there are a huge number of very qualified candidates who have been looking for a very long time
Too bad they're very qualified for jobs that don't need doing. Really. We don't need anymore web designers, database application developers or over-paid help desk workers. Meanwhile, jobs for people who can do some real math, design solid embedded applications, do non-trivial alorithmic analysis or put in some quality face/phone time in a services environment go unfilled for 6-10 months due to the lack of available qualified candidates.
The problem is that the job glut for minimally skilled computer jobs went away, and people haven't realized that the artificial demand for those skills is never coming back. There's nothing that any politician, economist, or headhunter can do about it. That doesn't, however, mean that they can't make a living. Like the parent to your comment said; it might not be the kind of inflated lifestyle they were used to in the '90s when salaries and hiring were stupid, but it's a living.
The last thing these people need is a cheap joke like yours.
While harsh, it's what most of these people do need: a dose of reality. Perhaps he could have been nicer, but the sooner many of these people start looking for other types of jobs, or refocus their skillset to be qualified for other types of jobs, the better. It has to happen eventually. I know the american dream somehow transformed itself into the desire to never learn anything new again once you turn 21, but there are far to many people in this country willing to work hard and adapt for people to get by with that attitude.
If such a shift in attitude doesn't occur soon, I think we may have yet hit the worst of the aftermath of the bubble economy. Just wait until all the people who were living beyond their artificially inflated means in the '90s start defaulting on their debt.
If younger people typically don't have landlines, and thus are missed by the polls, and younger people stereotypically don't vote in anywhere near the percentages of older people, wouldn't this be making the polls more accurate?
In fact, I'll tell you what: if Microsoft could actually come up with a copy-protection scheme that actually _works_ and actually stops pirates, Microsoft would have my heartfelt gratitude. Speaking as a consumer, and no, I don't work for MS. I'm sick and tired of seeing good games companies going bankrupt, while freeloading cheapskates (some driving SUVs and sports cars) leech their games on P2P.
You're living in a dream world. If people can't get little utilities and general purpose software for free anymore they won't start buying it, they'll stop using Windows. Software companies don't go bankrupt because of piracy. They go bankrupt because their software isn't worth what they charge for it. Sure, people may use pirated copies because the program is useful at the low price point, but almost everybody who pirates software would do without rather than pay for the application they "stole". This mentality isn't limited to "$6000" software as you imply. It's the same for $50 software too. Who has $50 to spend on a silly utility, or a mediocre game? Not many people. $50 is more than a week of groceries for a family of four for most of the world, including in the US.
Games provide a great illustration of this point. Many games these days have an online component. Most online games have an effective copy protection mechanism, and few if any of the online players of these games are using pirated copies. This hasn't stopped the majority of these games from tanking though. The fact of the matter is that most games, even good games, don't do so well, and it's not because of piracy; it's a matter of supply and demand. More and more games come out on the market every year. Supply is infinite in the sense that nobody has the time to play every game that comes out... Yet the price point is fixed. This ensures that only the best of the best games make a signifigant profit. And those games *do* profit, even if there is some, or a lot of piracy. Most game development companies are started out of a passion for games, out of an idea for how to be profitable, which is what feeds the oversupply of games. Once you pass that through the publishing cartel you're guaranteed that many of your favorite development houses are going to go out of business, piracy or no piracy.
What will really happen if Microsoft figures out how to stop piracy once and for all is that people will start using platforms where everything that is non-novel (Office software), or can be written by one guy in less than a week (practially every shareware application released in the last 10 years) is free, or in the case of games, they'll do without for the most part; countinuing to buy only a select few each year and maintaining the current situation.
I did some linux porting work to a new platform once, and frequently worked in the lab of the company that made the mainboard of the computer I was working on when things didn't work as documented. There was this woman there who would rework the board I was using when I found a problem who was amazing with a soldering iron. I once saw her solder on a row of bus termination resistors, all tiny surface mount componants... There were 32 of them, and they came on a tape for a machine to apply them to a board in manufacturing. She peeled the seal off, and did this little flip thing with the tape while dragging the iron across the board and had one side of every resistor soldered to the board in under a second. I'm convinced she is the goddess of soldering.
