Thanks for the link. Elsewhere on that site, I found this (emphasis mine):
Keep away from radiators/heaters, hot equipment surfaces, direct sunlight (near a window or in a car during hot weather), pets,
small children, and other destructive forces. Magnetic fields have no effect on DVDs.
It's nice to see that Disney regards children as "destructive forces" -- clearly, whoever wrote that is an experienced parent.:)
The others can't be added to Windows by anyone except Microsoft, cause no one else has the code. Oh, and Microsoft has zero reason to want to add them, because it would make it easier for people to have Windows and Linux co-exist.
What most people don't seem to get is that Microsoft's motivations are based in simple corporate economics.
MS Windows is competing with Linux. Why should they spend development dollars to support a "foreign" filesystem when they could spend the same money improving their product to beter compete?
MS isn't worried about how easy it is for Windows and Linux to co-exist. Read that sentence again. The reason why Windows and Linux do not always co-exist peacefully is precisely because MS doesn't care if Windows and Linux get along. They care that a Windows machine runs Windows in a reasonably sane manner. Windows is the dominant OS right now; why would they spend money making sure they can "play nice" with another OS? Linux "plays nice" with Windows because it needs to do so in order to gain a foothold in the Windows market-share.
Microsoft does not see any competitive advantage -- and, for what its worth, neither do I see any -- in marketing to anyone except those who use MS exclusively on a machine.
There are scores of unique things which don't have their names capitalized. The earth. The sun. The internet is now one of those things. Initially, it was named the Internet because it wasn't unique. "Internet" was only capitalized in order to differentiate it from other large internetworks of computers back in the early days.
Your very argument is flawed. The Earth should be capitalized, but "earth" may not be. Likewise with the Sun. If you refer to it as the name of the specific object (I live on Earth), it gets capitalized. Otherwise, (I enjoy having fresh earth between my fingers) it may not be.
Capitalization of proper nouns exists to increase comprehension. The Internet was named that way because it was unique. There were, agreed, many inter-networks, but the Internet was the "mother of all internets" as it aimed to connect them all into one global inter-network.
Corporations have intranets, but they may also have inter-networks with various vendors and customers -- these may not always be part of the Internet. So, as long as it is possible to have an internet that is not the Internet, the proper version should be capitalized.
Wired is merely hoping to be ahead of the curve in suggesting that it won't be long before all internets are part of the Internet -- and then it won't matter if the term is capitalized at all.
They totally shut down Afganistan's heroine business
That's really a shame, I'm tired of movies that always feature a hero, but never a heroine. Though I'm not sure I recall any Afghani-produced heroines, either...
I can't believe the government is dictating what kinds of people can take the protagonist role. Seems like a waste of taxpayer money to me.
But plonk down 49 USD on a USB printer and click Print, and it prints! If I plug my USB 10/100 NIC into my laptop under RH 9, it kernel panics and dies.
Everyone I've ever heard say "I want it to 'Just Work', and it doesn't undre Linux" has had a system that they "customized" into inoperability.
I have installed a countless amount of USB hardware on a great many Linux machines (running Mandrake, RedHat, SuSE, and even Gentoo), and the most work I ever had to do was install vendor-supplied drivers for CUPS. The only places I had any difficulty was where I encountered non-default installs that were "tweaked" by someone who didn't know what they were doing.
There are plenty of legitimate ease-of-use issues facing Linux and OSS, but everyone seems to harp on the solved ones.
Besides, OSS is not just Linux; I use Windows at work, and with the exception of a couple sparse tools (MSDE, the company-required McAfee), All the software I use is OSS. Not because I'm some strange OSS junkie, but because OSS alternatives are better quality in every case over the tools my corp. gives me. Again, there are places where OSS needs to improve, but already OSS software frequently trounces commercial software for similar tasks; the number of cases where that isn't so is steadily declining.
The business model is to take the product and make it useful, just like a steel mill or lumber yard. Take raw material, make it accessible to the common man (consumer), who trades you the money value of his time for the product.
