I have to shut the computer room door at night, as the noise from the various bits of kit keeps me awake (or more usually, the wife complaining about the noise keeps me awake). Ok, I could shut the computers off, but they're usually doing something (downloading/backing up/running virus check etc).
Presumably, it's the same as with every other form of legistation, where the grey areas get defined by test cases and precedent. It's the precedents, rather than the laws themselves that tend to take up most of a lawyer's research in a typical case (IANAL - but my wife used to be).
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I've got all of my MP3s on one of my Windoze PCs, and have that available as a shared drive on the network. I can then get iTunes to look at that shared drive, and can quite easily create (and play) playlists from these tracks, on the Mac, with the MP3s still sitting on the PC.
I was wondering the same thing. It evidently wouldn't be that difficult to write one (six lines of perl and all that).
According to this site it does seem to cost $10,000 per DVD format (of which you seem to need two) for a licence to produce a DVD player, though, so it may be a business case thing. The question is - would 1,000 people would be prepared to spend $20 for the right to play DVDs legally on Linux?
Polished, smooth, persuasive. Check. Knows how to argue. Negative.
Surely, the purpose of arguing is to pursuade the other party(or maybe look for a fight, but let's ignore that), so by being persuasive he must be demonstrating that he knows exactly how to argue. It may not be intellectually rigorous arguement, but it's effective non the less.
For instance some of the tools that are fairly unique to the human brain:
Really?
- language
Many animals have some form of language (i.e., some abstract way to represent something) - think cats spraying their territory. Ours may be more highly developed, but that doesn't mean that other animals don't have any.
- short-term memory
- long-term memory
Are you claiming that other animals don't have memory?
- social feedback
Again, many examples from the animal world. Many social animals have such things like the idea of an alpha male (or some equivalent), and they are selected through their behaviour and treated differently.
sense of time
My cat has a very rigid pattern in the morning - waking us up around 6:00, heading out and then coming back in about 8:15. He's almost certainly not aware that it's 8:15, but he certainly acts on some form of timetable.
Depends where you buy from. CD Wow has pretty much all chart CDs at 8.99 (which even at the current exchange rate makes them under $16). Places like Fopp have loads of older music for about 5. If you're going to buy from places like Virgin or HMV then you're going to pay over the odds, but you can get a lot cheaper if you shop around.
If the cost/benefit of the product is the same then it doesn't matter if it's made in New York USA, Newcastle UK, Nalanda India, or Nanjing China.
That's where you're wrong. One of the reasons that these countries can afford to undercut western salaries is because the workers are protected by virtually none of the rights (such as health and safety regulations) that workers in the west have fought for over the past 200 years. I've been to factories in China, producing goods for western companies, and seen the working conditions (unbelievably hot, unbelievably loud, virtually no protection on very dangerous machinary etc), and the pay was, even taking into account the cost of living difference, pitifully low.
If these had been western factories, they would have been closed down(and these are the factories that are considered acceptable for western visitors). In the same way that a company wouldn't be allowed to employ people in this county under those conditions, they shouldn't be allowed to employ (even through a third party) foreigners working under them either, and the only way that this is likely to happen is by banning trade with countries that don't have minimum acceptable workers rights.
I've no problem with jobs going abroad, so long as it's not being used to drive down worker rights in the process.
So it's more sensible to have to decide in advance what you fancy listening to, than to be able to decide at any point? How does that work then?
I sometimes go away from home for 2 weeks at a time. It's great to be able to decide "ooh, I just fancy a bit of mellow jazz to calm me down 'cos the plane's been delayed again"
The other week, I had an 18hr trip back home, and got through probably 14 hrs of music (which is getting on for 250-300 different tracks on that one day alone).
Of course, I could cope with listening to the same tracks over and over again, or decide in advance which 1000 tracks I'm most likely to be in the mood for, but why bother when I can carry my entire collection in my jacket?
Don't know if any of these are in the last 30 years (or even if they're true, but hey it's the Internet so I can publish what I like and claim that it is).
