Re:Why bother keeping corporate policies up to dat
on
When Ethics and IT Collide
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· Score: 2, Interesting
And there are no crooked accountants? Haven't the very largest accounting firms in the USA, regulated and certified, been responsible for most of the recent multi-billion dollar corporate scandals? They just found ways to work around the "ethical rules" imposed on them.
It's about culture. Most IT guys are "techies" not money-grubbing bastards (aka business executives, accountants, etc.) Most IT professionals have a sense of integrity, understand their power within the organization, and act reasonably responsibly. Some do not. Lots download stuff they shouldn't at work and read the HR department's email. Annoying, but not a big deal. What they don't do is copy the records from the accounting department and sell them to brokerage firms. They don't create bogus POs for themselves. The don't sell proprietary information to competitors.
I guess I'm saying that their are DEGREES of corruption, and in the grand scheme of things IT workers aren't anywhere near the realm of "the money people" when it comes to corruption.
Back before "the internets" became big, the was a phenomena called "local BBSs". Local computer bulletin boards that you would dial into with a modem and where you could chat, leave messages, download files, etc. Each user would require a phone line, so a BBS operator would have to have dozens of phone lines to accommodate lots of users. Early BBS networks, like Fidonet, required long distance calls to transfer messages between BBSs scattered around the country.
Who do you think paid for all this? It was the BBS operators. Sure their were some BBSs and services that had fees (like the Well) and many solicited donations, but for the most part the BBS operators paid out of pocket. And they liked it because it was their hobby.
It shouldn't be hard to see how this is relavent to web site operators. It on you bitches. Don't expect to make money unless you can provide content compelling enough for a significant number of people to spend cash money on. This is what the most successful websites (like/.!) have done and it's what you're going to have to do instead of whining about people blocking your ads.
You don't have the god-given right to make money off your web site. People are doing you a favor by reading your shit. If your shit is really compelling, people might donate or subscribe. That's great! But a website is not a money tree, and you shouldn't expect it to make money or "pay for itself".
The industry is keenly aware that there is big money in porn games. That isn't the issue. The issue is that video games are unfortunately regarded as a "kids media" like comic books. And just like comic books in the 1950 legislators have seized on video games (I'm looking at you Hillary Clinton) as a way to score easy "for the children" points against an industry that can't do them a lot of damage. Never mind that most of the legislation they pass is obviously unconstitutional.
It's that last part that's the issue. Video game companies simply do not spend enough money on lobbyists, and rely too much on the courts to protect and vindicate them. They aren't running attack campaigns on legislators that attack them (like Hillary), and they should be. They need to realize that legislators AREN'T well-intentioned (regardless of what they say) and just want to score points. The message they keep sending is "we'll try to do better" but the message they SHOULD be sending is "pick on someone else or we'll hurt you".
Nor are they required to tell you or anyone else how Word 95 rendered a table. Yes they do, if they want it to be part of an OPEN standard.
You don't seem to get that releasing a standard with big chunks of it poorly defined or not defined is very bad practice. It makes it impossible for anyone to create a complete implementation based on the standard. Here's a question for you:
Why didn't Microsoft define the backwards compatibility tags in the standard? Length and complexity certainly can't be an issue, the standard is already over 6,000 pages long. They did it because they see value in keeping the details of their proprietary format secret. And they keep those details secret to promote vendor lock-in. But AVOIDING VENDOR LOCK-IN IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE STANDARD.
OOXML is written to make it near-impossible for anyone other than Microsoft to implement BY DESIGN. OOXML simply will not be "open", in the sense that any vendor can easily build an editor for the format. And remember, AVOIDING VENDOR LOCK-IN IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE STANDARD. The ODF is written as a standard that's relatively easy for anyone to implement, that's why most people are backing it.
And yes, most people who aren't fucking crazy want Microsoft to implement ODF as their "default" format and to write their own converters for older formats, mainly because MS is clearly NOT going to release the details of their binary formats.
And yeah, there is nothing to keep MS from creating their own propretary extensions to ODF and making THAT modified format their new "default". In fact, assuming ODF wins, that's almost certainly what they'll do. Why are you defending this behavior of mangling open formats to create vendor lock-in?
It's a bad translation. The Hebrew words Tame & Tahor only relate to issues of ritual. IE. Someone who comes into contact with the dead is Tame (impure). That doesn't mean we don't revere our dead. Laws of purity are a spiritual issue, not relating to valuations of greater than or less than. Though some forms of impurity are more "difficult" or prohibit more activities. Earlier pre-diasporah forms of Judiasm dealt largely with it. Taharat Hamishpacha, is one of the few forms of this idea left. And it largely favors the woman. As it is often used by women to avoid abuse or to throw their weight around in the marriage.
I don't accept the argument of "some Jews are doing it wrong" when this used to be mainstream practice. Saying it is a "spiritual issue" that has no practical affect on women in laughable. I don't know how this is supposed to prevent abuse or help women "throw their weight around" except in the sense that they can insist on a separate dwelling. Modern menustral shacks are quite a bit nicer that the term "shack" implies for those few Jews who continue this practice. None of this obviates the fact that this is clearly a sexist doctrine.
