You don't see in 3 dimensions now, you MOVE in 3 dimensions and you SEE in 2. If you could see in 3 dimensions you'd be awfully confused, because you'd be able to see every side of every object in your field of view.
Theoretically, this would not be possible anyway given our current configuration and understanding of light. To be able to see in 3d, you'd have to somehow pick up light that was being deflected away from your eyes, or that was blocked by foreground objects in your field of vision.
Unfortunately for the bible-thumpers, this isn't actually a theory, it's just an idea. The idea that among a litany of predatory creatures human beings were primarily pushed by one - that although fear-inducing is relatively harmless on the scale of tribes and socities - is a bit of a stretch.
If this is pursued by scientists we will likely find that, yes, there are specific factors involved in competition between humans and snakes that drove specific selections that persist in modern humans, but to suggest that all of "pre-human evolution" was driven primarily by snakes is a bit silly.
Despite the fact that you meant that they should have distributed off-site backups, potentially with failsafe switches, this is MySpace we're talking about here. I would be mildly surprised if they even still have the installation medium for the operating system the site is running on.
Besides, I didn't know anything was wrong. I try to avoid MySpace like it has the plague (oh wait, it does), but even when I let my defenses down and click through to a link, it's always down anyway.
I fail to see what position you are attempting to argue from. Are you trying to discredit my statement that researchers will disprove false statements by highlighting an event in which researchers disproved false statements? Or, perhaps, you are trying to argue that scientific inquiry is flawed because there is imperfection in humanity that must be recognized and overcome manually?
Either way, your argument is fatally flawed and nonsensical. You could just as well argue that knowledge of phsyics is fatally flawed because of the proposal of aether. Yet, here we are, a space-faring species of life that can even peer nearly to the edge of universe. For a group of people who must, by your argument, be so wholly ignorant of light's properties, we sure do manage and exploit it pretty well, wouldn't you agree?
Any argument against evolution that relies on mistakes and lies from the past - especially those that have been recognized and corrected - is as patently ridiculous as it gets. Your argument is logically absurd, and if you continue to press it, I propose that you too might well be absurd and your opinion on the matter be little more valuable to rational people than that of a diseased chimpanzee.
I wonder how they are going to spin it to claim that it supports evolution.
That statement doesn't make any sense. Even ignoring the fact that you're preconcieving of what people you don't know might say about something you apparently don't understand, if it becomes another piece of evidence to toss on that outrageously huge pile of proof for our current evolutionary models, they wont' have to "spin" anything, and if they do try to "spin" something that isn't so, all the evolutionary biologists, being at no loss for evidence by any stretch of the imagination, will immediately climb all over each other to tear them to pieces for the purpose of increased visibility in the field.
But, that's what I'm getting at. It's not that they "don't understand them", it's that they don't pander to them. Bush's campaign was specifically designed not to contain much actual information. Instead, it was meant to convey the idea that Bush was in control, had all the answers, and that he understood the needs of the people so well that they didn't need to know about their needs themselves.
Kerry, on the other hand, took on more of an inclusive role by providing a lot of information and then explaining his position, apparently assuming that people either knew what was going on, or were willing to find out. In a sort of sordid irony, Kerry's approach was exactly the OPPOSITE of elitist: he presented the information with the belief that he was talking to intelligent people who wanted to be involved in the political process and who would understand how he had reasoned his positions.
Bush, on the other hand, ran a campaign of emotion where he talked to the people like they were children who simply needed hand-holding. His campaign was EXTREMELY elitist and conveyed the idea of a supreme leadership that would care for a flock so the flock, which was too ignorant and weak to understand, didn't have to worry about things.
For whatever reason - I'm not a psychologist so I don't understand it - Bush's cooing beat out Kerry's inclusionary approach. Maybe people just need to feel sheltered from a problem rather than a part of the solution to that problem, I don't know. Whatever the reason, the point remains: Kerry and democrats ran a (relatively) honest and straightforward old-fashioned campaign whereas Bush and the republicans ran a campaign largely based on emotional inclusion. Kerry's approach was almost that of a business-first task force and Bush's was more of a nurturing, familial campaign. Bush's was largely "trust me" and Kerry's was more like "join me".
Now, mind you, I didn't directly address any of the procedural complaints you made against the campaigns. I don't necessarily disagree with the points you make on them though. I'm just less interested in that than I am in the psychological approaches of each campaign and how that seemed to impact things.
...trap of believing that your ideals are correct...
I would argue that only mental illness would result in a different position on the matter. Why, after all, would a healthy, rational mind continue to hold a belief it thought to be inferior? That is, you're correct: where you and I differ, I believe my opinion to be superior to yours, which is why I continue to hold it. Were you to convince me that my opinion is, in fact, inferior, I would change it and again believe that my opinon is superior than somebody who held my prior one.