There's another fairly easy solution too. Just don't allow people to start collecting so soon, where the age you're allowed to retire is based on what we can afford.
At the very least we sould be adjusting the retirement age with life expectancy. If people live for 10 more years that doesn't mean they should be able to spend those extra years on the government's tab. 65 or 67 was a fine age to let people start collecting when people only lived to be 72, but life expectancies have increased dramatically, and the age has only been increased a tiny bit. If you want to have that many years to collect instead of contribute you should have to pay for them yourself.
Regardless, if we can only afford to pay out so much, that's all we should pay out. Raising income taxes to bail out a flawed "retirement" scheme shouldn't be an option. The parents of the baby boom generation got us into this mess, and their children should have to pay for it. Stop the madness now before we pass it down another generation, but worse. Even more importantly, don't start another one of these government social programs for healthcare; especially now that we're seeing how a similar plan for retirement looks two generations down the line.
It's more complex than that. Telecommunications monopolies are protected because they were granted in good faith in the first place. The monopolies exist because the grant of rights was offered to convince private parties to front the money for massive infrastructure development. In other words, they get a monopoly in exchange for taking the risk of spending unthinkable sums of money laying millions of miles of copper wire. It's a financial risk that nobody was willing to take without the guarantee that they'd have the rights exclusively, and it's the reason that telecommunications became viable in the first place.
In hind sight those rights should really only have been exclusive until the development costs were recovered, but they weren't and now the public wants out of their side of the deal. The consessions that would need to be made to break the monopoly agreements would include deregulation of the incumbant carriers, since without their monopoly status they should be subject to market regulation rather than governmental regulation, however that's a risky proposition, since if new competitors fail in the market you would be left in a situation when you had an unregulated monopoly. People could be left without affordable service.
So, while your paranoia about election funds may have some truth to it, the reality is that the issue is more complex than the sale of a few senators for election dollars.
The last device driver I wrote under contract paid US$88,000. Plus, I had documentation and access to the hardware developers to ask questions, so it was a fairly easy gig. For $5k this would only be worth it if I wanted the driver for myself too, and that's assuming it's even possible. Without docs it would be a considerable amount of work to even figure out if it could be done.
Also, this is probably the wrong place to come to ask about home security.
Oh yes. Be sure to get your information from a certified security industry cartel member. That way you can buy the hardware at a 5000% markup and have it professionally installed so you don't realize that most of the stuff is decades old technology.
Not that you have much choice in the matter. Practically every manufacturer of decent security hardware won't sell to you unless you join the price fixing club anyway, and the "experts" will tell you that those other guys who will sell to anybody only make crap. Enjoy!
First you should install a photo beam across your driveway and use EOL resistors to detect tampering.
Like I said, technology of the '70s today! Now you can have neighborhood pets setting off a blazing siren as a false alarm all the time, instead of using a camera with motion sensing software which would easily distinguish between things of different sizes moving across your driveway. And EOL resistors? What is this, a bank? Some petty car thief isn't going to be shorting your sensor circuit. Security as about a balance between the costs and the probablities. It's like insurance. It's a calculated risk. Of course my inablity to oversell technology with a straight face is why I write software now instead of sell security systems.
Smart cards run about $10 apiece. Yes, I know this for a fact...
No you don't. There's more than one type of smart card. Sure, the form factor and the connector may be the same, but what type of ship is in the card has a vast influence on the cost of the card. There's a big price difference beween a card with a 1K ROM on it and a card with 128MB of flash and an encryption processor on it. You can find cards that cost nowhere near $10 on both sides of the price spectrum.
In my parents neighborhood, you can't have a ham radio antenna or a satellite dish visible - these things are regulated by the FCC, yet the neighborhood association can limit their use
Actually, the neighborhood association can make those rules, but they can't enforce them. Your parents could put up a dish if they wanted to.
