If anyone is looking for a free (as in beer) software firewall for Windows with a very small footprint, Ghostwall is a great choice for the not-afraid-of-configuration. The setup file is less than a MiB.
> Nobody is dying or being raped. They are downloading music for free. The two are very different things. Nobody is being oppressed here. They're merely suffering consequences > for breaking [mostly unfair] laws.
You're quite right! My analogy is flawed because it isn't exactly the same situation as the situation it attempts to describe.
To be serious, if you hold "People who suffer consequence Y deserve no pity because they performed action X while knowing about consequence Y" to be true, it doesn't matter if consequence Y is being slapped on the wrist or being taken out and shot. If the degree to which you hold that argument to be true varies based on your distaste for consequence Y, then you're basing your statement on something other than logic.
> As unfair as it is, they should suffer some consequences to what they did. Most anyone knows that file sharing can make you the target of a lawsuit, > but most believe that it won't be them. If you think it is unfair, then actually get up and move to somewhere where it isn't considered illegal.
As unfair as it is, they should suffer some consequences to what they did. Most anyone knows that [practising homosexuality] can make you the target of [the death penalty in Iran], but most believe that it won't be them. If you think it is unfair, then actually get up and move to somewhere where it isn't considered illegal. And I'm willing to bet that 99% of the [homosexuals] did it because they wanted [to have homosexual sex], not because they somehow believed they were sticking it to the man.
As unfair as it is, they should suffer some consequences to what they did. Most anyone knows that [taking drugs] can make you the target of [the death penalty in Thailand], but most believe that it won't be them. If you think it is unfair, then actually get up and move to somewhere where it isn't considered illegal. And I'm willing to bet that 99% of the [drug users] did it because they wanted [to take drugs], not because they somehow believed they were sticking it to the man.
As unfair as it is, they should suffer some consequences to what they did. Most anyone knows that [not wearing religiously sanctioned clothing] can make you the target of a [being raped with no legal recourse in more than one Middle Eastern country], but most believe that it won't be them. If you think it is unfair, then actually get up and move to somewhere where it [won't result in you being raped with no legal recourse]. And I'm willing to bet that 99% of the [women] did it because they wanted [to wear clothing that was not religiously sanctioned], not because they somehow believed they were sticking it to the man.
> Yes, if that one page encapsulates at least one entirely complete piece of work. Otherwise, photocopying a page in a book would be > likened to perhaps downloading a snippet of a song. Depending on how you use that snippet, it may be covered by fair use. Get your analogies straight. > Oh, wait...this is Slashdot. Nevermind...let fly with the inane analogies!
Actually, IIRC, for things like anthologies of poems and short stories, you are permitted to copy one complete story or poem, at least in under UK law. So, photocopying a page in a book might not be a terrible analogy for downloading one song from an album.
I have a friend who doesn't approve of illegaly downloading music. He occasionally buys a second hand CD for a couple of bucks, then immediately downloads high-bitrate rips of the same album from bittorrent, because more often than not the disks are scratched and he can't be bothered spending hours trying to make a decent rip of his own.
I always wonder, what exactly is he giving back to the artist? Aside from a few fairly abstract arguments to do with the price point being higher if consumers know they can sell CDs they buy second hand, in what way does buying second hand CDs benefit the artists/RIAA more than just downloading the damn thing?
You're reducing the level of average Joe user's intelligence to such a level as to render meaningless your point. The type of person you describe is incapable of performing even the most trivial of computing tasks. The type of person you describe will not realise that a custom Google ad-laden error page is not the normal result of a mis-typed url or a bad link. The type of person you describe will believe that is just how the internet works, and will have no need or desire to disable such a page.
However, a person of reasonable intelligence who is capable of determining that the custom Google error page they see on their computer is not normal, and is resourceful enough to find an online resource that explains the problem and gives the name of the service they need to uninstall should be fully capable of disecting such a clear name.
"Browser" - Not terribly technical. "To browse the internet" is a very common phrase even amongst non-technical folks, and if one resorts to a dictionary compiled in the last four years the usage in reference to a computer program used to surf the internet will be noted.
"Address" - One hardly needs to have a degree in computer science to conflate the everyday usage of "address" to the technical usage - someone who has already realised that the problem arises from a bad link or a mis-typed URL should have no problems understanding this usage of "address".
