The GPL doesn't "force itself" on the surrounding code. That is simply a path that can be chosen.
So if I follow you correctly, nobody can be forced to do anything? Since there is always the option to choose a negative punitive action.
The GPL can't force you to GPL your code because you could always choose to ignore it and risk a lawsuit?
The option to do something disallowed is always present, but when it comes to deciding on whether or not the GPL is enforceable do you really think the court is going to accept the argument "well, they had the option to ignore the GPL and just get sued." ?? Lawsuits exist because someone allegedly did something they were not allowed to do. A court is going to consider the merits of what was allowed within the agreement, not this weird theory of accepting yet another lawsuit to clog the legal system.
What about the Microsoft example I just brought up? They had a copyright on their operating system. Nobody else had a legal right in the first place to copy it without their permission.
They should have been able to charge whatever the market would bear with whatever conditions the market would accept... but they were forced to stop because in the end they were unfairly restricting trade and competition. It was the origin of the phrase "Microsoft Tax."
The government most certainly has the right to find sections of your license agreement unenforceable if it is shown that it negatively affects trade and/or competition.
In this case legal and fair are the same thing. In the U.S., anything which unfairly restrains trade is illegal. Microsoft once imposed a licensing agreement which required computer manufacturers to pay them a royalty for every machine they sold regardless of whether or not that machine had Microsoft's OS on it, or else pay exorbitant fees for each individual license. This was found to be unfair competition. Although it was their prerogative to put whatever licensing agreement on their software they wanted, afterall it was their software and thus their copyright, it was found to be unfair competition and therefore illegal.
Thus, if the GPL is found to similarly unfairly restrain trade, it could be found unenforceable.
Specifics, please? What environmentalits are dismissing what solutions "out of hand"? (And please note that coming to different conclusions that you is not dismissing "out of hand".)
The forests of the pacific northwest have evolved over millions of years to survive being completely scorched every several decades. In fact most native species of trees specifically evolved to get their seeds to survive the inferno so that they can come up in the fertile ash of a post-fire forest. When explorers first encountered these forests, they wrote how wonderful these shady yet low density forests were.
Late in the 19th century we decided that allowing a wildfire to burn out of control was a bad thing. Eventually we got very good at containing fires, and the forests stopped getting scorched. Now the forests aren't so lovely, the foliage is dense and the build up of flammable detritus under the canopy continues until a devastating wildfire ravages the forest with greater ferocity than any time in history.
There's a solution. There are lumber interests who will thin the forest free of charge. In fact, they'll even let government inspectors choose which trees get cut. It's a great win all the way around. Logging companies get money. The market gets wood. The government doesn't have to pay its own workers to clean the forest.
The environmentalists dismiss it out of hand. It looks too much like the government endorsing clear cutting. They've been quite successful at blocking most attempts by logging to get access to the extra lumber in the forests. As a result we still see these super-charged wild fires.
A carefully managed program of clearing forested areas and reseeding it with young trees would emulate what fire has done for millions of years without destroying what little remains of the shrinking habitat of thousands of animals. Processing timber is also less polluting than a wild fire.
the GPL and other such licenses are conditions or terms that must be satisified in order to acquire permission to redistribute from the copyright holder(s).
And like I said, if the terms and conditions are deemed to be illegal, unfair, or whatever, then the GPL can be declared unenforceable.
As the author you can attach any condition you want. But that condition may not be enforceable. Which is exactly why I contrived the "first born" example. You can write code and put that stipulation in the licensing agreement, but you could never legally compel performance of that requirement. You can argue "hey, he knew the licensing agreement when he used the code, now he has to pay up," but the court will not uphold compliance of an illegal/unfair/legalese-mumbo-jumbo clause.
Same holds for the GPL. It is possible that a court might find that condition an unfair clause in restraint of trade or who knows what else, and could find the "you must license your code under GPL if you distribute a product" unenforceable.
Your logic is strange. Are you saying that you can just get sued and everyone walks away happy? If you get sued the outcome will involve paying damages and being compelled to either: remove the GPL code, release your code under the GPL, or reach a re-licensing agreement with the authors of the GPL code. Getting sued means you broke the rules. You violated the contract. You did something you were not allowed to do. You're saying the GPL isn't viral because I can violate the license agreement and get sued?
So I suppose my right to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre hasn't been taken from me, I simply agree not to incite a panic in exchange for not getting jail time?
