He means f*ck them up the ass in a court of law, not the other way around. His whole point had nothing to do with patent law. You are truly obtuse.
Of course, if the administration didn't change so significantly in 2000 (think: complete reversal), im sure M$ would have had a much more tough "justice" department to fend off.
Any economist will confirm that far from helping innovation, a totally deregulated 'free market' leads to monopoly.
I'm surprised that more free-market fundamentalists don't realize or conveniently ignore this reality.
In the USA the rule of law depends on the administration, and thus what the Clinton administration had begun to do was undone by the GW administration.
And I wonder what gets rolled back when the Bush adminstration finally gets replaced (hopefully the USA PATRIOT Act)?
Had less satisfactory results from Radio Shack-brand NiMH ones.
Anyone else have their batteries leak after being recharged too long? Well, my RatShack batteries sure did. Never went back to NiMH after that, tho from the comments I see hear, maybe I should just avoid RatShack...Anyone with similar experiences on overcharging?
Although I'm all for the protection of privacy, I also think it's important to point out that the integration of various government databases has a lot of potential positive effects as well [for those who are in power]. There are a lot of agencies out there maintaining separate (and redundant) databases that could be combined or used together to make government services easier to obtain [for personal power plays]. There is also a lot of potential money saved [for those who hold the pursestrings], in terms of government functions currently done manually that could be automated [for the corporate masters].
Certainly, it is prudent to keep prying eyes from using their power to intrude into our lives. But there is a balance to be struck as well, between protecting privacy and allowing government to make use of tools that I think many/.ers will agree are useful and productive.
[additional comments inserted]
Who do you think benefits from all these "plusses" you quote? Surely not a lowly citizen...
Please keep in mind, efficiency is not in and of itself, a good thing, unless it's balanced with accountability, and fairness. I mean, for example, lots of dictatorships can be very efficient at doing what they want... but if the leadership's goals are suspect...
You would think the national list will make it easier on telemarketers. It must be easier to deal with one list rather than 50.
Is it the case that the nation list deprecates the state lists? It was of my understanding that if someone wanted to call my sister in MO, they would need to steer clear of both the national and state lists...
But, still . . . the death of the frontier marked the inability for a man to be physically independent.
cue matrix analogies.
Matrix Analogies indeed... perhaps you need to question the "independence" rhetoric you've been fed all these years. That "frontier" you spoke of belonged to someone else (Native Americans). Sure, in my childhood, I used to eat and breathe the same love fore indepedence, until I went to visit foreign countries. There I found people who were interdependent... they understood that there was no frontier, and that whatever you did impacted other people.
Welcome to the interdependent world... you're about a century late.
I think they're probably more deeply involved than you might imagine.
For example...
Clicked on the link... but Enron is still a US corporation (that was used and abused to further the US Energy hegemony). Now if you start to implicate Bechtel, or maybe Alstrom, I might agree with you.
For all their varied political and social differences, European big business is just as much good old American-style unfettered capitalism as anybody headquartered on Wall Street.
Totally agreed, but how integrated are they into the energy cartel? I think that's a major difference, as it tends to affect geopolitical alliances and such.
I'm waiting on the internet-enabled clock radio. Never needs to have the time changed (thanks to NTP)
As great as this sounds, would this also mean that when your net connection goes down, you lose time due to NTP sync issues? Or I guess you could make the clock intelligent enough to only sync when a connection is available? I suppose it could call out daily like tivo over even dialup... this is definitely a cool idea!
Insightful post, wish I had mod points now. That said, I do take issue to a couple of points here...
Finally, eventually the same problem will hit India. They will experience their bubble, and it won't last as long as it did here because they have less to offer. I have already seen one news story about fears in India about losing their jobs to literally-dirt-cheap offshore contractors in the Philipenes and the former Soviet republics. It's only a matter of time.
I see no end to this, and I believe it will cause severe and long-lasting damage to the US economy. And don't be so naive as to believe the rest of the world can withstand long-term major economic distress in the US.
