One of the biggest complications I've encountered when conversing with people who visit homoeopaths is that homoeopaths don't always strictly practice homoeopathy. In fact, they often mix homoeopathy with a variety of other treatments that make complete sense.
Currently one of my friends is on a nutrition course which is administered by a registered homoeopath, although she didn't realise this until the group went on an optional weekend field trip to the practitioner's office. I've seen other occasions when registered homoeopaths have immediately diagnosed allergies that regular doctors didn't pick up after years of visiting, for one reason or another. (In saying so, I'm sure that other doctors may well have picked them up.) My gut reaction to this is that if the practitioner believes that homoeopathic treatment has genuine benefits, then I wouldn't trust them to give treatment to me for anything that's important, because I'm not convinced they'd be qualified to understand what they're doing. That said, the course that my friend is taking isn't about homoeopathic medicine -- it's simply administered by someone who happens to administer homoeopathic remedies at times, but also knows a lot about good nutrition.
I think the difficulty is that homoeopaths actually do often offer treatment that works well, and sometimes they offer useful advice that comes from outside the system that doctors typically work in, even if they don't fully understand it. Such treatment is based on things that I wouldn't actually consider to be homoeopathy anywhere near as much as common sense. This it what conjures up a false sense of belief, and it's why homoeopaths get credibility. A lot of people have visited practising homoeopaths and come back in genuinely better condition because of it, and maybe it's just because they've cut down on sugar and started drinking more water. The difficulty is when a homoeopath suddenly offers treatment that's completely bogus.
Most homoeopaths simply strike me as people who don't fully understand what they're practising. They mix together bad treatments with good treatments without appreciating why a good treatment works and why a bad one doesn't. Then they reinforce their view that their treatments work through a combination of fallacies when viewing the outcomes of their treatments.
The likeliness that computers are capable of correctly counting 100,000 perfectly submitted votes more accurately than humans in an ideal world isn't exactly a surprise, but this isn't really the point because the world isn't ideal and it's not realistic.
Even if paper trails are slightly less accurate in the counting (something I'd dispute once factoring in less measurable quantities like corruption of officials and potential hacking), one of the most important advantages of paper trails is that they can be easily understood by virtually everyone who votes. A voter verifies their correct vote is recorded on a slip of paper, places it in a ballot box, and then the votes recorded on the papers in the ballot boxes are counted, with the process being vetted by people who have reasons to make sure it's being done properly. The entire process is completely visible and clear from start to finish.
This is quite different to voting through computer interfaces, where the ability for nearly everyone to understand ends at them pressing a touch-screen. The abstract concepts of what goes on inside the system are very difficult for most people to grasp, unless they have a relatively high education. Furthermore, very few people can verify and confirm that it's working correctly.
Trust of as much of the population as possible is of huge importance in elections, and systems with paper trails are the ones that are easiest for the majority of people to trust.
Now it just needs to be intergrated into a virus/worm the the whole windows world will be converted!
I realise this is meant as a joke but I hope it doesn't happen in any vaguely successful way. It'd only serve to hit all the Debian mirrors really hard and they'd end up being black-listed by a lot of admins, possibly by ISPs. That wouldn't be good for anyone, regardless of their OS preferences.
What if the CCP has purposely built their firewall to be circumventable with just a little hacking? A few years of this and much of the population has an interest and a little skill in computer tricks, increasing the pool of computer talent in the country for both peaceful development and recruitment for nasty hacker armies? They could be engaging in social engineering to get a leg up in computer warfare.
It doesn't sound very plausible to me. Just because someone uses a proxy doesn't mean they understand much about what they're doing, especially if they're just copying the instructions of someone else. (As an analogy, just because someone uses libdvdcss2 doesn't mean they have a clue what it's doing.) There are plenty of much more reliable ways the CCP could train people to be hackers.
Besides, why should a typical hacker feel any loyalty to help the government with skills they've learned as a result of the government trying to prevent them from getting what they want? It's like suggesting that people who hack around DRM technology would for some illogical reason feel motivated to patriotically use their discoveries to help the RIAA or MPAA to impose it on people elsewhere.
...but I don't understand why Microsoft even needs its own closed source implementation when it's actively supporting an OSS implementation. Surely the OSS implementation could be ported to Windows, and probably will be anyway sooner or later.
