Project management software? Who the heck wants project management software at home? Your target, as you say, is large-ish companies. Maybe it's different in the US (the news suggests it is), but here in NZ companies big enough to need project management software tend to have developed ethics, and will buy the software they need. They trade on their reputation, and doing illegal things tends to tarnish reputations. Don't worry about controlling, or even checking, them. Do every damn thing you can to make it easy for them, they're the ones paying you the big bucks. If you have a good product with no pain, they'll pay for it.
So do a tiered approach - small numbers of copies get individual license keys. Large customers, wanting large numbers of licenses, get "site licenses", ie no controls. It works for a lot of "corporate" software I've come across. It even worked for Microsoft - they didn't get as big as they are on the back of the mess that is Vista's activation scheme; they got big on Windows and the key code you have to enter in, along with "corporate licenses" which just install without any of that nonsense. A big IT department rolling out 327 PCs doesn't want to muck about with individual license keys, they just want it to work.
Sure, eventually a site license will leak out and become generally available. But by then you'll have upgraded your software and the old version will be out of date. Sure, there'll be cracks and bypasses and whatever, some people will be using your software without paying for it. Just figure it into the price and ignore it - it works for retail shops.
For your peace of mind, sure, implement some sort of count-up if you feel you have to, but DON'T rely on it working, DON'T disable or alter the bahaviour of your software in any way if it fails. If you piss off the big companies, you're losing your big payers. Best thing is probably ask them to count how many users they have whenever they upgrade, and sell them that many licenses. Chances are you'll have a 1-10, 10-100, 100-1000 style pricing scheme anyway, so going from 327 users to 402 users won't make any difference anyway.
Now if you were writing a game, something for the home market... *grin*
As I understand it, there are observed facts ("things fall down"), and theories ("gravity pulls them down").
The scientific method as I was taught it is to find a bunch of related facts, and come up with a theory to explain them. Then as more facts come along, they will either fit with your theory or they won't. If they do, then they increase everybody's confidence in your theory. If they don't fit, then you have to modify or replace your theory. But even a theory which has been around for hundreds of years and which everybody knows is true (eg "the world is flat") is still only a theory because there might be some facts out there that we haven't discovered yet which contradict the theory (as they did, and not many people now believe in a flat earth, the theory has been fairly thoroughly discredited).
One of the main features of a good theory is that it can make predictions. If you make predictions and your predictions turn out to be true, then as above, people have more confidence in your theory. Many of the theories which form the basis of modern science have been so well tested by so many extremely smart people, without any of them finding any facts to contradict the theory, that the theories are universally accepted as correct. But, strictly speaking, they are still theories because there's still that small chance that something will come to light that proves them wrong. Or, at least, a little bit wrong - Newton's Theory of Gravity is wrong, but only by a very small amount and only in special circumstances; for all practical purposes in everyday life it's good enough, so we accept it.
The problem with the theory of evolution is that it hasn't been around for long enough for the predictions it makes to be observed, because visible evolution only happens over long time-scales. So there is nobody (other than microbiologists, who nobody seems to believe) who can say that they've actually seen evolution happening. Nobody has ever seen a microbe evolve into a fish. So evolution is a theory. What we have to decide for ourselves is whether we consider it to be a good theory. There are a lot of observable facts which appear to support it - fossil records, similarities in DNA between species, the list goes on. To me, this is enough evidence to make me believe that evolution is, as far as it goes, a good theory. There are a number of aspects which could do with some work, but that's because we don't completely understand it yet.
If you keep a properly open mind, however, it still has to be admitted that it is *possible* that the world was created a few thousand years ago. This is a perfectly legitimate theory. The thing to do is to see what observable facts there are to support it. If you take the existence of a higher being as a given, and also the "fact" that complicated things don't "just happen", then ID makes sense. To me, those seem very shaky foundations for a theory to start from, but that is only my belief, other people are free to believe what they will.
There are, of course, limits to how much you should insist on observing your own facts. If you insisted on seeing everything with your own personal pair of eyeballs, then you would not believe very much at all. This is a bit extreme. You have to decide whose observations to put your faith in. That might be your local minister, in which case ID might be a perfectly credible theory, because your local minister gets revelations from God.
Essentially it comes down to freedom of thought - people can believe what they want, and we have no right to harangue them for it.
The problem comes when people make up their minds and then impose their belief on the education system to the exclusion of the competing theories, thus denying future generations of much of the evidence and also the freedom to make up their own minds. It is just as bad to teach evolution and exclude ID as the other way around. The students have to be given the evidence, have the various theories explained to them, and be encouraged to make up their own minds. Whether you call it religion or science is sophistry.
