There's more than one abbreviation for "Wireless Access Point", as a Google of 802.11g WAP shows. Only the first link refers to the mobile web technology. All the others, on the first page at least, are using it as an abbreviation for Wireless Access Point.
I've seen WAP used to mean the latter as often as I have to the mobile web, and that's heavily biased towards the mobile web technology as I'm interested in mobile phone technologies.
So it's not unreasonable that WAP would be used to mean Wireless AP in the FreeBSD documentation.
Sometimes TLAs are re-used. There'd be a lot of angry cops around if every time we hooked our PCs up to the mains, we had to use the original definition of "PC".
You know, last year when most liberals complained bitterly that half the country must be several sandwiches short of a picnic in order to re-elect such a completely absurdly bad administration, we got shouted down with "If you keep saying we're morons, you'll never get our votes!"
Is the comment I'm responding to an attempt to continue to practically force liberals to consider conservatives idiots? I mean, liberals promote economic sanctions against repressive regimes, and suddenly it's hypocritical for us to do that but oppose war against Iraq, and, erm, also for us to express concern about sanctions causing starvation and death on a personal level? Is this hypocritical to all Republicans, or is it just a chronically stupid minority who see some sort of inconsistancy there? Is it an unbelievably moronic minority of right-wing nutcases, like yourself, who believe that liberals were against taking any kind of action against Saddam Hussein or do the vast majority of the 52% have that amount of their brain missing?
Meanwhile, doubtless you were impressed by Bush's crusade for war, because, well, that Blix guy was clearly lying 'cos he was a yurp-ean, right? And, let's be honest, something had to be done about Saddam, and that means anything should be done, preferably something that involves blood and killing and torture and blowing things up and being really, really, fucking mean! And you wonder why liberals get concerned when Republicans are re-elected.
Oh, bollocks. If Darknets become the future of P2P, the RIAA and its members are going to high-five one another and say "We did it!"
The issue with P2P is that it's a way for a single person to distribute a piece of music to potentially millions of anonymous strangers. That hadn't existed before, and it was, by and large, mostly used for piracy. People took copyrighted materials whose producers were relying upon sales (and realistically have no alternatives) to pay for the costs of production and, without permission, used Napster and its successors to distribute it instead.
That's what got the music industry in a panic. Suddenly content that could, previously, only be accessed under relatively controlled conditions was available, on a on-demand basis, to anyone who wanted it, without the receivers having to contribute a penny to the costs of production. While some Slashdotters have argued the additional publicity might have generated sales as people were exposed to content they wouldn't otherwise have been, it's also a fact that many, possibly even most, P2P users used P2P to build music collections directly, bypassing the usual pay-for-CDs routes. I know such people, and I know more people who I can definitely say didn't pay money they otherwise would have done, than people who bought CDs purely on the basis of being exposed to the content via P2P that they wouldn't otherwise have been.
What Darknets do is they reduce the numbers involved considerably, and return music-redistribution to the limited scales we saw in the days of home taping. The participants know one-another. Downloadable music libraries become limited to those of a small group of friends. It ceases to be possible for millions of people to be able to download a song illegally the day after it goes on sale.
Darknets represent a victory for the recording industry. Oh, they'll continue to chase them, if only to keep the numbers down and limited and prevent a single darknet from becoming large enough to constitute a threat, but over-all, darknets will never be as damaging, in practice, as Napster and its successors.
Don't think like a geek. The issue with Napster wasn't that you could physically transfer an MP3 from one person to another. It was that you could rip an MP3, and then it'd be available to millions of people within hours, in a form easily searched for and obtainable on demand. In short, if someone thought "How can I get Rosen and the Hillarycats's latest hit 'Copy me to the moon'", they now had two choices: find the CD and buy it, or download the MP3." That latter method just isn't practical with Darknets.
Can you point to links of definitions of "socialism" that indicate that clarify the common ownership versus state ownership?
Why should I need to? You know, as does everyone else, that the trade union movement and the cooperative movement are socialist movements. You know that Robert Owens is considered the father of socialism by many, and his ideas basicly consisted of a somewhat paternalistic reform of his own mills in order to create better living and working conditions for the people who operated them. You know that in all these cases, neither common ownership nor state ownership are relevent.
I don't need to say anything about "common ownership" vs "state ownership" because it's not relevent. There are governments that have attempted to introduce socialist principles through nationalising the big industries in order to reform them and put them under the will of their workers, on the principle that the state is a representative of the people. However, that's a group of people trying to implement it, another attempt to implement socialism.