Primary example: I used to be staunchly anti-gay. Now, however, after thoroughly reviewing my position, I feel no particular need to treat gay people any differently from straight people, and I am staunch supporter of allowing gay people to do all the things straight people do (although it should be noted that within the context of marriage I think that the concept of marriage the government recognizes must be a government-sanctioned institution and that churches should merely have access to the paperwork and be able to perform religious ceremonies on the matter however they see fit)
Also, being a member of a political party is not a matter of being a borg-life entity in a larger collective. I in no way agree with all the things the democratic party does and says, but on the whole I support them in certain circumstances (in reality I tend to prefer a jointly controlled Congress with a Democratic president because it usually seems to promote moderation).
There is really no "elitism" in any significant, non-localized sense. The elitism charge stems from the right from people who reject education as a means to improved leadership qualities and it stems from the left (in its modern form) from people who reject experience as a means to improved leadership qualities. In reality, most people simply disagree on things and there's no elitism at all. They just believe what they believe for whatever reason they have, and either side would be equally valid in claiming "elitism" was to blame.
What you don't seem to understand is that it's irrelevant whether or not theives are hurting their bottom line. What is relevant is that they're correct: people ARE stealing their music. Regardless of the impact it has (or doesn't), that is what gives them traction to press for insane anti-consumer laws and technologies.
Furthermore, it gives them a scapegoat. If CD prices go up and legit consumers complain, they can just blame the theives to silence detractors. No regular consumer has the time to delve into balance sheets and such to discern the truth, so they just say "oh okay" and then when people like me go around and say "I don't buy CDs here's why", they just say "oh, you're one of the dirty theives who makes my CD prices go up".
What the p2p theives just don't get, or don't care about maybe, is that by continuing to steal music, whether it hurts the industry or not, they just provide this enormous amount of fuel that makes it next to impossible to actually stop the RIAA. People using legit means get looked at just like the pirates so they get no support from common consumers. Furthermore, they give the RIAA a reason to keep pressing for new laws and restrictions.
P2P does nothing but harm any chances of ever reversing this tide. The best friend the RIAA has in all this is the people who keep stealing music.
Problem is, customers aren't evil, piracy is not rampant (yeah, it exists, but it's not the monster the RIAA claims it is), and it doesn't need to be stopped.
You fail to understand the enemy, and that is why you will lose.
The RIAA and MPAA are not fighthing this fight because they believe piracy is a problem now. They're not spending all this money fighting it because they want to get a couple extra bucks in sales.
They're fighting it because they recognize that p2p has the potential to completely decimate their supply channels by allowing every Tom, Dick, and Harry to interrupt their entire business plan with a mouse clicks.
This is a fact. Whether you believe it will actually happen or not is up for debate, but the RIAA and MPAA do believe that it will, or that it's likely enough that going on this campaign now is in their best interests.
Of course, like any other company that mistreats a cusomter, the simplest solution is to simply cease doing business with them. However, since the majority of people who are aware of this problem seem to be comprised of either theives or theif sympathizers who would rather just keep fueling the fire by stealing music, there's nobody really out there with any effective grassroots campaign to expose this disgraceful behavior.
If you want to put an end to this, the simple answer is to cease all activities involving consumption of the product. Don't steal it, don't buy it, don't listen to it on the radio, and make sure you let everyone know your position and explain why you're taking that position WITHOUT making it sound like you're just whining that you're coming under fire for wanting to steal things.
I can just see it now, businesses trying to get work done while dealing with those messages.
Of course, what all the slashbots refuse to acknowledge is the fact that false positives appear to be a relatively small problem considering the large scale deployment of Windows. 100% of the people who get these are not innocent. A majority of them are people who either stole a copy of Windows from p2p or who got scammed by some fly-by-night PC shop.
There is really very little to worry about from consumer and business perspective. It's an annoyance, but compared to other Windows annoyances (spyware, viruses, patching, etc.) it looks to me to be a very, very small one.
There's really no story here. WGA is an insult and a pest. It's not an enormous, major scale issue.
Personally, I'll probably just retire my PC to be purely an offline game machine if WGA ever becomes mandatory and then switch back to my FreeBSD system as my primary workstation. It will be a minor inconvenience and I will have to invest about an hour switching configurations and moving boxes. I will quickly forget about the entire thing shortly thereafter.
If you are a miswired conservative lunatic and will mistake this post for some sort of anti-right-wing bashing campaign, or a miswired liberal lunatic who will mistake this for a sweeping acquittal of left-wingers, kindly skip to the last paragraph, then come back to read the rest. Thanks.
