We have a legal right to play these cd's (and dvd's - remember we aren't supposed to be able to watch them in linux) on any system we want. Period.
(Covers mouth and coughs "bullshit!").
That would be like buying an old vinyl 45 RPM record, then complaining that it would not play on your Victorphone with the wax cylinder playing system. When you buy a CD you have the right to play it (and expect it to play) only in the hardware it was designed for. There is no requirement that it play in hardware it was not designed for. When copies were analog (vinyl to tape), no one cared because (1) tape prices included a small kickback to the recording industry to cover the opportunity costs of piracy, and (2) 3rd or 4th generation copies were interesting exercises in white noise.
The fact that you can make flawless digital copies does not mean you have a right to do so any more than the fact that you can walk into a corn field and take corn means you have a right to do so.
You may convince yourself that you are making copies only for your own convenience (certainly my MP3 collection means I don't have to dig out individual CDs to play songs I like), but once you post them or distribute them, you are nothing more than a common criminal with a nifty distribution plan. The fact that you do not charge for your copies moves you from "common criminal" to "common vandal" since you are really only doing the damage for the fun of it.
The fact that this battle is between a shitty, pop-culture stealing, value warping music industry and a bunch of snotty-nosed vandals just means that most of us (I hope) are on the sidelines waiting for the damn half-time show, hoping that it will be better than the fekkin game. When I want to support music, I go to a damn concert.
sure, the entire planet would be destroyed too, but that was the case with nuclear
weapons, and it never stopped their deployment.
Except for some fun-loving physicists who took bets on whether the early bomb tests could ignite spontaneous atmosphere-consuming nuclear fires, no one ever believed that a single weapon could destroy the world. As for lots of them, well, looks like we'll never know now, since the US and Russia are reducing stores and the US is pretty much ready, willing, and able to militarily stop anyone from building those nuclear-winter levels ever again. I just hope Al Gore or Hillary C understands this if she gets in power. I doubt she does.
Sometimes the worst effect of a bad law is not the law itself, but rather the disrespect for the law in general that grows as a result of disrespect for the bad law.
Government organizations suffer from this as well. The reputation of all government organizations suffer from the "Leno effect" when the late night shows ridicule the behavior of a bad government office. This is surely such an example.
The Patent Office finding that swinging from a tree branch on two ropes/chains is patentable (2002, Patent #6,368,227, see appended text) is so unbelievable, so idiotic, and so blatently bad that just knowing that the beaurocractic beast is able to generate such stupidity makes be wonder if other government "truths" are also of any value. I think I'll start smoking and start driving a 1976 Plymouth Fury wagon with the big engine (4 m.p.g., contributes more global warming gases that the average 3rd world country burning rain forests to cook rats and monkeys).
Apparently, the Patent Office standard operating procedure (S.O.P.) is to issue first, then let merit be determined based on subsequent challenges. Of course, this
patent fails the challenge, but in the meantime the US Patent Office takes another publicity hit. Ironically, since the Patent Office is probably not involved in the litigation, this is possibly a cost-effective (for the taxpayers) way to handle patents, although it looks a lot like a W.P.A. for lawyers. By approving everything, the resulting litigation is between competing patent lawyers paid by private companies rather than between a private company and the US Patent Office.
And, for a free market, the real problem is most certainly in the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) a letter from an organization claiming "we own a patent that covers your work" can cause in a development environment.
It might appear that the solution lies in bringing the costs of undefenseable patents back to the patent holder, at least then they would do a reasonable "due-diligence" search against existing patents and prior art before they filed. As NewtonsLaw pointed out in the parent post, this might make patents too expensive for the little guy.
Bottom line, a patent is like a copyright, and has no real value unless you can afford the lawyers to get your money out of infringers or can make money off the original work.
I am trying to coordinate a small team generating version 3.6 of their product. (I came in as part of 3.5). I shift all requests for new features to my 4.0 list, bump 4.0 stuff to 4.1, ask the developers for their best deadline estimates on their 3.6 components, and add my SWAG to shift their own estimates further out. Then you want to blame me when the deadlines are all bullshit. You are right, I must be stupid for believing them.
