Which is curious. What is the difference between a Zionist and a White Supremacist? Both believe that God has given them dominion over their land and right to kill anyone who resides on it that they don't like.
The reason that such things should not be included is that it is hard to quantize. For instance, if I included the clause 'This software should only be used by people who believe that all humans are equal', which is a much less bigoted statement than yours, how would i enforce it? it arguable that some Jews who believe they are the children of god are arguable out of this catagory. It is arguable that some catholics who believe that certain people cannot be priests are out of the this catagory. it is arguable that certai companies do not function as if all workers are potentially equal.
The reason that this discussion is pointless is because almost every religion, at least in the west, is bigoted. Many demand conformity. Many say that others are less than they are. Many have arbitrary restrictions on leadership. You are subjected one group to individual scrutiny that is not applied to the population in general. That is the definition of a bigot.
The thing is that, like many innovations, much of the work for powered heavier than air flight had been done. What was needed was, most importantly, someone to be systematic in their application of the knowledge, as well as a practical engine to be developed. The wright brothers did both. My understanding is that they were very focused and very methodical in their research. They took it step by step. They learned how to fly. They did experiments and carefully corrected for their failures. The achieved not only a design, but a process, that allowed them to very quickly move from their prototypes to practical flying machines.
This is what is important today, not only physical objects but process. As in the wright brothers time, there were many people who were building the flying machines. The knowledge base had increased enough so that it was possible. The key was who did it systematically enough to make it matter.
Oh, come on. The article is a joke. The number, though shrouded in reality, should be taken even less seriously than the average economic pontifications. The responses mostly reflect that reality.
It is expected that some of the younger population, with their ideals and unattainable standards, would take it too seriously. What is sad is when a wise and knowledgeable person take those responses seriously.
And let's be honest. If the sole criteria for upward moderation was wisedom and correct information, we would have precious few 5's, and a much less interesting forum. As it is I sit in awe at the amount of funny stuff that gets rated flamebait, or, even more distressing, interesting.
So they are claiming that with unemployment still up, and orchestras laying off employess or going under due to lack of donations, the cost of talent is up this year. It seems like semi-pro musician and dancers could be hard for $100 a piece.
And what is it with the birds. I see them for sale along the freeway all the time for next to nothing. And a pear tree? Those are everywhere. Go and dig one up. I mean they are just trees.
It's christmas. We have no money. Be creative
And, btw, where are they shipping to? Longyearbyen to Cape Horn.
The first thing I thought is this is too complicated. A single LN2 compressor, some insulating tubes running into the box, and a heat exchange instead of a heat sink, you could easily chill that baby to 150K. The compressor would not even have to be in the same room. You would even have to charge it often if you kept the N2 clean.
Generally speaking, a copy protection schemes does not stop even the most casual party from copying software. There has to be something else that encourages them to license the product.
In software that extra something is either the carrot of value added services or the stick of the BSA taking all company assets to cover huge litigation bills and the resulting fines. The labels are tying to implement the stick with music and movies, while virtually ignoring possible carrots, like pricing the product so it is easier to license than copy, or adding original content to the product to justify the cost.
These schemes can also help protect the innocent from mistakes. This is the value in some software based DRM in terms of security. I see no security benefits from this DRM scheme.
And of course they are playing a dangerous PR game in which they have to balance the power of the DRM against the loyalty of the customers. If the kids think you are dissing them, they will go somewhere else.
I largely agree with you. But these do not work because they are wars. Using the mentality of war means that either you or the enemy must be vanquished. I know that in government and business this mentality is rampant, but neither is zero sum game. Not only that, but in the issues of drugs, poverty, terror, and spam, the enemies and allies are often the same people.
There are valid reasons to take drugs. Drugs are pushed on us all the time, on TV, at sporting events, even by the government. The arbitrary lines between good and bad just don't make sense. Poverty is caused by people don't have stuff. We can get stuff for more people. We just don't want to. The war is mostly PR. With terror, we know pretty much who is funding much of this. And it goes way beyond the gentleman was just captured. It is other parties that our multinational corporations depend on for lucrative contracts. Are we really going to give up that money just because a few thousand lives are lost every year? We can't even give up smoking!
So let's not treat spam as an enemy and declare a war. We can avoid developing arbitrary boundaries, creating PR campaigns to make the problem look more or less important, or destroying token parties so we don't have to deal with real lucrative players? It looks like we a clear and effective definition of spam. I like that this may give us a place to start. From there it is all diplomacy
A good programmer seperates those questions and then asks each in turn.
Organization and manipulation of data is a specific problem requiring specific skills. Ideally one will find the optimal process to handle the data quickly and effeciently.
UI is another issue. It requires a certain skill and tools. The user thinks of data in a certain way, and it may not the best way to work with the data in the computer.
The problem with Windows programming is that want to combine these two processes into a monolithic program. People raised on visual studio want to hook widgets to databases and call it programming. At no time do they ask if the the solution makes sense.
