But for everyone that doesn't want Windows, it is indeed a tax.
No, it isn't.
If you don't want windows, don't buy it. Either you want a warranty on your laptop, so you buy from a company that will install Linux, or you are building it yourself, and can simply omit the cost of an OEM license on your computer. In any other situation, you're buying a package, that gets a discount because it's packaged. (You don't see me complaining about the "Lightscribe tax", even though the sale package I bought my laptop in has a component I never would have paid extra for.)
Let me put it another way -- everyone I know who's ever bought a prebuilt PC has left the vendor's OS on it. Even the Linux geeks.
How seriously you treat our data doesn't matter; if the government and its legal apparatus wants to get our data from you, they will. You shouldn't be collecting our data to begin with. Google has no better policies than Microsoft in that regard. If the government wants to snoop on you, and they get a court order, they will. No private company can avoid that happening.
I don't mind one bit of the US Military, CIA, NSA, or the President Himself wants to know what I had for breakfast, what websites I visit, or what the last porn site I visited was. We're talking about the equivalent of a harbormaster watching you as you leave port, not the redcoats breaking into your house and disrupting your life.
The same solution is required, a hybrid which can implement the old way and new way reasonably well (70+%) of a pure implementation of both. Nope. The "solution" is a pressing need to move from one to the other. x86 will be around for a long time because there's no significant end-user benefit to ditching it. Hyrogen vs. Gasoline, on the other hand...
This only makes atheists more comfortable when theists realize that non-believers, the most hated group in America, are not members of a religion or cult. Nope, sorry.
When you ask a Jew or a Christian or a Wiccan what an Atheist is, they won't say "someone who doesn't believe." They will say "someone who believes God doesn't exist." It's a fundamental difference.
Science can neither prove nor disprove the Christian God, nor any tenable modern deity. This means that the default answer is "I don't know", not "that's a fairy tale!" And most believers have come to terms with this, as have a good deal of non-believers.
It's only those few anti-believers that most everyone hates -- "theists" because they're so obnoxious about it, and "not-knowers" because they make them look bad.
(If you believe that God doesn't exist -- not that it's beyond knowledge, or that you simply don't believe -- then you're a capital-A Atheist, and you have a religion.)
You can bet your bottom dollar on it. Oh wait you already did. You shouldve kept it under the mattress. No. If my credit union or bank closed tomorrow, I could withdraw all of my funds, up to the bank's insured amount -- which is more than I or most other Americans make in a year.
Now, if I had instead invested my money and bought shares of the bank, then I'd be up shit creek without a paddle. But that's why stocks pay more -- because they're riskier, and so they have to or no one would buy them.
Why is visio's non-activation trying to get the user to buy a second copy of Office? Because MS isn't "spying" on anybody. I mean, if they were, they'd point them to the "buy Visio" page.
How is the average user supposed to figure out that when they try to update office and Microsoft tells them they can't update office until they buy office, that the problem is actually somewhere else? I'd say "by calling Microsoft and asking for their help." They maintain a line where you can call, with a telephone, and ask for assistance in setting up your Microsoft Office software.
I want an affordable (>$500 2007 dollars), multi-purpose (music / web / email / ebook / addresses), computing device, that isn't tied to being a cell phone.
Consumers don't want Windows Mobile, and they don't want Palm OS Hacket, but they do want PDAs. Otherwise, hacking the iPhone and the iPod wouldn't even be an issue.
A strawman would be "look, say the record companies set the price of songs at 10 cents a pop. yadda yadda yadda, there'd always be someone who says ten cents is too many..."
He didn't do that. he came right out and made his point, clearly and simply. Not a straw-man at all. (And, really, the choice of where to set the price point for more profit vs. less theft should be the artist's, or the artist's agent. Not Microsoft, IBM, Big Oil, McDonald's, Wal-Mart, or some other thug.)
1) copyright - how do you copy relevant portions of a publication without getting caught up in this nightmare? Keep it brief and light. The whole fair use exception was written into law EXPRESSLY for this kind of purpose. "Orwell's 1984 Novel proved that Totalinarism can be as bad as Romance novels" or something similiarly simple. (This is basic writing, that you should have learned in High School.)