India in comparison to even China or the eastern European countries, has a large number of their educated populace who speak English (most schooling is done in English). As unfortunate as that is for local language/learning, it does offer a benefit that other potential offshore countries don't have: a educated culture that already has english engrained as the "language of learning". This benefit is the primary reason for choosing India instead of China for offshore work, and I don't see this changing soon, though in the long run it may simply mean that India will be considered "preferred" offshore location.
I know of several people who started IT-based businesses both here and in India, and although their business here is very slow or in the red, things are really picking up in India. And these are consumer-level offerings (local economy is growing).
I grieve as well for the US economy, but the EU is getting more and more dissociated from the US in terms of markets (thanx to the xenophobic administration), now that the Euro competes for the dollar as "default currency".
Ok, I know... YHBT, and all, but I couldn't pass this up:
Fact: Smackheads, Alcoholics and other drug addicts should NOT be rehabilitated. They should be eliminated. A swift bullet through the...[snip]...Empasis mine
So you're saying that your esteemed president (who was once an alkie) should not only be President, but be shot as well? I hope mr. EffBeeAye doesn't listen too hard to your hate-speech rants, fool.
How can the US be a mix between a socialist society (which doesn't have a marketplace, because everything is provided and you don't need money), and a democracy (the US is a republic).
You're so off-base it's not even funny. Comparing socialism and democracy is not legitimate, because socailism is an ECONOMIC system, and democracy is a POLITICAL system. The opposites of socialism maybe capitalism, or anarchy. Democracy on the other hand, can be contrasted with totalitarianism, or police state.
For example, it's widely recognized that many European countries are socialist democracies.
The US is somewhere between capitalism and socialism.. since we do regulate trade, and break up monopolies (sometimes), but don't have state-run companies (like in France, Germany, or China).
Companies don't take away freedoms, they persuade you to buy their product. If you don't like the deal they offer, you turn around and walk out. Only in the minds of regulators can a company monopolize an entire market.
Hmm... what would you call your local power company? Or how about Microsoft? They are monopolies, one is a regulated, natural monopoly, the other is not, and is coercive. (figuring out which one is which is left as an exercise to the reader). Both do exist thanx to the government, and are not going away anytime soon.
Linux should not be misused by political parties to strengthen their chances for reelection.
I say... more power to them. They promote linux by handing MS's sales folks their asses.. they should get some street cred for that. What, you think the pawn administration that the US would want to rule your country would do the same?
Wasn't it RMS who said that ultimately software is always political?
First, you should know that I'm by no stretch of the imagination a rich man. I can pay my bills, make my car payments (I don't drive an expensive car), set aside a little money but that leaves me pretty much broke.
Given that, I have to carefully prioritize where my money goes. Last year, I contributed to the ACLU, the EFF and to my public radio station, KQED. These are all good causes which, in my opinion, do demonstratively good things with my money and they all are tax deductible donations.
Well, all of those are about $50-$60 apiece per year (depending on how much you donate to PBS). I know, I donate to the same.org's also. Why not just a single donation of $5? If everyone who used Mozilla/Firebird did so, it'd be a big boost in cash for the org (ie, more dev time to fix bugs)
Me, I'm planning on giving out a few $ once their 501.3(c) clears (effectively doubling my donation, cool!). No way I'd give $5/month, but even a few dollars would help em out.
On a side note, even using the products help them out, just use bugzilla to report bugs and vote for your pet peeves... remember, to make bugs shallow, lots of eyes are needed.
The last valid complaint about Mozilla is "I don't need an IRC/Mail/HTML Editor in my Browser!", and the Mozilla project is fixing that as we speak.
Of course, for all those complaints, you can forward them right on over to Firebird. I'ts everything that Mozilla wants to be (faster, lighter, more extensible). Gee, I wonder if the could do the same for OOo? I'd use *that* in a heartbeat.
Interesting point.
I think I respectfully disagree - In my experience, I went through a lot of "domains": equipment leasing, retail/distribution, defense and space, cosmetics, insentives management, pharmacy, logistics, government - and all the time the software problems were orthogonal to the "domain" problems.