The upshot is is the GUI presents a data structure, not a interface. The database is driven by the need to make it understandable to users, not effeciency. Both sides lose in this model.
This is a really good development because it sets the ground rules by which SCO shows the court the evidence. It means that SCO has finally been forced to end the waiting game. They probably threw in this condition as a last minute effort to avoid showing the code, and the court worked out a compromise to counter the effort.
Since the only real game is the IBM lawsuit, anything that will get that process rolling is good. Hopefully the trial will begin to go badly and all the other diversionary offenses will begin to break down. But even if IBM is found to be liable in some way, the court will at least define a much more narrow avenue of liability, which will still stop SCO from it's current round of random bombing.
Ah, but did we give the remedial student all his accommodations? Did we give him enough extra time for the search. Did we read all his reports to him. Were we sure that he understood the complicated words. Did we put him in a quite room without distractions such as alcohol or coke. If not, we cannot legally fail him.
Not only is the private citizen doing nothing wrong when posting methods that the US consumer can purchase a product, or get the best deal on product, but the firm that thinks they can suppress such information is exhibiting increasingly unsustainable historical behavior.
US firms pretty much want the opportunity to purchase source material or finished parts anywhere in the world, put those items together into a product anywhere in the world, engineer those products anywhere in the world, support those products anywhere in the world, and then sell those products to US consumers without any tariffs, tolls or taxes. The firms say any government imposed fees will cause unnecessary friction in trade that will only hurt the consumer. OTOH, these same firms want the government to create as much friction as possible for the consumer that attempts to find the best way to spend his or her money.
This is really just modern imperialism pushed by multinationals. It is no different from the British government forcing the Indian people to pay a tax on a critical produce they could easily purchase themselves. This is really no different from certain countries denying their women independence by denying them an education. This is really no different from the imperialistic method of stealing local resources, manufacturing them in the imperialist country, and then selling them back to the oppressed savages. These are really just laws that limit arbitrage opportunities to a privileged few.
US firms cannot have it all. Firms cannot claim the right to destroy communities by exporting production to cheaper labor markets, and then deny those communities the opportunity to bypass US firms in their purchasing decision. Firms cannot claim the right to limit the availability of product to the US consumer, the one basic right we still enjoy in the US, just because it will hurt the bottom line.
While this advice is useful for some presentations, heeding such advice as a rule of thumb, particularly 2 and 3, probably just makes the presentation more lame. #4 of course is always important.
The nice thing about powerpoint is that it allows people who would ordinarily drone on without visuals or manipulative to have both. The bad thing is that these people believe that because they have visuals and manipulative they have a good presentation. They believe that because they have animated text, which will in general bring a distracted person back to the presentation, they have an engaging presentation.
These people miss the reason for powerpoint. To address a wider range of learning styles, not just to be cool. Too much animation will distract the learner that just wants to read the handout and listen to the speaker. Too much color will distract the visual learner that the images are supposed to draw in. The use of a overhead or projector is often irrelevant because the presentation is seldom strong enough for such a choice to make a significant difference.
That said, the article appears to be mostly about the fact that most presentation focus on low quality cognitive presentations, and make little effort to encourage analysis, synthesis and evaluation in the audience. It is unfair to blame powerpoint for this. Encouraging such thinking is the responsibility of the presenter. he or she must ask the proper questions, present discrepant events, or otherwise cause the audience members to leave the dumdum state of regurgitation.
If this does not happen it is either because the presenter does not know how, or is afraid to do so. The later is often the case. Forcing more complex questions may lead to those that the presenter can not answer, and some may capitalized on such a situation to assert personal dogma. Likewise, discrepant events may be interpreted not as an opportunity to explore, but as an indication of incompetence.
As an example of the importance of visual presentation styles, look at these first two links from google on blooms taxonomy. Some will prefer the first, and some will prefer the second.
http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/guides/bloom. html
http://www.coun.uvic.ca/learn/program/hndouts/bloo m.html
IANAL, but I think this question, and maybe the article, kind of misses the point. One good point has already been made, the the programmers are not rogue.
The second point is that this is not a case where copyrighted material has escaped, been used by a competing company, and the competing company is claiming that because the copyrighted material is now in public view, it is no longer under copyright protection.
This is a case where the accused party is perfectly willing to discuss specific instances of copyright violation, and, if proved valid, remove the code.
The things that complicate this is whether IBM was under the standard or modified UNIX agreement, and whether anyone who ever worked in UNIX can be considered to have stolen IP from UNIX.
And this is why most of the discussion on this topic is irrelevant. The suite against IBM is probably a valid question, and maybe even justifiable due to the previous action of IBM. If the laws are followed, it will only affect IBM, at least until another battle is fought to prove the code in Linux is substantially similar. At which point the code will simply be removed and life will go on.
