Well, if the client is careful, the savings would be passed onto the client in return for not having source code and complete control over all parts of the final deliverable. Client would be crazy to pay the same amount for only binary (or some source, some binary) as it would cost to have the whole project custom-developed from scratch.
The problem with your argument is that it's not up for you (or Nick DePlume) to decide when it's okay to release Apple trade secrets. I'm not arguing the merits of going after somebody who didn't sign the NDA. But those were trade secrets, even if it was only a day or 2 before they were to be released to everybody.
What if the vendor has a specialty in some domain, and has built up a library over time? The vendor can then build outsourced solutions for less money using the library that they have built up, and save the customer both time and money. In that circumstance, it is very justifiable that the customer might not get all of the source code. Which should, of course, be stipulated in the contract.
So you already know enough about Harvard that I don't have to tell you that Harvard has a policy that anybody who is accepted into Harvard and whose family income is less than $40,000 per year goes to Harvard for free. Glad you're only commenting on issues about which you're fully informed.
Why it's a scam is that they didn't have to report it as an expense to their shareholders. So while they were telling the IRS that they didn't make money, they were telling their investors that the stock options were free, and that they were making money hand-over-fist.
...liberal side cannot accept that people may have a differing viewpoint than theirs they resort to name calling smear tactics.
I hate to reply multiple times, but here's another comment on yours. I have no problem when people disagree with me. I do have a problem when people try to legislate their way of life on me. I don't care if you're not gay. Hell, I'm not gay. But why shouldn't we allow gays couples to have the same rights as straight couples? Lots of conservatives would claim that allowing gays to marry is legislating that view on everybody, but that's a bunch of BS. Nobody is making anybody marry people of the same sex. It does not affect you. Really. Just let me live how I want to live, not how you want me to live. That's why I get all worked up - it's not about different viewpoints like you say, it's about allowing me to keep MY viewpoint.
Have you actually read some of the stuff that Card wrote on Ornery.org? He apparently claims to be an expert on sociology and yammers on about how divorce is killing our society. Somehow he concludes that "Civilizations that enforce rules of marriage that give most males and most females a chance to have children that live to reproduce in their turn are the civilizations that last the longest." No studies cited. No research performed, just a broad swath of an opinion cited as fact. He thinks that his conservative-minded thought experiment is to be considered as fact.
You want more? He says that "... huge numbers of Americans know that the schools are places where their children are indoctrinated in anti-family values." Again, no explanation, no citations, just a statement floating around. And then we get to the "if you don't agree with me, you're an idiot" statement: "Parents in a stable marriage are much better than schools at civilizing children. You have to be a fanatical idealogue not to recognize this as an obvious truth -- in other words, you have to dumb down or radically twist the definition of "civilizing children" in order to claim that parents are not, on the whole, better at it."
And, oh my god! Look what he's afraid of: "Television programs will start to show homosexual 'marriages' as wonderful and happy...." Not that! How could those heathen homos be happy!!
I'll stop there. You get the point - he's making lots of baseless statements about how homosexual marriage will destroy America. I don't know what's behind it, but bigotry certainly seems like a likely guess. I mean, he even seems to resent that homosexuals could be happy. Is that not bigotry?
Why do you hope they lose? You're doing the right thing - you don't like it, don't buy it. There are alternatives. The problem with the lawsuit is that the basis of it is that there aren't alternatives. But there are. If you don't like a company's products, you should stay away from them. Suing is not the answer.
And you're wrong about the iPod at a loss thing - they don't care how much money they make from iTunes, they want to sell iPods for a profit.
it may be that humans were designed by Klaatu the Alien rather than "God"
The problem with this (from a logical standpoint) is that somebody believing this (or in (a) god(s), but I'm going to try not to get into that) hasn't simplified anything. How did Klaatu the Alien (obviously a complex being himself if he's capable of intelligently designing life on Earth!) come into existence? Evolution? You're not going to find an I.D. believer who accept that. Another Intelligent Designer? Then you've got an infinitely recursive loop. God? Well, now we're back to what it's really about.
...the point is that an accident happened due to the flow of traffic changing. Ergo, it's a dangerous, and stupid, practice. No less dangerous and stupid than tailgating is.
If a dangerous situation is caused by a large difference in the speed of different cars, it's the fault of the people moving much faster than the speed limit, not the fault of the people moving at or near the speed limit. Changing speeds in itself is not a dangerous practice - slowing down is not a problem (ever) if people follow a safe distance behind the car in front of them. You just have to assume that the car in front of you might have to slam on its brakes for some reason. I just don't see why I'm doing something wrong if I choose to drive at a reasonable speed. You don't like it? Don't drive behind me!
