Because most of us belong to the dominating race of our societies. Race mostly tend to be an (conscious) issue when you belong to another race than the dominating one.
It seems to me that by far the largest benefit to Sun from GPL'ing Solaris would be to gain the ability to import driver code from Linux. They can't do that since Linux is forced to stay at version 2 because of its lack of an "or later" clause or a clear owner.
The "we are headed towards an ice age" meme was due to the belief in cyclic weather, basically that the global temperature could be predicted by a Fourier series. You can always fit any measured data to a Fourier series, but here at least some of the coefficients had astronomical explanations.
Global warming was also a concern 30 years ago, as the mechanisms were well known. There were actually people warning about global warming a 100 years ago. However, only recently computers have become fast enough, and measurements accurate enough, that you can actually quantify the risk.
Interestingly enough, cyclic weather has until recently[1] been used to dismiss global warming, claiming that it was not man made but predicted by the coefficients in the Fourier series. Which does apparently conflict with the series predicting an ice age, but not really, as the series consist of overlapping cycles, and you can be on the way up on one of the short cycles, and on the way down one of the longer.
[1] You still see references to it by laypeople on the net, but it is no longer used that way by scientists.
I was at a presentation where a member of our agricultural research group presented the result of a feasibility study for bioenergy in Scandinavia and the Baltic countries. Basically, the conclusion was that if we converted the entire food production, and the entire production from forestry into equivalents of oil, it would cover 40% of our current oil consumption.
The situation is probably better in the US, but I think it is a healthy exercise to see what the potential is before investing too much in that energy source.
Something also worth considering is that, baring any huge catastrophes, simple demographics tell us that the Earth population will reach 12 billion people in our lifetime, even if the average number of children per women fall to the low number of Japan and Europe and life expectancy stay put. The more realistic scenarios top around 20 billion people.
It finding other purposes for our agriculture than food really what we want to do, even considering that there currently is a world surplus of 2% in the food production?
The big step is dropping DRM, and MP3 is the best first step as it is the only one most people have heard of, and the one that will generate most publicity. Later, they can add support for other formats.
> One scary place this could be used was to check religious beliefs, in some countries you are > prohibited to believe anything else than what the state dictates.
It is only really in Christianity that it is common for followers to care what other people believe. In most religions, the norm is to only care about what people actually do, not what they think. So as long as you do the rituals and stay away from the taboos, you are all right.
Should work even better than the old successful IBM FUD piece "Nobody has been fired for buying IBM". And like good FUD pieces, it has some truth in it.
If the company internet connection is down now, I lose all external email contacts. I may still be able to use internal email when physically at work.
With Google (or another outside provider), I'll still be able to keep my external email contacts when working at home, even during a DoS attack on the company.
I don't know about you, but in my job the external contacts are more important than the internal contacts, and it will be easier to use alternative communication channels for the internal contacts (like calling or even walking down the hallway).
Seems like a win to me.
And about the "monthly revenue generator": The fee is for running your mail system for you, freeing your internal people to do stuff that may be more related to your line of business. Dedicated data centers have done this kind of stuff for at least four decades, if this has really been Microsoft's "wet dream" they chose the wrong line of business.
My first encounter with Microsoft was their BASIC that were in a lot of the home computers back then. It was always disappointing when a new home computer came with Microsoft BASIC, the non-Microsoft dialects (like in the BBC micro) were much more exciting. So even then, Microsoft was not cool, they were bland.
MS-DOS came to be around the time of my first encounter with Unix. Unsurprisingly, MS-DOS had the non-coolness of a mud hut standing next to a stone castle.
The MS Flight Simulator was kind of cool, I'll grant them that.
Those key bindings date at least back to Apple Lisa (1981), and probably Xerox PARC before that. It is no surprise that they can be found in many different environments today.
UK is a member of the EU, and as such is not allowed to restore the death penalty. Thus, death by torture as subject implies, is not an option, and jail time will have to do.