And I will attempt to establish a new country on a Pacific island, I swear"
Wake up and smell the masses my friend. Several posts have said that they will escape to a better place, but until we can move to the moon (any bets?), or further, you can no longer run away from governments that will tax you beyond any reason (95% rates in UK, 105% rates in some Scandanavian country, so I've heard). In the USA at least, the "victim-jockeys" have discovered that 51% of the voters can make it so the other 49% have to support them, and the tax burden is spiralling hopelessly in that direction. Be careful that you do not confuse privacy with freedom, they are not the same at all. Being required to prove who you are before you can access a bank account (buy something) or see someone's medical records (prove to the information-holder that you are authorized to see these private records) is not solved by anything that you can hold (or have injected like a subcutaneous piercing --- no doctor required). It is only solved by a true live biometric measurement. It is not an infringment on your privacy to expect you to present positive ID before you access this sort of information.
On the other hand, just as there are Web sites that specialize in letting you hide your true identity, there will be debit cards that perform exactly that function, so you will be able to buy your pr0n and eat it too.
.01% of the population might be willing to copyright their DNA and let Big Medicine play with it. Then, So, in a hundred years or so, when it turns out that they and their offspring can get much better health care than the descendents of the other 99.99% because medicine was able to progress to help them, who should we blame? I hope the anarcho-privacy complex that we are so worried about doesn't become a death sentence for our great-grandchildren.
Hmmmm, you can't disprove a statement that "there is something wrong with describing gravity as 'f=m1*m2*G/(r*r)'" by claiming that "the equation 'f=m1*m2*G/(r*r)' describes gravity".
The fundamental question raised by the experiment is whether the equation does cover it all (I simplify from the tensors that describe General Relativity, the point is the same).
Also, the poster with the perpetual motion machine made a good point, but I suspect that the answer would be that the plate slows down even in the absence of friction, meaning that energy is needed to drive the plate, therefore no net gain is possible. On the other hand, the region that the plate shields must be quite small indeed, since it is a mathematical convenience to act as if gravity is a linear field radiating from the "center of the earth". It is, in fact, the sum of lots of little attractions that conveniently acts as if the mass of the earth were concentrated at the center, but this is a good approximation only when you get far enough away from the earth. That's why the gravity models used to manage LEO (low earth orbit) satellites have to account for higher order effects (beyond simple r*r stuff).
Some would see the mass production of cars to have had a similar effect on our species.
Good point, glad this was modded up. The question is... how do we stop (Luddite alert) the market-based deployment of technology that has mixed benefits and costs? I point to the IT (or whatever), that "why should I walk when I can stand and ride on this" gizmo, as an example that could continue the fattening of the world by once again reducing the need to actually lift up one's feet and put them back down to move. We know that evolution happens (not counting those atavistic throwbacks that quote Q'uran, Talmud, Bible to say otherwise). How do we counteract the effects of these technologies without becoming Nazis? How do we even agree on which technologies are the dangerous ones? I might argue that the "IT" is a dangerous technology, a reactionary might argue that emotion-based newscasting (lots of images, little content, what I call the "Katie Couric factor") is a dangerous use of technology, an eco-reactionary might argue that using fossil fuels and wood was a dangerous use of technology, a fundamentalist (pick your favorite superstition/religion) might argue that free speech enabled by the Internet is a dangerous use of technology. All would be correct, but would they be righteous if they fought back? Each would think so. Each might use extreme methods. Some would be terrorists, some would be freedom fighters, all would be wackos.
It is pretty much a scientific fact (high probability) that viewing/playing violent video games increases the probability that a person will react violently or use violence to settle disputes. In addition, the games tend to desensitize players by reducing their ability to empathize with "targets". The military knows this, they use such tools to desensitize soldiers so they will overcome their natural tendency to not shoot people. The fact that you yourself drive across town without plowing down pedestrians is called "anecdotal" and as such proves jack-shit. Failing to understand the difference is probable cause to believe that you are incompetent to vote on any issues that are not reducible to simple statements like "no parking after midnight".
Having said that, the question is "how large must the change in probability be before we should attempt to control violent video games". The answer comes in two parts - Ammendment I to the Constitution says (more or less) that the delta must be infinite before I can stop the virtual-training; Ammendment II lets me say "bring it on you desensitized cyberpunk".
Why is it that Slashdot only wants to protect the rights of the "artist" when that artist is a student whose work - at best - should probably be viewed as "work for hire" of the corporate entity (school) they are attending? Yet, if an artist recording music (also probably legally a work-for-hire situation) wants that same protection we cry RIAA conspiracy? While a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, it seems to me that inconsistency in application of principles is the quintescience of hypocratic thinking.
