Do people have or should have the right to live anonymously? I say yes but I'm sure there are a lot of people who would disagree.
Actually, offhand the only people I can think of who would disagree are those who want power over others, power for power's sake and would deny people the right to live anonymously for no other reason.
People have the right to live anonymously. Governments, however, will always consider those living anonymously, those 'outside the loop' to be threats to their power. Can't have that now, can we? Freedom be damned, I want my goddamn power! Governments only expand their power for one reason: to ensure their existence. It has nothing to do with your safety: only with theirs, whomever 'they' may be at any given moment.
Maybe sadly, this isn't in violation of the Bill of Rights at all.
Oh I dunno, that whole nagging "right to be secure in their persons" phrase in the 4th Amendment might apply, along with the "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" part of the 5th Amendment.
It can be argued that the violation of your privacy deprives you of liberty.
Right, cause I was talking about Fortune 500 Korean companies
Chinese companies can do this easily with CD and DVD players because those formats are open. Blu-ray is not, it is wholly proprietary and you can be sure Sony and the others to which the format belongs are going to spend as much as they need to protect that investment.
I'm already hungry for devices that generate true high definition content. I'm not sure why people are saying they need to wait because I've heard all of this before and it was just fine.
Speak for yourself. I have no intention of re-buying all my DVD's that I've spent $thousands on over the past several years. For me, DVD is 'good enough' - which brings up another point. YOU may be hungry for devices that generate 'true high definition content,' but I know few who would say the same, including myself. In addition, I don't spend enough time parked in front of my TV for hi-def to EVER have any value for me. I realize that in THAT statement, I may be in the minority, but there it is.
They needed a "next gen DVD" system and this is what they came up with. Why are they evil for trying such a thing? Or why aren't the HD-DVD group evil as well? that is the name of the game of innovation.
Sony did't need a 'next gen DVD', they needed to find a way to enforce vendor lock-in "and this is what they came up with." Sony hates the idea of dual Blu-ray/HD-DVD players and will likely fight tooth and nail to try to enforce licensing agreements to that end. They wanted a new way to control your viewing experience, "and this is what they came up with" - invasive, draconian DRM that forces you to buy $thousands worth of new hardware just to be able to view HD content, not because your current hardware is insufficient, but they have to make sure your hardware supports the ICT (Image Constraint Token) so that you can't play it on your current computer, for example, which *gasp* might in a million years be able to make a copy of it!
that is the name of the game of innovation.
No it isn't, that's the name of the game of deceptive and unethical business practices. Innovation.. please. Innovation is bad for business, because free innovation doesn't guarantee success to any one company. And corporations just can't have that.
There's a happy medium between the bleeding edge and being a Quaker.
Assuming you're not being facetious, why in the world is being happy with your current technology considered being a 'Quaker'? Is it because corporations don't make money off people actually being happy with their equipment, and so they've brainwashed all of us to think we absolutely MUST upgrade or be considered backwards?
Sorry, the one thing capitalism has never provided (that it always promised it would) is higher quality merchandise. Companies don't make money off high quality, they make money off repeating purchases, and they need to find ways to force people to continue to spend money, and by God they don't want people being happy with what they've already got! Satisfaction is bad for business.
We are worrying about formats, backwards compatability, and whether or not we have a setup that will please the DRM gods. What for? Watching video files. Sorry. I think I'm done.
Thank you. I am too. I'm done playing their stupid little games. I don't freaking care if Blu-ray or HD-DVD becomes the new defacto standard: I will not 'march forward into the future' to the beat of any corporation's profit-driven drum.
DVDs offered me a real, tangible, worthwhile benefit. This new garbage does not.
Ohh common, since when has "not allowed in the license" ever stopped a chineese company?
Uhh... you are aware, right, that Samsung announced it would build a dual player and was summarily trounced by Sony for violating some obscure section of their license agreement?
Don't hold your breath. Sony has no intention of letting anyone produce systems that will allow HD-DVD to exist.
And that, by the way, reveals their true intentions for creating Blu-ray to begin with, and why it is stuffed chock full of DRM: vendor lock-in. They couldn't care one whit about protecting content.
