Unfortunately, this is not just one case. Though it is near the extreme end in senseless greed. And most similar cases aren't as well financed or pick such prominent targets.
This is but one of many similar cases. Most you never hear of. Then there's the SLAPP cases. A different category, but another category of cases that prove the same point.
Civil law is not about justice. I don't know if it ever was, but it clearly isn't now. It's not clear that criminal law is about justice either, but you can find more examples of cases where justice appears to have been done, or at least moderately approximated, in criminal law. You can also find many cases, however, where justice is clearly not the aim.
Lawyers are interested primarily in following official court procedures to achieve their chosen goals. Sometimes justice may result, but it's rarely the intent. This, unfortunately, applies to DAs as much as to other lawyers.
E.g., if justice were the intent, then plea bargaining would never be used. That is purely a coercive tactic to scare a possibly innocent person into asserting that they are guilty of a minor crime in order to escape having to prove that they aren't guilty of a major crime. It saves the DA a lot of work, but I can't think that it ever serves justice.
You do realize that so far Darl has has made multiple millions off this? And that nobody has shown any signs of coercing him into paying it back? Last I heard it was asserted that he had transferred some of his real estate into his wife's name so that it would be harder to reclaim, but thus far that has been an action that hasn't been necessary. (OTOH, I don't know how long such an action can be reverted.)
I'm sure it's been stressful, but no more running a protection racket. And if he can manage to finagle things properly the results will be legally his.
Nobody's going to buy SCOX.pk. They would also be buying the liabilities in the IBM lawsuit, and probably the debt to Novell. Particular assets might be bought. But SCOX.pk doesn't seem to own very much of value to anyone. (I think their estimates of what the assets are worth is grossly inflated. If anyone pays that much it's probably worth investigating why.)
In particular, they can't transfer their ownership in rights to System V without Novell's consent. (And those rights are already very limited.) This basically means that they can't sell the right to sell working versions of the code that they've added to System V, as that requires the right to also sell System V which Novell has to approve the transfer of. (And which SCOX.pk is also likely to lose the right to. I'm sure this is sufficient grounds for Novell to cancel their agency agreement with SCOX.)
The SCOX.pk lawsuit has lost all credibility. Even though I do believe that MS once gave them money to pay for this lawsuit (at whose initiative is a good question), I don't believe that this is still of any value to MS, and so more money will be forthcoming only if they have some incriminating evidence on MS.
Not likely. I think MS knew what kind of slime they were dealing with. Which argues that they initiative came from SCOX. (But it's a ways short of proof.)
And even after all that, those they have injured will not have been made whole.
The law is unjustly lenient in cases like this precisely because it is being abused by lawyers, and most laws are written by lawyers. I don't know anyone else who could write them, but it creates an inherent bias in favor of those acts that lawyers perform and others don't. And in favor of those acts that people who hire lawyers perform and others don't.
I'm willing to consider arguments that this is not a fair summation of this aspect of the legal system, but I've never heard any that were convincing.
Not all places are that bad. I worked at the same job for around 35 years, and hearing the horror stories has made me quite glad I never got quite disgusted enough to look for greener pastures. But it all depends on management. It really does. I don't know what they do...I only know that I'd be a really bad manager... but the personality of the manager makes possibly even more difference than whether or not they are competent.
The traditional answer is "experience". OTOH, I never did come up with a decent way to answer. I did a good job, and people appeared to be satisfied with each piece of work after it was completed, but I could never learn to guess at the start of a project how long it would take.
Some things that initially looked easy were so difficult that I never did finish them. Some that looked incredibly hard turned out to be a snap. And I never did learn to tell the difference.
Yeah, but they won't switch off MS software. Give them a workable answer and they reject it. It's *your* fault the software they chose won't work. (If you chose it for them, this may be a fair assessment. Otherwise, not.)
I campaigned for it seemed like a decade to get Linux used instead of MSWind. Finally I retired to avoid a newer and more restrictive EULA. But I've never had a Linux box be as flaky as the MSWind boxes at work. (And actually the Macs before MSWind95 weren't that bad either, even though they weren't as stable as Linux. [Well, to be fair Linux wasn't all that stable then either.])
