I actually have some sympathy for the reporters involved in this, because they have no clue what they're getting themselves in to.
Anonymous is what happens when you give people the ability to act without reprecussions, a good portion of the world turns into total a**holes. And they will surely retaliate, for two reasons. The first being the justification that "oh, we're called domestic terrorists, we better at least do something worth that name now". The second being the justification "Umm, no. You totally misunderstand what we do here. We're just normal internet stupidity. want a sample? How about everyone in your company? We can do a mass raid if you want"
The second already is happening in droves, if you'll notice their forums.
Now, that said, the people i DON'T feel pity for are the "victims". The male victim, who fails at trying to be anonymous, now has his name, and his story, all over all of the *chans. All he's doing is trying to get revenge because anonymous wouldn't raid his stupid girlfriend and that they told him he was being a moron. He spends most of his time actively trying to spread dirt on the *chans, including warning potential raid targets, making up lies about what raids actually are.
As for the female victim, her story is similarly stupid, but as I do not know the entire thing with all facts for certain, i will refrain from final judgement and spreading rumors.
But for most raid "victims" in general, their main flaw was that they posted too much personal information online, and made a point of either harassing others, who happened to be anonymous, or whining to anonymous for favors.
I am not anonymous, but it pays to know about them.
Reboot should remain reboot. That means the following should NOT happen:
Excessive character re-design/"Updating for new technology" No, the binomes should stay binomes. Sprites should stay sprites.
Keep in the old feel That means utterly horridly corny computer jokes.
Do NOT try to bring back old characters in a "new" reincarnation that makes them nothing like their old selves. Either take the old chars and leave em like that, or design new ones. Don't keep the old character but make them look/act like someone new.
Btw, anyone else see hack/slash and keep thinking they should be working for doctor robotnik?
I'm all for pointing out how insecure a machine is for voting, and that nothing was wrong with the old paper system, but he's really hit the nail on the head on how much we shouldn't really worry about this without more specifics.
Are they vulnerable only to someone who is there at the time of the vote toying with the machine? Or is this something that can be triggered remotely or set up on time-delay. Is it something that is easily detectable if we have people watching over the machines/running maintenance before/after elections. How useful are these hacks in falsifying the backup system (paper) that some of these machines are supposed to be using, or do they just mess up the electronic data?
You can find a bug in almost any software. Finding an exploitable bug that is useful and won't be easily detected is quite a bit harder.
He did. That's where the mmo genre came from, a lot of what is taken for granted was started with ultima online. Then origin systems was ravaged by EA and he was taken off the project, and the game went to heck.
He's "built a better game" many times over throughout his game design history. It's a pity that companies don't really thrive on new business models anymore, or take a chance with an "untested" formula for a game as often as they used to, because now games that push new boundaries aren't as common as they once were.
1. it gives all the trolls of the internet, and real life, confirmed spoilers. and not just the xxxx dies or yyyy maries zzzz, but spoilers that involved actually plot twists. Most spoilers to this point were way off or were easy to see, and didn't break plot twists. After this was released, the spoilers got a lot worse and revolved around plot points.
2. This allows people who want to browse any part of the internet before the book comes out, a chance to read the book and NOT have it ruined for them.
3. The low-quality camera pictures, which originated from luelinks, then quickly migrated to 4chan and from there were spread via rapidshare to the rest of the internet, are so horrid that negative color is the best way to read them, which isn't very hard w/o zooming, but is near impossible for any commercial or noncommercial OCR package without doing every page almost completely manually.
Disclaimer as a fan: I am buying the book on friday, 3 copies, 1 for family, 1 for family library, 1 to read. Disclaimer as a techie: I speak from experience as i've seen the camera captures, i watched the spread on 4chan and onto the torrent sites, and there was an entire thread devoted to people OCRing the pages, which i contributed to. Most commerical and university packages were used, as well as the open source OCR engine, which wasn't that horrid.