If I hold the copyright on material, and I insist that you abide by the terms a license that I dictate before you are legally allowed to distribute *ANY* of the code I wrote, that is my perogative.
It is your prerogative to insist that. Enforceability is a completely separate issue. What if a requirement for using your software was agreeing to give up your first born child? You don't seriously think that a court would agree that "If you didn't want to give up your first born, you could have used some other software." And compel your licensee to turn over their child, do you?
Clearly you cannot attach just any condition to a license. If it tramples some other right, as the viral nature of the GPL might, it can be found to be unenforceable.
I'm not sure how you could have watched the movie and not gotten this, but...
In Gattaca, not everyone was perfect. Those who weren't came up with a flashing "invalid" on an I.D. screen. In fact even among those who were perfect there were varying levels of "perfect". Upon your birth, a blood sample was drawn, your dna was sequenced and they could tell your parents the probability that certain health problems could occur.
The person who wrote the article also apparently didn't watch Gattaca, because in the movie there were laws against dna screening. However there were not laws against urine testing for drug use. Employers simply did an illegal dna screen from that. Thus those who were not engineered were relegated to the jobs on the bottom rung of society (in this case, janitors).
Among young Canadians aged 15-9 women now account for 44.5 per cent of new positive HIV tests.
I think it is just tragic that so many 9 year old canadian girls are being promiscuous and catching HIV. I think it is high time we invaded Canada and taught them proper morals.
Even if they have never heard of Linux, they have all heard of Apple. In spite of this, they do not switch. Why? Because they ARE satisfied with Microosft's products and if they aren't satisfied they still regard Microsoft's products as the best available.
Nonsense. They, like me, use microsoft because it runs on inexpensive hardware and most software out there is designed to work with it. This does not imply my or their satisfaction. It implies only acknowledging the facts.
As an avid counter-strike player, I've noticed that in heavily team-oriented games like CS, team matching in public servers is generally more important than skill matching. Whether I go 20-0 or 0-20 can depend greatly on how organized my team is.
Sometimes you get the team where everybody rushes together, a few effectively decoy and you dominate maps that place you at a disadvantage, other times you get the team with a bunch of rogues who just want to find a cosy corner to picnic and hope somebody happens by to shoot at.
The best remedy for this is several mature admins who will switch players around so that each team is winning roughly half the rounds played. By far the best games I've played are the ones where at the end of 30 minutes of map play the score is 7-8. Those are the ones that give you the white-knuckled adrenaline rush we all crave in game.
I think your view of the context is too narrow. I think they looked at just about every country in europe at the time and determined that marrying the government and the church was a bad thing so they wrote that amendment to ensure that the church and state were separate entities.
For that look at our laws. They are all based on judeo/christian ethics.
Really? What about the laws permitting trademark, patent and copyright and the corresponding judeo/christian ethics? I'm rather curious what the Bible's position on intellectual property is. Heck, while we're at it, what about the Sherman Anti-Trust act of 1890? I could never follow the Bible's position on laissez-faire capitalism and government's role for nurturing a robust economy.
And while we're speculating, when do you think they are finally going to make the first commandment law?
It states that the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, Congress specifically, can't ESTABLISH a state run religion.
Okay, now you've posted this twice... I really think you are misreading the first amendment. If it said:
Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion
Then you'd be right. But it doesn't, it says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion
The use of an indefinite article in front of 'establishment' and no article in front of 'religion' clearly indicates a reference to "respect" of "any established religion."
The first amendment separates church and state. It says the government cannot make a law which gives any religion or religions preferential treatment.
The first amendment bans Congress from ESTABLISHING a state religion. It says nothing about seperation of church and state.
It says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion
That sounds an awful lot like separating church and state to me. Or are you trying to say "establishment of religion" in this case means the act of establishing a religion?
What I don't like are judges who make law. The judiciary is unlelected, and serves for life. That is hardly a body ANY person who doesn't believe in fascism would want writing laws...
The Judiciary being unelected is a very important component in our government. It means that they can look at laws passed by the tyrannical majority and strike them down without fear of losing the next election. Some rogue judge could start interpretting laws in a patently bizarre manner, that is why we have appellate courts.
But where do you get that judges are making laws? They can remove language from existing law if it violates a constitution (state or federal), they can interpret a law in an unusual manner, but I didn't think they could add laws to the books.
