Because those few musical notes and flash of the Intel logo at the end of EVERYONE'S PC commercials are SO COOL!. Just the blood rush from that second or two should be worth a hundred frames per second on any benchmark! We should feel privileged to contribute our dollars to a company who can come up with a marketing campaign like that. Mere performance and stability are secondary.
Along that line, can anyone tell me how to get a good Phish concert recording of "Dark Side of the Moon" that they did in Utah? From what I hear, the band sez concert recording is just fine, so one of these recordings isn't illegal.
Scary thing is that I've lived in the Burlington, Vt. area over 25 years, and only ever heard Phish once or twice on the radio. I did like what I heard, though it was a bit too late, and I have liked DSotM ever since it came out. I'd like to hear the Phish rendition.
Is the real purpose of the "Distribution Layer" to distribute revenue to Cisco?
Reading TFA and the other posts, I can see the point of reaching for that degree of networking control in a big enterprise. At the other end of the scale - the home LAN level, network bandwidth is practically where nuclear-generated electricity once promised to be - too cheap to measure. I went from 10Mb to 100Mb because it was cheap and available, not because of need, and any future migrations will likely be the same.
You're obviously in the middle, between the home LAN and the big enterprise. I suspect the degree of network control you need depends more on your usage than simply the size of your network. For instance, do you have automated tools that periodically dump a Gig of data to a fileserver? Do you feel it necessary to detect and/or prohibit employee net activity? Do you have multiple sites, or other circumstances that form weak links that need extra control? How is your backup architected, and does that constitute a weak link in the network? Or your fileservers, for that matter?
Finally can you just deploy the architecture you're proposing, but make sure the equipment you buy can fit into a 3-layer with a little reconfiguration. That may become necessary as the company grows, too.
I sort of agree with you, but I don't think it's the black and white line that you seem to. Take our industry, for instance. It has been called, "The Microsoft Tax," and while it IS possible to buy a PC (or Mac) without Microsoft software, at various times it has been well beyond the abilities of most of the marketplace. So in this respect, we tend to be held over a barrel and "taxed" by corporations as well as the government. Maybe it's not really a tax, but it's effectively as unavoidable as one. Perhaps the greatest Evil that Microsoft did was to sell others on the "tax revenue" path, because now just about every corporation seeks the holy grail where customers are practically forced to pay on an ongoing basis, unfettered by competition. (Can you say I.P.?)
So permitting myself to perceive "corporate taxes" as well as "government taxes" in many respects I'd prefer the government ones. With the government I have a direct vote with which to protest, and I have the feeling that the government is more bumbling than greedy - I'd rather sleep with an elephant than a shark.
Then of course we have the grey ground of regulated monopolies, like power and phone - and how are they different from roads?
So I sort of agree with you, but don't think it's quite so clear-cut. It's nearly impossible to avoid some corporate products, or to buy from a different source, making them effectively a tax, too. Once put on that plane, IMHO it's no longer a black-and-white matter.
They should instead privatize the streets, including the street you live on. Then the company that bought it can charge YOU for the privilege of leaving and entering your driveway. And if you don't like that, sell your house and buy different one on a street whose owners' policies you DO like. Unless of course after you move, the owner of the street you used to live on buys the street you now live on.
But that's private enterprise, isn't it? It's "theft" for the government to levy a tax in exchange for services. It's "private enterprise" for a corporation to require large sums of money for those same exclusive services. (Thinking of natural monopolies here, like the ROAD (singular) to your house, or the fact that I don't really want competitive electric poles and wires strung up there.)
Keep in mind I'm not being a government apologist, here. I'm just a lot more cynical about private enterprise and the Free Market. Both have their good points, and their bad points. Any caveman can grunt, "Government BAD, Private Enterprise GOOD!" but that doesn't make it so.
Unfortunately, I forgot the title, but a rough synopsis...
A scientist invents a thing called "Viral Construct" (hereinafter, "VC")and tries it on himself. He runs into a friend in a bar who is already slightly tipsy, and the friend takes it, too. The friend goes home and sleeps for 3 days straight, but wakes up feeling astonishingly good. The scientist is dead - it turns out because he didn't let himself sleep the 3 days straight, but forced a normal waking schedule. Kind of an odd, silly, unlikely beginning, but it sets an interesting stage.
