The first is drawing up the list, the second will send out letters offering the chance to license the code SCO says has been copied into Linux, and the third will take legal action against those who refuse.
Um, excuse me SCO, but what if I just remove "your" code from my kernel and recompile? What if I've already engineered my own replacement?
IANAL, but it seems to me that anyone who gets sued by SCO could just demand to see the evidence of infringement, and then pay a college student to rewrite those portions of the kernel. After that SCO would have no case.
Quite frankly, they can sue all they want. If it ever comes to them suing me, I need do little more than demand evidence of infringement, and show up in court with my new source tree for my "modified" linux kernel.
So in 138.25 days their program checked over 6.8E11 tours per second. That makes your solution look a bit pathetic, doesn't it?
Actually, it makes your math look worse. According to you, this program evaluated 680 billion moves per second. Kind of interesting considering that the processor on which they ran the evaluation has a theoretical maximum of 4 billion instructions per second!
But that's not the point - brute force is always the least efficient solution.
so the program had to enumerate and check all possible knight's tours
Unless, of course, that the program's author could formally prove that the algorithm would eliminate non-magical tours before the evaluation began. The point of algorithm analysis is not merely to write a program which will enumerate and check every possible knight's tour, but rather, one that would eliminate non-magical tours as quickly as they could be proven non-magical.
Quite frankly, who cares? If it is illegal to disclose a security flaw to the public, then I can't be held liable for system insecurity. Because it is illegal to publish security vulnerabilities, a sysadmin can no longer be responsible for system security - for to do so would involve possession of illegal information.
Yeah, this is bad for end users. But, as Microsoft's popularity has shown, the general public cares more about being able to play multimedia than about system security. It won't be until ID theft becomes widespread that people will get serious.
Ultimately, I think people ultimately get the security they deserve. If they don't want to know about system holes, let them get hacked I say. It would do us all a favor.
who was forced to solve this problem in my sophomore-level data structures class? This is a "standard" problem in many computer science texts! My solution took a few seconds as opposed to 150 days - and that was back when pII 400's were the fastest thing around.
Seems to me that this guy would have done better to take a few computer science courses before attempting this. My first iteration of the problem produced results similar to his - it could take billions of moves to calculate one solution. But by refining the algorithm so that squares with the highest number of "accessible" positions were tried first, I reduced the number of moves to solution from several billion tried to several thousand.
I guess it just goes to show that even though computer science started as a branch of mathematics, they have really become two discrete disciplines. A good computer scientist would not have needed 150 computer days to solve this problem; a good mathematician wouldn't have needed a computer. Sadly, the only thing his "solution" has shown is that he's neither good at mathematics, nor computer science.
I too used to think that I was smart, until I was exposed to college. As I worked through college, I found that many of my "bright ideas" had already been implemented by people who had come before me; I was simply unaware of the solution. Had this guy done a bit of research into computer science first, he would have saved himself the embarassment of spending 150 computer-days to solve a standard textbook problem.
A hardware/software vendor actually taking responsibility for the code they write?! Is this a joke?
Microsoft would NEVER do this.
Everyday it looks more and more like my next machine will be an Apple. What Microsoft fails to understand is that their customers hate Microsoft's "Screw the customer" attitude more than the bugs in their products.
and a "predetonator" on each tube, which uses, supplemental oxygen, ethylene fuel and a Ferrari spark plug to kick-start detonation...[emphasis mine]
IIRC, Ethylene oxide and oxygen are the primary ingredients in the fuel-air bomb. So, yeah, I would expect the equivalent of an open-ended bomb to produce more thrust than a conventional jet engine. I'll be more impressed when they can do this without supplemental oxygen, bomb fuel, and a large compressor to "simulate mach 4 speeds".
Granted, it sounds promising, but as of yet they haven't managed to build a prototype which can run on conventional fuels (hydrocarbon based, ethyl alcohol, etc...). Furthermore, the article states that these engine may someday produce power from near standstill to hypersonic speeds, yet their prototype can't run at less than mach4, and requires supplemental O2 at that. Quite frankly, the ramjet designs of the 80's showed more promise than PDEs.