The only reason for a closed source edition that I can think of are that Microsoft is using the OSS support for PR purposes only, and has future plans to make sure they're incompatible over time.
Even if OOXML gets approved for ISO don't we still have a choice?
I don't know about you, but I certainly won't. Organisations and governments everywhere will choose to use OOXML on the basis that it's an approved ISO standard. People who pay for Microsoft products will be fine (in the short an medium term, at least). Everyone who doesn't will be screwed.
Standards organisations such as the ISO exist to consider standards seriously so that other organisations don't have to, and a lot of trust is put in them. At a time when standards are finally coming to be seen as important by many organisations, Microsoft is trying to make a mockery of the standards-creation process, undermining the ISO and all its stakeholders so it can keep itself on top without actually providing a real, genuine standard.
Can you imagine how the internet wouldn't even exist if IETF standards were approached this way?
We'd all be using massively centralised proprietary online services like Compuserve, AOL and The Microsoft Network (before they became internetized), which would put all the power of what content people could see in the hands of a few corrupt mega-corporations.
[--snip CDs and DVDs--] Apparently the answer is B, but C and D are also correct (at least, compared to vinyl, which is what CDs replaced).
This is one of the reasons I have so many problems with multiple choice questions, and I find it surprising that multi-choice is usually considered easier.
I would have looked at that question and decided that none of the answers are really correct. As far as I'm aware, CDs and DVDs have no effect on the quality of sound I can hear, nor the range of frequencies. I'd probably guess D, on the grounds that 'loudness' could be defined in a way that's specific to the production of sound, and apparently that would be wrong.
At least with Short Answer questions (or essay questions), there's room to actually convince a marker that you understand what you're talking about. With multi-choice questions, especially badly worded questions, it's so easy to go through an entire test picking one that's either almost right, or not correct under some undefined assumption by the person who wrote the test.
Personally I think the whole movement to multi-choice questions, if there is one, is to make tests faster, easier and cheaper to mark, which they are. A multi-choice test can quite easily be marked by a computer, or a marker template. Multi-choice doesn't do anything except make the results of a test more of a lottery, which causes students to appear less separated than they really are.
M$ shouldn't be suing FOSS, but you can't create a new version of a license and retroactively apply it to M$. We'd all be yelling at the top of our lungs if MS retroactively altered their Windows XP license so that it, say, required to be renewed every year for a fee.
The GPL3 is not a retroactive licence. The issue is that many open source developers are choosing to release new versions of their software under GPL3. Sooner or later, Novell has to decide if it will fork the old GPL2 versions, or if it will start offering the GPL3 versions. Due to the complexities of the Microsoft voucher system, things start getting complicated when Novell distributes GPL3 code.
Commercial companies, especially including Microsoft and Novell, change the licenses on their software all the time, giving end users no realistic right to dispute new terms short of stopping the use of software that to which they've already been locked in. Neither company is in a position to complain about Free Software authors doing the same without looking flat out hypocritical. If Microsoft and Novell want to, they have all the source code and resources to fork a completely new GPL2-only operating system, or simply keep the one they have and issue bug and compatibility fixes as appropriate. Even being able to do this is a lot more freedom than most closed source distributors would offer their paying customers.
They did vote No, but personally I still feel irritated that Google didn't make an effort to take part in the preceding discussion for the Swedish Standards Institute. It makes a mockery of the voting process and I don't see why a corporation should be exempt from criticism just because they voted differently from everyone else who pulled the same trick.
If not, then 23 companies with a common interest with Microsoft joined an organization to vote for something in their own interests.
Apparently while also making no effort to take part in the preceeding constructive debate with others who had an interest. This is the entire point of such organisations, because by actually talking to people with other points of view, everyone's final decision is much more informed.
But that's not what happened. 23 companies showed up to vote at the last minute, quite possibly being completely ignorant about what they were voting for, not giving any realistic opportunity for others to talk to them about their vote, and they were allowed to. Irrespective of whether it's legal, if it's true, this doesn't look very good for the Swedish Standards Institute, nor does it look that great for the quality assurance methods of the ISO, unless the ISO somehow takes actions to invalidate the vote or at the very least make sure that it can't happen again.
