CADE I thank you, good people: there shall be no money;
all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will
apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree
like brothers and worship me their lord.
DICK The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
CADE Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable
thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should
be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled
o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings:
but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal
once to a thing, and I was never mine own man
since. How now! who's there?
2 KING HENRY VI, ACT IV, SCENE II.
Shakespeare, of course.
There's nothing quite so nice as having *all* of the Bard's works on your hard drive. It's available on line, but it's been a while and I forgot where I got it. All I have to do is grep for stuff and I can make myself look like a real highbrow on the Internet.
...have a filter to prevent excessive whitespace in a post? Come on, Cowboy, time to update the lameness filter. How hard is it to check for an excessive number of consecutive <br>s?
It worked for 6 years. How much longer would it have worked if they hadn't opened their source?
Of course you don't want obscurity to be your only method, but you shouldn't rely on peer review as your only method either. It's just that I've grown tired of people saying that obscurity is of no value at all.
There seems to be a lot of sucky name changing going on lately. Ximian??? What's that? A monkey that knows how to run a photocopier? This is almost as bad as the one Andersen Consulting did. Now they're... umm... see? It's really bad and I can't even remember it.
With just a few lines of BASIC and some filter tweaks, I made this random explosion generator that just *rocked*. The code has long since rotted away on a 5 1/4" disk somewhere, and I have yet to do anything similar on a PC with so little effort.
Yet another reason I wish I hadn't gotten rid of my C-64.
"Only two forms of regulation are available in the United States: governmental and corporate. "
That's the central flaw. There is another form of regulation: Self control. TV rotting your mind and turning you into a corpulent blob? Get up, turn it off, and go for a walk. Kids downloading porn? Take 'em aside and explain the evils of the sex industry to them.
No irony. Better yet, I'm not even going to resort to that tired point about Free Speach vs. Free Beer either. I've never bought that argument anyway.
Instead, I'm going to point out that the job of an entrepreneur is to take raw materials, turn them into finished goods, and receive profits in return.
It's natural for an entrepreneur to seek raw materials at the lowest possible price. Indeed, as a nascent software entrepreneur I stumbled into my first experience with Free Software because I typed "Free JPEG code" into a search engine. Much to my surprise, I found some.
Now, the time during which any piece of software is of interest to an entrepreneur as a pure product (as opposed to being bundled with some other product) is limited by how quickly Free Software implements something comparable. This doesn't make entrepreneurs, even software entrepreneurs, seeking free software a study in irony. It just makes them shrewd buyers.
It seems like this system requires ISP customers to accept a pay per byte system. Right now, most ISPs in the US are flat rate.
If we go to a pay per byte system, then spam will start costing us money. This is already the case in the UK, isn't it? Well, we certainly haven't solved the spam problem yet, so going pay per byte on the user end is problematic.
How about only charging per byte on HTTP, FTP, etc., but not SMTP? Well, then people who want to exchange copyrighted material will just set up list servers.
Another alternative is for participating ISPs to continue charging flat rate, but add a uniform surcharge to each account. Problem? The first participating ISP will lose customers to nonparticipating ISPs. Even if everybody does it, the cost of an ISP will be driven up for people who don't download copyrighted material.
Ultimately, the possibility of maintaining reasonable ISP prices at flat rates can be determined with a simple calculation: Take the current revenue of all content providers, add it up, and divide by the number of ISP customers. What do you get? I don't know. If it's $10, that's not bad. Who wouldn't want all the guilt-free MP3s they can download for $10/month? If it's $100 forget it.
The ISP could simply pass through charges to the customer based on whether or not they downloaded copyrighted material. Then we are right back to the same old problem. Users who want to download a lot of copyrighted material will find a way to make it look like they aren't.
Semantics. When I hear that someone is a "Windsurfing champion" I don't think they represent Windsurfing Incorporated.
