Neither of these destroy any significant amount of value - shipping them is still profitable.
The WTO is a start, but generally full of crap. African markets, and markets that would otherwise be open to Africa and have the potential to start a renaissance of sorts are made inaccessible by them. Free trade - the lack of subsidies - would help, not hurt.
A "stock exchange" is just a place where people gather to sell shares of ownership in a company. You can have a "stock exchange" in the mens room if you feel like selling paper certificates to a person there. No "human relationship" is required to keep markets "fair" - prices are functions of supply and demand, which are equitable where free markets and free trade permit adequate competition.
Everyone is a consumer. Even the penniless are consumers of public goods, such as a city's roads and sidewalks by living in a metropolis, or of national defense by living in a country with a military. The search for efficiency is good and necessary - efficiency/productivity is the sole long-term determinant of our standard of living. Profit is what motivates people to do something job-creating with their money instead of just keeping it in a bank. With either, we have nothing.
Consumers in general are richer - even though they don't have "more money" - because everything is cheaper. The same amount of currency buys more than it did before.
Jobs will be lost in the country's least efficient and poorest performing industries, and that sure does blow for the newly unemployed. However, these losses are usually paired with gains in the country's most efficient industries, because in truly free trade they now have a new market to sell their products. It's specialization and division of labor, but on a global scale.
And, a country doesn't need an absolute advantage in order for trade to be successful - just a relative advantage. Let me conjure a trite example to explaion what this means:
Country ABC can produce a Linux computer for $150 and a plastic widget for $200. The impoverished, imaginary nation of Canada lacks the technology enjoyed by Country ABC, and so it costs them $600 to produce the same Linux box and $400 for a plastic widget.
You would think that Country ABC has little to gain from trading with Canada, because it would produce everything Canada can for less - it has an absolute advantage in both computers and widgets.
The truth is that this doesn't matter. Both ABC and Canada can produce a limited number of goods each month because of the finite amount of factories and workers, and silly things like the laws of physics. If both Canada and ABC can devote their factories to making 5 computers, 5 widgets, or some combination thereof, they can benefit by trading with each other. If ABC trades 5 $150 computers for 5 of Canada's widgets, ABC saved $250 dollars over producing the widgets themselves.
Likewise, Canada saved money. They traded something that cost them $400 to produce (the widget) for objects that would have cost them $600 to produce. Although ABC saved $250 through trade, Canada saved $1000 through trade.
Granted, this is a stupidly simple, asinine, and idealized example - but the point is that real, tangible wealth is created through trade. Trade that does happen, regardless of whether it is "free" or not, is advantageous to both parties - otherwise, the other party wouldn't give up what they had. And as long as Country ABC doesn't do something silly like erect tariffs, taxes, or subsidies, this idealized situation pretty much plays out.
Raising cattle is tremendously land-intensive. Countries in eastern Europe often don't have a lot of grassland to begin with, and countries like Great Britain and Japan don't have a lot of unindustrialized land, period.
So maybe they need to deindustrialize?
So, Britain and Japan should raze all their factories to the ground and destroy millions of blue-collar jobs, so that a few farmers could have grass for cows that could be purchased elsewhere for cheaper?
This seems to me to be a huge negative from a few different angles.
1. Energy usage- is it really a good thing to be selling parishable dairy products a half a world away at all, essentially creating huge multinational corporations, where millions of local dairies served before and created a fresher product for the mere reason that it didn't have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to get to you?
2. If we're selling dairy overseas, what is happening to local dairies overseas? Are they losing their market to US Government subsidised dairy products?
3. And what happens to those overseas dairy farmers? Do they end up coming here to compete with us for land and resources (by coming here illegally, as the Oxacan Chicano Indians did when the same thing happened in Mexico) or by committing suicide (as farmers in India are doing)?
If energy was a problem, it would be more expensive to buy imported perishables than it would be to make them yourself. Besides, we have freezers and pasteurization.
Subsidizations are a barrier to free trade, and as long as they exist, trade isn't "free." This transcends the example of the few being replaced by those who can do their jobs more efficiently. The flip side with subisides is that now the US government is paying to make foreign dairy cheaper. But, this is a problem with subisides and trade barriers, not with free trade.
