There are already multiple rating systems for Internet content, including both server-supplied and third party supplied, and you can configure your browser to utilize them to keep yourself from accidentally accessing "bad" content. In fact, many companies implement the NSFW relation through content filtering anyway.
For users (probably not, principally, corporate environments) who are concerned about accidentally viewing certain types of content, and for organizations not principally concerned with profit interested in helping users avoid stumbling on to such content, it would be nice to have a set of open standards and browser behaviors that identified suspect links in a not-to-intrusive way, but one that provided information as to what kind of potentially objectionable content they might contain. Something less obtrusive than the blocked-but-click-through-if-you-really-need-it behavior of, say, some WebSense configurations, and something that allowed accessing a user-defined set of public repositories to get the ratings (including a local database.)
Doing it this way in HTML won't serve the needs and interests of users well. What is really needed is an optional, client-side change in how HTML is handled that automatically processes links against a customizable set of content ratings (perhaps using separate advisory ratings hosted by hosts of the target content, or linked or embedded into the document providing the link, as one source of ratings, but also capable of accessing a user-selected set of third-party remote rating sources and locally-maintained user ratings potentially overriding remote ratings) and modifying the appearance of links or statusbar descriptions based on those ratings.
If you are going to try to provide this kind of information, using a single NSFW marker provided by the provider of the link is a way-too-limited way of doing things to be of much use.
If someone bought me an iTunes gift card I'd slap them in the head with it.
Most people I know would only buy an iTunes gift card for someone they know uses iTMS.
Presumably, your friends know about your distaste for iTMS. What are you going nuts about?
I mean, seriously, if someone posted that most of the gifts they bought for people were, say, Garth Brooks CDs, I wouldn't go berserk about how I hate Garth Brooks and would be angry if someone bought me one of his CDs as a gift, because, you know, I'd just assume that someone who said that had lots of friends that they knew wanted Garth Brooks CDs.
It's fantastic that they let you burn a copy of YOUR music that you purchased to a regular audio CD, but the fact of the matter is that what you're burning is sub-CD-quality sound and yet costs the same as the CD would if you had bought it in the store. $10-$12 is the going rate for popular CDs in brick and mortar shops.
Why would you assume that a CD burned out of iTunes collection would contain an identical set of songs to any "popular CD" available in brick and mortar shops?
Considerably larger? My God, everything up to the 3G iPods must have been cinder blocks then.
Comparatively, sure.
I'm not choosing between buying a 3G or earlier iPod and a Zune. I'm choosing between a current iPod and a Zune. (Well, no, I'm not, my wife and I just bought iPods. But the point remains; noncurrent hardware is not the competition for the Zune.)
The Zune is marginally larger than the new 5/5.5G iPods.
Correct.
If you notice a difference then you need to hit the gym my friend.
Well, sure, if I lost a little bit of weight in my waist, I wouldn't be bugged as much by larger belt-clip devices (though larger pocket devices would still be exactly as much of an annoyance as they are now, and the iPod I have is about as big as I'd like a pocket device to be.)
Yeah, maybe I'm pickier than the people that bought 1G iPods. So what? Is Microsoft only hoping to sell to people who would have bought 1G iPods but haven't noticed all the players introduced since?
I'm eyeing the Zune. So far, every single detractor I have heard about it is a software problem. Lot of problems, to be sure, but most of them amount to "not an iPod" or "not what I wish it was". Very few of the complaints are in any way reflective of an inability to do the job: play music and video in a portable format.
"Not what I wish it was" (especially if a competing product is what the customer wishes it was) is a complaint reflective of an inability to do "the job".
Compare iPod: can't change the battery, case easily scratched, screen not large and bright enough.
Personally, I think the iPod screen is large enough for anything where I wouldn't want something much bigger than a handheld device (like a real TV or at least my laptop), the battery thing is something of a problem, though I'm not sure its that big of a dela, and I wouldn't keep a protable player out of a carrying case, anyhow, so the scratching deal is literally a nonissue.
