That was, indeed, the saying. There's no evidence that it was particularly true, however, and his rephrasing of it appears to more accurately describe the situation. (Yes, I've read the occasional newspaper stories. I've also studied data summaries reported by the Census. And I was employed professionally as a statistician. [I didn't do any statistical tests on the data testing this particular conjecture...but I have a rough feel for how it would have come out in the 1960 census, which is the one I worked with.])
In so far as I am aware of it, the data support more rich people having large famlies than poor people. This is not what common mythology dictates, but that's created by newspapers, who generally have an ax to grind. (E.g., in almost all cases reported in the news, the poor family is living on communally supplied funding. Rich people don't do this, so they don't raise the same degree of outrage. Occasional outrage helps sell papers.)
What's embarassing is whey it's YOU who has misdiagnosed the hardware problem. Last week my network connection was down for a couple of days, and I was quite upset with the provider for not fixing it. (Fortunately I didn't tell them so!) Then I noticed an idiot light that wasn't on...and started investigating again...somehow the power cable had come unplugged. This was starkly incredible as it happened between one e-mail and the next, and where I sit when I'm at the computer blocks access to that power cord. But it was there, out of it's socket.
What saved me from total embarassment is that I hadn't yet gotten through to anyone at the ISP. (OTOH, for that same reason I'm contemplating changing ISPs.)
Did anyone *ever* like disko? It was definitely "in" at one point, but I never encountered anyone who actually liked it. They liked to go to dances, yes, but that's not the same thing at all. (And glitter balls definitely got WAY overdone quite quickly.)
Sorry to disagree, but there are parasitical diseases for which there are "immunizations". (I'm not certain that it's proper to call them vaccines, but they look the same and act the same.)
OTOH, malairia isn't one of them. (Well, there's this one vaccine in early alpha that looks promissing...if all those dying people would just wait a couple of decades so we could get the bugs out and do the Q/A tests...)
You always find yourself needing to do cost-benefit analyses. This one *looks* fairly safe, and the gain could be huge. So far I haven't seen any reasonable projection of large downsides. (Actually, I haven't seen any reasonable projection of *ANY* downsides...except the guy who said "Great, now I need a better bug spray!".)
Considering that malaria kills large numbers of people every year, and renders another large number minimally productive... the one cost I see is that equatorial areas might experience a surge in population. That seems... well, not tolerable, but a "necessarily acceptable cost". One hopes that birth control will be accepted, also. If one starts eliminating all natural causes of death, one needs to drastically slow the birth rate. Preferably before it gets to the point where the government feels the need to do as China did. (It's a lousy policy. It's socially destructive. But it's better than increased population pressure. Personally I think they should have taken social costs into consideration and altered it to "You can have kids until you have a son. Then *NO MORE*, or else. With China's social history that would have been less socially destructive than it's current "Two kids, that's all" approach. But this is just fine tuning. Malthus rules.)
It does, however, meean that those who review it will be few in number, and will have a similar perspective. These are both strong indications that the peer-review is weak.
P.S.: Note that OpenSource programs with few developers interested in the code run into this same problem. Good peer review takes lots of eyes in multiple environments over an extended period of time. A structured code walkthrough just isn't the same thing. It helps, but it's not the same.
There are, indeed, questions that science hasn't got a clue as to how to answer, and if by "aspects of the human condition" you mean things like why Pi is an irrational number, then you have a point. That's not how I usually interpret the phrase.
It wasn't chance that sent Islam in a fundamentalist direction. We have Tamerlane to thank for that. When he destroyed the Islamic culture along the silk road (Samarkand, etc.) he simultaneously destroyed moderate Islam. Ever since then Islam has been two groups of fanatics fighting over the ashes left by an invader. (Who is the true descendant of Mohammed? Who is the Caliph? Etc.)
It was a great shock, as if.... I can't think of anything really comparable that's also seriously credible. Many of the survivors, possibly most, despaired of the goodness of god. This is really bad when your world view is built around an all-powerful god ruling the course of not only people in general, but yourself in particular. Those who survived decided that they had to be militant enough that nobody would dare attack them again. Then they swept through northern Africa, conquering all in their way. (Well, the fiercest, and those with the most military skill did.) A few civil wars later to set the country boundaries. (Hey, this is a thumbnail sketch of something that took many centuries.) And we are left with the muslem of today. Occasionally a group tries to be moderate, but they are quicly smothered by the militant fanatics. Sometimes without blood, but not by any means always.
THAT's why muslem ended up so militant. (And silly, if they weren't likely to kill you.) What I can't explain are the christians. They're equally bloody, but without the historic truama.
Well, "real" is an undefined term..but that doesn't make it a free variable. There are various constraints on it.
OTOH, some scientists seem to choose to ridgidly compartmentalize their minds. A rather extreme example that occurs to me is a biologist who is also a creationist. I admit that I can't understand how or why a person would choose to do such a thing. (In the particular instance that I'm thinking of, he was a creationist BEFORE he became a biologist, but learning biology didn't dislodge his prior belief.)