Do you work in the software industry? Like actualy pushing a desk at a small company trying to get a product out the door? Let me tell you, marketing departments love to find an editor like you. I've hear them trot out all the things you've just said as ways to exploit what the editor and readers think is an honest publication. Let me give you examples of what they tell us at monthy meetings:
First off, we always invite technologists to write our articles, not journalists, not marketers.
"We gain credibility by having an engineer credited for the article even though it's been filtered through marketing before publication."
Second, as readers will see in both articles (and I of course invite any and all scrutiny) neither of the articles you mention promote specific products.
"It doesn't matter that we couldn't mention our product. The goal is to establish ourselves as leaders in the field. Customers will have no problem finding our product once they're already thinking of us in a positive manner. Besides, we want the customer to think they found the solution, and didn't have it sold to them by an advertisement."
And, where they discuss any given approach to a problem, they also point out shortcomings with those approaches, and problems left to be solved. I hardly call this self-serving editorial (pointing out problems w/you own area of technology doesn't tend to sell more products!)
"Pointing out limitations and unsloved problems establishes us as thought leaders in the field and convinces CTOs that we understand the space we're selling in."
I'm sure your intentions are good, but at least from the perspective of Marketing VPs of these companies you're publishing articles from, you're getting played.
Once you buy a HDTV, you really see the limitations of video on DVD.
DVD is a shitty stop-gap format. I predict BluRay or HD-DVD to overtake it quickly.
Replace predict with hope...
It'll still be decades before a signifigant percentage of the population has HD televisions. Once that hits 40 or 50%, sure some HD format will quickly overtake DVD, but how long do you think it will be before half of us replace our televisions with HD models?
So what you're saying is that Linux and Windows and Mac OSX can run the same application just because it's compiled and linked against OpenGL? No porting involved?
No, that's not what I'm saying.
What I am saying is that if you use an API with implementations on multiple platforms your port is considerably more simple than a rewrite. It's a lot easier to rewrite some platform specific elements than to rewrite to a different I/O API when you do a port.
Lets face it, different versions of Linux with different libraries are different platforms.
That's what static linking is for. It's considerably easier to support multiple versions/distributions of linux than it is to support the multitude of windows variants... assuming you know what you're doing.
Heck, even the WORA mantra of Sun's Java is a different platform on Windows than it is on Unix
Tell that to all the developers that have successfully written WORA applications in Java. Especially the games developers. I'm not limiting that comment to applet developers either.
This assumes that your users are running Windows... What percentage of the market is that?
100% if you're using DirectX. Why would you eliminate potential sales from the rest of the market when you could potentially run on other platforms with minimal effort though? Targeting the platform with the most market share may seem like a no-brainer strategy, but it's not that simple. If your port is easy enough it's more than possible that your sales to people on minority platforms will generate profits far in excess of the porting cost.
The question was never "can it be intimidating." The question is "was it intimidating." It was not.
I don't see how you can say either of those things. If you read the begining of this thread, the discussion is clearly about whether something like this can be intimidating or not. As for whether it actually was intimidating, that's certainly something that at best would be your word against theirs and would be for a jury to decide.
Possibly. But were they calling him because they were intimidated? Or because they were just plain mad?
Again, for a jury, and not you, to decide. This is a moot point anyway.
I've seen signs that say something to the effect of "if you vote for 'X', you are a baby killer."
How is that the same thing at all? That's like saying "I think you're a terrible person if you vote for this person" which is just expressing an opinion without implying the potential for further action. It's not at all like saying "I know where you live", which is exactly what the publication of this list in this manner was doing.
At the time they were "intimidated" (assuming they were for this argument) they were not voters
Really? At what point did they lose the qualification of "voter". Did they go to their local registry of voters and unregister? Perhaps you should explain it. I can't wait to hear what you're going to say about this one....
Never mind the fact that even if you can convince me that these people aren't voters, the law still exists and still fits the purpose of showing you wrong in your blanket statement that there are no laws or case history limiting what you are allowed to do with public information.
You are purposefully not addressing what I say.... You are essentially making up my stance, then proving the strawman to be false.
Hello pot, let me introduce you to the kettle...
