I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to assume that 80% of drinkers follow it up with heavy use of painkillers in general, much less that they follow it up with acetaminophen specifically. Without that assumption, reduced acetaminophen consumption seems rather unlikely to be the reason for an 80% reduction in the rate of cirrhosis among those who drink 4+ cups of coffee per day. It could still be a contributing factor, sure, but the primary reason? I doubt it.
Why should the GPL respect the wishes of someone who wants to appropriate it, base commercial software on it, make money selling the commercial software that's based on someone else's GPL code, and give nothing back?
If I release code under the GPL and you want to use it in a closed-source project, come to me and see if you can get access to it under an alternate license. Just be aware that if you intend to make money off using my code, there's a good chance that your alternative licensing will include sending some of your profits in my direction.
Nope, it specifically states that it's a national number:
According to a 1997 study by the State of Washington's Office of the Attorney General "the murder of a child who is abducted... is a rare event. There are estimated to be about 100 such incidents in the United States each year, less than one-half of one percent of the murders committed";
All it takes to avoid losing contact with the world is to be with one friend whose parents don't subscribe to a tracking service. Everyone else can turn theirs off and any calls can be made through the bug-free phone.
Billosaur has chosen to sacrifice his free time in order to maintain a good quality of life for his family.
Some of us consider "a good quality of life for [one's] family" to include being able to spend time together as a family. If you or Billosaur maintain a schedule/lifestyle which requires both parents to be working, at least one of them to be working/commuting for 12+ hours a day, hardly seeing each other, and being too tired from an excess of work and a shortage of sleep, then I question whether it is possible to have a truly good family life under those conditions.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to readily google up an annual number of incidents for "abuse" of abducted children, but I did find a statement from the Washington State Attorney General's Office that approximately 100 children are abducted and murdered each year. While I'm not going to call that "acceptable collateral damage", neither do I believe it to be suitable justification for curtailing the independence and self-sufficiency of the millions of kids who aren't abducted or killed.
A little risk is OK. Really. It's part of the cost of growth. There are realistic risks which can and should be mitigated, sure, but if there are 10,000,000 children[1] in the US and 100 are abducted and killed each year, that's a 0.001% chance per year - far below what I consider the threshold of a realistic risk.
[1] I'm sure children actually make up substantially more than 1/30 of the population, but picking 10 million makes the numbers prettier and artifically inflates the odds. The actual chance per year of your child being abducted and killed is less than the figure calculated above.
Actually, no, she doesn't say that anything she did was wrong. She says that she's not responsible for the lawsuits because they were done after she resigned. Whether that's true or not, she can't "actually [do] anything to make amends" because she's no longer the RIAA chair, so she has no authority to do so.
Yes, training your replacement is SOP, if you quit the job.
These guys aren't quitting. They're being fired and replaced with cheaper labor.
The standard procedure when you're being fired (or even just laid off) seems to be to get you out the door and remove your access to the building as quickly as possible.
As a matter of fact, if a language doesn't have a way to express a concept, you simply can't think naturally about it.
I frequently find myself pondering concepts which I can't explain to others because I lack the words to explain them. Sometimes I can come up with ways to combine existing words for that purpose, other times I can't. Language may prevent me from expressing some concepts, but it in no way prevents me from thinking about them.
Just look at the inuit language which has something like 40 words that translate has 'ice'.
Yeah, it didn't occur to me that itunes.no might not be the Norwegian ITMS site until after I posted. Mea culpa.
(And, yes, I have an iPod and iTunes, but have never used ITMS other than to locate free podcasts to subscribe to. Even then, it took a while before I noticed that the podcast directory was part of ITMS.)
How does that square with your statements in the post I originally replied to that "If you got your system with Windows installed and you didn't agree, technically according to the (enforceable or unenforceable) EULA, you shouldn't be using it if you didn't agree to the terms." (emphasis yours) and "So according to MS, you are in breach of contract already if you are using their software without explicitly agreeing to the terms."? That looks an awful lot like two statements that only the person who accepts the EULA is allowed to use the machine. Which is a ridiculous claim to make, so I took the opportunity to ridicule it.