What your dictionary says isn't that important, it reflects, in an attempt to help you, the term used as an insult (based upon a misinterpretation of governmental socialists), or misused by a Leninist/Stalinist/etc regime to justify the unjustifiable. The surprise really is not that this stuff's listed there, but that forcing people to pay tithes, or banning literature that relates to sex, is not listed under Christianity.
Like I said, much of the confusion probably comes from the fact that people are using words that mean different things to different people.
Like I said in the comment you originally responded to, this goes more towards disingenuous use of language than just "different things to different people", and is why I hold people like our SAP friend in contempt. They are attempting to use both the general definition of socialism - of collective rather than competitive action, of workers owning and controlling production - together with a definition irrelevent to open source, that of state ownership. I'll repeat my comment here in the hope that the context and above paragraph has clarified it somewhat:
The thing to be aware of is that people who oppose open source and use the "socialist" word to insult it are being disingenious. They are changing the definitions they use mid way through from the correct, valid, ones to the emotion laden versions. The logic goes something like this:
1. Open source is socialism, according to most socialists, because it's cooperative, non-competitive, software development where the programmers involved "own" the results, and anyone who wants to take part also "owns" the results.
2. Socialism is about state control of commerce.
3. Therefore, open source is evil.
2 is completely incompatable with 1. Yet fanatics like our SAP exec use this argument anyway.
Open source is socialist. It's socialist because it's people working together rather than against one another, because the workers own and control the production. It couldn't be more socialist. This is only a problem if you change the definition of socialist mid-way through, as the SAP fuckwit did. If you believe that socialism is about state control of property, then open source has nothing to do with socialism. If you actually care about definitions, and look at the origins of socialism, and look at Robert Owens or the Cooperative Movement or the half-dozen other groups that constituted socialist activity before Labour Parties and Communist Parties tried to reorganize commerce forcably, then open source is and there's nothing wrong with socialism.
They're releasing a WRT54GL, which supports Linux. Additionally all the current WRT54GS models support Linux. The most recent has half the ram and flash of previous versions, just like the barebones WRT54G (but as the earlier GSes had a lot of both, it still has enough to run Linux), which suggests Linksys are just cutting costs rather than involved in a conspiracy to deny their customers a flexible, programmable, router device.
but I'm not sure that I agree there since socialism is about state control of property...
But that's your error. Socialism is not about state control of property. Socialism is about people working together, about workers "owning" production. If your definition was correct, then Robert Owens wouldn't be considered the "Father of socialism" (Owen's ideas had little or nothing to do with the state), and the Trade Union movement and Cooperative Movement wouldn't be considered socialist. There wouldn't be a single Anarchist that would consider themselves a socialist either.
The whole "state control of property" stuff is a nonsense definition that is propogated amongst Americans but that few people who consider themselves socialists would agree with.
Open source is socialist. It's furfills all legitimate definitions of socialism. It's people working together, cooperating. It's workers owning the means of production, and indeed the production itself. There's nothing wrong with any of that, it's when people make jumps along the lines of "Well, I can see it's socialist according to <Real Definition Of Socialism<, and my definition of socialism is actually <Bogus definition of socialism that happens to describe something relatively abhorent>, ergo open source is abhorent", that the mistakes, which are entirely rhetorical, creep in, and people reject a wonderful and beautiful thing because of elementary logic errors based upon a confusion of propaganda and reality.
The point is that socialism is founded on the principle of coercion, and calling it "sharing" just reeks of propaganda.
No, it isn't. Socialism is only coerced if it's forced by government. You could make the same arguement about any system of morality and values.
(I'll grant you this, the Amish have proven that socialism can be voluntary. They are, in fact, an example of successful anarcho-socialism. But, obviously, socialism as we know it is very different from that -- our socialism is founded on the principle of coercion.)
Robert Owens, the trade union movement, the cooperative movement, and the open source movement didn't and do not use coercion. What on Earth are you talking about?
These are examples of statism, not socialism. None of the laws and technologies you mention have anything to do with the concept of workers working together, rather than in opposition to one another, to improve their conditions and those of everyone else.
Here's a thing that'll scare most people reading this, because most people are Americans and have been given a wierd definition of socialism from birth. In its purest form, socialism is an ideology that open source definitely compatable with, if not an example of. It fits right in with the cooperative movement, for example.
