Which will make everyone's savings disappear and lead to an economic collapse like 1930s Germany, that worked so well last time. Defaulting will tank the market's credibility but it won't lead to the kind of riots and revolution letting the presses really go would. Personally I've never figured how a country can default anyway, people certainly can't default unless they have no assets to pay. Yet do I see them auctioning off every bit of public property to do it? Nah. It seems countries have this rule where they can just say "Well, I don't feel like paying anything so I won't". I guess it's due to you needing tanks and guns to force them to pay, but it still seems awfully easy compared to what the rest of us have to go through.
Well, if all he wants is to draw that is easy - at least in Qt it doesn't take a canvas just a widget and a QPainter. Since he's asking for canvas functionality I figure he'll want to actually use them interactively, which does bring you over to "if I click on x, how do I trigger y to happen" which is deep into toolkit land keeping track of items and their properties and programming model. And for that, I'd recommend Qt...
This was a lot more true when Qt was GPL, but being LGPL you can write and sell closed source applications with it as long as you contribute back any improvements you make to the library. Other people will not be able to give away copies of your software because the GPL only gives them distribution rights to the library, not the whole thing as with the GPL. Very few projects should need the commercial license anymore, and if you do because of some anal platform requirements like iOS or consoles then Qt doesn't support those platforms anyway. If all you want is Win/Mac/Linux then I don't see any reason to not use Qt.
Reality is that KDE4 didn't really become usable until v4.4 and has really come into it's own with 4.5.
Funny, because 4.0 was released as being usable. Then when 4.1 came out they said "4.0 wasn't usable, now it's great with 4.1". Then 4.2 came out, and the official line was "4.0 and 4.1 weren't usable, now it's great with 4.2". This has continued for every single point release of the 4 series so far, and each time they've hyped up the current release so that people who have tried it have been on the whole rather disappointed. Making the mature and familiar 3.5 releases impossible to use before the 4 series became (becomes) usable was a major mistake, because people have got used to Gnome during the wait.
Agreed. Now 4.0 through 4.3 was the development releases? That's a solid two years of development, that people now in all seriousness say it should tell you how far away 4.0 was from being ready for the public. Seriously, read the fscking release anonuncement. There's not one word in it that could reasonably suggest it's not a normal end user release. Yes, it's a big x.0 release but normal end user software does have x.0 releases, they don't start at version x.4. All the "we told you so" comments are referring to the little (*) written in 2pt white-on-white font that nobody caught.
Exactly. It is a PEBCAK thing. KDE does not required any fiddling for the average user and is very usable out-of-the box, even those versions distros have tried to "personalize". I run only kde straight from source and even there for the newb it does not require any fiddling about at all.
Ah, denial. It's so wonderful to explain why you're running the second most popular DE of a OS with 1% desktop market share. Why would anyone bother to complain when all you'll be met is with is "LALALALA PEBCAK" and if you go "screw this" the answer is "well good riddance we don't need n00bs like that, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out". Do you know what the difference between you and Steve Jobs is? His reality destortion field affects everyone, your only affect yourself...
For one most of the people that are paid have employers that want them to focus on specific things, not in detail but I doubt they'd could sit around making games on company time. The other thing is that it's much easier to envision a mod of an existing game than a new game, and on Linux you're mostly talking about a new game. There's few existing communities today. The open source model has proven much more effective when there is a clear rally flag, the way FreeCiv is a clone of civilization.
In a democracy, the laws are established by the majority. This gives the majority great power to oppress the minority. If there is widespread breaking of the law by a significant minority, then it is a sign that democracy is WORKING.
That is only true if you follow the Bush logic, everyone who is not with us is against us. First there is normally a halo of people that sympathize but don't break the law, secondly most people usually don't care much one way or the other. So if you have 10% breaking the law you probably have another 20% who sympathize and 68% that don't care. But because the last 2% have much money and influence, they are able to win anyway.