Perhaps it was the SIS's fault for not properly communicating what it was voting on with reasonable notice, but hearing about this kind of manipulation of the system really does sicken me.
Instead of coding open source projects, now we're coding projects to detect license violations.
No, we're not. Those guys are developing a method to detect license violations, and despite Slashdot's implications, I can't personally see any reference they've made in their project to GPL, open source or free software.
It's only a net loss for open source projects if they were otherwise going to be working on something more beneficial for open source, and they probably weren't. Usually people who develop open source software work on whatever the hell they feel like, because they're motivated by a variety of things other than seeing free software conquer closed source software.
I realise this is going off on a tangent, but I'm concerned about the use of the word theft. Usually I'm one of the first people to jump up and down when I hear the RIAA or MPAA accuse people of stealing, and I've noticed that quite a few other people on Slashdot do the same. I think it's mis-representative of the paper to represent copyright infringement as anything other than exactly what it is, which is copyright infringement.
Language is what it is, and it changes over time, but I'd be really disappointed if this one was let to slip, because rather than the language changing because it's more convenient or better, it's changing because a group of powerful corporations want to confuse the issue for their own control and commercial benefit.
There is no gold standard... The dollar isn't backed by any commodity. The only value that the U.S. dollar has is that it can be used to purchase U.S. goods. For every dollar the U.S. spends on foreign goods, those foreign traders need to spend a dollar on U.S. goods (or on U.S. stocks or bonds or property).
I realise that this side-steps the point, but there are still some countries that live or die on the US dollar, for better or worse. The US dollar can also be used to purchase their goods, and the money doesn't necessarily make its way straight back to the US.
One thing that caught me by surprise when I was leaving Peru a couple of months ago was that the standard customs departure form asks people how much money they spent, expressed in US Dollars. US dollars are effectively the other half of a dual currency in Peru, along with Peru's on Soles currency. Virtually everyone accepts them, and some prefer them, at least on the tourist trail, and much moreso than in Bolivia or Chile (where I also visited). What amazed me most, though, was that even the Peruvian Government doesn't seem to have confidence in expressing amounts in its own currency.
I suppose the main point, though, is that most countries that leech off the US dollar are probably doing so because they don't have a strong enough economy to keep their own currency stable... and so they're probably not in a good position to help keep the US dollar valuable if the USA isn't.
How the hell are you supposed to know if you're allowed to connect to an available unsecured access point or not?
Media articles are notorious for under-reporting the full context of a situation. Even with that knowledge, though, from the way the article reads, this guy parked himself outside a residential property and knowingly leeched off someone's badly secured home connection, probably in full knowledge that it was likely to be a private network that he wasn't supposed to be allowed to connect to, and costing someone money that they probably didn't wish to pay.
Say what you like about people running insecure networks. As soon as you get into an area where there are known to be lots of intentionally free networks, and it's easier to accidentally connect to the wrong one, it becomes more ambiguous. But just because someone leaves their stuff outside accidentally doesn't make it ethical to knowingly and consciously come and use it.
You get the same thing with "closed" products too: you purchase a license to redistribute something, but the actual product you are redistributing has to stay closed.
It's not really the same. A typical closed source licence doesn't require that you distribute your entire product under the same licence as the closed source component. The GPL does. If you include GPL'd code in your distribution, then pretty much any code you distribute with it has to be GPLd. If the GPL was confined to the module that contained the GPLd code, I doubt anyone would be anywhere near as concerned. But then it would be more like the LGPL.
Add to this that closed source components tend to be business-oriented. They nearly always provide a way for businesses to buy rights to redistribute, including if the closed source product was introduced lazily, accidentally, or without permission by an ignorant developer. GPLd code doesn't always -- it's not uncommon for copyright holders of GPLd code to be less negotiable on selling alternative licences. Sometimes even tracking down the copyright holders can be a problem, as a lot of GPLd code has evolved through many developers and forked projects.
Plus, closed source code tends to be distributed in a more modular fashion, which is likely to be easier to add, remove or replace in a larger product. With GPLd code, it's just as easy for a programmer to lift bits of code, change them, and make it much less clear as to what came from the GPLd source and what didn't.
