Cripes.. relax, laugh, it's funny, very funny. Any CTO that is so lacking in the ability to both understand a good Zork joke and to be able to laugh at it is not someone who should be a CTO-- they don't have enough real world experience in computing nor are they human enough to lead their IT organization.
Besides, you apparently never use MS software. I think my favorite is the flight simulator embedded in Excel. Should we now abandon Office because it's too frivolous?
Ooops. I just fed a troll, didn't I? Oh well, life goes on.
Please explain why strongly supporting the GPL prevents you from using KDE if GNOME is too frustrating from a technical standpoint. The entire official KDE environment is available under a Free Software license (either GPL or LGPL) and the Qt library itself is now available under the GPL (which admittedly isn't friendly to creating proprietary software on top of Qt, and also brings up the question of whether I can develop proprietary software based on KDE libraries if the KDE libraries depend in turn on Qt-- but as a GPL supporter there is no need to feel sorry for those who can't develop proprietary software with Qt).
There is no reason to use GNOME if it's not up to your feature/stability standards. I could understand being a C programmer hooked on gtk. Or a Perl developer disappointed in the lack of a recent module for Qt/KDE. But that's about it. In either case, one won't die from learning C++ or Python (now GPL compatible as well).
Of course some of the language in the ruling is not exact. As much as all good citizens would like law to be exact, it ain't. That's why we have a large number of people involved in drafting laws, and another large group of people interpreting them and making rulings on them. In extremely important cases, you have 12 people come in and hear the arguments for and against and make a ruling. This is why there are several layers to the court system, so that poor individual decisions at the beginning levels can be revised or examined by later levels. The final level is a group of nine individuals who make determinations in particularly tough cases.
Pathetic example: we all agree that killing other people is wrong most of the time, but that sometimes it may be okay or even desirable. But you can't simply spell out most of this stuff, so you have to have a way for human judgement to enter. I mean, at what point does self-defense become aggressive retribution. Even if you can define this exactly in English, you still need to have someone come into the case and look at the facts and decide which way this case looks according to the law.
I'd say 700,000 hits a month is famous enough. It was certainly famous enough that someone else used typos to redirect poor typists to advertisements wholly unrelated to Cartoon Joe. But I'd never heard of it before today. Fame just ain't what it used to be.:)
Moreso than simple home accounting software, I'm interested in electronic tax filing. Any plans to integrate GnuCash with any existing filing services, or to integrate tax features into the program (if there are any, I apologize for overlooking them)? As tax preparation and filing are services many of us are comfortable paying a fee for (especially online), I don't wonder if there isn't a revenue stream in there somewhere, as well.
Doesn't this say more about the bank than the software? I won't mention specific banks since I work for one of them (and not in an area where I'd know anything about online banking and related topics), but I've seen where you can download account history as.qif or even.csv files, both of which I'd think would work to get bank account info into GnuCash (I haven't tried the software, finding the online account access to be sufficient). It looks to me like a lot of the convenience features in Quicken rely on cooperation from the financial institution.
Of course this would require you to log in to your financial institution to grab the file, but if you can do it manually, then you can automate it. But I'm guessing building what amounts to a screenscraper for banks that don't provide account information downloads as.qif or.csv/.txt would be painful at best.
My only question, and this is serious, is: do we see as much of Angelina Jolie in "Tomb Raider" as we did of Halle Berry in "Swordfish"? Given that Matrix-copy special effects are now the norm, rather than the exception (remember how jump cutting was all the rage after "Bram Stoker's Dracula" in the early 90's), and story development seem to have been completely abandoned (following a death spiral throughout the 90's), there is little left to distinguish these wannabe action films other than degree of titillation.
In fact, where are the good jokes and characters with character like we had in action films like "Lethal Weapon 2". I saw "Swordfish" last night and I only laughed at how bad all the computer stuff was, and never once found myself caring about the welfare of ANY of the characters (well, except maybe Ginger). You know how Star Wars spawned Space Balls, Lethal Weapon/Bond/Die Hard spawned Spy Hard and Loaded Weapon, and Scream (among others) inspired Scary Movie? No one will be making a Matrix/Swordfish sendup, they are already laughable.