Authentication, access control, persistence, queries, schema - the things that an application consists of seem to be not related to the application domain. If you are good at putting them together, you will succeed regardless of your domain experience.
You may be correct.
I have no doubt that for certain types of work (independent contracting/consulting/etc) basic skills are crucial, and you will be measured by them, and your ability to "learn into" whatever you're hired to do.
However, I was involved in the hiring process for my team just a few months ago, and we turned down MANY people who were very qualified in domains that we weren't interested in, generally very intelligent, and also people who might have been language gurus (got corrected on my Java questions, for example). The finalists all had one thing in common: They knew a lot about the domain we play in, and specifically, the product/architecture (proprietary to our company). Learning point for me.
And don't get me started about something else that is rarely mentioned on/., hiring through personal networks (which is critically important).
I can get a refurbished IBM ThinkPad coming off corporate lease with a Pentium III circa 700MHz
Not that I doubt you, but where have you found these off-lease deals? Usually for $800, you get a P3, 500 to 650 Mhz, with a used battery (on average my experience has been 50% charge) and possibly some case defects (nothing functionally wrong, but definitely used). I've had to replace both battery and keyboards on all the used laptops i've bought, within 1 year. (3 dells, 1 thinkpad, 1 toshiba). These are not commodity parts, and that alone costs on average $100 per laptop per part... if you can find them (usually, for old laptops like the Dell CPI-R series, you can't buy them from dell, you can only find used ones on ebay).
With this system, you get a small form factor laptop (The only think that I could think of that would make a difference is the warranty... which is often similar from various providers (and probably don't support linux).
If China stopped with the oppresion of Tibet, and stopped leaning on Tiawan like they do, then maybe I'd be a little more inclined to believe you when you say that China "wants peace".
Hmm... s/China/the US/ s/Tibet/Afghanistan/ s/Taiwan/the rest of the world
If the US stopped with the oppresion of Afghanistan, and stopped leaning on the rest of the world like they do, then maybe I'd be a little more inclined to believe you when you say that the US "wants peace".
Too often I've been telling my friends in the software industry that when hiring into a software company, the primary thing a prospective employer should ask for is domain knowledge. ie, if you're looking to join Cisco's IOS team, you better have a pretty fundamental understanding of networking and routing. If you're joining an CRM software company, knowledge of CRM (at least a specialty like sales force automation) is the primary thing they will want. Even better is direct knowledge of the product/architecture itself. Programming experience is, of course, neccessary, but runs secondary to the actual domain knowledge.
C++, Java, etc.. don't matter as much these days because everyone knows them... including those offshore programmers who are probably better and/or cheaper than you. Understanding and becoming an expert in a domain gives you a value add that a non-knowledgeable person can't match.
Now that the Freaking Awesome G5 machines are about to be released, the absolute number of desktop sales should increase massively, reducing the laptop percentage. With the new machines shipping in September or so, I'd expect that Apples 2003H2 laptop sales to drop to 20% or something (while still showing reasonable growth in absolute numbers).
Yeah, but I'd bet you an apple:-), that if they released relatively equally powerful (G5) laptop today, those numbers would still favor the laptop. Now, they have a monopoly on Macs, and so they will squeeze the desktop G5 for what it's worth, then release the G5 powerbook next year. Then you should see numbers similar to before.
Jack's P.O.V. : A bin full of newspapers, Starbucks cup and FAST FOOD GARBAGE.
JACK (V.O.)
When deep space exploration ramps up, it will be corporations that name everything: The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Microsoft Galaxy. Planet Starbucks.
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Of course, if the administration didn't change so significantly in 2000 (think: complete reversal), im sure M$ would have had a much more tough "justice" department to fend off.
Any economist will confirm that far from helping innovation, a totally deregulated 'free market' leads to monopoly.
I'm surprised that more free-market fundamentalists don't realize or conveniently ignore this reality.
In the USA the rule of law depends on the administration, and thus what the Clinton administration had begun to do was undone by the GW administration.
And I wonder what gets rolled back when the Bush adminstration finally gets replaced (hopefully the USA PATRIOT Act)?