The thing to be aware of is that people who oppose open source and use the "socialist" word to insult it are being disingenious. They are changing the definitions they use mid way through from the correct, valid, ones to the emotion laden versions. The logic goes something like this:
1. Open source is socialism, according to most socialists, because it's cooperative, non-competitive, software development where the programmers involved "own" the results, and anyone who wants to take part also "owns" the results.
2. Socialism is about state control of commerce.
3. Therefore, open source is evil.
2 is completely incompatable with 1. Yet fanatics like our SAP exec use this argument anyway.
Fuck 'em and their abuse of other people's beliefs.
AAC is about as non-proprietary as MP3 - that is, yes, it's covered by patents and, long term, it'd be foolish to rely upon it for an open application, but it's properly, openly, documented, and easily implemented.
What's your alternative to the iPod if AAC is the problem? Almost all the competitors use WMA, which, so far as I'm aware, isn't documented and open to the same extent that AAC is, though I'm happy to be proven wrong. And virtually everything plays MP3s.
The bug was about missing data in a lookup table. Intel said the problem was caused by a bug in the script designed to populate that table when the CPU was being designed, though legend has it that someone erronously "proved" that the data wasn't needed. So, I guess, either way you look at it, be it the script, the table, or the alleged logic flaw, it's a software, not a hardware bug (or at least, it's a bug caused by software.)
So soliciting crimes should be illegal for everyone except businesses, for example?
If you intentionally encourage illegal behaviour, than it's absolutely right you should be held accountable. Saying "It wasn't MY finger on the trigger, I just said "fire"" shouldn't be an opt-out for anyone, be they an enraged wife, or the marketing department of Google.
That's a poor analogy. Does looking at your girlfriend in a weird way have the same affects as if she's raped? Almost certainly not.
However, if you make a copy of something you'd otherwise have bought, does the content producer or the producer's publisher no longer have something they otherwise would have had while you have something you otherwise wouldn't (eg has the same affect as theft)? Answer: of course! You have content, the publisher doesn't have the money they would have received for that content.
Now, that doesn't mean (and I know people will have started replying after the second paragraph even though it was carefully worded, because people are dumb and do kneejerk responses) I think all cases of copyright infringement are legitimately compared to theft. People do "try before they buy" and at least three P2P users use P2P for that reason. But there are at least some. If the general belief by those opposing a particular method of copyright infringement is that, in general, most transactions are similar to that described above, and that over-all, most users are using it as a substitute for legitimately purchasing content, then, yeah, it's legitimate for them to compare it to theft and describe it as theft.
Is there a difference between stealing a physical CD from a store and copying someone's CD? Answer: well, ignoring the numbers of victims in both, this really depends on the circumstances. If you copy a CD you'd never have bought, then no, it's not comparable to stealing a CD, whether you'd have bought that CD or not. If you copy a CD that you'd have bought otherwise, then, yes, the comparison is very similar. The fact the first involves 50c of plastic doesn't change the equation that much.
Nope. It's only lying if they lied. If they thought it was legal, and they've been told since, by SCOTUS no less, that it isn't, then they weren't lying, and aren't now.
You can still share files. It's just more difficult to do so anonymously than it was previously. The World Wide Web still exists. BitTorrent still exists. Usenet (barely) still exists.
Nothing stops anyone from setting up a P2P system that promotes responsibility, say, by requiring those who put files up for redistribution digitally sign and certify them so that any potential complaints about copyright can go back to a named individual. The complete absense of such a system, in my view, legitimizes complaints by the content industry that, for the most part, the major P2P networks were designed primarily to facilitate piracy.
Good riddance to Grokster, and let's hope that compromises that ensure networks exist to transfer genuinely free content while copyright holders still have some control over their works and have some assurances that they'll be able to deal easily with violations without affecting innocent parties come into being. We need them. We need a free network, not an illegal one.
I don't think you commit perjury if you're wrong, only if you lie. But IANAL.
On top of which, even lying, when you're a defendant, isn't a guaranteed perjury charge. For example, plenty of people have been found guilty of committing crimes that they pleaded "Not Guilty" to.
In all these kinds of cases, I tend to defer to "Squiggleslash Shrugged". I see nothing wrong with businesses that rely upon ignorance and confusion on the part of their customers being regulated out of existance. If Sony wants to become a parasite, then it's time to expose it to the anti-lice cream. Sorry dada21, you're not making a great case for anarcho-libertarianism if you support Sony's right to take advantage.