"Error" - Once again, a completely clear, non-jargon usage of the word. It refers simply to a mistake in an entered URL ("address"). Very relatable for non-technical people.
"Redirector" - Are you kidding me? You think most people can't determine what "redirect" means? It's lifted directly from everyday usage, it's a perfect, clear, relatable term. Traffic is redirected, people are redirected - and a user is redirected if they mis-type an address. If I am giving directions to a typical person over the phone, and say "Oh, hang on, I forgot that Foo Highway is closed for repairs, I'm going to redirect you via Bar Boulevard.", they do not flap their mouths gormlessly like the lobotomised moron you describe.
The name is as clear as it could possibly be. Anybody capable of diagnosing the problem and determining to fix it should be able to dissect the name very easily. It is not obfuscated in any fashion.
If average Joe user speaks the English language, then I imagine he'd be able determine what the service did. There's really no jargon. What does the service do? It redirects addresses that contain errors when entered into the browser. It would be irresponsible to call it something like "Google Search Helper" because then even techies won't have a clue what it does.
The gist of the 'Spyware' claim comes from OpenDNS claiming the error redirecting service from Google
has no clear name and is very hard to uninstall
Complete FUD. The service is called "Browser Address Error Redirector" - which is a completely accurate and clear name for the service, and to remove it, you uninstall it from the Add/Remove Programs dialogue, as you would any regular peice of software.
I'm sure slashdot denizens will have a good time discussing how useless the bundled software and trialware that comes with Dell computers is, and how the sensible thing to do is reinstall from scratch, but that's been the case for a while. There is zero story here.
Competition is one thing in a regular market, but the accusation is that Intel is using their marketplace power and financial reserves to undercut a not-for-profit to force them out of the market as part of their corporate rivalry with AMD, who supplied the CPUs for the OLPC machines. That's something different from healthy competition.
No, you can't at the moment, although there are various conflicting rumours that the OLPC machine will be on sale to the general public. It was my understanding that it would be only be possible to buy two at a time, with one going to a child in the developing world, but I'm not sure wether or not that turned out to be true.
Does anyone know just how underhanded Performics' SEO tactics are? Much as I hesitate to put faith in uncited Wikipedia 'facts', the article on Performics claims that they are a 'Google Qualified Company', and employ 'about two dozen "Google Qualified Professionals"'.
SEO =! underhanded tactics. Sometimes SEO can be as simple as a sane site structure and standards compliant bot-readable content. It's often lots of other spammy things, but it doesn't necesserily make sense to assume that's what's going on.
Wouldn't it make sense for Google to run an 'Optimised for Google(tm)' optimisation service? The more sites that Google can spider properly, the more useful it is.
I am not an economist so forgive me this this question seems obvious, but wouldn't enforcing a 'cheaper' price on a product be destroying competition? If there is competition already, and said competitions greatest competitive advantage is it's price (in lots of cases free), wouldn't forcing MS to lower prices mean you're taking away the competitive advantage and be giving MS an edge?
The good being discussed here is one that enables interoperability - therefore, the lower the price, the lower the barriers to entry for competing firms to make compatible products. If the server protocols cost $1,000,000,000 to license, there will be very few products that can fully interface with the servers in question, Microsoft's own offerings will dominate the market. If the server protocols cost $1 to license, there will be a relatively large number of products that can fully interface with the servers, the market will be more competitive.
Your question was a reasonable one, but the aim is to make the market for products that can interface fully with Microsoft Server Products more competitive, not to make the market for the protocols themselves more competitive.
*Monopolistic 'markets' set prices motivated by only one factor - maximum profits for firmse.
There's one thing I recall from my Econ. 101 class. A businesses #1 goal is to maximize profits, independently of what kind of market they are in. The only difference the market makes is who has the most (but not all) sway in setting the price. A business who is not trying to maximize profits is not a business, but a charity. Non-profit charities still have to make money, they're just not trying to make more than they need.
The other thing I remember is that a product/service is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. If Windows had cost $1 million per unit, no matter what the monopoly they had, they wouldn't likely sell any.