I hadn't seen that quote from Galileo before, and it pretty much sums up my views on creationism.
Having a scientific type of mind, I have to acknowledge the possibility that yes, the world was created "as is" a few thousand years ago, fossils and all. Assuming the existence of an omnipotent Higher Being (God, FSM, Loki, your deity of choice), who is presumably capable of anything and hence can get all the little details just right to fool us, then there is *by definition* no way we could know the difference. In fact, with enough attention to detail, the whole lot could have been created yesterday, or five minutes ago, including everybody's memories of alleged events prior to the point of creation, and we would not be able to tell. Whether I believe it has no bearing on whether it is the truth.
Given that we by definition can't know which is the truth, what is one to believe?
Consider this exchange:
Student: "How did the Himalayas get there?" Teacher: "God put them there." Student: "Oh. Well, how can cheetahs run so fast?" Teacher: "God made them like that." Student: "Oh. Well, why are there so many diseases killing people?" Teacher: "God makes them do it." Student: "Oh. I'm going to go watch tv." (this seems to be where America is at now.)
See where I'm coming from? Creationism, to any sort of inquiring mind, is *boring*! The answers are all the same!
Man's understanding of his world has been a continual movement from explaining phenomena in terms of gods (lightning? Thor!) to explaining it in terms of natural processes and forces ("clouds rubbing together" *cough* I hate pop science sites). I don't see any reason why this should not continue. I believe in trying to explain occurrences in terms of things that we understand. If we don't understand the causes for something, then hey, that's another opportunity to go learn something!
By all means teach ID. Teach FSM. Teach Buddhism. Teach whatever it is pygmies in the rainforests believe (I apologise for my ignorance). Teach Evolution. I don't much care whether you call it all science or religion, there seem to be enough people who can turn either one into the other, the key thing is to give the darling (*cough*) little mites _all_ the evidence and teach them to think for themselves and make their own decisions. Make sure they understand that there are _facts_ ("these are microbes and these are fish and there are these similarities in their DNA") and there are _theories_ ("God created them all" or "some microbes evolved into fish, some evolved into different things") and what the difference is between the two.
Slashdot Mirror
Project management software? Who the heck wants project management software at home? Your target, as you say, is large-ish companies. Maybe it's different in the US (the news suggests it is), but here in NZ companies big enough to need project management software tend to have developed ethics, and will buy the software they need. They trade on their reputation, and doing illegal things tends to tarnish reputations. Don't worry about controlling, or even checking, them. Do every damn thing you can to make it easy for them, they're the ones paying you the big bucks. If you have a good product with no pain, they'll pay for it.
So do a tiered approach - small numbers of copies get individual license keys. Large customers, wanting large numbers of licenses, get "site licenses", ie no controls. It works for a lot of "corporate" software I've come across. It even worked for Microsoft - they didn't get as big as they are on the back of the mess that is Vista's activation scheme; they got big on Windows and the key code you have to enter in, along with "corporate licenses" which just install without any of that nonsense. A big IT department rolling out 327 PCs doesn't want to muck about with individual license keys, they just want it to work.
Sure, eventually a site license will leak out and become generally available. But by then you'll have upgraded your software and the old version will be out of date. Sure, there'll be cracks and bypasses and whatever, some people will be using your software without paying for it. Just figure it into the price and ignore it - it works for retail shops.
For your peace of mind, sure, implement some sort of count-up if you feel you have to, but DON'T rely on it working, DON'T disable or alter the bahaviour of your software in any way if it fails. If you piss off the big companies, you're losing your big payers. Best thing is probably ask them to count how many users they have whenever they upgrade, and sell them that many licenses. Chances are you'll have a 1-10, 10-100, 100-1000 style pricing scheme anyway, so going from 327 users to 402 users won't make any difference anyway.
Now if you were writing a game, something for the home market... *grin*
As I understand it, there are observed facts ("things fall down"), and theories ("gravity pulls them down").
The scientific method as I was taught it is to find a bunch of related facts, and come up with a theory to explain them. Then as more facts come along, they will either fit with your theory or they won't. If they do, then they increase everybody's confidence in your theory. If they don't fit, then you have to modify or replace your theory. But even a theory which has been around for hundreds of years and which everybody knows is true (eg "the world is flat") is still only a theory because there might be some facts out there that we haven't discovered yet which contradict the theory (as they did, and not many people now believe in a flat earth, the theory has been fairly thoroughly discredited).