My advice was that anyone who knows what they are doing can create any "evidence" they want in the digital realm. This will become a serious problem for many of our court systems, as they focus on hard evidence. Soon, digital evidence may be regarded as weak as eyewitness reports. [emphasis mine]
Hopefully, this will happen sooner, rather later. By far, the biggest problem I see with our society's dependence on computers is that they believe that computers are infallible. Most people are unaware of the ease with which a hacker could frame a person, leaving behind no evidence of his activities.
IIRC, several years ago a man was almost convicted of embezzling based on a series of computer printouts in which the framer had altered the date and time stamps on the printed reports in order to show "evidence" of embezzlement. Fortunately for the defendant, the police had ripped the printouts out of the printer in a roughshod manner, and managed to pick up the first page of a subsequent report, which showed the correct date and time in the header. Had this not happened, this man would have been sent to jail for a crime that someone else committed.
I can dynamically load and unload kernel modules (cool), but I have to recompile the whole kernel to install a device driver. I suppose if I hacked around enough I could figure out how to compile just the particular module I need, but I really don't have the time and inclination to do so. I need something that just plain works.
Hate to say it, but Windows has a better driver management scheme. If I screw up a kernel compile, I'm looking at a complete reinstall - if I screw up Windows driver installation, I'm looking at restarting in safe mode and uninstalling the driver. It seems to me that Linux driver installation could be made a little easier for the technically uninclined or the lazy programmer.
Contrary to popular belief, you can't sue the government. Granted, if the Feds allow the suit, you may bring it, but not without their permission. Which means, of course, that SCO has no chance of winning against Uncle Sam - even should the Gov allow a suit to proceed, they've got more legal resources than SCO, and could drag the trial out indefinitely. Even should SCO gain a victory, the Government would need do little more than rewrite the offending pieces of the kernel. In the end, I see SCO getting a few thousand in damages, at best.
OEM's write hardware drivers. Which means that if they're using Linux, they've got developers very knowledgeable about the kernel. They need do little more than wait for SCO to sue, at which point SCO will have to reveal the offending code to the OEM. Once this happens, their developers will rewrite the infringing sections of code, and the OEM's will be cleared of any liability whatsoever.
Although IANAL, it would seem that SCO can't possibly expect to collect royalties from anyone with a backbone. Given that the Open Source community is practically begging SCO to reveal the "infringing" parts of the code, and that SCO is not cooperating, it is very unlikely that any court would find in their favor. In order for a cause to be actionable in a court of law, the plaintiff must show that they did not contribute to their own damages - that is, that they did everything reasonable to prevent injury. This will be impossible for SCO, because they continued to distribute the Linux kernal for free after they knew of the "ip infringements". Furthermore, they refused to cooperate with the Open Source community in removing the infringing files from the Linux kernel.
And they've got this anti-piracy poster - you know, red-circle with a bar through it over the silhouette of a pirate on an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper.... right under the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' marquee, in which every letter is about 12" high.
I couldn't help but think, how ironic. I'm wondering if movie makers in the year 2203 will romanticize movie pirates...
On a slightly different note, it seems kind of hypocritical for an association which makes movies glorifying violence and killing to treat copying as a capital offense. What's even more interesting is that they claim that pirates are putting them out of work, but who really cares? They've produced movie after movie in which theft is glorified (Gone in 60 Seconds, Out of Sight, etc...), and then they act appalled when their viewers go out and do the very things their movies espouse. After all, isn't theft (illegal copying?) really okay if your heart is in the right place (Robin Hood)?
Sorry, MPAA, but I can't feel sorry for an organization that does everything thing within their power to promote theivery and then complains that people are "stealing their work".
If you want people to stop "stealing" your movies, maybe you shouldn't make movies glorifying theft in the first place.
Might be interesting to encrypt mp3's into a self-extracting executable format with a click through license agreement that says something similar to the following:
By clicking on the 'I agree' button, you agree that you will indemnify the source of this file from any copyright infringement action, and refrain from participation in any litigation involving copyright hencewith. If you are a copyright holder for content contained herein, you further agree that the source of this file has permission to distribute said content.