All their inability to "upgrade" to their own OS in a timely fashion shows is that they are way behind the curve and that if business has serious network needs they should not be relying on NT/Win2K for any of it since it is basically a big game of catch-up, right?
But what it also says to me, as I watch mergers and acquisitions all across the spectrum is that our corporate rules around mergers and acquisitions are a little screwy. I mean, obviously Hotmail is helping MS somehow, but as an observer, I don't get it. How does providing free email on a network that isn't even powered primarily by an MS OS relate at all to MS' normal business of writing operating systems for desktops and office software? All I see is that they are doing their best to keep it from falling into the hands of Sun, Oracle, AOL, or the like.
No kidding. Not to mention that you can't freaking mention them as the bad guys every other story, but then rush to run reviews of their movies (no matter how good the movies are)-- witness the recent reviews of Atlantis (by CmdrTaco himself, does he think Disney isn't using his $7.50 ticket price to pay the lawyers at the MPAA?) and Tomb Raider (by Jon Katz). Then there are the endless promotions of DVD this or that. If you're going to excoriate the MPAA in print, I don't mind if you catch a movie once in a while, but you shouldn't talk about it.
I don't know who sold you the line that most people don't care about 3rd party cookies. Except maybe the same person who told you "what they don't know can't hurt them".
I, for one, consistently refuse third party cookies using either IE4.5 on Mac OS or Konqueror under Linux. But this is because I get a little message each time a cookie is sent and I have to choose. The public has only been web browsing seriously for about four years and is generally uneducated about the kinds of databases that are being built from the collected data. But as they become more aware, I think you'll find that no one will want to accept 3rd party cookies-- even those that pass whatever minimum standards MS implements here.
Hmmm. I've never thought to include a user agent check to tell a user they've gone to the dark side, and could they please see the light. Interesting idea.
As I read this article it sounded like a perfect opportunity for MS to screw small business and amateur web designers out of being able to reach customers or interact with them meaningfully. Of course, I was only half paying attention since most of the time I was thinking, "why bother? IE6 won't run on Linux and I wouldn't use it over Konqueror even if it did."
I support the GPL, but let's make sure to point out that GPL software is basically a community ownership or charity situation. Which is great, epsecially for making sure that the MS'es of the world don't simply go around accepting charity they don't need or skimming off a community in which they refuse to participate.
But BSD is much better for something which is produced from tax funding (i.e. developed at a university or government lab). Everyone has a right to the BSD version produced on the public tab in the lab. But if Microsoft (or hopefully someone else entirely) comes along and adds substantial value to that codebase, they have a right to not release the source to the changes (of course, I have a right to ignore them in the process). And similarly, GPL nuts have the right to GPL their new value-added version (and Microsoft has the right to whine and lie about the GPL).
Python is an interpreted language. It would be almost impossible to make a commercial app in Python, sell it, and not release the source code. The source code is the program. This has to do with being able to fork, reuse, or mutilate parts of the codebase for the interpreter itself.
Um, while I'm glad Linus got Linux going, and I'm glad that someone felt strongly about freedom and worked on GNOME (although I like KDE a lot more at the moment)... how is it we're supposed to cheer for Amiga? Are they releasing this code under the GPL? Will this really be any more useful down the road than Palm OS? I didn't see anything in the screenshots to indicate anything other than some developer has a very cool looking GUI.
For that matter are there any decent examples of micropayments for any business-- online or off? The only thing that even comes close would be long-distance phone service before all these calling plans went into effect. Even then the payments weren't micro, they were billed in lumps, but the unit charges were per minute.
I wouldn't mind paying a one-time flat fee for a micropayment service ("MicroPay"), if it allowed me to use several sites (like Salon, WSJ, CR, WebNapster, etc) that then used MicroPay to send me a monthly bill.
But as it is, no one is creating such a thing that I know of and making it easy to use. I know PayPal comes close, but frankly that's a PITA compared to what you'd need to have for me to care. I'd rather maintain subscriptions to several print magazines (or even online journals) than mess around with PayPal every time I want to read an article.
This is the only post in the whole thread that makes sense, although you didn't need ten bullet points to get to the meat. "no one language is good enough"... doesn't that pretty much say it all. Is there any even marginally competent programmer out there who hasn't programmed in at least two languages? Why not switch between languages during the introductory course to get at concepts that are more universal?
