Then it's only fair that only Citizens be taxed on their income.
No corporation big enough to hire a part time lawyer pays income taxes anyway. Hell, I know several people personally who have incorporated themselves solely to avoid paying taxes.
The private electric companies lobbied for "deregulation", because it is in their best interest to be regulated. It seems counterintuitive, but it's a fact of life that corporations like to be regulated. It keeps the small time operators out of the industry.
This whole use of the term "deregulation" is the epitome of Newspeak. People now distrust deregulation even though nothing was ever deregulated in the power industry in California. For the same reason, people distrust free trade because of NAFTA, which had nothing to do with free trade other than its name.
The crux of the FSF's argument is that a Linux distribution is merely The GNU System that uses the linux kernel. But the RMS quote demonstrates that The GNU System is not composed of just GNU software.
Corporations are legal persons, not citizens. There is a difference. Citizens can vote. Corporations cannot. Citizens can get drivers licenses. Corporations cannot. Citizens can hold public office. Corporations cannot.
Lest you think I'm sticking up for corporations, let me assure you that I am not. Citizens can be tried for crimes. Corporations cannot. That last point is crucial. Microsoft is not being tried for any felony.
But the article you pointed me two has one very gross error amid its wealth of information. It tried to distinguish between the oppression of government and the oppression of corporations. They are one and the same. The East India Company, Massachusetts Bay Company, etc., were all chartered corporations. That meant that the power they wielded came directly from the British government. When independence was gained from the the British government, the corporations instantly ceased to have any power over the former colonists.
If you rebel against corporations but ignore the government, you are accomplishing nothing. The only power they have over you is derived from the government. The RIAA and MCAA is not legislating any law. Congress is doing that. It is only because the people of the United States have elected spineless cowards and money grubbing opportunists that we face this current problem.
If Disney and Sony suddenly disappeared tomorrow, our legal rights regarding digital content would still be in jeapardy. Stomp out Disney and another corporation will take its place. But if you take away the power of Congress to control your rights, then they won't have that power to sell to the highest bidder.
I fear any government, of any political persuasion, that is so large that it has to power to tell what I can or cannot do with my CDs.
Probibiting corporations from owning a copyright is interesting. I don't know if it's practical, but it is interesting.
Corporations may be legal entities, but they are not human beings. Neither are they citizens of any nation. A single one paragraph bill stating that copyrights will only be issued to citizens of the United States would do it. We would still have to recognize the Berne convention, and honor copyrights granted to corporations from other nations, but we don't have to perpetuate this myth that corporations are people.
Corporations do not create works. Their employees do. Give the copyright to the employee that created the work. As part of the "standard" employee agreement, a work created by an employee on company time would be automatically licensed to the company free of charge for any use, but copyright still belongs to the employee.
why arent there at least a few 'open source' lobbyists?
Because there's no money in Open Source. The total profits made by Open Source companies last year would fit into the penny slot of the petty cash drawer at Disney.
That's not as far fetched as it seems. By integrating Mozilla into The Gnu System, it will become an official component of GNU. To quote from RMS: "The GNU system includes programs that are not GNU software, programs that were developed by other people and projects for their own purposes, but which we can use because they are free software".
Our users are interested in the web site working, and working correctly.
If it is a true vertical market, where you have physical control over the client machines, then you can impose whatever damn browser you want on them. But as long as the user has a choice in their own browser, then it makes sense at this level of sensitivity to implement *fewer* CSS2 features rather than more.
Where I work we build an embedded device with an integrated webserver for remote access. The data served by this webserver is even more sensitive than credit reports (medical diagnostic images). The developer of the access page really wanted to use just Internet Explorer as the browser, since it handled the features he wanted to use. But Navigator didn't. But our clients are all physicians and predominantly Mac users, so Navigator was extremely common. So the access page had to be made to work with Navigator.
are probably going to be forced to block all Mozilla browsers.
