In fact you would be well within your rights to re-brand RedHat, brand it as "myEnterpriseOS" and charge ONE BILLION DOLLARS if you so desire (good luck finding someone willing to pay for it though)
Maybe not a billion, but yeah there's been quite a few cases of open source software getting a different logo slapped on, obscuring that it's GPL and bundled with ad/mal/crapware or sold as if it was payware. Generally frowned upon, but grayishly legal enough they mostly get away with it.
I'm all for the "standing on shoulders of giants" thing, but the whole "let someone else do all the work, slap on a new logo and ship as our own" is more taking the bad with the good. Otherwise you'd run into a ton of legal misery trying to define identical or essentially similar software.
One form of value is simple liquidity, like for example I'm moving to a new apartment. In theory I'd be just as happy to swap apartments with possibly some other stuff to make it even, but it's very hard to find a perfect match that wants to do the exact opposite. If we think there's thousands of people in the market then probably there's some set of trades where I'd give what I have and get what I want, but it'd be very hard to find. However, if there's a currency then I can just sell and buy what I want with no real risk because I'm only momentarily invested in the currency. If I know I can get 1000 bitcoins here, pay 1000 bitcoins there and so does everyone else in a zerosum game then who cares what a bitcoin really is? It's just the glue between normal goods, tokens that don't exist for any other purpose. If enough people are constantly looking to buy and sell things that may be enough to constantly keep a market flowing and there's no one left holding the bag of worthless bitcoins.
Holding money or giving loans on the other hand is a whole other ball of twine. Then you really have to consider what is the currency going to be worth in the future. Even with fiat money there are whole economies that run on those currencies, people that need it to shop at the corner store or pub because they only take $local_currency and to pay subscriptions, debts, taxes and so on. You can "lose faith" in the dollar but it's pretty damn hard living in the US without it. And even despite that, a few of them collapse. How quickly could bitcoin collapse? In a heartbeat. There's no "captive" demand and no inherent value to keep, it's like a stampede waiting to happen. And I doubt there's a bigger group of fools who'll raise prices to new levels after the first one.
It takes two to communicate, you didn't do half as bad trying to read it as the guy who wrote it. Except for the long words you'd almost think a grade school kid wrote it.
Yeah. Sadly the Internet didn't evolve a generic, open CDN-ish system. Something not unlike a HTTP proxy, except you store binary blocks by hash. If some other guy from my ISP has downloaded the same torrent, I'd just grab it from my ISPs "CDN" server instead. Really just a HDD with a LRU cache, new stuff is added and the least used falls off.
Depending on how complicated you want it you could have a hierarchy of them, like first try locally, regionally, nationally etc. so stuff would only get pulled long-distance once. The MAFIAA would of course jump all over it but you could store encrypted pieces - wouldn't do them much good unless they had the access key. It'd probably save them bandwidth and money while we get faster content - a win-win.
Instead you have to make deals with the big CDNs with again have to make deals with the big ISPs and everybody wants $$$ all the way. Ah well the good thing is that P2P drives fiber everywhere - I heard that in my home town of 150k people there's now 2400 cable gates that need asphalt. Soon the "last mile" problem is a thing of the past. Well, except places like the US but I don't care about those:)
Point taken, can states pass taxes that would be unconstitutional for federal taxes? I thought the 14th amendment bound the states pretty hard to follow the Bill of Rights and most other restrictions imposed on the government. I'm not *that* into constitutional law.
1) Why limit yourself to models that pay for something AFTER it has been produced?
Because it's the only way mass market products work. True, many companies will invest money before it is produced to collect pay afterwards - for a risk premium of course - but if the consumers aren't paying they will go away too. How do I know your project will deliver? Do I have any say in the project so I know the features I want will even be there? Will you 80% down the road say you need more time and money? I don't want the risk or uncertainty of investing in something that could be a flop or a scam, as a consumer I want you to offer me a finished solution at a fixed price. And on the exceptions where I do pay up front I'm normally in control of the projects with deliverables and estimates, while I have no control over $20 in a $100k project.
2) There are in fact successful comercial models that include free distribution of the copyrighted product.
In certain niches where service and support is critical, yes. There's lots of software where people either don't need it or feel you're giving them a broken product and charging to fix it. And it doesn't work so good for music, movies and other things that are "done" so to speak. Of the total volume the exceptions are pretty marginal and can't be generalized to apply very broadly.
3) In computer systems DRM is more than just a means of protecting copyright.
Yes, sadly. It's a huge flaw that the DMCA protects use restrictions and that kind of bundling should simply be outlawed.
The average pensioner receives more than they've put in (Google it yourself).
Not sure what you mean, yes pensioners are a net expense. There's an "expense curve" of sorts constructed of the average person's net contribution. It's negative in childhood (child support, public schools) and up to mid 20s (many students at public education, high unemployment, low wages to tax), then a net contribution up to retirement age, afterwards public pensions and hospitals cost more.