If you use GPLd source code without being certain that you'll have rights to buy an alternative licence, you have to be pretty sure that you're never going to distribute your product, or that you'll be happy giving away its source code. I don't fear the GPL, and I'm fortunate to work for an employer who's clued up enough to know the difference between including GPLd source, and running a GPLd application. On the other hand, I can fully appreciate why many businesses consider it a big risk that someone might one day discover some GPLd code that was accidentally or lazily introduced a product 10 years before, and then demand that the business release all their source code.
People renaming files to.DOC in the PDP-11 era? Yeah, right...
The DOC extension has been around for as long as I can remember (mid-late '80s, which is about when I started using computers). It used to be an extension used interchangeably with.txt, particularly for documentation files for downloaded software.
It was much more recently that Microsoft decided to use.doc as its default MS Word extension. I don't know how much basis it has, but my conspiracy theory at the time was that they simply did it because it would mean that MS Word would automatically become the default editor for a lot of pre-existing documents and gain more visibility for PC users, even though they were really only text files.
I still wouldn't be too surprised if it turned out that this was actually the case. It certainly annoyed me enough at the time that it was more difficult to figure out if a.doc file was really a text file without actually opening it, and that it was more complicated to open.doc files without the slow and bloated MS Word jumping in and always wanting to be the application to edit them.
I definitely agree with this -- contacts can be very useful. My biggest let-down was that I spent several extra years working towards a Masters' degree while most of my friends went out to get jobs with the companies that actively recruited finishing undergraduates. I got it in the end, but also decided I'd had enough of academia and just wanted a job.
Getting past the recruitment agents was awful, because there was absolutely zero understanding beyond keyword searches of buzzwords that were related to Java and DotNet, especially when my only formal commercial experience had been a couple of years of ASP web development. (yuck) Years of experience programming and scripting in a zillion languages in NetBSD, Solaris and Linux systems in academia didn't really count for much.
In the end, I emailed someone who I'd worked with in a temp job at Christmas a few years before, to ask if there was anything going. I was very fortunate that there was, and that he already had a lot of respect for my abilities, and now I've landed a nice job which is right now is primarily working with DotNet, but which also gives me a lot of opportunities to play in other things. I'm also hoping that the commercial experience I get here might actually count for something in the future.
I think that part of it can be finding the right recruitment agent. For the ones who don't properly understand the industry, it's a risk presenting someone to an employer when they don't necessarily have the specifics that were asked for, especially if the agent doesn't really understand the industry. I did manage to find a couple of agents who actually seemed to understand a lot more and were really enthusiastic, but I was only discovering them at about the time I already found a new job. Those are the agents I recommend to friends, and next time I'm searching they'll be the first I go back to.
It does show that a monopoly results in consumers paying a ridicuously high price for the merchandise.
Surely what it shows is that Microsoft is content to use its US customer base to subsidise Chinese customers, so it can have its products everywhere. The reason Microsoft can charge more in the US is because there's a higher cost of living and people have more money. Even if there was competition, Microsoft would only have to provide a product people were content with for a lower price than any competition.
I don't think this is an obvious consequence of a monopoly -- other companies probably do this too. That said, it's definitely a tactic that might help to spread Microsoft's monopoly even further into China, where people wouldn't be able to afford the product if it wasn't subsidised by other customers.
I mean, if you are in a country that has no IP enforcment, why not just steal the best one?
Perhaps because in China, stealing is still treated as a serious crime, and is often (I think) enforced quite heavily. A better course of action for people in China would be to infringe on the copyright, which is not seriously enforced.
Unless, of course, you've fallen into the semantics of the stop-copyright-infringement lobby groups, who would love it if everyone saw the complicated artificial legal definition of copyright infringement as being equivalent to horrible crime of stealing. In that case, yes, they should steal the best one.
Actually...Back in old days, when it was MS Works 2.0 (DOS version!). Early 90's. I really liked the darn thing.
Speaking of which, I have a collection of Works 2.0 (for Windows) files (old school reports, etc) from the early 1990s that I don't seem to be able to convert to anything. The only converters I can find seem to work for Works 3 and up.
I'd love to know if anyone can suggest a way to get the content out of them, preferably free because I doubt I'd bother otherwise.