One of the main features of a good theory is that it can make predictions. If you make predictions and your predictions turn out to be true, then as above, people have more confidence in your theory. Many of the theories which form the basis of modern science have been so well tested by so many extremely smart people, without any of them finding any facts to contradict the theory, that the theories are universally accepted as correct. But, strictly speaking, they are still theories because there's still that small chance that something will come to light that proves them wrong. Or, at least, a little bit wrong - Newton's Theory of Gravity is wrong, but only by a very small amount and only in special circumstances; for all practical purposes in everyday life it's good enough, so we accept it.
The problem with the theory of evolution is that it hasn't been around for long enough for the predictions it makes to be observed, because visible evolution only happens over long time-scales. So there is nobody (other than microbiologists, who nobody seems to believe) who can say that they've actually seen evolution happening. Nobody has ever seen a microbe evolve into a fish. So evolution is a theory. What we have to decide for ourselves is whether we consider it to be a good theory. There are a lot of observable facts which appear to support it - fossil records, similarities in DNA between species, the list goes on. To me, this is enough evidence to make me believe that evolution is, as far as it goes, a good theory. There are a number of aspects which could do with some work, but that's because we don't completely understand it yet.
If you keep a properly open mind, however, it still has to be admitted that it is *possible* that the world was created a few thousand years ago. This is a perfectly legitimate theory. The thing to do is to see what observable facts there are to support it. If you take the existence of a higher being as a given, and also the "fact" that complicated things don't "just happen", then ID makes sense. To me, those seem very shaky foundations for a theory to start from, but that is only my belief, other people are free to believe what they will.
There are, of course, limits to how much you should insist on observing your own facts. If you insisted on seeing everything with your own personal pair of eyeballs, then you would not believe very much at all. This is a bit extreme. You have to decide whose observations to put your faith in. That might be your local minister, in which case ID might be a perfectly credible theory, because your local minister gets revelations from God.
Essentially it comes down to freedom of thought - people can believe what they want, and we have no right to harangue them for it.
The problem comes when people make up their minds and then impose their belief on the education system to the exclusion of the competing theories, thus denying future generations of much of the evidence and also the freedom to make up their own minds. It is just as bad to teach evolution and exclude ID as the other way around. The students have to be given the evidence, have the various theories explained to them, and be encouraged to make up their own minds. Whether you call it religion or science is sophistry.
I hadn't seen that quote from Galileo before, and it pretty much sums up my views on creationism.
Having a scientific type of mind, I have to acknowledge the possibility that yes, the world was created "as is" a few thousand years ago, fossils and all. Assuming the existence of an omnipotent Higher Being (God, FSM, Loki, your deity of choice), who is presumably capable of anything and hence can get all the little details just right to fool us, then there is *by definition* no way we could know the difference. In fact, with enough attention to detail, the whole lot could have been created yesterday, or five minutes ago, including everybody's memories of alleged events prior to the point of creation, and we would not be able to tell. Whether I believe it has no bearing on whether it is the truth.
Given that we by definition can't know which is the truth, what is one to believe?
Consider this exchange:
Student: "How did the Himalayas get there?"
Teacher: "God put them there."
Student: "Oh. Well, how can cheetahs run so fast?"
Teacher: "God made them like that."
Student: "Oh. Well, why are there so many diseases killing people?"
Teacher: "God makes them do it."
Student: "Oh. I'm going to go watch tv."
(this seems to be where America is at now.)
See where I'm coming from? Creationism, to any sort of inquiring mind, is *boring*! The answers are all the same!
Man's understanding of his world has been a continual movement from explaining phenomena in terms of gods (lightning? Thor!) to explaining it in terms of natural processes and forces ("clouds rubbing together" *cough* I hate pop science sites). I don't see any reason why this should not continue. I believe in trying to explain occurrences in terms of things that we understand. If we don't understand the causes for something, then hey, that's another opportunity to go learn something!
By all means teach ID. Teach FSM. Teach Buddhism. Teach whatever it is pygmies in the rainforests believe (I apologise for my ignorance). Teach Evolution. I don't much care whether you call it all science or religion, there seem to be enough people who can turn either one into the other, the key thing is to give the darling (*cough*) little mites _all_ the evidence and teach them to think for themselves and make their own decisions. Make sure they understand that there are _facts_ ("these are microbes and these are fish and there are these similarities in their DNA") and there are _theories_ ("God created them all" or "some microbes evolved into fish, some evolved into different things") and what the difference is between the two.