This is a naive way to grasp economics; would you care to explain how this model explains service-based businesses? All OSS suggests is a move away from the "exchange good for trade token" model of economics to a more service- and expertise-based model. As OSS grows, it will move jobs away from production of materials and software and into solution-provision and problem-solving realms.
Linux does not have it and it is a logical result from the many years during which crypto was excluded as a matter of policy from the mainline kernel. Thanks god it is over now, so we might see proper auth framework for linux sometimes in the future.
Linux may not have the same built-in-crypto stuff than Win has, but PAM allows one to plug an authentication module -- even a "roll-your-own" -- into the auth system. With PAM on a system, there is no effective barrier to implementing something like SecurID on Linux. It's a simple matter of business -- there are more Windows machines out there in shops that can afford SecurID-like tech.
As Linux becomes more ubiquitous, you'll see implementations of stronger (expensive) security systems, as there will be a percieved demand.
There is a difference between learning a couple of new things and learning a couple of hundreds of new things. If it takes too much time to learn, sorry, I can't be bothered because I have real-life matters to take care of.
Perhaps, but you aren't reviewing software, either. It's one thing for a user to look at something and say "I don't have time to learn new skills right now"; it's quite another for a reviewer to say " sucks because it requires me to learn new things".
All these arguments make me wonder whether Linux zealots have real lives or not. Obviously they have more than enough time to remeber all those computer commands and tricks.
I'm not a zealot, acutally. I use Windows at work, and develop for SQL Server. It works just fine, and in fact I wouldn't ask for any changes (Ok, I'd rather use SyBase, but that's personal preference, not something I'd bother trying to advocate). But, I use Linux at home because it works better for what I want to do, plain and simple. My girlfriend uses Linux, she's not even a geek.
The whole point is that learning a new operating system has a learning curve -- no one is debating that. However, the pundits are crying that "Linux is hard to use", when it hasn't been "hard to use" for a couple of years -- it's just different. The learning curve for the average user to switch from Windows to Linux is only slightly steeper than moving from Windows to Mac. If that's too much of a curve for you to bother, fine. But that doesn't make a Mac (or Linux) "not ready for the Desktop".
Genuine technical shortcomings for specific applications (i.e. the infamous ext2 2GB file limit)
"I can't be bothered to learn anything new"
Seriously, I'm glad some article is pointing out that the vast majority of criticism about Linux from an end-user standpoint amounts to griping that it isn't exactly like Windows.
It's the same mentality that made people run progman.exe as their shell in Win95, and that gives me headaches from users who think their computer has been reformatted when their desktop colors change.
Newsflash, Linux is not Windows. Better or worse is largely a matter of opinion, but articles like those quoted in TFA are simply "different=worse" mentality and a clear example of pundits phoning it in. If you can't be bothered to learn something before reviewing it, I can't be bothered to read your articles or buy your magazine.
I've got a quick-and-dirty solution that I use for off-site backups of a relative's Windows network. This may not be exactly what you need, but hopefully it gets you started in the right direction.
First, I create backup files. To do this, I use the Backup utility built into Windows (for better or worse). Of course, this assumes you have enough freespace on your Windows volumes to accomodate the backups...
On the server side, I set up an FTP daemon and an OpenSSH daemon. The FTP daemon is configured to only accept connections from localhost, so one must log in via SSH to transfer via FTP.
Then, I use a simple Win script to
open a key-authenticated SSH session with PuTTY (configured to tunnel FTP connections)
establish an FTP connection with localhost on the Win machine (initiates tunnelled connection)
transfer the files with FTP over the secure link
This has worked fantastically well for me, and the only thing I didn't already have was PuTTY. It's also as secure as any other SSH activity (pretty darn secure), and if you make the SSH session log in as a restricted "backup" user, it becomes very difficult to use this system to escalate privileges on the server.
The counting of the votes is easy, and a well-solved problem. The vast majority of the work goes toward making sure those votes are counted with perfect accuracy (i.e. that the simple interface never "glitches" about sending the correct vote to the counter), and in securing the device against tampering with the vote count or interface before, during, and after the election.