I specifically wrote that _markets_ set the price and not _firms_. You are correct insofar as any one firm in a market will always seek to maximise profits. The point here is that if the firm is in a perfectly competitive market, the price at which profits are maximised is always the same - the price is always equal to mariginal cost of the product, which is in turn always equal to marginal revenue of the product. Bascially, although every firm is trying to maximise profits, in order to sell any goods, it has to compete with every other firm, and so the price is set by the _market_ - by every firm competing with every other firm. One of the identifiable characteristics of a perfectly competitive market is that individual firms never set prices - if any one firm raises its prices above the market level, it simply ceases selling any goods.
In a market dominated by a monopoly, the monopoly, not the market, sets the price. It can charge whatever it likes. Because it seeks to maximise profits, it will set the price at a level to do so, but this will be a different price from that of a competitive market. It will, incidentally, still be equal to marginal revenue, but it will no longer be equal to marginal cost. If a monopoly raises prices, it will sell _less_ goods, but it will still sell _some_.
Additionally, a good may be "worth" whatever people are willing to pay for it, but that will never be its price - this makes intuitive sense, as different goods are of different levels of utility to different people, but everybody usually pays the same price. You can actually plot on a graph the difference between what people are willing to pay for a good and its price, and by doing so you calculate "consumer surplus". Imagine you're at a coffee machine and you're hung over - the first coffee you could buy might be "worth" $1 to you, but the machine doesn't know that, it only has one price, $0.50. The second cup is "worth" $0.60 to you (you've already had one cup, you don't want a second cup as much), the price is still $0.50, so you buy a second cup. A third cup would only be "worth" $0.20 to you, because you've already had two cups. The price is still $0.50, so you don't buy a third cup. Your consumer surplus is ($1.00 - $0.50) + ($0.60 - $0.50) = $0.60.
I'm not sure if you're trolling or not, but I'll humour you.
Antitrust legislation and structures are designed to maintain a competitive market. In this case, the reasoning is that by limiting prices in a specific area, a monopolostic company is exposed to more competition, hopefully resulting in a situation where the market can once again set the prices of goods efficiently.
A market with no safegards and protections is _horrible_ at setting prices, worse even than governments. Monopolistic 'markets' set prices motivated by only one factor - maximum profits for firmse. This is not great for consumers.
Conversely, perfectly competitive markets set prices so that companies make zero economic profit. Basically, in a perfectly competitive market, labour and capital generate exactly the same level of economic profit in every industry.
So, sometimes it _is_ good for consumers if the government sets prices - if in doing so the government encourages a more competitive market later on.
I strongly urge any European slashdot denizens to contact their MEP(s) and advise them to vote for amendments to IPRED2 on the twenty-fifth of April. There's a BoingBoing post about it *here*, please don't let Cory's well-intentioned hyperbole sway you away from action.
The ammendments would-
*
LIMIT the scope of IPRED2 to true criminal enterprises, involving copyright piracy and trademark violations done on a commercial scale, with malice and the intention of earning a profit from the enterprise, rather than criminalizing all intellectual property infringement as the current directive does;
*
AVOID creating an unprecedented scope of secondary liability for Internet intermediaries, ICTs, software vendors and a range of legitimate business activity, by removing the words "aiding or abetting and inciting" from Article 3.
*
PROVIDE LEGAL CERTAINTY by adopting precise and appropriate definitions of "on a commercial scale" and "intentional infringement" in Article 2 as commercial activity done with the intent to earn a profit directly attributable to the infringing activity.
This will be a great opportunity to get a rare insight in to the kind of proprietary, highly advanced digital fingerprinting schemes they're using at Redmond! Digital certificates, binary padding - who can say?!
The software preview was posted on the site by a user named 'Richard' soon after it was released to a small group of testers. In an e-mail to MVPs whose names contain 'Richard,'....
Exactly, the website and business proposal seem very amateurish. They actually tried using motor oil before realising that by some strange, arcane and entirely unpredictable process it correded PCBs? Am I being too presumptive in assuming that these people know very, very little about electronics?
Why on earth they didn't at least think to use highly-refined mineral oil like transformer oil is beyond me. I mean, filling a server with motor oil? Are you kidding me?