Older male slaves are worth less than younger male slaves because they can do less work. It has nothing to do with feminism. It's just a fact that in an agrarian society someone who can pull a plow and build fences is worth more.
Pagan societies had different rules. Women were often worth more than women depending on skills and background, in Jewish law women were always worth less in large part because they weren't allowed to acquire valuable skills and weren't allowed to market their sexuality. This was all pretty deliberately done to limit their power.
Limitations on a womans education are (more or less) recent.
Recent? Supposedly women in the time of Moses (a fictional character) weren't even allowed to read or write and could be executed for contradicting their husbands in public.
Law was largely managed by a monarchy and a hierarchical judiciary. Women & children were forbidden from giving testimony or judging because they were easily physically intimidated. Again, life then is not as it is now; and how these customs project themselves into the modern era is a very long discussion. Men were required to learn, because they had to participate in court, and lead their families. Women were encouraged to learn more spiritual aspects (rather than legal) since they were the families primary educator and emotional (for lack of a better word) center.
So, in other words, in traditional Jewish culture women had no say in political life whatsoever. Again, the notion that they were too "physically intimidated" to speak or know what they wanted is laughable. It also doesn't say much about the quality of Jewish jurisprudence (Did they punch people in the face that came to testify?).
I fail to see how women covering there hair is opressive. Do or don't, or leave
First, if they didn't they would be beaten. So "don't" wasn't an option. It's "opressive" in the sense that it's a symbolic depredation of women's sexuality. At the time, decorating their hair was the primary form of adornment for women and covering their hair was done in a effort to make women less sexual. And since sexuality is an important power too for women, it makes them less powerful.
We were the first. I could hazard a few good reasons why, but it doesn't really matter.
Plenty of other religions were there first. There are lots of reasons why the Jews banned it, but my understanding is that the main reason is that homosexuality was associated with "pagan" religions and Jewish authorities didn't want their faith "corrupted". I suspect it also had to do with the patriarchal system, men were expected to be fathers and head of household, women were expected to be mothers, etc. and homosexuality throws a monkey wrench i9nto that model.
This hasn't stopped Bittorrent, which has much bigger problems in this regard. Basically, what the OP is talking about is Btitorrent for XML listings with the tracker hosted in Russia or somewhere else safe. The tracker site does the scraping then seeds the XML listings which are then picked up by a Bittorrent client in MythTV.
In theory, this shouldn't be too hard to do. I think the hard part would be modifying MythTV to get XML listings via Bittorrent.
God invented this thing called "advertising" a way back. The deal was that you could get media FOR FREE, or at a greatly reduced price, by submitting your eyes and ears to advertising. Subscription TV was certainly POSSIBLE in the early days, but broadcasters realized that they could make more money by using a "free with advertising" model. Now they're making even MORE money because they've convinced people to submit to advertising AND pay.
We shouldn't have to pay for listings because we're already submitting to advertising. Take out the advertising, and I'll start paying. That's why I don't mind paying for HBO (which STILL has advertising). I *DO* mind paying for commercial TV, which is why I don't feel the least bit bad about stripping commercials out of shows I watch. I pay for listings. I pay for the satellite TV. I'll be dammed if I'm going to watch the advertising too.
Remember, my goal as a consumer is to get the stuff I want for as little as possible, ideally free. Producers don't give a fuck about me. They simply see me a a bag of money, and they're trying to get as much out of that bag as possible. Tribune Media is hardly starved for cash, and frankly, they're an evil company. They've been buying up lots of local newspapers and wrecking them. So I really hope I'm stealing from them of fucking them over somehow by stealing listings.
And if someone welds a can of caltraps under the rear bumper of your car (to be shook loose at random), you can not be held responsible for accidents that's caused by them. In practice, I think it's going to be near-impossible to convince the police that SOMEONE ELSE attached such a device to your car.
And no, if a burglar drops his wallet with $1,000 on your floor, that doesn't make the money yours. He may be guilty of a crime, but that doesn't give you any rights to what's not yours. Crime must not pay, neither for the perpetrator nor the victim (when it becomes profitable to be a victim, people will seek to become one, which increases crime instead of lowering it).
Transference of ownership occurs when both parties agree to it. It's not enough that one person thinks it's an ownership transfer. What this guy did was theft. The police might or might not have broken a law by placing the devices on his car, but that's irrelevant to the ownership of the devices. In theory yes, in practice no. One must try to take reality into account when dealing with the law.
In theory, it's illegal to rob drug dealers. IN PRACTICE, it's legal because there is no practical way the drug dealer can report his goods stolen or claim ownership. This is the biggest reason most drug dealers are armed, because they are very vulnerable targets for robbery. The same logic applies to the burglar that drops his wallet or the police doing illegal surveillance. If you are unwilling to claim ownership of something because it might get you in trouble, then it no longer belongs to you and it's a little perverse to charge someone with theft for taking something the owner has abandoned.
And there *IS* the concept of "abandoned property". If something is "abandoned", like these surveillance devices were, it's fair game. If people fish through your garbage and take out valuable items you can't claim they were stealing from you because you implicitly abandoned the property.
