There's a pretty simple way out of the catch, although it would be hard to do and potentially open pandora's box: have Congress pass a law which allows legal challenges to the Constitutionality of laws and actions without having to show actual damages. The only reason it's a problem now is because of the technicalities of the laws, which could easily be remedied.
On the other hand, good luck in getting Congress to do something as blatantly beneficial for the country as that...
This is why Linux will never get adopted by mainstream users, IMHO, much more so than the original article's reason. The typical Linux advocate/guru's response to normal users having issues is that they should google the workarounds for problems (which usually involves separate DL/installs, compiles, or command-line hacks), get different hardware which works with Linux (assuming people configure their own hardware), or go find some other esoteric online reference explaining the "simple" workaround for their problem.
This is the quintessential reason why Linux will _never_ be mainstream. Normal users want things that just work. Believe it or not, Microsoft goes to a lot of trouble working (read: fighting) with their ISV's to try to make sure stuff just works. Apple is even more abusive to third parties trying to integrate addons, in the name of stuff just working. Linux developers don't get it, have never considered it important, and will likely never give it ongoing high priority as a whole.
In no particular order: - Get rid of social security (or scale it down drastically); it's already bankrupt, so no big change other than admitting that - Fix medical insurance by legislating severe penalties for insurance companies discouraging treatment (without socializing healthcare and destroying our lead in medical research) - Investigate establishing an independent court in the government responsible for investigating cases of breach of constitutionality in actions of anyone in any branch. There would be very strict standards for bringing actions and finding guilty (ie: gross breach and 3/4 majority to find guilty), but guilt would result in immediate impeachment. - Change the tax code to a flat tax (fixed % for everyone); different %'s possible for investment and work income. - Establish independent, private, non-partisan commission to develop an index for real inflation. Allow inflation amount of investment income tax free each year (ie: allow people to keep up with inflation before counting "real" income on investments). - Force a balanced budget - Work on protecting privacy, civil liberties, freedom
Slightly off-topic, but I'd love to see a similar system for software: you own the copyright for 5 years or for as long as you're updating the software (to fix security problems, etc.). After that time, the copyright expires, and the software automatically goes into the public domain. The vendor would not be forced to release the source code, but anyone would be free to modify it, patch it, offer continued support, etc.
Unfortunately, this idea (like many others) is too good for people to get passed by our legislature, which is essentially bought and paid for by corporations. Great idea, though.
Personally, the worst code I've had to write has been when I had to follow so-called "best practices". Things like excessive comments which quickly become out of date and incorrect, dictated program structure which doesn't correlate with the intent of the code, etc. Also, the more rules/procedures the company has, the slower people code, the less creative they try to be, and the more they resign themselves to just putting in their 8 hours a day following the rules, instead of trying to produce as best they can and get better at their profession.
Sure, there are ways to write good code. However, I find that whenever manager types get involved with dictating the rules for coding, you end up with worse code. That's my experience, anyway.
Most likely 9.3 million current subscriptions, at least that was the definition when Blizzard last announced a milestone. Keep in mind that this includes all the subscription/payment types, which vary by country.
For example, even if you attribute fully 50% of their sales revenue to ongoing WoW subscriptions only (no other games, no initial cost of expansions, no new purchase sales, etc), that's only $17 per subscriber per quarter, or $5.65 a month. So most of those subscriptions are outside the US, and with terms netting much less $ for Vivendi than the US subscriptions. When you start thinking about subscriptions as, say, $1/month, it's not hard to see how they could accumulate them to inflate their subscription numbers by just lowering the price.
A meaning number would be revenue from ongoing WoW subscriptions compared to previous quarters. Good luck getting them to show you that downward trend, though.
Background: small ISV, making software for corporations.
In my experience, the turnaround time is mainly driven by the urgency of the customers and the inherent delays in the company. As a dev, security fixes rarely take more than a few hours to find and fix. The time between then and release is entirely dependent on the company's methods and procedures, the efficiency with which you can slip into the code tree and deploy hotfixes (as opposed to entirely new builds), and the urgency and importance of the customer (which drives the willingness of the company to ship something before all the normal methods and procedures have run their course).