Add to this the fact that consumer grade AA Li-Ion batteries are non-rechargeable (unless you know where I can find LiIon rechareable AA's?)
Anyone else have their batteries leak after being recharged too long?
Well, my RatShack batteries sure did. Never went back to NiMH after that, tho from the comments I see hear, maybe I should just avoid RatShack...Anyone with similar experiences on overcharging?
In short, I won't use them... at least not until they improve the tech (Li-Ion/Polymer). In the meanwhile, I will replace what I can with these babies, and when I can't fit those into the form factor, standard lithium AAs
[additional comments inserted]
Who do you think benefits from all these "plusses" you quote? Surely not a lowly citizen...
Please keep in mind, efficiency is not in and of itself, a good thing, unless it's balanced with accountability, and fairness. I mean, for example, lots of dictatorships can be very efficient at doing what they want... but if the leadership's goals are suspect...
Is it the case that the nation list deprecates the state lists? It was of my understanding that if someone wanted to call my sister in MO, they would need to steer clear of both the national and state lists...
cue matrix analogies.
Matrix Analogies indeed... perhaps you need to question the "independence" rhetoric you've been fed all these years. That "frontier" you spoke of belonged to someone else (Native Americans). Sure, in my childhood, I used to eat and breathe the same love fore indepedence, until I went to visit foreign countries. There I found people who were interdependent... they understood that there was no frontier, and that whatever you did impacted other people.
Welcome to the interdependent world... you're about a century late.
Clicked on the link... but Enron is still a US corporation (that was used and abused to further the US Energy hegemony). Now if you start to implicate Bechtel, or maybe Alstrom, I might agree with you.
Totally agreed, but how integrated are they into the energy cartel? I think that's a major difference, as it tends to affect geopolitical alliances and such.
As great as this sounds, would this also mean that when your net connection goes down, you lose time due to NTP sync issues? Or I guess you could make the clock intelligent enough to only sync when a connection is available? I suppose it could call out daily like tivo over even dialup... this is definitely a cool idea!
Cost. Your linked C-64 like solution is around 469 GBP =~ $760. That's close to 4x the cost of the lindows boxy solution.
Finally, eventually the same problem will hit India. They will experience their bubble, and it won't last as long as it did here because they have less to offer. I have already seen one news story about fears in India about losing their jobs to literally-dirt-cheap offshore contractors in the Philipenes and the former Soviet republics. It's only a matter of time.
I see no end to this, and I believe it will cause severe and long-lasting damage to the US economy. And don't be so naive as to believe the rest of the world can withstand long-term major economic distress in the US.
Fact: Smackheads, Alcoholics and other drug addicts should NOT be rehabilitated. They should be eliminated. A swift bullet through the ...[snip] ...Empasis mine
So you're saying that your esteemed president (who was once an alkie) should not only be President, but be shot as well? I hope mr. EffBeeAye doesn't listen too hard to your hate-speech rants, fool.
You're so off-base it's not even funny. Comparing socialism and democracy is not legitimate, because socailism is an ECONOMIC system, and democracy is a POLITICAL system.
The opposites of socialism maybe capitalism, or anarchy.
Democracy on the other hand, can be contrasted with totalitarianism, or police state.
For example, it's widely recognized that many European countries are socialist democracies.
The US is somewhere between capitalism and socialism.. since we do regulate trade, and break up monopolies (sometimes), but don't have state-run companies (like in France, Germany, or China).
Companies don't take away freedoms, they persuade you to buy their product. If you don't like the deal they offer, you turn around and walk out. Only in the minds of regulators can a company monopolize an entire market.
Hmm... what would you call your local power company? Or how about Microsoft? They are monopolies, one is a regulated, natural monopoly, the other is not, and is coercive. (figuring out which one is which is left as an exercise to the reader). Both do exist thanx to the government, and are not going away anytime soon.
Welcome to the not-so-free-as-you-think market.
I say... more power to them. They promote linux by handing MS's sales folks their asses.. they should get some street cred for that. What, you think the pawn administration that the US would want to rule your country would do the same?
Wasn't it RMS who said that ultimately software is always political?