What this would do is force the issue of the legality of click-through license agreements into the courts. The RIAA will bring infringement action against the distributor of a file such as this one, and the legality of the click-through agreement will be tested. In order for the RIAA to win, the judge would have to rule that click-through license agreements are invalid; this is good for the masses, but bad for Joe Filetrader. OTOH, if the filetrader wins, this means that the RIAA will have no legal means to stop filesharing.
Just an aside, but it would seem to me that if DRM/Palladium can keep consumers from digitally copying copy-protected music, then it could also be used by pirates to keep the RIAA from ever prosecuting music pirates. If a pirate recorded the digital output from the soundcard, and then used that to rip to mp3, they would then have technical "ownership" of the mp3, from the DRM perspective. They could then offer this file on the p2p networks with no worries at all - should the RIAA ever stumbled across a copy, the pirates could use their "authorship permissions" inherent in the DRM software to remotely delete the file from the RIAA's computer.
What happens if you predict an attack, and the attack happens? Will you:
Be investigated by the FBI because of your knowledge of the events?
Be jailed as a material witness?
Be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit murder? After all, how could you so accurately predict a terrorist incident unless you had ties to the terrorists?
Microsoft completely missed the boat on the low-cost Intel server bandwagon. After 10 years of Windows NT technology (yeah, it's built into W2K and XP too), Microsoft has failed to gain even an appreciable share in the Intel server market.
Microsoft has been saying for years that Windows NT/2000/XP is an alternative to UNIX, and later Linux, but their attempt to penetrate the UNIX market has been an abject failure. I think Microsoft is slowly starting to realize that catchy phrases like "Enterprise Class Computing" and "Mission Critical" don't fool the UNIX crowd.
Granted, I'm not trying to troll, but it seems to me that UNIX and mainframe folks have a much different expectation of reliability and uptime than Microsoft, and Microsoft has been slow in realizing this. At this point, the reliability of WinXP is inconsequential; Microsoft has been so successful on the desktop that they will be forever known as a desktop vendor. When
people think of Microsoft, they think of butterflies and games and multimedia - not exactly the images one wants to associate with their "mission critical server" vendor. This, combined with their hostile attitude toward UNIX and the open source philosophy practically gaurantees that Microsoft will never be accepted as anything more than a toy by the UNIX crowd.
Or do what I do: Reciprocal Secure Offsite Backup. At regular intervals, my friends and I backup everything on our systems to CD and send them to each other. We distribute to multiple friends in case one is on vacation when our system crashes. So here are the benefits:
This is a Fully Legal and industry accepted practice.
The RIAA and MPAA can't snoop - it's illegal to open someone else's mail.
I no longer have to worry about system crashes.
In the event that the RIAA misidentifies me as a song swapper and seizes my PC, restoring from backup is as simple as buying a new PC, and giving a friend a call.
And yes, my MP3 collection is legal - I bought the CD's I've ripped; I have a right to copy the music I've legally acquired.
I'll leave you with a philosophical question. Presumably, it isn't illegal to record songs from the radio. So then, if it isn't illegal to get music for free from the radio, why is it illegal to get it from the 'net? It's not as if these songs being traded online haven't been played on the radio, and from what I've heard, quite a few of them aren't any better in quality either. So why is it that songs grabbed from the 'net are illegal, yet those recorded from the radio are not?
Sosa doesn't have to care - sooner or later, this is going to be a problem for the John Gotti of satellite piracy, and some DirecTV execs are going to end up getting whacked. From what I've read, organized crime (the Mafia) is much more involved with pirating tv signals than movies or CD's. DirecTV isn't taking on just a bunch of casual downloaders; they've included the mob in their hit list, and I imagine the mob will return the favor.
If you have a file stored on your computer and your computer is connected to a publicly available network, you may not even know that you are committing a felony, but this law could put you in jail...
Taken literally, these guys want to make it a crime to connect a computer to the internet.
If you have a file stored on your computer and your computer is connected to a publicly available network, you may not even know that you are committing a felony, but this law could put you in jail...
Every computer has copyrighted material on their machines. Windows is copyrighted by Microsoft, so in essence, this bill makes committing a felony as simple as connecting a Windows machine to the internet. Someone who misconfigures their file and print sharing services, and inadvertently shares their whole C drive has just committed a felony - regardless of their intentions.