It's not that the dems are "disorganized". This is a lie, and a very effective one, perpetuated by a group of people who have something to gain by the loss of others: republican politicians and their supporters.
The problem here is that the republicans have realized that propagandistic nonsense made into a platform through the use of empty platitudes like "liberal senator from Massachussettes" and "with us or against us" and "cut and run" are far more effective campaign platform statements than actual plans. Democrats, like Kerry, who compiled and published a vastly detailed series of positions, continue to assume that the voting population is intelligent and interested and so they continue the uneffective campaign strategy of actually putting forward a platform.
Republicans, on the other hand, have spent the last ten years crafting devious ways to boil ultra-complicated issues into stupid, insultingly simplistic sound bites. As a result, they come off as "speaking to the common man" (in fact, they're simply assuming the typical voter is an idiot incapable of absorbing and understanding and forming an independent opinion on a complicated topic and talking down to them) while the Democrats then come off as "elitists" (another empty piece of slander used against any republican foe who attempts to take in a complete view of any topic rather than boil it down into troglodytic black and white views) for trying to honestly discuss matters openly.
That's why people like Hillary Clinton get so little support from democrats. They're trying to abandon the honesty platform and mimic the republicans, which is insulting, and so we tell them to take thier stupid little campaigns and shove 'em.
The Democrats are not "disorganized", for the most part. They're simply engaging in the same old-time campaigns of the 40s and 50s when people expected their candidates to be open and honest about their opinions and didn't expect them to simply say "trust me, you don't need to know anything because I can handle it all for you, honest, oh, and by the way, I saw my opponent picking Stalin's nose on the train in this morning".
When it comes right down to it, republicans and republican supporters rely primarily on propaganda. They seize on sound bites and meaningless slander ("idiotarian", "moonbat", "elitist") while the democrats - generally speaking, not all of this is entirely true of all memmbers of each party of course - continue to make the mistake of assuming that they can treat voters like competent people who are interested in honest participation in the political process.
Naturally I feel obliged to point out that all this is merely observation, not a damnation of republicans and veneration of democrats. I in no way particularly trust either party when it comes to actually being elected to power, and if you think that the dems aren't going to be just as corrupt and stupid as teh republicans I might remind you that CALEA, Communications Decency, and the DMCA all came into being under the watch of, primarily, Democrats, and that the primary reason for the takeover of the republicans in the 90s was disgust with a Congress run by democrats that was just as corrupt as the current republican Congress is today.
But what if consumers don't need better processors? There's a huge disparity between this new "war" and the early P4 and late P3 days. Back then, it was a foot race to provide the newest, most exciting processors around. Now? Meh.
Here's the rub: everytime a new breed of chips comes out, I find myself just buying the increasingly cheap leftover stocks of prior generations. The last big thing that got me up off my butt to buy a CPU was 64-bit on the x86 platform, and the only reason I even did that was because my LAST chip, the innovation of which was an 800MHz bus, got a nice little roasting from a shorted motherboard.
When it comes down to it, processing power and innovation, outside a few specialized sectors, isn't really doing it for me anymore. I find myself focusing very little on processors when shopping for parts because, frankly, I literally just need "A" processor and I can practically grab just about anything I want as long as it's compatible with my chipset.
Intel and AMD need to branch off into something more interesting. As a consumer, I don't need all this stuff. Give me something truly innovative, don't just drag concepts over from other platforms and hype them up in a press release. This is all well and good, but it's just not exciting and, by extension, it's not creating anything exciting as far as applications and use go. There is niether a NEED for the latest and greatest (short of neuroses some of us suffer) nor is there any exciting drive fueled by innovative new concepts.
Bah. Wake me when the first consumer-level quantum processing unit is getting ready to be released, I guess.
You're not so much naive as you are lacking in creative thinking. Squishy internal security is not uncommon, especially if a company has devoted a large amount of time to securing things on the outside. A very hard external shell often creates a false sense of security whereby people fail to secure against directly connected internal attacks, or attacks (and mistakes) from regular users.
Bear in mind that they did not have to deal with trying to find vulnerabilities in external gateways and then try to wind their way into the center of the network, they STARTED in the center of the network.
The fact that they were even able to get a network connection on a foreign laptop immediately suggests to me that the system is configured in a dangerous way, probably to allow management types to bring in either personal or company laptops that they take home and on business with a low level of security but a high level of convenience.
There's a difference between anti-Americanism as a political and social principle and being anti-American as a matter of bigotry. When people speak of anti-Americanism, they generally are referring to the fact that, as far as the world is concerned (and correctly so) your political, military, and social behaviors are insane, dangerous, and belligerent.