If there weren't any plans, then yeah, that's refusing to offer them. So I guess it was the case, and I have to say I'm amazed. I'm not surprised they're offering packages though now.
I use most of my (700) minutes, I also get free M2M and unlimited nights and weekends on my plan, shared amongst myself and my fiance, of which we generally use several thousand minutes. I fail to see how it's a rip-off or "crappy shit". If I used my phone to anything like the same extent on any pay-as-you-go tariff in the UK or US I'm aware of, I'd be paying $150-300 a month (and that's assuming I've carefully selected the plan.) I'm paying more like $75, and I know, the occasional text message or international phone call aside, that's all I'm going to pay.
So it's not "crappy shit". It's a poor choice, perhaps, if you don't use your phone very often, but that's what choices are for. The fact there are packaged plans doesn't mean there aren't any pay as you go systems. I mentioned a while range. If you think that your average bill on a PAYG plan would be well under what you'd pay on a monthly plan, then go with that. It wouldn't suit me, so I don't do it.
One thing I intensely dislike is the European attitude that people should have phones, but be punished for actually using them. That's what time charges amount to. This is a wonderful technology. It links people in ways never before imagined. With modern digital networks, there's more than enough capacity to go around in practice. There's no reason to discourage its use.
The only pay-as-you-go account I used in the UK before I moved here (Orange's JustTalk) also required minimal payment. It was an order of magnitude or two lower than you get here (You had to, IIRC, make one outgoing call of at least two minutes - about 1GBP IIRC every six months) but it had to be done. Orange, of course, also benefitted from the fact that it charged callers for incoming users, whereas US cellphone operators have to extract their revenues from the cellphone customer itself. I wonder if the cellphone really did earn your carrier 30GBP, or if you're just counting the money you yourself gave them.
There's probably never going to be a "True PAYG" plan as you've defined it because there are fixed resources that phone users are using by keeping their lines open - namely that the infrastructure to ensure a call can be connected has to be there, whether it's a telephone number or whatever else. There is an incentive on carriers to encourage their customers to spend something or disconnect.
Using a more reasonable definition, I'd say that most US PAYG plans are PAYG. You may have to make a minimum top-up every three months, but you will not lose that credit as long as you do so. That credit's available, and your minutes will be charged against it. The issue here, I think, is that a lot of people who say they want "PAYG" are actually looking for "Emergency Back-up Phone that Costs As Little As Possible". Whether it makes commercial sense to have such a tariff, especially when you can't say "Oh well, at least they make leave the phone on for incoming calls and use it largely for that" is open to question.
You do realise this is the case absolutely everywhere, right? I don't know of any countries where the cellular carriers refuse to include tariffs that include packaged minutes.
Look, you have several choices.
You can buy less minutes than you generally need, and pay overage occasionally.
You can buy more minutes than you generally need, and get a predictable bill.
You can buy a little more than you generally need on a Roll-Over plan (currently only available on Cingular and their affiliates), and not get hit too hard when you do go over.
You can go Pay As You Go. Cingular, Virgin Mobile, and T-Mobile all have decent plans in that area that require very little as the minimum call spend. Check them out.
All are available in the US, and Sprint PCS also has the "Fair and Flexible" plan which makes overage less of an issue.
What countries do you not have that choice, and why do you consider not being able to buy (note: not "buying", but "having the choice if you want it") more minutes than you need an advantage?
I'm not really sure what your issue is. Most, if not all (well, MetroPCS excepting, which does unlimited service), mobile carriers in the US allow you to go beyond your talk plan. The minutes are expensive, but typically not much worse than prepaid service. Usually it's more economical to buy more minutes than you'd generally need, but you don't have to. Even then, some, like Sprint PCS, have some pretty affordable alternatives.
What carrier were you signing up for where going beyond 45 minutes would result in your service being cut off?
With the greatest of respect, I really feel the "superior design" thing from Apple has always been over-rated. They've been a leader in original aesthetic design that other people have slavishly copied, but the results - from my standpoint at least - have been as often ugly as they have been beautiful. The Blue and White G3 and, dare I say it, the original iMac (coloured, transparent, portable TVs?) were hailed by fans to occupy the design high-ground, and were widely copied, a role I'd say was deserving of the iMac G4, Cube, and Mac mini, but not those.
