I got into twitter recently (once the jQuery team began twittering) and my co-worker (who had been into twitter before) told me that I should have it send the messages to my cell phone. Unfortunately, the plan I'm on (with Verizon Wireless) charges $0.20 per text message sent or received. So, using Dr Banniste's calculations, I would need to pay 20 cents for each of 7,490 text messages. Transmitting 1MB of data would cost me $1,498, or 9 times the cost of transmitting 1MB of Hubble data. I could pay Verizon $5 per month per phone to get unlimited texting, but that would mean increasing my bill by $10 per month (for 2 phones), or $120 per year. I just don't see the need to pay Verizon so much more money just to get and send text messages.
There's nothing wrong with protesting (peacefully) when one finds something offensive. By all means, Muslims should organize massive peaceful protests whenever they find some cartoon offensive. I would have no problem with that. There's a long tradition of using large peaceful protests to get your arguments heard. It's when those "peaceful" protests turn violent or when religious leaders call for the death of the one who offended that they cross the line from appropriate response into highly inappropriate response.
A cinematic example that springs to mind is Marty McFly from Back to the Future II and III. A recurring theme in those movies was that a villain would try to goad Marty by calling him a chicken (or coward or similar insult). Marty, not wanting the guy to think that he was scared, would turn to face the villain, usually with horrible consequences. At the end of Back to the Future III, Marty ignores the taunts of a character and winds up changing the future for the better. (Not crashing into the limo... not working for the horrible boss... not getting fired.) The moral was that you shouldn't care what other people say and you shouldn't allow other people's opinions of you dictate your actions.
So if I make an offensive comment regarding Islam, the correct action for a civilized person wouldn't be to slug me or kill me. The civilized action might be to organize a peaceful protest against me, or argue against my offensive comment. Similarly, if someone made an offensive comment regarding my religion, I wouldn't want them killed. I might argue against them or protest against them, but I wouldn't seek for their death. (And I've had plenty of offensive comments made to me or made in my vicinity about my religion.)
In general, my "keep government small and out of our lives" sensibilities would be opposed to a Network Neutrality bill. I'd be afraid that they would muck things up too much. However, the only thing worse than government interference is giant corporations run amok. At least the government (somewhat) answers to the public. Giant corporations answer only to shareholders. In the case of ISPs, they also hold near-monopoly power. Want a broadband Internet connection? You can go with the Cable Company or the Phone Company. Don't like that the Cable Company is blocking bittorrent? What about the Phone Company who has decided that Slashdot will be slowed to dial-up speeds unless Slashdot pays the Phone Company for the right to reach the Phone Company's users? Don't like either? Well, either pick the lesser of two evils or go back to dial-up. The Giant ISP Companies have already either made my examples real (bittorrent throttling) or have threatened to do it (Ed Whittacre's "content providers are using my pipes for free" speeches). If they had their way, you would pay them for access to the Internet and then Internet sites would have to pay them for access to you. Our only hope against these giant companies is the government.
I'm going to agree with the general advice of not pirating a game (or anything else for that matter). If you *NEED* something, pay for it or find a freeware alternative.
However, just because you live your online life on the up and up doesn't mean you won't be sued. All it takes is one ISP typer transposing some digits and you can find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit. Then you have to spend your time and money defending yourself and proving your innocence. If you and your lawyer don't do a good enough job (or the judge is biased against "copyright infringers" whether proven or not), you could be fined thousands of dollars. Or you could pay thousands of dollars in a settlement because it's cheaper than fighting the lengthy fight to clear your name. Even if you win, you then have to counter-sue for legal fees, fight that fight, and then try to get them to pay. (Oddly enough, big copyright holders tend to be big fans of courts awarding them money but hate it when courts tell them to pay legal fees of people they wrongly sued. I guess the copyright holders figure an "Oops. Our bad." should be enough and everyone should go on their merry way... With the sued individual possibly going on their merry way to bankruptcy from the lawsuit.)
If the President and majority of members of Congress are from the same party (or the opposing party doesn't have a spine), the President can greatly influence legislation. He won't be able to write it himself, obviously, but he can get a close political friend to write it and have it sail through Congress and onto his desk. Meanwhile, his political friends in Congress can see to it that bills that he opposes don't even get voted on (much less reach his desk to be vetoed). That's why I think that this country works the best when Congress is split nearly 50-50 with a slight tilt to the opposing party of the President. Gridlock is Good!