Speaking as someone who is interested in the crafting of intelligence, such occurances give rise to despair. I can't figure out why an intelligence would do such a thing, and if you don't understand it you can't figure out how to implement it. Still, similar things happen. OTOH, few first rank scientists have a religious viewpoint that contradicts thier major area of study. (I can't think of any.)
My tentative supposition is that early beliefs are difficult to dislodge, and frequently "encyst" themselves in defensible fortifications. And that the mind will generally prefer to avoid challenging them. This is particularly true if they are "ego syntonic" as most religious beliefs are. If something makes you feel good, you may not be willing to check whether it is true or not, and if questioning it makes you feel bad, you may explicitly avoid questioning it. So if you build your idea of "Who I am" around a particular belief, then it may not be readily removed. Of course, since your idea of who you are is built before you know much about how the world works, dubious ideas are easily inserted. (This doesn't always work, but it works very frequently.)
Back to "real". Nobody can question everything. There's just too much stuff. So we generally only question things that are, to us, of central importance (which varies from moment to moment). As a result one can be a physicist in, say, tesile-strength of crystals, and not have one's religious beliefs seriously questioned even if they are rather restrictive beliefs. Also, I don't thing that a Unitarian-Universalist's beliefs would be questions even by studies of cosmology. Similarly for Buddhism. Also for various of the neo-pagan beliefs. Note that none of these are fundamentalist style religions. If you demand that the simple truth be immanent and fit with the word of the ancestors, without using metaphors...you will be a lousy scientist wherever science comes into contact with your religion. This appears true of all religious faiths, without limit.
Note, by the way, that Dawkins appears to be of this same fundamentalist persuasion, only on the side of the "1st Church of Materialism, revealed". His fortune is that this particular faith does not rely on the "wisdom of the ancients", but rather on the revealations of the experiment. (He's also quite fortunate that he didn't form his ideas before quantum physics was accepted as true. He would otherwise have fought it until his death, as Einstein did.)
That's not guaranteed. They could ship binary drivers that aren't available with other distributions. I'm interested in hardware that generally supported by Linux. If they won't offer it, I'll continue to go elsewhere.
I understand why so many people want Dell to offer Linux. Personally, I'm not that certain that it would be a good thing. It might be better if they just died quietly, and let other manufacturers that don't have such a tight bond to MS move into the space. Dell *COULD* make a large positive difference. It's just that I have a hard time believing that they would choose to do so. They don't have the kind of bad reputation that MS has, but they've got a long history of "bait and switch" advertising and PR announcements.
Basically, I don't trust anything they say. They've lied too often. Now it's "prove your intentions by your actions if you want me to believe you".
WRT the survey: MAYBE they mean what they say. Maybe they're collecting info for an ad campaign. Maybe something else. I'll decide after I see how they respond. I'm not going to presume that they're being honest this time. That awaits proof. Still, it probably doesn't do any harm to answer their questions about what we'd like them to do. (So I answered them.) This is not a commitment to trusting them. This is not a commitment to buying whatever garbage they decide to offer. OTOH, if they do offer something, I'll look it over.
P.S.: One interesting thing about the survey: They presume during the survey that you know what their various lines of computers are. I don't know an inspiron from a latitude, so I made wild guesses as to what the correct answers were...but this looks more like a marketing effort than a serious research effort.
The trouble is, they won't warrant any of their hardware to be compatible with Linux. You *KNOW* that means that if you call tech support, their first demand will be that you install MSWind. I'd rather buy somewhere else. Pretty nearly anywhere else, actually, except that many places make the same demands.
Whatever, I've got a local whitebox shop, and they don't insist on MSWind being installed before they'll service the machine. And they aren't that much more expensive. If it weren't for them I'd buy from Penguin Computing, or Pogo. Or Emperor Linux, except that I don't have that much use for laptops.
I object, but not wildly, to paying the MS tax. I object STRENUOUSLY to buying hardware and after I get it finding out it's unsupported and unsupportable. So I don't buy Dell.
Sorry. No references, as those were years ago, but I also remember those as "official MS statements". They weren't addressed to FOSS advocates, per se, of course, but they were addressed to the business community.
Search InfoWorld is my best suggestion if you seriously need confirmation. (Though if it was only in InfoWorld it must have been more than three years ago.)
When you're looking for an excuse, you can always find one.
I'm not impressed by the argument that "Linux users are too hard to please" or that "the market is too balkanized". But I'll admit they make dandy excuses to do what you've already decided to do.
It's interesting, however, that none of the companies that offer Linux preinstalled seem to have Dell's purported difficulties. (So I'm going to consider them more excuses than reasons.)
