Assuming you only buy CD-R media with the tax. In practice, this would simply be a huge gift for mail order / ecommerce types and I imagine the French businessmen would love this. In the US, the high taxes on cigarettes are becoming a joke because the various indian tribes are making a fortune because they can sell them tax free.
Of course, since most pirating is done in Asia (some operations have large factories and crank out bootlegs in 10,000-100,000 unit quantities daily) I think the only real effect would be a kick in the nads to legal businesses when the recordable media market slows.
Unfortunately, the stats could be easily used to back that up simply because there is a higher percentage of poor black males than poor white males and poverty is one of the major causes of crime.
I think this also highlights a common way people lie with statistics. Skin color isn't the real determining factor here (e.g. the crime rate for middle-class black males and white males would be pretty similar) but it could be made to look that way by someone carefully selecting the numbers.
Insurance companies spend a great deal of time maximizing their profits in this fashion. They've got one set of statistics used to justify higher rates for young male drivers when their own accounting figures show that young female drivers are more expensive to insure. Those statistics will be used to justify raising rates for females. Since the insurance companies' rented politicians have made many of their services mandatory, it's not like you have a choice to stop playing what is basically a rigged game.
This is one of the reasons why I've never liked GNOME. KDE's been doing a great job (IMHO, YMMV) and it's safe to say that had the whole license snit not come up, everyone would be working on it. Instead, there are a number of flamewars and the end-user is still left with two gargantuan suites which have many nice features but still aren't ready for prime-time. (Just from a usability standpoint, it's not even at the level of Windows, much less something slick like BeOS. It works, but there's just no trace of elegance...)
Can people stop debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin long and get back to coding?
Worse, Opera still doesn't include built-in support for common Web tools such as Macromedia Shockwave or Java. Some Netscape plug-ins work with Opera, but they're tricky to install.
As others have commented, Opera does support Java and there's even a single download which includes Opera and Sun's JVM for the people who don't have it. As for that difficult plugin installation process, it consists of going into the preferences panel and clicking on "Find plugins", which configured every plugin on my system. Flash, Shockwave, QuickTime - you name it, it works. Neither Netscape or IE make plugin installation that easy (although ActiveX makes this less of an issue for IE).
Based on the comments about Java and plugins, I'm increasingly suspicious that the author actually used Opera 4 extensively for the review. The situation he describes is suspiciously like Opera 3.6.
Opera 4 compares quite favorably to Netscape 4.7 or IE5; it's significantly faster, more stable and gives the user better ways of coping with shoddy sites (e.g. the zoom and user-stylesheet settings). I certainly have had no problems making Opera my primary browser and I'm a web developer, so I've got Opera and Textpad running >8 hours a day.
I find it interesting that the NYU links and some of the VitalBook links are all 404ed. Anyone want to bet that we won't be seeing hastily sanitized versions shortly?
There is a larger issue at work here than just this evil notion of "control". Though all intellectual property ultimately revolves around control, control is just the means by which one attains the ends (i.e., profits). This issue is really not so different. Just as the labels will not allow you to pirate music, they don't want mp3.com to provide that service. They frankly don't want to "control" for controls sake, they want to profit. The more pervasive piracy is, the less likely they are to sell CDs; the more use of my.mp3.com, the less capable they are of positioning themselves in mp3.com's position [which erodes their ability further supplement their profits and promotional opportunities].
[...]
If my.mp3.com goes unchecked: In the short run, you, the consumer, enjoy easier access to your music collection, and the label still seems to do okay. In the long run, the label runs the risk of being marginalized and hurt.
How? Unlike Napster, MP3.com did not commit a single case of piracy. MP3.com provided the means for someone to have access to the CDs they had purchased without having to carry them around. It didn't eliminate the need to buy the CD in the first place. It doesn't compete with online music distribution, since you still have to purchase the CD. In fact, it'd be cheaper for a label since they still get the sale and don't have to provide the bandwidth each time you listen. Yes, I'm sure there are college students who loaded every CD in the dorm; these are the same people who will use a CD-R drive or MP3 ripper to do the same thing in any case (preventing digital data from being copied is quixotic at best).
The only reason the RIAA was able to sue was the confusion caused by the fact that my.mp3.com's software didn't make you rip and upload the MP3 directly (which would have been completely legal for them to provide). This is functionally equivalent to shared-dictionary compression, where you simply indicate which blocks of data you have rather than transmitting the entire message directly. The US Navy does this sort of thing with those extremely low frequently radio links which can be used by a submerged submarine but have low bandwidth; instead of sending the plain text, they'd just transmit a few symbols from a large code book available on each end of the connection. In addition to being very secure, it's much faster to send a few 4-letter symbols than a few hundred characters of English text. Sending a CD over a 28.8k modem is quite similar to sending a text message over a link measure in tens of bits per second.