There are already viruses which turn unsuspecting Windows machines into filesharing nodes and spambots. If this law is passed, computer virus victims could literally be sent to jail for doing nothing more than checking their email. When it comes down to it, most users are not sophisticated enough to correctly configure their file and print sharing on windows machines, let alone detect when their box has been owned by a filesharing virus. This law would literally make it a crime for joe user to connect to the internet after his box gets hacked.
There's a difference between the economic notion of worth, and the moral notion of worth. The economic notion says that an employee is only worth what the market demands for said work. The moral notion of worth states that a company ought to pay its employees a salary commeasurate with the profit it makes from their services. That is, the employees who do the most essential work of the company should be the highest paid. Yes, a worker should be paid enough to make a living, but if their is excess beyond that, it should be given back to them, because after all, it was their work that made the company successful.
Bottom line, to me, is that the guy on the other side of the planet has just as much right to the job as you or I do. He doesn't want to be homeless or starve, either. I say this from the safety of a good job in a relatively low-cost locale, of course, but I like to think my moral view wouldn't change even under other conditions.
I agree, but I will add this: if my labor is worth $35/hour to a US company, then his labor is as well, all other things being equal. The US company should pay him as much as they pay me, because that is what the job is worth. If they don't, they are cheating him, and he's cheating me by working for so little. Bottom line: nobody wins - not him, not me, only a single CEO. It doesn't matter what his cost of living is - if they pay him less than what they'd pay an American programmer, then he's getting cheated.
By your argument, the vast majority of people who have never in their lives felt even the slightest physical attraction to their own sex are somehow less "dignified" than the minority who do and struggle against it.
Yes, that's my point - there is more dignity in one who overcomes their desires (regardless of their sexuality) than there is one who lives in subjugation to them. For some reason, however, the homosexual community seems oblivious to this.
Witness Schaumburg, Illinois, where the cost of housing has tripled in ten years. In the early 90's, developers on the east side of Schaumburg built and sold houses for $250-$350k. Now those houses are selling for $750k. These are four and five bedroom houses - not mansions.
No, the problem is that people think they have to have such a large house.
No, it's worse than that. In some areas of the country (Schaumburg comes to mind...), it is actually illegal to build houses with less than 4 bedrooms. The reason? Existing homeowners want their property values to skyrocket. Because smaller homes cost less, it would be harder for those who bought large houses to sell their house. Thus, you get all sorts of housing and zoning laws which make it virtually impossible not to buy the stereotypical suburban dream house.
For many of us, moving to a different locale simply isn't an option. Yes, I suppose I could move downstate where I could by a house for $100k. Problem is, if I can't find a job in Chicago, where jobs are plentiful, I won't find a job downstate.
Sure, I could live without the amenities you stated, but these wouldn't make a significant difference in my financial situation. Here's the breakdown:
55% of my net goes to housing and transporation costs, and I'm single, renting an apartment.
When I get married, that percentage will jump to 78%.
If I wanted to buy a house in my area, I would have to spend at least $225k. Should I do this, I would be spending 83% of my net income on housing and transportation.
So the difference between living in the cheapest place I can afford and buying a house is only 5% of my income - that's not a lot of leeway. And given that I can do without either a car (can't work), or a place to live, I don't really have any cost-of-living options. Even if I frugally restrict myself to only the basic amenities, it would make only a 10% in my cost of living, at best. However, working for the same wages a foreigner does would result in me making 75% less than I currently do. If I chose to work for the same wages as my foreign counterpart, I'd literally be homeless and starving.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, excuse me SCO, but what if I just remove "your" code from my kernel and recompile? What if I've already engineered my own replacement?
IANAL, but it seems to me that anyone who gets sued by SCO could just demand to see the evidence of infringement, and then pay a college student to rewrite those portions of the kernel. After that SCO would have no case.
Quite frankly, they can sue all they want. If it ever comes to them suing me, I need do little more than demand evidence of infringement, and show up in court with my new source tree for my "modified" linux kernel.