So, we see that ~1mm is the distance limit because c in the material is too slow - the next generation chips will be little hard vacuums with state information stored in one of the other 7 dimensions so that signals are not impeded by the materials used in the chip.
As for my old 1.2G processors, I am going to start using them as domain controllers for my electric fences... "hello post 42, acknowledge... now."
Basically you have to ask the govt, why is a war needed if a speech can shake people's belief in the purpose of that war.
Yeah. Right. The problem is that the people who usually run those wars believe in free speech for citizens under the protections of the Constitution enough to kill non-citizens who threaten that and other freedoms. They also (at least in US North America) tend to believe in reasoned discourse as a means of changing laws and not in rant-and-chant. Unfortunately, rant-and-chant tactics (as seen often in non-Western cultures, and seen more and more in the West) are not reasoned discourse, and represent an abuse of the principle of free speech as much as does kiddie pr0n. The Vietnam war was not stopped by reasoned discourse, it was stopped by unreasoned response to mob actions. How many millions of SE Asians died in Cambodia and S. Vietnam because the West (first France, then the US) were driven out before they could impose the rules of law and freedom that the Brits imposed on (for example) India?
We are talking here about whether a game host has the right to say that one of the rules is that you may not use real-world exchanges to motivate players within the game. I think game hosts do have that right, just like Monopoly players know that they are supposed to use two die. Sometimes Monopoly players will agree to "throw three, pick two", which changes the randomness dynamic, but all the players at the table know this going in, and are agreed that that is the new rule.
Now, if I offer my 12 yr old cousin a candy bar in exchange for not having to pay rent on Park Place, at least the other players KNOW I am stretching the rules, and a lively debate will often resolve one way or another, but at least we will all know the new rules.
Once, while playing Monopoly, I negotiated "free rides", then when the property sold, I claimed (successfully) that my "free rides" was an easement, which meant that they transferred to the new owner. This sort of flexibility and ability to find loopholes is one of the things that makes dungeon-master driven games so much fun ("I cast ball-of-fire against the tarpits"). The issue is not whether the rule is designed to control the play (as in, "you cannot jump 50 feet because people cannot jump 50 feet") or to control the game (as in "taking two turns in a row is against the rules"). It is whether the game developer can deliver the game they promised to the people who may pay to play. People who do not follw the rules of a game, no matter how arbitrary those rules are, are cheaters.
Doesn't it cost money for the WinCE license? And does it not cost money for the Midori Linux license (GPL)?
Maybe they expect a higher rate of tech support with the Linux version since users won't understand it as well. Sounds like their marketing department is lazy.
Or, perhaps it cost them more to integrate Linux than WinCE and their marketing dept. does not understand the concept of sunk costs?
BTW - our company is looking at providing a biometric reader solution for this platform, but we don't have money to develop Linux versions (yet), so since we are one-platform deep, we have to go with the one that holds 90% of the market share so we have a chance. However, we are working toward a platform neutral solution (at least in our thinking).
Wonderful post - especially the use of game-theoretic language to make the point that the fact that taxes steal from one group to support another means that the optimal solution is to stop working. I think it was B. Franklin who said that democracy will fail when the mob realizes that they own the keys (votes) to the treasury.
For a truly frightening statistic, I read that the bottom 51% of taxpayers pay only 4% of the taxes! They have no incentive to reduce taxes, lots of incentives to vote for new services. D'oh! There's a formula for trouble.
i have to admit that i myself have large reservations about capitalism
I have no such concerns, it is the conversion of time (my labor) to capital (land, investments, etc.) that allows me to reach the point where I do not need to work 24/7 to live, and may even be able to work 4/5 at something I enjoy and live the rest as I wish. If I am really good, I might even get to the point where my capital lets me work 0/1 and live fully off of capitalism.