Anyway, it's quite interesting reading, from what seems to be a law firm's website, around protecting/losing trademarks.
Ah, there's a question. The rest of the business has been crying out for the IT dept. to do more for the past two year , so we hired a load of consultants to identify how we could be more efficient, which they did - they claim 20% improvement, and so someone senior (as yet unidentified) went "ooh, good, that means we can run IT, delivering the same amount, for 20% cheaper". Yet the business is still crying out for us to do more. Go figure.
It's not like your chief executive sneaks into the vault in the middle of the night and steals your pay.
No, it's not really that subtle.
Someone (most likely your board of directors) decided he was worth whatever rate he is paid.
Oh,yes. That'll be the board of directors (they, I believe, make up a majority of the shareholders) deciding how much the directors should be paid (mostly in share options, so getting more control of the company as they get paid). No conflict of interests, there.
But you can always quit and go somewhere else if you don't like the way things are being run.
There don't seem to be many places that aren't run like this, so not really much of an option.
Add to that the general reliability of its operating system
I've just got a loan of my first Mac (an eMac), as I am planning on doing some development for a friend on it. I tried to download the XCode dev environment from the Apple dev site on it, but got so sick of the copy operation locking up, requiring me to "force quit" on Finder (must have had 30 attempts that resulted in a lock up), that I gave up and used Windows to download it, and then copied it over from there - worked first time.
I really wanted to like it, but so far, I've got to say, I've found the interface unbelievably slow, clunky, and difficult to navigate. It has got some pretty features such as the animation when minimising a window though, and I've been quite impressed with the couple of hours play I've had with XCode.
Legally, probably not. Morally (in my opinion), yes.
I have absolutely no qualms about downloading ROMs for games that are no longer sold/available legally. I'm not harming anyone. They couldn't have got my money anyway (OK, I could have sent an unsolicited cheque off to the company, but you get the point). However, if I could easily buy the ROM cheaply off someone who was giving money back to the original producer, then I'm depriving them of money.
Re:Thanks, unions, government, and greedy employee
on
Train Your Own Replacement
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
American businesses do find it difficult to employ Americans.
Like my company, that has just announced record profits, but is just about to lay off 20% of the IT dept, as a cost cutting excercise. Last year the CEO got paid over 10 times the amount that this excercise will save the company. My heart bleeds for these struggling corporations.
Businesses are fueled by customers, not labor. Strike 3. Yer ouuuuta there! But let's give ya one more at-bat:
That's like saying cars are fueled by cash. It's customers that pay for the employees, but it's the workers that actually power the company. Try again...
Can't use pointers in C++ code, because the manager doesn't understand them. Must use almost useless references.
Reminds me of a job (that I managed to stay in for 5 days before handing my notice in) where I was told that we weren't allowed to use ++ in C code, as some people might not understand what it meant. The response "Well, they shouldn't be let near the code then" didn't go down too well.
My wife is a teacher and works with complex multi-tabled documents for lesson planning on a daily basis, yet she can, using Open Office, open the Word document given to her by the headmistress and works on it fine, save it again and give it back to the headmistress, who opens it back up in Word.
Capitalism does help everyone. Please read up on the fricking theory, okay?
You really do seem to be willfully ignorant of the large amounts of poverty in the world, including in Capitalist countries. Try looking at the practice,rather than reading the theory. Which theory are you on about anyway? Is this yet another misinterpretation of Adam Smith's Wealth Of Nations?
Europe was rich long before military imperialism
Huh? Military imperialism has been part and parcel of European policies since Greek/Roman times. Most economic power has been pretty much constantly concentrated with the most militaristic states.
but its just plain stupid to oppose something like free trade, which helps everyone in the end
The current outsourcing is not free trade. There is no free movement (either way) within the job market between here and India, so we are not competing from equal positions. Also, pure free trade, as described by Adam Smith, only creates equal value between parties of equal power. This is not the case with modern capitalism. There are a small amount of very powerful employers and a vast collection of individual employees. The balance had been partially redressed in much of the west through the rise of organised labour, but the large corporations' answer was to move employment to countries that had little or no employee powerbase.