Are we not fawning over "celebs" enough? Not constructing enough temple record stores, to be preached to in a condescending manner if we pick up the wrong album? Are we actually daring to put their music in the same store as a lesser known artist? Or, perhaps his music might even be sharing the same server on itunes as one of us common ruffians?
He's not commenting about music distribution, or about music cartels that manufacture awful music and buy radio stations to reduce people's choice.
What he's saying, in his own opinion, is that he thinks musicians are communicating less because the recent technology has been making it so much easier for people to produce things on their own. He thinks this is having a negative effect on the quality of music being produced, because the composition process has changed in such a way that musicians aren't getting as much feedback from each other. Celebrities, temple record stores or more competition between artists really have nothing to do with what he said.
I'm sure he couldn't care less if artists still used the Internet to distribute their work, if they worked together more frequently when producing it in the first place. (Actually I'm sure many already do, but clearly Elton thinks that many aren't.) Saying the Internet should be shut down for five years is just a provocative statement to get attention. It's a random idea to get people to think about how things might change if they ditched some of the technology they're using in their creative process.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the biggest complications I've encountered when conversing with people who visit homoeopaths is that homoeopaths don't always strictly practice homoeopathy. In fact, they often mix homoeopathy with a variety of other treatments that make complete sense.
Currently one of my friends is on a nutrition course which is administered by a registered homoeopath, although she didn't realise this until the group went on an optional weekend field trip to the practitioner's office. I've seen other occasions when registered homoeopaths have immediately diagnosed allergies that regular doctors didn't pick up after years of visiting, for one reason or another. (In saying so, I'm sure that other doctors may well have picked them up.) My gut reaction to this is that if the practitioner believes that homoeopathic treatment has genuine benefits, then I wouldn't trust them to give treatment to me for anything that's important, because I'm not convinced they'd be qualified to understand what they're doing. That said, the course that my friend is taking isn't about homoeopathic medicine -- it's simply administered by someone who happens to administer homoeopathic remedies at times, but also knows a lot about good nutrition.
I think the difficulty is that homoeopaths actually do often offer treatment that works well, and sometimes they offer useful advice that comes from outside the system that doctors typically work in, even if they don't fully understand it. Such treatment is based on things that I wouldn't actually consider to be homoeopathy anywhere near as much as common sense. This it what conjures up a false sense of belief, and it's why homoeopaths get credibility. A lot of people have visited practising homoeopaths and come back in genuinely better condition because of it, and maybe it's just because they've cut down on sugar and started drinking more water. The difficulty is when a homoeopath suddenly offers treatment that's completely bogus.
Most homoeopaths simply strike me as people who don't fully understand what they're practising. They mix together bad treatments with good treatments without appreciating why a good treatment works and why a bad one doesn't. Then they reinforce their view that their treatments work through a combination of fallacies when viewing the outcomes of their treatments.
The likeliness that computers are capable of correctly counting 100,000 perfectly submitted votes more accurately than humans in an ideal world isn't exactly a surprise, but this isn't really the point because the world isn't ideal and it's not realistic.
Even if paper trails are slightly less accurate in the counting (something I'd dispute once factoring in less measurable quantities like corruption of officials and potential hacking), one of the most important advantages of paper trails is that they can be easily understood by virtually everyone who votes. A voter verifies their correct vote is recorded on a slip of paper, places it in a ballot box, and then the votes recorded on the papers in the ballot boxes are counted, with the process being vetted by people who have reasons to make sure it's being done properly. The entire process is completely visible and clear from start to finish.
This is quite different to voting through computer interfaces, where the ability for nearly everyone to understand ends at them pressing a touch-screen. The abstract concepts of what goes on inside the system are very difficult for most people to grasp, unless they have a relatively high education. Furthermore, very few people can verify and confirm that it's working correctly.
Trust of as much of the population as possible is of huge importance in elections, and systems with paper trails are the ones that are easiest for the majority of people to trust.
I realise this is meant as a joke but I hope it doesn't happen in any vaguely successful way. It'd only serve to hit all the Debian mirrors really hard and they'd end up being black-listed by a lot of admins, possibly by ISPs. That wouldn't be good for anyone, regardless of their OS preferences.
It doesn't sound very plausible to me. Just because someone uses a proxy doesn't mean they understand much about what they're doing, especially if they're just copying the instructions of someone else. (As an analogy, just because someone uses libdvdcss2 doesn't mean they have a clue what it's doing.) There are plenty of much more reliable ways the CCP could train people to be hackers.