It is exactly because of the potential problems that a printed, hand-countable, voter-verifiable paper audit trail should be an essential part of any e-voting rules.
According to the story text, the GPL-based version is being forked, and (hopefully) brought to the US. So, the fact that the initial version of the code was GPL is protecting its availability.
The original copyright-owners of the code have the right to change licenses -- whether to or from GPL or any other license. The "viral GPL" argument has to do with people other than the original author attempting to close the source-code for a product. If your product contains GPL code, you must either isolate and release that code, or you must make the containing product GPL. If, however, you own copyright to that code, you are free to change licenses -- you just can't enforce the new license on the users of the GNU license.:P
Linux evaluation versions usually lack (or limit access to) key proprietary features. RedHat evaluations, for example, used to allow only short-term access to the RedHat Network (now, you fill out a survey on occasion to renew your access).
Also, some Linux evaluation versions run from CD, and therefore don't have any installer or package manager. It all depends. However, rest assured that while it is possible to get an evaluation distro to run as almost-like-the-real-thing, you'd likely invest more in time than it costs to just buy the full, supported version.
In this case, as the Novell website says:
Check out this free 30-day evaluation of SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 complete with 30 days of free support & maintenance.(SLES 9 Evaluation Details)
In short, you need a serial number to get any updates from SuSE/Novell, or use any support.
While it is certainly possible to update software oneself, in a corporate environment, the convenience of having someone else (SuSE/Novell) verify (check signatures, review code, etc.) and distribute updates is well worth the cost of purchase.
so you can dump you free platform, buy an expensive one and run your free apps on them?
No, you can choose Solaris over a FOSS platform, get all the Solaris apps &c, and also run Linux apps. Given the choice between buying a decent Solaris machine for one application plus a decent Linux machine for another, or buying one really nice Solaris box that will do both jobs, I might just opt for the latter.
It's actually a very smart move by Sun - give people trying to decide between Solaris and Linux an easy out.
Back when I was a tech trainee at a local computer shop, I was asked to repair a PC that would no longer power on. This, mind you, was in the days when power switches actually switched power, not just initiated "soft" power sequences.
I plugged it in, hit the switch --- gooshy. Ick. Dead switch.
So, I crack the case open, yank the switch, and begin to install a replacement. I failed to notice, though, that I hadn't unplugged the power supply from the wall. As I'm about to hook up the last lead to the new switch, a nice bright arc jumps from the lead to the grounded case. Lots of smoke, and a nice little black-and-lumpy line that looked like someone took a tiny arcwelder to the case.
Unplugged the power supply, attached the switch, bolted it all back together -- works beautifully. Sigh of relief heaved.
Google's business is selling advertisements. We get the fringe benefit of having the search engine, but their perfectly transparent business model is selling those advertisements.
Actually, Google does quite a bit more than sell ads, they sell technology. The brunt of their revenue comes from licensing their search method and "backdoor" access to their database -- i.e. through API licensing and network appliances.
Actually, my examples are lists, of length two. Longer lists are an extension.
Your examples are logical operators, not lists as in Perl's @list context.
Whether they are "grammatical" or not I leave to the philosophers of language, noting only that I have seen both used by intelligent people.
Intelligent people frequently misuse logical, grammatical, and syntactic elements in English. It may not make them less intelligent, but it does make them poorer communicators.
I'm not sure where this is coming from. I was demonstrating that words such as "and" and "or" in English can have diverse meanings in a logical sense.
I'm aware of that, but your examples demonstrate a poorer understanding of English mechanics than you might realize. Unless, of course, you were deliberately being simplistic, in which case my comments merely add to yours. Your intent, however, was not clear.
There is actually ambiguity in the English language on this issue (natural languages are ambiguous? Who would have guessed?) For an even simpler example, consider the following signs: (1) No eating and drinking in the library. (2) No eating or drinking in the library. (3) Return your overdue books or you will get fined. In the first case, "and" really means "nor". In the second case, "or" really means "nor". In the third case, "or" really means "xor".
