The mere fact that something isn't illegal doesn't make it more palatable. If two companies employ the same dirty tactics you shouldn't judge them different simply because one succeeded and the other failed. You certainly shouldn't vilify one and worship the other.
The point I was trying to make is that when the company doesn't have a monopoly, it's not only not illegal, it's not dirty. For Apple pushing iPods, this is aggressive marketing. For Microsoft pushing its products, it's either extending its monopoly (for Windows or Office) or using its monopoly in one area to try to create a monopoly in another area (for any other product).
Anyways your market share analysis is flawed - Apple dominate the digital music industry (or so we have been told) so this time they are the monopoly.
Do you know what the word "monopoly" means? It does not mean being the most successful company in a given area. It means being successful to the point that there is no competition. You might argue that Windows is not a monopoly. Although the US justice system will disagree with you, they are not infallible. But Apple, with about 50% of the market for digital music players and about 70% of the market for online music sales, is not a monopoly in these or any other markets.
Because Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, and Apple is not.
There are many tactics which are perfectly acceptable when you own 5% of the market and which are not only unacceptable but illegal when you own 95% of the market.
Who needs the essential data to design a deep bunker buster bomb when help from an NZ cruise missile designer, a few kilos of plutonium, plenty of TNT and a good machine shop would allow you to build a weapon which, while it might not fission, would be able to kill large numbers of people a long way away?
A dirty bomb has two main effects. First, it's a large explosion, just like a conventional bomb, and that blast can kill people. Second, people are incredibly afraid of "radiation" and "nuclear", so it has an incredibly huge fear factor, which is what terrorists aim for. The number of people who would actually be seriously injured or killed by the nuclear materials in any reasonable dirty bomb would be nearly insignificant. (I'm sure it would be significant to those affected, but the chemical explosives would kill many more.)
Unless I'm totally mistaken, he's not being extradited to the US on charges of a crime, he's simply being deported because he doesn't have a valid passport. That is a decision the Japanese undertook, because like most countries, Japan doesn't like foreigners wandering around without valid passports, visas, and so on. Normally the action taken in such cases is to kick the offender out of the country by deporting him to his country of origin, in this case the United States. Once he arrives, of course, he'll probably be arrested, since he is a wanted criminal, but it's not like he was the subject of a long international manhunt and the US is finally bringing him to justice. He simply fucked up and is getting forcibly returned to a place where people want to arrest him.
$30 million would probably not even pay for the studies necessary to decide which project should get funding in NASA-land. If they get any results at all from such a tiny amount of money, it's a real bargain compared to doing it in-house.
According to http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp65.htm, the HP 65 was introduced in 1974, far too late to participate in any of the moon missions, but it did fly on Apollo-Soyuz and got some use doing course corrections there.
You forgot to convert back: 3178K = 5277F. It's not exact, but it's close. When you get to temperatures that high, the measly few hundred degrees between absolute zero and 0F or 0C simply don't matter that much.
It's not an agenda; the law prohibits distribution of applications that use MP3 (at least in the US) without reaching an agreement with the owners of the patent. Since there's a snowball's chance in hell that said patent owners will agree to license the patent to free software that can't pay any royalties, free software cannot legally distribute MP3 players (at least in the US). It has nothing to do with ideology, and everything to do with law.
I agree that Free Software is very often agenda first, user-friendliness second, but this is not one of those cases.
Thank you, I didn't know the difference, now I am better educated than before. Nevertheless, Ferion is neither a Ponzi Scheme nor a pyramid scheme. (I know you didn't correct that part of it, I just want to be clear.)
Attempting to deploy "several bleeding edge technologies" on a "very short time scale" for a project like repairing the hubble space telescope is simply not a good idea. In all likelihood the technology used will not be adequately developed and it will be a unnecessary failure.
You know, space programs in general and NASA in particular have a very good track record of taking tons of bleeding edge technologies, throwing them all together in a mission, and pulling it off wonderfully. Your scenario is possible, but I don't see it as being likely at all.