People jumped out of buildings during the stock crash that began the Great Depression, but that neither makes buildings nor stock exchanges "bad." India is suffering from years of draconian central planning and lack of access to education and other staples Americans take for granted. Although the farmer there commits suicide because his market has dried up, that means millions of others are no longer starving because their food is cheaper. The farmer is always free to find other work - and if there isn't any, that seems to be a problem with India and not trade.
Free trade in and of itself is neither good nor bad - there are tradeoffs (no pun intended) and winners and losers. Fact is that everyone is a consumer, and consumers tend to benefit most from free trade, while a country's least efficient industries tend to get the chopping block. Decide for yourself whether or not that's fair.
Truly free trade does benefit a lot of people at the expense of a few. It's analogous to the car replacing the horse and buggy - everyone benefitted from an (ultimately) cheaper form of transportation, but all the liveries were put out of businesses.
Here, the case isn't that a technology was made obsolte, but we still have the same end-result - something that's ultimately cheaper and better for the consumer has taken root, and it's displaced some jobs. Many benefit from the cheaper good ("many" being "anyone who buys that good", which truly is "many") and these consumers grossly outnumber the former producers of said good.
And exactly what countries do you think aren't amenable to raising lare numbers of cattle?
Other than the obvious problems like lack of space (Japan), lack of suitable climate (look North), or lack of grassland (look South) or any number of suitable factors, the important thing is: why would you want to be raising large numbers of cattle? If Wisconsin can sell you a cow cheaper, and right now - is it truly worth the time and additional cost raising your own?
Again, the problem isn't that it can be done - cows/edible animals have been around long before trade barriers. The fact is that technology, cost of inputs, human capital, and other economic buzzwords that all boil down to "efficiency" make it cheaper to buy from someone else.
Not everyone in the world is the cheapest, fastest, and best-er-est at making everything. Trade works because you can trade what you country makes cheapest for what another country makes cheapest - and both save.
Wouldn't it be better just to export the cows?
Some charities do that, but the problem with this is twofold. Businesses aren't charities - they have both cow and milk and want money, and people have money and want milk. The milk sells for more than the cow, so they keep it and sell the milk. Does that really work for the starving children? No, not really - unless you consider the fact that many don't have the food to feed a cow let alone themselves, and again, Western technology can actually make exporting the end products of the cow cheaper than just giving the cow away.
Except in Vista, 99% of drivers DON'T reside and CAN NO LONGER reside in kernel space. Other than very special and limited applications (videocard drivers), most drivers are FORCED to be loaded in userspace.
The system is more stable because a crappy printer driver won't blue-screen your system, and the printer driver (and others) achieve the same functionality they had in kernel space using the new Windows Driver Model.
Although signing drivers costs $money, only companies like nVidia actually have to. The new DRM only protects kernel space, and the new kernel FORCES 99% OF ALL DRIVERS to reside in userspace. Kernel protection isn't a problem because most people can't put drivers there anyway.
lets thank all our elected republicans for helping out the middle class families out there/end sarcasm..|..
Traditionally, Republicans have been protectionist. Free-trade Republicans are a new breed. There are also free-trade Democrats.
a great example of how capitalistic free open market with lots of competition can bite us in the ass.
sure its great to have competition, unfortunately one way to be competitive is to reduce your expenses(costs).
overseas is cheaper then the u.s., so everything is moved overseas to help reduce costs, increase profits,
and potentially be more competitive since you will have more flexibility in your prices.
This is a good thing.
goodbye american jobs
Not true. Granted, if an Indian engineer can design a circuit for $15 an hour and an American won't work for less than $50, the American is going to lose his job to the Indian.
However, free trade also creates jobs, especially in my home state of Wisconsin. With tariffs and other protections removed that make offsourcing and exporting possible, our dairy industry now sells a great deal overseas. This is especially true for the smaller farmers - they didn't have the infrastructure the corporate farms did to effectively deal with trade barriers; now, they have a market to sell to that they didn't before.
Trade works both ways. American engineers may lose jobs in the short run, but everyone who uses a computer will benefit from cheaper microprocessor prices. European farmers may lose jobs, but the EU gets cheaper milk. Although it sure sucks to be the Engineer, the offshoring, in effect, made the rest of the world richer - if everything costs less, you can buy more than you could before, even though you don't make any more money.
Free trade isn't as simple as "goodbye American jobs" - it's a choice between protecting a few industries or seeing a widespread reduction in the price of, well, everything.