It turns out that VC is readily communicable, and has the same effects on those so infected. Not only do they feel good, but they tend to lose their bad habits. They generally quit smoking, and while they may enjoy alcoholic beverages, they no longer abuse. They also tend to automatically eat better, get more exercise, take a more positive outlook on life, etc. In essence, it's a "sanity infection." A small group of people forms around this, and keeping one of them uninfected as a control, the rest set out to infect the world.
One typical case was advance scout soldiers who had not reported in on schedule. Their followup found them - having lunch with the scouts from the other side. They had met and talked, and discovered how much their lives were alike, and that they'd likely be friends, if only they weren't wearing different uniforms.
There was a loose movie adaptation called, "What's So Bad About Feeling Good?" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063799/ starring a young Mary Tyler Moore, in between The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Since we're on the topic of global environmental gloom'n'doom...
Years ago I got to see MIT Futurist Lester Thoreau speak. He opened his talk with a quote from the "Global 2000" (or some name like that) report done during the Carter administration. "If present trends continue..." and then went on to forecast gloom'n'doom. Thoreau asserted that you could quit reading the paper right after those first words, because present trends never continue, over the long run. Things change.
If present trends continue... The US will continue to grow more and more conservative. One aspect will be selection of domestic news coverage by media moguls and "cultural forces." The US will continue to act like an overbearing superpower until in about 20 years we are economically overwhelmed by China, kind of like what we did to the USSR in the 1980's. Enough people will be happy to see the US get its comeuppance that they won't notice for a while that the new superpower is no better. Environmental degredation will continue, and we'll all get used to the Humanitarian Disaster of the Year as marginal areas become uninhabitable. But no concrete action will be taken. Later in the century Kyoto will be meaningless as the world's dominant economy (China) continues to be exempt as a "developing nation." One could go on...
That present trends probably won't continue is the bright spot in all of this.
No other distribution has made it so easy to install what I want, with so little fuss. So I have to wait a bit for compilation... Some stuff (OpenGL Hexen 1 port with networking, for instance) I never got running on another distribution, and came right up under Gentoo.
While you're mentioning the community, I need to get out there, again. The last BDB update broke OpenLDAP. Good thing I'm only fooling around with it, but it would be good to get it running, again. I need to find some time.
Re:[Scaremongering] has other purposes
on
The Next Net
·
· Score: 1
Obviously not, on both counts. But I'm sure ISPs don't mind that people are getting scared of the Big, Bad Internet and running and hiding behind NAT routers. Even if you subscribe to Stupidity instead of Evil Intent, having users run to NAT routers simplifies ISPs life. In fact, Verizon has a plan where they distribute wireless routers. There's a good deal of sense to it, too. In one fell swoop they get past having to set up PPPoE on users' machines - dhcp to the router is a HECK of a lot easier.
NAT has other purposes
on
The Next Net
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
NAT is the ISPs way of keeping its subscribers in line, and acting as consumers rather than citizens. Given the TOS of my ISP, it just doesn't matter whether I get NATted, or not. Anything I could do that I can't do behind NAT isn't allowed.
Maybe: (3) People in many charitable organizations are out DOING charity, not talking about it. Kind of like Project Gutenberg.
I suspect it's the (3)s that make charity work, and make people want to keep it alive, but it's the (1)s that make the most noise and draw the most money.
IMHO there's an unfortunately large class of people who specialize in smelling the flow of money, and inserting themselves into that flow. The world would be for the most part better off without them.
Authorship of the New Testament is not a simple question at all. First off, the Apostles didn't sit down and start collecting the New Testament. That was done hundreds of years later by some chaps in Rome or Turkey who also had political axes to grind. Every few decades or centuries, there's also Yet Another Translation, and in the forward they talk about the prayer, consideration, and attempts to divine the True Word of God that went into it. Common belief is that over the centuries there has been so much prayer, consideration, and attempts to divine the True Word of God that today's bibles MUST be correct. Yet in spite of all that, I have this feeling that precedent is even stronger in the Bible than in the US legal system, and that we're still carrying the weight of perhaps improper decisions made over a thousand years ago, plus trying to justify them.
Then you also get to the issue of what is and isn't in the Bible. Consider "The suppressed Gospels and Epistles of the original New Testament of Jesus the Christ, Complete" http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6516 for an example. Would the Apostles have wanted them published, or not? What about "The Forgotten Books of Eden"? Or less/more controversial, how about Maccabees, Sirach, Tobit, and company - the ones in the Catholic, but not the Protestant Bible? (Perhaps Maccabees is the most historically verifiable book IN the Bible, too.)