Basically, in theory there MAY have been a crime committed, but in actual practice what he's doing is perfectly legal.
Shockingly, if you share your entire hard drive in P2P that WILL include all your personal information and people WILL take it and possibly do bad things with it. Most P2P software actually includes warnings against doing this and by default, only shares a specific created directory. Users would have to manually add their whole hard drive.
To put it another way: Complete dipshits shouldn't be using P2P.
As an American who has spent a lot of time in Denmark I can tell you the fundamental difference between Denmark and the United States is the strong sense of egalitarianism in Denmark. The Queen rides around town every Sunday in a procession. If you want to meet you MOP you can just walk into their office. Read the papers sometime, they're filled with social commentary.
Whenever anyone talks about "class" in the United States they're immediately accused of communism and inciting "class warfare". But the massive class divisions are real and palpable in the USA. When was the last time that the President went outside without an army of security? Haven't we gotten used to the idea of gated communities and armies of Mexican servants?
Fair use is not actually a defined right. It is, instead, an"affirmative defense" against a charge of copyright violation. That's a difference, however subtle. That is to say, IF you are charged with violation, you may assert FU as a defense. Actually, no. IP lawyers and defenders of IP law very much wish this to be true. But it's wrong. Copyright law includes specific exemptions for fair use, so it is a "right" in the same sense copyright is a "right". The issue here is that "fair use" is not clearly defined. The IP lawyers very much want to keep it this way because it means they can argue in court about what qualifies.
To it simply: IP advocates want fair use determined and argued on a case-by-case basis as that favors THEM, in part because they have armies of lawyers and in part because it gives them wiggle room. In practice this means that they can threaten just about anyone with SOME weight. Their opponents want fair use much more clearly defined (as it is in Canada, for example) with clearly deliniated exceptions for home copying, etc. One can see how this obviously favors consumers who don't have to worry about legal threats and lawsuits for time-shifting or making software backups.
Contrary to what most posters seem to think it is doubtful that this has anything to do with games. It's more likely that ATI wasn't to sell professional 3D editing cards, for wich Linux is becoming an increasingly important platform. Ditto for embedded devices like PVRs and other video appliances, many of which run Linux. Better drivers would lead to better performance of these devices,l particularly for things like H.264 decoding. I also know know one video vendor that is developing a MacOSX-like "dock" interface with expanding icons that would require 3D.
Nobody at Linuxworld would answer my simple question:
Can I use this as a stand-alone PDA?
I explained that I was looking for a replacement for the NEC MobilePro, basically an instant-on portable device with a full-sized keyboard that could be used for transcription. The guy there said that he didn't know.
Of course, the reality is that the Folio was EXACTLY what I wanted. The staff just had no fucking idea what they were talking about. It was being pushed pretty much solely as a Treo accessory, which I told them I didn't want.
Basically, Palm completely dropped the ball on marketing this thing.
The various government agencies, federal, state, and local, have spent billions running phone lines all over the country. Do you actually think AT&T paid to run the poles to podunk towns in the midwest? Think again. The government still maintains the poles, underground, and COs in many areas.
What the government hasn't done is run a lot of fiber. Of course, if the fiber is being run for fat data links between data centers there is a powerful financial incentive for the telcos to fork out their own money. And they do, partially. Of course, the get tons of tax breaks and subsidies so we're still paying for part of that.
Why has the 3G rollout been so slow (and why does 3G suck in general)? Because the government wouldn't pay for it because the telcos couldn't agree on anything. 3G and DSL is typical of the kind of work the telcos do on their own.
Why is there no FTTH? Because, again, the telcos won't pay for it and they can't convince the government to pay for it because they're arguing with each other too much.
Jewish law doesn't marginalize women. Nonsense. Ever hear of "menstrual shacks"? The idea is that when a woman is menstruating she is "ritually unclean" and has to be sepreated from the rest of the family and religious services as she might make them "impure". Jewish law expressly regards women as being less valuable, a female slave is worth less, punishments for killing women are lower, etc.
The "male" responsibilities are to provide income for his family, engage in Torah learning and teach Torah to his children, and participate in public prayer. Those "male" responsibilities are just as important They are obviously much more important. Since men are only allowed to have religious education, and "traditional" Jewish live is based on theocracy, in traditional Judism women are absolutely prohibited from engaging in political life. They have no vote, they have no say, except whatever influence they can have on their husbands. An unmarried woman in traditional Judism is essentially powerless.
It was the Romans who decided that sex between a man and a woman was a necessary evil for procreation.... Church law started as a response to the Roman hedonistic culture, that wrapped it's orgies (gay and straight) in a religious veneer. You're contradicting yourself. It was the Jews, for example, that started the practice of women covering their hair out of modesty. Jews expressly forbid homosexuality. Look into the practices of the Essenes and other 1st century Jewish movements. Asceticism and anti-sex views were widespread long before the time of Jesus, though they certainly weren't EXCLUSIVELY Jewish.
The reality is that Roman religion was diverse and some particular cults were anti-sex and ascetic, some were hedonistic, but MOST promoted what we would call today "traditional family values".