So of the two things you could get right, Microsoft chose to focus on the physical device that needs to be shipped and examined and repaired
The Zune is considerably bulkier, the video iPod is a much more comfortable size for pocket or belt clip, IMO. That's a pretty big deal in a portable player for me, and definitely a hardware issue.
Why does Steve Jobs need an army of lawyers if he didn't do anything wrong?
So, what you are saying, is that no one (and certainly not the government) ever commences or threatens legal action against someone who hasn't done anything wrong, and that having professional, capable legal advice can't help someone who has done nothing wrong demonstrate that?
Wow. Nice world you live in. Nothing like the one over here, though.
Wow, people using the Internet to download TV episodes they missed, i.e., timeshifting, which is allowed by the Fair Use clause?
Downloading TV episodes you "missed" is not timeshifting as was ruled fair use under Betamax.
Receiving it through the regular broadcast means and recording it yourself is timeshifting. Getting a copy from someone else who recorded it, edited it from the format it was broadcast (say, by removing commercials) and made it available to you is something completely different.
That's the part I don't understand. Why does the 14th bring the right of free speech to individuals, but not the right to bear arms?
The 14th Amendment doesn't bring either of those rights to individuals; it makes certain rights of individuals enforceable against the states, rather than merely against the federal government, under the federal Constitution. One articulation of the rationale of "selective incorporation" is that the 14th amendment incorporates the rights that are "essential to ordered liberty" against the states—IOW, that it incorporates fundamental human rights against the states, and that those federal Constitutional rights that existed that simply expressed those fundamental human rights were incorporated, whereas those federal Constitutional rights which were created as an instrumental means to protect other rights but not themselves fundamental are not incorporated. Note that the reason for this rationale is that "incorporation" itself is an application of the language in the 14th Amendment prohibiting states from depriving people of "life, liberty, or property" without due process of law, and particularly that incorporation is simply viewing certain rights established against the federal government by earlier amendments as part of the "liberty" which states may not deprive people of under the 14th.
Under this view, the 2nd Amendment RKBA remains disputed (there isn't a real definitive ruling, AFAIK, on incorporation of the RKBA), while the 5th amendment privileges against prosecution for infamous crimes without an indictment and the 7th amendment right to jury trial in civil suits where the amount at issue is $20+ are generally held to be instrumental rather than fundamental rights.
Yes Microsoft has "already" released Vista -- it is a matter of time before those in the GNOME community see things they like in Vista, and incorporate their favorite ideas into GNOME.
Yeah. I mean, in a few years, there will be 3D-accelerated desktops for GNOME, following on Vista's lead with Aero, right?
Linux will not get more mainstreem till it becomes easier to install.
I haven't had worse experience with Linux installs, generally, than Windows installs.
OTOH, most users don't have to install Windows, because it comes pre-installed and tailored to the factory hardware configuration of their box. That is the disadvantage Linux faces.
I will say this to you: take a gander at ebay. PS3s are selling at only a $50 premium. Compare that to the 360 last year and the far more abundant Wii (selling at a $200-250 premium), and you can see that the demand for the PS3 is worryingly low.
Or, conversely, that Sony intelligently priced the PS3 near the market-clearing price, rather than below it creating an opportunity for arbitrage. Since Sony is in business to make money for Sony, not a horde of e-Bay resellers, the lack of an e-Bay premium isn't, in and of itself, a bad sign.
(OTOH, its a bad sign if Sony both has no strategy for keeping demand near its current level and has plans that require it to keep the PS3 near its current price for a long time into the future.)
The media simply isn't talking about it anymore.
I really don't think that except at the beginning of a launch, the media talking about a console is a big factor. In store, in friends houses, etc., exposure is, I think, more important than what the media is talking about.
Not since several years. And when I did, I arrived late precisely for this reason.
How late do you arrive to avoid the paid product placement in movies? Because, if you don't miss that, you haven't missed the ads.
And that's usually a part of some program, and most of the time I leave before ads begin.
Same question as preceding. As the GP noted, ads don't come only in the form of 30-second spots.
If I want to see a movie, I'll get a DVD and skip past all the crap with mplayer.
mplayer lets you skip over the paid product placement that is the closest analog in movies of in-game advertising in computer games? Amazing feature, I'll have to try it out.