All I've done thus far is to try and convince you that what you think I'm saying isn't what I'm saying at all... With a little side dose of critique on some of the less well thought out opinions you've presented that were unrelated to the discussion. You say I'm not addressing what you're saying? Well you make it real easy this time. Let me beat a dead horse in response again:
This isn't about whether someone it intimatated. No one was intimidated. No one will be intimidated. This is about whether the information should or should not be public. What people do with it is a separate issue that I've repeatedly stated that I'm not addressing here.
Nobody has yet to question whether this information was public; especially not me. In fact the only thing in question in this thread is that which you say isn't: whether somebody can be intimidated by having their name being included on a list made public in a certain context.
Since you obviously don't care to have a dialogue about the issues I brought up regarding your assertions about their rights, I can' only tell you to go screw yourself.
Wait? I should go screw myself because I started a discussion with a narrow scope, and didn't present opinions to expand it? The only reason I'm continuing this discussion with you is because you continue to put words in my mouth. If you'd like to have a dialogue about the issue (singular) that I was commenting on, I'd be glad to.
So, not only are you wrong, but you know you are wrong, yet you keep asserting you are right by bringing in race, intimidation, private situations not related to the public officials involved, and straw men.
I claim to be right about one particular thing. The reason you think I'm wrong is that you think, for some strange reason, that I'm making a much more broad commentary than I really am, and then fabricating my position about these matters.
No. It does agree with me on *all* cases (with regards to my assertion). I can't prove that the law agrees with me in every case. To do so would require that I post every decision for every court case related. You can prove me wrong. All you have to do is post one single finding that disagrees with my statement. Of course, I expect you to do what you continue to do, purposefully misintrepret my statement to something easier to refute, then refute that which I never claimed.
Funny you should say all this in an article that references a subpoena issued by a grand jury in reference to USC Title 18 section 594. All you needed to do was click the link in the article (Oh horrors, you have to actually read the article in a slashdot post). Clearly the US district court doesn't consider the law to be unconstitutional. Of course if you're arguing about some law that nobody has yet dreamed of that says that public information should somehow be illegal to publicize, clearly that is going to lead to confusion, since nobody has said anything like that.
No. That's not what it is about.
Now you're telling me what I was talking about? I'm telling you right now: you're wrong. That is what this is about. I can say that with authority since I started this conversation and that is what I was discussing.
For one, I disagree. I expect that very few (if any) delegates were intimidated by the list.
So David Kelley just happened to be reading Indymedia and decided to prosecute over this? Unlikely. I'm sure that somebody on the list complained to his office that the list existed.
Additionally, even if they were intimidated, you intimate that it is somehow wrong to use public information to further your ag
Paul Thorrott reviews Windows Media Player 10 and notes that unlike Apple's iTunes Music Store, which offers music that is only compatible with Apple's iPod portable player, WMP 10 will work with songs from virtually any other online music store.
Shouldn't he be comparing a player to a player, and a store to a store? I mean, considering the player doesn't really offer songs, and the store doesn't really play songs...
If electricity prices came down via a new found abundance of nuclear generated power, use of electricity could replace the use of oil for many things.
The easiest would be heating. Many homes in the US burn fuel oil for heat and hot water. This could be switched over to electricity easily.
More difficult, but still possible would be the conversion of automobile fuel to hydrogen that would be generated via electrolysis of water at the fueling station (which could be your garage).
It would be a coal killer directly, but could reduce oil consumption indirectly.
I might be wrong, but I would guess that Apple and HP were there against the induce act. These people make the stuff that would be limited by the act, so why would they support it?
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so maybe I exagerated a little, but not much. Let's see what $50 can buy you.
120 Jars of baby food
80 1/3rd pound pre-prepared and frozen fried fish filets
63 lbs of whole, frozen turkey
100 dozen eggs (same link)
50 loaves of white sandwich bread
25 gallons of 1% milk
25 whole, frozen roaster sized chickens
100 cans of soup
200 pounds of white rice
100 pounds of potatos
I think you get my point... $50 is still a lot of money.
there are a huge number of very qualified candidates who have been looking for a very long time
Too bad they're very qualified for jobs that don't need doing. Really. We don't need anymore web designers, database application developers or over-paid help desk workers. Meanwhile, jobs for people who can do some real math, design solid embedded applications, do non-trivial alorithmic analysis or put in some quality face/phone time in a services environment go unfilled for 6-10 months due to the lack of available qualified candidates.