When I read "Linux Consultant" it looked the same as "Legal Consultant", "IT Consultant", or even "Unix Consultant". I think most people understood that he is a "consultant who specializes in Linux" which just doesn't roll off the tounge quite as easily as "Linux consultant" or "burger flipper". Imagine if you had to say "man who flips hamburgers". Writers are sometimes forced to choose between precision and brevity.
A lot of times, especially on the internet, people critique journalists regarding the fact that they weren't precise about such-n-such. The problem with most of these critiques is that if the writer took the pains to precisely describe everything, their style would come off as tedious, long winded, pedantic, and perhaps under confident.
As far as the phrase "Linux consultant" is concerned, I don't think there is a problem. If he worked for a company they might say "Linux consultant from Acme Inc" or something like that. If he is independant, then "Independant Linux consultant" is perhaps clearer, but I don't think anybody with a clue had trouble understanding what "Linux consultant" meant, neither do I think/.'s editorial policy should play to the clueless.
Hardly. The sex industry is extraordinarily profitable
That was exactly my point. As "legitimate" businesses fail to turn a profit, it stands to reason that some of them would turn to sex to subsidize the other side of the business, or perhaps as an alternative to the business.
It happened when I was in tech support. We always "punched in" by typing a code into a computer time clock. One day, the computer gave me a wierd error I had never seen. I told my manager about the error, and she said, jokingly, "maybe you got fired". I was in good standing, so we could both laugh about this. I guess she knew that the error was associated with termination, but she figured it was just a glitch and that it would resolve itself. The problem persisted, and I reported it to her again. Well, then she realized it wasn't going away and did something about it. Sure enough, I was "fired" by accident. They even paid me for my vacation hours and zeroed out my leave balance. Getting a severance check was nice, but I lost my leave which was OK because I didn't have much saved up anyway.
Anyhow, stuff happens. I took this accidential "firing" in good stride. Starting termination mechanisms before the employee is actually informed is just COLD though.
Good point. The only thing that makes me sicker than the Megahertz race in PCs is the Megapixel race in DCs. Yes, our camera has 2 megapixels. All the images are recorded as 4 by 500,000 JPEGs with a strong skew towards pink.:)
Anyway, this is not unexpected news from Apple. Many expected that the price cuts on older models were signs of newer stuff coming out. It doesn't sound like anything revolutionary here; just improvements on existing designs. On one hand, it's good for them to be cautious after the Cube debacle. On the other, it won't rejuvinate them like the iMac did. With the still somewhat cloudy PC market, it's hard to fault them for being conservative.
I read an article about this someplace, so I know you are right. What I wondered is if anybody has tried building pools and then floating the foundations on pontoons? You could pump out the water before Winter, then pump it back in in the Spring. Of course that wouldn't work well for roads, but you can float a pretty big ship in a canal lock, so what's to stop you from floating a pretty big building in a pond dug out of permafrost?
These costs have a way of rising. Also, Alaska has a way of rising... and falling... and swaying side-to-side. I'm referring to the tremendous quake that struck the area... in the 1960s was it? What would that have done to a tunnel?
Build the connecting lines, run some good, sturdy, Ice-breaker ferries for a while. See if they turn a profit, then get back to us. OK?
I agree with most of what you say, except the part about extending past the life of the author. The life of the IP should not depend on the life of the author. If it does, you are building in an incentive to bump off the author. By "to the author" I think it makes sense to pass the IP on to the author's estate after death, thus dramaticly reducing the incentive for competitors to hire hitmen.
Slashdot Mirror
It's much easier to prove that cell phones cause ulcers and car accidents.
ALL God save your majesty!
CADE I thank you, good people: there shall be no money;
all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will
apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree
like brothers and worship me their lord.
DICK The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
CADE Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable
thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should
be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled
o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings:
but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal
once to a thing, and I was never mine own man
since. How now! who's there?
2 KING HENRY VI, ACT IV, SCENE II.
Shakespeare, of course.
