However, you are explicitly prohibited from analyzing the composition of the Viagra tablets and manufacturing your own by various patent and copyright laws that modify your right to do anything at all with your possessions.
Not at all. I am perfectly free to analyse a tablet of Viagra, and even to publish the results of those analyses. However, I am not free to produce my own Viagra tablets until the patent runs out.
There's also a good chance that there are process patents that are newer than the original Viagra patent, which prevent me from using the same methods that Pfizer uses to manufacture Viagra for a few years past the expiration of the Viagra patent. Since the patent discloses the methods used, I have to use some other method.
This only applys to people who are granted a special administrative measure which applys to less than a tenth of a percent of people. And only to people who the AG says "reasonable suspicion exists to believe that a particular inmate may use communication with attorneys or their agents to further or facilitate acts of terrorism".
Well, let's be smart about this, then - don't allow the prosecution access to the tapes, only the military and intelligence agencies. We've got a reasonable suspicion that Prisoner X is a terrorist, and is using his lawyer to communicate with other terrorists? Let the CIA or the FBI track down others with those conversations, but don't let the prosecutor have those tapes. That way, Prisoner X still has a right to a fair trial, and we still get to track down terrorists.
Future Tech seems to be an Italian company, with a branch in US, and Mosfet appears to live in US too, so I guess this would be handled according to US law (read the work contract and check the employment and contract laws). Somehow I doubt that US government would quarantee salaries in bankruptcy situations.
The US Government does not guarantee salaries in bankruptcy situations, but employee salaries are first priority in a bankruptcy case. However, independent contractors are just another vendor, afaik, and are likely to get screwed. They are likely to be able to take their work product back, if that's possible, but that's not going to be resalable for open-source development.
You do not have to submit to searches at every turn.
It's easy: Quit. Tell your supervisor, your department head, other important people in the heirarchy, and your congresscritter that you are quitting because of the unreasonableness of the search policy.
Less drastically, tell your boss that if something doesn't change, you'll quit - that you can't be productive and creative if you're constantly being treated as a criminal at work.
There's security, and there's security. Some level of increased security is appropriate under the current circumstances, but the constant searches sound ridiculous. Can't they maintain a "secure perimeter", where they search coming in and going out, but allow people to move freely within?
Besides asbestos is not an environmentilst issue, its a heath issue. For what asbestos did there are better ways of doing it. If you'd like me to cover your house in asbestos than feel free. But don't come complaining when you get cancer from it, or other lung problems.
Asbestos in solid form (like insulation) is perfectly, 100%, safe. Until it starts to crumble and asbestos dust starts to fly around. The preferred treatment for a house with old asbestos insulation is to encapsulate it - not remove it. Removal will get more of it flying around the building than sealing it in place.
Hydrogen has some drawbacks as a fuel, in general, though is also has some advantages. (I don't really understand them that well, but I do know they exist.) In terms of crashes, a hydrogen-fueled plane that crashed would explode all at once - once the fuel tank was ruptured, all the fuel would either burn quickly or blow away, rather than continue to provide fuel for the fire as avgas does.
A hydrogen fueled 747 crashing into the WTC would likely have caused a bigger explosion on impact, but the resulting fire wuoldn't have stayed so hot for so long - if the building didn't collapse right away, it may not have collapsed at all.
if ZDNet is going to review WinToNet, they should have reviewed VNC - it does essentially the same thing, and doesn't require a high-powered NT server, or Java. I've had a few problems with VNC, but the right-click works fine. I've even daisy-chained VNC sessions. My IT guy here, who's a Microsoft Man through and through, uses VNC on our servers to do remote work.
A swimming pool is what's known as an attractive nuisance. You, as a pool owner, are required to take reasonable precautions for the safety of children who might be attracted to it. This means a gate with a lock. It doesn't have to be very secure, just secure enough that people too young to know any better won't be able to easily get in.
Should using Microsoft Outlook be considered an "attractive nuisance"?