I've hit cars doing stupid shit like you propose. I've had cars hit me BECAUSE someone did stupid shit like you propose. Just get out of the fucking way and let everyone past you, rather than try to decide how everyone else should drive.
No, troll, you're the problem. You hit them because YOU WERE TAILGATING. If you were following a safe distance behind, YOU WOULDN'T HAVE HIT THEM. What if they'd had to slam on their brakes because something was in the lane? You would have hit them. If you rear-end somebody, it is almost always your fault (the only exception that I can think of is if you were just cut off). He has to be able to slow down. If you rear-end him when he just takes his foot off of the gas, what do you think is going to happen if he actually uses his brakes? If other people hit you because you had to slow down, well, that's unfortunate and it's the fault of the person who hit you, not the person in front of you who slowed down, too. Maybe you should have been traveling further behind the car in front of you so that you didn't have to hit the brakes so hard.
And about the "just get out of the way" comment. If I'm moving 75 in the right-hand lane, and some jackass is in my trunk, how the hell do I get out of the way? You're right that people should be more aware of the speed of the lane that they're in, but there are lots of people out there who think that they should be able to drive 100 MPH in whatever lane they want, and other people need to get out of their way.
Whether you like it or not, your choices are:
1. Allow simple passwords
2. Require complex passwords, but don't expire them (so that users can memorize them and keep them memorized)
3. Have users write their passwords down
Many users will do number 3 no matter what. But, really, people just aren't going to memorize 8 new random secure passwords every month. It just isn't going to happen. You might want to live in a perfect world where you can implement security rules assuming that the users aren't the weakest link, but this is the real world, and I have news for you: your users are your weakest link.
A sales tax is far-more fair, for the simple reason that if you so choose, you don't *have* to buy anything
Well, hell, then if you so choose, you don't *have* to earn anything because you don't *have* to buy anything and the income tax passes your very odd sense of fairness.
I'm also very skeptical of your math. Care to elaborate?
The problem isn't only the self-medication. He went to a doctor. Things felt better for a while, before starting to feel worse. Rather than going back to the same doctor, he waited until it was horrible, and went to another ER. Lather, rinse, repeat. If he had gone to his regular doctor, and let the doctor know if/when the initial treatment failed, the doctor could have done more research and looked for less common problems. The point is that it's impossible for your doctor to know immediately what's wrong with you unless it happens to be something that's pretty common. By not giving anybody a chance to hunt down what this really was, he was getting a bunch of different people treating him for what the most likely problem was - but unfortunately for him, it doesn't appear that it was any of those likely things. So he was getting the same ineffective treatment time after time because none of the doctors treating him knew the whole history.
He also doesn't seem to be treating things too rationally when he complains about not being able to be seen within 48 hours, and deciding that the best course of action would be to drive halfway across the country....
Clearly an engineer:-) Those of us who were science majors (Physics, here) know that it's just like a scientific experiment. Fiddle with it for a while, see what happens. When I do this, what happens? When I do this then that, what happens? I used to be able to do it in a minute, but I probably can't get the bottom row at all any more without several hours of work to re-learn the patterns.
I'm not surprised that it's just out of the reach of real practicality. After all, you'd be dealing with very small generators, which just aren't going to be as efficient as larger ones (though you have much less line loss). It is nice to dream about (from both financial and environmental standpoints).
Of course, as you said, neither solar nor wind are 24/7, so I wouldn't be able to remove myself from the grid entirely. But, if it were to cost $10,000 to remove my house from the grid entirely? That would be a good investment. Would pay a guaranteed 8% per year or so (perhaps more), and that's if energy prices don't rise. Sounds like a fantastic investment to me.
Quick math. Average home: 300 KiloWatt Hours per month (that's a reasonably high guess, I'm pretty sure we approach that much only during the hottest summer months in my house). That's 300,000 Watt-hours, or an average of 300,000 Wh / 720 hours per month = 417 Watts average use. Obviously, it's higher at some times and lower at others, but we are talking about a noticeable portion of your electric bill.
Huh. I do application development and data warehousing for a pharma-related company. We're a tech company in that our main asset is data and the knowledge of how to use it. I do a lot of programming, though not 100% of my time. And, with the exception of maybe 2 weeks of crunch time per year, I work 40-45 (50 max) hours a week. During crunch time, I might work 60-70 hours/week.
I communicate well with people who don't have a tech background. They can't outsource me. They wouldn't try, nor would they want to try. If you make yourself more than just a commodity programmer, you'll be surprised how reasonably people will treat you. If you're really just a commodity, people will treat you as such.
Lisa: You know, in a way, all Americans are immigrants. Except, of
course Native Americans.
Homer: Yeah, Native Americans like us.
Lisa: No, I mean American Indians.
Apu: Like me.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, how about "people"?