Unfortunately, in many of the languages that I'm aware of that implemented foreach, the language itself specifies sequential execution. Some of these are recent languages, too! E.g., D (Digital Mars D) is a language so new that it's 1.0 release was this January. It specifies that foreach is executed sequentially. So, I believe, does Python. This has always seemed to me like lack of foresight, but I didn't write the languages, or even the specs, so I don't have enough room to complain seriously. (I did comment during the D design phase, but it was ignored.)
I can't answer your question directly because: 1) It's been a long time, and 2) I never read those particular licenses But the MS enforcement agency has shut down entire cities for an "unannounced audit". I'm talking about the "Business Software Alliance", aka BSA. One city they shut down was Charlotttesville, South Carolina (I think I've got the name right)...I'm operating off a news story from around 1995 here...and if there was a followup, I don't remember it.
I'll admit that I don't, and never have, understood why the license gives them the right to do this kind of shakedown racket, but the govt. seems to agree with them that it does give them such a right. IANAL, so I presume that if the govt. allows the license to be an excuse to shut down a city govt., then it actually does give them that right. (They claim this right, and execute it frequently against individual companies. Usually it's used as an extortion racket...as in "Pay up or we shut you down!", but occasionally they just bust in with cops in attendence. I presume that they have a warrant, but the news stories are generally too vague to allow me to decide with certainty that this is claimed as truth.)
I still don't understand why people get upset with a company periodically checking to see if your install is valid. They have been doing it for years with Business Software. Now because of increasing amounts of piracy companies like Microsoft who make most of their money from the OS itself have to do it for their software.
Because they didn't read and understand the EULA during installation. I must admit that I didn't read enough of it to claim to understand it (the MSWind98 EULA), but I understood enough to know that I wanted out NOW!! It took me over a year to transition to Red Hat Linux 5.x. Even finding a word processor was difficult. (No, Lyx[?] doesn't satisfy me. What else is available?) I eventually ended up with StarOffice 5.2(?), but that wasn't the first or second one I tried.
If you understand the MS EULA, then when something like this happens you just go "OK, what's the next shoe on this milipede?" You've agreed that they can do whatever they want to you whenever they want. This includes entering your home/place of business without warning and confiscating all of your computers. As I said, once I read that I took the short road out.
That sounds like the original meaning of open source. (Notice that I didn't capitalize it?)
OSI redefined the term Open Source to be something different, but the term existed before they did, and they just redefined it. Open source originally just meant that if you bought the product you could see the code. I think the concept goes back to IBM mainframes in the 1950's, but it might go back further. At that time people didn't automatically get copyright, and most code wasn't copyrighted. If the company shared it's source code with you, you could legally do whatever you wanted, but all it generally promissed was that the code was available. Sometimes it was copyrighted, and if it was available, it still qualified.
I'm about to introduce a few new acronyms. Pardon me, but in this discussion more precision seems necessary:
Things have gotten a lot more complex with the extension of copyrights to longer terms, and of copyright laws into more areas, and, of course, lets not forget patents. Just wanting them to go away won't make them do so. The BSD license is the license most equivalent to the early "open source" licenses. It was against this historic background that Stallman got irritated because he couldn't get a printer driver, and created F(L)&OSS. (Parse that as Free (Libre) *and* Open Software Source. The & is a logical conjuction implying BOTH.) The Open Source people were a reaction against F(L)&OSS, because they didn't like the requirements that the software be Free (Libre), just as F(L)&OSS was a reaction against increasingly closed software. They didn't mind showing the code...in fact some of them depended on it, but they wanted to maintain control over how it was used. This is roughly analogous to how back before it bacame an anti-virus company Symantec code used to come with libraries that could only be used with Symantec IDEs. (MS copied and improved on that trick.) Symantec'd give you the source code to the libraries, but you would need to rewrite them to use them with another company's IDE...and Symantec held the copyrights, so you would need to REALLY do a rewrite if you wanted to make legally redistributable code. (Symantec granted you the right to distribute the code if you built it with their tools.) This was clearly Open Source, even though OSI hadn't yet been formed, and the term hadn't been given "Official Sanction And Blessing". (?? What makes a company any more "official" than a citizen? Still, that seems to be the usage.)
That said, I think many tech companies have open positions and describe having difficulty filling them. Does the entire sector, as a whole, not pay enough? Are there people out there that are not working for anyone, rather than work for what they deem to be too little? Said another way, if you see that across the board, tech companies have open heads, it's hard to suggest that it is purely a Microsoft problem related to salary or other undesirability. Doesn't Google have difficulty hiring people? Apple?
I'm just going to speak to a part of this. If you look around you, programming is a field where one invests a lot of up-front time and effort before getting much in the way of rewards. The low-haning fruit has been harvested, AND IT DOESN'T NEED TO BE DONE AGAIN! So. If you have such an industry, and you go through boom-and-bust cycles (as we do), then people are going to be VERY skittish about making the kind of commitment that you want them to give. YOU (the company) aren't making they commitment, so asking it of them can only be seen as a power-play.
