It doesn't appear the government has asserted the document is classified - that's a term of art meaning that the release of the data would compromise national security in some way. Instead, they've declared that the data was marked For Official Use Only, which means the data is unclassified, but not for wide dissemination.
Let's break it down. We have classified information, which is data that, if released, would affect the national security. This determination is made by the President or directly appointed representatives only - I think Deputy Secretary of the Army/Navy/whatever is the lowest level with classification authority. Everyone else is merely applying the policies as determined by the originating authority. So I, as a low-level contractor, cannot unilaterally decide to classify a piece of information. Instead, I apply a predetermined set of rules (does it come from system A or mention topic B) to data I sort, and mark it appropriately.
For classified data, there are three broad groupings - Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. Secret has a subcategory of NoForn - not to be shared with foreign governments. Top Secret has a bazillion "code-word" subcategories - my favorite was Cosmic Top Secret.
There is also a category of unclassifed information that should not be in wide release. This is information that would not impact national security, but should still be controlled. The classic example is Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Leaking your address and social wouldn't impact national security, and neither would leaking your medical records or job evaluations. But I think we'd all agree this information should be kept out of the public eye, so it's marked FOUO. Not classified, but still not for dissemination.
The other category of FOUO information tends to be operational details for a command. This would include unit movements, detailed meeting schedules, specific evaluation criteria, etc. The stuff that, in a corporation, would be tagged Company Propriatary.
Finally, there is unclassified information that is treated as classified. This is generally any build media used for classified systems. The media itself isn't classified - it's straight from the vender. But once we have it, we treat it as if it's classified at the level of the system it was used to build. That way, no one can modify the unclassified source material without already having access to the classifed data.
It's not censorship. It's all Freedom of Speech, all the way down.
The Truth Wins Out crowd is using their free speech to oppose the webapp, both by calling it ingorant and bigoted, and by lobbying Apple and Steve Jobs.
They aren't asking Apple to censor the app; they're asking Apple to exercise their editorial control over the app store and remove it as not reflecting the "Apple values". Editorial control is a cornerstone of Freedom of Speech; there's no right to make someone else say something for you.
You may think Apple shouldn't exercise editorial control over the app store in this way - I might even agree. But they clearly do - see the ban on "Adult" apps. The arguement is that this app makes them look at least as bad as a Playboy app would, and should be removed for the same reasons.
Because the economy was perfect in the 1800s. It's not like the US had 23 recognized recessions in the 1800s, including one bigger than the great depression.
Even a passing look at economic history shows that the current economic regime, including the Fed, leads to a significantly more stable economy, with shorter and less frequent downturns.
It would cost more to take the nuclear power plants out than it would to build a new ship. So that's a non-starter. And you want to keep the plane-handling abilities if you can, as planes give you a much greater range and ability to ship in supplies and move people.
But the whole idea is still completely unworkable. In a natural disaster scenario, the key window is right after the disaster, out to a week or two. That's the window when everything is disrupted, even in the most modern countries, and an external airbase/supply depot is useful. Hawaii (the closest the ship would be stationed) is about 4000 miles away, At an unrealistic top speed of 50 mph, that's over 3 days, or half your useful window. At a more realistic speed, the ship arrives after the need has passed.
And that assumes the ship can get underway instantly. It would probably take at least a day to get ready to steam - you have to get the crew onboard, get the plants up, move in perishable supplies, etc, etc. It's not a quick process.
And that's just Japan. The ship would be several weeks out from other possible response areas - India, South America, Europe, etc. A single ship just doesn't work. Until you develop the ability to teleport the ship, you need to have a ship already in the area to be useful.
Nice to see that even the Linux partisans know that the only way for Linux to have desktop success is to have no competition. Given a choice, almost no one would choose linux.
Laws can always protect freedom of speech in real life, but they can't protect you against someone who disagrees with you enough to want to do some damage to you and does so before law enforcement can step in.
That's a valid issue, but not one you can do much about.
They also can't stop people not wanting to be your friend or not wanting to do business with you because of your point of view.