OTOH, I admit that when I first started using Linux the applications just weren't there. I ended up using Netscape's HTML editor to compose word processing documents for awhile. (I never have made my peace with Tex. And groff was so much more difficult that either nroff or troff [or possibly so ill-documented compared with] that I never used it.) But I knew better than to even start pushing for Linux until OpenOffice (NOT StarOffice) appeared. Didn't make any difference. They wouldn't even look at it. What did make a difference was Oracle. Which was totally stupid. We had no need for Oracle. It was a hideously expensive mistake. (Fortunately they never admitted it was a mistake, or they might have blamed Linux.) We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a contractor who never even delivered a working dialog. And this was a contractor recommended by Oracle! I was really glad not be be even peripherally involved with that mess, Linux OS or no Linux OS. As a follow on, though, we hired a different contractor who actually knew how to do Oracle development. (They do have some slick GUI tools.) But MySQL or PostGreSQL would have been more than we needed. SQLite would probably have sufficed. Not that anyone asked me. (I was miffed and relieved at the same time.)
I can't find a backup medium that people agree is reliable. Removable disks is a reasonable choice for the amount of data I'm currently working with, but... well, perhaps their capacity will continue growing.
N.B.: Removable disks is definitely not a long term solution, but it's a good fast short term answer. And 100GB is small compared to a hard disk. If there is a good answer, I don't know it.
Don't think so. It didn't the last time I checked the official definition. When I checked it was anyone who hadn't been gainfully employed during the last ???? days. Probably about 3 mo.s, but it's been so long I can't remember. This means that lots of people who have, e.g., medical problems, aren't counted even after they recover. And it means that anyone who, for whatever reason, was unable to find a job isn't counted. You can speculate about the reasons, but that isn't a part of the figuring. (Reasonable. They don't have that information.) But the name that they give the figure is intentionally misleading.
Well, I don't think it was that early. Whenever X started allowing you to switch between logins via function keys, though, would seem to qualify. That was quite awhile ago.
OTOH, the current "Switch User" (KDE menu) is a *lot* slicker. And it's much more recent. A few years old, though, but I don't think decades.
A valid point, but if the software is closed, then one can't rely on it continuing to support open standards.
I agree that open standard implementation is what's important and also that frequently open source applications are slow to arrive. But when they do arrive one can count on them continuing to support the open standard as long as it has anyone interested in it. With close source software this is dependent on the good will of the company implementing it. And that's subject to change without notice.
That's what they told me when I complained, but that's not what this news story indicates:
as Negroponte shifts the agenda away from software freedom and towards Windows.
Also that's not what other reports that I've seen have indicated. Possibly MS is just managing all the news...or possibly OLPC spokesmen are lying to people who complain.
Russia, nor any other country, was ever communist. Russia had a government that was a cross between Leninism and Ivan the Terrible. China... well, it seems different, but it sure isn't communist.
There were very good reasons why Marx said that communism had to FOLLOW the industrial revolution. We haven't yet reached the economy that Marx posited communism as being able to work in. (I think he was wrong, but don't blame him for dictatorships that owe more to the Russian Tsars and the Chinese Emperors.)
The actual communist communities lie in the past. They were all small and isolated communities. They usually had a very strong religious theme. (Attempts to recreate them in the '60s were nearly universal failures...but then so were the earlier communities. Oneida is an exception, but it evolved away from communism as it grew larger, and as the second generation succeeded the first.)
Marx was attempting to resolve what should happen when the wealth generated by machines far surpassed that generated by individual work. Ask yourself "What will we do when almost all labor is automated?" to get an idea of the problem he was trying to solve. And try to come up with a workable answer. Marx didn't even really clearly see the problem, but he caught a dim outline of it. It's a lot closer now, and we still don't have a workable answer.
(Warning: It's been around 4 decades since I read Das Kapital, so I may be remembering things incorrectly, but that's the problem I remember him addressing. And failing to either see clearly or to solve.)
Sorry, but open standards is the correct priority. The problem is that closed source software never supports open standards...at least not reliably. One version may, but then after the next patch update it won't, and you upgraded without noticing.
So even though open standards is the correct priority, they require open source software to be ensured.
Sorry, but there are actually reasons why, e.g., art departments traditionally use Macs. Doesn't mean that you can't use anything else, but there are reasons.
OTOH, there are companies that prescribe that even the art departments use MSWind. Their prerogative.
I think that Vietnam will find that some of their departments are less efficient using Linux. Most may well be better, but some will be less efficient. Others will require more expensive software to properly do their job under Linux (and may require particular distributions for the necessary software to be supported). But by and large I think that it's a reasonable and justifiable decision. They just ought to allow justified exceptions. (But again, that's an efficiency consideration.)
On the average, though, I believe that using open standards will pay off in only a very few years. Given that, Linux is a reasonable standard. Having a single supported OS should act to minimize support costs, since it's one that can actually *BE* supported. BSD would have been another choice, but it has less end-user support, while Linux has a great deal of server support. And there are other choices that would have been plausible...but none of them have the support of either Linux or BSD. (I really can't consider MSWind as acceptable to anyone who actually reads their EULA. Unfortunately, the same has recently become true of the Mac. I think I've bought my last Apple product.)
