I'm sorry. I live in the United States. I have a hard time remembering politicians actually advocating an issue based on personal conviction. All I ever see anymore is "negotiating" positions with special interest groups.
DRM directly threatens the right to free speech. It will allow third parties to control which computers communicate with which computers. It will allow authorization of all speech by third parties. It will control whether you can or cannot alter or copy any file on your computer. Hardware implementation of this will mean that the cost to free oneself of this will be the cost of fabrication of chips to alter the code for this. In fact, it would be possible to eliminate Free Software altogether with hardware DRM. This will leave 1984 style control of free speech in the hands of the likes of Microsoft, Intel, and a handful of other companies that will be able to basically control all of your communication with the outside world.
Give me a break. This is the worst FUD I have ever seen! No one is talking about preventing you from copying any file. DRM is about protecting copyright. If the files on your hard drive are copyrighted or were licensed by you (in other words, you paid for the privelege to use them--you don't own them), then DRM is indeed fair. It will never be used to limit what you can do with your own files. People spread all this FUD about DRM because it either: (A) offends their agenda of software anarchy or concept of private ownership, or (B) prevents them from doing the very (illegal) things that DRM prevents them from doing. Get over it and get a a life. I'm sick and tired of this post-modern crap where people fill in the void that religion used to occupy in their lives with whatever particular cause they decide to devote themselves to. It's software, not a religion!
I always enjoy it when Richard Stallman gives interviews. He was probably the first person--many, many years ago!--to fundamentally understand that we have a CHOICE of whether we want to preserve freedoms to do whatever we want with our software, or whether we're going to let other parties take those freedoms away from us.
Yes, you have the right to do whatever you want with your software. If you don't like DRM, then don't incorporate it into your software. Many companies like DRM because it is a strong deterrent and effectively inhibits casual copyright infringement. Maybe if you actually made a living from selling music or movies, you might have a little different perspective about the very real problem of people renting movies for the sole purpose of making illegal copies of them or teenagers who like to copy a CD and give it to 10 of their friends, none of whom paid a dime for the music. Multiply this by a few million Americans who engage in casual copyright infringement, and you'll understand why the industries like DRM.
Also, he had the guts to stand up for his freedoms and everyone else's, to be able to do what they want with their software. He's done more than just about any other single person to try and protect those freedoms for regular folks like you and me.
Utter hogwash. Most people are not software developers. I don't mind RMS promoting free software as an ideal, but he has no more right to try to force it upon people as the development model any more than anyone else has to enforce keeping software closed and proprietary. In short, yes, you have the freedom to do whatever you please with your code. I'm tired of RMS trying to tell me what to do with mine.
Can you imagine what the software landscape would look like today without the GPL, without the FSF and without all the free software that has been licensed under the GPL (both by the FSF and by many other open-source contributors)? Even if many of us continue to use non-free systems such as Windows XP, it is nice to know we have a choice. And we WOULDN'T have that choice anymore if Richard and many others had not stood up when they did.
My God... just think... we'd all be stuck using Microsoft software... Or is it, perhaps that we use Microsoft software because it's (comparatively) cheap, available, and compatible? It's not like the PC revolution happened in a vacuum. Apple had a chance with Macintosh but kept the platform closed and artificially expensive. Commodore couldn't hold on to the low end as PC clones became cheaper and add-on cards like Sound Blaster and VGA made them obsolete. Atari.. well, they were Atari. There was plenty of competition. The combination of PC + Windows was a result more of consumer choice and battle in the real marketplace than of coercion and force. Don't believe the hype! Hey, if you don't like Windows, buy a Mac. Or install Linux or *BSD. It's your choice. I used to prefer OS/2 myself. But don't kid yourself into thinking that F/OSS is the savior of computing. There was already plenty out there besides Windows. The market did not choose them and chose Windows instead. Not knocking F/OSS.. it's nice to have options. But it's software, not a religion.
Lots of people criticise Richard Stallman, but in my view nearly all of those people are either (1) immature kids who wouldn't pass a real civics class if they were ever put in one, (2) people who don't understand the real issues and how fundamental they are, or (3) shills or trolls or other people with an anti-freedom agenda.