Shouldn't a basic concepts class have a decent survey of various languages as a significant piece of what makes it useful? Like, what is the difference between functional, object-oriented, procedural, etc? Like, what are X language's strengths and weaknesses? How does a compiler work? How does this differ from interpreted languages? And most importantly, can you write at least "Hello World" in assembler or ML, so that just once in your programming life you have to understand binary, hex, and the fundamental structure of a computer that much better.
Don't be stupid-- did you even read my post? I never misinterpreted their report. I clearly stated why it is mostly irrelevant to those of us who are not product managers at hardware and software companies-- it measures sales, not actual penetration. Your comment about 486's in the basement makes it sound like you may be biased. Kind of like when Miller calls Linux a "niche" and Ballmer calls it a cancer. It's nothing more than peer pressure and scare tactics at the corporate level.
First of all, I think the sample is rather small. Around 750 people-- who were asked about this issue during a phone call. There is some wiggle room for error that they don't mention at all. I'm no statistician, so I can't say what the plus/minus factor is.
Second, this reports only sales of servers-- yes, I know they're asking people who have had a chance to install a new OS onto new hardware, but what percentage of the installed base of servers is actually new within the last three months? How many older servers are finding new lives or being passed along using Linux or a BSD?
What they are not taking into account, and given their sponsorship by MS, we can only assume they are not going to mention unless someone else does first, is that this doesn't mean that there aren't a lot more Linux servers out there than the 8.6% or whatever it was. This also seems to deliberately obscure the fact that you don't need a server class machine purchase to obtain a Linux server. Any new Pentium 3 with a large enough hard-drive is more than capable of handling intranet services for smaller businesses. Stuff like web-proxies, central DB, firewall, web development test system, custom programming, file server, etc. No reason to go buy a really expensive server for a lot of this stuff if you only have 2-50 employees.
The upshot of the way they present this, by trying to say that previous Linux studies were wrong when it doesn't sound to me like they measured the same thing at all, seems to me to be a strategy designed to discourage people from considering Linux seriously. And frankly, unless I'm a product manager at Red Hat or VALinux why do I even care about penetration? The three things I care about are technical quality/reliability, usability, and cost to license. The only way any of these are in danger from penetration statistics is if there is so much incompatibility between my server and the rest of the world that usability becomes a distant pipe dream. And from what I've seen Linux plays pretty nice with other OSs.
Judging by the number of responses to this story expressing hopes that this will result in a serious drop in the number of tampon ads said "nerd" will have to view, I can only conclude that there is a sizable group on Slashdot who are way too uptight and probably need to turn off the TV altogether and go out in the world and meet a real woman at least once before they die. (apologies fo r the run-on sentence)
I guess that depends where you are a manager. If you manage a Taco Bell, your example seems to work just fine. Work people as hard as possible, giving them the legally required breaks so they remain standing long enough to slap more tacos together.
But if you are in an office environment a good share of the work is mental-- especially the more professional the work gets. Writing/communications, working up ad campaigns, programming, managing products, managing people... even engineering and academia-- these are things that productivity can not be measured in widgets or in hours, but in results and achieved objectives.
Any professional is going to be given a budget to work against, whether this is an amount of time, or money to spend, the return on investment from the point of view of each next higher layer is all that matters. Completely degrading workplaces that lack basic privacy are not going to foster better results, it will simply stress people out who will then make mistakes.
In fact, many proprietary, closed-source products suffer from the same sort of problems that ASPs have. Look at the binary incompatibility issues with pre-PPC mac to Mac OS 8.# and 9 to Mac OS X. Look at the binary incompatibility of RedHat 6.2 to 7.0-- on the same chips no less. And somewhere along the way, I'm sure there are products that did not manage to migrate from DOS to Windows to Win2k. My point being not to denigrate any of these but to demonstrate that binary-only has its dangers.
If I select an application for one archictecture, and the company making the application is out of business or unwilling to port to the next platform, I am hostage to the platform that I'm started on.
Personally I feel that art is done a tremendous disservice by government programs designed to encourage it, but I feel this way because they subsidize art that no one likes, but some artist has been able to explain on a grant form. However, as long as we are going to have government funded arts programs, we cannot prohibit religious themed art from the galleries. To do so is to invite an ongoing debate about what exacly makes an artwork religious or not.