I don't doubt you may have had a wonderful vista experience. But i will point out that the major complaints against windows vista have nothing to do with your story.
1. The obscene hardware requirements. I'm sorry, when an os RECCOMENDS 10+ gigs of install space, that's trouble 2. The drm, the drm, the drm, did I mention the drm? My computer should not be phoning home to redmond, or anyone, nearly 40% of the time it is on. 3. Usability and Security for normal users. You are an exceptional user, who we assume knows what he 's doing. Most users click ok on dialogues because it's what they are supposed to do to make it close. Security has been sacrificed greatly by microsoft in the form of making everything require "approval" in an annoying way that quickly becomes habit and is so rendered harmful by giving false a sense of security. 4. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - Windows Vista, like windows xp before it, has several of the EEE principals built into it, making it not function with some older hardware/software due to forced api rewrites. I know some incompatability is expected, but some of the compatability errors are in there for no other reason than to force outdating, in the same manner as it's predecessors, such as the serial port "revamp" that was featured with windows xp that rendered most serial devices unusuable.
Because of course when software tells a user they can't do something, the user wouldn't ever DREAM of trying to get around it. Or leave their passwords on sticky notes. Or copy sensitive files to a public ftp for "Easy access" from home.
It's that belief structure that makes democracy not work.
Who cares if he's republican, who cares if he's conservative. He's the president. That means he should act in the best interests of the nation WHETHER OR NOT he personally agrees with it. That means letting all sides be heard, not squelching things he doesn't agree with. That means doing things that his party may not like, because it's the right thing to do.
That type of thinking is why most elections are worthless nowadays, because you have people who tick a box for a party without caring about the person's beliefs or if that party really agrees with that they believe themselves.
It's called an entropy field. Some people have it. Like normal entropy, you can have positive or negative entropy. You ever know a person who'd have a computer problem, and they'd go to get a certain tech or person to help, but the minute that person gets there, the problem fixes itself? Or maybe you're the person who has the phantom problem that goes away when people walk into the room. That person has positive entropy.
Now we have the converse, the guy who has an above normal failure rate, or more likely, when he has a lot of things fail in a relatively short amount of time. The guy who has to get his new car into the shop every month. The guy who has 5 bad hard drives in a year, despite being new. The guy who's cd laser dies out after only a few months. Or, more aptly, the guy who's hceck engine light keeps comming on but no one ever knows why. This guy has negative entropy. Negative entropy more often than not, fluctuates, so it is a harder problem to notice, but is easier to detect when it is high as it causes massive failures.
Physical Limits. You're trying the age old logical fallacy of applying real world logic and laws to a digital problem, without translating the real world logic. We laugh at senators and lawyers and everyone else for trying to do this stupid thing, so please try to use common sense of technology and not do it yourself.
The difference between playing music from speakers and streaming it off your hard drive is simple. First, the law allows for unavoidable audio pollution. I.e. if you play something, others might hear it on accident. Big deal. However that is your choice as the person playing the music for your own enjoyment. Streaming from a hard drive allows multiple people to play a file, where a cd and speaker set up allows you to playback the music on one system. From a streaming hardrive, 30 people in 30 different locations can play the song and not hear the other copies of it. If we expand this analogy, you could have the entire US listening off 1 copy of the music.
Now, does that mean this is bad/illegal? Probably. Should it be? Debatable.
Now let me rephrase your original question so it makes sense and uses digital logic:
If play music over my speakers so that I may listen to it, others nearby can hear it. If I stream music off my harddrive to a location so i can listen to it, others nearby can still hear it. If other people play my legal music off my hard drive without my involvement, they can hear it. If 20 other people play my legal music off my hard drive without my involvement at the same time, they can hear it.
There is a very fine distinction to be argued here, and that is that the other people playing the music do not own it. Copyright law allows for the person who owns the copy to play it whenever they deem fit, for themselves or others of their choosing. Everyone else who uses that copy is breaking the law, plain and simple.