Well, if the client is careful, the savings would be passed onto the client in return for not having source code and complete control over all parts of the final deliverable. Client would be crazy to pay the same amount for only binary (or some source, some binary) as it would cost to have the whole project custom-developed from scratch.
The problem with your argument is that it's not up for you (or Nick DePlume) to decide when it's okay to release Apple trade secrets. I'm not arguing the merits of going after somebody who didn't sign the NDA. But those were trade secrets, even if it was only a day or 2 before they were to be released to everybody.
What if the vendor has a specialty in some domain, and has built up a library over time? The vendor can then build outsourced solutions for less money using the library that they have built up, and save the customer both time and money. In that circumstance, it is very justifiable that the customer might not get all of the source code. Which should, of course, be stipulated in the contract.
Huh. I've never had any problems using my Canon i550 with my Macs....
I wish there were a "-1 Clueless" mod. Hint: grandparent is making fun of Slashdot's title for the article and mocking it. It was intentional.
So you already know enough about Harvard that I don't have to tell you that Harvard has a policy that anybody who is accepted into Harvard and whose family income is less than $40,000 per year goes to Harvard for free. Glad you're only commenting on issues about which you're fully informed.
Why it's a scam is that they didn't have to report it as an expense to their shareholders. So while they were telling the IRS that they didn't make money, they were telling their investors that the stock options were free, and that they were making money hand-over-fist.
I hate to reply multiple times, but here's another comment on yours. I have no problem when people disagree with me. I do have a problem when people try to legislate their way of life on me. I don't care if you're not gay. Hell, I'm not gay. But why shouldn't we allow gays couples to have the same rights as straight couples? Lots of conservatives would claim that allowing gays to marry is legislating that view on everybody, but that's a bunch of BS. Nobody is making anybody marry people of the same sex. It does not affect you. Really. Just let me live how I want to live, not how you want me to live. That's why I get all worked up - it's not about different viewpoints like you say, it's about allowing me to keep MY viewpoint.
people may have a differing viewpoint than theirs
Have you actually read some of the stuff that Card wrote on Ornery.org? He apparently claims to be an expert on sociology and yammers on about how divorce is killing our society. Somehow he concludes that "Civilizations that enforce rules of marriage that give most males and most females a chance to have children that live to reproduce in their turn are the civilizations that last the longest." No studies cited. No research performed, just a broad swath of an opinion cited as fact. He thinks that his conservative-minded thought experiment is to be considered as fact.
You want more? He says that "... huge numbers of Americans know that the schools are places where their children are indoctrinated in anti-family values." Again, no explanation, no citations, just a statement floating around. And then we get to the "if you don't agree with me, you're an idiot" statement:
"Parents in a stable marriage are much better than schools at civilizing children. You have to be a fanatical idealogue not to recognize this as an obvious truth -- in other words, you have to dumb down or radically twist the definition of "civilizing children" in order to claim that parents are not, on the whole, better at it."
And, oh my god! Look what he's afraid of: "Television programs will start to show homosexual 'marriages' as wonderful and happy...." Not that! How could those heathen homos be happy!!
I'll stop there. You get the point - he's making lots of baseless statements about how homosexual marriage will destroy America. I don't know what's behind it, but bigotry certainly seems like a likely guess. I mean, he even seems to resent that homosexuals could be happy. Is that not bigotry?
Perhaps he said that because deep-down, he knows that he's a bigot.
Why do you hope they lose? You're doing the right thing - you don't like it, don't buy it. There are alternatives. The problem with the lawsuit is that the basis of it is that there aren't alternatives. But there are. If you don't like a company's products, you should stay away from them. Suing is not the answer.
And you're wrong about the iPod at a loss thing - they don't care how much money they make from iTunes, they want to sell iPods for a profit.
You can still buy CDs.... They're digital music.
it may be that humans were designed by Klaatu the Alien rather than "God"
The problem with this (from a logical standpoint) is that somebody believing this (or in (a) god(s), but I'm going to try not to get into that) hasn't simplified anything. How did Klaatu the Alien (obviously a complex being himself if he's capable of intelligently designing life on Earth!) come into existence? Evolution? You're not going to find an I.D. believer who accept that. Another Intelligent Designer? Then you've got an infinitely recursive loop. God? Well, now we're back to what it's really about.
If a dangerous situation is caused by a large difference in the speed of different cars, it's the fault of the people moving much faster than the speed limit, not the fault of the people moving at or near the speed limit. Changing speeds in itself is not a dangerous practice - slowing down is not a problem (ever) if people follow a safe distance behind the car in front of them. You just have to assume that the car in front of you might have to slam on its brakes for some reason. I just don't see why I'm doing something wrong if I choose to drive at a reasonable speed. You don't like it? Don't drive behind me!