For the record, though, I have a Windows machine at home that I use for gaming, which never asked me to click on an EULA, so I didn't agree to it. I agree that, in the real world, all that matters is that somebody clicked "Agree" on the EULA, as you said in the later post. And that's the problem with EULAs (well, one of them): Somebody clicked "Agree", but that doesn't mean it was the owner of the machine. It could have been a previous owner. It could have been a tech at Dell or a service desk. It could have been the owner's 3-year old daughter. It could have been my cat walking across the keyboard. Neither Microsoft nor the owner has any way of knowing.
All of your three examples are of contracts between two people of roughly-comparable status in the contract, giving you the ability to negotiate terms, or either of you can walk away from the deal if you so choose and find someone else to work with.
That's a completely different situation that EULAs and other such contracts between an individual and a corporation large enough to run over the top of that individual without even noticing them. Microsoft, Apple, etc. don't offer you a contract, they dictate terms to you. Yes, you can walk away, but doing so is at significant cost to you and none to the other side. That's why consumer protection laws exist - you can't enter into an equal agreement with Apple, so the government steps in on your behalf.
(Of course, Apple only exists as it does because the government specifically allows it... I would prefer to see laws changed to remove corporate personhood and many of the other protections which allow them to overpower individuals so readily, in which case the consumer protection laws could probably be weakened or go away entirely, but that's not happening any time soon.)
Microsoft, Apple, and many other technology companies are by and large at the "market entrepreneur" end of the spectrum
Interesting. When I read your definition that "Any company that benefits from special rules or protections set up by the government is a political entrepreneur", I immediately thought of the likes of "Microsoft, Apple, and many other technology companies", whose business models are based on taking advantage of specific rules set up by governments. The rules I refer to are, of course, patent and copyright law. While these laws may theoretically apply to everyone (and thus could be seen as failing the "special" part of your definition), they have been tending towards redefinition into a form which benefits large corporations far more than smaller companies or individuals. Everyone is supposed to operate under the same copyright laws, but I can't afford to send the BSA after someone who infringes on my code or use the DMCA to bring down a TV station playing my music without permission.
I'm not saying patents or copyrights are inherently bad (although I do believe their current forms in the US to be excessive and counterproductive), but rather that Microsoft's continued existence as a business depends on legislation just as heavily as the taxi drivers from your example.
You are incorrect: Domain Name: itunes.no Organization Name: APPLE COMPUTER Filial av utenlandsk foretak Postal Code: NO-0216 Postal Area: Oslo Country: NO
(Sorry the columns don't line up right. The lameness filter seems to think whois records are lame, presumably because it considers the strings of dots used for spacing to be "junk characters". Idjits.)
Most supporters of free markets seem to take it as axiomatic that competition is good for consumers. Therefore, what is good for competitors is (generally) also good for consumers.
In this particular case, yes, making FairPlay available to manufacturers of other digital music players is beneficial to Apple's competitors. But it also allows consumers a choice of what player they wish to use with FairPlay-DRMed files, which is to their benefit - some people may not be able to afford an iPod, others may hate its user interface, others may want a feature that it lacks, etc. Allowing players to be developed which address these issues without having to give up the ability to play iTunes tracks is clearly beneficial to consumers.
MS EULAs now have a clause stating that the person who agrees to it is the only person authorized to use the computer? There are a lot of families and businesses are gonna get busted on that one - if it's true.
(Nice to know that I'm not legally allowed to use Windows are work, since I didn't click an EULA on my workstation, though. I'm sure my boss will be real disappointed when I tell him about it. Especially since it means that nigh-on every one of the company's thousands of employees are no longer allowed to do their jobs.)
In this context, "deflect" = "reflect in a direction other than back towards the transmitter". If the wave is sent off into space somewhere, then it doesn't reach the radar antenna and you don't show up.
