I also do not agree with the $5 billion law suit. When are Americans going to realize that suing over everything is not the answer?
I wholeheartedly agree with the suit. In a
society that's structurally founded on greed and egotism, only the fear of monetary loss will ever effect any change. It's the only answer.
They want to block obscenity, child pornography and material harmful to minors. The third category obviously encompasses the first two, so why do they even list them? Pure propaganda. Put the words "child pornography" in, and the opposition is silenced.
I understand that quality information can't be completely free. I'd rather have pay-for-use sites instead.
My experience is quite the contrary: whenever I have some question to research on the internet and I need high quality information, I invariably end up at a free site or FAQ put up by some enthusiastic volunteer or engaged academic. The commercial sites by their very nature target the broad masses and can't and don't want to bother them with high quality and necessarily complicated information.
When I had written and released one of the first filtering proxies, NoShit (now called webfilter), I got
a letter from a lawyer accusing me of contributory Copyright infringement (the proxy creates a derived work of a web page without authorization). Ignoring the dimwit solved the problem for me.
Since Siemens was behind WebWasher, I assume they had their lawyers check out those issues.
Ok, your credit card number is supposed to be secret, they tell you. But then they print it in clear text on the very card that you are supposed to present to countless people every day. What the fuck? And then they complain about high fraud rates?
Furthermore, well known algorithms exist to guess valid CC numbers, which can then be used for online or phone purchases. All the resulting fraud has to be absorbed by the merchants, meaning higher prices for everybody.
The only fair solution is this: credit card customers should have to pay higher prices; those of us who use safer payment schemes shouldn't be penalized.
Short of that, boycott merchants who accept credit cards, so that you are not forced to pay for the results of an ill-designed system.
Obviously the CC company doesn't care, since
it doesn't foot the bill: the merchant does. The
merchant also has to pay chargeback fees, so the CC company is happy. If you want to have charges pressed, go to the merchant: they are the victims of the fraud.
The beauty of this is that as soon as customers
finally realize that credit cards can't be used
online, the whole e-business joke is going down
the drain. Then we only have to teach people to always use WebWasher or Junkbuster and we'll have the internet back.
oil is used because you the consumer like your big suv vehicles, your plastic milk jugs, platic coke bottles, etc.
That's only half of the story. Consumers like that crap partly because it is being presented as cool by the advertising industry. Environmental propaganda in Europe presents these abominations as uncool, and consequently much less demand exists.
Producers are responsible for what they produce, they cannot eschew their responsibility by saying "but lots of people want to buy it!". Lots of people want to buy child porn.
In Germany, they have variable length area codes (all start with 0) and variable length phone numbers (can't start with 0). Every city has one and only one unique area code. Small cities have long area code and short phone numbers, big cities the opposite.
Compared to the mess here, (some large cities use several area codes, but it's still a local call, so you have to dial 10 digits, but if it's a little bit farther away, it's long distance and you have to dial 11 digits, but if it's real close, you dial only 7 digits), it's beautifully simple. And it is scalable, you never change anything.
The ones that are maintained are often those with some corporate backing.
The kernel, Debian, KDE, Apache, Gimp. Corporate backing? Ridiculous. Maybe they donate some hardware or money every once in a while to keep up good will, but that's about it. These crumbs off the corporate table are certainly not the reason that those projects are well maintained; they are a consequence of the project's success. Corporations are not needed at all, all that's needed is enthusiastic volunteers. This is also shown by the fact that corporations entered the game very late, when much of the hard work had already been done and the success of free software had become apparent.
Nothing is free, software costs developer time which is a limited resource.
Developers like to give up that limited resource on projects they find interesting, and that's the reason why there is a tremendous wealth of software that is completely free in every sense. "There is no such thing as a free lunch" has been proven wrong by the free software world over and over again.
you don't need to chase away all the application vendors to develop a free OS.
The more proprietary software is chased away, the freer the resulting system will be.
The ghetto-Linux analogy appears to be somewhat far-fetched. The Linux buildings are maintained rather nicely, and nobody needs to spend any money on them. Linux is where it is today not because of, but in spite of proprietary software. If you want the Linux world to deterioate into a proprietary mass market wasteland, why not start with a proprietary system to begin with? After all, what's the point of the whole exercise?
If I recall right, R and G are actually rather similar spectrally, with somewhat broad humps in the long end of the spectrum, while the B dye has a very different spectrum with a sharp peak near the short end of blue.
True, and the reason is that R and G come originally from the same gene, while the B gene sits on a different chromosome altogether. Most mammals have only two dies (they were active mostly at night) but at some point there was a mutation which duplicated the R gene and modified it slightly to turn it into G.
Maybe these greenish Slashdot separator bars should contain a tetrachromat-visible message in order to help Dr. Jordan in the search...
Not possible to specify a tetrachromat-only visible message in HTML, GIF, PNG etc nor to
display such a message on a common color monitor
since all of these are based on the RGB system
for trichromats.
This may be the one pitfall to the entire open source movement and any companies looking to make a profit off of it. IE: anything you produce, someone else will release for free and put you out of buisness.
This sure is a pitfull for any companies trying to make money off of proprietary software on Linux, which is good, but I don't see how it can be construed to be a pitfall to the entire open source movement? It is sort of the point behind the entire open source movement: free wins, proprietary loses.
. I have thought of writing commerical software for linux, but then the thought that someone will start an open source version the next day puts me off, and I don't bother.