As for the idea that Linux or any other alternative OS is better or more important to the OpenSource community misses the point. An OS is nothing but a tool, and getting ones panties in a wad over them is like arguing whether 50 Hz or 60 Hz is is a "better" base frequency to be used in the power grid. Important tools will be insensitive to the carrier frequency (e.g., the PS on my computer is switchable so it is not stuck in a particular "OS"). The power for my AC probably is not (how often does one drag an AC with them on vacation?).
or you are too uneducatable to learn simple things important to businesses, like the difference between "
your" and "you're" and, if you are like my nephew, you are as proud of your ignorance as I am of my ignorance of WWF. One of my students, who happened to be a soldier, once said that he figured that anyone too stupid to not be able to remember the difference between its and it's ought not be allowed to lead men into battle. Certainly in business there are good arguments requiring a high degree to literacy if you want to stay out of suckee jobs. "Ya want fries wid dat?
It is the recognition of this breeding selection effect and the dialog that needs to be conducted that is important. A chilling interview between a British female reporter and a pro-Taliban woman in Afghanistan revealed how intuitively the 3rd world understands this, and how much in denial the West is. I paraphrase
Naive Western reporter: "
How do you feel about having your sons die in this war?"
Oppresses Afghani women: Proud. I may have 15 children [she is really proud of this fact]. You may have one or two. How can you think that you will win out?
Naive Wetern reporter: [speechless]
[Remember, I am paraphrasing here. Replace Afghani women with any third world mother, or even a mother from the redneck-hillbilly-welfare-mom class in the US. Replace the Naive Western Reporter with any geek class, including Yuppies. Extrapolate. Understand why colonization of Mars is critical, since the skill set necessary to get on such missions is a convenient selection method against stupidity and superstition (one would hope).]
Multiple, successive jumps on one would lead to a "blow up" where the player would be wildly, and unexpectedly shot through the roof and to the outer edge of the game universe.
I cannot be the only one here who remembers running around in Quake and suddenly finding myself orbiting several hundred meters outside the known universe (I could see the whole structure, but could not get back, nor do anything about it). And the first game I coded (an orbital mechanics-based game on an HP9825 using a paper plotter as a display) suffered from exactly the orbital problems discussed since I used a simple 2nd-order approximation to a numerical solution. It was never worth the bother to use better integration (e.g., Runge-Kutta) because the ships were maneuvering enough that the imprecisions were "lost in the thrust".
On the other hand, when we did ballistics analyses for ICBMs, we used the best approximation methods we could afford.
When I moved to Northfield, I visited Papyrus Software, who were working on extremely accurate head-to-head racing programs to be played by phone connection useing the then-uncommon 9600 baud dialup. They had a room full of 486's tied to a bank of modems. Their big physics modeling problem was that their customers knew how tires warmed up and became "slick", and their players wanted to be able to set up their cars the way the real drivers did. I suspect that most gamer first, then fanatic, players of games requiring any physics are more interested in unrealistic rail rides (ride your board down the Eiffel tower!) than they are interested in realistic physics.
Until I read this post I was sooooo confused I could not find my dick with a $30 hooker. The My Documents abomination that Windoze has implemented drives me nuts... I suspect there is a registry setting somewhere that I could change -- after skipping over the "DO NOT ENTER" warnings -- so the damn thing would put my documents where I wanted them, rather than having to use "Find Files" so I can find them within the file hierarchy after they get put on the disk by some app. Now add VSS with its own implementation of aliasing, and I am almost as confused as when I first tried to find my way to a file on a Solaris box. With virtual file systems and the cursed ~ redirects I was reduced to tears when the gurus would not tell me how to find the fekkin root for the web host.
"All I want to know is what to type in at the system prompt to change the file using vi. Is it "vi/etc/usr/lusr/htdocs/where/the/fek/am/I/Index.html ?", I sobbed. "No," replied the gurus, "it's "vi/etc/usr/lusr/htdocs/where/the/fek/am/i/Index.html ", you ignorant peasant, can't you read?".
As an applications programmer and analyst who codes, I have seen the hierarchy of science mirrored in the programming community. Each level aspires to the level above's rigor and models. In science, for example, social scientists (universally recognized by everyone to be a bunch of fekkin wannabes) aspire to use biological models, biologists want to explain their world in chemists' terms, chemists want to use the physics models, physicists want to use mathematical models, and mathematicians want to use pure logic.
Similarly, in programming, spreadsheet programmers (universally recognized by everyone to be a bunch of fekkin wannabes) want to be as rigorous as database programmers, database programmers want to be as powerful as applications programmers, app programmers want to play in the OS world, and the OS world wants to be rigorous as the mathematicians who...
Well, you get the idea.
