"A company that depends upon selling software to survive cannot exist where there is no copyright law."
Of course it can. Just as authors existed before copyright law.
Copyright law might help them, but it's by no means necessary. Plus, who actually cares about people selling software. All copyright is concerned about is people developing and publishing software. It doesn't matter why they do it.
Quite so. I was mostly talking about Microsoft's specific case, as in "a company like MS couldn't attain and maintain the market position it has built for itself on software sales without copyright law". That is, MS exists by virtue of leveraging the value of its copyrights.
Microsoft has initiated other kinds of IP lawsuits against other companies and there is no reason to think that they won't iniate a patent lawsuit as well. Both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have made public statements about "defending our intellectual property".
Copyrights and patents are really only related in that they are both considered "intellectual property", and are government granted monopolies. A company that depends upon selling software to survive cannot exist where there is no copyright law. I'm afraid it's really too great a leap to say that a software company that defends its copyrights is likely to, for that reason alone, vigorously defend its patents, particularly when it never has in the past.
The fact that a sale is a binding contract, with certain assumptions, is well defined. So much so that we assume a product is ours once we buy it, and should not have to deal with store staff once past the register.
That is exactly the limit of the implied contract of a sale. They get the money you get the goods.
However, stores quite openly have changed that contract,
No, they most certainly have not. They cannot arbitrarily add clauses to the implied contract of sale.
and publicized that change, so we all know we will be searched as we exit,
I don't know where you got the idea that a retail store can "publicize" changes to implied contract and have them be legal. If they "publicize" a change that says all customers must drop their pants and submit to a genital inspection before leaving, do you honestly think that it would be enforceable? If not, where do you think the line is between that and involuntary searches?
Much (but not all) of the 'shut up and blindly follow any orders' attitude on the part of the Red Army came from the political imperative of keeping down the only force that could conceivably threaten the power of the communist party. Hence the political officers, who could on occasion overrule the regular officers.
After the initial shock of the invasion the soldiers in the red army became very effective, parlty because in the desperate times with national survival at stake some of the totalitarian bullshit was swept aside.
Oh yes, naturally most of that bullcrap would get swept aside in real combat. Mostly what I'm getting at is that the Soviet training and doctrine, specifically that of the cold war era, almost without exception mandated the "smart head, dumb body" approach, as opposed to the US military's emphasis on "individual initiative". Even then it was indeed mostly a political maneuver intended to ensure that the military didn't "get any ideas" rather than a rational approach to conducting modern warfare.
With all the facts, I trust Harvard--a world renowned institution and teacher of ethics--to decide in this case of applicants, what is and isn't ethical.
If the students were applying to the School of Philosophy, you might have a point. This is the dean of the Harvard Business School, though.
"Your description fits the old Soviet military, but not ours."
Simply not true. Our army and the soviet's army have a lot more in common than you think.
Hey, I'm not saying that the Red Army had a single strategy of "send wave after wave of cannon fodder until the enemy collapses" (though they did use this tactic on occasion in WW2). All I'm saying is that the Red Army did not value the same degree of "individual initiative" the US Army does. The fact of the matter is that the Red Army expected the officers and mid- to senior-grade NCOs to direct the actions of the privates and junior NCOs, and they were expected to obey. This is basically true of any army, but the Red Army took it to the extreme that (say) if their officers were killed, a motorized rifle platoon would often be at a loss to continue until they could get the company commander to assign an officer to them to relay orders. The divide between the "head" and the "body" was a lot wider, mostly because the filled the lower ranks with conscripts fulfilling their compulsory service.
Ask the Nazi's what they thought of the soviet army.
The Nazi high command mostly thought they were crazy hordes of untrained peasants, and that whatever skill they appeared to have in night fighting or camouflage was due to the "natural cunning of the slav" rather than training. Their asessment was, naturally, in error. My grandfather, a private in the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, did not concur with this sentiment.
Think about it. D&D attracts imaginitive players who are able to think for themselves. Now does that seem like people you want in your Army?
That's exactly the sort of people you want in your army. Clueless nimrods who can't function if the expected parameters are altered are exactly what they should be trying to avoid.
I ship out to Marine boot camp Aug. 1st and people have told me over and over again that when I get there...I shouldn't stand out. D&D players are different...and normally very smart.