This kind of attitude is intolerable. It's stupid. It's arrogant. It's wrong. It's no wonder web "developers" are the laughingstock of the software engineering world.
Imagine a gas station that blocked all Fords.
There are millions of web sites that render under Mozilla just as well, or better, then under the monopolist's client. They can do it, why can't you?
If your site won't render on 99.99% of your target audience's browsers, then you need to fix your site. You don't have to make a page under Mozilla look exactly like a page under IExploder. It would be nice, but it will never happen. Hell, you can't even make the page look identical under every IExploder browser, because the users will all have different monitors, desktop sizes, fonts, plugins, etc.
Let me hit you upside the head with a clue stick: the user is in charge. If you block them from your site they will go elsewhere, and they will take their money with them. That might only be 5% of your user base, but your user base is 10 million, that's half a million users you're insulting. You could be losing millions of dollars. This type of action may be commonplace in the software industry, but for every other industry in the world such behavior would be shocking.
The browser I use is Konqueror. Imagine if Konqueror was designed for only Linux. I couldn't use it because I'm not using Linux. But it still works. How can it work? Because it isn't designed for a particular platform, but for a particular set of *standards* instead. As long as I use a platform that minimally supports the POSIX and X11R6 standards, I can build and use Konqueror. But you can't adhere to standards too slavishly. If Konqueror required conformance to every POSIX standard, then not even Linux could run it.
In a nutshell, if a browser like Mozilla, which is more standards compliant than Internet Exploder, can't render your webpages, then the fault lies with your web pages.
Re:.NET is overall a good thing.
on
Java v. .Net?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
First of all, it moves the Microsoft world away from Visual C++, and VB.
I see you haven't been receiving the Visual.NET flier in your mail every week. I'll have to report you to the authorities.
Yet, Elanor Gamgee is listed in the credits, played by Sean's daughter herself. Something must have been filmed in the Shire after the end of the war...
And I prefer KDE. That last thing we need is some bonehead telling you to KDE or me to use Gnome. I love the choice. But some people are truly frightened by freedom.
The simplicy and power of typing setenv DISPLAY mickeymouse.window.manager:0.0
Yup! Just try doing that on Windows and you'll see the simplicity of it. My login script sets my DISPLAY, so no matter which remote machine I login to, I can display locally. Really nice and completely effortless.
Or the simplicity of the most retarded cut and paste model yet developed?
Cut and paste is a policy. By rights, it shouldn't even *be* in X. It belongs in Motif, GTK+, Qt, etc. A policy-less GUI has its disadvantages, but the advantages outweigh them.
Or the power to drag and drop between almost no applications?
Don't blame X. Blame GTK+, Qt, Motif, etc. A policy-less GUI means it won't impose a standard on you. Because of this, a KDE program can drag and drop from my FreeBSD box to a program running remotely on my Solaris box. Otherwise there would have to be some standard out there with enough teeth for Sun to adhere to. A standard with that much teeth in it is detrimental to my freedom.
As it is now, it doesn't matter which which X server is running, my X client is fine.
...having a fully functional computer (called X-terminal) being fully subutilized because the system was planned with a thin client in mind which ended up being a thick client?
Oh! If only I could subutilize Windows the same way! If only I could push that everpresent IExplorer running in the background off to another machine... If only I could compile in the background without dragging my MystIII down...
A subutilized CPU is a wonderful thing! Well worth the money. But if you want a fully utilized CPU, the answer is simple. Just downgrade.
Right now I am running XFree86-4.2.0 on FreeBSD-4.5. I have to interact with a Solaris-8 box. With X, I am able to run Clearcase, Rational Rose, Framemaker, etc. under FreeBSD. That's awesome.
If all you're doing is running some game under Wine under Linux on a standalone box in your dorm, then you don't really need X. But the rest of us appreciate the power and simplicity that is X.