The problem is that the job glut for minimally skilled computer jobs went away, and people haven't realized that the artificial demand for those skills is never coming back. There's nothing that any politician, economist, or headhunter can do about it. That doesn't, however, mean that they can't make a living. Like the parent to your comment said; it might not be the kind of inflated lifestyle they were used to in the '90s when salaries and hiring were stupid, but it's a living.
The last thing these people need is a cheap joke like yours.
While harsh, it's what most of these people do need: a dose of reality. Perhaps he could have been nicer, but the sooner many of these people start looking for other types of jobs, or refocus their skillset to be qualified for other types of jobs, the better. It has to happen eventually. I know the american dream somehow transformed itself into the desire to never learn anything new again once you turn 21, but there are far to many people in this country willing to work hard and adapt for people to get by with that attitude.
If such a shift in attitude doesn't occur soon, I think we may have yet hit the worst of the aftermath of the bubble economy. Just wait until all the people who were living beyond their artificially inflated means in the '90s start defaulting on their debt.
If younger people typically don't have landlines, and thus are missed by the polls, and younger people stereotypically don't vote in anywhere near the percentages of older people, wouldn't this be making the polls more accurate?
I.e., the majority of games sold are _not_ protected by their online component.
Doesn't matter...
I wasn't trying to say that all games were online, just that the online games provide a real world example of what happens when there's no piracy.
In fact, I'll tell you what: if Microsoft could actually come up with a copy-protection scheme that actually _works_ and actually stops pirates, Microsoft would have my heartfelt gratitude. Speaking as a consumer, and no, I don't work for MS. I'm sick and tired of seeing good games companies going bankrupt, while freeloading cheapskates (some driving SUVs and sports cars) leech their games on P2P.
You're living in a dream world. If people can't get little utilities and general purpose software for free anymore they won't start buying it, they'll stop using Windows. Software companies don't go bankrupt because of piracy. They go bankrupt because their software isn't worth what they charge for it. Sure, people may use pirated copies because the program is useful at the low price point, but almost everybody who pirates software would do without rather than pay for the application they "stole". This mentality isn't limited to "$6000" software as you imply. It's the same for $50 software too. Who has $50 to spend on a silly utility, or a mediocre game? Not many people. $50 is more than a week of groceries for a family of four for most of the world, including in the US.
Games provide a great illustration of this point. Many games these days have an online component. Most online games have an effective copy protection mechanism, and few if any of the online players of these games are using pirated copies. This hasn't stopped the majority of these games from tanking though. The fact of the matter is that most games, even good games, don't do so well, and it's not because of piracy; it's a matter of supply and demand. More and more games come out on the market every year. Supply is infinite in the sense that nobody has the time to play every game that comes out... Yet the price point is fixed. This ensures that only the best of the best games make a signifigant profit. And those games *do* profit, even if there is some, or a lot of piracy. Most game development companies are started out of a passion for games, out of an idea for how to be profitable, which is what feeds the oversupply of games. Once you pass that through the publishing cartel you're guaranteed that many of your favorite development houses are going to go out of business, piracy or no piracy.
What will really happen if Microsoft figures out how to stop piracy once and for all is that people will start using platforms where everything that is non-novel (Office software), or can be written by one guy in less than a week (practially every shareware application released in the last 10 years) is free, or in the case of games, they'll do without for the most part; countinuing to buy only a select few each year and maintaining the current situation.
I did some linux porting work to a new platform once, and frequently worked in the lab of the company that made the mainboard of the computer I was working on when things didn't work as documented. There was this woman there who would rework the board I was using when I found a problem who was amazing with a soldering iron. I once saw her solder on a row of bus termination resistors, all tiny surface mount componants... There were 32 of them, and they came on a tape for a machine to apply them to a board in manufacturing. She peeled the seal off, and did this little flip thing with the tape while dragging the iron across the board and had one side of every resistor soldered to the board in under a second. I'm convinced she is the goddess of soldering.