You assume that being smart will make you stand out in the military. Well, sorry to burst your bubble but the military has a LOT of smart people, and chances are your intelligence won't stand out as much as you think. Anyone who says "don't let on that you're smart" is really saying "don't spout off trying to be a know-it-all". Keeping your mouth shut and your eyes open (particularly when in boot camp) is the wisest course. Once you've been in a while you'll figure out when it's appropriate to offer your "smarts". Nobody (particularly drill sergeants) likes a wise-ass.
In an army you want drones who can think for themselves but will never question orders.
You got a lot to learn about the nature of the US military. Your description fits the old Soviet military, but not ours. In an army you want people who can understand an objective and modify an operational plan of the fly as the situation changes. Soldiers who stop and look at their commanding officer every time they run into an unexpected obstacle are worthless. I suspect you'll get quite an eye-opening education on this come 2005AUG01, courtesy of the US Marine Corps.
Why do you think the great dictators killed teachers???
Which "great dictators"? Name a dictator that had an effective army full of mindless, uneducated "drones". Name an effective army that wasn't backed by a solid educational system. Killing teachers is a move to solidify a political position, not to create an ignorant pool of cannon fodder.
As for the IDF automatically lowering RPG-ers security clearances, I think they're idiots. I spent 4 years in the US Army as a SIGINT analyst, and I'd say that fully half the people I worked with played role playing games. I wonder, do they think that D&D is "bad" and that hex-map war games are good? At what point does pretending you're Rommel the general become OK, vs. playing Skorzeny the commando? Is it the level of abstraction? Is it the medieval fantasy aspect of D&D? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that most people entering the IDF are there for compulsory service. I knew a lot of D&D dorks in high school who would never be a good fit for military service. The thing is, those of us dorks who were a good fit would have been stuck as truck drivers or something under an IDF-style rule. I think the IDF is tossing out the baby with the bathwater here, but hey, it's their stupid army.
Interesting that, despite the school's opinion that no amount of rationalization could make this behavior acceptable, you (and others) still attempt to find a way around the intent that applicants wait until official notification.
Nonsense. You're conflating two points of Harvard's position. Harvard claims what they did is unethical and some of us disagree with that claim. Now, Harvard's claim that there is no way to rationalize the behavior is merely a statement saying that no excuse will be enough to get these students back on the accepted list. This is a perfectly legitimate position, as Harvard can choose to enforce rules like this any way they please. The claim that it is unethical, however, is debatable. Harvard is not the arbiter of what is and is not ethical, so their opinion is irrelevant.
Somewhere in the West, ca. 1806. The Lone Ranger and Tonto are hiding together behind a rock...
I know you're just making up a year to put with the joke in order to have it come out to a nice round 200 years, but putting the Lone Ranger in 1806 is ridiculous. The Lone Ranger carried a.45 caliber Colt revolver loaded with silver bullets in self-contained cartridges. Unless he was a time traveller, there's no way he was carrying such a firearm in 1806, when flintlock muskets were the norm. I'm not picking nits here-- you might as well have placed Gatling guns in the American Revolution.
RTFA. It rolls for the "vertical" axis, and slides left and right in its socket for the "horizontal".
I did RTFA. How far does it slide? Does it slide the full length of the keyboard? Or does it move maybe half an inch? I know it's not spring-loaded only by means of deducing from their "bump it against the stop to move the cursor to the edge" comment. The article is crap on details. I shouldn't have to be Sherlock Freaking Holmes to understand what, exactly, a piece of journalism is talking about.
People are naysaying this, but I've been using one of these for a few weeks now, and it is INCREDIBALLY nice not to have to move my hand over to reach the mouse (and it has more buttons than your traditional laptop touchpad/eraserhead mouse, too). Yes, it's not for gaming, but if you're gaming, switch to a traditional mouse for that...then go back to an alternative input system which requires less motion, less stress, and gives you more productivity for the remainder of your computing time.
Could you briefly explain how it actually works? Those morons at SuperMondoExtremeTech-X failed to actually describe what the F this rollermouse is, other than "an updated version of the OLD rollermouse". The pictures show what looks like, to me, a roller. This only acounts for the vertical axis. How does horizontal movement work?