Also perhaps people might like to buy the cheaper windows version, and then "pirate" linux to get some of the additional features only usually available on the more expensive model?
Good idea. Maybe someone should set up a "PirateLinux.com" website to help consumers find various versions of Linux for free.;-)
I've got to agree. Technically, though, the original timeframe was 14 years, plus an additional (one-time) 14 year extension that you had to apply for. Assuming most people applied for it and that copyright was returned to 14+14, this would mean that movies from 1980 would just now be entering the public domain. I was wondering how many movies from 1980 actually still made money, so I checked IMDB. The list was *WAY* too long to go through, though. I'd be willing to bet that 99% of those movies don't make any significant money anymore. So I figured, let's stack the deck a bit for the movie industry and only pick the top 30 movies from 1980 as voted by IMDB users. These movies would be more likely to still be making money. Here's the list:
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Shining, The (1980) Raging Bull (1980) Blues Brothers, The (1980) Airplane! (1980) Elephant Man, The (1980) Caddyshack (1980) Superman II (1980) Friday the 13th (1980) Ordinary People (1980) Fog, The (1980) Gods Must Be Crazy, The (1980) Flash Gordon (1980) Cannibal Holocaust (1980) Blue Lagoon, The (1980) Popeye (1980) Kagemusha (1980) Nine to Five (1980) Dressed to Kill (1980) Somewhere in Time (1980) Private Benjamin (1980) Altered States (1980) American Gigolo (1980) Fame (1980) Changeling, The (1980) Final Countdown, The (1980) Long Good Friday, The (1980) Stardust Memories (1980) Big Red One, The (1980) Stir Crazy (1980)
Now, I'm sure that Empire is still making money for Lucas, but how many of those other movies are still making significant money now? Does anyone know of a good way to check? If 99% of movies made 28 years ago aren't making significant amounts of money, then why are we overextending copyright for the 1% that do? Not that "making money" is a good reason to extend copyright, mind you, but proving that most of these old titles no longer make their owners any money would be a serious blow against the arguments of the big copyright owners.
I often find myself awed by just how much you can buy nowadays cheaply. I'm told that at Costco nowadays, you can buy a terabye of disk storage for about $250 CDN -- that's utterly mind-boggling to someone who remembers single-density, single-sided floppy drives.
I know what you mean. My first computer, back in the late 80's, had a "HUGE" 40MB hard drive. (Yes, MEGAbytes, not GIGAbytes for you youngsters out there.) I have a 1GB SD card sitting on my desk right now. That's more than 25 times the space of my first desktop computer and it can fit in my shirt pocket. And that's not even the biggest SD card out there. I often try to picture how high I would need to stack those old desktop computers to get the same storage space.
He claimed that the licenses weren't SCOsource when the SEC filing said they were. He can't just say "oops. My bad. I didn't know what we were talking about." These licenses are pretty much the main section of the lawsuit. If a CEO takes the stand in a lawsuit without knowing the basic facts of the case, it's gross incompetence of a level that should be criminal. So either Darl is the world's biggest idiot of a CEO, or he perjured himself, or SCO lied in their SEC filing. I doubt that his ego will allow him to say "I'm the world's biggest idiot", so his only options left can have pretty severe penalties.
The part where they determined whether or not (and how much) SCO owned Unix is over. Now that it has been determined that Novell owns the copyrights, the questions are:
1. Did SCO sell Unix licenses and keep money that should have gone to Novell? 2. If so, how much of this does SCO owe Novell?
The main sales in this trial are the Microsoft and Sun ones. There's something like $20 million that SCO might owe Novell. (Money that SCO doesn't have even if they sold every last chair in the office.)
SCO insists, however, that the licenses weren't SCOsource licenses and thus weren't ones that Novell would be owed money for. Darl testified to this on the stand. However, SCO's own SEC filing insists that the money was SCOsource. So either SCO lied in an SEC filing or Darl perjured himself. Either way, Darl and SCO have only the barest shreds of a case left. (Unfortunately for them, that "barest shred" relies on the past few years of case history vanishing magically.)