From a hardware point of view, we've been looking at a stream of successes and failures just as varied as any other PC manufacturer, with 166MHz FSB laptops still the norm, and reliability - in reality - as varied. Someone recently showed me, trying to demonstrate Apple's superiority, some form of consumer reliability statistics showing the return rate on Apple's products was lower than virtually everyone else. While this may have been technically true, it's also true that the comparison was something like 10% returned vs 11% returned. From an order-of-magnitude point of view, it was identical. When you throw in the fact that Dell, et al, sell low cost machines that virtually everyone, computer literate or not, buys, while Macs are generally bought by people who have done the research into what they're getting, the lower return rate doesn't look as impressive either.
In many areas Apple is really the equal of its competitors. OS X has strengths that Windows 2000 doesn't (yeah, I said 2000, not XP, shoot me), but 2000 also has strengths: it's emulation of APIs for legacy apps is nicer and more integrated than OS X's "classic", it has a superior security model (even if Microsoft then screws everything up by making the default configuration full of holes and then, thanks to the network effect, making it close to impossible to actually use NT's fine-grained ACL-based security model to fix it); supposedly it's a little bit faster too. But OS X has the GUI, and the Cocoa development system.
I think Apple's niche is not so much its "superior" design, it's its "different design". The fact is many of us do not like Microsoft Windows. We want a friendly machine that's reasonably up to date running an OS that's likewise. Apple's software is definitely "good enough", it's hardware is also "good enough", and if you want a menu on the top of the screen or a Unix environment that means you can get around limitations of the GUI by dropping to the command line once in a while, it's all there.
As others have pointed out, not really. You can't modify the GPL, you have to choose it or choose something else (like a written-from-scratch thing that achieves the aims you want to achieve.)
That said, you can also dual license or add licenses. There's nothing to stop you saying "This is provided under the terms of the GPL, you may also link this code with this other bit of code, as long as you...(etc etc.)" Linus Torvalds did something similar to ensure people were aware that the fact your program is written to load and execute under the Linux kernel using the Linux APIs does not mean it has to be subject to the GPL in the same way as a kernel modification would be. Arguably, it was unnecessary, but he did it anyway.
Socialism is a hard to define bastard term- it originally was an offshoot of communism, but now tends to be used to describe economic systems where the government (not the people!) control the means of production.
Seriously, why did you even say that?
Socialism predates Communism. It started with Robert Owen's attempts in the early nineteenth century to improve living and working conditions for the workers in his mills.
As for "now tends to be used", why yes, it does, misleadingly, but not exclusively and rarely accurately. Two of the most successful examples of socialism are entirely non-governmental - they being the trade union movement, and the cooperative movement. Your definition is so wide it could be used to describe the government of Germany in the 1930s, or most other Fascist regimes, groups ideologically opposed to socialists and socialism.
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I've seen WAP used to mean the latter as often as I have to the mobile web, and that's heavily biased towards the mobile web technology as I'm interested in mobile phone technologies.
Wikipedia also lists it as a common definition.
So it's not unreasonable that WAP would be used to mean Wireless AP in the FreeBSD documentation.
Sometimes TLAs are re-used. There'd be a lot of angry cops around if every time we hooked our PCs up to the mains, we had to use the original definition of "PC".
Is the comment I'm responding to an attempt to continue to practically force liberals to consider conservatives idiots? I mean, liberals promote economic sanctions against repressive regimes, and suddenly it's hypocritical for us to do that but oppose war against Iraq, and, erm, also for us to express concern about sanctions causing starvation and death on a personal level? Is this hypocritical to all Republicans, or is it just a chronically stupid minority who see some sort of inconsistancy there? Is it an unbelievably moronic minority of right-wing nutcases, like yourself, who believe that liberals were against taking any kind of action against Saddam Hussein or do the vast majority of the 52% have that amount of their brain missing?
Meanwhile, doubtless you were impressed by Bush's crusade for war, because, well, that Blix guy was clearly lying 'cos he was a yurp-ean, right? And, let's be honest, something had to be done about Saddam, and that means anything should be done, preferably something that involves blood and killing and torture and blowing things up and being really, really, fucking mean! And you wonder why liberals get concerned when Republicans are re-elected.
The issue with P2P is that it's a way for a single person to distribute a piece of music to potentially millions of anonymous strangers. That hadn't existed before, and it was, by and large, mostly used for piracy. People took copyrighted materials whose producers were relying upon sales (and realistically have no alternatives) to pay for the costs of production and, without permission, used Napster and its successors to distribute it instead.