When I first started working, I was a firm believer in honesty, etc. As time went on, I observed that politics was more important than ability to do the official job. I ended up quite cynical about companies. Managers that have been delegated power to do their job instead use it for personal advancement at the expense of the staff, and appear to feel that it's their right. There are exceptions, but the exceptions aren't as personally successful (as measured in terms of the number of promotions).
This, I feel, is that nature of human politics. It's wrong to centralize power to accomplish some good end, because once centralized the power will be abused, and the good end will not be accomplished in any final way, because that would eliminate the need for the centralization of the power, which isn't to the benefit of those controlling the power.
OTOH, human society requires reliable structures in order to operate properly. 'Tis a difficult puzzle. I don't know of a decent answer. History provides MANY examples of indecent answers, but none of good ones. If you did have a decent answer, the problem would then arise of "how does one get from here to there?" This is made difficult if one imposes the condition "And don't make things a lot worse in the process!"
I'm glad you got so close an approximation of justice. But being allowed to sue companies that are in the wrong, while a component of justice, isn't justice. Your comment rather reinforces mine. Justice isn't for sale because they're out of stock.
IBM will, eventually, be declared the winner. SCOX will be ordered, probably, to pay court costs, legal fees and more. Unfortunately, they'll have already spent the money, so they won't be able to. It's possible that IBM will then go after the private fortunes of the responsible executives, but that's difficult. Just in case, however, they will probably have so arranged things that the money/property/etc. is legally not under their control, or in an hidden account, perhaps in the Caymans. (Numbered Swiss bank accounts used to be used for this kind of thing, but they've become a bit porous under various national treaties.)
There won't be any justice. SCOX will have gone bankrupt, but it was a failing company before it launched this lawsuit, and the puppet-master doesn't appear to have excessively revealed himself. There's fair indications, but hardly conclusive evidence. (Such evidence as I know of points to MS as the puppet-master. AFAIK it's far from enough to justify a case against them.)
Being publically declared the winner doesn't make the process just, not even when the party that genuinely should win does. You should be well aware of that.
You don't lose patents by not enforcing them, but issuing vague threats based on unnamed infringements may be something different.
I would guess that the courts would at least consider "failure to mitigate damages", and it's also possible that the doctrine of "latches" would apply. MS is publically acknowledging that they aren't ignorant of the infringement, and simultaneously they are refusing to make mitigation possible. This has to put them in a very bad position, legally. At minimum they would lose all right to punitive damages, and they might lose the right to enforce the patent. (This isn't the same as losing the patent, but it has a somewhat similar effect.)
Caution: IANAL. My guess at what the courts would do is not even reasonable grounds for a $2 bet.
Also remember, you can't win a suit if you can't afford to defend against it. TANJ. (But justice isn't guaranteed no matter how much you can afford. Consider SCOX vs IBM. IBM will never be recompensed.)
I'll agree that he's wrong. I'm not sure about the "Fortunately". The problem is, the legal system is even WORSE than "You can buy justice". Justice isn't for sale, because they're out of stock. Consider, e.g., SCOX vs. IBM. IBM is clearly in the right, and is clearly the wealthier party. SCOX has shown zip in the way of evidence, and even their statement of what they're suing about is incoherent. IBM has not been able to get justice in over three years, and it's becoming clear that they never will. They'll probably eventually get a court decision in their favor, but they won't get their legal expenses repaid, or their "opportunity cost" (i.e., pay them for the things they could have been doing if they hadn't had to waste their time defending against a baseless legal suit).
And if their public reputation had been damaged, there would be no attempt made to "make them whole".
Somehow it reminds me of Michael Moorecock's "Justice Maker" (a god) who said "Justice does not exist...but it can be manufactured in small quantities." I believe that he says it to Elric. (There may, or may not, be a "with great effort" interpolated into that quote somewhere...I don't remember which book it's from.)
Anything that's been in public use for more than a year before the patent was applied for is a good defense...if you can afford it.
Unfortunately, the USPTO is rather picky about what they recognize as "published". It's not at all clear that puting an application in a downloadable Linux distribution counts. I seem to recall that they've decided that posting on SourceForge doesn't count. (Aren't they nice and honorable and fair? Of course, I could be mis-remembering. They've also got rules that make it inadviseable for a programmer to examine a patent and decide what it covers...so I don't. Reportedly the patents are useless WRT how to program something anyway.)
The only defense, such as it is, is to publish openly. Time-stamps help. None of this is any defense if somebody with money decides to abuse you. But then if they've got enough money, they can always invent SOME excuse, patents just make it easy for them. What SCO has proven is that even having enough money can't buy you justice. (It can, however, limit the damage that can be done to you if used skillfully.)
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That was, indeed, the saying. There's no evidence that it was particularly true, however, and his rephrasing of it appears to more accurately describe the situation. (Yes, I've read the occasional newspaper stories. I've also studied data summaries reported by the Census. And I was employed professionally as a statistician. [I didn't do any statistical tests on the data testing this particular conjecture...but I have a rough feel for how it would have come out in the 1960 census, which is the one I worked with.])