Unless there is a grave moral principle involved, WORK lawfully to change the law. People who advocate selectively following the law are destructive social PARASITES.
If you just like to be exempt yes, if you want to break the law while everyone else follows it. As for laws that are wrong there are many I find stupid and lame, but they don't register on my moral compass. But if my moral compass disagrees with the law then I'd rather trust my moral compass. If you have paid any attention to how laws are made you should know how much institutionalized injustice and lobbying and compromise has gone into it.
One of the key tests for a law is reciprocity, would you like others to do the same to you? To legalize murder is to legalize being murdered. To legalize rape is to legalize being raped. To legalize stealing is to legalize being stolen from. To legalize copying is to legalize being copied from. Wait, I don't have a problem with that. Nobody (or at least extremely few) refuse all laws, because most laws are good. It's those we can't justify we have a problem with.
By widespread breaking of the law you are only proving the point that current laws need better enforcement and bigger punishments.
You're an oppressive government's wet dream, every time they impose another unjust law you just say "it's still the law" and obey it. Widespread breaking of the law probably means democracy is being circumvented and that politicians are lobbied or bought off to prevent the law from changing. Why would then stopping what you're doing change anything? It just means that those that want to suppress them has scored a massive victory and will continue to marginalize the need for change. You show a charming naivity when it comes to how most change comes about. Wnen people wanted to legalize gay sex, do you think it was like "So we've never done it seeing as we obey the law and all, but we think it maybe would be a nice change."? If so, I have a bridge to sell you. Enough breaking of the law has changed many laws like prohibition for example. Maybe it's not our "moral high ground" way of winning, but it works.
Well, not reporting crime could be an offense depending on jurisdiction but that's a bit farfetched. If you run a contact service for drug sellers and drug buyers to find each other, that might be a little different. Particularly if you show them ads as commission for your brokering service. I don't know how much ad income is these days but TPB is a huge, huge site with tons of pagehits and no staff to create content only the cost of running the system. I doubt they earned less per hit than trashy XXX sites so if they weren't making money then I doubt many places could. Let's face it, TPB enables a lot of non-commercial sharing but I'm not so convinced the site itself is that too. If non-commercial sharing was legal and you set up a non-profit organization with transparency and oversight it would be different. But right now, people don't even know *who* is running TPB because the founders claim it's not them, much less what their income statement looks like.
Our company rule is: No outside code gets checked in unless our lawyers have checked the license.
I think you missed the point. It is not officially "outside code", the employees claim to have written it so your lawyers would never get called in. I would hope that it's standard procedure to have the lawyers check the any outside code you officially use, anything else sounds very reckless. Though I'm not sure why it needs to be a jab at H1B workers, they're by far not the only people who do it...
Yup, and it's one of the ways big companies curb a potentially dangerous patent. They put a ton of patent lawyers on it and try patenting every reasonable extension or application. Though I suppose if it wasn't that way, you'd see overly broad patents claiming anything and everything deriving from it is also their patent.
Those who get the reward, however, are the ones willing to make the effort to develop their ideas.
No, it's those that are best at ripping off creative people by putting it in their own product and kill them on margins and market power. You put down long hours actually doing product development, only to find yourself overrun by cheap clones that have done nothing but pick your product apart and copy it. I remember that happened to one company around here, it was a good idea, they actually had product on the market for one season produced locally and sold well, very far from "a flash of inspiration in the shower".
Next season a bigger company had taken their design, changed it just enough to not be a direct copy and fired it off to some low-cost country and flooded the market. Could they have won a lawsuit? Maybe, but when you're a failing startup due to lack of sales that's then even winning is losing because you can't take the short term cost and with appeals even just for the sake of appeals it can take forever. It's just that patent law is woefully ineffective at actually protecting real innovators and serve large companies with patent lawyers on staff and the deep pockets to kill startups that can't or won't play ball. But it's not like everything would be fine without patents either.