The similarity in MP3.com's case is that the end result is identical - every single CD will be bit-for-bit identical and, assuming identical settings, every MP3 will be identical, just as in those large codebooks. Sending a few cryptographic hashes to confirm that you do in fact own a copy of a CD is a lot more efficient for a modem user.
Every single step would be legal if you were the only person doing it. You bought the CD, so you can legally rip an MP3, upload it to a private webserver and listen to it from work. You can use a compression algorithm to speed that transfer. You could even use a shared-dictionary setup, but there wouldn't be any point for a single user.
The RIAA is claiming that it infringes upon their rights for you to listen to a stream of bytes if it was converted by someone else, even if you own an identical stream of bytes. That's why I say that this case is about control.
Some software companies attempt to do the same thing in their licenses. I've bought a few products where the shrinkwrap license claims that the CD is only to be used with a single machine. By the wording on the license, a network admin like myself should make sure that a single CD is never used on a different system, even if we own 30 licenses. In practice, not even the manufacturer's lawyer would try to claim that it's a crime that I grabbed a different CD to install a couple files, since they're all identical and we have a legal license for every user.
One may be entitled to recieve, but the giver may not be entitled to give.
It's not a question of giving. The real world equivalent would be playing a friend's copy of a CD because you don't want to drive home to get yours. It's entirely about control, because the record companies are trying to prevent certain rights from being maintained online.
My.MP3.com: Very grey. Here we have a for-profit corporation (mp3.com) that wants to profit off of others intellectual property. I'm not so sure that it is unreasonable for the intellectual property owners to want to determine the terms and conditions of their property where it reasonably offers to potential to affect their revenues.
You're confusing MP3.com and Napster. Not even the RIAA tried to claim that consumers didn't have the right to make MP3s from the CDs they owned and listen to them. The issue was whether MP3.com could create a library of MP3s such that you did not have to rip every CD you owned and upload the results yourself. That's the only grey area in the case and the greyness comes from ignorance. Very few people would agree that two people could have a identical copies of a file but only be able to use the one they created.
Yes, people buy lots of stuff on credit - I'm not arguing that. However, I would argue that the average American would strongly agree that owning something is better than renting/leasing it.
This has, in fact, been one of the main reasons I've seen people complain about software licenses, since there's a strong feeling that despite allegedly owning something you don't really own anything as there are so many restrictions. I don't know anyone who agrees with the "use only on the original system / no resale / no support / you get nothing" clauses, which is why they tend to be ignored so frequently.
Here's the complete email - I didn't copy all of it earlier:
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Steve Heckler, a Sony Pictures Informations Systems employee, was invited to
speak at an education conference on computer technology.
Nowhere in his prepared remarks did he discuss Napster. In an informal
conversation after his prepared remarks, he was quoted by a student newspaper as
allegedly making certain statements regarding Napster. The story that appeared
as a result is totally inaccurate. Furthermore, the quotes attributed to Mr.
Heckler have been taken out of context and do not represent the opinions or
strategies of Sony Pictures, Sony Music or any other Sony Company.
It's hard to tell without seeing an actual transcript, and I would doubt very much that such is available.
That's what I'm afraid of. Still, you'd think that some investigative reporter would at least want to take a look - either way, there's a pretty interesting story here.
I agree that they're very carefully wording the message. What I found interesting was the allegation that substantial liberties were taken with those unofficial comments. While I'm not exactly a fan of big media, I have little tolerance for people who forge evidence to support a cause.
Since there wasn't any news about Napster, I'll contribute Sony's response to that infamous quote about firewalling Napster. I find it particularly interesting that this is getting very little attention from the same people who were spreading the original story far and wide, particularly as it makes a serious challenge to the validity of the original report. Given how serious this issue is, you'd think that someone would be interested in getting to the bottom of it...
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Steve Heckler, a Sony Pictures Informations Systems employee, was invited to
speak at an education conference on computer technology.
Nowhere in his prepared remarks did he discuss Napster. In an informal
conversation after his prepared remarks, he was quoted by a student newspaper as
allegedly making certain statements regarding Napster. The story that appeared
as a result is totally inaccurate. Furthermore, the quotes attributed to Mr.