The fundamental problem with webvan seems to be that they tried to expand too fast and didn't make enough money to support the expansion. But why did they try to expand too fast? Because the internet is worldwide. There was (and maybe still is) a belief that if you're on the 'net, *everyone* can see you, so you'd better be able to service everyone. Or at least everyone in the United States.
For some sorts of operations, that makes sense. If my product is an electronic download, anyone in the world who has an internet connection can receive my product. For lightweight, non-perishable products, the postal service or its competitors can provide delivery cheaply enough that people won't squawk over the price of delivery. For groceries, delivery is expensive, and the more areas you cover, the more it costs.
So Webvan tried to become a national player, when no grocery chain had succeeded yet, instead of concentrating on capturing enough of the Bay Area market to make a profit. So it's gone tits-up.com. Oh well.
As much as we technical types (I'm a Civil Engineer, not a marketer) sneer at marketers; they're damned important, and what they do is a learned, and not terribly easy, skill.
I have a license from the State of California which says I can do Civil Engineering for hire direct to customers. But I can't. I don't have the marketing skills or the existing customer base to be able to do that. My options right now are to work for a company which does the marketing for me, or change careers. Fortunately, my boss is an excellent marketer as well as a good engineer - he can talk to clients, make them not only feel confident in our abilities to do the job, but make them feel that we're the people they want to do their job. I can do the first part, but not the second. So I work for someone who can.
Contracts and finance aren't beyond most geeks' understanding, though the details are better left to professionals. But marketing is hard to hire a professional to do for you when you're first getting started, unless it's your spouse, your business partner, or someone who's going to be similarly important to your operation. After all, your skill can be hired, so why wouldn't the marketer go out on his/her own and hire you as needed, rather than be hired by you?
Everytime you speed, you run the risk of killing someone.
Not speeding is risky, too, especially on wide-open freeways designed to be travelled at 75 mph in cars which didn't handle as well as cars do today. I don't get too incensed about red-light monitors, but the speed laws in most of the US are incredibly irrational, and designed to raise revenue or facilitate police harrassment. If the speed limit on California freeways defaulted to 90, with lower speed limits (like 70 to 85) on the older ones with tighter turns, etc., I could respect them; but right now, the only thing which keeps me at the speed limit on a freeway is heavy traffic.
In addition, the value of currency increases and decreases as the size of the economy rises and falls; limiting inflationary pressures.
You fail Econ 101. The value of the currency changes as the supply of currency changes relative to all goods and services which can be purchased for that currency. When the government causes the supply of currency to grow faster than the supply of purchasable goods, which is historically pretty much all the time, there is inflation.
"Inflationary Pressures" have been low since the beginning of the Reagan years because the Federal Reserve has deliberately acted to restrict the growth of the money supply to not much faster than the growth of the economy. In the late 1990s, the money supply increased more rapidly, in a way that a lot of the new money was fed into the tech boom; we're seeing a typical end-of-inflation crash in at least the tech sector this year and likely next year.
The Gold standard was a nightmare in the United States. There were depressions every 10-15 years caused by bank panics as the relative values of silver and gold shifted. Inflation ran as high as 15%, since after 1860 the amount of gold in the economy ceased to expand.
The "gold standard" which caused "panics" was a fractional-reserve gold standard, which allowed a small increase in the gold supply to create large increases in the money supply. Generally, the maximum potential money supply, as some multiple of the gold supply, was not circulating, so the money supply could increase rapidly up to a point, but then could not increase once the limit was reached. The end of the inflation was what caused the crash - investments which counted on paying back dollars worth significantly less than the dollars loaned would fail when the dollar ceased to drop in value.
You can't get inflation of 15% if your money supply isn't growing, unless the supply of goods and services drops. There was inflation after the Civil War, as prices were freed from wartime controls and rose to match the inflated money supply.
Gotta watch that "fair-use" stuff... it's extremely limited and does not refer to modification at all. You have the right to quote small snippets in a academic context, parody, and a couple of other small things, but it does not extend to arbitrary modification.