How much further can you get without getting a lawyer, filing a lawsuit and start subpoenaing evidence? It's exactly the same algorithm, and if you don't want to spend $100k on a patent litigation case than naming and shaming is as close as you'll get. If they pull a defamation suit, then you can bring in the big guns yourself.
Care about what you do, not what they do
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Anxiety and IT?
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Unless you have a real ownership in the company, realize that their problems are not your problems. I do my job and I do it well, even the times when I realize it won't matter because they're busy shooting themselves in the foot. And I do try to give some input on that when asked or when I have the opportunity. But if they seem determined to jump off a cliff and start flying, then I'm not trying to be the Hercules to stop them. If what you're paying me for is to run as fast as possible towards it, I'll do it. As long as we're talking about wasting money and not something that'd get me in a war crimes tribunal, I'm just obeying orders like a good soldier.
It pays off in that everyone in your immidiate surroundings, and probably your closest boss sees you're a good worker. Maybe from an eagle eye view the project is still a flop because it's mission impossible, but those people might be in a hiring position someday or they may help you find work through their network or they might give you good recommendations. It's a big world out there, but the people doing the same kind of work in the same field in the same geographical area is small. Essential personal qualities like "yeah I remember working with him 10 years ago, always doing a great job" have lasting value. Do that and there will always be work for you, maybe not the same job but you'll always have alternatives. Because no matter how much you've fretted over work, you might be laid off anyway.
It's always like that, if you are already attractive enough for another employer then you appear more attractive for a new employer. I've heard the same is true of girlfriends, only with more complicated transitions;)
Different people define porn in different ways. Should wikipedia be changed to wikipedia.xxx because there are some naked pictures on there? Who decides?
And yet despite that tons of magazine stores, dvd stores, web sites and whatnot manage to determine if what they're selling is "pornographic" or not. Yes, there are problems of international law and jurisdiction but the "it's individual" argument seems hollow when that is already not the case.
Bad example. If a magazine published an article on how to get a bomb past airport security they would improve security. Why? How? Simple their exposure of an obvious "security gap" would force the airport security to be improved.
If and only if it's so simple that now that we know about it, it's trivial to prevent. What if it's limitations you can't so easily fix? You've just lighted a path for terrorists and shutting down air travel until we can close the hole isn't a practical solution. You should disclose it to the authorities and only if they lack the will to fix it should you go public with it and even that preferably not in great detail.
You have a choice to either do nothing, or do evil. But that evil will prevent a greater evil, are you then "right" or "wrong"? Imagine it's right before D-day and you have a captured Nazi officer that has detailed knowledge of the German troops and defenses. Breaking him will save many Allied and civilian lives and end the war sooner, but he's an ideological hardliner and won't talk willingly. Would it be right to torture him? I don't think there's any school of ethics that's ever considered torture to be "right". And for all the good it'll do for the war, that person will be far worse off tortured than in a friendly POW-camp so there's no win-win situation here.
To say that some action is "not right" but that one "should keep doing it" is a contradiction.
Yes. The real world doesn't work on boolean logic so the results are as flawed as the model.
The media has a deep invested interest in the preservation of copyright as most of their business models revolve around it, be it in print, TV, radio or online. It's not about left wing or right wing, they're pretty much all pro-copyright mouthpieces. I think trying to win sympathizers, that is non-participants that still sympathize will not get you anywhere. It's about recruiting participants and making them aware how many of the people around them do it too. Raise the "status" of being a file sharer to something you openly admit to the people around you. The potential is huge, in Sweden it's up to 20% of the population now and roughly 50% in males 16-25. 20% of 300 million Americans is 60 million.
To take one example - and I'm not comparing copyright to Gandhi's fight here - Gandhi broke the salt law simply by telling everyone to make salt. The British arrested over 60,000 people in one month. ONE month. Every jail they had ran full and yet they still kept doing it and trading it, there was no end and no victory in sight. That's how copyright will fall too, through the sheer mass of people, not a few demonstrators doing it as a provocation but many doing it for themselves. Granted they did get public sympathy, but that was not the force that led to victory. There's a whole different power in mass civil disobedience than in just civil disobedience.