There is a degree of collectivism to it, some will die before the retirement age so in total there's somewhat more to share than what each put in. Those that die in early retirement is a net plus while those that live the longest generally get way, way more than they put in, you still get your pension if you get 100+ years old. So yes, the average pensioner receives more than they've put in but that's because they're the survivors. In total they're not supposed to recieve more than they've in total put in.
They need to re-establish the link between getting stuff and working for it. As it is, you get to vote even if you haven't net contributed. (...) With this kind of system a politician would promise stuff to the non-workers, paid for by everyone else.
That's a reasonable argument for the budget, but really terrible for everything else. Students, retirees and others that don't net contribute can and should have lots of opinions and have their vote on what should be legal and not. They do a lot more in government than set tax levels.
As for tax systems, a flat tax with a maximum figure seems reasonable. Why do I say that? (...) If such a person pays the flat tax, they will essentially be paying for the upkeep of dozens, or even hundred or thousands of other people.
That will have all sorts of bad practical consequences. It'll be much better with a stay-at-home mom on benefits and have you work and earn more, instead of her getting a job too. It creates lots of incentives for black labor, where people add to your "above the max" income and then get kickbacks instead of paying tax on it themselves. That's why it should hit some max rate and stay there.
No. "General Welfare" is a term from contract law, and in the constitution it's a limit on the taxing power: it requires all appropriations to be made for the benefit of the people as a whole, not favoring any region or group at the expense of another.
And how would anything ever be exactly equal? We all use public roads, but we'll never get perfectly equal benefit from them. Some use them more, some use them less, some only use them indirectly as passengers or public transport and even more indirectly buy goods that got there over public roads. And there's always arguments about what route to take because it'll benefit different people or where to build roads at all. And if we should spend more or less money on roads in general. That is just one tiny fraction of the things that you think all should be balanced. The argument you make just doesn't work much in practice.
Around here one of the big rah-rahs is the Apollo program. Was that of equal benefit for everyone? Or was it certain tech centers that benefited way, way more than others? Even with the best of intentions and results, things will differ. Also there's the question of what horizon you take, like for example work to get electrify and phones to everyone. In the long run it pulls the whole country along, in the short term it's a pretty clear subsidy. Does something like the CPS benefit everyone equally? No, childless families don't need it except maybe it get other people's maltreated kids taken care of. Other reasons are that other people react to us, like for example trade relations, attracting investors, flight of jobs and capital.
I very much doubt you could make a credible case that proves that a tax does not in any possible way contribute to the general welfare of the United States. That some will benefit more and less yes, but to prove that it can't possibly overall be for the greater good is a near impossible task.
In what way? The power to tax is in the constitution itself and "general Welfare of the United States" is pretty much "whatever you think is good".
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Also they added this amendment which is very, very broad:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
You assume sanity. I've seen companies easily use five-digit sums instead of three-digit sums because it came out of a different budget, if the former is within the executive's spending power and the latter requires some exception to corporate policy. Now I agree that without it policy stuff wouldn't get done, but I've seen some very irrational decisions happen locally as an effect.
HDCP has nothing to do with the cable but everything to do with the devices at the ends of the cable. It's just a DRM encryption, and HDMI being digital, well, it doesn't make a difference if the signal is delayed by 200ns, as long as the signal gets there and the device supports HDCP it will be decoded.
Sadly, no the delay matters. There are HDCP handshake timing issues, like my TV that will not accept anything passed through my surround system. Direct cable will work and I've tested with my computer monitor that it's the TV having the issue. Sadly I wasn't using HDMI when I bought it so I didn't realize until much later, but it seems others have had that issue too.
Once I decided that I was done with part time home repair work, I used my prices to drive away work. I would charge higher and higher prices and would be very up front with them. I even had a minimum charge of one hour. I was surprised at how much people were willing to pay. I eventually moved away from the area and was able to call it quits.
Because they're past the "risk premium". They can get some other guy and end up with someone that doesn't know shit or spends forever and bills it or just makes a mess of things or is a plain old scam. If they give this work to you, and know you'll deliver quality work with no fuzz then you are the safe, simple option. Consider it a bit like hiring a plumber, even if it a week later springs a leak and he does immediately take full responsibility (we're well into fairytale land here already) you still have to deal with the leak, damage assessment, insurance agency, repairs and all that paperwork and phone calls and shit. All the time stolen is rarely covered. Or you could call the guy who charges more but does it right. That relationship is strongly personal though, it won't do to send your hireling replacement.