That said, a commentary art piece on religion is not an exercise of religion, it is an exercise of speech. And although the government partially sponsors the museum, there is no implicit endorsement of the viewpoints in the museum-- in fact, given the scope of most large museums, I would be surprised that there weren't also numerous works and artifacts depicting various pro-religion views. The nature of a museum is to display work that is considered of historical or artistic import, in this case, as determined by the standards of the community. Personally, I'd rather see finely crafted, historically significant Nativity scenes in the museum than art that has little merit.
A nativity scene on the Capitol lawn, however, is not a commentary on religion, it is a celebratory display for one specific religion. It is displayed only at the time of the holiday and for the distinct purpose of celebrating a religious event. There is no opportunity for an opposing viewpoint. There is no qualification for inclusion-- it simply is there because of religious tradition. And it smacks of the creation of an official religion.
The failing here is in the selection process for the directors of the museum, not in the Constitutionality of the funding of the museum, per se. The failing comes in the form of choosing directors who do not have the public interest at heart when they go to select work for display. They are poor stewards who do not make good decisions. Good stewards would work dissent and critical artwork into a display that got its audience through excellence, rather than scandal.
But as I've said, I do not favor public funding for arts. Nor do I approve of tax supports for business developments of any sort. Taxes, as they stand, are used to prop up all sorts of social agendas-- from home-ownership to subsidizing single motherhood to speed-limits to "educational" programs. Some would say this is all very inappropriate and I would agree. But to make the first victim of this notion the arts is to guarantee that once we've stopped funding "Piss Christ" that we won't hear another word about how our tax money is being used to promote unproven social welfare strategies.
In the case that prompted this supreme court ruling, the power consumption records were subpoenaed after the police received information from snitches. I would hope the power companies and the police have better things to do that presuppose criminal enterprise based on increases in power usage-- especially since it would take a bit of computer time to calculate true rises in consumption.
Please learn the difference between a museum, which intends by design to encourage discourse, discussion, and thoughtful consideration and a Capitol building, designed to encourage respect for authority and good citizenship.
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Cripes.. relax, laugh, it's funny, very funny. Any CTO that is so lacking in the ability to both understand a good Zork joke and to be able to laugh at it is not someone who should be a CTO-- they don't have enough real world experience in computing nor are they human enough to lead their IT organization.
Besides, you apparently never use MS software. I think my favorite is the flight simulator embedded in Excel. Should we now abandon Office because it's too frivolous?
Ooops. I just fed a troll, didn't I? Oh well, life goes on.
Please explain why strongly supporting the GPL prevents you from using KDE if GNOME is too frustrating from a technical standpoint. The entire official KDE environment is available under a Free Software license (either GPL or LGPL) and the Qt library itself is now available under the GPL (which admittedly isn't friendly to creating proprietary software on top of Qt, and also brings up the question of whether I can develop proprietary software based on KDE libraries if the KDE libraries depend in turn on Qt-- but as a GPL supporter there is no need to feel sorry for those who can't develop proprietary software with Qt).
There is no reason to use GNOME if it's not up to your feature/stability standards. I could understand being a C programmer hooked on gtk. Or a Perl developer disappointed in the lack of a recent module for Qt/KDE. But that's about it. In either case, one won't die from learning C++ or Python (now GPL compatible as well).
Of course some of the language in the ruling is not exact. As much as all good citizens would like law to be exact, it ain't. That's why we have a large number of people involved in drafting laws, and another large group of people interpreting them and making rulings on them. In extremely important cases, you have 12 people come in and hear the arguments for and against and make a ruling. This is why there are several layers to the court system, so that poor individual decisions at the beginning levels can be revised or examined by later levels. The final level is a group of nine individuals who make determinations in particularly tough cases.
:)
Pathetic example: we all agree that killing other people is wrong most of the time, but that sometimes it may be okay or even desirable. But you can't simply spell out most of this stuff, so you have to have a way for human judgement to enter. I mean, at what point does self-defense become aggressive retribution. Even if you can define this exactly in English, you still need to have someone come into the case and look at the facts and decide which way this case looks according to the law.
I'd say 700,000 hits a month is famous enough. It was certainly famous enough that someone else used typos to redirect poor typists to advertisements wholly unrelated to Cartoon Joe. But I'd never heard of it before today. Fame just ain't what it used to be.