Well if you put the money in the bank at 3% interest rate you'd see about 1.03^36 = 290% return, but it's not how we normally talk about it. Return on investment (ROI) is implicitly annual, 666 * 1.18^36 = 210,000 so nominally 18%. You are correct that it should be corrected for inflation though, 2562 * 1.13^36 = 210,000 so a real ROI of 13%. Which is still impressive but not that absurdly high.
- Your hardware actually works with Linux, or you've bought specifically only Linux-friendly hardware. It's great if everything works out of the box, if you don't have to put in driver CDs that's great. But there's still a lot of hardware that isn't or is poorly supported under Linux. Or it has some quirks like wireless not doing encrypted connections, suspend/resume not working fully or something like that. - You're not looking to run any Windows software. Don't get me wrong, WINE is great in that it exists at all but it's a maintenance nightmare with many bugs and regressions, and very few applications run out of the box with a platinum status. Normally you have to follow a set of tweaks to make it work decently, and even then not often perfectly. - You're not looking to interact with any proprietary software or service, for example I've had plenty problems getting the OSS clones to work well together with my friends on MSN, basic messaging works but stuff like file transfers, support for emoticons, notice to others that I'm typing etc. have been broken. Free Spotify is a killer app here in Scandinavia. Does it exist under Linux? No, only a hacked up client that requires a paid subscription.
I'm pretty much a FAIL on all three. I've struggled with half-supported hardware, WINE and proprietary stuff. Without it Linux just wouldn't work well enough for me, I'm not doing it just for fun. Why I bother I'm not sure, but I'm certainly not spending less time managing Linux...
This is like the Intel Extreme Edition CPUs, for people who absolutely must have the fastest. To take an example here in Norway from one of our FIOS services. It's in Norwegian but top speed = 1990 NOK/month = $325/month, and they are far from a monopoly. Most people are happy with the $73 30/30 Mbit service if you get TV and phone from them too. To the degree that spending $200/month on Internet makes sense at all, this doesn't look like a bad offer to me...
Fixed cost? Canle maintenance and repairs, rack space, billing, customer support etc. are all pretty constant. Here in Norway I consider it to be quite decent competition but they all pretty much flat out at 40$/month for the really low end, whether DSL or cable. 60$ is normal and 80$ high-end, often giving you 10x the speed for 2x the cost.
Personally I predict that the usage pattern changes too. My 2 Mbit line was maxed almost 24x7. My 25 Mbit line isn't. A 150 Mbit line would be even better, but my average utilization would be even lower. So it's not even certain that their bandwidth costs scale with the advertised speed.
First, if Seagate could have established that the person was hired for a perfectly valid position, which went away as a result of business conditions they couldn't have forseen, then they wouldn't have lost this trial in the first place.
Their business plan could have been extremely optimistic or even delusional, but that wouldn't be illegal. A rose tinted presentation of where he'd fit in those plans likewise so. Good people in speciality fields like a yield engineer aren't a dime a dozen, if they were staffing up in anticipation of said delusional plans they weren't lying. The standard is not with perfect hindsight to reality, it's whether they knowingly gave him false information to take the job. As in things that weren't or couldn't possbily become true. In short you could easily get screwed this way within the law, it takes extra wrongdoing on part of the employer to make it illegal.
That depends on whether you consider intelligence a talent or a skill. Your talent is an innate ability which gives you a natüral level and a potential, while your actual skill will depend on training. Intelligence as measured by IQ tests will improve with education, as well as other mental challenges. So I would say both effects are true, you will both learn more and get better at the process of learning. You might say that this is only experience and not intelligence, but there's really no test that could separate the two. You are always the sum of what you were born with and your life up to now.