Besides, why should a typical hacker feel any loyalty to help the government with skills they've learned as a result of the government trying to prevent them from getting what they want? It's like suggesting that people who hack around DRM technology would for some illogical reason feel motivated to patriotically use their discoveries to help the RIAA or MPAA to impose it on people elsewhere.
...but I don't understand why Microsoft even needs its own closed source implementation when it's actively supporting an OSS implementation. Surely the OSS implementation could be ported to Windows, and probably will be anyway sooner or later.
The only reason for a closed source edition that I can think of are that Microsoft is using the OSS support for PR purposes only, and has future plans to make sure they're incompatible over time.
I don't know about you, but I certainly won't. Organisations and governments everywhere will choose to use OOXML on the basis that it's an approved ISO standard. People who pay for Microsoft products will be fine (in the short an medium term, at least). Everyone who doesn't will be screwed.
Standards organisations such as the ISO exist to consider standards seriously so that other organisations don't have to, and a lot of trust is put in them. At a time when standards are finally coming to be seen as important by many organisations, Microsoft is trying to make a mockery of the standards-creation process, undermining the ISO and all its stakeholders so it can keep itself on top without actually providing a real, genuine standard.
We'd all be using massively centralised proprietary online services like Compuserve, AOL and The Microsoft Network (before they became internetized), which would put all the power of what content people could see in the hands of a few corrupt mega-corporations.
Hopefully the SIS will offer a refund to all the honest corporations who were falsely led to believe they could buy a vote.
This is one of the reasons I have so many problems with multiple choice questions, and I find it surprising that multi-choice is usually considered easier.
I would have looked at that question and decided that none of the answers are really correct. As far as I'm aware, CDs and DVDs have no effect on the quality of sound I can hear, nor the range of frequencies. I'd probably guess D, on the grounds that 'loudness' could be defined in a way that's specific to the production of sound, and apparently that would be wrong.
At least with Short Answer questions (or essay questions), there's room to actually convince a marker that you understand what you're talking about. With multi-choice questions, especially badly worded questions, it's so easy to go through an entire test picking one that's either almost right, or not correct under some undefined assumption by the person who wrote the test.
Personally I think the whole movement to multi-choice questions, if there is one, is to make tests faster, easier and cheaper to mark, which they are. A multi-choice test can quite easily be marked by a computer, or a marker template. Multi-choice doesn't do anything except make the results of a test more of a lottery, which causes students to appear less separated than they really are.
The GPL3 is not a retroactive licence. The issue is that many open source developers are choosing to release new versions of their software under GPL3. Sooner or later, Novell has to decide if it will fork the old GPL2 versions, or if it will start offering the GPL3 versions. Due to the complexities of the Microsoft voucher system, things start getting complicated when Novell distributes GPL3 code.
Commercial companies, especially including Microsoft and Novell, change the licenses on their software all the time, giving end users no realistic right to dispute new terms short of stopping the use of software that to which they've already been locked in. Neither company is in a position to complain about Free Software authors doing the same without looking flat out hypocritical. If Microsoft and Novell want to, they have all the source code and resources to fork a completely new GPL2-only operating system, or simply keep the one they have and issue bug and compatibility fixes as appropriate. Even being able to do this is a lot more freedom than most closed source distributors would offer their paying customers.
They did vote No, but personally I still feel irritated that Google didn't make an effort to take part in the preceding discussion for the Swedish Standards Institute. It makes a mockery of the voting process and I don't see why a corporation should be exempt from criticism just because they voted differently from everyone else who pulled the same trick.
Apparently while also making no effort to take part in the preceeding constructive debate with others who had an interest. This is the entire point of such organisations, because by actually talking to people with other points of view, everyone's final decision is much more informed.
But that's not what happened. 23 companies showed up to vote at the last minute, quite possibly being completely ignorant about what they were voting for, not giving any realistic opportunity for others to talk to them about their vote, and they were allowed to. Irrespective of whether it's legal, if it's true, this doesn't look very good for the Swedish Standards Institute, nor does it look that great for the quality assurance methods of the ISO, unless the ISO somehow takes actions to invalidate the vote or at the very least make sure that it can't happen again.