Most of the ancient tribal customs that remain in some form in traditional Judaism (wrapped in a complex Rabbinic layer) and the Church (wrapped in a Roman layer) only seem sexist looking at them backwards. They don't seem sexist, they ARE sexist. The big question I have for you is: If you acknowledge that most of the moral teachings of the Torah are basically nonsense, why isn't it ALL nonsense? Genesis pretty obviously didn't happen, the Exodus almost certainly didn't happen. Since it's all fictional, why follow any of it?
Religious marriage laws may not have been "equal" in a 21st Century sense, but they were all designed to protect women who were being used by men that were stronger than them, and had no protection under pre-Christian European customs. Modern Jews/Christians mostly base their opinions of pagan culture on anti-pagan rhetoric by early church fathers and religious leaders. The reality is quite different. Romans introduced divorce, one of the most important women's rights innovations in history. For the first time, women could own property, declare heirs, and have significant political representation in Rome. One of the first things the Christian emperor Constantine did was eliminate divorce and women's rights.
The only "modern" religion built in response to the current day environment is Scientology... and while Scientology appears to harness and direct modern desires (worship of celebrity, pursuit of money without limitation, sexual freedom), I don't think that many people would want society to become more like Scientology, would they? Scientology does not claim to be a modern religion, but an ancient religion "revealed" to a modern man. Scientology is primarily concerned with "personal growth" and self-help (eliminating addictions and mental health problems). Scientology does not worship celebrity, they see celebrities as a marketing tool. The pursuit of money is not a major VALUE of Scientology, though they are greedy for money in the way that all churches are. Scientology opposes sexual freedom and homosexuality.
Given the choice of Scientology, which most people recognize is a money-making scam, and Judism, which most people DON'T recognize as a money-making scam, I'd pick the former.
Linux has well-tested encryption schemes. I use LUKS with cryptsetup. This is a little newer and less tested than some other mechanisms, but it works well (and I think it's fairly popular). Why would you use something that's so untested for something that's so important? Name 'em. LUKS with cryptsetup is slow as molasses and buggy. Truecrypt is marginally better, but the Linux tools for mounting the volumes are so shitty and unstable that I just store the volumes on a Windows server, format them with ext3, and access them remotely.
The original poster was quite rightly pointing out that file encryption (and filesystems in general) are awful in Linux.
For the record, this is pretty doable with Windows if you understand Policies and Limited User levels. You can basically give them a Windows box locked down to the point where all they can do is run a few apps and auto-install updates, no installing anything. This solves 95% of the problems you're likely to experience. The disadvantage is that your apps aren't getting updated, but that's a disadvantage of most of the solutions presented. Tools like DeepFreeze and Clean Slate can help alleviate these problems, though they're a little pricey.
As others have pointed out here, Windows has a few advantages when it comes to playing multimedia files and printing, two things your users will almost certainly want to do. Frankly, the printer will probably cause you more hassles than the PC in this scenario.
It cuts both ways. One of the big causes of corruption right now is the decentralized power of our government both makes it easy for large organizations to play states (for example) against one another for development projects. It gives rural representatives and representatives from small states inordinate power in the central government. And finally, a complicated multi-level bureaucracy (local, county, state, federal) makes it much harder for busy Americans to keep track of what the government is doing for and against them, and it makes elections more complicated discouraging them from participating altogether. Federalism fundamentally causes more problems than it solves. Our government is already mostly appointed anyway, I'm just proposing taking it a bit further.
I think the other poster was on the right track. Clearly the management at SCO doesn't give a damn about the company and are operating in cahoots with the lawyers trying to bleed what's left through salaries and legal fees. They're probably shorting the stock too. At some point maybe the shareholders thought they could get some value out of the company through IP, but now it's just about the executives getting paid to do essentially nothing.
I stand corrected on this point. I had heard somewhere that a toolset was in development for this purpose but souinds like it's either proprietary (maybe Omni has it?) or broken somehow.
I hear this is in the pipe for DX10d, but it's more or less working now. My understanding that DX10 for XP is the subject of rather bitter internal conflict about pushing Vista. Basically, the "gaming" unit that does DirectX and XBOX wants it out there, the idiots in the os unit (most of the good people are on gaming or media now) don't because they see it as an important selling point of Vista. Developers (many of whom are familiar with the internals of DirectX and know that MS is full of the crap owith the "won't work in XP" line). Having said that, ATI and NVIDIA will need to update their drivers, and the changes aren't trivial. Assuming developers put enough pressure on MS and the video card makers get on board, you can expect this in late 2008 at the earliest.
They're just different irritations and problems. Generally true, but there is one important thing that you get with Macs: A distinct lack of troyjans, virii, and malware. Some of these nowadays are so nasty, that unless you need Windows-specific software, there is a powerful argume for not using Windows. Especially for users that aren't technically savvy enough to protect themselves from and remove malware.
Though if I were going this route I'd push users towards Ubuntu or one of the other user-friendly Linuxes. I've had nothing but bad experiences with Mac tech support.