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Which will make everyone's savings disappear and lead to an economic collapse like 1930s Germany, that worked so well last time. Defaulting will tank the market's credibility but it won't lead to the kind of riots and revolution letting the presses really go would. Personally I've never figured how a country can default anyway, people certainly can't default unless they have no assets to pay. Yet do I see them auctioning off every bit of public property to do it? Nah. It seems countries have this rule where they can just say "Well, I don't feel like paying anything so I won't". I guess it's due to you needing tanks and guns to force them to pay, but it still seems awfully easy compared to what the rest of us have to go through.
Well, if all he wants is to draw that is easy - at least in Qt it doesn't take a canvas just a widget and a QPainter. Since he's asking for canvas functionality I figure he'll want to actually use them interactively, which does bring you over to "if I click on x, how do I trigger y to happen" which is deep into toolkit land keeping track of items and their properties and programming model. And for that, I'd recommend Qt...
This was a lot more true when Qt was GPL, but being LGPL you can write and sell closed source applications with it as long as you contribute back any improvements you make to the library. Other people will not be able to give away copies of your software because the GPL only gives them distribution rights to the library, not the whole thing as with the GPL. Very few projects should need the commercial license anymore, and if you do because of some anal platform requirements like iOS or consoles then Qt doesn't support those platforms anyway. If all you want is Win/Mac/Linux then I don't see any reason to not use Qt.
Reality is that KDE4 didn't really become usable until v4.4 and has really come into it's own with 4.5.
Funny, because 4.0 was released as being usable. Then when 4.1 came out they said "4.0 wasn't usable, now it's great with 4.1". Then 4.2 came out, and the official line was "4.0 and 4.1 weren't usable, now it's great with 4.2". This has continued for every single point release of the 4 series so far, and each time they've hyped up the current release so that people who have tried it have been on the whole rather disappointed. Making the mature and familiar 3.5 releases impossible to use before the 4 series became (becomes) usable was a major mistake, because people have got used to Gnome during the wait.
Agreed. Now 4.0 through 4.3 was the development releases? That's a solid two years of development, that people now in all seriousness say it should tell you how far away 4.0 was from being ready for the public. Seriously, read the fscking release anonuncement. There's not one word in it that could reasonably suggest it's not a normal end user release. Yes, it's a big x.0 release but normal end user software does have x.0 releases, they don't start at version x.4. All the "we told you so" comments are referring to the little (*) written in 2pt white-on-white font that nobody caught.
Exactly. It is a PEBCAK thing. KDE does not required any fiddling for the average user and is very usable out-of-the box, even those versions distros have tried to "personalize". I run only kde straight from source and even there for the newb it does not require any fiddling about at all.
Ah, denial. It's so wonderful to explain why you're running the second most popular DE of a OS with 1% desktop market share. Why would anyone bother to complain when all you'll be met is with is "LALALALA PEBCAK" and if you go "screw this" the answer is "well good riddance we don't need n00bs like that, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out". Do you know what the difference between you and Steve Jobs is? His reality destortion field affects everyone, your only affect yourself...
For one most of the people that are paid have employers that want them to focus on specific things, not in detail but I doubt they'd could sit around making games on company time. The other thing is that it's much easier to envision a mod of an existing game than a new game, and on Linux you're mostly talking about a new game. There's few existing communities today. The open source model has proven much more effective when there is a clear rally flag, the way FreeCiv is a clone of civilization.
In a democracy, the laws are established by the majority. This gives the majority great power to oppress the minority. If there is widespread breaking of the law by a significant minority, then it is a sign that democracy is WORKING.
That is only true if you follow the Bush logic, everyone who is not with us is against us. First there is normally a halo of people that sympathize but don't break the law, secondly most people usually don't care much one way or the other. So if you have 10% breaking the law you probably have another 20% who sympathize and 68% that don't care. But because the last 2% have much money and influence, they are able to win anyway.