There's nothing quite so nice as having *all* of the Bard's works on your hard drive. It's available on line, but it's been a while and I forgot where I got it. All I have to do is grep for stuff and I can make myself look like a real highbrow on the Internet.
...have a filter to prevent excessive whitespace in a post? Come on, Cowboy, time to update the lameness filter. How hard is it to check for an excessive number of consecutive <br>s?
It worked for 6 years. How much longer would it have worked if they hadn't opened their source?
Of course you don't want obscurity to be your only method, but you shouldn't rely on peer review as your only method either. It's just that I've grown tired of people saying that obscurity is of no value at all.
There seems to be a lot of sucky name changing going on lately. Ximian??? What's that? A monkey that knows how to run a photocopier? This is almost as bad as the one Andersen Consulting did. Now they're... umm... see? It's really bad and I can't even remember it.
Jupiter sized planets are a bore these days. When we have the technology to find Earth sized planets, that will be exciting.
If it's time travel, will someone please come back and post as an Anonymous Coward to let us know?
Rumor has it that IT requires excessive ammounts of Dihydrogen Monoxide.
Since when have musicians stopped making music??? Look! There's Brittney Spears, and Eminem and... Oh. I see your point.
With just a few lines of BASIC and some filter tweaks, I made this random explosion generator that just *rocked*. The code has long since rotted away on a 5 1/4" disk somewhere, and I have yet to do anything similar on a PC with so little effort.
Yet another reason I wish I hadn't gotten rid of my C-64.
"Only two forms of regulation are available in the United States: governmental and corporate. "
That's the central flaw. There is another form of regulation: Self control. TV rotting your mind and turning you into a corpulent blob? Get up, turn it off, and go for a walk. Kids downloading porn? Take 'em aside and explain the evils of the sex industry to them.
No irony. Better yet, I'm not even going to resort to that tired point about Free Speach vs. Free Beer either. I've never bought that argument anyway.
Instead, I'm going to point out that the job of an entrepreneur is to take raw materials, turn them into finished goods, and receive profits in return.
It's natural for an entrepreneur to seek raw materials at the lowest possible price. Indeed, as a nascent software entrepreneur I stumbled into my first experience with Free Software because I typed "Free JPEG code" into a search engine. Much to my surprise, I found some.
Now, the time during which any piece of software is of interest to an entrepreneur as a pure product (as opposed to being bundled with some other product) is limited by how quickly Free Software implements something comparable. This doesn't make entrepreneurs, even software entrepreneurs, seeking free software a study in irony. It just makes them shrewd buyers.
It seems like this system requires ISP customers to accept a pay per byte system. Right now, most ISPs in the US are flat rate.
If we go to a pay per byte system, then spam will start costing us money. This is already the case in the UK, isn't it? Well, we certainly haven't solved the spam problem yet, so going pay per byte on the user end is problematic.
How about only charging per byte on HTTP, FTP, etc., but not SMTP? Well, then people who want to exchange copyrighted material will just set up list servers.
Another alternative is for participating ISPs to continue charging flat rate, but add a uniform surcharge to each account. Problem? The first participating ISP will lose customers to nonparticipating ISPs. Even if everybody does it, the cost of an ISP will be driven up for people who don't download copyrighted material.
Ultimately, the possibility of maintaining reasonable ISP prices at flat rates can be determined with a simple calculation: Take the current revenue of all content providers, add it up, and divide by the number of ISP customers. What do you get? I don't know. If it's $10, that's not bad. Who wouldn't want all the guilt-free MP3s they can download for $10/month? If it's $100 forget it.
The ISP could simply pass through charges to the customer based on whether or not they downloaded copyrighted material. Then we are right back to the same old problem. Users who want to download a lot of copyrighted material will find a way to make it look like they aren't.
Semantics. When I hear that someone is a "Windsurfing champion" I don't think they represent Windsurfing Incorporated.