This is why they are trying to attack on the second front, essentially saying that Linux stole everything from Unix. There is no reason to show specific code, because all the code in effect breaks copyright because it was all done by people who saw Unix code. Saying that a programmer here and there legally contributed little pieces of code does not mean that overall product is does not break Unix copyright. Many would say this is a silly argument. But this is not something that will be won in courts. This will be won in the marketplace. And even thought the OSS software has no more risk than closed software, people may begin to believe that it does. And by fight SCO on the battlefield it selects, with articles such as this, we play into their strategy.
There are only two things that matter. First, the real battle is between IBM and SCO. That is the lawsuit that is filed. That is the only battle SCO needs to actively defend. If SCO wins, Linux will adjust the code. I think everyone has said this. Until a judgment is handed down, nothing needs to be done.
The second is the assumption that Linux breaks copyrights from Unix. SCO is not putting anything substantial into this fight. It is merely a distraction to make the OS community waste time. The only reasonable response is to sumarily state that there is no legal basis to find that Linux is derived from Unix and no known copyright infringement exists. If any are found, they will be corrected, as in the past. If asked why this is true, all one needs to do is ask why SCO has not filed suit to defend their point. At this point it is all words.
OSS can and should define the battlefield, and not just respond to SCO. I am sure that people will correct me or mod me down if they disagree.
By the time I got to high school, we did have a PDP-11 as our main machine. However, we were able to use ed and FORTRAN and BASIC. We also liked it very much.
You know, you are so right. When I was in school we had old machines running old OS and we had to so everything ourselves. It was long enough ago that a lot of the fancy software was not available. One of my teachers wrote the physics simulator for the Apple, which at the time was not that old, but we had other machines that were older.
Now I see that MS is pushing licensing scheme that makes it difficult to donate old Machines. Schools don't even want the older computers because all they care about is cheap tech support and surfing the internet. How many MSCE have the depth of knowledge to work on an old DOS machine or any apple? But if I were teaching programming, I would rather have enough machines so I could have every student in the school learn the logic of programming rather than just the lucky few who signed up first. Likewise, if i were teaching math or science, i would like every team to have their own computer so that could do their demonstrations and simulations. And I would want them to be old so that is all they could do.
Of course, modern machines are necessary when you are teaching Visual Studio and MS office. For the Vocational training stuff, this is defensible. But for the more basic classes, fast machines are really just a luxury.
For me it is an issue of cost and speed. I know windows NT will run on my machine. I know when it works and when it doesn't. I need to upgrade to Windows 2000, but do i buy the upgrade or standard? I have had so much trouble with MS upgrades, especially when I have to recover from a crash, it seems better just to buy the standard version and still have a legal version of the old OS. But that means nearly $200, even at steep discounts, for every machine. And who knows how fast the new OS will run, and what other upgrades will be needed.
They need to price to sell to the home consumer. Like Apple the should have a 5 user $200 license so that we can stay current without violating copyright. I know employees can now legaly use MS software at home if corporate licenses it, but that is not everyone. It doesn't help that they give corporate customer the ultimatum of upgrading now or being unable to upgrade affordable later. I Linux gets it act together on the desktop, this lack of upgrading could lead to a significant decline in MS market share. Which is probably why MS is going after Lindows.
The way things are going, I think the spam laws are going to end up like mail fraud laws, and that would be a good thing. If a person sends an email, even a single email, with the intention of defrauding the recipient, that can and should be treated as a possible criminal act. Such behavior could include deceptive titles, forged headers, deceptive URL, including copyrighted images and layouts, and the like.
This makes the case crystal clear. Prove the email is deceptive. Prove the person who created the email knew or should have known the email was deceptive. Then apply the law. There will be none of this complicated decisions of how much bandwidth was used, or how much damage was done to the victims computing equipment. If the victim wants to pursue those civil matter, fine. But the criminal matter will be one of content and intent.
And this will stop maost domestic spam. If spammers are froced to use honest content, or risk being chased by the FBI, thier whole bussiness model falls apart. Honest email is much easier to stop at the ISP, and much easier to track back to the source.
So, it sounds like they merely created a new series based on current SciFi expectations. Computer run amok. Earth destroyed. Sex. More complex Efx done by computers.
This is marketing, not creativity. It sounds like a good series. There does not appear to be anything wrong with it. But it is really just capitilizing on the franchise name, while creating a totaly different modern creature.
And I like when when writers don't get caught up in the backstories. The biggest problem with TV and movies is they waste precious time on 'this is how it happened' and by the time they get to the real story, everyone is board. If the back story is important, do it as brief flashbacks.
Automatic payment can be legal, even if it is variable. It is how iTunes, other music service, and various utilities work. You sign an agreement saying you will be responsible for all charges incurred, and the service bills periodically. With iTunes it is important to keep your computer secure, otherwise a child or other miscreant might run up bills. It is really no different from the kid leaving the lights and air on all day and night.
The problem is going to be getting the original authorization and insuring the user is informed of the obligations incurred by using the product, as well as informing the user if those obligations change. My suspicion is that this is going to require more that a click through license. It has to be solid enough to insure the user cannot call the credit card company and ask for a cancelation of charges.