Someone saw the Tom's Hardware cooking-oil-cooled-PC experiment that was published a while back, and saw an opportunity to make some money. They didn't realise that Tom's Hardware used oil because it was headline-grabbing, cheap, easy to purchase and --oh yeah-- wasn't being used to cool a server that had to be stable and reliable. That doesn't mean it's the best choice of coolant.
Hell, you could do it with purified water if you wanted to, but your uptimes might take a hit.
If you're the type of person that would download and run an undocumented installer from a pretty much unknown source on a Windows box to find out where your files are from, let me save you some time:
Your warez are the intellectual property of eastern-european content producers, and all have filenames like "BRITNEY_SPEARS_NAKED_FUCK_SEX_ANAL_REAL_GENUINE_H OT_ACTION.JPG.GIF.EXE"
> If you can AFFORD Photoshop, great! Many people who edit photographs professionally believe the
> price is more than offset by their increased productivity. But if you can't afford Photoshop you
> have no right to steal it. Don't you even try justifying it either.
Er, why not?
If you can't AFFORD Photoshop, who loses out if you use the WAREZ(TM) edition instead? Perhaps the developers of the GIMP should sue you because they lost out on a "sale"?
Slashdot Mirror
If anyone is looking for a free (as in beer) software firewall for Windows with a very small footprint, Ghostwall is a great choice for the not-afraid-of-configuration. The setup file is less than a MiB.
> Nobody is dying or being raped. They are downloading music for free. The two are very different things. Nobody is being oppressed here. They're merely suffering consequences
> for breaking [mostly unfair] laws.
You're quite right! My analogy is flawed because it isn't exactly the same situation as the situation it attempts to describe.
To be serious, if you hold "People who suffer consequence Y deserve no pity because they performed action X while knowing about consequence Y" to be true, it doesn't matter if consequence Y is being slapped on the wrist or being taken out and shot. If the degree to which you hold that argument to be true varies based on your distaste for consequence Y, then you're basing your statement on something other than logic.
Wii Sports with the foot-operated power generator, anyone?
> As unfair as it is, they should suffer some consequences to what they did. Most anyone knows that file sharing can make you the target of a lawsuit,
> but most believe that it won't be them. If you think it is unfair, then actually get up and move to somewhere where it isn't considered illegal.
As unfair as it is, they should suffer some consequences to what they did. Most anyone knows that [practising homosexuality] can make you the target of [the death penalty in Iran], but most believe that it won't be them. If you think it is unfair, then actually get up and move to somewhere where it isn't considered illegal. And I'm willing to bet that 99% of the [homosexuals] did it because they wanted [to have homosexual sex], not because they somehow believed they were sticking it to the man.
As unfair as it is, they should suffer some consequences to what they did. Most anyone knows that [taking drugs] can make you the target of [the death penalty in Thailand], but most believe that it won't be them. If you think it is unfair, then actually get up and move to somewhere where it isn't considered illegal. And I'm willing to bet that 99% of the [drug users] did it because they wanted [to take drugs], not because they somehow believed they were sticking it to the man.
As unfair as it is, they should suffer some consequences to what they did. Most anyone knows that [not wearing religiously sanctioned clothing] can make you the target of a [being raped with no legal recourse in more than one Middle Eastern country], but most believe that it won't be them. If you think it is unfair, then actually get up and move to somewhere where it [won't result in you being raped with no legal recourse]. And I'm willing to bet that 99% of the [women] did it because they wanted [to wear clothing that was not religiously sanctioned], not because they somehow believed they were sticking it to the man.
> Yes, if that one page encapsulates at least one entirely complete piece of work. Otherwise, photocopying a page in a book would be
> likened to perhaps downloading a snippet of a song. Depending on how you use that snippet, it may be covered by fair use. Get your analogies straight.
> Oh, wait...this is Slashdot. Nevermind...let fly with the inane analogies!
Actually, IIRC, for things like anthologies of poems and short stories, you are permitted to copy one complete story or poem, at least in under UK law. So, photocopying a page in a book might not be a terrible analogy for downloading one song from an album.