This isn't a valid issue. You want to abbrogate their freedom of speech - by preventing them from disagreeing with you - to further yours. That's not how it works. Freedom of speech isn't a lone man shouting, it's a conversation. If I can't disagree with you - even shunning you, if I feel strongly enough, then I really don't have freedom of speech, do I?
The whole point of speech is consequences - to change someone's mind, and therefore their actions. You can't demand that only the positive consequences be allowed - that's too tolitarian even for North Korea.
Mastercard has 1st amendment rights, too. One of those is the right to disassociate themselves from speech they don't approve of. If they think whatever hit they'd take by cutting off the KKK is worth it, that's their call.
1st amendment protections only mean you get to say whatever you want. It's not a magic shield that should render you immune from criticism or consequences. After all, those criticisms and consequences are just other people exercising exactly the same rights.
As a practical note, Mastercard can't afford to cut off very many organizations - pretty much what a government asks them too. If they open it up any wider, then they face constant pressures to cut off ever more organizations, as we see here from the RIAA.
It's not just modern inventions, either. Look up the history of the sewing machine, and you'll see the same pattern of interdependant patents building on each other.
Patent thickets and consortiums are nothing new.
Actually, the first step towards good linux drivers is entirely in the dev's hands. No one to blame but the kernel hackers.
Provide a stable interface. Provide a stable binary interface, and the manufacturers will provide drivers, at least for common processors. It really is that simple.
As long as the drivers need to be rewritten every few months because the kernel was changed (often for no other reason than to break compatibility), linux will have crummy drivers. No sane company is going to sign up to do 10 times the work for a platform with 1% of the usage.
Quote:
The same applies to corporations and regulation: when people like me call for deregulation it is only at the federal level--the states have every right to regulate as their citizens please, and state regulations are (marginally) less likely to be written by the corporations to which they apply for their own advantage.
Really? You honestly think that West Virginia would write stricter coal mining standards than Congress? Louisiana would write stricter oil-drilling regulations than Congress? New York would write stricter financial regulations?
That's just plain delusional. States are smaller, and therefore easier to "buy". Heck, a company bought a West Virginia Supreme Court justice to get a favorible ruling in a lawsuit. North Carolina has the laxest tobacco rules in the country for a reason, you know.
We never lost the launch codes. President Clinton's authorization card was lost (I'm not following it close enough to know by whom), but all that meant is that he couldn't authorize launch. There are many other people able to authorize a launch, beginning with VP Gore. There's a whole designated chain, and there's quite a few people at the top of the list with authorization cards. It's all designed to maintain a National Command authority in the event of a decapitation attack.
In addition, it would only matter in the event of a massive suprise attack with no buildup. In the normal course of events, tensions would rachet up for weeks or months, and its likely the President would be in a command center when the order needed to be given. At the very least, he's be able to give a verbal order to someone with a card who was in the room, and launch would be approved.
If configured to do so*, the Aegis weapon system can fire missiles at targets with no human intervention. Been that way since it first went into service. I don't think any fleet ship uses the capability, but it has has been baked in since the first ship.
A CIWS gun in automatic will engage anything that appears to be a threat in its assigned area.
*Proper configuration is firing keys in (to enable weapon launch) and Auto Special doctrines enabled. At that point, any track that matches the criteria will eat a missile, usually launching before the crew is aware there's a new threat.
1) The Director's guild rule is there for a reason - it keeps the money-men from insisting of directing credit. Director's decided they wanted to get credit for their work, instead of living with a legal type system, where the headline billing goes to the biggest name, not the people who did all the work. Judges don't actually write most of their work, but they get all the credit. And the same goes for big law firms, where the people doing most of the work (paralegals and researchers) get no credit at all.
Anyway, this was a big problem (for the directors, at least) when Hollywood was young, so when they unionized it was one of their basic principles. And its a reasonable position, even if you disagree with it.
2) Rodriguez knew the rules when he joined the guild. He knew the rules when he tried to name Miller as co-director. He was given multiple chances to back off, and chose instead to thumb his nose at the guild. It became an ego issue with him, and the guild reacted as they had to. Remember, the guild cares deeply about their members getting proper credit, and bending here immediately opens the door for other to claim director's credit (J.K. Rowling for Harry Potter, for instance).