A pyramid scheme is where you get people to invest in something, and you use new investors to pay returns to the older investors. Once all available suckers have been scammed, it collapses. What you describe is not a pyramid scheme.
I agree that running as root is bad, but it's not as bad as it sounds. In a typical desktop system, every important file is in the user's home directory. Not running as root only prevents you from inadvertently screwing up system files, which isn't a big deal because you can simply reinstall. Reinstalling is bad, and you want to avoid it when you can, but it's nothing compared with the ability to steal or delete the user's files or use his box as an infection vector or spambot, all of which don't require root privs.
Sigh. Karma isn't a game, whose goal is to maximize your score. If you make a great post and it gets modded +5 Funny, you weren't robbed of anything just because Funny doesn't give karma points. Don't take the whole karma thing so seriously.
Disclaimer: I hit the karma kap not long after it was first implemented and so you might consider there to be a bit of hypocrisy up above, if you're that sort of person.
Sorry about the misunderstanding; I realize now that it's ambiguous, but I meant that it's probably not possible to thrive. Although I lived here for a while, I'm not a native, and I don't live here anymore (I'm just back for a visit). You may know the dialect, but I sure don't. (And wtf does "Props to Leinie's" mean? I'm all curious now.)
So how is it better than before? First, most people in the world a thousand years ago were not native Americans living in an area that was rich enough to support human life on 20 hours a week. Most people a thousand years ago had to do a lot more work to survive at all. Second, with your extra $100-$200/month left over money, you can do things those people never dreamed of, like take occasional vacations to faraway destinations, fly a plane, talk to people on the other side of the planet, etc. etc., and you can still spend the rest of your time singing, walking around, chasing the girls, or smoking some good stuff.
Let's say you can find a decent part-time job paying $8/hour. This might be high, but increase your hours per week to compensate for lower wages; I'll assume a straight 20 hours a week to make up for it.
$8/hour for 20 hours a week is $160 a week, or about $700 a month. Around here (bumfuck, Wisconsin), a cramped one-person apartment will probably run you $200-300/month. Add on another $100/month for utilities, if you really go crazy. If you're frugal you can easily get away with $200/month for food. If you're good, it's probably a lot less, but we'll be generous. So that's a worst-case total of $600/month in expenses.
That's a pretty crappy situation, but you can survive that way. Note, in case you misunderstood, that I specifically said that you can not thrive on such a job.
How is life truly 'better' today then it was 100 or 1000 years ago? You have more toys and convenience and more luxury but you still have to work like a dog and it still costs you (in work) the same amount of time taken away from life.
Today, you can survive, if not thrive, on a part-time job of 20-30 hours a week. A thousand years ago, the vast majority of the population had to work from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week, from when they were old enough to walk until they were too crippled to do any useful work just in order to survive. Most people working full-time jobs in the US get half of their waking hours off, don't work weekends, and get vacation time; that's far less work than before.
Theoretically, it is impossible to have anonymous communication on the Internet.
Can you elaborate some more? I skimmed the linked paper, although I didn't read it thoroughly, and it appears to claim exactly the opposite. Did I completely misunderstand?
Considering that Mozilla browsers default to a Google search (at least FireFox does, and I assume the others do as well because it's just so damned useful), and IE defaults to MSN search, I think Google would show many more Mozilla users than there really are.
I don't think it matters if MS dies or not. No mature industry has a single company holding 95% of the market. The current situation simply cannot last forever, and when it changes, we'll go back to having many large companies with big chunks of the market instead of a single company with almost all of it.
And you have to be an admin in order to have that permission. There isn't "the" admin, there can be many, but you do need an admin's username and password (which on single-user systems is normally your own) to do things outside of your home directory.
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The mere fact that something isn't illegal doesn't make it more palatable. If two companies employ the same dirty tactics you shouldn't judge them different simply because one succeeded and the other failed. You certainly shouldn't vilify one and worship the other.