If my accounting documentation is subpoenaed and I don't produce those Post-Its, and the court finds out about their existence, I am in deep shit for destruction of evidence and/or failure to keep required records. Completely wrong. "Accidental" destruction of records is EXTREMELY common during the discovery process. I'd wager that in any complex case some records are ALWAYS lost. Saying "sorry I tossed those post-its, but it's all in the ledger" really is good enough unless the court has a lot of evidence to prove you're deceiving them. Basically, in this case it would consist of witnesses saying you were doing a dual accounting system with the post-its. And even then, so what? It's still a tough case to push for destruction of evidence unless you can PROVE that the didn't replicate the post-it into in the leger.
People have come up with excellent examples like chalkboards and etch-a-sketches as examples of "transient media" like computer RAM. There is already case on this in regards to "cocktail napkins" or informal notes. This particualr judge is just an idiot. Since her ruling is literally impossible to enforce, she'll probably swiftly withdraw it.
BTW, Many people don't seem to grasp that TorrentSpy is basically fighting this for fun. The actual company "Torrentspy" has no assets to speak of, and they can't go after the owners. They could just walk off and start a new company "Torrentsearch" next week doing exactly the same thing and wait to get sued again. This whole strategy by the RIAA/MPAA is retarded for this reason. They need to convince the ISPs to help them, which is pretty fucking unlikely since the ISPs make billions redistributing their content.
Vista + DX 10 is 2.3% of users Considering that there are only about FOUR DX10 games currently available, this is hardly suprising. The primary argumemnt against DX10 is that it doesn't add enough features, not compatibility or uptake problems. Developers don't want to learn new tools if there isn't a significant improvement (this is really what Valve is bitching about, they didn't get the changes they wanted). I suspect another issue is the perception that Vista is buggy (relatively speaking, it is) and many people are waiting for the first Service Pack. This is almost a Microsoft tradition at this point.
Hell, this whole discussion is moot as a version of DX10 WILL apparently be coming out for 2000/XP that will allow users of those operating systems to play pure DX10 games, but without all the bells and whistles.
Um, no. DirectX gets you the Wii, PS3, XBOX360, and PC. All of these platforms have DirectX ports. I'm not sure how DirectX games are ported to the Mac, but it HAS happened in the past. AFAIK, it is only Linux and handhelds that don't support DirectX.
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And there are no crooked accountants? Haven't the very largest accounting firms in the USA, regulated and certified, been responsible for most of the recent multi-billion dollar corporate scandals? They just found ways to work around the "ethical rules" imposed on them.
It's about culture. Most IT guys are "techies" not money-grubbing bastards (aka business executives, accountants, etc.) Most IT professionals have a sense of integrity, understand their power within the organization, and act reasonably responsibly. Some do not. Lots download stuff they shouldn't at work and read the HR department's email. Annoying, but not a big deal. What they don't do is copy the records from the accounting department and sell them to brokerage firms. They don't create bogus POs for themselves. The don't sell proprietary information to competitors.
I guess I'm saying that their are DEGREES of corruption, and in the grand scheme of things IT workers aren't anywhere near the realm of "the money people" when it comes to corruption.
Back before "the internets" became big, the was a phenomena called "local BBSs". Local computer bulletin boards that you would dial into with a modem and where you could chat, leave messages, download files, etc. Each user would require a phone line, so a BBS operator would have to have dozens of phone lines to accommodate lots of users. Early BBS networks, like Fidonet, required long distance calls to transfer messages between BBSs scattered around the country.
/.!) have done and it's what you're going to have to do instead of whining about people blocking your ads.
Who do you think paid for all this? It was the BBS operators. Sure their were some BBSs and services that had fees (like the Well) and many solicited donations, but for the most part the BBS operators paid out of pocket. And they liked it because it was their hobby.
It shouldn't be hard to see how this is relavent to web site operators. It on you bitches. Don't expect to make money unless you can provide content compelling enough for a significant number of people to spend cash money on. This is what the most successful websites (like
You don't have the god-given right to make money off your web site. People are doing you a favor by reading your shit. If your shit is really compelling, people might donate or subscribe. That's great! But a website is not a money tree, and you shouldn't expect it to make money or "pay for itself".
The industry is keenly aware that there is big money in porn games. That isn't the issue. The issue is that video games are unfortunately regarded as a "kids media" like comic books. And just like comic books in the 1950 legislators have seized on video games (I'm looking at you Hillary Clinton) as a way to score easy "for the children" points against an industry that can't do them a lot of damage. Never mind that most of the legislation they pass is obviously unconstitutional.
It's that last part that's the issue. Video game companies simply do not spend enough money on lobbyists, and rely too much on the courts to protect and vindicate them. They aren't running attack campaigns on legislators that attack them (like Hillary), and they should be. They need to realize that legislators AREN'T well-intentioned (regardless of what they say) and just want to score points. The message they keep sending is "we'll try to do better" but the message they SHOULD be sending is "pick on someone else or we'll hurt you".