Uptime on the Vista beta boxes is likely to be low - on a test system, you're going to have frequent reboots, I would suspect. Besides, this is the home-user, desktop version - Longhorn Server is coming out later.
My Vista install has crashed a few times - 90% due to DivX not liking Vista, a few due to Media Center not liking DivX, and the rest video drivers crashing. All but twice Vista RESTARTED the driver and booted my game again, meaning I only saw two bluescreens.
All the bugs, minus the DivX related ones, have been reported as "fixed" in some RTM build. Turst 'em or not, we'll see when the release (or a beta refresh) comes out.
You can turn of all logging on YOUR computer, perhaps, but every other server on the internet your packets hop across isn't likely to oblige you.
Also, it doesn't seem they can just "cut the PC off the network" the "moment" they grab the data - it doesn't seem like they're looking for anything specific, just mining data and looking for holes. This is something ongoing. Besides, you can't assume the machines are perfectly "secure' just because it's what you would do - maybe they were dumb, or maybe they did do everything you suggest. But, just because any "smart" person would set fire to his PC afterwards doesn't mean the hackers did.
And, the ties between the hacker and government were cited as the hacker having the government's "tacit approval."
But for all the other young, impressionable slashdotters out there who may be tempted to use the "information wants to be free" line themselves, remember this:
"Information wants to be free" is an idiot's way of saying "intangible goods are by definition non-rival", which you'll find a couple chapters into your economics textbook. Just to plug (at) a catchy, meaningless line that should long be dead.
Firefox screwed up your web browsing because I'm pretty sure they don't have a "Designed for Vista" version yet. They made a bunch of kernel level changes, such as setting special user permissions just for the browser process that pretty much run it in a virtual machine. Assuming everything works like it does in XP when yanking away a core part of the Vista kernel is a bit dangerous. (Before more FUD starts, I have FireFox working just fine in Vista RC1, thankyouverymuch.)
The deactivation happens when your Vista key is used to activate more than 10 computers. Of course you never "shared" it with anyone, did you? Microsoft shut you down because you were the only one to use a browser other than IE7.
But, I can agree with you that Microsoft phone support is crap. (My friend works at the local WeTech and regularly calls their tech support to unregister customers' copies of XP so he can reinstall them; he reports no problems whatsoever, but that's kind of a special case.)
RC1 is great - the only crashes I had was from my videocard driver (which Vista restarted without even interrupting my game!) and from the standard package not playing nice with Windows Media Player. That and the "extra shiny" takes a powerful PC. Oh well - pressint control+windows+tab is one of the coolest things I've ever seen ^.^
And while I'm plugging Microsoft products, we have the OpenOffice team to thank for making Microsoft innovate just a litle bit in Office 2007. Pretty damn spiffy.
Books are "interactive" by my standards in that for the jumble of characters on the pages to become meaningful, you have to actively give them meaning. Besides simply reading the sentences, which is mostly passive, you also have to analyze what's happening in the plot, what might happen next, and what particular themes and points the author is trying to explore. Reading a "good" book is very interactive.
Same could be said for music, but to a lesser extent - I can listen to music while I drive, but I can't read a book while I drive ^.^
TV and movies are as passive as you get, even with the really "deep" stuff. And lumping the other three in with TV is just bad. And I'm pretty sure the "burning hatred of humanity" was a joke on the parent poster's on introvertedness.
I used netstat to figure out why my IIS was unreachable from outside the computer it was on.
Had nothing to do with port forwarding or NAT... a typo set my firewall to explicitly "block" the ports it used instead of "allow" them. Netstat didn't fix something like user error, but let me eliminate the other options.
saying that quite possibly, those who ALREADY have that predisposition to violence will find it just that much more easy to enact thier fantacies [...]
Possibly, yes - but then, that's not exactly the fault of the videogame, is it? They were "predisposed" before they even picked up a controller.
This also raises the question: should this suit be successful, how are videogames manufacturers/stores/clerks/the interweb supposed to know which people are predisposed?
Actually, the labels are prettry unnecessary, even in American courts. Between the already existing precedents on liability and the laws that specifically govern situations like this, they do little more than let corporate lawyers sleep better at night in a land where McDonalds settled with a woman who spilled coffee on her lap.
Is there any actual evidence that pirate FM broadcasters cause chaos?