This sort of moderation wouldn't be suitable for matters of opinion or debate; but there are really a lot of things that are knowable with a high degree of confidence, particularly given our access to vast databases and recordings of past events: Politician: "I never said "foo", I said "bar". Moderator: "This clip is from our interview three weeks ago"*plays clip of Politician saying "foo".
This is why I like the Daily Show versus regular news. Regular news broadcasts a quote from a politician: "I've always been against foo!"
Daily Show shows that quote, pauses, then shows a series of quotes from the politician showing how they changed positions ("I'm all in favor of foo!" "Foo is a wonderful idea!" "We need more foo!").
I'm all for politicians changing positions. Sometimes the information that you have on hand changes and you need to modify your policy positions because of that. I'd rather have a politician who did that than one who refused to let and new information sway him from his set-in-stone position. Still, the politician should acknowledge the previous position and lay out their reasons for the change. ("Yes, I used to be in favor of foo. However, studies have now shown that foo causes cancer. Therefore, I can't in good conscience support foo any longer!") When they try to rewrite history, however, the news media should be right there calling them on it. Somewhere along the way, though, the media lost their collective spines and just became Soundbite Broadcast Networks.
What if physics simply won't allow faster than light travel?
From my days as a physics major (before I hit the brick wall of Quantum Mechanics), I remember that the problem isn't going faster than the speed of light. You can do that. You just can't speed up from sub-light speeds, pass the speed of light, and then go faster than light. You could start out faster than light, but then you would be unable to slow down to sub-light speeds again.
As far as the chances of there being intelligent life out there versus our not detecting any, remember that the Universe is an extremely large place. We've only been listening in for a very short time at very small slices of the sky. The chances of us stumbling upon an alien signal and recognizing it as coming from an intelligent source (they won't exactly be speaking English) is minuscule.
In addition, it's likely that the time that an intelligent civilization spends tossing radio waves about is relatively short. If they want to advance to be a true space-faring race (as opposed to our civilization which is in the toddler stage), they would need to develop some other means of communication. Imagine trying to communicate with a space station orbiting Jupiter and having to wait for a 35 to 52 minute delay with each question. (Depending on which side of the sun Jupiter was on and, yes, that is how long it takes.)
So SETI and similar efforts have been searching a tiny fragment of the sky for a very short time for signals that might only be "visible" to us for a short period of time. It's no wonder we haven't detected any other intelligent life.
we have only been listening for a very short time to a very small portion of the sky, in a narrow range of frequencies.
Maybe it's like those folks who fall for the Nigerian schemes. Once you're in you can either admit that you've been scammed and have lost thousands of dollars or you can ignore all of the blaring warning signs, press on, and construct an elaborate fantasy world to live in where friendly Nigerian e-mailers will be shipping you your pile of cash any day now. The investors, instead of cutting their losses and moving on, are just hoping against hope that some magical evidence fairy will visit SCO overnight, leave proof positive that Linux really is owned by SCO, and all of their sunk money wasn't wasted.
I hate flash advertisements for another reason. Due to some quirk in my FireFox installation and/or my Flash installation, Flash will sometimes open up "javascript:" functions in IE. Now, my default browser is set as FireFox so that would be bad enough. However, these links open by themselves, make a "ping"-ing sound (as IE can't find the "page") and then IE closes. Annoying enough? It gets worse. The Flash ads don't seem to give up. They'll keep opening a hundred IE windows in an attempt to run this javascript function successfully. And I can't close the FireFox tab because FireFox and my entire system is bogged down from a hundred IE windows being opened.
I really need to uninstall/reinstall FireFox and Flash to try to fix this (and a few other) problems, but I just never seem to have the time. (Plus, I'm afraid of losing my nicely customized setup.)
I ran the beta of that awhile back and the sheer act of installing it made it grab all of my OpenDocument/OpenOffice.org extensions. With no prompting or anything. Fine, I figured. Maybe that's just a bug in the installer. But then, after setting it back, I launched Symphony to check how some documents opened only to find that Symphony re-grabbed the extensions again. I looked for a setting to disable this behavior, but there didn't seem to be one. Unless something has changed in the latest version, I couldn't recommend Lotus Symphony to anyone. It's simply idiotic for an application to change your file associations every time it launches without any prompting and without any way to opt out of the changes. Of course, file association changes should be opt in and not opt out, but even opt out is better than "no option at all."