Both systems would be an end-user activity that adds value, in the user's mind, to the information already present in the website.
First, there is no "right" to add value to somebody else's copyrighted work. If your use isn't covered under the extremely limited fair-use clauses and you don't have permission, you are legally out of luck.
The changes are not made on the server, they're made in the browser. Just because Opera allows you to zoom a page, is it violating fair use? No. A website delivers you some information, either free, or in exchnage for something (money, advertising data, etc.). At that point, as long as you're not duplicating it for others, it's yours. You can feed it through a program to do word-count analysis, you can feed it to a translation program, you can feed it to a program which shows you how it looks to people with color-blindness or other vision impairments, you can insert your own commentary on the page, you can rot13 it, encrypt it, delete it, etc. Copyright is about copying. If the information is delivered to you in a physical form (like a newspaper), you can destroy it, give it to someone else, etc., as long as you're not copying it.
What Microsoft is doing is creating a filter in the users' browsers which adds complementary information. In theory (in other words, ignoring monopoly practices and considerations), users have every right to use that browser to perform that task, or to choose a different browser, to perform other information-processing tasks.
I use SuSE 6.2, with lots of stuff I've added on, mostly compiling it. But - I've got one big DLL problem: ImageMagick 5.1.0 requires libjpeg.so.6.1, and breaks on 6.2, while Mozilla & Opera require 6.2, and break on 6.1.
Since it's only two programs, I've modified the Mozilla startup script and created a startup script for Opera to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to find libjpeg.so.6.2, instead of 6.1.
I've tried upgrading ImageMagick, but both non-SuSE rpms and the source break, and the SuSE rpm essentially requires upgrading all of SuSE.
oh well - DLL Hell is warm in the winter...
After all, if you're running Linux, you won't buy a copy of Final Cut Pro ($999) or DVD Studio Pro (also $999), nor would you be very likely to shell out over $1,000 to attend their developer conference (see ad banners on/. today)
Don't be silly - Apple is a hardware company - they'll just start selling yMacs, preloaded with Yellow Dog Linux, and with a cool yellow dog logo on the side, for $100 more.
And there'll be Apple Linux Developer conferences...
So if I write the best damned solenoid control software available and make sure everyone can use it, I'll be able to walk past someone banging the side of a coke machine for five minutes and say "well, it aint my code!"
It might be, though - after all, it could just be bad hardware.
Most companies get the unions they deserve, and all unions get the management they deserve.
In the construction industry in California, the unions provide training for new workers, and generally only make noise over pay scales. Union construction companies in return don't generally pull lots of arbitrary and heavy-handed shit on their employees.
Stories I've heard from people working for PacBell or AT&T indicate that the unions fight hard to keep incompetent workers, people who show up stoned, and otherwise make a general nuisance of themselves. In return, the companies will fire people for minor infractions that wouldn't even rate being reprimanded in a sane work environment. Then the union files a grievance, and the employee gets reinstated, without back pay for the day missed.
Teachers unions are notorious for fighting against any form of accountability for their members, for demanding more money every time any budget at the school gets increased, even the maintenance budget, and for opposing any kind of change in the way that schools are run. In return, school managements play nasty political BS games with the teachers, over rooms and scheduling, and have kept teachers poorly paid, which is directly related to the lack of accountability the unions cherish.
Communism is NOT about control - that is Fascism - and usually Americans confuse the two. Communism promotes Democracy. Communism does not require nor desire Fascism.
To be honest, Capitalism more closely aligns with Fascism.
Right up to there, you had a pretty good analysis. Mr. Garrin's motivations do seem to be to collect a chuck of the pie for himself, using something he built and can get other people to pay for. That's pretty capitalist.
Your two lines about the differing systems in politics and economics is very simplistic, but generally correct (there are *lots* of shades of gray in-between, but that doesn't really matter).