You don't have to ignore the pain, you can do things to ease it, but you shouldn't stop progress because of it.
So if this has all been part of Capitalism for centuries, what is the 'progress' you're talking about then?
But we cannot ignore progress because it is uncomfortable.
But on the other hand, you shouldn't just ignore the pain that change can cause on the grounds that it's 'progress'.
Yet, it ultimately turned out better for everyone.
Everyone? Don't think so. There's still large amounts of poverty in the north of England (as there is elsewhere in the world).
It is just plain hipocracy to support capitalism only when its convenient for you.
Indeed it is. I've personally not done too bad in the current economic system. However, I don't agree with it, and actively campaign to change things, but at the end of the day I've got to eat, so I have to work within a 'Capitalist' system.
Free trade has done wonders for countries around the world. It has been instrumental in making Europe the economic power that it is.
I think you'll find that was military Imperialism. For instance, one of the main reasons that the west overtook China in the 19th Century as the leading trading power in the world was the Opium wars, which forced restrictions on their trade and also forced them to accept our vast amounts of Opium shipments.
but I think its utterly stupid to halt progress because people cannot handle change. If we had taken that attitude, we'd all still be hunters and gatherers, living in the jungle!
Oh yes. The 'all progress is good' arguement, where one tries to claim that by fighting against the latest Capitalist trend, people are demonstrating that they would obviously rather live in caves. It goes really well alongside the 'don't change the Capitalist System, because it's worked in the past' arguement.
So how about supporting some real progress in the world and trying to move away from a system that supports the powerful few to one that helps everyone.
Of course, some change is good, but some change is also bad. The important thing is to be able to figure out which is which, and a good starting point is if a change is designed to benefit a small, already rich, minority at the cost of plunging large amounts of people into poverty then it's probably not a good thing.
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I have to shut the computer room door at night, as the noise from the various bits of kit keeps me awake (or more usually, the wife complaining about the noise keeps me awake). Ok, I could shut the computers off, but they're usually doing something (downloading/backing up/running virus check etc).
Presumably, it's the same as with every other form of legistation, where the grey areas get defined by test cases and precedent. It's the precedents, rather than the laws themselves that tend to take up most of a lawyer's research in a typical case (IANAL - but my wife used to be).
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I've got all of my MP3s on one of my Windoze PCs, and have that available as a shared drive on the network. I can then get iTunes to look at that shared drive, and can quite easily create (and play) playlists from these tracks, on the Mac, with the MP3s still sitting on the PC.
I was wondering the same thing. It evidently wouldn't be that difficult to write one (six lines of perl and all that).
According to this site it does seem to cost $10,000 per DVD format (of which you seem to need two) for a licence to produce a DVD player, though, so it may be a business case thing. The question is - would 1,000 people would be prepared to spend $20 for the right to play DVDs legally on Linux?
Knows how to argue. Negative.
Surely, the purpose of arguing is to pursuade the other party(or maybe look for a fight, but let's ignore that), so by being persuasive he must be demonstrating that he knows exactly how to argue. It may not be intellectually rigorous arguement, but it's effective non the less.
Really?
- language
Many animals have some form of language (i.e., some abstract way to represent something) - think cats spraying their territory. Ours may be more highly developed, but that doesn't mean that other animals don't have any.
- short-term memory
- long-term memory
Are you claiming that other animals don't have memory?
- social feedback
Again, many examples from the animal world. Many social animals have such things like the idea of an alpha male (or some equivalent), and they are selected through their behaviour and treated differently.
sense of time
My cat has a very rigid pattern in the morning - waking us up around 6:00, heading out and then coming back in about 8:15. He's almost certainly not aware that it's 8:15, but he certainly acts on some form of timetable.
Depends where you buy from. CD Wow has pretty much all chart CDs at 8.99 (which even at the current exchange rate makes them under $16). Places like Fopp have loads of older music for about 5. If you're going to buy from places like Virgin or HMV then you're going to pay over the odds, but you can get a lot cheaper if you shop around.