You forgot to mention the corollary: Lots of people admire RMS, but nearly all of them are (1) immature kids who think they're super-l337 because they run Linux and stick it to "the Man" (a.k.a. Microsoft), (2) people who incredibly exaggerate the issues of free software vs. proprietary out of some translation of Marxist justice into the cyberworld, and (3) shills or trolls or religious fanatics with an anti-freedom agenda (i.e., proprietary software is evil, you must
Guess what the first operating system to include a bundled web browser and TCP/IP stack and dialer? Give you a hint... it predates Windows 95... it's Windows 3.1 compatible... it's...
OS/2!!
All of this talk about how Microsoft killed the internet is typical OSS/Mac/Commie fanboi rhetoric that picks on companies they don't like (like Microsoft) while ignoring companies that are supportive of their particular agenda (strange how IBM used to be the evil empire, but they embraced Linux, so they're "cool" now).
My first experience with the internet at home was on OS/2 Warp 3.0, which came with the wonderfully easy to set up Internet Access Kit. This included the Web Explorer browser, a TCP/IP stack and dialer, and (OMG how evil of them to bundle this a la MSN!) the IBM Global Connection client and a signup wizard for IBM's own ISP.
And OS/2 Warp 3.0 also came with a full suite of multimedia applications quite a bit more sophisticated than MPLAYER.EXE and SNDREC.EXE. How dare they bundle that in the O/S? They should make people download RealAudio Player and use that!
Here's the simple facts: Any O/S worth its salt was going to have to include a TCP/IP stack as the internet became popular. Same thing with a web browser. After all, what on earth do you do once you're connected to the internet? At the very least you need an FTP client to fetch other software, but a web browser makes that much easier. Heck, IBM Web Explorer was atrocious! I typically used it to download Netscape or IE for Windows 3.1 and used that instead and never touched WebEx again! Same thing when Windows 95 started to include IE. IE 2.0 was utterly unusable. And 3.0 wasn't much better. But it was a way to easily go to www.netscape.com to download the latest version of Netscape.
What really did Netscape in was that IE 4.0 was actually quite usable and feature-rich. Microsoft simply delivered a better product. Netscape decided to offer a bloated suite with their 4.0 release. Remember Communicator? With IE you had a browser and you had the option to use MS's lame Internet Mail and News, or you could get something decent like Eudora or Pegasus Mail. But with Netscape Communicator, you had this massive, crash-prone application that threw everything but the kitchen sink. And it took an eternity to download because it was so large. Eventually, they started offering a 4.x version of Navigator, but not at first, and it often lagged behind the Communicator version, so you were stuck with bugs and incompatibilities that were fixed in the newer versions.
So get this straight... Netscape killed Netscape, not Microsoft. Microsoft simply offered a better product. With the advent of IE 4.0, there was no longer any reason to download Netscape because Netscape was the inferior product by that time. This is totally fair. It's called competition. So what if Microsoft bundled it with the O/S? As I said, you need something to be able to, at the very least, go get something better. Why would Microsoft settle for having such a cruddy and almost unusable browser as IE 2.0 was? Of course they improved it and made it fully functional. (I think the KDE developers realized this, too. In the internet age, you need a web browser in your desktop. Hence Konqueror. And while the first versions of Konqueror weren't quite up to the task of using it as your default browser, they too saw a need to improve it and today it is quite adequate as one's default WWW browser.) You all bash MS constantly for making bug-ridden crapware, but then when they actually make great improvements to IE, you then bash them because it's finally better than your beloved Netscape and pretty much puts Netscape out of business? Gee, shame on Microsoft for developing and improving their software. And this wasn't even just on Windows. I ran Mac OS 8 for a long time, and Netscape would be guaranteed to crash my computer- it was just a matter of time until it happened. If I ever had to use someone else's Mac and all I saw wa
When the governments are only hearing one side of the story on DRM/copyright, it should be obvious that the laws are going to be heavily biased. And *this* is what is bad. Nobody from the opposite end of the spectrum is being listened to, and we are LOSING OUR RIGHTS.
[rolleyes] Rights? Who are you, John Locke? Do you really think there is an inalienable, God-given right to do whatever you please with someone else's property? The fact is, that recordings are owned by the copyright holder. It is up to them to decide what rights they want to confer upon you to make use of them. If they choose to release these recordings in DRM-only format, then how is that infringing upon your rights? A copyright holder has the right to choose whether or not to release their property in a DRM or free format. You also have the right to choose whether or not to buy such goods. You can complain all you want if the producers of the recordings don't release them in the format you prefer, but ultimately, it is their right to decide what to do with their property, not you. If they were forcing you to protect your own work with DRM, you'd have an argument.
