gdee

Why does the server side (whatever might live there) have to parse HTML?

Well the demo video is up now and I believe MS's Bing is pale, very pale in comparison.

Also, to generalize the point, All the actions that you cited are actions that are generally forbidden regardless of the means used. That's fine. The problem is that they were cited as counter examples to actions generally permitted but forbidden if done a certain way. Or more precisely only permitted in certain ways. That's not fine. I'm expected to shell the money but only enjoy a movie DVD at home (no transposing please, or else), in the "right" part of the world (no region free players please, or else), with the "right" kind of equipment.

> I take it you also object to laws that prevent you using the gun you've purchased to shoot someone

Well it depends on the context but your example is wrong in any context. I would object to a law prohibiting me to use a gun I bought (as if I could, seeing how I live in Spain) as a hammer for example. Or to paint it pink (as if I would). All stretched counterexamples, I agree, but there is an underlying trend.

> using the lighter you've bought to start a fire

Wrong kind of analogy again. I object to being forbidden from engraving my zippo. Or braking it to pieces.

> driving the car you've bought over a pet dog

Wrong kind of analogy again. I (would) object to being forbidden from repainting the car. Or cutting it in half. Or reselling it to someone else.

I could go on with the reactor (oh please), the printing press (you're trying to hard), the stereo and so on but it's useless because they are all dishonest analogies. They put the focus on forbidden actions for witch the owned items are mere tools. Objections to DRM are generally focused on forbidden actions to witch the owned items are subjects. Like transposing a DVD to watch it on my PMP. Huge difference. And I think you knew that difference already.

I think it is. To paraphrase a certain famous man,

" Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use Method Chaining.' Now they have many more problems."

If you read the article, you'll see those problem mount and mount and the proposed solutions are more and more hideous. Thus humor. Akin to this really: http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer....

What if I don't have one? (This is the problem with assumptions)

Is this kind of humor allowed?

Oh ok. The "all" and "one bit" threw me off. And the creamy, 4 days old hand-roasted, Yellow Bourbon SHB double shot made me answer. :)

> I've tried all the stuff mentioned in the article, and to me personally ... it hasn't made one bit of difference.

You mean you actually roasted good greens, let them degass, ground them correctly and pulled espresso shots (at the right temp./pressure) and found them to have not one bit of diff from regular, supermarket/sb coffee?

> It just looks like a fairytale.

Well applied HDR[1] does that to photography.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging

The second paragraph though makes a great point.

Oh, that's just one part of the inconsistency shown in the BSA quotes.

"Digital content is not a tangible good and should not be subject to the same liability rules as toasters" is also interesting seeing how in regards to [intellectual] property they very much push the opposite stance.

"extending consumer regulation to software could lead to less interoperability between software products" is just shameless seeing how the EC had to force some (much fought against) interoperability down some of the bigger memberst of the BSA.

So cooks, carpenters , people really serious about clothes are "hobbyists who have reached the utmost peak level in their art" but when I buy green and toast then grind for myself, I'm just a "coffee snob"... hmm... no Monsooned Malabar [1] for you.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsooned_Malabar

hmm... I usually have 300+ tabs open (6-8 windows, 2-3 processes) with FF3 with no slowdown... (XP/C2D/4G)

Yes, but that is a relatively new interpretation right? Funny how religions have a way to, at least sometimes, adapt themselves, to evolve there, sometimes, core truths, yet still claim to be based on immutable facts, long time ago revealed. From a sufficiently zoomed back time scale, they seem almost agile... like startups... As I said... funny. :)

>the majority of studies indicate...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

>that filesharing replaces demand for (paid) recorded music, rather than stimulating it

"Altin asked Wallis if there is any connection between illicit downloads and lost sales in the music industry. Contradicting the opinion of John Kennedy of the IFPI in his testimony yesterday, Wallis said that downloading caused an increase in sales of live event tickets and although there has been a reduction in CD sales, this won’t continue.