Unless there is a grave moral principle involved, WORK lawfully to change the law. People who advocate selectively following the law are destructive social PARASITES.
If you just like to be exempt yes, if you want to break the law while everyone else follows it. As for laws that are wrong there are many I find stupid and lame, but they don't register on my moral compass. But if my moral compass disagrees with the law then I'd rather trust my moral compass. If you have paid any attention to how laws are made you should know how much institutionalized injustice and lobbying and compromise has gone into it.
One of the key tests for a law is reciprocity, would you like others to do the same to you? To legalize murder is to legalize being murdered. To legalize rape is to legalize being raped. To legalize stealing is to legalize being stolen from. To legalize copying is to legalize being copied from. Wait, I don't have a problem with that. Nobody (or at least extremely few) refuse all laws, because most laws are good. It's those we can't justify we have a problem with.
By widespread breaking of the law you are only proving the point that current laws need better enforcement and bigger punishments.
You're an oppressive government's wet dream, every time they impose another unjust law you just say "it's still the law" and obey it. Widespread breaking of the law probably means democracy is being circumvented and that politicians are lobbied or bought off to prevent the law from changing. Why would then stopping what you're doing change anything? It just means that those that want to suppress them has scored a massive victory and will continue to marginalize the need for change. You show a charming naivity when it comes to how most change comes about. Wnen people wanted to legalize gay sex, do you think it was like "So we've never done it seeing as we obey the law and all, but we think it maybe would be a nice change."? If so, I have a bridge to sell you. Enough breaking of the law has changed many laws like prohibition for example. Maybe it's not our "moral high ground" way of winning, but it works.
Well, not reporting crime could be an offense depending on jurisdiction but that's a bit farfetched. If you run a contact service for drug sellers and drug buyers to find each other, that might be a little different. Particularly if you show them ads as commission for your brokering service. I don't know how much ad income is these days but TPB is a huge, huge site with tons of pagehits and no staff to create content only the cost of running the system. I doubt they earned less per hit than trashy XXX sites so if they weren't making money then I doubt many places could. Let's face it, TPB enables a lot of non-commercial sharing but I'm not so convinced the site itself is that too. If non-commercial sharing was legal and you set up a non-profit organization with transparency and oversight it would be different. But right now, people don't even know *who* is running TPB because the founders claim it's not them, much less what their income statement looks like.
Our company rule is: No outside code gets checked in unless our lawyers have checked the license.
I think you missed the point. It is not officially "outside code", the employees claim to have written it so your lawyers would never get called in. I would hope that it's standard procedure to have the lawyers check the any outside code you officially use, anything else sounds very reckless. Though I'm not sure why it needs to be a jab at H1B workers, they're by far not the only people who do it...
Yup, and it's one of the ways big companies curb a potentially dangerous patent. They put a ton of patent lawyers on it and try patenting every reasonable extension or application. Though I suppose if it wasn't that way, you'd see overly broad patents claiming anything and everything deriving from it is also their patent.
Those who get the reward, however, are the ones willing to make the effort to develop their ideas.
No, it's those that are best at ripping off creative people by putting it in their own product and kill them on margins and market power. You put down long hours actually doing product development, only to find yourself overrun by cheap clones that have done nothing but pick your product apart and copy it. I remember that happened to one company around here, it was a good idea, they actually had product on the market for one season produced locally and sold well, very far from "a flash of inspiration in the shower".
Next season a bigger company had taken their design, changed it just enough to not be a direct copy and fired it off to some low-cost country and flooded the market. Could they have won a lawsuit? Maybe, but when you're a failing startup due to lack of sales that's then even winning is losing because you can't take the short term cost and with appeals even just for the sake of appeals it can take forever. It's just that patent law is woefully ineffective at actually protecting real innovators and serve large companies with patent lawyers on staff and the deep pockets to kill startups that can't or won't play ball. But it's not like everything would be fine without patents either.