How do you figure? Is $20 free? Is $95 free? Having paid $20, which is strictly the cost of the media (huh? downloading software is cost of media what??) can I give my copy of Solaris to a friend?
My last version of RedHat cost me $0.12 in media thanks to a 200 pack of CD-Rs I got with a fat mail-in rebate came out to 4 cents a piece (I'm willing to pay 4 cents a CD to get copies of Knoppix into the hands of windows users). Oh, 12 cents plus whatever the electricity cost was (probably another 12 cents).
From where I sit, a "free" version of Solaris is two orders of magnitude more expensive than the "free" versions of RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo or several others I'm sure I could find.
The "ground state" for Laissez-Faire capitalism is a single giant company with a few well paid executives and a vast army of employees who are too poor to execute any sort of financial mobility.
This is because companies and executives will always do what is in their best interest. Eventually it will become in the interest of a company to own a supplier such that they will make an offer to the supplier that will be in the best interest of the supplier to take that offer.
Over time, large monopolies form in individual industries. This is was the situation we saw in the 19th century with the large trusts, monopolies, company towns, etc.. Inductively, I believe that given more time, the monopolies would merge until there were just a few, or maybe just one titanic corporation that controls production, distribution, and retail. A robust middle class is good for the economy, but not for business.
This is why this is such a political issue. Now that globalization is practical, government has to be watchful for businesses selling products in the US but manufacturing those products and spending the profits gained from those products overseas. That represents a massive trade deficit which will break the bank.
I was talking about my final tax bracket, and I do live in california. Fed + State + SUI/SDI + Medicare + Social Security all told came to 38%. Still a far cry from 50% I'm thinking.
Being good in biochem and computers is not a bad place to be. Bioinformatics is a growing industry right now, and they need a good infusion of people who not only understand the biology, but understand software as well.
Of that, $50,000 went to Federal and California taxes, leaving me with $50K.
50K?!?! Was your tax accountant DRUNK? You should have been at most at a 40% tax bracket. I think the year I was single, had nothing to write off and made $96K my final tax bracket was 38%.
rent for my modest apartment cost $2,700. Add in utilities and you're smack at $3K/mo.
How modest an apartment are we talking about? I had some friends living in that area paying $2K for a reasonable two bedroom apartment... and I thought that was ridiculous.
How inflated are these numbers? It sounds as though your discretionary income should have been at least double what you claim.
While it's certainly a better standard of living than most of the world has, a $100K salary was not enough for someone to engage in the great American pasttime of "upward mobility".
Mobility was available in the area to someone with that kind of salary...
I had friends looking to buy a house in the bay area before things started to crash. One in Dublin, one in Hayward, one in Petaluma. In all cases 3 bed 2 bath houses could be found for $350K or less. With a 100K Salary, 350K of house is about the limit of affordability. It would have made your tax bracket plummet. There are programs to get you into a first home with little to no money down.
Last I checked the US had a trade deficit with Asia (meaning we buy more dollars of stuff from them than they buy from us). Meaning Asia is benefitting more from us than we are from them.
Economics is a big complicated field for a reason. But it is hard to say just what would happen if all Asians stopped buying US products tomorrow (meaning no money from them flowing to us) and the US stopped buy all asian products at the same time (meaning no money flowing from us to them).
The simplistic view is that because there is a trade deficit we'd stop hemmorhaging money. Of course that doesn't mesh completely with reality since it isn't paper money that is moving but manufactured goods and labor. I suspect it would hurt them more than us though.
1 in 10 of those chips that Intel sells to Asia goes into the computer of someone taking a job from an american worker. That lost job will cost us more than the value of 10 chips... but it won't cost Intel a dime.
will boost those countries' economies enough that they'll be able to buy our stuff. And long-term, it's reasonable to believe that this is so.
This is a slippery slope. Long term $1 invested in India may never result in $1 in purchases of US goods. Over the long term that $1 declines in purchasing power, so just to keep the status quo that $1 would have to translate into more than $1 of US goods purchased. But India isn't performing this work with the idea of maintaining the state of their economy. They are performing this work intending to grow their economy. In essence, a large portion of that $1 is intended to stay in circulation in India and never get exported. This means a permanent movement of wealth from the US to India.
Historically when we see a trade deficit in one industry, another industry comes up to fill the void. However the industry that had the trade deficit gets a thorough battering: Textiles, Steel, Automotive.
