It's not the cell phone I mind so much as Push To Talk. You're in a public place, you shouldn't be broadcasting your personal business to the whole area! Hole the damned thing up to your ear and don't force the rest of us to listen to it! also, keep your voice down, the person on the other end can hear you fine without your shouting.
Well, the idea of government it not to compete with private enterprise.
BZZZZ! Wrong!
The idea of government is to provide for the common welfare of the people. If the government has already collected the data for other purposes, then providing that data free (or at most the cost of providing it) should not be considered "competition". Our tax money has already paid for it; there is nothing that says some other private entity has the right to prevent the government from publishing the data just so that private entity can make a profit.
One thing that really irks me is that the United States IRS refuses to allow individuals to electronically submit their returns independent of a paid service. Their rationale, as stated on their web site, is that this would be unfair competition with private businesses (tax preparation companies). How can they consider my ability to submit an electronic return to be competition with a business that prepares the return (does all the calculations for you). The IRS should provide electronic blank forms that I can fill in and submit, whether I have to do the math myself or the IRS does the math for me is irrelevant to me.
The issues that this article brings up are similar regardless of whether commercial software or opensource software is used.
This article is really talking about standardization and consistency across government organizations -- a huge job.
The article is also about paying for the software ONE time and using it everywhere, instead of paying for EACH copy of it everywhere it is or might be used.
That does not necessarily require Open Source, but Open Source is much more likely to make this possible than current proprietary commercial solutions.
Instead of paying a license to use each copy of the software, you pay someone to write the software, and you pay someone (not necessarily the same person!) to support the software.
Eventually, we'll probably end up with a federally funded department that writes and/or supports these applications.
Local governments can use them for free and get support as needed (maybe with a small fee?).
If a local government wants something that does not already exist they can pay to have it created (so that department isn't flooded with unnecessary requests), then others can obtain it for free. It would be a lot cheaper than everyone paying for licenses to use commercial software, and would directly affect our taxes.
Re:Sad state of affairs...
on
Stealth Inflation
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Trespassing isn't illegal? What if someone didn't want their yard mowed? What if these guys mowed down some new plants that were still in a straggly weed-look-alike stage?
What if one of the guys hurts himself while performing this unsolicited mowing? Why should my homeowner's liability insurance rates have to go up when I didn't even want the guy there in the first place?
Speaking as someone who has recently been involuntarily annexed and is being *forced* and billed to have city water and sewer installed, I'd be damned pissed off if my water suddenly quit working and it would be 2-3 days before you would even send someone over.
Currently, if I lose power, I fire up my generator; I still have water. If the water pump has problems, I can usually get someone over that day (or the next at the latest) to fix it or replace it. With the city water system, I do not get that option. I don't even get a choice of who to call.
The reason why this was never really a problem before is that strobe lights are illegal on cars - it turn them into emergency response vehicles, and is against the regulations that concern lights on cars.
Where do you live? I think I'd like to move out there. Here in the eastern US, I regularly see strobe lights on school buses, construction vehicles, electric utility vehicles, concrete trucks, even some bicycles.
I hate them! The bright white flashflashflash...............flashflashflash of those things drags my eyes away from traffic to focus on the vehicle with them. I could easily see the vehicle even without the flashflashflash of the strobe (how in heck can anyone miss a large bright yellow school bus???); why do they have to have these dangerous things on them?
For safety, I thought that's what the yellow rotating lights, such as found on tow trucks and wide load escort vehicles, were for.
If it is really talking about performing software updates like Windows Update...
If you replace the patent's text "World Wide Web" with "Internet", this would be a good description of IBM's AIX FixDist tool. It was firmly entrenched in place when I first encountered it in 1998, so I'm sure it has been around considerably longer than that.
It was a program that you downloaded on your AIX system. When you ran it, it would check in with IBM's FTP site for the list of available fixes and maintenance packages, then give you the option to download them. It used FTP to perform the downloads, and installation was not automatically performed, but the main point is that it determined what was the latest updates available and made it easy to download them.
On the other hand, what the patent sems to describe to me is more like (again substituting "Network" for "World Wide Web") is NIS, which is a fairly old *NIX software that lets you maintain user's data and setings on a central server for distribution to new machines.
Linux is a *multiuser* operating system. One machine could handle tens or even hundreds or users.
You're fussing that the number of users registered exceeds the number of machines registered.
You should be fussing that the number of users is so low as to almost equal the number of machines. How many of these machines are effectively just single-user machines?
What I would like is the ability to run a cable (USB/ serial/ firewire/
ethernet/ whatever) out to my car and fire up some open source
diagnostic software on my computer to get some hints at what's
wrong *before* I haul it in to the service center.