I would be delighted if they could build a better Java implementation than SUN have done to date. In what specific ways do you think they can better SUN?
I don't know. I do know that there are a lot of competing trade-offs in implementing most complex systems, and that some users may have interests that are different than those Sun is designing around. So that someone else with access to the Sun source could make better implementations for specialized uses than Sun (even if it means, say, an Linux distributor identifying and patching platform specific bugs more quickly than they make it into official Sun releases).
You seem to be referring to the state-by-state variation in laws allowing recording of otherwise ephemeral telephone conversations, which are not at all relevant to preservation and publication of fixed messages like email or snail mail.
Not really. It's great grounds for them getting sued.
No its not.
It was a private communication and one could (probably) argue he had a reasonable expectation of privacy.
False. There is generally no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in something you give to someone else, including email. Not that the existence of a reasonable expectation of privacy would necessarily make it illegal, anyway, this isn't a government search and seizure.
It may come as a shock to slashdotters, but you can't just forward any old email that drifts into your inbox.
Aside from that explicitly protected by privacy statutes or legal privileges, though it might come as a surprise to you, yes, you can.
Also, it would have been far more effective to have brought the emails to the attention of federal authorities. Now, the chances of a fair investigation (and trial) are pretty much blown to hell.
Not really. Certainly, there is some potentially prejudicial media attention which might slightly narrow the potential jury pool, and the wrongdoer has been tipped off. But that doesn't prevent both a fair investigation and a fair trial.
So, according to this logic, the first Constitution doesn't prevent a state from establishing religion, correct?
The "first Constitution" did not. The First Amendment alone does not either, which is why there were states with established religions up to the 1820s. The First Amendment was incorporated against the states by the 14th, after the Civil War, unlike the 2nd and parts of the 5th and 7th.
If I don't have a point then you'll be providing a link to where I can download an easy to install Linux driver? I'm using RHEL version 3 update 8. If you can't point me to a driver then my complain is valid.
Um, you never said what you wanted a driver for. That's kind of a critical point when making this kind of demand.
There ARE easy alternatives to "apt-get" and things of that nature.
Yeah. Not only do they exist, but the GUI frontends that make installing or uninstalling much (even third-party) software as easy on Linux as adding or removing Windows components that are designed to be option on Windows are standard on many Linux distros.
I think what people hate to admit is that in order to sell Linux to the masses, it's going to have to be dumbed down.
I don't think that's really true; the convenience features that already exist in most distros that often geeky Linux evangelists overlook because they prefer to get down to the metal may need to be emphasized more, but that isn't really dumbing-down the OS. The power is all there, and all still accessible to the user, its just a matter of PR focus.
The dumbed-down side of it is that there is no compiler... But then again, my mom doesn't want, or need, one.
A compiler is, I would argue, a great convenience feature for non-developers that enables (when properly hidden behind a package management system with a GUI front-end) a lot of simplification of software delivery and upgrades that the average user will appreciate once they've experienced it, and never have to think about the underlying machinery if the front-end is decent.
It is interesting, I guess, that the summary is nothing but a bunch of sentences excerpted from TFA (I supposed that's one solution to no one reading the linked article).
But KDE and Gnome are not the whole Linux desktop experience. Things like AIGLX/Xgl/Compiz/Ruby are part of that experience. Things like the availability of functionality that supports popular Windows-centric formats and service is part of that experience. There are many ways the Linux desktop experience has been advancing, recently, and it will continue to do so.
Plus, there never was a Linux desktop bubble. Linux is as competitive now, if not moreso, than it ever was in the past.
This is discounting the possibility that intelligence relies on some strange quantum-physicsy effect, to the extent that it couldn't achieve sentience without actually using this effect. But it would have to be a strange effect indeed if it made it provably impossible to abstract the hardware.
Sure, but the issue isn't really that it has to be "provably impossible" to abstract the hardware, but whether its practically easier to reproduce a faithful copy of a running system than of a human brain; if it's not (which, given how little we know of either topic, is impossible to say now) than AI doesn't pose a unique spectre of duplicated intelligences, either because it doesn't post any threat, or because the threat already exists in human intelligence without "AI", just direct copies of existing natural intelligences.