On the internet nobody knows you're grinning...
There's another fairly easy solution too. Just don't allow people to start collecting so soon, where the age you're allowed to retire is based on what we can afford.
At the very least we sould be adjusting the retirement age with life expectancy. If people live for 10 more years that doesn't mean they should be able to spend those extra years on the government's tab. 65 or 67 was a fine age to let people start collecting when people only lived to be 72, but life expectancies have increased dramatically, and the age has only been increased a tiny bit. If you want to have that many years to collect instead of contribute you should have to pay for them yourself.
Regardless, if we can only afford to pay out so much, that's all we should pay out. Raising income taxes to bail out a flawed "retirement" scheme shouldn't be an option. The parents of the baby boom generation got us into this mess, and their children should have to pay for it. Stop the madness now before we pass it down another generation, but worse. Even more importantly, don't start another one of these government social programs for healthcare; especially now that we're seeing how a similar plan for retirement looks two generations down the line.
It's more complex than that. Telecommunications monopolies are protected because they were granted in good faith in the first place. The monopolies exist because the grant of rights was offered to convince private parties to front the money for massive infrastructure development. In other words, they get a monopoly in exchange for taking the risk of spending unthinkable sums of money laying millions of miles of copper wire. It's a financial risk that nobody was willing to take without the guarantee that they'd have the rights exclusively, and it's the reason that telecommunications became viable in the first place.
In hind sight those rights should really only have been exclusive until the development costs were recovered, but they weren't and now the public wants out of their side of the deal. The consessions that would need to be made to break the monopoly agreements would include deregulation of the incumbant carriers, since without their monopoly status they should be subject to market regulation rather than governmental regulation, however that's a risky proposition, since if new competitors fail in the market you would be left in a situation when you had an unregulated monopoly. People could be left without affordable service.
So, while your paranoia about election funds may have some truth to it, the reality is that the issue is more complex than the sale of a few senators for election dollars.
Good Pay?
The last device driver I wrote under contract paid US$88,000. Plus, I had documentation and access to the hardware developers to ask questions, so it was a fairly easy gig. For $5k this would only be worth it if I wanted the driver for myself too, and that's assuming it's even possible. Without docs it would be a considerable amount of work to even figure out if it could be done.
Also, this is probably the wrong place to come to ask about home security.
Oh yes. Be sure to get your information from a certified security industry cartel member. That way you can buy the hardware at a 5000% markup and have it professionally installed so you don't realize that most of the stuff is decades old technology.
Not that you have much choice in the matter. Practically every manufacturer of decent security hardware won't sell to you unless you join the price fixing club anyway, and the "experts" will tell you that those other guys who will sell to anybody only make crap. Enjoy!
First you should install a photo beam across your driveway and use EOL resistors to detect tampering.
Like I said, technology of the '70s today! Now you can have neighborhood pets setting off a blazing siren as a false alarm all the time, instead of using a camera with motion sensing software which would easily distinguish between things of different sizes moving across your driveway. And EOL resistors? What is this, a bank? Some petty car thief isn't going to be shorting your sensor circuit. Security as about a balance between the costs and the probablities. It's like insurance. It's a calculated risk. Of course my inablity to oversell technology with a straight face is why I write software now instead of sell security systems.
Smart cards run about $10 apiece. Yes, I know this for a fact...
No you don't. There's more than one type of smart card. Sure, the form factor and the connector may be the same, but what type of ship is in the card has a vast influence on the cost of the card. There's a big price difference beween a card with a 1K ROM on it and a card with 128MB of flash and an encryption processor on it. You can find cards that cost nowhere near $10 on both sides of the price spectrum.
In my parents neighborhood, you can't have a ham radio antenna or a satellite dish visible - these things are regulated by the FCC, yet the neighborhood association can limit their use
Actually, the neighborhood association can make those rules, but they can't enforce them. Your parents could put up a dish if they wanted to.
