If I'm reading the patent right, they've actually applied for protection of the UAC popup system that appears in Vista and Win7. There's no unqualified patent on user account privilege escalation. Indeed, "su" would be explicitly outwith this patent's claims, as it's specifically about bringing up an interface to escalate when the system determines that escalation will be required, not about escalating manually before the task is attempted.
Top marks to the Groklaw article for providing a thorough explanation for how they can't get a patent on something they're not trying to get a patent for.
Why does slashdot keep quoting media sources written by people who are obviously either too old or too ignorant to type in a URL and watch a page load?!
See, here is where you are missing something. The 'Free market' isn't the magic bullet that you want to think it is. Oh sure, it will find an equilibrium between supply and demand. Nobody argues that. However, people might die and there might might be economic collapse while its happening, but gosh darn it, letting things take care of themselves gust makes sense!
'The free market' isn't omniscient. It can be blindsided by sudden changes. Those changes can be very bad in the short term. I might point out how the 'fee market' responded to banking deregulation over the last twenty years to illustrate my point. 'The market' has nobody's best interest at heart.
I am not advocating socialism or anything like that. The best system is probably a mixture of elements of a free market and a controlled economy.
I wish I had mod points.
I'd also like to point out that economics is not a religion to be blindly followed, it's a science to be utilized for the betterment of the human condition.
When the free market running amok threatens the human condition, it should be reigned in.
Sure, the invisible hand of supply and demand will straighten everything out in the long run, but to quote keynes: "in the long run, we're all dead".
In the United States, in order to ratify a treaty it must be approved by 2/3rds of the Senate. We're not bound by treaties which we have not ratified.
Wikipedia: In the US, treaty ratification must be advised and consented to by a two-thirds majority in the Senate. While the United States House of Representatives does not vote on it at all, the requirement for Senate advice and consent to ratification makes it considerably more difficult in the US than in other democracies to rally enough political support for international treaties.
Of course, the President can sign a treaty, and follow it through government policies and executive order, without the treaty being ratified, but that gives it no inherent weight in law.
The treaty which ended World War I was hotly debated in the senate, and in fact we did not ratify the treaty as presented.
So they get to bypass the house, which is also the most representative and populist part of our legislature.
The US constitution obviously has a massive hole in it.
In the 90's we saw the rise of the internet. The internet became the "in thing", and geeks began to receive highly lucrative salaries.
The consumer markets began to tailor their lines to geek culture. The scifi channel rose to top ratings, jpop and anime even broke into mainstream media, and the list goes on.
As the internet became passe and the tech bubble burst, however, all of this began to subside. Science fiction, particularly hard scifi, has virtually dried up. Culminating in the recent "SYFY" rebrand in which they called their old target base basement dwelling anti-social stereotypes.
The lucrative salaries vanished, and with it the market imperative to serve this demographic. Finally, there was the rebellion against all things scientific which continues to this day with the "anti-scifi" of SG:U with its constant vilificaiton of its main scientist protagonist.
A synonym is not reflective of the intent of the author.
As Al Franken points out, 'friendly' is a synonym for 'intimate', so coulter obviously stated she was having a trist with franken when asked by a reporter!
Authors choose their diction carefully, at least good ones do, and that should not be tampered with.
Lesson learned: do not shop at amazon if you respect artistic integrity.
Actually MBA programs provide you with the necessary knowledge to build your own corporation.
Unfortunately not many people put that aspect of the MBA curriculum to use, instead opting for sinecures.
Personally, given the choice, I would stay the hell away from harvard and other established east-coast universities for MBA's. After all, the idiots who trashed their companies and our economy were mostly harvard MBA's.
When you keep downward pressure on wages of scientific positions; When you don't offer people compensation for the utter destruction of their social lives required to seriously pursue science, they gravitate toward management. (for comparison, at least medicine and law provide salaries commensurate with the effort required for the education)
You never see those massive bonuses going to the mathematical wizards, engineers, or design teams who are actually responsible for the profits. It goes to some otherwise average person who sat in his office and barked orders.
Don't be surprised when the truly intelligent notice where the money is going and choose to expand their social lives in the process!
It's quite simple. In their efforts to "compete" with cable news to be first to the story, they slashed real investigative reporting, fact checking, and depth in their coverage.
They are guilty of dereliction of their duty to inform our democracy. They did not leverage their major advantage over cable news: freedom from constraints to 15 minute time slots.
They began publishing corporate and government press releases unquestioned.