But, in this day and age, in our society, things like that are not mass produced unless there is commercial viability.
It doesn't take mass production for a significant number of them to exist; a small but significant number of people making a few each would be enough (especially if, being independent, they decided that they'd like to make more of their own kind.)
Lots of people tinker with robotics now because of the joy of creation, not because of practical utility. You think if technology advanced so that robotics included the capacity to create self-willed creatures, no one would make that leap for noncommercial purposes?
(Also, I think its dubious that there wouldn't be a commercial demand if the self-willed beings could do commercially-valuable intellectual work that otherwise would require a human, but could do the work with less expense. Sure, the owner would have to keep them in line somehow, which would be harder than just running tame machines, but that could well be practical, and cost-effective, at some future level of technology, at least until the robots succeeded in their demand for legal rights...)
Which, according to you, was only protected when assembling before the federal government.
No, it wasn't. What I said is that it, and I quote here, created a right "only enforceable against the federal government". Its a question of who the limitation applied to not in what context it applied.
The federal government could (though, of course, it would violate the First Amendment if it did) interfere with peaceable assemblies that aren't before the federal capitol, just as the British government during colonial rule interfered with peaceable assemblies that weren't before the Houses of Parliament. That the right is only enforceable against the federal government does not mean that it only extends to assembly directed at the federal government.
So which is it? Did people have the right to assemble "which can be exercised anywhere people can gather." or did they only have it when assembling to petition the federal government?
They had a right to assemble "which can be exercised anywhere peopel can gather", which right (so far as it sprung from the federal Constitution) was only enforceable against the federal government (until the rights included in the 1st Amendment were applied to the states by the 14th Amendment.)
Slashdot Mirror
For users (probably not, principally, corporate environments) who are concerned about accidentally viewing certain types of content, and for organizations not principally concerned with profit interested in helping users avoid stumbling on to such content, it would be nice to have a set of open standards and browser behaviors that identified suspect links in a not-to-intrusive way, but one that provided information as to what kind of potentially objectionable content they might contain. Something less obtrusive than the blocked-but-click-through-if-you-really-need-it behavior of, say, some WebSense configurations, and something that allowed accessing a user-defined set of public repositories to get the ratings (including a local database.)
Doing it this way in HTML won't serve the needs and interests of users well. What is really needed is an optional, client-side change in how HTML is handled that automatically processes links against a customizable set of content ratings (perhaps using separate advisory ratings hosted by hosts of the target content, or linked or embedded into the document providing the link, as one source of ratings, but also capable of accessing a user-selected set of third-party remote rating sources and locally-maintained user ratings potentially overriding remote ratings) and modifying the appearance of links or statusbar descriptions based on those ratings.
If you are going to try to provide this kind of information, using a single NSFW marker provided by the provider of the link is a way-too-limited way of doing things to be of much use.
Most people I know would only buy an iTunes gift card for someone they know uses iTMS.
Presumably, your friends know about your distaste for iTMS. What are you going nuts about?
I mean, seriously, if someone posted that most of the gifts they bought for people were, say, Garth Brooks CDs, I wouldn't go berserk about how I hate Garth Brooks and would be angry if someone bought me one of his CDs as a gift, because, you know, I'd just assume that someone who said that had lots of friends that they knew wanted Garth Brooks CDs.
Why would you assume that a CD burned out of iTunes collection would contain an identical set of songs to any "popular CD" available in brick and mortar shops?
Comparatively, sure.
I'm not choosing between buying a 3G or earlier iPod and a Zune. I'm choosing between a current iPod and a Zune. (Well, no, I'm not, my wife and I just bought iPods. But the point remains; noncurrent hardware is not the competition for the Zune.)
Correct.
Well, sure, if I lost a little bit of weight in my waist, I wouldn't be bugged as much by larger belt-clip devices (though larger pocket devices would still be exactly as much of an annoyance as they are now, and the iPod I have is about as big as I'd like a pocket device to be.)