Moreso than simple home accounting software, I'm interested in electronic tax filing. Any plans to integrate GnuCash with any existing filing services, or to integrate tax features into the program (if there are any, I apologize for overlooking them)? As tax preparation and filing are services many of us are comfortable paying a fee for (especially online), I don't wonder if there isn't a revenue stream in there somewhere, as well.
Doesn't this say more about the bank than the software? I won't mention specific banks since I work for one of them (and not in an area where I'd know anything about online banking and related topics), but I've seen where you can download account history as .qif or even .csv files, both of which I'd think would work to get bank account info into GnuCash (I haven't tried the software, finding the online account access to be sufficient). It looks to me like a lot of the convenience features in Quicken rely on cooperation from the financial institution.
.qif or .csv/.txt would be painful at best.
Of course this would require you to log in to your financial institution to grab the file, but if you can do it manually, then you can automate it. But I'm guessing building what amounts to a screenscraper for banks that don't provide account information downloads as
My only question, and this is serious, is: do we see as much of Angelina Jolie in "Tomb Raider" as we did of Halle Berry in "Swordfish"? Given that Matrix-copy special effects are now the norm, rather than the exception (remember how jump cutting was all the rage after "Bram Stoker's Dracula" in the early 90's), and story development seem to have been completely abandoned (following a death spiral throughout the 90's), there is little left to distinguish these wannabe action films other than degree of titillation.
In fact, where are the good jokes and characters with character like we had in action films like "Lethal Weapon 2". I saw "Swordfish" last night and I only laughed at how bad all the computer stuff was, and never once found myself caring about the welfare of ANY of the characters (well, except maybe Ginger). You know how Star Wars spawned Space Balls, Lethal Weapon/Bond/Die Hard spawned Spy Hard and Loaded Weapon, and Scream (among others) inspired Scary Movie? No one will be making a Matrix/Swordfish sendup, they are already laughable.
All their inability to "upgrade" to their own OS in a timely fashion shows is that they are way behind the curve and that if business has serious network needs they should not be relying on NT/Win2K for any of it since it is basically a big game of catch-up, right?
But what it also says to me, as I watch mergers and acquisitions all across the spectrum is that our corporate rules around mergers and acquisitions are a little screwy. I mean, obviously Hotmail is helping MS somehow, but as an observer, I don't get it. How does providing free email on a network that isn't even powered primarily by an MS OS relate at all to MS' normal business of writing operating systems for desktops and office software? All I see is that they are doing their best to keep it from falling into the hands of Sun, Oracle, AOL, or the like.
No kidding. Not to mention that you can't freaking mention them as the bad guys every other story, but then rush to run reviews of their movies (no matter how good the movies are)-- witness the recent reviews of Atlantis (by CmdrTaco himself, does he think Disney isn't using his $7.50 ticket price to pay the lawyers at the MPAA?) and Tomb Raider (by Jon Katz). Then there are the endless promotions of DVD this or that. If you're going to excoriate the MPAA in print, I don't mind if you catch a movie once in a while, but you shouldn't talk about it.
Thanks for clearing that up. I didn't see any touting of this in obvious places on the python.org site.
I don't know who sold you the line that most people don't care about 3rd party cookies. Except maybe the same person who told you "what they don't know can't hurt them".
I, for one, consistently refuse third party cookies using either IE4.5 on Mac OS or Konqueror under Linux. But this is because I get a little message each time a cookie is sent and I have to choose. The public has only been web browsing seriously for about four years and is generally uneducated about the kinds of databases that are being built from the collected data. But as they become more aware, I think you'll find that no one will want to accept 3rd party cookies-- even those that pass whatever minimum standards MS implements here.
Hmmm. I've never thought to include a user agent check to tell a user they've gone to the dark side, and could they please see the light. Interesting idea.
As I read this article it sounded like a perfect opportunity for MS to screw small business and amateur web designers out of being able to reach customers or interact with them meaningfully. Of course, I was only half paying attention since most of the time I was thinking, "why bother? IE6 won't run on Linux and I wouldn't use it over Konqueror even if it did."
I support the GPL, but let's make sure to point out that GPL software is basically a community ownership or charity situation. Which is great, epsecially for making sure that the MS'es of the world don't simply go around accepting charity they don't need or skimming off a community in which they refuse to participate.