I can't tell if you're being serious and just picked some awful comparisons or if you're not being serious and somehow missed being modded as "Funny."
In any case, I agree with your basic premise that one can be an open source advocate without descending into the realm of zealotry. It requires adhering to one simple rule:
Users should use the software that is best suited for their needs.
Sometimes that software will be open source. Sometimes it will be closed source. Sometimes the software will be given away for free. Sometimes it will be sold in a commercial box. And, yes, sometimes that software will even (*gasp!*) come from Microsoft.
I, for example, like to push Open Source software wherever I can. I use OpenOffice.org, Password Safe, FireFox, and other Open Source programs. However, when it comes to image editing, I use Paint Shop Pro as I just can't get used to GIMP's interface. In that case, Open Source wasn't the best program for the job, so I used a commercial, closed-source program. I also run on Windows XP because too many other applications that I use are Windows-only. That said, I refuse to run Vista and, if Windows 7 either takes too long to come out or is as big of a bomb as Vista is, my next computer will likely run Ubuntu. (Though I would need to figure out a few kinks. Like how to test my websites under the latest version of IE if I'm not running Windows.)
You see, laptops commonly contain a dangerous substance known as Information. And Information just wants to be free. So the Information you keep couped up on your laptop could burst forth, whiz around the plane a bit (possibly injuring passengers) and then burst out of the plane causing catastrophic failure and severe loss of life. Help keep terrorism at bay by deleting all Information you find.
My favorite Atari game was Star Raiders. It was a complex, 3D space simulator years before X-Wing and the like. Sure the space ships you were battling were basic shapes, but you still could fly around in space, fire at them, watch your fuel level, refill at the service station (or blow it up!;-) ), travel in hyperspace (trying to keep from veering off course) and toggle your shields/weapons/etc to save on power. I only wish I could play a version of that on my PC today.
Slashdot Mirror
I got into twitter recently (once the jQuery team began twittering) and my co-worker (who had been into twitter before) told me that I should have it send the messages to my cell phone. Unfortunately, the plan I'm on (with Verizon Wireless) charges $0.20 per text message sent or received. So, using Dr Banniste's calculations, I would need to pay 20 cents for each of 7,490 text messages. Transmitting 1MB of data would cost me $1,498, or 9 times the cost of transmitting 1MB of Hubble data. I could pay Verizon $5 per month per phone to get unlimited texting, but that would mean increasing my bill by $10 per month (for 2 phones), or $120 per year. I just don't see the need to pay Verizon so much more money just to get and send text messages.
There's nothing wrong with protesting (peacefully) when one finds something offensive. By all means, Muslims should organize massive peaceful protests whenever they find some cartoon offensive. I would have no problem with that. There's a long tradition of using large peaceful protests to get your arguments heard. It's when those "peaceful" protests turn violent or when religious leaders call for the death of the one who offended that they cross the line from appropriate response into highly inappropriate response.
A cinematic example that springs to mind is Marty McFly from Back to the Future II and III. A recurring theme in those movies was that a villain would try to goad Marty by calling him a chicken (or coward or similar insult). Marty, not wanting the guy to think that he was scared, would turn to face the villain, usually with horrible consequences. At the end of Back to the Future III, Marty ignores the taunts of a character and winds up changing the future for the better. (Not crashing into the limo... not working for the horrible boss... not getting fired.) The moral was that you shouldn't care what other people say and you shouldn't allow other people's opinions of you dictate your actions.
So if I make an offensive comment regarding Islam, the correct action for a civilized person wouldn't be to slug me or kill me. The civilized action might be to organize a peaceful protest against me, or argue against my offensive comment. Similarly, if someone made an offensive comment regarding my religion, I wouldn't want them killed. I might argue against them or protest against them, but I wouldn't seek for their death. (And I've had plenty of offensive comments made to me or made in my vicinity about my religion.)