Wallis went on to explain that while some people download, these people also tend to buy more CDs than others that don’t. It’s not just downloading causing competition for the industry, other things have an effect such as the growth of computer games, he said."

"Professor and media researcher Roger Wallis appeared as an expert witness at the Pirate Bay trial yesterday. He was questioned on the link between the decline of album sales and filesharing. Wallis told the court that his research has shown that there is no relation between the two."

I suppose you did read TFA and related so you know who the man with the flower-showered wife is.

Totally OT but I'll try. You don't also happen to know the name of a SF novel about some project Australia. Somewhat resemblant to what you describe. Physical work unneeded, robots doing everything, energy problem solved, people VR'ing with some spinal implants. Whole thing started as a corp. venture witch sold stocks at a dollar the unit?

>We have to store the bits somewhere.

+1 for the fine, fine irony. Intended or otherwise as it might have been.

>but they simply can not create it.

I seem to remember reading that that's not the case anymore. As in, we actually can make gold through transmutation. The amount of energy required to do so is bigger than the "value" of the resultant gold tough.

Don't take this the wrong way, it's meant as a little meta-joke: Based on word count, you're "summary of the other 10%" is exactly 46.8% of the original. :)

I'm sorry if I seemed pedantic. It was not my intention. I took "all" literally because I thought that it was important in that context. The problem was pointed to be heat and I thought pointing out that heat is the result (and directly proportional with) the inefficiency of the design (friction mainly) and power drawn, would be useful. It thus seemed that increasing efficiency and/or reducing power requirements would be a nice way of solving that particular wish in the original article. Therefore I thought that assuming heat was unavoidable was not a good/correct idea and tried to argue that. The tone was already set to "let's make wishes". If you want to argue that all energy goes to heat in the end... irreversibly even, I think you move to a different level altogether.

Happy birthday ! :)

I've up voted you. Could someone explain the negatives? I had problems with both Microsoft and Borland IDEs coerced to multicolumn (which had to be multiwin, no other way) on the same file too.

Oh common. I objected to you saying that all energy drawn gets transformed to heat. That's patently false, unless the system you're studying has either efficiency 0% or is indeed a heater of efficiency 100%. Anything in between contradicts what you said. In the specific case I've objected to is even easier to see the problem. The HDD platters spin. That's work done. Energy transformation from electric to kinetic. Whether its quantity is bigger or smaller than that that gets transformed to thermal energy is a matter of efficiency. Otherwise the kinetic one would be free and Perendev and Bedini would be inclined to post here.

>It takes a lot of energy to spin platters that fast, and it all gets turned into heat in the end.

Wrong. Just the wasted energy turns to heat. Wasted by means of mechanical/electric friction. The usefully used (to put it this way) get's transformed in kinetic energy (platter rotation)(most), other electrical energy (transformers) and more.

I fully agree with the notion that (more) technology is not always a panacea but I think it should at least be given a fair chance. That includes implementing it properly. Given that this was not the case there (at that time) I would still bet on technology going forward. And process.

Allegedly, the robbers walked with 100M euros without cleaning the vault. Price would have to be really steep for those additional security measures for their cost to be an issue I think.

> A vault doesn't have to be impregnable, only visibly difficult to steal from.

I'm pretty sure a vault in this situation has to be really impenetrable and definitely not just visibly difficult to steal from.

What you're proposing is the exact situation they had. The result didn't look good.

Old (2006) article but extremely intellectually gratifying. A leaf of a wikitrip of course.

>As soon as I utter the word "programmer", I can see the light in their eyes begin to fade - but mentioning the iPhone brings them back and suddenly I'm a person with a cool job.

I know just the situation. It's game consoles instead of iPhone in my case though. If I talk with youngsters I usually top it with 'coin-op' and 'have more than 70 consoles in my house' for maximum bang :).

:) What's European time? I imagine we (you and me) share Central European Time (CET) but ET?