Yes; a previous poster noted that he (in Britain) could not pick up local BBC stations because of interference from poorly-broadcasted pirate FM.
Besides, the FCC is "complaint driven" - unless someone whines, they have little reason to do anything. And nobody will whine unless there's some amount of chaos. (Not much, mind you - people are whiny - but chaos nonetheless.
Even without the DRM crap WMP is still a nasty user unfriendly program. With more concern for style and gui glitter [hint: if you full screen your movies you can't see the fucking GUI anyways] than functionality or stability
Don't know what version you're using, but in 11 you move the mouse to the bottom of the screen to show the playback GUI.
I must be one of the lucky few that doesn't have WMP crashing every five minutes. What do you people do to your XP install?
Of course Microsoft (or any) products will eventually have security holes when released to the general public.
Two points - the IE7 betas (since 2) have been publicly available on Microsoft's website - everyone and their mother's mad-hatted donkey already has a copy.
Also, the new Vista kernel runs the iexplore.exe process under a separate, super-limited user. This user has all output redirected to a virtual folder with zero NTFS priviliges (think any file written to "c:\windows" will be placed by the kernel in "c:\program files\internet explorer\temp\c\windows").
So, this is in effect running IE in a virtual machine. There are always ways to tunnel under or to elevate priviliges, but the "hypo-user"/virtual machine analogy is exactly what they're trying to do
Not exactly an apt metaphor - a botnot can't kill you, and you would only be affected if you didn't have a virusscanner/firewall/security combo. (Even Windows has a firewall now!)
People start with IE because it's the Windows default.
People stay with IE either becasue:
They don't care
They like it
If they don't care, why should we? It's their computer that they're leaving vulnerable, after all. Besides, Firefox is starting to lose it's most difinitive advantage over IE - as it's popularity is increasing, so is the number of security vulnerabilities found, rivaling and even surpassing IE month to month.
Any differences in "speed" are pretty much a wash, too. Internet Explorer definitely starts faster, but it's integrated with the shell. Firefox uses an ungodly amount of memory and leaks it like a sieve. IE7 waits until it has the page 99% rendered before actually drawing it; Firefox will start drawing immediately, piece-by-piece as the site's downloaded. (Both, in total, seem to take the same amount of time.) ActiveX is known for being full of holes, but at least they try to sandbox it - Firefox extentions just blindly run native code.
Point is that as the differences between the browsers are diminishing - Firefox has forced IE to innovate and comply with standards and more and more pages are designed for Firefox and non-IE browsers. But, the security differences between the two are diminishing, and IE7s interface is cleaner and snappier now, IMHO.
Save the digivangelism for something more important than "Firefox isn't Microsoft." In Vista especially, IE is next to bulletproof - a reworked Windows kernel runs it within a virtual machine of sorts - and IE+Aero Glass has a much cleaner and prettyfuler interface. Use your browser of choice, but with alternatives and a little healthy competition forcing some new life into the browser world, there's fewer reasons to pick one over the other.
Since when is suggesting that Microsoft's trying to achieve world domination through doomsday logic and backdoors in Windows "insightful"? I would've picked "flamebait."
First of all, notice how I never said I supported Bush or was a Republican in any way, shape, or form. All I said was that what you said about Bush was completely unrelated to the article.
What you said:
Who says we're surprised? Or even disappointed, strictly speaking, since Bush's job is to keep expectations low [google.com].
Slashdot isn't "Surprises for Nerds". But living down to abyssmal expectations when handling telecomm policy is important news. Especially when the Republican Congress is facing losing reelection in only 7 weeks, on November 7, 2006. It's your chance to surprise them for a change.
Notice that nowhere do you say that Bush appointed the chair of the FCC, or that replacing the Republican Congress could change policy at the FCC (which are valid points.)
You do make an asinine link to one of the many pathetic things our President has said. That's more related to his reading list than the FCC, but whatever.
You do urge people to throw out Republicans in their upcoming "losing" elections. Warming up, but mere Republican bashing unless you suggest something "insightful", like "maybe Democrats would manage the FCC better."
And again, if anyone who disagrees with you is a "Republican Trollmod", then, well, you're a witch. And a communist.
but it's all digital, right? The problem is timing: although you think that your light is instantly either on or off, in reality it takes time to switch on and off. So the receiver has to "guess" when the transition to 1 or 0 is complete
The digital circuitry in every computer has to do that.