I really hate the pervasive meme that a crime is less of an issue if the damage is spread out over many victims, rather than concentrated on a few individuals. The economic damage done by a single large scale spam attack is large enough to fund several life saving operations. Just because you can't name the person who died doesn't make the crime any less severe.
And yes, the two years jail time is the upper limit, reserved to the worst cases. Most offenders will get far less than that, and first time offenders will most likely not even face jail time.
which does seem mild compared to the potential property damages that can be caused by this, depending on the number of addresses being sold.
What is the maximum penalty for breaking into a computer, stealing information, and in the process leave the computer unusable?...
And I strongly disagree with the sentiment often heard here on/. that jail time should be reserved to violent (blue collar) crimes, and economic (white collar) crimes should only get fines. The economic crimes are often much more damaging, because the number of victims is so much higher, and the perpetrators are often quite used to (and willing to) taking economic risks. Serving jail time seem much more real.
The notion also smack towards sending poor people in jail, and letting rich people go free, which is not exactly strengthening the fabric of society.
> Monarchies, Feudalism, the Inquisition-era Catholic church, and Soviet Russia were all the > biggest, most far-reaching institutions of their day.
Monarchies, the Catholic Church, and Soviet Russia were all leaded by a single all-powerful person, and how bad they sucked depended on how bad that person sucked.
Feudalism is not an institution, but a system.
> Thomas Jefferson and his cronies decided there was a better way.
Yes. They created institutions (in particular, the division of power) that meant that the US as a whole florished despite the long string of incompetent politicians (no, incompetent and crooked politicians is not a new invention) that lead it.
> I agree with him,
No, you misrepresenting him grossly, and arguing for the exact opposite of everything Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers build.
> so I'll take a handful of determined, skilled, like-minded individuals over an "institution" a any day.
That is Platon, not Jefferson, and the same idea in a modern context is called Fascism.
The new business model they have selected in Canada and Denmark (and probably other nations as well) is to make the state collect money for them through on "blank media", while still suing the ass off anyone who copy their recordings unauthorized, and granting themselves more and more state-like powers.
No, it is only half the supply and demand model. The demand adjusts to the price, the supply does not. The supply and demand model describes an equilibrium price that would happen in a perfect market. Most recordings are covered by copyright, making their production state granted monopolies, which is as far from a perfect market as you can come.
Supply and demand can be used to model what happens with recordings whose copyright has expired.
I just bought a rucksack for 50DKK (~ US$ 9). Seems OK. My new vacuum cleaner did cost 250 DKK (~ US$ 45). A new garden table set (table, bench and chairs) was 500 DKK (~ US$ 90).
I doubt I could have purchased any of these items for the same amount 20 years ago.
The rucksack and vacuum cleaner were made in China, the garden table set was made in Vietnam.
Demographics is a useful scientific term, which does not need redefinition, and certainly not from "Corporate America".
The use of demographics in marketing certainly can use some refinement, and it is also being refined all the time. There is a tendency to overuse demographics because it is so easily measurable. In particular, the use of too rigid demographic boxes can make it difficult to recognize the market radical new products.
I suspect the cost in lost productivity of treating your employees as potential enemies far outweigh the benefit in reduced risk of sabotage and theft. It might not even reduce the risk, people in general have a strange tendency of behaving the way you expect them to, so if you expect them to betray you, they are more likely to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Because most of us belong to the dominating race of our societies. Race mostly tend to be an (conscious) issue when you belong to another race than the dominating one.
It seems to me that by far the largest benefit to Sun from GPL'ing Solaris would be to gain the ability to import driver code from Linux. They can't do that since Linux is forced to stay at version 2 because of its lack of an "or later" clause or a clear owner.
If you accept Jesus as your savior, you are a Christian.
Anything else is fluff.
The "we are headed towards an ice age" meme was due to the belief in cyclic weather, basically that the global temperature could be predicted by a Fourier series. You can always fit any measured data to a Fourier series, but here at least some of the coefficients had astronomical explanations.