They stopped digging deep into issues which really matter to the nation, uncovering actual political corruption or travesties of the political process (the daily show is the only one which seems to do this now).
Gone are the days where they stood up to governments and corporations for the right of the people to be informed. When was the last time you heard of a case like time magazine's pentagon papers?
If you go by current fossil records, Modern man has seen 4 such cycles, and still managed to advance technology in a roughly exponential trend throughout history.
...Is a terrifying prospect. Truly horrific post-apocalypse shit that is!
I can spice up this flight of negative fancy for you: 70% and growing of the US population is F-A-T FAT, and the rest of the western world is slowly beginning to follow.
By using a software flag to distinguish between high scores submitted by pirates and those submitted by users who purchased the game, the piracy rate is estimated at around 80%
so, all this informal study shows is 80% of REVIEWS are provided by pirates. There could be plenty who decide never to rate the game, and of course the ratio of rated vs unrated in each of these two categories is not tracked nor is it mentioned.
let's turn this on it's head, shall we?
The higher the piracy rate of your game, the greater word-of-mouth you will receive, so if you like market exposure, slap a weak DRM scheme on it, make it good, and claim it's "unpiratable", then let the money roll in.
Production is a service. Charge people for the service, not for a good with zero marginal cost of production. Ever read the basic economic theory for price? Price = marginal cost. The price of something that's free to produce is free.
Paying someone for the service is fine, charging for some intangible, infinite pseudo-good is another.
Just out of curiosity why are so many slashdotters pro Pirate Bay. Even if they may not breaking the letter of the law they are going against the intent of the law. It is just an attempt at moral justification so you can sleep at night for downloading that copy of Photoshop? If you want people to respect the GNU policy you really should respect other policies.
Do you see they hypocrisy in the situation. When FSF sues a company for GNU violations then saying how horrible that pirate bay isn't allowed to ignore the licenses and copyright of other peoples code.
Let's turn this argument on it's head, shall we.
"Just out of curiosity why are so many politicians pro Macromedia. Even if they are not breaking the letter of the law they are going against the intent of the law (sherman anti-trust act). It is just an attempt at moral justification so they can sleep at night for charging over a thousand bucks for a simple photo editor? If you want people to respect your services, you should respect your customers. Do you see the injustice of the situtation? When they sue a child/single parent/grandmother/dead person/copying machine for violations of laws they've bought over the past 75 years?
When the law is the result of a corrupted legislative process, and it's not possible to excise the corruption, civil disobedience is next on the continuum of actions to take. It sure beats violence.
Watermarked content can be played on unlimited number of devices, but can not be posted to thepiratebay. Pirates can attempt conversion, but by the time you are sure you stripped all possible watermarking techniques, the video is so blurry people will buy a legit version anyway. This currently works for Apple/Amazon audio with zero issues. It's too sad that Disney wants both legal and technical special treatment to keep protecting Mickey Mouse.
"watermarked" mp3? solution is simple. burn-rip-repost.
You cannot go running around, blaming this on the right wing, on fox news and so on.
yes, he can. 2010 is next year, senators in moderate districts are up for re-election, and faux news somehow manages to continually pass off the mass of GOP propaganda they spew as "news".
I want to see laws imposed to reserve the "news" label for those who can show good-faith effort at balance and fact-checking, for those who report rather than manufacture and distort the news.
What, people's voices don't count once they've been influenced by others? If so, we have to rethink this whole democracy thing.
modded funny, but the irony is that while the media remains in the hands of the powerful and ever-increasingly few, democracy cannot work, as it depends on the ability of citizens to be informed.
For examples of the failures of democracy, see: any nation in which murdoch's news outlets have gained any modicum of reputation.
Slashdot Mirror
If I'm reading the patent right, they've actually applied for protection of the UAC popup system that appears in Vista and Win7. There's no unqualified patent on user account privilege escalation. Indeed, "su" would be explicitly outwith this patent's claims, as it's specifically about bringing up an interface to escalate when the system determines that escalation will be required, not about escalating manually before the task is attempted.
Top marks to the Groklaw article for providing a thorough explanation for how they can't get a patent on something they're not trying to get a patent for.
macos x has been doing this since its inception.
gksudo has been around for a long time as well.
this is NOT new.
The person analyzing this for groklaw is a lawyer well seasoned in tech and IP litigation, and disagrees with you.
Funny how you also don't provide the analysis into common english.
It's sudo with a gui, in other words: what macos does when you try to modify files in the system folder, or gksudo in linux.