Perhaps, though I've heard a lot of porn actors/actresses (and some main stream ones like Cameron Diaz) aren't looking forward to how highdef will likely accentuate their physical blemishes and flaws...
I still can't think of any new media that succeeded by ONLY offering higher resolution. And customers are at least sometimes very willing to give up high fidelity for good enough fidelity plus convenience: see MP3s for example...
I completely agree. For me, the mere offer of higher fidelity through larger disc space has absolutely no value to me, and will not convince me to buy these new DVDs or the new players.
I don't know anyone else for whom that is a big enough draw, either. Now, I do think there ARE people that will care enough about that to buy this new fangled crap that will destroy the future, but I am not one of them.
Even if I weren't disgusted with the DRM'd-to-hell nature of the new technology, even if I were Joe Sixpack, I still wouldn't buy the new stuff because higher resolution is not a sufficiently motivating factor for me (it is on my monitor, but not my TV, because I don't have 45 windows open on my TV:) And just because I like higher monitor resolution doesn't mean I'm going to buy new computer parts just to play DRM'd crap, either.
I am not sure if it does come down to greed.... if the network was totally neutral would each of my game requests be given the same priority as someone requesting a web page where a second of lag would not matter a jot?
In reply to this idea, I ask... do you suppose Comcast cares whether your game playing is slow? My guess is no - that is not one of their concerns. If almost all of their customers were huge game players, then maybe, but that is not the case. Few people care (or will even notice) if it takes 1.2 versus 0.7 seconds for their email to be sent.
That means that Comcast's interest in giving different content different priority has to be based on something else. If you can come up with another reason they care other than that caring will make them richer, I'd love to hear it.
I am not talking about bandwidth here but rather latency.
But the telecom's ARE talking bandwidth. Their claim is that sites that use tons of bandwidth are getting a free ride, so they want those sites to pay up. My question is, what bandwidth are they talking about? So the lower-bandwidth apps like plain text search will get throttled just like Google Video, because Google refuses to pay the additional fees? Does this seem reasonable? I would say NO, because there's a huge difference in bandwidth between downloading a video and clicking Search on a web page. Yet, the telecoms want to lump it all up into one company and say "Pay me more" regardless of the content being transferred, which further suggests less-than-honest reasoning in their claims.
Even your basic criminal knows it gives him the right to silence, to an attorney, etc.
Your basic criminal knows this because it's been popularized on TV and in popular culture over the past 30 years. The reason Miranda Rights originally started being read to people being arrested is because some people DIDN'T know they had them.
I would like to see a scientific study on the issue too, but what I do know just from watching people talk about rights and laws is that they're horribly, unendingly confused. Part of the reason for this confusion is that both the states and the Federal government want powers neither should have; and they fight over it all the time, and just because a law gets ignored for awhile (either state or federal) doesn't mean that government entity actually has the power to enact that law; it just means it hasn't been properly challenged yet.
And even if your own statement (and I don't know if you were just being blithe or if you really didn't know this) but this statement is incorrect:
so they must be aware that Federal level overrules state.
That is not always true, and actually, is false far more often than it is true. The government as it is laid out in the Constitution has a very small set of powers, and all others are given to the states. The Federal government is only supposed to overrule the states in very limited instances. These days, with the consequences of activist Supreme Court judges over the past 200 years, the Federal government holds alot more power than it was originally designed to, but even still many decisions are still in state hands, not Federal hands. And the thing is, because of the endless list of laws designed to assert Federal power in the past 50 years, it has gotten so confusing to determine where the Federal government ends and the states begin, that no common layperson could really make sense of it.
And this is exactly how the states and the Federals like it. It means that your common citizen is ill equipped to challenge the authority of any government entity, because they don't have a clear view of their own rights and the powers of the government. And governments love it when you weaken a citizen's ability to defend themselves. Makes their job so much easier.
I certainly hope Sony crashes and burns for this, not really because I dislike Sony (I'm rather ambivalent about the company itself) but just because I want to see Blu-Ray fall flat on its face. Regular DVD works just fine for me, thanks, without the draconian DRM contained in Blu-Ray.
"Are you totally ignorant or just trying to troll?"
I would give him the benefit of the doubt, simply because....
The US Constitution overrides any federal and state laws.