That's good. I hadn't thought of it before, but apparently the mere threat of free software keeps the free-to-proprietary ratio high on Linux, which is of course what we all want.
So, what if Gore wins in the courts and the FL
legislature overrides them and simply appoints
republican electors? Apparently, they can legally
do that. Is there any state that went for Bush and that has a democrat
legislature? Maybe such a state could retaliate by
appointing democrat electors.
Your arguments support any pyramid scheme: it's not zero sum, since we can always bring more people on board and convince them to put their money into our scheme. It works, but only to a point. The money lost is always equal to the money won.
When you buy stocks, you lose money, just like when you buy entry to a pyramid scheme. When you sell stocks, you make money, just like when you cash out of a pyramid scheme. If stocks don't pay dividends, then the total sum of money lost is of course equal to the total sum of money won. In precisely that sense it's zero sum.
Trading dividend-less stocks is exactly like trading baseball cards.
True, some non-dividend stock prices move in accordance with their P/E ratios, but only because speculators have been trained to look at that number. Baseball trading cards of successful teams are also more expensive than those of loser teams. Still, the money you make on a non-dividend stock must come from other investors in a zero-sum fashion, since no money ever leaves the company.
Of course, stock prices went up because more and more people were tricked into thinking that stock prices would go up, so they put their money into stocks. If you want the rise to continue, you have to convince ever more people. It's exactly like any other pyramid scheme. The money has to come from somewhere.
Vaccination campaigns are the biggest success of the WHO, and arguably of the whole UN. Smallpox has been eradicated and polio will be next. There are always some lunatics who find fault with everything, there are also people who doubt evolution or the HIV - Aids connection or who still try to square the circle 100 years after if was proven impossible.
Clearly the WHO is one of the most effective and important global agencies we have.
Slashdot Mirror
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I wholeheartedly agree with the suit. In a society that's structurally founded on greed and egotism, only the fear of monetary loss will ever effect any change. It's the only answer.
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My experience is quite the contrary: whenever I have some question to research on the internet and I need high quality information, I invariably end up at a free site or FAQ put up by some enthusiastic volunteer or engaged academic. The commercial sites by their very nature target the broad masses and can't and don't want to bother them with high quality and necessarily complicated information.
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Since Siemens was behind WebWasher, I assume they had their lawyers check out those issues.
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Furthermore, well known algorithms exist to guess valid CC numbers, which can then be used for online or phone purchases. All the resulting fraud has to be absorbed by the merchants, meaning higher prices for everybody.
The only fair solution is this: credit card customers should have to pay higher prices; those of us who use safer payment schemes shouldn't be penalized.
Short of that, boycott merchants who accept credit cards, so that you are not forced to pay for the results of an ill-designed system.
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Oops, that means you belong in prison too, because you steal other people's time and poison their brains.
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That's only half of the story. Consumers like that crap partly because it is being presented as cool by the advertising industry. Environmental propaganda in Europe presents these abominations as uncool, and consequently much less demand exists.
Producers are responsible for what they produce, they cannot eschew their responsibility by saying "but lots of people want to buy it!". Lots of people want to buy child porn.
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Compared to the mess here, (some large cities use several area codes, but it's still a local call, so you have to dial 10 digits, but if it's a little bit farther away, it's long distance and you have to dial 11 digits, but if it's real close, you dial only 7 digits), it's beautifully simple. And it is scalable, you never change anything.
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The kernel, Debian, KDE, Apache, Gimp. Corporate backing? Ridiculous. Maybe they donate some hardware or money every once in a while to keep up good will, but that's about it. These crumbs off the corporate table are certainly not the reason that those projects are well maintained; they are a consequence of the project's success. Corporations are not needed at all, all that's needed is enthusiastic volunteers. This is also shown by the fact that corporations entered the game very late, when much of the hard work had already been done and the success of free software had become apparent.
Nothing is free, software costs developer time which is a limited resource.
Developers like to give up that limited resource on projects they find interesting, and that's the reason why there is a tremendous wealth of software that is completely free in every sense. "There is no such thing as a free lunch" has been proven wrong by the free software world over and over again.
you don't need to chase away all the application vendors to develop a free OS.
The more proprietary software is chased away, the freer the resulting system will be.
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True, and the reason is that R and G come originally from the same gene, while the B gene sits on a different chromosome altogether. Most mammals have only two dies (they were active mostly at night) but at some point there was a mutation which duplicated the R gene and modified it slightly to turn it into G.
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This sure is a pitfull for any companies trying to make money off of proprietary software on Linux, which is good, but I don't see how it can be construed to be a pitfall to the entire open source movement? It is sort of the point behind the entire open source movement: free wins, proprietary loses.
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That's good. I hadn't thought of it before, but apparently the mere threat of free software keeps the free-to-proprietary ratio high on Linux, which is of course what we all want.
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When you buy stocks, you lose money, just like when you buy entry to a pyramid scheme. When you sell stocks, you make money, just like when you cash out of a pyramid scheme. If stocks don't pay dividends, then the total sum of money lost is of course equal to the total sum of money won. In precisely that sense it's zero sum.
Trading dividend-less stocks is exactly like trading baseball cards.
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Only if the stock pays dividends. Many stocks nowadays don't, and they are therefore traded exactly like baseball cards, in a zero sum game.
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Clearly the WHO is one of the most effective and important global agencies we have.
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