Hundreds of thousands of college kids are moving back into dorms with huge fat pipes and Outlook style email clients on computers that haven't been patched since April or May
Remember, when sending kids off to college, remind them it that the best ways get a disease is to do drugs, have unprotected sex, and use Windows
We must help the new generation learn the importance of responsibility for ones actions, safe sex and safe computing! It does no good to complain after the fact. "Oh, I just went to the StudParty for a bit of fun. I didn't mean to get drunk and get a virus!"
To an extent, a person in the U.S. is given the right to try to pursue the making of his or her fortune. This is often misconstrued as the right to make money, which is totally untrue.
For instance, a person has every right to sit on a corner a wash windows for money. Such a person does not right to expect people to stop and actually pay for service. Likewise, the state has the right to take that opportunity away if it enough people complain. The same is true for any shop on main street. They have right to try to push a product or service or whatever. No one has a responsibility to do trade with them, and the state has a right to disallow trade if norms are not met.
And your statement even goes on further to an assumption that many wish to make, but is not at all clearly a norm. Specifically, that a fictitious legal entity has a right to try to make a fortune. That is a dangerous assumption that has deep implications in the morality of responsibility.
The right of the opportunity to make money is considered a basic human right. It is the right for persons to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves and their families. The copyright laws are clearly a derivative of these basic rights, but are themselves fictional constructs that are increasingly being utilized to benefit other fictional constructs rather than to meet basic human needs. As such, if the laws no longer meet the needs of the real and tangible populous, but only the needs of the fictional entities, perhaps such laws are best ignored.
Certain people wish anonymity to vanish from the Internet, and since those are the same people with the power and money, we are seeing the argument framed as one of anonymity.
The reality is in that in most spam the player are not all that anonymous. Disguised often, but not totally unknown. The real issue is one very similar to the filesharing issue(and I am not saying filesharing is equal to spam, or making any judgments of filesharing, just that they share a specific similarity).
With spam we often can know who, at the end of the day, is going to receive our money when we purchase the product. We often know who registered the domain that orders are sent to, the registrar that holds that name, and the ISP that hosts it. We often even know who sent out the spam and the registrar and ISP for that person.
Unfortunately, the way things are structured the only entity we can attack is the person who sent the spam, which is often a very small and mobile target. ISPs are shielded from any action even though they are known to set up lucrative contracts with spammers. Doing anything against a Registrar is hopeless. If we go up against the company actually pushing product, they just claim it was their independent contractor and they are not responsible.
It is really very similar to the drug pushers that put up 'the work at home' signs all over the country. The top level company takes no responsibility for the actions of their contractors, and they will do nothing to police the activity of the people the 'hire'.
So it is not a matter of anonymity, but of responsibility, something that politicians talk about, but never do. They complain how irresponsible the kids are today, but if it them driving drunk, or lying during state of the union addresses, they just want to blame it one someone else. I say before pushing a police state, just try to get a single CEO criminal to go on tv and take responsibility for his incompetence. Down here at the worker level, we do it all the time.
It is not even a matter of cost. It is a matter that MS can dictate any arbitrary aspect of the functionality or distribution of anything. Some possibilities:
1. All software is property of owner, but cannot be open sourced and must be distributed under a standard MS license.
2. MS has a need to collect personal informations. All clients of MSN Messenger must supply any requested information.
3. MS has the right to cut off access at any time or demand an upgrade.
4. All clients must support ads that cannot be turned off, including pop ups.
5. The API only works in.NET. No other development environment can be used.
6. The messager requires IE.
7. The users of the client must accept email from MS and any associates.
ya know, I did not need any reviews to know that the Hulk, with it's cheesy CGI and lame story, was not worth the $8,
Likewise, I was sucked into Charlie's Angles once, but when I realized that there was no character that had the intelligence of Kate Jackson or the style of Jacyln Smith, or even the humor of David Doyle, I vowed never to see another on in the theater.
The reality is that movies are too expensive to make, the theater is too expensive to compete against video, and the plots are too formulaic to be interesting. Just note that when even a slightly different formula is introduced, no matter how bad the movie is, i.e. blair witch, such a movie does very well.