But BSD is much better for something which is produced from tax funding (i.e. developed at a university or government lab). Everyone has a right to the BSD version produced on the public tab in the lab. But if Microsoft (or hopefully someone else entirely) comes along and adds substantial value to that codebase, they have a right to not release the source to the changes (of course, I have a right to ignore them in the process). And similarly, GPL nuts have the right to GPL their new value-added version (and Microsoft has the right to whine and lie about the GPL).
Python is an interpreted language. It would be almost impossible to make a commercial app in Python, sell it, and not release the source code. The source code is the program. This has to do with being able to fork, reuse, or mutilate parts of the codebase for the interpreter itself.
Um, while I'm glad Linus got Linux going, and I'm glad that someone felt strongly about freedom and worked on GNOME (although I like KDE a lot more at the moment)... how is it we're supposed to cheer for Amiga? Are they releasing this code under the GPL? Will this really be any more useful down the road than Palm OS? I didn't see anything in the screenshots to indicate anything other than some developer has a very cool looking GUI.
For that matter are there any decent examples of micropayments for any business-- online or off? The only thing that even comes close would be long-distance phone service before all these calling plans went into effect. Even then the payments weren't micro, they were billed in lumps, but the unit charges were per minute.
I wouldn't mind paying a one-time flat fee for a micropayment service ("MicroPay"), if it allowed me to use several sites (like Salon, WSJ, CR, WebNapster, etc) that then used MicroPay to send me a monthly bill.
But as it is, no one is creating such a thing that I know of and making it easy to use. I know PayPal comes close, but frankly that's a PITA compared to what you'd need to have for me to care. I'd rather maintain subscriptions to several print magazines (or even online journals) than mess around with PayPal every time I want to read an article.
This is the only post in the whole thread that makes sense, although you didn't need ten bullet points to get to the meat. "no one language is good enough"... doesn't that pretty much say it all. Is there any even marginally competent programmer out there who hasn't programmed in at least two languages? Why not switch between languages during the introductory course to get at concepts that are more universal?
Shouldn't a basic concepts class have a decent survey of various languages as a significant piece of what makes it useful? Like, what is the difference between functional, object-oriented, procedural, etc? Like, what are X language's strengths and weaknesses? How does a compiler work? How does this differ from interpreted languages? And most importantly, can you write at least "Hello World" in assembler or ML, so that just once in your programming life you have to understand binary, hex, and the fundamental structure of a computer that much better.
Don't be stupid-- did you even read my post? I never misinterpreted their report. I clearly stated why it is mostly irrelevant to those of us who are not product managers at hardware and software companies-- it measures sales, not actual penetration. Your comment about 486's in the basement makes it sound like you may be biased. Kind of like when Miller calls Linux a "niche" and Ballmer calls it a cancer. It's nothing more than peer pressure and scare tactics at the corporate level.
First of all, I think the sample is rather small. Around 750 people-- who were asked about this issue during a phone call. There is some wiggle room for error that they don't mention at all. I'm no statistician, so I can't say what the plus/minus factor is.
Second, this reports only sales of servers-- yes, I know they're asking people who have had a chance to install a new OS onto new hardware, but what percentage of the installed base of servers is actually new within the last three months? How many older servers are finding new lives or being passed along using Linux or a BSD?
What they are not taking into account, and given their sponsorship by MS, we can only assume they are not going to mention unless someone else does first, is that this doesn't mean that there aren't a lot more Linux servers out there than the 8.6% or whatever it was. This also seems to deliberately obscure the fact that you don't need a server class machine purchase to obtain a Linux server. Any new Pentium 3 with a large enough hard-drive is more than capable of handling intranet services for smaller businesses. Stuff like web-proxies, central DB, firewall, web development test system, custom programming, file server, etc. No reason to go buy a really expensive server for a lot of this stuff if you only have 2-50 employees.
The upshot of the way they present this, by trying to say that previous Linux studies were wrong when it doesn't sound to me like they measured the same thing at all, seems to me to be a strategy designed to discourage people from considering Linux seriously. And frankly, unless I'm a product manager at Red Hat or VALinux why do I even care about penetration? The three things I care about are technical quality/reliability, usability, and cost to license. The only way any of these are in danger from penetration statistics is if there is so much incompatibility between my server and the rest of the world that usability becomes a distant pipe dream. And from what I've seen Linux plays pretty nice with other OSs.