Global warming was also a concern 30 years ago, as the mechanisms were well known. There were actually people warning about global warming a 100 years ago. However, only recently computers have become fast enough, and measurements accurate enough, that you can actually quantify the risk.
Interestingly enough, cyclic weather has until recently[1] been used to dismiss global warming, claiming that it was not man made but predicted by the coefficients in the Fourier series. Which does apparently conflict with the series predicting an ice age, but not really, as the series consist of overlapping cycles, and you can be on the way up on one of the short cycles, and on the way down one of the longer.
[1] You still see references to it by laypeople on the net, but it is no longer used that way by scientists.
I was at a presentation where a member of our agricultural research group presented the result of a feasibility study for bioenergy in Scandinavia and the Baltic countries. Basically, the conclusion was that if we converted the entire food production, and the entire production from forestry into equivalents of oil, it would cover 40% of our current oil consumption.
The situation is probably better in the US, but I think it is a healthy exercise to see what the potential is before investing too much in that energy source.
Something also worth considering is that, baring any huge catastrophes, simple demographics tell us that the Earth population will reach 12 billion people in our lifetime, even if the average number of children per women fall to the low number of Japan and Europe and life expectancy stay put. The more realistic scenarios top around 20 billion people.
It finding other purposes for our agriculture than food really what we want to do, even considering that there currently is a world surplus of 2% in the food production?
The big step is dropping DRM, and MP3 is the best first step as it is the only one most people have heard of, and the one that will generate most publicity. Later, they can add support for other formats.
> Which is why muslims are now slaughtering each other in Iraq over the question of who the legitimate
> successor of the prophet is.
Do you also believe that the trouble in Northern Ireland is about the holiness of the pope?
> One scary place this could be used was to check religious beliefs, in some countries you are
> prohibited to believe anything else than what the state dictates.
It is only really in Christianity that it is common for followers to care what other people believe. In most religions, the norm is to only care about what people actually do, not what they think. So as long as you do the rituals and stay away from the taboos, you are all right.
Should work even better than the old successful IBM FUD piece "Nobody has been fired for buying IBM". And like good FUD pieces, it has some truth in it.
If the company internet connection is down now, I lose all external email contacts. I may still be able to use internal email when physically at work.
With Google (or another outside provider), I'll still be able to keep my external email contacts when working at home, even during a DoS attack on the company.
I don't know about you, but in my job the external contacts are more important than the internal contacts, and it will be easier to use alternative communication channels for the internal contacts (like calling or even walking down the hallway).
Seems like a win to me.
And about the "monthly revenue generator": The fee is for running your mail system for you, freeing your internal people to do stuff that may be more related to your line of business. Dedicated data centers have done this kind of stuff for at least four decades, if this has really been Microsoft's "wet dream" they chose the wrong line of business.
My first encounter with Microsoft was their BASIC that were in a lot of the home computers back then. It was always disappointing when a new home computer came with Microsoft BASIC, the non-Microsoft dialects (like in the BBC micro) were much more exciting. So even then, Microsoft was not cool, they were bland.
MS-DOS came to be around the time of my first encounter with Unix. Unsurprisingly, MS-DOS had the non-coolness of a mud hut standing next to a stone castle.
The MS Flight Simulator was kind of cool, I'll grant them that.
They were big ugly boxes prices out of ordinary peoples reach, something intended for office use only. Office equipment tend to be very uncool.
Those key bindings date at least back to Apple Lisa (1981), and probably Xerox PARC before that. It is no surprise that they can be found in many different environments today.
Someone who believes The Register is a more authoritative source than Nature argues how Britannica is vastly more reliable than Wikipedia.
UK is a member of the EU, and as such is not allowed to restore the death penalty. Thus, death by torture as subject implies, is not an option, and jail time will have to do.