There's nothing wrong with it, but eventually Apple is going to find that it is a bad business decision as PlaysForSure devices improve and better and cheaper music stores appear. My wife and I just replaced our iPods with PlaysForSure devices, and I know a couple other people who are switching as well. My wife subscribes to Y! Unlimited and I subscribe to Rhapsody. For what one album costs on iTMS, we get our choice of half a million albums per month that we can take with us. And if there's something that Yahoo! Music or Real does not have, I can always shop at MSN Music, Walmart, or any of over a dozen other online music stores. (And FWIW, Real purchases are 192kbps AAC/WMA and MSN are 160kbps WMA, both discernibly superior to iTMS's 128kbps AAC-plus Real gives a 10% discount on purchases to Rhapsody subscribers. I get tracks for $.89 versus $.99. For ten tracks-or a full album-, that's a whole dollar saved!) Plus, I can play my Rhapsody music (both purchased and subscribed) on my Roku SoundBridge, as can my wife with her Y! Unlimited music. Can't do that with iTunes because Apple won't license Fairplay to Roku.
Apple's monopoly in portable players in large part was due to their superior user interface and the garbage that generally passed for competition. Now, Creative, Toshiba, and the other mfrs. have devices that are well-built and have streamlined their UIs. Plus, they all use USB 2.0 now (whereas initially, iPod used FireWire and most competitors used to use the slow-as-snails USB 1.1). The playing field is leveling in terms of hardware and usability, and I suspect that in the coming year or two, the balance will start to shift to PlaysForSure as people become more aware of the better alternatives out there.
Apple will lose its dominance, but it will be driven by consumers, not by government interference.
I wonder how all those Indian and Korean guys that own convenience stores do it? Or how about the Turks with the gas stations? Obviously, there are ways to come here legally without necessarily being someone's dependent.
Of course we don't want the poor ones coming here! They are a burden on society. They are a drain of our public resources--schools, hospitals, transportation infrastructure, and everything else in the public sector. I don't mind anyone coming here as long as someone is going to foot the bill other than the taxpayers. We live in a place that is bursting at the seams with illegals, mostly from El Salvador and Mexico. Everything suffers because of it. Meanwhile, we have a large African-American community here that is struggling to find jobs and survive. Their ancestors have been in this country what--300 years or so? And yet, they are competing for jobs with illegals. The public schools are crap because half of the students are either children of illegals or illegals themselves. And we are not on the border or even in the city. This is a rural portion of New York state.
They litter our streets waiting to be picked up for day work. (That "Dia sin immigrantes" was like heaven for us. You could actually drive around town without having to avoid running into crowds of 100 or more illegals loitering on corners and in parking lots waiting for work!) And they don't even take just illegal off-the-books work either. My wife works at Taco Bell and they have several illegals in their employ, and they are paying taxes on them and everything--they used forged documents to "prove" their "legal" status. So that means that Americans who are legal to be here don't get the legal jobs occupied by these forgers. They also drive using forged drivers licenses and unlicensed vehicles. They don't carry insurance. This is a major problem. I've already been hit and run twice this year by Hispanic drivers (granted, I can't tell if they're illegal just by looking at them, so this is an assumption) that hit my car, looked at me, and sped off. The assumption is that they are illegal or do not have insurance and didn't want to end up in jail or deported. Now, what if they didn't hit my car, but instead ran over my kid? Can't you see how big an issue this is for those of us who have to live in an environment where illegals are in large number?
First, we need to end this stupid Cuba policy where any Cuban that manages to make it to American soil can stay. It only inspires others to attempt the same thing.
Secondly, we need to see this for what it is--an invasion of our sovereign country. If it were anyone else anyplace else in the world, these people would be shot on sight attempting to cross the border illegally. People caught doing this should be shot on sight by Border Patrol or by citizens on whose land these wetbacks are trespassing.