Heckler have been taken out of context and do not represent the opinions or
strategies of Sony Pictures, Sony Music or any other Sony Company.
The way you mean it, the first two. Parallel ports were simply better. There are no real RISC processors in use today - current PowerPC processors have more instructions than any of the CISC processors which existed back when the RISC wave started. Intel's P4 will introduce something like 100 new instructions just for SSE2.
(Note that the "Reduced instruction set complexity" expansion of that acronym came later and represents the strategy which actually works.)
IANAL either, but you seem to have missed that the trial did not make the shirts illegal. The legislature makes things illegal; a trial is held only to determine if the existing laws were broken.
As far as a buyback goes, that would be equivalent to asking them to reimburse the asian DVD pirates (you know, the pirates which actually exist and pirate 10,000 at a time) or their vendors for the DVDs confiscated.
The MPAA has been using the big lie strategy throughout the DeCSS case and
the ruling today was the first success. The lie the MPAA has been pushing is
that this case is about piracy and it appears they've repeated often it
enough to get a District Court judge to believe it.
To summarize the facts:
DVD content is encrypted
DVD players include the decryption keys necessary to decode an encrypted
disc
Decryption is only necessary to view the DVD content
Copying the encrypted data produces a valid DVD
The MPAA has been unable to demonstrate even a single act of piracy using
DeCSS despite literally the millions of bootleg DVDs which exist.
The reason there's no evidence to support a piracy case is because
bootlegging a DVD is like photocopying a document with encoded data - even
if you don't have the key to view it yourself, a copy will be perfectly
viewable to anyone who does have a copy of the key.
The real issue here is control:
The MPAA feel that they have the right to control which areas of the world a
DVD may be viewed in - it's not a case of not offering it for sale; if you
buy a DVD in another region, you'd need to buy a DVD player there as well.
Legally you have no options if a given movie is never offered for sale in
your region. The other benefit is that the MPAA can get those nice licensing
fees from player manufacturers.
The more serious issue is fair-use. The DVD encryption technology is also
intended to prevent recognized legal uses of copyrighted material. The
copyright law changes the MPAA lobby was unable to get passed are now
installed by technical means.
Of course, Judge Kaplan ignored all of this.
Note that claim "[the d]efendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a
movement that believes that information should be available without charge
to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage
media in which it is located."? That's the big lie. Did anyone hear this claim? Did anyone of the defendants state that content producers should not be paid? I seem to recall the arguments focusing on whether the MPAA could dictate the software program you use to play back your legally-owned DVD.
This is the value in repeating a lie often enough - the MPAA managed to
convince a judge to base a ruling on a straw-man argument which was never actually made!
I find it very disturbing that anyone could seriously believe what you said. You appear to suggest that the police should be robots ("Just follow your training and orders!" went out of style in Nuremburg) and reach the same decisions with a few seconds of thought in a crisis point that you reached with much, much less information and much, much more time to ponder it.
There was an interesting article in the local paper yesterday about the police allowing more vocal critics to participate in training exercises. The general consensus seemed to be that the job was a lot harder than most people thought and that it's much, much easier to make claims like yours than to decide what would be "a measured and acceptable way" to act in the short amount of time available. This definitely did not mean, however, that everyone decided the cops were completely in the right, just that the problem is a lot more difficult than most people think. __
"She ordered a beverage which is made with boiling water and served immediately after"
I don't know how you make coffee wherever you come from, but most of the advanced people of the world do not boil water in a kettle and throw coffee grounds in it -- they use a coffee maker which does not boil water.
If you use a coffee maker which does not bring water to within a couple degrees of the boiling point, you're doing it wrong. (Note for the particularly dense: this does not mean that you are boiling the coffee ground in a pot; passing 98C water through the grounds still involves water which is either boiling or very close)
It might be dumb to put a cup of hot coffee between your legs, but that does not mean that you should assume that it will burn you down to muscle tissue if it spills. Most everyone has spilled coffee on themselves at one time or another. Did it burn you to the muscle tissue? I thought not.
The problem wasn't the temperature of the coffee but the fact that the woman's clothing held it in close contact with the skin for a prolonged period of time. If you spill freshly brewed coffee on your hand and leave it there, you'll get a nasty burn too. __
They had received dozens of complaints about serious burns and ignored them.
This is pure and utter idiocy. They had a few hundred complaints over a ten year period.