That's where you're wrong. One of the reasons that these countries can afford to undercut western salaries is because the workers are protected by virtually none of the rights (such as health and safety regulations) that workers in the west have fought for over the past 200 years. I've been to factories in China, producing goods for western companies, and seen the working conditions (unbelievably hot, unbelievably loud, virtually no protection on very dangerous machinary etc), and the pay was, even taking into account the cost of living difference, pitifully low.
If these had been western factories, they would have been closed down(and these are the factories that are considered acceptable for western visitors). In the same way that a company wouldn't be allowed to employ people in this county under those conditions, they shouldn't be allowed to employ (even through a third party) foreigners working under them either, and the only way that this is likely to happen is by banning trade with countries that don't have minimum acceptable workers rights.
I've no problem with jobs going abroad, so long as it's not being used to drive down worker rights in the process.
So it's more sensible to have to decide in advance what you fancy listening to, than to be able to decide at any point? How does that work then?
I sometimes go away from home for 2 weeks at a time. It's great to be able to decide "ooh, I just fancy a bit of mellow jazz to calm me down 'cos the plane's been delayed again"
The other week, I had an 18hr trip back home, and got through probably 14 hrs of music (which is getting on for 250-300 different tracks on that one day alone).
Of course, I could cope with listening to the same tracks over and over again, or decide in advance which 1000 tracks I'm most likely to be in the mood for, but why bother when I can carry my entire collection in my jacket?
Well, I've got over 1000 original CDs in my back room, (cost probably over 10,000), built up over the last 15+ years. What's your point?
Don't know if any of these are in the last 30 years (or even if they're true, but hey it's the Internet so I can publish what I like and claim that it is).
Anyway, it's quite interesting reading, from what seems to be a law firm's website, around protecting/losing trademarks.
Ah, there's a question. The rest of the business has been crying out for the IT dept. to do more for the past two year , so we hired a load of consultants to identify how we could be more efficient, which they did - they claim 20% improvement, and so someone senior (as yet unidentified) went "ooh, good, that means we can run IT, delivering the same amount, for 20% cheaper". Yet the business is still crying out for us to do more. Go figure.
It's not like your chief executive sneaks into the vault in the middle of the night and steals your pay.
No, it's not really that subtle.
Someone (most likely your board of directors) decided he was worth whatever rate he is paid.
Oh,yes. That'll be the board of directors (they, I believe, make up a majority of the shareholders) deciding how much the directors should be paid (mostly in share options, so getting more control of the company as they get paid). No conflict of interests, there.
But you can always quit and go somewhere else if you don't like the way things are being run.
There don't seem to be many places that aren't run like this, so not really much of an option.
Only 256mb. I'll look at adding some more.
Does it take the same chips as a PC?
Two more words. Brand new.
He bought 5 eMacs for his office, and dropped one of them over to my place on his way back from the shop. It's running OSX 10.3.3.
I've just got a loan of my first Mac (an eMac), as I am planning on doing some development for a friend on it. I tried to download the XCode dev environment from the Apple dev site on it, but got so sick of the copy operation locking up, requiring me to "force quit" on Finder (must have had 30 attempts that resulted in a lock up), that I gave up and used Windows to download it, and then copied it over from there - worked first time.
I really wanted to like it, but so far, I've got to say, I've found the interface unbelievably slow, clunky, and difficult to navigate. It has got some pretty features such as the animation when minimising a window though, and I've been quite impressed with the couple of hours play I've had with XCode.
Legally, probably not. Morally (in my opinion), yes.
I have absolutely no qualms about downloading ROMs for games that are no longer sold/available legally. I'm not harming anyone. They couldn't have got my money anyway (OK, I could have sent an unsolicited cheque off to the company, but you get the point). However, if I could easily buy the ROM cheaply off someone who was giving money back to the original producer, then I'm depriving them of money.
Like my company, that has just announced record profits, but is just about to lay off 20% of the IT dept, as a cost cutting excercise. Last year the CEO got paid over 10 times the amount that this excercise will save the company. My heart bleeds for these struggling corporations.