By using the copy, they are not passive listeners, nor are they part of the unavoidable effects of audio pollution, and therefore it's a conscious decision to rip the music from you.
Disclaimer: I am not arguing the validity of any laws reguarding timeshifting/placeshifting/multiple listeners etc. I'm just showing that in the current laws, your post was flawed.
The reason a lot of titles are exclusive, especially in the current "age" of consoles, is twofold. First the architectures are entirely different, so a lot of extra work has to go coding a compatible version for whatever other platforms you are designing for.
Second is called reduction. When you make a crossplatform game, it is limited by the lowest hardware specs of each console. maybe graphics for one, storage medium for another, and persistent objects for a third. What this means is if they design for the wii or the xbox 360, they have to limit the game size to something that those consoles can manage, even if the ps3 can go higher. Likewise if they do something better than the ps3, they have to limit it to the ps3s specs.
Thank you mr. jack thomson. Your insight into the ingenius theory that people play violent video games because they want to kill another living being is undoubtable! Also the fact that only people who are raise with bad parenting play bad video games. Astonishing! You should get a nobel prize for such wonderful insight.
MOD PARENT UP! I am all for patent bashing, but i am not a chemist, nor is most of slashdot.
Unless this is an obvious leap, this is EXACTLY what patents are for. It's not software, it's not the human genome, and it's a novel invention that includes both the method and the compound used. That is the epitome of somethign that someone should be able to patent so they can resell it for awhile to make money off it.
For the car analogy requirement: I would almost give this akin to, say, developing a new method of making spark plugs that are cheaper. Why wouldn't that be patentable?
For all the talk on slashdot about normal people getting stupid and losing common sense whenever technology is involved, there sure is some of it in our little group here.:P
Alright, that's fine for people who run businesses. Now what about the rest of the internet? What about non profit business, what about people who use a domain name to route to their own servers, so their net cost of operating is $7 a year, something they can afford as a hobby? What about nonprofit organizations or fan sites/clubs. There are hosting packages available for cheaper than $70/year. Why should just be able to say, hey, this string of ANSI characters leads to me, cost $70?
You're proposing a bad solution to a problem. All you're doing is raising the cost of squatting a bit, so people don't squat as much. That still doesn't fix some of the major moneymakers, which is buying up lapsed domains and forcing resell to the people who lost them. Likewise, you're not preventing obvious squatting on small businesses. Say you see a bob's hardware, you go in and ask if they have a website, they say no, but that they are getting one soon. Lets go register bobshardware.com, bobshardware(city).com, or bobshardware(state).com, and see how much money we can sell it back to them for.
Instead they should make a ban on automatic domain registration, because some of it you can tell is obviously bots. Likewise, they should ban farming. If someone owns 100+ domains, they should have a use for them.
Allow parking for up to 6 months or a year, that alone will force them to do something to their sites and at the very minimum raise their cost of operating a bit to encourage them to squat on less, without affecting the honest internet users.
No offense, but your response seems very typical nowadays american idioticy. "OMG terrorists, well lets id everyone and install tracking chips, that will stop them!". It may stop them, note the may, but the inconvenience to the honest citizens is not worth it. Disclaimer: I am an american, I am just also sick of the bad rhetoric.
Ok, forgive me here, but it seems there is a lot of discussion on how someone pulled this hoax off. I have a better conclusion? What if this is just apple trying to see who their leaks are? They give a slightly differently worded memo to different suspected employees, whatever copy leaks out shows who the snitch is. Then they say the first memo was a fake, and fire/punish the employee who leaked. Win win for apple.
Toast?... no, that's not right. Coast?... not right either. Most?... still doesn't sound right.
Gee I'm sure glad that humans can forget things, it would be so inconvenient if we remembered everything.
Joking aside, I use my computer precisely because it doesn't forget things and I do. While it may suck for humans to have history held accountable to them, what incentive do people have to NOT have a record of your actions?
Without an incentive, things don't usually change.