It's not even possible in the U.S.-- so why worry about China? :)
Judging by the number of responses to this story expressing hopes that this will result in a serious drop in the number of tampon ads said "nerd" will have to view, I can only conclude that there is a sizable group on Slashdot who are way too uptight and probably need to turn off the TV altogether and go out in the world and meet a real woman at least once before they die. (apologies fo r the run-on sentence)
I guess that depends where you are a manager. If you manage a Taco Bell, your example seems to work just fine. Work people as hard as possible, giving them the legally required breaks so they remain standing long enough to slap more tacos together.
But if you are in an office environment a good share of the work is mental-- especially the more professional the work gets. Writing/communications, working up ad campaigns, programming, managing products, managing people... even engineering and academia-- these are things that productivity can not be measured in widgets or in hours, but in results and achieved objectives.
Any professional is going to be given a budget to work against, whether this is an amount of time, or money to spend, the return on investment from the point of view of each next higher layer is all that matters. Completely degrading workplaces that lack basic privacy are not going to foster better results, it will simply stress people out who will then make mistakes.
In fact, many proprietary, closed-source products suffer from the same sort of problems that ASPs have. Look at the binary incompatibility issues with pre-PPC mac to Mac OS 8.# and 9 to Mac OS X. Look at the binary incompatibility of RedHat 6.2 to 7.0-- on the same chips no less. And somewhere along the way, I'm sure there are products that did not manage to migrate from DOS to Windows to Win2k. My point being not to denigrate any of these but to demonstrate that binary-only has its dangers.
If I select an application for one archictecture, and the company making the application is out of business or unwilling to port to the next platform, I am hostage to the platform that I'm started on.
Personally I feel that art is done a tremendous disservice by government programs designed to encourage it, but I feel this way because they subsidize art that no one likes, but some artist has been able to explain on a grant form. However, as long as we are going to have government funded arts programs, we cannot prohibit religious themed art from the galleries. To do so is to invite an ongoing debate about what exacly makes an artwork religious or not.
That said, a commentary art piece on religion is not an exercise of religion, it is an exercise of speech. And although the government partially sponsors the museum, there is no implicit endorsement of the viewpoints in the museum-- in fact, given the scope of most large museums, I would be surprised that there weren't also numerous works and artifacts depicting various pro-religion views. The nature of a museum is to display work that is considered of historical or artistic import, in this case, as determined by the standards of the community. Personally, I'd rather see finely crafted, historically significant Nativity scenes in the museum than art that has little merit.
A nativity scene on the Capitol lawn, however, is not a commentary on religion, it is a celebratory display for one specific religion. It is displayed only at the time of the holiday and for the distinct purpose of celebrating a religious event. There is no opportunity for an opposing viewpoint. There is no qualification for inclusion-- it simply is there because of religious tradition. And it smacks of the creation of an official religion.
The failing here is in the selection process for the directors of the museum, not in the Constitutionality of the funding of the museum, per se. The failing comes in the form of choosing directors who do not have the public interest at heart when they go to select work for display. They are poor stewards who do not make good decisions. Good stewards would work dissent and critical artwork into a display that got its audience through excellence, rather than scandal.
But as I've said, I do not favor public funding for arts. Nor do I approve of tax supports for business developments of any sort. Taxes, as they stand, are used to prop up all sorts of social agendas-- from home-ownership to subsidizing single motherhood to speed-limits to "educational" programs. Some would say this is all very inappropriate and I would agree. But to make the first victim of this notion the arts is to guarantee that once we've stopped funding "Piss Christ" that we won't hear another word about how our tax money is being used to promote unproven social welfare strategies.
In the case that prompted this supreme court ruling, the power consumption records were subpoenaed after the police received information from snitches. I would hope the power companies and the police have better things to do that presuppose criminal enterprise based on increases in power usage-- especially since it would take a bit of computer time to calculate true rises in consumption.
Please learn the difference between a museum, which intends by design to encourage discourse, discussion, and thoughtful consideration and a Capitol building, designed to encourage respect for authority and good citizenship.