However, as a matter of treating Americans individually, we tend to find you to be rather amusing people, whether because you create crazy spectacles that are entertaining to watch, or because you're simply and interesting people. Personally, I wouldn't want to live with you, but I certainly don't harbor any ill will as far as, for example, sitting in a pub and chatting it up a bit.
Furthermore, anti-Americanism as a security principle is entirely different. Americans are not hated, even by the bigots, to the point that normal people would attack them, but if you are easily identified as an American, you make an easy target for anybody looking to make a political statement. Because Americans, really, have so little to fear from terrorism, your news agencies always make a big deal about kidnapped or murdered Americans, so it's a good way to get an extreme political agenda face time. That, however, is a matter of opportunistic criminals and terrorists lurking in the crowds. The crowds themselves aren't going to mob you just because you're American. You may be shunned by some people for your country's disrespectful behavior toward the world, but for the most part we tend to look at you as people under the thumb of a violent and corrupt government, not as a violent and corrupt people.
Even the French, who you've been insulting for years (and who have been insulting the world for even longer) don't actually hate you as individuals. There's really very little ill will towards the American public, because we simply don't view you as being the same as your political views, and we can agree or disagree with you on whatever level is necessary for the current topic of conversation.
Needless to say the previous post was obviously made by a kid who lived in a fenced neighborhood where the most serious crime involves people stealing lawn ornaments and playing their car stereos too loud. I'd wager the average personal income in his area was about $55,000 and the school could easily afford to buy new computers year after year, fund expensive field trips, and maintain all portions of the school building on a daily basis.
Let me tell you about my school, dickhead.
I used to live in a pretty rural area where most people descended from farmers. As small time farming has obviously been utterly obliterated by big business conclaves in the Midwest, most of these people were forced to close up shop, sell their farms, and seek out work as low-wage labrorers doing mechanics, factory and warehouse work, or, often, just trying to find odd jobs time after time wherever they can.
The roof in the cafeteria collapsed because there wasn't enough money to fix water damage after a heavy winter snow melt, so we had to convert half the gym into a cafeteria. Until about 1994 the newest computer I ever used had a 3 Mhz processor, no disk drive, and in order to print, you had to ask if it was okay to use the dot matrix - that usually didn't work - and hope that there was enough paper left on the roll.
We were the most violent school in the state. Fights were a daily occurence, the ambulance was brought in a number of times each year to cart off kids with concussions, unchecked bleeding, or broken bones. There was no money for security, and the police, though they did what they could, were already stretched thin due to the lack of tax income to pay for them and the wide area they were responsible for watching over.
Drugs were a constant problem as well. Most of my friends did them, it was easy enough to buy them, and sometimes you could even just find them sitting places if you knew where to look.
Where there were two parent homes, it was almost unheard of to not have both parents working. It's not that these people didn't love their children, mind you, it's that they had to choose between taking their kids to the ballpark and feeding them. This contributed a great deal to the violence and drug abuse, as well as a large incidence of teen pregnancy (which was not the least bit hampered by our good, gracious right-wing retard overlords teaching abstinence-only programs - we were the only district in the area to do it, and by far we had the highest incidence of teen pregnancy).
So next time you decide to open your mouth and make a really easy comment on a really complicated problem, just remember that the people you're pissing off learned to fight in these types of schools so they didn't have to be carted to the hospital. YOU talk the talk because you CAN'T walk the walk, so just shut your damn mouth before somebody does it for you, you worthless little prick.
By "maintaining a Windows box" I assume you mean you gave up on the ultra-complicated task of allowing Windows Update to install patches for you? Because I had an XP Pro box for a year and half that had no trouble at all beyond failing due to a damaged motherboard, and my current system has been going along now for six months without a hitch.
So, basically, you're a lazy bastard who won't even give your computer 10 minutes to do the work for you every few weeks, and now you think it's edgy and cool to mention how lazy you are on Slashdot, and how wickedly 1337 you are for not using Windows?
It's a form of anti-intellectual proposal and, at this moment in America, pride in anti-intellectualism is predominantly a right-leaning and religious phenomenon.
Guess they were asking for help from the wrong guy, huh bucko? Or, were you able to answer based on your own personal track record of MISERABLE FAILURE?
Instead of modding this asscracker's unfunny junk up, why not consider helping me out? I was recently the victim of a targeted modbombing in which a number of far-right extremists modded several of my comments troll for no reason.
I'm proposing that you put your points to good use and reverse the damage done in this terrorist attack on my Slashdot credibility. Come on, it's not like there's anything else worth modding or commenting on coming in this story.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't see in 3 dimensions now, you MOVE in 3 dimensions and you SEE in 2. If you could see in 3 dimensions you'd be awfully confused, because you'd be able to see every side of every object in your field of view.