This wasn't a case of a guild be capricious - it's a guild protecting a (or perhaps the) core value of their members - that the director of the film deserves credit (or blame) for his or her film.
This isn't throwing yourself in front of a car. They didn't induce the violation - Sharron Angle did that all on her own.
This is a collection action. There's no real difference between this situation and someone who skipped out on their rent or a phone bill. Instead of forcing each individual firm to maintain an extensive collection department, you sell the debt to a collection firm, and let the experts attempt to recover the money.
And while individual collection firms do cross the line, the concept of specialist firms taking difficult tasks to free people to work at what they're good at is a cornerstone of our economy.
Because they weren't looking for the best solution, just ones that were 20 moves or less. So some of the items they have tagged as taking 20 moves might instead take 16-19.
Um, a ton of lead going mach 3 wouldn't do a whole heck of a lot to an aircraft carrier. Hell, it probably wouldn't sink a frigate. It's just not all that much energy.
By my rough calculations, your lead slug has roughly as much energy as 500 sticks of dynamite, or about 125 pounds. While that's quite a bit, it's still smaller than the explosive charge on an Exocet missile. In addition, the slug is going to have a much harder time penetrating the armor (inches of steel), further lessening the effect. Since it would take multiple Exocet hits to sink a carrier, and one hit is survivable on a frigate (USS Stark), we can guess how useless the ball of lead would be.
If that didn't work for you, try this. The Russians have a mach 5 missile weighing ~1200 kg intended for hunting aircraft carriers. That's over 3 times the energy of your lead slug. The also have a 3000 kg mach 3 missile, also 3 times the energy of your slug. If the slug were any good, that's all they'd need. But the Russians put large (either 150kg or 300kg of high explosives) warheads on these missiles. Since they do have competent engineers, I'd draw the conclusion that your idea is fatally flawed.
The money quotes from the article:
"Movies
Comparing VP8 to XviD, VP8 is 5-25 times slower with 10-30% better quality (lower bitrate for the same quality). When comapring VP8 and x264 VP8 also shows 5-25 lower encoding speed with 20-30% lower quality at average. For example x264 High-Speed preset is faster and has higher quality than any of VP8 presets at average."
Real competitive.
In theory, that information would be very useful to the developers.
In practice, it would have no value whatsover. The developers would do one of the following: a) ignore it b) ask for a patch c) treat the suggestions as a personal attack and launch a flamewar.
Open source software may have some virtues, but taking constructive criticism is definitely a major weakness.
Whistleblowers should suffer, at least a little. If there's no pain involved, then it changes from a self-sacrificing, possibly noble act, to crass political manuvering and meaningless, punkish rebellion.
For instance, the leaker of the video. The video is probably a defensible leak, but a quarter of a million classified diplomatic messages? That's not a leak to expose a specific incident - that's a stunt to try and build up the biggest Wikileaks e-peen.
And the Wikileaks founder? He's not a whistleblower - he's a publisher. With all the manipulations and story-building exercises of any other publisher.
To be perfectly clear, that model predates electricity, since that's how sewing machines were first sold (1856).
Honestly, these aren't new issues. Patent thickets have been around almost as long as patents, as have the solutions.
If you're paying $500 for glasses, you're shopping in the wrong places. if you're paying $1000, you're getting ripped off.
Last pair of glasses I bought cost $25 shipped. That's frames & lenses in my hands. Also got an ANSI approved set of safety glasses for another $30 on the same order. But those were spares - not my normal glasses.
My normal set cost $80 total, but that was because I wanted titanium half frames and next-day delivery. So all three sets of glasses, plus the eye exam, came to under $250.
Look at online eyeware makers. Same lenses, same frames, vastly lower prices. I start at glassyeyes.blogspot.com, because they have decent reviews and usually a discount coupon. I had good experiences with both eyebuydirect and 39dollarglasses.
Every process works well with smart, motivated people. No process works well with dumb, unmotivated people. That's not news. The particular process doesn't matter; neither does the task*. From ditch-digging to nuclear engineering, from slave labor to the latest programming paradigm, it's always the same - the smart, motivated people outperform the stupid and lazy.