I have auto-run turned off. I did it with tweakui which microsoft provided. I assume this means the CD will always be easily copyable on my computer with the extra effort of holding down the shift key. It sure was nice of microsoft to provide me with this nifty circumvention.
[MP3s] I agree with you there; hence my statement "most people's inability to detect any significant difference". Nevertheless, an MP3 is NOT an exact copy of a song on the CD. You can argue that there is no noticeable (to most people) difference, but you could also argue that a simple photocopy of a book has no noticeable difference;
after all, all the words are still there, almost undetectably less sharp, in the same order, in the same layout, with the same pagination. So the physical paper is larger than the original, so it is in a three-ring binder instead of glued with a cover, so what? The story is still readable, and with LESS data loss than an MP3 ripped from a CD.
[time and money] I disagree with you there. My argument is that the difference between duplicating books or cassettes is time, effort, and money. File sharing is no different than the other activities except that it is faster, easier, and costs less to do. Because it is faster, easier, and cheaper, it is done on a larger scale than earlier formats (text and cassettes). How does that make it any less acceptable than doing so with the earlier formats?
How does the increasing ability to do copy something make it increasingly less acceptable to do so?
MP3 is NOT CD quality. When you share MP3s, you get exact copies of the MP3, not of the CD.
Even with broadband, most people do not feel it is worth it to share or download true CD quality copies of music, such as the SHN (I thikn) format,
mainly due to the size of the files and most people's inability to detect any significant difference.
Regarding books, if I wanted to go to the expense and effort, I could make an exact copy of a book. It wouldn't be worth the effort to me, and in fact would be considerably cheaper and faster to order a legitimate copy from the bookstore. That does not change the fact that it is possible to make an exact copy.
Copying someone else's work isn't acceptable to ME. It's not acceptable to my university--it's the fastest route to get expelled that exists, and it certaintly isn't acceptable to the law.
Copying someone else's work will not questioned in any university, IF you properly cite it.
If all you did was copy others' works but properly cited and attributed them, you may not get a good grade, but you won't be expelled.
If you claim it as your own work, that is when you will be expelled.
Copying someone else's work has always been acceptable if for your own use.
Otherwise the entirety of copyright law would consit one sentence "Material may not be copied without the owner's express permission."
"Fair use" is an attempt to define circumstances when it is acceptible to copy others' works.
For me, I consider copying to be acceptable if it is for my (or my immediate family's) personal use.
I consider copying to not be acceptable in a commercial setting, where I am profiting (typically financially) from the copied works.
File sharing is a grey area in my definition.
I can see where it is possible to consider the downloaded file a profit, though I would not consider it that for my definitions above.
One big diference is that someone am not "spending" (sharing files I have) to obtain new files.
Someone does not have to share files in order to download more.
Someone shares the files they have either because they want to or because they don't realize they are doing so.
File sharing is no different than lending books out to friends with access to photocopiers, or cassette tapes to friends with dual-deck recorders, except that making the copy is easier and faster than ever before.
You even still have the cost of the blank media (hard drive vs. paper or cassette) and copying equipment (computer and internet vs. Xerox or dual-deck recorder).
Again, the only real difference is that it is faster and easier than ever before.
Since when? The SBC DSL service I dropped last year (because I moved out of state) used DHCP, not PPPoE. The Cable service I have at my new house (outside the DSL range) uses DHCP, not PPPoE. In fact, though I have had some form of broadband continuously since 1999, I have never used anything but DHCP to obtain an address.
PPPoE causes more problems than it's worth, especially with the reduced MTU size it sometimes require you to manually configure. Where do you get that this is an industry standard? DHCP is much better.
Now you can write essays that people can read, but that computer programs (so far) can make no sense of.
Someone intercepts your encrypted note and tries to decrypt it.
The decryption software may not recognize that it has successfully decrypted the message because so few of the words are in the dictionary, ANY dictionary, of ANY language.
Now you can get past a lot of filters. How many "words" (combinations of letters) must be defined just to filter out an intelligible variation of ahsolse, vriign, fgoagt, lbisean, suxael, itconrrseure, etc? The filters' dictionaries will have to quadruple or more just
to attempt to cover them all. And then what happens when one of those variations is a real
but competely unrelated word? Yet another false positive to show the lameness of filters.
If you do it right, your sentences can have multiple literal meanings. Make sure each word-scramble you use can be unscrambled into two different words.
If you get in trouble about something you wrote, just pick the other word and say that's what you meant and didn't realize it unscrambled into the other word at all!