In all business the people who have the money and the people who pay the money are the people with the power. This rule is almost always valid, and following it make most "dirty little secrets" obvious.
The sellers on ebay are the customers of ebay. They pay ebay's bills, they are the ones ebay wants to keep happy. The bidders are necessary, but ebay only needs to keep them happy enough to provide enough demand for the sellers. Losing a bidder is not nearly the problem as losing a seller.
In order to create a system where the bidders were important, the bidders would have to directly pay ebay. This way any seller that did not ship product as specified could be quickly removed from the site. ebay would not care because the seller generates no direct cash-flow. Of course, the sellers might be more wary about joining as the bid pool might be smaller and they would be more at risk.
Actauly a great deal of the repetitive spam I receive now is registered in Canada. Although the service providers are in the US, they are not liable for anything under the current laws. Of course, Canada does not yet have a specific spam law.
This blanket immunity is what makes the laws pointless. The one entity that can do something about spam is the ISP. However, they don't want to do anything about spam because they can often negotiate lucrative contracts with these customers. Since the ISP has no legal risk, they have a great disincentive to stop spam.
This is clearly another case of the lawmakers wanting to look like they are doing something, without actually endangering the people who bribe them.
OTOH, the Texas law which come into effect in a few weeks makes sending sexual material without the proper label a felony. I am collecting emails now, and any that continue past labor day will be duly submitted to the AG. I only wish the ISPs that encourage the spammers, such as whitcon and congentco, and ignore email complaints would be liable as well.
First let me say that for business I have little preference on OS. I was raised on VMS, DOS, Windows, and MacOS. I learned C on an ATT machine running UNIX.
That said, I believe your statements are incorrect. People go with windows machines because that is the standard. If GUN/Linux machines ever become the standard, then we would buy that and be arguing if 90% of people using it was a good thing.
1) If we look at pricing of desktop OS
MacOS and Windows upgrade come out about at the same intervals. While Windows upgrade generally cost around $200, MacOS upgrade cost around $150 and quickly fall to around $100. Also, MacOS upgrades tend to be much more liberal on site licenses. For example, 10.2 is $200 for up to five home machines, and X server is $500 for up to 10 office machines. Also, MS is much more adamant about upgrades than apple, as we see by the licensing schemes. As in everything, if you are not at the leading edge, deals can be had.
2) Again, this is a standard thing. As long as Windows is the standard, and MS hides that standard, then everything else is going to inferior. It has little to do with the Mac. I transfer stuff between OSes and I know the problems of which you speak. They can almost all be attributed to MS problems, but since they write the rules, it automatically becomes a Mac problem.
In reference to the machines, I run a G3 mac for older applications and hardware, and a G4 powerbook for current stuff. Apple is like a fashion house. It puts out new designs every year, but the consumer has no obligation to change. Just like Prada shoes or Versace slacks, one can choose to be a few years behind the curve, and doing so save you a bunch of money. The support pages has front page information on machines all the way back to 1999. In my experience, Macs remain useful for much longer than PCs. We have already had much discussion that the two cost the same for comparable machines, but that Apple does not make the cheap machines that businesses need for their drones.
Also remember that Apple wanted to get rid of OS 9(1999) but have so far caved into consumer demand to continued support. 10.0 and 10.1 were bad pieces of software. There is no way around that. But in nearly 20 years of using Macs, 10.2 was the only the second Mac OS I had to buy, and the first time I bought an OS to fix a problem. It may be the beginning of a trend, but at $100 a year it is not so expensive of a trend.
I have to agree. Ideally, having reliable backups is a critical part of any technology enterprise, and the lack of backups may indicate that the firm is not taking itself seriously as an important part of the technology sector.
That said, outside of the US federal government, I have seen very few firms with truly complete backup strategies. In fact this is one thing that really concern me when people say that the government should be run like a business.
Also, the FSF can claim that they have a distributed system of redundancy. There are mirrors, individual developers, and off line distributions. While it may be harder to recreate the web site from such disparate sources, economics may indicate that such a system is vastly more cost effective that regular backups.