Bad analogies. If I don't want to use the spellchecker, I can just turn it off (or simply not invoke it, depending on the software being used). If I don't want a fridge, I can choose not to use it or even sell it. I don't have to make 50,000 spelling mistakes to unlock the spellchecker before it's available to me and I don't have to buy the house without knowing whether there's a fridge or not and then peek into every nook and cranny for the hidden switch that will reveal the fridge (if the switch and the fridge exist).
the chances of one person having more than one discovery to their name isn't that small: even luck favors those that play 10+ hours a day.
...unless it's based on crafting, which GP suggested should be done off-line. In which case playing more hours could either reduce your chances of a discovery or have no effect on it, depending on just how it's implemented.
(Bleah... "Plain Old Text" posting option doesn't seem to be working today. Yay for making us use explicit <p>/</p> tags. Where's the "go back to the old slashdot" button?)
I don't recall... Did Warcraft do that before or after Total Annihilation? (Big TA fan, but never really got into Warcraft, so I don't recall which came out first.)
Yes, but it's quite simple to cater to both the right to listen to the EM spectrum and the right to private phone calls: Stop making/using cellphones that transmit in the clear.
As for the neighbor analogy, you could just say "close your curtains", but that doesn't really hold up because it's something that the neighbor has to actively do to avoid having her privacy compromised. Encrypting cell transmissions can (and should) be automatic and transparent to the user, so the analogy breaks on that point.
No, I rather doubt that it does. I remember hearing complaints about the decision to simply make it illegal for scanners to listen to cellphone frequencies instead of properly encrypting cell traffic going all the way back to the dawn of cellphones, well before we had a War on Terror or large-scale domestic snooping. I expect that this is the work of cheap cell providers and phone manufacturers, not nosy spies.
So websites have been using Web 2.0 since the dawn of CGI, then? (Shopping carts being the most obvious example of early CGI not-just-a-document-handler applications.)
Slashdot Mirror
That's... a bit of a stretch.
I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to assume that 80% of drinkers follow it up with heavy use of painkillers in general, much less that they follow it up with acetaminophen specifically. Without that assumption, reduced acetaminophen consumption seems rather unlikely to be the reason for an 80% reduction in the rate of cirrhosis among those who drink 4+ cups of coffee per day. It could still be a contributing factor, sure, but the primary reason? I doubt it.
if MS's platform doesn't run the next killer app, what is it good for anyway?
MS - huh!
Good god, y'all!
What is it good for?
Absolutely NOTHIN'!
Say it again...
Why should the GPL respect the wishes of someone who wants to appropriate it, base commercial software on it, make money selling the commercial software that's based on someone else's GPL code, and give nothing back?
If I release code under the GPL and you want to use it in a closed-source project, come to me and see if you can get access to it under an alternate license. Just be aware that if you intend to make money off using my code, there's a good chance that your alternative licensing will include sending some of your profits in my direction.
Nope, it specifically states that it's a national number:
... is a rare event. There are estimated to be about 100 such incidents in the United States each year, less than one-half of one percent of the murders committed";
According to a 1997 study by the State of Washington's Office of the Attorney General "the murder of a child who is abducted
All it takes to avoid losing contact with the world is to be with one friend whose parents don't subscribe to a tracking service. Everyone else can turn theirs off and any calls can be made through the bug-free phone.
Billosaur has chosen to sacrifice his free time in order to maintain a good quality of life for his family.
Some of us consider "a good quality of life for [one's] family" to include being able to spend time together as a family. If you or Billosaur maintain a schedule/lifestyle which requires both parents to be working, at least one of them to be working/commuting for 12+ hours a day, hardly seeing each other, and being too tired from an excess of work and a shortage of sleep, then I question whether it is possible to have a truly good family life under those conditions.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to readily google up an annual number of incidents for "abuse" of abducted children, but I did find a statement from the Washington State Attorney General's Office that approximately 100 children are abducted and murdered each year. While I'm not going to call that "acceptable collateral damage", neither do I believe it to be suitable justification for curtailing the independence and self-sufficiency of the millions of kids who aren't abducted or killed.
