Comment Re:Back in them good ol' days... (Score 1) 926
Well sure, use semantic markup. But what the hell is wrong with a bit of css?
Comment Re:So what happens (Score 1) 388
I can never find my plug gauge when I need it.
Real men set their plugs with a 6-inch ruler!
Comment Re:Why are they attacking him? (Score 1) 273
And yes, downloading music without paying for it is STEALING.
No, its not.
Stealing or theft is when you take something away from someone else without their consent and/or providing compensation. The original owner no longer has the thing you stole. Example: If you walk into Walmart, pick up a music CD, and then walk right back out without paying for it.
Downloading music means you're making a COPY of it, you don't go to the provider's computer/server and take the digital file from them. Copying, when the work is copyrighted, is copyright infringement.
Now, is Copyright Infringement wrong? Most people would say yes, and I'd agree with that (although I don't agree with the copyright time lengths).
The RIAA/MPAA, however, want to have their cake and eat it too. They want Copyright Infringement to be viewed, by both the general public and the courts, as stealing.
Why? Well, by making Copyright Infringement into theft, they an make it a criminal offense meaning it could end up as a felony or misdemeanor charge. Just imagine, the RIAA/MPAA could go far beyond demanding insane amounts of money per infringement, they could add jail time into their extortion methods to put the fear of The Almighty RIAA/MPAA into the infringers
Comment Re:USA is losing because we think we're winning (Score 1) 181
Because people are stupid and think economics is a zero-sum game. [...] If China is getting richer, it means they have more money to buy things from the US/EU and less competitive labour!
Perhaps a better question, then: How far away from zero does the sum have to get to make it profitable to move those factories that build the things we and the Chinese buy back to America?
Do we have to flip the earnings and cost of living ratio around to the point where America has 1/10th the cost of living and 1/10th the wage rates of China before we can start looking for improvement in America again?
Bringing OSS Into a Closed Source Organization? 427
Piranhaa writes "At the major corporation I work for, there is currently a single person who decides what software to approve and disapprove within the organization. I've noticed that requests from users for open source Windows programs get denied, nearly instantaneously, on a regular basis. Anything from Gimp, to Firefox, even to Vim don't make the cut due to the simple fact that they are open source. Closed source programs from unknown vendors have a much better chance at approval than Firefox does. The whole mentality here is that anybody can change the source of a project, submit it, and you never know what kind of compiled binary you're going to get. I'm a firm believer in open source code, but I also know closed source has its place. So what would be the best way for me to argue, with all the facts, to allow these people to come to their own conclusion that open source is actually good? Would presenting examples of other big companies moving to open source work, and if so what are some good examples? Or can you suggest any other good approaches?"
Comment Re:Return of the clipper chip (Score 1) 418
But, but, but ... won't someone think of the kids?!?!
Senate Votes To Empower Parents As Censors 418
unlametheweak recommends an Ars Technica report that the US Senate has unanimously passed a bill requiring the FCC to explore what "advanced blocking technologies" are available to parents to help filter out "indecent or objectionable programming." "...the law does focus on empowering parents to take control of new media technologies to deal with undesired content, rather than handing the job over to the government. It asks the FCC to focus the inquiry on blocking systems for a 'wide variety of distribution platforms,' including wireless and Internet, and an array of devices, including DVD players, set top boxes, and wireless applications."
Robert Heinlein's Pre-Internet Fan Mail FAQ 181
Hugh Pickens writes "Kevin Kelly has an interesting post about a letter he found amongst correspondence from his days editing the Whole Earth Catalog. The letter is Robert Heinlein's own nerdy solution to a problem common to famous authors: to deal with fan mail. In the days before the internet, Heinlein's solution was to create a list of frequently asked questions, answer them, and remove the questions. Then he, or rather his wife Ginny, checked off the appropriate answer(s) and mailed it back. Some of the entries in Heinlein's answer sheet are quite illuminating and amusing. Our personal favorite: 'You say that you have enjoyed my stories for years. Why did you wait until you disliked one story before writing to me?'"