Theoretically, this would not be possible anyway given our current configuration and understanding of light. To be able to see in 3d, you'd have to somehow pick up light that was being deflected away from your eyes, or that was blocked by foreground objects in your field of vision.
Unfortunately for the bible-thumpers, this isn't actually a theory, it's just an idea. The idea that among a litany of predatory creatures human beings were primarily pushed by one - that although fear-inducing is relatively harmless on the scale of tribes and socities - is a bit of a stretch.
If this is pursued by scientists we will likely find that, yes, there are specific factors involved in competition between humans and snakes that drove specific selections that persist in modern humans, but to suggest that all of "pre-human evolution" was driven primarily by snakes is a bit silly.
Nobody said it was easy, they said it was your job. If you don't like that, go find a new profession.
Despite the fact that you meant that they should have distributed off-site backups, potentially with failsafe switches, this is MySpace we're talking about here. I would be mildly surprised if they even still have the installation medium for the operating system the site is running on.
Besides, I didn't know anything was wrong. I try to avoid MySpace like it has the plague (oh wait, it does), but even when I let my defenses down and click through to a link, it's always down anyway.
I fail to see what position you are attempting to argue from. Are you trying to discredit my statement that researchers will disprove false statements by highlighting an event in which researchers disproved false statements? Or, perhaps, you are trying to argue that scientific inquiry is flawed because there is imperfection in humanity that must be recognized and overcome manually?
Either way, your argument is fatally flawed and nonsensical. You could just as well argue that knowledge of phsyics is fatally flawed because of the proposal of aether. Yet, here we are, a space-faring species of life that can even peer nearly to the edge of universe. For a group of people who must, by your argument, be so wholly ignorant of light's properties, we sure do manage and exploit it pretty well, wouldn't you agree?
Any argument against evolution that relies on mistakes and lies from the past - especially those that have been recognized and corrected - is as patently ridiculous as it gets. Your argument is logically absurd, and if you continue to press it, I propose that you too might well be absurd and your opinion on the matter be little more valuable to rational people than that of a diseased chimpanzee.
That statement doesn't make any sense. Even ignoring the fact that you're preconcieving of what people you don't know might say about something you apparently don't understand, if it becomes another piece of evidence to toss on that outrageously huge pile of proof for our current evolutionary models, they wont' have to "spin" anything, and if they do try to "spin" something that isn't so, all the evolutionary biologists, being at no loss for evidence by any stretch of the imagination, will immediately climb all over each other to tear them to pieces for the purpose of increased visibility in the field.
But, that's what I'm getting at. It's not that they "don't understand them", it's that they don't pander to them. Bush's campaign was specifically designed not to contain much actual information. Instead, it was meant to convey the idea that Bush was in control, had all the answers, and that he understood the needs of the people so well that they didn't need to know about their needs themselves.
Kerry, on the other hand, took on more of an inclusive role by providing a lot of information and then explaining his position, apparently assuming that people either knew what was going on, or were willing to find out. In a sort of sordid irony, Kerry's approach was exactly the OPPOSITE of elitist: he presented the information with the belief that he was talking to intelligent people who wanted to be involved in the political process and who would understand how he had reasoned his positions.
Bush, on the other hand, ran a campaign of emotion where he talked to the people like they were children who simply needed hand-holding. His campaign was EXTREMELY elitist and conveyed the idea of a supreme leadership that would care for a flock so the flock, which was too ignorant and weak to understand, didn't have to worry about things.
For whatever reason - I'm not a psychologist so I don't understand it - Bush's cooing beat out Kerry's inclusionary approach. Maybe people just need to feel sheltered from a problem rather than a part of the solution to that problem, I don't know. Whatever the reason, the point remains: Kerry and democrats ran a (relatively) honest and straightforward old-fashioned campaign whereas Bush and the republicans ran a campaign largely based on emotional inclusion. Kerry's approach was almost that of a business-first task force and Bush's was more of a nurturing, familial campaign. Bush's was largely "trust me" and Kerry's was more like "join me".
Now, mind you, I didn't directly address any of the procedural complaints you made against the campaigns. I don't necessarily disagree with the points you make on them though. I'm just less interested in that than I am in the psychological approaches of each campaign and how that seemed to impact things.
I would argue that only mental illness would result in a different position on the matter. Why, after all, would a healthy, rational mind continue to hold a belief it thought to be inferior? That is, you're correct: where you and I differ, I believe my opinion to be superior to yours, which is why I continue to hold it. Were you to convince me that my opinion is, in fact, inferior, I would change it and again believe that my opinon is superior than somebody who held my prior one.