A little risk is OK. Really. It's part of the cost of growth. There are realistic risks which can and should be mitigated, sure, but if there are 10,000,000 children[1] in the US and 100 are abducted and killed each year, that's a 0.001% chance per year - far below what I consider the threshold of a realistic risk.
[1] I'm sure children actually make up substantially more than 1/30 of the population, but picking 10 million makes the numbers prettier and artifically inflates the odds. The actual chance per year of your child being abducted and killed is less than the figure calculated above.
Actually, no, she doesn't say that anything she did was wrong. She says that she's not responsible for the lawsuits because they were done after she resigned. Whether that's true or not, she can't "actually [do] anything to make amends" because she's no longer the RIAA chair, so she has no authority to do so.
Yes, training your replacement is SOP, if you quit the job.
These guys aren't quitting. They're being fired and replaced with cheaper labor.
The standard procedure when you're being fired (or even just laid off) seems to be to get you out the door and remove your access to the building as quickly as possible.
As a matter of fact, if a language doesn't have a way to express a concept, you simply can't think naturally about it.
I frequently find myself pondering concepts which I can't explain to others because I lack the words to explain them. Sometimes I can come up with ways to combine existing words for that purpose, other times I can't. Language may prevent me from expressing some concepts, but it in no way prevents me from thinking about them.
Just look at the inuit language which has something like 40 words that translate has 'ice'.
Urban legend.
Yeah, it didn't occur to me that itunes.no might not be the Norwegian ITMS site until after I posted. Mea culpa.
(And, yes, I have an iPod and iTunes, but have never used ITMS other than to locate free podcasts to subscribe to. Even then, it took a while before I noticed that the podcast directory was part of ITMS.)
itunes.no is in Norway. Oslo, to be exact, according to their whois records.
How does that square with your statements in the post I originally replied to that "If you got your system with Windows installed and you didn't agree, technically according to the (enforceable or unenforceable) EULA, you shouldn't be using it if you didn't agree to the terms." (emphasis yours) and "So according to MS, you are in breach of contract already if you are using their software without explicitly agreeing to the terms."? That looks an awful lot like two statements that only the person who accepts the EULA is allowed to use the machine. Which is a ridiculous claim to make, so I took the opportunity to ridicule it.
For the record, though, I have a Windows machine at home that I use for gaming, which never asked me to click on an EULA, so I didn't agree to it. I agree that, in the real world, all that matters is that somebody clicked "Agree" on the EULA, as you said in the later post. And that's the problem with EULAs (well, one of them): Somebody clicked "Agree", but that doesn't mean it was the owner of the machine. It could have been a previous owner. It could have been a tech at Dell or a service desk. It could have been the owner's 3-year old daughter. It could have been my cat walking across the keyboard. Neither Microsoft nor the owner has any way of knowing.
All of your three examples are of contracts between two people of roughly-comparable status in the contract, giving you the ability to negotiate terms, or either of you can walk away from the deal if you so choose and find someone else to work with.
That's a completely different situation that EULAs and other such contracts between an individual and a corporation large enough to run over the top of that individual without even noticing them. Microsoft, Apple, etc. don't offer you a contract, they dictate terms to you. Yes, you can walk away, but doing so is at significant cost to you and none to the other side. That's why consumer protection laws exist - you can't enter into an equal agreement with Apple, so the government steps in on your behalf.
(Of course, Apple only exists as it does because the government specifically allows it... I would prefer to see laws changed to remove corporate personhood and many of the other protections which allow them to overpower individuals so readily, in which case the consumer protection laws could probably be weakened or go away entirely, but that's not happening any time soon.)
