Something that is specifically designed to self replicate, does EXACTLY what it is meant to do and the person who owns the land and air it happens on is the one sued?
The farmer might have been OK legally if he hadn't used the Roundup, too...
A few years of that and tada... Roundup resistant dandelions.
Well, you're assuming that the trait already exists somewhere in the population so that it can be selected. Otherwise, you might as well select dandelions on their ability to speak French...
That way it's easier to remove them from the food chain if we find out down the line that there is a problem.
That's an even bigger problem. Now farmers can't set aside part of their crop for the next season's planting, and instead have to go back to Monsanto (or whomever) to buy more seed each year. Suppose Monsanto has a superior variety of wheat that grabs a big portion of the world market (which is what they're trying to do, after all). Then you have a big chunk of the world's food supply depending on one company and the relatively few seed farms that it operates. Even if the company has the best of intentions, any major problems -- disease, pests, natural disasters, terrorism -- on a small number of seed farms could then have huge repercussions worldwide.
Absolutely they are. People don't even stop to think what the word "terrorism" really means, let alone how the word is used to manipulate them politically. In our brains there is just a direct link between that word and our concept of "evil", to be used by politicians for their own purposes. How, for example, can any intelligent person listen to the word "terrorist" being applied to insurgents in Iraq without wincing a little? For better or worse, they're fighting a foreign occupation force in their own country!
What makes this whole thing farcical is that being a "terrorist" is treated as some kind of latent disease that can be rooted out before it expresses itself. Much of it is, in fact, a tactical response to repression where no legitimate alternative is tolerated. The fallacy of our current hysterical thinking is that the solution to terrorism is simply more oppression. After all, look how well that's worked with the Palestinians...
If there was idiocy involved here, it may not have been from the tech support guy!
"The problem is that the Mac can only show a movie at up to twice its original size," the second-tier guy told me. "Your Cinema Display is bigger than that."
He's not talking about the aspect ratio, he's talking about the native resolution of the movie; i.e., how many pixels (rows x columns) are encoded in each frame. Apparently your software will no more than double this for display, and a movie encoded at 640x360 will therefore not fill a 1600x900 display. Sorry.
This sounds like they're grasping for straws when they don't even know what straw to look for.
Probably a little bit of that, and a lot of dragging things out to keep the FUD rolling as long as possible. And, since "anyone" can contribute to an OSS project, it wouldn't surprise me if they've planted a few of their own...
we'll have students learning to write to beat software, not form a well written essay.
Right. The software can grade things like spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, but it won't grade the quality of the ideas expressed or the depth of understanding displayed. Therefore those latter dimensions will cease to be considered important, since grading them is expensive compared to the more mechanical stuff.
They can easily do this, because 99.9999999999% of their users will never have more than, say, 1 MB of mail anyway.
Unless people start using this as a free remote backup service. Just back up your drive into multiple tarballs or zip volumes, each of which fit under the size limit for attachments, and mail them to yourself. A simple program could keep track of everything quite easily.
I was with a company that was doing this back in the early 80s, first with a conferencing program called "Confer" (I think) and then using internal newsgroups. Or was it the other way around? I forget. Anyway, it worked extremely well, both for the management of multiple projects and for bug tracking. As I recall most of the non-technical management team was a bit suspicious of it, however...
First I don't agree with Microsoft being a monopoly.
...there isn't a real reason to run much of anything else other than a Windows derivative
You just contradicted yourself. If there is no viable alternative in the minds of the public (even if the public is wrong), then they are a monopoly, no?
Regardless, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO RUN THEIR PRODUCTS ON YOUR PC. No one does.
It isn't necessary to hold a gun to peoples heads, forcing them to buy your product, to be a monopoly. You merely need to be the only viable alternative.
Hell I don't want to set up linux boxes for people I know because they will ask for things I know are a bear to solve. They will have hardware which just doesn't work or there are no drivers for.
Interesting that you should toss that in. I've run Linux for years and my Mother has installed it as well, all with no problems (not even viruses, heh heh). So while there is a technically viable alternative to Windows, Microsoft to maintain their effective monopoly must conceal that fact from the public mind through the dissemination of FUD precisely of the sort that you are spewing for them.
I defy you to show me the US statute that says a business even if it is a monopoly can't pass costs on to customers.
You didn't understand the parent post; the only "laws" it refers to are those of economics. It made the point that Microsoft can simply pass on these costs only because it is a monopoly. If it were in a truly competitive industry prices would be set by the market, and if they attempted to raise prices unilaterally to cover extraordinary costs (like fines), they would lose business to their competitors.
Imagine two convenience stores across the street from each other. One gets robbed and its owner decides to double all of its prices to recover the loss. Perfectly legal, but it would never happen, would it?
And I'm sure that every one of them would be just tickled about being used to justify the new American Police State. How many died in WWII for just the opposite reason?