You don't seem to get that releasing a standard with big chunks of it poorly defined or not defined is very bad practice. It makes it impossible for anyone to create a complete implementation based on the standard. Here's a question for you:
Why didn't Microsoft define the backwards compatibility tags in the standard? Length and complexity certainly can't be an issue, the standard is already over 6,000 pages long. They did it because they see value in keeping the details of their proprietary format secret. And they keep those details secret to promote vendor lock-in. But AVOIDING VENDOR LOCK-IN IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE STANDARD.
OOXML is written to make it near-impossible for anyone other than Microsoft to implement BY DESIGN. OOXML simply will not be "open", in the sense that any vendor can easily build an editor for the format. And remember, AVOIDING VENDOR LOCK-IN IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE STANDARD. The ODF is written as a standard that's relatively easy for anyone to implement, that's why most people are backing it.
And yes, most people who aren't fucking crazy want Microsoft to implement ODF as their "default" format and to write their own converters for older formats, mainly because MS is clearly NOT going to release the details of their binary formats.
And yeah, there is nothing to keep MS from creating their own propretary extensions to ODF and making THAT modified format their new "default". In fact, assuming ODF wins, that's almost certainly what they'll do. Why are you defending this behavior of mangling open formats to create vendor lock-in?
It's a bad translation. The Hebrew words Tame & Tahor only relate to issues of ritual. IE. Someone who comes into contact with the dead is Tame (impure). That doesn't mean we don't revere our dead. Laws of purity are a spiritual issue, not relating to valuations of greater than or less than. Though some forms of impurity are more "difficult" or prohibit more activities. Earlier pre-diasporah forms of Judiasm dealt largely with it. Taharat Hamishpacha, is one of the few forms of this idea left. And it largely favors the woman. As it is often used by women to avoid abuse or to throw their weight around in the marriage.
I don't accept the argument of "some Jews are doing it wrong" when this used to be mainstream practice. Saying it is a "spiritual issue" that has no practical affect on women in laughable. I don't know how this is supposed to prevent abuse or help women "throw their weight around" except in the sense that they can insist on a separate dwelling. Modern menustral shacks are quite a bit nicer that the term "shack" implies for those few Jews who continue this practice. None of this obviates the fact that this is clearly a sexist doctrine.
Older male slaves are worth less than younger male slaves because they can do less work. It has nothing to do with feminism. It's just a fact that in an agrarian society someone who can pull a plow and build fences is worth more.
Pagan societies had different rules. Women were often worth more than women depending on skills and background, in Jewish law women were always worth less in large part because they weren't allowed to acquire valuable skills and weren't allowed to market their sexuality. This was all pretty deliberately done to limit their power.
Limitations on a womans education are (more or less) recent.
Recent? Supposedly women in the time of Moses (a fictional character) weren't even allowed to read or write and could be executed for contradicting their husbands in public.
Law was largely managed by a monarchy and a hierarchical judiciary. Women & children were forbidden from giving testimony or judging because they were easily physically intimidated. Again, life then is not as it is now; and how these customs project themselves into the modern era is a very long discussion. Men were required to learn, because they had to participate in court, and lead their families. Women were encouraged to learn more spiritual aspects (rather than legal) since they were the families primary educator and emotional (for lack of a better word) center.
So, in other words, in traditional Jewish culture women had no say in political life whatsoever. Again, the notion that they were too "physically intimidated" to speak or know what they wanted is laughable. It also doesn't say much about the quality of Jewish jurisprudence (Did they punch people in the face that came to testify?).
I fail to see how women covering there hair is opressive. Do or don't, or leave
First, if they didn't they would be beaten. So "don't" wasn't an option. It's "opressive" in the sense that it's a symbolic depredation of women's sexuality. At the time, decorating their hair was the primary form of adornment for women and covering their hair was done in a effort to make women less sexual. And since sexuality is an important power too for women, it makes them less powerful.
We were the first. I could hazard a few good reasons why, but it doesn't really matter.
Plenty of other religions were there first. There are lots of reasons why the Jews banned it, but my understanding is that the main reason is that homosexuality was associated with "pagan" religions and Jewish authorities didn't want their faith "corrupted". I suspect it also had to do with the patriarchal system, men were expected to be fathers and head of household, women were expected to be mothers, etc. and homosexuality throws a monkey wrench i9nto that model.
A
This hasn't stopped Bittorrent, which has much bigger problems in this regard. Basically, what the OP is talking about is Btitorrent for XML listings with the tracker hosted in Russia or somewhere else safe. The tracker site does the scraping then seeds the XML listings which are then picked up by a Bittorrent client in MythTV.
In theory, this shouldn't be too hard to do. I think the hard part would be modifying MythTV to get XML listings via Bittorrent.
Because we *ARE* paying for it.
God invented this thing called "advertising" a way back. The deal was that you could get media FOR FREE, or at a greatly reduced price, by submitting your eyes and ears to advertising. Subscription TV was certainly POSSIBLE in the early days, but broadcasters realized that they could make more money by using a "free with advertising" model. Now they're making even MORE money because they've convinced people to submit to advertising AND pay.
We shouldn't have to pay for listings because we're already submitting to advertising. Take out the advertising, and I'll start paying. That's why I don't mind paying for HBO (which STILL has advertising). I *DO* mind paying for commercial TV, which is why I don't feel the least bit bad about stripping commercials out of shows I watch. I pay for listings. I pay for the satellite TV. I'll be dammed if I'm going to watch the advertising too.