While you're at it, throw in noise pollution restrictions. Especially car stereos and outdoor boom boxes. It drives me crazy that I can't find a single campground *anywhere* where I can go pitch a tent and relax without some group of drunken louts cranking up the music and drowning out the babbling brook, croaking frogs, whistling wind, etc.
If I could find a place to occasionally get away from all the artificial light AND noise, I'd be in heaven.
A little over a year ago, I bought a house on a nice quiet, DARK street. Earlier this year, the nearby city annexed this neighborhood. They've already started the process of installing street lights for our safety. I've got to wonder just how the people on this half-mile semi-circle back-street survived the past 40 years (the age of this neighborhod) if the darkness was so unsafe.
I bought the place *because* it was dark and I could see a lot of stars at night. At night, my bedroom is pitch black, and the sun wakes me up in the morning as it should. Within a few months, I am going to have to make a choice to either have a street light shining in my bedroom window or install more opaque blinds which would also block out the sun.
This is progress? This is better for me *how*?
Re:You can't copy right fact
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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The problem is that if someone was able to get in and replace that one image, what else were they able to do that you haven't discovered yet? Correcting this is not done by restoring the original image. You have to figure out how the hacker got in, figure out how to fix the hole, find and restore from a whole-system backup that is known to be good, and *then* apply the fix. You're probably looking at a minimum of six hours of work by a good sysadmin. During this time, your site is either down or still runing on a backup system that may or may not have also been compromised.
As for monetary hurt, did this result in lost business? Are you paid hourly or are you salaried? Do you get overtime? In the overall scheme of things, the dollar amount may not seem like much, but it can add up quickly.
Strange, my postman walks down my driveway to deliver packages that require a signature or are too large for the mailbox. My driveway is 200 feet long and the center is 15 feet lower than either end, so he literally does have to walk uphill both ways. Despite that, he is not out of breath (I usually am after walking it twice to haul the garbage to the curb) and has had a smile on his face every time.
You might talk to your local postmaster and see if there is some reason he doesn't knock on the door.
It could easily be scripted.
One script in a loop generate a random address on your own mail server and submit the form with the address and phone number.
Another script to process the email that comes in response and submit the URL from it.
If the admins of that site ever get it working right, the email volume from that might even approach the spam volume you already get. Since when does "a couple minutes" mean "in an hour or two"?
When and if it comes time to resell, the price increase is not worth it. If I can sell it for what the county says I can, then I will be paying capital gains taxes on the sale. Somehow, I don't see the increased sale price 15, 20, or 40 years down the road offsetting the steadily increasing property taxes, especially after capital gains taxes are subtracted.
Yes, if I had bought the house as an investment to sell for a profit without spending any time on it, then I would appreciate the increased resale value. Maybe if you would give me a loan I only have to pay back once I sell hte house, I could afford to do that.
Since I bought the house to live in, hopefully for a long time, I do not at all appreciate the increase in value. I have no intentions of selling, but the increasing taxes eat away more and more every year.
I would prefer to keep my taxes steady. When I sell the house, I should get back what I paid for it, plus any improvements, minus any damages and wear-and-tear. It's ridiculous the way everyone thinks they should be able to buy a house, use it with minimal maintenance, and then sell it for a big profit.
Property taxes are a great example.
I bought a house 5 years ago for $98,000.
Every year of those 5 years, the county has increased the supposed value of my house,
so I am paying more taxes on it.
The county now says it is worth $127,000,
and all I have done to it is use it.
Not one single improvement has been made to it.
The problem is that other people increased the
value of their homes nearby, or some businesses were built nearby, and that caused houses in my area to sell for more.
I consider this completely unreasonable, and
very close to stealing. These other people may not
have any intention to cause me harm, but they do so anyway. It makes it very hard to keep to a budget when these other people's activities cause my supposedly 'fixed' costs to steadily increase
When my son was born, I setup an email address and web page for him. The web page to announce his birth, and the email address so people could send him notes to read later in life.
The only place his email address is posted is on his web page. His birthdate is on the same page, so it is obvious he not even two years old yet.
He already receives spam for credit cards, porn, penis enlargers, etc.
I would love to sue these spammers, if only for the time I spend keeping my son's mailbox clean of this junk.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the cell phone I mind so much as Push To Talk. You're in a public place, you shouldn't be broadcasting your personal business to the whole area! Hole the damned thing up to your ear and don't force the rest of us to listen to it! also, keep your voice down, the person on the other end can hear you fine without your shouting.
BZZZZ! Wrong!