I have a friend who doesn't approve of illegaly downloading music. He occasionally buys a second hand CD for a couple of bucks, then immediately downloads high-bitrate rips of the same album from bittorrent, because more often than not the disks are scratched and he can't be bothered spending hours trying to make a decent rip of his own. I always wonder, what exactly is he giving back to the artist? Aside from a few fairly abstract arguments to do with the price point being higher if consumers know they can sell CDs they buy second hand, in what way does buying second hand CDs benefit the artists/RIAA more than just downloading the damn thing?
You're reducing the level of average Joe user's intelligence to such a level as to render meaningless your point. The type of person you describe is incapable of performing even the most trivial of computing tasks. The type of person you describe will not realise that a custom Google ad-laden error page is not the normal result of a mis-typed url or a bad link. The type of person you describe will believe that is just how the internet works, and will have no need or desire to disable such a page.
However, a person of reasonable intelligence who is capable of determining that the custom Google error page they see on their computer is not normal, and is resourceful enough to find an online resource that explains the problem and gives the name of the service they need to uninstall should be fully capable of disecting such a clear name.
"Browser" - Not terribly technical. "To browse the internet" is a very common phrase even amongst non-technical folks, and if one resorts to a dictionary compiled in the last four years the usage in reference to a computer program used to surf the internet will be noted.
"Address" - One hardly needs to have a degree in computer science to conflate the everyday usage of "address" to the technical usage - someone who has already realised that the problem arises from a bad link or a mis-typed URL should have no problems understanding this usage of "address".
"Error" - Once again, a completely clear, non-jargon usage of the word. It refers simply to a mistake in an entered URL ("address"). Very relatable for non-technical people.
"Redirector" - Are you kidding me? You think most people can't determine what "redirect" means? It's lifted directly from everyday usage, it's a perfect, clear, relatable term. Traffic is redirected, people are redirected - and a user is redirected if they mis-type an address. If I am giving directions to a typical person over the phone, and say "Oh, hang on, I forgot that Foo Highway is closed for repairs, I'm going to redirect you via Bar Boulevard.", they do not flap their mouths gormlessly like the lobotomised moron you describe.
The name is as clear as it could possibly be. Anybody capable of diagnosing the problem and determining to fix it should be able to dissect the name very easily. It is not obfuscated in any fashion.
If average Joe user speaks the English language, then I imagine he'd be able determine what the service did. There's really no jargon. What does the service do? It redirects addresses that contain errors when entered into the browser. It would be irresponsible to call it something like "Google Search Helper" because then even techies won't have a clue what it does.
I'm sure slashdot denizens will have a good time discussing how useless the bundled software and trialware that comes with Dell computers is, and how the sensible thing to do is reinstall from scratch, but that's been the case for a while. There is zero story here.
It's part of Intel's new intarwebs 2.0 marketing campaign. They're saying they own at low-cost laptops.
Or slightly more impartial information can be found at Wikipedia.
Competition is one thing in a regular market, but the accusation is that Intel is using their marketplace power and financial reserves to undercut a not-for-profit to force them out of the market as part of their corporate rivalry with AMD, who supplied the CPUs for the OLPC machines. That's something different from healthy competition.
No, you can't at the moment, although there are various conflicting rumours that the OLPC machine will be on sale to the general public. It was my understanding that it would be only be possible to buy two at a time, with one going to a child in the developing world, but I'm not sure wether or not that turned out to be true.
Vista is trying to drain your laptop's battery. Cancel or Allow?
Does anyone know just how underhanded Performics' SEO tactics are? Much as I hesitate to put faith in uncited Wikipedia 'facts', the article on Performics claims that they are a 'Google Qualified Company', and employ 'about two dozen "Google Qualified Professionals"'.
SEO =! underhanded tactics. Sometimes SEO can be as simple as a sane site structure and standards compliant bot-readable content. It's often lots of other spammy things, but it doesn't necesserily make sense to assume that's what's going on.
Wouldn't it make sense for Google to run an 'Optimised for Google(tm)' optimisation service? The more sites that Google can spider properly, the more useful it is.
Standard rules of grammar, apparently.