Disclaimer: I am a mathematician (now if I could just find my way around this damn Godel's Paradox, maybe I could get some real rigor going)....
Being a volunteer fire fighter for 15+ years now, I know for a fact that the government collects data on every aspect of a fire. What materials were used to start the fire, electrical involvement, equipment involvement, radiated heat, blah blah blah. If we can do this with fire, why not computer systems? I mean heck,
what better product to do statistics about than the product that compiles the statistics!
Which misses the important difference - when investigators to go a fire site to collect data no one screams "Violation of privacy". And a company that is a victim of arson does not percieve that to be a bit of press that will reflect unfavorably on them.
plugging the
security holes, so there's no defacement in the first place
Hmmmmm, think about it. There are 13 kazillion script kiddies trying to find new security holes. There usually are one or two techies at a company trying to keep the Web site up. They can try to keep up with/ahead of the 13 kazillion, or buy a piece of automated repairware, launch and forget about it. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.
If the freedom to select one's mate based on common interests is leading to a slow-motion form of genetic engineering, and if higher autism is the price paid by the tech workers (the creative side, not the assembly line side), what price do office workers pay? And drug dealers? We might like to joke that the tech-wiz can destroy your credit rating overnight by hacking your bank accounts, but children born in a violent subset can clean out your chest cavity with the same ease. Class warfare, 21st century style?
Let's use "information workers" to describe writers, content providers, programmers, musicians, and all those who need good copyright to get income. As copy technology improves these information workers will realize less and less income from their work, which means that they will work more secretively in an effort to make a big sale on their initial debut, sort of like the old patronage model. Eventually they may only realize income from "tip jars", as they become the information-space equivalent of the street musician with his open violin case collecting stipends from passers by.
In the limit, information workers become wards of the state, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, (IS Division), where they will compete with various performance artists and virus writers who have successfully submitted grant requests to get NEA(ISD) handouts. They ride on the goodwill of real workers who create goods and services that cannot easily be duplicated or automated - which in the world of robotics means the people who braid hair and the ones who change diapers (the so called "heads or tails faction"). Farmers, miners, assembly line workers and other traditional value creaters (as opposed to VARs like grocers etc.) eventually disappear as well, as their businesses succumb to the ability of the average person to gain access to their goods under the guise of "freedom". The Freedom of Access Act of 2034 evicerates their ability to protect their produce against people who successfully point out in courts that the locks on these facilities are easily hacked, and therefore should not be allowed to keep out the people who need or want access.
We are probably totally in agreement... for example I completely support teaching real gun safety in schools, not the leave it alone and find an adult that is designed to instill an unreasoning dread. True, finding an adult is the correct thing to do, but that is not the only thing they should know about guns.
I'm immune to both; the only effect they have on me is to annoy me.
Me too, as are my sons. But, as I like to point out, we all get one vote each, 200M Joe and Jane Gullibles also each get one vote. It is not enough to be smart about such things yourself, we all must work to proslytize for reason.
If you get to people early enough you can steer them away from such idiocy.
The trick is to get to them early... so you don't have to send them to re-education camps.:-)
Remember, the 1st and 2nd ammendments are your strongest protections should democracy become mobocracry.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be like buying an old vinyl 45 RPM record, then complaining that it would not play on your Victorphone with the wax cylinder playing system. When you buy a CD you have the right to play it (and expect it to play) only in the hardware it was designed for. There is no requirement that it play in hardware it was not designed for. When copies were analog (vinyl to tape), no one cared because (1) tape prices included a small kickback to the recording industry to cover the opportunity costs of piracy, and (2) 3rd or 4th generation copies were interesting exercises in white noise.
The fact that you can make flawless digital copies does not mean you have a right to do so any more than the fact that you can walk into a corn field and take corn means you have a right to do so.
You may convince yourself that you are making copies only for your own convenience (certainly my MP3 collection means I don't have to dig out individual CDs to play songs I like), but once you post them or distribute them, you are nothing more than a common criminal with a nifty distribution plan. The fact that you do not charge for your copies moves you from "common criminal" to "common vandal" since you are really only doing the damage for the fun of it.
The fact that this battle is between a shitty, pop-culture stealing, value warping music industry and a bunch of snotty-nosed vandals just means that most of us (I hope) are on the sidelines waiting for the damn half-time show, hoping that it will be better than the fekkin game. When I want to support music, I go to a damn concert.