Why is this news? Sounds to me like he broke a US law that the AU has an equivalent law about, and the us wants him to be on trial here first. Plus the AU has agreements with the US to comply. Sounds like SOP to me.
Your argument falls apart the minute you say that you don't have to buy their product.
Because you do.
You work for the government? You get stuck on microsoft office. You want to turn in a document to the government? Most require that it be in a word format.
While open office can do.doc files, they do not always translate and read 100% perfectly on microsoft software, and so you usually have to use MS Office to check it before sending it in to make sure it shows right, or risk fines or other government penalties.
As long as microsoft strongarms business and the government, you don't have a choice. And that is why this is such a big deal.
God just needs to invent a better fool. Or in this case, someone who cares about being able to watch stuff they buy, on other stuff they buy. No questions asked and no crud breaking because it thinks it's "illegal" due to some dust or something.
When will they learn? I'm remembering a phrase about old dogs and new tricks. The **AAs are very old dogs.
How exactly is star wars somehow less scifi then firefly?
I'd wager that there is more theoretical technology and theoretical futuristic social structure in star wars then serenity and probably most of firefly. So what do you define as science fiction? I mean, it's fiction, about science. Firefly barely had enough science to make it not qualify as a current fiction w/ spaceships.
Judges are starting to make sense and get onto companies for being legal morons.... Where are they comming from and what are they putting in the water in that city?
When you have the microsoft fanboys and employees complaining or pointing out problems, you have to wonder exactly WHO does microsoft ask for opinions and ideas of why their products aren't doing well?
You're forgetting that the lines they lay out run across mostly public and private land not owned by the corporation.
In return for the use of such land, they are obligated to open their network to competitors. It's the argeement most telcos make with their governments to get land rights, as WELL as prevent dozens of networks all wasting space
Slashdot Mirror
I actually have some sympathy for the reporters involved in this, because they have no clue what they're getting themselves in to.
Anonymous is what happens when you give people the ability to act without reprecussions, a good portion of the world turns into total a**holes. And they will surely retaliate, for two reasons. The first being the justification that "oh, we're called domestic terrorists, we better at least do something worth that name now".
The second being the justification "Umm, no. You totally misunderstand what we do here. We're just normal internet stupidity. want a sample? How about everyone in your company? We can do a mass raid if you want"
The second already is happening in droves, if you'll notice their forums.
Now, that said, the people i DON'T feel pity for are the "victims".
The male victim, who fails at trying to be anonymous, now has his name, and his story, all over all of the *chans. All he's doing is trying to get revenge because anonymous wouldn't raid his stupid girlfriend and that they told him he was being a moron. He spends most of his time actively trying to spread dirt on the *chans, including warning potential raid targets, making up lies about what raids actually are.
As for the female victim, her story is similarly stupid, but as I do not know the entire thing with all facts for certain, i will refrain from final judgement and spreading rumors.
But for most raid "victims" in general, their main flaw was that they posted too much personal information online, and made a point of either harassing others, who happened to be anonymous, or whining to anonymous for favors.
I am not anonymous, but it pays to know about them.
Reboot should remain reboot.
That means the following should NOT happen:
Excessive character re-design/"Updating for new technology"
No, the binomes should stay binomes. Sprites should stay sprites.
Keep in the old feel
That means utterly horridly corny computer jokes.
Do NOT try to bring back old characters in a "new" reincarnation that makes them nothing like their old selves.
Either take the old chars and leave em like that, or design new ones. Don't keep the old character but make them look/act like someone new.
Btw, anyone else see hack/slash and keep thinking they should be working for doctor robotnik?
Mod parent up.
I'm all for pointing out how insecure a machine is for voting, and that nothing was wrong with the old paper system, but he's really hit the nail on the head on how much we shouldn't really worry about this without more specifics.
Are they vulnerable only to someone who is there at the time of the vote toying with the machine?
Or is this something that can be triggered remotely or set up on time-delay.
Is it something that is easily detectable if we have people watching over the machines/running maintenance before/after elections.