I myself back up all my data, but the methodology I use does still pose a significant risk of loss. It is frankly not worth the money is to further reduce the risk.
In any case, you may be looking at the lesser security issue. If the crack was caused by a known venurability, it would have likely been far cheaper to patch the system rather than establish an overly complex backup protocol
The thing about a true mission critical application is you leave it the fuck alone for as long as fucking possible. It is the machine that makes the money. You do not go in there a fucking mess with it every month. It has to be reliable, it has to work. Even testing a patch on a non production machine does not guarantee that there will be not problem on a production machine.
I have been in situations where the the computer tech wants to come into my machine and put new crap on it every couple weeks. I am sitting there twiddling my thumb for an hour, and I have no idea if the machine will work. Of course the tech has to do this to justify the position, but it scare me every time that my production machine will be out of whack, and I will have to justify to my supervisor why no code has been written.
It is this lax attitude that made programming no fun. I was in one place where developers would put patches in mission critical application without thoroughly testing them. Everything would go down, and they just claimed ignorance. Sure, such things happen to everyone once in a while, but some people just seem to have no sense or responsibility.
Having worked in vapor deposition, and worked with wafers made of various crystals, and even made wafers for a while, I do not think this is the as cheap or easy as they make it out to be, at least for the computer application
The industry is geared to Si because it is cheap, can be easily made into big oriented doped single crystal ingots, the ingots can be easily converted into single crystal wafers that can easily be made into chips.
I do not think the same is true for diamond. Where a silicon ingot can be pulled with a foot diameter and a couple feet in length, the diamond grows from a seed in a prism shape, and probably with a fixed orientation. This means the orientation must be set at the time of cutting, which impacts the actual size of wafer produced. To be compatible with current machines, the wafers will have to be rounded, which is an additional cost and incurs additional losses.
The size is also an issue. The currently exploited economies of scale dictate that the bigger the wafer the better. For instance, a wafer with a diameter of 1 foot can conceivably create twice as much product as an 8 inch wafer. This means that each step in a manufacturing process can often create twice as much product in the same time with the same number of machines. This is a really big deal. To put this in perspective, it could conceivable require over 200 machines using a 10mm wafer to match the production of a single machine using a 8 inch wafer. Of course this is massively oversimplified, but the point is valid.
Really the material costs are not all that significant. The manufacturing costs are what eat all the money. The are some application where the added manufacturing costs are not going to be an issue, but I do not see mass produced electronics. If they can get to 4 inches in 5 years, and 8 inches in 10 years, we should start seeing some diamond electronics. Of course, this is also going to be much harder than they are letting on.
I believe it is probably the corporate welfare culture where fictitious legal entities have they mistaken belief they have all the rights of person, and expect the government to take care of them no matter how inept they are. Rather than creating new works, these entities wants to create laws that force persons to buy the same product over and over again. The hypocrisy is that the entities do not take responsibility for their damage they cause. The pass laws that makes the damage legal and forces the persons to pay the consequence.
And, of course lets not forget that these fictitious entities collect millions from lawsuits, while complaining when real persons try to do the same thing.
How can a person possible learn responsibility when the most powerful entities in the world do not take a responsibility? How can we be patriotic American that believe in democracy and capitalism, when some of the largest economies in the world are non-transparent command economies?
All the greats have dealt with this issue, many in an idealistic way, assuming that space travel is easy enough to spread the population amongst the cosmos. One example that comes to mind is Frederick Pohl "Outnumbering the Dead." Of course, as many have mentioned, many authors use extended life as an assumption or plot device. K.S. Robinson has both actual and metaphorical longevity. Heinlein also uses this extensively in his later adult oriented novels.
The thing that most of these miss is how efficiently we kill each other, especially when resources are scarce. A recent movie with this theme is "28 Days Later"(I am talking about the military people trying to kill the men to get the women). We already have older people consuming an extraordinary amount of resources to live a few more years. There is backlash against this, and it will increase. The most likely consequence of immortality, unless it is achieved very cheaply or results in people wanting much less stuff, will likely be the routine killing of the weak and otherwise useless portion of society to make room for those deemed more worthy. This is already kind of done in an informal way.