What is with this fud about TPB being closed?
it's still there! It hasn't gone anywhere!
Why does slashdot keep quoting media sources written by people who are obviously either too old or too ignorant to type in a URL and watch a page load?!
Especially when it's such a substance-less [non-]story.
you mean the abridgment of freedom of speech (in a clear-cut case of political dissent, no less)?
yes, not substantive at all.
The fact that this is a politician stifling anonymous speech makes this decision even more egregious.
This type of speech is SPECIFICALLY what the first amendment was written and added to the constitution to protect!
Oh wait, that's free market economics,
See, here is where you are missing something. The 'Free market' isn't the magic bullet that you want to think it is. Oh sure, it will find an equilibrium between supply and demand. Nobody argues that. However, people might die and there might might be economic collapse while its happening, but gosh darn it, letting things take care of themselves gust makes sense!
'The free market' isn't omniscient. It can be blindsided by sudden changes. Those changes can be very bad in the short term. I might point out how the 'fee market' responded to banking deregulation over the last twenty years to illustrate my point. 'The market' has nobody's best interest at heart.
I am not advocating socialism or anything like that. The best system is probably a mixture of elements of a free market and a controlled economy.
I wish I had mod points.
I'd also like to point out that economics is not a religion to be blindly followed, it's a science to be utilized for the betterment of the human condition.
When the free market running amok threatens the human condition, it should be reigned in.
Sure, the invisible hand of supply and demand will straighten everything out in the long run, but to quote keynes: "in the long run, we're all dead".
The parties negotiating this, with the exception of Canada, already have xeroxed copies of the US DMCA on their books.
How does this change anything?
In the United States, in order to ratify a treaty it must be approved by 2/3rds of the Senate. We're not bound by treaties which we have not ratified.
Wikipedia:
In the US, treaty ratification must be advised and consented to by a two-thirds majority in the Senate. While the United States House of Representatives does not vote on it at all, the requirement for Senate advice and consent to ratification makes it considerably more difficult in the US than in other democracies to rally enough political support for international treaties.
Of course, the President can sign a treaty, and follow it through government policies and executive order, without the treaty being ratified, but that gives it no inherent weight in law.
The treaty which ended World War I was hotly debated in the senate, and in fact we did not ratify the treaty as presented.
So they get to bypass the house, which is also the most representative and populist part of our legislature.
The US constitution obviously has a massive hole in it.
In the 90's we saw the rise of the internet. The internet became the "in thing", and geeks began to receive highly lucrative salaries.
The consumer markets began to tailor their lines to geek culture. The scifi channel rose to top ratings, jpop and anime even broke into mainstream media, and the list goes on.
As the internet became passe and the tech bubble burst, however, all of this began to subside. Science fiction, particularly hard scifi, has virtually dried up. Culminating in the recent "SYFY" rebrand in which they called their old target base basement dwelling anti-social stereotypes.
The lucrative salaries vanished, and with it the market imperative to serve this demographic. Finally, there was the rebellion against all things scientific which continues to this day with the "anti-scifi" of SG:U with its constant vilificaiton of its main scientist protagonist.
Geek culture is on the fall, not on the rise.
A synonym is not reflective of the intent of the author.
As Al Franken points out, 'friendly' is a synonym for 'intimate', so coulter obviously stated she was having a trist with franken when asked by a reporter!
Authors choose their diction carefully, at least good ones do, and that should not be tampered with.
Lesson learned: do not shop at amazon if you respect artistic integrity.
Actually MBA programs provide you with the necessary knowledge to build your own corporation.
Unfortunately not many people put that aspect of the MBA curriculum to use, instead opting for sinecures.
Personally, given the choice, I would stay the hell away from harvard and other established east-coast universities for MBA's. After all, the idiots who trashed their companies and our economy were mostly harvard MBA's.
an MBA Is not science, it is in fact the closest thing to the opposite of scientific pursuit in a graduate level program.
When you keep downward pressure on wages of scientific positions; When you don't offer people compensation for the utter destruction of their social lives required to seriously pursue science, they gravitate toward management. (for comparison, at least medicine and law provide salaries commensurate with the effort required for the education)
You never see those massive bonuses going to the mathematical wizards, engineers, or design teams who are actually responsible for the profits. It goes to some otherwise average person who sat in his office and barked orders.
Don't be surprised when the truly intelligent notice where the money is going and choose to expand their social lives in the process!
It's quite simple. In their efforts to "compete" with cable news to be first to the story, they slashed real investigative reporting, fact checking, and depth in their coverage.