I've hit cars doing stupid shit like you propose. I've had cars hit me BECAUSE someone did stupid shit like you propose. Just get out of the fucking way and let everyone past you, rather than try to decide how everyone else should drive.
No, troll, you're the problem. You hit them because YOU WERE TAILGATING. If you were following a safe distance behind, YOU WOULDN'T HAVE HIT THEM. What if they'd had to slam on their brakes because something was in the lane? You would have hit them. If you rear-end somebody, it is almost always your fault (the only exception that I can think of is if you were just cut off). He has to be able to slow down. If you rear-end him when he just takes his foot off of the gas, what do you think is going to happen if he actually uses his brakes? If other people hit you because you had to slow down, well, that's unfortunate and it's the fault of the person who hit you, not the person in front of you who slowed down, too. Maybe you should have been traveling further behind the car in front of you so that you didn't have to hit the brakes so hard.
And about the "just get out of the way" comment. If I'm moving 75 in the right-hand lane, and some jackass is in my trunk, how the hell do I get out of the way? You're right that people should be more aware of the speed of the lane that they're in, but there are lots of people out there who think that they should be able to drive 100 MPH in whatever lane they want, and other people need to get out of their way.
Whether you like it or not, your choices are:
1. Allow simple passwords
2. Require complex passwords, but don't expire them (so that users can memorize them and keep them memorized)
3. Have users write their passwords down
Many users will do number 3 no matter what. But, really, people just aren't going to memorize 8 new random secure passwords every month. It just isn't going to happen. You might want to live in a perfect world where you can implement security rules assuming that the users aren't the weakest link, but this is the real world, and I have news for you: your users are your weakest link.
A sales tax is far-more fair, for the simple reason that if you so choose, you don't *have* to buy anything
Well, hell, then if you so choose, you don't *have* to earn anything because you don't *have* to buy anything and the income tax passes your very odd sense of fairness.
I'm also very skeptical of your math. Care to elaborate?
The problem isn't only the self-medication. He went to a doctor. Things felt better for a while, before starting to feel worse. Rather than going back to the same doctor, he waited until it was horrible, and went to another ER. Lather, rinse, repeat. If he had gone to his regular doctor, and let the doctor know if/when the initial treatment failed, the doctor could have done more research and looked for less common problems. The point is that it's impossible for your doctor to know immediately what's wrong with you unless it happens to be something that's pretty common. By not giving anybody a chance to hunt down what this really was, he was getting a bunch of different people treating him for what the most likely problem was - but unfortunately for him, it doesn't appear that it was any of those likely things. So he was getting the same ineffective treatment time after time because none of the doctors treating him knew the whole history.
He also doesn't seem to be treating things too rationally when he complains about not being able to be seen within 48 hours, and deciding that the best course of action would be to drive halfway across the country....
Clearly an engineer :-) Those of us who were science majors (Physics, here) know that it's just like a scientific experiment. Fiddle with it for a while, see what happens. When I do this, what happens? When I do this then that, what happens? I used to be able to do it in a minute, but I probably can't get the bottom row at all any more without several hours of work to re-learn the patterns.
I'm not surprised that it's just out of the reach of real practicality. After all, you'd be dealing with very small generators, which just aren't going to be as efficient as larger ones (though you have much less line loss). It is nice to dream about (from both financial and environmental standpoints).
Of course, as you said, neither solar nor wind are 24/7, so I wouldn't be able to remove myself from the grid entirely. But, if it were to cost $10,000 to remove my house from the grid entirely? That would be a good investment. Would pay a guaranteed 8% per year or so (perhaps more), and that's if energy prices don't rise. Sounds like a fantastic investment to me.
Quick math. Average home: 300 KiloWatt Hours per month (that's a reasonably high guess, I'm pretty sure we approach that much only during the hottest summer months in my house). That's 300,000 Watt-hours, or an average of 300,000 Wh / 720 hours per month = 417 Watts average use. Obviously, it's higher at some times and lower at others, but we are talking about a noticeable portion of your electric bill.
Huh. I do application development and data warehousing for a pharma-related company. We're a tech company in that our main asset is data and the knowledge of how to use it. I do a lot of programming, though not 100% of my time. And, with the exception of maybe 2 weeks of crunch time per year, I work 40-45 (50 max) hours a week. During crunch time, I might work 60-70 hours/week.
I communicate well with people who don't have a tech background. They can't outsource me. They wouldn't try, nor would they want to try. If you make yourself more than just a commodity programmer, you'll be surprised how reasonably people will treat you. If you're really just a commodity, people will treat you as such.
Ob. Simpsons:
Lisa: You know, in a way, all Americans are immigrants. Except, of course Native Americans.
Homer: Yeah, Native Americans like us.
Lisa: No, I mean American Indians.
Apu: Like me.