Yeah, maybe I'm pickier than the people that bought 1G iPods. So what? Is Microsoft only hoping to sell to people who would have bought 1G iPods but haven't noticed all the players introduced since?
"Not what I wish it was" (especially if a competing product is what the customer wishes it was) is a complaint reflective of an inability to do "the job".
Personally, I think the iPod screen is large enough for anything where I wouldn't want something much bigger than a handheld device (like a real TV or at least my laptop), the battery thing is something of a problem, though I'm not sure its that big of a dela, and I wouldn't keep a protable player out of a carrying case, anyhow, so the scratching deal is literally a nonissue.
The Zune is considerably bulkier, the video iPod is a much more comfortable size for pocket or belt clip, IMO. That's a pretty big deal in a portable player for me, and definitely a hardware issue.
Downloading TV episodes you "missed" is not timeshifting as was ruled fair use under Betamax.
Receiving it through the regular broadcast means and recording it yourself is timeshifting. Getting a copy from someone else who recorded it, edited it from the format it was broadcast (say, by removing commercials) and made it available to you is something completely different.
The 14th Amendment doesn't bring either of those rights to individuals; it makes certain rights of individuals enforceable against the states, rather than merely against the federal government, under the federal Constitution. One articulation of the rationale of "selective incorporation" is that the 14th amendment incorporates the rights that are "essential to ordered liberty" against the states—IOW, that it incorporates fundamental human rights against the states, and that those federal Constitutional rights that existed that simply expressed those fundamental human rights were incorporated, whereas those federal Constitutional rights which were created as an instrumental means to protect other rights but not themselves fundamental are not incorporated. Note that the reason for this rationale is that "incorporation" itself is an application of the language in the 14th Amendment prohibiting states from depriving people of "life, liberty, or property" without due process of law, and particularly that incorporation is simply viewing certain rights established against the federal government by earlier amendments as part of the "liberty" which states may not deprive people of under the 14th.
Under this view, the 2nd Amendment RKBA remains disputed (there isn't a real definitive ruling, AFAIK, on incorporation of the RKBA), while the 5th amendment privileges against prosecution for infamous crimes without an indictment and the 7th amendment right to jury trial in civil suits where the amount at issue is $20+ are generally held to be instrumental rather than fundamental rights.
Yeah. I mean, in a few years, there will be 3D-accelerated desktops for GNOME, following on Vista's lead with Aero, right?
I haven't had worse experience with Linux installs, generally, than Windows installs.
OTOH, most users don't have to install Windows, because it comes pre-installed and tailored to the factory hardware configuration of their box. That is the disadvantage Linux faces.
Or, conversely, that Sony intelligently priced the PS3 near the market-clearing price, rather than below it creating an opportunity for arbitrage. Since Sony is in business to make money for Sony, not a horde of e-Bay resellers, the lack of an e-Bay premium isn't, in and of itself, a bad sign.
(OTOH, its a bad sign if Sony both has no strategy for keeping demand near its current level and has plans that require it to keep the PS3 near its current price for a long time into the future.)
I really don't think that except at the beginning of a launch, the media talking about a console is a big factor. In store, in friends houses, etc., exposure is, I think, more important than what the media is talking about.
How late do you arrive to avoid the paid product placement in movies? Because, if you don't miss that, you haven't missed the ads.
Same question as preceding. As the GP noted, ads don't come only in the form of 30-second spots.
mplayer lets you skip over the paid product placement that is the closest analog in movies of in-game advertising in computer games? Amazing feature, I'll have to try it out.
I don't know. I do know that there are a lot of competing trade-offs in implementing most complex systems, and that some users may have interests that are different than those Sun is designing around. So that someone else with access to the Sun source could make better implementations for specialized uses than Sun (even if it means, say, an Linux distributor identifying and patching platform specific bugs more quickly than they make it into official Sun releases).
Its a standard Republican Congressional excuse, see, for instance, Mark Foley.
You seem to be referring to the state-by-state variation in laws allowing recording of otherwise ephemeral telephone conversations, which are not at all relevant to preservation and publication of fixed messages like email or snail mail.