Let's do the math assuming each of the 25,000 McDonalds stores sells 10 cups of coffee a day (each morning they probably sell that many cups every 15 minutes):
25,000 * 10 * 365 * 10 = 912,500,000
Even if you seriously underestimate McDonald's coffee sales and significantly overestimate the number of complaints, you're literally talking about less than a one-in-a-million chance. If you're an American, you stand a greater risk of accidental death in a swimming pool or falling asleep while smoking.
Ah yes, the infamous "It was justified - my attorney told me so!" claim. It's still a frivolous suit no matter what some ambulance-chaser tells you.
Facts:
She ordered a beverage which is made with boiling water and served immediately after.
She placed the cup between her legs and removed the lid
While in a stopped vehicle, she spilled the coffee
The clothing she wore held the hot liquid in close contact with her skin for a prolonged period of time
While McDonald's has had similar cases in the past, the figures they quoted reflect an accident rate on the order of.00001%
This is the case of someone misusing a product and suing because they don't want to accept the blame. There is no difference between this case and the luser who lost some fingers trying to stop the blade on his chainsaw quickly.
If you use the product in the normal fashion, you will not be hurt. If you misuse it, you may be hurt. Why is this so hard to grasp?
As a side note, why does anyone trust the Consumer Attorneys of California, a group which has a very powerful financial incentive for encouraging frivilous suits? Would you trust a Microsoft report on Apache? __
If you use an IMAP server which supports the maildir format, you'll get most of the efficiency benefits without having to setup a database. I've got qmail + cyrus imap running on an OpenBSD box here with ~35 heavy users (>100MB each, lots of subfolders, checking frequently, etc) and the load average is usually under.05 unless I'm doing something unusual. (The same box is doing NAT and http/https+PHP/MySQL services as well) __
It's been most amusing to reread the old stories and see the "MOSR is full of crap. There's never going to be a Mac cube" posts.
My question is simple: why does anyone get this worked up about it. MOSR has been wrong. Ever notice that most of what's posted is "(unreliable|unconfirmed|past|usually reliable) sources claimed"? Even the weenie who posted the little "How MOSR gets news" story managed nothing better than being listed as an "unconfirmed email".
Are people somehow unclear on the meanings of words like "rumor" or "unconfirmed"? It's somewhat obvious that the literacy level on slashdot has been dropping but I still find it amazing that anyone considers it an act of fraud when an "Unconfirmed Rumor" at MOSR turns out to be wrong.
Even things like the infamous 17" iMac stories - I'd be amazed if Apple hadn't started work on such a beast and called off the project later. That sort of thing happens in this industry, where projects are created, cancelled, revived, drastically changed and recancelled in a matter of weeks; you can usually ask 5 people on the same project about it and get at least 5 separate answers. Couple that with using highly unofficial sources at a secretive company who don't want to be identified as the source of a leak and it's no surprise that most stories end up being wrong in at least a few details. Maybe that's why they call them rumors? __
You've got a point there... So what about Lusers who misuse/abuse drugs? Is that a reason to ban all drugs? Hmmm, food for thought:)
Not really. You've just invented something to argue about. Personally, I'm a big fan of letting people live their own lives. If someone wants to do drugs and this does not adversely affect others, they're welcome to since they'll be receiving the bad effects.
Fact remains that crime rates are much lower in countries where firearms are illegal for the general population.
I'll tell that to the next Mexican I meet (it's almost as if the Mexican gun control laws are being ignored by criminals. go figure.). Of course, this doesn't account for the rising crime rates in most European countries, countries like Israel or Switzerland or the way crime rates *plummet* in any US state which legalizes concealed-carry.
More to the point, it's still a meaningless comparison if everything else isn't equal. As a simple example: I don't think it's coincidental that the areas with the worst crime rates are also the ones with the weakest law enforcement.
Ofcourse that could be due to various other things, but it does raise some thought. I mean, I spent a few weekends in the Bijlmermeer, "the bad part" of Amsterdam, visiting friends of my girlfriend, dropping by black bars and clubs (black as in skin colour) taking black cab rides (black as in illegal) with random black people (black as in skin colour) at the wheel. Could a white young man like me do that in "the bad part" of a random American city?
Depends on the city - my (very white) father lived in Harlem for awhile and had no problems.
Also, are high racial tensions present & abused by racists on both sides for political gain to the same degree they are in the US? Probably also no. I consider this behaviour one of the most disgusting activities in the American political arena. __
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, since most pirating is done in Asia (some operations have large factories and crank out bootlegs in 10,000-100,000 unit quantities daily) I think the only real effect would be a kick in the nads to legal businesses when the recordable media market slows.