This is going to limit the flexibility of the system. If a user is presented with a charge confirmation screen every time a song is downloaded to a portable device or a movie is played, it is unlikely the consumer will frequently deal with that content.
Currently, people who send files through file-trading networks, or via e-mail or instant messaging, are largely locked in to sending a specific file that may not be readable by people who lack the appropriate software or hardware.
What kind of fantasy world are they living in. The problem is that almost everything is encoded in well known formats that can be handled by most machines. The powers that be wish that content on P2P networks were in proprietary protected formats, but except for a bit of windows media crap, it isn't.
They openly state in their charter that all humans have certain rights, like freedom of speech, as long as using that right doesn't interfere with a stated goal of the UN
This is pretty much what happens in the US. You can say whatever you wish, as long as it doesn't cause a problem. We have censorship of commercial speech, political speech, and public speech in general. We already have censorship of the Internet. The US already is passing laws to limit what individuals can say. The internet is right now probably much less free than the traditional press.
So, I guess these are the opinions that are developed by listening to random drug addicts.
The reality is that the UN is controlled by countries that are very concerned about the sovereignty and their borders. They want the rest of their worlds to stay out of their business and out of their borders. This is why it so hard to get resolutions past, especially those that would foreign forces inside a sovereign nation. If such a thing is done too often, and without an extreme purpose, it would create a situation in which such actions were the norm instead of the exception.
Because the US does not have worries about another country coming to formally invade, and because it does not sign many of the international treatise, the US pretty much feels free to invade anyone else. But because the US feels the need to obey the 'rule of law', mostly because it uses the 'rule of law' to justify invasions, it tries to get UN to rubber stamp these invasion. Other countries, who do have something to fear, even from the US, are not comfortable with these invasions, and are offended by the US action. The offense is further amplified when the US links funding to extreme Christian beliefs.
As far as borders, it is the US that continuously violates other borders, and thus makes the concept of borders less valid. The violations of foreign boarders is an ongoing US policy. Examples from the past are the encouragement of Panama to revolt against Colombia and the gunboat diplomacy that opened up Chinese ports. This continued with GATT, WTO and NAFTA, all which the US administration strongly supported. These agreements resulted in increasing porous US boarders that result in continuous job loss and trade deficits. That these might have benefits are to be determined. If it were up to the UN, boarders would likely be much more solid and respected. Just to be clear, the UN was created out of WWII. One big issue in WWII was the boundries. They were considered important then, and the UN tries to keep them that way.
It would be good for Europe and Asia to define themselves in positive ways. However, the US makes it very difficult to do this because so much energy is spent protected sovereign nations from US incursion.
Now, to be on topic, the Internet is in theory within boundries, so the UN may not be the best agency. OTOH, the Internet is clearly US-centric, with the US pretty much controlling the.com,.org, and.edu TLD, while giving other countries control over thier single TLD. If we wish to make the Internet more of a wordly network, and we in fact may not, a change has to be made.
Today MS announced products intended to help the struggling and much maligned spammer. These tool, name Longhorns Up The Ass, are expected to be incorporated into all future security updates.
The key to LutA are tools that can be downloaded as a normal web page, then run as an local application. Once the application is launched, it will continue to run in it's own window until the process is manually killed. It is assumed that other processes may be periodically be created, or the system otherwise modified, so that a restart will be required to stop all processes, and a system reinstall necessary to remove all autoruns.
A famous spammer out of Florida, who we interviewed in his trailer home, and who wished to remain anonymous, had this to say. "We have been real disappointed in MS lately. They have been modifying Outlook to make it harder for us to get viruses through. The have telling users not to open unknown emails. They have even said they will block pop ups. For a hard working guy like me, with three ex-wives, 7 children, a mistress, not mention that I am putting two titty dances through college, I just can't make enough money.
"I was losing faith. But this new stuff, this will be great. It will be in Windows. That damn open source commie crap won't be able to block it. I can work with Gator and Kazaa so that I can run banner ads, gateways, porn web servers, whatever, on the mark's machines. I might just be able to start moving these small breast disease remedires again."
It is not know if MS itself will use these tools for marketing purposes. It is thought that sales to spam organizations and other organized crime outfits were on the decline, and such a tool was necessary to convince them not to support user migration to other platforms.
Investment in SCO is passive, made to hedge an economic exposure resulting from client transactions
This seems to be making sense. The investment companies are playing both sides against the middle. If SCO wins, the consequences will be likely be lower earnings for companies that must pay the licensing fees. OTOH, the investment bankers who have invested with SCO will be able to offset those losses by their earnings from SCO. If SCO loses, they lose their investment, but it is not that much money.
As far as the lawyer veto, I think this is just another hedge in case SCO loses. The bankers want to keep the money instead of paying for currently promised obligation. In any event, they will probably just go court and claim that the lawyer fees are excessive. No one likes lawyers, and even in the case where a lawyer funds a litigation, such as the tobacco case with the states, the courts seem willing to put aside contractual obligations to the detriment of the lawyers.