As much as I hate to admit it, most programmers never use the theory they learned in college. This is why we see a large number of non-diploma programmers in industry - they don't need the degree to do it. This is a fancy way of saying that most programming is only low- to moderately-skilled labor. Non-programmers (like tech support) even less so. It isn't shocking that the labor is getting exported to a cheaper area.
I suspect most of the truly high-tech work (such as scientific programming that depends on a thorough knowledge of science as well as software) will stay here.
The only real solution is getting AOL to stop blocking. That task may be unworkable. Using ftp is just a workaround as well. Http has clear advantages for web use. I'm suggesting a workaround that uses Http.
This is the flawed thinking of the open source movement, that somehow things like "market share" are measures of success.
[...]
As long as we have that, any GNU/Linux vendor in the world is free to cooperate with other vendors and standardize or not standardize as they see fit. A properly functioning economy (both in terms of money and ideas) requires lots of small companies (suppliers) all competing for the dollars/yen/euros/attention of the consumer.
Competing for dollars/yen/euros is the same thing as competing for market share. That's how "market share" is a measure of success. How many companies spent millions of dollars on Linux development because it had server market share? How much better is Linux today because of that? Market share is a very real measure of success.
Absolute freedom in the software is what's important.
That may be what is important to you... To the average person what is important is: ease of use, compatibility with existing software, ease of obtaining new software, and cost of ownership. If we want to remove Linux's barriers to the desktop, those are issues we need to wrestle with.
Personally I feel like users expect too little from their systems, and too little from themselves as well.
This is the sort of reasoning among Linux users that creates a barrier to acceptance of Linux on the desktop. Should automobile designers assume that users should select their own gear ratios and rebuild their transmission themselves? Users don't care about how their system works, they just care that it works. It's nice that you are comfortable being a mechanic, not everyone has the least interest in being one.
Computers are complicated machines that require a certain level of know-how.
No, that is fundamentally wrong, and apple has shown this in spades. "You need a certain level of know-how" is a poor excuse for a system that isn't designed with the average person in mind. If a person has little trouble learning to use windows, but does have trouble with linux, the problem is with the software, stop blaming the user.
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The GPL doesn't "force itself" on the surrounding code. That is simply a path that can be chosen.
So if I follow you correctly, nobody can be forced to do anything? Since there is always the option to choose a negative punitive action.
The GPL can't force you to GPL your code because you could always choose to ignore it and risk a lawsuit?
The option to do something disallowed is always present, but when it comes to deciding on whether or not the GPL is enforceable do you really think the court is going to accept the argument "well, they had the option to ignore the GPL and just get sued." ?? Lawsuits exist because someone allegedly did something they were not allowed to do. A court is going to consider the merits of what was allowed within the agreement, not this weird theory of accepting yet another lawsuit to clog the legal system.
What about the Microsoft example I just brought up? They had a copyright on their operating system. Nobody else had a legal right in the first place to copy it without their permission.
They should have been able to charge whatever the market would bear with whatever conditions the market would accept... but they were forced to stop because in the end they were unfairly restricting trade and competition. It was the origin of the phrase "Microsoft Tax."
The government most certainly has the right to find sections of your license agreement unenforceable if it is shown that it negatively affects trade and/or competition.
In this case legal and fair are the same thing. In the U.S., anything which unfairly restrains trade is illegal. Microsoft once imposed a licensing agreement which required computer manufacturers to pay them a royalty for every machine they sold regardless of whether or not that machine had Microsoft's OS on it, or else pay exorbitant fees for each individual license. This was found to be unfair competition. Although it was their prerogative to put whatever licensing agreement on their software they wanted, afterall it was their software and thus their copyright, it was found to be unfair competition and therefore illegal.
Thus, if the GPL is found to similarly unfairly restrain trade, it could be found unenforceable.
Specifics, please? What environmentalits are dismissing what solutions "out of hand"? (And please note that coming to different conclusions that you is not dismissing "out of hand".)
The forests of the pacific northwest have evolved over millions of years to survive being completely scorched every several decades. In fact most native species of trees specifically evolved to get their seeds to survive the inferno so that they can come up in the fertile ash of a post-fire forest. When explorers first encountered these forests, they wrote how wonderful these shady yet low density forests were.
Late in the 19th century we decided that allowing a wildfire to burn out of control was a bad thing. Eventually we got very good at containing fires, and the forests stopped getting scorched. Now the forests aren't so lovely, the foliage is dense and the build up of flammable detritus under the canopy continues until a devastating wildfire ravages the forest with greater ferocity than any time in history.