I think this also highlights a common way people lie with statistics. Skin color isn't the real determining factor here (e.g. the crime rate for middle-class black males and white males would be pretty similar) but it could be made to look that way by someone carefully selecting the numbers.
Insurance companies spend a great deal of time maximizing their profits in this fashion. They've got one set of statistics used to justify higher rates for young male drivers when their own accounting figures show that young female drivers are more expensive to insure. Those statistics will be used to justify raising rates for females. Since the insurance companies' rented politicians have made many of their services mandatory, it's not like you have a choice to stop playing what is basically a rigged game.
Can people stop debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin long and get back to coding?
Oops - make that "Flash, Director, QuickTime".
Based on the comments about Java and plugins, I'm increasingly suspicious that the author actually used Opera 4 extensively for the review. The situation he describes is suspiciously like Opera 3.6.
Opera 4 compares quite favorably to Netscape 4.7 or IE5; it's significantly faster, more stable and gives the user better ways of coping with shoddy sites (e.g. the zoom and user-stylesheet settings). I certainly have had no problems making Opera my primary browser and I'm a web developer, so I've got Opera and Textpad running >8 hours a day.
I find it interesting that the NYU links and some of the VitalBook links are all 404ed. Anyone want to bet that we won't be seeing hastily sanitized versions shortly?
The only reason the RIAA was able to sue was the confusion caused by the fact that my.mp3.com's software didn't make you rip and upload the MP3 directly (which would have been completely legal for them to provide). This is functionally equivalent to shared-dictionary compression, where you simply indicate which blocks of data you have rather than transmitting the entire message directly. The US Navy does this sort of thing with those extremely low frequently radio links which can be used by a submerged submarine but have low bandwidth; instead of sending the plain text, they'd just transmit a few symbols from a large code book available on each end of the connection. In addition to being very secure, it's much faster to send a few 4-letter symbols than a few hundred characters of English text. Sending a CD over a 28.8k modem is quite similar to sending a text message over a link measure in tens of bits per second.
The similarity in MP3.com's case is that the end result is identical - every single CD will be bit-for-bit identical and, assuming identical settings, every MP3 will be identical, just as in those large codebooks. Sending a few cryptographic hashes to confirm that you do in fact own a copy of a CD is a lot more efficient for a modem user.
Every single step would be legal if you were the only person doing it. You bought the CD, so you can legally rip an MP3, upload it to a private webserver and listen to it from work. You can use a compression algorithm to speed that transfer. You could even use a shared-dictionary setup, but there wouldn't be any point for a single user. The RIAA is claiming that it infringes upon their rights for you to listen to a stream of bytes if it was converted by someone else, even if you own an identical stream of bytes. That's why I say that this case is about control.
Some software companies attempt to do the same thing in their licenses. I've bought a few products where the shrinkwrap license claims that the CD is only to be used with a single machine. By the wording on the license, a network admin like myself should make sure that a single CD is never used on a different system, even if we own 30 licenses. In practice, not even the manufacturer's lawyer would try to claim that it's a crime that I grabbed a different CD to install a couple files, since they're all identical and we have a legal license for every user.
Yes, people buy lots of stuff on credit - I'm not arguing that. However, I would argue that the average American would strongly agree that owning something is better than renting/leasing it.
This has, in fact, been one of the main reasons I've seen people complain about software licenses, since there's a strong feeling that despite allegedly owning something you don't really own anything as there are so many restrictions. I don't know anyone who agrees with the "use only on the original system / no resale / no support / you get nothing" clauses, which is why they tend to be ignored so frequently.
Here's the complete email - I didn't copy all of it earlier:
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Steve Heckler, a Sony Pictures Informations Systems employee, was invited to
speak at an education conference on computer technology.
Nowhere in his prepared remarks did he discuss Napster. In an informal
conversation after his prepared remarks, he was quoted by a student newspaper as
allegedly making certain statements regarding Napster. The story that appeared
as a result is totally inaccurate. Furthermore, the quotes attributed to Mr.
Heckler have been taken out of context and do not represent the opinions or
strategies of Sony Pictures, Sony Music or any other Sony Company.
What amused me was being marked as offtopic in a story which explicitly mentions that topic.
I agree that they're very carefully wording the message. What I found interesting was the allegation that substantial liberties were taken with those unofficial comments. While I'm not exactly a fan of big media, I have little tolerance for people who forge evidence to support a cause.
(Note that the "Reduced instruction set complexity" expansion of that acronym came later and represents the strategy which actually works.)