The US government current base of power in world politics is that it can and will destroy anything that gets in the way of US desires. It frankly established this authority by being the only country to ever drop an atomic bomb on another country. To this day it has maintained this power by showing little mercy to people, countries, or other forces that do not tow that US line.
There are some people that want to challenge this authority directly. These people believe that they can beat the US using the rules and battlefield chosen by the US. These people are stupid. There are ways to beat the US, such as 911, which, in spite of the destruction of other parties by the US, seems to have had little effect on the terrorist themselves. We are inconvenienced by long lines at airlines and have had our civil liberties shriveled to the perceived size of our leaders genitalia, which Laden and his cohorts and money roams free.
But direct attacks are not going to work. You set up a compound. You fill it with weapons. You mock the government. You laugh at their power. What the fuck do you think is going to happen. Do you think the government that wiped out entire villages in Asia is going give a shit about killing you. Do you think the government that practically wiped out the native population is going to tolerate such a threat to power on it's own soil. Do you think that a government that imprisoned and imprisons thousands of it's own citizens for being the wrong ethnicity is going to really have any significant remorse about destroying a group of whackos that claims to want to die anyway?
Get a dose of reality. We are not in Disney land. We are in a country in which dozens of people are murdered every day. We are in county of great wealth and we requires a significant military presence to defend that wealth. The idea that some group of people could win against such a government is as silly as the idea that a well armed local militia is important to the defense of this country. Such a militia did absolutely no good on 911. I think it were the unarmed rescue workers and volunteers who did the most good.
One thing you have to remember about most movies is that by the time they become available on DVD they are a stale product. They have been in the movie houses, on cable, etc. The fact that is that it took a long time for the studios to realize take the staleness into consideration. For the longest time they wanted $50+ for a movie,
Even with the all the addons with DVD, I believe the proper price would be at most twice an admision, or $16. The current price, given that the movie has likely already gained a profit, is excessive. My preferred price point for most movies is $10, about the same as a CD.
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The reason that such things should not be included is that it is hard to quantize. For instance, if I included the clause 'This software should only be used by people who believe that all humans are equal', which is a much less bigoted statement than yours, how would i enforce it? it arguable that some Jews who believe they are the children of god are arguable out of this catagory. It is arguable that some catholics who believe that certain people cannot be priests are out of the this catagory. it is arguable that certai companies do not function as if all workers are potentially equal.
The reason that this discussion is pointless is because almost every religion, at least in the west, is bigoted. Many demand conformity. Many say that others are less than they are. Many have arbitrary restrictions on leadership. You are subjected one group to individual scrutiny that is not applied to the population in general. That is the definition of a bigot.
This is what is important today, not only physical objects but process. As in the wright brothers time, there were many people who were building the flying machines. The knowledge base had increased enough so that it was possible. The key was who did it systematically enough to make it matter.
It is expected that some of the younger population, with their ideals and unattainable standards, would take it too seriously. What is sad is when a wise and knowledgeable person take those responses seriously.
And let's be honest. If the sole criteria for upward moderation was wisedom and correct information, we would have precious few 5's, and a much less interesting forum. As it is I sit in awe at the amount of funny stuff that gets rated flamebait, or, even more distressing, interesting.
10 Lords-a-Leaping
11 Pipers Piping
12 Drummers Drumming
So they are claiming that with unemployment still up, and orchestras laying off employess or going under due to lack of donations, the cost of talent is up this year. It seems like semi-pro musician and dancers could be hard for $100 a piece.
And what is it with the birds. I see them for sale along the freeway all the time for next to nothing. And a pear tree? Those are everywhere. Go and dig one up. I mean they are just trees.
It's christmas. We have no money. Be creative
And, btw, where are they shipping to? Longyearbyen to Cape Horn.
The first thing I thought is this is too complicated. A single LN2 compressor, some insulating tubes running into the box, and a heat exchange instead of a heat sink, you could easily chill that baby to 150K. The compressor would not even have to be in the same room. You would even have to charge it often if you kept the N2 clean.
In software that extra something is either the carrot of value added services or the stick of the BSA taking all company assets to cover huge litigation bills and the resulting fines. The labels are tying to implement the stick with music and movies, while virtually ignoring possible carrots, like pricing the product so it is easier to license than copy, or adding original content to the product to justify the cost.
These schemes can also help protect the innocent from mistakes. This is the value in some software based DRM in terms of security. I see no security benefits from this DRM scheme.
And of course they are playing a dangerous PR game in which they have to balance the power of the DRM against the loyalty of the customers. If the kids think you are dissing them, they will go somewhere else.
There are valid reasons to take drugs. Drugs are pushed on us all the time, on TV, at sporting events, even by the government. The arbitrary lines between good and bad just don't make sense. Poverty is caused by people don't have stuff. We can get stuff for more people. We just don't want to. The war is mostly PR. With terror, we know pretty much who is funding much of this. And it goes way beyond the gentleman was just captured. It is other parties that our multinational corporations depend on for lucrative contracts. Are we really going to give up that money just because a few thousand lives are lost every year? We can't even give up smoking!