By the way, most of the Bible ended up being written down much later - after even US copyrights would have expired. Good thing Steamboat Willie doesn't date back to BC.
I don't argue with any of your points, at all. I merely say that if the banks are pushing credit on people they ought to know are bad risks, when those bad risks go belly up, the bank ought to share in the blame. They didn't exercise due diligence in handing out credit, and that's part of their job. That's part of why bankers make the big bux, because they're supposed to be competent in handling money, and the current looming credit crisis shows that they haven't been.
Beyond that I agree with you, that medical issues are a bigger problem. But I wouldn't be surprised to see that even a small economic downturn would furnish a massive wave of bankruptcy wannabees. (but can't under the new legislation)
Revise a little, the banks and lenders hawked credit cards and loans of every kind on TV for decades, and loosedned up their criteria for extending credit.
They KNEW they were letting people in over their heads. They KNEW they were making bad loans. Now lest their own bad loaning practices come back to haunt them, they got Congress to protect them. Now what we need is some sort of organ-harvest law so that the people who should be bankrupt but can't can sell parts of their bodies to get out of debt. After all, it must be their moral failing. (reference to a different post of mine)
Oh, but I am serious, about all of it, including the 4th paragraph. I suspect you are a bit younger than me, reaching incredulity on the 4th paragraph. I believe/fear that there really are people who believe the whole thing I wrote.
I guess, except for the phrase about "wage slaves," because that's an oxymoron. After NOBODY is forced by economic or any other conditions to work under such poor conditions for such poor wages.
Brief tirade: So the CEOs of Worldcom or Enron DIDN'T KNOW that such financial shenanigans were happening, taking their companies down? Then they're guilty of either MALFEASANCE or MISFEASANCE! Either they were part of the bad stuff that was happening and they're criminals, or they were at the helm of a corporation and didn't know what the heck was going on there, in which case they were incompetent and shareholders should demand that they give back their salaries and bonuses for their employment terms. But I guess they're moral and we're not, and that's what really matters, and I should just shut up.
If you're a programmer, no matter how good a programmer, and don't have the business acumen to start your own business, it's YOUR moral failing.
If you haven't already saved enough money to feed your family while you endure the hardships of startup, or don't have some property with a lot of equity that you can mortgage, it's YOUR moral failing.
Oh, don't forget that something like 9 of 10 businesses fail within 5 years, but I guess that's due to moral failing, especially if through their previous moral failings they haven't saved enough to survive several business startup attempts.
So wealth has nothing to do with it, it's a moral issue. After all, one-in-a-million in the US has been able to move from pretty much nothing to be a billionaire, so that establishes an existence theorem. Therefore we ALL can do it, it's our moral failing when we don't, and we deserve to be wage slaves.
Personally I agree with you, but I fear that this too, shall pass.
Seems like the US government just needs a shopping list from big business, these days. So the answer to this issue depends on whether those business who want teeth in shrinkwrap licenses have more clout than those businesses who don't. I suspect that some big businesses will wind up in the latter camp, too. From what I hear, IBM's lawyers are legendary when it comes to contracts, for instance. (Whether that's a good or bad "legendary" is a separate issue.)
I'm sure someday we'll get to the point where there will have to be shrinkwrap licenses on our music and video, but for the moment take a look at software. I would contend that in practice, you have the same rights to music and video that you buy that you have to software that you buy. Just read the license, some time.
In other words, you may use the media in the approved fashion on an approved device, and very little else.
I'm sure the ??AA (as well as a lot of other companies) would rather rewrite the license to simply give us the "right" to hand them money, with no return obligation on their part. Fortunately we're far from that point.
It's not necessary that a large number of people in the public review the work. It's only necessary that SOME people in the public review it, and that those be self-selected people.
I run quite a selection of software on my machines, and to be honest, I've never done a security review of ANY of it. To be equally honest, I'm not really competent to do a security review of the code, though with effort I could well become so. But by and large, I pay attention to OSS community discussions, and know that others who appear to be competent have review that software. Note that I use the term "appear to be competent," since I have no personal knowledge of their qualifications. However, when enough people who "appear to be competent" reach a concensus, either: 1: They're all incompetent in the same way. 2: They're all email aliases of the same guy hunched over the keyboard in his parents' basement. 3: They're the techno-incarnation of the Club of Rome, bent on World Dominatino. 4: They're a variety of informed backgrounds and opinions who have come to a rough concensus. I submit that 4 is most likely. 1 is possible, given that there are common misconceptions, but the larger the group, the less likely 1 becomes. 2 and 3 are just plain for the tin-foil hat club.