Honestly "most people" aren't interested in civil rights unless it hits them in the wallet and never were. Like the US revolution was mostly because of British taxes, that was what fueled the common man. That's what the Romans said too with their "bread and circus", if you have money for that you won't be unhappy enough to rebel. The Soviet Union too was mostly an economic collapse, it was the endless lines to empty shops to buy things with worthless rubles that caved them in not the Iron Curtain and Pravda. In the Civil War, was the south that much more racist than the north or did they have a much greater economic interest in slavery? No doubt they rationalized. Same with the civil rights movement it was also a lot about economic equality, black people couldn't get the same education, same jobs at the same pay as white people.
You can see the tendencies already in some of the economies that pretty much have failed, like in Greece. It's a full on democracy and all that but facing collapse, massive unemployment and massive public cutbacks there's tons of strikes and riots. A hundred years ago that's what would have triggered a socialist revolution, now hopefully not that bad. Iceland is now rebelling with the people refusing to pay UK and the Netherlands after the bank collapse, despite the parliament approving it twice but the president forcing a referendum. The pessimist in me is saying it could so far as revolutions and countries saying they won't pay for the old corrupt regime.
I came from a Gtk+ background, but am using Qt Quick (QML) in one project. The widget set as of Qt 4.7.2 is woefully anemic, but other than that, it seems like a general improvement over using C++ for the entire UI.
My impression is that Qt Quick is another one of those things that's going to come full circle. First you go from a huge set of widgets (QWidget & decendants) to html/css (Qt Quick) and eventually you'll want to build the exact same widgets on top of that again for convienience. Oh well..
The best part is that TFA calls them a Tier 1 ISP. If these guys were running the Internet backbone, I'd short my stocks in everything Internet-based right now.
If you write a piece of software and you get 100 paying customers and 1000 warez kiddies, you have 1000 future customers when they need to buy something for work.
I'm sure that business model works great for Call of Duty. The software that basically exist as training tools for work is only one segment of the software market, and they do usually offer reasonably priced student editions. There's a lot of software that is meant to exist in the consumer market by its own right.
There's the "You could find the money, if you really needed too". No matter how poor the student claims to be, I've never seen one that couldn't in some way find beer money. It's pretty hard to get beer without the money for it, while it it's pretty easy with the software so if you can't afford both you buy the beer and pirate the software. I'm a poor student, I can't afford it after all my 'necessary' expenses right? Particularly if you set it up so you "had to" get the ultra extreme pro enterprise package at full retail.
Ultimately it's their choice if they want to be fools and only offer a 3500$ package. If they don't want to offer any light/express/student/personal/whatever edition, then you don't really have the right to say "Hey I'm taking this but I'm really doing you a favor." Same with the "marketing" defense if they don't want to promote this way. Mostly what you're promoting is that everyone else downloads it too, why should the one you market it to be the fool who buys it when no one else does?
to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.
Ah, but as you may notice this definition is invalid if you give acknowledgement. This is about quoting without citation, to take what someone else has produced as your own. Then yes, informally we say "He stole my song."
There is no obfuscation here from the BSA on the simple fact that copyright infringement is a class of theft.
No, you can't take any random definition and conclude it's a legal definition. Otherwise "to steal a kiss" would be a class of theft.
Some were viewed as posers, while others were popular, because, well, they were likable. (...) When people try to be liked or try to be cool, they typically fail.
And you didn't spot the connection here? Even though some things makes you popular with one group and unpopular with another - you can't both be nerd and jock, gother and jesusfreak - there's definitively things that make you unpopular with almost everyone. Most people just want to fit in somewhere - doesn't really matter where, if it's not the cool group then the rest form their own groups with their own social hierarchies. That is why people that start hanging out with bad people often end up so badly, because they try so hard to conform locally even if they're in rebellion with everyone else. Maybe exactly because they're in rebellion to everyone else.
Of course you could say social status doesn't matter, but I think most people will consider your bank account a pretty lousy measure of success if you socially gave everyone the finger. Being in a group and making friends is finding a social common ground, things you can do together which means you have to compromise and not always do what you want. Some diversity is good, it brings different viewpoints, experiences and activities you can do together but if you're too far apart you don't fit in. That's the nature of social groups, they're neither the Borg nor all over the place. They're a group of like-minded individuals, it's not just about who you are but also who you choose to be.
Good question, as far as I can tell there are some variations in fiber optic cables so impossible to say. Most cables are built to work in some rather narrow bands at extreme speeds, you might get the 500GHz with regular cables but probably not full spectrum. This is mostly guesswork though.
These jackasses paying my rate because I'm good at a few things; but rather than have me do those things, I'm sitting in a meeting, bored, but well paid.
What's wrong with:
These jackasses paying my salary because I'm good at a few things; but rather than have me do those things, I'm sitting in a meeting, bored, but getting paid.