Very few American citizens are actually aware of that fact, which is part of why most Americans are so willing to lay down and just accept any abridgement of their rights and freedoms. They believe that if the government says it, it must be true, and while that statement seems silly to us Slashdotters, we are in a very, very small minority.
I'm with you. I have no intention of ever using any of these newfangled "web apps" - nothing like the security of someone else storing all your data, and without encryption on top of that.
I'll stick with programs that run on my computer and can't be sniffed, packet-snooped or wiretapped (so long as I unplug the ethernet cord and it still works!), thank you very much.
"The only way I can see MS hurting google is if they make IE point to MSN like Firefox does with Google"
Well, IE already defaults to MSN.com with a new Windows installation, and MSN is the default search engine if you type stuff into the browser it doesn't recognize. That's in IE6 though.
I do recall reading something here about MS putting MSN as the only 'preinstalled' search engine in the IE7 search box, although that was in an IE7 beta so it's possible the release will have additional searches installed. But, that doesn't help much if the DEFAULT search engine selected is MSN. We'll just have to see when IE7 goes to release.
Including that "Maxed-out both ways","always on","24/7/12","$50/month","dragging down the entire neighborhood" broadband connection.
The consumer has every right to use what they paid for. If a telecom company sells you a cable plan stating that you get XMBps upload, Y MBps download with a monthly ZGB bandwidth cap, they can't complain when you actually USE it. Oh, sorry, they're faking it by overselling bandwidth because they bought corporate jets and yachts with all that money the local municipalities gave them, instead of using it to actually build infrastructure? I really can't feel sorry for them.
The telecom companies painted themselves into this corner, and now they're whining for mommy because they have a booboo, only they're WAY old enough to know exactly what they did.
Every browser i've used renders tables before completing the page download.
How in the world does the browser know what to draw until the [/table] tag has been reached? The reason you see some of the page render as it is downloading is because it's drawing intermediate tables that are already completed. I'm talking about a very few poorly designed websites (and yes, I agree that's because of the developer, not the HTML), because over the years people have learned NOT to jam 200kb of content into one table (or one page, for that matter, although Amazon's web pages are still routinely over 200kb each).
quit being so impatient.
Totally uncalled for. I didn't say anything about being impatient, nor did I even imply I was sitting there tapping my finger waiting for it to complete. I said (and implied) only that the page doesn't appear until it's done downloading.
What sane developer relies on a parsing bug in a browser? How easy is that to maintain?
Well, I can't disagree with you there. That part is insane and I hope in the next couple of years we see a proliferation of fully CSS compliant browsers. I mean, that's the whole point of standard in the first place. Even Firefox doesn't fully implement CSS correctly, and I'm not sure why.
But there are so many things that were simple with tables that become unnecessarily complex with CSS.
This is why tables were popularized in the first place. The lay-person who just wanted to throw up a personal web page had neither the time, nor the inclination to learn CSS, so they resorted to the easiest possible manner of positioning things the way they wanted: tables.
Creating layouts with CSS was never easy, which has always been exactly the problem.
But there are problems with table-based designs, first and foremost being user presentation, in the form of increased load times for the increased amount of text, AND because browsers can't render the table until the entire thing is downloaded. I have seen some website that don't come up for quite sometime because their entire 226kb layout is contained within a single outer table, so it doesn't show up on the screen until the whole page is downloaded.
The second major problem with table-based designs is accessibility: screen readers for the blind don't like tables very much. I don't know about the newest versions of programs like JAWS, but the ones a few years ago would read every table element, including empty ones that only contained spacer images. Not a very user-friendly experience.
Most developers simply give up and use tables because it's faster. This is ALWAYS the motivating factor in businesses where time is money - and consequently why so few commercial websites are built using CSS. It takes longer to learn. But once you learn it, things that are at first "unnecessarily complex" become easy, just as tables are easy now because everyone does it that way.
"Easy" in the end has less to do with syntax and language, and more to do with how widely the technology is used, because the more people use CSS, the better the documentation for it will be, and the more websites will show you how to do simple things like a 3 column, full height layout (which I know how to do; I have a basic template I always use when starting a new page for this layout, so I don't have to redo it every time).