GNOME and KDE, as good as they might be to deluded Linux users, is nothing compared to BeOS and Windows.
I've never used BeOS, so I can't comment on it, but from personal and direct experience, KDE blows the Windows desktop out of the water. The only place Windows is superior is the abundance of native apps. Everything else is in the dark ages of design, functionality and usability.
Look at *just* the window manager. Kwin is probably the simplest window manager out there. It doesn't do anything. Yet it has more usability than the Windows equivalent. I can maximize vertically or horizontally. I can snap windows to other windows or to the edges of the screen. I can do rollups. I can middle-click and send the window to the bottom.
Another tiny example: wallpaper. Try to display a JPG image in Windows and you need Active Desktop enabled. Huh? Why are there TWO different components for displaying wallpapers in Windows, and why do they conflict with each other? Why can't Windows do smooth scaling of wallpaper? Why? Why? Why?
From my remembrance of the evidence, Microsoft never refused to negotiate. You wouldn't get the full discount your competitor was getting, but you would still get a discount off of the standard wholesale price.
The arguments (whines) I remember were along the lines of "but Microsoft won't give me the same discount as the other guys even though they're shipping all their PCs with Windows and a Windows advert sticker and I'm not." If you want the same margins as your competitor whose in bed with Microsoft, then you had better be prepared to lube up.
I've been a salesman in an commodity industry with a monopolist supplier. I know what it's like to stay independent while all your competitors bend over for the monopolist. But we didn't go out of business, even though we had to pay 10% to 25% more for the same components. We even managed to successfully compete with the monopolist's company stores. That's because we differentiated ourselves with sales, service and quality.
My whole point is that the OEMs are in their situation because of two things: A) they won't differentiate themselves, and B) they bend over every time Microsoft drops a bar of soap.
If Gateway didn't strive so hard to be the most generic OEM amongst a field of generic OEMs, they might actually have a margin they could play with.
It seems that if an OEM does not ship Windows on every PC they ship that they are severely penalized, and can have their license revoked."
If the OEMs negotiated contracts giving a discount if Windows is shipped on every PC, then it is the OEMs who are breaking the contract by not shipping every PC with Windows. If they don't like this situation, then they need to negotiate a new contract that gives them a slightly less discount for shipping slightly fewer Windows PCs.
If you're a Gateway, HP or Dell, Microsoft may have you by the balls, but you STILL have Microsoft by the short and curlies. The marketplace may demand that you ship with Windows, but you don't have to ship consumer models with MSOffice, you don't have to ship server models with IIS or Exchange, you don't have to ship MS mice with every PC, etc.
If all else fails, sue Microsoft under the terms of the US Commercial Code for selling you non merchantable goods.
The OEM's are already operating on the edge with each box they manufacture. In the commodity world, a $10 difference in price is enough to put a consumer onto another brand.
I wonder whose to blame here? Is it Microsoft for bullying these poor innocent companies living on fractional margins? Or is it the companies themselves for making the PC into a commodity to begin with?
If the OEMs had ever decided to distinguish themselves from each other, they would never have gotten themselves into this situation.
So I'm trying to move an icon from here to there, but my hand isn't steady. So the application keeps starting.
If double click wasn't available, the first thing I would do is remap the single click app-start action to the middle button. But Macs don't have middle buttons.
So I decided to look at my "clear" script. It has one line with "#!/bin/sh -", 35 lines with the BSD license and warranty disclaimer, and one line with "exec tput clear".
95% of this script is copyright. Geez! I'm so glad this isn't under the GPL...
So use a stylesheet. That's what stylesheets are for. Structure your document with DocBook and present it with CSS, XSL or DSSSL.
I would love to see an text processor that let me type in structured text (like LyX), then switch to a style mode where I can fiddle with the style (like Word). You get the best of both worlds that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Then it's only fair that only Citizens be taxed on their income.