There's a solution. There are lumber interests who will thin the forest free of charge. In fact, they'll even let government inspectors choose which trees get cut. It's a great win all the way around. Logging companies get money. The market gets wood. The government doesn't have to pay its own workers to clean the forest.
The environmentalists dismiss it out of hand. It looks too much like the government endorsing clear cutting. They've been quite successful at blocking most attempts by logging to get access to the extra lumber in the forests. As a result we still see these super-charged wild fires.
A carefully managed program of clearing forested areas and reseeding it with young trees would emulate what fire has done for millions of years without destroying what little remains of the shrinking habitat of thousands of animals. Processing timber is also less polluting than a wild fire.
the GPL and other such licenses are conditions or terms that must be satisified in order to acquire permission to redistribute from the copyright holder(s).
And like I said, if the terms and conditions are deemed to be illegal, unfair, or whatever, then the GPL can be declared unenforceable.
As the author you can attach any condition you want. But that condition may not be enforceable. Which is exactly why I contrived the "first born" example. You can write code and put that stipulation in the licensing agreement, but you could never legally compel performance of that requirement. You can argue "hey, he knew the licensing agreement when he used the code, now he has to pay up," but the court will not uphold compliance of an illegal/unfair/legalese-mumbo-jumbo clause.
Same holds for the GPL. It is possible that a court might find that condition an unfair clause in restraint of trade or who knows what else, and could find the "you must license your code under GPL if you distribute a product" unenforceable.
Your logic is strange. Are you saying that you can just get sued and everyone walks away happy? If you get sued the outcome will involve paying damages and being compelled to either: remove the GPL code, release your code under the GPL, or reach a re-licensing agreement with the authors of the GPL code. Getting sued means you broke the rules. You violated the contract. You did something you were not allowed to do. You're saying the GPL isn't viral because I can violate the license agreement and get sued?
So I suppose my right to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre hasn't been taken from me, I simply agree not to incite a panic in exchange for not getting jail time?
Truly strange.
If I hold the copyright on material, and I insist that you abide by the terms a license that I dictate before you are legally allowed to distribute *ANY* of the code I wrote, that is my perogative.
It is your prerogative to insist that. Enforceability is a completely separate issue. What if a requirement for using your software was agreeing to give up your first born child? You don't seriously think that a court would agree that "If you didn't want to give up your first born, you could have used some other software." And compel your licensee to turn over their child, do you?
Clearly you cannot attach just any condition to a license. If it tramples some other right, as the viral nature of the GPL might, it can be found to be unenforceable.
I'm not sure how you could have watched the movie and not gotten this, but...
In Gattaca, not everyone was perfect. Those who weren't came up with a flashing "invalid" on an I.D. screen. In fact even among those who were perfect there were varying levels of "perfect". Upon your birth, a blood sample was drawn, your dna was sequenced and they could tell your parents the probability that certain health problems could occur.
The person who wrote the article also apparently didn't watch Gattaca, because in the movie there were laws against dna screening. However there were not laws against urine testing for drug use. Employers simply did an illegal dna screen from that. Thus those who were not engineered were relegated to the jobs on the bottom rung of society (in this case, janitors).
Oh it gets worse...
Among young Canadians aged 15-9 women now account for 44.5 per cent of new positive HIV tests.
I think it is just tragic that so many 9 year old canadian girls are being promiscuous and catching HIV. I think it is high time we invaded Canada and taught them proper morals.
Even if they have never heard of Linux, they have all heard of Apple. In spite of this, they do not switch. Why? Because they ARE satisfied with Microosft's products and if they aren't satisfied they still regard Microsoft's products as the best available.
Nonsense. They, like me, use microsoft because it runs on inexpensive hardware and most software out there is designed to work with it. This does not imply my or their satisfaction. It implies only acknowledging the facts.
As an avid counter-strike player, I've noticed that in heavily team-oriented games like CS, team matching in public servers is generally more important than skill matching. Whether I go 20-0 or 0-20 can depend greatly on how organized my team is.
Sometimes you get the team where everybody rushes together, a few effectively decoy and you dominate maps that place you at a disadvantage, other times you get the team with a bunch of rogues who just want to find a cosy corner to picnic and hope somebody happens by to shoot at.