For exmaple, when the CPU reads a value for memory, how does it know when the data bus holds the correct information? In addition to actually pulling the data from memory, it also takes a while for all those zeroes and ones on its bus to change state. There are similar problems when reading the state of a single bit after changing it: depending on the type of your microcontroller and memory, it's possible for the microcontrolelr to poll the bit in the middle of it's state change.
The problems are largely the same, and have pretty much been solved by computer science. (Otherwise, computers just wouldn't be possible.)
I quote Bush saying it's his job to keep expectations low. I point out that "news" isn't necessarily "surprises". I point out that the news here is Bush living down to low expectations.
Then I point out that we can do something about it in 7 weeks by voting.
Which part do the TrollMods mod down as "Flamebait"?
Try "all of it."
George Bush is completely unrelated to the FCC skullduggery in question. You might as well have started beating drums and chanting "Bush lied, people died."
News != surprise is a "duh" point, and misses that the grandparent was commenting on the seemingly incompetent nature of the FCC and not the definition of "news."
Again, Bush is still entirely unrelated to the article. Living down to "low expectations" is debatable, since ~60% of the country seems to have higher expectations for him.
The FCC is not and never was up for election, and I have yet to see a candidate running on the "FCC reform" plank.
In short, you can't get much more "flamebait" than provocative, frothing-at-the-mouth rhetoric completely unrelated to the article. (Calling people who disagree with you "Republican TrollMods" doesn't help, either.) Maybe you got modded insightful for tying "some news is unsurprising" to "there are elections in 7 weeks."
Slashdot Mirror
Consumers in general are richer - even though they don't have "more money" - because everything is cheaper. The same amount of currency buys more than it did before.
Jobs will be lost in the country's least efficient and poorest performing industries, and that sure does blow for the newly unemployed. However, these losses are usually paired with gains in the country's most efficient industries, because in truly free trade they now have a new market to sell their products. It's specialization and division of labor, but on a global scale.
And, a country doesn't need an absolute advantage in order for trade to be successful - just a relative advantage. Let me conjure a trite example to explaion what this means:
Country ABC can produce a Linux computer for $150 and a plastic widget for $200. The impoverished, imaginary nation of Canada lacks the technology enjoyed by Country ABC, and so it costs them $600 to produce the same Linux box and $400 for a plastic widget.
You would think that Country ABC has little to gain from trading with Canada, because it would produce everything Canada can for less - it has an absolute advantage in both computers and widgets.
The truth is that this doesn't matter. Both ABC and Canada can produce a limited number of goods each month because of the finite amount of factories and workers, and silly things like the laws of physics. If both Canada and ABC can devote their factories to making 5 computers, 5 widgets, or some combination thereof, they can benefit by trading with each other. If ABC trades 5 $150 computers for 5 of Canada's widgets, ABC saved $250 dollars over producing the widgets themselves.
Likewise, Canada saved money. They traded something that cost them $400 to produce (the widget) for objects that would have cost them $600 to produce. Although ABC saved $250 through trade, Canada saved $1000 through trade.
Granted, this is a stupidly simple, asinine, and idealized example - but the point is that real, tangible wealth is created through trade. Trade that does happen, regardless of whether it is "free" or not, is advantageous to both parties - otherwise, the other party wouldn't give up what they had. And as long as Country ABC doesn't do something silly like erect tariffs, taxes, or subsidies, this idealized situation pretty much plays out.
So, Britain and Japan should raze all their factories to the ground and destroy millions of blue-collar jobs, so that a few farmers could have grass for cows that could be purchased elsewhere for cheaper?
Are you a Marxist Hacker?
Free trade in and of itself is neither good nor bad - there are tradeoffs (no pun intended) and winners and losers. Fact is that everyone is a consumer, and consumers tend to benefit most from free trade, while a country's least efficient industries tend to get the chopping block. Decide for yourself whether or not that's fair.
Truly free trade does benefit a lot of people at the expense of a few. It's analogous to the car replacing the horse and buggy - everyone benefitted from an (ultimately) cheaper form of transportation, but all the liveries were put out of businesses.