As far as a buyback goes, that would be equivalent to asking them to reimburse the asian DVD pirates (you know, the pirates which actually exist and pirate 10,000 at a time) or their vendors for the DVDs confiscated.
To summarize the facts:
The reason there's no evidence to support a piracy case is because bootlegging a DVD is like photocopying a document with encoded data - even if you don't have the key to view it yourself, a copy will be perfectly viewable to anyone who does have a copy of the key.
The real issue here is control:
- The MPAA feel that they have the right to control which areas of the world a
DVD may be viewed in - it's not a case of not offering it for sale; if you
buy a DVD in another region, you'd need to buy a DVD player there as well.
Legally you have no options if a given movie is never offered for sale in
your region. The other benefit is that the MPAA can get those nice licensing
fees from player manufacturers.
- The more serious issue is fair-use. The DVD encryption technology is also
intended to prevent recognized legal uses of copyrighted material. The
copyright law changes the MPAA lobby was unable to get passed are now
installed by technical means.
Of course, Judge Kaplan ignored all of this. Note that claim "[the d]efendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located."? That's the big lie. Did anyone hear this claim? Did anyone of the defendants state that content producers should not be paid? I seem to recall the arguments focusing on whether the MPAA could dictate the software program you use to play back your legally-owned DVD.This is the value in repeating a lie often enough - the MPAA managed to convince a judge to base a ruling on a straw-man argument which was never actually made!
There was an interesting article in the local paper yesterday about the police allowing more vocal critics to participate in training exercises. The general consensus seemed to be that the job was a lot harder than most people thought and that it's much, much easier to make claims like yours than to decide what would be "a measured and acceptable way" to act in the short amount of time available. This definitely did not mean, however, that everyone decided the cops were completely in the right, just that the problem is a lot more difficult than most people think.
__
__
Let's do the math assuming each of the 25,000 McDonalds stores sells 10 cups of coffee a day (each morning they probably sell that many cups every 15 minutes):
25,000 * 10 * 365 * 10 = 912,500,000
Even if you seriously underestimate McDonald's coffee sales and significantly overestimate the number of complaints, you're literally talking about less than a one-in-a-million chance. If you're an American, you stand a greater risk of accidental death in a swimming pool or falling asleep while smoking.
__
Facts:
This is the case of someone misusing a product and suing because they don't want to accept the blame. There is no difference between this case and the luser who lost some fingers trying to stop the blade on his chainsaw quickly.
If you use the product in the normal fashion, you will not be hurt. If you misuse it, you may be hurt. Why is this so hard to grasp?
As a side note, why does anyone trust the Consumer Attorneys of California, a group which has a very powerful financial incentive for encouraging frivilous suits? Would you trust a Microsoft report on Apache?
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If you use an IMAP server which supports the maildir format, you'll get most of the efficiency benefits without having to setup a database. I've got qmail + cyrus imap running on an OpenBSD box here with ~35 heavy users (>100MB each, lots of subfolders, checking frequently, etc) and the load average is usually under .05 unless I'm doing something unusual. (The same box is doing NAT and http/https+PHP/MySQL services as well)
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My question is simple: why does anyone get this worked up about it. MOSR has been wrong. Ever notice that most of what's posted is "(unreliable|unconfirmed|past|usually reliable) sources claimed"? Even the weenie who posted the little "How MOSR gets news" story managed nothing better than being listed as an "unconfirmed email".
Are people somehow unclear on the meanings of words like "rumor" or "unconfirmed"? It's somewhat obvious that the literacy level on slashdot has been dropping but I still find it amazing that anyone considers it an act of fraud when an "Unconfirmed Rumor" at MOSR turns out to be wrong.
Even things like the infamous 17" iMac stories - I'd be amazed if Apple hadn't started work on such a beast and called off the project later. That sort of thing happens in this industry, where projects are created, cancelled, revived, drastically changed and recancelled in a matter of weeks; you can usually ask 5 people on the same project about it and get at least 5 separate answers. Couple that with using highly unofficial sources at a secretive company who don't want to be identified as the source of a leak and it's no surprise that most stories end up being wrong in at least a few details. Maybe that's why they call them rumors?
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More to the point, it's still a meaningless comparison if everything else isn't equal. As a simple example: I don't think it's coincidental that the areas with the worst crime rates are also the ones with the weakest law enforcement.
Depends on the city - my (very white) father lived in Harlem for awhile and had no problems.Also, are high racial tensions present & abused by racists on both sides for political gain to the same degree they are in the US? Probably also no. I consider this behaviour one of the most disgusting activities in the American political arena.
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