How useful are these hacks in falsifying the backup system (paper) that some of these machines are supposed to be using, or do they just mess up the electronic data?
You can find a bug in almost any software.
Finding an exploitable bug that is useful and won't be easily detected is quite a bit harder.
He did. That's where the mmo genre came from, a lot of what is taken for granted was started with ultima online. Then origin systems was ravaged by EA and he was taken off the project, and the game went to heck. He's "built a better game" many times over throughout his game design history. It's a pity that companies don't really thrive on new business models anymore, or take a chance with an "untested" formula for a game as often as they used to, because now games that push new boundaries aren't as common as they once were.
Actually you are way off target.
This does 3 important things:
1. it gives all the trolls of the internet, and real life, confirmed spoilers. and not just the xxxx dies or yyyy maries zzzz, but spoilers that involved actually plot twists. Most spoilers to this point were way off or were easy to see, and didn't break plot twists. After this was released, the spoilers got a lot worse and revolved around plot points.
2. This allows people who want to browse any part of the internet before the book comes out, a chance to read the book and NOT have it ruined for them.
3. The low-quality camera pictures, which originated from luelinks, then quickly migrated to 4chan and from there were spread via rapidshare to the rest of the internet, are so horrid that negative color is the best way to read them, which isn't very hard w/o zooming, but is near impossible for any commercial or noncommercial OCR package without doing every page almost completely manually.
Disclaimer as a fan: I am buying the book on friday, 3 copies, 1 for family, 1 for family library, 1 to read.
Disclaimer as a techie: I speak from experience as i've seen the camera captures, i watched the spread on 4chan and onto the torrent sites, and there was an entire thread devoted to people OCRing the pages, which i contributed to.
Most commerical and university packages were used, as well as the open source OCR engine, which wasn't that horrid.
Well, for every story there is a contrary.
I don't doubt you may have had a wonderful vista experience. But i will point out that the major complaints against windows vista have nothing to do with your story.
1. The obscene hardware requirements. I'm sorry, when an os RECCOMENDS 10+ gigs of install space, that's trouble
2. The drm, the drm, the drm, did I mention the drm? My computer should not be phoning home to redmond, or anyone, nearly 40% of the time it is on.
3. Usability and Security for normal users. You are an exceptional user, who we assume knows what he 's doing. Most users click ok on dialogues because it's what they are supposed to do to make it close. Security has been sacrificed greatly by microsoft in the form of making everything require "approval" in an annoying way that quickly becomes habit and is so rendered harmful by giving false a sense of security.
4. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - Windows Vista, like windows xp before it, has several of the EEE principals built into it, making it not function with some older hardware/software due to forced api rewrites. I know some incompatability is expected, but some of the compatability errors are in there for no other reason than to force outdating, in the same manner as it's predecessors, such as the serial port "revamp" that was featured with windows xp that rendered most serial devices unusuable.
Because of course when software tells a user they can't do something, the user wouldn't ever DREAM of trying to get around it. Or leave their passwords on sticky notes. Or copy sensitive files to a public ftp for "Easy access" from home.
It's that belief structure that makes democracy not work.
Who cares if he's republican, who cares if he's conservative. He's the president. That means he should act in the best interests of the nation WHETHER OR NOT he personally agrees with it. That means letting all sides be heard, not squelching things he doesn't agree with. That means doing things that his party may not like, because it's the right thing to do.
That type of thinking is why most elections are worthless nowadays, because you have people who tick a box for a party without caring about the person's beliefs or if that party really agrees with that they believe themselves.
It's called an entropy field.
Some people have it.
Like normal entropy, you can have positive or negative entropy.
You ever know a person who'd have a computer problem, and they'd go to get a certain tech or person to help, but the minute that person gets there, the problem fixes itself?
Or maybe you're the person who has the phantom problem that goes away when people walk into the room.
That person has positive entropy.
Now we have the converse, the guy who has an above normal failure rate, or more likely, when he has a lot of things fail in a relatively short amount of time.