So given that they have decided to standardize, to my mind Linux is a reasonable choice. And standardizing has lots of arguments in it's favor...and only a few against it. Those few can be very powerful in special cases, however, and that should be allowed for. (Probably it will. This is a news story, and as such certain details were probably stripped. Note that the article didn't say that no commercial software would be allowed.)
Sorry, but K Rowling deserves her wealth. She wrote those books and sold them. Copyright protecting her is copyright acting as it should. (Possibly it should only last for 17 years, but will the Harry Potter books be popular then anyway? I wouldn't bet on it.)
Queen Elizabeth is a bit less deserving. (Most of her power and wealth are inherited.) Still, she appears to have been an excellent manager of her family's fortunes, and she doesn't appear to have done poorly by the country, either. (Do remember her limited political power.) As such she should be paid as well as any other good manager. (Unfortunately, it the bad ones that are usually paid the most. Who sets the salaries...)
Augustus wasn't all that benevolent. And Nero wasn't all that bad (unless you were a christian, and thus a designated scapegoat). Or prominent in his circle of acquaintances. (He may or may not have poisoned his mother, but she deserved it. She was much worse than he was.) There's a rumor that Nero appointed his horse to the Senate, but this may have improved the average intelligence. (More seriously, he may have been making a point over who held power. And it may well have been total fabrication. I couldn't find any evidence.)
Unfortunately, it's the wrong politicians that usually get shot. (Not always, though. Huey Long was reasonable. And Wallace. Reagan was just senile and malleable...the one they should have shot was his handler. JFK was dangerous!!! 90 seconds from nuclear war was just crazy! But I liked most of what he did [domestically]. And 52 soldiers in VietNam wasn't unreasonable.)
Slashdot Mirror
If you just avoid anything that horrible trash, you're probably safe.
Unfortunately, this is not just one case. Though it is near the extreme end in senseless greed. And most similar cases aren't as well financed or pick such prominent targets.
This is but one of many similar cases. Most you never hear of. Then there's the SLAPP cases. A different category, but another category of cases that prove the same point.
Civil law is not about justice. I don't know if it ever was, but it clearly isn't now. It's not clear that criminal law is about justice either, but you can find more examples of cases where justice appears to have been done, or at least moderately approximated, in criminal law. You can also find many cases, however, where justice is clearly not the aim.
Lawyers are interested primarily in following official court procedures to achieve their chosen goals. Sometimes justice may result, but it's rarely the intent. This, unfortunately, applies to DAs as much as to other lawyers.
E.g., if justice were the intent, then plea bargaining would never be used. That is purely a coercive tactic to scare a possibly innocent person into asserting that they are guilty of a minor crime in order to escape having to prove that they aren't guilty of a major crime. It saves the DA a lot of work, but I can't think that it ever serves justice.
You do realize that so far Darl has has made multiple millions off this? And that nobody has shown any signs of coercing him into paying it back? Last I heard it was asserted that he had transferred some of his real estate into his wife's name so that it would be harder to reclaim, but thus far that has been an action that hasn't been necessary. (OTOH, I don't know how long such an action can be reverted.)
I'm sure it's been stressful, but no more running a protection racket. And if he can manage to finagle things properly the results will be legally his.
Nobody's going to buy SCOX.pk. They would also be buying the liabilities in the IBM lawsuit, and probably the debt to Novell. Particular assets might be bought. But SCOX.pk doesn't seem to own very much of value to anyone. (I think their estimates of what the assets are worth is grossly inflated. If anyone pays that much it's probably worth investigating why.)
In particular, they can't transfer their ownership in rights to System V without Novell's consent. (And those rights are already very limited.) This basically means that they can't sell the right to sell working versions of the code that they've added to System V, as that requires the right to also sell System V which Novell has to approve the transfer of. (And which SCOX.pk is also likely to lose the right to. I'm sure this is sufficient grounds for Novell to cancel their agency agreement with SCOX.)
The SCOX.pk lawsuit has lost all credibility. Even though I do believe that MS once gave them money to pay for this lawsuit (at whose initiative is a good question), I don't believe that this is still of any value to MS, and so more money will be forthcoming only if they have some incriminating evidence on MS.
Not likely. I think MS knew what kind of slime they were dealing with. Which argues that they initiative came from SCOX. (But it's a ways short of proof.)
And even after all that, those they have injured will not have been made whole.