And yes, I realize the most recent incarnations of these MS products are much more bloated, but the vital point is that Microsoft achieved a level of efficiency and functionality by 1997 that FOSS has yet to achieve.
Applications have gotten bigger and more bloated across the board. The 1997 software was smaller not because Microsoft was successfully striving for "efficiency", but rather because (a) contempory hardware wouldn't support much more, and (b) it missed the last 7 years of bloating. Your statement is like saying that you outweigh a 2-year-old child because the toddler eats right and exercises often.
Miles per gallon of gas in a Hybrid car are way better for the environment because the Hybrid also uses electricity
No, because MPG in a hybrid car is in addition to whatever electricity is consumed (which also must be generated somehow). So, I would argue that it's a good deal worse, for this and other reasons (e.g., disposal of toxic batteries, etc.).
don't break any laws/talk about it in email, and there yah go - no concern.
Of course, that's always true because all government officials and police are honest, ethical, and interested only in the diligent and dispassionate enforcement of the law. It is simply unthinkable that the power to invade the privacy or liberty of honest citizens could ever be abused, and for this reason it is just silly to demand any "rights" at all!
Seriously, it saddens me how often I see this naive and insipid "if you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" argument...
Is this a change in Microsoft? Or are they just trying to focus their resources on monopolizing other markets instead?
They probably decided that the margins in network hardware were just too thin to justify the effort. After all, they're used to markets that basically allow them to just print money...
People have tried, but the developers LIKE the current interface.
Your head, I'm afraid, is stuck in the closed-source, proprietary world. This is OSS. "The Developers" do not control the software, and cannot stop anyone or their dog from improving it in any way they want. If you take the existing code, build a GUI on top of it that satisfies you, and then distribute it to the world, you'll be famous and no one will sue you.
You know, one can always fork the project and design a good interface.
Someone mod this up, please. That is the whole point (and strength) of Open Source. Anyone who thinks they can do better is welcome to modify it any way they like. You don't need permission from whomever is currently directing development.
You may believe that the Patriot Act is G.W's tyrrany and that Conservatives are "evil", but I assure you, there are very few people in Congress right now who are opposed to it, regardless of party affiliation.
That's good old-fashioned Cover-Your-Ass politics, unfortunately. If there's another terrorist attack, conservatives will mount a big campaign to hold responsible anyone who voted against the Patriot Act, regardless of whether it even conceivably would have made any difference. There are all too few people in Congress who will stand on principle and accept that kind of exposure.
Why use Mozilla when you have Firefox and Thunderbird?
I could be (and probably am) wrong, but Firefox doesn't seem to allow the limiting of animations to one cycle. Or, at least there's nothing in the preferences GUI to interface to such a capability. I can't stand things flashing on my screen while I'm trying to read something else, and so this was a show-stopper for me.
By the way, to reversibly disable Flash under Linux, just move the flashplayer.xpt and libflashplayer.so files out of the plugins directory where Mozilla is installed. To enable it again, just move 'em back in there.
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The farmer might have been OK legally if he hadn't used the Roundup, too...
Anyone care to invest in my new company? We'll be patenting genetically modified weeds.
Well, you're assuming that the trait already exists somewhere in the population so that it can be selected. Otherwise, you might as well select dandelions on their ability to speak French...
That's an even bigger problem. Now farmers can't set aside part of their crop for the next season's planting, and instead have to go back to Monsanto (or whomever) to buy more seed each year. Suppose Monsanto has a superior variety of wheat that grabs a big portion of the world market (which is what they're trying to do, after all). Then you have a big chunk of the world's food supply depending on one company and the relatively few seed farms that it operates. Even if the company has the best of intentions, any major problems -- disease, pests, natural disasters, terrorism -- on a small number of seed farms could then have huge repercussions worldwide.
Absolutely they are. People don't even stop to think what the word "terrorism" really means, let alone how the word is used to manipulate them politically. In our brains there is just a direct link between that word and our concept of "evil", to be used by politicians for their own purposes. How, for example, can any intelligent person listen to the word "terrorist" being applied to insurgents in Iraq without wincing a little? For better or worse, they're fighting a foreign occupation force in their own country!
What makes this whole thing farcical is that being a "terrorist" is treated as some kind of latent disease that can be rooted out before it expresses itself. Much of it is, in fact, a tactical response to repression where no legitimate alternative is tolerated. The fallacy of our current hysterical thinking is that the solution to terrorism is simply more oppression. After all, look how well that's worked with the Palestinians...
"The problem is that the Mac can only show a movie at up to twice its original size," the second-tier guy told me. "Your Cinema Display is bigger than that."
He's not talking about the aspect ratio, he's talking about the native resolution of the movie; i.e., how many pixels (rows x columns) are encoded in each frame. Apparently your software will no more than double this for display, and a movie encoded at 640x360 will therefore not fill a 1600x900 display. Sorry.