You make it sound like employers care about the work to be done and contractors don't. That isn't true - or at least shouldn't be true unless you're one of the idiot employees who do unpaid overtime to finish. If it takes more hours of your life, of course you should be paid more. But then I hear the US has really abused the "exempt worker" so be roughly any white collar worker. Around here the definition is fairly strictly limited to management and others of exceptionally free positions that have great liberty to prioritize, delegate and decide when and how to work. If practically you have to be on time every morning, you're not exempt and even if you don't pay could easily get sued for back pay when they leave.
Another thing is that you get less stupid meetings. Consultants is a visible, billed expense so if you're measuring "whose time is more valuable" then the contractor is pretty high up. And unlike salaried people somebody is going to look at that bill and ask if you actually needed to be in that meeting. I did come to a place once and things weren't set up, and he was all apologizing. I was shrugging "Well the meter's running, if you want me to come back another day just say so but that won't be until I have another opening in my calendar." That's when he realized he wouldn't be apologizing to me, but to the PM for either billing extra hours or causing a delay in the schedule. If I don't get my work one, it's not my problem it's yours. Right now I'm employed but I still think the same way.
Funny, because I've worked another place where the attitude was always "another small task won't hurt (non-IT) operations". Instead of fixing and automating routines, the quickfix was always to add a manual check or correction or copy-paste and IT never got around to delivering solutions. The worst was when this lead to massaged data, because then this would take a data conversion which was always a huge high-risk job that would never, ever get done. Any operational error was of course because operations was sloppy, not because it was an incomprehensible maze of exceptions, corrections and special cases. The leader types didn't help, it was as much dom/sub as you get in the corporate world.
Sadly I think the collapse was so noisy from other reasons nobody truly saw ITs role in it, the high operational costs drove us away from the mass market to few customers and large orders - which is a very competitive market with a low tolerance for error. And because of the many lacks in error checking we had errors. So just to sum it up, it's not just other departments playing "somebody else's problem" with IT, I've seen IT play that game just as well themselves. That's what happens when one department gets to rewrite the business like it serves them, not as it serves the company. Your head of IT is probably a work suck hole, thinking the more IT do for the company the more powerful he is. Reality is you're just everyone's bitches.
No, but you probably don't need 1000 gigabit either. At the giant LAN party "The Gathering" this easter they had 5200 people and a 100 Gbps uplink, but the traffic mostly stayed in the 10-12 Gbps range. True, the ~140 table routers were limited to 2 Gbps each, but that is still only 5-6 of those maxed. And those are pretty much all computer enthusiasts spending their easter there.
The NIX (Norwegian Internet eXchange) in Norway tops out at about 70-80 Gbps maximum for 4.96 mio people - that isn't all Internet traffic but all that crosses an ISP boundary. Netnod is something similar in Sweden, they max at 220-230 Gbps for 9.35 mio people. Even if you take The Gathering as an extreme high end, you could comfortably place 500 million people on gigabit with an exabit uplink. Using Sweden as a more realistic sampling of average people under average conditions more like 40 billion.
Eventually you reach a point where it's more like laptops, the faster you can finish the faster you go back to an idle state. Currently on my 25 Mbit line I can download a BluRay in 5 hours. On a gigabit line more like 7 minutes - but it'll still take me 2 hours to watch. And I have to do a lot of other things like work and sleep and other stuff too, which means I don't even need 7 mins of max capacity every 2 hours, maybe 3 times a day at most.
Already 12% of the households here in Norway have fiber connections, pretty much every apartment complex with 50+ apartments built now has fiber and they're rewiring a lot of normal residential neighborhoods too. They expect more than 1/3rd coverage by 2015, and I can believe it. The future is coming, maybe not to the US but that's not the rest of the world's problem. Anything that's not fiber is going into the "legacy" category.
Yes, but it's RAR + PAR, because this is another hack on top of a system never designed to do binaries. Long story short, any "large" file - originally 60kb and not much larger today - is split and transmitted as multipart binaries. This has nothing to do with RARs, every large file is that way. A lot of Usenet software won't download incomplete files because it means it should wait for more parts to arrive at the server. It doesn't know that with PAR files you actually have enough to recover the whole file anyway. So in practice many people download the *complete* RAR and PAR files they can get, then use the PAR files to recover the missing RAR files.
Now people with "stupid" software download all parts except r04 as well as par2.par. We now have 90+10 parts and can recover r04. I won't bore you with old history, just say that everything is a hack to transfer over a system originally designed to only deal with ASCII text. It works, but it'll never be pretty.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact you would be well within your rights to re-brand RedHat, brand it as "myEnterpriseOS" and charge ONE BILLION DOLLARS if you so desire (good luck finding someone willing to pay for it though)
Maybe not a billion, but yeah there's been quite a few cases of open source software getting a different logo slapped on, obscuring that it's GPL and bundled with ad/mal/crapware or sold as if it was payware. Generally frowned upon, but grayishly legal enough they mostly get away with it.
