I think the excuse given was more along the line that Tom would misplace it.
The fact that the ring has no power over him is his unique qualification for having it.
I disagree with your conclusion about what Sauron could accomplish without the ring. The fundamental premise of the story is that Sauron needs the ring to rule. If the only truth of the ring was that Sauron would die if it were destroyed, then the ring would have arranged to be lost. Instead Sauron is calling to it even though doing so actually puts him in more danger. His desire to rule the world is greater than his fear of destruction.
I think Tom's inclusion in the book was a bit awkward. Tolkien introduces a character that could easily handle the one ring, and than provides some rather lame excuses for not giving it to him.
I always thought the fact that Merry and Eowyn are not Men was the critical factor. Anduril is a much more powerful weapon than Merry's, but I doubt Aragorn could have used it to kill the Witch King.
You are right about bringing this discussion to a close.
My only comment at this point is that there are many activities that an individual can participate in and only a limited time for that particpation. If I were more generous with my time I'd prefer to contribute it to what I believe are much more important causes than OSS, such as helping the homeless, teaching people to read, etc. I haven't been doing these things, so I don't take credit for them, but frankly I'd feel better doing those things than contributing to OSS. This may seem to you to be a fault, but I suspect the day will come when you aren't so judgemental.
If you read my post carefully you'll note that I did acknowledge that IBM has contributed software to the free/open source movement, just not the software they make a lot of money on. Generally the software they open either supports the sale of closed hardware or closed software. There's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't qualify them as a poster-boy for OSS either.
By the way, in case it's not obvious from the name I chose; I'm not doing anything for the OSS movement. I don't, however, consider it a fault.
"It is true though, that it does not prevent IBM from going around and trying to squash everyone else - but I haven't seen IBM doing that lately. Have you?"
No, I haven't, but I don't see much evidence of Sun, MS, HP, or Oracle doing it either. It's a power that is used sparingly; where the upside of being offensive outweighs the negative PR.
On the other hand, IBM has given lip service (and some no-profit software) to the "free" software movement. If they're sincere, they should not be seeking patents or they should start adopting the royalty-free license I mentioned earlier.
From a software patent perspective, the only difference between IBM and MS is that IBM has a lot more of them.
"I actually understand why IBM does this. It is to protect them from other companies coming along afterwards and saying that IBM owes them money because they are infringing on their patents."
I disagree. The primary purpose of patents is to fight competition. You can stop a competitor from producing a product that violates your patent without actually using the technology yourself.
Carmakers, for example, can make it difficult to market an alternative fuel vehicle by holding relevent patents. Thus they can stop the potential competition without actually spending the money to develop a product.
If IBM was only concerned about defending itself, it could provide royalty-free licenses for all it's patented technologies. The fact that it doesn't indicates that these patents are not strictly defensive. IBM retains the right to use them as offensive weapons.
Gee, Afghanistan's highly sophisticated government database system is down today, so I can't give you any figures now.
Seriously, though, if you believe that someone other than the Taliban or Warlords are in power in Afghanistan (outside the capital) please enlilighten me with their names and titles.
Even the Bush administration doesn't explicitly claim that the officials in the capital are in control of the entire country. Of course, they don't talk much about Afghanistan or bin Laden these days.
Actually, outside of the capital it's a mix of the Taliban and Warlords that run the show. Democracy is no closer to reality in Afghanistan than it was on 9/11 and democracy has slightly faded in the US since then.
There are plenty of programmers out of work that have never been guilty of using their skills in a destructive manner. Employers can hire anyone they want, but only the foolish will hire a dishonest person when there a plenty of honest, more qualified people available.
"You can't apply one standard to the group you agree with, and then apply another standard to those you don't. That's just hypocrisy."
So I guess those that are calling for Rather's resignation should also call for the resignation of 90% of US journalists who passed along all the fake evidence about WMDs and Saddam's role in 9/11 without doing any due diligence.
"Besides, the future of IT is Linux. Who gives a shit about Office?"
Well, it's a little early to be sure of that. In any case, most children are not going to grow up and become IT workers and if current trends continue a much smaller percentage will do so than in the last generation.
If they use Linux when they grow up, they'll be using a GUI and won't know any more about the Unix command line or Unix internals than the average person knows about the Windows command prompt or Windows internals today.
"If it were a direct election, a candidate could, in a 3 way race, come in 2nd in every state but still win by having just more than a 3rd of the vote."