Perhaps it was the SIS's fault for not properly communicating what it was voting on with reasonable notice, but hearing about this kind of manipulation of the system really does sicken me.
No, we're not. Those guys are developing a method to detect license violations, and despite Slashdot's implications, I can't personally see any reference they've made in their project to GPL, open source or free software.
It's only a net loss for open source projects if they were otherwise going to be working on something more beneficial for open source, and they probably weren't. Usually people who develop open source software work on whatever the hell they feel like, because they're motivated by a variety of things other than seeing free software conquer closed source software.
I realise this is going off on a tangent, but I'm concerned about the use of the word theft. Usually I'm one of the first people to jump up and down when I hear the RIAA or MPAA accuse people of stealing, and I've noticed that quite a few other people on Slashdot do the same. I think it's mis-representative of the paper to represent copyright infringement as anything other than exactly what it is, which is copyright infringement.
Language is what it is, and it changes over time, but I'd be really disappointed if this one was let to slip, because rather than the language changing because it's more convenient or better, it's changing because a group of powerful corporations want to confuse the issue for their own control and commercial benefit.
I realise that this side-steps the point, but there are still some countries that live or die on the US dollar, for better or worse. The US dollar can also be used to purchase their goods, and the money doesn't necessarily make its way straight back to the US.
One thing that caught me by surprise when I was leaving Peru a couple of months ago was that the standard customs departure form asks people how much money they spent, expressed in US Dollars. US dollars are effectively the other half of a dual currency in Peru, along with Peru's on Soles currency. Virtually everyone accepts them, and some prefer them, at least on the tourist trail, and much moreso than in Bolivia or Chile (where I also visited). What amazed me most, though, was that even the Peruvian Government doesn't seem to have confidence in expressing amounts in its own currency.
I suppose the main point, though, is that most countries that leech off the US dollar are probably doing so because they don't have a strong enough economy to keep their own currency stable... and so they're probably not in a good position to help keep the US dollar valuable if the USA isn't.
Media articles are notorious for under-reporting the full context of a situation. Even with that knowledge, though, from the way the article reads, this guy parked himself outside a residential property and knowingly leeched off someone's badly secured home connection, probably in full knowledge that it was likely to be a private network that he wasn't supposed to be allowed to connect to, and costing someone money that they probably didn't wish to pay.
Say what you like about people running insecure networks. As soon as you get into an area where there are known to be lots of intentionally free networks, and it's easier to accidentally connect to the wrong one, it becomes more ambiguous. But just because someone leaves their stuff outside accidentally doesn't make it ethical to knowingly and consciously come and use it.
It's not really the same. A typical closed source licence doesn't require that you distribute your entire product under the same licence as the closed source component. The GPL does. If you include GPL'd code in your distribution, then pretty much any code you distribute with it has to be GPLd. If the GPL was confined to the module that contained the GPLd code, I doubt anyone would be anywhere near as concerned. But then it would be more like the LGPL.
Add to this that closed source components tend to be business-oriented. They nearly always provide a way for businesses to buy rights to redistribute, including if the closed source product was introduced lazily, accidentally, or without permission by an ignorant developer. GPLd code doesn't always -- it's not uncommon for copyright holders of GPLd code to be less negotiable on selling alternative licences. Sometimes even tracking down the copyright holders can be a problem, as a lot of GPLd code has evolved through many developers and forked projects.
Plus, closed source code tends to be distributed in a more modular fashion, which is likely to be easier to add, remove or replace in a larger product. With GPLd code, it's just as easy for a programmer to lift bits of code, change them, and make it much less clear as to what came from the GPLd source and what didn't.
If you use GPLd source code without being certain that you'll have rights to buy an alternative licence, you have to be pretty sure that you're never going to distribute your product, or that you'll be happy giving away its source code. I don't fear the GPL, and I'm fortunate to work for an employer who's clued up enough to know the difference between including GPLd source, and running a GPLd application. On the other hand, I can fully appreciate why many businesses consider it a big risk that someone might one day discover some GPLd code that was accidentally or lazily introduced a product 10 years before, and then demand that the business release all their source code.
The DOC extension has been around for as long as I can remember (mid-late '80s, which is about when I started using computers). It used to be an extension used interchangeably with .txt, particularly for documentation files for downloaded software.