In so far as I am aware of it, the data support more rich people having large famlies than poor people. This is not what common mythology dictates, but that's created by newspapers, who generally have an ax to grind. (E.g., in almost all cases reported in the news, the poor family is living on communally supplied funding. Rich people don't do this, so they don't raise the same degree of outrage. Occasional outrage helps sell papers.)
What's embarassing is whey it's YOU who has misdiagnosed the hardware problem. Last week my network connection was down for a couple of days, and I was quite upset with the provider for not fixing it. (Fortunately I didn't tell them so!) Then I noticed an idiot light that wasn't on...and started investigating again...somehow the power cable had come unplugged. This was starkly incredible as it happened between one e-mail and the next, and where I sit when I'm at the computer blocks access to that power cord. But it was there, out of it's socket.
What saved me from total embarassment is that I hadn't yet gotten through to anyone at the ISP. (OTOH, for that same reason I'm contemplating changing ISPs.)
Did anyone *ever* like disko? It was definitely "in" at one point, but I never encountered anyone who actually liked it. They liked to go to dances, yes, but that's not the same thing at all. (And glitter balls definitely got WAY overdone quite quickly.)
Sorry to disagree, but there are parasitical diseases for which there are "immunizations". (I'm not certain that it's proper to call them vaccines, but they look the same and act the same.)
OTOH, malairia isn't one of them. (Well, there's this one vaccine in early alpha that looks promissing...if all those dying people would just wait a couple of decades so we could get the bugs out and do the Q/A tests...)
Yah, it's a risk. What isn't?
... well, not tolerable, but a "necessarily acceptable cost". One hopes that birth control will be accepted, also. If one starts eliminating all natural causes of death, one needs to drastically slow the birth rate. Preferably before it gets to the point where the government feels the need to do as China did. (It's a lousy policy. It's socially destructive. But it's better than increased population pressure. Personally I think they should have taken social costs into consideration and altered it to "You can have kids until you have a son. Then *NO MORE*, or else. With China's social history that would have been less socially destructive than it's current "Two kids, that's all" approach. But this is just fine tuning. Malthus rules.)
You always find yourself needing to do cost-benefit analyses. This one *looks* fairly safe, and the gain could be huge. So far I haven't seen any reasonable projection of large downsides. (Actually, I haven't seen any reasonable projection of *ANY* downsides...except the guy who said "Great, now I need a better bug spray!".)
Considering that malaria kills large numbers of people every year, and renders another large number minimally productive... the one cost I see is that equatorial areas might experience a surge in population. That seems
It does, however, meean that those who review it will be few in number, and will have a similar perspective. These are both strong indications that the peer-review is weak.
P.S.: Note that OpenSource programs with few developers interested in the code run into this same problem. Good peer review takes lots of eyes in multiple environments over an extended period of time. A structured code walkthrough just isn't the same thing. It helps, but it's not the same.
There are, indeed, questions that science hasn't got a clue as to how to answer, and if by "aspects of the human condition" you mean things like why Pi is an irrational number, then you have a point. That's not how I usually interpret the phrase.
It wasn't chance that sent Islam in a fundamentalist direction. We have Tamerlane to thank for that. When he destroyed the Islamic culture along the silk road (Samarkand, etc.) he simultaneously destroyed moderate Islam. Ever since then Islam has been two groups of fanatics fighting over the ashes left by an invader. (Who is the true descendant of Mohammed? Who is the Caliph? Etc.)
.... I can't think of anything really comparable that's also seriously credible. Many of the survivors, possibly most, despaired of the goodness of god. This is really bad when your world view is built around an all-powerful god ruling the course of not only people in general, but yourself in particular. Those who survived decided that they had to be militant enough that nobody would dare attack them again. Then they swept through northern Africa, conquering all in their way. (Well, the fiercest, and those with the most military skill did.) A few civil wars later to set the country boundaries. (Hey, this is a thumbnail sketch of something that took many centuries.) And we are left with the muslem of today. Occasionally a group tries to be moderate, but they are quicly smothered by the militant fanatics. Sometimes without blood, but not by any means always.
It was a great shock, as if
THAT's why muslem ended up so militant. (And silly, if they weren't likely to kill you.) What I can't explain are the christians. They're equally bloody, but without the historic truama.
many aspects of the human condition are not amenable to any scientific approach.
Could you list a few? I can't think of any. (I can think of many where religion makes one feel good, but that doesn't have much to do with truth.)
Well, "real" is an undefined term..but that doesn't make it a free variable. There are various constraints on it.
OTOH, some scientists seem to choose to ridgidly compartmentalize their minds. A rather extreme example that occurs to me is a biologist who is also a creationist. I admit that I can't understand how or why a person would choose to do such a thing. (In the particular instance that I'm thinking of, he was a creationist BEFORE he became a biologist, but learning biology didn't dislodge his prior belief.)
