplexing manner for a while before it learns what you want.
mmm, tbh I haven't seen much propietry software for linux full stop (which is IMO a bad thing since I belive there are certain categories of software that are unlikely to be filled by open source) but lets take a look through some of the stuff i'm aware of that is still active.
flash: gtk
opera: qt
acrobat reader: gtk
matlab: not sure but I belive it uses java awt which can be built to use either a motif variant or use X directly.
google earth: not sure, I thought it was wine but it doesn't appear to be using that anymore, neither does it appear to be using either of qt or gtk.
no but you need a terminal server client access license for each machine and of course a terminal server license for the terminal server itself. Will that really work out much cheaper than having a windows license (which you often get thrown in with the hardware whether you want it or not anyway) for each machine.
Things have progressed somewhat further than the GP suggests, there is now a read/write driver (not using the windows driver code) and a resize tool which are considered pretty safe (nothing is completely safe, especially with desktop hard drives that often have unsafe cache implementations).
If the tech is there to do a resize tool the tech is there to do a defrag tool both are essentially moving stuff arround on the disk and updating the structures pointing to it (with resizing you also at the end change the volume size information and partition table).
I suspect the real reason you don't see them is risk perceptions. Users irrationally perceive defragmenting to be low risk and partition resizing to be high risk (the reality is that both are very similar operations with much the same risks).
Given those risk perceptions I would not want to ship a defragmenting tool that had been developed using information derived from reverse engineering the filesystem.
There is also the licensing issue, if you want to develop a propietry (or even opensource but not GPL compatible) application then you can't use QT unless you pay trolltech a load of money.
in Vista, all drivers apart from a component of the graphics driver are supposed to run in userspace.
Bullshit.
A couple of driver types got major changes (most notablly display drivers which got the DX10 related stuff and printer drivers which were pushed into user mode) but by and large the driver model didn't really change significantly from XP to vista (despite this MS for some reason didn't allow XP drivers to install on vista, in most cases this can be worked arround by editing the inf file).
MS did introduce a framework for allowing some types of drivers to be developed in user mode but there are many that have to be done in kernel mode (anything that has kernel mode clients, anything that uses a memory mapped bus, anything that handles interrups) and many more that are still kernel mode because that makes the driver portable to more windows versions.
It is only fairly recently that ordinary desktop and laptop chipsets started supporting more than 4GB of address space (and you need more than 4GB of address space to fully use 4GB of ram).
If you are a laptop user and want to go beyond 4GB things get even worse. Many suppliers still want silly money for 4GB sodimms (some are now offering them at more sane prices but many of those aren't in my country and/or are names i've never heared of) and afaict there is often no way to find out if 2x4GB modules will work in your laptop other than buying them and trying it.
and going 64 bit is not an option for many people due to compatability issues (made worse by ms REQUIRING driver signing for any venfors that ships a 64 bit driver).
and you also in many cases get the option of having it preinstalled with XP rather than vista, some are even nice enough to give you recovery media for both.
That's right -- the source of the story should be liable.
I disagree, everyone knows that while news is usually right screwups are inevitable if you want fast news. Making providers of information liable for such mistakes will just mean that noone is prepared to supply information without a contract as to how you will use that information and potential liability incurred. I think that would be very detrimental to society as a whole.
The fact is if you are going to play the game of trying to move before everyone else does you are going to base some of your moves on bad information.
Remember to sell stuff you need a buyer, (similarly to buy stuff you need a seller but that isn't the issue at hand here).
what this means is that on real bad news there is a huge advantage in moving fast before other players know about it. That can make the difference between losing almost nothing and losing almost your entire investment.
Furthermore once a stock is going down a combination of fear and people who have stop loss orders with thier brokers is going to drive it down further.
note that L will be a long term support release so I would think they would try to find something more proffesional sounding for that one.
maybe a little too close to apples trademark for comfort though.....
Sure but IMO unless there is a serious medical reason not to such irreversable desicions should be left until the person is old enough to make an informed choice for themselves. Not be forced on a child by thier parents.
You're forgetting Breezy Badger though there was indeed no A or C named release.
I highly doubt that such action would kill EA. The point is to try and make them regard this DRM as a failed experiment, not to kill them.
The trouble with a lot of copy protection is that it really inconviniances the legitimate customers while having next to no effect on the pirates (since patching out the check is probablly no harder than patching out a CD check or similar). It may help against casual copying but IMO a copy protected CD plus a CD check is a nicer way to handle that.
I always thought the reason for doing generics through erasure was to keep new code running on old VMs.
Afaict if that works it means either the DVD wasn't protected in the first place (not all publishers bother) or you had some driver installed that was trasparently decrypting the DVD as it was read.
I'm pretty sure most reasonablly modern PAL TVs can handle the NTSC framerate/line count just fine.
I'm sure MS for a while had media player setup to add some level of DRM to music it ripped from CD. No idea if it still does.
My understanding is that water vapour in our upper atmosphere is pretty much at saturation. So any extra gets released just condenses out becoming clouds and then falling as rain snow or hail.
Why not, can't you say
"we have x nukes hidden in $(large city), if you don't do X we will set them off. If tampered with the nukes will auto-detonate"