The best remedy for this is several mature admins who will switch players around so that each team is winning roughly half the rounds played. By far the best games I've played are the ones where at the end of 30 minutes of map play the score is 7-8. Those are the ones that give you the white-knuckled adrenaline rush we all crave in game.
I think your view of the context is too narrow. I think they looked at just about every country in europe at the time and determined that marrying the government and the church was a bad thing so they wrote that amendment to ensure that the church and state were separate entities.
For that look at our laws. They are all based on judeo/christian ethics.
Really? What about the laws permitting trademark, patent and copyright and the corresponding judeo/christian ethics? I'm rather curious what the Bible's position on intellectual property is. Heck, while we're at it, what about the Sherman Anti-Trust act of 1890? I could never follow the Bible's position on laissez-faire capitalism and government's role for nurturing a robust economy.
And while we're speculating, when do you think they are finally going to make the first commandment law?
It states that the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, Congress specifically, can't ESTABLISH a state run religion.
Okay, now you've posted this twice... I really think you are misreading the first amendment. If it said:
Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion
Then you'd be right. But it doesn't, it says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion
The use of an indefinite article in front of 'establishment' and no article in front of 'religion' clearly indicates a reference to "respect" of "any established religion."
The first amendment separates church and state. It says the government cannot make a law which gives any religion or religions preferential treatment.
It says:
That sounds an awful lot like separating church and state to me. Or are you trying to say "establishment of religion" in this case means the act of establishing a religion?
What I don't like are judges who make law. The judiciary is unlelected, and serves for life. That is hardly a body ANY person who doesn't believe in fascism would want writing laws...
The Judiciary being unelected is a very important component in our government. It means that they can look at laws passed by the tyrannical majority and strike them down without fear of losing the next election. Some rogue judge could start interpretting laws in a patently bizarre manner, that is why we have appellate courts.
But where do you get that judges are making laws? They can remove language from existing law if it violates a constitution (state or federal), they can interpret a law in an unusual manner, but I didn't think they could add laws to the books.
Solaris on Intel is, for all intents FREE
How do you figure? Is $20 free? Is $95 free? Having paid $20, which is strictly the cost of the media (huh? downloading software is cost of media what??) can I give my copy of Solaris to a friend?
My last version of RedHat cost me $0.12 in media thanks to a 200 pack of CD-Rs I got with a fat mail-in rebate came out to 4 cents a piece (I'm willing to pay 4 cents a CD to get copies of Knoppix into the hands of windows users). Oh, 12 cents plus whatever the electricity cost was (probably another 12 cents).
From where I sit, a "free" version of Solaris is two orders of magnitude more expensive than the "free" versions of RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo or several others I'm sure I could find.
It's called capitalism. It works.
The "ground state" for Laissez-Faire capitalism is a single giant company with a few well paid executives and a vast army of employees who are too poor to execute any sort of financial mobility.
This is because companies and executives will always do what is in their best interest. Eventually it will become in the interest of a company to own a supplier such that they will make an offer to the supplier that will be in the best interest of the supplier to take that offer.
Over time, large monopolies form in individual industries. This is was the situation we saw in the 19th century with the large trusts, monopolies, company towns, etc.. Inductively, I believe that given more time, the monopolies would merge until there were just a few, or maybe just one titanic corporation that controls production, distribution, and retail. A robust middle class is good for the economy, but not for business.
This is why this is such a political issue. Now that globalization is practical, government has to be watchful for businesses selling products in the US but manufacturing those products and spending the profits gained from those products overseas. That represents a massive trade deficit which will break the bank.
Some of us have crawled out of the primordial ooze and left our vestigal floppy drives behind.
Bootable rescue CDs are useful to me. Rescue CDs with a bunch of useful stuff on them are even more useful to me.
I was talking about my final tax bracket, and I do live in california. Fed + State + SUI/SDI + Medicare + Social Security all told came to 38%. Still a far cry from 50% I'm thinking.
Being good in biochem and computers is not a bad place to be. Bioinformatics is a growing industry right now, and they need a good infusion of people who not only understand the biology, but understand software as well.
Of that, $50,000 went to Federal and California taxes, leaving me with $50K.
50K?!?! Was your tax accountant DRUNK? You should have been at most at a 40% tax bracket. I think the year I was single, had nothing to write off and made $96K my final tax bracket was 38%.
rent for my modest apartment cost $2,700. Add in utilities and you're smack at $3K/mo.
How modest an apartment are we talking about? I had some friends living in that area paying $2K for a reasonable two bedroom apartment... and I thought that was ridiculous.