I have a lot of problems with the recent lawsuit reform crap, but if such reform goes through, I think it will still make a lot of lawyer rich.
Here is the scenario.
1. Set up a public server with various web pages. Name the pages stuff with BritneySpearsBoys, PacManEXE, MSOfficeXP.
2. Wait for the cease and desist letter to come. Respond with form letter stating you are hosting no copyright content.
3. Wait for the lawsuit begin. Bring in proof that there is in fact no copyrighted material.
4. Sue for frivolous lawsuits, corporation has to pay all your legal fees and fines.
5. PROFIT
It is bad form to reply to your own comments, and there is a lot of truth to the statement that the crisis was more that just some unethical energy companies. However, just to justify my statement since so many people think they are false
As I said, there is truth in that California does not have enough capacity, but that does not mean they were not hoodwinked. I think it is kind of like ordering a penis pump that never is received. The mark is just too embarrassed to admit the crime took place
I take care of a relitives machine. As it is only on dialup it is very hard to update from the MS site. I usually need to put aside two hours.
I am most often there to visit, not to update software. As such I only do MS updates every four to six months. At these intervals, I spend 3-6 hours downloading and testing updates.
So the real question is why does MS need to issue an update every month. And why are some of the udates so huge.
I can't imagine being a sysadmin and having to update 50 machines every month, and then going though the process to insure the update didn't break anything.
I am wondering if it might be mandatory to strip out SCO support. As the lawsuit continues, it seems that it is moving from talking about contract breaches by IBM, to what knowledge OSS programmer have about SCO processes, and whether such things have made it into OSS in way that might violate copyright, patents, or trademarks.
Clearly if you have SCO support, whatever that means, in a product you have some knowledge of SCO processes. You have at some point talked to someone, done a bit of reverse engineering, or perhaps even looked at the code. And since SCO is claiming ownership of all work derived from their UNIX, and such support may be claimed as a derivation, it may be a path for SCO to claim ownership of the overall product.
Indeed it is assumed that any suspect code will be removed from GNU/Linux. As has been shown it is arguable that such code could very well include code that supports SCO.
Of course this reasoning process is silly, but no more silly than the overall SCO plan.
In the past, your state allowed a few special interests to rewrite your laws concerning energy regulation, which subsequently allowed a couple rednecks from Texas to steal billions of dollars from your citizens and in the process bring California to it's knees.
A similar situation, with less disastrous effect, occurred with Oracle. What are your plans to protect your state and it's cities from such special interests in the future.
Perhaps, but in this case the methodology is flawed, and one needs to read no further than the first several paragraphs to see this.
As clearly point out in the rebuttal, this was a statistical study and as such must follow precise rules to considered valid. First, any sample must be random. The study was not random but self-selective as the names were drawn from a web site registry. Second, the poll question must be made public to insure that they were not leading. Without these two criteria met, we must assume that survey is flawed.
The problems mount when one reads that the data analysis methodology is not given. We can in fact live without know the specific data, but without the methods we must assume that the analyst crunched the data until they discovered the answer they wanted. This is a classic method of lying with statistics.
The nail in the coffin, even if we assume the analysts are honest in all other respects, is that we do not know how the result were normalized. All we know is that for the projects developed by the Linux people cost four times as much as the projects developed by the windows developers. Were the Linux projects 4 times as hard? Did the Linux projects return four times the revenue? Were the Linux projects more costly research based projects while the Windows projects merely applications of work already completed? Were the differences in the way the various companies costed the projects.
All the other stuff is just in the rebuttal is just a rational of why Linux development is probably just as good as Windows development. The fact is that the study has all the classic signs of a mercenary statistician massaging data to generate a predetermined answer. People wonder why kids are so stupid now. It is because companies like MS want to keep them stupid so they will believe these bogus studies.
one would assume that the member is responsible for the behavior of the guest, and the guest, by association with the memeber, agrees to follow all rules in the member agreement.