However, when you say that capitalism better lines up with fascist politics, you're wrong. The choices in econimics are between political control of the economy (communism, socialism, etc.) and private control of the economy, with political action limited to enforcing basic rules and adjudicating contract disputes (capitalism). Political control of the economy requires a police state, because otherwise most people won't cooperate enough for it to work. Democratic politics doesn't require people voting money and control out of each others hands.
Why is this an "Ask Slashdot"? It's a great question to fire up a flamewar, or, with a bit more expansion, it could have been an interesting article about the "maturity of FreeBSD as a Desktop Operating System".
Perhaps we need a new category of "User Experiences" - people could write in about their experiences configuring and running various OSes as or for end-users. For example, now that Sun is giving out Solaris CDs for (essentially) nothing, what's it like to use as an end user. Would you really want it on your desktop? What's missing? What really rocks about it?
Almost every answer has some reference to a way he's voted on a bill, a committee he's chaired, a piece of legislation he's working on, etc. In other words, constant reminder's of the work he's doing in Washington.
That's because that's what he does. People are asking questions about political topics, and about how the internet and the law intersect. It's one thing for me or you or T. J. Rodgers or George Gilder to say "the law should say this". Rep. Boucher ought to be telling us what he's done about it, not just what he thinks about it. Otherwise, he's just another pundit. He's authored this bill, gotten that one passed, and educated a bunch of his fellow Representatives about the internet. Gosh, that's pretty useful stuff to know, and it's what I'd want to hear from a Congressman in this forum.
Slashdot Mirror
haven't we been here before?
Not at all. I am perfectly free to analyse a tablet of Viagra, and even to publish the results of those analyses. However, I am not free to produce my own Viagra tablets until the patent runs out.
There's also a good chance that there are process patents that are newer than the original Viagra patent, which prevent me from using the same methods that Pfizer uses to manufacture Viagra for a few years past the expiration of the Viagra patent. Since the patent discloses the methods used, I have to use some other method.
Well, let's be smart about this, then - don't allow the prosecution access to the tapes, only the military and intelligence agencies. We've got a reasonable suspicion that Prisoner X is a terrorist, and is using his lawyer to communicate with other terrorists? Let the CIA or the FBI track down others with those conversations, but don't let the prosecutor have those tapes. That way, Prisoner X still has a right to a fair trial, and we still get to track down terrorists.
The US Government does not guarantee salaries in bankruptcy situations, but employee salaries are first priority in a bankruptcy case. However, independent contractors are just another vendor, afaik, and are likely to get screwed. They are likely to be able to take their work product back, if that's possible, but that's not going to be resalable for open-source development.
You do not have to submit to searches at every turn.
It's easy: Quit. Tell your supervisor, your department head, other important people in the heirarchy, and your congresscritter that you are quitting because of the unreasonableness of the search policy.
Less drastically, tell your boss that if something doesn't change, you'll quit - that you can't be productive and creative if you're constantly being treated as a criminal at work.
There's security, and there's security. Some level of increased security is appropriate under the current circumstances, but the constant searches sound ridiculous. Can't they maintain a "secure perimeter", where they search coming in and going out, but allow people to move freely within?
Asbestos in solid form (like insulation) is perfectly, 100%, safe. Until it starts to crumble and asbestos dust starts to fly around. The preferred treatment for a house with old asbestos insulation is to encapsulate it - not remove it. Removal will get more of it flying around the building than sealing it in place.
Hydrogen has some drawbacks as a fuel, in general, though is also has some advantages. (I don't really understand them that well, but I do know they exist.) In terms of crashes, a hydrogen-fueled plane that crashed would explode all at once - once the fuel tank was ruptured, all the fuel would either burn quickly or blow away, rather than continue to provide fuel for the fire as avgas does.
A hydrogen fueled 747 crashing into the WTC would likely have caused a bigger explosion on impact, but the resulting fire wuoldn't have stayed so hot for so long - if the building didn't collapse right away, it may not have collapsed at all.
if ZDNet is going to review WinToNet, they should have reviewed VNC - it does essentially the same thing, and doesn't require a high-powered NT server, or Java. I've had a few problems with VNC, but the right-click works fine. I've even daisy-chained VNC sessions. My IT guy here, who's a Microsoft Man through and through, uses VNC on our servers to do remote work.