In general, my "keep government small and out of our lives" sensibilities would be opposed to a Network Neutrality bill. I'd be afraid that they would muck things up too much. However, the only thing worse than government interference is giant corporations run amok. At least the government (somewhat) answers to the public. Giant corporations answer only to shareholders. In the case of ISPs, they also hold near-monopoly power. Want a broadband Internet connection? You can go with the Cable Company or the Phone Company. Don't like that the Cable Company is blocking bittorrent? What about the Phone Company who has decided that Slashdot will be slowed to dial-up speeds unless Slashdot pays the Phone Company for the right to reach the Phone Company's users? Don't like either? Well, either pick the lesser of two evils or go back to dial-up. The Giant ISP Companies have already either made my examples real (bittorrent throttling) or have threatened to do it (Ed Whittacre's "content providers are using my pipes for free" speeches). If they had their way, you would pay them for access to the Internet and then Internet sites would have to pay them for access to you. Our only hope against these giant companies is the government.
I'm going to agree with the general advice of not pirating a game (or anything else for that matter). If you *NEED* something, pay for it or find a freeware alternative.
However, just because you live your online life on the up and up doesn't mean you won't be sued. All it takes is one ISP typer transposing some digits and you can find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit. Then you have to spend your time and money defending yourself and proving your innocence. If you and your lawyer don't do a good enough job (or the judge is biased against "copyright infringers" whether proven or not), you could be fined thousands of dollars. Or you could pay thousands of dollars in a settlement because it's cheaper than fighting the lengthy fight to clear your name. Even if you win, you then have to counter-sue for legal fees, fight that fight, and then try to get them to pay. (Oddly enough, big copyright holders tend to be big fans of courts awarding them money but hate it when courts tell them to pay legal fees of people they wrongly sued. I guess the copyright holders figure an "Oops. Our bad." should be enough and everyone should go on their merry way... With the sued individual possibly going on their merry way to bankruptcy from the lawsuit.)
If the President and majority of members of Congress are from the same party (or the opposing party doesn't have a spine), the President can greatly influence legislation. He won't be able to write it himself, obviously, but he can get a close political friend to write it and have it sail through Congress and onto his desk. Meanwhile, his political friends in Congress can see to it that bills that he opposes don't even get voted on (much less reach his desk to be vetoed). That's why I think that this country works the best when Congress is split nearly 50-50 with a slight tilt to the opposing party of the President. Gridlock is Good!
It also increases your size by 5 inches which makes you popular with the ladies.... oh, wait. That's spam. Nevermind.
Good idea. Maybe someone should set up a "PirateLinux.com" website to help consumers find various versions of Linux for free.
I've got to agree. Technically, though, the original timeframe was 14 years, plus an additional (one-time) 14 year extension that you had to apply for. Assuming most people applied for it and that copyright was returned to 14+14, this would mean that movies from 1980 would just now be entering the public domain. I was wondering how many movies from 1980 actually still made money, so I checked IMDB. The list was *WAY* too long to go through, though. I'd be willing to bet that 99% of those movies don't make any significant money anymore. So I figured, let's stack the deck a bit for the movie industry and only pick the top 30 movies from 1980 as voted by IMDB users. These movies would be more likely to still be making money. Here's the list:
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Shining, The (1980)
Raging Bull (1980)
Blues Brothers, The (1980)
Airplane! (1980)
Elephant Man, The (1980)
Caddyshack (1980)
Superman II (1980)
Friday the 13th (1980)
Ordinary People (1980)
Fog, The (1980)
Gods Must Be Crazy, The (1980)
Flash Gordon (1980)
Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
Blue Lagoon, The (1980)
Popeye (1980)
Kagemusha (1980)
Nine to Five (1980)
Dressed to Kill (1980)
Somewhere in Time (1980)
Private Benjamin (1980)
Altered States (1980)
American Gigolo (1980)
Fame (1980)
Changeling, The (1980)
Final Countdown, The (1980)
Long Good Friday, The (1980)
Stardust Memories (1980)
Big Red One, The (1980)
Stir Crazy (1980)
Now, I'm sure that Empire is still making money for Lucas, but how many of those other movies are still making significant money now? Does anyone know of a good way to check? If 99% of movies made 28 years ago aren't making significant amounts of money, then why are we overextending copyright for the 1% that do? Not that "making money" is a good reason to extend copyright, mind you, but proving that most of these old titles no longer make their owners any money would be a serious blow against the arguments of the big copyright owners.