It seems to me that the any mention of risk of lawsuits for using OSS software should be countered with the risks of using BSA patrolled software, particularly those covered by the MS license.
So let's look at the facts. On the desktop there is little current risk. All SCO is asking is that if a user wants to use Linux (and I do not even know if they are specifically taking about the kernel or GNU/Linux) that you pay them $700. There is no talk about annual payments, or forced upgrades, or anything. One could imaginable switch to a MS product or Sun or whatever. In fact, the biggest risk seems to have nothing to do with OSS. The biggest risk is to those people who have shelled out money for IBM kit and will not have an OS if AIX becomes unavailable.
Now let's look at the risks for a company running, say, MS software. You can be audited anytime, and if found in violation of copyright, be fined multiple times the price of the software for all machines. Saying I'm sorry and switching to Linux will not stop the fine. Now, since hardly anyone can for sure say they have every single license for every single piece of software on every single machine, the BSA has a deal. Let us install a piece of software that will monitor the machines and report back to us all the software you use. MS then has a deal where you pay them a increasingly chunk of change every year to license every product, even if you only need some of the product, and even if you don't have the resources to physically upgrade the computers every year. Oh, and if you were thinking of donating those computers for a tax write off, forget about it. No one will take them because we will immediately audit them and try to find a way to fine both of you for violations of copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, when sending kids off to college, remind them it that the best ways get a disease is to do drugs, have unprotected sex, and use Windows
We must help the new generation learn the importance of responsibility for ones actions, safe sex and safe computing! It does no good to complain after the fact. "Oh, I just went to the StudParty for a bit of fun. I didn't mean to get drunk and get a virus!"
can anyone say Justice Clarence Thomas?
To an extent, a person in the U.S. is given the right to try to pursue the making of his or her fortune. This is often misconstrued as the right to make money, which is totally untrue.
For instance, a person has every right to sit on a corner a wash windows for money. Such a person does not right to expect people to stop and actually pay for service. Likewise, the state has the right to take that opportunity away if it enough people complain. The same is true for any shop on main street. They have right to try to push a product or service or whatever. No one has a responsibility to do trade with them, and the state has a right to disallow trade if norms are not met.
And your statement even goes on further to an assumption that many wish to make, but is not at all clearly a norm. Specifically, that a fictitious legal entity has a right to try to make a fortune. That is a dangerous assumption that has deep implications in the morality of responsibility.
The right of the opportunity to make money is considered a basic human right. It is the right for persons to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves and their families. The copyright laws are clearly a derivative of these basic rights, but are themselves fictional constructs that are increasingly being utilized to benefit other fictional constructs rather than to meet basic human needs. As such, if the laws no longer meet the needs of the real and tangible populous, but only the needs of the fictional entities, perhaps such laws are best ignored.
The reality is in that in most spam the player are not all that anonymous. Disguised often, but not totally unknown. The real issue is one very similar to the filesharing issue(and I am not saying filesharing is equal to spam, or making any judgments of filesharing, just that they share a specific similarity).
With spam we often can know who, at the end of the day, is going to receive our money when we purchase the product. We often know who registered the domain that orders are sent to, the registrar that holds that name, and the ISP that hosts it. We often even know who sent out the spam and the registrar and ISP for that person.
Unfortunately, the way things are structured the only entity we can attack is the person who sent the spam, which is often a very small and mobile target. ISPs are shielded from any action even though they are known to set up lucrative contracts with spammers. Doing anything against a Registrar is hopeless. If we go up against the company actually pushing product, they just claim it was their independent contractor and they are not responsible.
It is really very similar to the drug pushers that put up 'the work at home' signs all over the country. The top level company takes no responsibility for the actions of their contractors, and they will do nothing to police the activity of the people the 'hire'.
So it is not a matter of anonymity, but of responsibility, something that politicians talk about, but never do. They complain how irresponsible the kids are today, but if it them driving drunk, or lying during state of the union addresses, they just want to blame it one someone else. I say before pushing a police state, just try to get a single CEO criminal to go on tv and take responsibility for his incompetence. Down here at the worker level, we do it all the time.