This is because this stuff is not only regulated by the FCC, but FCC regulations specifically preempt homeowners association rules and rental agreement provisions about the placement of dishes.
It wasn't modded down. It started at zero. If you click the comment number you can see the moderation history. This comment has none.
Do you work in the software industry? Like actualy pushing a desk at a small company trying to get a product out the door? Let me tell you, marketing departments love to find an editor like you. I've hear them trot out all the things you've just said as ways to exploit what the editor and readers think is an honest publication. Let me give you examples of what they tell us at monthy meetings:
First off, we always invite technologists to write our articles, not journalists, not marketers.
"We gain credibility by having an engineer credited for the article even though it's been filtered through marketing before publication."
Second, as readers will see in both articles (and I of course invite any and all scrutiny) neither of the articles you mention promote specific products.
"It doesn't matter that we couldn't mention our product. The goal is to establish ourselves as leaders in the field. Customers will have no problem finding our product once they're already thinking of us in a positive manner. Besides, we want the customer to think they found the solution, and didn't have it sold to them by an advertisement."
And, where they discuss any given approach to a problem, they also point out shortcomings with those approaches, and problems left to be solved. I hardly call this self-serving editorial (pointing out problems w/you own area of technology doesn't tend to sell more products!)
"Pointing out limitations and unsloved problems establishes us as thought leaders in the field and convinces CTOs that we understand the space we're selling in."
I'm sure your intentions are good, but at least from the perspective of Marketing VPs of these companies you're publishing articles from, you're getting played.
Who says he's not living there already?
Once you buy a HDTV, you really see the limitations of video on DVD.
DVD is a shitty stop-gap format. I predict BluRay or HD-DVD to overtake it quickly.
Replace predict with hope...
It'll still be decades before a signifigant percentage of the population has HD televisions. Once that hits 40 or 50%, sure some HD format will quickly overtake DVD, but how long do you think it will be before half of us replace our televisions with HD models?
See you in 10 years.
So what you're saying is that Linux and Windows and Mac OSX can run the same application just because it's compiled and linked against OpenGL? No porting involved?
No, that's not what I'm saying.
What I am saying is that if you use an API with implementations on multiple platforms your port is considerably more simple than a rewrite. It's a lot easier to rewrite some platform specific elements than to rewrite to a different I/O API when you do a port.
Lets face it, different versions of Linux with different libraries are different platforms.
That's what static linking is for. It's considerably easier to support multiple versions/distributions of linux than it is to support the multitude of windows variants... assuming you know what you're doing.
Heck, even the WORA mantra of Sun's Java is a different platform on Windows than it is on Unix
Tell that to all the developers that have successfully written WORA applications in Java. Especially the games developers. I'm not limiting that comment to applet developers either.
This assumes that your users are running Windows... What percentage of the market is that?
100% if you're using DirectX. Why would you eliminate potential sales from the rest of the market when you could potentially run on other platforms with minimal effort though? Targeting the platform with the most market share may seem like a no-brainer strategy, but it's not that simple. If your port is easy enough it's more than possible that your sales to people on minority platforms will generate profits far in excess of the porting cost.
Man, today, it doesn't matter what API you use...
Yes it does. Some APIs have implementations on multiple platforms, and some don't.
The question was never "can it be intimidating." The question is "was it intimidating." It was not.
I don't see how you can say either of those things. If you read the begining of this thread, the discussion is clearly about whether something like this can be intimidating or not. As for whether it actually was intimidating, that's certainly something that at best would be your word against theirs and would be for a jury to decide.
Possibly. But were they calling him because they were intimidated? Or because they were just plain mad?
Again, for a jury, and not you, to decide. This is a moot point anyway.
I've seen signs that say something to the effect of "if you vote for 'X', you are a baby killer."
How is that the same thing at all? That's like saying "I think you're a terrible person if you vote for this person" which is just expressing an opinion without implying the potential for further action. It's not at all like saying "I know where you live", which is exactly what the publication of this list in this manner was doing.