Actually, no.
No eating and drinking in the Library. This is grammatically incorrect unless you mean "and"; colloquial usage causes it to be interpreted as the intended "or".
No eating or drinking in the library. This is not supposed to be "nor". Nor is a clause for a neither, this is an "either". Parse: either eating or drinking in the library is forbidden. (The "No" at the head is a shorthand for "is forbidden" at the end).
Return your overdue books or you will get fined. This isn't XOR, but relies on the idea that the clause after OR will not be evaluated unless the first clause fails. In Perl: ($return_your_books) or (payfine($some_amount));
None of your examples apply to the ruling, since it is separate (list) syntax. The following are illegal: Sale, Advertisement, Possession for Commercial purposes, and Use of Mod Chips. The and is just syntactic sugar to indicate the close of the list.
The only way to phrase it so that one would have to commit all infractions would be along these lines: "You are committing a crime if you are engaged in the Sale, Advertisement, Possession , and Use of Mod Chips". However, it was "The Sale, Advertisement, Possession, and Use of Mod Chips are illegal". The latter phrasing puts the evaluation in list context, where $illegal is tested against each element in the list, returning true if one or more match. Note the presence of "are", which is the plural verb indicating the list context.
I have no issue using programming mentality to parse logical statements in language, but it's important to learn how the logic syntax of the target langauge (English) differs from your base of comparison.
Why develop any new tech? Partially, because the research that went into it helps with other projects, and partially because both the research and the resulting technology can be sold for pretty decent cash.
the economy is a myth- a shared myth, but still a myth.
Economies self-create, they are not shared myths. We do have an artificial economy filled with rules and laws to keep it "stable". Just because the artificial economy exists doesn't mean the real one is a myth; in fact, it's often hard to tell where the real and artificial economies intersect.
There SHOULD be no risk in new ideas at all
The real risk in any new idea is that you waste your time pursuing it. In our world, time is money; if you aren't out making money, you can't buy the things you need (food, clothing, etc.). So, if you want to take the time to develop new ideas, you need a backer.
The other thing about new ideas is that there is a plethora of them on a daily basis. If you want to inform people about your new idea, you have to have a voice. Money talks -- if you have none, you need a backer.
I never said these situations were the ideal economy. The idea that venture capitalists simply sit back and earn off the hard work of others, however, is just plain stupid. That isn't the way our economy works, and you can't have a modern capitalism without VC.
Just survive on wellfare until your idea gets off the ground.
And this is better than VC's "living off the hard-working"? How, exactly? I can't imagine that you'd like to pay 50-70% of your income in taxes to support people that think they have good ideas. Or, if you would, wouldn't you rather have some control over where your money went, like to people with ideas you think have merit?
In short, if you think capitalism is good, you have to accept the necessity of VC. If you think capitalism is bad, put your effort where your mouth is -- quit your job, join a socialist or communist "community" and prove us all wrong.
The fact that you think investors merely "suck off the hard work" of other people shows how little you (and most people) grasp economics. Without investment capital, many ideas cannot get off the ground; VC firms lose money all the time as they invest in new ideas.
The upshot of this is that people get the opportunity to try new things even if they can't afford to take the risk personally -- this actually feeds money into the economy, creates jobs, &c.
A binary bit holds one piece of information, it has two states but is still only one bit (piece) of information.
First, "binary bit" is redundant - "bit" is short for "binary digit". Second, your implication that 'bit' is equivalent to 'piece' is flawed, for the reason above.
Finally, the fact is that there are two states, and based on the article context, "states" is what they meant by "pieces of information".
hey have released the stuff on a non-revokable perpetual license (the GPL), so there is nothing stopping free use
That's where the monetary damages come into play. RedHat et al can charge for Linux (the binary distribution) and for the support, but they know better than to charge for a license; after all, there is already an extant license they've agreed to that is free (GPL).
This would be a lot like MS saying "here, IE is free under the terms of our EULA", then coming back to users and saying "you have to pay now". Users are likely to sue.