1. All software is property of owner, but cannot be open sourced and must be distributed under a standard MS license.
2. MS has a need to collect personal informations. All clients of MSN Messenger must supply any requested information.
3. MS has the right to cut off access at any time or demand an upgrade.
4. All clients must support ads that cannot be turned off, including pop ups.
5. The API only works in .NET. No other development environment can be used.
6. The messager requires IE.
7. The users of the client must accept email from MS and any associates.
I am sure that others can think of many others.
Likewise, I was sucked into Charlie's Angles once, but when I realized that there was no character that had the intelligence of Kate Jackson or the style of Jacyln Smith, or even the humor of David Doyle, I vowed never to see another on in the theater.
The reality is that movies are too expensive to make, the theater is too expensive to compete against video, and the plots are too formulaic to be interesting. Just note that when even a slightly different formula is introduced, no matter how bad the movie is, i.e. blair witch, such a movie does very well.
The sellers on ebay are the customers of ebay. They pay ebay's bills, they are the ones ebay wants to keep happy. The bidders are necessary, but ebay only needs to keep them happy enough to provide enough demand for the sellers. Losing a bidder is not nearly the problem as losing a seller.
In order to create a system where the bidders were important, the bidders would have to directly pay ebay. This way any seller that did not ship product as specified could be quickly removed from the site. ebay would not care because the seller generates no direct cash-flow. Of course, the sellers might be more wary about joining as the bid pool might be smaller and they would be more at risk.
This blanket immunity is what makes the laws pointless. The one entity that can do something about spam is the ISP. However, they don't want to do anything about spam because they can often negotiate lucrative contracts with these customers. Since the ISP has no legal risk, they have a great disincentive to stop spam.
This is clearly another case of the lawmakers wanting to look like they are doing something, without actually endangering the people who bribe them.
OTOH, the Texas law which come into effect in a few weeks makes sending sexual material without the proper label a felony. I am collecting emails now, and any that continue past labor day will be duly submitted to the AG. I only wish the ISPs that encourage the spammers, such as whitcon and congentco, and ignore email complaints would be liable as well.
That said, I believe your statements are incorrect. People go with windows machines because that is the standard. If GUN/Linux machines ever become the standard, then we would buy that and be arguing if 90% of people using it was a good thing.
1) If we look at pricing of desktop OS
MacOS and Windows upgrade come out about at the same intervals. While Windows upgrade generally cost around $200, MacOS upgrade cost around $150 and quickly fall to around $100. Also, MacOS upgrades tend to be much more liberal on site licenses. For example, 10.2 is $200 for up to five home machines, and X server is $500 for up to 10 office machines. Also, MS is much more adamant about upgrades than apple, as we see by the licensing schemes. As in everything, if you are not at the leading edge, deals can be had.
2) Again, this is a standard thing. As long as Windows is the standard, and MS hides that standard, then everything else is going to inferior. It has little to do with the Mac. I transfer stuff between OSes and I know the problems of which you speak. They can almost all be attributed to MS problems, but since they write the rules, it automatically becomes a Mac problem.
In reference to the machines, I run a G3 mac for older applications and hardware, and a G4 powerbook for current stuff. Apple is like a fashion house. It puts out new designs every year, but the consumer has no obligation to change. Just like Prada shoes or Versace slacks, one can choose to be a few years behind the curve, and doing so save you a bunch of money. The support pages has front page information on machines all the way back to 1999. In my experience, Macs remain useful for much longer than PCs. We have already had much discussion that the two cost the same for comparable machines, but that Apple does not make the cheap machines that businesses need for their drones.
Also remember that Apple wanted to get rid of OS 9(1999) but have so far caved into consumer demand to continued support. 10.0 and 10.1 were bad pieces of software. There is no way around that. But in nearly 20 years of using Macs, 10.2 was the only the second Mac OS I had to buy, and the first time I bought an OS to fix a problem. It may be the beginning of a trend, but at $100 a year it is not so expensive of a trend.