I'm all for the "standing on shoulders of giants" thing, but the whole "let someone else do all the work, slap on a new logo and ship as our own" is more taking the bad with the good. Otherwise you'd run into a ton of legal misery trying to define identical or essentially similar software.
It's his first post ever, obviously created to troll this thread.
One form of value is simple liquidity, like for example I'm moving to a new apartment. In theory I'd be just as happy to swap apartments with possibly some other stuff to make it even, but it's very hard to find a perfect match that wants to do the exact opposite. If we think there's thousands of people in the market then probably there's some set of trades where I'd give what I have and get what I want, but it'd be very hard to find. However, if there's a currency then I can just sell and buy what I want with no real risk because I'm only momentarily invested in the currency. If I know I can get 1000 bitcoins here, pay 1000 bitcoins there and so does everyone else in a zerosum game then who cares what a bitcoin really is? It's just the glue between normal goods, tokens that don't exist for any other purpose. If enough people are constantly looking to buy and sell things that may be enough to constantly keep a market flowing and there's no one left holding the bag of worthless bitcoins.
Holding money or giving loans on the other hand is a whole other ball of twine. Then you really have to consider what is the currency going to be worth in the future. Even with fiat money there are whole economies that run on those currencies, people that need it to shop at the corner store or pub because they only take $local_currency and to pay subscriptions, debts, taxes and so on. You can "lose faith" in the dollar but it's pretty damn hard living in the US without it. And even despite that, a few of them collapse. How quickly could bitcoin collapse? In a heartbeat. There's no "captive" demand and no inherent value to keep, it's like a stampede waiting to happen. And I doubt there's a bigger group of fools who'll raise prices to new levels after the first one.
It takes two to communicate, you didn't do half as bad trying to read it as the guy who wrote it. Except for the long words you'd almost think a grade school kid wrote it.
Yeah. Sadly the Internet didn't evolve a generic, open CDN-ish system. Something not unlike a HTTP proxy, except you store binary blocks by hash. If some other guy from my ISP has downloaded the same torrent, I'd just grab it from my ISPs "CDN" server instead. Really just a HDD with a LRU cache, new stuff is added and the least used falls off.
Depending on how complicated you want it you could have a hierarchy of them, like first try locally, regionally, nationally etc. so stuff would only get pulled long-distance once. The MAFIAA would of course jump all over it but you could store encrypted pieces - wouldn't do them much good unless they had the access key. It'd probably save them bandwidth and money while we get faster content - a win-win.
Instead you have to make deals with the big CDNs with again have to make deals with the big ISPs and everybody wants $$$ all the way. Ah well the good thing is that P2P drives fiber everywhere - I heard that in my home town of 150k people there's now 2400 cable gates that need asphalt. Soon the "last mile" problem is a thing of the past. Well, except places like the US but I don't care about those :)
Point taken, can states pass taxes that would be unconstitutional for federal taxes? I thought the 14th amendment bound the states pretty hard to follow the Bill of Rights and most other restrictions imposed on the government. I'm not *that* into constitutional law.
1) Why limit yourself to models that pay for something AFTER it has been produced?
Because it's the only way mass market products work. True, many companies will invest money before it is produced to collect pay afterwards - for a risk premium of course - but if the consumers aren't paying they will go away too. How do I know your project will deliver? Do I have any say in the project so I know the features I want will even be there? Will you 80% down the road say you need more time and money? I don't want the risk or uncertainty of investing in something that could be a flop or a scam, as a consumer I want you to offer me a finished solution at a fixed price. And on the exceptions where I do pay up front I'm normally in control of the projects with deliverables and estimates, while I have no control over $20 in a $100k project.
2) There are in fact successful comercial models that include free distribution of the copyrighted product.
In certain niches where service and support is critical, yes. There's lots of software where people either don't need it or feel you're giving them a broken product and charging to fix it. And it doesn't work so good for music, movies and other things that are "done" so to speak. Of the total volume the exceptions are pretty marginal and can't be generalized to apply very broadly.
3) In computer systems DRM is more than just a means of protecting copyright.
Yes, sadly. It's a huge flaw that the DMCA protects use restrictions and that kind of bundling should simply be outlawed.
The average pensioner receives more than they've put in (Google it yourself).
Not sure what you mean, yes pensioners are a net expense. There's an "expense curve" of sorts constructed of the average person's net contribution. It's negative in childhood (child support, public schools) and up to mid 20s (many students at public education, high unemployment, low wages to tax), then a net contribution up to retirement age, afterwards public pensions and hospitals cost more.