How inflated are these numbers? It sounds as though your discretionary income should have been at least double what you claim.
While it's certainly a better standard of living than most of the world has, a $100K salary was not enough for someone to engage in the great American pasttime of "upward mobility".
Mobility was available in the area to someone with that kind of salary...
I had friends looking to buy a house in the bay area before things started to crash. One in Dublin, one in Hayward, one in Petaluma. In all cases 3 bed 2 bath houses could be found for $350K or less. With a 100K Salary, 350K of house is about the limit of affordability. It would have made your tax bracket plummet. There are programs to get you into a first home with little to no money down.
Last I checked the US had a trade deficit with Asia (meaning we buy more dollars of stuff from them than they buy from us). Meaning Asia is benefitting more from us than we are from them.
Economics is a big complicated field for a reason. But it is hard to say just what would happen if all Asians stopped buying US products tomorrow (meaning no money from them flowing to us) and the US stopped buy all asian products at the same time (meaning no money flowing from us to them).
The simplistic view is that because there is a trade deficit we'd stop hemmorhaging money. Of course that doesn't mesh completely with reality since it isn't paper money that is moving but manufactured goods and labor. I suspect it would hurt them more than us though.
1 in 10 of those chips that Intel sells to Asia goes into the computer of someone taking a job from an american worker. That lost job will cost us more than the value of 10 chips... but it won't cost Intel a dime.
will boost those countries' economies enough that they'll be able to buy our stuff. And long-term, it's reasonable to believe that this is so.
This is a slippery slope. Long term $1 invested in India may never result in $1 in purchases of US goods. Over the long term that $1 declines in purchasing power, so just to keep the status quo that $1 would have to translate into more than $1 of US goods purchased. But India isn't performing this work with the idea of maintaining the state of their economy. They are performing this work intending to grow their economy. In essence, a large portion of that $1 is intended to stay in circulation in India and never get exported. This means a permanent movement of wealth from the US to India.
Historically when we see a trade deficit in one industry, another industry comes up to fill the void. However the industry that had the trade deficit gets a thorough battering: Textiles, Steel, Automotive.
As much as I hate to admit it, most programmers never use the theory they learned in college. This is why we see a large number of non-diploma programmers in industry - they don't need the degree to do it. This is a fancy way of saying that most programming is only low- to moderately-skilled labor. Non-programmers (like tech support) even less so. It isn't shocking that the labor is getting exported to a cheaper area.
I suspect most of the truly high-tech work (such as scientific programming that depends on a thorough knowledge of science as well as software) will stay here.
The only real solution is getting AOL to stop blocking. That task may be unworkable. Using ftp is just a workaround as well. Http has clear advantages for web use. I'm suggesting a workaround that uses Http.
I should know better than to reply to trolls.
Could you get around this using tinyurl? I'm not sure if it changes the HTTP_REFERRER or not.
This is the flawed thinking of the open source movement, that somehow things like "market share" are measures of success.
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As long as we have that, any GNU/Linux vendor in the world is free to cooperate with other vendors and standardize or not standardize as they see fit. A properly functioning economy (both in terms of money and ideas) requires lots of small companies (suppliers) all competing for the dollars/yen/euros/attention of the consumer.
Competing for dollars/yen/euros is the same thing as competing for market share. That's how "market share" is a measure of success. How many companies spent millions of dollars on Linux development because it had server market share? How much better is Linux today because of that? Market share is a very real measure of success.
Absolute freedom in the software is what's important.
That may be what is important to you... To the average person what is important is: ease of use, compatibility with existing software, ease of obtaining new software, and cost of ownership. If we want to remove Linux's barriers to the desktop, those are issues we need to wrestle with.
Personally I feel like users expect too little from their systems, and too little from themselves as well.
This is the sort of reasoning among Linux users that creates a barrier to acceptance of Linux on the desktop. Should automobile designers assume that users should select their own gear ratios and rebuild their transmission themselves? Users don't care about how their system works, they just care that it works. It's nice that you are comfortable being a mechanic, not everyone has the least interest in being one.
Computers are complicated machines that require a certain level of know-how.
No, that is fundamentally wrong, and apple has shown this in spades. "You need a certain level of know-how" is a poor excuse for a system that isn't designed with the average person in mind. If a person has little trouble learning to use windows, but does have trouble with linux, the problem is with the software, stop blaming the user.