The idea of government is to provide for the common welfare of the people. If the government has already collected the data for other purposes, then providing that data free (or at most the cost of providing it) should not be considered "competition". Our tax money has already paid for it; there is nothing that says some other private entity has the right to prevent the government from publishing the data just so that private entity can make a profit.
One thing that really irks me is that the United States IRS refuses to allow individuals to electronically submit their returns independent of a paid service. Their rationale, as stated on their web site, is that this would be unfair competition with private businesses (tax preparation companies). How can they consider my ability to submit an electronic return to be competition with a business that prepares the return (does all the calculations for you). The IRS should provide electronic blank forms that I can fill in and submit, whether I have to do the math myself or the IRS does the math for me is irrelevant to me.
The article is also about paying for the software ONE time and using it everywhere, instead of paying for EACH copy of it everywhere it is or might be used.
That does not necessarily require Open Source, but Open Source is much more likely to make this possible than current proprietary commercial solutions.
Instead of paying a license to use each copy of the software, you pay someone to write the software, and you pay someone (not necessarily the same person!) to support the software.
Eventually, we'll probably end up with a federally funded department that writes and/or supports these applications. Local governments can use them for free and get support as needed (maybe with a small fee?). If a local government wants something that does not already exist they can pay to have it created (so that department isn't flooded with unnecessary requests), then others can obtain it for free. It would be a lot cheaper than everyone paying for licenses to use commercial software, and would directly affect our taxes.
What if one of the guys hurts himself while performing this unsolicited mowing? Why should my homeowner's liability insurance rates have to go up when I didn't even want the guy there in the first place?
At the very least, they should ask first.
Currently, if I lose power, I fire up my generator; I still have water. If the water pump has problems, I can usually get someone over that day (or the next at the latest) to fix it or replace it. With the city water system, I do not get that option. I don't even get a choice of who to call.
Where do you live? I think I'd like to move out there. Here in the eastern US, I regularly see strobe lights on school buses, construction vehicles, electric utility vehicles, concrete trucks, even some bicycles.
I hate them! The bright white flashflashflash...............flashflashflash of those things drags my eyes away from traffic to focus on the vehicle with them. I could easily see the vehicle even without the flashflashflash of the strobe (how in heck can anyone miss a large bright yellow school bus???); why do they have to have these dangerous things on them?
For safety, I thought that's what the yellow rotating lights, such as found on tow trucks and wide load escort vehicles, were for.
If you replace the patent's text "World Wide Web" with "Internet", this would be a good description of IBM's AIX FixDist tool. It was firmly entrenched in place when I first encountered it in 1998, so I'm sure it has been around considerably longer than that.
It was a program that you downloaded on your AIX system. When you ran it, it would check in with IBM's FTP site for the list of available fixes and maintenance packages, then give you the option to download them. It used FTP to perform the downloads, and installation was not automatically performed, but the main point is that it determined what was the latest updates available and made it easy to download them.
On the other hand, what the patent sems to describe to me is more like (again substituting "Network" for "World Wide Web") is NIS, which is a fairly old *NIX software that lets you maintain user's data and setings on a central server for distribution to new machines.
So what do you send if you want the recipient to receive just the text 'P'?
Linux is a *multiuser* operating system. One machine could handle tens or even hundreds or users. You're fussing that the number of users registered exceeds the number of machines registered. You should be fussing that the number of users is so low as to almost equal the number of machines. How many of these machines are effectively just single-user machines?
What I would like is the ability to run a cable (USB/ serial/ firewire/ ethernet/ whatever) out to my car and fire up some open source diagnostic software on my computer to get some hints at what's wrong *before* I haul it in to the service center.
I have auto-run turned off. I did it with tweakui which microsoft provided. I assume this means the CD will always be easily copyable on my computer with the extra effort of holding down the shift key. It sure was nice of microsoft to provide me with this nifty circumvention.
[time and money] I disagree with you there. My argument is that the difference between duplicating books or cassettes is time, effort, and money. File sharing is no different than the other activities except that it is faster, easier, and costs less to do. Because it is faster, easier, and cheaper, it is done on a larger scale than earlier formats (text and cassettes). How does that make it any less acceptable than doing so with the earlier formats?
How does the increasing ability to do copy something make it increasingly less acceptable to do so?
Regarding books, if I wanted to go to the expense and effort, I could make an exact copy of a book. It wouldn't be worth the effort to me, and in fact would be considerably cheaper and faster to order a legitimate copy from the bookstore. That does not change the fact that it is possible to make an exact copy.
Copying someone else's work will not questioned in any university, IF you properly cite it. If all you did was copy others' works but properly cited and attributed them, you may not get a good grade, but you won't be expelled. If you claim it as your own work, that is when you will be expelled.