I'm reading a lot of supposition on this person's intentions. It ranges from "it's nice to see a guy admit his mistake" to "he's just saying this to cut back on the public backlash".
What I haven't seen is anything along these lines:
Avoid lawsuit by buying SCO licenses, knowing full well they have no standing ("cut losses").
Wait for SCO to advertise the deal
Publicly smack SCO for forcing their hand, making SCO lose serious credibility points and making it painfully clear that EV1 never thought SCO actually had legal standing.
Gamble that SCO will lose the "mother lawsuit" and then sue them for selling licenses to a product they had no right to license.
Sounds like a gamble, but a good way to nail the coffin of SCO if/when they lose; also a great way to send a message to anyone else that might try these SCO tactics.
Slashdot Mirror
But since we all start counting from 0, it's still 13. Or 0x0C. I like the idea that Linux is "C" years old.
MS Windows is competing with Linux. Why should they spend development dollars to support a "foreign" filesystem when they could spend the same money improving their product to beter compete?
MS isn't worried about how easy it is for Windows and Linux to co-exist. Read that sentence again. The reason why Windows and Linux do not always co-exist peacefully is precisely because MS doesn't care if Windows and Linux get along. They care that a Windows machine runs Windows in a reasonably sane manner. Windows is the dominant OS right now; why would they spend money making sure they can "play nice" with another OS? Linux "plays nice" with Windows because it needs to do so in order to gain a foothold in the Windows market-share.
Microsoft does not see any competitive advantage -- and, for what its worth, neither do I see any -- in marketing to anyone except those who use MS exclusively on a machine.
Capitalization of proper nouns exists to increase comprehension. The Internet was named that way because it was unique. There were, agreed, many inter-networks, but the Internet was the "mother of all internets" as it aimed to connect them all into one global inter-network.
Corporations have intranets, but they may also have inter-networks with various vendors and customers -- these may not always be part of the Internet. So, as long as it is possible to have an internet that is not the Internet, the proper version should be capitalized.
Wired is merely hoping to be ahead of the curve in suggesting that it won't be long before all internets are part of the Internet -- and then it won't matter if the term is capitalized at all.
They totally shut down Afganistan's heroine business
That's really a shame, I'm tired of movies that always feature a hero, but never a heroine. Though I'm not sure I recall any Afghani-produced heroines, either...
I can't believe the government is dictating what kinds of people can take the protagonist role. Seems like a waste of taxpayer money to me.
I have installed a countless amount of USB hardware on a great many Linux machines (running Mandrake, RedHat, SuSE, and even Gentoo), and the most work I ever had to do was install vendor-supplied drivers for CUPS. The only places I had any difficulty was where I encountered non-default installs that were "tweaked" by someone who didn't know what they were doing.
There are plenty of legitimate ease-of-use issues facing Linux and OSS, but everyone seems to harp on the solved ones.
Besides, OSS is not just Linux; I use Windows at work, and with the exception of a couple sparse tools (MSDE, the company-required McAfee), All the software I use is OSS. Not because I'm some strange OSS junkie, but because OSS alternatives are better quality in every case over the tools my corp. gives me. Again, there are places where OSS needs to improve, but already OSS software frequently trounces commercial software for similar tasks; the number of cases where that isn't so is steadily declining.This is a naive way to grasp economics; would you care to explain how this model explains service-based businesses? All OSS suggests is a move away from the "exchange good for trade token" model of economics to a more service- and expertise-based model. As OSS grows, it will move jobs away from production of materials and software and into solution-provision and problem-solving realms.
As Linux becomes more ubiquitous, you'll see implementations of stronger (expensive) security systems, as there will be a percieved demand.
The whole point is that learning a new operating system has a learning curve -- no one is debating that. However, the pundits are crying that "Linux is hard to use", when it hasn't been "hard to use" for a couple of years -- it's just different. The learning curve for the average user to switch from Windows to Linux is only slightly steeper than moving from Windows to Mac. If that's too much of a curve for you to bother, fine. But that doesn't make a Mac (or Linux) "not ready for the Desktop".