Should using Microsoft Outlook be considered an "attractive nuisance"?
For some sorts of operations, that makes sense. If my product is an electronic download, anyone in the world who has an internet connection can receive my product. For lightweight, non-perishable products, the postal service or its competitors can provide delivery cheaply enough that people won't squawk over the price of delivery. For groceries, delivery is expensive, and the more areas you cover, the more it costs.
So Webvan tried to become a national player, when no grocery chain had succeeded yet, instead of concentrating on capturing enough of the Bay Area market to make a profit. So it's gone tits-up.com. Oh well.
I have a license from the State of California which says I can do Civil Engineering for hire direct to customers. But I can't. I don't have the marketing skills or the existing customer base to be able to do that. My options right now are to work for a company which does the marketing for me, or change careers. Fortunately, my boss is an excellent marketer as well as a good engineer - he can talk to clients, make them not only feel confident in our abilities to do the job, but make them feel that we're the people they want to do their job. I can do the first part, but not the second. So I work for someone who can.
Contracts and finance aren't beyond most geeks' understanding, though the details are better left to professionals. But marketing is hard to hire a professional to do for you when you're first getting started, unless it's your spouse, your business partner, or someone who's going to be similarly important to your operation. After all, your skill can be hired, so why wouldn't the marketer go out on his/her own and hire you as needed, rather than be hired by you?
nope - Montana's highway fatality rate DOUBLED after reimposing speed limits. hhttp://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana_2001.htm
Not speeding is risky, too, especially on wide-open freeways designed to be travelled at 75 mph in cars which didn't handle as well as cars do today. I don't get too incensed about red-light monitors, but the speed laws in most of the US are incredibly irrational, and designed to raise revenue or facilitate police harrassment. If the speed limit on California freeways defaulted to 90, with lower speed limits (like 70 to 85) on the older ones with tighter turns, etc., I could respect them; but right now, the only thing which keeps me at the speed limit on a freeway is heavy traffic.
You fail Econ 101. The value of the currency changes as the supply of currency changes relative to all goods and services which can be purchased for that currency. When the government causes the supply of currency to grow faster than the supply of purchasable goods, which is historically pretty much all the time, there is inflation.
"Inflationary Pressures" have been low since the beginning of the Reagan years because the Federal Reserve has deliberately acted to restrict the growth of the money supply to not much faster than the growth of the economy. In the late 1990s, the money supply increased more rapidly, in a way that a lot of the new money was fed into the tech boom; we're seeing a typical end-of-inflation crash in at least the tech sector this year and likely next year.
The Gold standard was a nightmare in the United States. There were depressions every 10-15 years caused by bank panics as the relative values of silver and gold shifted. Inflation ran as high as 15%, since after 1860 the amount of gold in the economy ceased to expand.
The "gold standard" which caused "panics" was a fractional-reserve gold standard, which allowed a small increase in the gold supply to create large increases in the money supply. Generally, the maximum potential money supply, as some multiple of the gold supply, was not circulating, so the money supply could increase rapidly up to a point, but then could not increase once the limit was reached. The end of the inflation was what caused the crash - investments which counted on paying back dollars worth significantly less than the dollars loaned would fail when the dollar ceased to drop in value.
You can't get inflation of 15% if your money supply isn't growing, unless the supply of goods and services drops. There was inflation after the Civil War, as prices were freed from wartime controls and rose to match the inflated money supply.
haven't been able to successfully compile it, or install from RPM.