That's what got the music industry in a panic. Suddenly content that could, previously, only be accessed under relatively controlled conditions was available, on a on-demand basis, to anyone who wanted it, without the receivers having to contribute a penny to the costs of production. While some Slashdotters have argued the additional publicity might have generated sales as people were exposed to content they wouldn't otherwise have been, it's also a fact that many, possibly even most, P2P users used P2P to build music collections directly, bypassing the usual pay-for-CDs routes. I know such people, and I know more people who I can definitely say didn't pay money they otherwise would have done, than people who bought CDs purely on the basis of being exposed to the content via P2P that they wouldn't otherwise have been.
What Darknets do is they reduce the numbers involved considerably, and return music-redistribution to the limited scales we saw in the days of home taping. The participants know one-another. Downloadable music libraries become limited to those of a small group of friends. It ceases to be possible for millions of people to be able to download a song illegally the day after it goes on sale.
Darknets represent a victory for the recording industry. Oh, they'll continue to chase them, if only to keep the numbers down and limited and prevent a single darknet from becoming large enough to constitute a threat, but over-all, darknets will never be as damaging, in practice, as Napster and its successors.
Don't think like a geek. The issue with Napster wasn't that you could physically transfer an MP3 from one person to another. It was that you could rip an MP3, and then it'd be available to millions of people within hours, in a form easily searched for and obtainable on demand. In short, if someone thought "How can I get Rosen and the Hillarycats's latest hit 'Copy me to the moon'", they now had two choices: find the CD and buy it, or download the MP3." That latter method just isn't practical with Darknets.
I don't need to say anything about "common ownership" vs "state ownership" because it's not relevent. There are governments that have attempted to introduce socialist principles through nationalising the big industries in order to reform them and put them under the will of their workers, on the principle that the state is a representative of the people. However, that's a group of people trying to implement it, another attempt to implement socialism.
What your dictionary says isn't that important, it reflects, in an attempt to help you, the term used as an insult (based upon a misinterpretation of governmental socialists), or misused by a Leninist/Stalinist/etc regime to justify the unjustifiable. The surprise really is not that this stuff's listed there, but that forcing people to pay tithes, or banning literature that relates to sex, is not listed under Christianity.
Like I said in the comment you originally responded to, this goes more towards disingenuous use of language than just "different things to different people", and is why I hold people like our SAP friend in contempt. They are attempting to use both the general definition of socialism - of collective rather than competitive action, of workers owning and controlling production - together with a definition irrelevent to open source, that of state ownership. I'll repeat my comment here in the hope that the context and above paragraph has clarified it somewhat: Open source is socialist. It's socialist because it's people working together rather than against one another, because the workers own and control the production. It couldn't be more socialist. This is only a problem if you change the definition of socialist mid-way through, as the SAP fuckwit did. If you believe that socialism is about state control of property, then open source has nothing to do with socialism. If you actually care about definitions, and look at the origins of socialism, and look at Robert Owens or the Cooperative Movement or the half-dozen other groups that constituted socialist activity before Labour Parties and Communist Parties tried to reorganize commerce forcably, then open source is and there's nothing wrong with socialism.They're releasing a WRT54GL, which supports Linux. Additionally all the current WRT54GS models support Linux. The most recent has half the ram and flash of previous versions, just like the barebones WRT54G (but as the earlier GSes had a lot of both, it still has enough to run Linux), which suggests Linksys are just cutting costs rather than involved in a conspiracy to deny their customers a flexible, programmable, router device.
The whole "state control of property" stuff is a nonsense definition that is propogated amongst Americans but that few people who consider themselves socialists would agree with.
Open source is socialist. It's furfills all legitimate definitions of socialism. It's people working together, cooperating. It's workers owning the means of production, and indeed the production itself. There's nothing wrong with any of that, it's when people make jumps along the lines of "Well, I can see it's socialist according to <Real Definition Of Socialism<, and my definition of socialism is actually <Bogus definition of socialism that happens to describe something relatively abhorent>, ergo open source is abhorent", that the mistakes, which are entirely rhetorical, creep in, and people reject a wonderful and beautiful thing because of elementary logic errors based upon a confusion of propaganda and reality.
Here's a thing that'll scare most people reading this, because most people are Americans and have been given a wierd definition of socialism from birth. In its purest form, socialism is an ideology that open source definitely compatable with, if not an example of. It fits right in with the cooperative movement, for example.
The thing to be aware of is that people who oppose open source and use the "socialist" word to insult it are being disingenious. They are changing the definitions they use mid way through from the correct, valid, ones to the emotion laden versions. The logic goes something like this:
1. Open source is socialism, according to most socialists, because it's cooperative, non-competitive, software development where the programmers involved "own" the results, and anyone who wants to take part also "owns" the results.