- Genuine technical shortcomings for specific applications (i.e. the infamous ext2 2GB file limit)
- "I can't be bothered to learn anything new"
Seriously, I'm glad some article is pointing out that the vast majority of criticism about Linux from an end-user standpoint amounts to griping that it isn't exactly like Windows.It's the same mentality that made people run progman.exe as their shell in Win95, and that gives me headaches from users who think their computer has been reformatted when their desktop colors change.
Newsflash, Linux is not Windows. Better or worse is largely a matter of opinion, but articles like those quoted in TFA are simply "different=worse" mentality and a clear example of pundits phoning it in. If you can't be bothered to learn something before reviewing it, I can't be bothered to read your articles or buy your magazine.
First, I create backup files. To do this, I use the Backup utility built into Windows (for better or worse). Of course, this assumes you have enough freespace on your Windows volumes to accomodate the backups...
On the server side, I set up an FTP daemon and an OpenSSH daemon. The FTP daemon is configured to only accept connections from localhost, so one must log in via SSH to transfer via FTP.
Then, I use a simple Win script to
This has worked fantastically well for me, and the only thing I didn't already have was PuTTY. It's also as secure as any other SSH activity (pretty darn secure), and if you make the SSH session log in as a restricted "backup" user, it becomes very difficult to use this system to escalate privileges on the server.
Precisely right.
The counting of the votes is easy, and a well-solved problem. The vast majority of the work goes toward making sure those votes are counted with perfect accuracy (i.e. that the simple interface never "glitches" about sending the correct vote to the counter), and in securing the device against tampering with the vote count or interface before, during, and after the election.
It is exactly because of the potential problems that a printed, hand-countable, voter-verifiable paper audit trail should be an essential part of any e-voting rules.
The original copyright-owners of the code have the right to change licenses -- whether to or from GPL or any other license. The "viral GPL" argument has to do with people other than the original author attempting to close the source-code for a product. If your product contains GPL code, you must either isolate and release that code, or you must make the containing product GPL. If, however, you own copyright to that code, you are free to change licenses -- you just can't enforce the new license on the users of the GNU license.
Also, some Linux evaluation versions run from CD, and therefore don't have any installer or package manager. It all depends. However, rest assured that while it is possible to get an evaluation distro to run as almost-like-the-real-thing, you'd likely invest more in time than it costs to just buy the full, supported version.
In this case, as the Novell website says:In short, you need a serial number to get any updates from SuSE/Novell, or use any support.
While it is certainly possible to update software oneself, in a corporate environment, the convenience of having someone else (SuSE/Novell) verify (check signatures, review code, etc.) and distribute updates is well worth the cost of purchase.
It's actually a very smart move by Sun - give people trying to decide between Solaris and Linux an easy out.
Back when I was a tech trainee at a local computer shop, I was asked to repair a PC that would no longer power on. This, mind you, was in the days when power switches actually switched power, not just initiated "soft" power sequences.
I plugged it in, hit the switch --- gooshy. Ick. Dead switch.
So, I crack the case open, yank the switch, and begin to install a replacement. I failed to notice, though, that I hadn't unplugged the power supply from the wall. As I'm about to hook up the last lead to the new switch, a nice bright arc jumps from the lead to the grounded case. Lots of smoke, and a nice little black-and-lumpy line that looked like someone took a tiny arcwelder to the case.
Unplugged the power supply, attached the switch, bolted it all back together -- works beautifully. Sigh of relief heaved.
Your examples are logical operators, not lists as in Perl's @list context.
Whether they are "grammatical" or not I leave to the philosophers of language, noting only that I have seen both used by intelligent people.
Intelligent people frequently misuse logical, grammatical, and syntactic elements in English. It may not make them less intelligent, but it does make them poorer communicators.
I'm not sure where this is coming from. I was demonstrating that words such as "and" and "or" in English can have diverse meanings in a logical sense.
I'm aware of that, but your examples demonstrate a poorer understanding of English mechanics than you might realize. Unless, of course, you were deliberately being simplistic, in which case my comments merely add to yours. Your intent, however, was not clear.