Actually, it makes your math look worse. According to you, this program evaluated 680 billion moves per second. Kind of interesting considering that the processor on which they ran the evaluation has a theoretical maximum of 4 billion instructions per second!
But that's not the point - brute force is always the least efficient solution.
so the program had to enumerate and check all possible knight's tours
Unless, of course, that the program's author could formally prove that the algorithm would eliminate non-magical tours before the evaluation began. The point of algorithm analysis is not merely to write a program which will enumerate and check every possible knight's tour, but rather, one that would eliminate non-magical tours as quickly as they could be proven non-magical.
Yeah, this is bad for end users. But, as Microsoft's popularity has shown, the general public cares more about being able to play multimedia than about system security. It won't be until ID theft becomes widespread that people will get serious.
Ultimately, I think people ultimately get the security they deserve. If they don't want to know about system holes, let them get hacked I say. It would do us all a favor.
Seems to me that this guy would have done better to take a few computer science courses before attempting this. My first iteration of the problem produced results similar to his - it could take billions of moves to calculate one solution. But by refining the algorithm so that squares with the highest number of "accessible" positions were tried first, I reduced the number of moves to solution from several billion tried to several thousand.
I guess it just goes to show that even though computer science started as a branch of mathematics, they have really become two discrete disciplines. A good computer scientist would not have needed 150 computer days to solve this problem; a good mathematician wouldn't have needed a computer. Sadly, the only thing his "solution" has shown is that he's neither good at mathematics, nor computer science.
I too used to think that I was smart, until I was exposed to college. As I worked through college, I found that many of my "bright ideas" had already been implemented by people who had come before me; I was simply unaware of the solution. Had this guy done a bit of research into computer science first, he would have saved himself the embarassment of spending 150 computer-days to solve a standard textbook problem.
Microsoft would NEVER do this.
Everyday it looks more and more like my next machine will be an Apple. What Microsoft fails to understand is that their customers hate Microsoft's "Screw the customer" attitude more than the bugs in their products.
IIRC, Ethylene oxide and oxygen are the primary ingredients in the fuel-air bomb. So, yeah, I would expect the equivalent of an open-ended bomb to produce more thrust than a conventional jet engine. I'll be more impressed when they can do this without supplemental oxygen, bomb fuel, and a large compressor to "simulate mach 4 speeds".
Granted, it sounds promising, but as of yet they haven't managed to build a prototype which can run on conventional fuels (hydrocarbon based, ethyl alcohol, etc...). Furthermore, the article states that these engine may someday produce power from near standstill to hypersonic speeds, yet their prototype can't run at less than mach4, and requires supplemental O2 at that. Quite frankly, the ramjet designs of the 80's showed more promise than PDEs.
So you only did tech support until you got laid? Perhaps the experience made you realize how much tech support sucks?
Perhaps you meant laid off?
Hopefully, this will happen sooner, rather later. By far, the biggest problem I see with our society's dependence on computers is that they believe that computers are infallible. Most people are unaware of the ease with which a hacker could frame a person, leaving behind no evidence of his activities.
IIRC, several years ago a man was almost convicted of embezzling based on a series of computer printouts in which the framer had altered the date and time stamps on the printed reports in order to show "evidence" of embezzlement. Fortunately for the defendant, the police had ripped the printouts out of the printer in a roughshod manner, and managed to pick up the first page of a subsequent report, which showed the correct date and time in the header. Had this not happened, this man would have been sent to jail for a crime that someone else committed.
I can dynamically load and unload kernel modules (cool), but I have to recompile the whole kernel to install a device driver. I suppose if I hacked around enough I could figure out how to compile just the particular module I need, but I really don't have the time and inclination to do so. I need something that just plain works.
Hate to say it, but Windows has a better driver management scheme. If I screw up a kernel compile, I'm looking at a complete reinstall - if I screw up Windows driver installation, I'm looking at restarting in safe mode and uninstalling the driver. It seems to me that Linux driver installation could be made a little easier for the technically uninclined or the lazy programmer.