For those of you that make it to the 4th page of the UW Columns article, Lai has left the research field (moved to Colorado) and doesn't use a cell phone, plus requires his family members to use headsets - maybe he's on to something?
I heard of this brilliant mathematician that found out that most all modern technology is bad, and moved out to a shack in Montana. Maybe he was on to something?
Or maybe both Lai and Ted Kacyzinski are nuts. You can't really use the actions of the researcher as proof that their research is valid. You gotta look at the research itself.
The fact that radiation can cause DNA damage in anything is proof enough.
The fact that this study is about RF/microwave radiation, for which (as another poster has noted) no mechanism has been demonstrated by which it even can cause DNA damage at power levels too low to cause thermal damage, shows that some people need to learn the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation before they make blanket pronopuncements about what constitutes "proof enough".
Because they're protecting themselves from radiation with goggles. That strikes me as not terribly effective.
The goggles are actually protection from a well known thermal effect of microwaves (cataracts). Goggles aren't some new idea in protecting from a previously unknown danger of microwave exposure. The OP is off his rocker.
I can't help you, nor can I add anything to the discussion, but I thought I'd act on my Macbot impulses and point out that OS X includes Chinese text input (both Simplified and Traditional) right out of the box.
Sounds to me like his goal was specifically to get his wife to Linux, not off Windows. Moving her to OS X would have been a significant expense that would do nothing to achieve the goal.
Quit your job and join the military. Plenty of fitness, decent pay, they usually pay for a whole lot of crap you normally would (housing, education, some meals, etc).
Man, he's trying to get AWAY from working 15 hour days. After 4 years of intermittently dragging 40lbs of ammo and/or radios (or sitting in a truck listening to radio static) 12-18 hours a day, sometimes for weeks straight, I was damn near used up. If a regular desk job is killing him, a thankless military term might just finish the job.
I've been curious for a long time. Maybe you can tell me if Austrians also call themselves "Aussies"?
Can't say for certain, but since the official language there is German and "Austria" is just an anglicised form of the country's real name "Österreich", they probably call themselves "Österreicher".
Oh, well...anecdotal evidence, reported secondhand by an internet stranger....MUST be true.
Cripes, I didn't claim my dad's off the cuff estimate was the results of a careful survey of a meticulously selected random cross section, I'm just reporting what one guy said he's experienced. The very fact that they sell a freakin' SHIRT in Austria with the joke on it is a pretty good indicator that it's a common mistake and that it's not just my dad mumbling causing the mistake.
Re:As if they'd so that.
on
Datamining the NSA
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Hmmm, what did the Australians do? I know this article was about Austria....
Yes, that's the joke. It's dismally common among north american* english speakers to [hear|read] "Australia" when someone [says|writes] "Austria", mostly because they've never heard of Austria. My father is from Austria and has a shirt he got there that has:
-An outline of Austria
-A kangaroo silhouette inside the outline
-A "red circle with diagonal line through it" over the kangaroo
-A caption which reads "There are no kangaroos in AUSTRIA"
*The English are close enough to europe to know where Austria is, and Australians know the name of their own country well enough to tell the difference; but like 20% of US and Canadian english speakers he meets get it wrong, according to my dad.
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Of course it can. Just as authors existed before copyright law. Copyright law might help them, but it's by no means necessary. Plus, who actually cares about people selling software. All copyright is concerned about is people developing and publishing software. It doesn't matter why they do it.
Quite so. I was mostly talking about Microsoft's specific case, as in "a company like MS couldn't attain and maintain the market position it has built for itself on software sales without copyright law". That is, MS exists by virtue of leveraging the value of its copyrights.
Copyrights and patents are really only related in that they are both considered "intellectual property", and are government granted monopolies. A company that depends upon selling software to survive cannot exist where there is no copyright law. I'm afraid it's really too great a leap to say that a software company that defends its copyrights is likely to, for that reason alone, vigorously defend its patents, particularly when it never has in the past.
That is exactly the limit of the implied contract of a sale. They get the money you get the goods.
However, stores quite openly have changed that contract,
No, they most certainly have not. They cannot arbitrarily add clauses to the implied contract of sale.
and publicized that change, so we all know we will be searched as we exit,
I don't know where you got the idea that a retail store can "publicize" changes to implied contract and have them be legal. If they "publicize" a change that says all customers must drop their pants and submit to a genital inspection before leaving, do you honestly think that it would be enforceable? If not, where do you think the line is between that and involuntary searches?