Speaking as someone who is interested in the crafting of intelligence, such occurances give rise to despair. I can't figure out why an intelligence would do such a thing, and if you don't understand it you can't figure out how to implement it. Still, similar things happen. OTOH, few first rank scientists have a religious viewpoint that contradicts thier major area of study. (I can't think of any.)
My tentative supposition is that early beliefs are difficult to dislodge, and frequently "encyst" themselves in defensible fortifications. And that the mind will generally prefer to avoid challenging them. This is particularly true if they are "ego syntonic" as most religious beliefs are. If something makes you feel good, you may not be willing to check whether it is true or not, and if questioning it makes you feel bad, you may explicitly avoid questioning it. So if you build your idea of "Who I am" around a particular belief, then it may not be readily removed. Of course, since your idea of who you are is built before you know much about how the world works, dubious ideas are easily inserted. (This doesn't always work, but it works very frequently.)
Back to "real". Nobody can question everything. There's just too much stuff. So we generally only question things that are, to us, of central importance (which varies from moment to moment). As a result one can be a physicist in, say, tesile-strength of crystals, and not have one's religious beliefs seriously questioned even if they are rather restrictive beliefs. Also, I don't thing that a Unitarian-Universalist's beliefs would be questions even by studies of cosmology. Similarly for Buddhism. Also for various of the neo-pagan beliefs. Note that none of these are fundamentalist style religions. If you demand that the simple truth be immanent and fit with the word of the ancestors, without using metaphors...you will be a lousy scientist wherever science comes into contact with your religion. This appears true of all religious faiths, without limit.
Note, by the way, that Dawkins appears to be of this same fundamentalist persuasion, only on the side of the "1st Church of Materialism, revealed". His fortune is that this particular faith does not rely on the "wisdom of the ancients", but rather on the revealations of the experiment. (He's also quite fortunate that he didn't form his ideas before quantum physics was accepted as true. He would otherwise have fought it until his death, as Einstein did.)
You can use any argument you want to. That's the, um, beauty of theological speculations.
Personally I find the Flying Spaghetti Monster equally convincing.
That's not guaranteed. They could ship binary drivers that aren't available with other distributions. I'm interested in hardware that generally supported by Linux. If they won't offer it, I'll continue to go elsewhere.
I understand why so many people want Dell to offer Linux. Personally, I'm not that certain that it would be a good thing. It might be better if they just died quietly, and let other manufacturers that don't have such a tight bond to MS move into the space. Dell *COULD* make a large positive difference. It's just that I have a hard time believing that they would choose to do so. They don't have the kind of bad reputation that MS has, but they've got a long history of "bait and switch" advertising and PR announcements.
Basically, I don't trust anything they say. They've lied too often. Now it's "prove your intentions by your actions if you want me to believe you".
WRT the survey: MAYBE they mean what they say. Maybe they're collecting info for an ad campaign. Maybe something else. I'll decide after I see how they respond. I'm not going to presume that they're being honest this time. That awaits proof. Still, it probably doesn't do any harm to answer their questions about what we'd like them to do. (So I answered them.) This is not a commitment to trusting them. This is not a commitment to buying whatever garbage they decide to offer. OTOH, if they do offer something, I'll look it over.
P.S.: One interesting thing about the survey: They presume during the survey that you know what their various lines of computers are. I don't know an inspiron from a latitude, so I made wild guesses as to what the correct answers were...but this looks more like a marketing effort than a serious research effort.
The trouble is, they won't warrant any of their hardware to be compatible with Linux. You *KNOW* that means that if you call tech support, their first demand will be that you install MSWind. I'd rather buy somewhere else. Pretty nearly anywhere else, actually, except that many places make the same demands.
Whatever, I've got a local whitebox shop, and they don't insist on MSWind being installed before they'll service the machine. And they aren't that much more expensive. If it weren't for them I'd buy from Penguin Computing, or Pogo. Or Emperor Linux, except that I don't have that much use for laptops.
I object, but not wildly, to paying the MS tax. I object STRENUOUSLY to buying hardware and after I get it finding out it's unsupported and unsupportable. So I don't buy Dell.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=946- 01-10.2353t icle_id=657314r _linux_is_communism/
n ux+communist&btnG=Google+Search
http://www.fourm.info/Politics/Politics_Item.2005
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=en&ar
and, of course,
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/31/ms_ballme
For more links, try:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Microsoft+Li
Sorry. No references, as those were years ago, but I also remember those as "official MS statements". They weren't addressed to FOSS advocates, per se, of course, but they were addressed to the business community.
Search InfoWorld is my best suggestion if you seriously need confirmation. (Though if it was only in InfoWorld it must have been more than three years ago.)
When you're looking for an excuse, you can always find one.
I'm not impressed by the argument that "Linux users are too hard to please" or that "the market is too balkanized". But I'll admit they make dandy excuses to do what you've already decided to do.