The trick is to figure out the process that works best for your particular team. And there's no one right answer to that question - each team has to take the available ideas and figure out a process on their own.
*The army has studied this pretty closely over the years. IIRC, they estimated a 30% increase in productivity at any task by adding 1 90%+ ASVADS scorer to a team. That's at any task, from tank repair to foxhole digging to missile defense. The increase in productivity was reasonably consistant across the entire gamut of Army jobs.
Ascendancy was a bad version of Master of Orion. There was nothing particularly original about it, and the execution was quite a bit off.
Not to mention I never managed to lose a game. In fact, given that it was possible to "win" by forming peace treaties between all the species, I actuially had to work hard to try and not win before the game got started.
I'm suprised this worked (or maybe you just didn't attribute any problems you saw to switching the jumper).
See, the 486sx was a 486 processor that failed the FPU tests (or got binned out due to demand). The 486dx was the version that passed all the tests. So by setting that jumper, you just enabled the (probably faulty) FPU.
So not only did you probably not get any usable speed improvements (floating point coprocessors were still optional and not widely used at this point), but you ran the risk of unnoticed errors any time you did use it. Bravo.
Lets say, for the sake of argument, that this product was completely open-source. But the core development team just got scooped up by Oracle to work on a competing project. So exactly the same situation, except the source code is freely available. What changes?
Well first, the sales partners could keep selling the existing technology. They could probably afford a few bug fixes, but none of the sales partners would have anywhere near the revenue stream to hire a new team to support the project. If that had that kind of revenue, they wouldn't be sales partners. Not to mention, the sales partners are integration shops, not code shops. It's a different skill set, and there are going to be significant growing pains. Not too mention the months it would take to get a new programming team up to speed. That's the kind of risk that breaks companies, even if it goes fairly well.
The community won't be any help - despite all the claims to the contrary, the vast majority of open-source code work is done by paid programmers in an environment similar to any other programming shop. You'll get the occasional bug fix from the community, but you're not going to get many new features. You want to keep up with your competitors, you need a full time team.
So the sellers could keep selling the same product. But without a source of updates, that's a slow trip to bankruptcy. Any sales partner worth a damn would look to immediately migrate to a supported platform. In other words, exactly what's happening here. Having the code wouldn't really change anything.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't appear the government has asserted the document is classified - that's a term of art meaning that the release of the data would compromise national security in some way. Instead, they've declared that the data was marked For Official Use Only, which means the data is unclassified, but not for wide dissemination.
Let's break it down. We have classified information, which is data that, if released, would affect the national security. This determination is made by the President or directly appointed representatives only - I think Deputy Secretary of the Army/Navy/whatever is the lowest level with classification authority. Everyone else is merely applying the policies as determined by the originating authority. So I, as a low-level contractor, cannot unilaterally decide to classify a piece of information. Instead, I apply a predetermined set of rules (does it come from system A or mention topic B) to data I sort, and mark it appropriately.
For classified data, there are three broad groupings - Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. Secret has a subcategory of NoForn - not to be shared with foreign governments. Top Secret has a bazillion "code-word" subcategories - my favorite was Cosmic Top Secret.
There is also a category of unclassifed information that should not be in wide release. This is information that would not impact national security, but should still be controlled. The classic example is Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Leaking your address and social wouldn't impact national security, and neither would leaking your medical records or job evaluations. But I think we'd all agree this information should be kept out of the public eye, so it's marked FOUO. Not classified, but still not for dissemination.
The other category of FOUO information tends to be operational details for a command. This would include unit movements, detailed meeting schedules, specific evaluation criteria, etc. The stuff that, in a corporation, would be tagged Company Propriatary.
Finally, there is unclassified information that is treated as classified. This is generally any build media used for classified systems. The media itself isn't classified - it's straight from the vender. But once we have it, we treat it as if it's classified at the level of the system it was used to build. That way, no one can modify the unclassified source material without already having access to the classifed data.