The law is unjustly lenient in cases like this precisely because it is being abused by lawyers, and most laws are written by lawyers. I don't know anyone else who could write them, but it creates an inherent bias in favor of those acts that lawyers perform and others don't. And in favor of those acts that people who hire lawyers perform and others don't.
I'm willing to consider arguments that this is not a fair summation of this aspect of the legal system, but I've never heard any that were convincing.
Not all places are that bad. I worked at the same job for around 35 years, and hearing the horror stories has made me quite glad I never got quite disgusted enough to look for greener pastures. But it all depends on management. It really does. I don't know what they do...I only know that I'd be a really bad manager... but the personality of the manager makes possibly even more difference than whether or not they are competent.
But would I *want* to work for you?
You have clearly stated that you don't think it fair to pay value for service received.
The traditional answer is "experience". OTOH, I never did come up with a decent way to answer. I did a good job, and people appeared to be satisfied with each piece of work after it was completed, but I could never learn to guess at the start of a project how long it would take.
Some things that initially looked easy were so difficult that I never did finish them. Some that looked incredibly hard turned out to be a snap. And I never did learn to tell the difference.
Yeah, but they won't switch off MS software. Give them a workable answer and they reject it. It's *your* fault the software they chose won't work. (If you chose it for them, this may be a fair assessment. Otherwise, not.)
I campaigned for it seemed like a decade to get Linux used instead of MSWind. Finally I retired to avoid a newer and more restrictive EULA. But I've never had a Linux box be as flaky as the MSWind boxes at work. (And actually the Macs before MSWind95 weren't that bad either, even though they weren't as stable as Linux. [Well, to be fair Linux wasn't all that stable then either.])
OTOH, I admit that when I first started using Linux the applications just weren't there. I ended up using Netscape's HTML editor to compose word processing documents for awhile. (I never have made my peace with Tex. And groff was so much more difficult that either nroff or troff [or possibly so ill-documented compared with] that I never used it.) But I knew better than to even start pushing for Linux until OpenOffice (NOT StarOffice) appeared. Didn't make any difference. They wouldn't even look at it. What did make a difference was Oracle. Which was totally stupid. We had no need for Oracle. It was a hideously expensive mistake. (Fortunately they never admitted it was a mistake, or they might have blamed Linux.) We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a contractor who never even delivered a working dialog. And this was a contractor recommended by Oracle! I was really glad not be be even peripherally involved with that mess, Linux OS or no Linux OS. As a follow on, though, we hired a different contractor who actually knew how to do Oracle development. (They do have some slick GUI tools.) But MySQL or PostGreSQL would have been more than we needed. SQLite would probably have sufficed. Not that anyone asked me. (I was miffed and relieved at the same time.)
I can't find a backup medium that people agree is reliable. Removable disks is a reasonable choice for the amount of data I'm currently working with, but... well, perhaps their capacity will continue growing.
N.B.: Removable disks is definitely not a long term solution, but it's a good fast short term answer. And 100GB is small compared to a hard disk. If there is a good answer, I don't know it.
The 10% are the fraction that were willing to admit to the problem. Consider what the actual number probably was.
(Yes, it can only be a wild ass guess, but if 10% admit a problem, I'd guess the real percentage is closer to 30%.)
VERY few. Sigh. Even after a bad experience, very few will learn. And comments about how necessary it is aren't passed onwards by supervisors.
Memos to files are your friends.
Don't think so. It didn't the last time I checked the official definition. When I checked it was anyone who hadn't been gainfully employed during the last ???? days. Probably about 3 mo.s, but it's been so long I can't remember. This means that lots of people who have, e.g., medical problems, aren't counted even after they recover. And it means that anyone who, for whatever reason, was unable to find a job isn't counted. You can speculate about the reasons, but that isn't a part of the figuring. (Reasonable. They don't have that information.) But the name that they give the figure is intentionally misleading.
Well, I don't think it was that early. Whenever X started allowing you to switch between logins via function keys, though, would seem to qualify. That was quite awhile ago.
OTOH, the current "Switch User" (KDE menu) is a *lot* slicker. And it's much more recent. A few years old, though, but I don't think decades.
It won't be a tattoo, it'll be an injected RFID.
And it wasn't prophecy as much as an insight into the nature of governments and those who run them.
A valid point, but if the software is closed, then one can't rely on it continuing to support open standards.
I agree that open standard implementation is what's important and also that frequently open source applications are slow to arrive. But when they do arrive one can count on them continuing to support the open standard as long as it has anyone interested in it. With close source software this is dependent on the good will of the company implementing it. And that's subject to change without notice.