Really? My college dropout former receptionist black African wife who just started working in this country four years after her arrival would beg to differ with that. People talk a lot of crap that don't know any better. They think it's nearly impossible to enter this country legally. Guess what? It's not! It just takes longer. You may have to wait several years. You'll need a sponsor (common sense, really... someone that will take financial responsibility for you if you can't support yourself rather than being a burden to society).
Yes, it takes longer, it costs money, and the paperwork is a pain, but it really isn't that hard, and I mean, if you really, really want to be here legally, you should be motivated enough to file the paperwork.
I'm still trying to figure out why anyone cares anyway. He is a living, breathing troll. He exists solely to confuse anarchist politics with computer science. Most of us just care that something works, not what ideology is behind it.
True. Probably the majority of electronics (not just computers) seem to be sporting the "MADE IN CHINA" sticker these days. But the difference between, say a Lenovo computer and an HP computer, is that while the HP may be made in China, it is an American company, and you have to assume they have some kind of oversight of their manufacturing plants in China and would be looking out for things like employees planting bugs in computers. Lenovo has no such interest since it is based in China and is answerable only to the Chinese government in terms of breaking any laws. If HP allowed their computers to be bugged, they'd have major legal troubles back home in the states, so they have an incentive to make sure that their computers do not have bugs (the snooping kind, not the programmatic kind). It really is splitting hairs, I'll give you that. But there is a small question of incentive. The Chinese government can put pressure on Lenovo and Lenovo would have to accede to that pressure because they are a Chinese company, whereas the Chinese government would know better than to explicitly ask HP to start bugging their machines, and there should be some representative from HP at the plant to make sure that no funny stuff is going on. Personally, I wouldn't mind buying a Lenovo PC. I like ThinkPads and I like some of the improvements that Lenovo has made to them. But if I still worked in government or if I did work on my computer (I only work from my company-provided laptop, which is a Dell-UGH!), I might have to think twice about it.
As a big proponent of debian, the biggest problem corporate/companies have with debian support options is that is not coming directly from the distributor of the software. So maybe thats one reason for choosing Ubuntu is that they offer support directly.
I understand this, but didn't Ian Murdock (founder of Debian) already try this with Progeny? The distro went belly-up and eventually Progeny became just another Linux services and support company. I'm not even sure if they're still around TTT. How is Ubuntu more a more corporate-friendly face for Debian than Progeny was (supposed to be)?
How is this different from any other cartel, say, the mafia? Seriously, substitute "RIAA" with "Fat Tony" and "XM Radio" with "Acme Waste Management" and it's hard to see any difference between them and any other cartel. What will it take to break up the RIAA? Government intervention? A RICO suit? What?
...and if you've got an SFF with a non-standard MB size, you can't even readily replace the motherboard. It's still way too early to replace my XPC SN95G5, but I'll have no choice if I can't get an AGP vidcard. So far, my 5900XT is holding up just fine but it was all I could afford _at the time_ and I'd love to get something with more than 128MB RAM sometime in the near future so I can see a little better detail at hi-res.
...and it's about the only place to get international programming. We have the Latino Bonus Pack (Spanish), RTPi/Record/Globo (Portuguese), and RAI (Italian). I can only get two Spanish channels, part-time RAI, and no Portuguese on cable. Our cable company doesn't even carry EWTN (largely because our own diocese has their own television station). And yet they charge more for fewer channels. Cablevision has had a monopoly for so long that they feel they can charge whatever they like and offer very little for the money. Especially since it is near impossible to receive anything over-the-air here (eastern Long Island, New York).
(In the interest of full disclosure, my sister works for Cablevision.)
Speed isn't everything. I used to use TiVo before I got DISH. Now I have the DISH DVR. I hadn't realized how awful it was and I wanted two tuners in the living room, so I moved the TiVo into my son's room since he has a simple DISH 321 receiver.
The DISH DVR is much more responsive than the TiVo, and the navigation in some places is quicker, but overall, it is nothing like the TiVo experience. The best thing I liked about TiVo was its ability to rate shows and record recommendations. The Season Pass feature also worked a lot better. DISH DVR only cares whether something is flagged as a repeat or not (regardless of whether it's recorded it before), whereas Season Pass is driven by whether or not TiVo recorded that episode in the past. Also, the TiVo is networkable. I can download shows to my computer and watch them on my laptop or burn them to DVD. I do not have that option with the DISH DVR (although I may end up getting one of the Archos Pocket DISH devices).