2) not everything can be made explicit. There are many aspects of any scientific field that are "fundamental" and would be tedious to have to re-explain everytime So skip those, or reference a handy explanation of them. ("This article assumes you're familiar with basic warp theroy, outlined nicey at X")
3) putting that much data into an article may make it too large and unwieldy to read. Guess what? Writing's hard. You need to learn how to strike a balance between "simple" and "obtuse." (Jesus Christ's lesson for Science: everything in moderation.)
however, unless you are willing to conduct many more experiments prior to leading up to whatever your studying, wouldn't you be forced to make some assumptions. NO. This is Science, not politics or medicine. If you don't know something, and need to know it before you can know what you're really interested in, DO THE DAMN SCIENCE FOR THE THING YOU DON'T KNOW!
It's all well and good that you had a visionary dream that house cats get cancer from smoking cigarettes from McCancer field. But don't start your study by checking for nicotine withdrawal -- first prove cancer, then prove smoking, then worry about if they're smoking tobacco or cannabis, then check the tobacco.
Einstein got General Relativity because he started with Special Relativity, which he only got because he started before THAT with years of boring patent applications and thought experiments. The Wright Brothers got flight possible because they built a gilder first, and did tests before that, and focused on the first problems first.
There is NO reason to cut corners in science. Especially if you're doing a study. State what is known, state your hypothesis, and gather your data. Then, as we all learned in middle school, you try and argue for why your hypothesis is right. (If you don't see a logical progression in first facts to latter ones, maybe you shouldn't be a scientist. Or, if you doing shot-in-the-dark science, then just come out and say it.)
There's got to be a ton of precedent for awarding damages to the owner of a copyright when someone else is illegally profiting from the sale of that copyrighted work. There's zero precedent for awarding profits to an author who made a willing and intentional donation to the public domain, of their own free will, with the express idea that anyone can take their work and do virtually anything they want with it.
The GPL will eventually go before a judge, and one of two things will happen. It will likely be found to be perfectly fine and enforceable. Or, it might be found to be in whole or in part against the law, and hence either invalid or partially voidable. And if that happens, it's likely that the judge would also rule that any program released "under the GPL" is closer to a public domain work than an empty utterance.
Either way, if I take a program that you wrote, and put on the web with a note saying "take this and use it in your computers or in other things you make", and I forth and make a fortune, a judge won't order me to share my profits with you. Maybe I'd be compelled to follow specific parts of your note, and maybe I might have to pay your lawyer as well if I was a real dick about it.
. Can no one make an original discovery without having to get it printed in a book? Not in the body of "established knowledge." If you have something new to say, pay the $50 and publish it yourself. Or submit it to another publishing body.
Because Wikipedia gives an author zero control over editing, it is not the appropriate place to publish something new. This is by design, and is a Very Good Thing.
Its funny how much we've been conditioned to think that the price of things should go up not down. Think about it, all other things being equal, as we get smarter, more efficient with our production of goods prices should go down. Prices only go up because inflation is an even more powerful force than innovation in our economy. One can only "innovate" a gallon of milk so much. So, food prices generally rise with inflation. (IIRC, they're actually one of the prime measures of inflation.)
Land is a fixed good -- the Earth isn't getting any bigger -- so land prices should also generally go up with inflation, plus more for the ever-increasing development. (An empty field has less value than either a working farm or a home.)
Now, as for "manufactured goods", you've got a point. Except that, for any good that I might purchase, a fair third of them are cheaper than they were ten years ago. (Spatulas, T-shirts, etc.) Others are a wee bit more expensive, due to increased demand for a finite supply of raw materials (printed books, gasoline, blue jeans, real wooden furniture). Still others really are cheaper, no matter how you measure it -- televisions and computers being the best examples of this. ($ per MIPS, inflation-adjusted dollar-per-MIPS, dollars-per-PC, % of income, etc.)
One thing that jumps up and down and screams that it's getting more expensive each year is automobiles. Except that they aren't -- car prices for comparable-featured cars go down, leading manufacturers to make cars with more and more built in.
This is all about the allocation of resources. You might think that going to the moon is worthy -- if so, pay for it yourself -- don't come to my door with a gun to collect the resources (taxes) you need to do so.
You don't want your taxes to pay for that? Then make some friends, learn how the game is played, and get your hands dirty in classic American Politics. Democracy may be a flock of sheep and a pack of wolves deciding what to have for dinner, but the sheep are going to point to the crazy one who never talks to anyone first.
Yes, that company was Microsoft, but that doesn't change the fact that they threatened to sue them over its inclusion for "antitrust reasons" (read: It would hurt the sales of Acrobat). Yes, it does. If you don't have a monopoly, it means nothing. (Ever notice how Adobe doesn't care that OpenOffice has PDF output?)