That's like saying cars are fueled by cash. It's customers that pay for the employees, but it's the workers that actually power the company. Try again...
It seems like most of the comments so far are along the lines "it's voluntary, google should be allowed to do what they want."
/. if this had been a Microsoft service.
It would be interesting to see the reaction on
Reminds me of a job (that I managed to stay in for 5 days before handing my notice in) where I was told that we weren't allowed to use ++ in C code, as some people might not understand what it meant. The response "Well, they shouldn't be let near the code then" didn't go down too well.
By that arguement, it's not an internet worm either. This vulnerablity is not the fault of the internet, just a program that's attached to it.
My wife is a teacher and works with complex multi-tabled documents for lesson planning on a daily basis, yet she can, using Open Office, open the Word document given to her by the headmistress and works on it fine, save it again and give it back to the headmistress, who opens it back up in Word.
FYI - In an odd twist midway through the suit, Xerox filed suit against Apple, declaring that Xerox was the holder of any and all copyrights on all GUIs. Xerox had been an investor in Apple, and had themselves invited the Macintosh design team to view their GUI computers at the PARC research lab; these visits had been very influential on the development of the Macintosh GUI. The Xerox case was dismissed on a technicality. OK, so it wasn't the reason that the case was dropped, but I thought I'd remembered something about Xerox suing them.
You really do seem to be willfully ignorant of the large amounts of poverty in the world, including in Capitalist countries. Try looking at the practice,rather than reading the theory. Which theory are you on about anyway? Is this yet another misinterpretation of Adam Smith's Wealth Of Nations?
Europe was rich long before military imperialism
Huh? Military imperialism has been part and parcel of European policies since Greek/Roman times. Most economic power has been pretty much constantly concentrated with the most militaristic states.
but its just plain stupid to oppose something like free trade, which helps everyone in the end
The current outsourcing is not free trade. There is no free movement (either way) within the job market between here and India, so we are not competing from equal positions. Also, pure free trade, as described by Adam Smith, only creates equal value between parties of equal power. This is not the case with modern capitalism. There are a small amount of very powerful employers and a vast collection of individual employees. The balance had been partially redressed in much of the west through the rise of organised labour, but the large corporations' answer was to move employment to countries that had little or no employee powerbase.
You don't have to ignore the pain, you can do things to ease it, but you shouldn't stop progress because of it.
So if this has all been part of Capitalism for centuries, what is the 'progress' you're talking about then?
But on the other hand, you shouldn't just ignore the pain that change can cause on the grounds that it's 'progress'.
Yet, it ultimately turned out better for everyone.
Everyone? Don't think so. There's still large amounts of poverty in the north of England (as there is elsewhere in the world).
It is just plain hipocracy to support capitalism only when its convenient for you.
Indeed it is. I've personally not done too bad in the current economic system. However, I don't agree with it, and actively campaign to change things, but at the end of the day I've got to eat, so I have to work within a 'Capitalist' system.
Free trade has done wonders for countries around the world. It has been instrumental in making Europe the economic power that it is.
I think you'll find that was military Imperialism. For instance, one of the main reasons that the west overtook China in the 19th Century as the leading trading power in the world was the Opium wars, which forced restrictions on their trade and also forced them to accept our vast amounts of Opium shipments.
but I think its utterly stupid to halt progress because people cannot handle change. If we had taken that attitude, we'd all still be hunters and gatherers, living in the jungle!
Oh yes. The 'all progress is good' arguement, where one tries to claim that by fighting against the latest Capitalist trend, people are demonstrating that they would obviously rather live in caves. It goes really well alongside the 'don't change the Capitalist System, because it's worked in the past' arguement.
So how about supporting some real progress in the world and trying to move away from a system that supports the powerful few to one that helps everyone.
Of course, some change is good, but some change is also bad. The important thing is to be able to figure out which is which, and a good starting point is if a change is designed to benefit a small, already rich, minority at the cost of plunging large amounts of people into poverty then it's probably not a good thing.