I really do miss the TiVo and find the DISH DVR to be a poor substitute, but it was a sacrifice I had to make in order to have a dual tuner that works in two rooms with my DISH service. You can bet that if DISH offered a TiVo-compatible solution, I'd get it, even if it cost more.
I think their problem with Java is that if they totally free it, then they no longer control the language itself. It could lead to compatibility issues where certain distributions of Java have one API or feature and others don't... basically it would become Linux.
That's because Mr. Volkerding cares more about his users' experience in providing something that just works, works reliably, and is complete than ideology and software politics.. Slackware has been including xv (a shareware image viewer) since like Slackware 1.0..
Does this mean that/. will finally render properly on IE? It's only the most popular browser on the planet, and many of us browsing from work are stuck with it anyway...
If there is a seal on the book which said that "By breaking this seal you are accepting the terms and conditions specified herein... The book may only be sold with new reading glasses... This book may not be used with any reading glasses other than the reading glasses the book was supplied with... The user may not bypass the use of reading glasses or use reading glasses not specifically authorized by this agreement." If you read the Microsoft EULA for an OEM version of Windows, this is basically what it says.
See how quickly that was modded flamebait? The moderator proved my point. Apple is untouchable on Slashdot. If you thought Linux users on/. had a cult-like mentality, you haven't dared speak the ineffable name of the holy fruit!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry. I live in the United States. I have a hard time remembering politicians actually advocating an issue based on personal conviction. All I ever see anymore is "negotiating" positions with special interest groups.
Give me a break. This is the worst FUD I have ever seen! No one is talking about preventing you from copying any file. DRM is about protecting copyright. If the files on your hard drive are copyrighted or were licensed by you (in other words, you paid for the privelege to use them--you don't own them), then DRM is indeed fair. It will never be used to limit what you can do with your own files. People spread all this FUD about DRM because it either: (A) offends their agenda of software anarchy or concept of private ownership, or (B) prevents them from doing the very (illegal) things that DRM prevents them from doing. Get over it and get a a life. I'm sick and tired of this post-modern crap where people fill in the void that religion used to occupy in their lives with whatever particular cause they decide to devote themselves to. It's software, not a religion!
Yes, you have the right to do whatever you want with your software. If you don't like DRM, then don't incorporate it into your software. Many companies like DRM because it is a strong deterrent and effectively inhibits casual copyright infringement. Maybe if you actually made a living from selling music or movies, you might have a little different perspective about the very real problem of people renting movies for the sole purpose of making illegal copies of them or teenagers who like to copy a CD and give it to 10 of their friends, none of whom paid a dime for the music. Multiply this by a few million Americans who engage in casual copyright infringement, and you'll understand why the industries like DRM.
Also, he had the guts to stand up for his freedoms and everyone else's, to be able to do what they want with their software. He's done more than just about any other single person to try and protect those freedoms for regular folks like you and me.
Utter hogwash. Most people are not software developers. I don't mind RMS promoting free software as an ideal, but he has no more right to try to force it upon people as the development model any more than anyone else has to enforce keeping software closed and proprietary. In short, yes, you have the freedom to do whatever you please with your code. I'm tired of RMS trying to tell me what to do with mine.
Can you imagine what the software landscape would look like today without the GPL, without the FSF and without all the free software that has been licensed under the GPL (both by the FSF and by many other open-source contributors)? Even if many of us continue to use non-free systems such as Windows XP, it is nice to know we have a choice. And we WOULDN'T have that choice anymore if Richard and many others had not stood up when they did.
My God... just think... we'd all be stuck using Microsoft software... Or is it, perhaps that we use Microsoft software because it's (comparatively) cheap, available, and compatible? It's not like the PC revolution happened in a vacuum. Apple had a chance with Macintosh but kept the platform closed and artificially expensive. Commodore couldn't hold on to the low end as PC clones became cheaper and add-on cards like Sound Blaster and VGA made them obsolete. Atari.. well, they were Atari. There was plenty of competition. The combination of PC + Windows was a result more of consumer choice and battle in the real marketplace than of coercion and force. Don't believe the hype! Hey, if you don't like Windows, buy a Mac. Or install Linux or *BSD. It's your choice. I used to prefer OS/2 myself. But don't kid yourself into thinking that F/OSS is the savior of computing. There was already plenty out there besides Windows. The market did not choose them and chose Windows instead. Not knocking F/OSS.. it's nice to have options. But it's software, not a religion.
