"What the hell is wrong with people and the continual redefinition and apologetics for censorship? It's not censorship unless they shoot you for publishing it? Whats wrong with you?"
What the hell is wrong with people and the continual sensationalism of anti-censorship? Censorship is a necesary element of individual rights. Say for instance I stood at the front door of your office building shouting "Thebdj [bleep]ed my sister and now she has AIDS" (not that my sister nor Thebdj actually has AIDS so far as I know). I can screem free speach and anti-censorship rhetoric all day, but your rights as an individual protect you from slander, harasment, and noise pollution. So in that case I sure hope that your rights are strong enough to censor me.
Blanket censorship with out descrimination is a bad thing. But in this case, we are talking about a soverenty's rights issue. (doesn't quite roll off the tongue like States Rights). The country code top level domain names were created and specificly intended to be maintain for and by their respective countries. Some countries' governments did not meet the fundamental requirements for maintaining those systems. And now, as governments are taking a more active role in their top level domain maintenance, some are at a point where they are capable of handling it. So what if PrivateCorp had opperated.iq, it belongs to the country of Iraq. What happens if PrivateCorp develops an agreement with Advertisment Company A which states that only Company A can advertise on the PrivateCorp maintained top level domian? All other advertisors would be censored and there would be next to nothing you could do about it. By having the TLD maintained by the government, it is subject to governmental regulation. Now, if you government is full of ass hats, they may censor sites also, but atleast then you have the option of voting/revolting.
And in this specific case, it is technically a very weak censorship. They didn't tell the author they couldn't write the comics, or that they could distribute their commics, just that they could destribute them from a site on the country's TLD. In the US you can scream Fire as loud as you want, as long as you are not in a place the will cause a panic. Either way, the government is censoring you.
That would be an interesting ploy, but risky, the likelihood of a counter suit would be high. But if someone where to claim patent infringment on the DRM system just before the technology made it to market (ie: Plants tooled up and producing units and media) even if just to stall the release for 6 months or longer while litigation goes forth and a 3rd party reviews every line of code in the system. That would have to have quite a profound effect.
The GDI API was revamped a while back (for XP I believe) to GDI+. It's nothing fancy, it still uses the processor only for all work, there is no hardware acceleration, and all graphics are handled by an application's primary thread. GDI's craptacular performance requires developers to create double buffers and perform some nasty cross thread work to keep a GUI seemlessly updated while preforming proc intensive or IO wait threads in the background.
Ever notice how sometimes a window stops responding while an app is accessing a network share or disk? That's because the primary thread is running both the IO process (which hits a wait state while waiting on the stream) and the Graphics process. There are kludges that have been getting stuck into GDI to make it smoother arround this. It is still a piece of crap, a nicely polished and well used piece of crap, but a piece of crap none the less. I unfortunately haven't had much time to developer in the new graphics system, but if it can do even just a fraction of what I have heard, it will be a huge boon to windows application graphics. Good bye grey boxes!
"However, public demonstrations have been full of cool graphics effects and consumer features that probably turn off more IT staff than they attract"
With the exception of Windows application developers who have been battling with GDI(+) for the last 10 years. The new graphics core of windows has been needed for a long time now.
So true! It didn't take many trips to TJ to learn the phrase "Yo no vendo los drogas, pero vendo mi querpo." (I'm sure that my written spanish is significantly worse then my written english, but I don't know how to say Ie dun Spel gud in spanish.)
Look at it from a super rich person's point of view. I can take $10m and build a new mansion, paying for hundreds of laborers, skilled laborers, engineers, designers, material suppliers, etc. Since this is a lavish luxury, the $10m will get taxed at a higher rate, let's say, 30%. So this $10m mansion will cost over $13m, and the extra $3m will not "work"(as in generating a return on investment) for the rich person.
That same rich person could also spend their money on tax exempt holdings and international investments(ie: a Villa in Spain, a construction company in China, etc) where they don't have to pay the "fairtax". In this case, the entire $10m is "working" for the person without $3m of overhead. But only a fraction of the $10m is invested in the US economy, the rest is invested in international venues where fair tax does not apply.
So why should a person take a 30% loss on investment in the US when they can invest overseas with out any penalty? Simple answer, they shouldn't.
Will "FairTax" destroy the US Economy? doubtful. Would it have a negative overall impact? Very likely. Am I going to go read HR25 or books by your favorite market analysist? No, because for everyone you can find that says "FairTax" is good, I can find another that says the opposite.