Primary example: I used to be staunchly anti-gay. Now, however, after thoroughly reviewing my position, I feel no particular need to treat gay people any differently from straight people, and I am staunch supporter of allowing gay people to do all the things straight people do (although it should be noted that within the context of marriage I think that the concept of marriage the government recognizes must be a government-sanctioned institution and that churches should merely have access to the paperwork and be able to perform religious ceremonies on the matter however they see fit)
Also, being a member of a political party is not a matter of being a borg-life entity in a larger collective. I in no way agree with all the things the democratic party does and says, but on the whole I support them in certain circumstances (in reality I tend to prefer a jointly controlled Congress with a Democratic president because it usually seems to promote moderation).
There is really no "elitism" in any significant, non-localized sense. The elitism charge stems from the right from people who reject education as a means to improved leadership qualities and it stems from the left (in its modern form) from people who reject experience as a means to improved leadership qualities. In reality, most people simply disagree on things and there's no elitism at all. They just believe what they believe for whatever reason they have, and either side would be equally valid in claiming "elitism" was to blame.
What you don't seem to understand is that it's irrelevant whether or not theives are hurting their bottom line. What is relevant is that they're correct: people ARE stealing their music. Regardless of the impact it has (or doesn't), that is what gives them traction to press for insane anti-consumer laws and technologies.
Furthermore, it gives them a scapegoat. If CD prices go up and legit consumers complain, they can just blame the theives to silence detractors. No regular consumer has the time to delve into balance sheets and such to discern the truth, so they just say "oh okay" and then when people like me go around and say "I don't buy CDs here's why", they just say "oh, you're one of the dirty theives who makes my CD prices go up".
What the p2p theives just don't get, or don't care about maybe, is that by continuing to steal music, whether it hurts the industry or not, they just provide this enormous amount of fuel that makes it next to impossible to actually stop the RIAA. People using legit means get looked at just like the pirates so they get no support from common consumers. Furthermore, they give the RIAA a reason to keep pressing for new laws and restrictions.
P2P does nothing but harm any chances of ever reversing this tide. The best friend the RIAA has in all this is the people who keep stealing music.
You fail to understand the enemy, and that is why you will lose.
The RIAA and MPAA are not fighthing this fight because they believe piracy is a problem now. They're not spending all this money fighting it because they want to get a couple extra bucks in sales.
They're fighting it because they recognize that p2p has the potential to completely decimate their supply channels by allowing every Tom, Dick, and Harry to interrupt their entire business plan with a mouse clicks.
This is a fact. Whether you believe it will actually happen or not is up for debate, but the RIAA and MPAA do believe that it will, or that it's likely enough that going on this campaign now is in their best interests.
Of course, like any other company that mistreats a cusomter, the simplest solution is to simply cease doing business with them. However, since the majority of people who are aware of this problem seem to be comprised of either theives or theif sympathizers who would rather just keep fueling the fire by stealing music, there's nobody really out there with any effective grassroots campaign to expose this disgraceful behavior.
If you want to put an end to this, the simple answer is to cease all activities involving consumption of the product. Don't steal it, don't buy it, don't listen to it on the radio, and make sure you let everyone know your position and explain why you're taking that position WITHOUT making it sound like you're just whining that you're coming under fire for wanting to steal things.
No income = dead cartel. Very simple equation.
Of course, what all the slashbots refuse to acknowledge is the fact that false positives appear to be a relatively small problem considering the large scale deployment of Windows. 100% of the people who get these are not innocent. A majority of them are people who either stole a copy of Windows from p2p or who got scammed by some fly-by-night PC shop.
There is really very little to worry about from consumer and business perspective. It's an annoyance, but compared to other Windows annoyances (spyware, viruses, patching, etc.) it looks to me to be a very, very small one.
There's really no story here. WGA is an insult and a pest. It's not an enormous, major scale issue.
Personally, I'll probably just retire my PC to be purely an offline game machine if WGA ever becomes mandatory and then switch back to my FreeBSD system as my primary workstation. It will be a minor inconvenience and I will have to invest about an hour switching configurations and moving boxes. I will quickly forget about the entire thing shortly thereafter.
If you are a miswired conservative lunatic and will mistake this post for some sort of anti-right-wing bashing campaign, or a miswired liberal lunatic who will mistake this for a sweeping acquittal of left-wingers, kindly skip to the last paragraph, then come back to read the rest. Thanks.
It's not that the dems are "disorganized". This is a lie, and a very effective one, perpetuated by a group of people who have something to gain by the loss of others: republican politicians and their supporters.