Although IANAL, it would seem that SCO can't possibly expect to collect royalties from anyone with a backbone. Given that the Open Source community is practically begging SCO to reveal the "infringing" parts of the code, and that SCO is not cooperating, it is very unlikely that any court would find in their favor. In order for a cause to be actionable in a court of law, the plaintiff must show that they did not contribute to their own damages - that is, that they did everything reasonable to prevent injury. This will be impossible for SCO, because they continued to distribute the Linux kernal for free after they knew of the "ip infringements". Furthermore, they refused to cooperate with the Open Source community in removing the infringing files from the Linux kernel.
Do you have a link, please? I'd really like to see scientific evidence of this.
I couldn't help but think, how ironic. I'm wondering if movie makers in the year 2203 will romanticize movie pirates...
On a slightly different note, it seems kind of hypocritical for an association which makes movies glorifying violence and killing to treat copying as a capital offense. What's even more interesting is that they claim that pirates are putting them out of work, but who really cares? They've produced movie after movie in which theft is glorified (Gone in 60 Seconds, Out of Sight, etc...), and then they act appalled when their viewers go out and do the very things their movies espouse. After all, isn't theft (illegal copying?) really okay if your heart is in the right place (Robin Hood)?
Sorry, MPAA, but I can't feel sorry for an organization that does everything thing within their power to promote theivery and then complains that people are "stealing their work". If you want people to stop "stealing" your movies, maybe you shouldn't make movies glorifying theft in the first place.
By clicking on the 'I agree' button, you agree that you will indemnify the source of this file from any copyright infringement action, and refrain from participation in any litigation involving copyright hencewith. If you are a copyright holder for content contained herein, you further agree that the source of this file has permission to distribute said content.
What this would do is force the issue of the legality of click-through license agreements into the courts. The RIAA will bring infringement action against the distributor of a file such as this one, and the legality of the click-through agreement will be tested. In order for the RIAA to win, the judge would have to rule that click-through license agreements are invalid; this is good for the masses, but bad for Joe Filetrader. OTOH, if the filetrader wins, this means that the RIAA will have no legal means to stop filesharing.
Just an aside, but it would seem to me that if DRM/Palladium can keep consumers from digitally copying copy-protected music, then it could also be used by pirates to keep the RIAA from ever prosecuting music pirates. If a pirate recorded the digital output from the soundcard, and then used that to rip to mp3, they would then have technical "ownership" of the mp3, from the DRM perspective. They could then offer this file on the p2p networks with no worries at all - should the RIAA ever stumbled across a copy, the pirates could use their "authorship permissions" inherent in the DRM software to remotely delete the file from the RIAA's computer.
Microsoft completely missed the boat on the low-cost Intel server bandwagon. After 10 years of Windows NT technology (yeah, it's built into W2K and XP too), Microsoft has failed to gain even an appreciable share in the Intel server market.
Microsoft has been saying for years that Windows NT/2000/XP is an alternative to UNIX, and later Linux, but their attempt to penetrate the UNIX market has been an abject failure. I think Microsoft is slowly starting to realize that catchy phrases like "Enterprise Class Computing" and "Mission Critical" don't fool the UNIX crowd.
Granted, I'm not trying to troll, but it seems to me that UNIX and mainframe folks have a much different expectation of reliability and uptime than Microsoft, and Microsoft has been slow in realizing this. At this point, the reliability of WinXP is inconsequential; Microsoft has been so successful on the desktop that they will be forever known as a desktop vendor. When people think of Microsoft, they think of butterflies and games and multimedia - not exactly the images one wants to associate with their "mission critical server" vendor. This, combined with their hostile attitude toward UNIX and the open source philosophy practically gaurantees that Microsoft will never be accepted as anything more than a toy by the UNIX crowd.
Or do what I do: Reciprocal Secure Offsite Backup. At regular intervals, my friends and I backup everything on our systems to CD and send them to each other. We distribute to multiple friends in case one is on vacation when our system crashes. So here are the benefits:
And yes, my MP3 collection is legal - I bought the CD's I've ripped; I have a right to copy the music I've legally acquired.