The problem with fair tax is that it encourages people to NOT spend their money. America's economy is dependent on the movement of money, not the amount. So anything that motivates people to not spend money is going to be bad for the economy.
"The initial bill's detractors who pushed for this amendment want a tax for author rights to be paid by everyone on the ISP fees."
So now all musicians can be treated exactly the same. And the government has control over which musical groups/producers get funded and by how much. For all the people who have been saying that the content providers need to find a new means of revenue, I think they may have found one.
"HBO works that way. It's $11/month on top of what we pay for cable and for that there's about 10 feeds, 1 high def. Now clearly it's a workable business model since they've been doing it for years, and show no signs of stopping."
HBO produces very little of their own content. Most of what your $10 goes to is the network overhead and content licenses.
Your $10 a month isn't paying for HBO to produce Lord of the Rings. Its paying for them to license it, for a fraction of the cost of production.
Also, The HBO version of DodgeBall is edited, it has numerous scenes fragments/dialogue cut, some of which are really freaking funny!
These guys where ripping off thousands of dollars in software with each sale. Heck, if you coughed up $30 for each of the 77 video games they gave away with their modded box (for less then $500) you'd have to pony up over 2 grand. Realisticly it would be significantly higher then that. If they sold 100 fully loaded boxes they would have effectively ripped off a quarter million dollars from the publishers.
I'm lazy and did not read TFA. But are we talking about a Dell Logo next to the standard text add? Or are we talking about a marketing supplied advertising graphic?
I would be fine with logos. The are small, simple, and not too distracting. The let me immediately associate a link with a corporate entity.
I along with pretty much everyone else here would throw google adds in the block list if they start tossing out animated gifs, flash, or even just tacky images. I waste enough of my employer's bandwidth with out having to deal with that crap.
My Comp Sci Assoc program started with ~40 stundents. I think there were 5 girls. We graduated 2 years later with 7 students, only one of which was a girl. That's about 12.5% enrolment and 14% graduation.
"The typical slashdot response to my anti-patent opinion is that prescription drugs wouldn't be researched, but the majority of the people actually researching these drugs aren't the ones who gain billions in profits from the discovery. You may not see megacorps working on solutions, but the biggest medical developments in human history came originally from a few researchers, not megalabs that spend billions and release drugs that addict and kill their users."
Correct, it only takes a handful of scientist to research a new drug. As opposed to the 20 years of testing and refining, test subjects, clinical trials, FDA application/approval, marketing and production.
The pharmasudical industry is one of the places 20 year patents make sence. They are protecting a tangible thing that cost huge amounts of money to develope.
In this case however, the patent appears to be for an 'idea'. I think MS should be able to patent a chunk of software that auto pauses a feed. But they should not be able to patent the IDEA of pausing a feed. They can patent the way in which the feed is paused. They can patent the technology that stores the paused feed. But allowing them to patent the idea of pausing is horrendous. That would be like a pharmasudical company patenting "a way of delivering highly tagetted drugs to a part of the body". That's an idea. They can patent chemical/nano products that perform that idea, but they shouldn't be able to patent the idea.
Having access to the data is worthless. What are you going to do with a listing of billions of phone calls? The only value to system provides is social networking of specific targets. So yes, if they choose you as a target, they can find out who you have been in contact with... Which they can already do! The only difference is that now the carriers are required to maintain that data for 2 years instead of their previously established time frames.
And I'm still not seeing a large posibility for abuse. Ok so some crooked cop could theoreticly pull the listings for the local "cancer hotline" as mentioned before and sell that info to insurance companies. But with a simple set of checks and balances the likelihood would be next to nothing. Especially if a warrent is still needed to get the listing/networking info. And in any case, they can do that exact same thing right now, but I haven't heard of any cases of call lists being resold from police stations.
Call it flame bait, but what's wrong with Windows Media Player 10? Toss in a CD, switch to the RIP tab, turn off the DRM option and rip to MP3 or WMA. It automaticly grabs the artist, title, song list, and cover art and puts the whole thing together for you. My P4 540 chews through an album in no time, and works fine in the back ground. I have next to no time to waste ripping, but I managed to get through a quarter of my collection (over 200 discs) taking the time to select which songs to rip and which albumns to grab in and hour or so.
"Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?"
Except in this case the quote would be more like "We have proof that Jimmy is a Communist and that over the last 2 years you and Jimmy called eachother 5 times a week, are you also a Communist?"