Oh yes, naturally most of that bullcrap would get swept aside in real combat. Mostly what I'm getting at is that the Soviet training and doctrine, specifically that of the cold war era, almost without exception mandated the "smart head, dumb body" approach, as opposed to the US military's emphasis on "individual initiative". Even then it was indeed mostly a political maneuver intended to ensure that the military didn't "get any ideas" rather than a rational approach to conducting modern warfare.
If the students were applying to the School of Philosophy, you might have a point. This is the dean of the Harvard Business School, though.
That's the tenth one that myseriously went dark.....muahahahaha!
Simply not true. Our army and the soviet's army have a lot more in common than you think.
Hey, I'm not saying that the Red Army had a single strategy of "send wave after wave of cannon fodder until the enemy collapses" (though they did use this tactic on occasion in WW2). All I'm saying is that the Red Army did not value the same degree of "individual initiative" the US Army does. The fact of the matter is that the Red Army expected the officers and mid- to senior-grade NCOs to direct the actions of the privates and junior NCOs, and they were expected to obey. This is basically true of any army, but the Red Army took it to the extreme that (say) if their officers were killed, a motorized rifle platoon would often be at a loss to continue until they could get the company commander to assign an officer to them to relay orders. The divide between the "head" and the "body" was a lot wider, mostly because the filled the lower ranks with conscripts fulfilling their compulsory service.
Ask the Nazi's what they thought of the soviet army.
The Nazi high command mostly thought they were crazy hordes of untrained peasants, and that whatever skill they appeared to have in night fighting or camouflage was due to the "natural cunning of the slav" rather than training. Their asessment was, naturally, in error. My grandfather, a private in the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, did not concur with this sentiment.
That's exactly the sort of people you want in your army. Clueless nimrods who can't function if the expected parameters are altered are exactly what they should be trying to avoid.
I ship out to Marine boot camp Aug. 1st and people have told me over and over again that when I get there...I shouldn't stand out. D&D players are different...and normally very smart.
You assume that being smart will make you stand out in the military. Well, sorry to burst your bubble but the military has a LOT of smart people, and chances are your intelligence won't stand out as much as you think. Anyone who says "don't let on that you're smart" is really saying "don't spout off trying to be a know-it-all". Keeping your mouth shut and your eyes open (particularly when in boot camp) is the wisest course. Once you've been in a while you'll figure out when it's appropriate to offer your "smarts". Nobody (particularly drill sergeants) likes a wise-ass.
In an army you want drones who can think for themselves but will never question orders.
You got a lot to learn about the nature of the US military. Your description fits the old Soviet military, but not ours. In an army you want people who can understand an objective and modify an operational plan of the fly as the situation changes. Soldiers who stop and look at their commanding officer every time they run into an unexpected obstacle are worthless. I suspect you'll get quite an eye-opening education on this come 2005AUG01, courtesy of the US Marine Corps.
Why do you think the great dictators killed teachers???
Which "great dictators"? Name a dictator that had an effective army full of mindless, uneducated "drones". Name an effective army that wasn't backed by a solid educational system. Killing teachers is a move to solidify a political position, not to create an ignorant pool of cannon fodder.
As for the IDF automatically lowering RPG-ers security clearances, I think they're idiots. I spent 4 years in the US Army as a SIGINT analyst, and I'd say that fully half the people I worked with played role playing games. I wonder, do they think that D&D is "bad" and that hex-map war games are good? At what point does pretending you're Rommel the general become OK, vs. playing Skorzeny the commando? Is it the level of abstraction? Is it the medieval fantasy aspect of D&D? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that most people entering the IDF are there for compulsory service. I knew a lot of D&D dorks in high school who would never be a good fit for military service. The thing is, those of us dorks who were a good fit would have been stuck as truck drivers or something under an IDF-style rule. I think the IDF is tossing out the baby with the bathwater here, but hey, it's their stupid army.