There is a degree of collectivism to it, some will die before the retirement age so in total there's somewhat more to share than what each put in. Those that die in early retirement is a net plus while those that live the longest generally get way, way more than they put in, you still get your pension if you get 100+ years old. So yes, the average pensioner receives more than they've put in but that's because they're the survivors. In total they're not supposed to recieve more than they've in total put in.
They need to re-establish the link between getting stuff and working for it. As it is, you get to vote even if you haven't net contributed. (...) With this kind of system a politician would promise stuff to the non-workers, paid for by everyone else.
That's a reasonable argument for the budget, but really terrible for everything else. Students, retirees and others that don't net contribute can and should have lots of opinions and have their vote on what should be legal and not. They do a lot more in government than set tax levels.
As for tax systems, a flat tax with a maximum figure seems reasonable. Why do I say that? (...) If such a person pays the flat tax, they will essentially be paying for the upkeep of dozens, or even hundred or thousands of other people.
That will have all sorts of bad practical consequences. It'll be much better with a stay-at-home mom on benefits and have you work and earn more, instead of her getting a job too. It creates lots of incentives for black labor, where people add to your "above the max" income and then get kickbacks instead of paying tax on it themselves. That's why it should hit some max rate and stay there.
No. "General Welfare" is a term from contract law, and in the constitution it's a limit on the taxing power: it requires all appropriations to be made for the benefit of the people as a whole, not favoring any region or group at the expense of another.
And how would anything ever be exactly equal? We all use public roads, but we'll never get perfectly equal benefit from them. Some use them more, some use them less, some only use them indirectly as passengers or public transport and even more indirectly buy goods that got there over public roads. And there's always arguments about what route to take because it'll benefit different people or where to build roads at all. And if we should spend more or less money on roads in general. That is just one tiny fraction of the things that you think all should be balanced. The argument you make just doesn't work much in practice.
Around here one of the big rah-rahs is the Apollo program. Was that of equal benefit for everyone? Or was it certain tech centers that benefited way, way more than others? Even with the best of intentions and results, things will differ. Also there's the question of what horizon you take, like for example work to get electrify and phones to everyone. In the long run it pulls the whole country along, in the short term it's a pretty clear subsidy. Does something like the CPS benefit everyone equally? No, childless families don't need it except maybe it get other people's maltreated kids taken care of. Other reasons are that other people react to us, like for example trade relations, attracting investors, flight of jobs and capital.
I very much doubt you could make a credible case that proves that a tax does not in any possible way contribute to the general welfare of the United States. That some will benefit more and less yes, but to prove that it can't possibly overall be for the greater good is a near impossible task.
In what way? The power to tax is in the constitution itself and "general Welfare of the United States" is pretty much "whatever you think is good".
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Also they added this amendment which is very, very broad:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
So do tell... what is unconstitutional?
You assume sanity. I've seen companies easily use five-digit sums instead of three-digit sums because it came out of a different budget, if the former is within the executive's spending power and the latter requires some exception to corporate policy. Now I agree that without it policy stuff wouldn't get done, but I've seen some very irrational decisions happen locally as an effect.
HDCP has nothing to do with the cable but everything to do with the devices at the ends of the cable. It's just a DRM encryption, and HDMI being digital, well, it doesn't make a difference if the signal is delayed by 200ns, as long as the signal gets there and the device supports HDCP it will be decoded.
Sadly, no the delay matters. There are HDCP handshake timing issues, like my TV that will not accept anything passed through my surround system. Direct cable will work and I've tested with my computer monitor that it's the TV having the issue. Sadly I wasn't using HDMI when I bought it so I didn't realize until much later, but it seems others have had that issue too.
Once I decided that I was done with part time home repair work, I used my prices to drive away work. I would charge higher and higher prices and would be very up front with them. I even had a minimum charge of one hour. I was surprised at how much people were willing to pay. I eventually moved away from the area and was able to call it quits.
Because they're past the "risk premium". They can get some other guy and end up with someone that doesn't know shit or spends forever and bills it or just makes a mess of things or is a plain old scam. If they give this work to you, and know you'll deliver quality work with no fuzz then you are the safe, simple option. Consider it a bit like hiring a plumber, even if it a week later springs a leak and he does immediately take full responsibility (we're well into fairytale land here already) you still have to deal with the leak, damage assessment, insurance agency, repairs and all that paperwork and phone calls and shit. All the time stolen is rarely covered. Or you could call the guy who charges more but does it right. That relationship is strongly personal though, it won't do to send your hireling replacement.
Honestly "most people" aren't interested in civil rights unless it hits them in the wallet and never were. Like the US revolution was mostly because of British taxes, that was what fueled the common man. That's what the Romans said too with their "bread and circus", if you have money for that you won't be unhappy enough to rebel. The Soviet Union too was mostly an economic collapse, it was the endless lines to empty shops to buy things with worthless rubles that caved them in not the Iron Curtain and Pravda. In the Civil War, was the south that much more racist than the north or did they have a much greater economic interest in slavery? No doubt they rationalized. Same with the civil rights movement it was also a lot about economic equality, black people couldn't get the same education, same jobs at the same pay as white people.