Show me an implementation of a three column layout, with header and footer, without using javascript. In a perfect world, you'd do it without browser dependent hacks too.
The websites I did this for are no longer up, but it's not something I found terribly difficult. In fact, I learned to do almost everything better without Javascript, especially dynamic multi-level menus that are easy, semantically correct (e.g. using ul and li instead of tables and javascript), and stylishly appealing, using about 100 lines of pure CSS.
Problem is, people have just been doing it this way for so long that it seems impossibly difficult to do it any other way. And, at first, it IS very difficult, because it requires a different way of thinking about the page. Once you get past the conceptual hurdles though, it starts to make very good sense.
"Its funny big business has done more to create a totalitarian state than any communistic or fascist regime. Weird."
Not really, at least, not to my way of thinking. I would have thought it more weird for the government to have anything to do with it, because people tend to critisize the actions of the government alot more than corporations, for the very simple reason that in most cases, the actions of the government are more visible. Also, corporations can fall back on the tired argument that they're "trying to make a profit" and our silly culture seems to have no problem with that argument as a means to justify almost any action.
Not that I think making a profit is wrong; but it should not be as high on a company's list of priorities as it is now. The worst day in the history of the world (in terms of long term consequenceS) was the day in 1849 when the US Supreme Court declared corporations to have the same rights as individuals, relieving them of all social and environmental responsibility in the name of 'profit.'
And now we are seeing the world corporations long ago envisioned for us, a world where they own everything and you have to beg to get even a tiny piece of it to make a living.
Ok so this is totally the wrong place to ask this question, but you being a Microsofty and all you'd be the quickest way for me to get an answer to this question...
Is.NET 3.0 REALLY just the next version of.NET? Meaning, can I open up my 2.0 app and only need to change a few things to make it work on 3.0? Or will it be something migrating from MFC to.NET 1.1, where you had to basically completely rewrite everything?
I ask because this actually might impact my job and this is the first I have ever heard of.NET 3.0..
Slashdot Mirror
People have the right to live anonymously. Governments, however, will always consider those living anonymously, those 'outside the loop' to be threats to their power. Can't have that now, can we? Freedom be damned, I want my goddamn power! Governments only expand their power for one reason: to ensure their existence. It has nothing to do with your safety: only with theirs, whomever 'they' may be at any given moment.
It can be argued that the violation of your privacy deprives you of liberty.
That was my point.
Can't let nagging things like suffering, civil liberties and human rights get in the way of obscene profi - err, 'innovation.'
Bread and circuses, indeed.
Sony did't need a 'next gen DVD', they needed to find a way to enforce vendor lock-in "and this is what they came up with." Sony hates the idea of dual Blu-ray
No it isn't, that's the name of the game of deceptive and unethical business practices. Innovation.. please. Innovation is bad for business, because free innovation doesn't guarantee success to any one company. And corporations just can't have that.
Sorry, the one thing capitalism has never provided (that it always promised it would) is higher quality merchandise. Companies don't make money off high quality, they make money off repeating purchases, and they need to find ways to force people to continue to spend money, and by God they don't want people being happy with what they've already got! Satisfaction is bad for business.
Thank you. I am too. I'm done playing their stupid little games. I don't freaking care if Blu-ray or HD-DVD becomes the new defacto standard: I will not 'march forward into the future' to the beat of any corporation's profit-driven drum.
DVDs offered me a real, tangible, worthwhile benefit. This new garbage does not.
Uhh... you are aware, right, that Samsung announced it would build a dual player and was summarily trounced by Sony for violating some obscure section of their license agreement?
Don't hold your breath. Sony has no intention of letting anyone produce systems that will allow HD-DVD to exist.
And that, by the way, reveals their true intentions for creating Blu-ray to begin with, and why it is stuffed chock full of DRM: vendor lock-in. They couldn't care one whit about protecting content.
I completely agree. For me, the mere offer of higher fidelity through larger disc space has absolutely no value to me, and will not convince me to buy these new DVDs or the new players.
I don't know anyone else for whom that is a big enough draw, either. Now, I do think there ARE people that will care enough about that to buy this new fangled crap that will destroy the future, but I am not one of them.