It's not censorship. It's all Freedom of Speech, all the way down. The Truth Wins Out crowd is using their free speech to oppose the webapp, both by calling it ingorant and bigoted, and by lobbying Apple and Steve Jobs. They aren't asking Apple to censor the app; they're asking Apple to exercise their editorial control over the app store and remove it as not reflecting the "Apple values". Editorial control is a cornerstone of Freedom of Speech; there's no right to make someone else say something for you. You may think Apple shouldn't exercise editorial control over the app store in this way - I might even agree. But they clearly do - see the ban on "Adult" apps. The arguement is that this app makes them look at least as bad as a Playboy app would, and should be removed for the same reasons.
Because the economy was perfect in the 1800s. It's not like the US had 23 recognized recessions in the 1800s, including one bigger than the great depression. Even a passing look at economic history shows that the current economic regime, including the Fed, leads to a significantly more stable economy, with shorter and less frequent downturns.
It would cost more to take the nuclear power plants out than it would to build a new ship. So that's a non-starter. And you want to keep the plane-handling abilities if you can, as planes give you a much greater range and ability to ship in supplies and move people. But the whole idea is still completely unworkable. In a natural disaster scenario, the key window is right after the disaster, out to a week or two. That's the window when everything is disrupted, even in the most modern countries, and an external airbase/supply depot is useful. Hawaii (the closest the ship would be stationed) is about 4000 miles away, At an unrealistic top speed of 50 mph, that's over 3 days, or half your useful window. At a more realistic speed, the ship arrives after the need has passed. And that assumes the ship can get underway instantly. It would probably take at least a day to get ready to steam - you have to get the crew onboard, get the plants up, move in perishable supplies, etc, etc. It's not a quick process. And that's just Japan. The ship would be several weeks out from other possible response areas - India, South America, Europe, etc. A single ship just doesn't work. Until you develop the ability to teleport the ship, you need to have a ship already in the area to be useful.
Nice to see that even the Linux partisans know that the only way for Linux to have desktop success is to have no competition. Given a choice, almost no one would choose linux.
That's a valid issue, but not one you can do much about.
This isn't a valid issue. You want to abbrogate their freedom of speech - by preventing them from disagreeing with you - to further yours. That's not how it works. Freedom of speech isn't a lone man shouting, it's a conversation. If I can't disagree with you - even shunning you, if I feel strongly enough, then I really don't have freedom of speech, do I? The whole point of speech is consequences - to change someone's mind, and therefore their actions. You can't demand that only the positive consequences be allowed - that's too tolitarian even for North Korea.
Mastercard has 1st amendment rights, too. One of those is the right to disassociate themselves from speech they don't approve of. If they think whatever hit they'd take by cutting off the KKK is worth it, that's their call. 1st amendment protections only mean you get to say whatever you want. It's not a magic shield that should render you immune from criticism or consequences. After all, those criticisms and consequences are just other people exercising exactly the same rights. As a practical note, Mastercard can't afford to cut off very many organizations - pretty much what a government asks them too. If they open it up any wider, then they face constant pressures to cut off ever more organizations, as we see here from the RIAA.
It's not just modern inventions, either. Look up the history of the sewing machine, and you'll see the same pattern of interdependant patents building on each other. Patent thickets and consortiums are nothing new.
Actually, the first step towards good linux drivers is entirely in the dev's hands. No one to blame but the kernel hackers. Provide a stable interface. Provide a stable binary interface, and the manufacturers will provide drivers, at least for common processors. It really is that simple. As long as the drivers need to be rewritten every few months because the kernel was changed (often for no other reason than to break compatibility), linux will have crummy drivers. No sane company is going to sign up to do 10 times the work for a platform with 1% of the usage.
Quote: The same applies to corporations and regulation: when people like me call for deregulation it is only at the federal level--the states have every right to regulate as their citizens please, and state regulations are (marginally) less likely to be written by the corporations to which they apply for their own advantage. Really? You honestly think that West Virginia would write stricter coal mining standards than Congress? Louisiana would write stricter oil-drilling regulations than Congress? New York would write stricter financial regulations? That's just plain delusional. States are smaller, and therefore easier to "buy". Heck, a company bought a West Virginia Supreme Court justice to get a favorible ruling in a lawsuit. North Carolina has the laxest tobacco rules in the country for a reason, you know.