How much further can you get without getting a lawyer, filing a lawsuit and start subpoenaing evidence? It's exactly the same algorithm, and if you don't want to spend $100k on a patent litigation case than naming and shaming is as close as you'll get. If they pull a defamation suit, then you can bring in the big guns yourself.
Unless you have a real ownership in the company, realize that their problems are not your problems. I do my job and I do it well, even the times when I realize it won't matter because they're busy shooting themselves in the foot. And I do try to give some input on that when asked or when I have the opportunity. But if they seem determined to jump off a cliff and start flying, then I'm not trying to be the Hercules to stop them. If what you're paying me for is to run as fast as possible towards it, I'll do it. As long as we're talking about wasting money and not something that'd get me in a war crimes tribunal, I'm just obeying orders like a good soldier.
It pays off in that everyone in your immidiate surroundings, and probably your closest boss sees you're a good worker. Maybe from an eagle eye view the project is still a flop because it's mission impossible, but those people might be in a hiring position someday or they may help you find work through their network or they might give you good recommendations. It's a big world out there, but the people doing the same kind of work in the same field in the same geographical area is small. Essential personal qualities like "yeah I remember working with him 10 years ago, always doing a great job" have lasting value. Do that and there will always be work for you, maybe not the same job but you'll always have alternatives. Because no matter how much you've fretted over work, you might be laid off anyway.
It's always like that, if you are already attractive enough for another employer then you appear more attractive for a new employer. I've heard the same is true of girlfriends, only with more complicated transitions ;)
Different people define porn in different ways. Should wikipedia be changed to wikipedia.xxx because there are some naked pictures on there? Who decides?
And yet despite that tons of magazine stores, dvd stores, web sites and whatnot manage to determine if what they're selling is "pornographic" or not. Yes, there are problems of international law and jurisdiction but the "it's individual" argument seems hollow when that is already not the case.
Bad example. If a magazine published an article on how to get a bomb past airport security they would improve security. Why? How? Simple their exposure of an obvious "security gap" would force the airport security to be improved.
If and only if it's so simple that now that we know about it, it's trivial to prevent. What if it's limitations you can't so easily fix? You've just lighted a path for terrorists and shutting down air travel until we can close the hole isn't a practical solution. You should disclose it to the authorities and only if they lack the will to fix it should you go public with it and even that preferably not in great detail.
If the end justifies the means, and the end is right, then the means are right.
Really?
You have a choice to either do nothing, or do evil. But that evil will prevent a greater evil, are you then "right" or "wrong"? Imagine it's right before D-day and you have a captured Nazi officer that has detailed knowledge of the German troops and defenses. Breaking him will save many Allied and civilian lives and end the war sooner, but he's an ideological hardliner and won't talk willingly. Would it be right to torture him? I don't think there's any school of ethics that's ever considered torture to be "right". And for all the good it'll do for the war, that person will be far worse off tortured than in a friendly POW-camp so there's no win-win situation here.
To say that some action is "not right" but that one "should keep doing it" is a contradiction.
Yes. The real world doesn't work on boolean logic so the results are as flawed as the model.
The media has a deep invested interest in the preservation of copyright as most of their business models revolve around it, be it in print, TV, radio or online. It's not about left wing or right wing, they're pretty much all pro-copyright mouthpieces. I think trying to win sympathizers, that is non-participants that still sympathize will not get you anywhere. It's about recruiting participants and making them aware how many of the people around them do it too. Raise the "status" of being a file sharer to something you openly admit to the people around you. The potential is huge, in Sweden it's up to 20% of the population now and roughly 50% in males 16-25. 20% of 300 million Americans is 60 million.
To take one example - and I'm not comparing copyright to Gandhi's fight here - Gandhi broke the salt law simply by telling everyone to make salt. The British arrested over 60,000 people in one month. ONE month. Every jail they had ran full and yet they still kept doing it and trading it, there was no end and no victory in sight. That's how copyright will fall too, through the sheer mass of people, not a few demonstrators doing it as a provocation but many doing it for themselves. Granted they did get public sympathy, but that was not the force that led to victory. There's a whole different power in mass civil disobedience than in just civil disobedience.