Yea for us!
That said, outside of the US federal government, I have seen very few firms with truly complete backup strategies. In fact this is one thing that really concern me when people say that the government should be run like a business.
Also, the FSF can claim that they have a distributed system of redundancy. There are mirrors, individual developers, and off line distributions. While it may be harder to recreate the web site from such disparate sources, economics may indicate that such a system is vastly more cost effective that regular backups.
I myself back up all my data, but the methodology I use does still pose a significant risk of loss. It is frankly not worth the money is to further reduce the risk.
In any case, you may be looking at the lesser security issue. If the crack was caused by a known venurability, it would have likely been far cheaper to patch the system rather than establish an overly complex backup protocol
I have been in situations where the the computer tech wants to come into my machine and put new crap on it every couple weeks. I am sitting there twiddling my thumb for an hour, and I have no idea if the machine will work. Of course the tech has to do this to justify the position, but it scare me every time that my production machine will be out of whack, and I will have to justify to my supervisor why no code has been written.
It is this lax attitude that made programming no fun. I was in one place where developers would put patches in mission critical application without thoroughly testing them. Everything would go down, and they just claimed ignorance. Sure, such things happen to everyone once in a while, but some people just seem to have no sense or responsibility.
The industry is geared to Si because it is cheap, can be easily made into big oriented doped single crystal ingots, the ingots can be easily converted into single crystal wafers that can easily be made into chips.
I do not think the same is true for diamond. Where a silicon ingot can be pulled with a foot diameter and a couple feet in length, the diamond grows from a seed in a prism shape, and probably with a fixed orientation. This means the orientation must be set at the time of cutting, which impacts the actual size of wafer produced. To be compatible with current machines, the wafers will have to be rounded, which is an additional cost and incurs additional losses.
The size is also an issue. The currently exploited economies of scale dictate that the bigger the wafer the better. For instance, a wafer with a diameter of 1 foot can conceivably create twice as much product as an 8 inch wafer. This means that each step in a manufacturing process can often create twice as much product in the same time with the same number of machines. This is a really big deal. To put this in perspective, it could conceivable require over 200 machines using a 10mm wafer to match the production of a single machine using a 8 inch wafer. Of course this is massively oversimplified, but the point is valid.
Really the material costs are not all that significant. The manufacturing costs are what eat all the money. The are some application where the added manufacturing costs are not going to be an issue, but I do not see mass produced electronics. If they can get to 4 inches in 5 years, and 8 inches in 10 years, we should start seeing some diamond electronics. Of course, this is also going to be much harder than they are letting on.
And, of course lets not forget that these fictitious entities collect millions from lawsuits, while complaining when real persons try to do the same thing.
How can a person possible learn responsibility when the most powerful entities in the world do not take a responsibility? How can we be patriotic American that believe in democracy and capitalism, when some of the largest economies in the world are non-transparent command economies?
After all, it's not like baby killing hasn't had a long history of use in propaganda and literature.
Let's at least try to act like we are educated.
The thing that most of these miss is how efficiently we kill each other, especially when resources are scarce. A recent movie with this theme is "28 Days Later"(I am talking about the military people trying to kill the men to get the women). We already have older people consuming an extraordinary amount of resources to live a few more years. There is backlash against this, and it will increase. The most likely consequence of immortality, unless it is achieved very cheaply or results in people wanting much less stuff, will likely be the routine killing of the weak and otherwise useless portion of society to make room for those deemed more worthy. This is already kind of done in an informal way.
Here is the scenario.
1. Set up a public server with various web pages. Name the pages stuff with BritneySpearsBoys, PacManEXE, MSOfficeXP.
2. Wait for the cease and desist letter to come. Respond with form letter stating you are hosting no copyright content.
3. Wait for the lawsuit begin. Bring in proof that there is in fact no copyrighted material.
4. Sue for frivolous lawsuits, corporation has to pay all your legal fees and fines.
5. PROFIT
There may be a light at the end of the tunnel.
