Part of the problem there is that it is not possible to vote against a politician, you have to vote for one. It is almost certain that you will not agree with all of the policies of any candidate/party. So you have to weigh up all the issues and often end up voting for the 'least bad' candidate. It would be much better if every election had to have a 'none of the above' choice on the voting paper.
The price can also depend on which 'route' through the web site you take. Taking the route through 'Home/SOHO' and 'Small Business' can yeild different prices for identically spec'd systems.
Not only does it put money in Microsoft's coffers but it also inflates the usage/purchase count for Windows. As most PCs come with Windows installed, even if it is removed and another OS installed it still counts for the Windows usage statistics. So (and I know that these are silly numbers, but serve to illustrate the point) if 3 PCs were sold, 2 had Windows removed and Linux installed, the actual usage would be Windows:1, Linux:2, but the statistics would show Windows:3, Linux:2.
It requires the copyright owner's permission in order to create new copies (which is what sharing on p2p is), but does that permission have to be in the form of a licence? Or does such permission automatically make it (legally) a licence?
As far as security is concerned, is centralised (update and configuration) management not an additional vulnerability? If an attacker can attack the centralised control then they have just subverted all the systems managed by it.
I used to use the Tesco internet shopping service. I stopped because, despite placing the order 2 or 3 days in advance*, there were too many 'substitutions' where the items I had ordered were 'out of stock' and often the substitutes sent in their place were very poorly chosen. So now I use Sainsburys and Ocado (Waitrose) who are much better.
Maybe Tesco have improved since I switched, but for me they had their chance and they 'blew it'.
* Thus giving sufficient time for them to obtain any goods which were out of stock at time of ordering.
No, it is not terrible wording, it is the correct and precise wording. In the retail instrustry (and probably others) the job title 'buyer' has been traditionally been applied to the people who select the goods and suppliers. Also the "buyer" for a large or prestigious retail organisation is a very senior position and is often treated as a VIP by suppliers and potential suppliers.
If they want a system which only plays DRM content then they had better make the mechanism for DRMing the content available to everyone at a reasonable (preferably free) cost. The indie musician releasing their own tracks should have just as much right and opportunity to DRM their works (and hopefully to be able to set the rights as freely copyable if the so desire) as the large studios.
Also hardware support would help. Even 25 years ago the ICL 2900 series systems had a native hardware 'pointer' type (they called it a descriptor). This included in it the size of the object pointed to, and the hardware would check that any dereferences were not out of bounds.
I doubt that Firefox will need a patch. The only patch which should be needed is to libz, then all applications which use is will benefit from the fix.
If it is to level the playing field, they also need to regulate the selling price. I do not know if it will be same with this one, but with at least some of the previous Harry Potter books some of the giant suppliers (such as Amazon and Tesco) were selling retail at less than the small bookstore could buy wholesale.
So, if the companies cannot release the code, what is stopping them from just publishing the interface specification to their hardware? These companies make their money from selling hardware not software. I am sure that (especially in the case of graphics cards) just releasing the interface specs would enable the open-source developers to write decent drivers, thus saving the company the expense of doing so.
Also I am sure that I have read that companies have to pay Microsoft to have their drivers certified and included with Windows. So publishing the interface specifications would both save them money and increase the sales of their hardware.
Yes, but if you submit the driver to the kernel tree (and put it under GPL), then you should not have to worry about changes to kernel internal APIs etc as the kernel developers/maintainers will keep the drivers up-to-date when interfaces/methanisms change.
They seem to have forgotten that VOIP can be used from any country in the world. With GSM, if you are visiting another country an emergency call is routed to the local (where the cell is located) emergency operator. Have they considered how this will work with VOIP? If a visitor to the US needs to make an emergency call on VOIP or if a US citizen in another country wants to make a 911 call, they do not want to be routed to their 'home' emergency operator but to the emergency operator local to where they are.
Not forgetting all the DOS programs which broke when the 80286 (eg IBM AT) was introduced because they relied on memory wrapping round at 1Mbyte and the '286 did not wrap even in real mode.
Which I believe is what Microsoft used to do, but they gor complaints from administrators who have to plan updates (security or otherwise) and therewanted a release schedule rather than ad-hoc updates.
The legislators making the laws probably do not even know that 'opensource' music exists. They will have been briefed by the music 'industry' who would rather such freely (as in beer) available music did not exist and who pretend that it does not. They act as though the only legal source of music is through their members. It is the same as when legal downloads are mentioned in the media, the sites and artists offering free music are never mentioned.
Why limit/block IRC? I do not use IRC very much but it is low bandwidth. By its very nature, if the traffic in a particular channel gets too high then the channel is unusable because it is not possible to follow the 'conversation'. Do they also apply the same restrictions to IM services such as AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and MSN?
Before doing this, i think that Amazon could do well to improve their existing recommendations. Where I think they do badly is that if you buy an X, where X is something which there are several brands and/or models but which you are only likely to want one of, they recommend many alternatives which you might have considered when making the initial purchase but do not want now that you have made your purchase.
Example from personal experience include USB SD/CF etc readers and foreign language dictionaries.
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Part of the problem there is that it is not possible to vote against a politician, you have to vote for one. It is almost certain that you will not agree with all of the policies of any candidate/party. So you have to weigh up all the issues and often end up voting for the 'least bad' candidate. It would be much better if every election had to have a 'none of the above' choice on the voting paper.