No corporation big enough to hire a part time lawyer pays income taxes anyway. Hell, I know several people personally who have incorporated themselves solely to avoid paying taxes.
The private electric companies lobbied for "deregulation", because it is in their best interest to be regulated. It seems counterintuitive, but it's a fact of life that corporations like to be regulated. It keeps the small time operators out of the industry.
This whole use of the term "deregulation" is the epitome of Newspeak. People now distrust deregulation even though nothing was ever deregulated in the power industry in California. For the same reason, people distrust free trade because of NAFTA, which had nothing to do with free trade other than its name.
The crux of the FSF's argument is that a Linux distribution is merely The GNU System that uses the linux kernel. But the RMS quote demonstrates that The GNU System is not composed of just GNU software.
Corporations are legal persons, not citizens. There is a difference. Citizens can vote. Corporations cannot. Citizens can get drivers licenses. Corporations cannot. Citizens can hold public office. Corporations cannot.
Lest you think I'm sticking up for corporations, let me assure you that I am not. Citizens can be tried for crimes. Corporations cannot. That last point is crucial. Microsoft is not being tried for any felony.
But the article you pointed me two has one very gross error amid its wealth of information. It tried to distinguish between the oppression of government and the oppression of corporations. They are one and the same. The East India Company, Massachusetts Bay Company, etc., were all chartered corporations. That meant that the power they wielded came directly from the British government. When independence was gained from the the British government, the corporations instantly ceased to have any power over the former colonists.
If you rebel against corporations but ignore the government, you are accomplishing nothing. The only power they have over you is derived from the government. The RIAA and MCAA is not legislating any law. Congress is doing that. It is only because the people of the United States have elected spineless cowards and money grubbing opportunists that we face this current problem.
If Disney and Sony suddenly disappeared tomorrow, our legal rights regarding digital content would still be in jeapardy. Stomp out Disney and another corporation will take its place. But if you take away the power of Congress to control your rights, then they won't have that power to sell to the highest bidder.
I fear any government, of any political persuasion, that is so large that it has to power to tell what I can or cannot do with my CDs.
Probibiting corporations from owning a copyright is interesting. I don't know if it's practical, but it is interesting.
Corporations may be legal entities, but they are not human beings. Neither are they citizens of any nation. A single one paragraph bill stating that copyrights will only be issued to citizens of the United States would do it. We would still have to recognize the Berne convention, and honor copyrights granted to corporations from other nations, but we don't have to perpetuate this myth that corporations are people.
Corporations do not create works. Their employees do. Give the copyright to the employee that created the work. As part of the "standard" employee agreement, a work created by an employee on company time would be automatically licensed to the company free of charge for any use, but copyright still belongs to the employee.
At the minimum, there is a seed for thought here.
The democrats haven't fought for democracy since Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus.
why arent there at least a few 'open source' lobbyists?
Because there's no money in Open Source. The total profits made by Open Source companies last year would fit into the penny slot of the petty cash drawer at Disney.
Petitions and the near universal outcry from the tech industry killed the Clipper Chip.
That's not as far fetched as it seems. By integrating Mozilla into The Gnu System, it will become an official component of GNU. To quote from RMS: "The GNU system includes programs that are not GNU software, programs that were developed by other people and projects for their own purposes, but which we can use because they are free software".
Our users are interested in the web site working, and working correctly.
If it is a true vertical market, where you have physical control over the client machines, then you can impose whatever damn browser you want on them. But as long as the user has a choice in their own browser, then it makes sense at this level of sensitivity to implement *fewer* CSS2 features rather than more.
Where I work we build an embedded device with an integrated webserver for remote access. The data served by this webserver is even more sensitive than credit reports (medical diagnostic images). The developer of the access page really wanted to use just Internet Explorer as the browser, since it handled the features he wanted to use. But Navigator didn't. But our clients are all physicians and predominantly Mac users, so Navigator was extremely common. So the access page had to be made to work with Navigator.
are probably going to be forced to block all Mozilla browsers.