True nerds use Microsoft Zunes?!!!
I know what you mean. My first computer, back in the late 80's, had a "HUGE" 40MB hard drive. (Yes, MEGAbytes, not GIGAbytes for you youngsters out there.) I have a 1GB SD card sitting on my desk right now. That's more than 25 times the space of my first desktop computer and it can fit in my shirt pocket. And that's not even the biggest SD card out there. I often try to picture how high I would need to stack those old desktop computers to get the same storage space.
Awhile back, I saw this photo of an old 1GB hard drive compared with a 1GB SD card: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/changing-times/this-is-what-1gb-of-storage-looks-like-now-and-20-years-ago-302856.php
Imagine what the comparison photos will look like in 20 years!
He claimed that the licenses weren't SCOsource when the SEC filing said they were. He can't just say "oops. My bad. I didn't know what we were talking about." These licenses are pretty much the main section of the lawsuit. If a CEO takes the stand in a lawsuit without knowing the basic facts of the case, it's gross incompetence of a level that should be criminal. So either Darl is the world's biggest idiot of a CEO, or he perjured himself, or SCO lied in their SEC filing. I doubt that his ego will allow him to say "I'm the world's biggest idiot", so his only options left can have pretty severe penalties.
The part where they determined whether or not (and how much) SCO owned Unix is over. Now that it has been determined that Novell owns the copyrights, the questions are:
1. Did SCO sell Unix licenses and keep money that should have gone to Novell?
2. If so, how much of this does SCO owe Novell?
The main sales in this trial are the Microsoft and Sun ones. There's something like $20 million that SCO might owe Novell. (Money that SCO doesn't have even if they sold every last chair in the office.)
SCO insists, however, that the licenses weren't SCOsource licenses and thus weren't ones that Novell would be owed money for. Darl testified to this on the stand. However, SCO's own SEC filing insists that the money was SCOsource. So either SCO lied in an SEC filing or Darl perjured himself. Either way, Darl and SCO have only the barest shreds of a case left. (Unfortunately for them, that "barest shred" relies on the past few years of case history vanishing magically.)
This is why I like the Daily Show versus regular news. Regular news broadcasts a quote from a politician: "I've always been against foo!"
Daily Show shows that quote, pauses, then shows a series of quotes from the politician showing how they changed positions ("I'm all in favor of foo!" "Foo is a wonderful idea!" "We need more foo!").
I'm all for politicians changing positions. Sometimes the information that you have on hand changes and you need to modify your policy positions because of that. I'd rather have a politician who did that than one who refused to let and new information sway him from his set-in-stone position. Still, the politician should acknowledge the previous position and lay out their reasons for the change. ("Yes, I used to be in favor of foo. However, studies have now shown that foo causes cancer. Therefore, I can't in good conscience support foo any longer!") When they try to rewrite history, however, the news media should be right there calling them on it. Somewhere along the way, though, the media lost their collective spines and just became Soundbite Broadcast Networks.
What? And have them become more powerful than we could possibly imagine? No. We won't make that mistake.
From my days as a physics major (before I hit the brick wall of Quantum Mechanics), I remember that the problem isn't going faster than the speed of light. You can do that. You just can't speed up from sub-light speeds, pass the speed of light, and then go faster than light. You could start out faster than light, but then you would be unable to slow down to sub-light speeds again.
As far as the chances of there being intelligent life out there versus our not detecting any, remember that the Universe is an extremely large place. We've only been listening in for a very short time at very small slices of the sky. The chances of us stumbling upon an alien signal and recognizing it as coming from an intelligent source (they won't exactly be speaking English) is minuscule.
In addition, it's likely that the time that an intelligent civilization spends tossing radio waves about is relatively short. If they want to advance to be a true space-faring race (as opposed to our civilization which is in the toddler stage), they would need to develop some other means of communication. Imagine trying to communicate with a space station orbiting Jupiter and having to wait for a 35 to 52 minute delay with each question. (Depending on which side of the sun Jupiter was on and, yes, that is how long it takes.)