The price can also depend on which 'route' through the web site you take. Taking the route through 'Home/SOHO' and 'Small Business' can yeild different prices for identically spec'd systems.
Not only does it put money in Microsoft's coffers but it also inflates the usage/purchase count for Windows. As most PCs come with Windows installed, even if it is removed and another OS installed it still counts for the Windows usage statistics. So (and I know that these are silly numbers, but serve to illustrate the point) if 3 PCs were sold, 2 had Windows removed and Linux installed, the actual usage would be Windows:1, Linux:2, but the statistics would show Windows:3, Linux:2.
It requires the copyright owner's permission in order to create new copies (which is what sharing on p2p is), but does that permission have to be in the form of a licence? Or does such permission automatically make it (legally) a licence?
As far as security is concerned, is centralised (update and configuration) management not an additional vulnerability? If an attacker can attack the centralised control then they have just subverted all the systems managed by it.
Neither for that matter was The Avengers
And pay with cash rather than a credit card as they might be able to associate your use of the credit card with your previous purchases.
I used to use the Tesco internet shopping service. I stopped because, despite placing the order 2 or 3 days in advance*, there were too many 'substitutions' where the items I had ordered were 'out of stock' and often the substitutes sent in their place were very poorly chosen. So now I use Sainsburys and Ocado (Waitrose) who are much better.
Maybe Tesco have improved since I switched, but for me they had their chance and they 'blew it'.
* Thus giving sufficient time for them to obtain any goods which were out of stock at time of ordering.
No, it is not terrible wording, it is the correct and precise wording. In the retail instrustry (and probably others) the job title 'buyer' has been traditionally been applied to the people who select the goods and suppliers. Also the "buyer" for a large or prestigious retail organisation is a very senior position and is often treated as a VIP by suppliers and potential suppliers.
If they want a system which only plays DRM content then they had better make the mechanism for DRMing the content available to everyone at a reasonable (preferably free) cost. The indie musician releasing their own tracks should have just as much right and opportunity to DRM their works (and hopefully to be able to set the rights as freely copyable if the so desire) as the large studios.
Also hardware support would help. Even 25 years ago the ICL 2900 series systems had a native hardware 'pointer' type (they called it a descriptor). This included in it the size of the object pointed to, and the hardware would check that any dereferences were not out of bounds.
I doubt that Firefox will need a patch. The only patch which should be needed is to libz, then all applications which use is will benefit from the fix.
If it is to level the playing field, they also need to regulate the selling price. I do not know if it will be same with this one, but with at least some of the previous Harry Potter books some of the giant suppliers (such as Amazon and Tesco) were selling retail at less than the small bookstore could buy wholesale.
So, if the companies cannot release the code, what is stopping them from just publishing the interface specification to their hardware? These companies make their money from selling hardware not software. I am sure that (especially in the case of graphics cards) just releasing the interface specs would enable the open-source developers to write decent drivers, thus saving the company the expense of doing so.
Also I am sure that I have read that companies have to pay Microsoft to have their drivers certified and included with Windows. So publishing the interface specifications would both save them money and increase the sales of their hardware.
Yes, but if you submit the driver to the kernel tree (and put it under GPL), then you should not have to worry about changes to kernel internal APIs etc as the kernel developers/maintainers will keep the drivers up-to-date when interfaces/methanisms change.
They seem to have forgotten that VOIP can be used from any country in the world. With GSM, if you are visiting another country an emergency call is routed to the local (where the cell is located) emergency operator. Have they considered how this will work with VOIP? If a visitor to the US needs to make an emergency call on VOIP or if a US citizen in another country wants to make a 911 call, they do not want to be routed to their 'home' emergency operator but to the emergency operator local to where they are.
The article states that the only stipulation is a fast internet access. Though, of course, that could just be journalistic licence simplifying things.
Not forgetting all the DOS programs which broke when the 80286 (eg IBM AT) was introduced because they relied on memory wrapping round at 1Mbyte and the '286 did not wrap even in real mode.
Which I believe is what Microsoft used to do, but they gor complaints from administrators who have to plan updates (security or otherwise) and therewanted a release schedule rather than ad-hoc updates.
No, the best time to announce a security flaw is just before a scheduled security update which does not address the flaw.
iRate is quite good. I have bought a number of albums, either CDs or high quality downloads from sites like Magnatune, after hearing tracks on iRate.
Or the RIAA companies should be releasing similar music of at least as good quality as the imports, so that they get the revenue.
The legislators making the laws probably do not even know that 'opensource' music exists. They will have been briefed by the music 'industry' who would rather such freely (as in beer) available music did not exist and who pretend that it does not. They act as though the only legal source of music is through their members. It is the same as when legal downloads are mentioned in the media, the sites and artists offering free music are never mentioned.
Why limit/block IRC? I do not use IRC very much but it is low bandwidth. By its very nature, if the traffic in a particular channel gets too high then the channel is unusable because it is not possible to follow the 'conversation'. Do they also apply the same restrictions to IM services such as AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and MSN?
Before doing this, i think that Amazon could do well to improve their existing recommendations. Where I think they do badly is that if you buy an X, where X is something which there are several brands and/or models but which you are only likely to want one of, they recommend many alternatives which you might have considered when making the initial purchase but do not want now that you have made your purchase.
Example from personal experience include USB SD/CF etc readers and foreign language dictionaries.