So let's not treat spam as an enemy and declare a war. We can avoid developing arbitrary boundaries, creating PR campaigns to make the problem look more or less important, or destroying token parties so we don't have to deal with real lucrative players? It looks like we a clear and effective definition of spam. I like that this may give us a place to start. From there it is all diplomacy
Organization and manipulation of data is a specific problem requiring specific skills. Ideally one will find the optimal process to handle the data quickly and effeciently.
UI is another issue. It requires a certain skill and tools. The user thinks of data in a certain way, and it may not the best way to work with the data in the computer.
The problem with Windows programming is that want to combine these two processes into a monolithic program. People raised on visual studio want to hook widgets to databases and call it programming. At no time do they ask if the the solution makes sense.
The upshot is is the GUI presents a data structure, not a interface. The database is driven by the need to make it understandable to users, not effeciency. Both sides lose in this model.
Since the only real game is the IBM lawsuit, anything that will get that process rolling is good. Hopefully the trial will begin to go badly and all the other diversionary offenses will begin to break down. But even if IBM is found to be liable in some way, the court will at least define a much more narrow avenue of liability, which will still stop SCO from it's current round of random bombing.
Ah, but did we give the remedial student all his accommodations? Did we give him enough extra time for the search. Did we read all his reports to him. Were we sure that he understood the complicated words. Did we put him in a quite room without distractions such as alcohol or coke. If not, we cannot legally fail him.
US firms pretty much want the opportunity to purchase source material or finished parts anywhere in the world, put those items together into a product anywhere in the world, engineer those products anywhere in the world, support those products anywhere in the world, and then sell those products to US consumers without any tariffs, tolls or taxes. The firms say any government imposed fees will cause unnecessary friction in trade that will only hurt the consumer. OTOH, these same firms want the government to create as much friction as possible for the consumer that attempts to find the best way to spend his or her money.
This is really just modern imperialism pushed by multinationals. It is no different from the British government forcing the Indian people to pay a tax on a critical produce they could easily purchase themselves. This is really no different from certain countries denying their women independence by denying them an education. This is really no different from the imperialistic method of stealing local resources, manufacturing them in the imperialist country, and then selling them back to the oppressed savages. These are really just laws that limit arbitrage opportunities to a privileged few.
US firms cannot have it all. Firms cannot claim the right to destroy communities by exporting production to cheaper labor markets, and then deny those communities the opportunity to bypass US firms in their purchasing decision. Firms cannot claim the right to limit the availability of product to the US consumer, the one basic right we still enjoy in the US, just because it will hurt the bottom line.
The nice thing about powerpoint is that it allows people who would ordinarily drone on without visuals or manipulative to have both. The bad thing is that these people believe that because they have visuals and manipulative they have a good presentation. They believe that because they have animated text, which will in general bring a distracted person back to the presentation, they have an engaging presentation.
These people miss the reason for powerpoint. To address a wider range of learning styles, not just to be cool. Too much animation will distract the learner that just wants to read the handout and listen to the speaker. Too much color will distract the visual learner that the images are supposed to draw in. The use of a overhead or projector is often irrelevant because the presentation is seldom strong enough for such a choice to make a significant difference.
That said, the article appears to be mostly about the fact that most presentation focus on low quality cognitive presentations, and make little effort to encourage analysis, synthesis and evaluation in the audience. It is unfair to blame powerpoint for this. Encouraging such thinking is the responsibility of the presenter. he or she must ask the proper questions, present discrepant events, or otherwise cause the audience members to leave the dumdum state of regurgitation.
If this does not happen it is either because the presenter does not know how, or is afraid to do so. The later is often the case. Forcing more complex questions may lead to those that the presenter can not answer, and some may capitalized on such a situation to assert personal dogma. Likewise, discrepant events may be interpreted not as an opportunity to explore, but as an indication of incompetence.
As an example of the importance of visual presentation styles, look at these first two links from google on blooms taxonomy. Some will prefer the first, and some will prefer the second.. html
o m.html
http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/guides/bloom
http://www.coun.uvic.ca/learn/program/hndouts/blo
The second point is that this is not a case where copyrighted material has escaped, been used by a competing company, and the competing company is claiming that because the copyrighted material is now in public view, it is no longer under copyright protection.
This is a case where the accused party is perfectly willing to discuss specific instances of copyright violation, and, if proved valid, remove the code.
The things that complicate this is whether IBM was under the standard or modified UNIX agreement, and whether anyone who ever worked in UNIX can be considered to have stolen IP from UNIX.
And this is why most of the discussion on this topic is irrelevant. The suite against IBM is probably a valid question, and maybe even justifiable due to the previous action of IBM. If the laws are followed, it will only affect IBM, at least until another battle is fought to prove the code in Linux is substantially similar. At which point the code will simply be removed and life will go on.