The guy who has to get his new car into the shop every month.
The guy who has 5 bad hard drives in a year, despite being new.
The guy who's cd laser dies out after only a few months.
Or, more aptly, the guy who's hceck engine light keeps comming on but no one ever knows why.
This guy has negative entropy.
Negative entropy more often than not, fluctuates, so it is a harder problem to notice, but is easier to detect when it is high as it causes massive failures.
Physical Limits.
You're trying the age old logical fallacy of applying real world logic and laws to a digital problem, without translating the real world logic.
We laugh at senators and lawyers and everyone else for trying to do this stupid thing, so please try to use common sense of technology and not do it yourself.
The difference between playing music from speakers and streaming it off your hard drive is simple.
First, the law allows for unavoidable audio pollution. I.e. if you play something, others might
hear it on accident. Big deal. However that is your choice as the person playing the music for your own enjoyment.
Streaming from a hard drive allows multiple people to play a file, where a cd and speaker set up allows you to playback the music on one system.
From a streaming hardrive, 30 people in 30 different locations can play the song and not hear the other copies of it.
If we expand this analogy, you could have the entire US listening off 1 copy of the music.
Now, does that mean this is bad/illegal? Probably.
Should it be? Debatable.
Now let me rephrase your original question so it makes sense and uses digital logic:
If play music over my speakers so that I may listen to it, others nearby can hear it.
If I stream music off my harddrive to a location so i can listen to it, others nearby can still hear it.
If other people play my legal music off my hard drive without my involvement, they can hear it.
If 20 other people play my legal music off my hard drive without my involvement at the same time, they can hear it.
There is a very fine distinction to be argued here, and that is that the other people playing the music do not own it. Copyright law allows for the person who owns the copy to play it whenever they deem fit, for themselves or others of their choosing. Everyone else who uses that copy is breaking the law, plain and simple.
By using the copy, they are not passive listeners, nor are they part of the unavoidable effects of audio pollution, and therefore it's a conscious decision to rip the music from you.
Disclaimer: I am not arguing the validity of any laws reguarding timeshifting/placeshifting/multiple listeners etc. I'm just showing that in the current laws, your post was flawed.
The reason a lot of titles are exclusive, especially in the current "age" of consoles, is twofold.
First the architectures are entirely different, so a lot of extra work has to go coding a compatible version for whatever other platforms you are designing for.
Second is called reduction.
When you make a crossplatform game, it is limited by the lowest hardware specs of each console. maybe graphics for one, storage medium for another, and persistent objects for a third.
What this means is if they design for the wii or the xbox 360, they have to limit the game size to something that those consoles can manage, even if the ps3 can go higher. Likewise if they do something better than the ps3, they have to limit it to the ps3s specs.
Thank you mr. jack thomson. Your insight into the ingenius theory that people play violent video games because they want to kill another living being is undoubtable! Also the fact that only people who are raise with bad parenting play bad video games. Astonishing! You should get a nobel prize for such wonderful insight.
MOD PARENT UP!
:P
I am all for patent bashing, but i am not a chemist, nor is most of slashdot.
Unless this is an obvious leap, this is EXACTLY what patents are for. It's not software, it's not the human genome, and it's a novel invention that includes both the method and the compound used. That is the epitome of somethign that someone should be able to patent so they can resell it for awhile to make money off it.
For the car analogy requirement: I would almost give this akin to, say, developing a new method of making spark plugs that are cheaper. Why wouldn't that be patentable?
For all the talk on slashdot about normal people getting stupid and losing common sense whenever technology is involved, there sure is some of it in our little group here.
Alrighty, so an interesting piece of slashdot trivia.
How does this post get a +4 funny, when another post, #19247463, says almost the exact same thing and gets a -1?
I ask this because these two posts were literally one above the other.
Alright, that's fine for people who run businesses.
Now what about the rest of the internet?
What about non profit business, what about people who use a domain name to route to their own servers, so their net cost of operating is $7 a year, something they can afford as a hobby?