For example, if you (the customer) are important enough to talk to dev directly, and are happy to use a beta build in whatever state the product is in as long as it fixes the specific bug, and you're important enough for management to not care about QA and other impediments, chances are you can have a fix in a day. If one of those is not true, you'll wait for the next regular update, whenever that may be (days, months, etc.).
... is that citizens don't have a problem with giving up some of their anonymity and/or privacy when it makes sense to protect the common good. What people do have a very large problem with is giving that information to the government, because the government is composed of people who will not just use that information to protect the people, but also to persecute the people who do not act the way the people in charge would like people to act. In addition, the government is not accountable to anyone if they misuse that information, so they have no incentive not to abuse it.
The government was founded with branches and a balance of power because the founders knew government could not be trusted, and every subsequent generation of our government has validated that hypothesis. As long as that problem persists unsolved, privacy will be absolutely essential for the people to fight to preserve.
One position is that JavaScript should be kept simple, and that extending it so substantially has a lot of downsides. Some examples: harder to maintain backwards compatibility for browser vendors, harder to write simple code, resulting language would be "messy" because of BC requirements, and some major vendors may not support it due to overlapping functionality with their solutions (eg: C#).
The other position is that having browser vendors ship with multiple VM's to process different scripting languages, which would probably need to work together (memory model, resource sharing, etc) would be prohibitively difficult, and it would be better to have one standard language with both the current JavaScript functionality, and whatever new functionality vendors want added.
There really isn't a "right" answer, just conflicting opinions (and motivations) on how to best evolve the language/platform.
So, the interesting legal question for the source code viewing clause would be: if you put something in a public area (eg: the internet), can you then claim someone viewing it is in violation of your implicit license agreement to view it? That is, if I post a sign outside my house, can I prohibit looking at the sign without wearing 3D glasses, for example? Someone with knowledge of how the normal law works want to educate me?
As far as I know, there's no requirement that the number you use as a key need be random; it makes sense cryptographically of course, but the law has no such requirement.
I wonder if you could patent some choice GUID's, and sue Microsoft if they choose to include them in their operating system without paying you royalties...
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There's a pretty simple way out of the catch, although it would be hard to do and potentially open pandora's box: have Congress pass a law which allows legal challenges to the Constitutionality of laws and actions without having to show actual damages. The only reason it's a problem now is because of the technicalities of the laws, which could easily be remedied.
On the other hand, good luck in getting Congress to do something as blatantly beneficial for the country as that...
This is why Linux will never get adopted by mainstream users, IMHO, much more so than the original article's reason. The typical Linux advocate/guru's response to normal users having issues is that they should google the workarounds for problems (which usually involves separate DL/installs, compiles, or command-line hacks), get different hardware which works with Linux (assuming people configure their own hardware), or go find some other esoteric online reference explaining the "simple" workaround for their problem.
This is the quintessential reason why Linux will _never_ be mainstream. Normal users want things that just work. Believe it or not, Microsoft goes to a lot of trouble working (read: fighting) with their ISV's to try to make sure stuff just works. Apple is even more abusive to third parties trying to integrate addons, in the name of stuff just working. Linux developers don't get it, have never considered it important, and will likely never give it ongoing high priority as a whole.
In no particular order:
- Get rid of social security (or scale it down drastically); it's already bankrupt, so no big change other than admitting that
- Fix medical insurance by legislating severe penalties for insurance companies discouraging treatment (without socializing healthcare and destroying our lead in medical research)
- Investigate establishing an independent court in the government responsible for investigating cases of breach of constitutionality in actions of anyone in any branch. There would be very strict standards for bringing actions and finding guilty (ie: gross breach and 3/4 majority to find guilty), but guilt would result in immediate impeachment.
- Change the tax code to a flat tax (fixed % for everyone); different %'s possible for investment and work income.
- Establish independent, private, non-partisan commission to develop an index for real inflation. Allow inflation amount of investment income tax free each year (ie: allow people to keep up with inflation before counting "real" income on investments).
- Force a balanced budget
- Work on protecting privacy, civil liberties, freedom
Clearly I'll never be elected, lol.