At the time they were "intimidated" (assuming they were for this argument) they were not voters
Really? At what point did they lose the qualification of "voter". Did they go to their local registry of voters and unregister? Perhaps you should explain it. I can't wait to hear what you're going to say about this one....
Never mind the fact that even if you can convince me that these people aren't voters, the law still exists and still fits the purpose of showing you wrong in your blanket statement that there are no laws or case history limiting what you are allowed to do with public information.
You are purposefully not addressing what I say. ... You are essentially making up my stance, then proving the strawman to be false.
Hello pot, let me introduce you to the kettle...
All I've done thus far is to try and convince you that what you think I'm saying isn't what I'm saying at all... With a little side dose of critique on some of the less well thought out opinions you've presented that were unrelated to the discussion. You say I'm not addressing what you're saying? Well you make it real easy this time. Let me beat a dead horse in response again:
This isn't about whether someone it intimatated. No one was intimidated. No one will be intimidated. This is about whether the information should or should not be public. What people do with it is a separate issue that I've repeatedly stated that I'm not addressing here.
Nobody has yet to question whether this information was public; especially not me. In fact the only thing in question in this thread is that which you say isn't: whether somebody can be intimidated by having their name being included on a list made public in a certain context.
Since you obviously don't care to have a dialogue about the issues I brought up regarding your assertions about their rights, I can' only tell you to go screw yourself.
Wait? I should go screw myself because I started a discussion with a narrow scope, and didn't present opinions to expand it? The only reason I'm continuing this discussion with you is because you continue to put words in my mouth. If you'd like to have a dialogue about the issue (singular) that I was commenting on, I'd be glad to.
So, not only are you wrong, but you know you are wrong, yet you keep asserting you are right by bringing in race, intimidation, private situations not related to the public officials involved, and straw men.
I claim to be right about one particular thing. The reason you think I'm wrong is that you think, for some strange reason, that I'm making a much more broad commentary than I really am, and then fabricating my position about these matters.
No. It does agree with me on *all* cases (with regards to my assertion). I can't prove that the law agrees with me in every case. To do so would require that I post every decision for every court case related. You can prove me wrong. All you have to do is post one single finding that disagrees with my statement. Of course, I expect you to do what you continue to do, purposefully misintrepret my statement to something easier to refute, then refute that which I never claimed.
Funny you should say all this in an article that references a subpoena issued by a grand jury in reference to USC Title 18 section 594. All you needed to do was click the link in the article (Oh horrors, you have to actually read the article in a slashdot post). Clearly the US district court doesn't consider the law to be unconstitutional. Of course if you're arguing about some law that nobody has yet dreamed of that says that public information should somehow be illegal to publicize, clearly that is going to lead to confusion, since nobody has said anything like that.
No. That's not what it is about.
Now you're telling me what I was talking about? I'm telling you right now: you're wrong. That is what this is about. I can say that with authority since I started this conversation and that is what I was discussing.
For one, I disagree. I expect that very few (if any) delegates were intimidated by the list.
So David Kelley just happened to be reading Indymedia and decided to prosecute over this? Unlikely. I'm sure that somebody on the list complained to his office that the list existed.
Additionally, even if they were intimidated, you intimate that it is somehow wrong to use public information to further your ag
Paul Thorrott reviews Windows Media Player 10 and notes that unlike Apple's iTunes Music Store, which offers music that is only compatible with Apple's iPod portable player, WMP 10 will work with songs from virtually any other online music store.
Shouldn't he be comparing a player to a player, and a store to a store? I mean, considering the player doesn't really offer songs, and the store doesn't really play songs...
If electricity prices came down via a new found abundance of nuclear generated power, use of electricity could replace the use of oil for many things.
The easiest would be heating. Many homes in the US burn fuel oil for heat and hot water. This could be switched over to electricity easily.
More difficult, but still possible would be the conversion of automobile fuel to hydrogen that would be generated via electrolysis of water at the fueling station (which could be your garage).
It would be a coal killer directly, but could reduce oil consumption indirectly.
I might be wrong, but I would guess that Apple and HP were there against the induce act. These people make the stuff that would be limited by the act, so why would they support it?