2. Socialism is about state control of commerce.
3. Therefore, open source is evil.
2 is completely incompatable with 1. Yet fanatics like our SAP exec use this argument anyway.
Fuck 'em and their abuse of other people's beliefs.
What's your alternative to the iPod if AAC is the problem? Almost all the competitors use WMA, which, so far as I'm aware, isn't documented and open to the same extent that AAC is, though I'm happy to be proven wrong. And virtually everything plays MP3s.
The bug was about missing data in a lookup table. Intel said the problem was caused by a bug in the script designed to populate that table when the CPU was being designed, though legend has it that someone erronously "proved" that the data wasn't needed. So, I guess, either way you look at it, be it the script, the table, or the alleged logic flaw, it's a software, not a hardware bug (or at least, it's a bug caused by software.)
If you intentionally encourage illegal behaviour, than it's absolutely right you should be held accountable. Saying "It wasn't MY finger on the trigger, I just said "fire"" shouldn't be an opt-out for anyone, be they an enraged wife, or the marketing department of Google.
However, if you make a copy of something you'd otherwise have bought, does the content producer or the producer's publisher no longer have something they otherwise would have had while you have something you otherwise wouldn't (eg has the same affect as theft)? Answer: of course! You have content, the publisher doesn't have the money they would have received for that content.
Now, that doesn't mean (and I know people will have started replying after the second paragraph even though it was carefully worded, because people are dumb and do kneejerk responses) I think all cases of copyright infringement are legitimately compared to theft. People do "try before they buy" and at least three P2P users use P2P for that reason. But there are at least some. If the general belief by those opposing a particular method of copyright infringement is that, in general, most transactions are similar to that described above, and that over-all, most users are using it as a substitute for legitimately purchasing content, then, yeah, it's legitimate for them to compare it to theft and describe it as theft.
Is there a difference between stealing a physical CD from a store and copying someone's CD? Answer: well, ignoring the numbers of victims in both, this really depends on the circumstances. If you copy a CD you'd never have bought, then no, it's not comparable to stealing a CD, whether you'd have bought that CD or not. If you copy a CD that you'd have bought otherwise, then, yes, the comparison is very similar. The fact the first involves 50c of plastic doesn't change the equation that much.
Nope. It's only lying if they lied. If they thought it was legal, and they've been told since, by SCOTUS no less, that it isn't, then they weren't lying, and aren't now.
Nothing stops anyone from setting up a P2P system that promotes responsibility, say, by requiring those who put files up for redistribution digitally sign and certify them so that any potential complaints about copyright can go back to a named individual. The complete absense of such a system, in my view, legitimizes complaints by the content industry that, for the most part, the major P2P networks were designed primarily to facilitate piracy.
Good riddance to Grokster, and let's hope that compromises that ensure networks exist to transfer genuinely free content while copyright holders still have some control over their works and have some assurances that they'll be able to deal easily with violations without affecting innocent parties come into being. We need them. We need a free network, not an illegal one.
On top of which, even lying, when you're a defendant, isn't a guaranteed perjury charge. For example, plenty of people have been found guilty of committing crimes that they pleaded "Not Guilty" to.
That's a joke, needless to say.
In all these kinds of cases, I tend to defer to "Squiggleslash Shrugged". I see nothing wrong with businesses that rely upon ignorance and confusion on the part of their customers being regulated out of existance. If Sony wants to become a parasite, then it's time to expose it to the anti-lice cream. Sorry dada21, you're not making a great case for anarcho-libertarianism if you support Sony's right to take advantage.
I use most of my (700) minutes, I also get free M2M and unlimited nights and weekends on my plan, shared amongst myself and my fiance, of which we generally use several thousand minutes. I fail to see how it's a rip-off or "crappy shit". If I used my phone to anything like the same extent on any pay-as-you-go tariff in the UK or US I'm aware of, I'd be paying $150-300 a month (and that's assuming I've carefully selected the plan.) I'm paying more like $75, and I know, the occasional text message or international phone call aside, that's all I'm going to pay.
So it's not "crappy shit". It's a poor choice, perhaps, if you don't use your phone very often, but that's what choices are for. The fact there are packaged plans doesn't mean there aren't any pay as you go systems. I mentioned a while range. If you think that your average bill on a PAYG plan would be well under what you'd pay on a monthly plan, then go with that. It wouldn't suit me, so I don't do it.