The changes are not made on the server, they're made in the browser. Just because Opera allows you to zoom a page, is it violating fair use? No. A website delivers you some information, either free, or in exchnage for something (money, advertising data, etc.). At that point, as long as you're not duplicating it for others, it's yours. You can feed it through a program to do word-count analysis, you can feed it to a translation program, you can feed it to a program which shows you how it looks to people with color-blindness or other vision impairments, you can insert your own commentary on the page, you can rot13 it, encrypt it, delete it, etc. Copyright is about copying. If the information is delivered to you in a physical form (like a newspaper), you can destroy it, give it to someone else, etc., as long as you're not copying it.
In fact, the web gives you even more options: if the server permits, you can fetch the page through another server which translates for you, or processes the page to show you how it looks to a color-blind person. You used to be able to have whole collections of commentary on web pages, but the commentary was so useless that there's no money in it...
What Microsoft is doing is creating a filter in the users' browsers which adds complementary information. In theory (in other words, ignoring monopoly practices and considerations), users have every right to use that browser to perform that task, or to choose a different browser, to perform other information-processing tasks.
Since it's only two programs, I've modified the Mozilla startup script and created a startup script for Opera to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to find libjpeg.so.6.2, instead of 6.1. I've tried upgrading ImageMagick, but both non-SuSE rpms and the source break, and the SuSE rpm essentially requires upgrading all of SuSE. oh well - DLL Hell is warm in the winter...
Don't be silly - Apple is a hardware company - they'll just start selling yMacs, preloaded with Yellow Dog Linux, and with a cool yellow dog logo on the side, for $100 more.
And there'll be Apple Linux Developer conferences...
It might be, though - after all, it could just be bad hardware.
No, reading Slashdot isn't THAT taxing on my cpu.
Unless you're using Mozilla.
In the construction industry in California, the unions provide training for new workers, and generally only make noise over pay scales. Union construction companies in return don't generally pull lots of arbitrary and heavy-handed shit on their employees.
Stories I've heard from people working for PacBell or AT&T indicate that the unions fight hard to keep incompetent workers, people who show up stoned, and otherwise make a general nuisance of themselves. In return, the companies will fire people for minor infractions that wouldn't even rate being reprimanded in a sane work environment. Then the union files a grievance, and the employee gets reinstated, without back pay for the day missed.
Teachers unions are notorious for fighting against any form of accountability for their members, for demanding more money every time any budget at the school gets increased, even the maintenance budget, and for opposing any kind of change in the way that schools are run. In return, school managements play nasty political BS games with the teachers, over rooms and scheduling, and have kept teachers poorly paid, which is directly related to the lack of accountability the unions cherish.
CobolScript
Politics: Democracy, Fascism
Economics: Communism, Capitalism.
To be honest, Capitalism more closely aligns with Fascism.
Right up to there, you had a pretty good analysis. Mr. Garrin's motivations do seem to be to collect a chuck of the pie for himself, using something he built and can get other people to pay for. That's pretty capitalist.
Your two lines about the differing systems in politics and economics is very simplistic, but generally correct (there are *lots* of shades of gray in-between, but that doesn't really matter).
However, when you say that capitalism better lines up with fascist politics, you're wrong. The choices in econimics are between political control of the economy (communism, socialism, etc.) and private control of the economy, with political action limited to enforcing basic rules and adjudicating contract disputes (capitalism). Political control of the economy requires a police state, because otherwise most people won't cooperate enough for it to work. Democratic politics doesn't require people voting money and control out of each others hands.
Perhaps we need a new category of "User Experiences" - people could write in about their experiences configuring and running various OSes as or for end-users. For example, now that Sun is giving out Solaris CDs for (essentially) nothing, what's it like to use as an end user. Would you really want it on your desktop? What's missing? What really rocks about it?
That's because that's what he does. People are asking questions about political topics, and about how the internet and the law intersect. It's one thing for me or you or T. J. Rodgers or George Gilder to say "the law should say this". Rep. Boucher ought to be telling us what he's done about it, not just what he thinks about it. Otherwise, he's just another pundit. He's authored this bill, gotten that one passed, and educated a bunch of his fellow Representatives about the internet. Gosh, that's pretty useful stuff to know, and it's what I'd want to hear from a Congressman in this forum.