When I read "Linux Consultant" it looked the same as "Legal Consultant", "IT Consultant", or even "Unix Consultant". I think most people understood that he is a "consultant who specializes in Linux" which just doesn't roll off the tounge quite as easily as "Linux consultant" or "burger flipper". Imagine if you had to say "man who flips hamburgers". Writers are sometimes forced to choose between precision and brevity.
A lot of times, especially on the internet, people critique journalists regarding the fact that they weren't precise about such-n-such. The problem with most of these critiques is that if the writer took the pains to precisely describe everything, their style would come off as tedious, long winded, pedantic, and perhaps under confident.
As far as the phrase "Linux consultant" is concerned, I don't think there is a problem. If he worked for a company they might say "Linux consultant from Acme Inc" or something like that. If he is independant, then "Independant Linux consultant" is perhaps clearer, but I don't think anybody with a clue had trouble understanding what "Linux consultant" meant, neither do I think /.'s editorial policy should play to the clueless.
Hardly. The sex industry is extraordinarily profitable
That was exactly my point. As "legitimate" businesses fail to turn a profit, it stands to reason that some of them would turn to sex to subsidize the other side of the business, or perhaps as an alternative to the business.
Eventually all the good people got out of there and the only people left are yes men/women and those that sleep with their bosses.
Maybe this company should reorganize as a bordello and move to Nevada, where prostitution is legal.
Then again, we all knew: The limit of a dotcom as perception approaches reality = the sex industry.
It happened when I was in tech support. We always "punched in" by typing a code into a computer time clock. One day, the computer gave me a wierd error I had never seen. I told my manager about the error, and she said, jokingly, "maybe you got fired". I was in good standing, so we could both laugh about this. I guess she knew that the error was associated with termination, but she figured it was just a glitch and that it would resolve itself. The problem persisted, and I reported it to her again. Well, then she realized it wasn't going away and did something about it. Sure enough, I was "fired" by accident. They even paid me for my vacation hours and zeroed out my leave balance. Getting a severance check was nice, but I lost my leave which was OK because I didn't have much saved up anyway.
Anyhow, stuff happens. I took this accidential "firing" in good stride. Starting termination mechanisms before the employee is actually informed is just COLD though.
I imagine they would turn the ship around, thus turning the thruster into a brake, long before they get there.
Good point. The only thing that makes me sicker than the Megahertz race in PCs is the Megapixel race in DCs. Yes, our camera has 2 megapixels. All the images are recorded as 4 by 500,000 JPEGs with a strong skew towards pink. :)
Anyway, this is not unexpected news from Apple. Many expected that the price cuts on older models were signs of newer stuff coming out. It doesn't sound like anything revolutionary here; just improvements on existing designs. On one hand, it's good for them to be cautious after the Cube debacle. On the other, it won't rejuvinate them like the iMac did. With the still somewhat cloudy PC market, it's hard to fault them for being conservative.
I think Billy Bass support was holding up the kernel release. They'll have it RSN. Promise.
...just build a tunnel to the ISS?
I read an article about this someplace, so I know you are right. What I wondered is if anybody has tried building pools and then floating the foundations on pontoons? You could pump out the water before Winter, then pump it back in in the Spring. Of course that wouldn't work well for roads, but you can float a pretty big ship in a canal lock, so what's to stop you from floating a pretty big building in a pond dug out of permafrost?
These costs have a way of rising. Also, Alaska has a way of rising... and falling... and swaying side-to-side. I'm referring to the tremendous quake that struck the area... in the 1960s was it? What would that have done to a tunnel?
Build the connecting lines, run some good, sturdy, Ice-breaker ferries for a while. See if they turn a profit, then get back to us. OK?
Oh brother. Next thing they'll probably try to tell us that the shuttle docking music was actually written about a river or something.
I agree with most of what you say, except the part about extending past the life of the author. The life of the IP should not depend on the life of the author. If it does, you are building in an incentive to bump off the author. By "to the author" I think it makes sense to pass the IP on to the author's estate after death, thus dramaticly reducing the incentive for competitors to hire hitmen.