They are guilty of dereliction of their duty to inform our democracy. They did not leverage their major advantage over cable news: freedom from constraints to 15 minute time slots.
They began publishing corporate and government press releases unquestioned.
They stopped digging deep into issues which really matter to the nation, uncovering actual political corruption or travesties of the political process (the daily show is the only one which seems to do this now).
Gone are the days where they stood up to governments and corporations for the right of the people to be informed. When was the last time you heard of a case like time magazine's pentagon papers?
"You write what you're told! Thanks Corporate News!"
If you go by current fossil records, Modern man has seen 4 such cycles, and still managed to advance technology in a roughly exponential trend throughout history.
nothing to see here, move along!
you really can't balme 4chan for this.
If you go to the forums you will notice there are no capcha systems or even basic registration systems to allow proper bans to be imposed.
Every thread is quickly found by a forum spam bot and filled to the maximum page length with spam links.
This is a failure of basic security.
by these guys
Hopefully with the same results, it'd be nice to have some REAL news for a change.
...Is a terrifying prospect. Truly horrific post-apocalypse shit that is!
I can spice up this flight of negative fancy for you: 70% and growing of the US population is F-A-T FAT, and the rest of the western world is slowly beginning to follow.
It seems I misread the meaning of "high scores"
I stil think my point stands, but.. nothing to see here, move along.
By using a software flag to distinguish between high scores submitted by pirates and those submitted by users who purchased the game, the piracy rate is estimated at around 80%
so, all this informal study shows is 80% of REVIEWS are provided by pirates. There could be plenty who decide never to rate the game, and of course the ratio of rated vs unrated in each of these two categories is not tracked nor is it mentioned.
let's turn this on it's head, shall we?
The higher the piracy rate of your game, the greater word-of-mouth you will receive, so if you like market exposure, slap a weak DRM scheme on it, make it good, and claim it's "unpiratable", then let the money roll in.
Production is a service. Charge people for the service, not for a good with zero marginal cost of production. Ever read the basic economic theory for price? Price = marginal cost. The price of something that's free to produce is free.
Paying someone for the service is fine, charging for some intangible, infinite pseudo-good is another.
P.S. - What astro-turfing firm do you work for?
Just out of curiosity why are so many slashdotters pro Pirate Bay. Even if they may not breaking the letter of the law they are going against the intent of the law. It is just an attempt at moral justification so you can sleep at night for downloading that copy of Photoshop? If you want people to respect the GNU policy you really should respect other policies.
Do you see they hypocrisy in the situation. When FSF sues a company for GNU violations then saying how horrible that pirate bay isn't allowed to ignore the licenses and copyright of other peoples code.
Let's turn this argument on it's head, shall we.
"Just out of curiosity why are so many politicians pro Macromedia. Even if they are not breaking the letter of the law they are going against the intent of the law (sherman anti-trust act). It is just an attempt at moral justification so they can sleep at night for charging over a thousand bucks for a simple photo editor? If you want people to respect your services, you should respect your customers. Do you see the injustice of the situtation? When they sue a child/single parent/grandmother/dead person/copying machine for violations of laws they've bought over the past 75 years?
When the law is the result of a corrupted legislative process, and it's not possible to excise the corruption, civil disobedience is next on the continuum of actions to take. It sure beats violence.
Watermarked content can be played on unlimited number of devices, but can not be posted to thepiratebay. Pirates can attempt conversion, but by the time you are sure you stripped all possible watermarking techniques, the video is so blurry people will buy a legit version anyway. This currently works for Apple/Amazon audio with zero issues. It's too sad that Disney wants both legal and technical special treatment to keep protecting Mickey Mouse.
"watermarked" mp3? solution is simple.
burn-rip-repost.
any questions.
You cannot go running around, blaming this on the right wing, on fox news and so on.
yes, he can. 2010 is next year, senators in moderate districts are up for re-election, and faux news somehow manages to continually pass off the mass of GOP propaganda they spew as "news".
I want to see laws imposed to reserve the "news" label for those who can show good-faith effort at balance and fact-checking, for those who report rather than manufacture and distort the news.
What, people's voices don't count once they've been influenced by others? If so, we have to rethink this whole democracy thing.
modded funny, but the irony is that while the media remains in the hands of the powerful and ever-increasingly few, democracy cannot work, as it depends on the ability of citizens to be informed.
For examples of the failures of democracy, see: any nation in which murdoch's news outlets have gained any modicum of reputation.