Here, the case isn't that a technology was made obsolte, but we still have the same end-result - something that's ultimately cheaper and better for the consumer has taken root, and it's displaced some jobs. Many benefit from the cheaper good ("many" being "anyone who buys that good", which truly is "many") and these consumers grossly outnumber the former producers of said good.
And exactly what countries do you think aren't amenable to raising lare numbers of cattle?
Other than the obvious problems like lack of space (Japan), lack of suitable climate (look North), or lack of grassland (look South) or any number of suitable factors, the important thing is: why would you want to be raising large numbers of cattle? If Wisconsin can sell you a cow cheaper, and right now - is it truly worth the time and additional cost raising your own?
Again, the problem isn't that it can be done - cows/edible animals have been around long before trade barriers. The fact is that technology, cost of inputs, human capital, and other economic buzzwords that all boil down to "efficiency" make it cheaper to buy from someone else.
Not everyone in the world is the cheapest, fastest, and best-er-est at making everything. Trade works because you can trade what you country makes cheapest for what another country makes cheapest - and both save.
Wouldn't it be better just to export the cows?
Some charities do that, but the problem with this is twofold. Businesses aren't charities - they have both cow and milk and want money, and people have money and want milk. The milk sells for more than the cow, so they keep it and sell the milk. Does that really work for the starving children? No, not really - unless you consider the fact that many don't have the food to feed a cow let alone themselves, and again, Western technology can actually make exporting the end products of the cow cheaper than just giving the cow away.
Except in Vista, 99% of drivers DON'T reside and CAN NO LONGER reside in kernel space. Other than very special and limited applications (videocard drivers), most drivers are FORCED to be loaded in userspace.
The system is more stable because a crappy printer driver won't blue-screen your system, and the printer driver (and others) achieve the same functionality they had in kernel space using the new Windows Driver Model.
Although signing drivers costs $money, only companies like nVidia actually have to. The new DRM only protects kernel space, and the new kernel FORCES 99% OF ALL DRIVERS to reside in userspace. Kernel protection isn't a problem because most people can't put drivers there anyway.
lets thank all our elected republicans for helping out the middle class families out there /end sarcasm. .|..
Traditionally, Republicans have been protectionist. Free-trade Republicans are a new breed. There are also free-trade Democrats.
This is a good thing.
goodbye american jobs
Not true. Granted, if an Indian engineer can design a circuit for $15 an hour and an American won't work for less than $50, the American is going to lose his job to the Indian.
However, free trade also creates jobs, especially in my home state of Wisconsin. With tariffs and other protections removed that make offsourcing and exporting possible, our dairy industry now sells a great deal overseas. This is especially true for the smaller farmers - they didn't have the infrastructure the corporate farms did to effectively deal with trade barriers; now, they have a market to sell to that they didn't before.
Trade works both ways. American engineers may lose jobs in the short run, but everyone who uses a computer will benefit from cheaper microprocessor prices. European farmers may lose jobs, but the EU gets cheaper milk. Although it sure sucks to be the Engineer, the offshoring, in effect, made the rest of the world richer - if everything costs less, you can buy more than you could before, even though you don't make any more money.
Free trade isn't as simple as "goodbye American jobs" - it's a choice between protecting a few industries or seeing a widespread reduction in the price of, well, everything.
Uptime on the Vista beta boxes is likely to be low - on a test system, you're going to have frequent reboots, I would suspect. Besides, this is the home-user, desktop version - Longhorn Server is coming out later.
My Vista install has crashed a few times - 90% due to DivX not liking Vista, a few due to Media Center not liking DivX, and the rest video drivers crashing. All but twice Vista RESTARTED the driver and booted my game again, meaning I only saw two bluescreens.
All the bugs, minus the DivX related ones, have been reported as "fixed" in some RTM build. Turst 'em or not, we'll see when the release (or a beta refresh) comes out.
You can turn of all logging on YOUR computer, perhaps, but every other server on the internet your packets hop across isn't likely to oblige you.
Also, it doesn't seem they can just "cut the PC off the network" the "moment" they grab the data - it doesn't seem like they're looking for anything specific, just mining data and looking for holes. This is something ongoing. Besides, you can't assume the machines are perfectly "secure' just because it's what you would do - maybe they were dumb, or maybe they did do everything you suggest. But, just because any "smart" person would set fire to his PC afterwards doesn't mean the hackers did.
And, the ties between the hacker and government were cited as the hacker having the government's "tacit approval."