Yes, when a plurality of citizens vote for a candidate and he wins, we call it democracy. Without the electoral college the state-by-state breakdown would be no more than an arbitrary grouping of the election results.
So you take a fat computer that could already handle browser-based apps, replace the hard drive with a new device and add $150. The end result: less functionality at additional cost.
Since Apple Computer already agreed to a settlement in 1991 over the Apple trademark, they can hardly argue in 2004 that Apple is a generic name (not to mention the flood of "Apple" Music players that would be made by me-too start-ups if a court agreeed with the argument).
To the best of my knowledge grocery stores have not had any settlements with Apple over its trademark so they would have a much better argument.
I consider the fact that Courier fonts were not used to be pretty good evidence that the documents are not fake. Unless of course, the forgers are from Australia
Re:One, two, three, four, I declare a flame-war!
on
Assault Weapons Ban
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· Score: 1
I don't see the relationship between your comment and mine but I'll take a shot anyway.
1. American Idol contestents are more interesting than political candidates.
2. We actually get to see AI's performing. If they were covered like candidates, we'd see 3 seconds of their performance followed by 100's of hours of unqualified commentary.
3. Political commercials have very low bandwidth. Only a handful of bits of factual information dribles out over the course of the entire campaign.
Re:One, two, three, four, I declare a flame-war!
on
Assault Weapons Ban
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· Score: 1
Well, we do have an oppressive government right now, so I guess it's not working.
Right, that's exactly my point. The grandparent post claimed that all the changes migrate upstream. That may be desirable in most cases, but it's neither required nor guaranteed.
"It's not fragmentation, because all the work of the different distros migrates upstream and benefits the entire community."
I don't think that's necessarily true. There's no requirement for changes to "migrate upstream" in the GPL. You are required to distribute the source when you distribute the application. If you don't distribute "upstream" then your changes may never be incorporated there.
If the capabilities of the Freeware and the OSS alternative are exactly the same or they both meet your minimum requirements, then go for the OSS.
On the other hand, it's much more likely that for any particualar type of application sometimes the Freeware will be much better and sometimes the OSS will be much better. Always choosing the OSS version or always choosing the Freeware version seems like a bad approach.
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I think the excuse given was more along the line that Tom would misplace it.
The fact that the ring has no power over him is his unique qualification for having it.
I disagree with your conclusion about what Sauron could accomplish without the ring. The fundamental premise of the story is that Sauron needs the ring to rule. If the only truth of the ring was that Sauron would die if it were destroyed, then the ring would have arranged to be lost. Instead Sauron is calling to it even though doing so actually puts him in more danger. His desire to rule the world is greater than his fear of destruction.
I think Tom's inclusion in the book was a bit awkward. Tolkien introduces a character that could easily handle the one ring, and than provides some rather lame excuses for not giving it to him.
I always thought the fact that Merry and Eowyn are not Men was the critical factor. Anduril is a much more powerful weapon than Merry's, but I doubt Aragorn could have used it to kill the Witch King.
You are right about bringing this discussion to a close.
My only comment at this point is that there are many activities that an individual can participate in and only a limited time for that particpation. If I were more generous with my time I'd prefer to contribute it to what I believe are much more important causes than OSS, such as helping the homeless, teaching people to read, etc. I haven't been doing these things, so I don't take credit for them, but frankly I'd feel better doing those things than contributing to OSS. This may seem to you to be a fault, but I suspect the day will come when you aren't so judgemental.
If you read my post carefully you'll note that I did acknowledge that IBM has contributed software to the free/open source movement, just not the software they make a lot of money on. Generally the software they open either supports the sale of closed hardware or closed software. There's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't qualify them as a poster-boy for OSS either.
By the way, in case it's not obvious from the name I chose; I'm not doing anything for the OSS movement. I don't, however, consider it a fault.
"It is true though, that it does not prevent IBM from going around and trying to squash everyone else - but I haven't seen IBM doing that lately. Have you?"
No, I haven't, but I don't see much evidence of Sun, MS, HP, or Oracle doing it either. It's a power that is used sparingly; where the upside of being offensive outweighs the negative PR.
On the other hand, IBM has given lip service (and some no-profit software) to the "free" software movement. If they're sincere, they should not be seeking patents or they should start adopting the royalty-free license I mentioned earlier.
From a software patent perspective, the only difference between IBM and MS is that IBM has a lot more of them.
There have been reports from organizations like Human Rights Watch that have people on the ground in Afghanistan (see Afghanistan: Human Rights Watch Key Documents)
If you don't believe what I'm saying, what do YOU base it on?