Well if you put the money in the bank at 3% interest rate you'd see about 1.03^36 = 290% return, but it's not how we normally talk about it. Return on investment (ROI) is implicitly annual, 666 * 1.18^36 = 210,000 so nominally 18%. You are correct that it should be corrected for inflation though, 2562 * 1.13^36 = 210,000 so a real ROI of 13%. Which is still impressive but not that absurdly high.
Assuming a few things, like:
- Your hardware actually works with Linux, or you've bought specifically only Linux-friendly hardware. It's great if everything works out of the box, if you don't have to put in driver CDs that's great. But there's still a lot of hardware that isn't or is poorly supported under Linux. Or it has some quirks like wireless not doing encrypted connections, suspend/resume not working fully or something like that.
- You're not looking to run any Windows software. Don't get me wrong, WINE is great in that it exists at all but it's a maintenance nightmare with many bugs and regressions, and very few applications run out of the box with a platinum status. Normally you have to follow a set of tweaks to make it work decently, and even then not often perfectly.
- You're not looking to interact with any proprietary software or service, for example I've had plenty problems getting the OSS clones to work well together with my friends on MSN, basic messaging works but stuff like file transfers, support for emoticons, notice to others that I'm typing etc. have been broken. Free Spotify is a killer app here in Scandinavia. Does it exist under Linux? No, only a hacked up client that requires a paid subscription.
I'm pretty much a FAIL on all three. I've struggled with half-supported hardware, WINE and proprietary stuff. Without it Linux just wouldn't work well enough for me, I'm not doing it just for fun. Why I bother I'm not sure, but I'm certainly not spending less time managing Linux...
This is like the Intel Extreme Edition CPUs, for people who absolutely must have the fastest. To take an example here in Norway from one of our FIOS services. It's in Norwegian but top speed = 1990 NOK/month = $325/month, and they are far from a monopoly. Most people are happy with the $73 30/30 Mbit service if you get TV and phone from them too. To the degree that spending $200/month on Internet makes sense at all, this doesn't look like a bad offer to me...
Fixed cost? Canle maintenance and repairs, rack space, billing, customer support etc. are all pretty constant. Here in Norway I consider it to be quite decent competition but they all pretty much flat out at 40$/month for the really low end, whether DSL or cable. 60$ is normal and 80$ high-end, often giving you 10x the speed for 2x the cost.
Personally I predict that the usage pattern changes too. My 2 Mbit line was maxed almost 24x7. My 25 Mbit line isn't. A 150 Mbit line would be even better, but my average utilization would be even lower. So it's not even certain that their bandwidth costs scale with the advertised speed.
First, if Seagate could have established that the person was hired for a perfectly valid position, which went away as a result of business conditions they couldn't have forseen, then they wouldn't have lost this trial in the first place.
Their business plan could have been extremely optimistic or even delusional, but that wouldn't be illegal. A rose tinted presentation of where he'd fit in those plans likewise so. Good people in speciality fields like a yield engineer aren't a dime a dozen, if they were staffing up in anticipation of said delusional plans they weren't lying. The standard is not with perfect hindsight to reality, it's whether they knowingly gave him false information to take the job. As in things that weren't or couldn't possbily become true. In short you could easily get screwed this way within the law, it takes extra wrongdoing on part of the employer to make it illegal.
That depends on whether you consider intelligence a talent or a skill. Your talent is an innate ability which gives you a natüral level and a potential, while your actual skill will depend on training. Intelligence as measured by IQ tests will improve with education, as well as other mental challenges. So I would say both effects are true, you will both learn more and get better at the process of learning. You might say that this is only experience and not intelligence, but there's really no test that could separate the two. You are always the sum of what you were born with and your life up to now.