Remember, my goal as a consumer is to get the stuff I want for as little as possible, ideally free. Producers don't give a fuck about me. They simply see me a a bag of money, and they're trying to get as much out of that bag as possible. Tribune Media is hardly starved for cash, and frankly, they're an evil company. They've been buying up lots of local newspapers and wrecking them. So I really hope I'm stealing from them of fucking them over somehow by stealing listings.
Transference of ownership occurs when both parties agree to it. It's not enough that one person thinks it's an ownership transfer. What this guy did was theft. The police might or might not have broken a law by placing the devices on his car, but that's irrelevant to the ownership of the devices. In theory yes, in practice no. One must try to take reality into account when dealing with the law.
In theory, it's illegal to rob drug dealers. IN PRACTICE, it's legal because there is no practical way the drug dealer can report his goods stolen or claim ownership. This is the biggest reason most drug dealers are armed, because they are very vulnerable targets for robbery. The same logic applies to the burglar that drops his wallet or the police doing illegal surveillance. If you are unwilling to claim ownership of something because it might get you in trouble, then it no longer belongs to you and it's a little perverse to charge someone with theft for taking something the owner has abandoned.
And there *IS* the concept of "abandoned property". If something is "abandoned", like these surveillance devices were, it's fair game. If people fish through your garbage and take out valuable items you can't claim they were stealing from you because you implicitly abandoned the property.
Basically, in theory there MAY have been a crime committed, but in actual practice what he's doing is perfectly legal.
Shockingly, if you share your entire hard drive in P2P that WILL include all your personal information and people WILL take it and possibly do bad things with it. Most P2P software actually includes warnings against doing this and by default, only shares a specific created directory. Users would have to manually add their whole hard drive.
To put it another way: Complete dipshits shouldn't be using P2P.
I can live with that.
As an American who has spent a lot of time in Denmark I can tell you the fundamental difference between Denmark and the United States is the strong sense of egalitarianism in Denmark. The Queen rides around town every Sunday in a procession. If you want to meet you MOP you can just walk into their office. Read the papers sometime, they're filled with social commentary.
Whenever anyone talks about "class" in the United States they're immediately accused of communism and inciting "class warfare". But the massive class divisions are real and palpable in the USA. When was the last time that the President went outside without an army of security? Haven't we gotten used to the idea of gated communities and armies of Mexican servants?
To it simply: IP advocates want fair use determined and argued on a case-by-case basis as that favors THEM, in part because they have armies of lawyers and in part because it gives them wiggle room. In practice this means that they can threaten just about anyone with SOME weight. Their opponents want fair use much more clearly defined (as it is in Canada, for example) with clearly deliniated exceptions for home copying, etc. One can see how this obviously favors consumers who don't have to worry about legal threats and lawsuits for time-shifting or making software backups.
Contrary to what most posters seem to think it is doubtful that this has anything to do with games. It's more likely that ATI wasn't to sell professional 3D editing cards, for wich Linux is becoming an increasingly important platform. Ditto for embedded devices like PVRs and other video appliances, many of which run Linux. Better drivers would lead to better performance of these devices,l particularly for things like H.264 decoding. I also know know one video vendor that is developing a MacOSX-like "dock" interface with expanding icons that would require 3D.
Nobody at Linuxworld would answer my simple question:
Can I use this as a stand-alone PDA?
I explained that I was looking for a replacement for the NEC MobilePro, basically an instant-on portable device with a full-sized keyboard that could be used for transcription. The guy there said that he didn't know.
Of course, the reality is that the Folio was EXACTLY what I wanted. The staff just had no fucking idea what they were talking about. It was being pushed pretty much solely as a Treo accessory, which I told them I didn't want.
Basically, Palm completely dropped the ball on marketing this thing.
What, in the past year?
The various government agencies, federal, state, and local, have spent billions running phone lines all over the country. Do you actually think AT&T paid to run the poles to podunk towns in the midwest? Think again. The government still maintains the poles, underground, and COs in many areas.
What the government hasn't done is run a lot of fiber. Of course, if the fiber is being run for fat data links between data centers there is a powerful financial incentive for the telcos to fork out their own money. And they do, partially. Of course, the get tons of tax breaks and subsidies so we're still paying for part of that.
Why has the 3G rollout been so slow (and why does 3G suck in general)? Because the government wouldn't pay for it because the telcos couldn't agree on anything. 3G and DSL is typical of the kind of work the telcos do on their own.
Why is there no FTTH? Because, again, the telcos won't pay for it and they can't convince the government to pay for it because they're arguing with each other too much.