You can see the tendencies already in some of the economies that pretty much have failed, like in Greece. It's a full on democracy and all that but facing collapse, massive unemployment and massive public cutbacks there's tons of strikes and riots. A hundred years ago that's what would have triggered a socialist revolution, now hopefully not that bad. Iceland is now rebelling with the people refusing to pay UK and the Netherlands after the bank collapse, despite the parliament approving it twice but the president forcing a referendum. The pessimist in me is saying it could so far as revolutions and countries saying they won't pay for the old corrupt regime.
I came from a Gtk+ background, but am using Qt Quick (QML) in one project. The widget set as of Qt 4.7.2 is woefully anemic, but other than that, it seems like a general improvement over using C++ for the entire UI.
My impression is that Qt Quick is another one of those things that's going to come full circle. First you go from a huge set of widgets (QWidget & decendants) to html/css (Qt Quick) and eventually you'll want to build the exact same widgets on top of that again for convienience. Oh well..
The best part is that TFA calls them a Tier 1 ISP. If these guys were running the Internet backbone, I'd short my stocks in everything Internet-based right now.
If you write a piece of software and you get 100 paying customers and 1000 warez kiddies, you have 1000 future customers when they need to buy something for work.
I'm sure that business model works great for Call of Duty. The software that basically exist as training tools for work is only one segment of the software market, and they do usually offer reasonably priced student editions. There's a lot of software that is meant to exist in the consumer market by its own right.
There's the "You could find the money, if you really needed too". No matter how poor the student claims to be, I've never seen one that couldn't in some way find beer money. It's pretty hard to get beer without the money for it, while it it's pretty easy with the software so if you can't afford both you buy the beer and pirate the software. I'm a poor student, I can't afford it after all my 'necessary' expenses right? Particularly if you set it up so you "had to" get the ultra extreme pro enterprise package at full retail.
Ultimately it's their choice if they want to be fools and only offer a 3500$ package. If they don't want to offer any light/express/student/personal/whatever edition, then you don't really have the right to say "Hey I'm taking this but I'm really doing you a favor." Same with the "marketing" defense if they don't want to promote this way. Mostly what you're promoting is that everyone else downloads it too, why should the one you market it to be the fool who buys it when no one else does?
One of the definitions of stealing is:
to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.
Ah, but as you may notice this definition is invalid if you give acknowledgement. This is about quoting without citation, to take what someone else has produced as your own. Then yes, informally we say "He stole my song."
There is no obfuscation here from the BSA on the simple fact that copyright infringement is a class of theft.
No, you can't take any random definition and conclude it's a legal definition. Otherwise "to steal a kiss" would be a class of theft.
Some were viewed as posers, while others were popular, because, well, they were likable. (...) When people try to be liked or try to be cool, they typically fail.
And you didn't spot the connection here? Even though some things makes you popular with one group and unpopular with another - you can't both be nerd and jock, gother and jesusfreak - there's definitively things that make you unpopular with almost everyone. Most people just want to fit in somewhere - doesn't really matter where, if it's not the cool group then the rest form their own groups with their own social hierarchies. That is why people that start hanging out with bad people often end up so badly, because they try so hard to conform locally even if they're in rebellion with everyone else. Maybe exactly because they're in rebellion to everyone else.
Of course you could say social status doesn't matter, but I think most people will consider your bank account a pretty lousy measure of success if you socially gave everyone the finger. Being in a group and making friends is finding a social common ground, things you can do together which means you have to compromise and not always do what you want. Some diversity is good, it brings different viewpoints, experiences and activities you can do together but if you're too far apart you don't fit in. That's the nature of social groups, they're neither the Borg nor all over the place. They're a group of like-minded individuals, it's not just about who you are but also who you choose to be.
Good question, as far as I can tell there are some variations in fiber optic cables so impossible to say. Most cables are built to work in some rather narrow bands at extreme speeds, you might get the 500GHz with regular cables but probably not full spectrum. This is mostly guesswork though.
These jackasses paying my rate because I'm good at a few things; but rather than have me do those things, I'm sitting in a meeting, bored, but well paid.
What's wrong with:
These jackasses paying my salary because I'm good at a few things; but rather than have me do those things, I'm sitting in a meeting, bored, but getting paid.
You make it sound like employers care about the work to be done and contractors don't. That isn't true - or at least shouldn't be true unless you're one of the idiot employees who do unpaid overtime to finish. If it takes more hours of your life, of course you should be paid more. But then I hear the US has really abused the "exempt worker" so be roughly any white collar worker. Around here the definition is fairly strictly limited to management and others of exceptionally free positions that have great liberty to prioritize, delegate and decide when and how to work. If practically you have to be on time every morning, you're not exempt and even if you don't pay could easily get sued for back pay when they leave.