This kind of attitude is intolerable. It's stupid. It's arrogant. It's wrong. It's no wonder web "developers" are the laughingstock of the software engineering world.
Imagine a gas station that blocked all Fords.
There are millions of web sites that render under Mozilla just as well, or better, then under the monopolist's client. They can do it, why can't you?
If your site won't render on 99.99% of your target audience's browsers, then you need to fix your site. You don't have to make a page under Mozilla look exactly like a page under IExploder. It would be nice, but it will never happen. Hell, you can't even make the page look identical under every IExploder browser, because the users will all have different monitors, desktop sizes, fonts, plugins, etc.
Let me hit you upside the head with a clue stick: the user is in charge. If you block them from your site they will go elsewhere, and they will take their money with them. That might only be 5% of your user base, but your user base is 10 million, that's half a million users you're insulting. You could be losing millions of dollars. This type of action may be commonplace in the software industry, but for every other industry in the world such behavior would be shocking.
The browser I use is Konqueror. Imagine if Konqueror was designed for only Linux. I couldn't use it because I'm not using Linux. But it still works. How can it work? Because it isn't designed for a particular platform, but for a particular set of *standards* instead. As long as I use a platform that minimally supports the POSIX and X11R6 standards, I can build and use Konqueror. But you can't adhere to standards too slavishly. If Konqueror required conformance to every POSIX standard, then not even Linux could run it.
In a nutshell, if a browser like Mozilla, which is more standards compliant than Internet Exploder, can't render your webpages, then the fault lies with your web pages.
First of all, it moves the Microsoft world away from Visual C++, and VB.
.NET flier in your mail every week. I'll have to report you to the authorities.
I see you haven't been receiving the Visual
Ummm, Helm's Deep is Rohan...
Yet, Elanor Gamgee is listed in the credits, played by Sean's daughter herself. Something must have been filmed in the Shire after the end of the war...
Holy kerning Batman! I haven't seen terms like that in a license since the days of the Borland "Book" license.
And I prefer KDE. That last thing we need is some bonehead telling you to KDE or me to use Gnome. I love the choice. But some people are truly frightened by freedom.
The simplicy and power of typing setenv DISPLAY mickeymouse.window.manager:0.0
...having a fully functional computer (called X-terminal) being fully subutilized because the system was planned with a thin client in mind which ended up being a thick client?
Yup! Just try doing that on Windows and you'll see the simplicity of it. My login script sets my DISPLAY, so no matter which remote machine I login to, I can display locally. Really nice and completely effortless.
Or the simplicity of the most retarded cut and paste model yet developed?
Cut and paste is a policy. By rights, it shouldn't even *be* in X. It belongs in Motif, GTK+, Qt, etc. A policy-less GUI has its disadvantages, but the advantages outweigh them.
Or the power to drag and drop between almost no applications?
Don't blame X. Blame GTK+, Qt, Motif, etc. A policy-less GUI means it won't impose a standard on you. Because of this, a KDE program can drag and drop from my FreeBSD box to a program running remotely on my Solaris box. Otherwise there would have to be some standard out there with enough teeth for Sun to adhere to. A standard with that much teeth in it is detrimental to my freedom.
As it is now, it doesn't matter which which X server is running, my X client is fine.
Oh! If only I could subutilize Windows the same way! If only I could push that everpresent IExplorer running in the background off to another machine... If only I could compile in the background without dragging my MystIII down...
A subutilized CPU is a wonderful thing! Well worth the money. But if you want a fully utilized CPU, the answer is simple. Just downgrade.
Right now I am running XFree86-4.2.0 on FreeBSD-4.5. I have to interact with a Solaris-8 box. With X, I am able to run Clearcase, Rational Rose, Framemaker, etc. under FreeBSD. That's awesome.