The problem here is that the republicans have realized that propagandistic nonsense made into a platform through the use of empty platitudes like "liberal senator from Massachussettes" and "with us or against us" and "cut and run" are far more effective campaign platform statements than actual plans. Democrats, like Kerry, who compiled and published a vastly detailed series of positions, continue to assume that the voting population is intelligent and interested and so they continue the uneffective campaign strategy of actually putting forward a platform.
Republicans, on the other hand, have spent the last ten years crafting devious ways to boil ultra-complicated issues into stupid, insultingly simplistic sound bites. As a result, they come off as "speaking to the common man" (in fact, they're simply assuming the typical voter is an idiot incapable of absorbing and understanding and forming an independent opinion on a complicated topic and talking down to them) while the Democrats then come off as "elitists" (another empty piece of slander used against any republican foe who attempts to take in a complete view of any topic rather than boil it down into troglodytic black and white views) for trying to honestly discuss matters openly.
That's why people like Hillary Clinton get so little support from democrats. They're trying to abandon the honesty platform and mimic the republicans, which is insulting, and so we tell them to take thier stupid little campaigns and shove 'em.
The Democrats are not "disorganized", for the most part. They're simply engaging in the same old-time campaigns of the 40s and 50s when people expected their candidates to be open and honest about their opinions and didn't expect them to simply say "trust me, you don't need to know anything because I can handle it all for you, honest, oh, and by the way, I saw my opponent picking Stalin's nose on the train in this morning".
When it comes right down to it, republicans and republican supporters rely primarily on propaganda. They seize on sound bites and meaningless slander ("idiotarian", "moonbat", "elitist") while the democrats - generally speaking, not all of this is entirely true of all memmbers of each party of course - continue to make the mistake of assuming that they can treat voters like competent people who are interested in honest participation in the political process.
Naturally I feel obliged to point out that all this is merely observation, not a damnation of republicans and veneration of democrats. I in no way particularly trust either party when it comes to actually being elected to power, and if you think that the dems aren't going to be just as corrupt and stupid as teh republicans I might remind you that CALEA, Communications Decency, and the DMCA all came into being under the watch of, primarily, Democrats, and that the primary reason for the takeover of the republicans in the 90s was disgust with a Congress run by democrats that was just as corrupt as the current republican Congress is today.
But what if consumers don't need better processors? There's a huge disparity between this new "war" and the early P4 and late P3 days. Back then, it was a foot race to provide the newest, most exciting processors around. Now? Meh.
Here's the rub: everytime a new breed of chips comes out, I find myself just buying the increasingly cheap leftover stocks of prior generations. The last big thing that got me up off my butt to buy a CPU was 64-bit on the x86 platform, and the only reason I even did that was because my LAST chip, the innovation of which was an 800MHz bus, got a nice little roasting from a shorted motherboard.
When it comes down to it, processing power and innovation, outside a few specialized sectors, isn't really doing it for me anymore. I find myself focusing very little on processors when shopping for parts because, frankly, I literally just need "A" processor and I can practically grab just about anything I want as long as it's compatible with my chipset.
Intel and AMD need to branch off into something more interesting. As a consumer, I don't need all this stuff. Give me something truly innovative, don't just drag concepts over from other platforms and hype them up in a press release. This is all well and good, but it's just not exciting and, by extension, it's not creating anything exciting as far as applications and use go. There is niether a NEED for the latest and greatest (short of neuroses some of us suffer) nor is there any exciting drive fueled by innovative new concepts.
Bah. Wake me when the first consumer-level quantum processing unit is getting ready to be released, I guess.
You're not so much naive as you are lacking in creative thinking. Squishy internal security is not uncommon, especially if a company has devoted a large amount of time to securing things on the outside. A very hard external shell often creates a false sense of security whereby people fail to secure against directly connected internal attacks, or attacks (and mistakes) from regular users.
Bear in mind that they did not have to deal with trying to find vulnerabilities in external gateways and then try to wind their way into the center of the network, they STARTED in the center of the network.
The fact that they were even able to get a network connection on a foreign laptop immediately suggests to me that the system is configured in a dangerous way, probably to allow management types to bring in either personal or company laptops that they take home and on business with a low level of security but a high level of convenience.
There's a difference between anti-Americanism as a political and social principle and being anti-American as a matter of bigotry. When people speak of anti-Americanism, they generally are referring to the fact that, as far as the world is concerned (and correctly so) your political, military, and social behaviors are insane, dangerous, and belligerent.
However, as a matter of treating Americans individually, we tend to find you to be rather amusing people, whether because you create crazy spectacles that are entertaining to watch, or because you're simply and interesting people. Personally, I wouldn't want to live with you, but I certainly don't harbor any ill will as far as, for example, sitting in a pub and chatting it up a bit.