I'll leave you with a philosophical question. Presumably, it isn't illegal to record songs from the radio. So then, if it isn't illegal to get music for free from the radio, why is it illegal to get it from the 'net? It's not as if these songs being traded online haven't been played on the radio, and from what I've heard, quite a few of them aren't any better in quality either. So why is it that songs grabbed from the 'net are illegal, yet those recorded from the radio are not?
Sosa doesn't have to care - sooner or later, this is going to be a problem for the John Gotti of satellite piracy, and some DirecTV execs are going to end up getting whacked. From what I've read, organized crime (the Mafia) is much more involved with pirating tv signals than movies or CD's. DirecTV isn't taking on just a bunch of casual downloaders; they've included the mob in their hit list, and I imagine the mob will return the favor.
From article:
If you have a file stored on your computer and your computer is connected to a publicly available network, you may not even know that you are committing a felony, but this law could put you in jail...Taken literally, these guys want to make it a crime to connect a computer to the internet.
From article:
If you have a file stored on your computer and your computer is connected to a publicly available network, you may not even know that you are committing a felony, but this law could put you in jail...Every computer has copyrighted material on their machines. Windows is copyrighted by Microsoft, so in essence, this bill makes committing a felony as simple as connecting a Windows machine to the internet. Someone who misconfigures their file and print sharing services, and inadvertently shares their whole C drive has just committed a felony - regardless of their intentions.
There are already viruses which turn unsuspecting Windows machines into filesharing nodes and spambots. If this law is passed, computer virus victims could literally be sent to jail for doing nothing more than checking their email. When it comes down to it, most users are not sophisticated enough to correctly configure their file and print sharing on windows machines, let alone detect when their box has been owned by a filesharing virus. This law would literally make it a crime for joe user to connect to the internet after his box gets hacked.
Is to hear that the proposed TIA will be built on top of an MS Access database....
There's a difference between the economic notion of worth, and the moral notion of worth. The economic notion says that an employee is only worth what the market demands for said work. The moral notion of worth states that a company ought to pay its employees a salary commeasurate with the profit it makes from their services. That is, the employees who do the most essential work of the company should be the highest paid. Yes, a worker should be paid enough to make a living, but if their is excess beyond that, it should be given back to them, because after all, it was their work that made the company successful.
I agree, but I will add this: if my labor is worth $35/hour to a US company, then his labor is as well, all other things being equal. The US company should pay him as much as they pay me, because that is what the job is worth. If they don't, they are cheating him, and he's cheating me by working for so little. Bottom line: nobody wins - not him, not me, only a single CEO. It doesn't matter what his cost of living is - if they pay him less than what they'd pay an American programmer, then he's getting cheated.
Yes, that's my point - there is more dignity in one who overcomes their desires (regardless of their sexuality) than there is one who lives in subjugation to them. For some reason, however, the homosexual community seems oblivious to this.
Witness Schaumburg, Illinois, where the cost of housing has tripled in ten years. In the early 90's, developers on the east side of Schaumburg built and sold houses for $250-$350k. Now those houses are selling for $750k. These are four and five bedroom houses - not mansions.
No, the problem is that people think they have to have such a large house.
No, it's worse than that. In some areas of the country (Schaumburg comes to mind...), it is actually illegal to build houses with less than 4 bedrooms. The reason? Existing homeowners want their property values to skyrocket. Because smaller homes cost less, it would be harder for those who bought large houses to sell their house. Thus, you get all sorts of housing and zoning laws which make it virtually impossible not to buy the stereotypical suburban dream house.
For many of us, moving to a different locale simply isn't an option. Yes, I suppose I could move downstate where I could by a house for $100k. Problem is, if I can't find a job in Chicago, where jobs are plentiful, I won't find a job downstate.
Sure, I could live without the amenities you stated, but these wouldn't make a significant difference in my financial situation. Here's the breakdown:
So the difference between living in the cheapest place I can afford and buying a house is only 5% of my income - that's not a lot of leeway. And given that I can do without either a car (can't work), or a place to live, I don't really have any cost-of-living options. Even if I frugally restrict myself to only the basic amenities, it would make only a 10% in my cost of living, at best. However, working for the same wages a foreigner does would result in me making 75% less than I currently do. If I chose to work for the same wages as my foreign counterpart, I'd literally be homeless and starving.