Thankfully civil liberties in the US have improved greatly over the last 40 years, and being part of a non-violent law abiding political party is significantly more exceptable. The danger here is for people within a single or double degree of seperation who are unknowing of the investigation target's illegal/suspect behavior, expecially in cases dealing with terrorist threats. (Given the White House's apparent history of snatch first, admit guilt later)
The bright side is that social networks could be quickly mapped out once a target was selected. Patterns could be picked out and warnings could be sent up. Just imagine if you could quickly pick out a calling pattern an extremist group, a suspected handler, a previously unknown target, and a flight school. At that point you have no idea what people are talking about, heck, maybe the unknown target is an immigrant who works as a custodian at the school and has no idea that his uncle is under investigation. A couple quick background checks, maybe and interview or two, and it becomes clear that the person is not a threat, no harm, no foul. On the other hand, if the person were a threat, you could have just identified a potential terrorist extremely quickly.
In the US the police can already pull the numbers, times and call durations from any phone with the carrier's cooperation (and a warrent if necesary), I'm not sure how long of history they get, but you would assume it would be atleast a month or two and likely longer. So don't go thinking the US is on some moral high road here, we just have the FCC make rules instead of having to pass a bill through congress.
And for the record, I always thought McCarthy was an ass hat.
Turbos/Superchargers increase air flow to the engine, in order to maintain optimal burn the engine needs more fuel to go with the extra air. So while a Turbo is a much more efficient power generator, it requires additional fuel. This system uses the heat from the exhaust to generate steam to turn a steam engine that adds power to the engine. It uses no more fuel, adds power, and reduces exhaust temperatures (which can help reduce specific types of emmissions)
Slashdot Mirror
"What the hell is wrong with people and the continual redefinition and apologetics for censorship? It's not censorship unless they shoot you for publishing it? Whats wrong with you?"
.iq, it belongs to the country of Iraq. What happens if PrivateCorp develops an agreement with Advertisment Company A which states that only Company A can advertise on the PrivateCorp maintained top level domian? All other advertisors would be censored and there would be next to nothing you could do about it. By having the TLD maintained by the government, it is subject to governmental regulation. Now, if you government is full of ass hats, they may censor sites also, but atleast then you have the option of voting/revolting.
What the hell is wrong with people and the continual sensationalism of anti-censorship? Censorship is a necesary element of individual rights. Say for instance I stood at the front door of your office building shouting "Thebdj [bleep]ed my sister and now she has AIDS" (not that my sister nor Thebdj actually has AIDS so far as I know). I can screem free speach and anti-censorship rhetoric all day, but your rights as an individual protect you from slander, harasment, and noise pollution. So in that case I sure hope that your rights are strong enough to censor me.
Blanket censorship with out descrimination is a bad thing. But in this case, we are talking about a soverenty's rights issue. (doesn't quite roll off the tongue like States Rights). The country code top level domain names were created and specificly intended to be maintain for and by their respective countries. Some countries' governments did not meet the fundamental requirements for maintaining those systems. And now, as governments are taking a more active role in their top level domain maintenance, some are at a point where they are capable of handling it. So what if PrivateCorp had opperated
And in this specific case, it is technically a very weak censorship. They didn't tell the author they couldn't write the comics, or that they could distribute their commics, just that they could destribute them from a site on the country's TLD. In the US you can scream Fire as loud as you want, as long as you are not in a place the will cause a panic. Either way, the government is censoring you.
-Rick
Beer + Google = Pretty Girls?
err, oh, goggles, my bust.
-Rick
"You can drink an ugly girl pretty, but you can't drink a fat girl thin"
I can't remember who to attribute that to though.
-Rick
You'll notice Version 11 of Crystal Reports is still just as crappy and unreliable as ever.
-Rick
"So, as New Year's Eve is coming, remember to use only tall glasses for your party!!!"
I think you have that backwards, we want to use the short fat glasses.
-Rick
That would be an interesting ploy, but risky, the likelihood of a counter suit would be high. But if someone where to claim patent infringment on the DRM system just before the technology made it to market (ie: Plants tooled up and producing units and media) even if just to stall the release for 6 months or longer while litigation goes forth and a 3rd party reviews every line of code in the system. That would have to have quite a profound effect.
-Rick
I for one welcome our new indecisive DRM overlords.
Err, am I welcoming the indecisiveness of our DRM overlords?
-Rick
And in other news the UK Dept of Corporate Ball Breaking stops killing kittens.