I argue that the work needs to be open for the self-selection of reviewers. If the reviewers are selected by the authors, no matter how hard they try to find 'fair and neutral' parties or even antagonists, something will be missed.
Most of the nation, including for instance the Supreme Court, accepts that the nation is at War. Not really Iraq, but the War on Terror.
How does the War on Terror end?
From whom do we accept surrender? Osama Bin Laden? What if Bin Laden were to surrender, but other terrorists disagree and want to continue fighting the US.
How and when can a War on Terror possibly end? If you really want to consider this a War, then the answers have to be, "no way" and "never". Terrorism only requires people willing to be terrorists in order to continue, and I forsee no shrinkage in that pool of people in either near or distant futures.
So we'd probably better get ready for the "temporary restriction of liberties during Wartime" to become permanent, because there is no forseeable way to end that war.
It occurs to me that we are seeing the Free Market at work. There is obviously more money to be made in spamming and supporting spamming than there is in ordinary folks like you and me communicating through email. Nor is this the type of thing that one ISP can solve alone, so you can't vote with your money at another ISP.
Until the cost equations tilt somehow, spam will continue and probably grow. As long as the incremental cost of sending additional spam is so close to zero it'll happen.
Perhaps another law is being broken with zombie nets, but as long as it's only for a nuisance like spam or zombie growth, I doubt the government will get involved.
Now, if we could prove that terrorists are shipping plans and information through zombie nets, steganographically hidden in spam, it would be a different story. We could wear our tinfoil hats right to the DHS and get action.
I use the Mozilla *suite* on a rather old machine. I get ONE copy of the runtime executable and data structures up and running, and can do my basics with acceptable performance on that rather old machine. That rather old machine also barfs above a 32G drive, and Mozilla is smaller than Thunderbird + Firefox, etc.
There are times and situation where the integration makes sense.
To a certain point, spending rises with income. Past a certain point you just can't spend that much money that fast. Past that point, money gets invested or otherwise stashed away.
Slashdot Mirror
Because those few musical notes and flash of the Intel logo at the end of EVERYONE'S PC commercials are SO COOL!. Just the blood rush from that second or two should be worth a hundred frames per second on any benchmark! We should feel privileged to contribute our dollars to a company who can come up with a marketing campaign like that. Mere performance and stability are secondary.
Along that line, can anyone tell me how to get a good Phish concert recording of "Dark Side of the Moon" that they did in Utah? From what I hear, the band sez concert recording is just fine, so one of these recordings isn't illegal.
Scary thing is that I've lived in the Burlington, Vt. area over 25 years, and only ever heard Phish once or twice on the radio. I did like what I heard, though it was a bit too late, and I have liked DSotM ever since it came out. I'd like to hear the Phish rendition.
Is the real purpose of the "Distribution Layer" to distribute revenue to Cisco?
Reading TFA and the other posts, I can see the point of reaching for that degree of networking control in a big enterprise. At the other end of the scale - the home LAN level, network bandwidth is practically where nuclear-generated electricity once promised to be - too cheap to measure. I went from 10Mb to 100Mb because it was cheap and available, not because of need, and any future migrations will likely be the same.
You're obviously in the middle, between the home LAN and the big enterprise. I suspect the degree of network control you need depends more on your usage than simply the size of your network. For instance, do you have automated tools that periodically dump a Gig of data to a fileserver? Do you feel it necessary to detect and/or prohibit employee net activity? Do you have multiple sites, or other circumstances that form weak links that need extra control? How is your backup architected, and does that constitute a weak link in the network? Or your fileservers, for that matter?
Finally can you just deploy the architecture you're proposing, but make sure the equipment you buy can fit into a 3-layer with a little reconfiguration. That may become necessary as the company grows, too.
I sort of agree with you, but I don't think it's the black and white line that you seem to. Take our industry, for instance. It has been called, "The Microsoft Tax," and while it IS possible to buy a PC (or Mac) without Microsoft software, at various times it has been well beyond the abilities of most of the marketplace. So in this respect, we tend to be held over a barrel and "taxed" by corporations as well as the government. Maybe it's not really a tax, but it's effectively as unavoidable as one. Perhaps the greatest Evil that Microsoft did was to sell others on the "tax revenue" path, because now just about every corporation seeks the holy grail where customers are practically forced to pay on an ongoing basis, unfettered by competition. (Can you say I.P.?)