Funny post!
But for all the other young, impressionable slashdotters out there who may be tempted to use the "information wants to be free" line themselves, remember this:
"Information wants to be free" is an idiot's way of saying "intangible goods are by definition non-rival", which you'll find a couple chapters into your economics textbook. Just to plug (at) a catchy, meaningless line that should long be dead.
Wow - what a piece of work.
Firefox screwed up your web browsing because I'm pretty sure they don't have a "Designed for Vista" version yet. They made a bunch of kernel level changes, such as setting special user permissions just for the browser process that pretty much run it in a virtual machine. Assuming everything works like it does in XP when yanking away a core part of the Vista kernel is a bit dangerous. (Before more FUD starts, I have FireFox working just fine in Vista RC1, thankyouverymuch.)
The deactivation happens when your Vista key is used to activate more than 10 computers. Of course you never "shared" it with anyone, did you? Microsoft shut you down because you were the only one to use a browser other than IE7.
But, I can agree with you that Microsoft phone support is crap. (My friend works at the local WeTech and regularly calls their tech support to unregister customers' copies of XP so he can reinstall them; he reports no problems whatsoever, but that's kind of a special case.)
RC1 is great - the only crashes I had was from my videocard driver (which Vista restarted without even interrupting my game!) and from the standard package not playing nice with Windows Media Player. That and the "extra shiny" takes a powerful PC. Oh well - pressint control+windows+tab is one of the coolest things I've ever seen ^.^
And while I'm plugging Microsoft products, we have the OpenOffice team to thank for making Microsoft innovate just a litle bit in Office 2007. Pretty damn spiffy.
Books are "interactive" by my standards in that for the jumble of characters on the pages to become meaningful, you have to actively give them meaning. Besides simply reading the sentences, which is mostly passive, you also have to analyze what's happening in the plot, what might happen next, and what particular themes and points the author is trying to explore. Reading a "good" book is very interactive.
Same could be said for music, but to a lesser extent - I can listen to music while I drive, but I can't read a book while I drive ^.^
TV and movies are as passive as you get, even with the really "deep" stuff. And lumping the other three in with TV is just bad. And I'm pretty sure the "burning hatred of humanity" was a joke on the parent poster's on introvertedness.
I used netstat to figure out why my IIS was unreachable from outside the computer it was on.
Had nothing to do with port forwarding or NAT... a typo set my firewall to explicitly "block" the ports it used instead of "allow" them. Netstat didn't fix something like user error, but let me eliminate the other options.
Oh well.
saying that quite possibly, those who ALREADY have that predisposition to violence will find it just that much more easy to enact thier fantacies [...]
Possibly, yes - but then, that's not exactly the fault of the videogame, is it? They were "predisposed" before they even picked up a controller.
This also raises the question: should this suit be successful, how are videogames manufacturers/stores/clerks/the interweb supposed to know which people are predisposed?
Actually, the labels are prettry unnecessary, even in American courts. Between the already existing precedents on liability and the laws that specifically govern situations like this, they do little more than let corporate lawyers sleep better at night in a land where McDonalds settled with a woman who spilled coffee on her lap.
Is there any actual evidence that pirate FM broadcasters cause chaos?
Yes; a previous poster noted that he (in Britain) could not pick up local BBC stations because of interference from poorly-broadcasted pirate FM.
Besides, the FCC is "complaint driven" - unless someone whines, they have little reason to do anything. And nobody will whine unless there's some amount of chaos. (Not much, mind you - people are whiny - but chaos nonetheless.
"Marketing deals" and "tie-ins" == $$$
That's not fun? Hell, I do a lot of things that aren't fun (like work) for $$$
Even without the DRM crap WMP is still a nasty user unfriendly program. With more concern for style and gui glitter [hint: if you full screen your movies you can't see the fucking GUI anyways] than functionality or stability
Don't know what version you're using, but in 11 you move the mouse to the bottom of the screen to show the playback GUI.
I must be one of the lucky few that doesn't have WMP crashing every five minutes. What do you people do to your XP install?
Of course Microsoft (or any) products will eventually have security holes when released to the general public.
Two points - the IE7 betas (since 2) have been publicly available on Microsoft's website - everyone and their mother's mad-hatted donkey already has a copy.