Government organizations suffer from this as well. The reputation of all government organizations suffer from the "Leno effect" when the late night shows ridicule the behavior of a bad government office. This is surely such an example.
The Patent Office finding that swinging from a tree branch on two ropes/chains is patentable (2002, Patent #6,368,227, see appended text) is so unbelievable, so idiotic, and so blatently bad that just knowing that the beaurocractic beast is able to generate such stupidity makes be wonder if other government "truths" are also of any value. I think I'll start smoking and start driving a 1976 Plymouth Fury wagon with the big engine (4 m.p.g., contributes more global warming gases that the average 3rd world country burning rain forests to cook rats and monkeys).
Apparently, the Patent Office standard operating procedure (S.O.P.) is to issue first, then let merit be determined based on subsequent challenges. Of course, this patent fails the challenge, but in the meantime the US Patent Office takes another publicity hit. Ironically, since the Patent Office is probably not involved in the litigation, this is possibly a cost-effective (for the taxpayers) way to handle patents, although it looks a lot like a W.P.A. for lawyers. By approving everything, the resulting litigation is between competing patent lawyers paid by private companies rather than between a private company and the US Patent Office.
And, for a free market, the real problem is most certainly in the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) a letter from an organization claiming "we own a patent that covers your work" can cause in a development environment.
It might appear that the solution lies in bringing the costs of undefenseable patents back to the patent holder, at least then they would do a reasonable "due-diligence" search against existing patents and prior art before they filed. As NewtonsLaw pointed out in the parent post, this might make patents too expensive for the little guy.
Bottom line, a patent is like a copyright, and has no real value unless you can afford the lawyers to get your money out of infringers or can make money off the original work.
I am trying to coordinate a small team generating version 3.6 of their product. (I came in as part of 3.5). I shift all requests for new features to my 4.0 list, bump 4.0 stuff to 4.1, ask the developers for their best deadline estimates on their 3.6 components, and add my SWAG to shift their own estimates further out. Then you want to blame me when the deadlines are all bullshit. You are right, I must be stupid for believing them.
On the other hand, just as there are Web sites that specialize in letting you hide your true identity, there will be debit cards that perform exactly that function, so you will be able to buy your pr0n and eat it too.
The fundamental question raised by the experiment is whether the equation does cover it all (I simplify from the tensors that describe General Relativity, the point is the same).
Also, the poster with the perpetual motion machine made a good point, but I suspect that the answer would be that the plate slows down even in the absence of friction, meaning that energy is needed to drive the plate, therefore no net gain is possible. On the other hand, the region that the plate shields must be quite small indeed, since it is a mathematical convenience to act as if gravity is a linear field radiating from the "center of the earth". It is, in fact, the sum of lots of little attractions that conveniently acts as if the mass of the earth were concentrated at the center, but this is a good approximation only when you get far enough away from the earth. That's why the gravity models used to manage LEO (low earth orbit) satellites have to account for higher order effects (beyond simple r*r stuff).
Having said that, the question is "how large must the change in probability be before we should attempt to control violent video games". The answer comes in two parts - Ammendment I to the Constitution says (more or less) that the delta must be infinite before I can stop the virtual-training; Ammendment II lets me say "bring it on you desensitized cyberpunk".
Why is it that Slashdot only wants to protect the rights of the "artist" when that artist is a student whose work - at best - should probably be viewed as "work for hire" of the corporate entity (school) they are attending? Yet, if an artist recording music (also probably legally a work-for-hire situation) wants that same protection we cry RIAA conspiracy? While a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, it seems to me that inconsistency in application of principles is the quintescience of hypocratic thinking.
As for my old 1.2G processors, I am going to start using them as domain controllers for my electric fences ... "hello post 42, acknowledge ... now."
Now, if I offer my 12 yr old cousin a candy bar in exchange for not having to pay rent on Park Place, at least the other players KNOW I am stretching the rules, and a lively debate will often resolve one way or another, but at least we will all know the new rules.
Once, while playing Monopoly, I negotiated "free rides", then when the property sold, I claimed (successfully) that my "free rides" was an easement, which meant that they transferred to the new owner. This sort of flexibility and ability to find loopholes is one of the things that makes dungeon-master driven games so much fun ("I cast ball-of-fire against the tarpits"). The issue is not whether the rule is designed to control the play (as in, "you cannot jump 50 feet because people cannot jump 50 feet") or to control the game (as in "taking two turns in a row is against the rules"). It is whether the game developer can deliver the game they promised to the people who may pay to play. People who do not follw the rules of a game, no matter how arbitrary those rules are, are cheaters.