The point I was trying to make is that when the company doesn't have a monopoly, it's not only not illegal, it's not dirty. For Apple pushing iPods, this is aggressive marketing. For Microsoft pushing its products, it's either extending its monopoly (for Windows or Office) or using its monopoly in one area to try to create a monopoly in another area (for any other product).
Anyways your market share analysis is flawed - Apple dominate the digital music industry (or so we have been told) so this time they are the monopoly.
Do you know what the word "monopoly" means? It does not mean being the most successful company in a given area. It means being successful to the point that there is no competition. You might argue that Windows is not a monopoly. Although the US justice system will disagree with you, they are not infallible. But Apple, with about 50% of the market for digital music players and about 70% of the market for online music sales, is not a monopoly in these or any other markets.
Because Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, and Apple is not.
There are many tactics which are perfectly acceptable when you own 5% of the market and which are not only unacceptable but illegal when you own 95% of the market.
Who needs the essential data to design a deep bunker buster bomb when help from an NZ cruise missile designer, a few kilos of plutonium, plenty of TNT and a good machine shop would allow you to build a weapon which, while it might not fission, would be able to kill large numbers of people a long way away?
A dirty bomb has two main effects. First, it's a large explosion, just like a conventional bomb, and that blast can kill people. Second, people are incredibly afraid of "radiation" and "nuclear", so it has an incredibly huge fear factor, which is what terrorists aim for. The number of people who would actually be seriously injured or killed by the nuclear materials in any reasonable dirty bomb would be nearly insignificant. (I'm sure it would be significant to those affected, but the chemical explosives would kill many more.)
Unless I'm totally mistaken, he's not being extradited to the US on charges of a crime, he's simply being deported because he doesn't have a valid passport. That is a decision the Japanese undertook, because like most countries, Japan doesn't like foreigners wandering around without valid passports, visas, and so on. Normally the action taken in such cases is to kick the offender out of the country by deporting him to his country of origin, in this case the United States. Once he arrives, of course, he'll probably be arrested, since he is a wanted criminal, but it's not like he was the subject of a long international manhunt and the US is finally bringing him to justice. He simply fucked up and is getting forcibly returned to a place where people want to arrest him.
$30 million would probably not even pay for the studies necessary to decide which project should get funding in NASA-land. If they get any results at all from such a tiny amount of money, it's a real bargain compared to doing it in-house.
By the time he became an astronaut, he was out of the Navy and back to being a civilian.
According to http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp65.htm, the HP 65 was introduced in 1974, far too late to participate in any of the moon missions, but it did fly on Apollo-Soyuz and got some use doing course corrections there.
You forgot to convert back: 3178K = 5277F. It's not exact, but it's close. When you get to temperatures that high, the measly few hundred degrees between absolute zero and 0F or 0C simply don't matter that much.
Most people don't know what they know. Case in point, I didn't know that I knew this until you pointed it out.
It's not an agenda; the law prohibits distribution of applications that use MP3 (at least in the US) without reaching an agreement with the owners of the patent. Since there's a snowball's chance in hell that said patent owners will agree to license the patent to free software that can't pay any royalties, free software cannot legally distribute MP3 players (at least in the US). It has nothing to do with ideology, and everything to do with law.
I agree that Free Software is very often agenda first, user-friendliness second, but this is not one of those cases.
Thank you, I didn't know the difference, now I am better educated than before. Nevertheless, Ferion is neither a Ponzi Scheme nor a pyramid scheme. (I know you didn't correct that part of it, I just want to be clear.)
Attempting to deploy "several bleeding edge technologies" on a "very short time scale" for a project like repairing the hubble space telescope is simply not a good idea. In all likelihood the technology used will not be adequately developed and it will be a unnecessary failure.
You know, space programs in general and NASA in particular have a very good track record of taking tons of bleeding edge technologies, throwing them all together in a mission, and pulling it off wonderfully. Your scenario is possible, but I don't see it as being likely at all.