(whom*)
Your question was a reasonable one, but the aim is to make the market for products that can interface fully with Microsoft Server Products more competitive, not to make the market for the protocols themselves more competitive. I specifically wrote that _markets_ set the price and not _firms_. You are correct insofar as any one firm in a market will always seek to maximise profits. The point here is that if the firm is in a perfectly competitive market, the price at which profits are maximised is always the same - the price is always equal to mariginal cost of the product, which is in turn always equal to marginal revenue of the product. Bascially, although every firm is trying to maximise profits, in order to sell any goods, it has to compete with every other firm, and so the price is set by the _market_ - by every firm competing with every other firm. One of the identifiable characteristics of a perfectly competitive market is that individual firms never set prices - if any one firm raises its prices above the market level, it simply ceases selling any goods.
In a market dominated by a monopoly, the monopoly, not the market, sets the price. It can charge whatever it likes. Because it seeks to maximise profits, it will set the price at a level to do so, but this will be a different price from that of a competitive market. It will, incidentally, still be equal to marginal revenue, but it will no longer be equal to marginal cost. If a monopoly raises prices, it will sell _less_ goods, but it will still sell _some_.
Additionally, a good may be "worth" whatever people are willing to pay for it, but that will never be its price - this makes intuitive sense, as different goods are of different levels of utility to different people, but everybody usually pays the same price. You can actually plot on a graph the difference between what people are willing to pay for a good and its price, and by doing so you calculate "consumer surplus". Imagine you're at a coffee machine and you're hung over - the first coffee you could buy might be "worth" $1 to you, but the machine doesn't know that, it only has one price, $0.50. The second cup is "worth" $0.60 to you (you've already had one cup, you don't want a second cup as much), the price is still $0.50, so you buy a second cup. A third cup would only be "worth" $0.20 to you, because you've already had two cups. The price is still $0.50, so you don't buy a third cup. Your consumer surplus is ($1.00 - $0.50) + ($0.60 - $0.50) = $0.60.
I'm not sure if you're trolling or not, but I'll humour you.
Antitrust legislation and structures are designed to maintain a competitive market. In this case, the reasoning is that by limiting prices in a specific area, a monopolostic company is exposed to more competition, hopefully resulting in a situation where the market can once again set the prices of goods efficiently.
A market with no safegards and protections is _horrible_ at setting prices, worse even than governments. Monopolistic 'markets' set prices motivated by only one factor - maximum profits for firmse. This is not great for consumers.
Conversely, perfectly competitive markets set prices so that companies make zero economic profit. Basically, in a perfectly competitive market, labour and capital generate exactly the same level of economic profit in every industry.
So, sometimes it _is_ good for consumers if the government sets prices - if in doing so the government encourages a more competitive market later on.
The ammendments would-
There's some more info *here*.
No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.
Did you mean: MS Urges Scuttling of Antitrust
Oh...
Exactly, the website and business proposal seem very amateurish. They actually tried using motor oil before realising that by some strange, arcane and entirely unpredictable process it correded PCBs? Am I being too presumptive in assuming that these people know very, very little about electronics?
Why on earth they didn't at least think to use highly-refined mineral oil like transformer oil is beyond me. I mean, filling a server with motor oil? Are you kidding me?
Someone saw the Tom's Hardware cooking-oil-cooled-PC experiment that was published a while back, and saw an opportunity to make some money. They didn't realise that Tom's Hardware used oil because it was headline-grabbing, cheap, easy to purchase and --oh yeah-- wasn't being used to cool a server that had to be stable and reliable. That doesn't mean it's the best choice of coolant.
Hell, you could do it with purified water if you wanted to, but your uptimes might take a hit.
If you're the type of person that would download and run an undocumented installer from a pretty much unknown source on a Windows box to find out where your files are from, let me save you some time:
H OT_ACTION.JPG.GIF.EXE"
Your warez are the intellectual property of eastern-european content producers, and all have filenames like "BRITNEY_SPEARS_NAKED_FUCK_SEX_ANAL_REAL_GENUINE_
All things any moderately-savy computer user should be entirely familiar with.
> If you can AFFORD Photoshop, great! Many people who edit photographs professionally believe the
> price is more than offset by their increased productivity. But if you can't afford Photoshop you
> have no right to steal it. Don't you even try justifying it either.
Er, why not?
If you can't AFFORD Photoshop, who loses out if you use the WAREZ(TM) edition instead? Perhaps the developers of the GIMP should sue you because they lost out on a "sale"?