No its not.
False. There is generally no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in something you give to someone else, including email. Not that the existence of a reasonable expectation of privacy would necessarily make it illegal, anyway, this isn't a government search and seizure.
Aside from that explicitly protected by privacy statutes or legal privileges, though it might come as a surprise to you, yes, you can.
Not really. Certainly, there is some potentially prejudicial media attention which might slightly narrow the potential jury pool, and the wrongdoer has been tipped off. But that doesn't prevent both a fair investigation and a fair trial.
Isn't that one of the whole points of the GPL, to enable that?
Sure. And they probably can, at least for certain uses.
The "first Constitution" did not. The First Amendment alone does not either, which is why there were states with established religions up to the 1820s. The First Amendment was incorporated against the states by the 14th, after the Civil War, unlike the 2nd and parts of the 5th and 7th.
Yeah. Not only do they exist, but the GUI frontends that make installing or uninstalling much (even third-party) software as easy on Linux as adding or removing Windows components that are designed to be option on Windows are standard on many Linux distros.
I don't think that's really true; the convenience features that already exist in most distros that often geeky Linux evangelists overlook because they prefer to get down to the metal may need to be emphasized more, but that isn't really dumbing-down the OS. The power is all there, and all still accessible to the user, its just a matter of PR focus.
A compiler is, I would argue, a great convenience feature for non-developers that enables (when properly hidden behind a package management system with a GUI front-end) a lot of simplification of software delivery and upgrades that the average user will appreciate once they've experienced it, and never have to think about the underlying machinery if the front-end is decent.
Sun is a big company. As far as I know, OOo/StarOffice is second (though a distant second) to MS Office in market share among office suites.
"Games" is certainly an issue for the home desktop, but certainly less for the corporate desktop.
It is interesting, I guess, that the summary is nothing but a bunch of sentences excerpted from TFA (I supposed that's one solution to no one reading the linked article).
But KDE and Gnome are not the whole Linux desktop experience. Things like AIGLX/Xgl/Compiz/Ruby are part of that experience. Things like the availability of functionality that supports popular Windows-centric formats and service is part of that experience. There are many ways the Linux desktop experience has been advancing, recently, and it will continue to do so.
Plus, there never was a Linux desktop bubble. Linux is as competitive now, if not moreso, than it ever was in the past.
Sure, but the issue isn't really that it has to be "provably impossible" to abstract the hardware, but whether its practically easier to reproduce a faithful copy of a running system than of a human brain; if it's not (which, given how little we know of either topic, is impossible to say now) than AI doesn't pose a unique spectre of duplicated intelligences, either because it doesn't post any threat, or because the threat already exists in human intelligence without "AI", just direct copies of existing natural intelligences.
It doesn't take mass production for a significant number of them to exist; a small but significant number of people making a few each would be enough (especially if, being independent, they decided that they'd like to make more of their own kind.)
Lots of people tinker with robotics now because of the joy of creation, not because of practical utility. You think if technology advanced so that robotics included the capacity to create self-willed creatures, no one would make that leap for noncommercial purposes?
(Also, I think its dubious that there wouldn't be a commercial demand if the self-willed beings could do commercially-valuable intellectual work that otherwise would require a human, but could do the work with less expense. Sure, the owner would have to keep them in line somehow, which would be harder than just running tame machines, but that could well be practical, and cost-effective, at some future level of technology, at least until the robots succeeded in their demand for legal rights...)
No, it wasn't. What I said is that it, and I quote here, created a right "only enforceable against the federal government". Its a question of who the limitation applied to not in what context it applied.
The federal government could (though, of course, it would violate the First Amendment if it did) interfere with peaceable assemblies that aren't before the federal capitol, just as the British government during colonial rule interfered with peaceable assemblies that weren't before the Houses of Parliament. That the right is only enforceable against the federal government does not mean that it only extends to assembly directed at the federal government.
They had a right to assemble "which can be exercised anywhere peopel can gather", which right (so far as it sprung from the federal Constitution) was only enforceable against the federal government (until the rights included in the 1st Amendment were applied to the states by the 14th Amendment.)