- No eating and drinking in the Library. This is grammatically incorrect unless you mean "and"; colloquial usage causes it to be interpreted as the intended "or".
- No eating or drinking in the library. This is not supposed to be "nor". Nor is a clause for a neither, this is an "either". Parse: either eating or drinking in the library is forbidden. (The "No" at the head is a shorthand for "is forbidden" at the end).
- Return your overdue books or you will get fined. This isn't XOR, but relies on the idea that the clause after OR will not be evaluated unless the first clause fails. In Perl: ($return_your_books) or (payfine($some_amount));
None of your examples apply to the ruling, since it is separate (list) syntax. The following are illegal: Sale, Advertisement, Possession for Commercial purposes, and Use of Mod Chips. The and is just syntactic sugar to indicate the close of the list.The only way to phrase it so that one would have to commit all infractions would be along these lines: "You are committing a crime if you are engaged in the Sale, Advertisement, Possession , and Use of Mod Chips". However, it was "The Sale, Advertisement, Possession, and Use of Mod Chips are illegal". The latter phrasing puts the evaluation in list context, where $illegal is tested against each element in the list, returning true if one or more match. Note the presence of "are", which is the plural verb indicating the list context.
I have no issue using programming mentality to parse logical statements in language, but it's important to learn how the logic syntax of the target langauge (English) differs from your base of comparison.
Why develop any new tech? Partially, because the research that went into it helps with other projects, and partially because both the research and the resulting technology can be sold for pretty decent cash.
the economy is a myth- a shared myth, but still a myth.
Economies self-create, they are not shared myths. We do have an artificial economy filled with rules and laws to keep it "stable". Just because the artificial economy exists doesn't mean the real one is a myth; in fact, it's often hard to tell where the real and artificial economies intersect.
There SHOULD be no risk in new ideas at all
The real risk in any new idea is that you waste your time pursuing it. In our world, time is money; if you aren't out making money, you can't buy the things you need (food, clothing, etc.). So, if you want to take the time to develop new ideas, you need a backer.
The other thing about new ideas is that there is a plethora of them on a daily basis. If you want to inform people about your new idea, you have to have a voice. Money talks -- if you have none, you need a backer.
I never said these situations were the ideal economy. The idea that venture capitalists simply sit back and earn off the hard work of others, however, is just plain stupid. That isn't the way our economy works, and you can't have a modern capitalism without VC.
Just survive on wellfare until your idea gets off the ground.
And this is better than VC's "living off the hard-working"? How, exactly? I can't imagine that you'd like to pay 50-70% of your income in taxes to support people that think they have good ideas. Or, if you would, wouldn't you rather have some control over where your money went, like to people with ideas you think have merit?
In short, if you think capitalism is good, you have to accept the necessity of VC. If you think capitalism is bad, put your effort where your mouth is -- quit your job, join a socialist or communist "community" and prove us all wrong.
The fact that you think investors merely "suck off the hard work" of other people shows how little you (and most people) grasp economics. Without investment capital, many ideas cannot get off the ground; VC firms lose money all the time as they invest in new ideas.
The upshot of this is that people get the opportunity to try new things even if they can't afford to take the risk personally -- this actually feeds money into the economy, creates jobs, &c.
Maybe because:
First, "binary bit" is redundant - "bit" is short for "binary digit". Second, your implication that 'bit' is equivalent to 'piece' is flawed, for the reason above.
Finally, the fact is that there are two states, and based on the article context, "states" is what they meant by "pieces of information".
That's where the monetary damages come into play. RedHat et al can charge for Linux (the binary distribution) and for the support, but they know better than to charge for a license; after all, there is already an extant license they've agreed to that is free (GPL).
This would be a lot like MS saying "here, IE is free under the terms of our EULA", then coming back to users and saying "you have to pay now". Users are likely to sue.
What I haven't seen is anything along these lines:
Sounds like a gamble, but a good way to nail the coffin of SCO if/when they lose; also a great way to send a message to anyone else that might try these SCO tactics.