Lots of people criticise Richard Stallman, but in my view nearly all of those people are either (1) immature kids who wouldn't pass a real civics class if they were ever put in one, (2) people who don't understand the real issues and how fundamental they are, or (3) shills or trolls or other people with an anti-freedom agenda.
You forgot to mention the corollary: Lots of people admire RMS, but nearly all of them are (1) immature kids who think they're super-l337 because they run Linux and stick it to "the Man" (a.k.a. Microsoft), (2) people who incredibly exaggerate the issues of free software vs. proprietary out of some translation of Marxist justice into the cyberworld, and (3) shills or trolls or religious fanatics with an anti-freedom agenda (i.e., proprietary software is evil, you must
You know, someone somewhere is dying to get their hands on that cooling rig so they can overclock the hell out of their Celeron..
OS/2!!
All of this talk about how Microsoft killed the internet is typical OSS/Mac/Commie fanboi rhetoric that picks on companies they don't like (like Microsoft) while ignoring companies that are supportive of their particular agenda (strange how IBM used to be the evil empire, but they embraced Linux, so they're "cool" now).
My first experience with the internet at home was on OS/2 Warp 3.0, which came with the wonderfully easy to set up Internet Access Kit. This included the Web Explorer browser, a TCP/IP stack and dialer, and (OMG how evil of them to bundle this a la MSN!) the IBM Global Connection client and a signup wizard for IBM's own ISP.
And OS/2 Warp 3.0 also came with a full suite of multimedia applications quite a bit more sophisticated than MPLAYER.EXE and SNDREC.EXE. How dare they bundle that in the O/S? They should make people download RealAudio Player and use that!
Here's the simple facts: Any O/S worth its salt was going to have to include a TCP/IP stack as the internet became popular. Same thing with a web browser. After all, what on earth do you do once you're connected to the internet? At the very least you need an FTP client to fetch other software, but a web browser makes that much easier. Heck, IBM Web Explorer was atrocious! I typically used it to download Netscape or IE for Windows 3.1 and used that instead and never touched WebEx again! Same thing when Windows 95 started to include IE. IE 2.0 was utterly unusable. And 3.0 wasn't much better. But it was a way to easily go to www.netscape.com to download the latest version of Netscape.
What really did Netscape in was that IE 4.0 was actually quite usable and feature-rich. Microsoft simply delivered a better product. Netscape decided to offer a bloated suite with their 4.0 release. Remember Communicator? With IE you had a browser and you had the option to use MS's lame Internet Mail and News, or you could get something decent like Eudora or Pegasus Mail. But with Netscape Communicator, you had this massive, crash-prone application that threw everything but the kitchen sink. And it took an eternity to download because it was so large. Eventually, they started offering a 4.x version of Navigator, but not at first, and it often lagged behind the Communicator version, so you were stuck with bugs and incompatibilities that were fixed in the newer versions.
So get this straight... Netscape killed Netscape, not Microsoft. Microsoft simply offered a better product. With the advent of IE 4.0, there was no longer any reason to download Netscape because Netscape was the inferior product by that time. This is totally fair. It's called competition. So what if Microsoft bundled it with the O/S? As I said, you need something to be able to, at the very least, go get something better. Why would Microsoft settle for having such a cruddy and almost unusable browser as IE 2.0 was? Of course they improved it and made it fully functional. (I think the KDE developers realized this, too. In the internet age, you need a web browser in your desktop. Hence Konqueror. And while the first versions of Konqueror weren't quite up to the task of using it as your default browser, they too saw a need to improve it and today it is quite adequate as one's default WWW browser.) You all bash MS constantly for making bug-ridden crapware, but then when they actually make great improvements to IE, you then bash them because it's finally better than your beloved Netscape and pretty much puts Netscape out of business? Gee, shame on Microsoft for developing and improving their software. And this wasn't even just on Windows. I ran Mac OS 8 for a long time, and Netscape would be guaranteed to crash my computer- it was just a matter of time until it happened. If I ever had to use someone else's Mac and all I saw wa
[rolleyes] Rights? Who are you, John Locke? Do you really think there is an inalienable, God-given right to do whatever you please with someone else's property? The fact is, that recordings are owned by the copyright holder. It is up to them to decide what rights they want to confer upon you to make use of them. If they choose to release these recordings in DRM-only format, then how is that infringing upon your rights? A copyright holder has the right to choose whether or not to release their property in a DRM or free format. You also have the right to choose whether or not to buy such goods. You can complain all you want if the producers of the recordings don't release them in the format you prefer, but ultimately, it is their right to decide what to do with their property, not you. If they were forcing you to protect your own work with DRM, you'd have an argument.