It's interesting, however, that none of the companies that offer Linux preinstalled seem to have Dell's purported difficulties. (So I'm going to consider them more excuses than reasons.)
Unfortunately, in many of the languages that I'm aware of that implemented foreach, the language itself specifies sequential execution. Some of these are recent languages, too! E.g., D (Digital Mars D) is a language so new that it's 1.0 release was this January. It specifies that foreach is executed sequentially. So, I believe, does Python. This has always seemed to me like lack of foresight, but I didn't write the languages, or even the specs, so I don't have enough room to complain seriously. (I did comment during the D design phase, but it was ignored.)
I can't answer your question directly because:
1) It's been a long time, and
2) I never read those particular licenses
But the MS enforcement agency has shut down entire cities for an "unannounced audit". I'm talking about the "Business Software Alliance", aka BSA. One city they shut down was Charlotttesville, South Carolina (I think I've got the name right)...I'm operating off a news story from around 1995 here...and if there was a followup, I don't remember it.
I'll admit that I don't, and never have, understood why the license gives them the right to do this kind of shakedown racket, but the govt. seems to agree with them that it does give them such a right. IANAL, so I presume that if the govt. allows the license to be an excuse to shut down a city govt., then it actually does give them that right. (They claim this right, and execute it frequently against individual companies. Usually it's used as an extortion racket...as in "Pay up or we shut you down!", but occasionally they just bust in with cops in attendence. I presume that they have a warrant, but the news stories are generally too vague to allow me to decide with certainty that this is claimed as truth.)
I still don't understand why people get upset with a company periodically checking to see if your install is valid. They have been doing it for years with Business Software. Now because of increasing amounts of piracy companies like Microsoft who make most of their money from the OS itself have to do it for their software.
Because they didn't read and understand the EULA during installation. I must admit that I didn't read enough of it to claim to understand it (the MSWind98 EULA), but I understood enough to know that I wanted out NOW!! It took me over a year to transition to Red Hat Linux 5.x. Even finding a word processor was difficult. (No, Lyx[?] doesn't satisfy me. What else is available?) I eventually ended up with StarOffice 5.2(?), but that wasn't the first or second one I tried.
If you understand the MS EULA, then when something like this happens you just go "OK, what's the next shoe on this milipede?" You've agreed that they can do whatever they want to you whenever they want. This includes entering your home/place of business without warning and confiscating all of your computers. As I said, once I read that I took the short road out.
That sounds like the original meaning of open source. (Notice that I didn't capitalize it?)
OSI redefined the term Open Source to be something different, but the term existed before they did, and they just redefined it. Open source originally just meant that if you bought the product you could see the code. I think the concept goes back to IBM mainframes in the 1950's, but it might go back further. At that time people didn't automatically get copyright, and most code wasn't copyrighted. If the company shared it's source code with you, you could legally do whatever you wanted, but all it generally promissed was that the code was available. Sometimes it was copyrighted, and if it was available, it still qualified.
I'm about to introduce a few new acronyms. Pardon me, but in this discussion more precision seems necessary:
Things have gotten a lot more complex with the extension of copyrights to longer terms, and of copyright laws into more areas, and, of course, lets not forget patents. Just wanting them to go away won't make them do so. The BSD license is the license most equivalent to the early "open source" licenses. It was against this historic background that Stallman got irritated because he couldn't get a printer driver, and created F(L)&OSS. (Parse that as Free (Libre) *and* Open Software Source. The & is a logical conjuction implying BOTH.) The Open Source people were a reaction against F(L)&OSS, because they didn't like the requirements that the software be Free (Libre), just as F(L)&OSS was a reaction against increasingly closed software. They didn't mind showing the code...in fact some of them depended on it, but they wanted to maintain control over how it was used. This is roughly analogous to how back before it bacame an anti-virus company Symantec code used to come with libraries that could only be used with Symantec IDEs. (MS copied and improved on that trick.) Symantec'd give you the source code to the libraries, but you would need to rewrite them to use them with another company's IDE...and Symantec held the copyrights, so you would need to REALLY do a rewrite if you wanted to make legally redistributable code. (Symantec granted you the right to distribute the code if you built it with their tools.) This was clearly Open Source, even though OSI hadn't yet been formed, and the term hadn't been given "Official Sanction And Blessing". (?? What makes a company any more "official" than a citizen? Still, that seems to be the usage.)
That said, I think many tech companies have open positions and describe having difficulty filling them. Does the entire sector, as a whole, not pay enough? Are there people out there that are not working for anyone, rather than work for what they deem to be too little? Said another way, if you see that across the board, tech companies have open heads, it's hard to suggest that it is purely a Microsoft problem related to salary or other undesirability. Doesn't Google have difficulty hiring people? Apple?
I'm just going to speak to a part of this. If you look around you, programming is a field where one invests a lot of up-front time and effort before getting much in the way of rewards. The low-haning fruit has been harvested, AND IT DOESN'T NEED TO BE DONE AGAIN! So. If you have such an industry, and you go through boom-and-bust cycles (as we do), then people are going to be VERY skittish about making the kind of commitment that you want them to give. YOU (the company) aren't making they commitment, so asking it of them can only be seen as a power-play.