What about nonprofit organizations or fan sites/clubs.
There are hosting packages available for cheaper than $70/year. Why should just be able to say, hey, this string of ANSI characters leads to me, cost $70?
You're proposing a bad solution to a problem. All you're doing is raising the cost of squatting a bit, so people don't squat as much. That still doesn't fix some of the major moneymakers, which is buying up lapsed domains and forcing resell to the people who lost them.
Likewise, you're not preventing obvious squatting on small businesses.
Say you see a bob's hardware, you go in and ask if they have a website, they say no, but that they are getting one soon. Lets go register bobshardware.com, bobshardware(city).com, or bobshardware(state).com, and see how much money we can sell it back to them for.
Instead they should make a ban on automatic domain registration, because some of it you can tell is obviously bots. Likewise, they should ban farming. If someone owns 100+ domains, they should have a use for them.
Allow parking for up to 6 months or a year, that alone will force them to do something to their sites and at the very minimum raise their cost of operating a bit to encourage them to squat on less, without affecting the honest internet users.
No offense, but your response seems very typical nowadays american idioticy. "OMG terrorists, well lets id everyone and install tracking chips, that will stop them!".
It may stop them, note the may, but the inconvenience to the honest citizens is not worth it.
Disclaimer: I am an american, I am just also sick of the bad rhetoric.
Ok, forgive me here, but it seems there is a lot of discussion on how someone pulled this hoax off.
I have a better conclusion? What if this is just apple trying to see who their leaks are?
They give a slightly differently worded memo to different suspected employees, whatever copy leaks out shows who the snitch is. Then they say the first memo was a fake, and fire/punish the employee who leaked.
Win win for apple.
Toast?... no, that's not right.
Coast?... not right either.
Most?... still doesn't sound right.
Gee I'm sure glad that humans can forget things, it would be so inconvenient if we remembered everything.
Joking aside, I use my computer precisely because it doesn't forget things and I do. While it may suck for humans to have history held accountable to them, what incentive do people have to NOT have a record of your actions?
Without an incentive, things don't usually change.
Why is this news? Sounds to me like he broke a US law that the AU has an equivalent law about, and the us wants him to be on trial here first. Plus the AU has agreements with the US to comply. Sounds like SOP to me.
Your argument falls apart the minute you say that you don't have to buy their product.
.doc files, they do not always translate and read 100% perfectly on microsoft software, and so you usually have to use MS Office to check it before sending it in to make sure it shows right, or risk fines or other government penalties.
Because you do.
You work for the government? You get stuck on microsoft office. You want to turn in a document to the government? Most require that it be in a word format.
While open office can do
As long as microsoft strongarms business and the government, you don't have a choice. And that is why this is such a big deal.
God just needs to invent a better fool. Or in this case, someone who cares about being able to watch stuff they buy, on other stuff they buy. No questions asked and no crud breaking because it thinks it's "illegal" due to some dust or something.
When will they learn? I'm remembering a phrase about old dogs and new tricks. The **AAs are very old dogs.
How exactly is star wars somehow less scifi then firefly?
I'd wager that there is more theoretical technology and theoretical futuristic social structure in star wars then serenity and probably most of firefly.
So what do you define as science fiction?
I mean, it's fiction, about science.
Firefly barely had enough science to make it not qualify as a current fiction w/ spaceships.
Judges are starting to make sense and get onto companies for being legal morons.... Where are they comming from and what are they putting in the water in that city?
When you have the microsoft fanboys and employees complaining or pointing out problems, you have to wonder exactly WHO does microsoft ask for opinions and ideas of why their products aren't doing well?
Monkeys on typewriters?
You're forgetting that the lines they lay out run across mostly public and private land not owned by the corporation.
In return for the use of such land, they are obligated to open their network to competitors. It's the argeement most telcos make with their governments to get land rights, as WELL as prevent dozens of networks all wasting space
Imagine a beowulf cluster of... a cluster?