We never lost the launch codes. President Clinton's authorization card was lost (I'm not following it close enough to know by whom), but all that meant is that he couldn't authorize launch. There are many other people able to authorize a launch, beginning with VP Gore. There's a whole designated chain, and there's quite a few people at the top of the list with authorization cards. It's all designed to maintain a National Command authority in the event of a decapitation attack. In addition, it would only matter in the event of a massive suprise attack with no buildup. In the normal course of events, tensions would rachet up for weeks or months, and its likely the President would be in a command center when the order needed to be given. At the very least, he's be able to give a verbal order to someone with a card who was in the room, and launch would be approved.
If configured to do so*, the Aegis weapon system can fire missiles at targets with no human intervention. Been that way since it first went into service. I don't think any fleet ship uses the capability, but it has has been baked in since the first ship. A CIWS gun in automatic will engage anything that appears to be a threat in its assigned area. *Proper configuration is firing keys in (to enable weapon launch) and Auto Special doctrines enabled. At that point, any track that matches the criteria will eat a missile, usually launching before the crew is aware there's a new threat.
1) The Director's guild rule is there for a reason - it keeps the money-men from insisting of directing credit. Director's decided they wanted to get credit for their work, instead of living with a legal type system, where the headline billing goes to the biggest name, not the people who did all the work. Judges don't actually write most of their work, but they get all the credit. And the same goes for big law firms, where the people doing most of the work (paralegals and researchers) get no credit at all. Anyway, this was a big problem (for the directors, at least) when Hollywood was young, so when they unionized it was one of their basic principles. And its a reasonable position, even if you disagree with it. 2) Rodriguez knew the rules when he joined the guild. He knew the rules when he tried to name Miller as co-director. He was given multiple chances to back off, and chose instead to thumb his nose at the guild. It became an ego issue with him, and the guild reacted as they had to. Remember, the guild cares deeply about their members getting proper credit, and bending here immediately opens the door for other to claim director's credit (J.K. Rowling for Harry Potter, for instance). This wasn't a case of a guild be capricious - it's a guild protecting a (or perhaps the) core value of their members - that the director of the film deserves credit (or blame) for his or her film.
This isn't throwing yourself in front of a car. They didn't induce the violation - Sharron Angle did that all on her own. This is a collection action. There's no real difference between this situation and someone who skipped out on their rent or a phone bill. Instead of forcing each individual firm to maintain an extensive collection department, you sell the debt to a collection firm, and let the experts attempt to recover the money. And while individual collection firms do cross the line, the concept of specialist firms taking difficult tasks to free people to work at what they're good at is a cornerstone of our economy.
Because they weren't looking for the best solution, just ones that were 20 moves or less. So some of the items they have tagged as taking 20 moves might instead take 16-19.
Um, a ton of lead going mach 3 wouldn't do a whole heck of a lot to an aircraft carrier. Hell, it probably wouldn't sink a frigate. It's just not all that much energy. By my rough calculations, your lead slug has roughly as much energy as 500 sticks of dynamite, or about 125 pounds. While that's quite a bit, it's still smaller than the explosive charge on an Exocet missile. In addition, the slug is going to have a much harder time penetrating the armor (inches of steel), further lessening the effect. Since it would take multiple Exocet hits to sink a carrier, and one hit is survivable on a frigate (USS Stark), we can guess how useless the ball of lead would be. If that didn't work for you, try this. The Russians have a mach 5 missile weighing ~1200 kg intended for hunting aircraft carriers. That's over 3 times the energy of your lead slug. The also have a 3000 kg mach 3 missile, also 3 times the energy of your slug. If the slug were any good, that's all they'd need. But the Russians put large (either 150kg or 300kg of high explosives) warheads on these missiles. Since they do have competent engineers, I'd draw the conclusion that your idea is fatally flawed.
The money quotes from the article: "Movies Comparing VP8 to XviD, VP8 is 5-25 times slower with 10-30% better quality (lower bitrate for the same quality). When comapring VP8 and x264 VP8 also shows 5-25 lower encoding speed with 20-30% lower quality at average. For example x264 High-Speed preset is faster and has higher quality than any of VP8 presets at average." Real competitive.