Microsoft, Apple, and many other technology companies are by and large at the "market entrepreneur" end of the spectrum
Interesting. When I read your definition that "Any company that benefits from special rules or protections set up by the government is a political entrepreneur", I immediately thought of the likes of "Microsoft, Apple, and many other technology companies", whose business models are based on taking advantage of specific rules set up by governments. The rules I refer to are, of course, patent and copyright law. While these laws may theoretically apply to everyone (and thus could be seen as failing the "special" part of your definition), they have been tending towards redefinition into a form which benefits large corporations far more than smaller companies or individuals. Everyone is supposed to operate under the same copyright laws, but I can't afford to send the BSA after someone who infringes on my code or use the DMCA to bring down a TV station playing my music without permission.
I'm not saying patents or copyrights are inherently bad (although I do believe their current forms in the US to be excessive and counterproductive), but rather that Microsoft's continued existence as a business depends on legislation just as heavily as the taxi drivers from your example.
iTMS isn't "operating there" AFAIK
You are incorrect:
Domain Name: itunes.no
Organization Name: APPLE COMPUTER Filial av utenlandsk foretak
Postal Code: NO-0216
Postal Area: Oslo
Country: NO
(Sorry the columns don't line up right. The lameness filter seems to think whois records are lame, presumably because it considers the strings of dots used for spacing to be "junk characters". Idjits.)
In this particular case, yes, making FairPlay available to manufacturers of other digital music players is beneficial to Apple's competitors. But it also allows consumers a choice of what player they wish to use with FairPlay-DRMed files, which is to their benefit - some people may not be able to afford an iPod, others may hate its user interface, others may want a feature that it lacks, etc. Allowing players to be developed which address these issues without having to give up the ability to play iTunes tracks is clearly beneficial to consumers.
(Nice to know that I'm not legally allowed to use Windows are work, since I didn't click an EULA on my workstation, though. I'm sure my boss will be real disappointed when I tell him about it. Especially since it means that nigh-on every one of the company's thousands of employees are no longer allowed to do their jobs.)
In this context, "deflect" = "reflect in a direction other than back towards the transmitter". If the wave is sent off into space somewhere, then it doesn't reach the radar antenna and you don't show up.
Bad analogies. If I don't want to use the spellchecker, I can just turn it off (or simply not invoke it, depending on the software being used). If I don't want a fridge, I can choose not to use it or even sell it. I don't have to make 50,000 spelling mistakes to unlock the spellchecker before it's available to me and I don't have to buy the house without knowing whether there's a fridge or not and then peek into every nook and cranny for the hidden switch that will reveal the fridge (if the switch and the fridge exist).
the chances of one person having more than one discovery to their name isn't that small: even luck favors those that play 10+ hours a day.
...unless it's based on crafting, which GP suggested should be done off-line. In which case playing more hours could either reduce your chances of a discovery or have no effect on it, depending on just how it's implemented.
(Bleah... "Plain Old Text" posting option doesn't seem to be working today. Yay for making us use explicit <p>/</p> tags. Where's the "go back to the old slashdot" button?)
I don't recall... Did Warcraft do that before or after Total Annihilation? (Big TA fan, but never really got into Warcraft, so I don't recall which came out first.)
Yes, but it's quite simple to cater to both the right to listen to the EM spectrum and the right to private phone calls: Stop making/using cellphones that transmit in the clear.
As for the neighbor analogy, you could just say "close your curtains", but that doesn't really hold up because it's something that the neighbor has to actively do to avoid having her privacy compromised. Encrypting cell transmissions can (and should) be automatic and transparent to the user, so the analogy breaks on that point.
No, I rather doubt that it does. I remember hearing complaints about the decision to simply make it illegal for scanners to listen to cellphone frequencies instead of properly encrypting cell traffic going all the way back to the dawn of cellphones, well before we had a War on Terror or large-scale domestic snooping. I expect that this is the work of cheap cell providers and phone manufacturers, not nosy spies.
So websites have been using Web 2.0 since the dawn of CGI, then? (Shopping carts being the most obvious example of early CGI not-just-a-document-handler applications.)