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Comment Re:Typical American attitude (Score 1) 70

If you didn't want to limit your legal remedies to those available in a certain area, then why did you agree to doing so in the first place? Was it an intentional act of fraud in order to benefit from what you otherwise couldn't?

This isn't something that just got made up. Its part of the license agreement people agree to in order to install the software.

What license agreement? The only installed software in this discussion in Safari.

uninteligent

Speak for yourself.

Comment Re:The Only Good Bug is a Dead Bug. (Score 1) 726

As a Dutch person, America's sarcasm detector seems collectively turned completely off. All of Paul Verhoevens films are dark comedies about the big issues of our times (as seen by Mr. Verhoeven), but it seems it takes another Dutchman to see this. The fact that some people only now see Starship Troopers as perhaps somewhat sarcastic blows my mind. How can you miss it?

Yes! Same with Robocop, a satire on corporate greed and its influence on capitalism. Even the studio that produced it doesn't seem to have understood the joke judging by the two sequels they made.

Comment Re:History Lesson (Score 2) 108

I only mean that, in isolation from other configuration, turning hyperthreading off produced a higher benchmark result than turning it on. Dell didn't publish details of how they had configured the computer to produce their numbers although the compiler probably had a large part to do with it; according to the follow-up article, the host OS was different (Linux vs Windows) and they had probably used the Intel compiler whereas the VeriTest study used gcc (for both the x86 and the G5, which makes sense if your aim is to compare chip performance as opposed to compiler performance).

From the article:

To be fair, at least Apple and VeriTest tell you what they've done, which is more than can be said for the vendor-supplied figures on SPEC's web site. What tweaks have vendors applied to boost their own scores?

Comment Re:Apple Cheating on Benchmarks since 2003 (Score 4, Informative) 108

That report was later discredited. The accusation was largely based on the fact that the testers had disabled hyperthreading on the compared Dell PC: it turned out they had done this because it made that benchmark result *better*. They showed the x86 in its best possible light, so that those in the peanut gallery couldn't credibly accuse them of bias in favour of the G5.

Comment Just wondering... (Score 2) 221

Is there an upper limit to the number of times we can sarcastically quote "Open Always Wins!" after news articles like this one, before it stops being funny?
I know we haven't reached it yet, I'm just asking for information.

Science

Richard III Suffered an Ignominious Burial, Researchers Find 145

An anonymous reader writes "Richard III may have been the King of England and the subject of a Shakespearean play, but even that couldn't keep him safe from ending up in a hastily-dug grave that ultimately became part of a parking lot, according to a new study published in the journal Antiquity."
Security

Music and Movies Could Trigger Mobile Malware 88

mask.of.sanity writes "Lights, sounds and magnetic fields can be used to activate malware on phones, new research has found. The lab-style attacks defined in a paper (PDF) used pre-defined signals hidden in songs and TV programmes as a trigger to activate embedded malware. Malware once activated would carry out programmed attacks either by itself or as part of a wider botnet of mobile devices."

Comment Re:Fascinating ... (Score 1) 320

So do you have any objection to DRM on rentals, then?

DRM is a way of forcing ALL sales to be rentals.

except, no discount for being just a rental. you pay full price but still don't get to actually own what you bought.

Well, that's utterly dodging the question. iTunes has two prices for most of its movies - £1-5 for a "rental" you must watch in a 30 period, or £8-15 to "buy" and you can keep until Apple go out of business. I kinda agree that the "buy" option is a long-term rental in disguise, and I wasn't arguing against you wanting to remove DRM from it. But the explicit "rental" option does have a considerable price discount, and makes it clear what you are getting (and what you are not getting) for your money. Are you saying that iTunes "rental" option should send a non-DRM movie file, and just ask you nicely not to keep it?

What about something like Netflix? You pay one month at a time, for one month's access to their library. It's explicitly a rental arrangement, and if they go out of business you don't lose anything you'd paid for in the past. Do you think their movies should be without DRM too? How do you stop someone from buying a subscription, downloading enough movies to occupy themselves for a year, and then cancelling the subscription after one month? Or is that not something that should be stopped, and Netflix would have to "just alter their business model" to cope with people doing it?

Comment Re:Fascinating ... (Score 1) 320

So let's say that I buy 2000$ worth of movies, music, ebooks from some BIG CONTENT provider, and then BIG CONTENT provider is bought by another one, and sells off the music business to some other content provider. Now when I visit their site or use their app I no longer have access to the music I already paid for.

THAT is the why DRM is bad and needs to go away.

So do you have any objection to DRM on rentals, then?

Comment Re:terrorism, pure and simple (Score 1) 285

Can we quit tossing around the bloody "T-word" every time a crime is committed? This is VANDALISM.

No, I think the OP's remark is entirely justifiable.

This particular news item may only have been about mixing up samples and vandalizing a lab, but in the UK there have been numerous examples of animal rights protestors setting bombs and making death threats to academics. Life-threatening intimidation with an expressly political aim is precisely the definition of terrorism.

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