I don't recall Nazi Germany agreeing to any war crimes convention. Germany had been conquered and had unconditionally surrendered. The war crimes trials were done in lieu of the tradition, said tradition being summary executions.
Given how difficult it would be to "launch fighters" and destroy or take over such settlements...
Far less difficult than getting there in the first place.
All the USA would need to do if they wanted to smack you down would be to send cruise-missile type device. Preferably one with a fancy multi-attack payload. No need to carry a heat shield, cargo containers, or even O2. They wouldn't even have to go nuclear.
...for which their department would have been charged $200. $200 well-spent, considering that Virgin is getting sued right now, and at the least will have to spend far more than $200 defending themselves. All of which should be billed to the Marketing Department, if it's set up as you claim.
In-house lawyers exist for a reason. Whenever you use a new license or contract, or use it in a new way, run it by your f---ing lawyer and make sure you're not missing something. I suspect this case will be taught to law students in a year or two.
The law has been (purposefully) made so complex that almost every decision requires the advice of one or more attorneys--and here's the rub--who frequently aren't themselves aware of other law that may apply outside of their specialty, even assuming they know their own specialty sufficiently well. The law is complex, but it's not so complex that you are frozen and need to call a lawyer every day. In fact, most industries quickly develop a set of standard practices, that in themselves fulfill virtually every possible legal requirement. If you're in one and can't afford a lawyer, find an industry association, who will have a lawyer on staff who can tell you where you will and won't need a lawyer.
I don't see how any government is really going to be able to control what people are going to do once they "get up there".
The same way the USA controlled California and Alaska in the 19th century.
Sheesh. More history, less sci-fi. Wherever people go, they will want something that does the functions of a government -- enforce laws, build roads, organize defense, etc. All an Earth-based government needs to do is to make sure that the space-government has the backing of the earth-government, and finds benefit in maintaining that relationship that exceeds the cost of ending it.
It's a little strange when you can't quite figure out if a thought is the result of having read too much history or too much science fiction.:-) Science fiction. The historical colonial revolutions started when the colonists were mis-managed by their parent company. The English and Spanish "new world" colonies had a few generations of poor management, and where possible they attempted to have their government air grievances.
GPL'd code is copyrighted. The GPL merely grants permission to copy to people. Period. Wrong.
The GPL is legal agreement between two parties -- the copyright holders and anyone who wishes to make a derivative work thereof. Like any other legal agreement, it is subject to the interpretation of the judges of the world, as argued by the lawyers of the world. (even a simple "you may use my work X in your work Y" permission is a legal agreement.)
One of the things that judges can do, if moved by a lawyer's argument or their own sense of public policy, is void part of a contract while still leaving others parts enforceable.
For the most extreme relevant example, imagine if you took a photograph, and I asked for permission to use that photograph. The hypothetical you, being a racist, writes a permission statement that says "may only use in a work that includes a denunciation of all non-blacks." (The hypothetical you is both black, and a racist. Since this is/., I presume the former is only possible and the latter quite unlikely. Anyway.) I take the photo and use it in my happy-bunny cook book, which contains no denunciation of the white man, and you sue me. The judge takes one look at your permission statement, laughs, and voids that "may only" clause, while leaving the permission itself intact.
Let's put it in clear terms: the GPL has not been tested in US courts, which means that there is NO binding precedent for it. Given Congress's and SCOTUS's recent predilection for expansive, pro-business interpretation of copyright law, there is a non-zero chance that the GPL could be rewritten from the bench. (And then appealed, and appealed, until SCOTUS gets a chance to weigh in on the matter).
(And FWIW, you're wrong about derivative works, too. For some works, even if you completely re-create the entire thing, it's still a derivative work. What is and isn't "derivative" is the sort of thing that copyright lawyers get paid millions to figure out.)
How many people who have one of the new nanos was able to try it before they bought it?
all of them. For a hundred dollar electronics purchase, you should have enough vendors around you that at least one will get one out of a box and let you listen to it. An Apple Store should have several one on display, with music and movies.
Not everyone graduates highschool, By the time you're 20, if you haven't graduated highschool or gotten a GED, you're as far outside the norm of "everyone" as someone who's parents were filthy stinking rich.
and since grades are set based on relative achievement, a certain percentage of kids will always get bad grades Nope. Grades are based on absolute achievement -- otherwise they're meaningless. What backwards school did you go to?
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But for everyone that doesn't want Windows, it is indeed a tax.
No, it isn't.