The Fedora-Red Hat Crisis 263
jammag writes "When Linux journalist Bruce Byfield tried to dig for details about the security breach in Fedora's servers, a Red Hat publicist told him the official statement — written in non-informative corporate-speak — was all he would get. In the wake of Red Hat's tight-lipped handling of the breach, even Fedora's board was unhappy, as Byfield details. He concludes: 'If Red Hat, one of the epitomes of a successful FOSS-based business, can ignore FOSS when to do so is corporately convenient, then what chance do we have that other companies — especially publicly-traded ones — will act any better?'"
Review: Spore 605
The hype leading up to Spore was excessive. But then, so is the scope of the game; following the growth of a species from the cellular level to galactic domination was an ambitious goal, to say the least. Bringing evolution into the realm of entertainment was something Will Wright hoped and gambled he could do after the success of the Sim franchise. But rather than evolution, Spore became more about creation — creation that allows a single-player game to include the community, as well. It ties the various parts of the game together to make Spore very entertaining as a whole. Read on for my thoughts.
Submission + - Dell Loses Bid to Trademark 'Cloud Computing' (datacenterknowledge.com)
1sockchuck writes: "The USPTO has denied Dell's request to trademark the term "cloud computing" (see earlier discussion), finding that the term is generic and "therefore incapable of functioning as a source-identifier for applicant's services." Dell stirred up controversy when it sought to trademark the term, a move which may have been related to its ownership of the domain cloudcomputing.com."
Mimicking Photosynthesis To Split Water 257
plantsdoitsocanwe writes "An international team of researchers led by Monash University has used chemicals found in plants to replicate a key process in photosynthesis, paving the way to a new approach that uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The breakthrough could revolutionize the renewable energy industry by making hydrogen — touted as the clean, green fuel of the future — cheaper and easier to produce on a commercial scale." This was a laboratory demonstration only and the researchers say they need to bring up the efficiency.
Canadians Battling Proposed Canadian DMCA 202
An anonymous reader writes "CTV reports on how Canadians are fighting back against the Canadian DMCA. Led by Michael Geist, the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group is nearing 90,000 members. There are local chapters, a YouTube contest, wikis, and people writing letters and organizing rallies against the copyright bill. Geist said, 'When you get tens of thousands of Canadians speaking out like this, there's big political risk for any political party who chooses to ignore it.'"
id, Raven Developers Discuss New Wolfenstein 162
CVG is running an interview with Kevin Cloud, executive producer at id, and Eric Biessman, who leads Raven Software's programmers and artists, about the upcoming installment to the Wolfenstein series. They provide some detail about what kind of weapons will be available, what those crazy Nazis are up to this time, and BJ Blazkowicz's new ability to "shroud" himself.
"Press a single button, at any time, and you'll see the other side of reality: a green and violent dimension that's filled with strange creatures and whirling tornadoes of energy. Just being in the shroud gives you options: floating above the ground are 'collectors' - fleshy heavy metal album cover worms that are scavenging electrical energy. Pop them, with a single rifle round, and they'll blast apart, damaging enemies in the real world. They are essentially exploding, hidden, organic barrels. ...In shroud mode, too, occult symbols etched into the masonry are transformed into holes in walls that BJ can simply step, shoot, or lob a grenade through."
Sun Open-Sources Java UI Toolkit 59
ruphus13 writes "As the mobile space heats up, Sun has released the source code for Java Lightweight UI Toolkit under the GPL v2 license. ZDNet quotes Sun's senior director of embedded software saying, 'By creating LWUIT, Sun is reaffirming its commitment to the mobile development community and by open-sourcing the LWUIT code, we are enabling mobile developers to quickly and easily create rich, portable interfaces for their applications -- functionality that they have been requesting for some time.' Will Adobe follow suit?"
Sun is also working on some fixes to holes in their mobile Java platform, which were discovered by a Polish researcher who demanded €20,000 to disclose the information.
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