Enron trader pleads guilty to rig california energy prices
Another trader pleads guilty.
Fastow indicted in defrauding California PERS
The Texas PUC recommends that Enron pay $7 million for manipulating power prices in Texas
Texas has an obscene overcapacity of power, and obscenely low prices.
As I said, there is truth in that California does not have enough capacity, but that does not mean they were not hoodwinked. I think it is kind of like ordering a penis pump that never is received. The mark is just too embarrassed to admit the crime took place
I am most often there to visit, not to update software. As such I only do MS updates every four to six months. At these intervals, I spend 3-6 hours downloading and testing updates.
So the real question is why does MS need to issue an update every month. And why are some of the udates so huge.
I can't imagine being a sysadmin and having to update 50 machines every month, and then going though the process to insure the update didn't break anything.
Clearly if you have SCO support, whatever that means, in a product you have some knowledge of SCO processes. You have at some point talked to someone, done a bit of reverse engineering, or perhaps even looked at the code. And since SCO is claiming ownership of all work derived from their UNIX, and such support may be claimed as a derivation, it may be a path for SCO to claim ownership of the overall product.
Indeed it is assumed that any suspect code will be removed from GNU/Linux. As has been shown it is arguable that such code could very well include code that supports SCO.
Of course this reasoning process is silly, but no more silly than the overall SCO plan.
A similar situation, with less disastrous effect, occurred with Oracle. What are your plans to protect your state and it's cities from such special interests in the future.
When konfabultor pops up a moose that asks for pizza, then I will be impressed
As clearly point out in the rebuttal, this was a statistical study and as such must follow precise rules to considered valid. First, any sample must be random. The study was not random but self-selective as the names were drawn from a web site registry. Second, the poll question must be made public to insure that they were not leading. Without these two criteria met, we must assume that survey is flawed.
The problems mount when one reads that the data analysis methodology is not given. We can in fact live without know the specific data, but without the methods we must assume that the analyst crunched the data until they discovered the answer they wanted. This is a classic method of lying with statistics.
The nail in the coffin, even if we assume the analysts are honest in all other respects, is that we do not know how the result were normalized. All we know is that for the projects developed by the Linux people cost four times as much as the projects developed by the windows developers. Were the Linux projects 4 times as hard? Did the Linux projects return four times the revenue? Were the Linux projects more costly research based projects while the Windows projects merely applications of work already completed? Were the differences in the way the various companies costed the projects.
All the other stuff is just in the rebuttal is just a rational of why Linux development is probably just as good as Windows development. The fact is that the study has all the classic signs of a mercenary statistician massaging data to generate a predetermined answer. People wonder why kids are so stupid now. It is because companies like MS want to keep them stupid so they will believe these bogus studies.
one would assume that the member is responsible for the behavior of the guest, and the guest, by association with the memeber, agrees to follow all rules in the member agreement.
So let's look at the facts. On the desktop there is little current risk. All SCO is asking is that if a user wants to use Linux (and I do not even know if they are specifically taking about the kernel or GNU/Linux) that you pay them $700. There is no talk about annual payments, or forced upgrades, or anything. One could imaginable switch to a MS product or Sun or whatever. In fact, the biggest risk seems to have nothing to do with OSS. The biggest risk is to those people who have shelled out money for IBM kit and will not have an OS if AIX becomes unavailable.
Now let's look at the risks for a company running, say, MS software. You can be audited anytime, and if found in violation of copyright, be fined multiple times the price of the software for all machines. Saying I'm sorry and switching to Linux will not stop the fine. Now, since hardly anyone can for sure say they have every single license for every single piece of software on every single machine, the BSA has a deal. Let us install a piece of software that will monitor the machines and report back to us all the software you use. MS then has a deal where you pay them a increasingly chunk of change every year to license every product, even if you only need some of the product, and even if you don't have the resources to physically upgrade the computers every year. Oh, and if you were thinking of donating those computers for a tax write off, forget about it. No one will take them because we will immediately audit them and try to find a way to fine both of you for violations of copyright.
So, ok, what is the more risky OS.