If you don't want windows, don't buy it. Either you want a warranty on your laptop, so you buy from a company that will install Linux, or you are building it yourself, and can simply omit the cost of an OEM license on your computer. In any other situation, you're buying a package, that gets a discount because it's packaged. (You don't see me complaining about the "Lightscribe tax", even though the sale package I bought my laptop in has a component I never would have paid extra for.)
Let me put it another way -- everyone I know who's ever bought a prebuilt PC has left the vendor's OS on it. Even the Linux geeks.
Like a computer?
yes. A computer that can fit in my pocket. Also known as a "PDA."
I don't mind one bit of the US Military, CIA, NSA, or the President Himself wants to know what I had for breakfast, what websites I visit, or what the last porn site I visited was. We're talking about the equivalent of a harbormaster watching you as you leave port, not the redcoats breaking into your house and disrupting your life.
For about $40,000, you can get a small one or two bedroom apartment either in the midwest or in a rural town here on the eastern side.
In my city exactly, at fair market value, you could get about 1/5 of a four-bedroom house. For $400,000, you could buy two.
Or, one one-bedroom studio in Manhattan.
When you ask a Jew or a Christian or a Wiccan what an Atheist is, they won't say "someone who doesn't believe." They will say "someone who believes God doesn't exist." It's a fundamental difference.
Science can neither prove nor disprove the Christian God, nor any tenable modern deity. This means that the default answer is "I don't know", not "that's a fairy tale!" And most believers have come to terms with this, as have a good deal of non-believers.
It's only those few anti-believers that most everyone hates -- "theists" because they're so obnoxious about it, and "not-knowers" because they make them look bad.
(If you believe that God doesn't exist -- not that it's beyond knowledge, or that you simply don't believe -- then you're a capital-A Atheist, and you have a religion.)
You shouldve kept it under the mattress. No. If my credit union or bank closed tomorrow, I could withdraw all of my funds, up to the bank's insured amount -- which is more than I or most other Americans make in a year.
Now, if I had instead invested my money and bought shares of the bank, then I'd be up shit creek without a paddle. But that's why stocks pay more -- because they're riskier, and so they have to or no one would buy them.
I want an affordable (>$500 2007 dollars), multi-purpose (music / web / email / ebook / addresses), computing device, that isn't tied to being a cell phone.
Consumers don't want Windows Mobile, and they don't want Palm OS Hacket, but they do want PDAs. Otherwise, hacking the iPhone and the iPod wouldn't even be an issue.
Sorry, he was making a single cognizant argument.
A strawman would be "look, say the record companies set the price of songs at 10 cents a pop. yadda yadda yadda, there'd always be someone who says ten cents is too many..."
He didn't do that. he came right out and made his point, clearly and simply. Not a straw-man at all. (And, really, the choice of where to set the price point for more profit vs. less theft should be the artist's, or the artist's agent. Not Microsoft, IBM, Big Oil, McDonald's, Wal-Mart, or some other thug.)
It's all well and good that you had a visionary dream that house cats get cancer from smoking cigarettes from McCancer field. But don't start your study by checking for nicotine withdrawal -- first prove cancer, then prove smoking, then worry about if they're smoking tobacco or cannabis, then check the tobacco.
Einstein got General Relativity because he started with Special Relativity, which he only got because he started before THAT with years of boring patent applications and thought experiments. The Wright Brothers got flight possible because they built a gilder first, and did tests before that, and focused on the first problems first.
There is NO reason to cut corners in science. Especially if you're doing a study. State what is known, state your hypothesis, and gather your data. Then, as we all learned in middle school, you try and argue for why your hypothesis is right. (If you don't see a logical progression in first facts to latter ones, maybe you shouldn't be a scientist. Or, if you doing shot-in-the-dark science, then just come out and say it.)
The GPL will eventually go before a judge, and one of two things will happen. It will likely be found to be perfectly fine and enforceable. Or, it might be found to be in whole or in part against the law, and hence either invalid or partially voidable. And if that happens, it's likely that the judge would also rule that any program released "under the GPL" is closer to a public domain work than an empty utterance.
Either way, if I take a program that you wrote, and put on the web with a note saying "take this and use it in your computers or in other things you make", and I forth and make a fortune, a judge won't order me to share my profits with you. Maybe I'd be compelled to follow specific parts of your note, and maybe I might have to pay your lawyer as well if I was a real dick about it.
(IANAL, yadda yadda yadda.)
Because Wikipedia gives an author zero control over editing, it is not the appropriate place to publish something new. This is by design, and is a Very Good Thing.
Oh, and this is an American site. You're wrong in the first place.