Nonsense. You're conflating two points of Harvard's position. Harvard claims what they did is unethical and some of us disagree with that claim. Now, Harvard's claim that there is no way to rationalize the behavior is merely a statement saying that no excuse will be enough to get these students back on the accepted list. This is a perfectly legitimate position, as Harvard can choose to enforce rules like this any way they please. The claim that it is unethical, however, is debatable. Harvard is not the arbiter of what is and is not ethical, so their opinion is irrelevant.
I know you're just making up a year to put with the joke in order to have it come out to a nice round 200 years, but putting the Lone Ranger in 1806 is ridiculous. The Lone Ranger carried a .45 caliber Colt revolver loaded with silver bullets in self-contained cartridges. Unless he was a time traveller, there's no way he was carrying such a firearm in 1806, when flintlock muskets were the norm. I'm not picking nits here-- you might as well have placed Gatling guns in the American Revolution.
I did RTFA. How far does it slide? Does it slide the full length of the keyboard? Or does it move maybe half an inch? I know it's not spring-loaded only by means of deducing from their "bump it against the stop to move the cursor to the edge" comment. The article is crap on details. I shouldn't have to be Sherlock Freaking Holmes to understand what, exactly, a piece of journalism is talking about.
Could you briefly explain how it actually works? Those morons at SuperMondoExtremeTech-X failed to actually describe what the F this rollermouse is, other than "an updated version of the OLD rollermouse". The pictures show what looks like, to me, a roller. This only acounts for the vertical axis. How does horizontal movement work?
Pierre Curie (her husband) died in an accident crossing the street in 1906, actually.
I heard of this brilliant mathematician that found out that most all modern technology is bad, and moved out to a shack in Montana. Maybe he was on to something?
Or maybe both Lai and Ted Kacyzinski are nuts. You can't really use the actions of the researcher as proof that their research is valid. You gotta look at the research itself.
The fact that this study is about RF/microwave radiation, for which (as another poster has noted) no mechanism has been demonstrated by which it even can cause DNA damage at power levels too low to cause thermal damage, shows that some people need to learn the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation before they make blanket pronopuncements about what constitutes "proof enough".
The goggles are actually protection from a well known thermal effect of microwaves (cataracts). Goggles aren't some new idea in protecting from a previously unknown danger of microwave exposure. The OP is off his rocker.
Sounds to me like his goal was specifically to get his wife to Linux, not off Windows. Moving her to OS X would have been a significant expense that would do nothing to achieve the goal.
Man, he's trying to get AWAY from working 15 hour days. After 4 years of intermittently dragging 40lbs of ammo and/or radios (or sitting in a truck listening to radio static) 12-18 hours a day, sometimes for weeks straight, I was damn near used up. If a regular desk job is killing him, a thankless military term might just finish the job.
Was it stuff that should have gone to Austria that was mis-shipped, or stuff for Australia that was mis-labelled?
p.s. good sig
Not likely to happen, but I think it would be a hoot if IBM bought UNIX at the SCO bankruptcy auction for peanuts.
Yes, well, the implication of the joke is that kangaroos are not native to Austria. But trying to explain a joke ruins it, doesn't it.
Can't say for certain, but since the official language there is German and "Austria" is just an anglicised form of the country's real name "Österreich", they probably call themselves "Österreicher".
Cripes, I didn't claim my dad's off the cuff estimate was the results of a careful survey of a meticulously selected random cross section, I'm just reporting what one guy said he's experienced. The very fact that they sell a freakin' SHIRT in Austria with the joke on it is a pretty good indicator that it's a common mistake and that it's not just my dad mumbling causing the mistake.
Yes, that's the joke. It's dismally common among north american* english speakers to [hear|read] "Australia" when someone [says|writes] "Austria", mostly because they've never heard of Austria. My father is from Austria and has a shirt he got there that has:
-An outline of Austria
-A kangaroo silhouette inside the outline
-A "red circle with diagonal line through it" over the kangaroo
-A caption which reads "There are no kangaroos in AUSTRIA"
*The English are close enough to europe to know where Austria is, and Australians know the name of their own country well enough to tell the difference; but like 20% of US and Canadian english speakers he meets get it wrong, according to my dad.
2. Utilize legacy hot grits(tm) technology
3. ???
4. Profit!
I thought we all agreed that "3. ???" was to be changed to:
3. Fire Rick Berman from a cannon, charging people $5 admission to watch