Given that, I have to carefully prioritize where my money goes. Last year, I contributed to the ACLU, the EFF and to my public radio station, KQED. These are all good causes which, in my opinion, do demonstratively good things with my money and they all are tax deductible donations.
Well, all of those are about $50-$60 apiece per year (depending on how much you donate to PBS). I know, I donate to the same .org's also. Why not just a single donation of $5? If everyone who used Mozilla/Firebird did so, it'd be a big boost in cash for the org (ie, more dev time to fix bugs)
Me, I'm planning on giving out a few $ once their 501.3(c) clears (effectively doubling my donation, cool!). No way I'd give $5/month, but even a few dollars would help em out.
On a side note, even using the products help them out, just use bugzilla to report bugs and vote for your pet peeves... remember, to make bugs shallow, lots of eyes are needed.
Of course, for all those complaints, you can forward them right on over to Firebird. I'ts everything that Mozilla wants to be (faster, lighter, more extensible). Gee, I wonder if the could do the same for OOo? I'd use *that* in a heartbeat.
Authentication, access control, persistence, queries, schema - the things that an application consists of seem to be not related to the application domain. If you are good at putting them together, you will succeed regardless of your domain experience.
You may be correct.
I have no doubt that for certain types of work (independent contracting/consulting/etc) basic skills are crucial, and you will be measured by them, and your ability to "learn into" whatever you're hired to do.
However, I was involved in the hiring process for my team just a few months ago, and we turned down MANY people who were very qualified in domains that we weren't interested in, generally very intelligent, and also people who might have been language gurus (got corrected on my Java questions, for example). The finalists all had one thing in common: They knew a lot about the domain we play in, and specifically, the product/architecture (proprietary to our company). Learning point for me.
And don't get me started about something else that is rarely mentioned on /., hiring through personal networks (which is critically important).
Not that I doubt you, but where have you found these off-lease deals? Usually for $800, you get a P3, 500 to 650 Mhz, with a used battery (on average my experience has been 50% charge) and possibly some case defects (nothing functionally wrong, but definitely used). I've had to replace both battery and keyboards on all the used laptops i've bought, within 1 year. (3 dells, 1 thinkpad, 1 toshiba). These are not commodity parts, and that alone costs on average $100 per laptop per part... if you can find them (usually, for old laptops like the Dell CPI-R series, you can't buy them from dell, you can only find used ones on ebay).
With this system, you get a small form factor laptop (The only think that I could think of that would make a difference is the warranty... which is often similar from various providers (and probably don't support linux).
Hmm...
s/China/the US/
s/Tibet/Afghanistan/
s/Taiwan/the rest of the world
If the US stopped with the oppresion of Afghanistan, and stopped leaning on the rest of the world like they do, then maybe I'd be a little more inclined to believe you when you say that the US "wants peace".
Too often I've been telling my friends in the software industry that when hiring into a software company, the primary thing a prospective employer should ask for is domain knowledge. ie, if you're looking to join Cisco's IOS team, you better have a pretty fundamental understanding of networking and routing. If you're joining an CRM software company, knowledge of CRM (at least a specialty like sales force automation) is the primary thing they will want. Even better is direct knowledge of the product/architecture itself. Programming experience is, of course, neccessary, but runs secondary to the actual domain knowledge.
C++, Java, etc.. don't matter as much these days because everyone knows them ... including those offshore programmers who are probably better and/or cheaper than you. Understanding and becoming an expert in a domain gives you a value add that a non-knowledgeable person can't match.
Yeah, but I'd bet you an apple :-), that if they released relatively equally powerful (G5) laptop today, those numbers would still favor the laptop. Now, they have a monopoly on Macs, and so they will squeeze the desktop G5 for what it's worth, then release the G5 powerbook next year. Then you should see numbers similar to before.
Can't wait till 2K4 to get my G5 Powerbook :-)
You'd probably even eat French Fries if they weren't from France.
Oh, wait... they're not
JACK (V.O.) When deep space exploration ramps up, it will be corporations that name everything: The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Microsoft Galaxy. Planet Starbucks.
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