So permitting myself to perceive "corporate taxes" as well as "government taxes" in many respects I'd prefer the government ones. With the government I have a direct vote with which to protest, and I have the feeling that the government is more bumbling than greedy - I'd rather sleep with an elephant than a shark.
Then of course we have the grey ground of regulated monopolies, like power and phone - and how are they different from roads?
So I sort of agree with you, but don't think it's quite so clear-cut. It's nearly impossible to avoid some corporate products, or to buy from a different source, making them effectively a tax, too. Once put on that plane, IMHO it's no longer a black-and-white matter.
They should instead privatize the streets, including the street you live on. Then the company that bought it can charge YOU for the privilege of leaving and entering your driveway. And if you don't like that, sell your house and buy different one on a street whose owners' policies you DO like. Unless of course after you move, the owner of the street you used to live on buys the street you now live on.
But that's private enterprise, isn't it? It's "theft" for the government to levy a tax in exchange for services. It's "private enterprise" for a corporation to require large sums of money for those same exclusive services. (Thinking of natural monopolies here, like the ROAD (singular) to your house, or the fact that I don't really want competitive electric poles and wires strung up there.)
Keep in mind I'm not being a government apologist, here. I'm just a lot more cynical about private enterprise and the Free Market. Both have their good points, and their bad points. Any caveman can grunt, "Government BAD, Private Enterprise GOOD!" but that doesn't make it so.
Unfortunately, I forgot the title, but a rough synopsis...
A scientist invents a thing called "Viral Construct" (hereinafter, "VC")and tries it on himself. He runs into a friend in a bar who is already slightly tipsy, and the friend takes it, too. The friend goes home and sleeps for 3 days straight, but wakes up feeling astonishingly good. The scientist is dead - it turns out because he didn't let himself sleep the 3 days straight, but forced a normal waking schedule. Kind of an odd, silly, unlikely beginning, but it sets an interesting stage.
It turns out that VC is readily communicable, and has the same effects on those so infected. Not only do they feel good, but they tend to lose their bad habits. They generally quit smoking, and while they may enjoy alcoholic beverages, they no longer abuse. They also tend to automatically eat better, get more exercise, take a more positive outlook on life, etc. In essence, it's a "sanity infection." A small group of people forms around this, and keeping one of them uninfected as a control, the rest set out to infect the world.
One typical case was advance scout soldiers who had not reported in on schedule. Their followup found them - having lunch with the scouts from the other side. They had met and talked, and discovered how much their lives were alike, and that they'd likely be friends, if only they weren't wearing different uniforms.
There was a loose movie adaptation called, "What's So Bad About Feeling Good?" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063799/ starring a young Mary Tyler Moore, in between The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
In Soviet Russia, Comdex cancels YOU!
Since we're on the topic of global environmental gloom'n'doom...
Years ago I got to see MIT Futurist Lester Thoreau speak. He opened his talk with a quote from the "Global 2000" (or some name like that) report done during the Carter administration. "If present trends continue..." and then went on to forecast gloom'n'doom. Thoreau asserted that you could quit reading the paper right after those first words, because present trends never continue, over the long run. Things change.
If present trends continue...
The US will continue to grow more and more conservative. One aspect will be selection of domestic news coverage by media moguls and "cultural forces."
The US will continue to act like an overbearing superpower until in about 20 years we are economically overwhelmed by China, kind of like what we did to the USSR in the 1980's. Enough people will be happy to see the US get its comeuppance that they won't notice for a while that the new superpower is no better.
Environmental degredation will continue, and we'll all get used to the Humanitarian Disaster of the Year as marginal areas become uninhabitable. But no concrete action will be taken. Later in the century Kyoto will be meaningless as the world's dominant economy (China) continues to be exempt as a "developing nation."
One could go on...
That present trends probably won't continue is the bright spot in all of this.
Second.
No other distribution has made it so easy to install what I want, with so little fuss. So I have to wait a bit for compilation... Some stuff (OpenGL Hexen 1 port with networking, for instance) I never got running on another distribution, and came right up under Gentoo.
While you're mentioning the community, I need to get out there, again. The last BDB update broke OpenLDAP. Good thing I'm only fooling around with it, but it would be good to get it running, again. I need to find some time.