Another thing is that you get less stupid meetings. Consultants is a visible, billed expense so if you're measuring "whose time is more valuable" then the contractor is pretty high up. And unlike salaried people somebody is going to look at that bill and ask if you actually needed to be in that meeting. I did come to a place once and things weren't set up, and he was all apologizing. I was shrugging "Well the meter's running, if you want me to come back another day just say so but that won't be until I have another opening in my calendar." That's when he realized he wouldn't be apologizing to me, but to the PM for either billing extra hours or causing a delay in the schedule. If I don't get my work one, it's not my problem it's yours. Right now I'm employed but I still think the same way.
Funny, because I've worked another place where the attitude was always "another small task won't hurt (non-IT) operations". Instead of fixing and automating routines, the quickfix was always to add a manual check or correction or copy-paste and IT never got around to delivering solutions. The worst was when this lead to massaged data, because then this would take a data conversion which was always a huge high-risk job that would never, ever get done. Any operational error was of course because operations was sloppy, not because it was an incomprehensible maze of exceptions, corrections and special cases. The leader types didn't help, it was as much dom/sub as you get in the corporate world.
Sadly I think the collapse was so noisy from other reasons nobody truly saw ITs role in it, the high operational costs drove us away from the mass market to few customers and large orders - which is a very competitive market with a low tolerance for error. And because of the many lacks in error checking we had errors. So just to sum it up, it's not just other departments playing "somebody else's problem" with IT, I've seen IT play that game just as well themselves. That's what happens when one department gets to rewrite the business like it serves them, not as it serves the company. Your head of IT is probably a work suck hole, thinking the more IT do for the company the more powerful he is. Reality is you're just everyone's bitches.
No, but you probably don't need 1000 gigabit either. At the giant LAN party "The Gathering" this easter they had 5200 people and a 100 Gbps uplink, but the traffic mostly stayed in the 10-12 Gbps range. True, the ~140 table routers were limited to 2 Gbps each, but that is still only 5-6 of those maxed. And those are pretty much all computer enthusiasts spending their easter there.
The NIX (Norwegian Internet eXchange) in Norway tops out at about 70-80 Gbps maximum for 4.96 mio people - that isn't all Internet traffic but all that crosses an ISP boundary. Netnod is something similar in Sweden, they max at 220-230 Gbps for 9.35 mio people. Even if you take The Gathering as an extreme high end, you could comfortably place 500 million people on gigabit with an exabit uplink. Using Sweden as a more realistic sampling of average people under average conditions more like 40 billion.
Eventually you reach a point where it's more like laptops, the faster you can finish the faster you go back to an idle state. Currently on my 25 Mbit line I can download a BluRay in 5 hours. On a gigabit line more like 7 minutes - but it'll still take me 2 hours to watch. And I have to do a lot of other things like work and sleep and other stuff too, which means I don't even need 7 mins of max capacity every 2 hours, maybe 3 times a day at most.
Already 12% of the households here in Norway have fiber connections, pretty much every apartment complex with 50+ apartments built now has fiber and they're rewiring a lot of normal residential neighborhoods too. They expect more than 1/3rd coverage by 2015, and I can believe it. The future is coming, maybe not to the US but that's not the rest of the world's problem. Anything that's not fiber is going into the "legacy" category.
Yes, but it's RAR + PAR, because this is another hack on top of a system never designed to do binaries. Long story short, any "large" file - originally 60kb and not much larger today - is split and transmitted as multipart binaries. This has nothing to do with RARs, every large file is that way. A lot of Usenet software won't download incomplete files because it means it should wait for more parts to arrive at the server. It doesn't know that with PAR files you actually have enough to recover the whole file anyway. So in practice many people download the *complete* RAR and PAR files they can get, then use the PAR files to recover the missing RAR files.
Maybe an illustration is easier:
Movie.avi [94/100]
Par1.par [7/10]
Par2.par [10/10]
Do we have enough parts? Yes (94+7+10 > 100), but many people can't save Movie.avi and make this work.
Movie.rar [10/10]
Movie.r01 [10/10]
Movie.r02 [10/10]
Movie.r03 [10/10]
Movie.r04 [4/10]
Movie.r05 [10/10]
Movie.r06 [10/10]
Movie.r07 [10/10]
Movie.r08 [10/10]
Movie.r09 [10/10]
Par1.par [7/10]
Par2.par [10/10]
Now people with "stupid" software download all parts except r04 as well as par2.par. We now have 90+10 parts and can recover r04. I won't bore you with old history, just say that everything is a hack to transfer over a system originally designed to only deal with ASCII text. It works, but it'll never be pretty.