-Rick
The GDI API was revamped a while back (for XP I believe) to GDI+. It's nothing fancy, it still uses the processor only for all work, there is no hardware acceleration, and all graphics are handled by an application's primary thread. GDI's craptacular performance requires developers to create double buffers and perform some nasty cross thread work to keep a GUI seemlessly updated while preforming proc intensive or IO wait threads in the background.
Ever notice how sometimes a window stops responding while an app is accessing a network share or disk? That's because the primary thread is running both the IO process (which hits a wait state while waiting on the stream) and the Graphics process. There are kludges that have been getting stuck into GDI to make it smoother arround this. It is still a piece of crap, a nicely polished and well used piece of crap, but a piece of crap none the less. I unfortunately haven't had much time to developer in the new graphics system, but if it can do even just a fraction of what I have heard, it will be a huge boon to windows application graphics. Good bye grey boxes!
-Rick
"However, public demonstrations have been full of cool graphics effects and consumer features that probably turn off more IT staff than they attract"
With the exception of Windows application developers who have been battling with GDI(+) for the last 10 years. The new graphics core of windows has been needed for a long time now.
-Rick
So true! It didn't take many trips to TJ to learn the phrase "Yo no vendo los drogas, pero vendo mi querpo." (I'm sure that my written spanish is significantly worse then my written english, but I don't know how to say Ie dun Spel gud in spanish.)
-Rick
Look at it from a super rich person's point of view. I can take $10m and build a new mansion, paying for hundreds of laborers, skilled laborers, engineers, designers, material suppliers, etc. Since this is a lavish luxury, the $10m will get taxed at a higher rate, let's say, 30%. So this $10m mansion will cost over $13m, and the extra $3m will not "work"(as in generating a return on investment) for the rich person.
That same rich person could also spend their money on tax exempt holdings and international investments(ie: a Villa in Spain, a construction company in China, etc) where they don't have to pay the "fairtax". In this case, the entire $10m is "working" for the person without $3m of overhead. But only a fraction of the $10m is invested in the US economy, the rest is invested in international venues where fair tax does not apply.
So why should a person take a 30% loss on investment in the US when they can invest overseas with out any penalty? Simple answer, they shouldn't.
Will "FairTax" destroy the US Economy? doubtful. Would it have a negative overall impact? Very likely. Am I going to go read HR25 or books by your favorite market analysist? No, because for everyone you can find that says "FairTax" is good, I can find another that says the opposite.
-Rick
The problem with fair tax is that it encourages people to NOT spend their money. America's economy is dependent on the movement of money, not the amount. So anything that motivates people to not spend money is going to be bad for the economy.
-Rick
"The initial bill's detractors who pushed for this amendment want a tax for author rights to be paid by everyone on the ISP fees."
So now all musicians can be treated exactly the same. And the government has control over which musical groups/producers get funded and by how much. For all the people who have been saying that the content providers need to find a new means of revenue, I think they may have found one.
Atleast it's just France.
-Rick
"HBO works that way. It's $11/month on top of what we pay for cable and for that there's about 10 feeds, 1 high def. Now clearly it's a workable business model since they've been doing it for years, and show no signs of stopping."
HBO produces very little of their own content. Most of what your $10 goes to is the network overhead and content licenses.
Your $10 a month isn't paying for HBO to produce Lord of the Rings. Its paying for them to license it, for a fraction of the cost of production.
Also, The HBO version of DodgeBall is edited, it has numerous scenes fragments/dialogue cut, some of which are really freaking funny!
-Rick
These guys where ripping off thousands of dollars in software with each sale. Heck, if you coughed up $30 for each of the 77 video games they gave away with their modded box (for less then $500) you'd have to pony up over 2 grand. Realisticly it would be significantly higher then that. If they sold 100 fully loaded boxes they would have effectively ripped off a quarter million dollars from the publishers.
Rightly so these guys should be prosecuted.
-Rick
I'm lazy and did not read TFA. But are we talking about a Dell Logo next to the standard text add? Or are we talking about a marketing supplied advertising graphic?
I would be fine with logos. The are small, simple, and not too distracting. The let me immediately associate a link with a corporate entity.
I along with pretty much everyone else here would throw google adds in the block list if they start tossing out animated gifs, flash, or even just tacky images. I waste enough of my employer's bandwidth with out having to deal with that crap.
-Rick
My Comp Sci Assoc program started with ~40 stundents. I think there were 5 girls. We graduated 2 years later with 7 students, only one of which was a girl. That's about 12.5% enrolment and 14% graduation.