Obviously not, on both counts. But I'm sure ISPs don't mind that people are getting scared of the Big, Bad Internet and running and hiding behind NAT routers. Even if you subscribe to Stupidity instead of Evil Intent, having users run to NAT routers simplifies ISPs life. In fact, Verizon has a plan where they distribute wireless routers. There's a good deal of sense to it, too. In one fell swoop they get past having to set up PPPoE on users' machines - dhcp to the router is a HECK of a lot easier.
NAT is the ISPs way of keeping its subscribers in line, and acting as consumers rather than citizens. Given the TOS of my ISP, it just doesn't matter whether I get NATted, or not. Anything I could do that I can't do behind NAT isn't allowed.
Name a few more, and I'll add them to future rants.
Maybe:
(3) People in many charitable organizations are out DOING charity, not talking about it. Kind of like Project Gutenberg.
I suspect it's the (3)s that make charity work, and make people want to keep it alive, but it's the (1)s that make the most noise and draw the most money.
IMHO there's an unfortunately large class of people who specialize in smelling the flow of money, and inserting themselves into that flow. The world would be for the most part better off without them.
Authorship of the New Testament is not a simple question at all. First off, the Apostles didn't sit down and start collecting the New Testament. That was done hundreds of years later by some chaps in Rome or Turkey who also had political axes to grind. Every few decades or centuries, there's also Yet Another Translation, and in the forward they talk about the prayer, consideration, and attempts to divine the True Word of God that went into it. Common belief is that over the centuries there has been so much prayer, consideration, and attempts to divine the True Word of God that today's bibles MUST be correct. Yet in spite of all that, I have this feeling that precedent is even stronger in the Bible than in the US legal system, and that we're still carrying the weight of perhaps improper decisions made over a thousand years ago, plus trying to justify them.
Then you also get to the issue of what is and isn't in the Bible. Consider "The suppressed Gospels and Epistles of the original New Testament of Jesus the Christ, Complete" http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6516 for an example. Would the Apostles have wanted them published, or not? What about "The Forgotten Books of Eden"? Or less/more controversial, how about Maccabees, Sirach, Tobit, and company - the ones in the Catholic, but not the Protestant Bible? (Perhaps Maccabees is the most historically verifiable book IN the Bible, too.)
By the way, most of the Bible ended up being written down much later - after even US copyrights would have expired. Good thing Steamboat Willie doesn't date back to BC.
I don't argue with any of your points, at all. I merely say that if the banks are pushing credit on people they ought to know are bad risks, when those bad risks go belly up, the bank ought to share in the blame. They didn't exercise due diligence in handing out credit, and that's part of their job. That's part of why bankers make the big bux, because they're supposed to be competent in handling money, and the current looming credit crisis shows that they haven't been.
Beyond that I agree with you, that medical issues are a bigger problem. But I wouldn't be surprised to see that even a small economic downturn would furnish a massive wave of bankruptcy wannabees. (but can't under the new legislation)
Revise a little, the banks and lenders hawked credit cards and loans of every kind on TV for decades, and loosedned up their criteria for extending credit.
They KNEW they were letting people in over their heads. They KNEW they were making bad loans. Now lest their own bad loaning practices come back to haunt them, they got Congress to protect them. Now what we need is some sort of organ-harvest law so that the people who should be bankrupt but can't can sell parts of their bodies to get out of debt. After all, it must be their moral failing. (reference to a different post of mine)
Oh, but I am serious, about all of it, including the 4th paragraph. I suspect you are a bit younger than me, reaching incredulity on the 4th paragraph. I believe/fear that there really are people who believe the whole thing I wrote.
I guess, except for the phrase about "wage slaves," because that's an oxymoron. After NOBODY is forced by economic or any other conditions to work under such poor conditions for such poor wages.
Brief tirade: So the CEOs of Worldcom or Enron DIDN'T KNOW that such financial shenanigans were happening, taking their companies down? Then they're guilty of either MALFEASANCE or MISFEASANCE! Either they were part of the bad stuff that was happening and they're criminals, or they were at the helm of a corporation and didn't know what the heck was going on there, in which case they were incompetent and shareholders should demand that they give back their salaries and bonuses for their employment terms. But I guess they're moral and we're not, and that's what really matters, and I should just shut up.
If you're a programmer, no matter how good a programmer, and don't have the business acumen to start your own business, it's YOUR moral failing.