"I actually understand why IBM does this. It is to protect them from other companies coming along afterwards and saying that IBM owes them money because they are infringing on their patents."
I disagree. The primary purpose of patents is to fight competition. You can stop a competitor from producing a product that violates your patent without actually using the technology yourself.
Carmakers, for example, can make it difficult to market an alternative fuel vehicle by holding relevent patents. Thus they can stop the potential competition without actually spending the money to develop a product.
If IBM was only concerned about defending itself, it could provide royalty-free licenses for all it's patented technologies. The fact that it doesn't indicates that these patents are not strictly defensive. IBM retains the right to use them as offensive weapons.
Gee, Afghanistan's highly sophisticated government database system is down today, so I can't give you any figures now.
Seriously, though, if you believe that someone other than the Taliban or Warlords are in power in Afghanistan (outside the capital) please enlilighten me with their names and titles.
Even the Bush administration doesn't explicitly claim that the officials in the capital are in control of the entire country. Of course, they don't talk much about Afghanistan or bin Laden these days.
"IBM have already filed 2 patents for the project."
More evidence that IBM isn't really committed to an open/free philosophy.
Actually, outside of the capital it's a mix of the Taliban and Warlords that run the show. Democracy is no closer to reality in Afghanistan than it was on 9/11 and democracy has slightly faded in the US since then.
There are plenty of programmers out of work that have never been guilty of using their skills in a destructive manner. Employers can hire anyone they want, but only the foolish will hire a dishonest person when there a plenty of honest, more qualified people available.
"You can't apply one standard to the group you agree with, and then apply another standard to those you don't. That's just hypocrisy."
So I guess those that are calling for Rather's resignation should also call for the resignation of 90% of US journalists who passed along all the fake evidence about WMDs and Saddam's role in 9/11 without doing any due diligence.
"Besides, the future of IT is Linux. Who gives a shit about Office?"
Well, it's a little early to be sure of that. In any case, most children are not going to grow up and become IT workers and if current trends continue a much smaller percentage will do so than in the last generation.
If they use Linux when they grow up, they'll be using a GUI and won't know any more about the Unix command line or Unix internals than the average person knows about the Windows command prompt or Windows internals today.
"If it were a direct election, a candidate could, in a 3 way race, come in 2nd in every state but still win by having just more than a 3rd of the vote."
Yes, when a plurality of citizens vote for a candidate and he wins, we call it democracy. Without the electoral college the state-by-state breakdown would be no more than an arbitrary grouping of the election results.
So you take a fat computer that could already handle browser-based apps, replace the hard drive with a new device and add $150. The end result: less functionality at additional cost.
I don't think Glasser was whining. When Apple didn't give him want he wanted, he achieved his goals without them.
in the last 5 min?
Since Apple Computer already agreed to a settlement in 1991 over the Apple trademark, they can hardly argue in 2004 that Apple is a generic name (not to mention the flood of "Apple" Music players that would be made by me-too start-ups if a court agreeed with the argument).
To the best of my knowledge grocery stores have not had any settlements with Apple over its trademark so they would have a much better argument.
I consider the fact that Courier fonts were not used to be pretty good evidence that the documents are not fake. Unless of course, the forgers are from Australia
I don't see the relationship between your comment and mine but I'll take a shot anyway.
1. American Idol contestents are more interesting than political candidates.
2. We actually get to see AI's performing. If they were covered like candidates, we'd see 3 seconds of their performance followed by 100's of hours of unqualified commentary.
3. Political commercials have very low bandwidth. Only a handful of bits of factual information dribles out over the course of the entire campaign.
Well, we do have an oppressive government right now, so I guess it's not working.
Right, that's exactly my point. The grandparent post claimed that all the changes migrate upstream. That may be desirable in most cases, but it's neither required nor guaranteed.
"It's not fragmentation, because all the work of the different distros migrates upstream and benefits the entire community."
I don't think that's necessarily true. There's no requirement for changes to "migrate upstream" in the GPL. You are required to distribute the source when you distribute the application. If you don't distribute "upstream" then your changes may never be incorporated there.
If the capabilities of the Freeware and the OSS alternative are exactly the same or they both meet your minimum requirements, then go for the OSS.
On the other hand, it's much more likely that for any particualar type of application sometimes the Freeware will be much better and sometimes the OSS will be much better. Always choosing the OSS version or always choosing the Freeware version seems like a bad approach.