If all you're doing is running some game under Wine under Linux on a standalone box in your dorm, then you don't really need X. But the rest of us appreciate the power and simplicity that is X.
GNOME and KDE, as good as they might be to deluded Linux users, is nothing compared to BeOS and Windows.
I've never used BeOS, so I can't comment on it, but from personal and direct experience, KDE blows the Windows desktop out of the water. The only place Windows is superior is the abundance of native apps. Everything else is in the dark ages of design, functionality and usability.
Look at *just* the window manager. Kwin is probably the simplest window manager out there. It doesn't do anything. Yet it has more usability than the Windows equivalent. I can maximize vertically or horizontally. I can snap windows to other windows or to the edges of the screen. I can do rollups. I can middle-click and send the window to the bottom.
Another tiny example: wallpaper. Try to display a JPG image in Windows and you need Active Desktop enabled. Huh? Why are there TWO different components for displaying wallpapers in Windows, and why do they conflict with each other? Why can't Windows do smooth scaling of wallpaper? Why? Why? Why?
From my remembrance of the evidence, Microsoft never refused to negotiate. You wouldn't get the full discount your competitor was getting, but you would still get a discount off of the standard wholesale price.
The arguments (whines) I remember were along the lines of "but Microsoft won't give me the same discount as the other guys even though they're shipping all their PCs with Windows and a Windows advert sticker and I'm not." If you want the same margins as your competitor whose in bed with Microsoft, then you had better be prepared to lube up.
I've been a salesman in an commodity industry with a monopolist supplier. I know what it's like to stay independent while all your competitors bend over for the monopolist. But we didn't go out of business, even though we had to pay 10% to 25% more for the same components. We even managed to successfully compete with the monopolist's company stores. That's because we differentiated ourselves with sales, service and quality.
My whole point is that the OEMs are in their situation because of two things: A) they won't differentiate themselves, and B) they bend over every time Microsoft drops a bar of soap.
If Gateway didn't strive so hard to be the most generic OEM amongst a field of generic OEMs, they might actually have a margin they could play with.
It seems that if an OEM does not ship Windows on every PC they ship that they are severely penalized, and can have their license revoked."
If the OEMs negotiated contracts giving a discount if Windows is shipped on every PC, then it is the OEMs who are breaking the contract by not shipping every PC with Windows. If they don't like this situation, then they need to negotiate a new contract that gives them a slightly less discount for shipping slightly fewer Windows PCs.
If you're a Gateway, HP or Dell, Microsoft may have you by the balls, but you STILL have Microsoft by the short and curlies. The marketplace may demand that you ship with Windows, but you don't have to ship consumer models with MSOffice, you don't have to ship server models with IIS or Exchange, you don't have to ship MS mice with every PC, etc.
If all else fails, sue Microsoft under the terms of the US Commercial Code for selling you non merchantable goods.
The OEM's are already operating on the edge with each box they manufacture. In the commodity world, a $10 difference in price is enough to put a consumer onto another brand.
I wonder whose to blame here? Is it Microsoft for bullying these poor innocent companies living on fractional margins? Or is it the companies themselves for making the PC into a commodity to begin with?
If the OEMs had ever decided to distinguish themselves from each other, they would never have gotten themselves into this situation.
So I'm trying to move an icon from here to there, but my hand isn't steady. So the application keeps starting.
If double click wasn't available, the first thing I would do is remap the single click app-start action to the middle button. But Macs don't have middle buttons.
So I decided to look at my "clear" script. It has one line with "#!/bin/sh -", 35 lines with the BSD license and warranty disclaimer, and one line with "exec tput clear".
95% of this script is copyright. Geez! I'm so glad this isn't under the GPL...
So use a stylesheet. That's what stylesheets are for. Structure your document with DocBook and present it with CSS, XSL or DSSSL.
I would love to see an text processor that let me type in structured text (like LyX), then switch to a style mode where I can fiddle with the style (like Word). You get the best of both worlds that way.