If you haven't already saved enough money to feed your family while you endure the hardships of startup, or don't have some property with a lot of equity that you can mortgage, it's YOUR moral failing.
Oh, don't forget that something like 9 of 10 businesses fail within 5 years, but I guess that's due to moral failing, especially if through their previous moral failings they haven't saved enough to survive several business startup attempts.
So wealth has nothing to do with it, it's a moral issue. After all, one-in-a-million in the US has been able to move from pretty much nothing to be a billionaire, so that establishes an existence theorem. Therefore we ALL can do it, it's our moral failing when we don't, and we deserve to be wage slaves.
Personally I agree with you, but I fear that this too, shall pass.
Seems like the US government just needs a shopping list from big business, these days. So the answer to this issue depends on whether those business who want teeth in shrinkwrap licenses have more clout than those businesses who don't. I suspect that some big businesses will wind up in the latter camp, too. From what I hear, IBM's lawyers are legendary when it comes to contracts, for instance. (Whether that's a good or bad "legendary" is a separate issue.)
I'm sure someday we'll get to the point where there will have to be shrinkwrap licenses on our music and video, but for the moment take a look at software. I would contend that in practice, you have the same rights to music and video that you buy that you have to software that you buy. Just read the license, some time.
In other words, you may use the media in the approved fashion on an approved device, and very little else.
I'm sure the ??AA (as well as a lot of other companies) would rather rewrite the license to simply give us the "right" to hand them money, with no return obligation on their part. Fortunately we're far from that point.
It's not necessary that a large number of people in the public review the work. It's only necessary that SOME people in the public review it, and that those be self-selected people.
I run quite a selection of software on my machines, and to be honest, I've never done a security review of ANY of it. To be equally honest, I'm not really competent to do a security review of the code, though with effort I could well become so. But by and large, I pay attention to OSS community discussions, and know that others who appear to be competent have review that software. Note that I use the term "appear to be competent," since I have no personal knowledge of their qualifications. However, when enough people who "appear to be competent" reach a concensus, either:
1: They're all incompetent in the same way.
2: They're all email aliases of the same guy hunched over the keyboard in his parents' basement.
3: They're the techno-incarnation of the Club of Rome, bent on World Dominatino.
4: They're a variety of informed backgrounds and opinions who have come to a rough concensus.
I submit that 4 is most likely. 1 is possible, given that there are common misconceptions, but the larger the group, the less likely 1 becomes. 2 and 3 are just plain for the tin-foil hat club.
I argue that the work needs to be open for the self-selection of reviewers. If the reviewers are selected by the authors, no matter how hard they try to find 'fair and neutral' parties or even antagonists, something will be missed.
Most of the nation, including for instance the Supreme Court, accepts that the nation is at War. Not really Iraq, but the War on Terror.
How does the War on Terror end?
From whom do we accept surrender? Osama Bin Laden? What if Bin Laden were to surrender, but other terrorists disagree and want to continue fighting the US.
How and when can a War on Terror possibly end? If you really want to consider this a War, then the answers have to be, "no way" and "never". Terrorism only requires people willing to be terrorists in order to continue, and I forsee no shrinkage in that pool of people in either near or distant futures.
So we'd probably better get ready for the "temporary restriction of liberties during Wartime" to become permanent, because there is no forseeable way to end that war.
It occurs to me that we are seeing the Free Market at work. There is obviously more money to be made in spamming and supporting spamming than there is in ordinary folks like you and me communicating through email. Nor is this the type of thing that one ISP can solve alone, so you can't vote with your money at another ISP.
Until the cost equations tilt somehow, spam will continue and probably grow. As long as the incremental cost of sending additional spam is so close to zero it'll happen.
Perhaps another law is being broken with zombie nets, but as long as it's only for a nuisance like spam or zombie growth, I doubt the government will get involved.
Now, if we could prove that terrorists are shipping plans and information through zombie nets, steganographically hidden in spam, it would be a different story. We could wear our tinfoil hats right to the DHS and get action.
I use the Mozilla *suite* on a rather old machine. I get ONE copy of the runtime executable and data structures up and running, and can do my basics with acceptable performance on that rather old machine. That rather old machine also barfs above a 32G drive, and Mozilla is smaller than Thunderbird + Firefox, etc.
There are times and situation where the integration makes sense.
I disagree... partly.
To a certain point, spending rises with income. Past a certain point you just can't spend that much money that fast. Past that point, money gets invested or otherwise stashed away.