RMS shows unannounced at the Presidential retreat and Navy SEALS are sent to China to spring Jack Bauer from captivity in time to shut him up!
Apple's monopoly in portable players in large part was due to their superior user interface and the garbage that generally passed for competition. Now, Creative, Toshiba, and the other mfrs. have devices that are well-built and have streamlined their UIs. Plus, they all use USB 2.0 now (whereas initially, iPod used FireWire and most competitors used to use the slow-as-snails USB 1.1). The playing field is leveling in terms of hardware and usability, and I suspect that in the coming year or two, the balance will start to shift to PlaysForSure as people become more aware of the better alternatives out there.
Apple will lose its dominance, but it will be driven by consumers, not by government interference.
Of course we don't want the poor ones coming here! They are a burden on society. They are a drain of our public resources--schools, hospitals, transportation infrastructure, and everything else in the public sector. I don't mind anyone coming here as long as someone is going to foot the bill other than the taxpayers. We live in a place that is bursting at the seams with illegals, mostly from El Salvador and Mexico. Everything suffers because of it. Meanwhile, we have a large African-American community here that is struggling to find jobs and survive. Their ancestors have been in this country what--300 years or so? And yet, they are competing for jobs with illegals. The public schools are crap because half of the students are either children of illegals or illegals themselves. And we are not on the border or even in the city. This is a rural portion of New York state.
They litter our streets waiting to be picked up for day work. (That "Dia sin immigrantes" was like heaven for us. You could actually drive around town without having to avoid running into crowds of 100 or more illegals loitering on corners and in parking lots waiting for work!) And they don't even take just illegal off-the-books work either. My wife works at Taco Bell and they have several illegals in their employ, and they are paying taxes on them and everything--they used forged documents to "prove" their "legal" status. So that means that Americans who are legal to be here don't get the legal jobs occupied by these forgers. They also drive using forged drivers licenses and unlicensed vehicles. They don't carry insurance. This is a major problem. I've already been hit and run twice this year by Hispanic drivers (granted, I can't tell if they're illegal just by looking at them, so this is an assumption) that hit my car, looked at me, and sped off. The assumption is that they are illegal or do not have insurance and didn't want to end up in jail or deported. Now, what if they didn't hit my car, but instead ran over my kid? Can't you see how big an issue this is for those of us who have to live in an environment where illegals are in large number?
Secondly, we need to see this for what it is--an invasion of our sovereign country. If it were anyone else anyplace else in the world, these people would be shot on sight attempting to cross the border illegally. People caught doing this should be shot on sight by Border Patrol or by citizens on whose land these wetbacks are trespassing.
Yes, it takes longer, it costs money, and the paperwork is a pain, but it really isn't that hard, and I mean, if you really, really want to be here legally, you should be motivated enough to file the paperwork.
I'm still trying to figure out why anyone cares anyway. He is a living, breathing troll. He exists solely to confuse anarchist politics with computer science. Most of us just care that something works, not what ideology is behind it.
True. Probably the majority of electronics (not just computers) seem to be sporting the "MADE IN CHINA" sticker these days. But the difference between, say a Lenovo computer and an HP computer, is that while the HP may be made in China, it is an American company, and you have to assume they have some kind of oversight of their manufacturing plants in China and would be looking out for things like employees planting bugs in computers. Lenovo has no such interest since it is based in China and is answerable only to the Chinese government in terms of breaking any laws. If HP allowed their computers to be bugged, they'd have major legal troubles back home in the states, so they have an incentive to make sure that their computers do not have bugs (the snooping kind, not the programmatic kind). It really is splitting hairs, I'll give you that. But there is a small question of incentive. The Chinese government can put pressure on Lenovo and Lenovo would have to accede to that pressure because they are a Chinese company, whereas the Chinese government would know better than to explicitly ask HP to start bugging their machines, and there should be some representative from HP at the plant to make sure that no funny stuff is going on. Personally, I wouldn't mind buying a Lenovo PC. I like ThinkPads and I like some of the improvements that Lenovo has made to them. But if I still worked in government or if I did work on my computer (I only work from my company-provided laptop, which is a Dell-UGH!), I might have to think twice about it.