When I first started working, I was a firm believer in honesty, etc. As time went on, I observed that politics was more important than ability to do the official job. I ended up quite cynical about companies. Managers that have been delegated power to do their job instead use it for personal advancement at the expense of the staff, and appear to feel that it's their right. There are exceptions, but the exceptions aren't as personally successful (as measured in terms of the number of promotions).
This, I feel, is that nature of human politics. It's wrong to centralize power to accomplish some good end, because once centralized the power will be abused, and the good end will not be accomplished in any final way, because that would eliminate the need for the centralization of the power, which isn't to the benefit of those controlling the power.
OTOH, human society requires reliable structures in order to operate properly. 'Tis a difficult puzzle. I don't know of a decent answer. History provides MANY examples of indecent answers, but none of good ones. If you did have a decent answer, the problem would then arise of "how does one get from here to there?" This is made difficult if one imposes the condition "And don't make things a lot worse in the process!"
I'm glad you got so close an approximation of justice. But being allowed to sue companies that are in the wrong, while a component of justice, isn't justice. Your comment rather reinforces mine. Justice isn't for sale because they're out of stock.
IBM will, eventually, be declared the winner. SCOX will be ordered, probably, to pay court costs, legal fees and more. Unfortunately, they'll have already spent the money, so they won't be able to. It's possible that IBM will then go after the private fortunes of the responsible executives, but that's difficult. Just in case, however, they will probably have so arranged things that the money/property/etc. is legally not under their control, or in an hidden account, perhaps in the Caymans. (Numbered Swiss bank accounts used to be used for this kind of thing, but they've become a bit porous under various national treaties.)
There won't be any justice. SCOX will have gone bankrupt, but it was a failing company before it launched this lawsuit, and the puppet-master doesn't appear to have excessively revealed himself. There's fair indications, but hardly conclusive evidence. (Such evidence as I know of points to MS as the puppet-master. AFAIK it's far from enough to justify a case against them.)
Being publically declared the winner doesn't make the process just, not even when the party that genuinely should win does. You should be well aware of that.
You don't lose patents by not enforcing them, but issuing vague threats based on unnamed infringements may be something different.
I would guess that the courts would at least consider "failure to mitigate damages", and it's also possible that the doctrine of "latches" would apply. MS is publically acknowledging that they aren't ignorant of the infringement, and simultaneously they are refusing to make mitigation possible. This has to put them in a very bad position, legally. At minimum they would lose all right to punitive damages, and they might lose the right to enforce the patent. (This isn't the same as losing the patent, but it has a somewhat similar effect.)
Caution: IANAL. My guess at what the courts would do is not even reasonable grounds for a $2 bet.
Also remember, you can't win a suit if you can't afford to defend against it. TANJ. (But justice isn't guaranteed no matter how much you can afford. Consider SCOX vs IBM. IBM will never be recompensed.)
Fortunately you're wrong.
I'll agree that he's wrong. I'm not sure about the "Fortunately". The problem is, the legal system is even WORSE than "You can buy justice". Justice isn't for sale, because they're out of stock. Consider, e.g., SCOX vs. IBM. IBM is clearly in the right, and is clearly the wealthier party. SCOX has shown zip in the way of evidence, and even their statement of what they're suing about is incoherent. IBM has not been able to get justice in over three years, and it's becoming clear that they never will. They'll probably eventually get a court decision in their favor, but they won't get their legal expenses repaid, or their "opportunity cost" (i.e., pay them for the things they could have been doing if they hadn't had to waste their time defending against a baseless legal suit).
And if their public reputation had been damaged, there would be no attempt made to "make them whole".
Somehow it reminds me of Michael Moorecock's "Justice Maker" (a god) who said "Justice does not exist...but it can be manufactured in small quantities." I believe that he says it to Elric. (There may, or may not, be a "with great effort" interpolated into that quote somewhere...I don't remember which book it's from.)
Anything that's been in public use for more than a year before the patent was applied for is a good defense...if you can afford it.
Unfortunately, the USPTO is rather picky about what they recognize as "published". It's not at all clear that puting an application in a downloadable Linux distribution counts. I seem to recall that they've decided that posting on SourceForge doesn't count. (Aren't they nice and honorable and fair? Of course, I could be mis-remembering. They've also got rules that make it inadviseable for a programmer to examine a patent and decide what it covers...so I don't. Reportedly the patents are useless WRT how to program something anyway.)
The only defense, such as it is, is to publish openly. Time-stamps help. None of this is any defense if somebody with money decides to abuse you. But then if they've got enough money, they can always invent SOME excuse, patents just make it easy for them. What SCO has proven is that even having enough money can't buy you justice. (It can, however, limit the damage that can be done to you if used skillfully.)