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Comment I'm okay with surveillance (Score 5, Insightful) 180

As long as I don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

The problem is in the abuse of this, like the footage that came out of the police using their night surveillance equipment to spy on individuals having an evening with a lady in their penthouse.

So as long as abuse is monitored and actively discouraged, what's wrong with being watched while you're in public?

Comment Doubt this will affect much (Score 3, Interesting) 578

Any OEM with any brains at all will re-add IE to their system images, lest they field a mass of tech support calls claiming their computer doesn't have 'the internet' because they don't see the big blue E on the desktop.

This will only affect people buying at retail who likely already know how to install and configure an alternative browser, but now have to download via FTP or flash drive.

Comment Wow (Score 1) 272

I'm not a Linux fan myself but that is actually a pretty attractive feature set for $100 and I would seriously consider buying one if they were:

1. Fully supported: I don't have to hack anything to get something working, ever. That means after updates too.

2. Battery life was really ~10 hours.

3. Flash worked (sadly a web necessity).

4. Hibernate works flawlessly.

5. ARM repository is respectable and frequently updated.

6. It at least works as fast as my P3 1GHz on WinXP.

6 check marks there and you've got a check from me for a nice light web browsing / word processing computer.

Has the font situation improved in Linux since like 4 years ago?

Comment Re:Sure, move out. (Score 1) 1142

You provide some interesting information but I wasn't claiming that it was true (hence the supposedly), only that the US Gov likely thinks that it has a vested interest in fighting piracy.

The resources used to fight piracy could indeed be used to fight something else, but that the system as a whole hasn't gained is not a certainty. If they shifted resources from focusing on finding snails breaking speeding laws to piracy, then I don't see how everyone isn't technically better off.

Everything you say about the effects of cracking down on piracy are true. Indeed, not all pirates will purchase in lieu of not using at all, but some will. There is some gain there, whether it is substantial or not, nobody knows.

As for the shifting money from private sector to government. That is an economic concern, and while I'm sure the government would prefer economic growth, I doubt they are averse to shifting money their way in this manner.

Comment Re:Sure, move out. (Score 1) 1142

A good point, however, fighting piracy supposedly increases spending since the pirates can't free-ride, which means more tax dollars; so both sides have a vested interest in that.

In this case, the tax revenue from MS is still substantial, so Uncle Sam is probably better off with them here than overseas. Whether MS would be better off overseas is unclear.

Who will blink first?

Maybe the government can fight back by hinting at tariffs on software imports if they go overseas? I'm sure US sales are a significant portion of MS's revenue.

Anyone know of a similar occurrence in recent history (obviously won't be of this magnitude)?

Comment Re:You are kidding arent you ? (Score 1) 206

What in the hell are you talking about?

MKV is a video container file format, it stores the video/audio/subtitles in a documented fashion that allows media players with a proper MKV splitter to be able to parse and use the streams within. Similar file formats are AVI, and MP4.

Matroska does not aim to supplant DVD/Blu-ray. I think you might be assuming that MKV is a disc format that claims to be able to play on all hardware DVD players, which is not the case.

Comment Re:Hair... (Score 1) 95

I have no mod points so you'll have to settle for kudos. That made me laugh pretty hard.

What perplexes me though is why anyone would bother to click on the pictures (or even include more than one picture in an article like this) to begin with. It's not a Miss Teen USA pageant where I need hi-res closeups of the participants to make my judgment on their 'moral character'.

Comment Re:Are there any downsides to choice in this case? (Score 1) 948

Unless what you mean by 'distribution issues' is that there is more than one distribution, then it is certainly not just a distribution issue.

The real issue is when a developer goes to develop a sound application for Linux, and he has absolutely no idea what sound interface his users may be using. So he either attempts to support them all, which is a nightmare when he's getting bug reports from users of 5 different sound interfaces which have 3 different major revisions possible each, that have 30 different distribution specific patches each, and so on.

Or he picks one and supports only that, which means some % of his users won't even have it in their package repositories. Some % will again have some distribution specific patches applied, some % will have some hacked version that translates to a different API, some % won't even by able to use the one he chose to support because it doesn't play nice with one or more of the others. It is just a mess and he hasn't even gotten to the user interface yet.

This is precisely Google's complaint, and it is a fair one.

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