Copying someone else's work has always been acceptable if for your own use. Otherwise the entirety of copyright law would consit one sentence "Material may not be copied without the owner's express permission." "Fair use" is an attempt to define circumstances when it is acceptible to copy others' works.
For me, I consider copying to be acceptable if it is for my (or my immediate family's) personal use. I consider copying to not be acceptable in a commercial setting, where I am profiting (typically financially) from the copied works.
File sharing is a grey area in my definition. I can see where it is possible to consider the downloaded file a profit, though I would not consider it that for my definitions above. One big diference is that someone am not "spending" (sharing files I have) to obtain new files. Someone does not have to share files in order to download more. Someone shares the files they have either because they want to or because they don't realize they are doing so.
File sharing is no different than lending books out to friends with access to photocopiers, or cassette tapes to friends with dual-deck recorders, except that making the copy is easier and faster than ever before. You even still have the cost of the blank media (hard drive vs. paper or cassette) and copying equipment (computer and internet vs. Xerox or dual-deck recorder). Again, the only real difference is that it is faster and easier than ever before.
Since when? The SBC DSL service I dropped last year (because I moved out of state) used DHCP, not PPPoE. The Cable service I have at my new house (outside the DSL range) uses DHCP, not PPPoE. In fact, though I have had some form of broadband continuously since 1999, I have never used anything but DHCP to obtain an address.
PPPoE causes more problems than it's worth, especially with the reduced MTU size it sometimes require you to manually configure. Where do you get that this is an industry standard? DHCP is much better.
Now you can write essays that people can read, but that computer programs (so far) can make no sense of. Someone intercepts your encrypted note and tries to decrypt it. The decryption software may not recognize that it has successfully decrypted the message because so few of the words are in the dictionary, ANY dictionary, of ANY language.
Now you can get past a lot of filters. How many "words" (combinations of letters) must be defined just to filter out an intelligible variation of ahsolse, vriign, fgoagt, lbisean, suxael, itconrrseure, etc? The filters' dictionaries will have to quadruple or more just to attempt to cover them all. And then what happens when one of those variations is a real but competely unrelated word? Yet another false positive to show the lameness of filters.
If you do it right, your sentences can have multiple literal meanings. Make sure each word-scramble you use can be unscrambled into two different words. If you get in trouble about something you wrote, just pick the other word and say that's what you meant and didn't realize it unscrambled into the other word at all!
Okay, my imagination has run dry for the moment.
If I could find a place to occasionally get away from all the artificial light AND noise, I'd be in heaven.
I bought the place *because* it was dark and I could see a lot of stars at night. At night, my bedroom is pitch black, and the sun wakes me up in the morning as it should. Within a few months, I am going to have to make a choice to either have a street light shining in my bedroom window or install more opaque blinds which would also block out the sun.
This is progress? This is better for me *how*?
There you can search or browse through all editions of the Federal Register from 1994 to now. You can also:
Access to the information is free. If you want an official hardcopy version, you have to pay for it.
As for monetary hurt, did this result in lost business? Are you paid hourly or are you salaried? Do you get overtime? In the overall scheme of things, the dollar amount may not seem like much, but it can add up quickly.
You might talk to your local postmaster and see if there is some reason he doesn't knock on the door.
If the admins of that site ever get it working right, the email volume from that might even approach the spam volume you already get. Since when does "a couple minutes" mean "in an hour or two"?
Yes, if I had bought the house as an investment to sell for a profit without spending any time on it, then I would appreciate the increased resale value. Maybe if you would give me a loan I only have to pay back once I sell hte house, I could afford to do that.
Since I bought the house to live in, hopefully for a long time, I do not at all appreciate the increase in value. I have no intentions of selling, but the increasing taxes eat away more and more every year.
I would prefer to keep my taxes steady. When I sell the house, I should get back what I paid for it, plus any improvements, minus any damages and wear-and-tear. It's ridiculous the way everyone thinks they should be able to buy a house, use it with minimal maintenance, and then sell it for a big profit.
The problem is that other people increased the value of their homes nearby, or some businesses were built nearby, and that caused houses in my area to sell for more.
I consider this completely unreasonable, and very close to stealing. These other people may not have any intention to cause me harm, but they do so anyway. It makes it very hard to keep to a budget when these other people's activities cause my supposedly 'fixed' costs to steadily increase
The only place his email address is posted is on his web page. His birthdate is on the same page, so it is obvious he not even two years old yet.
He already receives spam for credit cards, porn, penis enlargers, etc.
I would love to sue these spammers, if only for the time I spend keeping my son's mailbox clean of this junk.