The reality is that Roman religion was diverse and some particular cults were anti-sex and ascetic, some were hedonistic, but MOST promoted what we would call today "traditional family values". Most of the ancient tribal customs that remain in some form in traditional Judaism (wrapped in a complex Rabbinic layer) and the Church (wrapped in a Roman layer) only seem sexist looking at them backwards. They don't seem sexist, they ARE sexist. The big question I have for you is: If you acknowledge that most of the moral teachings of the Torah are basically nonsense, why isn't it ALL nonsense? Genesis pretty obviously didn't happen, the Exodus almost certainly didn't happen. Since it's all fictional, why follow any of it? Religious marriage laws may not have been "equal" in a 21st Century sense, but they were all designed to protect women who were being used by men that were stronger than them, and had no protection under pre-Christian European customs. Modern Jews/Christians mostly base their opinions of pagan culture on anti-pagan rhetoric by early church fathers and religious leaders. The reality is quite different. Romans introduced divorce, one of the most important women's rights innovations in history. For the first time, women could own property, declare heirs, and have significant political representation in Rome. One of the first things the Christian emperor Constantine did was eliminate divorce and women's rights. The only "modern" religion built in response to the current day environment is Scientology... and while Scientology appears to harness and direct modern desires (worship of celebrity, pursuit of money without limitation, sexual freedom), I don't think that many people would want society to become more like Scientology, would they? Scientology does not claim to be a modern religion, but an ancient religion "revealed" to a modern man. Scientology is primarily concerned with "personal growth" and self-help (eliminating addictions and mental health problems). Scientology does not worship celebrity, they see celebrities as a marketing tool. The pursuit of money is not a major VALUE of Scientology, though they are greedy for money in the way that all churches are. Scientology opposes sexual freedom and homosexuality.
Given the choice of Scientology, which most people recognize is a money-making scam, and Judism, which most people DON'T recognize as a money-making scam, I'd pick the former.
The original poster was quite rightly pointing out that file encryption (and filesystems in general) are awful in Linux.
For the record, this is pretty doable with Windows if you understand Policies and Limited User levels. You can basically give them a Windows box locked down to the point where all they can do is run a few apps and auto-install updates, no installing anything. This solves 95% of the problems you're likely to experience. The disadvantage is that your apps aren't getting updated, but that's a disadvantage of most of the solutions presented. Tools like DeepFreeze and Clean Slate can help alleviate these problems, though they're a little pricey.
As others have pointed out here, Windows has a few advantages when it comes to playing multimedia files and printing, two things your users will almost certainly want to do. Frankly, the printer will probably cause you more hassles than the PC in this scenario.
It cuts both ways. One of the big causes of corruption right now is the decentralized power of our government both makes it easy for large organizations to play states (for example) against one another for development projects. It gives rural representatives and representatives from small states inordinate power in the central government. And finally, a complicated multi-level bureaucracy (local, county, state, federal) makes it much harder for busy Americans to keep track of what the government is doing for and against them, and it makes elections more complicated discouraging them from participating altogether. Federalism fundamentally causes more problems than it solves. Our government is already mostly appointed anyway, I'm just proposing taking it a bit further.
I think the other poster was on the right track. Clearly the management at SCO doesn't give a damn about the company and are operating in cahoots with the lawyers trying to bleed what's left through salaries and legal fees. They're probably shorting the stock too. At some point maybe the shareholders thought they could get some value out of the company through IP, but now it's just about the executives getting paid to do essentially nothing.
I stand corrected on this point. I had heard somewhere that a toolset was in development for this purpose but souinds like it's either proprietary (maybe Omni has it?) or broken somehow.
I hear this is in the pipe for DX10d, but it's more or less working now. My understanding that DX10 for XP is the subject of rather bitter internal conflict about pushing Vista. Basically, the "gaming" unit that does DirectX and XBOX wants it out there, the idiots in the os unit (most of the good people are on gaming or media now) don't because they see it as an important selling point of Vista. Developers (many of whom are familiar with the internals of DirectX and know that MS is full of the crap owith the "won't work in XP" line). Having said that, ATI and NVIDIA will need to update their drivers, and the changes aren't trivial. Assuming developers put enough pressure on MS and the video card makers get on board, you can expect this in late 2008 at the earliest.
Though if I were going this route I'd push users towards Ubuntu or one of the other user-friendly Linuxes. I've had nothing but bad experiences with Mac tech support.
People have come up with excellent examples like chalkboards and etch-a-sketches as examples of "transient media" like computer RAM. There is already case on this in regards to "cocktail napkins" or informal notes. This particualr judge is just an idiot. Since her ruling is literally impossible to enforce, she'll probably swiftly withdraw it.
BTW, Many people don't seem to grasp that TorrentSpy is basically fighting this for fun. The actual company "Torrentspy" has no assets to speak of, and they can't go after the owners. They could just walk off and start a new company "Torrentsearch" next week doing exactly the same thing and wait to get sued again. This whole strategy by the RIAA/MPAA is retarded for this reason. They need to convince the ISPs to help them, which is pretty fucking unlikely since the ISPs make billions redistributing their content.
Hell, this whole discussion is moot as a version of DX10 WILL apparently be coming out for 2000/XP that will allow users of those operating systems to play pure DX10 games, but without all the bells and whistles.
Um, no. DirectX gets you the Wii, PS3, XBOX360, and PC. All of these platforms have DirectX ports. I'm not sure how DirectX games are ported to the Mac, but it HAS happened in the past. AFAIK, it is only Linux and handhelds that don't support DirectX.