One thing I intensely dislike is the European attitude that people should have phones, but be punished for actually using them. That's what time charges amount to. This is a wonderful technology. It links people in ways never before imagined. With modern digital networks, there's more than enough capacity to go around in practice. There's no reason to discourage its use.
There's probably never going to be a "True PAYG" plan as you've defined it because there are fixed resources that phone users are using by keeping their lines open - namely that the infrastructure to ensure a call can be connected has to be there, whether it's a telephone number or whatever else. There is an incentive on carriers to encourage their customers to spend something or disconnect.
Using a more reasonable definition, I'd say that most US PAYG plans are PAYG. You may have to make a minimum top-up every three months, but you will not lose that credit as long as you do so. That credit's available, and your minutes will be charged against it. The issue here, I think, is that a lot of people who say they want "PAYG" are actually looking for "Emergency Back-up Phone that Costs As Little As Possible". Whether it makes commercial sense to have such a tariff, especially when you can't say "Oh well, at least they make leave the phone on for incoming calls and use it largely for that" is open to question.
Really? They *refused* to offer any talk plans at all with bundled minutes in your (unspecified) home country, to anyone? I find that hard to believe.
Look, you have several choices.
You can buy less minutes than you generally need, and pay overage occasionally.
You can buy more minutes than you generally need, and get a predictable bill.
You can buy a little more than you generally need on a Roll-Over plan (currently only available on Cingular and their affiliates), and not get hit too hard when you do go over.
You can go Pay As You Go. Cingular, Virgin Mobile, and T-Mobile all have decent plans in that area that require very little as the minimum call spend. Check them out.
All are available in the US, and Sprint PCS also has the "Fair and Flexible" plan which makes overage less of an issue.
What countries do you not have that choice, and why do you consider not being able to buy (note: not "buying", but "having the choice if you want it") more minutes than you need an advantage?
What carrier were you signing up for where going beyond 45 minutes would result in your service being cut off?
From a hardware point of view, we've been looking at a stream of successes and failures just as varied as any other PC manufacturer, with 166MHz FSB laptops still the norm, and reliability - in reality - as varied. Someone recently showed me, trying to demonstrate Apple's superiority, some form of consumer reliability statistics showing the return rate on Apple's products was lower than virtually everyone else. While this may have been technically true, it's also true that the comparison was something like 10% returned vs 11% returned. From an order-of-magnitude point of view, it was identical. When you throw in the fact that Dell, et al, sell low cost machines that virtually everyone, computer literate or not, buys, while Macs are generally bought by people who have done the research into what they're getting, the lower return rate doesn't look as impressive either.
In many areas Apple is really the equal of its competitors. OS X has strengths that Windows 2000 doesn't (yeah, I said 2000, not XP, shoot me), but 2000 also has strengths: it's emulation of APIs for legacy apps is nicer and more integrated than OS X's "classic", it has a superior security model (even if Microsoft then screws everything up by making the default configuration full of holes and then, thanks to the network effect, making it close to impossible to actually use NT's fine-grained ACL-based security model to fix it); supposedly it's a little bit faster too. But OS X has the GUI, and the Cocoa development system.
I think Apple's niche is not so much its "superior" design, it's its "different design". The fact is many of us do not like Microsoft Windows. We want a friendly machine that's reasonably up to date running an OS that's likewise. Apple's software is definitely "good enough", it's hardware is also "good enough", and if you want a menu on the top of the screen or a Unix environment that means you can get around limitations of the GUI by dropping to the command line once in a while, it's all there.
That said, you can also dual license or add licenses. There's nothing to stop you saying "This is provided under the terms of the GPL, you may also link this code with this other bit of code, as long as you...(etc etc.)" Linus Torvalds did something similar to ensure people were aware that the fact your program is written to load and execute under the Linux kernel using the Linux APIs does not mean it has to be subject to the GPL in the same way as a kernel modification would be. Arguably, it was unnecessary, but he did it anyway.
Socialism predates Communism. It started with Robert Owen's attempts in the early nineteenth century to improve living and working conditions for the workers in his mills.
As for "now tends to be used", why yes, it does, misleadingly, but not exclusively and rarely accurately. Two of the most successful examples of socialism are entirely non-governmental - they being the trade union movement, and the cooperative movement. Your definition is so wide it could be used to describe the government of Germany in the 1930s, or most other Fascist regimes, groups ideologically opposed to socialists and socialism.