-Rick
Garbage collectors also get paid pretty well, probrably (depending on municipality) comprably to most custom business software developers.
-Rick
"The typical slashdot response to my anti-patent opinion is that prescription drugs wouldn't be researched, but the majority of the people actually researching these drugs aren't the ones who gain billions in profits from the discovery. You may not see megacorps working on solutions, but the biggest medical developments in human history came originally from a few researchers, not megalabs that spend billions and release drugs that addict and kill their users."
Correct, it only takes a handful of scientist to research a new drug. As opposed to the 20 years of testing and refining, test subjects, clinical trials, FDA application/approval, marketing and production.
The pharmasudical industry is one of the places 20 year patents make sence. They are protecting a tangible thing that cost huge amounts of money to develope.
In this case however, the patent appears to be for an 'idea'. I think MS should be able to patent a chunk of software that auto pauses a feed. But they should not be able to patent the IDEA of pausing a feed. They can patent the way in which the feed is paused. They can patent the technology that stores the paused feed. But allowing them to patent the idea of pausing is horrendous. That would be like a pharmasudical company patenting "a way of delivering highly tagetted drugs to a part of the body". That's an idea. They can patent chemical/nano products that perform that idea, but they shouldn't be able to patent the idea.
-Rick
My Wife caught the Pixies in Chicago last spring, I was stuck home baby sitting :(
-Rick
Having access to the data is worthless. What are you going to do with a listing of billions of phone calls? The only value to system provides is social networking of specific targets. So yes, if they choose you as a target, they can find out who you have been in contact with... Which they can already do! The only difference is that now the carriers are required to maintain that data for 2 years instead of their previously established time frames.
And I'm still not seeing a large posibility for abuse. Ok so some crooked cop could theoreticly pull the listings for the local "cancer hotline" as mentioned before and sell that info to insurance companies. But with a simple set of checks and balances the likelihood would be next to nothing. Especially if a warrent is still needed to get the listing/networking info. And in any case, they can do that exact same thing right now, but I haven't heard of any cases of call lists being resold from police stations.
-Rick
Call it flame bait, but what's wrong with Windows Media Player 10? Toss in a CD, switch to the RIP tab, turn off the DRM option and rip to MP3 or WMA. It automaticly grabs the artist, title, song list, and cover art and puts the whole thing together for you. My P4 540 chews through an album in no time, and works fine in the back ground. I have next to no time to waste ripping, but I managed to get through a quarter of my collection (over 200 discs) taking the time to select which songs to rip and which albumns to grab in and hour or so.
-Rick
"Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?"
Except in this case the quote would be more like "We have proof that Jimmy is a Communist and that over the last 2 years you and Jimmy called eachother 5 times a week, are you also a Communist?"
Thankfully civil liberties in the US have improved greatly over the last 40 years, and being part of a non-violent law abiding political party is significantly more exceptable. The danger here is for people within a single or double degree of seperation who are unknowing of the investigation target's illegal/suspect behavior, expecially in cases dealing with terrorist threats. (Given the White House's apparent history of snatch first, admit guilt later)
The bright side is that social networks could be quickly mapped out once a target was selected. Patterns could be picked out and warnings could be sent up. Just imagine if you could quickly pick out a calling pattern an extremist group, a suspected handler, a previously unknown target, and a flight school. At that point you have no idea what people are talking about, heck, maybe the unknown target is an immigrant who works as a custodian at the school and has no idea that his uncle is under investigation. A couple quick background checks, maybe and interview or two, and it becomes clear that the person is not a threat, no harm, no foul. On the other hand, if the person were a threat, you could have just identified a potential terrorist extremely quickly.
In the US the police can already pull the numbers, times and call durations from any phone with the carrier's cooperation (and a warrent if necesary), I'm not sure how long of history they get, but you would assume it would be atleast a month or two and likely longer. So don't go thinking the US is on some moral high road here, we just have the FCC make rules instead of having to pass a bill through congress.
And for the record, I always thought McCarthy was an ass hat.
-Rick
Turbos/Superchargers increase air flow to the engine, in order to maintain optimal burn the engine needs more fuel to go with the extra air. So while a Turbo is a much more efficient power generator, it requires additional fuel. This system uses the heat from the exhaust to generate steam to turn a steam engine that adds power to the engine. It uses no more fuel, adds power, and reduces exhaust temperatures (which can help reduce specific types of emmissions)
-Rick