Land is a fixed good -- the Earth isn't getting any bigger -- so land prices should also generally go up with inflation, plus more for the ever-increasing development. (An empty field has less value than either a working farm or a home.)
Now, as for "manufactured goods", you've got a point. Except that, for any good that I might purchase, a fair third of them are cheaper than they were ten years ago. (Spatulas, T-shirts, etc.) Others are a wee bit more expensive, due to increased demand for a finite supply of raw materials (printed books, gasoline, blue jeans, real wooden furniture). Still others really are cheaper, no matter how you measure it -- televisions and computers being the best examples of this. ($ per MIPS, inflation-adjusted dollar-per-MIPS, dollars-per-PC, % of income, etc.)
One thing that jumps up and down and screams that it's getting more expensive each year is automobiles. Except that they aren't -- car prices for comparable-featured cars go down, leading manufacturers to make cars with more and more built in.
This is all about the allocation of resources. You might think that going to the moon is worthy -- if so, pay for it yourself -- don't come to my door with a gun to collect the resources (taxes) you need to do so.
You don't want your taxes to pay for that? Then make some friends, learn how the game is played, and get your hands dirty in classic American Politics. Democracy may be a flock of sheep and a pack of wolves deciding what to have for dinner, but the sheep are going to point to the crazy one who never talks to anyone first.
Given how difficult it would be to "launch fighters" and destroy or take over such settlements...
Far less difficult than getting there in the first place.
All the USA would need to do if they wanted to smack you down would be to send cruise-missile type device. Preferably one with a fancy multi-attack payload. No need to carry a heat shield, cargo containers, or even O2. They wouldn't even have to go nuclear.
...for which their department would have been charged $200. $200 well-spent, considering that Virgin is getting sued right now, and at the least will have to spend far more than $200 defending themselves. All of which should be billed to the Marketing Department, if it's set up as you claim.In-house lawyers exist for a reason. Whenever you use a new license or contract, or use it in a new way, run it by your f---ing lawyer and make sure you're not missing something. I suspect this case will be taught to law students in a year or two. The law has been (purposefully) made so complex that almost every decision requires the advice of one or more attorneys--and here's the rub--who frequently aren't themselves aware of other law that may apply outside of their specialty, even assuming they know their own specialty sufficiently well. The law is complex, but it's not so complex that you are frozen and need to call a lawyer every day. In fact, most industries quickly develop a set of standard practices, that in themselves fulfill virtually every possible legal requirement. If you're in one and can't afford a lawyer, find an industry association, who will have a lawyer on staff who can tell you where you will and won't need a lawyer.
I don't see how any government is really going to be able to control what people are going to do once they "get up there".
The same way the USA controlled California and Alaska in the 19th century.
Sheesh. More history, less sci-fi. Wherever people go, they will want something that does the functions of a government -- enforce laws, build roads, organize defense, etc. All an Earth-based government needs to do is to make sure that the space-government has the backing of the earth-government, and finds benefit in maintaining that relationship that exceeds the cost of ending it.
The GPL is legal agreement between two parties -- the copyright holders and anyone who wishes to make a derivative work thereof. Like any other legal agreement, it is subject to the interpretation of the judges of the world, as argued by the lawyers of the world. (even a simple "you may use my work X in your work Y" permission is a legal agreement.)
One of the things that judges can do, if moved by a lawyer's argument or their own sense of public policy, is void part of a contract while still leaving others parts enforceable.
For the most extreme relevant example, imagine if you took a photograph, and I asked for permission to use that photograph. The hypothetical you, being a racist, writes a permission statement that says "may only use in a work that includes a denunciation of all non-blacks." (The hypothetical you is both black, and a racist. Since this is
Let's put it in clear terms: the GPL has not been tested in US courts, which means that there is NO binding precedent for it. Given Congress's and SCOTUS's recent predilection for expansive, pro-business interpretation of copyright law, there is a non-zero chance that the GPL could be rewritten from the bench. (And then appealed, and appealed, until SCOTUS gets a chance to weigh in on the matter).
(And FWIW, you're wrong about derivative works, too. For some works, even if you completely re-create the entire thing, it's still a derivative work. What is and isn't "derivative" is the sort of thing that copyright lawyers get paid millions to figure out.)
((IANAL, RU?))
How many people who have one of the new nanos was able to try it before they bought it?
all of them. For a hundred dollar electronics purchase, you should have enough vendors around you that at least one will get one out of a box and let you listen to it. An Apple Store should have several one on display, with music and movies.