Even if I weren't disgusted with the DRM'd-to-hell nature of the new technology, even if I were Joe Sixpack, I still wouldn't buy the new stuff because higher resolution is not a sufficiently motivating factor for me (it is on my monitor, but not my TV, because I don't have 45 windows open on my TV
He's joking, people - a comic representation of the right-wing party line.
Or, as I hilariously saw elsewhere on Slashdot today, "Whoosh!"
That means that Comcast's interest in giving different content different priority has to be based on something else. If you can come up with another reason they care other than that caring will make them richer, I'd love to hear it.
But the telecom's ARE talking bandwidth. Their claim is that sites that use tons of bandwidth are getting a free ride, so they want those sites to pay up. My question is, what bandwidth are they talking about? So the lower-bandwidth apps like plain text search will get throttled just like Google Video, because Google refuses to pay the additional fees? Does this seem reasonable? I would say NO, because there's a huge difference in bandwidth between downloading a video and clicking Search on a web page. Yet, the telecoms want to lump it all up into one company and say "Pay me more" regardless of the content being transferred, which further suggests less-than-honest reasoning in their claims.
I would like to see a scientific study on the issue too, but what I do know just from watching people talk about rights and laws is that they're horribly, unendingly confused. Part of the reason for this confusion is that both the states and the Federal government want powers neither should have; and they fight over it all the time, and just because a law gets ignored for awhile (either state or federal) doesn't mean that government entity actually has the power to enact that law; it just means it hasn't been properly challenged yet.
And even if your own statement (and I don't know if you were just being blithe or if you really didn't know this) but this statement is incorrect:
That is not always true, and actually, is false far more often than it is true. The government as it is laid out in the Constitution has a very small set of powers, and all others are given to the states. The Federal government is only supposed to overrule the states in very limited instances. These days, with the consequences of activist Supreme Court judges over the past 200 years, the Federal government holds alot more power than it was originally designed to, but even still many decisions are still in state hands, not Federal hands. And the thing is, because of the endless list of laws designed to assert Federal power in the past 50 years, it has gotten so confusing to determine where the Federal government ends and the states begin, that no common layperson could really make sense of it.
And this is exactly how the states and the Federals like it. It means that your common citizen is ill equipped to challenge the authority of any government entity, because they don't have a clear view of their own rights and the powers of the government. And governments love it when you weaken a citizen's ability to defend themselves. Makes their job so much easier.
I certainly hope Sony crashes and burns for this, not really because I dislike Sony (I'm rather ambivalent about the company itself) but just because I want to see Blu-Ray fall flat on its face. Regular DVD works just fine for me, thanks, without the draconian DRM contained in Blu-Ray.
Very few American citizens are actually aware of that fact, which is part of why most Americans are so willing to lay down and just accept any abridgement of their rights and freedoms. They believe that if the government says it, it must be true, and while that statement seems silly to us Slashdotters, we are in a very, very small minority.
I'm with you. I have no intention of ever using any of these newfangled "web apps" - nothing like the security of someone else storing all your data, and without encryption on top of that.
I'll stick with programs that run on my computer and can't be sniffed, packet-snooped or wiretapped (so long as I unplug the ethernet cord and it still works!), thank you very much.
"The only way I can see MS hurting google is if they make IE point to MSN like Firefox does with Google"
Well, IE already defaults to MSN.com with a new Windows installation, and MSN is the default search engine if you type stuff into the browser it doesn't recognize. That's in IE6 though.
I do recall reading something here about MS putting MSN as the only 'preinstalled' search engine in the IE7 search box, although that was in an IE7 beta so it's possible the release will have additional searches installed. But, that doesn't help much if the DEFAULT search engine selected is MSN. We'll just have to see when IE7 goes to release.
Or a truffle!
Mmmmm.... truffle.... agggchchhhahgghh
The consumer has every right to use what they paid for. If a telecom company sells you a cable plan stating that you get XMBps upload, Y MBps download with a monthly ZGB bandwidth cap, they can't complain when you actually USE it. Oh, sorry, they're faking it by overselling bandwidth because they bought corporate jets and yachts with all that money the local municipalities gave them, instead of using it to actually build infrastructure? I really can't feel sorry for them.