So SETI and similar efforts have been searching a tiny fragment of the sky for a very short time for signals that might only be "visible" to us for a short period of time. It's no wonder we haven't detected any other intelligent life.
we have only been listening for a very short time to a very small portion of the sky, in a narrow range of frequencies.
Maybe it's like those folks who fall for the Nigerian schemes. Once you're in you can either admit that you've been scammed and have lost thousands of dollars or you can ignore all of the blaring warning signs, press on, and construct an elaborate fantasy world to live in where friendly Nigerian e-mailers will be shipping you your pile of cash any day now. The investors, instead of cutting their losses and moving on, are just hoping against hope that some magical evidence fairy will visit SCO overnight, leave proof positive that Linux really is owned by SCO, and all of their sunk money wasn't wasted.
I hate flash advertisements for another reason. Due to some quirk in my FireFox installation and/or my Flash installation, Flash will sometimes open up "javascript:" functions in IE. Now, my default browser is set as FireFox so that would be bad enough. However, these links open by themselves, make a "ping"-ing sound (as IE can't find the "page") and then IE closes. Annoying enough? It gets worse. The Flash ads don't seem to give up. They'll keep opening a hundred IE windows in an attempt to run this javascript function successfully. And I can't close the FireFox tab because FireFox and my entire system is bogged down from a hundred IE windows being opened.
I really need to uninstall/reinstall FireFox and Flash to try to fix this (and a few other) problems, but I just never seem to have the time. (Plus, I'm afraid of losing my nicely customized setup.)
I ran the beta of that awhile back and the sheer act of installing it made it grab all of my OpenDocument/OpenOffice.org extensions. With no prompting or anything. Fine, I figured. Maybe that's just a bug in the installer. But then, after setting it back, I launched Symphony to check how some documents opened only to find that Symphony re-grabbed the extensions again. I looked for a setting to disable this behavior, but there didn't seem to be one. Unless something has changed in the latest version, I couldn't recommend Lotus Symphony to anyone. It's simply idiotic for an application to change your file associations every time it launches without any prompting and without any way to opt out of the changes. Of course, file association changes should be opt in and not opt out, but even opt out is better than "no option at all."
I'm highly insulted. The public absolutely does *NOT* have a shor.... Look a squirrel! *runs off after squirrel laughing*
Forget the soundtrack, I'll deliver the pizzas! ;-)
In any case, I agree with your basic premise that one can be an open source advocate without descending into the realm of zealotry. It requires adhering to one simple rule:
Sometimes that software will be open source. Sometimes it will be closed source. Sometimes the software will be given away for free. Sometimes it will be sold in a commercial box. And, yes, sometimes that software will even (*gasp!*) come from Microsoft.
I, for example, like to push Open Source software wherever I can. I use OpenOffice.org, Password Safe, FireFox, and other Open Source programs. However, when it comes to image editing, I use Paint Shop Pro as I just can't get used to GIMP's interface. In that case, Open Source wasn't the best program for the job, so I used a commercial, closed-source program. I also run on Windows XP because too many other applications that I use are Windows-only. That said, I refuse to run Vista and, if Windows 7 either takes too long to come out or is as big of a bomb as Vista is, my next computer will likely run Ubuntu. (Though I would need to figure out a few kinks. Like how to test my websites under the latest version of IE if I'm not running Windows.)
You see, laptops commonly contain a dangerous substance known as Information. And Information just wants to be free. So the Information you keep couped up on your laptop could burst forth, whiz around the plane a bit (possibly injuring passengers) and then burst out of the plane causing catastrophic failure and severe loss of life. Help keep terrorism at bay by deleting all Information you find.
He went on to say:
"I'm going to build my own OLPC! With blackjack and hookers! In fact, forget the OLPC. Aw, screw the whole thing."
My favorite Atari game was Star Raiders. It was a complex, 3D space simulator years before X-Wing and the like. Sure the space ships you were battling were basic shapes, but you still could fly around in space, fire at them, watch your fuel level, refill at the service station (or blow it up! ;-) ), travel in hyperspace (trying to keep from veering off course) and toggle your shields/weapons/etc to save on power. I only wish I could play a version of that on my PC today.