That's what they told me when I complained, but that's not what this news story indicates:
as Negroponte shifts the agenda away from software freedom and towards Windows.
Also that's not what other reports that I've seen have indicated. Possibly MS is just managing all the news...or possibly OLPC spokesmen are lying to people who complain.
Russia, nor any other country, was ever communist. Russia had a government that was a cross between Leninism and Ivan the Terrible. China ... well, it seems different, but it sure isn't communist.
There were very good reasons why Marx said that communism had to FOLLOW the industrial revolution. We haven't yet reached the economy that Marx posited communism as being able to work in. (I think he was wrong, but don't blame him for dictatorships that owe more to the Russian Tsars and the Chinese Emperors.)
The actual communist communities lie in the past. They were all small and isolated communities. They usually had a very strong religious theme. (Attempts to recreate them in the '60s were nearly universal failures...but then so were the earlier communities. Oneida is an exception, but it evolved away from communism as it grew larger, and as the second generation succeeded the first.)
Marx was attempting to resolve what should happen when the wealth generated by machines far surpassed that generated by individual work. Ask yourself "What will we do when almost all labor is automated?" to get an idea of the problem he was trying to solve. And try to come up with a workable answer. Marx didn't even really clearly see the problem, but he caught a dim outline of it. It's a lot closer now, and we still don't have a workable answer.
(Warning: It's been around 4 decades since I read Das Kapital, so I may be remembering things incorrectly, but that's the problem I remember him addressing. And failing to either see clearly or to solve.)
Sorry, but open standards is the correct priority. The problem is that closed source software never supports open standards...at least not reliably. One version may, but then after the next patch update it won't, and you upgraded without noticing.
So even though open standards is the correct priority, they require open source software to be ensured.
Sorry, but there are actually reasons why, e.g., art departments traditionally use Macs. Doesn't mean that you can't use anything else, but there are reasons.
OTOH, there are companies that prescribe that even the art departments use MSWind. Their prerogative.
I think that Vietnam will find that some of their departments are less efficient using Linux. Most may well be better, but some will be less efficient. Others will require more expensive software to properly do their job under Linux (and may require particular distributions for the necessary software to be supported). But by and large I think that it's a reasonable and justifiable decision. They just ought to allow justified exceptions. (But again, that's an efficiency consideration.)
On the average, though, I believe that using open standards will pay off in only a very few years. Given that, Linux is a reasonable standard. Having a single supported OS should act to minimize support costs, since it's one that can actually *BE* supported. BSD would have been another choice, but it has less end-user support, while Linux has a great deal of server support. And there are other choices that would have been plausible...but none of them have the support of either Linux or BSD. (I really can't consider MSWind as acceptable to anyone who actually reads their EULA. Unfortunately, the same has recently become true of the Mac. I think I've bought my last Apple product.)
So given that they have decided to standardize, to my mind Linux is a reasonable choice. And standardizing has lots of arguments in it's favor...and only a few against it. Those few can be very powerful in special cases, however, and that should be allowed for. (Probably it will. This is a news story, and as such certain details were probably stripped. Note that the article didn't say that no commercial software would be allowed.)
Sorry, but K Rowling deserves her wealth. She wrote those books and sold them. Copyright protecting her is copyright acting as it should. (Possibly it should only last for 17 years, but will the Harry Potter books be popular then anyway? I wouldn't bet on it.)
Queen Elizabeth is a bit less deserving. (Most of her power and wealth are inherited.) Still, she appears to have been an excellent manager of her family's fortunes, and she doesn't appear to have done poorly by the country, either. (Do remember her limited political power.) As such she should be paid as well as any other good manager. (Unfortunately, it the bad ones that are usually paid the most. Who sets the salaries...)
Sorry. Canceling bad moderation.
Augustus wasn't all that benevolent. And Nero wasn't all that bad (unless you were a christian, and thus a designated scapegoat). Or prominent in his circle of acquaintances. (He may or may not have poisoned his mother, but she deserved it. She was much worse than he was.) There's a rumor that Nero appointed his horse to the Senate, but this may have improved the average intelligence. (More seriously, he may have been making a point over who held power. And it may well have been total fabrication. I couldn't find any evidence.)
And you left out Caligula.
Unfortunately, it's the wrong politicians that usually get shot. (Not always, though. Huey Long was reasonable. And Wallace. Reagan was just senile and malleable...the one they should have shot was his handler. JFK was dangerous!!! 90 seconds from nuclear war was just crazy! But I liked most of what he did [domestically]. And 52 soldiers in VietNam wasn't unreasonable.)