Probably a little bit of that, and a lot of dragging things out to keep the FUD rolling as long as possible. And, since "anyone" can contribute to an OSS project, it wouldn't surprise me if they've planted a few of their own...
Right. The software can grade things like spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, but it won't grade the quality of the ideas expressed or the depth of understanding displayed. Therefore those latter dimensions will cease to be considered important, since grading them is expensive compared to the more mechanical stuff.
Unless people start using this as a free remote backup service. Just back up your drive into multiple tarballs or zip volumes, each of which fit under the size limit for attachments, and mail them to yourself. A simple program could keep track of everything quite easily.
I was with a company that was doing this back in the early 80s, first with a conferencing program called "Confer" (I think) and then using internal newsgroups. Or was it the other way around? I forget. Anyway, it worked extremely well, both for the management of multiple projects and for bug tracking. As I recall most of the non-technical management team was a bit suspicious of it, however...
...there isn't a real reason to run much of anything else other than a Windows derivative
You just contradicted yourself. If there is no viable alternative in the minds of the public (even if the public is wrong), then they are a monopoly, no?
Regardless, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO RUN THEIR PRODUCTS ON YOUR PC. No one does.
It isn't necessary to hold a gun to peoples heads, forcing them to buy your product, to be a monopoly. You merely need to be the only viable alternative.
Hell I don't want to set up linux boxes for people I know because they will ask for things I know are a bear to solve. They will have hardware which just doesn't work or there are no drivers for.
Interesting that you should toss that in. I've run Linux for years and my Mother has installed it as well, all with no problems (not even viruses, heh heh). So while there is a technically viable alternative to Windows, Microsoft to maintain their effective monopoly must conceal that fact from the public mind through the dissemination of FUD precisely of the sort that you are spewing for them.
You didn't understand the parent post; the only "laws" it refers to are those of economics. It made the point that Microsoft can simply pass on these costs only because it is a monopoly. If it were in a truly competitive industry prices would be set by the market, and if they attempted to raise prices unilaterally to cover extraordinary costs (like fines), they would lose business to their competitors.
Imagine two convenience stores across the street from each other. One gets robbed and its owner decides to double all of its prices to recover the loss. Perfectly legal, but it would never happen, would it?
Ummm, because it's God's Will?
At least, that's what they seem to believe...
And I'm sure that every one of them would be just tickled about being used to justify the new American Police State. How many died in WWII for just the opposite reason?
My mistake.
Applications have gotten bigger and more bloated across the board. The 1997 software was smaller not because Microsoft was successfully striving for "efficiency", but rather because (a) contempory hardware wouldn't support much more, and (b) it missed the last 7 years of bloating. Your statement is like saying that you outweigh a 2-year-old child because the toddler eats right and exercises often.
No, because MPG in a hybrid car is in addition to whatever electricity is consumed (which also must be generated somehow). So, I would argue that it's a good deal worse, for this and other reasons (e.g., disposal of toxic batteries, etc.).
Of course, that's always true because all government officials and police are honest, ethical, and interested only in the diligent and dispassionate enforcement of the law. It is simply unthinkable that the power to invade the privacy or liberty of honest citizens could ever be abused, and for this reason it is just silly to demand any "rights" at all!
Seriously, it saddens me how often I see this naive and insipid "if you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" argument...
They probably decided that the margins in network hardware were just too thin to justify the effort. After all, they're used to markets that basically allow them to just print money...
Your head, I'm afraid, is stuck in the closed-source, proprietary world. This is OSS. "The Developers" do not control the software, and cannot stop anyone or their dog from improving it in any way they want. If you take the existing code, build a GUI on top of it that satisfies you, and then distribute it to the world, you'll be famous and no one will sue you.
Someone mod this up, please. That is the whole point (and strength) of Open Source. Anyone who thinks they can do better is welcome to modify it any way they like. You don't need permission from whomever is currently directing development.
That's good old-fashioned Cover-Your-Ass politics, unfortunately. If there's another terrorist attack, conservatives will mount a big campaign to hold responsible anyone who voted against the Patriot Act, regardless of whether it even conceivably would have made any difference. There are all too few people in Congress who will stand on principle and accept that kind of exposure.
I could be (and probably am) wrong, but Firefox doesn't seem to allow the limiting of animations to one cycle. Or, at least there's nothing in the preferences GUI to interface to such a capability. I can't stand things flashing on my screen while I'm trying to read something else, and so this was a show-stopper for me.
By the way, to reversibly disable Flash under Linux, just move the flashplayer.xpt and libflashplayer.so files out of the plugins directory where Mozilla is installed. To enable it again, just move 'em back in there.
Joe Average is going to be at the game, not hanging out in a science museum...
No, it'll just be hidden behind the creationism exhibit, by executive order...