This is why they are trying to attack on the second front, essentially saying that Linux stole everything from Unix. There is no reason to show specific code, because all the code in effect breaks copyright because it was all done by people who saw Unix code. Saying that a programmer here and there legally contributed little pieces of code does not mean that overall product is does not break Unix copyright. Many would say this is a silly argument. But this is not something that will be won in courts. This will be won in the marketplace. And even thought the OSS software has no more risk than closed software, people may begin to believe that it does. And by fight SCO on the battlefield it selects, with articles such as this, we play into their strategy.
There are only two things that matter. First, the real battle is between IBM and SCO. That is the lawsuit that is filed. That is the only battle SCO needs to actively defend. If SCO wins, Linux will adjust the code. I think everyone has said this. Until a judgment is handed down, nothing needs to be done.
The second is the assumption that Linux breaks copyrights from Unix. SCO is not putting anything substantial into this fight. It is merely a distraction to make the OS community waste time. The only reasonable response is to sumarily state that there is no legal basis to find that Linux is derived from Unix and no known copyright infringement exists. If any are found, they will be corrected, as in the past. If asked why this is true, all one needs to do is ask why SCO has not filed suit to defend their point. At this point it is all words.
OSS can and should define the battlefield, and not just respond to SCO. I am sure that people will correct me or mod me down if they disagree.
By the time I got to high school, we did have a PDP-11 as our main machine. However, we were able to use ed and FORTRAN and BASIC. We also liked it very much.
Now I see that MS is pushing licensing scheme that makes it difficult to donate old Machines. Schools don't even want the older computers because all they care about is cheap tech support and surfing the internet. How many MSCE have the depth of knowledge to work on an old DOS machine or any apple? But if I were teaching programming, I would rather have enough machines so I could have every student in the school learn the logic of programming rather than just the lucky few who signed up first. Likewise, if i were teaching math or science, i would like every team to have their own computer so that could do their demonstrations and simulations. And I would want them to be old so that is all they could do.
Of course, modern machines are necessary when you are teaching Visual Studio and MS office. For the Vocational training stuff, this is defensible. But for the more basic classes, fast machines are really just a luxury.
They need to price to sell to the home consumer. Like Apple the should have a 5 user $200 license so that we can stay current without violating copyright. I know employees can now legaly use MS software at home if corporate licenses it, but that is not everyone. It doesn't help that they give corporate customer the ultimatum of upgrading now or being unable to upgrade affordable later. I Linux gets it act together on the desktop, this lack of upgrading could lead to a significant decline in MS market share. Which is probably why MS is going after Lindows.
This makes the case crystal clear. Prove the email is deceptive. Prove the person who created the email knew or should have known the email was deceptive. Then apply the law. There will be none of this complicated decisions of how much bandwidth was used, or how much damage was done to the victims computing equipment. If the victim wants to pursue those civil matter, fine. But the criminal matter will be one of content and intent.
And this will stop maost domestic spam. If spammers are froced to use honest content, or risk being chased by the FBI, thier whole bussiness model falls apart. Honest email is much easier to stop at the ISP, and much easier to track back to the source.
This is marketing, not creativity. It sounds like a good series. There does not appear to be anything wrong with it. But it is really just capitilizing on the franchise name, while creating a totaly different modern creature.
And I like when when writers don't get caught up in the backstories. The biggest problem with TV and movies is they waste precious time on 'this is how it happened' and by the time they get to the real story, everyone is board. If the back story is important, do it as brief flashbacks.
The problem is going to be getting the original authorization and insuring the user is informed of the obligations incurred by using the product, as well as informing the user if those obligations change. My suspicion is that this is going to require more that a click through license. It has to be solid enough to insure the user cannot call the credit card company and ask for a cancelation of charges.
This is going to limit the flexibility of the system. If a user is presented with a charge confirmation screen every time a song is downloaded to a portable device or a movie is played, it is unlikely the consumer will frequently deal with that content.
What kind of fantasy world are they living in. The problem is that almost everything is encoded in well known formats that can be handled by most machines. The powers that be wish that content on P2P networks were in proprietary protected formats, but except for a bit of windows media crap, it isn't.
This is pretty much what happens in the US. You can say whatever you wish, as long as it doesn't cause a problem. We have censorship of commercial speech, political speech, and public speech in general. We already have censorship of the Internet. The US already is passing laws to limit what individuals can say. The internet is right now probably much less free than the traditional press.
So, I guess these are the opinions that are developed by listening to random drug addicts.
The reality is that the UN is controlled by countries that are very concerned about the sovereignty and their borders. They want the rest of their worlds to stay out of their business and out of their borders. This is why it so hard to get resolutions past, especially those that would foreign forces inside a sovereign nation. If such a thing is done too often, and without an extreme purpose, it would create a situation in which such actions were the norm instead of the exception.