I really hate the pervasive meme that a crime is less of an issue if the damage is spread out over many victims, rather than concentrated on a few individuals. The economic damage done by a single large scale spam attack is large enough to fund several life saving operations. Just because you can't name the person who died doesn't make the crime any less severe.
And yes, the two years jail time is the upper limit, reserved to the worst cases. Most offenders will get far less than that, and first time offenders will most likely not even face jail time.
which does seem mild compared to the potential property damages that can be caused by this, depending on the number of addresses being sold.
...
/. that jail time should be reserved to violent (blue collar) crimes, and economic (white collar) crimes should only get fines. The economic crimes are often much more damaging, because the number of victims is so much higher, and the perpetrators are often quite used to (and willing to) taking economic risks. Serving jail time seem much more real.
What is the maximum penalty for breaking into a computer, stealing information, and in the process leave the computer unusable?
And I strongly disagree with the sentiment often heard here on
The notion also smack towards sending poor people in jail, and letting rich people go free, which is not exactly strengthening the fabric of society.
If the nodes are syscalls, they should all be leaves on the graph. And graph consisting of only leaf nodes would be pretty uninteresting.
> Monarchies, Feudalism, the Inquisition-era Catholic church, and Soviet Russia were all the
> biggest, most far-reaching institutions of their day.
Monarchies, the Catholic Church, and Soviet Russia were all leaded by a single all-powerful person, and how bad they sucked depended on how bad that person sucked.
Feudalism is not an institution, but a system.
> Thomas Jefferson and his cronies decided there was a better way.
Yes. They created institutions (in particular, the division of power) that meant that the US as a whole florished despite the long string of incompetent politicians (no, incompetent and crooked politicians is not a new invention) that lead it.
> I agree with him,
No, you misrepresenting him grossly, and arguing for the exact opposite of everything Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers build.
> so I'll take a handful of determined, skilled, like-minded individuals over an "institution" a any day.
That is Platon, not Jefferson, and the same idea in a modern context is called Fascism.
I don't think so, you use it a lot. Even though it provides no trust.
Identity is quite a useful concept in itself. And as a bonus, you can build trust upon it.
The new business model they have selected in Canada and Denmark (and probably other nations as well) is to make the state collect money for them through on "blank media", while still suing the ass off anyone who copy their recordings unauthorized, and granting themselves more and more state-like powers.
> this is a classic example of supply and demand.
No, it is only half the supply and demand model. The demand adjusts to the price, the supply does not. The supply and demand model describes an equilibrium price that would happen in a perfect market. Most recordings are covered by copyright, making their production state granted monopolies, which is as far from a perfect market as you can come.
Supply and demand can be used to model what happens with recordings whose copyright has expired.
I just bought a rucksack for 50DKK (~ US$ 9). Seems OK. My new vacuum cleaner did cost 250 DKK (~ US$ 45). A new garden table set (table, bench and chairs) was 500 DKK (~ US$ 90).
I doubt I could have purchased any of these items for the same amount 20 years ago.
The rucksack and vacuum cleaner were made in China, the garden table set was made in Vietnam.
Demographics is a useful scientific term, which does not need redefinition, and certainly not from "Corporate America".
The use of demographics in marketing certainly can use some refinement, and it is also being refined all the time. There is a tendency to overuse demographics because it is so easily measurable. In particular, the use of too rigid demographic boxes can make it difficult to recognize the market radical new products.
>> Here is a partial list of successful free software projects not on Sourceforge:
> No, that's basically it.
Uh, no, we could easily continue: FireFox, OpenOffice.org, KDE, R, and Perl are also successful software project not on SourceForge.
I suspect you managed to totally miss the point of the message you responded to.
I suspect the cost in lost productivity of treating your employees as potential enemies far outweigh the benefit in reduced risk of sabotage and theft. It might not even reduce the risk, people in general have a strange tendency of behaving the way you expect them to, so if you expect them to betray you, they are more likely to do so.