I understand this, but didn't Ian Murdock (founder of Debian) already try this with Progeny? The distro went belly-up and eventually Progeny became just another Linux services and support company. I'm not even sure if they're still around TTT. How is Ubuntu more a more corporate-friendly face for Debian than Progeny was (supposed to be)?
How is this different from any other cartel, say, the mafia? Seriously, substitute "RIAA" with "Fat Tony" and "XM Radio" with "Acme Waste Management" and it's hard to see any difference between them and any other cartel. What will it take to break up the RIAA? Government intervention? A RICO suit? What?
...and if you've got an SFF with a non-standard MB size, you can't even readily replace the motherboard. It's still way too early to replace my XPC SN95G5, but I'll have no choice if I can't get an AGP vidcard. So far, my 5900XT is holding up just fine but it was all I could afford _at the time_ and I'd love to get something with more than 128MB RAM sometime in the near future so I can see a little better detail at hi-res.
...and it's about the only place to get international programming. We have the Latino Bonus Pack (Spanish), RTPi/Record/Globo (Portuguese), and RAI (Italian). I can only get two Spanish channels, part-time RAI, and no Portuguese on cable. Our cable company doesn't even carry EWTN (largely because our own diocese has their own television station). And yet they charge more for fewer channels. Cablevision has had a monopoly for so long that they feel they can charge whatever they like and offer very little for the money. Especially since it is near impossible to receive anything over-the-air here (eastern Long Island, New York).
(In the interest of full disclosure, my sister works for Cablevision.)
Speed isn't everything. I used to use TiVo before I got DISH. Now I have the DISH DVR. I hadn't realized how awful it was and I wanted two tuners in the living room, so I moved the TiVo into my son's room since he has a simple DISH 321 receiver.
The DISH DVR is much more responsive than the TiVo, and the navigation in some places is quicker, but overall, it is nothing like the TiVo experience. The best thing I liked about TiVo was its ability to rate shows and record recommendations. The Season Pass feature also worked a lot better. DISH DVR only cares whether something is flagged as a repeat or not (regardless of whether it's recorded it before), whereas Season Pass is driven by whether or not TiVo recorded that episode in the past. Also, the TiVo is networkable. I can download shows to my computer and watch them on my laptop or burn them to DVD. I do not have that option with the DISH DVR (although I may end up getting one of the Archos Pocket DISH devices).
I really do miss the TiVo and find the DISH DVR to be a poor substitute, but it was a sacrifice I had to make in order to have a dual tuner that works in two rooms with my DISH service. You can bet that if DISH offered a TiVo-compatible solution, I'd get it, even if it cost more.
Keep an eye out for the next R.E.M. single... They might use that as lyrics..
I think their problem with Java is that if they totally free it, then they no longer control the language itself. It could lead to compatibility issues where certain distributions of Java have one API or feature and others don't... basically it would become Linux.
That's because Mr. Volkerding cares more about his users' experience in providing something that just works, works reliably, and is complete than ideology and software politics.. Slackware has been including xv (a shareware image viewer) since like Slackware 1.0..
It's probably just another quote from Idi Amin...
Does this mean that /. will finally render properly on IE? It's only the most popular browser on the planet, and many of us browsing from work are stuck with it anyway...
If there is a seal on the book which said that "By breaking this seal you are accepting the terms and conditions specified herein... The book may only be sold with new reading glasses... This book may not be used with any reading glasses other than the reading glasses the book was supplied with... The user may not bypass the use of reading glasses or use reading glasses not specifically authorized by this agreement." If you read the Microsoft EULA for an OEM version of Windows, this is basically what it says.
See how quickly that was modded flamebait? The moderator proved my point. Apple is untouchable on Slashdot. If you thought Linux users on /. had a cult-like mentality, you haven't dared speak the ineffable name of the holy fruit!