Because the US does not have worries about another country coming to formally invade, and because it does not sign many of the international treatise, the US pretty much feels free to invade anyone else. But because the US feels the need to obey the 'rule of law', mostly because it uses the 'rule of law' to justify invasions, it tries to get UN to rubber stamp these invasion. Other countries, who do have something to fear, even from the US, are not comfortable with these invasions, and are offended by the US action. The offense is further amplified when the US links funding to extreme Christian beliefs.
As far as borders, it is the US that continuously violates other borders, and thus makes the concept of borders less valid. The violations of foreign boarders is an ongoing US policy. Examples from the past are the encouragement of Panama to revolt against Colombia and the gunboat diplomacy that opened up Chinese ports. This continued with GATT, WTO and NAFTA, all which the US administration strongly supported. These agreements resulted in increasing porous US boarders that result in continuous job loss and trade deficits. That these might have benefits are to be determined. If it were up to the UN, boarders would likely be much more solid and respected. Just to be clear, the UN was created out of WWII. One big issue in WWII was the boundries. They were considered important then, and the UN tries to keep them that way.
It would be good for Europe and Asia to define themselves in positive ways. However, the US makes it very difficult to do this because so much energy is spent protected sovereign nations from US incursion.
Now, to be on topic, the Internet is in theory within boundries, so the UN may not be the best agency. OTOH, the Internet is clearly US-centric, with the US pretty much controlling the .com, .org, and .edu TLD, while giving other countries control over thier single TLD. If we wish to make the Internet more of a wordly network, and we in fact may not, a change has to be made.
The key to LutA are tools that can be downloaded as a normal web page, then run as an local application. Once the application is launched, it will continue to run in it's own window until the process is manually killed. It is assumed that other processes may be periodically be created, or the system otherwise modified, so that a restart will be required to stop all processes, and a system reinstall necessary to remove all autoruns.
A famous spammer out of Florida, who we interviewed in his trailer home, and who wished to remain anonymous, had this to say. "We have been real disappointed in MS lately. They have been modifying Outlook to make it harder for us to get viruses through. The have telling users not to open unknown emails. They have even said they will block pop ups. For a hard working guy like me, with three ex-wives, 7 children, a mistress, not mention that I am putting two titty dances through college, I just can't make enough money.
"I was losing faith. But this new stuff, this will be great. It will be in Windows. That damn open source commie crap won't be able to block it. I can work with Gator and Kazaa so that I can run banner ads, gateways, porn web servers, whatever, on the mark's machines. I might just be able to start moving these small breast disease remedires again."
It is not know if MS itself will use these tools for marketing purposes. It is thought that sales to spam organizations and other organized crime outfits were on the decline, and such a tool was necessary to convince them not to support user migration to other platforms.
This seems to be making sense. The investment companies are playing both sides against the middle. If SCO wins, the consequences will be likely be lower earnings for companies that must pay the licensing fees. OTOH, the investment bankers who have invested with SCO will be able to offset those losses by their earnings from SCO. If SCO loses, they lose their investment, but it is not that much money.
As far as the lawyer veto, I think this is just another hedge in case SCO loses. The bankers want to keep the money instead of paying for currently promised obligation. In any event, they will probably just go court and claim that the lawyer fees are excessive. No one likes lawyers, and even in the case where a lawyer funds a litigation, such as the tobacco case with the states, the courts seem willing to put aside contractual obligations to the detriment of the lawyers.
The US government current base of power in world politics is that it can and will destroy anything that gets in the way of US desires. It frankly established this authority by being the only country to ever drop an atomic bomb on another country. To this day it has maintained this power by showing little mercy to people, countries, or other forces that do not tow that US line.
There are some people that want to challenge this authority directly. These people believe that they can beat the US using the rules and battlefield chosen by the US. These people are stupid. There are ways to beat the US, such as 911, which, in spite of the destruction of other parties by the US, seems to have had little effect on the terrorist themselves. We are inconvenienced by long lines at airlines and have had our civil liberties shriveled to the perceived size of our leaders genitalia, which Laden and his cohorts and money roams free.
But direct attacks are not going to work. You set up a compound. You fill it with weapons. You mock the government. You laugh at their power. What the fuck do you think is going to happen. Do you think the government that wiped out entire villages in Asia is going give a shit about killing you. Do you think the government that practically wiped out the native population is going to tolerate such a threat to power on it's own soil. Do you think that a government that imprisoned and imprisons thousands of it's own citizens for being the wrong ethnicity is going to really have any significant remorse about destroying a group of whackos that claims to want to die anyway?
Get a dose of reality. We are not in Disney land. We are in a country in which dozens of people are murdered every day. We are in county of great wealth and we requires a significant military presence to defend that wealth. The idea that some group of people could win against such a government is as silly as the idea that a well armed local militia is important to the defense of this country. Such a militia did absolutely no good on 911. I think it were the unarmed rescue workers and volunteers who did the most good.
Even with the all the addons with DVD, I believe the proper price would be at most twice an admision, or $16. The current price, given that the movie has likely already gained a profit, is excessive. My preferred price point for most movies is $10, about the same as a CD.