The telecom companies painted themselves into this corner, and now they're whining for mommy because they have a booboo, only they're WAY old enough to know exactly what they did.
How in the world does the browser know what to draw until the [/table] tag has been reached? The reason you see some of the page render as it is downloading is because it's drawing intermediate tables that are already completed. I'm talking about a very few poorly designed websites (and yes, I agree that's because of the developer, not the HTML), because over the years people have learned NOT to jam 200kb of content into one table (or one page, for that matter, although Amazon's web pages are still routinely over 200kb each).
Totally uncalled for. I didn't say anything about being impatient, nor did I even imply I was sitting there tapping my finger waiting for it to complete. I said (and implied) only that the page doesn't appear until it's done downloading.
Well, I can't disagree with you there. That part is insane and I hope in the next couple of years we see a proliferation of fully CSS compliant browsers. I mean, that's the whole point of standard in the first place. Even Firefox doesn't fully implement CSS correctly, and I'm not sure why.
This is why tables were popularized in the first place. The lay-person who just wanted to throw up a personal web page had neither the time, nor the inclination to learn CSS, so they resorted to the easiest possible manner of positioning things the way they wanted: tables.
Creating layouts with CSS was never easy, which has always been exactly the problem.
But there are problems with table-based designs, first and foremost being user presentation, in the form of increased load times for the increased amount of text, AND because browsers can't render the table until the entire thing is downloaded. I have seen some website that don't come up for quite sometime because their entire 226kb layout is contained within a single outer table, so it doesn't show up on the screen until the whole page is downloaded.
The second major problem with table-based designs is accessibility: screen readers for the blind don't like tables very much. I don't know about the newest versions of programs like JAWS, but the ones a few years ago would read every table element, including empty ones that only contained spacer images. Not a very user-friendly experience.
Most developers simply give up and use tables because it's faster. This is ALWAYS the motivating factor in businesses where time is money - and consequently why so few commercial websites are built using CSS. It takes longer to learn. But once you learn it, things that are at first "unnecessarily complex" become easy, just as tables are easy now because everyone does it that way.
"Easy" in the end has less to do with syntax and language, and more to do with how widely the technology is used, because the more people use CSS, the better the documentation for it will be, and the more websites will show you how to do simple things like a 3 column, full height layout (which I know how to do; I have a basic template I always use when starting a new page for this layout, so I don't have to redo it every time).
The websites I did this for are no longer up, but it's not something I found terribly difficult. In fact, I learned to do almost everything better without Javascript, especially dynamic multi-level menus that are easy, semantically correct (e.g. using ul and li instead of tables and javascript), and stylishly appealing, using about 100 lines of pure CSS.
Problem is, people have just been doing it this way for so long that it seems impossibly difficult to do it any other way. And, at first, it IS very difficult, because it requires a different way of thinking about the page. Once you get past the conceptual hurdles though, it starts to make very good sense.
"Its funny big business has done more to create a totalitarian state than any communistic or fascist regime. Weird."
Not really, at least, not to my way of thinking. I would have thought it more weird for the government to have anything to do with it, because people tend to critisize the actions of the government alot more than corporations, for the very simple reason that in most cases, the actions of the government are more visible. Also, corporations can fall back on the tired argument that they're "trying to make a profit" and our silly culture seems to have no problem with that argument as a means to justify almost any action.
Not that I think making a profit is wrong; but it should not be as high on a company's list of priorities as it is now. The worst day in the history of the world (in terms of long term consequenceS) was the day in 1849 when the US Supreme Court declared corporations to have the same rights as individuals, relieving them of all social and environmental responsibility in the name of 'profit.'
And now we are seeing the world corporations long ago envisioned for us, a world where they own everything and you have to beg to get even a tiny piece of it to make a living.
Land of the free, indeed.
Ok so this is totally the wrong place to ask this question, but you being a Microsofty and all you'd be the quickest way for me to get an answer to this question...
.NET 3.0 REALLY just the next version of .NET? Meaning, can I open up my 2.0 app and only need to change a few things to make it work on 3.0? Or will it be something migrating from MFC to .NET 1.1, where you had to basically completely rewrite everything?
.NET 3.0..
Is
I ask because this actually might impact my job and this is the first I have ever heard of