Slightly off-topic, but I'd love to see a similar system for software: you own the copyright for 5 years or for as long as you're updating the software (to fix security problems, etc.). After that time, the copyright expires, and the software automatically goes into the public domain. The vendor would not be forced to release the source code, but anyone would be free to modify it, patch it, offer continued support, etc.
Unfortunately, this idea (like many others) is too good for people to get passed by our legislature, which is essentially bought and paid for by corporations. Great idea, though.
Personally, the worst code I've had to write has been when I had to follow so-called "best practices". Things like excessive comments which quickly become out of date and incorrect, dictated program structure which doesn't correlate with the intent of the code, etc. Also, the more rules/procedures the company has, the slower people code, the less creative they try to be, and the more they resign themselves to just putting in their 8 hours a day following the rules, instead of trying to produce as best they can and get better at their profession.
Sure, there are ways to write good code. However, I find that whenever manager types get involved with dictating the rules for coding, you end up with worse code. That's my experience, anyway.
Most likely 9.3 million current subscriptions, at least that was the definition when Blizzard last announced a milestone. Keep in mind that this includes all the subscription/payment types, which vary by country.
For example, even if you attribute fully 50% of their sales revenue to ongoing WoW subscriptions only (no other games, no initial cost of expansions, no new purchase sales, etc), that's only $17 per subscriber per quarter, or $5.65 a month. So most of those subscriptions are outside the US, and with terms netting much less $ for Vivendi than the US subscriptions. When you start thinking about subscriptions as, say, $1/month, it's not hard to see how they could accumulate them to inflate their subscription numbers by just lowering the price.
A meaning number would be revenue from ongoing WoW subscriptions compared to previous quarters. Good luck getting them to show you that downward trend, though.
Background: small ISV, making software for corporations.
In my experience, the turnaround time is mainly driven by the urgency of the customers and the inherent delays in the company. As a dev, security fixes rarely take more than a few hours to find and fix. The time between then and release is entirely dependent on the company's methods and procedures, the efficiency with which you can slip into the code tree and deploy hotfixes (as opposed to entirely new builds), and the urgency and importance of the customer (which drives the willingness of the company to ship something before all the normal methods and procedures have run their course).
For example, if you (the customer) are important enough to talk to dev directly, and are happy to use a beta build in whatever state the product is in as long as it fixes the specific bug, and you're important enough for management to not care about QA and other impediments, chances are you can have a fix in a day. If one of those is not true, you'll wait for the next regular update, whenever that may be (days, months, etc.).
... is that citizens don't have a problem with giving up some of their anonymity and/or privacy when it makes sense to protect the common good. What people do have a very large problem with is giving that information to the government, because the government is composed of people who will not just use that information to protect the people, but also to persecute the people who do not act the way the people in charge would like people to act. In addition, the government is not accountable to anyone if they misuse that information, so they have no incentive not to abuse it. The government was founded with branches and a balance of power because the founders knew government could not be trusted, and every subsequent generation of our government has validated that hypothesis. As long as that problem persists unsolved, privacy will be absolutely essential for the people to fight to preserve.
Because it's a difference of opinion.
One position is that JavaScript should be kept simple, and that extending it so substantially has a lot of downsides. Some examples: harder to maintain backwards compatibility for browser vendors, harder to write simple code, resulting language would be "messy" because of BC requirements, and some major vendors may not support it due to overlapping functionality with their solutions (eg: C#).
The other position is that having browser vendors ship with multiple VM's to process different scripting languages, which would probably need to work together (memory model, resource sharing, etc) would be prohibitively difficult, and it would be better to have one standard language with both the current JavaScript functionality, and whatever new functionality vendors want added.
There really isn't a "right" answer, just conflicting opinions (and motivations) on how to best evolve the language/platform.
So, the interesting legal question for the source code viewing clause would be: if you put something in a public area (eg: the internet), can you then claim someone viewing it is in violation of your implicit license agreement to view it? That is, if I post a sign outside my house, can I prohibit looking at the sign without wearing 3D glasses, for example? Someone with knowledge of how the normal law works want to educate me?
As far as I know, there's no requirement that the number you use as a key need be random; it makes sense cryptographically of course, but the law has no such requirement.
I wonder if you could patent some choice GUID's, and sue Microsoft if they choose to include them in their operating system without paying you royalties...