Furthermore, anti-Americanism as a security principle is entirely different. Americans are not hated, even by the bigots, to the point that normal people would attack them, but if you are easily identified as an American, you make an easy target for anybody looking to make a political statement. Because Americans, really, have so little to fear from terrorism, your news agencies always make a big deal about kidnapped or murdered Americans, so it's a good way to get an extreme political agenda face time. That, however, is a matter of opportunistic criminals and terrorists lurking in the crowds. The crowds themselves aren't going to mob you just because you're American. You may be shunned by some people for your country's disrespectful behavior toward the world, but for the most part we tend to look at you as people under the thumb of a violent and corrupt government, not as a violent and corrupt people.
Even the French, who you've been insulting for years (and who have been insulting the world for even longer) don't actually hate you as individuals. There's really very little ill will towards the American public, because we simply don't view you as being the same as your political views, and we can agree or disagree with you on whatever level is necessary for the current topic of conversation.
Needless to say the previous post was obviously made by a kid who lived in a fenced neighborhood where the most serious crime involves people stealing lawn ornaments and playing their car stereos too loud. I'd wager the average personal income in his area was about $55,000 and the school could easily afford to buy new computers year after year, fund expensive field trips, and maintain all portions of the school building on a daily basis.
Let me tell you about my school, dickhead.
I used to live in a pretty rural area where most people descended from farmers. As small time farming has obviously been utterly obliterated by big business conclaves in the Midwest, most of these people were forced to close up shop, sell their farms, and seek out work as low-wage labrorers doing mechanics, factory and warehouse work, or, often, just trying to find odd jobs time after time wherever they can.
The roof in the cafeteria collapsed because there wasn't enough money to fix water damage after a heavy winter snow melt, so we had to convert half the gym into a cafeteria. Until about 1994 the newest computer I ever used had a 3 Mhz processor, no disk drive, and in order to print, you had to ask if it was okay to use the dot matrix - that usually didn't work - and hope that there was enough paper left on the roll.
We were the most violent school in the state. Fights were a daily occurence, the ambulance was brought in a number of times each year to cart off kids with concussions, unchecked bleeding, or broken bones. There was no money for security, and the police, though they did what they could, were already stretched thin due to the lack of tax income to pay for them and the wide area they were responsible for watching over.
Drugs were a constant problem as well. Most of my friends did them, it was easy enough to buy them, and sometimes you could even just find them sitting places if you knew where to look.
Where there were two parent homes, it was almost unheard of to not have both parents working. It's not that these people didn't love their children, mind you, it's that they had to choose between taking their kids to the ballpark and feeding them. This contributed a great deal to the violence and drug abuse, as well as a large incidence of teen pregnancy (which was not the least bit hampered by our good, gracious right-wing retard overlords teaching abstinence-only programs - we were the only district in the area to do it, and by far we had the highest incidence of teen pregnancy).
So next time you decide to open your mouth and make a really easy comment on a really complicated problem, just remember that the people you're pissing off learned to fight in these types of schools so they didn't have to be carted to the hospital. YOU talk the talk because you CAN'T walk the walk, so just shut your damn mouth before somebody does it for you, you worthless little prick.
Yea, in fact, you're so incredibly forward thinking that Aldous Huxley only beat you by 74 years.
By "maintaining a Windows box" I assume you mean you gave up on the ultra-complicated task of allowing Windows Update to install patches for you? Because I had an XP Pro box for a year and half that had no trouble at all beyond failing due to a damaged motherboard, and my current system has been going along now for six months without a hitch.
So, basically, you're a lazy bastard who won't even give your computer 10 minutes to do the work for you every few weeks, and now you think it's edgy and cool to mention how lazy you are on Slashdot, and how wickedly 1337 you are for not using Windows?
It's a form of anti-intellectual proposal and, at this moment in America, pride in anti-intellectualism is predominantly a right-leaning and religious phenomenon.
Guess they were asking for help from the wrong guy, huh bucko? Or, were you able to answer based on your own personal track record of MISERABLE FAILURE?
It itches and burns. Is there an ointment or something I can take for that?
And Tim O'Reilly != TOR so get the fuck out you pathetic little snotsucking worm.
If you're going to abbreviate things like that, make sure they don't abbreviate to actual technologies.
It only took a second or two for me to figure out you weren't talking about EFF, but it was still annoying.
I concur with your post.
Instead of modding this asscracker's unfunny junk up, why not consider helping me out? I was recently the victim of a targeted modbombing in which a number of far-right extremists modded several of my comments troll for no reason.
I'm proposing that you put your points to good use and reverse the damage done in this terrorist attack on my Slashdot credibility. Come on, it's not like there's anything else worth modding or commenting on coming in this story.