In theory, that information would be very useful to the developers. In practice, it would have no value whatsover. The developers would do one of the following: a) ignore it b) ask for a patch c) treat the suggestions as a personal attack and launch a flamewar. Open source software may have some virtues, but taking constructive criticism is definitely a major weakness.
Whistleblowers should suffer, at least a little. If there's no pain involved, then it changes from a self-sacrificing, possibly noble act, to crass political manuvering and meaningless, punkish rebellion. For instance, the leaker of the video. The video is probably a defensible leak, but a quarter of a million classified diplomatic messages? That's not a leak to expose a specific incident - that's a stunt to try and build up the biggest Wikileaks e-peen. And the Wikileaks founder? He's not a whistleblower - he's a publisher. With all the manipulations and story-building exercises of any other publisher.
To be perfectly clear, that model predates electricity, since that's how sewing machines were first sold (1856). Honestly, these aren't new issues. Patent thickets have been around almost as long as patents, as have the solutions.
If you're paying $500 for glasses, you're shopping in the wrong places. if you're paying $1000, you're getting ripped off.
Last pair of glasses I bought cost $25 shipped. That's frames & lenses in my hands. Also got an ANSI approved set of safety glasses for another $30 on the same order. But those were spares - not my normal glasses.
My normal set cost $80 total, but that was because I wanted titanium half frames and next-day delivery. So all three sets of glasses, plus the eye exam, came to under $250.
Look at online eyeware makers. Same lenses, same frames, vastly lower prices. I start at glassyeyes.blogspot.com, because they have decent reviews and usually a discount coupon. I had good experiences with both eyebuydirect and 39dollarglasses.
Every process works well with smart, motivated people. No process works well with dumb, unmotivated people. That's not news. The particular process doesn't matter; neither does the task*. From ditch-digging to nuclear engineering, from slave labor to the latest programming paradigm, it's always the same - the smart, motivated people outperform the stupid and lazy. The trick is to figure out the process that works best for your particular team. And there's no one right answer to that question - each team has to take the available ideas and figure out a process on their own. *The army has studied this pretty closely over the years. IIRC, they estimated a 30% increase in productivity at any task by adding 1 90%+ ASVADS scorer to a team. That's at any task, from tank repair to foxhole digging to missile defense. The increase in productivity was reasonably consistant across the entire gamut of Army jobs.
Ascendancy was a bad version of Master of Orion. There was nothing particularly original about it, and the execution was quite a bit off. Not to mention I never managed to lose a game. In fact, given that it was possible to "win" by forming peace treaties between all the species, I actuially had to work hard to try and not win before the game got started.
I'm suprised this worked (or maybe you just didn't attribute any problems you saw to switching the jumper). See, the 486sx was a 486 processor that failed the FPU tests (or got binned out due to demand). The 486dx was the version that passed all the tests. So by setting that jumper, you just enabled the (probably faulty) FPU. So not only did you probably not get any usable speed improvements (floating point coprocessors were still optional and not widely used at this point), but you ran the risk of unnoticed errors any time you did use it. Bravo.
Lets say, for the sake of argument, that this product was completely open-source. But the core development team just got scooped up by Oracle to work on a competing project. So exactly the same situation, except the source code is freely available. What changes? Well first, the sales partners could keep selling the existing technology. They could probably afford a few bug fixes, but none of the sales partners would have anywhere near the revenue stream to hire a new team to support the project. If that had that kind of revenue, they wouldn't be sales partners. Not to mention, the sales partners are integration shops, not code shops. It's a different skill set, and there are going to be significant growing pains. Not too mention the months it would take to get a new programming team up to speed. That's the kind of risk that breaks companies, even if it goes fairly well. The community won't be any help - despite all the claims to the contrary, the vast majority of open-source code work is done by paid programmers in an environment similar to any other programming shop. You'll get the occasional bug fix from the community, but you're not going to get many new features. You want to keep up with your competitors, you need a full time team. So the sellers could keep selling the same product. But without a source of updates, that's a slow trip to bankruptcy. Any sales partner worth a damn would look to immediately migrate to a supported platform. In other words, exactly what's happening here. Having the code wouldn't really change anything.