A pyramid scheme is where you get people to invest in something, and you use new investors to pay returns to the older investors. Once all available suckers have been scammed, it collapses. What you describe is not a pyramid scheme.
Feh, you kids with your fancy graphics, it's disgusting. Try a nice text-based game sometime, you might like it.
I agree that running as root is bad, but it's not as bad as it sounds. In a typical desktop system, every important file is in the user's home directory. Not running as root only prevents you from inadvertently screwing up system files, which isn't a big deal because you can simply reinstall. Reinstalling is bad, and you want to avoid it when you can, but it's nothing compared with the ability to steal or delete the user's files or use his box as an infection vector or spambot, all of which don't require root privs.
Sigh. Karma isn't a game, whose goal is to maximize your score. If you make a great post and it gets modded +5 Funny, you weren't robbed of anything just because Funny doesn't give karma points. Don't take the whole karma thing so seriously.
Disclaimer: I hit the karma kap not long after it was first implemented and so you might consider there to be a bit of hypocrisy up above, if you're that sort of person.
Sorry about the misunderstanding; I realize now that it's ambiguous, but I meant that it's probably not possible to thrive. Although I lived here for a while, I'm not a native, and I don't live here anymore (I'm just back for a visit). You may know the dialect, but I sure don't. (And wtf does "Props to Leinie's" mean? I'm all curious now.)
So how is it better than before? First, most people in the world a thousand years ago were not native Americans living in an area that was rich enough to support human life on 20 hours a week. Most people a thousand years ago had to do a lot more work to survive at all. Second, with your extra $100-$200/month left over money, you can do things those people never dreamed of, like take occasional vacations to faraway destinations, fly a plane, talk to people on the other side of the planet, etc. etc., and you can still spend the rest of your time singing, walking around, chasing the girls, or smoking some good stuff.
What I found is math. I'll pass it to you here:
Let's say you can find a decent part-time job paying $8/hour. This might be high, but increase your hours per week to compensate for lower wages; I'll assume a straight 20 hours a week to make up for it.
$8/hour for 20 hours a week is $160 a week, or about $700 a month. Around here (bumfuck, Wisconsin), a cramped one-person apartment will probably run you $200-300/month. Add on another $100/month for utilities, if you really go crazy. If you're frugal you can easily get away with $200/month for food. If you're good, it's probably a lot less, but we'll be generous. So that's a worst-case total of $600/month in expenses.
That's a pretty crappy situation, but you can survive that way. Note, in case you misunderstood, that I specifically said that you can not thrive on such a job.
How is life truly 'better' today then it was 100 or 1000 years ago? You have more toys and convenience and more luxury but you still have to work like a dog and it still costs you (in work) the same amount of time taken away from life.
Today, you can survive, if not thrive, on a part-time job of 20-30 hours a week. A thousand years ago, the vast majority of the population had to work from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week, from when they were old enough to walk until they were too crippled to do any useful work just in order to survive. Most people working full-time jobs in the US get half of their waking hours off, don't work weekends, and get vacation time; that's far less work than before.
Theoretically, it is impossible to have anonymous communication on the Internet.
Can you elaborate some more? I skimmed the linked paper, although I didn't read it thoroughly, and it appears to claim exactly the opposite. Did I completely misunderstand?
Considering that Mozilla browsers default to a Google search (at least FireFox does, and I assume the others do as well because it's just so damned useful), and IE defaults to MSN search, I think Google would show many more Mozilla users than there really are.
Can I use the old "it's just a joke" excuse?
One word: PowerBooks.
I don't think it matters if MS dies or not. No mature industry has a single company holding 95% of the market. The current situation simply cannot last forever, and when it changes, we'll go back to having many large companies with big chunks of the market instead of a single company with almost all of it.
And you have to be an admin in order to have that permission. There isn't "the" admin, there can be many, but you do need an admin's username and password (which on single-user systems is normally your own) to do things outside of your home directory.