Or, perhaps it cost them more to integrate Linux than WinCE and their marketing dept. does not understand the concept of sunk costs?
BTW - our company is looking at providing a biometric reader solution for this platform, but we don't have money to develop Linux versions (yet), so since we are one-platform deep, we have to go with the one that holds 90% of the market share so we have a chance. However, we are working toward a platform neutral solution (at least in our thinking).
For a truly frightening statistic, I read that the bottom 51% of taxpayers pay only 4% of the taxes! They have no incentive to reduce taxes, lots of incentives to vote for new services. D'oh! There's a formula for trouble.
As for the idea that Linux or any other alternative OS is better or more important to the OpenSource community misses the point. An OS is nothing but a tool, and getting ones panties in a wad over them is like arguing whether 50 Hz or 60 Hz is is a "better" base frequency to be used in the power grid. Important tools will be insensitive to the carrier frequency (e.g., the PS on my computer is switchable so it is not stuck in a particular "OS"). The power for my AC probably is not (how often does one drag an AC with them on vacation?).
On the other hand, when we did ballistics analyses for ICBMs, we used the best approximation methods we could afford.
When I moved to Northfield, I visited Papyrus Software, who were working on extremely accurate head-to-head racing programs to be played by phone connection useing the then-uncommon 9600 baud dialup. They had a room full of 486's tied to a bank of modems. Their big physics modeling problem was that their customers knew how tires warmed up and became "slick", and their players wanted to be able to set up their cars the way the real drivers did. I suspect that most gamer first, then fanatic, players of games requiring any physics are more interested in unrealistic rail rides (ride your board down the Eiffel tower!) than they are interested in realistic physics.
"All I want to know is what to type in at the system prompt to change the file using vi. Is it "vi /etc/usr/lusr/htdocs/where/the/fek/am/I/Index.html ?", I sobbed. "No," replied the gurus, "it's "vi /etc/usr/lusr/htdocs/where/the/fek/am/i/Index.html ", you ignorant peasant, can't you read?".
As an applications programmer and analyst who codes, I have seen the hierarchy of science mirrored in the programming community. Each level aspires to the level above's rigor and models. In science, for example, social scientists (universally recognized by everyone to be a bunch of fekkin wannabes) aspire to use biological models, biologists want to explain their world in chemists' terms, chemists want to use the physics models, physicists want to use mathematical models, and mathematicians want to use pure logic.
Similarly, in programming, spreadsheet programmers (universally recognized by everyone to be a bunch of fekkin wannabes) want to be as rigorous as database programmers, database programmers want to be as powerful as applications programmers, app programmers want to play in the OS world, and the OS world wants to be rigorous as the mathematicians who ...
Well, you get the idea.
Disclaimer: I am a mathematician (now if I could just find my way around this damn Godel's Paradox, maybe I could get some real rigor going). ...
If the freedom to select one's mate based on common interests is leading to a slow-motion form of genetic engineering, and if higher autism is the price paid by the tech workers (the creative side, not the assembly line side), what price do office workers pay? And drug dealers? We might like to joke that the tech-wiz can destroy your credit rating overnight by hacking your bank accounts, but children born in a violent subset can clean out your chest cavity with the same ease. Class warfare, 21st century style?
In the limit, information workers become wards of the state, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, (IS Division), where they will compete with various performance artists and virus writers who have successfully submitted grant requests to get NEA(ISD) handouts. They ride on the goodwill of real workers who create goods and services that cannot easily be duplicated or automated - which in the world of robotics means the people who braid hair and the ones who change diapers (the so called "heads or tails faction"). Farmers, miners, assembly line workers and other traditional value creaters (as opposed to VARs like grocers etc.) eventually disappear as well, as their businesses succumb to the ability of the average person to gain access to their goods under the guise of "freedom". The Freedom of Access Act of 2034 evicerates their ability to protect their produce against people who successfully point out in courts that the locks on these facilities are easily hacked, and therefore should not be allowed to keep out the people who need or want access.
Remember, the 1st and 2nd ammendments are your strongest protections should democracy become mobocracry.