Also, the new Vista kernel runs the iexplore.exe process under a separate, super-limited user. This user has all output redirected to a virtual folder with zero NTFS priviliges (think any file written to "c:\windows" will be placed by the kernel in "c:\program files\internet explorer\temp\c\windows").
So, this is in effect running IE in a virtual machine. There are always ways to tunnel under or to elevate priviliges, but the "hypo-user"/virtual machine analogy is exactly what they're trying to do
Not exactly an apt metaphor - a botnot can't kill you, and you would only be affected if you didn't have a virusscanner/firewall/security combo. (Even Windows has a firewall now!)
People start with IE because it's the Windows default.
People stay with IE either becasue:
If they don't care, why should we? It's their computer that they're leaving vulnerable, after all. Besides, Firefox is starting to lose it's most difinitive advantage over IE - as it's popularity is increasing, so is the number of security vulnerabilities found, rivaling and even surpassing IE month to month.
Any differences in "speed" are pretty much a wash, too. Internet Explorer definitely starts faster, but it's integrated with the shell. Firefox uses an ungodly amount of memory and leaks it like a sieve. IE7 waits until it has the page 99% rendered before actually drawing it; Firefox will start drawing immediately, piece-by-piece as the site's downloaded. (Both, in total, seem to take the same amount of time.) ActiveX is known for being full of holes, but at least they try to sandbox it - Firefox extentions just blindly run native code.
Point is that as the differences between the browsers are diminishing - Firefox has forced IE to innovate and comply with standards and more and more pages are designed for Firefox and non-IE browsers. But, the security differences between the two are diminishing, and IE7s interface is cleaner and snappier now, IMHO.
Save the digivangelism for something more important than "Firefox isn't Microsoft." In Vista especially, IE is next to bulletproof - a reworked Windows kernel runs it within a virtual machine of sorts - and IE+Aero Glass has a much cleaner and prettyfuler interface. Use your browser of choice, but with alternatives and a little healthy competition forcing some new life into the browser world, there's fewer reasons to pick one over the other.
Since when is suggesting that Microsoft's trying to achieve world domination through doomsday logic and backdoors in Windows "insightful"? I would've picked "flamebait."
Or "redundant." ^.^
First of all, notice how I never said I supported Bush or was a Republican in any way, shape, or form. All I said was that what you said about Bush was completely unrelated to the article.
What you said:
Notice that nowhere do you say that Bush appointed the chair of the FCC, or that replacing the Republican Congress could change policy at the FCC (which are valid points.)
You do make an asinine link to one of the many pathetic things our President has said. That's more related to his reading list than the FCC, but whatever.
You do urge people to throw out Republicans in their upcoming "losing" elections. Warming up, but mere Republican bashing unless you suggest something "insightful", like "maybe Democrats would manage the FCC better."
And again, if anyone who disagrees with you is a "Republican Trollmod", then, well, you're a witch. And a communist.
but it's all digital, right? The problem is timing: although you think that your light is instantly either on or off, in reality it takes time to switch on and off. So the receiver has to "guess" when the transition to 1 or 0 is complete
The digital circuitry in every computer has to do that.
For exmaple, when the CPU reads a value for memory, how does it know when the data bus holds the correct information? In addition to actually pulling the data from memory, it also takes a while for all those zeroes and ones on its bus to change state. There are similar problems when reading the state of a single bit after changing it: depending on the type of your microcontroller and memory, it's possible for the microcontrolelr to poll the bit in the middle of it's state change.
The problems are largely the same, and have pretty much been solved by computer science. (Otherwise, computers just wouldn't be possible.)
Try "all of it."
George Bush is completely unrelated to the FCC skullduggery in question. You might as well have started beating drums and chanting "Bush lied, people died."
News != surprise is a "duh" point, and misses that the grandparent was commenting on the seemingly incompetent nature of the FCC and not the definition of "news."
Again, Bush is still entirely unrelated to the article. Living down to "low expectations" is debatable, since ~60% of the country seems to have higher expectations for him.
The FCC is not and never was up for election, and I have yet to see a candidate running on the "FCC reform" plank.
In short, you can't get much more "flamebait" than provocative, frothing-at-the-mouth rhetoric completely unrelated to the article. (Calling people who disagree with you "Republican TrollMods" doesn't help, either.) Maybe you got modded insightful for tying "some news is unsurprising" to "there are elections in 7 weeks."