It was much more recently that Microsoft decided to use .doc as its default MS Word extension. I don't know how much basis it has, but my conspiracy theory at the time was that they simply did it because it would mean that MS Word would automatically become the default editor for a lot of pre-existing documents and gain more visibility for PC users, even though they were really only text files.
I still wouldn't be too surprised if it turned out that this was actually the case. It certainly annoyed me enough at the time that it was more difficult to figure out if a .doc file was really a text file without actually opening it, and that it was more complicated to open .doc files without the slow and bloated MS Word jumping in and always wanting to be the application to edit them.
I definitely agree with this -- contacts can be very useful. My biggest let-down was that I spent several extra years working towards a Masters' degree while most of my friends went out to get jobs with the companies that actively recruited finishing undergraduates. I got it in the end, but also decided I'd had enough of academia and just wanted a job.
Getting past the recruitment agents was awful, because there was absolutely zero understanding beyond keyword searches of buzzwords that were related to Java and DotNet, especially when my only formal commercial experience had been a couple of years of ASP web development. (yuck) Years of experience programming and scripting in a zillion languages in NetBSD, Solaris and Linux systems in academia didn't really count for much.
In the end, I emailed someone who I'd worked with in a temp job at Christmas a few years before, to ask if there was anything going. I was very fortunate that there was, and that he already had a lot of respect for my abilities, and now I've landed a nice job which is right now is primarily working with DotNet, but which also gives me a lot of opportunities to play in other things. I'm also hoping that the commercial experience I get here might actually count for something in the future.
I think that part of it can be finding the right recruitment agent. For the ones who don't properly understand the industry, it's a risk presenting someone to an employer when they don't necessarily have the specifics that were asked for, especially if the agent doesn't really understand the industry. I did manage to find a couple of agents who actually seemed to understand a lot more and were really enthusiastic, but I was only discovering them at about the time I already found a new job. Those are the agents I recommend to friends, and next time I'm searching they'll be the first I go back to.
Surely what it shows is that Microsoft is content to use its US customer base to subsidise Chinese customers, so it can have its products everywhere. The reason Microsoft can charge more in the US is because there's a higher cost of living and people have more money. Even if there was competition, Microsoft would only have to provide a product people were content with for a lower price than any competition.
I don't think this is an obvious consequence of a monopoly -- other companies probably do this too. That said, it's definitely a tactic that might help to spread Microsoft's monopoly even further into China, where people wouldn't be able to afford the product if it wasn't subsidised by other customers.
Perhaps because in China, stealing is still treated as a serious crime, and is often (I think) enforced quite heavily. A better course of action for people in China would be to infringe on the copyright, which is not seriously enforced.
Unless, of course, you've fallen into the semantics of the stop-copyright-infringement lobby groups, who would love it if everyone saw the complicated artificial legal definition of copyright infringement as being equivalent to horrible crime of stealing. In that case, yes, they should steal the best one.
Thanks for the tip. I might give it a try later on when I get home.
At least, it looks as if the Change Log is still being updated. (Click the link titled "ChangeLog in the main directory".)
Speaking of which, I have a collection of Works 2.0 (for Windows) files (old school reports, etc) from the early 1990s that I don't seem to be able to convert to anything. The only converters I can find seem to work for Works 3 and up.
I'd love to know if anyone can suggest a way to get the content out of them, preferably free because I doubt I'd bother otherwise.
He's not commenting about music distribution, or about music cartels that manufacture awful music and buy radio stations to reduce people's choice.
What he's saying, in his own opinion, is that he thinks musicians are communicating less because the recent technology has been making it so much easier for people to produce things on their own. He thinks this is having a negative effect on the quality of music being produced, because the composition process has changed in such a way that musicians aren't getting as much feedback from each other. Celebrities, temple record stores or more competition between artists really have nothing to do with what he said.
I'm sure he couldn't care less if artists still used the Internet to distribute their work, if they worked together more frequently when producing it in the first place. (Actually I'm sure many already do, but clearly Elton thinks that many aren't.) Saying the Internet should be shut down for five years is just a provocative statement to get attention. It's a random idea to get people to think about how things might change if they ditched some of the technology they're using in their creative process.